ankrgyl

21 ms·

121.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
> If you change the interface, it creates problems (e.g. unit testing gives you confidence to refactor, but if you change interfaces, you also have to change the tests...). Could you elaborate on this point? If you change the behavior o
122.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
This article confuses the reader with a weird implicit definition of modularity. The miscommunication is rooted here: > Separate compilation allows you to compile parts of a program separately from other parts. I would say it was a nece
123.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Yesod is actually backed by Warp, a webserver that is significantly faster than snap: http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2011/2/warp-speed-ahead The code for the benchmarks can be found here: https://github.com/snoyberg/benchmarks
124.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Additionally, an article on HN earlier today pointed out that Amazon had to spend a lot of money investing in infrastructure, whereas the only similar thing Groupon has done is assemble a "phone book" of interested businesses and consumers.
125.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Your analysis of Tornado is unfair. It offers easy ways to throw specific HTTPErrors, and those are handled exactly as they should be. If you throw an exception that Tornado doesn't know about, then it simply by default notifies the user th
126.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
I learned a lot of SML in college, and it is really a great language. In my opinion it has the best syntax and REPL of any language I've used. But Haskell has a much better chance of becoming main stream. The type classes allow things like
127.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
His arguments about the existing functional languages can be roughly split into two categories: 1.) Languages refuse to make compromises and therefore are obscure (Haskell, Erlang) 2.) Languages are crippled by making too many
128.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
To clarify, my definition of hacking is inspired by this http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
129.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
I think your definition of "hack" is confusing with respect to this forum. Hackers are people who understand the system so well that they can manipulate it to their advantage. Good hackers have done things the hard way and use those experie
130.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
No, and that's why they still provide the RSS feed. My point is that in the immediate future, companies like FB, Twitter, and NY Times will experiment with APIs that provide richer functionality than RSS. Hopefully within a relatively short
131.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Good point. The reason I didn't bring that up is that the comments suggest that if-modified-since isn't universally adopted by RSS publishers.
132.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
A common "general" application of RSS is news, but this will hopefully be slowly phased out as well. The New York Times offers an awesome API ( http://developer.nytimes.com/ ) which gives you a much better view of their data than their RSS
133.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
If you read about FriendFeed's Simple Update Protocol ( http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/08/simple-update-protocol-fe... ), you'll find some good arguments about why RSS slow. The crux of the problem is that to get any updates on a feed, y
134.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
I don't think getting you to visit their site is the point of the switch. Twitter and FB are in a position where they have enough addicted users that they can get away with messing with standards. RSS is outdated and slow, and FB and Twitte
135.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
This is super interesting. RSS has gotten really slow and bad, and a few years ago FriendFeed started to push for improvements with the Simple Update Protocol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Update_Protocol ). The world should move to
136.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Remember that modern implementations of kernel threads are designed to be general-purpose. So, while a threaded model would solve the problems, it also incurs necessary overhead (that works towards solving irrelevant problems). The event-dr
137.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
I don't think of this as a problem. Tornado is just a small and lightweight non-blocking HTTP server with a couple of convenient libraries. There are some pretty awesome, elegant solutions to the problem you point out, and I like to think o
138.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Yes, they of course involve the OS, but are much lighter than overhead from spawning a thread. Furthermore, what's the point in considering bad OS implementations? Linux is free and does a good enough job, so that should be the baseline for
139.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Even with Python (CGI backed by Apache), you can scale with threads. The issue of scaling with threads vs. events is a pretty hot debate, and I think the author sets up this kind of criticism by addressing it poorly. Personally, I fall into
140.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
The Python RPC libraries seem to rely on Twisted. Does it support generic code generation to fill in your own RPC implementation?
141.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Thrift's RPC is (optionally) built on top of HTTP, but provides support for custom typesafe (kind-of) data structures and the conveniences of RPC. If you're sending data that's more complex than a single homogenous type, then delivering a s
142.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
That's a good point, but I think by "most popular" the author was referring to popularity in the hacker/startup community. One could make a similar argument about operating systems ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_
143.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
Unfortunately, Thrift RPC is a pain in the butt for Python, especially if you want to code with Tornado ( http://www.tornadoweb.org/ ). The Thrift-generated code necessitates either using Twisted ( http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ ) or writin
144.
by ankrgyl 15y ago
The serialization/deserialization times are dramatically different for Python. Thrift has an accelerated binary serializer written in C with Python bindings, while Protobuf's is pure Python. While there exist third party C++ wrappers for