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benbeltran

325 karma · joined June 24, 2008

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/benbeltran; my proof: https://keybase.io/benbeltran/sigs/lGvGc4BPwyNTXdiX9sNBvwXTD2ZGF32iOj6Jg1LFBFA ]
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benbeltran··on Toxo, the cysts in our brains from cats, can improve self-control (2013)
Here's a good take on why we share cats on the internet, including brain-control, by pbs' idea channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ_6aRjYR0w
benbeltran··on In the medical response to Ebola, Cuba is punching above its weight
Off-topic, but I had the opportunity to have several cuban PhDs teach some of the final classses in college (Multi-agent systems, computer intelligence, etc) ... All of them were incredibly good in their fields, better than any other professors I had in school, and as good as some of the brightest I've met in this field.

There were also some docs in other disciplines and they were all incredibly good. Based on that experience I think cuba is hardly "punching far above its weight", but reflecting great care, passion and responsibility as they do in other fields... We just assume a lot of things about cuba. I sure did before.

benbeltran··on Record and Post GIFs to Twitter
Hey! Just as a followup, in case you're still interested. We released a pro version that includes FPS and password protection
benbeltran··on Record and Post GIFs to Twitter
http://recordit.co/dBgMnxsHVc.gif
benbeltran··on Record and Post GIFs to Twitter
Looks interesting. Will check it out. Only 10 seconds though, right?
benbeltran··on Record and Post GIFs to Twitter
There will be, soon! We're tweaking it to get all the parts moving just right. Also... ...
benbeltran··on Record and Post GIFs to Twitter
The current build, secretly has Cmd+Shift+5
benbeltran··on Record and Post GIFs to Twitter
Pretty excited to finally see this going up :)...
benbeltran··on Visual Programming Languages – Snapshots
Yes! The guy that made Max eventually made PureData (which is in the list). It's an awesome environment. Max (General) with MSP (Audio) and Jitter (Video) can do a lot of stuff, even control full lighting rigs + video, or even have a nice visual interface to an arduino. They recently integrated with Ableton Live too so you can use MSP patches as instruments. It's a great platform.
benbeltran··on Lua: the world's most infuriating language?
It's weird that I see many people complaining about tables because of pairs/ipairs or trivial stuff like that, which are more nuisances than anything. The flexibility of tables/metatables make them a very powerful data structure (not unlike javascript's prototype). I've been playing a bit with it for game development and you can build some very powerful stuff just using tables.

Maybe instead of trying to use lua as another language, you should totally embrace "the lua way" and then you'll understand why their tables/metatables is the way it is.

benbeltran··on A proper JavaScript templating engine with a sane syntax
Updated with a JSPerf: http://jsperf.com/thulium-vs-underscore-and-ejs ... Tm runs faster in chrome/node... Underscore wins in firefox. So we'll need to get to work in optimizing stuff for firefox too :)
benbeltran··on A proper JavaScript templating engine with a sane syntax
I'll try to do a /proper/ benchmark (Different cases, different types of templates, and such). Because the tests were with a simple template that had all the shared features. When I do, I'll add it to the README.

It's not that complicated, swaping between the two. they're basically the same if you don't use breaking printable blocks. So you just change:

    tm = _.template(string);
    tm(context);
to

    tm = new Thulium({template : string}).parseSync().renderSync(context);
It's different in that you do the initialization, parsing and rendering in different steps. TBH, with smallish templates, I found Thulium to be about 10µs faster. Which in most cases, is negligible. So if you're already using underscore, you probably shouldn't change everything. But if you need extra features like wrapping the output of a function in form tags or something like that, you can do it really easily with thulium. (Porting some of our helpers from EJS to Thulium meant a reduction of many lines of code and complexity.)
benbeltran··on A proper JavaScript templating engine with a sane syntax
I don't think so. I think the purpouse is to offer less: We don't even have built-in helpers or file loading mechanisms or caching. The philosophy is that we just do templating, we do it really well, and the rest is code from your stack. This philosophy has worked with our projects.
benbeltran··on A proper JavaScript templating engine with a sane syntax
It's based on EJS. So it's indeed really similar to underscore. In fact, we benchmarked against underscore's template function and EJS and, at least in our templates, achieved better performance (Not very scientific: we got averages out of 200000 renders). It offers breakable printable blocks, and very nice debuggability.
benbeltran··on A proper JavaScript templating engine with a sane syntax
We based it on EJS because we had a lot of views with EJS. But we needed a lot of performance (Our goal was to be faster than the underscore templating language). We also needed debuggability. So, it's built in a way that works very well with all the tools we use. Finally, the feature we benefit from the most is broken printable blocks. It's very easy to capture the output from a function in a block, and just move it around as we please. It makes wrapping helpers a hell of a lot easier.
benbeltran··on Plug: the brain of your devices
Is that the sparrow logo in one of the screenshots? ...
benbeltran··on Never Trust Facebook
In a very creepy aspect of this. I closed my account a while ago, and I opened a dummy one with another email, because I still needed to mod a few communities. The recommendations were the usual: friends of people in the communities and such. About a month ago it started recommending family members, classmates, and friends. Really accurate. It's creepy: I don't have a smartphone from which it could syphon the contacts, I'm not using my real name and I was using an email that I only use for facebook. I have no idea what data it's using. But I was not surprised, I just thought. "Damn it, they found a way"
benbeltran··on MySQL man pages license change is a bug
Well, in discourse it's more convention than anything. But the first category created, is a `meta` category. But this explains it better: http://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-meta/5249/2
benbeltran··on MySQL man pages license change is a bug
Kind of an aside, but still relevant to part of your post. Whining about the content and whining about the meta whining is part of any sufficiently old community. I can recall from communities I've managed, and from ones I've participated in there's /always/ metacommentary and metametacommentary. The best thing to do in these cases is not to engage it. But no, HN will never get past all the whiny meta and there's very little we can do about it except letting it slide :(

