copper

He's had experience with many managers, mind you - and if a fair number of those were from India, it would justify his bias.

In my experience, his third point (on them trying harder, and thus being more willing to treat ethical boundaries in an elastic manner) is spot-on.

The human body is conductive, so the masking tape acts as an insulator. I'm wondering at exactly what shape the antenna inside the phone is, if it can be affected that easily.

If you've ever played around with short-wave radio (I suppose people do need to be older than a certain age to have done that :) ) it's possible to improve reception if you touch the antenna.

It isn't much better without ClearType, either. Inconsolata looks a /lot/ better on linux, so it could be something wrong with the font hinting.

For CP, GECODE is C++, which makes it very easy to bundle /if/ you're writing in that language.

SWI-Prolog can be used embedded - but I haven't any experience with the results.

Well, there /is/ the BOFH :)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/

I think the authors point was that you shouldn't have to learn these things the hard way :)

Yes, there was.

I've been at a small startup in Bangalore for some time now, and the rents I've had to pay for an office have seen huge differences over the last couple of years.

> I think a language which manages to hide the complexity of monads without removing them

Hm, I'm not sure this is possible: a great part of the "complexity" of monads is because it's a similar (and fairly simple!) structure that applies to a great many apparently unrelated concepts: function sequencing, backtracking, and what have you.

Books do advertise, though in a much more tasteful manner: What would you call the one-page blurbs that contain a listing of other books by the author, and maybe even teaser chapters of other books that trade paperbacks contain?

Your point is spot-on.

> A better analogy would be an argument about exposing call/cc in scheme. Is call/cc good language design? There are arguments on both sides. Haskell does continuations differently than Scheme. Which is "better"?

To clarify this, here's a couple of questions whose answers might amuse you.

  Is it possible to implement explicit continuations in terms of monads? 
  Is it possible to implement monads in terms of explicit continuations?

If it is possible to implement A in terms of B (and not vice versa), then B is more basic than A.

Compressed sensing and matrix completion are almost the same (take that with a large set of caveats, but the basic L1 recovery process is the same.) Tech media fail, anyway.

PLT already has ephemerons too:

http://docs.plt-scheme.org/reference/ephemerons.html

Postini did, but they were bought out by google :)

They've removed the goat teleportation from this version :'(

> Engineering respect is an inverse log scale

What is the inverse log scale? 1/log(x) or exp(x)?

Clojure dates from 2007 according to wikipedia, and reddit did the switch way before that (this post was in 2005.)

Makes me feel positively ancient.

    There is nothing wrong with C-like C++ code. Nothing at all.

On the other hand, recognising that C and C++ treat 'unsigned' differently, and that certain C code may be wrong C++ code... A C/C++ coder who does not recognise that C++/C have different behaviour in certain cases is not much of a coder. (Hm, I believe that's actually one of the rare occasions when saying C/C++ is correct.)

I assume that's the bug in this code - it's neither idiomatic C++, nor is it C, but written in a manner that brings out the neatfreak in me.

Chris and Thomas: something like coverity should catch this particular bug without trouble. Have you guys verified this?

Absolutely - I think the original article implicitly assumes that it's a successful product that is being acquired. After all, why would anyone buy a company with an unsuccessful product? (but then, there are a lot of good reasons to do so.)

Violates his own guidelines? Orwell adds to his list of rules

....(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.