richchan's comments

I agree that coding is generally not "taught" in lectures or recitations, but, like the article says, we learn from other people -- other people's code, their comments on our code, etc. In fact, I feel like that may be the only way to learn how to write good code and isn't something that can easily be self-taught.

Working with and learning from other people is way more effective (than just writing code) in figuring out how to identify good and bad code. And I think formal CS education usually gives people the right tools (like algos, design patterns, data structures, etc.) to understand and work with others.

link to "copy factory": http://shanzhaioff.com/

I hope there isn't a flash app on Facebook that is using just that to decide whether to show an employee/admin interface.. Will be quite easy to spoof the result of that page if it is client-side.

The main goal of the web app is to have a shell-like environment with files in the cloud as the "file system" (currently only Dropbox, may add Google Docs later), so we can write scripts that interact with these files easily.

Please leave any comment/suggestions.

p.s. it only accepts javascript syntax right now. Writing a more shell-like parser is a potential TODO.

It probably doesn't even need to be "good" code. Just study any code and think about why it is written that way, and what circumstances makes it good.

Any correctly written code can probably be considered good. The rest is about how well it is designed and how it performs in different situations.

I think he meant the business-oriented marketplace: http://google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

Alternatively, perhaps we can let users select (follow) a set of like-minded people and make the up-votes of the people they pick weigh more on a "customized" front page.

But then people may have not like having their up-votes be so transparent..

I would love to say that I made a very sophisticated automated tool for this.. but it was mostly just me hacking a simple script that lets me manually select coordinates and preview the lines; while console.log()ing the coordinates and copy-and-pasting into the arrays.

The "borders" for each layer are easier -- all the coordinates come from the SVG, after translating and scaling.

Done! As a bonus, you can now dynamically change the parameters while it is drawing.

Yep.. Apparently calling jquery ui's disable method doesn't disable the handler -- guess I should've read the docs...

Anyway, thanks for pointing it out. I will try to fix it when I get home. Before then, have fun with the "interesting effects". =)

Other easter eggs:

http://www.google.com/search?q=anagram http://www.google.com/search?q=ascii+art

The video doesn't say much about what the app does exactly, but it sounds like they targeted a really good niche. Who knew an app for finding shoe boutiques would have so much demand?

As confirmed by wiki's twitter account: http://twitter.com/#!/wikipedia

.. and the thousands of tweets coming in about it.

Unless he meant the stock - it did go down a bit in the afternoon today. =p

From what they have on the wiki, it sounds like it may not necessarily slow down the performance by that much.

It looks like they are really only putting a web frontend on top of eclipse, so all the computation heavy stuff happens on the backend and gets sent back to the browser asynchronously. In other words, it should work as fast as the desktop eclipse (minus latency issues).

The idea does sound interesting - so it looks like they are trying to reduce the amount of network handshaking by imposing a stricter isolation.

I am not sure I am convinced by their results though. They say their deterministic system seems viable when comparing its performance to traditional systems under short in-memory transactions. That is a special case that is clearly in their favor though. In that situation, the amount of time spent in processing data is greatly reduced so the network overhead becomes much more significant - so the system that does less network communications will obviously win...

I guess it may potentially be good for in-memory database systems for stuff like OLTP apps (e.g. VoltDB and TimesTen), but then I think most OLTP apps are okay with a more relaxed isolation...

Has any one heard anything about the Kindle Development Kit? Looks like they are still in private beta.

I wonder if there will be Kindle apps (and app store??) coming any time soon.

Sounds like there could be a trade-off between using resources on your own server to keep track of these analytics versus just having Google do it. But then maybe it is insignificant.

Anyone has some stats on how much hit on the server it is doing?

Hm.. has any one hacked up some fancy visualizations using their framework yet?

Looks like social gaming really is the "big thing" this year. At least that's what Google seems to think.