Worst case scenario: you end up having to pay a reasonable price for the item. Since eBay uses proxy bidding, your infinite bid will only end up costing you one increment more than the highest serious bidder. If you end up winning a legitimate auction, you could probably resell the item to the second highest bidder and eat only a tiny loss. Or you could relist the item thereby only losing shipping and a bit of value if you bought at a market peak.
The only time you're going to get screwed is when two vigilantes go after the same auction.:)
You're Talking About Math In General, Right?
on
Everything and More
·
· Score: 1
In case you weren't, you should know that all higher-level Math is jargon-ridden crap that only lunatics are involved in. Math is like a religion with all these incantations and rituals. Part of the problem might be that the content of Mathematics has expanded so quickly in the last hundred years that the communication techniques are not keeping up. Or maybe it just has something to do with maintaining a high barrier to entry for the field of Professional Mathematicians.
Either way, it is a travesty that it is possible, with the technology we have available today, to publish a proof that contains an error. And the fact that someone with an undergrad degree in Math is not knowledgable enough to read your average journal paper is symptomatic of a serious problem.
Seriously, if you've ever taken a computational theory course, you have to admit that nothing in GEB is profound (sure, the ideas were profound originally, but Hofstadter is just reporting them). And, in fact, Hofstadter fills the book with vacuous connections to art and little games which I can only surmise are in there to show you how clever he is. Maybe all that junk is necessary to make it interesting to the uninterested layman, but personally I find the concepts interesting enough on their own.
The popularity of GEB on/. is one of the best pieces of evidence that you should ignore all the comments having anything to do with computer science.
Seriously, don't waste your time. Like most popular mathematics books, everything it has to say beyond some basic history (which you've probably already heard much of if you're a geek) is trivially obvious. It's written in such a light style that I found it patronising and questioned whether the author had any knowledge of higher-level math whatsoever.
Everything & More sounds much more like the way math books should be.
What the are you cocksuckers still doing down there? Like it's pretty clear to me that any non-Protestants staying in the US are about as smart as the dumb cunts who spend years hoping that their husbands will stop beating them. Leave that shitty place and come up here to Canada where the Prime Minister is required to be a lapsed Catholic.
Seriously, dude, all it's going to take is two more terms of Republican or I-Can't-Believe-He's-Not-A-Republician Democrats like Kerry and you'll be living in a motherfucking theocracy. So stop wasting your time pissing your troubles out on/. and get emigrating!
OTOH, you guys do have the biggest average tits in the world, so maybe that makes up for it?
Disclaimer: I haven't read Starship Troopers, but I did see the [Esc]3dbi have read other Heinlein books.
My understanding was that the point of the film was parody of Heinlein, particularly his neo-fascism. Putting the psychics in blatant Nazi uniforms seems too decontructional to just be trying to reflect the fascism in the book. And I think much of the script is mocking Heinlein's writing style and hero worship.
If the parody angle is correct, that would certainly explain why so many Heinlein fans didn't get the joke, wouldn't it?
There is significant recent evidence (see, for example, The User Illusion) to suggest that consciousness has no control over our creativity but only our actions. In other words, your nonconscious makes up all sorts of things to say and your conscious only acts as a filter to choose the most appropriate. Tor Norretranders suggests this may be a fundamental flaw in Christianity where thoughts are sinful over Judaism where only actions are sinful.
I have no idea whether your consciousness kicks in before subvocalisation, but if not this technology is probably useless to everyone but psychotherapists and artists.
You're right that if applied in a police state, where only the authorities had the ability to read the subvocalisers, then such technology could be of great harm to human rights. However if everyone had access to everyone else's subvocalisations, then it could completely transform society. A transparent society where you knew what everyone else was thinking would be so totally different from our own, I think we can't even begin to speculate on the pros and cons.
