pradocchia
Joined 17 years ago
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Member since
Apr 14
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View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 12 years ago
Barricelli presented a bold challenge to the standard Darwinian model of evolution by competition by demonstrating that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation.
Somehow I thought symbiosis and cooperation was the accepted model, and competition was just a cultural projection. No?
Comment · 12 years ago
I will grant that the first form is clearly [0, 1, 2], while the second form could be construed as [0, [1, 2]].
HOWEVER, given that there is no "and" between 0 & 1, and that 1 & 2 are not like things, I believe most readers will naturally interpret the list as [0, 1, 2] and not [0, [1, 2]]. There are enough other cues that risk of misinterpretation is very low. Anyone who does interpret as [0, [1, 2]] is probably being willfully obtuse.
Comment · 12 years ago
I'm glad I experienced the old internet back in its heyday, when high quality sites linked to other high quality sites, and Google exposed this natural topology for all to explore. Google's success eventually led to the end of the old internet: AdSense captured its value and then SEO perverted it with noise.
I expect within 5 years some crotchety old programmer will have build a search engine that penalizes sites for anything more than basic markup. No JS, no CSS, no hints of a CMS. Maybe it's already been done. "Old Skool Search"
And it will still be a poor imitation, because if there is one thing you can't recreate and experience for yourself, it is an internet gone by.
Comment · 12 years ago
And with nobody having to worry about surviving without a job, it also frees up many people to explore ideas they otherwise would never have had time for.
Well, even universal healthcare would have this same effect in America. There would be a veritable Cambrian explosion as hundreds of thousands of people quit their jobs and started doing something interesting, something they cared about. A lot of these interests would turn into businesses and we would all be far the richer for it, never mind the 50% taxes.
Comment · 12 years ago
Yeah, I'm not sure how much it increase discoverability, plus users pay the cognitive cost of quirky patterns.
I might have used an enum plus a second constructor to wrap the explicit conversation. I guess it depends on what's going on in the rest of the API.
Comment · 12 years ago
It still provides some of the same ergonomics. You can put away the mental cheat-sheet ("1: gold, 2: silver...."). Your IDE can find all uses of BookTypeId.Gold(), rather than textual occurrences of "1". Etc.
The static quality of enums is only one of their features, and sometimes a hindrance, and it good to have other options.
Comment · 12 years ago
Not sure what the point of the implicit operator overloads was.
I assume he didn't want to change the signature of the constructor for whatever reason, but still provide a small measure of discoverability (and tractability). Such things do happen.
In that case, I might have used an enum plus a second constructor to wrap the explicit conversation. Maybe that didn't occur to him, or maybe he had other constraints.
Comment · 12 years ago
Moreover, if a researcher shows up in a village offering cash, on the condition that player two doesn't refuse the split:
a) the villagers know each other.
b) the researcher is the stranger.
those are the teams, researcher vs players, not player one vs player two. when would it make sense to refuse the split, punish a neighbor, and let the stranger keep his money? never.
Comment · 12 years ago
Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection.
Do you have any more on this? I have stumbled across the notion before. Someone typically counters with "but the body maintains a constant pH" and the conversation dissolves.
Stay well.
Comment · 12 years ago
That's an interesting piece. You can see how some lines of thought have become verboten in respectable society. This era might be considered the Rise of Fear and the Return of Authority.
Comment · 12 years ago
Having to switch to the other side of the street or having to circumvent a dangerous block is a loss of freedom, a kind of coercion born of inequality, normalized by the very inconsiderate and self-serving illusion that everybody starts life with a similarly equivalent set of cards.
Yes, I think so too.
Comment · 12 years ago
It also seems to me as if having to switch to the other side of the street or by having to circumvent a dangerous block as some form of coercion resulting from a very inconsiderate and self-serving illusion that everybody starts life with a similarly equivalent set of cards.
Can you elaborate on the first part? I'm not sure I understand what you mean.
Comment · 12 years ago
if more US citizens would travel their view on how much they're getting ripped off would change drastically.
For many Americans, especially the richer ones that can afford a trip to northern Europe, it would be a case of cognitive dissonance: "gosh everything is so nice here / here is not America / America is the best / I can drive my SUV in America / these Europeans are crammed into tiny cars / thank god I'm an American!" or whatever the chain of reasoning is that gets you back to "thank god I'm an American!" from the world-crushing "gosh everything is so nice here".