Viewing profile — gloob

> So, please forgive us our gallows humor about this. Apologies for my pedantry, but dreaming about harming people is actually pretty much the opposite of gallows humour. A more ap…

It's okay for you to be wrong about something.

It's unclear to me whether you want "to write a program" or to "get the maximum out of Haskell". Those are two very different goals.

But first, how about we let capital usurp the political system for its own ends? That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

I, too, feel that perfectly uniform brace positioning is one of the critical technical challenges facing any new language today. There is no longer any excuse to get such an import…

By that standard, geometric population growth is killing people.

I agree with you entirely and unreservedly. The scare quotes in my comment were to poke fun at the idea that a person who holds a set of racist opinions is somehow not a racist. I …

To be fair, that's a reasonable position for a person who's "not really racist, but holds opinions that they concede certainly sound racist when said out loud".

Or row.

I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but... How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should s…

Should a Japanese octogenarian whose parents had the poor taste to spell their child's name with a character that would not make it into Unicode expect the same problem?

I look forward to being convinced that housing and car manufacturing are more stable and resilient than services.

Given that the entire website this article lives on is about roguelikes, and the author is also the developer of a roguelike (Unangband), I imagine he is likely aware of the histor…

Is it normal business practice to use ultimatums instead of negotiation?

I agree that, when we are talking about high-level languages, I prefer ones that will transparently convert integers to bignum when required. I'm just replying to the contention th…

This sort of thing is an intrinsic property of floating point math. It has limited precision. When the numbers get sufficiently large, that precision is insufficient to distinguish…

Is there a "canonical" justification for why the US legislative system allows non-germane additions to a bill? Or is ball-of-mud style legislation the norm due to tradition, rather…

You get downvoted a lot. shrugs

The correct response to that saying is to point out that regular expressions are significantly simpler than general-purpose, Turing-complete programming languages.

If you haven't seen Trusting Trust already, you should read it: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html . It's short and smart. The brief summary is, of course, you can almost n…

Like in BASIC and SQL.

All noses are frozzle. Some wiggles are noses. Therefore, some wiggles are frozzle.

Much the same thing that it says about English-speakers when they have to borrow the word "entrepreneur".

I really don't think 'the public' has any more say in this than they did about how cookies work. They're as clueless about how politics and laws work as they are about technical ma…

To my understanding, it is generally accepted that the primary purpose of karma points on HN is to encourage good discussions. One of the most common reasons I've seen proposed by …