nbouscal

17 ms·

121.
by nbouscal 12y ago
I definitely agree that working with SML first can make learning Haskell a lot easier. There's a Coursera course from the University of Washington on the subject of Programming Languages, which teaches SML, Racket, and Ruby, and does
122.
by nbouscal 12y ago
Again, whether or not people like the operators is irrelevant. Aesthetic opinions about syntax don't have a material effect on productivity. As I said, there are people using the language professionally who have an aesthetic distaste
123.
by nbouscal 12y ago
It's absolutely shocking that you're able to easily understand a literal hello world example in a language in the dominant paradigm, but not able to easily understand a significantly more complex example in a language from a diffe
124.
by nbouscal 12y ago
As I said, you can definitely raise aesthetic objections. You're free to hate operators all you want, though it does strike me as a peculiar basis on which to decide what tool to use. My point was whether there are actual practical i
125.
by nbouscal 12y ago
Have you ever tried doing any non-trivial work in Haskell? I've used it professionally, and spoken with a lot of other people who have, and exactly zero people have expressed an experience that the naming of operators has caused the la
126.
by nbouscal 12y ago
The value of a share of a stock for a typical investor is net present value of future cash flows, but the value of an entire company to one of its competitors can be something very different. As others in the thread have mentioned, the stra
127.
by nbouscal 12y ago
The article says almost exactly that: "However, Objects are not passed by reference. A correct statement would be Object references are passed by value."
128.
by nbouscal 12y ago
Yeah, 10mg is a crazy dose, even 5mg is far more than most people I know take. I would try out doses in the 100mcg-1mg range and see how they work.
129.
by nbouscal 12y ago
If you haven't yet, I recommend experimenting with the dosage. Most companies sell melatonin in dramatically higher doses than is necessary. I take 300mcg, but often see it sold in doses an order of magnitude larger than that. Effect
130.
by nbouscal 12y ago
I trust gwern's in-depth analysis significantly more than I trust a blurb from the Mayo Clinic: http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin
131.
by nbouscal 12y ago
Did you read the article? He made $90,000 in one month, and almost $10,000 per month for most months after that.
132.
by nbouscal 12y ago
> there has been zero selection for anything in the past 200 years This is false to the point of being absurd. For there to be zero selection, mating would have to be completely random, as would death at reproductively viable ages.
133.
by nbouscal 12y ago
You're proposing revolution as a resolution? Really? Revolution is not a means of governance.
134.
by nbouscal 12y ago
I think you're thinking more locally than this, but on the global scale there's GiveDirectly: https://www.givedirectly.org/
135.
by nbouscal 12y ago
Yep, on that point I agree with you completely. I don't at all understand why people find their appearance complicated or scary, but I agree that it's more appearance than reality.
136.
by nbouscal 12y ago
I'm not sure how worried I am about the class of newcomers that will be scared off by a word that they don't know. PHP is friendly to newcomers, and the result is thousands of insecure websites built by people who think they know
137.
by nbouscal 12y ago
You're demonstrating that you don't know what monads are. "Type wrapper function" could mean any number of things (lack of specificity is a bad trait in naming), but it couldn't mean a monad: monads consist of three
138.
by nbouscal 12y ago
Lack of familiarity doesn't make it fancy, and for a software engineer it shouldn't make it scary either. One of the largest parts of our job is learning unfamiliar things.
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by nbouscal 12y ago
Because the associated concepts, for example Kleisli categories, are easy to find if your search is seeded with the word "monad", but very hard to find if it's seeded with the word "strategy".
140.
by nbouscal 12y ago
I really don't understand why people think monad is a "fancy scary term". It's a five-letter easily-pronounceable word. What makes it fancy or scary? I think people assume that they're scary, and then confirmation b
141.
by nbouscal 12y ago
I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't think so. To me, full dependent types just means you have pi and sigma types. I don't see anything fundamental about pi and sigma types that would prevent you from having bottom in your langu
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by nbouscal 12y ago
Yeah, you can definitely do that example in Haskell – if by Haskell you mean GHC. GHC has been slowly but surely adding dependently-typed features for quite some time now, which will culminate in a proper DependentTypes pragma sometime soon
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by nbouscal 12y ago
Yes, it happens at compile time. To understand how proofs work here, you want to look at the Curry-Howard correspondence. Basically, there's a correspondence between types and propositions, and between the values inhabiting those types
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by nbouscal 12y ago
Sure, but rilita's original claim was "at companies", not at job sites. Your sense of indignation is a bit unwarranted given how loosely you're reading the post.
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by nbouscal 12y ago
Janitors and security guards aren't usually employed by the company, are they?
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by nbouscal 12y ago
They're not competitors so much as allied organizations using different methods, as far as I can tell.
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by nbouscal 12y ago
And the reason the argument is absurd is that of course the room doesn't understand Chinese; it's a lookup table! No Chinese speaker interacting with the Chinese room for any reasonable period of time would think it held a Chine
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by nbouscal 12y ago
MacLane is still the standard for working mathematicians, but for those with less background, Steve Awodey's book[1] is very good. He also has some YouTube lectures[2]. While you're on YouTube, the Catsters channel[3] has many exc
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by nbouscal 12y ago
I get the impression that people who prefer Mercurial to Git only ever talk about interfaces and not about the underlying model. It seems to me that especially for a tool as important as version control, the underlying model is significantl
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A wage revolution could end extreme poverty in Asia(oxfamblogs.org)
47 points by nbouscal 12y ago|13 comments

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