Viewing profile — notabel

On that note, you might take a glance at the lightweight concurrency paper; it proposes a new concurrency runtime for GHC, basically moving most of the implementation into Haskell,…

The extra speed would have been nice yesterday, while the emails were going out. I doubt I was the only one who noticed the site slow down as we all refreshed compulsively. :-)

Doing it in Lisp would be exceedingly tricky, since, while most dialects have some sort of laziness construction, it's explicit, so you don't get the automatic evaluation order red…

Well, given that I'm on the second floor of Marston, I'd probably find out what the view from the roof is. :-)

I've always taken this to be a feature, to promote development of comment threads beyond just the first few.

Hurray for over-engineered solutions! While you're at it, though, you might as well just have your robot slip inside YC and grab a copy of Arc--then it wouldn't just be Lisp, it wo…

I've got a Sieve script running on my IMAP server, set to redirect to my phone any message from an address containing any of the strings "pg@", "tlb@", "rtm@", "x@", or "ycombinato…

I'm waxing originalistic, but I'll spare you the argument from Latin (the relevant verb is educare), and just skip to the OED. To educate is "3. To train (any person) so as to deve…

Good luck getting that degree accredited.[0] You've entirely elided the fundamental aspect of education: education. A college degree is not supposed to just be a certification that…

I'm disinclined to think that this is PR motivated. The tool is pretty general, and FB has a history of open source involvement (notably, memcached, to which they contribute heavil…

I had a Logo class in 4th grade (10yrs), which led me to Scheme the next year. So, yes, it does happen.

It's only tangentially relevant and reads like spam.

I found it relatively inaccurate, but oddly, it was always very precise; i.e. when it got things wrong, it got them profoundly, diametrically wrong. One thing I wonder is whether t…

There are two distinct classes of work that are called "busy work". The first is heinous, the second is often loathed, but great. There's real busywork: work assigned just to take …

[This is just about your first paragraph.] The question is whether that is a problem. I for one don't really think that traditional secondary ed is the right place for teaching tec…

"public schools teach in a certain way and change very slowly." I can certainly agree with you about that. IB has been around for 30 years, and just got any foothold in American 10…

I think we're considering fundamentally different paradigms. In my education, there were effectively no assignments, and certainly none that could be completed online. Consider my …

I have to disagree with you, and vehemently. Centralization is exactly the problem. I was lucky enough to be educated in an International Baccalaureate program that stressed intera…

Bah! The grahambot would obviously have squishy actuators for dynamic balancing! None of this stiff-jointed ZMP crap! [Anybots++]

I don't find it entirely impossible. After Startup School I talked to Adam D'Angelo about spam on facebook (largely because I'd never seen any); he said that there is a lot of spam…

I agree with you; Tumblr seems to fill a niche somewhere between a public del.icio.us feed and a blog. It lets you show people things in a genuinely unified manner (unlike del.icio…

I think that question, like the question about stock, is largely to make you think about the problem, and see how you react to it. Obviously, it's not possible to produce a number …

"Hackers and Painters" had an immense impact on me a couple of years ago. Like pg, I multiplex art and hackery (I suck at painting though--sculpture, printmaking, and theatrical de…

I had long pined to read Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, but couldn't convince myself to spend the money; when I arrived at university, I immediately found a copy, and g…

I think Metaweb is the only big name currently betting itself on the Semantic Web, though in a way that might let it route around some of the problems. For most other startups, the…