christopherdone

Well I'd never heard of Wordnik but this is very cool and I'll be using it. This is like a respectable Dictionary.com+ Urban Dictionary. I don't see the category theory definition of a monad on it, though. Which is somewhat odd.

Hi there. This happened last night after I was tweaking the number of FastCGI processes. I changed it from four backends to one. Then Lighttpd believed the backend was overloaded:

2010-03-01 07:16:21: (mod_fastcgi.c.2926) backend is overloaded; we'll disable it for 2 seconds and send the request to another backend instead: reconnects: 0 load: 131 2010-03-01 07:16:24: (mod_fastcgi.c.3569) all handlers for /haskell-json.fcgi on haskell-json.fcgi are down.

I doubt there were 131 requests to the FastCGI process at the same time but I'll have to seek more information about it. http://redmine.lighttpd.net/issues/1825

For now I've set it back to four backends as that never had this problem.

Lisp's macros are a lot more expressive. They don't look weird (unlike Template Haskell) within the language, they look like normal constructs. And they're native to Lisp. I miss Lisp in Haskell because I can't define, e.g., my own macro to do this:

    case fileExists "sausage.txt"
      True -> putStrLn "Gonna do something with the sausage."
      False -> putStrLn "Woop."

And/or

    if do fileExists "sausage.txt"
       then putStrLn "Gonna do something!"
       else putStrLn "Woop."

Or lambda with alternate lambda cases.

    (\case of (Just a) -> a; Nothing -> b)

I wrote a little mini-lang to do this to see how much I liked it. I liked it a lot, Lou!

But Haskell is terse and predictable so one puts up with not having macros.

The Computer Language Shootout Haskell samples are low level, if you read them. Some are high level but many are nearly C, using malloc and such. But this is a good thing; you can write the "tight loops" that you need within Haskell.

That's a good way to see if the language actually helps you do things easier, too!

I did a ten-week course in BSL (passed with full marks!) and your assessment matches up with my experience, which was that it was like exaggerated enthusiastic telling of a story. It's like miming, too. Hearing people talk with their hands, bodies, faces, reactions, energy, rhythm, speed, etc. all the time already. They get along fine in clubs with loud music thumping away. Just watch someone chatting on the phone, they still make a tonne of physical gestures. And we've seen that textual interpersonal communication (i.e. pure English syntax and grammar) is hard, it's great for technical details or (with some effort) describing stories but sucks at that.

I just temporarily gave up on something I was trying to program. That's why I'm on Hacker News. Thanks for backing me up, random Internet blogger!

I am the same. I yawn when nervous or scared. I used to yawn when walking past a bunch of thugs at school in the mornings.

People at work tend to yawn when I talk to them.

Yeah, I worked it out just as the interviewer explained it. $0.1 per click, 20 out of 100 visitors click, that's 20*0.1=$2.0 per 100 visitors. We need $20 dollars so we need 1000 visitors. This really is child's play. Honestly I think the pressure must have crippled her.

Smart people get their news from aggregators and feeds. Normal people go to sites directly for their daily dosage of drivel. Both Google search for individual stories. It just so happens that the same news story is linked 10 times down the page, some often pointing to the same page due to blogs and aggregators.

I predict nothing consequential will come of this drama.

Deja Vu Sans Mono is highly superior to all the mentioned fonts there. It works perfectly clearly with anti-aliasing. I honestly wonder if the people praising other fonts are just trying to be different. I'm probably being subjective. It would be cool to see some research into the top programming fonts to find which are least tiring to the eyes, most legible when tired or scanning, etc.

I don't think the PDF offers any new insights for existing web developers, but nice to emphasise it nonetheless. The F-Shaped reading (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html) and banner blindless (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html) findings by Jakob Nielsen are equally relevant and contain more data.

I've wanted and want this feature so hard it's unreal. It's also based on Webkit which is amazing because it is the most ACID-compliant browser last I checked, supports JavaScript, Flash, all the usual horrible-but-necessary-for-getting-most-sites-to-work bobbins. All I want in my life is to be able to control Webkit with my keyboard inside Emacs buffers. I think the only logical step is to start work on this project.

> Doctors are urged to be vigilent for a new bug that has arriving in Britain

This has broken grammar, and they can't spell ‘vigilant’. In the second paragraph. Don't the Telegraph writers use a spell checker? Well-written text is kind of important for a bloody newspaper. I'd send an errata to the author, but they don't provide an email address and the author's profile takes me to a 404 page. Also:

> Antibiotics are widely available to buy without prescription in India and Pakistan and this has meant hospital doctor there have had to resort to

Waves arms about.

Hello!? Writing standards!?

I don't think this is really what is meant in SICP. It's not that the function takes in inputs, it's that the program itself is a language evaluator. Consider the following program:

    (define (add-squares x y)
      (+ (* x x) (* y y)))

This is a program which evaluates a squares-adding language in which we have a limited number of expressions. Such as:

    (add-squares 2 4)
    (add-squares (add-squares 4 3) 5)

etc.

I believe SICP's definition of a language involves these: means of simple data, means of combination and means of abstraction. Numbers, strings, data structures/objects are the simple data as you would find in any program. Functions and variables are means of abstraction. And what those functions and variables define also create new abstractions and means of combination. This is where our own language comes in. In this way, all your programs define languages, and to run them is to perform evaluation of these languages. So the program is the evaluator of a language we've defined in trying to describe our problem domain. I'd give examples but SICP gives ample.

Presumably this is newsworthy because everyone assumes building Tetris in Haskell is harder than in an imperative/OO language. This is a good thing because it proves that it's not.

It's "should have"; the contraction is "should've".

I have seen my coworkers viewing applications... many were discarded outright because of stupid spelling errors or poor grammar, or no letter at all. Applicants whose work and homepage weren't available or were scarce lead to the (inductive) conclusion that the applicant was crap.

My last two job interviews lead to being hired, and my approach is generally:

(1) be very picky about which company I apply to; (2) go the company's web site to get a history, which is important for: (3) write an interesting letter saying what you like about the company, and give attachments and links to things that they can go take a look at, and (4) to actually provide some critique of the work the company has done, and provide solutions. Anyone can point out mistakes; we need someone who solves problems, like The Wolf.

Also, in reference to language skills, I like a quote by Dijkstra:

“Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.”