Computers:

> Shelby,
>
> Well....I looked at the Forum and not much has changed.
>
> Is there any ANALYSIS of individual stocks? (I did the CAPS because I see
> we lost SRSrocco)

I was an early employee of both PayPal and Eventbrite. I know how that works. ANyway, back to metals and miners.

Come to find out that I can get the same efficiency as lazy does for 'or . map p', by using Traversable in strict language, where I have a version of 'traverse' which inputs a function that returns Maybe (i.e. can terminate the iteration).

I am becoming more confident there are no mainstream use cases where FP has disadvantages. And the advantages are beyond orders-of-magnitude, with the power of Reed's Law for composition. Imperative programming isn't generally compositional, and that is fundamental.

I recently explained the O(1) solution to the n-queens using an immutable random access array, which provides evidence that immutable is not likely to be log n slower in mainstream use cases. Today I published a tweak to Traversable so that lazy is not more efficient than eager for FP composition on combinations of mapping and folding.

As best as I can tell, no one other than me, is thinking about the separation of interface and implementation in FP. If anyone knows of anyone, I want to know who they are. So that could be the reason no progress has been made. I had a huge learning curve to climb, starting circa 2008, and I didn't really decide until 2011 that I had no choice but to create a language.

Also I could not achieve my work without Scala. There is no way I could reproduce all that effort by myself in any reasonable time-frame, so initially Copute will compile to Scala, and let the Scala compiler do as much as possible of the heavy lifting. My gratitude to the Scala folks is beyond words. I understand that Odersky's model was to throw in everything including the kitchen sink, because it was a research project to demonstrate that generality. My goal is different. Again too much talk on my part, but I am excited.

And the point that Scala wasn't well known and fully capable until about 2008 roughly, maybe 2006 sans some key features.

Some progress has been achieved, but not so mainstream yet. Twitter is deploying Scala and other boutique JVM languages throughout their server-side.

@The Thinking Man:
The original complaint wasn't about the semantics, but rather the verbosity of:

Code:

NSString *test = [myString stringByAppendingString:@" is just a test"];

The distinction you've raised is not a justification for the extra verbosity of Objective C, but rather the raison d'être for immutability, i.e. purity, a/k/a referential transparency. In an pure language, no object can be mutated, which eliminates the spaghetti nature of cross-dependencies of functions, i.e. any an impure function which inputs a string and appends to it by mutating its input, has modified its input and thus has a dependency on its caller, which spreads out into the program like spaghetti.

In pure language, the string is represented as an immutable list, thus the '+' operator for strings, is the construction operator for a list, which eliminates the wasteful copying and eliminates the other problems you raised:

Code:

List[String] = mystring :: "is just a test"

Pure FP isn't generally slower, and in the above case it is faster except for concatenation of very small strings (which could thus be automatically optimized by the '+' operator to be a copy to new string of only the small portions), because it forces us to use algorithms which make more sense in overall compositional perspective.

Thanks for providing a clear example of why pure FP is what we should all be using.

@Winter: I have a longish post stuck in moderator queue (because it is too long), and I wanted to be clear that the point I am detailing in that post, is that the social structure is not strong in the collectivist model, because it is based on false pricing of relative value. And that also is the essence of the suburbia point I am making. And my overall mathematical point, is that the way collectivism spreads is primarily via the debt model. This is what makes it so impossible to get rid off, and why we end up talking a lot, because we can't fix it. However, I think there is a technological solution, that won't require any more talk.

@Jessica et al, and this false pricing of relative value explains why education is so messed up and concurs with your and Monster's points. Winter, in a non-collectivist, free-market system, the kids and parents who are unmotivated, wouldn't be forced to attend, and the society wouldn't be forced to waste its resources. Collectivism always involves force. Free markets involve choice. When people can choose, resources are not wasted, because ultimately no matter how much we force people, people are only productive the areas they (like and) choose to be. Not everyone is destined to be a highly paid profession, some will be more lowly paid janitors with "on the job" education. In such a competitive model, people have an incentive to improve their education, if they so desire.

This will be a bit long, because this requires deeper conceptual exposition.

@Nigel: I misspoke, Ecole Classique is only $5k/yr for high school, competitive AA athletics, and Latin.

I assume you are conflating the price you pay for subsidized wireless, with my assumed higher actual cost of providing of lower density service. And/or it may be that the cost advantage diminishes above some population density, and this would not disprove my unproven theory that providing low density wireless may not have a positive real rate of return on capital.

I don't know if there is an inherent density limit for wireless, or it may be that the mean density of the area around the stadium is much lower than the peak density during event times, and thus sufficient hardware for peak density is not economically justified.

Agreed about processed sewage because the primary cost is the ongoing output per person. We have septic tanks here, which is better because it eliminates another vector towards collectivism and mis-pricing of relative value. Passive sewage systems can be more healthy and produce free methane to power heating and cooking. But of course your local planning board won't allow it, because there is no income for them. Your relatives left Philippines, because they wanted to come avail of the subsidized economy, where they can earn debt-inflated higher wages. But a reversion is coming.

The raw materials cost was not lower for larger sq ft housing, and the land, taxes, permitting, labor, etc.. cost significantly more than without the debt subsidy. And this is precisely my overall point, that this phenomenon is a disconnection of price from resource cost (and relative knowledge value in the society), caused by the debt and government subsidy economic model. It is a problem of uniform distribution, or socialism again. If everyone can get a loan to have the same size house, then all the inputs to housing go higher, and disconnect from the resource (relative value of knowledge) efficiency. Refer back to my prior comments on this page and the prior few blogs, where I explained that uniform distributions are the antithesis of progress, knowledge, efficiency, and prosperity. For example, when a programmer such as yourself who is adding much more knowledge to the economy, has to pay programmer level wages for basic services which do not add as much knowledge, then the economy becomes unproductive (as is the case now with huge and increasing debts). If everyone is rich, then no one is. The fallacy that if everyone is rich, then everyone is more prosperous, is the lie of pulling demand forward with debt, which always ends in loss of production, because of the mispricing of the relative value of knowledge.

Catherine Austin Fitts calls this the Tapeworm economy, where the productive capital of the locals is siphoned off to the capitalists far away.

A definition of insanity is doing the same destructive thing over and over again, and not realizing it. This is the nature of collectivism, and debt is the primary enabling mode of denial.


@Winter: I agree, the "collective idealism" never goes away, because the people never learn. That is why I said there won't be any breakup of the EU, instead the Europeans will prefer authoritarianism, probably leaning towards totalitarianism because of the cultural of idolizing of social contracts. Germany will bailout the PIIGS because they need markets to sell their industrial goods and so they need to force the PIIGS to borrow more money. And Germany will decide that they must force those PIIGS to make the necessary social changes so the PIIGS will produce as much as they spend. Just more top-down futility that ends up likes the 1920s and ultimately 1940. Can you help me to understand, why is this culture so widespread in EU? My vision of American culture used to be one of individuals can do for themselves.

