Viewing profile — jhaywood

Don't they know that if you want to open source something but don't want any contributors you're supposed to use GPL v3 with a CLA?

Except for experimental, which isn't even a coherent system, all of debian's branches are relatively stable. For personal desktop use I find unstable (Sid) to be just fine. I know …

This is always a canonical example for Erlang. For example the game servers for Call of Duty rely on Erlang. http://www.slideshare.net/eonblast/an-erlang-game-stack

Fantastic! If only I could write Excel macros in vb.net

Unless they actually are a VB programmer and And doesn't short circuit.

That's not true. At least in SML every function only takes one argument. If a function has an arity higher than 1 it is because it take a single tuple as an argument. But you can't…

I say it's not what people expect because everyone emphasizes the "fixed length" rather than "blank padded" nature of CHAR. CHAR is only actually a fixed length if you actually ens…

But the semantics of CHAR are not what most people expect and almost never what you actually want. If you want an actual fixed length of non-blank data you need an additional check…

The same criticisms are leveled at the standard model of physics. You're right that it's hard for a theory to be falsified if it can be molded to fit any data. But it still does ne…

Science is never required to be "provable". Scientific theories should be "falsifiable". Those are not the same thing.

Microsoft had trouble getting people to run Windows in their living room. They had no trouble getting millions to put PC hardware in their living room as evidenced by the XBOX.

I agree, mathematics is still the best tool we have for actually understanding these things.

I guess nobody ever thinks of Excel in these cases? I've heard it's used sometimes for calculations. It doesn't need to do destructive updates to intermediate values.

I think you're hitting up against something that is very subtle and it speaks to the fundamental nature of what it means to compute something. I think you can gain a bit of insight…

The internal electrical resistance of your tissues is a lot lower than the resistance provided by your skin. If you puncture your skin with electrodes a 9V battery can generate eno…

As a non-commissioned retail salesperson in a previous life, giving honest and helpful recommendations and trying not to annoy people that don't need help, was the only pride to be…

Make sure you're not confusing resignation with contentment.

I wouldn't say that futures markets make the price of a commodity less volatile. They do however let you lock into contracts at certain price levels to let you manage your risk in …

From what I learned of math, all mathematical algorithms are eventually refactored until they are "trivial". Trivial is a mathematician's favorite word.

While at the end of the day being consistent is always the most important thing, I don't agree with prefixes in database names. If you're not going to be accessing the data using s…