alexdowad

7 ms·

31.
by alexdowad 3y ago
Take a game show host who lets you choose a door, randomly reveals what is behind one other door, and then gives you an opportunity to change your choice. This game show host CAN (randomly) reveal the prize; he has equal probability of reve
32.
by alexdowad 3y ago
That's absolutely right; further, if you explicitly model the behavior of the game show host, you can exhibit models under which "it's better to switch" and models under which "it doesn't matter if you switch o
33.
by alexdowad 3y ago
Did you get that phrase backwards? It's hard for me to see how [2] could be interpreted as being about "physicists with a contempt for mathematics"; it's actually about mathematicians with a contempt for physics. Vladimi
34.
by alexdowad 3y ago
Well, maybe they don't use Stripe for payment processing?
35.
by alexdowad 3y ago
I have had single-drive btrfs filesystems lock up on me twice; i.e. file manipulation commands like `ls` freeze and "take forever". In both cases, there was a hardware failure of the drive. I believe that the frozen processes went
36.
by alexdowad 3y ago
In the comments, swannodette promised a response blog post to this one. Here it is: https://swannodette.github.io/2013/03/09/logic-programming-i...
37.
by alexdowad 4y ago
A couple thoughts based on my own 25 years of building software: • Working with many new tools and technologies on the same project is dangerous. There is a significant risk of running into too many unexpected issues with your tools, gettin
38.
by alexdowad 4y ago
Awesome stuff! I love it!
39.
by alexdowad 4y ago
This is hilarious. I would love to see a transcript of sample API calls and responses. Can anyone post one? Perhaps even contribute one to the project via GH PR?
40.
by alexdowad 4y ago
Nice! It sounds like you would do well to capture the debug output if a request handler takes an unusually long time to return (not just if an uncaught exception occurs).
41.
by alexdowad 4y ago
Good point! Log levels are pretty useless most of the time. I would add that there can be value in having 2 log levels: verbose and non-verbose. It is helpful if you can selectively switch on verbose logging by user or by API endpoint. In
42.
by alexdowad 4y ago
What browser do you use? How do you create shortcuts which can be accessed by typing in the address bar?
43.
by alexdowad 4y ago
This is what I did. Started with one small contract job on Upwork at a modest hourly rate. Then I raised my rate a bit for the 2nd contract, raised it a bit more for the 3rd contract, and so forth. In the process of doing these contract job
44.
by alexdowad 4y ago
The Art of Probability by Richard Hamming.
45.
by alexdowad 4y ago
If you want to know JS deeply, I think reading the EcmaScript language specification is a very good step. I've read through it before; it's quite long but not overly difficult reading. Studying the source code for a JS implementat
46.
by alexdowad 4y ago
Re-reading the comment as a whole might help to correct this "strawman" interpretation, but anyways, here is some clarification: In today's world of software development, many take it as given that every software library shou
47.
by alexdowad 4y ago
> What happens if the project is abandoned after you chose to rely on it? If the project already had the features you need, was thoroughly tested and debugged, and was built with almost no dependencies (only relying on a small number of
48.
by alexdowad 4y ago
Try 'strace git blah', it will be educational.
49.
by alexdowad 4y ago
There is a huge amount of "legacy" software out there and a huge amount of software dev work involves maintaining it. This is as it should be. It means that the software which people have already created is working and generating
50.
by alexdowad 4y ago
Good points. Further, a codebase which has survived for a significant period of time is probably one which has created (and is creating) a lot of value for people. If it didn't do anything valuable or useful, it would already have been
51.
by alexdowad 4y ago
Aside from the (good) comments made by others: - Before you can reliably modify any program, you absolutely must get to understand how and why it works. This is always challenging for a sizable program, but when its complexity has not been
52.
by alexdowad 4y ago
The natural tendency in almost any software is to keep adding and adding, while rarely throwing anything out. More features, more code, more supported platforms, more supported languages, more this, more that, more, more, more. If it was a
53.
by alexdowad 4y ago
When I saw the title, I first thought this article had something to do with the intersection of computational science and inner-city street gangs.
54.
by alexdowad 4y ago
MDN for the JavaScript language and standard browser APIs.
55.
by alexdowad 4y ago
As a suggestion, why not peek at the source code for git and see what they are doing differently from you?
56.
by alexdowad 4y ago
I've used GraphQL professionally and felt it was great... if it matches your use case. Basically, if your data comprises various different types of entities which relate to each other, and clients are likely to want to pull back data o
57.
by alexdowad 4y ago
I would suggest that GraphQL queries wrapped in quotes aren't bad. I personally don't see the point of using GraphQL client libraries at all. If you interpolate parameters into your query, then there are yucky quoting issues, but
58.
by alexdowad 4y ago
There is a manga series based on the history of the "kaiten", called "Tokkou no Shima" (特攻の島), which is pretty good. It depicts the commander of a kaiten-bearing submarine as lying to his superiors and reporting that eac
59.
by alexdowad 4y ago
Here's another approach for situations which fall in the middle: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/committing-changes-...
60.
by alexdowad 4y ago
If the code which is eventually merged is mostly the contributor's code, and you just had to do some small tweaks to get it up to the project's standard, then commit and merge it under their name. If the changes are so major that

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