arghbleargh's comments

I won't deny that a lot of times you only need to convey a very short message, but what makes this better than just texting?

Maybe you should narrow your focus to the one or two projects you think have the strongest value proposition for the general public and treat all the others as just tools for your own use?

I agree with a lot of what the author says, but I got a little confused at the end when he started talking about fixtures. It didn't seem to tie in with the rest of the article. But I think the underlying thesis of the article could be described as the following: treat testing as an internal tool.

This means thinking of yourself as the user and optimizing for your needs (avoiding repetitive tasks, minimizing bugs in your project). It means sometimes creating interfaces for creating new tests, like how admin pages are nice interfaces for SQL queries. Conversely, it also means things like not writing overly fine-grained tests in the name of test coverage (this would be like if your admin page had two separate tools for "change user first name" and "change user last name").

For me the pointer hand is a little too subtle. I prefer to have the border highlighted on mouseover, which gives a strong visual indication without obscuring the content.

I have to agree though that modern designs, while slick, are often no more usable than designs from the 2000s. For example, take the point about vague icons near the end of the article. Even though you can often guess roughly what those icons do, that moment of uncertainty when you click them to see what happens creates a jarring user experience that could have been avoided with a few words of text.

A major contributing factor to this trend in design is obviously the emphasis on mobile devices (e.g. sometimes you have to use those small icons due to limited screen sizes). It annoys me that a lot of this mobile-driven design gets copied over to the desktop even when the same constraints no longer apply. Unfortunately, this is not completely without reason. To me, words like "refresh" are less ambiguous than circular arrows, but maybe to someone who grew up using only tablets and iphones, the circular arrow is more familiar.

Those are actually matrix multiplications and additions, so it can make a significant difference (e.g. it's way faster to add two 50x50 matrices than to multiply them).

Hmmm.. but how did the theorem prover find the solution? Probably by heuristics + brute force.

I don't see causality as defined in this context as needing any extra "motivation". It's pretty clear that if an agent tries to do A and then B, your system probably should not first execute B and then A. Imagine if the instructions in one of your program threads were not guaranteed to be executed in order. You would never be able to write code that does anything meaningful that way.

Yes, I found the latest post quotes to be rather distracting. There is no context for the posts (not even thread name), so it's all wasted space for me. Maybe it would be more useful to show something like recently commented threads and maybe a preview of latest posts in that thread if you hover. Some other issues for me:

* The usernames do not appear next to the avatars in the posts, and generally users are identified by avatar rather than username. This is very confusing, especially since avatars can change, and it's hard to distinguish faces in images that small.

* Along the same lines, icons are used all over the place instead of text. I find this annoying, as the icons are not self-explanatory, and I have to hover over every little icon in order to understand what I can do. For example, I had no idea what the "topics" and "posts" icons meant before hovering. Similarly, there is no reason to use text in the navigation bar (add an icon next to the text if you must). To be fair, the icons have the advantage of taking up less space on mobile.

* The styling was a bit jarring to me, with the high contrast and lack of strong borders between elements. The whole purpose of going to a forum is to read a lot of text, so it makes sense to use more neutral background colors. Of course, this can be customized I'm sure, so this is more feedback on the demo site rather than the platform.

But overall the implementation seemed solid, and I can see this eventually becoming a nice BB platform.

Edit: this is all based on https://community.nodebb.org/.

Seems like a fine design, but doesn't it require a lot of space? It looks like you would have to widen existing roads by at least 10 ft or so, which wouldn't be practical for a lot of roads in the city.

Or you could do it even faster by solving it directly. First note that all the parities change together, so pick the two smallest groups with the same parity, say wolves and goats. These will be the species to try to eliminate.

Then have all the wolves eat goats until only one of the species is left, say 2k wolves. Then do k iterations of lion eat wolf and wolf eat goat.

I wouldn't be so sure that this isn't exactly what they want. Consciously you get annoyed, but it's those same ads that pop into your head from your subconscious every once in a while.

I'm still in the middle of reading, but I think many people (especially outside of the Bay area) have a certain perception on what the life of a startup founder is like. And the point of the story is to presumably give a real-life view of things that may be different from the popular perception. In other words, maybe you were not really the intended audience.

Yes, I guess the examples shown are indeed "game mechanics" of a sort, but it seems to be heavily focused on game physics, at least for now. When I saw the title I was thinking of something much broader that would include things like how to use items, how to level up, etc.

Disclaimer: I have not read the book either.

One thing I don't understand about the r and g thing is how it makes sense to compare these two values at all. Isn't capital a measure of accumulated wealth, while GDP is a measure of wealth produced in a certain unit of time? For example, what if we just maintained a perfectly steady GDP that exceeded our consumption needs; wouldn't that yield a positive r and explain r > g? Does someone who read the book have a better understanding of exactly what these two numbers mean?

P.S. I find it implausible that Piketty would make such an elementary mistake as the arithmetic mean vs. geometric mean issue discussed in the article. But again someone who has actually read the book should weigh in.

That sounds amazing to me too. What you described is really the only way that making lists of "core values" could possibly achieve something useful. I just never thought it could happen. Usually people just remember the core values as a list of things that sound good, and they're too abstract to offer any real guidance for a concrete situation.

You can always replace dialoguegue with dialogue again afterwards.

For the benefit of those who can't/don't want to watch the video, can someone summarize what Lessig's "cause" is?

EDIT: More specifically, I am wondering why he's calling for the help of "technically enabled" people. What is the relevance of technology here?

The article actually makes pretty good suggestions despite coming off as a little arrogant (our design tweaks will make a world of difference, if only the developers could understand!). I think the key is to realize that the visual design work comes last. Moving things by a few pixels here or there is not going to make or break your product, because the purpose of your product is to provide some sort of useful functionality and not just to look pretty (presumably). And a lot of times it's completely subjective anyway. Get the approximate layout and user interactions nailed down first, ignoring any superficial flaws. Then, at the very end, I don't think the developer will mind if you ask him or her to make one pass of tweaking a bunch of colors and alignments.

Your algorithm seems OK, but what was the "traditional approach" that you compared it to, and how did you compare them? It seems like you actually gain a lot from full document search (e.g. products with multi-paragraph descriptions). Otherwise, you might as well just do a SQL query to get your results.

It appears to be very similar to icedcoffeescript: http://maxtaco.github.io/coffee-script/