Recent submissions

Comment · 12 years ago
You can get session management by using tmux integration.

Terminal.app almost certainly does not do what you're describing by default.

Comment · 12 years ago
My point is that her tenure in the executive branch extended beyond her involvement in the Iraq War. As SoS, she was also involved in Africa policy, led a push for proactive diplomacy, etc.

In addition, the comments about hiring Rice to secure government contracts is absurd in the opposite direction.

Comment · 12 years ago
It's unbelievable the number of people commenting in this thread that don't comprehend the role of the Secretary of State.
Comment · 12 years ago
> False. In OOP you can do this using the visitor pattern. The difference is that Haskell makes this real convenient, with its algebraic types feature baked into the language, while OOP makes it very cumbersome.

I don't think we're on the same page here. I meant to say that Haskell protects against inconsistent states: you literally cannot create a dead player with HP and Inventory records. I don't have a strong grasp on the visitor pattern, but I'm not sure how it can be used to accomplish compile time guarantees that the properties of an object will always be correct.

> It's still far more annoying when the language is lazily evaluated and has Haskell syntax.

Python:

  def f(x,y):
      print x, y
      return x + y
Haskell:

  f x y = traceShow (x, y) (x + y)
Laziness is a separate issue altogether. Debugging lazy behavior is difficult in any language, and you would have similar problems in Python if you were testing deeply nested generators.

That said, laziness should not be an issue if you are simply testing that functions are correct, since most functions are pure and you will almost never use lazy IO.

If you need to debug evaluation order or a memory leak, that's much harder, and admitted one of Haskell's biggest weaknesses. My answer here is that you should almost always prefer strict data structures and functions unless you really need laziness. That's not a cure all, but it is a good policy when programming in Haskell.

Comment · 12 years ago
Here's a handful of things I really appreciate about Haskell, although some of this apply to other ML family languages as well:

1.) Algebraic Data Types let you enforce a huge amount of correctness in your programs simply by how you define your types.

For example, say you have a data type that represents a player's state in a game. If the player is alive, he has a "HP" and "inventory" record. If the player is dead, he should just be dead—HP and inventory may or may not be set to 0 and None, respectively. In C or OOP languages, you just get a player object/struct and you have to enforce this state logic manually, and you can easily write a function that puts the player in an inconsistent state (player.alive = False, but player.HP = 15). In Haskell, you can define the player such that code that produces this kind of inconsistent state will not compile.

Of course, you should still write tests in Haskell, but it's amazing to me that the type system can catch the vast majority of programming errors before your program even compiles. It takes longer to get something up and running, but you make up for this up front cost with long term gains in maintainability.

2.) Functional purity enforces two very useful properties:

a.) Data is never mutated by accident. This ensures you never have to look beyond the scope of the function you're working on (or closing over, in some cases) to know what's going on. You can then compose these functions to create more complex programs.

b.) When you do need mutability and side effects to happen, Haskell forces you to be very explicit about this and enforces a strict separation between "pure" and "effectual" code. This seems arbitrary until you realize that almost all of your errors not caught by the compiler happen because of IO. Whereas you have complete control over the pure part of your program, IO is nondeterministic and full of exceptions and edge cases. Separating this part of your code makes it far easier to reason about what's happening, adding to maintainability.

As a side note on the last point: people make the argument that this separation makes Haskell impossible to do printf debugging. Not true—the standard library provides ways of circumventing the type system specifically for this reason.

3.) "Monads" and other fancy sounding abstractions can be hard, but with practice they become as intuitive as inheritance in OOP. The real barrier to entry is the awful, awful documentation everywhere. I make no apologies for that: it's just really shitty and the community needs to do a hundred times better.

Comment · 12 years ago
Your confirmation email was sent to my spam folder.

Here's some things you can do to make your email look less like spam:

1.) Use Sublimall in the from field (never leave the from field blank).

2.) Include a physical address for your company somewhere in the message body.

3.) Use better english and include an explanation of what this email is, what triggered it, instructions to ignore the email if the recipient didn't request it.

Comment · 12 years ago
I think outside of the box by avoiding cliche.
Comment · 12 years ago
I like spaced repetition apps, but I'm kind of annoyed that this is just a sloppy landing page without a demo or a concrete description of what the app does. I would resubmit after the app is ready to launch, or you at least have some kind of demo.
Comment · 12 years ago
Are there any working ports for Mac?
Comment · 13 years ago
This is silly. "Government wasn't important to the construction of our transportation infrastructure" is an argument you're not going to win, and this conversation increasingly feels like you're grasping at straws.

I feel like the reasonable middle ground here is simply what Fred Turner is insisting: the two components are intertwined and symbiotic. Why is that so hard to accept?

Comment · 13 years ago
Just so people who only read the headline or skimmed the post know the whole story, the author of this blog ambushed a random Google employee with questions about the treatment of Google contract employees in a private chat room and proceeded to publish quotes from the conversation out of context.

See post here: http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks...

This is clearly done with the intention of embarrassing Travis Collins on the internet, which is in express violation of Digital Ocean's policy which forbids using the service to harass or embarrass others. The author makes a bunch of terrible, incoherent excuses for his disgusting behavior and tries to rally support for his cause on Hacker News.

Pretty embarrassing and deplorable behavior on the OP's part, all considered.

Comment · 13 years ago
What terribly written tripe. For an accomplished coder, Bryan Goldberg is surprisingly incapable of grasping nuance.

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