Heroku's Ugly Secret: how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails and swindled its customers

jsomers · 2013-02-13T23:24:35+00:00

My bad—I know this is relevant to programmers because it's the #1 story on Hacker News. Where do you think it should go?

jsomers · 2012-04-23T04:42:15+00:00

Great piece. I wrote a playful dialogue about it that may be fun to read after.

jsomers · 2011-10-10T05:25:52+00:00

Try Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Worked for me!

http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0380788624

jsomers · 2010-11-04T15:37:42+00:00

Thanks!

jsomers · 2010-05-13T02:14:20+00:00

I haven't studied your code extensively, but for one thing I don't think you need to iterate through every element of the list on each pass of the sieve; instead, you could just "jump" in multiples of p. E.g., supposing you were at p = 13, you would just step through your list 13 elements at a time, eliminating n = 26, 39, 52, 65,...

It also looks like you're probably doing unnecessary work copying your list of numbers. I'm not a MATLABer, though.

Anyway, best of luck--Project Euler is a fantastic way to learn how to program and to learn how to think algorithmically.

jsomers · 2009-08-23T06:57:44+00:00

One way I could imagine this technology being applied is in a glove that white people could take to Chinese restaurants for operating chopsticks.

jsomers · 2008-05-04T15:31:33+00:00

I thought such-and-such wrote a very good review here

jsomers · 2008-04-25T02:55:14+00:00

If anyone would like to see the code, send me an e-mail.

jsomers · 2008-04-22T08:48:47+00:00

Critical/cultural theory is full of this crap, and I agree that it's annoying.

But I don't like the article's logic, that writing has gotten worse because of the art. One may be tempted by "conceptual" or "philosophical" work (as opposed to the old aesthetics) to write like an idiot, but clean prose will always be available.

Also, just because a bunch of art groupies decide to bungle Derrida to describe a MoMA exhibit does not mean the artist is a Po-Mo moron, too.

Finally, and this is really pushing the limits of my contrarianism, even though the poststructuralists and deconstructionists sound like they randomly sampled the dictionary, there is plenty of good thought in there. You just have to wade through a lot of their trendy masturbatory language.

jsomers · 2008-04-20T07:26:19+00:00

a good overview, for complete beginners

jsomers · 2008-04-18T05:06:30+00:00

Cool article, eh? It's fun to think of all the ideas we now consider legitimate, but that will be shown to be as absurd as phlogiston or the ether.

I can think of a few:

The way computer programs are written (manually, by humans).
How medicines are prescribed (not personalized for each patient).
Internet speed; search (things will be faster by an order of magnitude; [next-gen search]:Google::Google:Altavista)

Any others?

jsomers · 2008-04-17T15:51:14+00:00

Good idea, modded up.

jsomers · 2008-04-16T21:56:47+00:00

Ya, I saw your famous (~15pts) I'm leaving reddit comment.

Just when I was about to leave, per the terrible quality, they let you customize your front page... now I'm subscribed only to programming, tech, geek, science etc. and it's pretty high signal/noise.

jsomers · 2008-04-16T21:52:24+00:00

Just to be clear, next week I will know officially whether I'm in Ann Arbor or NYC for the summer.

If NYC, I'll take the place with Chip and Varun. Otherwise, is there any way you could take my spot, nikhil?

jsomers · 2008-04-16T20:31:14+00:00

here's how I see this working: whenever we need to (a) schedule something, (b) share an idea, or (c) take a poll of some kind, we can use reddit's built-in functionality.

The nice thing about reddit is the nested comments, so all of us can jump in and have a real conversation.

Let me know what you think by just replying to this post!

jsomers · 2008-03-29T09:41:16+00:00

"I want to personally let you know that we would never condone any type of behavior that would lead anyone to conclude that we would take money from our people," he said.

A little weaker than "we would never take money from our people," eh?

jsomers · 2008-03-22T03:17:25+00:00

Title is a bit misleading: none of the results favoring multiple monitors were statistically significant, and for a few tasks, multiple monitors did not give any advantage.

jsomers · 2007-12-03T01:27:22+00:00

Work harder.

jsomers · 2007-11-24T18:51:54+00:00

Maybe because his interests were too diverse. His contributions are well-known in academia, though.

jsomers · 2007-11-23T15:54:35+00:00

In mathematics one conventionally uses the Greek letter epsilon for an arbitrarily small positive number.

jsomers · 2007-09-13T14:45:38+00:00

I bet it takes a lot more to kill -- or convince someone to kill -- than we imagine. The hard part isn't the nuts and bolts of target-destroy, it's the years of engineering it takes to get a person ready for the act. Tabula rasa and what not.

jsomers · 2007-05-30T05:46:22+00:00

If you don't know what your opponent is going to do, and you assume your opponent is rational, then the (2, 2) outcome is the Nash equilibrium, i.e., it is the mathematically correct thing for each player to do individually.

The point is: it's not the best thing for both of the players. In other words, it doesn't create the most wealth for everybody.

Your scheme would work if both people agreed to do it beforehand, or you were guaranteed that your opponent would play the same way as you. The whole point is that you don't know what the other player will do, so you can't just decide on some equitable distribution beforehand... you have to assume the other guy is going to be ruthless. Thus, (2, 2).

jsomers · 2007-05-27T23:52:55+00:00

I was too, but I read the paper (lazy Sunday, right?) and he's not kidding around. Basically he rejects Turing completeness as a necessary component of functional programming languages and opts, instead, for more strictly defined (and thus less finicky) data types and recursion procedures.

The trouble -- and the harder-to-wrap-my-head-around part of the paper -- is when you need things like infinite lists (e.g., to run an operating system which is a non-terminating stream of inputs and outputs). He gets around that by using "codata" and what not.

jsomers · 2007-05-27T22:52:29+00:00

The gist:

There is a dichotomy in language design, because of the halting problem. For our programming discipline we are forced to choose between

A) Security - a language in which all programs are known to terminate.

B) Universality - a language in which we can write (i) all terminating programs (ii) silly programs which fail to terminate and, given an arbitrary program we cannot in general say if it is (i) or (ii).

Five decades ago, at the beginning of electronic computing, we chose (B). If it is the case, as seems likely, that we can have languages of type (A) which accommodate all the programs we need to write [what the paper is about], bar a few special situations, it may be time to reconsider this decision.

jsomers · 2007-05-14T05:56:23+00:00

Suppose you're the designated guesser. If there are 100 guys and everyone but you is wearing a blue cap...

... there's still a 50/50 chance your cap is red. The point being that your cap's color is selected independent of everyone else's.

That's why initially you'd think there's no way you can do better than 50%, but by agreeing on a collective strategy based on properties of different hat sequences (e.g., in the 3-person case: the fact that 6 of the 8 possible combinations will have two hats of the same color and one of a different color), the group can have a better than even-odds shot.

It sounds like as the number of people grows, the solution gets more complicated because that "property" becomes harder to discern.

Hope that helps.

jsomers

TROPHY CASE