lectrick

Joined 16 years ago

Karma

1,393

Submissions

972

Member since

Aug 13

ruby/rails coder (and recent dabbler in clojure, haskell and Elixir), gamer, philosopher, technologist, sailor, swimmer, biker, music lover, partier, hourglass-figure adorer, and fan of Bitcoin, Apple, Tesla, open-source, and startups. I lean liberal and libertarian, although I love debating anything controversial.

As of today (2/3/2016), this account is now 2000 days old with 1369 karma. I've decided to celebrate by announcing a switch to a (for better or worse) far-less-anonymous account, "pmarreck".

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Recent submissions

Comment · 10 years ago

Evidence?

Also false dichotomy. We do not know the percentage of successful marriages with undiscovered affairs.

Comment · 10 years ago

While this sounds sexist, would any husband actually argue against that part? Let's be frank, here

Comment · 10 years ago

That limits your choices quite a bit. For example there are a large number of attractive women with terrible incomes and/or no savings, for which "scoring a successful man" may be a "valid" mating strategy

Comment · 10 years ago

I actually think this biases mate selection (not necessarily in a good way) toward people of similar or slightly greater/lesser income

Comment · 10 years ago

"Throughout its history Norsk Data produced a long string of extremely innovative systems, with a disproportionately large number of world firsts."

Still seems like something worth being proud of. It just got sideswiped by the personal computer industry (a lot of things did).

Comment · 10 years ago

Fascinating. I see it as yellow.

This also hints at the "qualia" mystery...

Comment · 10 years ago

http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_convers...

Page 3, point 4:

"Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomenon or known types of aerial vehicles."

Also note the National Security Council directive on the last page.

Comment · 10 years ago

Don't be jaded! Stay excited! You were way ahead of the curve! ;)

Comment · 10 years ago

As someone who has only recently (finally) become disillusioned by OO (especially in larger codebases and/or on programming teams, which both seem to rapidly escalate tech debt and complexity thanks to things like mutability, class reopening and stowing-state-everywhere)... I'm so sorry, man. The difference (which is significant) unfortunately seems to require years of real-world experience with both to see it.

I've been pointing OO people to these thoughts by John Carmack, who is pretty well-respected in the C++ OO community: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_pro...

Comment · 10 years ago

> I also like the immutable variables aspect.

Elixir has the same immutable variables. I don't know why this is such a misconception. Erlang conflates rebinding and reassignment, Elixir does not, and the tradeoffs seem to (overall) be better in Elixir's case. Here, read the language creators' explanation as to why that is, it's the best:

http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2016/01/comparing-elixir-an...

Very succinct and (hopefully) puts this misconception to bed.

Comment · 10 years ago

I thought Erlang looked weirder than Elixir (to the extent that I was turned off until Elixir came along), but fortunately, both of our opinions are compatible as everything compiles down to BEAM and is interoperable :)

From a semantic persopective I've found that I almost automatically understand Erlang just from working with Elixir. Some things like OTP are pretty much identical. Plus you get "real" macros :)

Comment · 10 years ago

"I couldn't be bothered to Google the problem, but based on my sample size of 1, I think your problem doesn't exist"

Thanks for that useful comment, man.

Comment · 10 years ago

This is a quite beautiful post about engineering in general, actually. You try to solve a practical problem as best as you can, and you get sort of an unintended-beneficial-consequences effect and end up creating principles that have a more universally-applicable nature.

I personally hope Elixir helps thrust Erlang into ever more success. (But not so much success that it becomes a victim of it...)

Comment · 10 years ago

I think physics and art are nearly the perfect potential sources of a good programmer