Money is very important, because when it does not represent fairness, then the society becomes violent after a falsely priced utopia. For example, the fractional reserve fiat system is based on the debasement via inflation tax of debt. When it is done by an authoritarian central bank as is the case every where in world now, instead of the free market of multiple fraudulent private banks as was case in USA in 1800s, then people have no choice. This continual transfer of the real capital of productive people to the capitalists, destroys the information in the society about relative value. Thus the society mal-invests and even mal-educates (that debt and welfare is optimal, etc), which results in deeply embedded destruction of fairness and productivity. It a curse so hurtful to the people in it, that I think I know what hell is. Did I answer my own question about what created the culture of Europe? But why do people get stuck in this culturally embedded curse? Well for one reason people think it is more fair, because they have this delusion that man can create superior top-down social control. Buy why are people so stupid? I think it is because if there were no stupid people, then there would be no smart people. So I just have to shrug my shoulders and say "thanks for giving me the opportunity to devise a technology that is more intelligent, rich, and fair". I should note that people do not really have much choice, because money is a social contract, due to the critical importance of fungibility, and thus money will naturally trend towards centralization. This is why I started to look for technological solution to money.

Those capitalists who have the delusion of being a superior race, software is coming and they can't capitalize knowledge, only the capital intensive hardware for deploying knowledge. Their futile useless slavery capital will wither as software is owned by the minds where it resides, because it is never static. And none of their attempts to capitalize the internet can help them. It doesn't matter how much they play their role in the fascist curse, they can't stop the fledgling age of software.

Winter, I think you want people to prosper, so I think you will abandon your love of top-down social contracts in time. Someone just needs to demonstrate another economic model that is working better. Given the unfairness of the collectivist fiat model, the only consolation scraps for the slaves, is the welfare state. So it is not surprising that you would view that as the only option. I come as a lamb in wolfskin, wide-eyed, bearing gifts of a nascent technology and economic model for uncoordinated cooperation. Would you not embrace a working solution that vests mankind in his own capital-- his mind?

@Winter: A summary of my link is that a collectivist promises that which is impossible to predict, the future, and thus is a habitual liar. The free market promises nothing, not even freedom, and thus is a habitual truth-teller. I wouldn't want to be known as a liar.

@Winter:

1. So you've conceded that collectivism is about always about force.

2. What is the equation that tells with certainty which skills will be in demand and not oversubscribed in the distant future?

3. If the state forces uniform indoctrination, then how does the workforce adapt to the unknown future? What if the future is we are invaded by aliens and they only need native tribes who know secret herbal medicines, and they kill the rest? What if they only let cannibals live? What if they only let collectivist live? Thus I am okay that collectivists exist, and encourage you to add more to your ranks.

4. Nature requires many finely grained variable outcomes (degrees-of-freedom) in order to anneal the globally optimized best fitness to dynamic outcomes. Less diversity is less degrees-of-freedom, and thus the system can't optimize. This is a scientific proof that collectivism is for those who like sub-optimal results.

5. Even parents can't force a child to be interested in something the child is not interested in, so neither can the state. What the state is good at is making kids so bored and uninterested, that many rebel and hate education. The state can buy off everyone, and this is called a debt bubble. But I think that power will diminish soon with the rise of a new technology.

6. The educational market is efficient now. Proof is I opted out, which has been very efficient in many facets.

7. I didn't write that I am not trading. I decide who and how I trade most efficiently. For the moment, apparently you think you are trading more efficiently in a collectivist model, but that might permanently collapse soon (if I am correct that industrial age is permanently dying). Living together does involve some compromise, but only to the degree that my needs and desires inhibit those of others, e.g. if my neighbor plays their karaoke at 120dB. But I have learned it is more efficient to not involve govt gridlock, and simply talk to my neighbor, or move if we can't agree (which I have done a few times). To the extent I am impacted by the poor education of others (not much), would be more so under this poor education system. However, I see this as an opportunity. I see all those frustrated kids, as fertile ground for my new computer language. Hopefully others also see economic opportunities in providing ways to side-step the morass of govt.

8. The fear-mongering about what would happen without universal, uniform education, is actually the outcome that we are getting with it, and the opposite of the outcome that basic science of fitness, entropy, and annealing says we would get without it. I could explain why in more detail, with numerous examples, but it won't change your mind. The only thing that will change your mind is to diminish the power of the state and the corporation via some technology (e.g. which makes it technically impossible to tax knowledge). Then you will have no choice. That is a theoretical possible outcome of my current work.

9. Regarding #7, I think you are going to be shocked at the severity of the death of the industrial age. It is going to destroy your world. I hope you find the knowledge age. And it will be the antithesis of the collectivist age which relied on material control, industry, and physical assets capital.

@Shelby:

...my less than $100 computer (in 1990s dollars)...
...because the economies-of-scale are increasing...
In short, all profits are derived from the knowledge portion of the business...

So this requires those who produce knowledge must be wealthier than those who don't, otherwise these economies-of-scale (driven by a large population and the declining costs of physical production) are wasted in the collectivist redistribution scam.

The propaganda about overpopulation is merely the calls of passive capital for a bailout from the knowledge age. But no one can bail them, game over, check mate. Do they even know what time it is?

The future is in the software that runs on the devices. Thus the competition is really about the model for leveraging the content of the devices.

Amazon: closed-source portal marketplace
Apple: closed-source one-stop marketplace
Google: open-source marketplace, closed-source derivative ad server marketplace

Google doesn't need to care so much about device content, they only need the internet ad market to continue expanding. Amazon doesn't need to care so much about the qualities of content, they only need the content providers market to continue expanding (which is why I think they offer the commodity server business). Thus Amazon is working for Google. Apple has to micromanage content, because their model depends on their quality being differentiated from the others.

Clearly Apple is more vulnerable to disruption than Amazon.

Thus ultimately they are all working for us– we the open source programmers

Apple: devices – uses content and services to sell devices

That is a subset of the more general model I offered, which is that Apple needs to control content quality in order to differentiate their products. They require that their products be differentiated on quality, in order for the total "Apple experience" to be differentiated. Otherwise there is no compelling reason to enter their jailed garden, where more open markets exist for Android and Amazon. Please realize that as hardware costs decline, all significant nominal profits will be made in software, not in hardware. Apple is thus the most vulnerable to disruption because they depend on being able to offer less choice and higher quality, but that isn't the nature of open source Inverse Commons, where high quality follows from more open choices.

Amazon: store – uses devices and content to sell stuff to people

That is a superset of my model which has no predictive power, because all 3 of them use devices and content to sell something, Google sells derivative ad servers. The significant predictive power quality of Amazon's model, is that is a portal and not a one-stop shop. Thus they are leveraging the devices (Kindle) and commodity servers (EC) businesses to drive more partner websites. Hopefully you have noted that Amazon takes orders for 1000s of partners, where you can find the same product for sale on the partner's website.

Google: ads – uses devices and content to sell eyeballs to advertisers

Yup, and I hope you get the point that the derivative model is immune to need for an result with the devices, other than that no one else can monopolize the devices to block ads. And that the main goal of Google is to lower the cost and increase the number of devices. Google doesn't need to win the device marketplaces.

So two are “working” for me. One is “working” for someone else.

That is the simplistic and obvious relationship, which doesn't capture the more significantly derivative economic relationship that I outlined.

I noted that ultimately they are all vulnerable to open source business models, i.e. Apple is vulnerable to "Web3.0 open apps" (assuming they won't be limted to Flash nor HTML5, but fully programmable), Amazon is vulnerable to open source exchange marketplaces (e.g. what I am working on), and Google is eventually vulnerable to open source decentralized social networking (e.g. Diaspora) where rent-free ad serving and relevancy is inherent in the network.

And they are all working to expand the market, which gives more economy-of-scale to our open source markets. Since closed-source can't scale, I can boldly claim they are working for open source programmers.

