lukego

IANAeconomist but may I ask, tongue firmly in cheek, if they also only pour water into the shallow end of swimming pools to avoid contributing drownings?

Sun JavaStation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation

Joe used to have all that code in his world-readable NFS-mounted home directory. He would just create a new directory for every idea or project. Take it with him from one computer to the next.

I hope that's preserved and one day published as e.g. the old MIT AI lab file system snapshots were.

(Robert Virding or Bjärne Däcker might well have a copy of the Prolog code to share if asked nicely.)

_The Ode Less Travelled_ by Stephen Fry could make a great Christmas present.

I pretty much always use ECDF in preference to histogram these days.

Is the question fundamentally: what's the relative likelihood of each number or clusters?

If so then estimating the marginal likelihood of each one and comparing them seems pretty reasonable?

(I mean in the sense of Jaynes chapter 20.)

Yeah, cffi.

I think the median user starts with quicklisp and then clones random stuff into the ~/quicklisp/local-projects/ dir where they are automatically visible.

Oxidation is a big problem with the harsh no-clean fluxes in many cheap lead-free solder wires. Switching to a rosin flux (RMA or RA) name brand solder should fix that (did for me.)

Metcal have a great big doc on tip care that covers this.

The failure mode that I worry about and would need X-ray to detect is that temporary misalignment will merge/bridge some of the solder balls.

I like to "wiggle" the chip with tweezers (under hot air) to see surface tension in action and judge whether the balls have all melted, but a tiny bit too much wiggle causes that problem.

The nixpkgs upstream CL infrastructure is also recently updated and IMHO excellent: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#lisp

Olin Shivers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382531

SBCL 25th anniversary workshop is in Vienna thu-fri next week. See you there!

I'm a parent of young kids in Scandinavia. The way I see it is that I mostly work and earn money for my own personal satisfaction. It's a selfish and egotistical activity but important for my own mental health.

I need to be careful that it doesn't interfere with my responsibility to raise independent kids who don't want or need money from me. This takes time and energy to make sure they can make the most of the social infrastructure available to them e.g. their school.

I'm very restrained in how I spend money for private consumption out of concern for setting an example that's unproductive e.g. making the kids feel pressure to earn a lot of money to sustain a lifestyle of luxury.

Likelihoods aren’t fundamentally small.

The center of a normal distribution has high likelihood (e.g. 1000000) if the standard deviation is small or low likelihood if the standard deviation is large (e.g. 1/1000000.)

This effect is amplified when you are working with products of likelihoods. They can be infinitesimal or astronomical.

Giant likelihoods really surprised me the first time I experienced them but they’re not uncommon when you work with synthetic test data in high dimensions and/or small scales.

They still integrate to the same magnitude because the higher likelihood values are spread over shorter spans.

Maybe of interest: https://github.com/probsys/AutoGP.jl

He said that in his youth his colleagues were in awe of him because he was brave enough to give presentations in English. (They were shy and stuck to the local Swiss German dialect.)

Besides all his innumerable accomplishments he was also a hero to Joe Armstrong and a big influence on his brand of simplicity.

Joe would often quote Wirth as saying that yes, overlapping windows might be better than tiled ones, but not better enough to justify their cost in implementation complexity.

RIP. He is also a hero for me for his 80th birthday symposium at ETH where he showed off his new port of Oberon to a homebrew CPU running on a random FPGA dev board with USB peropherals. My ambition is to be that kind of 80 year old one day, too.

It's really comical not being able to fit into a devroom for a talk and noticing that people inside weren't actually paying attention but rather just holding a chair for another talk coming later...

Thankfully the hallway is then full of people interested in that subject!

It's an acquired taste.

Have a relaxing quality morning with the family from 6am-8am. Go to bed on time to make it work.

My impression is that this comes down to expectations.

You might have a function:

foo(x,y) = x + y

and multiple dispatch means you can call that with integers, or floats, or arrays, or GPU-resident arrays, or automatically-differentiating numbers, or symbolic algebra terms, or...

Just because you can, does that mean you should? It depends...

The half-life of major Julia problems is impressively short.

Compiler latency ("time to first plot") used to be miserable but after a few releases with incremental improvements it feels mostly solved to me.

Just now on Friday at JuliaCon Local in Eindhoven one of the keynotes was about similar ongoing work on stand-alone binaries (including shared libraries to call like C/Fortran.)

I made a Wiki for the Erlang community in 1999. I wrote that from scratch in Erlang. (That was the conventional way to deploy a new wiki in those days!) That landed me a job at the first Erlang startup, Bluetail.

I'm ashamed to admit that I never got the Wiki up and running again after I relocated from Australia to Sweden. (Not yet anyway, I may still have a backup copy on a hard disk somewhere...)

The Architecture of Concurrent Programs (his book) is a real treasure. I read that on a tip from Ralph Johnson way back when on the C2 wiki.

Special purpose operating systems e.g. with disk driver (for input) and a compiler (the application) and a printer driver (for output.)

Those were the days!

1) they are terrible at arithmetic, 2) they are terrible at algebra

The interaction can be amusing. Proving algebra non-theorems by cranking through examples until an arithmetic mistake finally leads to a "counter-example."

It's like https://xkcd.com/882/ for theorems.

Glad to see Julia on HN. It's a great language.

That little kernel in Listing 2 sure packs a punch.

What works with my kids (6+) is to allocate some "creative" time when they can use the computer but not play video games and then put on Imphenzia "ten minute modelling challenge" videos on the TV. The rest takes care of itself.

They got fluent in low-poly modelling with Extrude/Scale/Inset operations from this. This skill carries over into Blockbench for customizing Minecraft too. Can 3D print the designs too via STL export.

I'm still looking for a good bridge to next steps like physics simulations, Geometry Nodes, and Fusion360.

Tutorial videos were mostly too slow-paced to hold their attention. I would prefer those myself but my kids do better with watching and imitation.

Same way they learned to play Minecraft which I couldn't figure out myself...

I've been following their work for the past five years or so. They have covered a lot of ground!

GToolkit uses a completely parallel graphics stack to standard Pharo. The VM and library ecosystem are still there but the UI is rebuilt from scratch on a modern vector based toolkit.

The productivity of the GToolkit developers is impressive.