18 Mar 2005 (updated 20 Oct 2008 at 12:30 UTC)
»
LtU node of the week
To try and get more regular about posting diary entries, I've dedided to adopt
the semi-strict discipline of choosing to link to a Lambda the
Ultimate node each week (either a new story or forum article, or
something classic from the archives). I'll start this week with the very fresh.
Week 1: Node #587: The fate of reduce() in Python
3000, which has become a sort of forum for complaining
about/defending Python's piss poor support of core FP style. Regular readers
of this diary will probably have become aware that my attitude to the
language moves around the spectrum from "distaste" through "irritation" and
"outrage" to "cold hatred".
Thoughts on Recentlog
I'm reading the whole of recentlog, at thresh=2
much more often these days (my default used to be to just skim it at thresh=6).
Very pleased to see ncm and raph posting again, welcome back! (And sorry,
ncm, about the unwelcoming nature of my last post...).
A point: the reason I am reading recentlog more fully these days, is not
having more time on my hands, but because it is faster to do, because fewer
people are posting, and more rewarding, because the idiots have all moved to
flashier ways of pulluting the blogosphere. Time, perhaps, for an advogato
renaissance.
Pace raph, I don't think there is anything wrong with the trust metric,
besides it's being meaningless-in-aggregate. Together with the
underutilised diary rating mechanism, it really succeeds in keeping me stop
reading crap on recentlog, with little personal effort, which is a very nontrivial
accomplishment for an open community site. I'd say: experiment
successful, but not quite in the way planned.
Today's responses on
Recentlog
zhaoway on today's good laugh from wikipedia general
equlibrium: I think economists don't tend to think hard enough
about what they are taking for granted with the kinds of mathematical models
they use (I'm a Neo-Ricardian, after all), but I can see why I might want to use assume
I had at least as many traders [as] there are points on a real
line when doing equilibrium modelling:
A trader is someone who performs actions in response to markets. Markets
provide a sequence of pieces of information in real time. Hence an
equilibium model ought not to behave differently when you assume the
existence of all possible traders, who will number at least |(Time =>
Information) => Action|, which if |Time| >= Nat, and both |Information|
and |Action| are >= 2, will number more than there are real numbers, or
indeed continuous functions on the real numbers (both of the =>
funcation space formers should include at least some discontinuous
functions under most reasonable topologies).
So, in short, I don't find the assumption ridiculous.
Read what robilad wrote about the purported complexity of open
source licenses when compared the the reasonableness of Sun's offerings...
Google search for Siskind's
Stalin
It takes a lot of qualifiers to get J. M. Siskind's ruthlessly optimising scheme
compiler appear on the first Google hit for stalin, but "stalin -hitler -joseph -death -inurl:logs -
USSR -Avidenko" does the trick...
Edit (2008-10-20): Fixed link to Stalin, above — I guess
Advogato's html reformatting engine claimed another hyperlink...