srean

Reminded me of Goldberg's classic: What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic [ http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html ]. If one wants a Goldberg lite an…

Natural language is hardly appropriate for things that we use computers for, primarily because of its inherent ambiguity. Its not a language for expressing algorithms, which is precisely what one uses…

Perhaps because of legal issues, particularly when Google is being sued for tweaking its ranking algorithm to boost their own pages higher. I dont understand the legalities of that lawsuit though. A r…

Thanks, that was helpful. Ideally I would like a book but lacking that these should do. I was aware of the first two but not the third.

I have been spoiled by the K&R tradition of programming books and this has made it hard for me to pick up R. When I want to pick up a language from a book what I look for in the very first place i…

From the docs: Case is insignificant in Nimrod and even underscores are ignored: This_is_an_identifier and ThisIsAnIdentifier are the same identifier. This feature enables you to use other pe…

Some older comments are here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606892

There's more to the suicides than microcredit. I commented on some here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2055046

Not all of farmer suicides in India is micro-credit related. There are many other forces in play, for example bad and corrupt policies. You would find it surprising that the worst hit states are those…

My friends explain that my humor is dry and unfunny.

In winter that would be a resounding yes. For all things such as metallic elevator buttons, metallic doors...... Hate getting spiked by static. I don't know why I get an unfair dose of those as compar…

A few odd couple short of 20 years ago, but nevertheless, Linux was a new wonder to me. Red Hat CDs came packaged with issues of a computer magazine. This was in India. 7 KB/sec was fast, and it laste…

Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what you asked for. But if you are interested in similar mentions in print http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=monad%2CHaskell&#... …

Wouldnt that be just "conductive" ? For the usual metals resistance does go down with temperature, but they wouldnt hit zero at zero K. p.s. I am aware that the article talks about O C and not 0 K.

My beef against testing is that I often see it adopted (and often subtly pushed) as an alternative to thinking through the logic carefully -- Why mess with the if statements, my tests will catch the e…

It probably makes the market efficient even at a resolution of sub-second intervals. But what societal benefits accrue from that is not clear to me.

I am a scheme neophyte. In my personal experience it has been a very thought compressible language. By that, what I mean is this: if you give more thought to a program one tends to be able to say mo…

because all types are really (or <x> null). Did you miss a word there ? It happens to me all the time.

I upvoted you for confirming my hunch. But not sure why it did not get added.

I am extrapolating from experiences with a tibetan mastiff and a bull terrier. I think dogs in this family are less temperamental and less snappy.They do have a lot of aggression for other dogs or ani…

I am really impressed by the level of activity in the Guile source tree. A lot has happened over the last few years. I came back to Guile 1.9 from Guile 1.6 and the difference in speed was significant…

You guessed correctly about my college. What I found fascinating was the difference in aggression level of the same species at different times of the year. The speed of their strike also blew me away.…