Whatever makes people stick to MS Windows, it is NOT the quality of MS technology

Another major factor is the browser runs fine on XP. So this opened up an unlimited world of expansion that didn't require change or OS differentiation. Also most people are task focused, with the minimum disruption possible. An outlier OS presents stumbling blocks along the way, and offsetting theoretical efficiency gains are difficult for the individual to mentally amortize across those. Apple solved this by being a first mover in a new device space.

This is another reason that I am trying to kill project granularity of composition, and this even applies to open source. We wouldn't get so stuck if programs could mutate incrementally "with enough monkeys banging randomly on the source" (paraphrased quote of Esr).

@Nigel:

but it’s not going to get disrupted in this fashion anytime soon

Disruption is often a waterfall event, that isn't expected by most observers. This is because it is often a surprising technology paradigm-shift, and the nature of new technology, is that it isn't well known before it is created and proven in the market.

I am specifically working on the technology that indirectly could possibly disrupt Apple's "native apps better than web apps" model, and more directly cause imperative programming such as Apple's required development system to suffer an orders-of-magnitude loss in relative productivity, and last night I rough drafted a beginner's tutorial to explain it (section Copute Tutorial at bottom of page). The library and compiler are progressing. Is the 5 line code example in the tutorial not compelling, elegant, and intuitive enough for rapid adoption?

@Doc Merlin:
The key is that without fractional reserve banking, debt isn't nearly as dangerous, because debt bubbles implode expeditiously. But if people demand debt and bonds, they also implicitly demand fractional reserve banking and a govt backstop, because otherwise bond holders consistently end up bankrupted. The 1800s is evidence, the implicit forces of which transitioned us to the central bank in 1913.

Afaics, the only solution is to eliminate the ability to store capital, by making DYNAMIC knowledge the only capital of significance. Then capital becomes active, and debt, bonds, and govt become useless. I am actively developing this solution.

@Tim F.: I humbly ask Esr for one transgression of my 1 comment/day limit (knowing I must accept the consequences), because I want to reply before I sleep (3am) while it is fresh in my mind. Indeed, I was writing about the Dunbar number limit in 2009, before I was aware of Reed's Law. Yet Reed's Law is still relevant in that even the 2^150 Dunbar limited version is an astronomical number, and to achieve the Dunbar limit across a wide range of grouping categories, requires a very large value of N because each category (e.g. interest, hobby, etc) can be sparse in the general population. This is a documented phenomenon with social networks, where grouping size (and marketing conversions) increase with the size of the network (or grouping, e.g. a game's usership). And the Dunbar limit can be exceeded by the fact that people group differently in different categories (e.g. I am interested in jock athletics, programming, math, theology, psychology, dating, natural health, Fukushima, etc.), and also that groupings sometimes don't require personal knowledge of everyone in the group, e.g. I don't remember everyone by name in Esr's blogs. Reed's Law assumes only one grouping category. So thus I although Reed's Law is an incomplete model, I think we can build a model that shows networking effects could scale exponentially with network size, and this has been one my primary motivations for working on modularity, because I think the limit in the s/w realm, is not human cognitive capacity but rather the inability to scale implementation (programming) of feature choices at exponential rates.

We see the grouping effects now with simultaneous synergy and competition between Amazon and Apple, Samsung hiring the Cmod developers, etc.. The potential groupings are limited when there is a walled garden. I do understand that any particular grouping category will plateau in utility, but the number of categories are limited only by the degrees-of-freedom in current technology, market, and legal structure, i.e. no where near a limit in human cognitive capacity because potential knowledge of all potential groupings is exponentially greater than a particular group's knowledge limit.

Afaics, the questions you claim as inconsistencies, instead are consistent. Apple, telcoms, etc. could possibly have been a threat to an open web platform, and now Google has apparently successfully marginalized them and the web has won (partially) because Google has embraced network effects. Afaik, Google is profiting on the ongoing growth of the web population (and afaik there was a potential threat to that before Android), nor do I think the bankrupt developed world is going to maintain its artificially inflated economic value over the developing world (a few more years at most then a currency revaluation which will wipe out everyone in paper assets). I agree that in terms of the implementators of technology, most will come from the developed world, but they will be making products for the world's youth who are coming into their working age, and they are predominantly in the developing world. The numbers (aging population, inadequate youth to pay for it, massive debt, etc) say the developed world can't grow their way out of their bankruptcy without the developing world consuming their technology products. The world has to become more integrated.

Agreed that Google owns the part that has value to Google (per the above paragraph) and lets the networking effects take care of the other parts. While Apple slows themselves down (relative to market share and network effects) by controlling and perfecting. Imagine if Google had allowed the adoption of the web by potential smart phone users to be stagnated by Apple's limited business model.

When I mentioned short-term effects at the cost of long-term gridlock, I wasn't referring to not using Google. I was referring to some nifty features in a walled garden in exchange for a loss of the Reed's Law benefits (groupings and degrees-of-freedom) from exponential scaling of the web platform. Pulling demand forward into a closed paradigm, is in my abstract mind analogous to pulling demand for housing forward (stealing from future demand) by 30 years with 30 year mortgages. In a recent blog, we discussed some of the technological tradeoffs that iPhone has in order to achieve performance now, at the cost of developer productivity in the future, e.g. lack of garbage collection and lack of choice with an outdated programming language.

That Apple can generate $345 billion to passive capitalists and only return $3 billion to all the third party developers who make the platform viable, speaks to me about the ultimate economic failure of the business model. The business model that is able to generate a proportionate share of value for the programmers, is going to kickarse, because none of this happens without programmers. Programmers are highly underpaid, even though they are some of the most highly paid. I predict something radical is going to happen within the next couple of years on this. You can argue that is all that apps can earn, because there are so many free apps. And I can argue that this is due to the structure of the business model. Apparently Apple apps earn more than Google apps. Imo, the problem is too much duplication of effort, because we don't have modularity of reuse. There are zillions of things that not being programmed yet, because they require project-scale, and there is limited project-scale groupings that mesh with the available corporate vested interests.

@Tim F., neither Metcalf nor Reed's Law correctly models the human networking effects, because there isn't only one category that is to be grouped pairwise (Metcalf) or N-tuples (Reed's Law). However, categories (topics that cause people to interact) are numerous and often the participants' set is temporal yet the interaction record is archived and persistently spawning new interaction. People can be in more than one grouping simultaneously, and even temporarily but persistently because they can put it down and forget about it, yet pick it up later at will. Many people remark that Google is their external memory. The Dunbar cognitive limit (~150) on human social groupings applies where we interact with those in the group personally. Technological groupings are not necessarily so limited, because for example with DCVS, it is possible for the effort of some group, to be taken up and extended by other people, without participants even being aware of each other. Although a particular case of interaction may reach diminishing marginal utility, new cases of groupings are spawned. This is life in action, it requires new births and deaths.

Bottom line is that paradigms which are decentralized are able to grow at exponential rates, because plurality of actors are not as retarded by top-down management bandwidth. The linear market-share growth of Google requires an exponential growth of nominal units, and this is possible because Google is not trying to do everything top-down, but instead allowing network effects.

The analysis of any particular company's or person's strategy is not so interesting to me, because by definition of the Theory of the Firm, every company exists because there is some friction in the free market which enables the firm to arbitrage and take a rent on the active capital doing the work (e.g. $345 billion to Apple shareholders, only $3 billion developers market). In other words, I view management as necessary because of friction. One set of people sees the friction and attacks it with management and makes money doing so successfully. Another smaller set of people, sets off to create technology that eliminates the friction (i.e. democratization via technology, e.g. the personal computer). Those who battled the friction with brute-force eventually reach the natural limit of growth that coexists with the friction, and then those who created the technology to eliminate the friction take over to eliminate this limit. This is the cycle of life. The former is order directed, the latter is disorder directed. The thermodynamic (entropic) universe is on an overall perpetual trend towards eliminating friction, i.e. order. Along the way there, we build some temporal orders as stop-gap measures. Often we need these orders to get the work down to eliminate the friction that caused the order.

