Enfranchised Mind - Latest Comments

Re: 7 Actually Useful Things You Didn’t Know Static Typing Could Do: An Introduction for the Dynamic Language Enthusiast

Qwerty — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:17:28 -0000

functions are a construct and closures can be a property of a construct.

Anonymous functions do not have to be closures and your mixing closures with lambdas makes me discount everything you wrote.

Re: Problems with Hash Tables

Esha0604 — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:13:56 -0000

like a history note :P

Re: Problems with Hash Tables

Dasmona898 — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:13:12 -0000

lengthy

Re: Dear User of My Open Source Project

John T. Roll — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:38:15 -0000

So... how about fixing that bug I told you about last week Bubba? You gonna be done this year or what?

Re: Time for More Tor: How to Set It Up

rockyhenry — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:03:02 -0000

here’s a guide on how to circumvent your ISP’s ability to record all
your personal information. I’m using OS-X and Firefox, and I’m assuming
you are, too.70-680 If you’re on Windows, I’m sorry, and hopefully you can
figure it out.

Re: What good is a CS degree?

William Blackburn — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:34:28 -0000

Re: What programming language should I use?

NeNSha — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 02:34:01 -0000

Ok... that will be really easier to chose if say that... but I always want to add scheme/lisp to somewhere :)

Re: Back Again to There: A Nontheistic Statement of Faithiness

Andy Walters — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:21:09 -0000

After my deconversion, I too struggled immensely with the idea that a legitimate ethical mandate seemed illusory. I'd like to offer you two different possible answers to look into in case you haven't already. The first is the closest I ever came to being convinced of a genuinely categorical imperative--a kind of souped up Kantianism, expressed in Christine Korsgaard's book, The Sources of Normativity. Starting with (among other things) a basic social interest, and the *capacity* for rationality, she follows Kantianish lines to create (or rather, recognize) a genuine imperative. Even so, the last half-century of neuroscience has done serious damage to Kantianism's plausibility, such as in Josh Greene's paper "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul." The second option is not quite a categorical imperative, but it does nevertheless preserve normativity, and that's Meulhauser & Fife's Desirism. While I have my reservations, it is a well thought out system built on the Broomean Normative (i.e. if one desires x, then one must y). Both are worth a look.

Ultimately, I've landed on something similar to Korsgaard's normativity. I'm not sure if I believe or merely hope that *on balance*, something like it is true. In any case, I try to live my life along those lines provisionally. :)

On a side note, I wonder whether you've read Quine? It strikes me that he might help you down the path of resolving your rationality/irrationality dilemma.

Re: Steve Yegge is an idiot

Billy — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:48:30 -0000

Ruby always returns the last expression evaluated in a method. Easy peasy.

Re: Steve Yegge is an idiot

Bill — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:45:28 -0000

If NullPointerException has been eliminated why is it still in the API?

I will answer it for you: because the crappy java static type system can not make any guarantees that the pointer(*cough 'reference') can not be null.

Re: Time for More Tor: How to Set It Up

Robert Fischer — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:26:52 -0000

They can record your encrypted traffic just fine...but it's random bytes for all practical purposes. SSL's problem is that its certificate-based trust system is broken: it's cryptography proper is just fine, and neither has Tor's encryption been broken.

There are some issues that come out of traffic analysis, but those are substantially helped by running your node as a relay. Even better if you run as an exit node.

The fact that China feels the need to block Tor suggests that at least they can't break it, which is pretty strong support.

Looks like Wikipedia has a conversation on Tor's weaknesses, if you'd like to see a conversation on it instead of just your personal "willing to bet"-ness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Time for More Tor: How to Set It Up

Vishwanath Ramarao — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:58:46 -0000

if the ISP is recording all traffic, why wont they also record the encrypted tor traffic from your computer to the tor node. I am willing to bet that if SSL is crackable, so also is the tor protocol

Re: What programming language should I use?

Brian Hurt — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:06:07 -0000

Full C++, not just the subset that looks like C, is a horrible language, IMHO. I have the branch on there- if you're doing windows programming, use .NET and F#.

RE: Clojure vr.s Scala- I haven't dug too terribly deeply into Scala, but from what I've seen, it doesn't have the parallelism/concurrency story Clojure does, and not quite as tight integration to legacy Java code. And the complexity of it's type system scares me. IMHO, applications should be no more than a few hundred lines of code- supported by special-purpose libraries. The libraries will be used by multiple different programs- this program, and whatever future variations of this program it grows into. So claiming that the type complexity only applies to library writers doesn't help me- most code is (or at least should be considered) libraries.

Subtyping/OO + static typing is really hard and complicated to do. Even Ocaml doesn't really get it right- notice how effectively no Ocaml programmers actually use the OO extensions. Although if you add the ability to downcast safely to Ocaml, you've got something that'd probably work (this is effectively where F# is- Ocaml plus the runtime downcast safety provided by .NET). Of course, if I don't have a need to access legacy OO C#/Java code, my strong preference is to dump OO/subtyping altogether and go pure functinal.

Re: What programming language should I use?

Brian Hurt — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:39:32 -0000

No. Or rather, that may be your recommendation, but it isn't mine. Static typing is a huge win.

