Scripts are typically small compared to the system that they are scripting.[...]Most of the time will not be spent executing scripts, but executing libraries or application subsystems called by scripts.[...]It's difficult to see how Hindley-Milner type inference would be the right tradeoff in such an environment, at least most of the time.
It's also difficult to see how it matters, since a small script is going to start pretty much instantly and consume very little resources, no matter how complex its type system might be, especially when compared to the rest of the (much larger) system. And this is also ignoring the possibility of having separate development and production runtimes.
If anything, one would think that robustness over speed would be the exact right tradeoff for a critical, but not performance-critical piece of the system.
Given that nobody has figured out how to do a first person shooter with a functional langauge, makes me suspect that they aren't the one answer to every problem. In fact even a relatively simple game is quite awkward in a functional style.
Suppose your gameworld is represented by a list of objects. For each tick, go through the list for the previous tick and call newState(oldlist) for every object. This function returns zero or more objects, which get added to the new list - done by functional-style recursion, of course. In imperative programming, spider kills a fly, in functional one, fly is killed by a spider. It basically just reverses the subject-object relationship - entities react to other entities, rather than acting on them.
Whether this provides any advantages is another matter.
Depending upon how the compiler, and the JVM behave (and the JVM is amazingly sophisticated) the variable may or may not continue to exist within the stack frame, but simply not be visible to other code within the function but outside of the curly braces where the variable was defined. So I expressly set the variable to null before the closing curly brace to ensure that my only reference to the structure disappears.
But even a relatively dumb compiler would simply optimize that assignment out, since it has no consquences - the variable goes out of scope, so it can never be accessed again. And for that matter, a sophisticated compiler could and probably should realize that the variable is never used past its last occurrence, so the space should be reused.
But why would you even bother? If the object holds some external resources, use try-finally to ensure they're released in a timely manner; if not, if it's just memory, let the JVM manage it. The JVM is, after all, "amazingly sophisticated", so any attempt to second guess it will likely just slow things down, especially since you don't - according to yourself - really know its inner workings that well.
Normally, "whoosh" is used for people who don't get the joke, but in this case you deserve a "whoosh" for not getting the point.
I get the point, it's simply incorrect.
WTF do I care if the drug dealer puts adulterants in his crappy drugs?
If you don't care about the facts related to a subject, don't make claims about the subject in the first place.
The point is that the deaths from overdoses are not because some insanely careful and meticulous dosage-calculating drug user OD'ed 'cause he counted on the drug dealer to give him a calibrated and accurate and precise amount and strength of drug as the USP would give him.
Yes, that's precisely what overdose deaths are often from.
These fuckers die because they used illegal drugs and they took too much of the damn drug.
Yes, and the reason they took too much of it is often because the amount of actual drug in a given amount of street drug varies.
It's no use blaming the drug dealer for getting your poor widdle kid addicted: your kid chose to use the drugs. Blame your kid, not the drug dealer, for the kid's decision to seek out and use drugs.
And a drug dealer chose to sell them, and randomly dilute them, sometimes with outright poisons. Why on Earth would it be okay to blame someone for making a decision that might hurt themselves, but not okay to blame someone for making a decision that will almost certainly hurt others?
Also, your claim is absurd. Of course drug dealers are trying to get poor widdle kids addicted. They depend on customers to make a profit, after all, and long-term customer relationships are pretty unlikely for obvious reasons.
Finally, the category of "drugs" included alcohol once upon a time. Does that mean that those moonshiners who bottled and sold methanol are blameless for the consequences, since their victims were criminals who ingested illegal substances?
To take a phrase from the NRA types: drug-dealers and drugs don't cause the overdoses, the fucking idiots who ingest the drugs cause the overdoses.
And yet someone who made a gun that randomly explodes when fired and kills its user would get sued post haste.
This is a base requirement for fracking: there is no way to do fracking without polluting the ground water.
That is an extraordinary claim and it requires extraordinary evidence. Specifically, it requires explaining why fracking liquid injected into a gasfield inevitably ends up in an aquifer, despite these being separated by impermeable layers (which is a requirement for gas to stay put in the first place).
