olliesaunders

Is this healthy?

I never said Stack Exchange websites were “perfect” for anything. I’ve just been using it today and I hate it. Stack Exchange websites use competition to achieve answers to questions a paradigm that is completely at odds with collaboration and understanding necessary to actually have conversations in which multiple opinions can coexist and learning can occur.

You obviously don’t socialize with non-programmers very much

Yeah. I want to learn Racket and my Haskell is very slowly advancing so I’m definitely down with Lisps etc.

Thanks for the useful reply. I’m giving MailMate some serious consideration depending on whether the smart mailboxes feature can distinguish between threads I’m involved in and threads I am not.

> Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities

Yeah that’s quite a good point. Twitter too I guess. The trouble with blogs and twitter is that you can’t ask a question unless you have a blog or a twitter account that is popular.

Oh yeah, this is not a book to use for learning Haskell. I personally recommend Graham Hutton’s Programming in Haskell or Real World Haskell if you want to learn Haskell. Hutton’s book focuses more on the principles of the language while RWH on its applications but still covers principles well. RWH is a significantly larger time commitment.

I know a lot of people wax on the virtues of Learn You A Haskell but I found its explanations sufficiently full of inferable minutiae that my brain switched off safe in the knowledge that thinking is not required and I stopped learning. Maybe this is just me though.

The first part is all about logic and it tells you everything you need to know. You have to approach it like reading a big academic paper though. It’s not like you’ll be flipping through the pages rapidly but it is definitely understandable. Can’t comment on later parts because I stopped reading. I might start again one day though. I quite liked it.

The absence of that executable flag does nothing to protect you from using an existing executable and some data such as an interpreter and source code.

That advice creates startups that are more likely to work, yes, but also seriously narrows the range of different startups likely to occur. You’re optimizing for reliability—not surprising, you’re an investor—not for where the need is greatest.

Perhaps once you’ve made a lot of money you could afford to optimize for where the need is greatest instead of reliability and fund tech startups tackling problems less familiar to their founders or founders from different backgrounds. This will probably be more risky but greater needs should produce greater rewards, right?

Except the overall effect of this startup will be the opposite of what you just describe. Prim isn’t creating more dirty laundry, it’s consolidating the laundry jobs into batches that will be performed by fewer businesses than would otherwise overall.

If you happen to own one of the laundromats that Prim doesn’t want to use you will see a reduction in your business. There is a saving grace for that situation however, you could apply for a job at Prim.

Nah, switch to DuckDuckGo and Firefox please :)

Aren’t we on IE 10 now? Why would you upgrade to IE7?

Don’t handicapped and retarded me pretty much the same thing? Why does one offend and you use the other freely?

I don’t really understand what he means by the POV quote. Could you explain it?

> There's no legal obligation to do that, so why should they? Because of morals? Are your morals demonstrably more correct than theirs?

The people get the government they deserve. If you demand fairness you might get it. This is why it is important people demand ethical behavior from companies and institutions. The quality of any individual’s own morals has little to do with whether one is entitled to do that or not. And even if it did why should they have to demonstrate it? Can you imagine a world like that: “we’re not going to help you until you demonstrate your morals”

What’s LO?

I think people are going to try to avoid the tester experiencing errors. Why would anybody write something badly if it’s just going to come back to them in a couple of hours as wrong? But any half-decent culture is probably already thinks this way.

I have no objection to that. I just don’t want those words written by people to make it sound like the application is a person. The app can talk about itself doing things (it does do things after all) but not as a human being with feelings and stuff.

Good UI design is all about effective communication. If you have a UI that is pretending to be something it isn’t (a person) then it is basically lying to you. That’s hardly good communication. It’s confusing and dishonest.

And believe it or not there are some users who won’t understand that it isn’t really a person. Some minds are very prone to anthropomorphizing especially when they are dealing with something they find hard to understand and unpredictable like a computer.

But versions of Windows before 95 didn‘t have the prefix. In Windows 3.1 it was just Program Manager, Write, Paintbrush, File Manager etc. So they took a step backwards in 95. It took them a decade to get back to where they were in the 80s.

I think this is a bad idea on so many levels. But all those aside, just think of all the other research that’s not getting funded because of these assholes.

> We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.

Yeah but we’re not allowed to. Most employers will demands you show up for 40 hours a week and then frown at you or, at least, never promote you if you don’t stay for a lot more.

Incidentally, an enforced max number of hours per work week is a potential solution to the high unemployment a lot of countries have right now.

> Oh, and by the way, the current worldwide depression will never end.

I think this is probably true. A related book is The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin, which I highly recommend.

Same old story: judging people by stereotypes isn’t such a great idea but remains tempting due to potential savings in cycles.

Price increases are the natural response from market forces given the reduction or merely risk of reduction in supply. This has at least two important beneficial effects: 1) people are less likely to panic buy 2) the incentive for supplying increases.

Switching is particularly costly. Just watch someone complete a web form who doesn't know to press tab. Painful.

Is this really the author's biggest objection to war? Really? I'm not surprised by this development. War is about winning. Props to gamification--really pointsification--for having gained enough traction to be used in this context. War still blows though.

What does this company do?

> Which page were you on, the front page of the website doesn't say that to me?

It's the contents of the <title> tag so it displays on the title bar of the browser you are using to read it with and in the tab if you are using a browser with tabs.