nudq

a linguist (with some understanding of development)

Your wish has been granted: Larry Wall, Perl 6.

Einstein, Dirac, Pauli

It sure helps to be dead by now. Try James Watson for a really motivating example.

A good idea if you want your personal relationships poisoned.

The guy has been doing the TED circuit for ages. I once looked closer at his claims and his supposed proof by simulation and came to agree with the more negative takes at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698

Without a doubt, C has "lost" nothing, because it barely changed

Thanks to UB exploitation, C as implemented has been changing a lot over time. Old C was a decent low-level language. New C is barely usable.

Controlled compromise of privacy for the sake of scientific insight seems like a good idea, until you realize that we either get profoundly non-replicable junk "science", or continued and unlimited re-breach of privacy for the sake of replication. Neither is any good.

I'm reminded of Raj Chetty who publishes papers based on exclusive access to IRS tax return data. (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/how-two-economists-g...) Not real science unless you can have access to that data, too. You can't.

How do you prevent nepotism

Why prevent nepotism when everybody is a cousin?

I don't think we can simply assume that starting position matters to "pulverization" after 1500 years.

Mobility is more likely; the mobile object moves along with the ice, the stationary one gets pulverized.

Some just choose to ignore them

Some... like smart people with lots of money.

Because, you know, the prediction market in nice oceanfront properties beloved by the coastal elites hasn't collapsed, even tough their tongues say they believe.

Going on title and comments only, sorry, but why does "it's genetic" count as an explanation for anything?

An explanation for this would need ecology. Why is it beneficial for some of us to need less sleep, but not for all of us? What are the trade-offs? It seems like needing less sleep has no downsides. Is it a novel, all-beneficial mutation that just didn't have the time yet to sweep the population? Or do short sleepers experience serious downsides?

There is no explanation in "we found a gene for it". Pretty much every personality difference is genetic, that doesn't explain why such differences evolved, or persist.

Because in the context of Epstein, intelligence doesn't necessarily mean CIA. Seriously, we can't say "Mossad" on Hackernews without getting flagged, can we realistically expect NPR to go there?

By following Chrome every time Google wants to removes access to parts of the web not sufficiently encrypted (to thwart ISP competition for ads and data) or not serving ads (like FTP) Firefox is working to keep Chrome relevant.

It has been going on for years.

Wouldn't Elsevier be able to legally link to Elsevier IP on SciHub even if you can't?

You realize it's problematic to emphasize typos, right?

(Thanks, would edit if I could.)

Not to take away from the side splitting hilariousness of this novel meme, but I just noticed Lisp is actually one of the few languages where you can't add spurious parentheses. If you find that a, (a), ((a)), etc are equivalent, it's probably not Lisp you're looking at.

You realize that the OP's concerns actually intesify if the author in question is perceived as an authority on the topic, right?

if 18 months comes and goes and it isn’t the end of the world

No reason for concern. If failed climate prophecies had any effect, climate prophecies would be out of fashion by now. Nothing will change.

I think algebraic effects are more general

Not an expert on algebraic effects, but I suspect they are both more and less general.

On the one hand, "algebraic" hints at some constraints in the name of static typeability. Such restrictions wouldn't be present in Common Lisp.

On the other hand, Common Lisp only has single-shot downward continuations, so you won't get, e.g. nondeterminism-as-an-effect.

I like how these three points aren't just "strengths of Rust", but...

the necessary components ... to make imperative programming work as a paradigm

You know, before Rust imperative programming just didn't work. Didn't work as a paradigm, even!

Do you read your own comments? (Asking for a logician friend...)

You do not understand evolution

Probably.

But although it is almost tautological that fertility is heritable, it doesn't follow that the first world infertility trend will reverse.

If whatever is causing first world infertility (1) actually profits from our infertility and (2) is some kind of evolving entity itself, we could find ourselves in an evolutionary arms race, and lose.

That compiles because with gcc extensions or sufficiently recent standards, variable size arrays are now a thing. The compiler doesn't insist on a static array size. What about something like this:

    #define ASSERT_BUILD(x) extern int STATIC_ASSERT_FAILED[(x)?1:-1]

If you're writing 'enough' Rust, you're probably a Mozilla employee.

Also, tastes of critics (journalists) and audiences have diverged, but both act as a filter. For example, critics tend to like an identity politics angle, but audiences don't like being lectured to. At the same time audiences won't automatically flock to movies panned by critics either. Movies have to cater to both. It's like two polarizing filters layered on top of each other at a 90 degree angle.

Interesting, and a sigh that the area of the Windows tax may be ending.

Windows is now an ad delivery platform. That probably sounded like a great plan to MS management, but consumer Windows is now on its way to shovelware status. Microsoft will end up paying hardware makers to include it.

I was under the impression that the pioneering Xerox systems were written in Mesa, which was not even object oriented. I'd love to hear the real story as well.

They obviously started writing Postgres in LISP, because "we soon realized that parts of the system were more easily coded in C" wouldn't make sense if writing a hybrid had been the initial plan.

They tried going all LISP at first, and failed. Was it them, or was it LISP?

his various personality disorders

Lovely. To inject some psychological precision, only his narcissism can be considered a personality disorder. Being old, white, or male... no. Not yet.

By a process of elimination, we decided to try writing POSTGRES in LISP. We expected that it would be especially easy to write the optimizer and inference engine in LISP, since both are mostly tree processing modules. Moreover, we were seduced by AI claims of high programmer productivity for applications written in LISP.

Yes, that's what I remembered, they started out using LISP.

Our feeling is that the use of LISP has been a terrible mistake for several reasons.

"Terrible mistake" is pretty unambiguous language.

If I remember correctly, Postgres was initially developed in Lisp, but then rewritten. Was that a mistake, or evidence against the thesis of this article?