mdakin

24 ms·

181.
by mdakin 19y ago
My point is that there are many really good, legitimate and numerically quantifiable reasons for using a high-level language that have nothing to do with the mythical, unprovable Sapir-Whorf justification. As for the "tradeoff" I mean that
182.
by mdakin 19y ago
Personally I'd take a great team of smart, flexible people over my choice of programming language any day. I think it all comes down to the specifics of your nature, the team, and its environment.
183.
by mdakin 19y ago
Sucks to your Sapir-Whorf hypothesis! That said higher-level languages do have real, non-mythical advantages over lower-level ones if one is trying to work quickly and with minimal effort. Good luck with your decision.
184.
by mdakin 19y ago
Once a problem is characterized the solution often follows naturally. Luckily there are no physical laws that prevent reasonable solutions to business/social problems of this sort.
185.
by mdakin 19y ago
I don't want to come across as anti-unit-test or anti-studies but I suggest you run your own study and gauge your own performance rather than assuming you and your team perform as an average team does. Thanks to the version control tools
186.
by mdakin 19y ago
If one is using Postgres as the DB it is not really necessary to set up a real-time database mirror to have a very robust error recovery strategy. (I can't speak about MySQL but there is probably a similar feature.) All you need to do is
187.
by mdakin 19y ago
Think of unit-testing as a tool and not a dogma. Proper unit-testing roughly doubles the amount of time it takes me to write a "unit" of code. This is a high cost so I do not have 100% unit-test coverage. Over time I have developed an in
188.
by mdakin 19y ago
It does not surprise me that the research is in conflict. It makes sense that as programmers age they either become better programmers (through experience) OR they stop programming (the bad programmers flux out of the field with time). The
189.
by mdakin 19y ago
If VCs are half as good at reading and understanding people as they like to think it should be rather trivial for them to filter out these hypothetical slackerpreneurs who give up once a modicum of success is achieved.
190.
by mdakin 19y ago
I've used Camino 1.0.4 extensively but I've not looked at 1.5 yet. 1.0.4 is closer to what I want than Firefox is but it was not quite "there". Basic things like .pdf files NOT being viewed inside the browser bothered me. Maybe that's fi
191.
by mdakin 19y ago
There are lots of little reasons why I end up using it most of the time: It, like all Cocoa apps, supports some of the emacs key-bindings out of the box. CTRL-a, CTRL-e, CTRL-k all work as expected when editing any text. If I double click
192.
by mdakin 19y ago
I don't have access to the Windows version BUT you might be able to mitigate the small-font problem with some configuration. In the Mac version of Safari you can to to Preferences-Advanced and tell Safari to "Never use font sizes smaller t
193.
by mdakin 19y ago
For more information about making data tamper-proof using HMACs see the paper "Dos and Don'ts of Client Authentication on the Web" by Kevin Fu et al. [1]. I've implemented the "FuCookie" and I use it everywhere. [1] http://pdos.csail.mit.
194.
by mdakin 19y ago
I'm by no means an expert on crypto but I think I understand the fundamentals. If something I said is incorrect please point it out specifically. See [1] for a more complete explanation of my point. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MITM
195.
by mdakin 19y ago
The language in my post is a bit sloppy and for for that I apologize. As I imply in the second paragraph and explain in the edit you do get a warning BUT unless you then pull out your paper copy of the fingerprint and manually compare the
196.
by mdakin 19y ago
The SSL software in your web browser uses the information from the certificate authority to mathematically PROVE a man in the middle attack is NOT happening. Anytime you use a self-signed certificate [edit] without manually verifying the
197.
by mdakin 19y ago
I try to get .com, .org and .net and not worry about the other TLDs.
198.
by mdakin 19y ago
Python gives you both upsides (the easy typical case AND the custom arbitrary C/C++ code case). Granted one needs to know C/C++ and not Java. If whatever operation you need is not already implemented by a Python module you can just write
199.
by mdakin 19y ago
The world is not a bag of marbles and it didn't change over night. Making something people want involves two main constraints: the making and the people. Human nature has remained constant for thousands of years (read some of the Latin
200.
by mdakin 19y ago
I'll be there. Thanks for taking the initiative to set this up.
201.
by mdakin 19y ago
A cool aspect of closures not stressed in the video is that they end up capturing all enclosing lexical environments (not just the parameter environments), even those you make using let! For example in Common Lisp: (let ((x 0)) (defun coun
202.
by mdakin 19y ago
One could avoid that problem by keeping track of the owner of each closure and ensuring the user is properly authenticated before calling the closure.
203.
by mdakin 19y ago
No, but the answer is relative. If you have a million dollars then $5,000 isn't "expensive" for the perfect name. But if you have $20,000 spending $5,000 on the domain name would be insane. I just went through this myself. I started ne
204.
by mdakin 19y ago
This is a perfect example of how big companies that rely on design-by-committe are incapable of doing original, creative work. But I doubt they will lose any subscribers because of this!
205.
by mdakin 19y ago
A non-SQL solution surely can work well and be a fine solution to some problems. Especially problems that are very well understood (like problems at the optimization stage of the project). But can a minimal non-SQL solution provide the b
206.
by mdakin 19y ago
Twitter is using a database because the Twitter engineers chose not to prematurely optimize their system. They now fully understand their problem domain and thus now would be the appropriate time to make optimizations such as replacing the
207.
by mdakin 19y ago
If anyone had ever tried to tell me that engineering was necessarily divorced from craftsmanship I would have laughed in his face.
208.
by mdakin 19y ago
The reason to use XHTML is simple: high-quality open source tools for processing XML documents exist and work well. You can find good XML processing tools for whatever language/platform you want. High quality SGML processing tools are muc
209.
by mdakin 20y ago
There might be some deals going on in anticipation of a bubble. Sort of hedge deals being made to guarantee a spot on the leading edge of some hypothetical bubble. But I don't think all the deals fall into that category and many of them a
210.
by mdakin 20y ago
No. A bubble happens when you have a huge number of trades at prices well above the fundamental value of items being traded. In this case I assume the items we're referring to are "small, internet-oriented companies". At least right now

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