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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Questions

#411

Post by nigelcleland »

JProthero wrote: post #197
nigelcleland wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RE rapidly completed projects A primary driver of the 'slowness' is a major focus upon safety in the workplace. Take a look back at the death rates per 1000 workers for some of the historical projects that people often like to point to and then look at a modern project. The second element is that these safety elements are often enforced by regulation. For example, look at how much extra scaffolding is in use today du…

The construction and infrastructure boom in China over the past few decades suggests major projects can still be completed rapidly, even in spite of widespread corruption. Political will can be an important driving force for pushing through major projects, but the most impressive feats of engineering are seen when there is substantial pent-up demand in an economy that can suddenly be supplied, usually due to social o…

Yes, and how many people have died during the construction and infrastructure boom in China/India/Africa. They're faster because they aren't as safety focused. For example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/09/07/c...

How much is unreported?

This isn't to say this doesn't happen in western countries but it is less common. A large number of deaths was also associated with the Qatar world cup for example.

Look at the public reports of engineering and manufacturing companies. How many of them have a "target zero" approach to safety and report the TIFR as a key KPI? I've known executives in engineering organisations to be fired for persistent safety breaches making them substantially more risk averse.

This all costs more money and takes more time and I would posit that if China/India/Africa become wealthier and more individualistic then their construction rates would also slow.

Re: Questions

#412

Post by curun1r »

jim777 wrote: post #408
curun1r wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter. You're assuming that intelligence is the determining factor in winning a Nobel prize, which seems spurious at best. Work ethic and training, particularly early in life seem, to me, like they'd be better predictors. I'd posit that Jewish culture is better at nurturing intelligence before I'd conclude that there's some et…

You used the term "ethnic superiority". That's you making a value judgement about intelligence. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. Personally, I don't think intelligence is a good proxy for "value of a human being". While there isn't a bullet-proof case, there is quite a bit of evidence for an ethnicity-intelligence correlation.

You left off a key word when you took the term "ethnic superiority" out of context. I prefaced it with the word "some" to indicate that I was considering only a single dimension, intelligence. I said nothing about "value of being a human being," so don't put words in my mouth.

The only value judgement I was making is that higher intelligence is superior to lower intelligence and that Nobel prizes is an extremely poor proxy for intelligence.

Re: Questions

#413

Post by lisper »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #308
lisper wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? You should probably direct that question at Patrick because his original question was kind of based on the premise that the answer to your question is "no". My personal opinion? No. OMG no. Javascript and HTML are both poorly designed re-inventions of tiny little corners of Lisp. In that regard they are improvements over C. Bu…

Can you/someone explain for this noob why you can't redefine a function, etc.? I'm not a programmer, so I'm imagining you hook in to the call that addresses the function (like modify a jump instruction), overwrite any registers that need changing, nullify caches, so the program runs new code -- this I think is how some hacks work? Ultimately couldn't you just write NOP to addresses used for a function? Is it somethin…

It's a good question, and I'm a little disappointed no one has answered this yet.

There is no reason you couldn't redefine a function in C. It's really more of a cultural constraint than a technical one. It's a little tricky, but it could be done. It just so happens that C programmers don't think in terms of interactive programming because C started out as a non-interactive language, and so it has remained mostly a non-interactive language. Lisp, by way of contrast, was interactive and dynamic on day 1, and it has stayed that way. In the early days that made C substantially faster than Lisp, but that performance gap has mostly closed.

However, there are some things that Lisp does that are actually impossible in C. The two most notable ones are garbage collection and tail recursion. It's impossible to write a proper GC in portable C because there is no way to walk the stack, and there is no way to compile a tail-call unless you put the entire program inside the body of a single function.

Re: Questions

#414

Post by qwerty456127 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #251
bigdubs wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shocked he mentions Visual Studio Code but not Visual Studio itself. The .net CLR has a lot of the features that he would want to enable the kind of interactive debugging (variable hovers, REPL) he talks about, and Visual Studio itself supports a lot of them. Personally going from doing C# development in VS2k15 to doing golang development in VSCode feels like going back in time.

Visual studio has a lot of power, especially if we consider Intellitrace, but damn is it hard to use that power. I really think the main problem here is UX and not technology.

The main problem of Visual Studio is that it doesn't work on free operating systems.

