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anon_don Taking History Personally

The problem with this whole line of thought is that, in reality, conspiracies abound. History is full of conspiracies.

The idea that all things are all just emergent phenomena created by laws and economics, that no groups of humans are trying to manipulate things, everybody is incompetent, and nobody is responsible for anything is absurd. It conflicts with reality.

In reality, everyone is engaged in conspiracies. Everyone is trying to manipulate things in some way, and some groups of people have far more influence than others. That's what it means to have power and influence.

It is true that people that are really into conspiracy theories often believe things on far too little evidence. However, that doesn't mean that conspiracies don't exist, or that they are not important.

anon_don How is it like to be a dev in Iran

Like America?

anon_don Dependent Haskell

Right now the only thing that seems clear is that dependent typing adds significant mental burden on the programmer to more thoroughly specify types, and to do so absolutely correctly

It's basically the opposite of this.

If a language has dependent types, you can continue to use it in the same way as a language with does not have dependent types.

BUT, there's a lot of programming patterns that previously couldn't be implemented in a type-safe way, that now can be. This also gives a ton of opportunities for libraries to implement abstractions that weren't expressible before.

Dependent types are not that complicated, actually, and they don't add any burden to programs that don't use them.

anon_don Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign

Critical thinking is good, but we have a system that only applies it to ideas that it doesn't like and a culture of hostility towards applying it to it's own sacred ideals.

The result of this system is not truth.

The result of this system is propaganda successful disguised as objectivity...

which is exactly what you need in order to effectively manipulate a democracy.

anon_don Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign

Yes, exactly.

It's not like the US media hasn't been successfully spreading it's own global propaganda for ages.

An end to the US's media/academic monopoly on truth-setting is a very welcome change. We need real competition here.

anon_don Untyped Programs Don’t Exist

Javascript is Unityped. In Haskell/ML, you would define the type of Javascript objects by doing something like this:

    data JSObj
      = Num Double
      | Str String
      | Obj (Hashtable String JSObj)
      | True
      | False
      | Nil
      | Undefined

anon_don Untyped Programs Don’t Exist

CSV is a list of lists of strings.

anon_don Why You Can Focus in a Coffee Shop but Not in Your Open Office

I don't see how what he's describing needs to interpreted as a lot of anxiety. He's just strongly pointing at the source of the anxiety. I think the GP's comment is dead on.

anon_don Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

Tokyo is 30% of Japan's population..

anon_don Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

They are publically defending an argument that got someone fired, so using a throwaway account is totally reasonable here.

anon_don OpenBSD switches the default compiler on amd64 and i386 to clang

This is a big deal! Weren't the OpenBSD pretty clang-hostile a few years back? Maybe I'm mixing up them and the suckless people?

I think I remember that they were even trying to move away from gcc to something home-grown and simpler, since gcc is such a huge dependency and even uses c++ now.

anon_don Palmer Luckey Leaves Facebook

So, this person's male-specific slurs are sexist against women because it fails to insult them as well?

anon_don Can sleep deprivation cure depression?

I've done the same before for a few months, and I also found myself getting up an hour later every day. It was amazing.

anon_don Climate Impacts of Biking vs. Driving

While the article is clearly setting up the calculation in a very slanted way, I think the point they are making is still interesting.

I definitely don't think this is (or even an attempt to be) an effective criticism of the environmental value of biking.

However, even with a biased setup like this, the fact that the numbers can be massaged into the same ballpark really shatters my intuition here. I think my take-away is that I've clearly been underestimating the climate impact of meat consumption, and that's interesting.

anon_don Tcl/Tk 8.6.6 Released

What don't you like about Ancient COBOL?

anon_don What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell 2.0

Haskell is not a great language for programs that need to fit within tight memory or latency limits. It's also slower in some cases than C/C++, but it's definitely competitive with other high-level languages. Other than that, it's pretty excellent for everything.

anon_don Linux 3.15 Can Resume From Suspend Faster

I did for me once I switched to the text-only version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

anon_don Functionally Solving Problems With Haskell

Also, if you don't want to make the full leap into "PURE EVERYTHING MUST STAY CLEAN DONT BREAK THE RULES" style code, try Haskell. Imperative programming in Haskell is great! The language evaluation rules may be purely function, but your code doesn't need to be.

anon_don SBCL: The Ultimate Assembly Code Breadboard

I've settled into the following workflow:

    ghci Module.hs
    *mess around*
    :e *this opens Module.hs in vim, and reloads afterwords.*
    *mess around some more*

It's the best programming work-flow I've found in any language.

anon_don SBCL: The Ultimate Assembly Code Breadboard

That's how I was doing it. It's been too long to remember the details, but I remember that there are different phases when code is loaded, and it can get very tricky when you're doing heavy meta-programming stuff. Everything works when load your new definitions from a buffer into the repl, but when you try to load it again from a file, all the phase issues come into play.

anon_don SBCL: The Ultimate Assembly Code Breadboard

Meh. You want to do imperative stuff in the repl, and you can't do that at the top-level in Haskell. The way ghci works is solid. When you are in the ghci repl, you are coding inside the do-notation for the IO monad.

Really, IMHO, jumping back and forth between the editor and the REPL with constant reloading is a better approach than pasting things into the REPL. I remember when I was playing with Common Lisp, I would always have trouble keeping the code on disk and the code loaded into the REPL synced.

anon_don Do you really know JavaScript?

I got it right the second time!

anon_don A 30 minute introduction to Rust

Just to clarify, using a `unsafe` block in a function does NOT mean that you have to tag that function as unsafe.

anon_don Haskell, Ada, C++, Awk: An Experiment in Prototyping Productivity (1994) [pdf]

Over-engineering definitely does seem to be a problem in very-expressive programming languages. Probably has more to do with the reasons most people use Haskell rather than with Haskell itself.

anon_don What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell

Sure, but IO gives you answers to the main questions that new people have. How do I write hello world? How do read a line from standard input? How can you DO things in a language without side effects? You can't even write programs without IO, and it's really not confusing.

On the other hand, I think avoiding do-syntax makes sense at first.

anon_don What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell

Do not agree! Monads were always this vague weird thing until I started using IO heavily. Once I was comfortable with IO, applying the abstraction to other things was obvious. I've also helped some other people learn Haskell, and being able to just explain how IO works is much easier than trying to explain the Monad abstraction.

anon_don Why Vagrant?

I do all of my coding in Virtualbox, and Virtualbox will not run within itself. Frustrating!