substack

Another neat thing about this module is that Lazy() can take an EventEmitter as an argument and custom event names, so you can wrap a Lazy() chain around existing streaming interfaces pretty easily.

Further, open code means that other researchers can come along and write unit tests. It amazes me how much code is still verified manually if at all in the sciences.

One time I worked on a power grid simulation that wanted to release its code but it couldn't because it used algorithms from «Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing» which has a pretty asinine copyright policy with respect to openness : http://www.nr.com/com/info-permissions.html

Even worse are the researchers who keep their models and data sets secret due to paranoia that some colleague will publish first, which admittedly does happen.

Cultivating a spirit of genuine cooperation and sharing in academia would do wonders for the progress of the sciences, but there are so many hurdles that need to be removed. It's not just a matter of knowing that it's good to release source code or feeling confident in including it as the article suggests.

I couldn't see how anything could possibly stay in orbit when gravity pulled everything together until I wrote a computer program to simulate orbits in 2d: http://ln-s.net/7oFZ

It was really enlightening to fiddle with the constants and to create events that show how kinetic and potential energy interact in space.

Yes but Android is a competitor to WebOS, so I was thinking more about how Google "feels" about its technologies being used in competitor's products.

I wonder how Google, with its competing Android platform must feel about this. That is to say, are chrome and android for that matter more like the Nexus 1: designed to push other companies forward, or more like standalone products of their own? Or maybe Google is being even more forward thinking about it and realizing that they can derive competitive advantage from both scenarios.

Glad you like it! Doing node-chess has given me a ton of ideas for the dnode web framework I have planned too. The framework will provide a more structured and out-of-the-box way to organize code that spans the server and client, since it can be hard to remember which functions belong to which side of the connection. It will also have some routines to synchronize objects between the server and client since sometimes you want a low-latency mirror of an object on the browser side, as we found in node-chess.

For fun I was whipping up some haskell one-liners as I read along.

You can just do:

    let fibs = 1 : 1 : [ fibs !! n + fibs !! (n - 1) | n <- [1..] ]

for the Fibonacci sequence and

    take 10 $ iterate (succ . recip) 1

for the first 10 iterations of the continued fraction.

To me these read much more clearly but then I haven't written anything big in a lispy language yet.

Neat. This style of code reuse is a lot like perl6 roles (http://search.cpan.org/~rkinyon/Perl6-Roles-0.01/lib/Perl6/R...) or haskell typeclasses: instead of describing how objects fit into a taxonomic hierarchy, objects or typeclasses are described by what behaviors they fulfill. For instance, in haskell a Complex type has an instance of Num in order to define numeric operations like (+) and (-). The emphasis is on what something does rather than on what it is.

Isn't it common in countries outside of the US for the younger generation to stay in the same home as the older generation? Perhaps this 20-something phenomenon is just a sign that Americans are becoming more established in their communities and closer to the world norm.

Not at all! The reason we haven't rolled out our demo yet is because hosting virtual machines takes a lot of server power to do. All of our code is up on github, so anybody can give it a spin for themselves, provided they can get it all running.

http://github.com/substack/stackvm

http://github.com/pkrumins/stackvm

These are pretty great and it looks like an interesting project, but why "4+ years of experience"? First of all, what exactly is a "year of experience"? You spent the entire year using some piece of tech? You used the tech once a year ago? I hate how commonplace these sorts of non-verifiable claims are in job postings.

Edit: I've been thinking about this some more and perhaps "hours of experience" is a better metric, given the 10,000-hours-to-mastery correspondence.

Can any individual government agent in such a capacity ever really be "just like me"? I don't take orders from anyone. They do. In that respect, they are nothing like me at all.

A large part of what makes tales of government harassment like this one so troubling is how similar, reasonable, and even pleasant the agents are. If they are just like us, then why is there so much injustice?

Modal dialog boxes make me sad/depressed/angry.

We plan to offer some kind of rdesktop or vnc backend for powerusers, since our software hooks into these on the backend anyways. This is a useful point!

