joelburget

It's of course tempting for storytellers to make their characters one-dimensional. In this case the makers of the movie decided to portray a singularly good and humanitarian Gandhi. Usually we see purely good or purely bad characters and know they are good or bad because the movie tells us. We usually don't know why characters are bad, other than the fact that they're fighting against the main character, so they must be.

The problem is this makes for boring characters. I love it when I see more complex characters and their motivations. I know that's not exactly the Gandhi the movie makers wanted to portray, but maybe it would have made for a better story.

First of all, change is inevitable. The worst response is too much worrying about it and talking about how you would like things to be how they used to be. Users come and go so it will never be exactly the way it used to be. A good response is to embrace the change and make it work.

In this case the problem seems to be an influx of new users that don't completely understand what the site's about. It seems to me the best response is to more actively encourage good commenting from new users. My suggestion is inspired by stackoverflow. Over there, below a certain karma threshold, users must submit their edits to be reviewed by others. It might be beneficial to do the same thing for, say, a user's first 10 comments. They would submit a comment, a more experienced user reviews it and gives feedback if necessary. That way new users are forced to learn a little bit about what the community values in a comment.

It's not rocket, it's rocket science. I.E. a complex or difficult mental exercise or field or study, used frequently in an ironic sense to suggest that a task should be easy or simple because it is not rocket science. (definition from wikipedia)

I've been writing some ffi myself code lately. The real world haskell chapter on ffi has been helpful. They use a bit of hsc2hs on top of plain ffi. I've also been using c2hs which does a lot of the work for you (a bit higher level) and have found Edward Z Yang's guide helpful for that.

I expected Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki to be on this list. I would recommend it but more importantly I've seen many people who know a lot more about functional programming recommend it. It is probably a bit more useful for the average programmer than many of the books listed here.

I'm kind of surprised it even made the list. It fills a very small niche currently, and has a more academic flavor than the more popular books on the list.

I think it will increasingly come to be recognized as important, as functional programming becomes more popular. I hope so at least.

Looking back at old visions of the future, they always seem to imagine the obvious things, e.g. flying cars and nuclear power. What I haven't ever seen is anything close to modern computers, which arguably have just as profound an impact on our lives and are probably more impressive technologically.

The author, Benjamin Pierce, also wrote the book Types and Programming Languages, among others.

His website: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/

On the other hand, GAE looks like a great fit for a static site built with Jekyll, like a personal blog. In fact I'm planning to migrate my site over today. Almost any personal site will be free to host. Even though I would only be paying a few dollars with S3, I see no reason not to give app engine a shot.

One thing I worry about is the reported downtime. I'm not sure whether or not that will affect a static site.

Earlier this month I had an email from Google that was marked as spam in gmail.

How is it a waste of time when caps lock is as close to my little finger as shift is and I can type normally for those few letters?

But I use both fingers for the letters in NASA so I would normally have to hold 2 different shift keys. Are you saying you hold just one shift and type the rest of the letters with your other hand

How do you type acronyms like NASA?

Very good point.

Well, DNA is fairly complex. Of all the elements and compounds life could involve it seems rather unlikely that DNA evolved in two places completely separately. Not impossible, but very unlikely.

I agree that it's an amazing discovery. Admittedly I didn't read the actual press release so you're probably right that they acted correctly. I only read second hand accounts of what they were going to announce.

We not only could have a common ancestor, it seems to me to be almost certain. What are the chances that some other life has evolved with DNA completely independently

Perhaps NASA should be more cautious about holding a press on astrobiology, and with a Science embargo. Clearly everyone will immediately think of aliens, and for good reason. It's NASA, it's about astrobiology, and it's something big enough to embargo Science. They're just asking for all the alien stories. And let's be clear, these are not aliens.

Agreed.

Thanks for a better explanation than I could have written myself.

I also like this page as a more basic introduction to type systems: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2010/08/what-to-know-before...

It's interesting that Wolfram makes a quick foray into computer science to bash type systems. (I think he couldn't be more wrong)

"To resolve this, Russell introduced what is often viewed as his most original contribution to mathematical logic: his theory of types—which in essence tries to distinguish between sets, sets of sets, etc. by considering them to be of different “types”, and then restricts how they can be combined. I must say that I consider types to be something of a hack. And indeed I have always felt that the related idea of “data types” has very much served to hold up the long-term development of programming languages. (Mathematica, for example, gets great flexibility precisely from avoiding the use of types.)"

Volume 2 of Principia Mathematica, not Principles of Mathematics.

It's exactly this kind of thing that lead me away from C++. There are far too many gotcha's and tricks you need to know to write good C++.

In my experience NaCl is not a viable platform at this time.

My friend and I spent a couple weeks just trying to get the developer tools to work. We tried on Ubuntu, OS X, Windows, and Arch Linux. We weren't able to get started on a single platform. In the process we came across bugs that were several months old that haven't been fixed, even on their supported platforms.

Another thing to worry about is whether NaCl will take off. We can't know how committed Google is and how many users will install the plugin. It was supposed to be enabled by default in Chrome 6 (I believe) but it still isn't enabled in 7.

NaCl is still promising (especially Portable Native Client) but Google has to get it working first.

If we're being picky, "l’appel du vide" is actually 4 words.

What language is he speaking? Finnish? Swedish? Also, what is he saying?

Someone must be held responsible for this.

Jason Santa Maria is the only designer whose rss feed I'm subscribed to. Check his porfolio for some projects you'll probably recognize.

http://jasonsantamaria.com/

The slide that stuck out to me was the claimed number of Haskell programmers: enough to fill 1155 Boeing 747's. By my estimation that comes out to about 575,000 (assuming ~500 per plane), which definitely seems high to me. I would guess the actual number is closer to the 125,000 the slide cites per HP release, and even that may be high. But in any case, Haskell's growth is very exciting and encouraging. Let's hope it continues!

"It's not about the degree: it's about what you can get out of the university while disguised as a student."

Could you elaborate?