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appamatto

382 karma · joined November 14, 2011

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appamatto··on What happens when you stop relying on resumes
I think this is very interesting counterpoint to TripleByte's data which implied that talking about passion projects was lower signal than their coding quizzes.

The benchmark was performance in a long form coding interview for TripleByte, whereas Aline's is the final offer, so not exactly apples to apples.

appamatto··on Typed Clojure Game of Life
Interesting that the Haskell version is the most concise and also has as much or more typing than the rest!
appamatto··on Epic, The Privacy Browser
What is being done here to combat browser fingerprinting? This seems like the most challenging threat to anonymity.
appamatto··on [dead]
It doesn't make any sense to divide the efficiency by population. I have no idea what meaning to assign to the resulting numbers.

For example, imagine a country of efficiency of 1 and a population of 1m, and therefore having an "efficiency per million people" of 1.

Now, that country splits into two countries, each of population 500k. Oh happy days, each half of the former country now has an "efficiency per million people" of 2.

appamatto··on Yep, Programming Is Borked
This certainly would make homework easier.
appamatto··on Copyfree is not the new copyleft.
There are two big points I wanted to make.

1) _This isn't just a matter of taste._ Choice of license has moral value. Although legally "it's my party and I can GPL if I want to" I don't think this is the case morally, and I try to argue that it the post.

2) _Copyleft is not anti-copyright._ Copyleft imposes additional restrictions that are not possible in a world without copyright. Copyfree (and specifically copyright waivers in countries that allow them) best simulate a world where we can share freely and also choose to withhold freely.

3) _Copyleft is often used specifically to sell proprietary software._ This is because the arrangement between creator and licensees is much more asymmetric in copyleft. If you're directly selling the software you're licensing then you're probably going to need to use a copyleft license.

I think #2 is well known although not often written about, and #1 seems contrary to what people on all sides (copy{right,left,free}) say. I haven't seen #3 written about elsewhere.

Those are my points, did that clarify or muddy?

appamatto··on Show HN: a Lisp that uses JSON instead of S-expressions (in .js)
Maybe he meant that his Java implementation of Scheme contains an ad-hoc implementation of Lisp.
appamatto··on Show HN: a Lisp that uses JSON instead of S-expressions (in .js)
Misapplication? I thought the Law was meant to describe accidental implementations of Lisp rather than overt ones.

In other words, "the complicated system you made _just happens_ to contain a Lisp, and if you had noticed that requirement in the first place its design would have been cleaner."