Many philosophers of mind would go so far as to argue that people without language are not conscious, never mind abstract. Daniel Dennett basically postulates that a running dialog (originally external, now internal) is required to synchronise our Society of Mind. So consciousness is a emergent property of language and without it you can only have a one-track (read: uniprocessing) mind. Of course it's not clear just how little language a creature needs -- most mammals and birds at least have a few different utterances. (One of the more political corollaries of this is that pre-linguistic humans should not have the same rights as fully-functioning humans.)
On the other hand, I remember reading somewhere that monotheistic religion was impossible before the invention of Aramaic and Hebrew because earlier languages couldn't express the necessary abstractions.
Autistic people seem to have a very poorly developed understanding of language, and consequently a distinctly different pattern of thought.
That is a post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this therefore because of this") fallacy. Language problems is just one of the many symptoms of autism which lead us to believe that they have a distinctly different pattern of thought. We can only speculate that some subset of those symptoms are closer to the problem on a cognitive level. For example, Simon Baron-Cohen would probably argue that autistic people have no theory of other minds, therefore don't have the same understanding of the purpose of language as other users, and therefore use language poorly from the perspective of those other users.
Remote teleoperation only; no on-site human presence allowed. No material, organic or otherwise, may ever leave the facility.
The facility in Aliens: Resurrectionshould have been BSL-5, but because the CDC hadn't updated its biosafety criteria in hundreds of years, they mistakenly think that BSL-4 is good enough. If the hatched Aliens were put in little pods out in space and poked at only by robots, all their acid tricks would have got them is a whole lotta vacuum.
And yeah, it does just exterminate the species, but that's why it needs to be studied: so we can figure out how to make it stop.
As far as I can tell, that is indeed a very insightful way of looking at it.
At the semantic level: In denotational semantics, a program is a function with side-effects. A Haskell program without side-effects (all the input comes in, then all the output goes out) defines a mathematical function.
At the implementation level: A Haskell program with IO is the specification of a sequence of system calls. A monad with branching and other constructs is an instance of a superclass of straight monads.
However, a C program isn't necessarily that different: it still needs to be called as a function by the kernel. Haskell simply has another layer of abstraction because functions (and therefore programs) are first-class entities. And, of course, it's much easier (although not automatic) to ensure that programs are full rather than partial functions in Haskell.
Got Anything Better To Do?
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Doing stuff in space is a high-return investment in technology. Unfortunately, you can't just tell people "do stuff in space", or they won't do anything interesting. So the managers come up with arbitrary goals, like getting to the Moon, or looking for life. That way the scienticians have real goals to work towards, they build technology, and we all win!
NASA's managers seem to have decided that their arbitrary goals will mostly have to do with putting people in random places. The ESA has decided to look for life in random places. Both will yield different technological paybacks and it's pretty hard to make a value judgement between the two, don't you think?
Creationists Don't Understand Science
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
First: when people say "The Theory of Foo" what they properly mean is "The Hypothesis That Foo".
Second: Evolution is a process, not a hypothesis. It has been applied in Computer Science, postulated in astrophysics and biology, etc. Natural Selection is a scientific hypothesis.
Third: Hypotheses are not directly verifiable. You don't go out and look for gravity to try and figure out whether Newton was right. Hypotheses are used to generate verifiable predictions, and the more predictions that are verified to be correct, the more correct the hypothesis that generated them is take to be.
Natural Selection generates predictions about disease resistance, fossil records, etc. So far, all of the significant predictions have been verified to be correct. How many of Creationism's have been? Oh right, it's a historical claim, not a hypothesis.
In retrospect, don't most people admit that Ada was a really good language for its time? And you're right to be skeptical, but it's not impossible that I'm right.:)
In my program, the algorithms class was at the start of second year, so many students were still not comfortable with pointers. As a result, most people spent so much time struggling with the implementations that they didn't get a chance to sit back and appreciate the structures.
In Haskell, structures like linked lists and binary trees are implemented with a single line of code. Yes, you don't see the actual memory addresses being used, but these are also barriers to understanding.
