notabel

5 ms·

1.
by notabel 19y ago
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, with just a thin layer of primitives in the RTS. Interesti
2.
by notabel 19y ago
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. :-)
3.
by notabel 19y ago
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 reduction that happens in Haskell. (NB: Unless I'm wrong. I've
4.
by notabel 19y ago
Well, given that I'm on the second floor of Marston, I'd probably find out what the view from the roof is. :-)
5.
by notabel 19y ago
I've always taken this to be a feature, to promote development of comment threads beyond just the first few.
6.
by notabel 19y ago
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 would be Hundred Year Lisp!
7.
by notabel 19y ago
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 "ycombinator". I also have my email here set to a subaddress, which is
8.
by notabel 19y ago
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 develop the intellectual and moral powers generally." The dist
9.
by notabel 19y ago
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 you are competent over a certain domain of facts, but ra
10.
by notabel 19y ago
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 heavily).
11.
by notabel 19y ago
I had a Logo class in 4th grade (10yrs), which led me to Scheme the next year. So, yes, it does happen.
12.
by notabel 19y ago
It's only tangentially relevant and reads like spam.
13.
by notabel 19y ago
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 there is any logic to deal with confounding variables--for in
14.
by notabel 19y ago
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 your time, create something to grade. That's crap, it sho
15.
by notabel 19y ago
[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 tech. Tech moves too fast. We need to fix the school systems
16.
by notabel 19y ago
"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 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to one of the early p
17.
by notabel 19y ago
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 senior English or Latin classes: the only "assignments" w
18.
by notabel 19y ago
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 interaction between students and teachers, convivial debate rathe
19.
by notabel 19y ago
Bah! The grahambot would obviously have squishy actuators for dynamic balancing! None of this stiff-jointed ZMP crap! [Anybots++]
20.
by notabel 19y ago
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 activity, but that internal safeguards prevent most of it f
21.
by notabel 20y ago
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.us, which is links, only links, nothing but links), withou
22.
by notabel 20y ago
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 with any real meaning; just discuss potentialities, grand s
23.
by notabel 20y ago
"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 design are my areas), so to read a book that validated and su
24.
by notabel 20y ago
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 greatly appreciated it (not to say I agreed with every point)
25.
by notabel 20y ago
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 semantic web is a possible benefit, but not a necessity.
26.
by notabel 20y ago
I have to wonder if the stream will expose any inadvertent goodies, like the photoset did. (I'm thinking of the pic of Justin talking to someone, with a justin.tv alpha test login clearly visible on the white board. I didn't try it, but it
27.
by notabel 20y ago
Firefox isn't going anywhere. Even if Apollo catches on like nothing since C, it wouldn't kill Firefox; the user still needs a browser. Yes, FF supports rich application development in XUL, and yes, Apollo might compete with that somewhat,
28.
by notabel 20y ago
The implementation here is really the amazing part; the basic data-vis tool is pretty simple (I wrote a much uglier variant in Mathematica, inspired by a proprietary stats app), but if they can/will expose this via a clean, open API, then t
29.
by notabel 20y ago
Quantitatively and predictively, no. You can only look at the outcomes from YC-funded companies, see to what extent they beat the curve. Of course, you still have to sort out the potentially higher quality of YC fundees to begin with. It
30.
by notabel 20y ago
Shooting in the dark, I'd say one big difference is the focus on the founders, rather than just throwing money in and hoping for something valuable to pop out. You can see that in the YC application--very different from a request for a bus

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