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On the subject of foreign data wrappers, there's an extension for storing columnar data in Postgres which is implemented via this concept: https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw I…

I find that Haskell (both mine and that of others) involves a lot less pattern matching than ReasonML, since control flow is often expressed by type classes. Unfortunately, these a…

My examples were deliberately dumb, but I’ve certainly use this ability to pattern match at arbitrary depth innumerable times. It most commonly appears when looking at a tuple of N…

I just noticed that it was converting all of the &’s I typed into & escapes. Didn’t realize how much further it went.

Pattern matching goes significantly beyond checking “foo.type”. It adds the ability to specify exactly (as exact as the language and your data allows) what case you’re dealing with…

I think you have a very specific, and not widely shared, definition of “code as art.” Code as art does not mean code full of pointless Rube Goldberg mechanisms or following some es…

> Error: ENOENT, no such file or directory '~/foorc' I can’t count how many times I’ve seen error messages that look like this, often with no context at all, in JavaScript apps, ev…

Seems like there's plenty of CO2 to go around. What's the issue?

As a Chicago resident worried about the terrible air quality here, this gives me some hope that things can be improved if the political will can be mustered.

I think the problem is that no one was arguing that slavery per se makes a country rich. The argument was that it did in the case of the US.

First of all, I have heard and read from numerous sources that I trust that slavery played a huge role in the early American economy. But that on its own would be a simple factual …

Perhaps my choice of the term "direct" is overly specific, but I feel like this is a very nit-picky quibble. The underlying point I was trying to make doesn't change, which is that…

Not to be "that guy," but I think the real reason we'll never colonize Mars is simply that we're going to run out of time. Climate collapse and/or nuclear war will probably set in …

> If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich? I never made the claim that any country can become rich simply by having slavery. The question of why the West is so much …

America’s success was the direct result of ethnic cleansing of millions of Native Americans and the backbreaking labor of millions of slaves. The comparison is ridiculous. We were …

This project is very interesting and I think it’s great that this is being studied, but we already have a technology for reducing greenhouse gasses in trees and other plants. They …

I’m curious to what extent this is just innuendo and FUD, and how much there’s legitimate speculation (if there could be such a thing) as to Nadal and/or Federer doping. I’ve never…

> Just as natural languages derive directly from our needs to do things with, and communicate about, things in, and state of in the real world, such as running away from lions, att…

> In Rust 1.36.0, the HashMap implementation has been replaced with the one in the hashbrown crate which is based on the SwissTable design. While the interface is the same, the Has…

It doesn’t eliminate them entirely; it’s just very smart about allowing packages to be built exactly once, and having a deterministic output such that it can be determined before a…

Can you really do it in python with an arbitrary function? What if your function takes a dictionary, set, or some other unhashable type as an argument?

I wish Haskell had better syntax for records, but to be honest it’s very rare that it actually presents a real issue in practical code that I write. Sure, it can be a bit awkward t…

Try using nix instead. Aside from being a fantastic package manager for many languages it’s a godsend for Haskell. The lengthy compilation times with Haskell are one of the not so …

“as much as I love China and can understand their politics due to the size of their country” The size of China is not the source of their politics; the source is a totalitarian sta…

Conflicts which the military industrial complex has no interest in us ever getting out of, as recent events in Yemen demonstrate. Not to mention what's looming on the horizon in Ve…