I'd advocate algorithm classes completing an implementation of linked lists in C (if this wasn't done in the C introductory class), then moving to a higher-level language for everything else. Because after all, once you've implemented one data structure in C, it's not difficult to implement them all.
I haven't really given it much thought, but I've heard claims that functional libraries are designed very differently from imperative libraries and therefore.NET's (which is, lets face it, designed for C#) will not fit perfectly with CLI functional languages. Of course a functional-style wrapper around the.NET libraries could be written, but then we might as well be using the meager native functional libraries we already have.
Do you have any feeling for how well F# or H# will get along with the.NET API?
Short answer: IO is an exit value, just like you said.
Long answer: Monads are a pattern for hiding a state that gets passed from a sequence of functions. For example, when you assign to a variable in an imperative language, the value of that variable in the implicit state is updated and all future phrases accessing that variable will get the new value. If you're using a Haskell state monad it works the same way, but you need to explicitly specify which phrases can be executed in the future (using sequencing operators much like C's semicolon). Effectively Haskell monads allow all imperative constructs except for backwards jumps (goto).
The Haskell IO Monad is a purely functional mechanism for ensuring that modifications of the RealWorld are done in the correct order. It is implemented to call system calls which have real side-effects, but wrapping IO in a monad ensures that you can still reason about the order the side-effects will occur in. Since Haskell is lazy, these side-effects won't actually be triggered until necessary, either because the program needs an input value or it exits.
(I can give examples if anyone wants, but the resources at haskell.org may be more helpful.)
OCaml, which is not purely functional but still closely related to Haskell, is nearly as fast as C. Haskell somewhat acts as a testbed for ideas in the ML language family, and future versions of OCaml are expected to include many features that were first implemented in Haskell. I'd also suggest that Haskell is a good introductory language for future OCaml programmers as it ensures they won't just try and use OCaml like a weird imperative language.
OTOH, it is theoretically possible to automatically multithread purely functional programs, especially if they're lazy like Haskell. So it could end up being a very important language on multi-processor and distributed systems.
Finally, Haskell has an excellent foreign function interface for when you need C-like performance and control.
Crush seems to have an awful lot of overhead for an OS language.
Oh, I see that it has unsafe pointers for when you want to avoid garbage collection, right? But wait, doesn't that make it an unsafe language?
And it's nice that you can switch between dynamic and static typing, because I sure as hell wouldn't want type inference in my kernel, but can the safety checks be done statically? I guess not, that'd be undecidable, right?
If Crush has "no primitive types or constructs", what's this "raw core" the Introduction talks about?
Do these guys actually have any idea what they're doing? Designing a modern programming language and designing an operating system are both monumental tasks. I hope they're at least having fun...
Is that why Unix is so far behind Windows in usability?
Seriously, though: the Unix philosophy emphasises little modular tools over monolithic applications, right? Shouldn't one of the chief advantages of this be that small, non-speed-critical apps can be written in high-level languages? But for some reason just because all the innards and libraries are written in C/C++ (as they should be), many open source coders decide that they should write applications running on top of those innards in the same languages.
Look, just because GTK is written in C, doesn't mean all the Gnome applets need to be! Same goes for Qt and C++. Hell, even Perl would be better! I'm tired of trivial apps causing memory faults. If it were written in a high-level language, I could just go in and fix the errors without having to wade through all this function redirection and reinvention of wheels.
I thought the open source community was supposed to like scripting languages? What's wrong with you guys?
And yet consumers will almost always sacrifice usability for power. A rational ranking of laptop features would start:
Weight
I/O (wireless, optical drives, etc.)
Screen quality
Formfactor (eg: convertable tablet is best)
...
Because: If it weights too much, you'll never have it with you. And there's no point in carrying it around if you can't access anything. And you won't want to access anything if it's a pain to use.
