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• 07.06: Partial evaluation ala POJQ could be very useful for web-based programming, where you have some code to execute on the client and some to execute on the server.
• 31.03: Here's a crazy sci-fi idea: in the future a computer programmer's job is simply to receive requirements and think about them while their neuron activation patterns are recorded; then the recording is used to construct and/or train a stupid neural network to implement the solution.
• 09.03: Ulf Wiger on comp.lang.functional Message-ID <xczacbzzo4g.fsf@CUT-ericsson.com>: Joe argues (not very visibly here) that message-passing interfaces are much more succinct than functional APIs.
• 28.11: The possibility of a semi-transparent wearable LCD give all new meaning to the old classic fairy tale.
• 30.09: The reason Lisp's syntax is good for macros & syntax extensions isn't just because it makes them easier to express -- you can always express macros on the underlying tree as in Mathematica.
• 12.09: Rob Thorpe on comp.lang.lisp today suggested that a Lisp compiler segregate objects into atomic versus non-atomic types, so that it can use separate heaps and different gc algorithms for each.
• 02.06: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2003/jw-0801-toolbox.htmlThis article is actually about several different problems:
• 18.05: Here's a difference between work and school: at work I never get problems that I can't "solve" instantly.
• 05.12: So I'm thinking about the GPL, and the fact that it allows entrepreneuring people like Ashish to take a project written 90% by me and sell it to places like Pflugerville ISD for potentially a lot of money, of which I could see none.
• 03.12: I've often said that programming is like writing proofs.
• 12.11: It seems like people who are introduced to lisp early on just don't get it.
• 09.10: The reason individualistic theories of poverty are appealing to most upper-middle-class people is the following: they look at really poor people and think to themselves, "Wow, I'd really have to be lazy to get to that state."
• 31.05: Today I just learned that the white cable of red white and yellow AV cables is the "mono" cable, not the left channel as I'd always assumed.
• 01.05: If I start a band I will name it Buckets of Murf Isn't it strange to think that you can spend $.99 convincing people to buy something which is worth nothing for $1, and you have made money?
• 08.04: Postulate: whatever rapport is required between a man and a woman which allows them to slip seamlessly between friend and romantic relationship (aka the boyfriend box) is 1. necessary for an effortless breakup, and 2. present only in the healthiest of relationships.
• 06.04: This doesn't merit a front-page blog entry, but it's funny: child sexually exploits self.
• 31.03: Is English the only language where you can get away with calling a guy "cute" instead of handsome?
• 28.03: Totally off the wall: the unpredictability of chaos theory derives from the fact that space and time are practically infinitely divisible (i.e. non-quantized), does it not?
• 26.03: Put a buddha on top of the christmas tree.
• 24.03: Economic "Rents"Locke and Hobbes applied to relationships.
• 15.03: Heard quoted on Marketplace today, regarding the situation in China where most people got rich by breaking the laws, and should laws be now enforced strictly: "If everyone had obeyed the law, the economy wouldn't be where it is today."
• 24.02: Capitalist strip poker -- when you run out of money, sell an article of clothing to the highest bidder to keep playing!
• 22.01: Here's a great analogy of atheism presented in a [k5 article|http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/1/18/13731/0410].
• 21.01: Is it ever advantageous to prove continuity of an algorithm over a certain range and then test the endpoints?
• 27.11: On compiling... when you do bottom-up design, you build layers of abstractions.
• 19.11: From an interview with an HP VP:
• 02.11: I think that over-productiveness is the top problem of our society.
• 27.07: Here is why, logically, the good of the group must equal the good of the individual.
• 25.04: We need a protocol which allows each version of every file to be assigned a permanent, unique identifier, akin to a global inode, which is then used to track references to it in both directions and make sure they are kept in synch.
• 24.04: It occurs to me that the kind of people that find C fast and don't mind programming in it probably only find it so because they're writing incorrect code.
• 23.04: The computer is a unique tool in that it's both tool and meta-tool.
• 20.03: The so-called von Nuemann bottleneck (referred to in Backus, Communications of the ACM, Aug 1978, vol 21 #8) basically refers to the linear nature of imperative programs.
• 10.03: Jef Raskin discusses why logic matches the real world.
• 05.03: Why do we need garbage collection?
