GorgeRonde

    - Java: no
    - Ruby: no
    - PHP:  no
    - C:    yes and no

Listening to what ? To the dude that tells me that's not possible and proceeds to dump a big pile of authority on top of my head or to my own experiment that tells me another story ?

I would have preferred to be told:

- yes and no. You'll get warnings if you try to return a pointer to a local, however, doing this and that, you can manage to do it.

- but once you have achieved that, the result will be dependent on the way the stack is handled (not really in your control). You'll feel some comfort doing this in recursive calls, however beware of signal.h.

But this isn't the answer I received. I guess C programmers do not know the difference between what you can do (however risky) and what you shouldn't do. Also when someone asks such "weird" questions, do not assume he's a beginner with no notion of what constructs he can handle safely, maybe he's someone trying to find the limits of C – and once these limits are identified it can be a good conversation starter about C's internal and the way various compilers differ.

Edit: also downvotes on HN are not like downvotes on Reddit: there's actually a limit (-2 ?). Below this the comment disappears. Conclusion: only downvote when the comment engages in antisocial behavior (not respecting the rules or common human decency, etc ...), not when you disagree with it. I always upvote an unfairly downvoted comment for these reasons.

Thanks, that was interesting.

Went to an IRC chat room when I was learning C in school. Asked if you could return a pointer to something that lives on the stack. Was talked down by an all-knowing dude telling me to go read K&R again. Proceeded to write a code sample [1] that showed it is possible (it's not really stable but works reliably in recursive calls IIRC).

I do not like this attitude (then again it was just one random dude).

[1] https://www.onlinegdb.com/HyO5VXRxS

Fighting stupidity, laziness and a misplaced love for typography in software developers

So are you fine with the idea that I get twice as much money and decision power than you, all things beyond worked hours being equal ?

Officially I work 35h/w. A little less than 40k€. Senior level. Very efficient. I think my actual hourly pay is under the minimum wage. No overtime pay of course.

I have no problem working twice as much as normal. What I want is to be paid twice as much (at least).

In Romance languages the at-sign is called an arobase/arroba.

We have macros and LISP is a building material, not a language.

One line of code is just enough to get something that works (defmacro infix [a op b] `(~op ~a ~b))

There are libraries for that too. Clojure: https://github.com/rm-hull/infix

Although I have never used Julia, this is something that is possible in Ruby, and I think this feature is seriously underrated – i.e. to be able to jump quickly to the definition of external code, modify it and run it. When you work with multiple libraries/repo this is very valuable when debugging, saves a lot of time.

It should also be possible with Node.js I think (node_modules).

And he abandoned his schizophrenic son.

People from Nasca also built a wind-powered aqueduct system.

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/blogs/myst...

Some people get high on big frogs in Arizona. Or so said the urban legend. And then a few weeks ago Youtube suggested me a video (Joe Rogan maybe ?) where the differences between ayahuasca DMT and frog DMT were discussed. In the comments someone said. "It happened to my chihuhua ! I was walking my dog (I'm from Arizona) when that huge frog squirted his venom at her. The poor animal convulsed for 30 minutes."

Amazing.

The absence of abstraction being what exactly ?

Also beware of that kind of pseudo-wise thinking. Is there a point in climbing up a learning curve anymore ? Maybe you have a constant and massive stream of fresh bodies to throw at your "simple" solutions before laying them aside once those abstractions have clogged up their heads ... And maybe if you can unskilled workers at such a scale, it's because you have massive fundings as well...

More a question of financial optimization than software engineering I think

A few remarks on methodology in linguistics (the science).

A phone is a class of sounds (as opposed to their instances which are all unique) that can be reliably described by articulatory or acoustic features (phonetics) or by patterns found in EEG (I'm thinking of MIT's voiceless mic).

A phoneme is another type of "sound" class used in linguistics and it is arguably the more important: phonemes, as studied in the context of a particular language, is the finite set of sounds (a few dozens at most) from which you build different words in that language. Phonemes always come in pairs, since they are defined as the minimal distinctive linguistic unit that can yield a difference in meaning.

Substitute /p/ with /f/ in/fear/ and you get /pear/, i.e. another word, a difference in meaning --> thus /p/ and /f/ are phonemes.

But substitute /r/ with /rrrrr/ in /Braveheart/ and you get the same word but with a scottish accent. These do not form a phonemic pair but allophonic variations of the same phoneme (here according to different geographic areas but they can also vary according to age, social status, gender, etc ...)

I watched a documentary about domestication a while back. Turns out there are many "corollary features" to being domesticated: for instance, ears falling down are also to be found in domesticated fox.

One of the most common feature across domesticated species was tighter jaws.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Zep-GhQYU

It is not that simple

The more I read about quantum mechanics the less i understand, and I'm absolutely unable to get into a proper learning path because it requires mathematics beyond my level and for which I'm not able to develop a taste on my own.

Of course I'm not interested in doing calculations but to appreciate quantum physics you have to know what the formalism behind are about and physicists are unable to explain it in simple terms for reasons I think I make out but can't properly formulate.

As an alternative path, Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision [1], may offer a less steep learning curve for the fact "you are the quantum system" and as such get to have actual experience with phenomena discussed in this book. To clear up the new-age vibe introduced in the last sentence, I think studying the maths through a phenomenon whose ambiguity is not questioned as a metaphysical abyss but is accepted as just being here in its mundane simplicity (semantic ambiguity in daily language use, that kind of thing) alleviates a lot of trouble in grasping what the maths mean in a physics course. Also the book is written for people coming from the fields related to psychology so it's a lot more approachable.