And so most handhelds have enough power, yet consumers continue to have their priorities almost in reverse and buy heavy pieces of crap. And critics continue to criticise tablets because they increase the cost without increasing the power. Why is everyone so stupid?
That's a very good point: it's more important to be formal than it is to be written. In reality, most verbal contracts are vague and writing them down tends to make people put a little more effort into specifying them.
Best to sign some kind of contract if you're just living together, before you become common-law. This'll certainly set a precedent for the subject of a pre-nup.
In fact, the safest thing to do is just sign contracts with everyone in your life, no matter what your relationship.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Worst case scenario: you end up having to pay a reasonable price for the item. Since eBay uses proxy bidding, your infinite bid will only end up costing you one increment more than the highest serious bidder. If you end up winning a legitimate auction, you could probably resell the item to the second highest bidder and eat only a tiny loss. Or you could relist the item thereby only losing shipping and a bit of value if you bought at a market peak.
:)
The only time you're going to get screwed is when two vigilantes go after the same auction.
In case you weren't, you should know that all higher-level Math is jargon-ridden crap that only lunatics are involved in. Math is like a religion with all these incantations and rituals. Part of the problem might be that the content of Mathematics has expanded so quickly in the last hundred years that the communication techniques are not keeping up. Or maybe it just has something to do with maintaining a high barrier to entry for the field of Professional Mathematicians.
Either way, it is a travesty that it is possible, with the technology we have available today, to publish a proof that contains an error. And the fact that someone with an undergrad degree in Math is not knowledgable enough to read your average journal paper is symptomatic of a serious problem.
Seriously, if you've ever taken a computational theory course, you have to admit that nothing in GEB is profound (sure, the ideas were profound originally, but Hofstadter is just reporting them). And, in fact, Hofstadter fills the book with vacuous connections to art and little games which I can only surmise are in there to show you how clever he is. Maybe all that junk is necessary to make it interesting to the uninterested layman, but personally I find the concepts interesting enough on their own.
/. is one of the best pieces of evidence that you should ignore all the comments having anything to do with computer science.
The popularity of GEB on
Seriously, don't waste your time. Like most popular mathematics books, everything it has to say beyond some basic history (which you've probably already heard much of if you're a geek) is trivially obvious. It's written in such a light style that I found it patronising and questioned whether the author had any knowledge of higher-level math whatsoever.
Everything & More sounds much more like the way math books should be.
What the are you cocksuckers still doing down there? Like it's pretty clear to me that any non-Protestants staying in the US are about as smart as the dumb cunts who spend years hoping that their husbands will stop beating them. Leave that shitty place and come up here to Canada where the Prime Minister is required to be a lapsed Catholic.
/. and get emigrating!
Seriously, dude, all it's going to take is two more terms of Republican or I-Can't-Believe-He's-Not-A-Republician Democrats like Kerry and you'll be living in a motherfucking theocracy. So stop wasting your time pissing your troubles out on
OTOH, you guys do have the biggest average tits in the world, so maybe that makes up for it?
Disclaimer: I haven't read Starship Troopers, but I did see the [Esc]3dbi have read other Heinlein books.
My understanding was that the point of the film was parody of Heinlein, particularly his neo-fascism. Putting the psychics in blatant Nazi uniforms seems too decontructional to just be trying to reflect the fascism in the book. And I think much of the script is mocking Heinlein's writing style and hero worship.
If the parody angle is correct, that would certainly explain why so many Heinlein fans didn't get the joke, wouldn't it?
There is significant recent evidence (see, for example, The User Illusion) to suggest that consciousness has no control over our creativity but only our actions. In other words, your nonconscious makes up all sorts of things to say and your conscious only acts as a filter to choose the most appropriate. Tor Norretranders suggests this may be a fundamental flaw in Christianity where thoughts are sinful over Judaism where only actions are sinful.
I have no idea whether your consciousness kicks in before subvocalisation, but if not this technology is probably useless to everyone but psychotherapists and artists.
