What is Swift written in?

So... C. Ok, we're done here.

No wait. One more thing. It's the Objective-C runtime. Which means Objective-C programs will just keep running, as they ever have.

The new language can't supplant the old one while the old one exists in the same environment. More to the point, compatibility with Objective-C, C, and C++ was an explicit design goal. So you can just pack up all the bullshit about taking over the world.

Even MIT is teaching courses that are nothing but rehashes of history? Seriously? I mean in theory, there's something to be learned from how it was done before, but from the description, this is just an excuse to rub elbows with an astronaut for bragging rights.

That sounds more like a conclusion than an assumption.

But the question isn't "Who won?" It is: "On the basis of this result what can we say about who will win next time?"

I don't know what kind of measures they used, and there are a couple of links in this discussion to papers pointing out how problematic p-values are, but it is perfectly possible for the weaker competitor to win any given competition. All it requires is that the width of the performance distributions be large enough to give significant overlap between the players.

People who don't understand statistics are baffled by this. They see individual instances, but statistics is about distributions. We can, by measuring instances, make judgements about the distributions they are drawn from, and knowing about the distributions we can make predictions about future instances.

In the present case, it appears that the observed distribution of performance was such that it wasn't possible to distinguish clearly between the case where the computer is slightly better than the humans but the humans got lucky, and the case where the humans are definitely better than the computer.

Age is not a great arbiter of such things, but it's still true that without age there are some experiences that are hard to get.

I remember when "structured programming" was the silver bullet du jour. Then it was OO. Then it was Java (this is hard to believe, but really, Java was touted as the solution to all our ills, and people believed it for a while, rushing out to re-write perfectly good code in Java and frequently ruining it in the process) Today it's FP.

All of these, except maybe Java, brought some real good to the table. There were a variety of side-trends that never really got off the ground, at least as silver bullets, like 5GLS, whatever they are.

An older developer has had the opportunity to watch these decade-long trends and make better judgements about the curve of adoption. Will Haskell ever become a mainstream language? Nope, although it'll be used in some niche areas, the way SmallTalk still is. Will FP techniques and ideas filter in to all kinds of other languages? Well, duh. Already happening. Is it worth learning a little Haskell and maybe come category theory? Sure. You can do that even while thinking the claim "apart from the runtime, Haskell is functionally pure" is precisely as impressive as the claim "apart from all the sex I've had, I'm a virgin."

Not all older developers will get any utility out of their experience. Some become cynical and dismissive. A very, very few retain their naive enthusiasm for the Next Great Thing. But many of them have a nuanced and informed attitude toward new technology that makes them extremely valuable as the technical navigator for teams they're on.

Here, here's a technically feasible Mars idea.

But wait, that's not a city. Not quite. How about this. There. That was about $5000 worth of work. Pay the man.

For my compiler, you insensitive clod. Now that we have SSDs that can feed the beast fast enough to keep it busy, I would be delighted to have one of these on my desk.

Uhm, what?

Since when was Elon Musk not a capitalist? I'm pretty sure he's charging real money for Tesla Model Ss and Powerwalls. I'm pretty sure SolarCity isn't giving away solar panels for free. I'm pretty sure the Model X will go on sale this year, and people will give him money and he will give them a car in return.

Capitalism is not incompatible with environmentalism. It's just that there are entrenched interests in our current capitalism that make money in ways that are incompatible with environmentalism. Elon Musk is a disruptive capitalist who is going to make several more entrenched interests very unhappy by the end of the decade. He's already making some entrenched interests (notably United Launch Alliance) very unhappy in non-environmentally related fields. (They're having to spend money on those horrible horrible professional middle class people to get them to design a better rocket for the first time in two decades, instead of just selling the same old piece of shit for sweet cost-plus contracts.)

As of today, if you have the capital, you can give Elon Musk money and he will give you equipment that can cut your personal carbon footprint by 36%, permanently, by wiping out your emissions for housing and travel. That 36% is fully half of the footprint that you personally control. This is a transaction in a capitalist system, where the means of production are privately owned, rather than government owned, where the organization doing the producing expands its production capacity and research and development efforts using private profits, and where the purchaser has a choice of viable alternatives in some sort of market.

The US economy has been capitalist for over 200 years, and it has been getting more environmentally friendly for that entire period. Admittedly it started out rather thoroughly unfriendly, so there was a lot of room for improvement, but it has happened. Nor were the changes voluntary, but they still happened, while still being fundamentally capitalist.

The skill distribution doesn't have to be U-shaped to produce a U-shaped distribution. All there has to be is a threshold of skill that must be reached to perform effectively: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

I liken this to a wall-climbing task in an obstacle course: some combination of height/weight/strength is necessary to get over the wall. If you measure them individually you'll see broad distributions with soft correlations with ability to get over the wall (because short/strong/light people will be able to do it and tall/strong/heavy people will be able to do it, but short/strong/heavy people won't and tall/weak/light people won't, etc). The wall-climbing task requires the right combination of a small number of such skills to be over some threshold. This trivially (as the simple model in the link shows) generates the observed U-shaped distribution in programming outcomes.