[1] http://bacon.umcs.lublin.pl/~lukasik/wp-content/uploads/2010...

I don't get the reference, would you mind explaining? On a related note, I've always been baffled by Coursera founder & ML fame Andrew Ng's name. How am I supposed to pronounced it?

They built other libraries on top of this [1] [2], and when compared to mobx [3] it indeed looks very similar, however I think the target ideal of having a small core on top of which one would build more complex computation is essential.

Since Clojure is pervasively built on laziness, there has been some discussions in the community about doing the same but for incremental computation. And doing it pervasively most importantly guarantees it will work at any granularity without any manual fiddling with observables and reactions.

A recent contribution to the solution field in Clojure is micro_adapton [4][5] which looks like it is to incremental computing what miniKanren is to logic programming, i.e. a tiny core for a a challenging problem.

Also, considering the literature around it it seems to be pretty tricky to do properly, especially when it comes to databases [6].

[1] https://github.com/janestreet/incr_map [2] https://github.com/janestreet/incr_select [3] https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx [4] https://github.com/aibrahim/micro_adapton [5] https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05337 [6] https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=incre...

    Future work:
    Reduce load on Postgres by:
    - Mapping events to active live queries
    - Incremental computation of result set

Meanwhile: https://opensource.janestreet.com/incremental/

It was almost certainly caused by one or multiple comet fragment impacts.

Sources: https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=hiawatha+cra...

MHD.

Also, completely off topic: why not try to make a MHD train instead of hyperloop ?

You may be interested in reading this piece by astrophysicist/MHD-ist Jean-Pierre Petit.

https://www.jp-petit.org/science/gal_port/Von_Ludwiger.htm

He proceeds to bash Vallée, Hynek, and some other lesser known ufologists. It's in French but Google Translate is very good nowadays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72n34fRkA3I

There is a whole field dedicated to this kind of study, namely sociolinguistics (see [1] for a short summary of the seminal experiment). Sociolinguistics study surface variations in language use that cannot be accounted by dialectology only (i.e. geographical factors) among speakers of the same language. There are clusters among linguistics uses, and it turns out they map to clusters in the space of social practices. For what I have studied of the field (not that much), it seems most of the time the variation is driven by the desire to belong or show you belong to the community of the users of the trait you adopt. It's said to be "inconscious" (pretty much like my masterful ability a handling language), but at the same time the subjects at hand can arrive at the same conclusions with the help of some introspection.

What's uncanny here is that having a goatee doesn't make you belong to any social group you could think of explicitly and enjoy belonging to. I guess the relationship is mostly driven by a mix of physionomical traits (gender + age) and the fact they correlate well to having a goatee (which isn't a tiny class anyway). Or there are indeed "deep" social structures to which we belong and are yet unable to identify.

[1] http://all-about-linguistics.group.shef.ac.uk/branches-of-li...

Edit: there may well be an immense data trove hidden in people's voice. That could be a very useful way to enrich datasets internally a bit like recommendation engines work: if my neighbour speaks like I do, then he must enjoy the same things as I.

Hold my bag of Es while I reach for Vice:

Sometimes, bruxism triggered by MDMA can become chronic, Chandwani adds. He had one patient who grinded her teeth for two years after using MDMA just once.

Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3kz9m/mdma-ecstasy-makes...

Edit: to clarify I got awake bruxism while on the influence of the substance (this is normal) and nocturnal bruxism for one year after that. I wasn't able to chew in the morning because of the toothache.

Edit2: Oh and did i mention one of the girl in the group used to be a heavy MDMA user and wear a dental guard at night ?

High speed train works well in France (and it's just 300km/h) because the country is small. Australia is huge. And so is the US.

This would make sense along coasts though but you wouldn't be able to cross the country from sea to sea in a few hours of course.

What's good with trains is that you can hop in at the very last moment (when the bell rings, happened to me a couple times) and the train stops in the center of cities, instead of the suburbs. This is the main reason why high speed train in France can compete with airplanes when crossing the country. By plane I must first reach the airport (30 mins), have some time ahead before embarking (30 mins), the flight is 1 hour long but the time to actually take off and pick back your luggages it's almost 2 hours long, and then you have to reach the center of your destination city (30 mins). By my generous estimates, it takes 3h30 to travel by plane North/South in France vs 4 hours by train.

And because currently not every railroad segment can support high speed trains going at full velocity (but work is in progress) it could take 3 hours. 300 km/h

Also note that Amdahl's law [1] applies in this context (there are diminishing returns in optimizing the speed of only one segment of the full path) and travelling the last kilometers accounts for a significant portion of the travel time.

For instance the TGV has to slow down when entering cities (because of the noise) and at some point in the development of the high speed rail network, it might become more interesting to dig long tunnels under cities for these trains rather than increasing the train's maximum speed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

Took 1/10th of a dose during a party (where everybody was doing it).

I did not feel high but was very unanxious (absolutely no adrenalin rush when 2 guys started a fight near me).

Now the problem is that I started to grind my teeth for one year on after that night.

So basically I did not get high but managed to fuck my teeth pretty badly (now 5 years later I'm considering orthodontia since my lower jaw bone has moved left with respect to the upper part of my mouth).

So yeah. MDMA. What a fun substance.