toadstone

7 ms·

1.
by toadstone 15y ago
Predator/prey is also a metaphor. People aren't actually being eaten. They are voluntarily sharing data that is used to provide them with a service that they want. I'm so depressed that I have to spell everything out.
2.
by toadstone 15y ago
It was a predator/prey metaphor, not a individual/group metaphor.
3.
by toadstone 15y ago
I don't understand this community. I thought you were wolves, but here you are taking the part of the sheep. Instead of being outraged, you should be trying to get your own piece of the data pie. Every single web startup is doing exactly th
4.
by toadstone 15y ago
By definition, being social means doing things other people are doing.
5.
by toadstone 15y ago
I'm more curious about what the alternative is because this is my default mode of programming. I don't see what's backwards about it. You establish what you need in the module first, then code. What else can you do?
6.
by toadstone 15y ago
I think the analogy was stated poorly. Here's my take: 1. Big company A sees small company B getting rich off a new market. A forsees B disrupting A. With MS, it was the fear that the web would become the OS. With G it's that social will be
7.
by toadstone 15y ago
What's the point? He'll never beat LuaJIT. I'd rather see a new language with a "slow, slow, and slow" implementation that had interesting semantics than another python/lua/js cut-down LISP.
8.
by toadstone 15y ago
I know they did shady things in the beginning. A lot of businesses have to do that, and many don't stop. That's just how the game works. As a user, of course you don't have to take it. Just don't buy what they're selling. There's no reason
9.
by toadstone 15y ago
Current Zynga games aren't that bad. The production values and gameplay are a lot better than the werewolves/vampires style games that they started with. Given a few more years, their games might even be comparable to traditional, non-soc
10.
by toadstone 15y ago
There's a lot of wishful thinking in these G+ posts of late. People hope that G+ won't have to make the painful compromises FB has, though without much justification. The two are so very similar, if G+ catches on most everything people hate
11.
by toadstone 15y ago
Facebook already has the exact same functionality in friend lists. They're only a small ui tweak away from parity in that respect. As for the drag and drop into circles, it's cute but realistically it's not a big part of day to day use.
12.
by toadstone 15y ago
I find this absurd. I don't even call them bugs when I get compiler errors. They are typos. They are trivial to fix, and I'd much rather fix them at 3pm before I've checked in the code than at 3am when it's live or 5 minutes before a presen
13.
by toadstone 15y ago
Every single story about facebook has a post like this, and I'm so tired of reading them. First of all, why would you even consider competing with Facebook? You do realize that outside of the valley, there are companies not packed to the gi
14.
by toadstone 15y ago
I think you know you've cracked when you prefer bad C# to clean Haskell.
15.
by toadstone 15y ago
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever written a program that doesn't use containers, manage memory, and handle errors.
16.
by toadstone 15y ago
Are you really saying that the time and energy you save coding and debugging by using high level features aren't worth a few minutes of compile time? It won't even be a few minutes except for the first time because of separate compilation.
17.
by toadstone 15y ago
I think http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/08/06/on-seeing-like-a-cat/on... is a more insightful analysis of the cat/dog dichotomy. There's nothing particularly cat like or dog like in the roles described in the linked article.
18.
by toadstone 15y ago
I remember it being a rare event when 212 created a FP enthusiast. Are the students in the new course liking it or just enduring it?
19.
by toadstone 15y ago
I'm sure the author wouldn't mind especially if you copied the article into notepad and deleted the first two sentences before reading it.
20.
by toadstone 15y ago
Sometimes articles are over my head too. Sometimes I work on figuring them out and learn something. Sometimes I give up because I don't have the time or energy. However, I don't blame the author for my ignorance.
21.
by toadstone 16y ago
Ah, quit being such a winklevoss. We win when there's competition of implementations.
22.
by toadstone 16y ago
Yeah, there totally should be a class on how, as an slightly above average programmer, to use open source projects representing man-decades of work by geniuses and millions of dollars in corporate investment to avoid any technical challenge
23.
by toadstone 16y ago
Exactly right, working at Palantir is betting on the status quo.
24.
by toadstone 16y ago
What are you talking about? Palantir isn't reinventing government or finance, they are making extremely niche data analysis tools for the intelligence services and trading tools for wall street. If those institutions crumble, Palantir has n
25.
by toadstone 16y ago
company does some pr. blogger fakes outrage to draw visitors. bored bitter nerds read it and do nothing.
26.
by toadstone 17y ago
I went through cmu miserable. It's fine, suffering brings out the best in me. But I like that poem, and the thought that someone actually jumped does not ruin it for me. To jump is to escape, and that poem is a sweet reminder that you have
27.
by toadstone 17y ago
when i read this, i involuntarily started every one of his answers with a haughty HA!
28.
by toadstone 17y ago
it just doesn't want people giving their facebook logins out
29.
by toadstone 17y ago
Well, they aren't campaigning for peace ON Facebook, so I don't see why you think this is about equality in facebook itself. I don't see why equal in rights and opportunity is nebulous either. If you look at one of the contrasts on peace.fa
30.
by toadstone 17y ago
Equal in rights and opportunity, ok? I'm not proposing the kind of enforced universal mediocrity that I know you hacker news ubermensch are paranoid of. Of course everyone wants peace. The oppressed want a peace that is an end to injustice.

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