mbrock

74 ms·

751.
by mbrock 9y ago
Hit them back with a question about how they conceive the difference between design patterns as a general concept and methodology stemming from Alexander's work in collaborative architecture, and the one specific GoF pattern language f
752.
by mbrock 9y ago
First of all, what makes "monoid" a "complex" name? Is your complaint basically about terminological aesthetics? I'd say no to your question. I've linked an article elsewhere in the thread that to me shows pret
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by mbrock 9y ago
Sure. It's funny with these algebraic things. If they're simple, people complain that they're not interesting... but when you add some depth, people complain that it's too difficult!
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by mbrock 9y ago
If you code Haskell then you'll run into monoids all the time, and if you understand what that word means then you can write more concise and idiomatic code that makes use of the wide range of monoid instances available under the commo
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by mbrock 9y ago
The cool thing about algebra is that it lets you reuse concepts and computations between elementary arithmetic and a wide range of abstract or complex structures. It's probably true that most programs use only very simple monoids, but
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by mbrock 9y ago
I really recommend this article about designing a graphics library with a lot of monoid structures. http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1773... For me it gets interesting when you compose monoids, a
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by mbrock 9y ago
I make continual notes about my work, progress and thoughts into a private chat group with just me. This makes it more fun to be productive. It gives me a chronological evidence of actually doing stuff, and it's also a place to get thi
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by mbrock 9y ago
That argument if you deploy it against for example gender becomes rather inpalatable for most people. Gender roles are to a very large extent made up of "arbitrary cultural baggage" but reasoning like that provokes almost an aller
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by mbrock 9y ago
Offline time tables are more than zero useful!
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by mbrock 9y ago
I once wrote an app that worked by sending diffs, not DOM diffs but JSON diffs which were then applied by the client and rendered by React. The data store was a repository, and so a client could ask "please give me the diff between sta
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by mbrock 9y ago
I think the DOM, and really the web as a whole, is a really incredible experiment in blurring the lines between documents and interfaces, which really are just two arbitrary delineations of "what a computer can do". So for example
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by mbrock 9y ago
A café I go to sometimes for coffee injects ads to non-HTTPS websites. Full screen ads with a timer. It's a good reminder that HTTP sites can be and are being arbitrarily manipulated and surveilled by WiFi operators.
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by mbrock 9y ago
That's what "they" WANT you to think!
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by mbrock 9y ago
Here are some kinds of claims I would like to be able to verify on my stylesheets, whether through testing, fuzzing, proving, or magically intuiting via some proprietary black box APIs for $99/month: - The number of columns in the arti
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by mbrock 9y ago
In a few years, what we now call "AI" is probably going to be a necessary part of at least most user-facing systems. Like, we'll go from calling this thing "AI" into just thinking that systems that don't have t
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by mbrock 9y ago
I think this type of thread should probably be removed by moderators. There's like one every week or so. You're basically just asking people to pump their favorite altcoin. This is not a good way to do investing.
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by mbrock 9y ago
This is basically the reason I've been using Ratpoison or Stumpwm as my window manager since 2004. I don't want to deal with somebody's arbitrary clobbering of hotkeys!
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by mbrock 9y ago
Here's a nice little paper from this year's ICFP about building a video editing tool using Racket. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3136534.3110274 > The Racket doctrine tells developers to narrow the gap b
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by mbrock 9y ago
I don't want to ask everyone to install a native app, I don't want to use several different native app UI libraries, etc. I'm one of those people who thinks that the web browser as an app platform is a pretty good idea.
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by mbrock 9y ago
Running the same language on the client and the server also has some deeper implications. Like, it becomes easy to imagine an app that runs in a hybrid way with computations shared between the client and server, i.e., "offline mode&quo
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by mbrock 9y ago
I mentioned to an academic computer scientist that I worked with blockchains. He immediately asked "So these blockchains, how do they do consensus? Isn't it some kind of majority vote?" I said "Well, kind of, in combinat
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by mbrock 9y ago
One of the things I love about dired-mode is wdired, which lets you edit the contents of the dired buffer as if it were a file, and then hit C-c C-c to make your changes happen: renamings, deletions, even file permission changes. https:&#x
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by mbrock 9y ago
Anything that would be improved by offline support.
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by mbrock 9y ago
Logicians have been extremely useful to fields like formal software methods, linguistics and semantics, programming language design, etc. The latest rumblings are that linear logic may be perfectly applicable to reasoning about blockchains;
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by mbrock 9y ago
I try to use Nix and NixOS as much as I can.
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by mbrock 9y ago
I don't put milk in coffee but oat milk is just great with cereal.
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by mbrock 9y ago
What do you mean by computation? What's an example of something that isn't computation?
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by mbrock 9y ago
Hmm, maybe a lot of computation is outsourced to server farms, but "clients" still do a lot of it: image processing, codecs, scheduling, layout, speech recognition, etc etc.
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by mbrock 9y ago
Yet you can't just tell the computer to communicate or do I/O -- it's all controlled by decisions, and making those decisions is basically what I call computation.
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by mbrock 9y ago
Maybe, I don't know. The psychology of programming language preference seems like a pretty interesting topic. Enjoying programming at all seems like it might depend on some quirks; I don't know if there's a significant differ

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