cia_plant

7 ms·

1.
by cia_plant 13y ago
From the magazine of things that totally happened
2.
by cia_plant 13y ago
No, actually, Java is a really bad language. It has a very complicated type system, but doesn't even allow you to express things like function composition or generic sums at the language level. Its syntax is stunningly verbose (e.g., n
3.
by cia_plant 13y ago
I think the majority of programmers are very conservative about language, they use whatever they already know, be it Java, C#, C++, ruby, etc. A minority are more fashion-driven - if something seems like the hot new trend they'll jump
4.
by cia_plant 13y ago
Right ... websites with tests and a staging environment never experience downtime.
5.
by cia_plant 13y ago
What's up with the cliff anyway? You're already asking me to take a much higher level of risk and a much lower level of liquidity than I'd like in my compensation, by giving me stock options. In addition to that you want me t
6.
by cia_plant 13y ago
No, I'm simply stating the fact that there are type systems capable of encoding assertions.
7.
by cia_plant 13y ago
All unit test assertions can be caught by a type checker.
8.
by cia_plant 13y ago
line height is straightforward enough, if you draw text with line height on N then you should move N pixels down for the next line. Text baseline is the tricky part - if you want to e.g. put a taller piece of text next to a shorter one, the
9.
by cia_plant 13y ago
When you're tying your square wheels together into a big circle so they turn better, it's time to start reinventing.
10.
by cia_plant 13y ago
I've written text wrapping and responsiveness code for canvas, in javascript - I don't think the complexity is even of the same order of magnitude as React or Angular.
11.
by cia_plant 13y ago
If you want to do immediate mode, then why would you use the DOM at all? Canvas is supported in IE9+, and is much less complicated for such applications.
12.
by cia_plant 13y ago
There are cases where the viewpoint "Of course one side is always right and the other isn't", has been entirely correct. For example, there was real controversy for decades over the idea that cigarettes caused cancer, that se
13.
by cia_plant 13y ago
You seem to think that an organized political group being pretty consistently wrong is a reductio ad adsurdum...?
14.
by cia_plant 13y ago
The person you're replying to never said they had no reason to be protesting, only that the google buses benefit the city, employees, and environment. This leaves an enormous number of reasons. For example, "Buses are, in reality,
15.
by cia_plant 13y ago
Assuming that everyone has a reasonable point, is also a bias. There are protests over gay marriage and "get the government out of medicare" and all kinds of ridiculous things.
16.
by cia_plant 13y ago
asm.js doesn't do fancy 1970 stuff like threads, and can't do them unless it breaks backwards compatibility, which is its one technical advantage.
17.
by cia_plant 13y ago
I clicked the comment link for this story just to see how HN readers would make this simple feel-good story into some cynical circle-jerk. Was not disappointed.
18.
by cia_plant 13y ago
How many layers of indirection can we put between the developer and the machine?
19.
by cia_plant 13y ago
PNaCl has been in development for a while, I'm having trouble understanding just what is being announced here. Is PNaCl now enabled by default in Chrome? I also hadn't seen pepper.js before, is that new?
20.
by cia_plant 13y ago
I guess that was obscure - I meant it selects for the candidates with few other options, i.e. a weak resume.
21.
by cia_plant 13y ago
A one-week trial run seems like a very bad idea to me. I wouldn't even consider going through such a long interview process. It's basically a low-pass filter on your candidate pool - maybe that's the goal?
22.
by cia_plant 13y ago
Yeah, definitely just more propaganda from "Big Haskell IDE".
23.
by cia_plant 13y ago
"Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" is among the best papers I've ever read, many other great pieces here as well.
24.
by cia_plant 13y ago
The economist is further left than throwback traditionalist movements like Islamism or the US Evangelical Right, on the rightward side of the consensus liberal-democratic center, certainly right of socialist movements. It uses a sort of hig
25.
by cia_plant 13y ago
What about, say, Isaac Newton? He invented calculus, but did not share the discovery for years, until after he'd used it to work out an entire theory of physics. He hardly collaborated with others and his ideas can hardly be considered
26.
by cia_plant 13y ago
That is not, strictly speaking, an observation but a supposition. An observation is something that you see in reality, and this experiment has not been tried in reality as far as I know (if you've observed such an experiment, I and I&#
27.
by cia_plant 13y ago
Yeah, I'm not saying that Angular literally replaces javascript "if" syntax with SGML syntax. However, it does fit in with a long line of tools whose premise is "Normal programming with normal control flow is an insuffic
28.
by cia_plant 13y ago
I work as a javascript programmer, so I'm trying to do my small part to stem the tide of crapware before it makes my job less pleasant (too late in the case of angular).
29.
by cia_plant 13y ago
Angular is yet another programming technology made by people who think that this: <span ng-switch="foo"> <span ng-switch-when="bar">...</span> <span ng-switch-default>...&lt
30.
by cia_plant 13y ago
Acqui-hires are basically, companies paying multiples of standard salary for exceptional programmers.

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