monkeyfacebag

I'm confused, I thought 2D acceleration was introduced with 10.4. I'm not a Mac user, so I'm not sure, but Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_%28graphics_layer%29) seems to agree.

It's not intuitive, but it's straightforward once you understand the semantics. There are basically two cases. Case 1:

    x <- monadicFunctionA
    monadicFunctionB

is rewritten as:

    monadicFunctionA >>= \x -> monadicFunctionB

The important thing here is that x is just the variable name in an lambda expression that you don't see. Case 2:

    monadicFunctionA
    monadicFunctionB

is rewritten as:

    monadicFunctionA >> monadicFunctionB

Where >> === >>= \_ ... . Given these rules, you can approximate do-notation like so:

    monadicFunctionA >>=
    \x -> monadicFunctionB >>
    monadicFunctionC ...

> Gnome3 is familiar, but very dated.

Have you used Gnome 3? Familiar and dated are not words I would use to describe it. The Gnome team is clearly focused on user experience and without rendering judgment as to whether or not they've succeeded (disclosure: I think they largely have), it's immediately obvious to new users of Gnome 3 (see Torvalds for the canonical case) that the product is not clinging tightly to familiar design patterns.

> he should encouraged and cheered.

Is that not happening already? From the article: "Tesla's current market value is 250 times higher than it would be if it were being valued as a car manufacturer rather than an idea whose time is about to come." Of course, we're also talking about a company that received a $465 million loan from US taxpayers so it's not like we're hanging him out to dry.

It's not clear to me what Python the language offers over the Lisp family, other than improved readability for some class of users and translation to and from pseudocode (see Peter Norvig's comment in 2010: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803351 ). These aren't necessarily small advantages, but neither do they mitigate Lisp's power and flexibility. I do, however, think Python the community offers a lot of practical advantages to the new user over, say, any particular Lisp community.

Completely agree that learning functional programming has improved my thinking and code. The one difficulty I continue to encounter is switching back and forth between recursive and iterative thinking. From a computational perspective they may be equivalent, but from a cognitive perspective they aren't (at least in my case). I don't know how many times, for example, I've been bitten by a stack overflow when jumping into Python from Haskell (or equivalently, jumping directly into the ST Monad because I want to iterate through some lists).

I really like the interaction and flexibility, but I failed to generate a set of colors as nice as those provided by Color Brewer (http://colorbrewer2.org/). Sure, Color Brewer doesn't dynamically generate color schemes, but the set of colors it provides looks damn good in just about any context. I might use this new app in cases where I need more than 12 colors (Color Brewer's limit), but I don't think dynamic color scheme generation adds much. The JSON and CSS exports do seem very useful, however, and a big improvement over Color Brewer's interface.

These "monad tutorials" drive me nuts. I wasted a week trying to understand monads from random "You can do monads in Python, JavaScript and Brainfuck!" tutorials that all had different (and sometimes inconsistent) perspectives on what they were and what they were good for before I gave up and learned Haskell. In my case, I was laboring under the false assumption that because I knew language X, it would be easier to learn about monads in X than to learn Haskell. In Haskell, the value of monadic computation falls out naturally from the type system and syntax. Yes, you still have to verify the laws, but Haskell's purity makes this easier as well.

I think the jQuery analogy has some didactic value for understanding combinators, but calling it a monad and falsely asserting that the laws hold is not doing "normal programmers" any favors. In the comments, he analogizes demonstrating the map function to C programmers, but this analogy is false because he clearly understands map and what it's used for but the same cannot be said for his understanding of monads.

For "normal programmers" out there who want to (for whatever reason) learn about monads, my recommendation is to ignore these tutorials and learn Haskell or an equivalent. I learned Haskell specifically to develop an understanding of monads, but what I got out of it was much, much more valuable than just an understanding of monads.

It appears the instructor is employed as an "instructional designer" in Georgia Tech's distance learning program. Superficially, traditional distance learning programs have something in common with MOOCs, but there are a number of important differences. An obvious one is scale and it seems like the instructor was legitimately unprepared for the M in MOOC. Unfortunately, (and obviously generalizing here) another one is quality. Distance learning programs have long been second rate and even though the MOOC format isn't perfect, there are some very good professors teaching fields they have made significant contributions to, which is not something I've experienced with distance learning. My take away? You have to vet the instructor.

As excited as this makes me, I am way more excited to hear about the "full blown Haskell IDE" they mention. Is this a cloud service?

I think the ribbon is great. Prior to the ribbon, Word, for example, had all of these different components, each with its own UI, all fighting among themselves for screen real estate (the UI version of how this article describes MS, I suppose). The ribbon came along with the expressed intent of unifying all of those UIs so that people could actually use all of Word's features without clobbering the space allocated for, you know, editing their documents. I think it's pretty successful at that, but you have to go back to those old versions of Office to remember just how awful it was.

Sure, it's different. It takes getting used to and that's unfortunate (if only they'd gotten it right the first time!). Ultimately, I realize that some people will never like it, and that's reasonable but I hardly think it qualifies as a "train wreck."

Regarding FTC action, it's worth noting that MS's page on the Surface Pro (http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-...) includes this small print: System software uses significant storage space; your storage capacity will be less. I freely admit ignorance of the law but to a layman it seems like they've covered themselves pretty well here. I would be curious to know what impact this would have on potential FTC action.