• 10.02: Reading about camlp4, it occurs to me that the ideal language has clearly separated parsing, compilation, and execution passes.
• 03.02: I think we need more simple languages designed for niches which interoperate well.
• 15.01: I've decided I don't believe in prison or execution.
• 14.01: PalmOS, alway-maximized is good.
• 06.01: A declarative language designed purely for expressing data structures.
• 22.12: Everything is connected, it's just a matter of how the lines are drawn between them.
• 18.11: Knoppix, "a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals.
• 02.11: Computer software is like a microcosm of the world, when it comes to cooperation versus self-interest.
• 09.10: Making decisions is not difficult -- it is a matter of falling into precisely the spot the issues force you to.
• 08.10: Let us compare sex to a two-player game like Go.
• 26.09: Lisp would never get invented today, because nobody would have the boldness to go for such simple syntax.
• 20.09: It is meaningless to try and figure out how the world should be.
• 15.09: Women with issues are attractive to me because I feel like they "need" me.
• 14.09: Data and presentation are both aspects of meaning -- or you could say that everything is presentation.
• 13.09: The government itself should be treated as a company -- composed of all individuals which are part of it.
• 11.09: Seeing others make the same mistakes we did is frustrating.
• 08.09: So I've got this book called How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.
• 07.09: Evil in the world comes completely from people who think they know what's good for you better than you do.
• 31.08: Here's a cynical idea... athiests claim christians are afraid of the finality of death and so invented the afterlife.
• 28.08: How could artificial scarcity be a sound policy?
• 26.08: One of my criterion for reading books is I usually avoid those where the author's name is in a bigger font than the title.
• 25.08: It's good that Rand called it Objectivism and not just capitalism or libertarianism or something.
• 24.08: The one problem with capitalism is the lifespan of humans.
• 21.08: Outside a McDonalds in Venice I saw a flag and a statue of Ronald ... and I realized, it's not just a restaurant, it's the McDonalds Embassy!Pretty much the only way to become a citizen of the Vatican City is to be born there.
• 15.08: A fully factored program and a fully non-factored program are the same.
• 31.07: When you feel guilty, is it your values or your actions that need changing?
• 30.07: To logically justify Objectivism very briefly.
• 28.07: If we accept that people who give unselfishly to others are good, then doesn't it follow that people who don't are bad?
• 26.07: On globalization: The speed of coommunication has changed the proper scale of commerce.
• 22.07: So here he was thinking, oh great, I finally have a reason to trim my toenails...
• 21.07: The role of a teacher is to lead students to questions whose answers are personally relevant.
• 16.07: A common theme in life is that you must sacrifice something in order to have it.
• 06.07: Last night in a dream I told Mark Dykstra, "And the most important thing is, don't change for anybody but yourself."
• 05.07: Use an HMM to follow common command sequences in Emacs.
• 04.07: Feature loyalty.
• 28.06: The primary goal of any sufficiently large organization is to justify and promote its own existence.
• 24.06: The paradox of property.
• 23.06: Proving a negative.
• 22.06: The less time you spend with Maran, the more pleasant he is.
• 16.06: The thing I don't like about being with other people is the feeling that I have to justify my emotions.
• 10.06: The biggest thing lacking from Scheme is standardized polymorphism (ala Haskell's type classes).
• 06.06: Iza would really like Linkin Park.
• 05.06: All the time I spent with you -- did you think it was for your benefit?
• 03.06: Harry Potter -- the "gateway drug" to books!
• 01.06: Is it possible to have a measurement system which is all relative?
• 28.05: Today's thoughts are all courtesy of Beibei: I compared Monet to whipped cream.
• 27.05: You can do anything you want -- the trick is getting to the point where you really want it.
• 26.05: The problem with anarchism is that we've already tried it.
• 25.05: We do what we can for others, and what we must for ourselves.
• 24.05: Jeff Bridge said: "Ahh yes, the fine art of redirecting emotional energy.
• 23.05: Self-confidence (i.e. a bit of ego) is ironically necessary to be unselfish; because many unselfish acts require that nobody else no about them -- for example, not saying something because it could hurt someone -- and you can only find the strength to do that if you can feel good based only on what YOU know about yourself and not what others know about you.
• 18.05: I'm really tired of the argument "Not everything which exists can be seen."
