nbouscal

33 ms·

211.
by nbouscal 13y ago
This depends heavily on what you mean by work. If by work you mean a minimum wage job at a McDonalds or Walmart, that isn't exactly what I would call purpose and dignity. For a meaning of work that included intellectual/artistic e
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by nbouscal 13y ago
They are doing a bit of that too. They have found correlations with IQ and other metrics. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ungar/papers/forecast_AAAI_MAGG.pd...
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by nbouscal 13y ago
There are multiple experimental groups in the project, which use different methods. One of the methods is a prediction market, where you can buy or sell shares of any given outcome, with the market price being the group estimate of the prob
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Say it is purely personal preference: 50% of people can work well in open offices, and 50% of people cannot. Even if that were the case (which I highly doubt), that would still be a solid argument for closed offices. Why? Because while peop
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by nbouscal 13y ago
I've always disliked the notion that Lisp or Haskell are only worth learning because of some revelation they give you which makes you more productive when you inevitably return to a mainstream language. Yes, there are some good insight
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by nbouscal 13y ago
You're thinking of Me.dium, which turned into OneRiot and was then acquired by WalmartLabs. No relationship with Ev Williams's Medium. Also, Kimbal is on Tesla's board, so it's not just a family relationship.
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by nbouscal 13y ago
The notion that terms like "monad" are nothing but shibboleths is very common and completely misguided. Instead, these terms are used for a couple of very good reasons. First, the simple reason that they are accurate terms for whi
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Cabal has been the focus of a ton of work lately, much of which is still ongoing. It has been improving rapidly, notably with sandboxes in 1.18. It still has a long way to go, admittedly, but I find myself having trouble with it way less
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by nbouscal 13y ago
To be fair to the OP, the original claim was: "People who have prior functional programming knowledge seem to find their stride in just a few days." I would be somewhat surprised if someone with no prior functional programming exp
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by nbouscal 13y ago
List comprehensions actually don't tend to get used very frequently, so I would not point to that as a good example of what Haskell code looks like. It's hard to point to one example, as different parts of the code look very diffe
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by nbouscal 13y ago
I think it's fine to cheerlead for Haskell, as we're all happy to increase the size of the community. What we don't want is for the community values to be diluted by that size increase, which is the sense in which "avoid
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by nbouscal 13y ago
I have to disagree on two points. First, the implicit point you are making that ambitious algorithms or novel data structures are useful in industry. For the vast majority of applications this simply isn't the case. Second, the argumen
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by nbouscal 13y ago
My experience is that popularity does matter a lot, but that the value of popularity is logistic rather than e.g. linear. Not enough popularity does make using a language in production unrealistic, but there is a threshold of usability afte
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Law school is so competitive precisely because there is more supply than demand . You're arguing against yourself.
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Unfortunately we've overloaded the term 'functional programming' a bit too much. Foundation on the lambda calculus is definitely core to most functional languages, and I see how it would be reasonable to think of that as thei
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by nbouscal 13y ago
There's abstraction and then there's abstraction. One of the benefits of Haskell is that it actually uses good abstractions rather than leaky ad-hoc ones. Making a Car an instance of Vehicle is not a good abstraction. Making a
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by nbouscal 13y ago
As far as I can tell, doing production work in Prolog would be an order of magnitude more difficult than doing production work in Haskell. This is just a guess, as I only have experience with the latter. This is similar to the reason we don
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Essentially a family-only basic income guarantee? Sounds like the best idea in the thread so far.
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by nbouscal 13y ago
I think the point was that it's not common for someone to switch from running a server on Linux to running a server on something else, and it's even less common for someone to do that without changing the configuration pretty exte
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by nbouscal 13y ago
@arfon doesn't admit that there's a bug, rather he says that "requiring a unique primary_extension isn't really a 'bug', rather it's a consequence of how language detection works in Linguist." The wor
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Minor feature that's really nice: the pull.ff config setting. I had made an alias for doing that manually, now I can start actually using git pull again.
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Whether or not it's a debate has nothing to do with whether or not your example is valid. I was just pointing out that it isn't.
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by nbouscal 13y ago
That example is a straw man. First, all reasonably strong type systems support polymorphism well enough to handle that case trivially. Second, type inference is a thing, so a lot of code in strongly-typed languages even looks the same as yo
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Shen has the same problem as Idris and all the rest of the languages with more powerful type systems than Haskell: none of them are ready for production use. I would absolutely love to be able to work in a more powerful type system, but the
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by nbouscal 13y ago
I'm confused. In what sense is correctness not pragmatic? Also, have you used lenses yet? Heterogenous hierarchical data in Haskell is quite easy now.
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by nbouscal 13y ago
It worked really nicely on my iPhone.
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Cabal still has a little ways to go, but it has been improving rapidly. Sandboxes came out recently and have helped a lot.
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by nbouscal 13y ago
What? The post specifically mentioned her noting when he did well: Then the storm passed. Spiegel resumed moving pieces and examining the game. She pointed out his good moves. “Very clever,” she said when he took the knight. As the game pr
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by nbouscal 13y ago
Yes, clearly the reason that machines aren't doing all of the programming is that there's no such thing as a non-leaky abstraction. ಠ_ಠ
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by nbouscal 13y ago
The problem with these massive ecosystems of dynamic code extensions is that when you layer leaky abstraction on top of leaky abstraction, each layer being broken in its own subtle ways, the end result is a ticking time bomb waiting to cost

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