Google's strategy is to increase as fast as possible, the number of people using the web, because their revenues are correlated. They are employing network effects to commoditize the web access devices, and marginalize the telcoms and others who might try to retard the exponential growth rate of the WAN participation. For me it is not a question of who is good or evil, because every person and every corporation is both. Every actor in the markets is playing their role.

My philosophy is becoming more clear to me. I don't think OSS should be a political movement, rather a technological one that speaks with results.

@Alex: When I say "modularity", I mean higher-level (e.g. category theory) denotational semantics via static typing, and combined with immutability (a/k/a referential transparency) so the invariants are deterministic, and the semantic invariants are enforced at compile-time by the higher-kinded types. This isn't necessarily complex for the user.

Then via the APIs we can capability-restrict unknown Turing-completeness, see Joe E.

Note that invariants which are not encoded into the static typing, are thus not enforced (but one can always increase the sophistication of their types as needed). There is no such thing as a perfect model for security. Even a walled garden (black or whitelisting) is insecure in that you may not be allowed to run something you want for your security, when you want to. Moreover a walled garden relies on testing for invariants, so it is unlikely it can do a more consistently exacting job than a compiler which checks sophisticated typing (this had not been practical with existing programming languages). The security model of gross exclusion (which browsers are heading towards also) is analogous to covering your eyes while driving to avoid crashing. This must be slayed, because given enough time for collectivism to amass, gross exclusion has a least common denominator of gridlock. Apple did what was expedient, because they have an outdated programming language. They succeeded in maximizing what they could do within such a limited model.

In a debate about microkernels, Linus had explained why they would not work, and the only potential solution in that direction would be a "designer language". Link available upon request.

@esr et all: regarding OSS UI, I am looking forward such a blog post to learn from others. My radical claim is that the future GUI will be functionally reactive, so that it maximizes utility of multiple cores and so that it is modularly compositional. I provided the following explanation at my site:

The real world is composed of values which change in time, but a pure functional reactive program inputs real world values and declares its output, independent of the order of time. For example, a pure reactive popup menu function which has a return type of Maybe[Menu], returns a popup menu when the input mouse position is within the input onMouseOver rectangle, and returns the type None otherwise. This pure function does not depend on any state other than its input, and thus it can be generally composed with any other pure function. Contrast this with the imperative event model, in which the event callback handler function can not be generally composed, because the onMouseOver rectangle is stored state in the event callback generation module.

At my site, I proceeded to discuss the coinductive "real world" that UI interfaces, efficiency, and performance.

I believe such a model will enable individual designers to focus their design expertise in their small modular cathedrals (which they may open source), which then interopt in a bazaar model. Even within these "cathedrals", I see module-wise forge features, so they are modular orthogonal bazaars, which interopt in larger bazaars. This is the grouping of Reed's law (see the prior blog where I explained Reed's law is not an exponential fantasy model).

it is quite difficult to write a test of
mental ability that is not at least 50% correlated with all other such
tests. Or, to put it another way, no matter how you design ten tests for
mental ability, at least about half the variance in the scores for any one
of them statistically appears to be due to a “general intelligence”
that shows up on the other nine tests as well.

Psychometricians call this general intelligence measure “g”. It
turns out to predict important real-world success measures quite well
— not just performance in school but income and job success as
well. The fundamental weakness in multiple-factor theories of intelligence
is that measures of intelligence other than g appear to predict
very little about real-world outcomes. So you can call a lot of other
things “intelligence” if you want to make people feel warm and fuzzy,
but doing so simply isn’t very useful in the real world.

Murray’s news is that the Flynn effect is not being driven by a
rise in average g...

...I’m not entirely sure what this means yet, and I don’t believe
Murray or other psychometricians have gotten to the bottom of it
either.

shelby wrote:

@nigel, my reply went into the spam queue I think.

And is never coming out. Shelby, you were warned that you would be banned if you went above one post a day. You’ve been repeatedly violating this. I had been putting up with it because you’ve been having a lucid streak recently, but you’re back to semi-unhinged babbling. So you’re banned.

Your semi-psychotic word-salad prose style is quite recognizable. I won’t tolerate you returning under yet another mask. Jocelyn, or whoever you are.

140-155: “…some in this group exceed the average university student in academic competence while still in primary school.”

but to have to cross-discipline knowledge to a depth and breadth necessary to see all the pieces in CatB before CatB would require a genuine polymath,

my experience is representative iqtest.com is completely broken. I took that one after kiba mentioned it. It got my IQ wrong by…well, mine is in the range where measurement becomes difficult because none of the instruments are very good, and the only psychometrician I currently know personally says she thinks the estimate I got from http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/ is low by almost two sigmas. So depending on whether you believe that site’s estimation methods or her, iqtest.com was low by 30 to 50(!) points.

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

After some sleep, I realized I am afaics correct. See point#1 below for the killer problem.

Identity theft means who+time is not necessarily unambiguous when the commit can not be located in the current copy. So if commit hashes in references are properly propagated by DVCS when they change, then afaics it is no less unambiguous in any case.

A commit hash will change when portions of a commit are propagated to a copy, and/or a commit is propagated to a copy which has a different history of commits.

The advantage is then the semantics of "I am referencing this content" is not changed to "I am referencing an identity and a time". The latter semantic introduces numerous problems:

1. Requires that contribution to open source can never be anonymous, because by definition anonymity requires an identity which is shared by all who want to be anonymous.
2. Privacy strategies may vary by DVCS.
3. Requires the DVCS to tag commit with identity+time key (apparently most do already).
4. The identity+time key on the tag has to be compatible with the format of the action stamp in the comment.

Action stamps are a "can-of-worms". The fundamental problem is that universal identity has an infinite asymptotic cost in ubiquitous networking. In networks, only the content should be linked (i.e. referenced), because it has a local scope (the content only). Notice how the political weakness of the internet are the global authorities for addressing content. An identity has a global scope and thus binds the referenced content to the globe, thus reducing degrees-of-freedom and thus is statism. For example, if Google+ forces global identity (not anonymous), then the government can (top-down) politicize content.

For philosophical and economic reasons, I am very much against forcing identity. It can't be controlled by the individual any way (identity theft, political hack jobs, authorities planting false evidence, etc), and it can become concrete boots. Some tolerate universal identity, for practical reasons I presume. I don't think they are practical reasons, because they are always uneconomic in the broader scope analysis.

Feel free to flame me, I just feel very strongly about protecting freedom, especially when it is always technically correct.

There are very few universal laws (forces) in nature. I think one is that uniformity or ubiquity of order is uneconomic and failure direction. This is because the trend of the universe it also towards maximum disorder, which I think most people fail to realize is maximum independent possibilities, i.e. maximum degrees-of-freedom. Sorry to be so verbose, but so many readers don't grasp this universal force of nature. If they would just learn this, so many incorrect design decisions (about everything, even AGW) could be averted.

Eric Raymond wrote:
> VCS-independent way

Now you are dependent on either non-anonymity and globally unique id (antithesis of locality and degrees-of-freedom preferred by the philosophy of unix), or for anonymity the user introduces random ids which are not guaranteed to be even locally (to a VCS set) unique.

