mdiep's comments

"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it." –Alan Perlis

A friend of mine made a fun (upcoming) cooperative party game based on this:

- BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/408945/boubakiki

- Kickstarter (Funded): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grandgamersguild/bouba-...

The cards in the game have nonsense words and illustrations. Players work through various scenarios where they try to agree about which nonsense words should go with which illustrations.

If you're interested in property-based testing, I highly recommend "How to Specify It!" by John Hughes, which is available both as a talk and as a paper.

https://research.chalmers.se/publication/517894/file/517894_... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NUOst-53U

He gives fantastic guidance about how to write PBTs.

I made a Swift library, Logician (https://github.com/mdiep/Logician), based on microKanren with the help of these links. I also wrote about how it works with Swift: https://matt.diephouse.com/2016/12/logic-programming-in-swif...

I haven't had the chance to build anything that uses them. But having become familiar, I think there are lots of potential applications. I always thought that Prolog was strange. Logic programming makes a lot more sense as a library IMO.

ScreenHero.

Slack built it their app, but made it way slower and ruined the simple UI. What used to take 3-5s now takes 30-60s.

What we've done with GitHub Desktop is very different than the write-an-entire-app-in-JS approach that a lot of apps have taken. There's a small piece of custom UI that's built with HTML, JS, and CSS; but even it is controlled by native code. GitHub Desktop is still mostly native code on both platforms.

This actually has nothing to do with our startup performance, at least on OS X. The comparison graph doesn't have a substantial impact on it. :)

Also, any similarities to Atom are superficial at best on OS X. We use WebKit (where Electron/Atom use Chromium) and most of the app is native code.

I'm less knowledgable about the Windows side, so I can't comment on it.

That is something that we've considered. Both Mac and Windows clients predate Electron (but maybe not the initial versions of Atom).

Rewriting from scratch in an unfamiliar environment would have taken a lot more work. There are tradeoffs to both approaches, but using the existing native apps let us ship a less buggy release more quickly.

I really liked the sound of Crashlytics. Then Twitter bought it. Now it's free. I don't trust Twitter and I don't trust free, so I'm less likely to use this.

If I don't understand why something is free, I grow suspicious. I want to know how a company plans to make money before I sign up for its services.

I think the argument is that if Apple made a calculator that looked like the Braun one it would be stealing. But since it's not the same type of device, it's a tribute. I'm not sure if this is a valid legal argument, but I understand it.

Let's not confuse arguments that benefit Apple with blind support of Apple. Intentionally making a phone that copies the iPhone is clearly wrong, IMO. This clock issue is quite a bit murkier.

I think we can all agree that Marco overreacted: he says as much in his blog post.

But this doesn't affect my confidence in the Instapaper service. I think it says a lot about Marco that he was willing to admit his fault and reverse his decision—much more than the mistake itself said.

The article does not say that downloading it over your wi-fi connection will result in $2.58 in delivery fees. It says that the average delivery fee for the book was $2.58.

Is there a reason I should care about GCC anymore? Admittedly, I mostly code ObjC on OS X, where GCC is no longer relevant, but LLVM seems to have leapfrogged GCC so dramatically that I'm unsure why I would even care about GCC.

LLVM integrates better with tools, has an amazing static analyzer, and AFAIK generates code that is on average as fast and small as GCC. (I believe who wins depends on the code.)

Absolutely. I read GEB in high school, and have often thought of reading it again, but it's a hefty book to carry around.

Unfortunately, I don't think we'll see an eBook edition too soon. Hofstadter describes himself somewhere (in the GEB preface, maybe?) as very picky about the layout of his books. I remember him saying that he would sometimes rewrite sentences in order to make the layout better.

As a tea neophyte, I strongly suggest that you add a link to recommended equipment for brewing loose-leaf tea. I have considered trying to get into tea several times, but could never figure out exactly what I should buy if I want to brew loose leaf tea. (I'm sure I could find something, but I only like buying things off of recommendations.)

This could do 2 things for you:

1) You could earn some money off of an affiliate program.

2) People like myself who are new to tea are unlikely to subscribe to your service without some help. Tell me what I need to enjoy tea (include brewing directions if they don't come with your tea), and I'm much more likely to subscribe.

I would specifically recommend that you recommend a single product with a direct link—not a type of product or brand.

Very cool! A few things for you to consider:

1. Consider putting preferences in their own window. This is the standard Mac behavior, and it's a little confusing to have your app do something different. You could also use the standard preferences toolbar look.

2. The artwork for your playback controls looks off. Specifically, I think the anti-aliasing of the circles looks uneven.

3. For the gear menu at the bottom left corner of the window, consider adding a little arrow like in Mail.app. That helps me know that this is a dropdown menu.

4. I had no idea what the X would do in the bottom left corner of the window the first time I pressed it.

5. Tooltips would help. You don't seem to have tooltips anywhere.

6. I was very surprised that spacebar didn't control play/pause and was even more surprised that there is no keyboard shortcut for play/pause. EDIT: It appears that spacebar does control playback. Maybe I had a focus issue before. But it would still be nice to see it in the menu. :)

7. Having "Library", "Playlists", etc. at the top of the window is interesting, but ultimately I think you'd do better with a standard look/feel. Consider using the standard selected toolbar item look. (See the preferences of almost any Mac app to see what I mean.)

8. This is very minor, but you have an extra menu item divider at the bottom of the View menu.

9. The album artwork of the currently playing song (top left corner) looks very slightly off-center. I think there's one more pixel on the right side than the left.

Overall, it's very impressive! Good work. :)

I'd love to see a full list of all the books you read and the order in which you read them. I recently started reading The Story of Civilization and augmenting it with other works seems like a wonderful idea.

Ha! Remarkable because I know Seun. He's not dangerous, but he does have a thick Nigerian accent.

I can't help but wonder if his accent helped him get through security and on the plane. It's hard to catch someone in a lie when you're struggling to understand what he's saying.

I don't think that's really a fair treatment of the issue.

It probably doesn't make sense, from a business standpoint, for Amazon to maintain their facilities there if Texas can make them collect sales tax. So Amazon would probably save money by moving the facility. But it still costs money for them to move, which they'd rather not do.

So consider these two options:

A) Amazon is forced to collect sales tax. Amazon moves the facilities to a different state. Texas still doesn't collect sales tax, and also loses 5,000 jobs! Amazon has to pay for new facilities/relocation.

B) Amazon isn't forced to collect sales tax. Amazon stays. Texas retains the 5,000 jobs, but also gains 5,000 new jobs. Amazon doesn't have to pay to relocate.

Either way, the state isn't going to collect sales tax. So why bother enacting the law? It's really a choice between keeping or losing the jobs, not between collecting or not collecting sales tax.

Amazon recognizes this. So rather than both lose money, Amazon proposes to Texas that they invest more in their infrastructure their, create new jobs, and indirectly fund the Texas government through income and property taxes.

(It may also make sense for Texas to pursue enforcement as a way to blackmail Amazon into investing more into their state.)

Politicians would do well to recognize that their actions don't exist in a vacuum. Businesses will react to maximize profits. So even though something might on paper bring in money, it's possible that in reality it will only cost money.

For a long time, that was also my impression. But it's wrong. Mostly.

It turns out that there isn't a single definition for the word species—there are multiple definitions that lead to different results. Reading through the Wikipedia article about species will give you a sense of the different definitions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species

If you use the Biological/Isolation species definition, I think you could argue that humans are or were multiple species. (Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.)