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farginay

Re:Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim on Monday February 24, 2014 @05:18AM (#7290014)
Clang v. GCC all over again?
Re:Can Quiet, Efficient 'Space Elevators' Really Work? on Wednesday February 19, 2014 @10:43AM (#7264124)
I've always wondered about the aggregate effect of wind pressure across the length of the cable. It seems like it could be significant.
Re:Ways to avoid using the word 'very' on Monday February 17, 2014 @12:31PM (#7253143)
Very good article.
Re:Spek – A Specification Framework on Monday February 17, 2014 @12:04PM (#7252974)
Be wary of an architect who hands you anything and tells you to implement it. Real architects talk to you and sit down and write code with you.
Re:Spek – A Specification Framework on Monday February 17, 2014 @09:52AM (#7252295)
I think it is fairer to say that tests can specify a system but not to the extent that you personally want to.
Re:Spek – A Specification Framework on Monday February 17, 2014 @09:51AM (#7252292)
Different thing. Spec# is about embedding specs in your code. Spek appears to be a Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) framework ala RSpec.

http://rspec.info/

Does anyone have a list of the 50+ options? No article seems to show them.
Re:hr for your terminal on Monday February 10, 2014 @05:42PM (#7214339)
I've long wanted a shell with logical separation of each command/output pair.
He starts with an anecdote about cheating and then lays out HFT an implies it is cheating without saying how. If he had to defend his assertion that it is cheating he wouldn't have an article.
Re:Swiss police: Screen in Tesla cars is too large on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @09:47AM (#7177670)
I'd prefer to live in a society where things like this were a matter of research rather than pronouncements by bureaucrats:

> "The distraction of the giant screen in the Tesla is not tolerable. I am convinced that the deflection is so great by the picture and sound while driving that accidents were due to the increase markedly. "

But is it illegal, or is this simply a civil thing?
I'm still not sure what the legal rationale is for treating link publication as copyright violation. When you publish a link, you are not copying anything, the person following the link is.

By analogy, a person who told people that Tarantino's script was under a box behind a grocery store would be violating copyright.

Re:Your most important skill: Empathy on Sunday January 19, 2014 @10:05AM (#7084584)
To me it's odd to see an article talk about empathy as a skill or a thing you can do. I've always thought being empathy as something you are at a feeling level.

I did some looking a while ago and discovered that psychologists distinguish a couple of different kinds of empathy. One is when you intellectually try to figure out how someone feels - the other is when you just feel it.

Re:Scala – 1 Star Would Not Program Again on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @02:26PM (#7059123)
This post reinforces my sense that Scala is the new C++.
Re:Zappos says goodbye to bosses on Thursday January 09, 2014 @09:59AM (#7030774)
You say "a hub" but I wonder whether it would be many? How close would such an effect be to hubs we see in scale free networks? In those, preferential attachment seems to induce hubs. Airline hubs are a good example - there's more value in connecting to a well-connected hub.
Re:Google+ invite lands man in jail on Thursday January 09, 2014 @09:56AM (#7030755)
I think that if it was your money paying for a lawyer you'd see the problem more readily.

The way you described the legal process is accurate: have a trial, having findings of fact. The thing people forget is that the process of being arrested, posting bail, paying for and going through the legal system, and putting one's life on hold for a period of time, is often more punishment than the fine or sentence under consideration.

This is why prosecutorial discretion and police discretion are important. When they are abused people suffer. And, sadly the accused have no voice at that stage of the process.

Re:Zappos says goodbye to bosses on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @01:48PM (#7025569)
Is there some result in the theory of random graphs that says that you can't have a graph of a certain size without developing hubs? It seems to happen in most systems.
Freedom of press is guaranteed only to those who own one. -- A. J. Liebling
If that's all they were concerned with they could just use GPS readings to invalidate the service agreement rather than switching the machine off.

In any case, I wish that Congress would step up and put law around the issue of whether one can "sell" things with restricted use. E-books, for instance, are really leased rather than sold. A sane legal system would give teeth to that legal distinction.

I'd hope that all costs are transparent at public universities.
I believe there was a copyright safe harbor for content on the internet before DMCA. However, it may have been just through case law. BBS and USENet operators took advantage of it back in the day.
Re:ATF uses rogue tactics in storefront stings across nation on Monday December 30, 2013 @04:26PM (#6987072)
We have privatized prisons with quotas for the number of prisoners.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quot...

What is a cry of "entrapment" next to incentive?

Re:Making Map Operations Implicit in Programming on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @12:41PM (#6929055)
It's interesting to see how the array programming languages have handled this. The way it works (loosely) is that everything is an array. A scalar is kind of a degenerate array, and a vector is an array of rank 1. Matrices can be seen as arrays of arrays of arrays..

Each operator defines its extent. The count operator '#' in J works at the top level. If you have a 3 x 4 matrix, it returns 3. Take '{.' works the same way. If you have a 3 x 4 matrix and you take 1, you will get a 4 element vector which is the first row of the matrix.

Something like decrement '<:' applies to all of the elements in a matrix regardless of the dimensionality.

This isn't like OO where collections have operations attached to them.

I wish the page described what the goal actually is - and what gitless is.

This is very hard to parse: "We are exploring what conceptual integrity means with the goal of building a rigorous foundation for concept design."

Huh?

Re:Making Map Operations Implicit in Programming on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @11:34AM (#6922002)
I think that it is more than syntactic sugar, it's an affordance. Different notation schemes make it more or less likely to find and code particular solutions. As an example, the syntax of ML-derived languages makes partial applications a much more reasonable choice than they are in Scala or in C-derived languages: the syntax is tuned to them.

Array programming is due for a renaissance. Like any other form of abstraction, we gain leverage once we are able to internalize it and use it. The thinking you mention is, I think, just the normal hurdle of unfamiliarity.

Re:Making Map Operations Implicit in Programming on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @11:10AM (#6921845)
Wouldn't it be nice if it was just:

    toUpperCase . guard (\x -> length x /= 0) . trim
I think that is how it would be if it was part of the language.
Re:Making Map Operations Implicit in Programming on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @10:53AM (#6921743)
I think the big thing is to make the case for one and the case for many look exactly the same in the language. Is that nicer to look at with do-notation?
Re:Making Map Operations Implicit in Programming on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @10:47AM (#6921706)
Erik Meijer points to this as research in this area: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.146....

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