Cheaper Energy would give a boost to German industry which is especially needed at a time when Europe is middle of a recession just like it has given a boost to the US industry.
Industry exists so people can get beer (and stuff). Industry is a means to an end, beer is (one of the) end(s). Saying the means are more important than the ends shows a deep confusion.
In any case, apart from their enviromental effects, fossil fuels can only get more expensive over time as the remaining reserves are ever harder to get at, and are ultimately finite. And a recession is an excellent time for the government to spend on updating the infrastructure to migrate away from them, since prices are low, debt is cheap and any spending will have a stimulus effect.
I think we would see a healthy change in the way corporations operate if we made any attempt to better "motivate" management other than by pure profit and shielding them from responisbility.:)
As long as people keep on saying making profit is the only responsibility a corporation has, that's exactly how they'll behave. Rather than try to set up intricate incentive systems that almost certainly lead to weird perversions of their intent, it would be far more useful to change the memescape in which they operate. Things like prestige matter to people, so change culture so that irresponsible greed becomes a shameful disgrace. They want to be feudal lords? Very well then, but if they insist on being robber barons they should be reviled and hated, not excused.
The people who lead corporations are human, no matter how hard it might be to believe sometimes, and as such cultural conditioning is much more efficient than threats. On the bad side, it'll take a lot longer to take hold, so perhaps we'll have to resort to threats in the short term. But in the long run, the only effective solution to the problem of corporations behaving badly is changing how our culture - and thus the people working in them - view them.
Domain Squatting is a plague that needs to be stamped out, not rewarded.
Scalpers are parasites, and Microsoft is a parasite. Let them duke it out.
If however it is a fan site or such that was created with a legitimate purpose THEN and only then should MS be paying off the site owner.
First come, first served. Why should anyone have to defend their reasons for acquiring a piece of property just because Microsoft later decides it wants it?
This whole idea that the interests of large companies trump the interests of individuals by default is a far worse plague than scalping.
It's like the politically correct mafia that also wants us to "feel" for the poor addicts who continue to use drugs when they ought to know better, or the parents of kids who die from drug overdoses and go out of their way to blame the drug dealers for their kids' deaths, rather than realize that their kids had everything to do with their ingestion of drugs.
Yes, blaming drug dealers for drug related deaths is a clear example of political correctness gone mad. These upstanding businessmen are especially blameless for adding varying amounts and types of adulterants into their wares, thus making their actual dosage essentially random and causing interesting and often unhealthy medical side effects beyond those of the drug itself. Thank you for bringing this extremely valid and not at all insane point to our attention.
When we see a heroine addict we don't mew and cry about the sociological reasons for their addiction. We have to be firm, tell them their continued abuse of drugs is not ok, and we will not abide it. The same should happen with people that are obese. We're enabling them. Fat is not beautiful, it kills you, stop treating it as if it were some sort of unavoidable birth defect. It's a choice, and it's not ok.
Your implicit asumption that you have a right to tell other people what they may eat or otherwise input into their bodies "for their own good" is not okay. Your continued abuse of your freedom of speech by advocating depriving other people of their freedom is not okay, and we will not abide it. Authoritarianism is not beautifull, it has killed over hundred million people in the last century alone, and you must stop treating it as if it were some sort of unavoidable birth defect. It's a choice, and it's not ok.
Also, let me tell you a terrible little secret: no one, no matter how fit, gets away alive. No one.
I realize the 992% figure is confusing, but I didn't make up that figure, I read it in an article. The term used is "accumulated devaluation", maybe some economist can make more sense of this.
So you don't know what it means, if anything, but "an article" provides it as evidence for a claim so it must be so?
Key of the problem is that we can not know whether the cat is dead or alive without looking at it. Poor cat. But could we maybe determine the dead/alive state of the cat indirectly? For example by looking at the death rates of the mice?
