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drblue

18 karma · joined February 17, 2009

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drblue··on Why Haskell?
The highest priority is probably making real debugging tools. Right now, the only decent debugging tool is ghc-debug to connect to a live process, and doing anything over that connection is slow, slow, slow. ghc-debug was the only thing which was able to resolve a long standing thunk leak in one of my systems, and I know that unexplained thunk leak caused a previous startup I was at to throw away their Haskell code and rewrite it in Rust. In my case, it found the single place where I had said `Just $` instead of `Just $!` which I had missed the three times I had inspected the ~15k line program. ghc-debug still feels like a pre-alpha though, go compare it to VisualVM for what other languages have.

Also, I have found very little use for the various runtime flags like `+RTS -p`. These flags aren't serious debugging tools; I couldn't find any way to even trigger them internally at runtime around a small section, which becomes a problem when it takes 10 minutes to load data from disk when the profiler is on.

The debugging situation with Haskell is really, really bad and it's enough that I try to steer people away from starting new projects with the language.

drblue··on An Update on the Open Game License (OGL)
Because Hasbro is in the S&P 500. There’s a constant bid wall from 401ks purchasing it.
drblue··on AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off
LessWrong is, sadly, an example of a forum that got flooded with low quality content. It's been Septembered beyond recognition from what it was in the early 2010s.
drblue··on 15.ai
Friendship is Magic was a legitimately good show. (Or at least Season 1 and 2 were).
drblue··on Show HN: Replace “NFT” with “silly JPEG” while browsing
Liquidity position "Silly JPEG"? Domain name "Silly JPEG"? Doesn't work. NFTs don't necessarily have off chain URL-links (Uniswap v3 positions). Most of the interesting uses of NFTs aren't about an image.
drblue··on Munchery Shuts Down
That article is from May of last year.

(I also just got the email that OP quoted.)

drblue··on Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)
You may want to take a look at hashcash[1]. It was a proof of work scheme for email invented in the late 90s, and they claim it was adopted by bitcoin[2]. (Sadly, it never caught on for its 'intended' purpose.)

[1]: http://www.hashcash.org/ [2]: http://www.hashcash.org/bitcoin/

drblue··on How Stress And Sleep Loss Are Shortening Your Life
Melatonin is amazing and has changed my sleep patterns for the better, but 5mg is a pretty big dose. I take 750mcg tablets.
drblue··on Google to strip Chrome of standard SSL revocation checking
Edit: Maybe wrong? see reply.

If I'm reading the sample implementation[0] correctly, the update mechanism isn't Omaha[1] (aka Google Update), but the CRX extension update mechanism[2] that keeps extensions and app bundles up to date.

[0]: https://github.com/agl/crlset-tools/blob/master/crlset.go [1]: http://code.google.com/p/omaha/ [2]: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/autoupdate.html

drblue··on Show HN We just launched forking for your Minecraft worlds
Has some bugs.

So I was wowed by your maps and signed up to try the free account. I uploaded my world (I had to do it twice because the upload timed out once, and the second time it took several minutes). After logging in to pluto.minefold.com, it didn't put me in my world (My world's seed: -6543031652815246039 vs what the seed on pluto is: 1328309103 if you want to follow up)

Also, I'm hesitant to play on anything that doesn't have bukkit/WorldGuard. I'm not sure what your access control/griefing rollback mechanisms are. That should probably go in your FAQ.

drblue··on Parents of overweight children don't know their children are overweight
Citations please. If that was true, I've learned a new fact that conflicts with most of what I know about obesity having an effect on, for example, heart disease.

The first link when googling for "lifespan by bmi" is:

http://wehrintheworld.blogspot.com/2009/05/bmi-and-life-expe...

Which cites two metareviews. The first is a collaboration between the UK Medical Research Council, several British organizations including one out of Oxford, and the US National Institute on Aging (which is under the NIH umbrella). It was published in _The Lancet_ (Impact factor: 33). I will quote the quoted part from said blogpost:

> BMI is in itself a strong predictor of overall mortality both above and below the apparent optimum of about 22·5–25 kg/m2. The progressive excess mortality above this range is due mainly to vascular disease and is probably largely causal. At 30–35 kg/m2, median survival is reduced by 2–4 years; at 40–45 kg/m2, it is reduced by 8–10 years (which is comparable with the effects of smoking). The definite excess mortality below 22·5 kg/m2 is due mainly to smoking-related diseases, and is not fully explained.

While I found a few studies that didn't find a correlation (including one in AMA), I can't actually find an academic source for the claim that people with a BMI of 25-30 have the longest lifespan and see lots of claims that the optimal BMI is in the low 20s. Do you have any citations handy?

drblue··on Father of Cryonics Dies at 92, Frozen in Cryonics Institute
> "it could be 'bad' where thawed people are treated like the property of the person who paid to thaw them."

The majority of funding goes into the patient care trust, which is used for upkeep of the patients and (hopefully) eventual revival.

http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html

At least with Alcor, your scenario is impossible and I'd be very surprised if CI didn't have an analog.

drblue··on Korma - a git based blogging engine
This looks like a less powerful engine than jekyll (http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/tree/master), the git based blogging engine available to github users.

Cool that it is only 230 lines, though.