imok20's comments

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics (interview)

Ah, don't we wish. There's this thing called an "Axiom" that is, ruefully, generally, arbitrary. Definitions, too.

e.g. Some say the set of natural numbers contain 0, some say it doesn't.

Granted, the kind of math being discussed here isn't open to much interpretation, but I thought I'd note it.

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: Canada beats the U.S.A., and Twitter beats the New York Times

While I completely agree, and upvoted you for it, I think the implication of this is more along the lines of "whoa, the NYT is no longer the formost producer of breaking news (mostly.)"

The NYT should focus more on investigative reporting and analysis, and Twitter should stick to being about getting information out there as fast as people can type. To each it's own, right?

EDIT: To those who downvote, I'm curious as to why you did; this makes a lot of sense to me, and I'd like to hear contrasting opinions.

EDIT2: I think I must not have been clear at all: I agree with the OP. Completely. I'm just saying that no, the NYT doesn't care about getting out information as soon as possible. BNO does, that's why they're slightly better than the NYT at it. Twitter delivers a little bit of news in small bites – for some, that isn't sufficient (and it isn't for me either, though Twitter is a nice heads-up for when I'm not watching the news). But bites of news can be transmitted in 140 characters, or at the very least they can contain links to news (such as, again, BNO's links.) I don't see the controversy here, but I suppose that must be the Twitter kool-aid.

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: Apple admits use of child labour in China

I, too, do wonder.

Right now, it's not clear what those conditions were; my comment was meant to address the only clear-cut part of this vague article: that 15 year-olds were working in a factory.

I'm not justifying poor working conditions, nor am I justifying overwork (though I find it interesting that we don't see it as criminal when professionals spend around 130 hours a week working.) I was simply astonished at the knee-jerk reaction so many have when children... gasp... work!

Substantiated claims that the working conditions of these children were poor can be addressed separately.

But, by all means, protect these children from feeding their families.

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: Apple admits use of child labour in China

I worked at a lab programming for minimum wage when I was 15; this isn't sweatshop work. Children are allowed to work in the US, too. (Though, certainly, not at factories.)

The title is is misleading, as well: Apple contracts these oversea factories; they don't hire or force children to work for them. It's all a bit inflammatory.

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: Insanely deep fractal zoom

That's not quite true – as you zoom in, you're no longer simply taking Re(c) = x pixel on the screen and Im(c) = y pixel on the screen. The more you zoom in, you're moving in on the Re/Im axes, which means you're no longer looking at integer values for the computation. You start looking at floating point values for x (Re(c)) and y (Im(c)) when computing the sequence. Therefore, the computer begins to do more and more floating point computations on, ostensibly, arbitrarily accurate fp.

EDIT: Added "pixel on the screen".

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: "On iteration": Why people leave Python

As additional anecdotal evidence, this is true for me, though I'm still using Python for my next project simply because it's a proven language with proven libraries.

But I'm certainly ready and interested in moving toward a more functional language -- I've always been interested in the Lisps, and have always tended to write code in the functional style, where possible (even though my first language was Java...)

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: TechCrunch Hacked

Really? Let's call this "cracked," not "hacked" – we're only furthering the misunderstanding by using the incorrect term here, too.

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: My nephew wants to learn programming. What should I recommend?

Make him a language: let me elaborate. Use Python or Ruby and write a library of functions that he can call in particular ways that will make a "game." Let him learn how they work, and let him dive into the source code and figure it out and eventually make his own functions and classes and ... etc.

Discovery is the most rewarding part of learning to program, and having fast payoffs is always nice to keep a kid interested. Worked for me (I started with Logo around his age, but Python/Ruby is way better.)

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: NYTimes to start charging for access to their website.

I've been hoping for this for over a year now. I'm _more_ than happy to support their journalists oversea and at home (USA for me, as for the NYT). Without some sort of support, we wouldn't be getting the same breadth and depth and quality of news.

It astonishes me when people think this should be free. KNowledge should be free, yes, but news that costs money and much, much time to acquire and then disseminate _does_ cost money and I'm glad to pay for it.

This is high quality journalism from hard working people: asking them to do it for less and less is ridiculous. Content is tangible, to me at least, and worth money, just as a few lines of code "anybody" could write is also worth quite a bit.

imok20 | 16 years ago | on: Pirahã: a non-Turing-complete human language

One of the most remarkable parts of the language is that is does not have recursion. Nor does it have ways of explicitly differentiating temporally distant events.

This is an old article, but there are new ones a-comin'; the implications of Dan's work are just starting to be realized.

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