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msvan | 6 years ago | on: Multicore OCaml: Feb 2020 update

Languages like Haskell and Go already have multicore GCs. How does OCaml's multicore GC compare? Is the work taking a long time because it is doing something brand new in the design space, or is it simply hard to integrate it with a mature language that was designed to be single core?

msvan | 6 years ago | on: Haskell in Production: Riskbook

I think it's just not gonna fly in many organizations. You need the people who are going to be working with it and maintaining it to buy into it, and you also need to convince whoever is in charge of technology choices that it's a good idea. If you are the latter yourself, then that's half the problem solved.

It's probably easier to join an organization that is already positive towards it.

msvan | 6 years ago | on: A Tour of Standard ML

I look at go and I see an admission of defeat in programming language design. The central idea of go is that the way to have a language that is productive in the large is to impair it as much as possible. Unfortunately this idea seems to have been wildly successful.

msvan | 6 years ago | on: Unbearable news

The problem is that revenue from paying subscribers is not enough. For most newspapers, ads are needed to run a profitable digital business. Ads cannot be removed for paying subscribers, since paying subscribers are precisely who advertisers want to target. And if you want to display ads on the internet, you have to track people just like your competitors Google and Facebook do.

> If news companies believe their core purpose is the dissemination of valuable information, it would make a lot of sense for them to provide a text-only static version of their website.

I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.

msvan | 6 years ago | on: 16-inch MacBook Pro

So Apple made a decent MacBook Pro again. Good. But they still haven't made things right for the lemon they sold me. My keyboard is still not working, even after I handed it in for repair twice. Now I'm expected to shell out a few more grand just to have a working f key, and Apple is not even willing to acknowledge that they for years sold faulty products to gullible idiots like me.

Would it really hurt their octibajillion dollar valuation too much to just make things right for the customers who got shafted by their broken keyboard design?

msvan | 6 years ago | on: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

The flip side of the story is that Sublime died. I know they have had some updates recently, but for years it was completely stagnant. The hole that was left by Sublime was filled by VS Code. Maybe Sublime would've survived with a subscription model?

When you're paying a subscription you are paying for the maintainer's continued interest in the product over time, which is not to be underestimated. Software rots quickly.

msvan | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Darklang

I think this is really cool. I love that they're writing a projectional editor and trying to make that work, because it's such an obviously good idea that should be more widespread. You can make major DX improvements by tightly integrating tools that are presently decoupled, and that seems to be the big idea behind this.

I have a hard time believing this is going to work, but I've been wrong before and if I lived in the US I'd be tempted to apply for a job. How often do you see programming languages get funded!

msvan | 6 years ago | on: Levenshtein Distance

The sum forms a necessary but not sufficient condition for being within a certain Levenshtein distance. In your example, the inequality I gave above does not apply since |c1-c2| = 0. You would have to calculate the Levenshtein distance. In cases where the inequality is satisfied, you do not have to calculate the Levenshtein distance at all.

The idea is that any edit operation on a string will at most change the letter sum by |A|.

msvan | 6 years ago | on: Levenshtein Distance

Not sure how it's supposed to be solved, but I thought of a cute hack in the special case where the character set of the strings is limited, e.g. lowercase ASCII only.

Let A be the alphabet used. Precompute the "letter sum" of each string and store it. Then given two strings with letter sums c1 and c2, they cannot have Levenshtein distance k if |c1-c2| > k|A|. This could allow you to skip a lot of rows.

msvan | 6 years ago | on: Alan Kay Did Not Invent Objects

I've been seeing this meme recently that object-oriented programming is not what we think it is, but rather that it's some other ethereal quality which does not exist as a paradigm in modern languages. Isn't it fair to say that object-oriented programming is what the huge amount of C++/Java/C#/etc programmers perceive it to be, rather than some ideal envisioned by dead languages like Smalltalk and Simula?

msvan | 6 years ago | on: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

1) I don't mind paying for games. I just don't want the game mechanics to be designed to divert me towards spending more money on the game.

2) It's 12 games to start with. I'm sure there could be more later on.

msvan | 6 years ago | on: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

I think it's cool. I'm not that old, but games these days mostly seem to be about squeezing every last dollar out of the consumer through shady means. I think this is part of why I don't play video games anymore. It's nice to see something different.
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