Re: Questions

#415

Post by seanmcdirmid »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #414
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual studio has a lot of power, especially if we consider Intellitrace, but damn is it hard to use that power. I really think the main problem here is UX and not technology.

The main problem of Visual Studio is that it doesn't work on free operating systems.

No. I mean, this might be a problem for some people, that it doesn’t work on OS X (not free) is a problem for me. But a bigger problem is that even on Windows its more advanced features are often too hard to be usable except for very special situations.

Re: Questions

#416

Post by VHRanger »

0x445442 wrote: post #185
andrewmutz wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence that “we are lying about inflation”? Unless you do, I think it those industries are getting more expensive due to Baumol’s Cost Disease: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

ShadowStats inflation is literally the CPI minus a constant. The guy making is completely laughing at you -- he doesn't have a methodology to calculate the inflation, he's just publishing numbers people want to hear.

Re: Questions

#417

Post by qwerty456127 »

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? Emacs, Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing: if the application doesn't do what you want, it's easy to tweak or augment it to suit your purposes... With Visual Basic, you can readily write...

Lisp was great and VBA was fun back in the days and I love it nostalgically but today VBA looks ridiculous because it actually is neither functional nor an object-oriented but a toy language and the fossil VBA IDE kept integrated in all the modern MS Office apps without an improvement for decades feels like a disaster. It ought to be replaced by either a modern dialect of Lisp (which is improbable as Lisp looks ugly and feels unintuitive to non-geeks and geeks are not the relevant target audience of Excel macros functionality) or something like Python (the best candidate that can probably satisfy everybody).

> Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile

I believe the main reason here is the cost of supporting (and developing too) the apps and forcing users to do what you want. It's easier when you know all the possible use cases in detail and you are who designs them.

> and web apps.

Web apps don't operate behind bulletproof glass. Thanks g-d we still can view source, inspect, change and script almost everything in the web with the developer tools integrated in every major browser.

Re: Questions

#418

Post by ams6110 »

starpilot wrote: post #403
trimbo wrote: post #191

> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…

China built their national high speed rail in remarkable time. Like less time to cover their entire country, than it will take California to build one high speed rail line. The difference seems to be that autocracy gets shit done.

Sure, they didn't have to worry about property rights, environmental impact studies, etc. They just did it.

We built the first interstate highways pretty quickly too, and part of why is we just plotted a line and set the bulldozers to work. Nobody worried about habitat destruction, erosion, endangered species, etc.

Re: Questions

#419

Post by JabavuAdams »

JepZ wrote: post #211
mikekchar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to believe in some of Stephen Krashen's notions of language acquisition. Specifically that there is a difference between learning (being able to remember and repeat something) and acquisition (being able to use it fluently). Also that acquisition comes from comprehension. I also believe that language acquisition is no different than any the acquisition of any other skill. Many people don't agree with these ide…

There are other ways of making sure the student understood the concept. Recently I played the game 'The Witness'. The whole game is about learning new puzzle rules, and yet there is not a single dialog within the game or even text explaining those rules. I am not saying that their technique is the most efficient (e.g., adding hints would undoubtedly increase the efficiency, but also ruin the game experience), just th…

You had a one on one conversation with Jon Blow's creation. This is not an argument against one on one. More like an argument for low-key AI tutors.

Re: Questions

#420

Post by cambalache »

novaRom wrote: post #370
petra wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an Israeli and it comes from a few factors: 1. Israelis basically have no choice. If you want to make a good income, working hard in a technology startup(we have very few big tech companies) is one of the very few good options. 2. The army: at a very young age,a decent percentage of Israelis who join the army lead, in high value, high risk situations. That creates a sense of responsibility and strong ambition at…

>> and possibly higher intelligence I heard that a lot of times from mostly uneducated people. All nations have equal level of intelligence. The difference might be access to education, environment, common wealth, and social inequality.

Source?

Edit: I would argue to the contrary, that there is a appreciable difference in average IQ between some countries which expresses itself among other things in GDP and quality of life. Perhaps the nature of this difference is based on things like nutrition, environment quality, pre-natal screening and care, so improvements in all these things will decrease the gap. If it happens that after all of that there is still a certain gap , who cares? As long as the citizens live in peace and relative prosperity.

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