Periodic

67 ms·

601.
by Periodic 17y ago
I think the great majority of people wouldn't know real quality if you showed them an example side-by-side with the thing they know. I think we often use price queues to figure that out. And I think people have different needs at different
602.
by Periodic 17y ago
He talks in his analogy of people who haven't taken off in their go-cart and are discussing design issues, and the people who took off and are fixing things with duct tape. There's a big difference between what I would call a "duct tape pr
603.
by Periodic 17y ago
The code and the tests go together. You don't just make a pile of code, and a pile of tests, and hope they all go together right. You have some big tests that are general and test that all the components work together, but for each compone
604.
by Periodic 17y ago
I cannot place the source of this quote, but to paraphrase: Judge a language not by what it makes hard, but what it makes easy.
605.
by Periodic 17y ago
Play around with the Computer Language Benchmarks Game. It's good at showing what some of the trade-offs are. Of course, it's really not very scientific, but it gives you an idea. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ You'll usually see C
606.
by Periodic 17y ago
"Pleasant to use" is not benchmarkable, it is subjective. You can benchmark the speeds and figure out which one runs something faster, but it's very hard to quantify what languages are the most pleasant to develop in. Some people like OO,
607.
by Periodic 17y ago
When you get down to it, all the code really just ends up being machine code. Many popular languages now allow you to build interfaces to use the generic C libraries. This lets you do the complicated, high-level stuff in a language suited
608.
by Periodic 17y ago
I work at a large university with a fairly flat domain. This means just about every computer is is name.university.edu, and every computer needs a name for the central database. The hardest part about this naming is avoiding conflicts. M
609.
by Periodic 17y ago
Pokemon? Genius! Well defined, very large set, built-in ordering.
610.
by Periodic 17y ago
I find it fascinating how much reputation and emotions carry over between games if you play with the same group regularly, and also at the house rules that develop. For example, with my brothers and a few of their friends it is entirely exp
611.
by Periodic 17y ago
I think you're right that it's basically outlining. As a practice, it started for me when I first started working on writing some literate code. I would basically write a paragraph about what the function should do, then write up the funct
612.
by Periodic 17y ago
Last I checked we were still animals that are, as a population, driven by instinct. We do have at least one significant difference from other species in our intelligence/self-awareness, but I challenge you to find any significantly large (c
613.
by Periodic 17y ago
I think it is used more to predict how a system will respond to a change in resources. If you reduce the amount of resources available to a population, that population will shrink approximately proportionally (until there is enough for the
614.
by Periodic 17y ago
I believe a lot of this is just an attempt to make up for what the language lacks, in this case it lacks stronger scoping and typing systems. It would be a bit of a pain to create a SanitizedString type for a sanitized string that is only
615.
by Periodic 17y ago
When my understanding of the problem is incomplete, I like to go through and just write functions and data structures first. It builds the high-level structure of the program before I get bogged down by details, and its easier to change th
616.
by Periodic 17y ago
I'm pretty sure that quote is a bit old. It's definitely true that one of the largest problems facing computer science today is how to parallelize across cores/systems/networks. This problem may only be particularly hard because we're stil
617.
by Periodic 17y ago
Isn't it a law in ecology that a population will grow to the limit of its scarcest resource? In some countries that is food, in many modern societies now it seems to be time. We know that the population can't grow exponentially forever, bu
618.
by Periodic 17y ago
I'd like to know the methods for estimating this number. Malnutrition deaths, children that were able to be born because their parents felt secure enough to have another child, food-shortage violence deaths, there are many indirect factors
619.
by Periodic 17y ago
The whole point is that a single failure will not bring down the whole system. As it is right now, regularly no one will have twitter access. With a decentralized system you might lose specific people, or even a whole region or maybe even
620.
by Periodic 17y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this was where any success of the system comes from. Simply providing students with different ways to learn gives each of them the ability to pick and choose what they will learn best with.
621.
by Periodic 17y ago
Exactly. I don't think there is an equivalence between server code and client code. There are some things you just can't trust the client to do, so there will always have to be server code to do it. Whether that code is in a web server,
622.
by Periodic 17y ago
In this case it will just move into the database. You'll have to start writing procedures and rules in the database instead of in your web framework and only expose those instead having only trusted code interact with the DB.
623.
by Periodic 17y ago
I kept hoping the next paragraph would address this, but it didn't. It's cool and all, but it sounds like you're still going to basically need a server stack there to enforce permissions and some logic and consistency things. For example,
624.
by Periodic 17y ago
He stated that one of the biggest reasons he did the switch was because Linux allowed him more freedom in terms of platform, libraries, and tools, while his windows options were limited by his company to Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP x64
625.
by Periodic 17y ago
I think there's a honeymoon period with just about any new technology. It generally starts once you've switched to solve a problem and the new technology solves it well. At this point any faults or frustrations are generally just because
626.
by Periodic 17y ago
There are benefits and drawbacks to maintaining an API vs updating it. Switching every few months will alienate your developers, but making sure everything is 20 years backwards compatible will lead to strange errors (particularly because
627.
by Periodic 17y ago
Please, write it up and post it to HN! It deserves its own discussion.
628.
by Periodic 17y ago
The main savings people seem to get from cloud computing is by not paying for servers when you aren't using them. There are some economies of scale that the cloud vendors can take advantage of, but in general it seems like the administrati
629.
by Periodic 17y ago
But it can make it much faster. Video cards optimized for a lot of those video-related operations.
630.
by Periodic 17y ago
I've seen a few people hand wave around the costs of sys admins and claim that since they have a bunch of cloud-based systems they don't have to worry about it. Then a few days later they complain about getting the APIs to work and their c

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