People who claim that anyone can be taught to code well enough to pass a first year computer science course have the opportunity to make a very simple, compelling argument in favour of their thesis: tell us how to teach people to program! If you can do that--if you can get rid of the U-shaped mark distribution that has been documented in first year computing for decades despite all kinds of efforts to understand and deal with it, your argument will be made. Everything else is just hot air: ideological and unconvincing.

There are certain things we know do not cause the bimodal mark distribution in first year computing:

1) Bad teaching (because the issue has been researched and any number of caring, intelligent teachers have thrown themselves at it, and anyone's sucky first year computing prof does not disprove this)

2) Language (because the bimodal mark distribution persists in all languages)

3) Years of coding experience of incoming students (because if that were the case it would have been identified as the differentiator in the decades of research that have gone into this: someone with no coding experience can do as well as someone with years... if they are over some threshold of skill.)

So while it's fun to watch equalitarian ideologues tub-thump this issue, they unfortunately bring nothing to the discussion but ideological blather. The U-shaped, bimodal, mark distribution in first-year computing is robust evidence of a threshold of some kind that people have to be over to code well. There may be other thresholds higher up the scale (I've seen estimates that 25% of coders will never get OO... god knows what the figure is for FP, which I'm still struggling with myself.) But the claim "It would be dreadful if everyone can't code!" is not an argument, it's an emotional outburst, and we need to focus on the data, not the way we wish the world is.

Personally, I would love it if we could figure out how to teach coding better. I see journalists, economists, politicians, business-people, all sorts who are dependent on coders to help them out on the most rudimentary questions. If we could teach everyone to code the level of data-driven discourse would go through the roof. But I'm not counting on that happening any time soon.

Why would you do that? Every single one of those things has an off switch. In all but extraordinarily rare cases, use of every one of those things is discretionary. You don't need to rewire your panel in order to keep the house running during quite a long power outage. Just don't use heavy draw appliances. If you are affluent enough to buy one or more of these battery packs in the first place, you can certainly afford to buy a few paper plates and an extra pair of underwear, if it comes to that.

Yeah, you're probably not going to be an early adopter, if you don't have solar panels already, if you don't have an electric car already, if you're not subject to substantially high differential energy pricing, and if you live in a region with a better-than-average grid maintenance organization. But the price will only come down once the gigafactory comes online. It's very likely that these packs will get cheap enough to fit in a discretionary budget just for rare convenience. My existing UPSes certainly fall into that category. You may already have a few for the same reason. It's just a somewhat bigger UPS, when all those other conditions apply.

Regardless of your individual situation, it's a gamechanging device for the vast majority of the world.

Walmart has decided to try it. To $9, not $20, but that's their minimum for 2015. 500,000 employees will make more money, costing Walmart $1 billion more than it would otherwise have spent on salaries this year. All of it going to the people in the very lowest income bracket, who are practically required to spend every dime they earn, because they're at or below the poverty line.

We'll see how it works, both for the economy and for Walmart. (Personally I think Walmart damn well knows that some large fraction of that billion dollars will be returned right back to them in increased spending at Walmart by poverty-stricken people.)

Damnit. Posting to undo moderation. Mouse aim is poor, and this is insightful.

The Coward is a ULA partisan who comes in here to spout lies pretty regularly. They're not losing money. They're profitable on every launch, by a healthy margin. The Coward can't understand how it happens, since the ULA can barely turn a profit when they charge $480 million for the same thing, so he assumes they're taking a loss.

Elon Musk hasn't been so rich that he can run a rocket company for 13 years out of his own pocket. (Probably he is now, because of Tesla stock, but he wasn't for most of that period.)

No.

The electrons emit cyclotron radiation, because they are being accelerated by a magnetic field. The acceleration is always perpendicular to the electron's velocity vector, so they don't speed up, they just turn in a circle. However, all accelerating charges emit electromagnetic radiation, and in the case of an electron moving in a magnetic field in this fashion it is called "cyclotron radiation". In other contexts it is called "bremsstrahlung", and so on. Physicists often have multiple names for the same basic phenomenon manifesting itself in different circumstances.

Add "electrons vibrate" or "everything vibrates" to this account adds nothing and obscures the actual source of the radiation, which is continuity conditions on the electro-magnetic field. These conditions are described by Maxwell's Equations, which predict such radiation. There is exactly nothing in Maxwell's Equations that could be said to describe a "vibrating electron" in this context.

The summary is equivalent to an account of a baseball game written by someone who has never seen a ball, or a game, of any kind. It is depressing that "science journalism" scrapes along at a standard that is an order of magnitude below anything found in sports journalism, which is itself not exactly a paragon of insight and coherence.

The paper itself can be found here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.5362...

It is a beautiful piece of work that really does open up new doors to precision measurement of beta spectra.

Does that mean you can't represent yourself in UK court without renting a wig?

And then apply the rule that "may" and "may not" have exactly the same literal meaning. Any headline that contains anything like "may" or "may not" is screaming sensationalism. "Scientists dispute oldest fossils" is informative, "Fossils may not have been created by life" is identical to "Fossils may have been created by life", and is therefore meaningless.