Viewing profile — valw

Or, you know, use a time-aware database like XTDB or Datomic.

I absolutely agree - one of the biggest shortcomings of SQL is that its primary programming interface is based on text and intended for human, instead of being based on data struct…

> There’s not much difference in expressiveness > However SQL is declarative Pick one :) the way I see it, if declarativeness is not a factor in assessing expressiveness, then expr…

Thanks for sharing this. I believe we essentially agree: chaining method calls is inexpressive compared to composing expressions in an algebraic language.

Btw, am I alone in thinking that DataFrame abstractions in OOP languages (like Pandas in Python) are oftentimes simply inferior to relational algebra? I'm not sure that many Data S…

Well, to be also fair, we also want quantum electronics to be deterministic in their behaviour. The difference lies not so much in randomness as in leveraging intrication.

I made the same remark in reply to another comment which used the phrase "factoring primes" :) Wikipedia does use the term "prime factorization": that seems legit to me, as prime i…

> factoring prime numbers factoring into prime numbers ;-) (factoring a prime number is trivial, that's why it's called prime)

> Are quantum computers overhyped? Well, let's see: > When given the same problem, a quantum computer should be able to trounce any supercomputer in any problem in terms of speed a…

> the annual worldwide energy usage of blockchain technology is roughly equal to the annual US energy waste from machines plugged in while in standby mode. It is also significantly…

April fool's joke : we'll pretend that bugs in software are distributed as a homogeneous Poisson process, AND that Poisson distributions are bounded, while we're at it. Poisson d'a…

Reminder that the Computer Languages Benchmark Game itself recommends against using it to draw general conclusions about performance of languages in real-world apps: https://benchm…

> Sir Tony Hoare famously said: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Er, wasn't it Donald Knuth? https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization

I submit that Event Sourcing (or at least something very close to it) can be easy, once you've removed some technology locks. I've seen it happen with Datomic ( https://vvvvalvalva…

I wrote the blog post you cited (thanks!) but I disagree with both statements: that is not what is meant in the article. 1. I don't think Event Sourcing sucks - I think we are lack…

Folks, just to clarify: "catalyst" is a very broad chemistry term for "something that helps a chemical reaction take place without being a reagent nor product of said reaction." So…

Reminder: this sort of metric is sensational but hardly relevant. The relevant metric is how much fossil production is left, not how much low-carbon production we add. All the more…

A shameless-because-related plug: https://www.reddit.com/r/patient_hackernews/ A Hacker News mirror biased in favor of thoughtful discussion, by enforcing that you cannot comment o…

Compiling means translating a program from one representation to another. Executing a program always involves a combination of compilation and interpretation (example: Java usually…

Interesting example, but it's funny how parts of the abstract read like an intro probability class: > The framework estimates the climate change risks in economic terms by modeling…

When you're in the business of sneaking in a Scheme-inspired language into the universal programming platform in a world of object-oriented dogma, you'd better add some camouflage …

Note that carbon credits are not all about afforestation - if you don't believe in afforestation, fine, you can buy from projects that do energy transition or industrial efficiency…

As should be known in a community of programmers, it's misguided to blame tools from their potential abuses. Every single tool for the ecological transition can be misused for gree…

The crazy thing about it, I think, is that removing CO2 from the atmosphere rather than where it's readily concentrated like power and cement plants, is picking the worse amount of…