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vadman | 9 years ago | on: I tried Haskell for 5 years

Why? The author didn't crap nor fawn all over the language. He highlighted what he thought were important quirks of the Haskell ecosystem/community/whatever, in a measured manner, while noting that if you invest time and effort you can indeed produce relevant output.

Should one dive in given those quirks? The decision is up to the reader.

Curious, what did you expect/wish for?

EDITED for better phrasing.

vadman | 10 years ago | on: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

But the within-audible-range-"beat" at the recorded "listening position" (where the microphones are located) would be recorded anyway, no?[1] So how does hi-res audio help in this case?

[1] AFAIK most music is not recorded like that, instruments are recorded separately and then overlaid; but then adding realistic-sounding "beats" based on whatever positioning the sound engineer envisions should be possible in software?

vadman | 10 years ago | on: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

One thing baffles me. If parents knew (there is security camera footage) that their child was run over several times because some asshole made a RATIONAL choice; and then said parents hired a bunch of guys to disappear the asshole, suddenly the expected penalty would change, and so would the rational choice. (There probably wouldn't be much of an investigation, either.) So why aren't they doing it? If the government can't/won't set the proper incentives for the assholes not to murder, why can't the people do it themselves? Desperate times call for desperate measures...

ADDENDUM: admittedly my comment above is emotional. Obviously not every accident ends in the driver running over the victim several times. But from the article and from some of the comments, I got an impression that these cases are not THAT unusual, and it's not just a case of a Western newspaper publishing a sensationalist Sinophobic article.

vadman | 10 years ago | on: The Software Engineer’s Guide to Negotiating a Raise

I brought up the topic of raise with one of my previous bosses, and he promised to check with the higher-ups.

Some time later, he honestly told me: "The only way they would give you a raise is to prevent you from leaving. At that point, if you already went through the trouble of getting another offer, you might as well leave." Several months later, I did. Money wasn't the only factor -- the big new project I was hired for got finished -- but it was a major one, they were underpaying me pretty badly.

vadman | 10 years ago | on: How China's one-child policy has backfired on men

Research/creative work is difficult to automate, and it seems that only a smallish percentage of population excels at it. Small population -> falling behind in those areas, unless the Japanese somehow revolutionize their education system.

vadman | 11 years ago | on: Testosterone is the drug of the future

"The body doesn't care where it gets its chemicals from"

Sometimes it does, or maybe the supplements are not formulated quite right. E.g. I saw this at LessWrong: "turns out that fish oil pills suck, and you’d need to take approximately 9 times as much to have the same effect as eating fish, at which point they’d have dangerous blood thinning effects." Link to the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12848287

vadman | 11 years ago | on: Google to close engineering office in Russia

Your country was of enormous help to Hitler while attacking the USSR, and the retribution you had to "endure", given everything you did, was astonishingly mild. So spare me your complaints.
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