Wow I had no idea! StackVM is all html and javascript and we've taken great care to make sure it works on all browsers without any silly plugins.

Yeah, it is one of the big unknowns we are testing with this startup, but for us it makes a lot of sense. By being open about our technology, we hope to gain eyeballs, traction, and goodwill from fellow hackers who might be our future customers. By being open about our ideas, we expose them to criticism so that we can reform them to be more realistic and to exploit new opportunities that we hadn't considered.

Thanks for pointing this out! Spoon seems to have found a nice niche in hosting up individual applications. StackVM right now is more about the entire operating system and geared towards hackers for the time being, but we may pivot into other areas. There are a lot of potential niches in this domain which is part of the reason why the problem is so exciting!

I prefer:

    my_variable or raise 'Hey dude! Where's My Variable Assignment'

or else:

    my_variable.nil? and raise 'Hey dude! Where's My Variable Assignment'

since it puts what's being tested in front like with if/then but is also syntactically light-weight.

I second the Sinatra recommendation. When I tried rails for the first time, it felt very large and unwelcoming, with a bunch of files that I didn't create sitting in my directory hierarchy doing unknowable things. Sinatra behaves just like any other library and requires far less of a time investment to pick up and start using.

The language is absolutely important, since in haskell I could just:

    > reverse [1,2,3,4]

or if I couldn't use the Prelude (yikes!)

    reverse [x] = [x]

    reverse (x:xs) = reverse xs ++ [x]

    > reverse [1,2,3,4]

The problem is that linked list traversal is a solved problem. Why not throw a novel and interesting problem at candidates? That way you could gain some insight into how they go about solving problems instead of how good the candidate is at memorizing other people's solutions that they could just as easily look up in a search engine in a few minutes.

The point of releasing open source software for me is that I am contributing in my own small way to the state of human technological progress and to the massive canon of free software that I benefit from every day. Plus it's exhilarating to see other people become as excited about the code I've written as I was when I wrote it!

This is a good point but at the same point not many employers have this strategy so I suspect there is plenty of underemployment among people writing open source given the level of skill. The hiring strategy that pkrumins advocates seems pretty sensible for a business that is already deeply familiar with the open source world.

Thanks for this response and the parent question too. I updated the article to make this point more clear.

When advance() in BufferList gets called, the linked list of buffers behind the scene advances so that all the unused buffers can get garbage collected. Binary has a flush() method too that calls advance().

This reminds me of a story from all the way back in high school algebra. I had just got a ti-83 calculator that year and was having fun writing basic programs for it. One of the class topics towards the end of the semester was the normal distribution and we were expected to memorize the percentages up to 3 standard deviations. I hated having to remember fixed quantities, so I wrote a program to calculate what I later learned were Riemann sums on the equation for the normal distribution I saw tucked away in the textbook.

I wrote a lot of programs like that one throughout high school and into college, and for me it was far more educational to solve a problem once and for through automation than to memorize constants, formulas, or to solve particular instances over and over.

I really hate years of experience used as a metric because it doesn't distinguish between people who did are actually experienced in a technology and people who have merely been around a technology for a long time but never bothered to probe its internals.

Not that I'm looking for a job, but this advert doesn't exactly sell the position, either. What sorts of technical problems are you solving? What is your development environment like? How does your team collaborate? You mention PHP, javascript, and linux, but what are you doing with these technologies specifically?

Light your lamp before going south and you'll be fine.

I ran the source through jsbeautifier.org yielding this: http://gist.github.com/351418

Some fun stuff:

* there is a MUD

* find kitten launches a mini-game

* apt-get moo

* i read the source code

As a male, computer science major, and avid coffee drinker, I too am repelled by energy drinks. That aside, in my experience I see two mostly-exclusive classes of "geek": people who are much more fascinated with producing technology and people who are much more interested in consuming it. Departments should be targeting producers irrespective of gender issues because they make better computer scientists. Increased diversity is a bonus.