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wesleyy

113 karma · joined August 27, 2014

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wesleyy··on Implement a programming language from scratch
Scared me for a second, thought he as going to make a programming language in the MIT gui language "Scratch"
wesleyy··on Apple Acquires FoundationDB
Well if we're in an ideal capitalism society, if what foundationDB created was really of such tremendous value, somebody will come along and do the same thing.
wesleyy··on Coding Like a Girl
I'm not sure what you mean? Which part of the quote are you referring to?

EDIT: whoops I now realized this is a reply to a different comment.

wesleyy··on Coding Like a Girl
This same article was posted on r/programming yesterday (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2y4294/coding_l...). The discussion following was quite interesting, especially this one comment regarding the twitter exchange (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2y4294/coding_l...).

"I'm not trying to say the whole article is bad so stay with me here, but is it just me or does some of this just come off as negative thinking and negative assumptions? A few examples from the article.. I have been a TA for weekend workshops that teach women to code. My male co-TA’s constantly asked me throughout the workshop how I was enjoying learning to program. ... ....Apparently, presenting as feminine makes you look like a beginner. You were at an event to teach women to code. I don't know the specifics because I wasn't there however maybe the assumption should be that they just didn't realise you weren't a student? I can understand how that must be frustrating but why attribute it to what you were wearing? I feel like the author didn't go into detail here. In another section the author links to a photo on twitter[1] that makes it appear as a commenter is telling Casey Johnston to read her own article. Casey Johnston: So many “solutions” to the lack of women in tech don’t get at the actual problems… Tomas Sancio: @caseyjohnston read the full article. There's a chicken and egg problem w/ female tech role models. Men want to be the next Jobs/Gates/etc. When I first read this screenshot I took it for what it was. "read the article"... i.e. "I read the article" and that's exactly what it turned out to be when I found the tweets[2] . The author putting this screenshot of twitter in here I feel is simply misrepresenting the situation or hasn't researched into even looking at the full context? I have to admit i've only looked at this for 10 minutes, maybe I'm getting the wrong picture here, but from what i've seen it's a completely different story to the one shown on the author's page. I often read these gender inequality articles, however I am always constantly disappointed when things like the above are over dramatized, or I do additional research to only find out that the author is presenting an incredibly biased view of a situation. I don't want people to conclude that there is no gender inequality, however I feel that things like the above do not help get the point across. In fact I think they do the opposite."

wesleyy··on How We Bought easypost.com
Hate to be a cynic but this article could've easily been titled 'how naming our startup "easypost" turned into a 15k mistake'.

I just can't imagine that the name easypost was 15k better than alternative names. I get that the company already had traction and it'd be cheaper to buy the domain than change the name of the company but I guess what I'm trying to say is domain name availability should probably be the number 1 criteria when picking a new startup name.

wesleyy··on Should Surgeons Keep Score?
If the score exists, the top end surgeons are going to show it to their patients, which will force the low end surgeons to do so as well. The only way to keep the score secret is to design regulations for it which I just don't see happening.
wesleyy··on Rvest: Easy web scraping with R
It's always great when you spend 10 hours trying to debug something and then find out from a mailing list that it's actually a bug in R. :(
wesleyy··on When Chinese children forget how to write
Well another thing with Chinese characters is that they are usually made up of parts, and these parts generally carry a theme. For example, if I have never seen a specific Chinese character, I can usually decipher its definition easier than English words because of the parts the Chinese character consists of. This is similar to roots in English, but these parts are less specific, and are recycled and reused in many more characters.

I agree that Chinese is not the easiest or best language when all practical aspects are considered, and this is one of the reason simplified Chinese was invented, but the social hurdle to completely adopt a different language or change it even more dramatically would be far bigger than the nuisances that the language may have.

wesleyy··on Why haven't China's cities learned from America's mistakes?
I don't think saying China didn't see and learn from the failing aspects of American city planning is fair or useful, especially when it comes to road planning. The Chinese and American culture on road use is completely different: (power/gas) scooters and (regular) bikes are extremely popular in Beijing, and Chinese drivers are generally much more aggressive. Because of this, most road users, including bikers, are capable of driving defensively against other road users. Most bikers/scooter-ers are already comfortable with weaving between cars on their commute. Would a segregated lane make commuting on smaller vehicles safer? Undoubtedly. Would it be necessary to incentivize biking over driving larger vehicles? Probably not.

This, along with other problems, like an exponentially expanding middle class population that can suddenly afford vehicles, is only one of the many different challenges most western governments have not experienced, which China currently faces. It may be unfair to quickly jump to conclusions and simply say the Chinese have not learned from the history of urban planning by western countries, when there are very few references from which the Chinese government can draw on, for the unique problems that they are facing.

TL;DR: Chinese urban centers have problems that cities in Western countries have not faced.

wesleyy··on When Chinese children forget how to write
Yes there actually is! English is a language that really favours the writer while Chinese favours the readers. Most of the time, you can read Chinese a lot quicker because the characters are all the same size (although they might have different complexity), and there is generally a lesser need for linking words to ease the awkwardness of sentences, unlike English, because each Chinese character carries more of a "concept"/"theme", where as english words usually have quite precise definitions, and have more specific places where the words would actually make sense.

This is just my opinion as a native Chinese and English speaker, but I'm sure other bilingual English/Chinese speakers would tend to agree.

wesleyy··on Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
I wonder if firefox purposely chose to adopt a developer-first strategy with its mobile OS, similar to Stripe. I know that this strategy works, at least somewhat, on me, as I recently needed a payment processor for a hackathon and, knowing nothing about payment processors and after some quick googling for the most developer friendly payment API, I went with Stripe. Though, it's probably going to be a lot tougher for Mozilla to use this strategy effectively in such a consumer facing product, especially when the mobile OS market is already so saturated with mature ecosystems.
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