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jeffsco

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PhD in Comp Sci from Univ of Washington, designing and writing code for my own outfits since then. Currently back at alma mater writing code for pervasive computing research projects. I'm still interested in running OCaml on iOS. I also enjoy taking long walks on cloudy days.

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I loved this (paraphrased) quote:

To quote Ken Thompson (from memory) – "Lisp is not a special enough language to warrant a hardware implementation. The PDP-10 is a great Lisp machine. The PDP-11 is a great Lisp machine. I told these guys, you're crazy."

Obviously nobody is forcing you to read it. Perhaps it's written for an English speaking audience that doesn't mind skipping over some French here and there.

Rather than simply asserting that the variable speed limits are a complete failure, it might be nice to cite some measurements. I live in Seattle, and I find the variable limits to be useful information.

Imagine a tournament to choose the best tennis player. If you imagine these dice as a simple model of a tennis player, there can be no best tennis player. So tennis tournaments make no sense. This is paradoxical if you believe in tennis rankings.

I was taught the "New Math" as a child and did not hate it. It was wonderful. When I look at math blogs today, they use notation and terminology I learned back then. This is a tremendous advantage (or so it seems to me).

The thing you realized is also what the guy is arguing is not the case. There's no one right view, but that's the point of his argument.

Repute is what people think of you in the aggregate. It doesn't make sense (at least to me) to say "beyond repute." On the other hand to say that something is "beyond reproach" is a standard phrase indicating that no reasonable person can find anything to disapprove about the thing. Perhaps you're thinking of "beyond dispute."

I am biased as a Scott A. fan and as somebody who knows essentially nothing about QM. However I see no way to conclude that Anderson and Brady even know what they're talking about, much less that they win the debate on the linked Scott Aaronson page. I just read through it again to confirm my recollection (skipping the Motl and Sidles posts fwiw).

"I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. ...Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party," Emerson lamented in his eulogy of Thoreau.

What Apple calls "automatic reference counting" is what is usually known as just "reference counting." They call it "automatic" to distinguish it from the previous, even cruder, system where counts were manipulated directly by the programmer. Obviously this is an improvement, but personally I am a supporter of GC. It is a myth that reference counting is not subject to arbitrary pauses: http://www.hboehm.info/gc/myths.ps