mjw

29 ms·

181.
by mjw 16y ago
I think you mean non-transitive. But yes.
182.
by mjw 16y ago
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ is worth a look!
183.
by mjw 16y ago
How about this: Design patterns have flopped because many if not most of them have proven not to be the universal computer science gems they were touted as. Rather, they've proven to be: * Stock workarounds for the overly restrictive type s
184.
by mjw 16y ago
One thing I've noticed is that a strong type system does force me to think harder about interfaces . Sure, you can think just as hard about interfaces without static typing. But speaking personally as someone who does mostly Ruby but is bu
185.
by mjw 16y ago
Interesting. This kind of "differential pricing by gentle emotional blackmail" approach seems to work for those who can establish more of a convincingly personal relationship with the customer. Or which at least on a broad economic scale fe
186.
by mjw 16y ago
Yep. Your code ends up looking like the output of a continuation-passing transform, with every kind of sequential composition involving nested callbacks. It feels quite low-level and clunky and is one of the things I like least about writin
187.
by mjw 16y ago
Interesting. Seems this depends on path-dependent types (x.T in the example) ? Do you think it's possible to fix the type system to avoid this without throwing away large parts of it? Is there are a relevant scala trac ticket?
188.
by mjw 16y ago
> I'm curious why it didn't work for music recommendation for you. In the netflix challenge for movie recommendation, pretty much everyone ended up using SVD-based methods and variations thereof. I expect the algorithm did reasonably we
189.
by mjw 16y ago
Interesting. Sounds like you're effectively doing a sparse matrix-vector multiplication for each request? If you want to buy yourself a bit more time performance-wise, might be worth looking into using a numerical computing library for spar
190.
by mjw 16y ago
Re jargons: I don't think all jargons are created equal. I'd say that it's possible, and worthwhile, to investigate and make some attempt at classifying jargons with respect to properties like: * To what extent do layers of jargon correspon
191.
by mjw 16y ago
I found your reply interesting too. I didn't really expect the author's jokey explanation of deconstruction to be technically accurate, and I can understand why it would irritate people in the field. I'd be more interested to hear what you
192.
by mjw 16y ago
RDF is based on a highly-normalised data model though--everything is broken down into binary relations. This is essentially just a rephrasing of the relational model (modulo a relatively simple translation which adds surrogate keys in order
193.
by mjw 16y ago
Couldn't agree more. They key point which I think people need to realise is that document databases / key-value stores are essentially lower-level tools than relational databases. Don't expect a free lunch from choosing lower-level tools.
194.
by mjw 16y ago
One relevant point here is that it's relatively easy to merge two branches of changes for a simple (key/value) data model, but harder to merge changes to relational data where there are additional constraints (like foreign keys) which must
195.
by mjw 16y ago
I think he means: if you have to traverse it without building up a result (or doing some in-place modification) as you go - then you're doing it wrong. Obviously you gotta traverse the thing at least once.
196.
by mjw 16y ago
I wondered that too. My first thought was to build it up again from new conses, as you would in lisp. But then spotted a neat in-place way to do it too. Found I absolutely had to draw a few scribbly diagrams first though.
197.
by mjw 16y ago
This bugged me throughout my maths degree. In particular complex analysis and Fourier theory would be less of a pain in the arse without all those factors of two. Statistics too, heck anything which uses some calculus.
198.
by mjw 16y ago
Yep, sbt is nice. Hopefully it'll get official blessing at some point. sbaz (their package management / repository system) was a bit of a disappointment, though, in that people aren't really using it (the last time I checked anyway). And yo
199.
by mjw 16y ago
A lot of this applies to other JVM languages, like Scala. Although I think Scala does some of this stuff better, there are still a lot of pain points for the newbie when it comes to different build systems, java toolchain, classpath, librar
200.
by mjw 16y ago
Yep - it's not safe to assume you can cache a PUT in that way. AFAIK no caches do this. What they should do though is purge their cache for that URI when they see a successful PUT has happened.
201.
by mjw 16y ago
Well distributed transactions in some mission-critical enterprise setting isn't what REST is all about, not even close. If people are really making that mistake fair play to you. I would hope that the majority of us out there using REST hav
202.
by mjw 16y ago
Hm, yeah the wording when it comes to idempotence does seem slightly vague now I look at it again; SHOULD, rather than MUST in the RFCs at least. It is hand-wavey isn't it. The whole REST concept smells of post-hoc generalisation based on j
203.
by mjw 16y ago
Again the (in this case draft) RFC begs to differ: http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-dusseault-http-patch-... "PATCH is neither safe or idempotent as defined by [RFC2616] Section 9.1." The only semantics it has seems to be "change th
204.
by mjw 16y ago
To summarise my point there: By constraining the use of PUT to 'full replacement' updates, you deny people a useful way to signal idempotence for other more general kinds of idempotent updates.
205.
by mjw 16y ago
No worries. Some of those HTTP RFCs are pretty crufty - there is a cleanup project in the works apparently: http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/charter/
206.
by mjw 16y ago
It's not so much about caching - it's more about knowing that you're safely able to repeat a request which timed out or failed. A way to distinguish form submissions (like a credit card purchase form) which must not be repeated after submis
207.
by mjw 16y ago
The RFC begs to differ :) http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html "If a resource has been created on the origin server, the response SHOULD be 201 (Created) and contain an entity which describes the status of the request and
208.
by mjw 16y ago
Personally I feel that idempotence should be the only important semantic component of PUT. Although the spec makes stronger assertions about its semantics than this, namely that the body of a PUT is supposed to a full replacement for the re
209.
by mjw 16y ago
The thing that bugs me about the 'NoSQL' name is that it seems to lump together "relational vs key-value/object store" and "centralised vs distributed" as one and the same distinction. They're not. Databases based on the relational model ca
210.
by mjw 16y ago
One other big thing to point out is that this approach has the biggest pay-off when you're doing API-focused development (eg writing RESTful web services for thick client applications to use, which was where the framework originated from).

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