Re: What programming language should I use?

Brian Hurt — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:38:26 -0000

Yep. I'm still firmly in the "Microsoft is evil and soul destroying" camp. Other than being basically tied to the evil empire, F# is a very nice language.

Re: There and Back Again: A Journey Into and Out of Faith

Chris H — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 09:10:48 -0000

Hi Robert,
Thanks for this article. I would not presume to offer advice.
I have indeed asked similar questions and I think that any honest person would have to agree with your implied conclusion that there are only two rational options to being: full theism or full nihilism. Everything in between is fantasy and wishful thinking.
I find the answer to the riddle of being in the book of Ecclesiastics where the Preacher draws a distinction between that which is under the sun and that which is under heaven. Both nihilism and theism are true. The problem is finding the bridge that crosses the divide between the two.
Sorry if this doesn't make sense. I'm trying to type it on my iPod Touch while on holidays. But I really believe there is a huge paradox there that is being missed in our rush to be seen as rational skeptics.

Re: Steve Yegge is an idiot

Jukka Hämäläinen — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:53:01 -0000

Very humorous. And when after 5 years of living in your house you notice that there are not enough power outlets and decide to construct more of them, you can't do this because the existing 220V wires are coated with adamantium and impossible to reuse. And of course the original builders of the house cannot do it, because they can't be sure how other households would react to the change.

Moreover you would like to add more powerful flushing possibility to your toilet because you literally shit bricks, but as you contact the plumber he says the original contractor designed the toilet to be flushed by its current velocity and it cannot be changed because the pipes are also coated with adamantium and the water pump is buried under ten feet of concrete so you won't hurt yourself... and moreover you are always nagging about this and that and anyways demanding too much, so why can't you just be happy with the API the contractor designed? And you know you could be in real big trouble if you would start tampering with the pipes and wires, no matter how much education or experience you have! After all technology isn't here to enable us to make things but to prevent us from doing things, don't you agree?

So you decide to build another house next to your fully functioning old house just because you wanted your shit gone and some more electric appliances. But at least the contract stays intact, because it's really for your best and because you fool don't really know what you are doing!

If you still don't get it, Yegge isn't implying everything should be straightly visible from the API (that is, he does not want the shit visible in his breakfast table). He is implying that Java is designed poorly because there is no way to use private methods, even if you are aware of the risks. These are two totally different beasts. Hiding things from the API is good thing as it keeps the API clean and clear, restricting the end user artificially is bad (I say artificially, because you can always copy-paste the hell out of the private methods as Yegge puts it).

Private methods should not be visible in the API, but they should let you get around the restriction if you decide it is worth the risk to use them! The risk is yours as the end user, not the original author of the code! Moreover, the original author should not have a say in how you use the code, because, as said, it is not his risk, it is yours!

The "private contract" should not be protecting you as the end user, it should be protecting the original author of the code by saying, "you carry the responsibility if you use this code". Only now, for Java, it is saying "I decided you shall not use or need this code". In the end it isn't contract, because the original author is dictating the use case to the end user and end user can't but to agree to this. It's dictatorship, not contract.

Re: Back Again to There: A Nontheistic Statement of Faithiness

Robert Fischer — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:57:56 -0000

You're a bit late to the game. See the original post to see how I came by that determination. See the comments for someone else who is arguing I have a scope problem. And no, I'm not asserting anything positive about what can or should form the foundation of lifestyle and morality.

Re: There and Back Again: A Journey Into and Out of Faith

Robert Fischer — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:55:49 -0000

That entirely depends on what you mean by "rational". I've certainly don't assert that the belief in a deity is going to be internally coherent: at least not the Christian stance. I'm deeply influenced by Kierkegaard in this respect.

Re: Back Again to There: A Nontheistic Statement of Faithiness

JustMe — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:24:06 -0000

You said

I have found rationality cannot form the foundation of lifestyle and morality.

How did you come to that determination?

Does this suggest to you that only irrationality can form the foundation of lifestyle and morality?

Re: There and Back Again: A Journey Into and Out of Faith

JustMe — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:04:57 -0000

Do you argue that a belief in a deity is or can be rational?

Re: What programming language should I use?

Hamlet D'Arcy — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 05:45:16 -0000

Why does F# come with the disclaimer/caveat? Is it just anti-MS?

Re: What programming language should I use?

Michael Ekstrand — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 10:01:38 -0000

OCaml's an option for that case - they support the MSVC toolchain, although there are limits and a different set of them for that than for MinGW.

F# or another .NET language could be an option - Mono is about as Linux-native as .NET is Windows-native.

Finally, a pretty good option in my opnion could be C++ with Qt. Qt gives you sufficiently high-level primitives that it almost feels like you're writing something at least at the level of Java - with all of C++'s (crufty and ugly) combination and code-reuse capabilities in the STL also available - along with additional things like good multithreading support (including parallel operations on collections).

As an unrelated aside, I'd also edit Brian's chart to replace Clojure with Scala.

Re: What programming language should I use?

NeNSha — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 02:36:30 -0000

Fully agreed :) But I will also add (maybe lisp) to OCaml point

Re: Postgres for the win!

Araneae — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:11:01 -0000

"it’s own transaction" should be "its own transaction"