How is this any more indirect than looking at the photons reflecting from the cat? Which you also don't observe directly, BTW: you observe the chemical reactions they cause in your eyes. Or, if we want to get really specific: photons reflect from the cat and cause chemical reactions in your eyes, which cause nerve pulses, which cause changes in the state of your visual cortex, which causes changes in the state of your cerebral cortex, which you observe as the thought "the cat is dead" or "the cat is alive".
There is no such thing as direct observation in physics.
Meaning, all those people replaced by robots still won't have a job or be spending money, but you want to be sure that the people running the companies that actually produce stuff are also kept poor so nobody resents them.
Well, obviously. Production stays the same, as does population, but there's no way to rearrange economy so people can still get goods once the work for pay -model breaks down. Clearly, things like having the society own the automated factories and distribute production quota to its citizens is out of the question. Instead, products will sit on the warehouses gathering dust and people who need them sit outside and do without because the most important thing is to ensure no one gets anything they didn't earn with their sweat, tears and blood - unless they're an investor, in which case it's okay to substitute other people's sweat for your own.
That will definitely be an incentive for them to keep bothering.
That doesn't really matter to people who can't afford to buy their products, now does it? Nor to even those who do, since they can eventually be replaced by computer algorithms as well.
An "agile" project cannot fail and cost Billions because it must always deliver runnable software with a maximum of a few weeks delay if you use some "semi agile" process like scrum or immediately any point if you use some true agile process.
Mandating success does not mean you can't or won't fail.
For every system there's a lower bound of features where it becomes useful, which requires a certain lower bound of code and thus work to achieve. Until you've hit that, you can't deliver working software, unless you define "working software" as "runs and passes some tests" which, according to your own message below, you don't. And there's no reason why reaching that point couldn't cost billions (at least in theory; in practice it's hard to see how any software could cost billions).
Kids of today will simply grow up to hold the attitude that literally everyone has made mistakes in their past, especially so while young, and most things a person did won't be held against them.
Or even better, stop pretending that the purpose of life is to be an industrial robot and any deviation from that is a "mistake" that one needs to express regret for. I can understand why employees would want that: for the same reason that tobacco industry kept on claiming their cancer sticks are harmless for as long as it could. That doesn't mean it isn't bullshit.
Frankly, this whole ritual of claiming one's actions were a mistake looks a lot like a blasphemous version of Catholic confessional, with the public playing the role of God.
I think it would be just as foolish to dismiss this outright, considering the " tantalizing hints that there may be something to it" and the developing theories as it would be to start dumping your life savings into Rossi's company.
No, not really. It's the "tantalizing hints that there may be something to it" part which pretty much screams bullshit. Fusion is not exactly subtle; if it's going on, it's not hard to detect, and hasn't been. Furthermore, according to the Wikipedia link, the device was covered up during demonstrations, actively hindering any kind of measurements. Add those together and shave with Occam's razor, and you get "conman".
Also, fusion is not really all that hard to achieve. For example, a fusor is simple enough for a hobbyist project. What's hard is a fusion device with a net energy output; we don't even know if Rossi's device is doing fusion at all, so why would we even begin to assume it's not only doing so but generating more power than it consumes?
So yeah, with the information we have, this seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be dismissed outright.
Well, isn't that what he was voted into office as? "Hope and change" - if you vote for him, everything will miraculously be fine again, rather than continue crumbling. That it actually worked - twice - tells something about how desperate people are getting.
I recently listened to the excellent History of Rome podcast, and one thing that struck home is the politics of the old Roman Republic. It would be trivial to sort many Roman politicians into left-right.
Because they actually were or because the podcaster had already done so when preparing the cast? After all, every political idea can be fitted into a left-right axis, just like any point on Earth's surface has a latitude. That does not mean it's sufficient information to capture the essence of the idea.
The more complex the subject and the less certain the data, the easier it's to see exactly what you expect to see.
That does not counter my arguments as to why that's exactly what you get.
It's entirely possible to close loopholes like this while making the tax code much less complicated,
Are you a lawyer who's actually read the tax code and has concrete ideas, or are you simply asserting this?
