akeefer

12 ms·

61.
by akeefer 15y ago
Of course he has to care about the haters if they leave negative reviews of his apps: negative reviews will directly hurt future sales. If people see the free app with a bunch of negative reviews, that can harm the overall brand, even if
62.
by akeefer 15y ago
Yes, it's a good idea to do that. They said that passwords were compromised; I'm really hoping that was a simplification and they really meant to say that "individually salted, hashed passwords have been stolen" but they didn't add that qu
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by akeefer 15y ago
The problem is precisely that it's too difficult for grassroots volunteer groups to put measures on the ballot, while at the same time being too easy for well-funded private interests to get things on the ballot, which has resulted in the c
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by akeefer 15y ago
As was already pointed out elsewhere, using per-capita $ numbers instead of percentage-of-GDP is fairly misleading, and if you use percentage-of-GDP it's more like 19th for California; I didn't feel the need to point that out again. So Cal
65.
by akeefer 15y ago
>>> "So California's problems are not because of direct democracy." Saying someone else's arguments for X aren't good isn't the same as making an argument for not X, and you've totally failed to do that. There have historically
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by akeefer 16y ago
I'd also say that the hardest part isn't the parsing itself per se, it's error reporting and recovery. Showing parse errors as someone types in an IDE, for example, requires an order of magnitude more sophistication than simply handling va
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by akeefer 16y ago
Python as a language does not lend itself to the same syntatic abuses as either Scala or C++ (or, for that matter, Perl). While you can certainly do some sketchy things, there's a pretty strong Python tradition of there being one standard
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by akeefer 16y ago
Note that by using a technique known as escape analysis, a virtual machine like the JVM can detect that the lifetime of an object is such that it doesn't leave the context of a particular method and then stack-allocate the object implicitly
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by akeefer 16y ago
As could all of ours . . . however, many of us in the enterprise space don't have much choice as to the form of data we have to consume from outside services, so the point of making good low-friction tools part of the language (with no code
70.
by akeefer 16y ago
Guidewire Software - San Mateo, CA (mid-peninsula in the Bay Area, for non-natives) We do core systems for insurance companies. No longer a startup (we're about 9 years old), but still privately held and doing very well financially. The co
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by akeefer 16y ago
I did my BA in philosophy (focusing mainly on ethics and political philosophy) and my MS in computer science, and I personally found the mix to work incredibly well, though not in the obvious way many people expect (which tends to be around
72.
by akeefer 16y ago
For what it's worth, the main points of the article are fairly similar to our reasoning behind the Gosu language's design: type inference helps alleviate a lot (not all, but a lot) of the pain of having to write type annotations in languag
73.
by akeefer 16y ago
There are lots of relatively coherent arguments already floating around the interweb around why composition is generally preferable to inheritance when it comes to code reuse; lots of people have strong feelings both ways. I should point ou
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by akeefer 16y ago
San Mateo, CA Guidewire Software - We do software for the P&C insurance industry, but we build a lot of cool stuff to let us build those systems (like the Gosu programming language, http://gosu-lang.org ). We need people both to work
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by akeefer 16y ago
I enjoy clever ways of approaching problems as much as the next guy, but I would never ding someone in an interview for not coming up with a clever-enough solution. Good software engineering is maybe 99.7% failure-avoidance and 0.3% clever
76.
by akeefer 16y ago
There is, however, now a company called Numenta that's working on AI using structures they call Hierarchical Temporal Memory that are, in fact, based on trying to model the sort of structures actually found in the brain. http://www.numenta
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by akeefer 16y ago
Talk to Cliff Click (or sift through his blog http://www.azulsystems.com/blogs/cliff ) and he will quickly disabuse you of the notion that having bytecode instructions in a processor is a good idea. For optimal performance you want a gene
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Why Gosu? Creating a better least common denominator language(guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com)
2 points by akeefer 16y ago|0 comments
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by akeefer 16y ago
That's kind of one of our explicit design goals with Gosu, honestly: we're not trying to set the world on fire with something no one's ever seen before, but we are trying to make sure that eventually we have a language that is A) has the "
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by akeefer 16y ago
Funny you mention that; the original syntax was actually based on ECMAScript, so the syntactic similarities with ActionScript are not accidental.
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by akeefer 16y ago
We don't work around Java type erasure: if you create some object in Java and pass it off to Gosu, then that information is lost. For Gosu classes that are reified, we actually store the type parameter on the object itself, and it becomes
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by akeefer 16y ago
Indeed . . . to be fair, back when we decided to rename the language internally, we looked for any existing projects using the name, and we actually contacted the Gosu library guys to make sure they didn't mind us using the name Gosu for ou
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by akeefer 16y ago
They're both important; beware of trusting the decision making of anyone who suggests otherwise. Rational analyses are almost always by necessity incomplete. There will always be assumptions we think are true that turn out to be false, fa
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by akeefer 16y ago
No, it's based on their extensive analysis of the cases and all documentation associated with those cases that tries to discern if there are even mere allegations by the plaintiff that the patent infringement was due to any manner of copy
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by akeefer 16y ago
This research doesn't tell you much concretely about the benefits of the patent system that might be lost in any potential reform, but it certainly says something about the costs that it imposes right now: clearly lots of people get su
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by akeefer 16y ago
Exactly. Funny story there . . . we started our JVM language as interpreted, more or less, and ended up having to write our own not-so-great debugger for it. We decided to compile it down to native java bytecode precisely so we could take
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by akeefer 16y ago
Indeed, it's the overall "experience" (for lack of a better word) of programming in a particular language that matters. That's influenced by not just the syntax and structure of a language but also by all of the development tools, librarie
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by akeefer 16y ago
One of the first things you will find out, if you attempt to write a new programming language and then use it for actual production work, is how much users of that language will miss simple, taken-for-granted things like debuggers. Creating
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by akeefer 16y ago
For anyone in the Bay Area that wants to play around with an Arduino, Mitch Altman runs fairly regular workshops (every few months) at Noisebridge up in San Francisco. ( https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge )
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by akeefer 16y ago
One common technique used by agile methodologies (yes, I know that word has a ton of baggage) is to estimate in terms of story points rather than actual hours, days, etc. You start out thinking of a point as "one ideal day of uninterrupted

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