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barrybe's comments

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: Instantly create beautiful GitHub project pages

That's how I do it, it works great that way. I didn't actually set up the gh-pages as a proper submodule, I just cloned the branch to a folder. Then I added the gh-pages folder to the top level .gitignore.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: "BitC isn't going to work in its current form"

Go might have had less marketing than Java, but it still had a decent amount of support. There were several high quality promotional videos when it was first released. The web page is really full-featured; it has a ton of documentation, including translations for several languages. And all those appearances at tech conferences take time & money (and I'm sure that Google sponsorship helped to secure some of them).

All that stuff adds up in terms of manpower and budget, and it's out of reach of what a small independent team can do. It's not all about technical merit.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: Why reddit sucks: The broken economics of karma

There is a cost to voting on Reddit, it's the time/attention cost of moving your mouse over and clicking a tiny button. Sometimes you even have to log in! For people browsing a web site, time & attention is a significant currency.

It's true that karma is a flawed as an economic system or a measure of contribution. But, who cares if the numbers are theoretically unsound? The end goal is to generate usage, something which Reddit has been extremely successful at.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: GUM: A better CLI for Git

If you start depending on reflog just remember that changes in there are subject to garbage collection. Commits can be permanently deleted after they are 2 weeks old (by the default settings), so that's how long you can depend on them staying alive in the reflog.

Of course you can always give a branch name or tag to any commit to keep it alive too.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: The Pirate Bay's statement on PIPA/SOPA

There's nothing about the US's past behavior which suggests that we're afraid of pissing off friendly countries. :) We're a bunch of international bullies, basically.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: What the Top 1% of Earners Majored In

It's kind of surprising how flat the curve is. Even the "worst" major choices still have plenty of people that make it to the 1%.

Of course, nowhere from this data can we conclude that your choice of major has an effect on your future financial success. Just that there's a correlation.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: Don't return null; use a tail call

That talk gets quoted pretty often, but it's a bit silly for Hoare to take all the blame/credit. Null references were discovered, not invented. They are so easy (from the point of view of someone implementing a non-functional language) that they were inevitable.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: Super Meat Boy leaves database wide open

Maybe you could argue that it was the right approach at the time. But deciding that the data doesn't matter anymore is not cool, you have to take care of your paying customers or else you lose credibility.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: "Another World" (game) Code Review

Another interesting case is Quake 3 which used a hand-written stack based VM. They don't introduce much of a performance hit when used wisely.

barrybe | 14 years ago | on: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

I don't get how NaCl can be a tool for controlling content, when it's easy to convert an NaCl app into a native app that can be downloaded and run at will. You can't really have Microsoft-style dominance over a platform when users can leave you as soon as they are slightly annoyed.

Not to mention that NaCl is open source BSD-license, so, yeah.

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