The problem is that if you insist on treating law as a computer program, which following it to the letter in essence is, you'll run into the same problem as actual programs: it'll start simple, but soon the first weird corner cases show up, and you add special-case code to handle them, and then more, and then more, until the whole thing is an utter mess where any chance is likely to have unintended consequences. And you just know that you should just rewrite the thing partially or completely, but of course the process simply repeats if you do.
But for any other serious financial transaction, well, unless you are a mobster or a dope dealer or otherwise involved in something illegal, the real question is WHY DEAL WITH IT.
Define "serious financial transaction". How does it differ from a regular financial transaction?
But in any case, the reasons to use Bitcoin is: you don't need the approval or cooperation of any third parties. You don't need a credit card, PayPal account nor even a bank account. You don't need to pay fees associated with these nor care if a government or a lobby group disapproves of your business. You don't need to worry about chargebacks nor people stealing your card number. You don't need to wait until the next day to have your transaction verified. Your have privacy - no, even if I don't do anything wrong or illegal I still don't want a stalker watching me. And you don't need to worry about things like the recent bank troubles in Cyprus.
Bitcoin is simply superior in over-the-Internet transactions, especially multinational ones.
McDonalds, for over a decade, served their coffee at temperatures hot enough to instantly cause severe burns
Which is the proper service temperature for coffee.
McDonald's customers should be defended from having hazardous material hastily handed to them,
Which includes pretty much everything served at McDonald's.
and medical professionals should be defended from being duty-bound to treat everyone, even if there's no reimbursement for the expense.
Dunno how this fits in with the rest - is it a Slashdot comment equivalent of a rider? In any case, you're wrong - with great power comes great responsibility, no matter how much it might clash with anyone's political ideology.
Still, it's not a difficult problem to solve another way - simply use a single-payer medical system and the doctors get their reimbursement from the government.
The solution is not to expect every single one of the thousands of players to voluntarily adhere to what you consider to be wrong. The solution is not to try to keep on eye on these players and shame or boycott them into playing honorably. The solution is to outlaw the tactic.
And then you get where we are today: with absurdly complex laws that try to split every last hair and control everything in a vain attempt to enumerate badness. And of course it requires a huge bureaucracy to actually enforce all those laws.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also difficult to see how it matters, since a small script is going to start pretty much instantly and consume very little resources, no matter how complex its type system might be, especially when compared to the rest of the (much larger) system. And this is also ignoring the possibility of having separate development and production runtimes.
If anything, one would think that robustness over speed would be the exact right tradeoff for a critical, but not performance-critical piece of the system.
Suppose your gameworld is represented by a list of objects. For each tick, go through the list for the previous tick and call newState(oldlist) for every object. This function returns zero or more objects, which get added to the new list - done by functional-style recursion, of course. In imperative programming, spider kills a fly, in functional one, fly is killed by a spider. It basically just reverses the subject-object relationship - entities react to other entities, rather than acting on them.
Whether this provides any advantages is another matter.
But even a relatively dumb compiler would simply optimize that assignment out, since it has no consquences - the variable goes out of scope, so it can never be accessed again. And for that matter, a sophisticated compiler could and probably should realize that the variable is never used past its last occurrence, so the space should be reused.
But why would you even bother? If the object holds some external resources, use try-finally to ensure they're released in a timely manner; if not, if it's just memory, let the JVM manage it. The JVM is, after all, "amazingly sophisticated", so any attempt to second guess it will likely just slow things down, especially since you don't - according to yourself - really know its inner workings that well.
I get the point, it's simply incorrect.
If you don't care about the facts related to a subject, don't make claims about the subject in the first place.
Yes, that's precisely what overdose deaths are often from.
Yes, and the reason they took too much of it is often because the amount of actual drug in a given amount of street drug varies.
And a drug dealer chose to sell them, and randomly dilute them, sometimes with outright poisons. Why on Earth would it be okay to blame someone for making a decision that might hurt themselves, but not okay to blame someone for making a decision that will almost certainly hurt others?