Quick Edit: This is one of the reasons why I love discourse, it encourages metadiscussion in a separate part, and while it doesn't keep it from contaminating, it seriously helps a lot to focus it and guide it.

benbeltran··on "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1
Not only that, they went a step forward and made downloads even more appealing by allowing you to download the minimum possible to play the game, and just do the rest while you play.
benbeltran··on Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google
Or, the ranking algorithm was previously designed for this not to have an impact, and as real-world usage showed abuse, they changed it. Repeat this cycle until now. So the techniques to game the algorithm changed, hence the algorithm changed, hence the stance changed... Constantly, we don't live in a static web.

(EDIT: Also of note is the fact that this change was from a year ago, and the previous one was in 2003 ... So. Yeah)

benbeltran··on Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" - (attributed to John Maynard Kaynes)

The algorithm has changed. The web has changed. Naturally, google has changed.

benbeltran··on Exploitation of an old Rails vulnerability
The double unescape in the comments felt kinda like "Enhance!" "Enhance!"
benbeltran··on Xbox One: Microsoft's All-In-One Home Entertainment System
It's bros... that are gamers.
benbeltran··on Xbox One: Microsoft's All-In-One Home Entertainment System
Chill out dude. I didn't say you were a bro gamer, I didn't say I agreed with the term. I tried to answer Caskain's question on "how did they alienate gamers", and yes, part of it is the sentiment of catering to bro gamers. But notice the usage of quotes. Follow your own advice.
benbeltran··on Xbox One: Microsoft's All-In-One Home Entertainment System
The event's games presentations were oriented to what is usually called the "Bro gamer" demographic (e.g. Madden/FIFA/CoD) ... It focused on TV, for which many of the core gamers don't care. Contrast this to the PS4 announcement, which had many developers and a lot of talk about how the platform is going to be more "open" for the small guys, and it felt really passionate about the "for-gamers" features. As a gamer, I feel like the PS4 is where the real passion for games is, where someone actually cared to provide tools for the "indie" crowd (who, arguably, are doing the good games these days) ... Meanwhile, microsoft is showing a TV machine, has forgotten the indie channel and has killed XNA. If you don't understand why this was dissapointing for gamers, it's most probably because you are not a gamer yourself I guess. Honestly it felt passionless, pointless and underwhelming. It wasn't a blunder or anything, of course. It was just meh.
benbeltran··on Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself
As you do with google reader. You can fully export your feeds and move elsewhere. At /least/ they're letting you keep your data. I'm not saying it didn't feel like a dick move... but at least they make it easy to move away. I already switched to another reader and I'm getting more used to it every day. We may be emotionally attached, but the world moves on. How many of these small companies you give money to give you the freedom to download your data?
benbeltran··on Console.meme
There are some types of errors that just /deserve/ to be in meme form.
benbeltran··on Group email address. Did 37signals copy my idea?
That's not really what the article is about.

Quick Edit: Seems to me that this is more about "Hey, don't forget there's also this" and taking the chance to "teach a quick lesson" about how dumb the concept of stealing ideas is and not to fear competition.

benbeltran··on Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia
But, the students that do care about the course are dissuaded from plagiarizing their work. If my experience in uni is any telling, people who get caught copying/plagiarizing will do it again. If you cut the easy access of the more hard-working students, at the very least they'll have to do some research for those answers.

The nice thing about the zero to the stronger student without consequence to the weak student is that they didn't go down together, which tends to make the affected more likely to go confront the issue.

Sure, what I'm saying is not based on any hard data except my years at uni and the fact that a physics professor in my campus did the exact same thing.

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