If someone adds a jit to this I bet it would offer a strong case versus luajit. However, it looks like someone would need to maintain an alternate implementation: https://github.com/munificent/wren/issues/371

Java’s results are super surprising. I hold the JVM’s GC in extremely high regard, so I would love to see comments from someone who is more familiar with it’s implementation.

Working on updating our Ruby JIT to work with something much closer to Ruby HEAD. Initial bits are done, but at the cost of neutering a lot of functionality

An Apple wired keyboard with numeric keypad.

http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MB110LL/B/apple-keyboard-with-numeric-keypad-english-usa

404 now. New link is https://engineering.shopify.com/122596804-why-shopify-moved-to-the-production-engineering-model

Not sure if anybody else on the BO team is a Lobsters user, but I’m happy to answer / forward any questions about this stuff. It’s still early days, but we’re all excited to have it out in the open where we can collaborate with the community :)

And so begins an arms race.

Blockchain is a pretty interesting technology but there’s one massive flaw in this implementation:

A decentralized peer-to-peer architecture with nodes consisting of market participants (such as banks and securities firms).

What makes a blockchain trustworthy is that it’s very hard for a single entity to dominate the network and start cheating. bitcoin has thousands of full nodes and each of these help to secure the network. When membership is limited to banks and securities firms only the number of nodes is going to be low. Add to that the stakes are also very high with large sums of money involved and the incentive for someone to break this relatively insecure system is very high.

In practical terms it’d make a lot of sense for them to just piggyback on the bitcoin blockchain since it’s already heavily secured by a large number of participants. But I doubt they’ll do that since then they’d have to give up on the control they get from the relatively centralized model they’re proposing.

Very surprised neither suggested speeding the whole process up with a bunch of AWS instances.

For me, I’m a software note-taker, and a dedicated user of Zim which is a desktop wiki that fits by brain very nicely: The ability to create document trees is really useful, for keeping a work log, or for putting related documents together.

Search is pretty good, and so I have a tendency to paste just about everything of interest into it, for future reference.

I’m really excited for OMR. Having a generic reusable tool of that power freely available is going to really enhance a lot of languages out there and possibly start some new cool ones.

I’ve been using Fantasque Sans Mono for over six months now, and it’s definitely one of the best monospaced font I’ve used. I initially installed it just to see how silly it looked (it used to be called Cosmic Sans, what should you expect), but I realized that a lot of work and effort went into making it. I find that it looks better than DejaVu, Consolas and Terminus for my uses, including playing roguelikes.

Really too bad that IO is included on Linux. Any way to get a similar metric without IO?

I think we all need to exercise a large amount of sympathy for the person who sent the message. While they go about things the wrong way, people do not understand the way that software is put together, and so come to unreasonable (to us) conclusions.

Perhaps we need to be developing some well written explanations that can serve as templates for responses to mail like this.

This was a fascinating look into how badly a game can be broken with effort. Lots, and lots of effort.

A real congratulations to the video production too – made the whole thing completely understandable, with an excellent level of detail.

We’ve made great use of this in our quest to improve the codebase. By making dependencies explicit, rather than third order includes of includes, it’s dramatically easier see what’s been put in the wrong place.

Up vote for excerpts.

Battery life on devices is infuriating, a device that can last for weeks sounds like heaven.

This sounds like a great topic, but just points me to a paywall.

I more or less subscribe to this methodology, however it breaks down in long-lived feature branches (I know, a bad thing anyway) with several collaborators. If you wait to rebase until the branch is “complete” then you risk some really hairy conflicts and potentially flat-out breaking the feature you’ve been collaborating on in hard-to-identify ways. If you rebase frequently, then you screw up peoples' local repo when they get out-of-sync with the newly forced branch refs. Generally rewriting history in a collaborative environment requires great care.

One of the best things I picked up from this post was actually from the comments - I didn’t realize --force-with-lease was a thing, but I like it. It’s too bad it’s such a long option, but it may help this collaborating with rebases problem somewhat.