werpon's comments

Formal methods may work for civil engineering where the usual workflow is gathering requirements, developing a detailed project and building the thing, with the implicit understanding that any little change will mean recalculating costs and deadlines.

When your customer decides to pivot the fintech app you were developing into a cryptocurrency investment tool, it makes no sense.

> As an American, I find this phenomenon extremely silly and very foreign feeling.

As the great British statesman George Washington once said: “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

Spaniard here. I don't think I've ever read or heard a sugarcoated version of the conquest. In fact it's usually the opposite.

October 12 is indeed the day Columbus set foot on the New World and also our national holiday, but I fail to see how it's different from other holidays such as Thanksgiving.

I called it an axiom for the sake of brevity. I felt that reciting the Peano axioms would only cloud my point.

Was I 100% precise? No. Did you add something meaningful to the discussion? That's for you to answer.

Is philosophy knowledge? Can I use it, for example, to take an informed choice about the real world? Does it at least contain a set of verifiable, falsifiable statements that every practitioner can and has agreed upon?

That's an axiom. It doesn't say anything about the real world, it just introduces a framework of thought.

In other words, if you can imagine a reality where 1+1=2 for some meaning of '1', '2', '+' and '=', then a series of conclusions will hold true.

In my view, the whole concept of scientism is the last attempt of philosophy to stay relevant, and it's usually only backed up by appeals to emotion and loaded words.

So, the scientist in me asks: what areas of knowledge are out of the scope of science and the scientific method?

I've invested a lot of time in trying to learn Haskell properly.

On one hand, it's incredibly rewarding when a completely new and strange concept finally 'clicks', then you write a few lines to test your understanding and it just works.

On the other hand, it's frustrating to realize that there are still a lot of concepts you don't fully grasp, several libs that are still out of your reach, yet another completely new way of structuring your code that you are yet to unravel. Essentially, that you are (I am) still a newbie.

All in all, I find Scala better suited to learning FP and applying your newly-acquired knowledge to develop mildly useful apps, as quick results usually lead to more motivation. Just IMHO.

(Not to mention there are many libs that aren't yet up to par with their JVM counterparts, but that's another can of worms.)

Option 3 has no basis since Intel doesn't need to write a single line of code to get their new chip supported under Linux, they just need to release the specs. Which brings us to:

4) Just like many graphics chips, this processor does some black magic to boost performance and Intel doesn't want to give any clues to competitors by releasing specs and/or open drivers.

It's easier when your target is just one OS.

I always thought they were built that way to cool the air faster due to the Jules-Thomson effect.

I don't think OS X nor iOS are much easier to use than their free counterparts, it's just that new users have at least two incentives to learn them, and so they do, without thinking too much about it.

First, they have a positive reinforcement: Mac is "hip", so you'll look cool by using their products (the fact that everybody and their mother owns one or ten doesn't seem to diminish this perception), and also a negative reinforcement because everybody knows "Apple makes easy-to-use products" so if you don't learn to use them quickly you'll look bad.

I'm sure Linux and *BSD have earned more followers by looking different or difficult than by trying to be "easy" (whatever that word means). But that's a discussion for another day...

Not to mention the tutorial, which is a work of art: succint, clear, informative and easy to follow (for a programmer anyway).

http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoTutorial.html

It's actually impossible to provision such a big army when essentially every adult man is in a trench.

World superpowers would have gone bankrupt had they used this tactic.

Big warships could accomodate bigger cannons. Bigger cannons could deliver bigger shells further, enabling your warships to hit the enemy while keeping out of their range.

These capital ships aren't being built today because missiles and fighter planes suddenly negated their advantage, not because they weren't a good idea to begin with.

IMHO it's an overwhelming act of condescension pretending to be smarter than thousands of admirals and military advisors, many of them with lots of real world experience fighting wars and stuff.