rtperson

7 ms·

31.
by rtperson 15y ago
The author answers the question himself in this paragraph: > Just think of any progressive education professor who inveighs against most academic work in K-12 schools, describes academic work that involves a little memorization and prac
32.
by rtperson 15y ago
The SICP, from the chapters I've read, does not rely on mathematical sophistication the way, say, Knuth does. There's a little bit of calculus, but not much. If you've had a semester of calculus, you're probably more than well prepared. If
33.
by rtperson 15y ago
> but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively. In the case of Russia, you would be very, very wrong. You'd have to go back to the Kievan empire of the 13th century to find the last time the place wasn't an
34.
by rtperson 16y ago
It's CNN. This is the best they can do these days.
35.
by rtperson 16y ago
That scene in The Dark Knight is adapted from a storyline in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns . If I recall the original, Batman's retirement makes people sufficiently nervous that a gangs of young kids dress like him and do their
36.
by rtperson 16y ago
> In the UK's example, nationalization fostered trade (the roads were all toll roads previously). In the case of the US railroads, nationalization can arguably be seen as a disaster so there are mixed results of this. It's a mixed bag a
37.
by rtperson 16y ago
> whatever that means. Let me put it this way. You're looking for a new CEO for a fashion outlet. You have two top candidates: one who has an encyclopedic knowledge of shoes, dresses, designers, and how to spot a knock-off from the genu
38.
by rtperson 16y ago
Actually, having used the interfaces to OpenGL, SDL, GLFW, and several other native C libraries, I have to say this isn't the case at all. Haskell's FFI is pretty clean, which shouldn't be too surprising, since Haskell compiles natively, an
39.
by rtperson 16y ago
Most of the time you're right. But I've done a fair bit of tinkering with Haskell's OpenGL library. Trying to get GHC to differentiate between a Float and a GLfloat inside a Vector is pretty much impossible without resorting to explicit typ
40.
by rtperson 16y ago
> the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful. That I agree with. More interesting was the recent Pew study of what US citizens perceive as wealth distribution versus what it is in reality: http://ba
41.
by rtperson 16y ago
The thing with Haskell is that it doesn't automatically coerce types the way other languages do. It uses Hindley-Milner type inference up front if you don't specify your types, but this is far from foolproof. Once it's decided you're using
42.
by rtperson 16y ago
Doesn't Warren Buffett advocate points two and three? What a socialist he must be! Either that or you're pretty good at throwing around the word "Socialist" to avoid points of view you'd rather not consider. After all, if you can build a st
43.
by rtperson 16y ago
> I'd be surprised if that's an issue in Python, Ruby, or Lisp. I'd be very surprised if there weren't similar issues in these languages, since these are all duck-typed and the topic at hand is "bugs prevented by rigorous up-front type
44.
by rtperson 16y ago
I always thought that Haskell programmers provided so many math-centric examples because the language provides one of the cleanest mappings of math to code available in any language. You might as well code to the language's greatest strengt
45.
by rtperson 16y ago
This is really no different from a publisher taking public domain works, putting a cover on it, and charging $12 for the paperback. There's a slight value-add for which Amazon is charging a slight price. I personally don't see the problem.
46.
by rtperson 16y ago
It also has what looks like a half inch of wasted margin space at the top and the right. It's shiny, but looks like a very big phone by today's standards.
47.
by rtperson 16y ago
Reddit is somewhat susceptible. I have no inside track on my info, but the admins seem to have built some sneaky mechanisms for dealing with problematic users. My favorite is the practice of "ghosting" accounts, where it looks to the accoun
48.
by rtperson 16y ago
I lived in New York for ten years (most of it in Washington Heights), and I can't agree with you enough. Except for the home-cooked meal thing. My ex-girlfriend and I delivered an entire Thanksgiving feast to a friend's apartment when we
49.
by rtperson 17y ago
I had exactly the same feeling reading this. The only thing I'd add is that this is exactly the sort of clumsy FUD that the Chinese government might throw out there to cover their tracks, especially given what a diplomatic cluster-you-know-
50.
by rtperson 17y ago
He would also have suggested a comma after "sadly," so that it's obvious that it's the writer's comment, rather than a modifier on the way Safire died.
51.
by rtperson 17y ago
I went to Amherst, and I think you're spot-on with the east-coast mentality. In my experience, most of the students there just got onto the law-school/grad-school/Wall-Street bus and sailed comfortably into their next gig. It's also worth n
52.
by rtperson 17y ago
He was writing satirically -- see comment 23.