lbarrow

17 ms·

121.
by lbarrow 12y ago
The author links to a much better critique of Pinker by Nassim Taleb. The basic idea is that Pinker uses data about very thin-tailed processes, like street crime, to make inferences about very fat-tailed processes, like casualties in war.
122.
by lbarrow 12y ago
This article is a bit over the top and has a lot of non-sequitors, but the statistical critique of Pinker's book by Nassim Taleb the author linked to is excellent: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
123.
by lbarrow 12y ago
I don't think security is produced by picking one language or another, but I do believe that it's harder to write secure code in a language like C than a language like Java or Rust. There are simply way, way more ways to shoot you
124.
PayPal acquires Paydiant(paypal-community.com)
3 points by lbarrow 12y ago|0 comments
125.
by lbarrow 12y ago
How was her life ruined? She lost her job, then got a new one. Her life seems fine.
126.
by lbarrow 12y ago
The author sums up his attitude in one of the first sentences: "I’m not a languages person (C will do, thanks)". Go is not C, and it's not going to be like C. It's not really reasonable to expect it to have the same tool
127.
by lbarrow 12y ago
Does anyone actually ask this sort of thing in an interview anymore? (I don't mean this as a knock on the repository, which looks very nice aside from the lack of tests.)
128.
Who is your type system for?(lionelbarrow.com)
6 points by lbarrow 12y ago|0 comments
129.
by lbarrow 12y ago
I'm an engineer at Braintree. Speaking only for myself, I don't see a conflict of interest between us and PayPal. PayPal has embraced our APIs and approach to support as the future of how merchants will integrate with PayPal, and
130.
by lbarrow 12y ago
The 20% figure quoted is describing an earlier deal that eBay considered and rejected.
131.
by lbarrow 12y ago
We already have those problems -- how will legalizing pot make them worse?
132.
by lbarrow 12y ago
Aphyr is truly amazing. This series of blog posts has introduced me to a rigorous, careful way of thinking about distributing systems. I'm a much, much better developer for having read his blog. How many people can you really say that
133.
by lbarrow 12y ago
I'm super pumped about this -- I plan to spend the weekend upgrading a graceful shutdown server I maintain to use it. https://github.com/braintree/manners
134.
by lbarrow 12y ago
Yea, I went back and forth on making sort of "effectiveness" into its own category. I think it makes more sense to think of overall effectiveness as the combination of the other three categories rather than its own independent thi
135.
How To Talk About Programming Languages(lionelbarrow.com)
6 points by lbarrow 12y ago|2 comments
136.
by lbarrow 12y ago
Your job sounds terrible. I would get out.
137.
by lbarrow 12y ago
Great article. The checklist bit speaks to me in particular. I once worked on a team that was responsible for maintaining a medium-sized legacy application. After one-too-many failed deploys, we instituted a pre-deployment checklist. The ch
138.
by lbarrow 12y ago
Don't post stuff from job boards.
139.
by lbarrow 12y ago
Braintree -- Chicago, San Francisco. We'll pay for relocation. We're hiring software and production engineers of all skill levels. Braintree makes awesome payments APIs for developers. You've almost certainly used our product
140.
by lbarrow 12y ago
It's an investor relations-ey site.
141.
by lbarrow 12y ago
This is clearly broken. You can't go back beyond the first part of the page you looked at. It doesn't work.
142.
by lbarrow 12y ago
No, you absolutely don't need to start with C. You need to learn C (or some equivalently low-level language) eventually .
143.
by lbarrow 12y ago
This is like saying that when teaching people how to cook, you should start with chemistry lessons. Sure, at some point you have to have some understanding of chemistry in cooking, but does that really mean you have to start out there? Yes,
144.
by lbarrow 12y ago
I worked with rvb closely last year and we always used to make fun of him whenever this debate came up. Then one day we realized he had co-authored a paper with Eric Brewer on the topic: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/ev
145.
by lbarrow 12y ago
Virtually all banks run on batched FTP processes. This isn't unique to ACH at all.
146.
by lbarrow 12y ago
I think it's more "We didn't do anything illegal, but we're still firing one of our founders, so clearly something was wrong ."
147.
by lbarrow 13y ago
The more I read about Rust, the more excited I am about it. When I wrote the great-grandparent comment I had Rust in mind.
148.
by lbarrow 13y ago
It's super cool to see the power of advanced static analysis these days. Props to the Coverity team for using the Heartbleed trainwreck to motivate new research on these problems. That said, are there other ways to fix this class of pr
149.
Chicago Crime Rates(chicagomag.com)
2 points by lbarrow 13y ago|0 comments
150.
by lbarrow 13y ago
Fantastic! I particularly like encoding the state in the URL - makes it very easy to share good designs you've built.

More ›