Viewing profile — skew

It's smaller, but not actually negligible. An old but oft-cited 2002 study said a laptop with a three year lifecycle took about twice the energy to manufacture as operate. Silicon …

Interesting that you mention neutrino astronomy - if you mean imaging, I don't know of anything but gravity that could focus neutrinos.

You haven't got many fun answers yet? Here are a few nice programs http://incredible.pm/ http://fluffynukeit.com/software/fnistash/ http://hledger.org/ If you're looking for not-ne…

Dare I hope "arguments against anthropomorphic global climate change" was not a typo? If not, please share!

Do you mean "seL4 is great"? I agree it won't do much for application-level security without adding some formally verified code on top (perhaps as simple as setting up isolation be…

Why do you think D-wave machines can be clustered at all? Unless you say it's operation is not essentially quantum, that would mean demonstrating coherence between a bunch of machi…

I disagree extensively - raw data should definitely be available, and there are a number of interesting things you can do with it without any special expertise. For one, evaluating…

I'm sceptical that you've ever actually tried to get any data. The first sentence of NASA's GISTEMP page tells you where they get there data, and a few more clicks will get you to …

http://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-announces-discovery-fund...

The response to the client is only sent after a majority of followers have the log entry. That's described in the text in the "Protocol Overview", and nicely animated in "Log Repli…

Non-Turing-complete is not a bad way to go. You pretty much have to already be a researcher in dependent type systems (or maybe set theory) to invent functions that always terminat…

That sounds like a pretty reasonable density to see savings in threaded forth code like the second post talks about (it also mentions adjusting the shift for other densities). Seco…

Wasn't that precisely the first complaint - observing a pair of incidents which make no sense as a consistent policy? (the second complaint being that even a senator had trouble cl…

Regarding those particular operators, + is conventionally reserved for commutative operations (e.g, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_and_minus_signs#Plus_sign ).

"kinetic energy" means nothing alone, thrust and specific impulse are better metrics to look at. Doing a lot better than ion thrusters at either without being too much worse in the…

That's actually the only place ML^F ever requires type annotations - when you want to take a polymorphic function as argument and use it at different types. MLF is basically as str…

There are some nice examples of re-using the same code at successively more interesting types in Conor McBride's ICFP keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGyJ519RY6Y (video onl…

The previous article really didn't make the argument "all you need is static typing". It was specifically refuting the idea that "all you need is unit testing" - or at least that u…

The first half is a bit easier - if you can show some implementation meets the specification it is at least consistent. The second isn't so clear, but sometimes you can get a bit m…

Yes, foldr/build is almost exactly reducibles, but not foldables. Iterators do nothing for parallelism either.

Isn't foldr/build fusion much closer? A collection is represented by a "build" function that takes the reducer, and list transformers become reducer transformers. The main differen…

The cost model can be very simple. Take the cost model of Java and apply it to programs where all fields are final. Maybe costs are higher than you'd like, but it's simple to under…

That's incoherent. If you accept the claims of > People regularly say they translated their system from language A to language B and got 10-100 times code-size reductions. then it'…

Every language is based on a huge mass of things which might fall under "fully understanding the tool you're using". Do you have a sharper distinction separating type inference alg…

If you were really pedantic, you'd make a distinction between executing beta-reductions directly, and executing them in zero time. Here's hardware that does the first http://www.cs…