Also, your claim is absurd. Of course drug dealers are trying to get poor widdle kids addicted. They depend on customers to make a profit, after all, and long-term customer relationships are pretty unlikely for obvious reasons.
Finally, the category of "drugs" included alcohol once upon a time. Does that mean that those moonshiners who bottled and sold methanol are blameless for the consequences, since their victims were criminals who ingested illegal substances?
And yet someone who made a gun that randomly explodes when fired and kills its user would get sued post haste.
That is an extraordinary claim and it requires extraordinary evidence. Specifically, it requires explaining why fracking liquid injected into a gasfield inevitably ends up in an aquifer, despite these being separated by impermeable layers (which is a requirement for gas to stay put in the first place).
Industry exists so people can get beer (and stuff). Industry is a means to an end, beer is (one of the) end(s). Saying the means are more important than the ends shows a deep confusion.
In any case, apart from their enviromental effects, fossil fuels can only get more expensive over time as the remaining reserves are ever harder to get at, and are ultimately finite. And a recession is an excellent time for the government to spend on updating the infrastructure to migrate away from them, since prices are low, debt is cheap and any spending will have a stimulus effect.
As long as people keep on saying making profit is the only responsibility a corporation has, that's exactly how they'll behave. Rather than try to set up intricate incentive systems that almost certainly lead to weird perversions of their intent, it would be far more useful to change the memescape in which they operate. Things like prestige matter to people, so change culture so that irresponsible greed becomes a shameful disgrace. They want to be feudal lords? Very well then, but if they insist on being robber barons they should be reviled and hated, not excused.
The people who lead corporations are human, no matter how hard it might be to believe sometimes, and as such cultural conditioning is much more efficient than threats. On the bad side, it'll take a lot longer to take hold, so perhaps we'll have to resort to threats in the short term. But in the long run, the only effective solution to the problem of corporations behaving badly is changing how our culture - and thus the people working in them - view them.
Scalpers are parasites, and Microsoft is a parasite. Let them duke it out.
First come, first served. Why should anyone have to defend their reasons for acquiring a piece of property just because Microsoft later decides it wants it?
This whole idea that the interests of large companies trump the interests of individuals by default is a far worse plague than scalping.
Yes, blaming drug dealers for drug related deaths is a clear example of political correctness gone mad. These upstanding businessmen are especially blameless for adding varying amounts and types of adulterants into their wares, thus making their actual dosage essentially random and causing interesting and often unhealthy medical side effects beyond those of the drug itself. Thank you for bringing this extremely valid and not at all insane point to our attention.
Your implicit asumption that you have a right to tell other people what they may eat or otherwise input into their bodies "for their own good" is not okay. Your continued abuse of your freedom of speech by advocating depriving other people of their freedom is not okay, and we will not abide it. Authoritarianism is not beautifull, it has killed over hundred million people in the last century alone, and you must stop treating it as if it were some sort of unavoidable birth defect. It's a choice, and it's not ok.
Also, let me tell you a terrible little secret: no one, no matter how fit, gets away alive. No one.
So you don't know what it means, if anything, but "an article" provides it as evidence for a claim so it must be so?
*Facepalm.jpg*
How is this any more indirect than looking at the photons reflecting from the cat? Which you also don't observe directly, BTW: you observe the chemical reactions they cause in your eyes. Or, if we want to get really specific: photons reflect from the cat and cause chemical reactions in your eyes, which cause nerve pulses, which cause changes in the state of your visual cortex, which causes changes in the state of your cerebral cortex, which you observe as the thought "the cat is dead" or "the cat is alive".
There is no such thing as direct observation in physics.
Well, obviously. Production stays the same, as does population, but there's no way to rearrange economy so people can still get goods once the work for pay -model breaks down. Clearly, things like having the society own the automated factories and distribute production quota to its citizens is out of the question. Instead, products will sit on the warehouses gathering dust and people who need them sit outside and do without because the most important thing is to ensure no one gets anything they didn't earn with their sweat, tears and blood - unless they're an investor, in which case it's okay to substitute other people's sweat for your own.