• 14.05: Why does math seem to have more standard conventions, rules, and notation than computer science?
• 08.05: I wonder if there's any geeks in China who can read Chinese encoding as ISO-8859? That would be mega-geek.
• 06.05: The problem with emotions is that, as far as I can tell, they are always (by nature) selfish.
• 05.05: When I say someone doesn't have "a right to be sad", what I mean is not that they shouldn't feel sad.
• 01.05: Love is a potential, not a state; it is like gravity.
• 29.04: Why do people believe that true love is incredibly rare and valuable, and yet still try and convince themselves that they won't die old bachelors/maids?
• 22.04: Beibei says selfishness is doing something to hurt others -- just helping yourself is not bad, if it hurts nobody else.
• 16.04: Fighting is always the symptom and not the cause.
• 13.04: Always err on the side of love.
• 06.04: So you want her to be happy.
• 23.03: Reading Tassajara Cooking, I finally got a concrete appreciation for why someone might choose to be a vegetarian.
• 22.03: Purpose, and the tautology it brings, is a uniquely human thought.
• 21.03: Otherwise-smart people commit themselves to the silliest nonsense so often, it makes me wonder what's the bloody use of being smart.
• 20.03: Hope is your enemy.
• 19.03: It is never the process, or the goal alone which are worthwhile.
• 18.03: Personality can be described as the strategies developed for the problems of being human.
• 17.03: C. S. Lewis implies very strongly that the only reasons people would doubt Christianity are related to sins.
• 16.03: Experience is the arbiter of reason.
• 14.03: The secret to life is not to take yourself too seriously.
• 11.03: Francesca's team lost 5-1 and she was terribly stricken; I spent a lot of time thinking about why anyone would invest themselves emotionally in something inherently meaningless.
• 09.03: Perfection has self-protection mechanisms.
• 07.03: The principle beauty of arch is that there are no checkouts and commits; everything is a branch, or a merge.
• 06.03: How come in movies it's always "My mother/father once said to me blah blah blah [insert cliched wisdom here"?
• 05.03: The most useful observations are made at the corner/failure cases (i.e. "The Man Who Tasted Shapes").
• 03.03: The difference between generic and name-brand cereals is how easy it is to open the bag without using scissors, totally ruining it, and/or getting cereal everywhere.
• 01.03: One thing I realize is that I'm very confused about how things should be.
• 25.02: Alcohol exaggerates people's personalities; people become "more themselves."
• 23.02: I have trouble with the contradiction between causing others to suffer and free will.
• 22.02: I just read something from The Philosopher's Magazine which indicates how ridiculous applied philosophy can be.
• 21.02: I mentioned earlier that religion progresses much more slowly than science.
• 18.02: Becoming friends with someone is like being "turned" by the Mule.
• 17.02: Did you ever wish you could fast-forward through time to skip something you dread?
• 16.02: Humans have progressed very far technologically in the last thousand years, but religiously not at all.
• 02.02: I realized I collect Magic Card art!
• 01.02: Emotions are the only mechanism we have for relating to other people.
• 28.01: A French-speaking Japanese schoolgirl with a teddy bear would be so cute I think she'd explode.
• 27.01: Can a blind person be afraid of the dark?
• 16.01: Quotes are obvious, trite crap condensed into witty nonsense.
• 14.01: The one good thing about politically-correct humor; it's timeless.
• 11.01: Why am I in Germany?
• 10.01: Have you ever heard someone say "Quasseau" instead of "Croissant", or say "Cabernet Sauvingnon" correctly, and thought they were being pretensious?
• 05.01: I gotta say, when you start writing songs about writing songs (I'm thinking Nothing Special by Duncan Shiek), that's a very bad sign.
• 05.12: Snow embodies everything I find fascinating about nature; it is quiet, patient, beautiful, gentle, sensual, impermanent, unique, deadly, and fun to stuff down people's shirts.
• 20.11: Buildings can kill people!
• 10.11: So I'm sitting here thinking, and come up with some cool thoughts, and think, ``Wouldn't it be neat if I could somehow snapshot and save all these thoughts for later so I don't forget them?'' and then I thought ``No, wait, my brain makes all these thoughts, what would be even cooler, would be to have my brain around all the time, and I'd always get new thoughts!'' and then I thought ``Ummm...''