I pointed out other problems in the post you censored, as well others have pointed out problems.

You ask for input, then you censor or refuse to debate it (and not just my input). Brilliant!

But that is what makes a free market. I encourage you to knock yourself out!

@Rrrr, more independent entities competing means more knowledge, because they can compete to provide better solutions (i.e. fitness). Centralization of decisions leads to vested interests and politics, which is always less knowledge and more gridlock.

@nigel wrote:

source license is orthogonal to do with being a walled garden

Disagree. The more open the license, the less limitations on reuse of the code base.

The definition of walled garden only requires that it is not possible to offer alternatives. Market success is orthogonal.

Linux is a mainstream open source OS with greater than 50% share in certain server segments.

But my point was that for the first time we have a mainstream (bulk of the world's population) OS with greater than 50% global share.

but doesn’t preclude closed source operating systems from gaining traction

No one has in general purpose servers. Now mobile has fallen to open source.

Before I wrote 2 - 4 years. Recently Apple has dropped to 14% because of the late and 4S disappointment, and seeing Android accelerating in developing markets, I am now pondering that Apple may drop to single digit global share in 2012.

I disagree that the business models for the Magic Cauldron's Inverse Commons are limited. Opposite actually. There are more degrees-of-freedom and more fitness cases, because open source removes friction and allows more companies to share effort in a win-win.

Any attempt to close an open source OS will fail into a fork, because the world has too much to gain from the enchanced degrees-of-freedom of the Inverse Commons.

Google's vested interests will if necessary be destroyed eventually by open source. Imho this is not heading toward socialism where we don't get paid for programming. (I am working on advancing solutions)

I expect Apple's high margin markets to crater with the collapse of the dollar (and strengthening of the NAU) and Euro (and strengthening of the EU) circa 2012 - 2014, including high margin Macs. The western masses are going to be devalued by a factor of 3 at least.

I expect the smaller nimbler competitors are also going to be making addons and software. I think eventually there will be standardized ports for Android. Perhaps the priority was to unfork the phone and tablet OS. Also as the OS stabilizes, the Taiwanese and Chinese will produce standard reference designs and then we will see a proliferation of smaller nimbler players. A company like Dell might jump in (or maybe Amazon is that). I recently saw Alcatel here (not sure if it was Android). And even as it stands now, you have got perhaps a dozen manufacturers of Android versus Apple. They will improve their vertical integration and their horizontal standardization.

I don't think Google wants to weaken the other players in the Android ecosystem, so I don't think they will buy up every small innovation that attacks every vertical market nook & cranny. Google's strategy is let the others do that low margin business.

In my vision of the future, we currently have too much discussion that could all be replaced by code submits. So really all we need for this future direction is the version control to be open. Don't tell me about a bug, or discuss a new feature, submit some code.

For this vision to work, I need:

1. Uncoordinated development, meaning anyone can submit a new version of a module at any time, and it gets used as others choose to.
2. Referential transparency of modules, to minimize cascade and localize effects of code submits.

The whole point is that the world is headed into massive unemployment, and the future is one where millions of people are employed as programmers.

I still hate the idea that the user has to have a global identity. I think that is headed in the wrong direction. You seem to be trying to solve a problem by adding complexity instead of removing the source of the complexity.

To go along with this, I am planning to start a computer science education system online, similar to khanacademy but more focused with some key tools development.

Building on my prior comment, when bug reports are submitted with code, i.e. we need only DVCS and no separate bug reporting tool, then this is federation.

It means that users who are not developers need to interface with some developer in his/her "TODO list" or "bug tracker".

It also solves Linus's problem of how to assign bugs to relevant developers.

So you finally see that centralization is always the problem. I have only been trying to tell you this for 2 years.

And you never want to force federation explicitly, as that has a very low entropy. Do it paradigmatically, by eliminating the centralization paradigm which is preventing it, as I suggested above.

Sigh, it takes people a long time to catch up with my thinking. First they ignore you, then they ban you, then they join you.

1. Cannot profit *within* a s/w platform
   
2. Own your clients
   
3. Open platforms (listen for several minutes until he explains that ExpertsExchange had a "pay wall")
   
4. Don't sell s/w
   
5. Knowledge is capital (relationships are based around mutual knowledge)
   
6. Behavior capture is the asset (it should be an instantaneous compulsive habit, and have inertia to minimize churn from competition)
   
7. Monetization can be orthogonal to main behavior (monetize the most valuable component of the knowledge capital)
   
8. Avoid centralization (because has reduced degrees-of-freedom, e.g. web portals)
   

If you down vote this, you do not know the subject matter. Ignorance is bliss I guess. – Shelby Moore III 3 hours ago

To say that a statement "does something" is incredibly imprecise, as an expression also "does something"-- it evaluates to a value. I know what people are trying to say, they just don't choose precise words and definitions. The precise word is (a statement must not be) referentially transparent (i.e. imperative). That is more precise than "does something" or "side-effect". Do you want SO to be a site of knowledge or ignorance? – Shelby Moore III 2 hours ago
1

A statement does not have to have a side effect: f(); is a valid statement, even if f happens to be side-effect-free. An expression does not have to have a value type: f() is an expression even if f returns void. C#'s type system doesn't exactly have a bottom type. – Gilles 2 hours ago

See my comments under Mark Cidade's answer, which explain why a statement is often in reality the bottom type and not the unit type. – Shelby Moore III 2 hours ago

@Gilles f(); is an expression. If it has side-effects, it becomes a imperative statement. I am sorry but you are wrong. The semicolon has nothing to do with it. Please read this and learn. I want to be friendly, so please don't take it the wrong way. I just want to help people understand. – Shelby Moore III 2 hours ago
2

Friendly advice: when you communicate with people, don't redefine what technical words mean. In the context of C#, the words “expression” and “statement” have precise meanings that are given by the syntax. – Gilles 2 hours ago

@Gilles I think perhaps Shelby might have missed the C# tag on this question. – Andrew Barber 1 hour ago

@AndrewBarber please read the question again. He "assumes it is the same in other languages", and he asks "a good definition of expressions and statements and what the differences are". – Shelby Moore III 1 hour ago

@ShelbyMooreIII Please read the question again, yourself; he was asking specifically about C#. You didn't even really attempt to answer the actual question. – Andrew Barber 1 hour ago

@Gilles Please don't redefine general technical terms 'expression' and 'statement'. My comments and answer are correct for C#. If f(); has the type void and has no side-effects, then it is a NOOP. A good compiler will not allow NOOPs. If f(); has no side-effects and its return value is not used, it is also a NOOP. Do you want to learn or downvote and be stubborn? I am here trying to teach and help. Do you appreciate or want me to leave SO? – Shelby Moore III 1 hour ago

@AndrewBarber I did answer the question w.r.t. C#. I answered with one precise sentence. That sentence is correct for C#. I then elaborated about what void in C# means in terms of type theory. You are wrong if you think type theory doesn't apply to C#. Are you proud of downvoting this? Please think about it. – Shelby Moore III 1 hour ago
1

@ShelbyMooreIII I'd be interested in knowing what makes you think I down voted. One thing for sure; I'll stop trying to help you figure out why you might be getting the votes/comments you are getting. – Andrew Barber 1 hour ago

@AndrewBarber If it is a political contest for who can be ignorant and deny their ignorance, then I have no business to be here. People who downvote based on their emotions, and not based on facts, deserve their bliss. – Shelby Moore III 53 mins ago