That doesn't really matter to people who can't afford to buy their products, now does it? Nor to even those who do, since they can eventually be replaced by computer algorithms as well.
Mandating success does not mean you can't or won't fail.
For every system there's a lower bound of features where it becomes useful, which requires a certain lower bound of code and thus work to achieve. Until you've hit that, you can't deliver working software, unless you define "working software" as "runs and passes some tests" which, according to your own message below, you don't. And there's no reason why reaching that point couldn't cost billions (at least in theory; in practice it's hard to see how any software could cost billions).
Or even better, stop pretending that the purpose of life is to be an industrial robot and any deviation from that is a "mistake" that one needs to express regret for. I can understand why employees would want that: for the same reason that tobacco industry kept on claiming their cancer sticks are harmless for as long as it could. That doesn't mean it isn't bullshit.
Frankly, this whole ritual of claiming one's actions were a mistake looks a lot like a blasphemous version of Catholic confessional, with the public playing the role of God.
So... people pay you dollars if you agree to take their bolivars away?
No, not really. It's the "tantalizing hints that there may be something to it" part which pretty much screams bullshit. Fusion is not exactly subtle; if it's going on, it's not hard to detect, and hasn't been. Furthermore, according to the Wikipedia link, the device was covered up during demonstrations, actively hindering any kind of measurements. Add those together and shave with Occam's razor, and you get "conman".
Also, fusion is not really all that hard to achieve. For example, a fusor is simple enough for a hobbyist project. What's hard is a fusion device with a net energy output; we don't even know if Rossi's device is doing fusion at all, so why would we even begin to assume it's not only doing so but generating more power than it consumes?
So yeah, with the information we have, this seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be dismissed outright.
I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of pennies suddenly screamed out in terror and were melted down to scrap.
This is true of any imaginable language.
Well, isn't that what he was voted into office as? "Hope and change" - if you vote for him, everything will miraculously be fine again, rather than continue crumbling. That it actually worked - twice - tells something about how desperate people are getting.
Because they actually were or because the podcaster had already done so when preparing the cast? After all, every political idea can be fitted into a left-right axis, just like any point on Earth's surface has a latitude. That does not mean it's sufficient information to capture the essence of the idea.
The more complex the subject and the less certain the data, the easier it's to see exactly what you expect to see.
That does not counter my arguments as to why that's exactly what you get.
Are you a lawyer who's actually read the tax code and has concrete ideas, or are you simply asserting this?
The problem is that if you insist on treating law as a computer program, which following it to the letter in essence is, you'll run into the same problem as actual programs: it'll start simple, but soon the first weird corner cases show up, and you add special-case code to handle them, and then more, and then more, until the whole thing is an utter mess where any chance is likely to have unintended consequences. And you just know that you should just rewrite the thing partially or completely, but of course the process simply repeats if you do.
Define "serious financial transaction". How does it differ from a regular financial transaction?
But in any case, the reasons to use Bitcoin is: you don't need the approval or cooperation of any third parties. You don't need a credit card, PayPal account nor even a bank account. You don't need to pay fees associated with these nor care if a government or a lobby group disapproves of your business. You don't need to worry about chargebacks nor people stealing your card number. You don't need to wait until the next day to have your transaction verified. Your have privacy - no, even if I don't do anything wrong or illegal I still don't want a stalker watching me. And you don't need to worry about things like the recent bank troubles in Cyprus.
Bitcoin is simply superior in over-the-Internet transactions, especially multinational ones.
Which is the proper service temperature for coffee.
Which includes pretty much everything served at McDonald's.
Dunno how this fits in with the rest - is it a Slashdot comment equivalent of a rider? In any case, you're wrong - with great power comes great responsibility, no matter how much it might clash with anyone's political ideology.
Still, it's not a difficult problem to solve another way - simply use a single-payer medical system and the doctors get their reimbursement from the government.
And then you get where we are today: with absurdly complex laws that try to split every last hair and control everything in a vain attempt to enumerate badness. And of course it requires a huge bureaucracy to actually enforce all those laws.