I've always loved Factor's homepage, which includes a random snippet of non-trivial (i.e. small but not ‘hello world’) code: https://factorcode.org/
(also, velociraptors)
Readit Newsgmfawcett commented on Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language ponylang.io/... · Posted by u/RossBencina
gmfawcett commented on Psilocybin shows promise as anti-aging therapy neurosciencenews.com/psil... · Posted by u/joak
If I take into consideration what I know about history then I'd say times are about as certain and safe as ever. What changed is that we now have an entire industry that thrives on fear and is very, very successful at it.
Arguably the European churches were such an industry for centuries, and were highly effective at it.
gmfawcett commented on Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken (2006) research.google/blog/extr... · Posted by u/thunderbong
I think adding the year is mostly crap. What exactly information would it give, except perhaps the false impression that this article is "antiquated information", when it pretty much holds true, and describes a perrenial issue?
It gives a cue about how many times I've probably seen the article before. Quite useful, IMO. I read this particular article when it came out in 2006... it's convenient to know we're not discussing a novel finding on the same topic.
There's the old saying that "we are free only as much as we don't have guns in our face telling us we're not". The reigns placed on our freedom are just unrecognized by the vast majority of people so they feel they have more freedom than what they might appreciate.
> we are free only as much as we don't have guns in our face telling us we're not.
Is this actually an old saying?
gmfawcett commented on Adventures in Probability buttondown.com/jaffray/ar... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
Another neat property of Poisson processes is that when raced against one another, they win in proportion to their underlying rates. This property is the basis of a clever random sampling algorithm that works well in SQL:
SELECT *
FROM Population
WHERE weight > 0
ORDER BY -LN(1.0 - RANDOM()) / weight
LIMIT 100 -- Sample size.
Nice article!
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gmfawcett commented on Asking the wrong questions (2017) ben-evans.com/benedicteva... · Posted by u/adamc
> But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development
On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly positive about space flight was that if you were writing in the 60s and 70s you would have been looking at almost a century of dramatic improvements in travel including steam trains, submarines, cars, prop planes, jets, and then rockets to the moon. With space shuttles and similar on the drawing board. People just assumed this would continue.
What very few SF writers understood was that all of these exploited chemical energy which is very limited in terms of how much can be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well and how fast you can go once you are up there. Many SF authors arm-waved atomics or nuclear propulsion but these, in the real world, never took off, as it were. Not in any mass transit to the stars sense, at least.
Edit: In reality space travel hit a hard brick wall due to the laws of physics. Most other forms of travel have experienced massive incremental improvements in reliability, efficiency, affordability, etc, but very few cars and and planes and ships actually now go much faster than they did 50 years ago.
> What very few SF writers understood
"Understood?" They were writing fiction, not instruction manuals.
gmfawcett commented on Markdown is meant to be shown (2021) daringfireball.net/linked... · Posted by u/SoKamil
In the words of John Gruber, the creator of markdown:
> "Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible. Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions."
He can say what he wants, but he literally inlined the entirety of HTML into the syntax. It's delusional to suggest that this design choice emphasizes readability above all else.
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gmfawcett commented on Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization steveblank.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/sblank
Reference, please?
My laconic question was downvoted. Sorry, I was on my phone, but didn't want to forget about this. I'm sincerely interested in reading the source of this research. Searching for it now, I came across this article:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-spa...
But is this really the one you mean? Even the abstract states that there is no single metric that measures developer performance, which contradicts your claim:
> Developer productivity is about more than an individual’s activity levels or the efficiency of the engineering systems relied on to ship software, and it cannot be measured by a single metric or dimension
So I'm still interested in reading the research you're talking about, and I would appreciate a reference. Thanks!