idyllei (u/idyllei) - Readit News

idyllei commented on Lisp's mysterious tuple problem codeproject.com/Articles/... · Posted by u/AndrewBissell

soberhoff · 8 years ago

I don't think it's as easy as that. In fact there's probably no single reason accountable for Lisp's lack of popularity. Here's my own personal pet peeve: Declaring local variables creates a level of nesting. Local variables are a great tool for improving code clarity. Having to wrap your logic with `(let [value (...)] ...)` in order make a new local variable is unnecessarily painful.

idyllei · 8 years ago

The deal breaker for me is the unwillingness to rename outdated identifiers: `car` instead of `first` or `head` and `cdr` instead of `rest` or `tail`; the use of asterisks to show that a function differs in semantics (`let` versus `let*`); and the verbosity of using anything other than a pure list.

If I had to use a Lisp-like language, I'd choose Clojure so I can interoperate with the JVM. (I use Scala already, so I could interoperate with that, too.)

idyllei commented on Dotty 0.2.0-RC1 scala-lang.org/blog/2017/... · Posted by u/darkdimius

idyllei · 8 years ago

Dotty is a great project to follow on GitHub if you want to take a look at some very high-quality Scala code. [1]

I like to take a look at /compiler/src/dotty/tools/dotc to whet my appetite from time to time [2].

[1] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty [2] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/tree/master/compiler/src/d...

idyllei commented on Why you should, actually, rewrite some of it in Rust unhandledexpression.com/2... · Posted by u/JoshTriplett

idyllei · 8 years ago

I would love to learn Rust, but the learning curve seems a bit too steep for me. The whole struggle with lifetimes is what has kept me from diving in. It seems impossible to me to figure out how to use them correctly. Plus the redundant syntax, I guess. If those things weren't an issue for me, I would gladly try to learn Rust.

idyllei commented on Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet blog.google/topics/public... · Posted by u/ghosh

idyllei · 8 years ago

Net neutrality has been a buzzword for a while now. Large new companies like to harp on it just for views, and they don't really explain to viewers just what losing it will mean. FOX News's motto "We report. You Decide" makes it evident that large networks don't care about the validity of information, just that it generates the largest amount of revenue for them. Companies (and individuals) with money won't care about net neutrality--they can pay their way around it. But the casual user can't afford that, and they aren't being educated as to what this means for them. We need to get large news networks to accurately report the situation and how consumers can help.

idyllei commented on The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem boffosocko.com/2017/07/11... · Posted by u/pmlnr

avar · 8 years ago

This is because they're not trying to give you stuff you'd generally like given your entire history. The recommendation feature powers the part of YouTube that auto-plays the upcoming video.

So e.g. if I go and view Russian dashcam videos they're going to automatically play more of them, even though I've shown no prior interest in that topic.

Having two systems for recommendations would introduce a lot of UI complexity, so I can see why they didn't go for that, and why the recommendations are consequently tuned for people who are actively watching videos on some topic right now.

idyllei · 8 years ago

I imagine it would be possible (though difficult) to autoplay videos which are related to each other and gradually converge to something that would interest the viewer.

For example, Russian dash cams to Russia at night to the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta, to horror games to video games in general, if that is what the user tends to watch.

I know this has graph theory written all over it and the shortest-distance problem has wreaked havoc for centuries, but I think with enough resources Google/YouTube could find a good compromise in this situation.