Please downvote it more. I will blog about this and raise awareness of why the format of SO doesn't work for knowledge in all cases. I would like you to maximize the downvotes please. – Shelby Moore III 49 mins ago

This "I am right, everybody else is wrong" attitude is not going to win you any friends. Instead of doing that, you might want to consider explaining your position in a constructive fashion. – NullUserException♦ 41 mins ago

@NullUserException What did I write that was not constructive. Your emotions are clouding your vision. Go read again what I wrote. Whether I am "right" or not, will be proven in due time. And your names will remain as a permanent record or where you stood on the issue and how you reacted to my sincere attempt to help here. My first comment about ignorance is because you shouldn't downvote w/o giving a reason, so the author can respond. I have responded constructively and my logic stands above. Are you proud of yourselves? I try to live in a rational and amicable world. – Shelby Moore III 38 mins ago

I always give the courtesy of an explanation when I downvote someone, except for 3 or 4 cases of gibberish that I couldn't make sense of. I try to be rational and fair. The fact that I have been designing a computer language nonstop for the past year, means I have had my head in these topics and that is why I know what I am writing about. It is incredulous that you are downvoting this logic. Must be based on some emotional criteria? – Shelby Moore III 33 mins ago

@ShelbyMooreIII You are being highly confrontational and you are accusing people of being ignorant. This is not constructive. And no, downvotes don't have to come with an explanation. This has been discussed at length, the most recent of these discussions is here: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/115398/149052 – NullUserException♦ 30 mins ago

@NullUserException They don't have to come with an explanation, but the system does ask you to do it each time, and I think it is a way to respect rationality and knowledge, especially when the answer is so strong. You are free to disagree. And I am free to leave SO. And I am not being confrontational. I am being factual. Ignorance is a demonstrated fact in this case. It is not ad hominen to state a fact. I am willing to help people learn. That is very valuable. If you don't value it, I will be oblige and leave. – Shelby Moore III 22 mins ago

You sound exactly like this guy here: timecube.com – Aillyn 15 mins ago

@Aillyn Factually, that is how we all sound to someone who doesn't know programming. So imagine what does that say about you, that you can't understand basic definitions of fundamental computer science terms? Are proud of that? You want to put your name on that comment? Amazing. Maybe it is because I am 46, and I come from a time where people respected those who know more and are gracious to take their scarce time to come teach. I will leave SO now. Bye. – Shelby Moore III 4 mins ago

1. No displayed rep power, nor # of votes on answers nor questions. (to minimize ego, the psychological retribution punitive value of downvoting, and the madness of herds to copy those with huge # of upvotes).
   
2. Users are competing only for relative rankings of their questions and answers.
   
3. Each up and down vote requires a new discussion thread, that opens with a statement of justification by the voter. Only the voter and the person being voted against, can post discussion in these threads. This appear as a collapsed single line in comments, that can be expanded (click the "+") to see whole discussion.
   
4. Votes can be up and down voted, ditto need a new justification discussion sub-thread for each.
   
5. Voting a vote up or down changes the weight of that user's vote. Also user's relative hidden rep is used to weight the votes. This is sort of analogous to a Google PankRank algorithm.
   

How can I maximize my downvotes so as to attain the most negative rep ever?

This ends with a suggestion for an improvement to anonymous downvoting. The title of this question is because I don't expect my suggestion to be taken seriously, because design-by-committee is well known to be an anti-pattern (i.e. oxymoronic).

I am trying to demonstrate that the tyranny of the MOB is incredibly "intelligent" when defining the fundamental definitions of computer science.

Remember, those terms that we are supposed to learn in Comp Sci 101, that are fundamental to our ability to understand higher-order computer science concepts. If we get those wrong, SO is not relevant to fundamental computer science.

(But maybe that isn't the point of SO? Maybe SO is only designed to be relevant to "teach me by doing my coding sample (job) for me", and gaining INCORRECT fundamental understanding?)

For example, "casting" (vs. conversion), "expression" vs. "statement", declarative vs. imperative vs. functional programming, call-by-sharing vs. call-by-value, subtyping vs. functional composition (smart questioner waited several months for the right answer, so SO worked in this case), inductive vs. coinductive types (the illiterates even called Spolsky an idiot, and I corrected them in comments), etc..

Even I see people voting down the answer (in spite in a recent downvoting war) that I noted in the comments is the answer that the creator of the Scala language said is the correct one. Stupendously "intelligent" anonymous downvoting system.

The prevailing collective "wisdom", reminds me of Steve Jobs' infamous customer-is-wrong remark, "just don't hold it that way".

This "community is always right" (tyranny-of-the-MOB) is evident by the rain of downvotes on every Q&A about eliminating anonymous downvoting.

This is the crowd pyschology of the Iron Law of Political Economics. It is the delusion that we can always be nice (Lol), thus violate Coase's Theorem, and thus not have human nature spill out in unintended consequences.

Howard Katz died in 2010, and his family removed the specific blog post I want to link to, but basically he made the point that Germans prior to Hitler were striving for a system where everyone was nice and "socialized medicine" (health care) was for everyone, it bankrupted their society (as collectivism always does), and then all the pent up demand to "not be nice" came out in a mega-death eruption (as predicted by Coase's theorem).

Here is another quote from Katz:

...you have probably come across references to the depreciation of the German mark in 1914-23. It went a trillion for one, and the German middle class was whipped out. But all of these references miss the important point. The important lesson of the depreciation of the German mark in 1923 was that the German people took it. They did not rebel against their government. They did not even vote it out of office. They did not even demand a gold standard. They didn’t have the guts to stand up for their own rights, and soon they had set out on a great quest to violate the rights of the rest of the world.

Katz makes a point about property and inalienable rights, that is analogous to the implicit right to own our free speech (i.e. as Joel Spolsky said no data jails and censorship):

the British Empire, the greatest in world history, was created because Britain recognized that people had rights, and other countries wanted to be under Britain because they wanted rights too. So they put up only token resistance, and this was their way of joining the British. (When Britain gave up her rights and adopted the welfare state between WWI and WWII, she soon lost her empire.)

How I might experiment with changing StackOverflow's game theory model to make relevancy more algorithmically convergent. (sort of analogous to Google's PageRank algorithm):

ADD: How ironic that "relevancy" is not a keyword tag. And I don't have the rep power to create one.

Dude, what is your problem? – slhck 1 hour ago

4 Sorry, I don't understand what you actually want to achieve here. You typed a lot of text, but still didn't succeed to bring over the point of your feature-request (I only know it is one because of the tag). – Paŭlo Ebermann 1 hour ago

@Paŭlo Click link at the end of the question. It enumerates the suggested changes. – Shelby Moore III 1 hour ago

@slhck Can you read the question? Do you have specific rebuttal point? – Shelby Moore III 1 hour ago

1 Then please add/quote them here for everyone to read and cut the rest that doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. – slhck 1 hour ago

5 @ShelbyMooreIII: (-1): I have no idea what you are proposing. If what you want implemented is in that last link you post, please provide the contents here (and if that is it, I hope I can downvote a second time) – Mat 1 hour ago

@slhck I think the rest is relevant. You can try to explain why you don't think so in an answer. You know how to click a link. – Shelby Moore III 1 hour ago

@Mat You can be lazy if you want. I can't stop you. The entire text of the question is relevant to explaining my suggested changes. So now we know you downvoted because you don't feel like reading. Intelligent. Keep proving my point. Thanks. – Shelby Moore III 1 hour ago