Further, I wonder how easily the "recovery partition" can be disabled and how much space a user could recover. How much is OS and how much is "recovery partition"?

Here you go: http://shiftedfrequency.net/

I agree that we need to know who he is and what he's done, but it was linked at the bottom of the post, so...

> Throw away your sexy idea

While I doubt very much that this advice is bad per se, it does seem to run counter to the spirit of HN. It's true that there's no inherent tension between pushing the envelope and being successful (read: making money), but I imagine that most of those involved in the startup world are there precisely because making money isn't enough for them.

Neither a college education nor continued employment in the field is a requirement to ask a stackoverflow question. In fact, I'd venture to say that a version of stackoverflow where the default answer to everything was "you should have learned this in college" would not be very useful (or used) at all. If you find the discussion beneath you, I suggest that you not participate and find a better use of your time. Others may be getting value from it and I can't for the life of me understand why you think this is a bad thing.

This is an interesting look at the data but some of the inference isn't quite there. The author uses the relative prevalence of the pattern 2468 over 1357 to justify the conclusion that people prefer even numbers to odd, completely ignoring the pattern-based analysis he just used to understand the prevalence of 2580!

Can someone who understood this post all the way through tell me what m refers to? It first shows up in this sentence

> Therefore we're faced with a series of decisions, at each number of conversions n, m more turned up A than B (m can, of course, be negative).

which I am not able to parse.

I found this article helpful.

I was very surprised by the quality of the code in the replace.js repo given the vitriol that surrounded it. I'm not a big contributor to open source, but I've recently made some modifications (improvements?) to a Haskell library I use and was planning to make a pull request soon. This event gave me pause. As someone who couldn't tell what was so eye-bleedingly bad about the replace.js code, I was nervous that I would endure a similar fate.

It's a bit disingenuous to make straight comparisons between the neighborhood designs in the US and Germany given that the latter has something like 4% of the area of the former and almost 7x the population density. That said, Americans did consciously choose to make full use of the country's land mass to spread themselves out, prioritizing investments in interstate highways over local transportation and I'd like very much to see those priorities shift.

Graph Search seems like strange branding to me. I almost didn't click the link because I thought "Graph Search" was a new API and not a user-facing product (to be fair, the context was a posting on HN so I was predisposed to think API). Graph Search's real focus appears to be on the use of natural language and the presentation of/interaction with data. The "Graph" is almost the least interesting about it.

Out of curiosity, have you tried using cabal-dev? It's far from a panacea, but it does mitigate library version issues. And, AFAIK, it's getting rolled into cabal proper Real Soon Now (see: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/SandboxedBuilds... ).

I've also been using a Nexus 7 as my primary (though not exclusive) connectivity device. Instead of GrooveIP, I use Spare Phone, which has a nicer icon (and yes, that is why I chose it). The biggest drawback I've encountered is that talking over the speakers doesn't work well because the other party can hear his/her voice on a slight delay.

The other thing I've been really surprised by is how much I like using it to write. Now that the stock keyboard has swipe input, I spend about 1 or 2 hours a day writing in Google Docs (err... Drive). To be fair, I was never a particularly fast typist, so I didn't notice the impact to my speed, that others surely would. Still, I don't find the tablet interface to be much of a barrier to getting my thoughts recorded, which was a real surprise.

I am no psychologist, but this sounds very much like impostor syndrome, which is by no means the exclusive domain of the startup world. When I was in grad school, the school offered seminars and workshops on it. I never went, but I'm not sure what a seminar is supposed to do for someone who has difficulty recognizing their accomplishments.

I don't know anything about these sites other than what's described in the article, but how can they possibly guarantee that the exploited "subjects" are not minors? Shouldn't this be a legal problem for them?

> And don't give me the BS that Gnome cares about UX, they don't.

I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to such a ridiculous and unsubstantiable claim, but there's actual evidence in the form of work product that GNOME cares about UX. It can be found here https://live.gnome.org/Design/Contribute

Hopefully this starts the ball rolling on Android tablet apps. I really love my Nexus 7, but the app selection is definitely inferior to what's available for iOS.

Chromium OS doesn't seem like a particularly good fit for the form factor and Android already runs Chrome, so I'm not sure I understand the effort, but I guess it's a neat hack.

That's not the conclusion I came away with. He wrote at the end "this is a great device." Obviously the jury's out on whether or not this thing will actually sell (and thus be worth talking about 2-3 years from now), but he clearly doesn't conclude that Surface is a failure.

The display is on the outside.

> I don’t mind the lack of a Retina screen in the first version. As we can see from the iPad 3 and 4, lighting and driving a 2048x1536 screen just can’t be done well in a small, thin, light, inexpensive device yet. Maybe next fall, or maybe the year after that.

This is being presented as though the only two choices were "retina" or 1024x768, which is obviously not true. I understand Apple's rationale for using the previous generation's resolution, but it means they shipped a device which is inferior to the competition in at least one measurable way. I'm not a spec-driven purchaser. I don't care that the iPad mini has less RAM or fewer cores than the Nexus 7 (disclosure: I own this). But a tablet's display is a critical part of the experience and I find Apple's decision here to be a let down.