You're right that if applied in a police state, where only the authorities had the ability to read the subvocalisers, then such technology could be of great harm to human rights. However if everyone had access to everyone else's subvocalisations, then it could completely transform society. A transparent society where you knew what everyone else was thinking would be so totally different from our own, I think we can't even begin to speculate on the pros and cons.
On the other hand, I remember reading somewhere that monotheistic religion was impossible before the invention of Aramaic and Hebrew because earlier languages couldn't express the necessary abstractions.
That is a post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this therefore because of this") fallacy. Language problems is just one of the many symptoms of autism which lead us to believe that they have a distinctly different pattern of thought. We can only speculate that some subset of those symptoms are closer to the problem on a cognitive level. For example, Simon Baron-Cohen would probably argue that autistic people have no theory of other minds, therefore don't have the same understanding of the purpose of language as other users, and therefore use language poorly from the perspective of those other users.
The facility in Aliens: Resurrection should have been BSL-5, but because the CDC hadn't updated its biosafety criteria in hundreds of years, they mistakenly think that BSL-4 is good enough. If the hatched Aliens were put in little pods out in space and poked at only by robots, all their acid tricks would have got them is a whole lotta vacuum.
And yeah, it does just exterminate the species, but that's why it needs to be studied: so we can figure out how to make it stop.
As far as I can tell, that is indeed a very insightful way of looking at it.
At the semantic level: In denotational semantics, a program is a function with side-effects. A Haskell program without side-effects (all the input comes in, then all the output goes out) defines a mathematical function.
At the implementation level: A Haskell program with IO is the specification of a sequence of system calls. A monad with branching and other constructs is an instance of a superclass of straight monads.
However, a C program isn't necessarily that different: it still needs to be called as a function by the kernel. Haskell simply has another layer of abstraction because functions (and therefore programs) are first-class entities. And, of course, it's much easier (although not automatic) to ensure that programs are full rather than partial functions in Haskell.
Doing stuff in space is a high-return investment in technology. Unfortunately, you can't just tell people "do stuff in space", or they won't do anything interesting. So the managers come up with arbitrary goals, like getting to the Moon, or looking for life. That way the scienticians have real goals to work towards, they build technology, and we all win!
NASA's managers seem to have decided that their arbitrary goals will mostly have to do with putting people in random places. The ESA has decided to look for life in random places. Both will yield different technological paybacks and it's pretty hard to make a value judgement between the two, don't you think?
First: when people say "The Theory of Foo" what they properly mean is "The Hypothesis That Foo".
Second: Evolution is a process, not a hypothesis. It has been applied in Computer Science, postulated in astrophysics and biology, etc. Natural Selection is a scientific hypothesis.
Third: Hypotheses are not directly verifiable. You don't go out and look for gravity to try and figure out whether Newton was right. Hypotheses are used to generate verifiable predictions, and the more predictions that are verified to be correct, the more correct the hypothesis that generated them is take to be.
Natural Selection generates predictions about disease resistance, fossil records, etc. So far, all of the significant predictions have been verified to be correct. How many of Creationism's have been? Oh right, it's a historical claim, not a hypothesis.
In retrospect, don't most people admit that Ada was a really good language for its time? And you're right to be skeptical, but it's not impossible that I'm right. :)
In my program, the algorithms class was at the start of second year, so many students were still not comfortable with pointers. As a result, most people spent so much time struggling with the implementations that they didn't get a chance to sit back and appreciate the structures.
In Haskell, structures like linked lists and binary trees are implemented with a single line of code. Yes, you don't see the actual memory addresses being used, but these are also barriers to understanding.
I'd advocate algorithm classes completing an implementation of linked lists in C (if this wasn't done in the C introductory class), then moving to a higher-level language for everything else. Because after all, once you've implemented one data structure in C, it's not difficult to implement them all.
