jayvanguard

I agree... I love the OS and like my iDevices but their commitment to application software over the years has been abysmal.

Have there been any proposals aimed at reducing the transferability of patents? Perhaps the lifetime of the patent could halve each time it is transferred to a new legal entity along with some reduction in possible damages.

2nding

Calling it misleading is stretch. There are dozens of factors that you can cherry pick to cast aspersions on the increase in inequality but if you step back they don't come close to explaining it. There are another dozen that can be chosen that do the opposite.

Take a look at one of the tutorials on writing a Ruby DSL. E.g. http://rubylearning.com/blog/2010/11/30/how-do-i-build-dsls-...

This is a very good explanation actually.

> Pro tip: If an article includes a diagram with a triangle, stop reading

Exactly. I've seen many explanations that try to turn it into a trade-off between three things analogous to the maxim "resources, features, schedule: fix any two and the third must change".

Trailing closures turn out to be magic when creating APIs and mini-DSLs. That slight reduction of friction that unifies regular language syntax with user-defined functions is often the difference between a high usable extension and a kludge.

Wow, I didn't realize that one map on COD: Black Ops was designed after an Amazon warehouse.

The existing power structure would continue to perpetuate itself? That is kinda how things work.

Great presentation as usual. One fundamental tension I see in much of the work he does is between purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments.

The challenge in both the maker space as well as much of the visual learning and programming material he has done previously is that each of them is incredibly time consuming to adapt to each new different project. In the real world even similar tasks within projects in the same domain often have enough subtle differences that re-use is not possible or very costly.

That isn't to say these are insurmountable but maybe much of the focus needs to be on meta-tooling that can accelerate the work of experts to build these purpose-built environments (as opposed to making generic tooling).

Inspiring stuff.

I recall reading an article that claimed the uptick in Alzheimer's is simply due to a larger percentage of people living long enough to get it.

What a huge step backwards. We had decades of binary protocols. They sucked. Then everyone moved to non-binary protocols and it was much better. Let's not do it all over again.

This is a troll, right? It looks like a windows 3.1 editor.

That's it?!? All these years and now there is incontrovertible evidence there was no substance behind the idea.

As someone has commented in the article most REPL environments are not sandboxed so I wouldn't consider this a requirement.

But yes, don't download and blindly run random Swift scripts...

He has been around a long time and has a lot of contacts in the industry. In general his work is opinionated but backed up by facts.

It looks like Rust was a major influence. It has been interesting seeing all these posts claiming Swift borrowed from _their_ language.

Obviously there is a lot of feature influence between languages but it was interesting to see the ones he called out explicitly.

No doubt. Also amazing is that they promoted a compiler architect to eventually lead the whole tools group. This is good news.

> Even though the bounds that identify a repository as massive are pretty high – for example the latest Linux kernel clocks at 15+ million lines of code

Yeah 15 million lines of code isn't a massive repository, it is medium-large at best. Any one of the big enterprise software companies has repos an order of magnitude bigger for each major product they sell.

This is the first accurate programming language popularity chart I've seen.

> as late as the 90s, code reuse was still an unsolved problem.

But that is about the social and business structures and economics around how computing matured. Zero to do with technology. The technology aspects of code re-use were worked out long ago.

Sounds too good to be true.

They also tend to be tagged poorly while on the paid sites the owners are highly incented to properly tag the pictures to increase search hits.

I thought in general the technical execution was quite good, but they tend to be over processed like 90% of all photography on the web.

> 3 - You end-up spending more time on these sites trying to find a decent image than you save money.

This is the real kicker. I found the same with stock icons and vectors. You might get lucky with the free stuff but if you have any needs that aren't completely generic you are better off going to a paid side, spend $20, and save yourself a ton of time.

> Startup-bucks are even worse than a lottery ticket, because of tax complications and money required to cover strike price.

There is also a major information asymmetry. They know the ins-and-outs of the stock types and likely acquisition scenarios. It is not likely you are going to go over the company financials and corporate documents during the interview process. You just have to hope they treat you fairly.

A very relevant line from this article:

"Unless you very quickly demonstrate that you know your own value by successfully negotiating more money and/or power, you are marked out as an exploitable clueless Loser."

If you are working long hours and aren't rapidly negotiating your way up and into serious equity then you are marking yourself as a sucker. Don't be surprised if they continue to exploit you.

Are margins on coffee good enough to support this long term? High end coffee is quite expensive as is square footage in small trendy coffee shops.

I suppose the odd abuser who parks their butt for 3-4 hrs a day in the coffee shop can be dealt with in other ways e.g. they must order food to keep a seat. If they are forced to walk to the coffee shop each time they will likely max out at a few coffees a day.

Sounds like you have to be a sycophant to work for him.

Just what I'm looking for, thanks.

Thanks for the insight. I've seen similar patterns in areas such as recommendation systems. There are active research communities but really all of the detail work and pushing the envelope happens in private companies.

The financial incentives drive the pace. In the future I'm sure it will become more commoditized but right now the practical nature of integrating with large shopping, coupon, and marketing systems and scaling for millions of users place the progress mostly in the domain of industry not academy.