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theaeolist

Re:The Recursive Book of Recursion on Saturday January 04, 2025 @07:50AM (#42594413)
Recursion is natural and easy to understand when the argument of the function is a recursive data structure, and the cases are patterns on the constructors. These are natural and useful cases, much better than the alternative. Starting with misguided examples like factorial is demotivating.
Re:Moore law is dead – Long live the chiplet on Friday October 07, 2022 @03:33AM (#33118404)
Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.
Re:Socialist Romania Computer Chips on Friday September 30, 2022 @03:09AM (#33031901)
"The consumption of electricity in everyday life was limited (it was forbidden to use a refrigerator during the winter, and the use of a vacuum cleaner was banned all year round), hot water was supplied to apartments twice a week,"

This is all false. Source: I was there.

Program Committee
A clear exposition of an obscure and hard to understand result is lack of 'respect for readers' time'? How so?
> 3. While the size of any one conference has to be fixed, tech has made it infinitely easier to create new conferences and journals with other focus areas. They may not start with the prestige of a larger journal, but if the papers published start to have an impact, it can catalyze an entire subfield of work.

Does it though? The largest conferences I go to as a CS academic have hundreds of people. There are academic areas where 10x people participate. The size limitation is a self-imposed excuse to keep acceptance low. I have been PC chair of two conferences and my attempts to expand the conference numbers were shot down by the steering committee precisely for this reason, not because we couldn't find a larger room.

Re:Real peer review has never been tried on Friday July 22, 2022 @05:04AM (#32190029)
Journals can still do curation of the stuff that's on preprint archives. Some already do. It's a lot less friction than the current model.
Maybe not so slow.
> For example, in Sri Lanka, there is no way for someone to accept payments or send money through PayPal or Stripe. However, people will be able to send money through the blockchain and bypass these restrictions if more people begin to trust crypto.

If Sri Lanka blocks PayPal and Stripe are you sure they will not block commercial entities from converting between rupees and crypto-assets? Individual and small scale operators might still do it, flying under the radar, but that is not a scalable proposition.

Re:The next Google on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @04:22AM (#30929743)
Maybe Google should start a new thing, a "search engine", which actually searches (rather then guess, anticipate, and interpret).
Re:Umeshisms on Tuesday March 15, 2022 @05:51AM (#30683425)
10 hrs waiting (i.e. catching up on email and social media, eating or shopping) for 4k? Does this seem reasonable to you?
Re:Umeshisms on Tuesday March 15, 2022 @05:42AM (#30683370)
At the airport I don't merely sit and wait. I catch up on email and paperwork, maybe start watching a movie. It's not wasted time so I don't mind being there 30 mins extra for safety.
Re:Umeshisms on Tuesday March 15, 2022 @05:41AM (#30683363)
If you need to flip your USB A connector three times before pushing it into the port you are not pushing hard enough.
Re:The Dark Side of Smart Contracts on Monday February 07, 2022 @06:45AM (#30243481)
> Smart contracts offer revolutionary new to transact gloablly.

They certainly do that.

Re:The Dark Side of Smart Contracts on Monday February 07, 2022 @06:41AM (#30243429)
You don't seem to understand what the previous poster said: all of this can be achieved with a database that allows some open access. You don't need a consensus protocol on a distributed system.

Ask HN: New Programming Language?

If you were not constrained by material considerations and were to commission the design of a new mainstream general-purpose programming language what new technical feature would it have and what important problem would that feature solve?I hope you can humour me and not challenge the assumptions baked into the question. That's a separate, if interesting, exercise.

( Read More... | 98 comments | 29 points | on HN )
Much like mixing garbage into food. You get garbage, not food.
Re:Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are on Monday January 10, 2022 @08:02AM (#29874137)
The article makes some specific points, which you fail to address. Your objection is a generic "never mind that, just give it more time". You can do better.
Re:The rise and fall of rationality in language on Saturday December 18, 2021 @01:33AM (#29602259)
You can, however, greatly reduce it. That would be good enough.
Re:The Matrix Is Unreal on Monday December 13, 2021 @12:01AM (#29536798)
This is so true, yet so totally besides the point.
Re:Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used? on Saturday November 27, 2021 @04:37AM (#29358913)
Everything about fancy hotel bathrooms is a usability nightmare. Sometimes there are two showers (hand-held and ceiling-mounted) operated by a single lever which sets temperature, pressure, and which of the two showers is active. The risk of giving yourself a too hot or too cold burst is significant. I usually cower into a corner while sloooooowly messing with that lever.

For an extra bonus: You usually have three identical looking small bottles with 'shampoo', 'conditioner', and 'shower gel' only distinguished by a tiny label, something like black-on-brown or yellow-on-white. Good luck if you are wearing glasses.

Re:On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017) on Saturday November 20, 2021 @07:58PM (#29293218)
Indeed. I hope posting jokey papers on the Arxiv does not become a thing.
Re:On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017) on Saturday November 20, 2021 @07:57PM (#29293214)
Can you recreate all phenomena computationally? Could you replace the antenna of your radio or mobile phone with a special CPU? Could you bomb a country with CPUs? I don't think so.
Re:On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017) on Saturday November 20, 2021 @07:56PM (#29293202)
We DO have PB-grade storage facilities and they lack full AI. Moving the memory inside a single box instead of having interconnected devices is not going to bring AI just like that.
Re:On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017) on Saturday November 20, 2021 @07:54PM (#29293189)
I wonder if there isn't some fundamental misunderstanding here. What if it's not "just the neurons". If you found a Regency TR-1 radio you could wonder "how can this 4-transistor device produce a continuous stream of music, much like Spotify, which requires billions of transistor to run?". Of course, the radio also has an antenna, which is a completely different device than a transistor.

The device running Spotify may also have an antenna, but I hope you get the analogy. My analogy is not meant to be taken faithfully, so that we need to start looking for antennas now instead of neurons. I am just saying that maybe the neuron-counting game is not the only thing. Maybe there is something else -- not magical, not divine, but physical and as-of-yet unknown. Humanity didn't always know everything, and maybe still doesn't.

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