I’ve been using iOS for about 2 years and only today learned about this feature from this article. It’s really hard to invoke, you need to shake phone with decent force, so I never invoked it accidentally. Very weird feature.

For task runner, we use queue_classic. Despite “database as message queue” is considered classical antipattern, it’s suitable for our load and our use cases (also postgres has notify so polling is not required).

For scheduler we use cron configured with whenever, which is not very convenient. Looking for replacement for it, but everything else is too complex.

On macOS, brew cask install docker will install Docker for Mac automatically.

This is a chance to get familiar with a newer and exciting language in the compile to Javascript world.

Why Reason is always marketed as “language that compiles to javascript”? I thought it’s just alternative syntax for Ocaml (i.e. it rather compiles to Ocaml or its internal representation than JS), and that compilation to javascript is performed by Bucklescript, not Reason.

What js-specific functionality it has, compared to plain Ocaml with Bucklescript? Maybe better integration with npm mentioned on website? Or [% … ] quasi-quotations allowing to embed raw js?

Even Bucklescript website shows code examples in Reason. I’m confused.

Often necessity to use deep copy (in any language) signals bad design: when you don’t know for sure that some code to which you pass that object will not mutate it and its deep sub-parts. That’s overly defensive programming. I rarely encounter even shallow copy in practice (almost always it’s right before mutating such objects) and almost never encounter need for deep copy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJGrl4gJxx4

This is track 3 from the CD. It’s cheesy soft synth video game muzak. It’s in high quality on YouTube. Awesome insight in the process of ripping, but why for this particular track?

This brings up the question if .NET brings any advantages to startups, say over Ruby or Node.js. My personal point of view is definitely.

Currently it lacks ecosystem badly. Over its history, almost everything in .NET world was exclusively made by Microsoft. Java has Apache Software Foundation and Spring, which are attractive to startups. .NET basically has only Weblogic/Websphere-like stuff. Even its build system (msbuild) is based on scary Visual Studio xml stuff which is hard to manage without Visual Studio GUI (there is better tooling on top of this from F# community such as Paket).

.NET/Mono is, however, became popular in indie gamedev because of Monogame (based on Microsoft’s XNA framework) and, later, Unity.

C# language is also not so attractive, being basically slightly better Java but still Java. F# might be more attractive than Scala, though, but it lacks ad-hoc polymorphism and has weird mix of OO and non-OO (only OO part of language has interfaces), I didn’t find this language very pleasant.

But is Java’s BigDecimal really noticeably slower than Cobol’s? Benchmark in this article compares Java’s floats with Java’s BigDecimals, not Java’s BigDecimals with Cobol’s BigDecimals. Uniquesoft’s article also didn’t come to conclusion: they were migrating from mainframes to common x86 hardware.

I thought primary use of Cobol is legacy banking and business data applications, not rocket engines and physics simulations (unlike Fortran), so why performance of fixed-point numbers have such importance?

Python (and for that matter Java) do not have fixed point built in and COBOL does. In order to get Python to do fixed point I needed to import the Decimal module.

Does this really matter? Moving features from core language to standard library is usually considered good thing.

We use Hipchat and it’s completely awful. Web version silently logs out every few days, after that I stop to receive messages and can’t notice that it’s logged out until switching to its tab. Desktop client (based on Electron and having huge size) stopped receiving messages after sleep mode in older versions. In newer versions it uses http polling to receive messages (not long polling, just regular periodic requests, like in 90s web chats). When pasting blocks of code, it replaces multiple spaces with non-breaking spaces, so if you copy it back, you’ll get invisible surprise.

Still better than Skype, though, and is cheaper than Slack.

But I fear that if it will be replaced with Slack, our team will use chat more (instead of Github and Basecamp comments), and chat notifications make me nervous.

Suing abandonware archives is too meanly. Personally I found Nintendo franchises like all these marios and zeldas as disgusting as Hollywood stuff. They had done lots of aggressive marketing in social networks recently to ensure “geek culture” is associated with their silly characters targeted to 5-year-old kids. I hope if all these ROMs would be removed from internets, this will lower popularity of Nintendo brands.

Other important political aspect of Material Design (and some other UI/web styles that are popular now) is “minimalism”. Your UI should have few buttons. User should have no choices. User should be consumer of content, not a producer. Having play and pause buttons is enough. User should have few choices how and what to consume — recommender system (“algorithmic timeline”, “AI”) should tell them what to consume. This rhetoric is repeated over and over in web and mobile dev blogs.

Imagine graphics editor or DAW with “material design”. It’s just nearly impossible. It’s suitable only for scroll-feed consumption and “personal information sharing” applications.

Also, it’s “mobile-first”, because Google controls mobile (80% market share or something like that). Some pages on Google itself (i.e. account settings) look on desktop like I’m viewing it on giant handset.

P.S. compared with “hipster” modernist things of ~2010, which often were nice and “warm”, Material Design looks really creepy for me even when considering only visual appearance.

This problem would have been avoided if Unreal Engine had fail-fast behavior in class remappings. Some discussion on Reddit. Seems that converting errors to warnings is popular in culture of gamedev (and was popular in web too in PHP era). Almost every game emits lots of creepiest warnings.

By looking at screencasts, this game reminded me of E.T. for Atari and non-bugged AI would not save it. Hollywood movie franchise games are almost always of extremely poor quality in all aspects, not only code, but gameplay, assets and art style too.

See also: ARM emulator on AVR, able to run Linux.

What are innovations of this system? It has DHT and it allows to download file by knowing its hash, but bittorrent and edonkey has this functionality for more than a decade. I don’t understand “Development Strategy” section but seems that it’s about testing and simulating rather than new features.

Stylus is using the same theme database without collecting your history:

• Firefox
• Chrome

I wouldn’t tell this “storytelling”, just a marketing trick to induce discussions in social media and to make the game look like it’s ever-changing and not static. “Battle royale” games are, perhaps, the most soulless things in the industry, after mobile games with in-app purchases. Moreover, Fortnite’s look-and-feel is directly borrowed from such mobile games.

Unfortunately, there are no details in this blog post how it’s used for GUI. Desktop GUI is non-standard use of clojure. I’m curious, what widget toolkit they are using, how they manage state, how they deal with boundary between imperative API in most GUI toolkits with (almost) pure core of app logic (hopefully). According to screenshots on the website, editor looks like it’s based on Eclipse or just using Eclipse’s SWT. Even binary download of their game toolkit is under login-gate.

What are key differences between ActivityPub and RSS+WebSub/pubsubhubbub? Its spec is long and verbose, I can’t tell at a glance what does it represent. I see that it supports likes and subscription lists, but what are other differences to RSS? Does it support comments? Is it just for twitter-like websites, or suitable for blogs and reddit-like websites too?

What I like in ActivityPub is that it’s RDF-based. It’s cool technology based on romantic ideas of expert systems, Prolog, rule-based AI, etc.

I experience pain of using it every time I have to edit i18n strings in Rails project. Even XML would be more convenient.

Other markup formats with the same philosophy (multiple ways to represent things, indentation-based, concise) has similar problems.

Stateless cryptography-based login tokens are also popular outside of JWT, for example Rails’s default session storage uses this approach (it also has handy MessageVerifier). So almost everything described in article applies to these session stores as well.