4 Why is there no close-reason "this is not a real feature-request"? – Paŭlo Ebermann 1 hour ago

4 If you want something changed, you should at least put that right on top of your post, so we can vote based on this, and not some philosophical explanations that might or might not justify what you're trying to accomplish. Yes, we know how to click a link, and no, you just don't want to understand how things normally work here, do you? – slhck 1 hour ago

@slhck The philosophy is essential for understanding the suggestions. Thanks for another downvote. Much appreciated. – Shelby Moore III 1 hour ago

1 I did not even downvote your question. Why do you think so? Something is terribly flawed in the way you want to communicate here. – slhck 1 hour ago

2 @ShelbyMooreIII: nice attitude. I did follow that link, why else would I have said I wouldn't support it if that was indeed what you were proposing? When multiple people tell you your post is not clear, whether it seems clear to you is irrelevant. You need to make it clear to the readers (unless you're writing to yourself). – Mat 58 mins ago

@Mat The point isn't that isn't clear. The point is that you want to tell me that if you don't feel like reading something long-winded, then you will just dimiss it. Some topics involve long-winded explanations. So you are simply proving the anti-pattern of least common denominator of "design by committee" (which I mentioned in my question). Attention Deficit Disorder syndrome. – Shelby Moore III 56 mins ago

4 "Each up and down vote requires a new discussion thread" ::boggle:: – dmckee 56 mins ago

I edited your post to include the only text that should have been in your post to begin with. Then I downvoted because your opinions are so ludicrously converse to the currently "ain't broke don't fix it" system that I have a hard time taking it seriously. – Toomai 55 mins ago

Awesome, Godwin's Law is satisfied in the original post! – tvanfosson 54 mins ago

1 @ShelbyMooreIII: I did read your question. I even followed that link. And even with that, I was confused about whether what you were suggesting as a feature request was the stuff you don't actually explain at all in your post. – Mat 54 mins ago

3 @dmckee Yeah don't throw away data. Just hide the noise by collapsing it. Did you know that I can edit any Wikipedia page and put anything I want on it and instantly get a permalink to my version of that official page? Wikipedia understands that deleting user data is violating their property rights. And such a model will never succeed. It will diverge into socialistic hell. – Shelby Moore III 53 mins ago

What the …? Even here, nothing is permanently deleted. It's about producing this "data". I don't think everybody wants a separate comment discussion thread for just a single vote. – slhck 51 mins ago

@Toomai That is my decision if I want a long-winded explanation. I am explaining the science behind my suggestion. Btw, thanks for editing the question and adding information. That shows a positive for knowledge formation. – Shelby Moore III 49 mins ago

@slhck Yes it is deleted, because the reader can't easily find it. And more importantly the fundamental principle of the internet is violated. I can't link to it. Data jail. – Shelby Moore III 47 mins ago

How is suggest that has 5 specific points not constructive? Oh it is my attitude that is not constructive? Thanks for proving my point guys. SO will collapse in socialism. Remember I told you so. – Shelby Moore III 46 mins ago

3 I was going to post a tl;dr comment, but I forced myself to read it and I still don't understand you point. Downvoting has, and always will be anonymous, otherwise we'll just get into petty votewars. The "question" was closed as it is, after all, not really contructive, and all that quoteing, referencing and psychobabble made it a hard read anyway. SO will collapse in socialism. SO is a website, not a country. If something isn't broken don't try to fix it. – tombull89 45 mins ago

@Mat I did explain very well the reasons for the suggested changes. Try reading a little bit more carefully and using your pre-frontal cortex. – Shelby Moore III 44 mins ago

3 @ShelbyMooreIII: for the last time: in your original post, you explained a lot of stuff. But you didn't say anything about what you were proposing to fix/address all the stuff you explained/showed/researched. Just put that on an external site when it is the core of your feature request. – Mat 42 mins ago

4 Your number (1), (2), and (5) have been suggested before. Search meta. Your number (4) is a recursive morass, and your number (3) is simply bats: if would require more words to be written about votes than about the questions people come here to ask. Nor do (3) and (4) scale very well. Note that Stack Overflow has more than 2 million extant questions and the sequence numbers exceed 8 million. – dmckee 41 mins ago

@Mat I disagree. You are trying to micro-manage my exposition style. Just read. You protesth too much. Make your points about the suggested items and the theory behind the suggestions that I presented. Instead you are more worried about being in control of my exposition style. That is socialism. With my suggestions, we can all say what we want, and we don't have to fight over who has authority. The algorithm will decide relevancy. Google can kick your butt if ever they apply their algorithmic smarts to this problem. – Shelby Moore III 36 mins ago

4 You wonder why this was closed? "> this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion". – slhck 36 mins ago
@dmckee Thank you for the first constructive comment. I will look at those and then reply. Thanks very much. – Shelby Moore III 33 mins ago

1 @slhck That is the point of Meta. This isn't SO. Remember? – Shelby Moore III 32 mins ago

5 Yes, of course this is the place to discuss, but not to the point where it's not about the feature request itself anymore, but about the way it is presented or written. Or socialism. – slhck 28 mins ago

@dmckee since you didn't provide links to prior discussion, I will just reply to your points. (4) recursive morass is fine. It is collapsed, most readers will never expand it. The salient point you probably missed is the relevancy data it builds from the recursive votes. (3) doesn't require anything. It is a release valve that lets people air their rebuttals. They can then condense their final thoughts back into the answer. The recursive data remains for research and for PageRank style relevancy calculation. – Shelby Moore III 25 mins ago

@dmckee (3) & (4) scale economically no problem, Joel said in the interview I linked, you need only 1 in billion pages monetized to be profitable. More data gives you more participation. I expect that people will learn to respect their own time and the futility of debating points too far. Opportunity cost will anneal that tradeoff optimally. As it is now, you try to force people to not do what they need (and OBVIOUSLY want) to do, which is to have permanent discussion in order to fine-tune top-level Q&A. – Shelby Moore III 22 mins ago

@dmckee I think there was win for SO when it did not copy the noisy format of Digg, but the problem with Digg is you are just dumped into threaded discussion with no top level Q&A format. We need to marry the best of Digg, best of SO, and best of PageRank. The other important point I made is that the rep power as an ego thing is really not desirable for knowledge formation. – Shelby Moore III 20 mins ago

4 You must be joking me. – Can't Get Enough Mahna 16 mins ago

@ShelbyMooreIII Mods have the power to delete comments if they deem them to be offensive or spam. – Can't Get Enough Mahna 16 mins ago

2 There has been one deleted comment in this whole thread, and it wasn't yours (it was deleted by the person who posted it). – mmyers♦ 15 mins ago

1 No, it's likely to be normal users of the site flagging the comments(s) as "too chatty". As per the close reason "this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion"...which it has done. If you do want to go on, create a chat room and anyone vaugely interested will join to see what you have to say. – tombull89 15 mins ago

@mmyers My mistake. Apologies. I deleted my erroneous comment. It is the system only showing voted comments by default now. – Shelby Moore III 14 mins ago

@slhck You have so many comments already, and you've said nothing factual about the feature request. That is my point. You are focused on attitude and control over my exposition style, and not on facts and substantive (i.e. constructive) work. – Shelby Moore III 11 mins ago

I am very happy for all the downvotes. I hope I can get a record number. Am I correct this Q&A will never be deleted? So I can link to this page permanently? And the comments will remain? I hope people here don't delete their comments later. Please be a man. Let it stay there for a permanent reminder of what works and what doesn't work. I will be using this page as an example that in many of my future writings. – Shelby Moore III 7 mins ago

