matt2000

Has anyone had any experiences learning different mathematical techniques using Mathematica? I was wondering if it might be more enjoyable to learn some areas without the manual arithmetic usually involved in school. Any recommendations on books or courses appreciated, thanks!

For reference, here's a fairly detailed response: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/valhalla-dev/2014-Dec...

Site note: I liked how both authors took pains to be respectful in their tones, keeps the focus on the issues at hand and avoids people getting irritated with one another.

I love the developer experience with Heroku, just please give some of the gains of Moore's law back to your customers. While AWS and Google drop prices and increase their offering, the 1x dyno stays exactly where it's always been. I am completely fine with paying a premium over other services for your awesome toolset, but please just give us some of the improvements other cloud services are seeing instead of taking that as profits.

We are all complete oafs.

Back up! For now...

Getting experience with the technology involved has definitely been a side effect. For example, I'm a whole bunch better at managing lots of pull requests in git versus a few days ago. It's been a really fun ride so far, no idea where it'll end up but excited to see what happens.

Hey there, one of the creators of the site here. When we put this line on the site we never expected it to be this controversial! It isn't meant to be a universal truth, it's just in terms of a "website you join via pull request." So, perhaps better written as: "Almost everybody who works on a website knows JavaScript."

The satellite that you join via pull request can be written in whatever you want :)

Awesome, thanks. We're going to go through most of this in detail in the morning, getting late here for us but this looks awesome.

Op here: yeah, it might be the case that the community selection will be too narrow, but we figured almost any programmer knows something of HTML or CSS or JavaScript, so that seemed like a good lowest common denominator for a minimal standard of contribution.

Op here: sorry, we got a little back logged processing the PRs when we hit the front page, and also because of exactly this username merge problem (whoops).

Op here: yeah, exactly - that's part of the thinking. Or maybe the feature surface area will expand enough that there's always low hanging fruit somewhere. I'm not really sure.

OP here, we just tried to pick a language that the most people would know. I'm pretty bad at JavaScript, but I know enough to get things done so we went with that.

Dear "angersock", it appears in fact you don't hate to be a jerk. The entire contents of your comment indicate the opposite, you enjoy being a jerk. However, there's an interesting question of what's worth working on in the comment, so let's rephrase so we can maybe discuss:

"Is photo storage really broken as the post says? Do we really need more of this kind of technology? I know of some real inefficiencies in medical image sharing which seems like it'd be a similar problem to solve, but to my eyes much more valuable. What would it take to convince people problems like that are worth tackling?"

In case anyone was wondering, like I was how VP9 quality stacks up, here's a comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctjm1kxw-BM (although it's a bit weird since everything is re-encoded for youtube, so take with a grain of salt).

To my eyes, VP9 looks roughly on par with h264, but not as good as h265.

Feels like Java is the new C, C is the new ASM (performance wise at least). I've been doing this long enough that when I started using Java it was too slow for "anything serious", now it's the coice for performance. Definitely feels weird.

In my opinion you've missed the point almost entirely:

1) If you see problems with a language you're an expert in, submit a pull request. I've never seen a benchmark done like this before, it gives everyone a chance to fix problems in their favorite framework/language. 2) It is a little bit of a unfair comparison between very low feature frameworks to higher ones, but it gives you a good idea of what you're trading off on basic performance. For example, I thought our use of play1-java wasn't far off of servlet on basic tasks, but boy was I wrong, perhaps by 10x.

Should you read this list and pick the top thing on the chart? No. However, hard to argue this isn't interesting and useful information.

There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem here: If app.net was already well established among users then it'd be great to tap into that userbase, and users would be looking for more apps. Unfortunately, before that happens it's pretty hard to imagine that an app developer would be able or want to introduce their users to both 1) their app, and 2) that they need to pay for a separate service in addition. Sounds like it'd be complicated and confusing to users. Perhaps if alpha.app.net were to take off that would solve the problem, but since they're focusing on a platform and not the app, that doesn't seem as likely.

Perhaps we should make a site who's terms of service explicitly bars use by members of congress. Once some member of congress goes to the site, we try to get them put in jail, at which point they'll change the law.

Just for interest sake what language were you working in?

Thanks. Am I right in thinking its basically bigtable?

I disagree with this almost entirely.

Startups _are_ different:

1. What you are doing starts at 0 value. 2. You can (usually) break it and it's ok. 3. You need to change stuff a LOT to figure out something that someone wants to use, rewriting tests makes that slower.

Every test case you write has a cost: It verifies that something of unknown value works. What if the value of that code is 0? Well, you just doubled down on something useless.

There are no absolutes in software development, but how we did it was have uncomfortably too few test cases when something is new, change the product for a while until someone actually wants to use it, then add a bunch of tests until we know it works from there on out.

And I hesitate to add: Also we work in Java so a bunch of testing comes for free, so there's that.

I agree, the other way to look at this is that they're working through the weekend to figure it out.

Fwiw our site isn't as big as rap genius and we see highly variable performance and timeouts even on requests that on average only take 100ms. I'm not ready to blame heroku entirely since there's a lot of moving parts that still could be at fault, but after optimizing as much as we could we still see the behavior. It feels like the routing layer could be the most likely problem. Summary: you might see highly variable request time regardless of traffic levels.

Hilarious - does anyone have any backstory or more info?

[I work at Docracy] The first part here isn't necessarily true. Many sites don't keep previous versions of their terms online, so the version of the terms you agreed to might no longer be available.

Do think this might be a viable messaging option instead of paying for Internet minutes or SMS?

I'd be very interested to hear from people using other databases on whether their DB of choice is much better. I've been using MySQL for a while, have been burned by a few things, but figured it was mainly my fault. If indeed there are better options I'd love to hear the details.

(Just to be clear, I know about other databases, just aren't sure if any are that much better in real world use).

I see, so the use case here is real time messaging and chat? Like if there's a lot of people in a given area they care fire this up and talk? That sounds pretty awesome. We were going more for a slowly propagating P2P effect that might take days for a message to reach someone farther away, but I like the sound of what you've got there too.

Thanks, looks interesting, I'll check that out.

I think sadly that changing without notice is the standard language, but I'll check against some other TOS on the site to be sure.