mattdw

9 ms·

31.
by mattdw 11y ago
New Zealand's TradeMe auction site just automatically delays the expiry by 2 minutes every time there's a bid within the last 2 minutes of the auction. The auction is not over until 2 minutes has passed with no further bids.
32.
by mattdw 11y ago
It used to live right at the top. Presumably Apple's is now the one most people are looking for.
33.
by mattdw 11y ago
Do signed types not also "break trivial math" like that, just at a different boundary? Genuine question. (The 0 boundary is obviously going to be more commonly hit than the 2^32 boundary, but nonetheless.)
34.
by mattdw 11y ago
Unfortunately the law provides no exemptions for media, or against public figures, and truth is no defense. All that is required is that you caused harm and it is found that you intended to. So for example, exposing the corruption of a poli
35.
by mattdw 11y ago
Swift is still (and will always be) automatically reference counted. Rust lets you closer to the metal. Rust also has much stronger safety guarantees – it's pretty easy to write Swift crashers that would just never compile in Rust. Tha
36.
by mattdw 11y ago
In the browser, Javascript (outside of webworkers) is single-threaded, and while running it blocks the browser run-loop (for the given webpage.) This means the page can't accept or respond to any incoming events. It's "blocke
37.
by mattdw 11y ago
In my experience, in the wide world of programming languages Rust and Swift are really not very far apart. Swift's designers even cited Rust as an influence.
38.
by mattdw 12y ago
It's JSON lists as s-exps, which means (as I understand it) that the author doesn't need to implement parsing, only traversal and evaluation. (Which can essentially be a big-ass case statement.) ["def", "foo&q
39.
by mattdw 12y ago
My first suggestion is to forget what you see on HN; it's totally not representative of most of the world's IT work. Excel VBA and legacy business systems and nasty abandoned PHP and shitty Java monoliths are way more common out
40.
by mattdw 12y ago
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood Any of Ursula K Le Guin's books, but particularly The Left Hand of Tomorrow. Ancillary Justice. Anything by Peter Watts or Iain M Banks.
41.
by mattdw 12y ago
There's a case currently in front of the employment courts here in NZ which is confronting this directly. A group of aged-care nurses (working in retirement homes etc.) have made a claim to the employment court that (a) it's a fem
42.
by mattdw 12y ago
Humans tended to hunt animals to exhaustion. The sprinting predators you're talking about stalk in close then sprint to take down their prey; groups of hunter-gatherer humans have instead tended to chase animals a long distance at mode
43.
by mattdw 12y ago
Or, to put it another way, the design process happened in the open, and you got to see some perfectly normal things that just wouldn't usually be visible to you. (And even have some input into them, if you were so inclined.) I don&#x27
44.
by mattdw 12y ago
They have obviously changed the copy in the last few hours. The second half of that sentence ("Using…") was not there earlier.
45.
by mattdw 12y ago
I'm not saying that I wish that it were true, or that I think it's a good thing. I agree that it's daft. But over the short term, pillaging societies appear to beat conserving ones. And it's a fact that we do seem to be
46.
by mattdw 12y ago
Perhaps, though, computing resources are priced artificially low due to externalities (e.g. third world wage inequality, environmental impact not paid for), and perhaps a sane long-term approach would find a different balance between progra
47.
by mattdw 12y ago
Maximising deprives others of the resource, optimising doesn't. I think that's the point being made. An economy that first maximised, then second optimised, would beat an economy that first optimised, then second maximised, becaus
48.
by mattdw 12y ago
Devs and designers are now (more so than ever) different sets of people, and designers are now calling the shots in most places. I'm a web dev, I know that ajax loading sucks, that without enough budget to do it right (and we never hav
49.
by mattdw 12y ago
I assume coroutines could be trivially implemented with sync_channel(0), which blocks the sender until the receiver takes the message. (And the receiver blocks until there is a message available.) The 'generator' use of coroutines
50.
by mattdw 12y ago
If your game is at all taxing in terms of performance, you may find that neither give you enough visibility into, or control over, allocations and garbage collection. I suspect particularly that ClojureScript (which would otherwise be my ch
51.
by mattdw 12y ago
It took me so long to figure out that "where is the monad?" was the wrong question. It took me even longer to grok that "monad" is essentially an interface/trait rather than a "type". I think your suggesti
52.
by mattdw 12y ago
My projects are generally quoted, so a lot of this is not always relevant to me (although they affect how I quote things), but, my thoughts: - Learning core software/skills is not billable. "Core" is "any decent dev in t
53.
by mattdw 12y ago
I guess I'm not suggesting you necessarily have to charge the survival rate, but it's worth knowing the absolute least you could charge and still survive. It's just a "zero" to calibrate your expectations against, s
54.
by mattdw 12y ago
Honestly, I'm not sure that anyone can answer this for you. As a freelance web dev myself, I can barely answer it for myself. I suggest starting by setting a bare minimum for yourself – the rate you need to charge to survive. Freelanci
55.
by mattdw 12y ago
Because Rust's "managed" benefits are compiled away, they have zero runtime impact. Meaning that there's no reason it couldn't be as fast as C/C++ for all workloads. So you get a safe language with bare-metal p
56.
by mattdw 12y ago
> "Let the market work." The market includes feedback mechanisms. Game criticism is one of said feedback mechanisms. If people are criticising a game, that is an element of the market at work.
57.
by mattdw 12y ago
To be fair, I'm on-side with the idea of an environment that adds niceties for your language. However, I agree that you should be able to still have a decent experience without installing or setting up language-specific editors or envi
58.
by mattdw 12y ago
Pretty familiar with Emacs, nrepl etc. Just a question of having enough time to familiarize myself with the ins and outs for any given new variety. I actually did the ClojureScript tuts via LightTable, which was slightly less complex than t
59.
by mattdw 12y ago
I really like Clojure (and have enjoyed David Nolen's CLJS tutorials and guides), but I find ClojureScript to have terribly arcane tooling. Despite being familiar with Clojure, it's still 10 minutes of cargo-culting and copy-pasti
60.
by mattdw 12y ago
My approach is (1) use CSS for as much as I can, (2) fill in the important compatibility gaps with JS (polyfill style) then (3) use JS to layer on any extra behaviours. That approach seems to play the best with the widest variety of configu

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