@slhck I have no way of verifying if you didn't downvote. You could be lying. The system allows that. – Shelby Moore III 3 mins ago edit

Happy to help maximize your down vote count with this non-request-request! – Andrew Barber 1 min ago

@Toomai It is broken. I provided links to several examples. Look in the right bar and see all the complaints you are getting about downvoting. Yes it is true that your traffic is growing, and it is true that SO is providing useful Google hits for obscure questions. I am thinking (as I mentioned in my question), that SO is not relevant for general terms. Maybe that is the fix that is needed. SO is relevant for specific coding examples only. Is that a more constructive input? It was in my question, but you didn't read it slowly probably. – Shelby Moore III just now edit

@AndrewBarber I disagree. It is a feature request. I explained the logic for it with a long explanation. Then I gave 5 specific changes. I don't know how you are defining "not a feature request", but it probably has something to do with attitude and your desire for conformance to authority of the community. That is why I went into great detail about "nice" in my question. You are focused on making everyone "nice". That will end with everyone massively angry in the end, bcz the freedom to vent (rebutt) isn't allowed. - Shelby Moore III

SO could have a set of canned responses for common scenarios, and let you choose from these. These could be rendered and presented differently than a normal response, so as to maximize the learning effect, plus minimize confusion and clutter.

What does this have to do with handling a user who keeps posting/deleting a message to spam your SO inbox? Aside from being a way to make it easier for such spamming to happen? – Andrew Barber 13 hours ago

1 This... uh, doesn't answer the question? Besides, this has been proposed and declined already – Yi Jiang's 独角兽 11 hours ago

@AndrewBarber Read the other answers. It was suggested that he reply to the user and explain. I suggested these be canned responses. Thus the explaining would be more FAQ-ual. The IQ here is impressive. – Shelby Moore III 11 hours ago

@YiJiang's独角兽 a link? You claim. – Shelby Moore III 11 hours ago

1 @Shelby You seriously need to stop with the insults. – Andrew Barber 11 hours ago

@AndrewBarber you too, "@Shelby I'm sorry, but you seem to be utterly tone deaf here. Good luck to you. – Andrew Barber 57 mins ago". Then you come here to attack in other place. Go politics! Rah, rah, rah. – Shelby Moore III 11 hours ago

@Shelby and you need to start applying your extreme IQ to learning how to use the site properly. NULLuserException and I have both told you repeatedly tonight how you make feature suggestions. – Andrew Barber 11 hours ago

@Shelby You were and continue to be completely tone deaf about what is happening here. No insult there. – Andrew Barber 11 hours ago

@AndrewBarber I disagree. Meta is a place to express ourselves about these matters. You may not like that people express themselves. Good night. – Shelby Moore III 9 hours ago
And I have told you already that it is pointless for me to fight the politics. It is better to leave SO. I am sure you are happy if I leave. So why keep peskering me about why I didn't post suggestions when I already said that design by committee doesn't work well. As evident by how broken the SO game theory model is (IMO). – Shelby Moore III 9 hours ago

@Shelby You can express all you want. You continue to do things like posting feature requests as answers and comments, when you have been told how to properly post them. – Andrew Barber 9 hours ago

@AndrewBarber Please stop talking to me in a dictator tone. I do what I want. You do what you want. That is called freedom. If it doesn't work out here, I leave. No big deal. – Shelby Moore III 9 hours ago

@Shelby Please stop doing everything contrary to how the community operates, then being surprised when people have less and less patience for you. – Andrew Barber 9 hours ago

@AndrewBarber Please don't tell me what to do. I am not your slave. – Shelby Moore III 9 hours ago

@Shelby I do what I want. You do what you want. This is called freedom. Sound familiar? – Andrew Barber 9 hours ago

@AndrewBarber Thanks. So keep checking my comments. I won't always be doing what you told me to do. It isn't to make you angry. It is because this is a game model. You are gaming it in your way and I am gaming it my way. That is exactly what game theory expects. – Shelby Moore III 9 hours ago

@Shelby Of course it's a game model. Seems rather silly to think you need to say so. – Andrew Barber 9 hours ago

@AndrewBarber Yeah it is silly I needed to tell you so. I need more downvotes. Can you help me out? We can make SO look "intelligent". – Shelby Moore III 9 hours ago

@AndrewBarber You remind me of Steve Jobs, "just don't hold it the improper way". hahaha. Stupendous advice, thanks. Calling our emotionalites who are defending the collective, I need more down votes please. I want a negative rep. Can you do it? – Shelby Moore III 3 hours ago

@Shelby You have problems. – Andrew Barber 36 mins ago

@AndrewBarber What sort of problems are you alledging? Note I have saved this entire discussion, as well as the entire Q&A that was deleted. Google will never forget your name. – Shelby Moore III just now edit

@Shelby You need a hobby. Was that Google thing a threat or something? – Andrew Barber 9 mins ago

@Shelby as for your saving of everything; that's fine. See the network FAQ. Be sure you are following the requirements there. – Andrew Barber 4 mins ago

@AndrewBarber I have a right by law to save evidence of defamation (when I have already examples of being deleted). I have a right to save the trails of information to it. – Shelby Moore III just now

Most precisely, a statement must have a "side-effect" (i.e. be imperative) and an expression must have a value type (i.e. not the bottom type).

The type of a statement is the bottom type.

Void is not precisely the bottom type (it isn't the subtype of all possible types). It exists in languages that don't have a completely sound type system. That may sound like a snobbish statement, but completeness such as variance annotations are critical to writing extensible software.

Please don't redefine general technical terms 'expression' and 'statement'. My comments and answer are correct for C#. If f(); has the type void and has no side-effects, then it is a NOOP. A good compiler will not allow NOOPs. If f(); has no side-effects and its return value is not used, it is also a NOOP. I did answer the question w.r.t. C#. I answered with one precise sentence. That sentence is correct for C#. I then elaborated about what void in C# means in terms of type theory. Type theory applies to C#. – Shelby Moore III 9 hours ago

See my comments under Mark Cidade's answer, which explain why a statement is often in reality the bottom type and not the unit type. To say that a statement "does something" is incredibly imprecise, as an expression also "does something"-- it evaluates to a value. I know what people are trying to say, they just don't choose precise words and definitions. The precise word is (a statement must not be) referentially transparent (i.e. imperative). That is more precise than "does something" or "side-effect". – Shelby Moore III 9 hours ago

A statement need not have a side effect. For instance, in python pass is a statement. It is a no-op, and it does not evaluate to anything. – Matthew Schinckel 6 hours ago

@MatthewSchinckel If it doesn't have a side-effect, then it is either an expression or a NOOP. A NOOP does nothing, so it can be removed from the program. It is a simple process of logical elimination. If you don't define statement as requiring a side-effect, then statement is same as expression. What other attribute would you use to differentiate a statement from an expression? It is amazing to me that I would even have to point this out, because it is such a simple logic and so fundamental to computer science. But that is why I teach here and take downvotes from the illiterates. – Shelby Moore III 4 hours ago

Flagging your continued insults. – Andrew Barber 27 mins ago

@AndrewBarber Illiteracy is not an insult. It is state of learning. That is what SO is for. The downvotes from people who are still learning, is a fact of how SO operates. Now your allegation is an insult, because it is not factual. But I will not flag it. I will be saving all these comments, in case they get deleted. As further evidence of a defamation case against you, should it become necessary. – Shelby Moore III 1 min ago