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johnpmayer

319 karma · joined August 12, 2011

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johnpmayer··on Succinct data structures
Whoa - I was there! This was at a small elm-lang meetup; Prezi hosted this while Evan was working there.

Thank you for sharing this link!

johnpmayer··on Samsung's folding screen tech has been stolen and sold to China
Unless it turns out that strong protections for intellectual property rights isn't correlated with the survival of a sovereign nation. Then it won't matter how loudly the international community complains; China will just do its thing. They're large enough and have the agricultural and industrial base to weather isolation in the way that Iran/Russia do not.
johnpmayer··on There is more to high house prices than constrained supply
Well yeah, that apparent injustice is the ethical rationale behind a progressive wealth tax, once you've decided to enforce property rights.
johnpmayer··on There is more to high house prices than constrained supply
A home produces rents. If you live in the home that you own, you can think of it equivalently as a productive asset that provides you one unit of free rent (modulo some quality of life factor based on how nice the property is to live in) every month.
johnpmayer··on There is more to high house prices than constrained supply
Credit allows people to purchase things beyond their current wealth but rather within their future means to pay (their future productivity and trustworthiness). This is particularly useful for those who aren't born into wealth: Credit is practically the only way for normal folks to access productive capital, such as a home that allows you to avoid paying rent, or an education that in theory makes you more productive in the future.

You are correct to point out that the prediction of one's future ability to pay (their future productivity and trustworthiness) is difficult. But I think eliminating credit (at least when used to purchase productive capital) is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

johnpmayer··on Prove the badness of coworkers at your own risk (2012)
Yep. It boils down to wanting to work at a place where it's OK to make mistakes, but unacceptable to not learn from mistakes. It's a culture thing, and it comes from the top.
johnpmayer··on Baltimore State Attorney Drops Dozens of Cases: Body Cam Shows Drug-Planting
This is silly and short-sighted. There are many people who genuinely want to 'serve and protect', multiple generations in some families. Some people take duty very seriously and in good faith. Applying to be a cop in no way implies that a person holds arrests and the use of deadly force as anything other than a necessary component of the real-world, end-to-end justice system.
johnpmayer··on An 89-year-old Reinventing the Train in His Backyard
> more than one train on a line at a given time.

Seems like the system is capable running different trains in different sections; the pressure/vacuum system is distributed and segmented down the length of the line.

johnpmayer··on What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?
I mean, it's all about "for whom" in this question. What's better, widgets and a polluted stream, or no widgets? Depends on whether society values the fish.
johnpmayer··on A bot has successfully appealed $3M worth of parking tickets in the UK
Sure, but then you're paying an attorney, not a bot.
johnpmayer··on Surrender fiscal sovereignty in return for bailout, Merkel tells Tsipras
QE is monetary policy. The (somewhat simplified) difference between the two: Fiscal policy is taxes and expenditures; monetary policy is what your central bank does.
johnpmayer··on Elm 0.15: Asynchrony with Tasks
There's probably going to be something like do-notation in Elm 0.16.
johnpmayer··on Learn Prolog Now
Authorization is a good fit - express your groups and roles as facts and rules (primitives) and then queries are... queries.
johnpmayer··on China fines Qualcomm $1B
...Qualcomm will offer licenses to 3G and 4G essential patents and will no longer require the bundling of those rights with other patents in its portfolio...

Wow, is that a common tactic? No wonder antitrust was on them.

johnpmayer··on First Impressions Using React Native
Regarding moving script code off the main thread: I wrote a cooperative FRP engine that multiplexes signal graph update recalculation onto Web Workers. UI updates like virtual DOM would live on the main thread.

https://github.com/Johnpmayer/liquid-thorium

johnpmayer··on Elm 0.14 – Simpler Core, Better Tools
For the record, I voted for enum, like in rust-lang ;-)

This was going to be contentious no matter what. For what it's worth, Wikipedia (top Google result) seems to have a compatible story.

Luckily, it's just a conversation change. I think it will be fine, and net more helpful than damaging. The overall goals are intuition and accessibility.

johnpmayer··on Who Has Your Back 2014: Protecting Your Data From Copyright/Trademark Bullies
I've been with them since SOPA. Never had issues but I'm not power user.
johnpmayer··on Nearly Every USGS Topo Map For Free
That's pretty cool. I'm a casual user who might go on a hike a few times a year; thought about picking this up but $20 plus IAP (do I need to buy maps?)... is there a trial or lite version?
johnpmayer··on Understanding what Minecraft really means to Microsoft
Care to elaborate? Much of the modding community is eagerly awaiting an official API.
johnpmayer··on Anger mounts over Barclays ban on rooted Android phones
Barclays surely has a web app; not sure how a rooted phone is any more unstable/unknown than HTML/Javascript running on an unknown browser client.
johnpmayer··on A call to arms: Helping Internet services accept anonymous users
Any site that uses Persona could be used anonymously through a trusted identity provider that generates on-demand, expiring email addresses.

(sans traffic monitoring ofc)

johnpmayer··on SWAT Team Detains Popular Gamer Who Was Live-Streaming ‘Counter-Strike’
I'm no lawyer, but to me, that's an interpretation that's more to-the-letter than in-the-spirit. A savvy judge could conceivably consider evidence collection mechanism tampering a special case of evidence tampering.
johnpmayer··on Show HN: PojoViz – Visualize the structure of any JavaScript library, framework
http://elm-lang.org/elm-runtime.js

I'm very curious what it looks like!

johnpmayer··on Show HN: PojoViz – Visualize the structure of any JavaScript library, framework
Looks like you can only see existing libraries on cdnjs? The version of elm-runtime is about 4-5 versions old.
johnpmayer··on Glowing Plant Is One of Y Combinator’s First Biotech Startups
Honestly I wouldn't be upset if the truth was none and none. May as well be happening in the open.

edit: If I got these I'd be breeding it with all sorts of other close species; see what sticks.

johnpmayer··on CSS is unnecessary given a layout language
Function calls and loops seem like a neat idea, but I dislike the fact they they compile down to JMP. It seems disingenuous. I'd much rather the CPU just be told this was a loop and ran with that properly.
johnpmayer··on CSS is unnecessary given a layout language
I think if you strip down this article, it's saying that something could be as powerful as CSS with fewer primitives given more composability.
johnpmayer··on Concurrency is the New Memory Management
You know, the embedded systems community has a heck of a lot of tools and formal logics for designing this stuff in the abstract. Lots of little DSLs and auto-checkers for thinking about processes and messages, that sort of thing. I'm not so sure about model -> code generation, I think that is mostly rolled by-hand.

For concurrency in the large, I wonder if there will be greater adoption of these sorts of engineering techniques.

johnpmayer··on Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]
It's not so much as quality of the UI but rather what the service actually is. I can black-box Aereo and it looks pretty much like a rebroadcaster. Aereo isn't renting me an antennae, not in the way AWS rents me a server.
johnpmayer··on Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]
Seems like, because Aereo isn't just a hardware renter but also an integrated SaaS provider, they were treated as such.

The court opinion talks in terms of user interaction with menus on the site to select shows. We're kidding ourselves if this works anything like "hardware rental". If it were, it would feel more like AWS.

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