Here’s an article I wrote a while ago about a hypothetical language feature I call “folded application”, that makes parameter-list style and folded style equivalent.

https://jonathanwarden.com/implicit-currying-and-folded-appl...

I think we should avoid suggesting that other people on this forum are evil, even if you think their ideas and arguments are harmful.

I think sometimes people are so certain about their beliefs that they perceive any argument that challenges them to be evil, bad faith trickery. But I think the best way to respond to these arguments is simply to give compelling reasons why they are wrong (and not why the person giving them is bad).

Otherwise, some people will be mislead by these bad arguments and you will have done nothing to help but say “don’t listen to him he’s evil”, which is not very convincing really.

What if the truth is that something is a lie?

Promoting truth and opposing lies are the same thing.

I agree. My post was titled "The evolution of OpenAI’s mission statement", and I didn't submit it to Hacker News.

Someone else submitted it and it was then merged with the thread with the misleading title.

It’s like being a manager.

No, it’s like being a micro manager.

I don’t just give somebody a bit’s ticket a let the go. I give them a ticket but have to hover over their shoulder and nitpick their design choices.

Tell them “you should use a different name for that new class”, “that function should actually be a method on this other thing”, etc

Nitpicking seems like a choice. It's also possible to be more relaxed/removed and only delve in when there is a problem.

We're at the stage right now where there's always a problem. That's the issue with this type of programming right now.

Capitalism just means private citizens can own the means of production (e.g. start a business, buy stock) and earn a return on investment. It doesn’t mean only the rich must get richer. It means anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.

However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a progressives taxation system such that the rich get richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.

>anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.

You realise that a large swathe of society earn less than their costs?

Everyone will get richer perpetually, there will never be any impact on climate, we'll never suffer water shortages, we'll all ride unicorns and eat rainbows...

The important thing to note here is people have been propagandized into thinking that capitalist = democratic. In fact the US would gladly punish you with 'un-American activities' investigation if you said anything to the contrary.

The thing is a capitalistic country will gladly turn itself into an authoritarian one if both wealth becomes concentrated and wealth buys votes. With the massive rise in authoritarian activities all over the world, especially in the US our democratic system is at very high risk of collapsing.

Reading the news and being informed are two separate things. Being an informed citizen, the kind that democracies need to survive, also requires 1) being informed of history and 2) understanding issues in depth.

People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.

As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.

I'd like to get a little pedantic here and suggest it's not reading the news that's so problematic, it's 1) watching it, and 2) scrolling it. Not that print can't be effective propaganda, but it's less optimized to the task than 1 and 2. The passive pawns can't get enough of either.

Yes that’s a good point.

One case where a function is often not substitutable for an array is equality testing. In a language where any two arrays with the same elements in the same order are equal ([1,2] == [1,2]), the same cannot always be true of two equivalent functions. That is because extensionally equality is undecidable for arbitrary functions.

Arrays and functions may be mathematically equivalent but on a programming language level they are practically different.

I don’t understand this argument. Just because functional extensionality is undecidable for arbitrary functions doesn’t mean that it is undecidable for every class of functions.

In the specific situation, let’s say that by an array we mean a finite, ordered list whose entries are indexed by the numbers 0, 1, …, n - 1 for some natural number n. Let’s also say that two arrays are equal if they have the same length and the same value at each position (in other words, they have “the same elements in the same order”).

If we now want to represent a function f as an array arr such that f(i) = arr[i] for every possible input i of f, then this will only be possible for some very specific functions: those whose domain are the set {0, 1, …, n - 1} for some natural number n. But for any two such functions f, g : {0, 1, …, n - 1} → t, their extensional equality is logically equivalent to the equality of the corresponding arrays: you really can check that f and g are extensionally equal by checking that they are represented by equal arrays.

Right, so for a subset of functions, a language could implement an extensional equality test operator `==` for two functions by calling the functions for every possible input. It would be prohibitively slow for some functions, but correct.

But for other functions, even that won't be possible.

The point is that functions and arrays may be practically different. You can always do an `==` test on the contents of two arrays, but you can't do the same for two arbitrary functions.

Ouch! I don’t think that’s fair.

It sounds like his professional life or personal interests naturally being him in contact with a social circle that isn’t fulfilling socially. Doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with him.

I say, look outward! Intentionally get involved with other social circles.

But like, it's weird that there are no women in those groups, or that OP hasn't run across any women.

Listen to them.