I haven't really given it much thought, but I've heard claims that functional libraries are designed very differently from imperative libraries and therefore .NET's (which is, lets face it, designed for C#) will not fit perfectly with CLI functional languages. Of course a functional-style wrapper around the .NET libraries could be written, but then we might as well be using the meager native functional libraries we already have.
.NET API?
Do you have any feeling for how well F# or H# will get along with the
Short answer: IO is an exit value, just like you said.
Long answer:
Monads are a pattern for hiding a state that gets passed from a sequence of functions. For example, when you assign to a variable in an imperative language, the value of that variable in the implicit state is updated and all future phrases accessing that variable will get the new value. If you're using a Haskell state monad it works the same way, but you need to explicitly specify which phrases can be executed in the future (using sequencing operators much like C's semicolon). Effectively Haskell monads allow all imperative constructs except for backwards jumps (goto).
The Haskell IO Monad is a purely functional mechanism for ensuring that modifications of the RealWorld are done in the correct order. It is implemented to call system calls which have real side-effects, but wrapping IO in a monad ensures that you can still reason about the order the side-effects will occur in. Since Haskell is lazy, these side-effects won't actually be triggered until necessary, either because the program needs an input value or it exits.
(I can give examples if anyone wants, but the resources at haskell.org may be more helpful.)
OCaml, which is not purely functional but still closely related to Haskell, is nearly as fast as C. Haskell somewhat acts as a testbed for ideas in the ML language family, and future versions of OCaml are expected to include many features that were first implemented in Haskell. I'd also suggest that Haskell is a good introductory language for future OCaml programmers as it ensures they won't just try and use OCaml like a weird imperative language.
OTOH, it is theoretically possible to automatically multithread purely functional programs, especially if they're lazy like Haskell. So it could end up being a very important language on multi-processor and distributed systems.
Finally, Haskell has an excellent foreign function interface for when you need C-like performance and control.
mod_haskell
Crush seems to have an awful lot of overhead for an OS language.
Oh, I see that it has unsafe pointers for when you want to avoid garbage collection, right? But wait, doesn't that make it an unsafe language?
And it's nice that you can switch between dynamic and static typing, because I sure as hell wouldn't want type inference in my kernel, but can the safety checks be done statically? I guess not, that'd be undecidable, right?
If Crush has "no primitive types or constructs", what's this "raw core" the Introduction talks about?
Do these guys actually have any idea what they're doing? Designing a modern programming language and designing an operating system are both monumental tasks. I hope they're at least having fun...
Is that why Unix is so far behind Windows in usability?
Seriously, though: the Unix philosophy emphasises little modular tools over monolithic applications, right? Shouldn't one of the chief advantages of this be that small, non-speed-critical apps can be written in high-level languages? But for some reason just because all the innards and libraries are written in C/C++ (as they should be), many open source coders decide that they should write applications running on top of those innards in the same languages.
Look, just because GTK is written in C, doesn't mean all the Gnome applets need to be! Same goes for Qt and C++. Hell, even Perl would be better! I'm tired of trivial apps causing memory faults. If it were written in a high-level language, I could just go in and fix the errors without having to wade through all this function redirection and reinvention of wheels.
I thought the open source community was supposed to like scripting languages? What's wrong with you guys?
And yet consumers will almost always sacrifice usability for power. A rational ranking of laptop features would start:
Because: If it weights too much, you'll never have it with you. And there's no point in carrying it around if you can't access anything. And you won't want to access anything if it's a pain to use.
And so most handhelds have enough power, yet consumers continue to have their priorities almost in reverse and buy heavy pieces of crap. And critics continue to criticise tablets because they increase the cost without increasing the power. Why is everyone so stupid?
That's a very good point: it's more important to be formal than it is to be written. In reality, most verbal contracts are vague and writing them down tends to make people put a little more effort into specifying them.
Best to sign some kind of contract if you're just living together, before you become common-law. This'll certainly set a precedent for the subject of a pre-nup. In fact, the safest thing to do is just sign contracts with everyone in your life, no matter what your relationship. :)