chancho

All of this happened in a span of time shorter than the interval at which most email clients check for new mail. I think the case against NYT here is overstated. And this news was about the outcome of a sporting event which is exactly one bit of information which becomes available at a predictable time. Basically it comes down to who can hit the button faster. When real news happens (a natural disaster, an assassination) it will take at least those few minutes to figure out WTF happened and write it up.

Pesky algebraic geometry. Get out of my graph!

Although that little bit of static typing would probably have dealt with the vast majority of expensive null-pointer bugs.

Qt on the other hand is very OO. You define the behavior of your widgets by subclassing. There are signals and slots, which are basically callbacks and thus very FP-friendly, but there are many things for which Qt doesn't use them (e.g., input) instead relying on C++ virtual methods. I'm looking over the qtHaskell docs now (which is just a wall-o-type-signatures) and it appears to have some kind of setHandler function for these virtual functions. I have no idea how this is supposed to work. AFAIK qtHaskell is just a one-man project, so it's understandably less mature than Gtk2Hs, considering the huge impedance mismatch between functional/imperative Haskell and OO C++.

As for wxWidgets, I have not used it, but as I understand it's mostly history. The Gtk2Hs team is large, active and contains many luminaries of the Haskell community, so that is where the action is at. Unfortunately though, it's Gtk+, so your "real world" better not have any Windows or Mac users in it.

"...it is not surprising that the tenure decision is freighted with anxiety. It takes anywhere from 10 to 20 years from entrance into graduate school for the tenure decision to be made. By that point, in their single-minded pursuit of their personal holy grail, most academics have purged themselves of skills that might be useful for the private sector."

Didn't Bishop have a reasonably successful business on the side? Something to do with automating petri dishes and culturing? I can't help but think all these english, history and sociology professors ascribe so much anxiety to tenure because their fields are so poorly valued by the private sector. But in many fields, such as Bishop's, there are plenty of opportunities for PhDs who can't or don't want to go for tenure. If nothing else, you're probably a pretty good coder after completing a STEM PhD. (Hey maybe it's matlab or fortran, but that's a good start.)

Isn't that a bit like saying that it "can outperform equivalent assembly"?

And why can you not prove the equivalent C correct? After all, you're doing that proof by hand either way. A Haskell compiler will only help you prove that your program is well-typed. If you're mutating buffers then you're in a monad like IO or ST and the the compiler will throw it's hands up and tell you that correctness is entirely your problem.

If describing this tragedy as "someone going postal" isn't dumbly applying pop-psych, then I don't know what is.

It sounds quaint and old-fashioned, but a man should give everything to a woman he hopes to marry, and demand nothing in return, without worrying about whether or not it's sensible. It doesn't make sense until you realize that she only wants to do the same for you. She will commit to unconditional satisfaction of your wants, but you have to commit to hers as well, and saying "I would never buy you a diamond" sets up some major conditions.

It's not about the diamond. You can debate the diamond specifically (and btw, the showing-it-off part is where most of the worth lies) and you might win. It's about the debate, about having to discuss her wants in order to decide if they make sense. That is unromance.

Surely, in situations like these, even you can understand the value of politeness. You engineered politeness into the bittorrent protocol (tit for tat.) It's the same thing. The admin wasn't being useless and patronizing, he was choking you because you were acting like a bad peer.

"This experiment was already attempted by the daughter of Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, who downed a handful of sleeping pills in a suicide attempt in December. However, the pills were homoepathic, so not only did she not manage to kill herself, but she didn't even manage to get a good night's sleep."

http://www.metafilter.com/88593/Dont-drink-the-extremely-dil...

http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo...

Favorite paper: minimal tetrahedralization of a convex polyhedron is NP-hard. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0012/0012177v1.pdf

http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~deloera/RECENT_WORK/recent.html

Anyway, this is not how law and order is supposed to work in a civilized society. You don't bait morons into breaking the law by fooling them into thinking they won't get caught. For every potential cheat who looks at this info and says "Aha! They don't know about the dividends from my Acme shares! Cha-ching!" there are probably more who will be dissuaded from cheating because they'll realize that, oh yeah, my bank sent a copy to the IRS as well. Or better yet, people will be prevented from _accidentally_ omitting income and having to go through an audit, which is a net win. (I sure as hell would have reported that bond.)

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Edit: sorry not sure if you were talking about Lua or a C-based Scheme, though I imagine it's the same.

I find that writing code, my right pinky is by far the most overworked finger, on account of the ; ' " [ ] { } - _ = and + characters, and especially the return key which you hit all the time in code but only once per paragraph in prose. So now I can shake off this nagging feeling that I should look into Dvorak. Thanks.

Standard Lua (the one from PUC-Rio) doesn't really, it uses boxed numeric values, as I imagine ruby (and almost every other dynamic language) does as well. "Boxed" meaning that each number is stored on the heap with some kind of tag, and when you pass such a value to a function you're really passing a pointer to it and that indirection costs cycles and puts pressure on the cache. LuaJIT's most significant (IMO) feature is that it stores numeric values directly, like C does, so when you call a function the actual bits representing it go right on the stack, not the address of where the bits can be found, and it uses some cool tricks of floating point representation to prevent the garbage collector from trying to follow these stack values as if they were pointers. This (combined with the trace optimization) is why when you write a numeric for-loop in LuaJIT it runs (nearly?) as fast a C.