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batista

4,147 karma · joined January 17, 2012

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batista··on Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
Java has jars and classes and dynamic calling. You don't compile everything into one big lump, nor you have to recompile millions of lines of code for one change in a file.

If Go wanted to compete on compile speed, then dynamic loading would be a better idea than having a simplistic compiler that compiles fast into one monolithic executable.

The main reason the Go compiler is fast, is because it is simple and doesn't do many passes and optimizations.

Which is like advertising the fact that your company makes a fast car, but forgetting to mention that it can only carry a driver if he weights 10kg.

batista··on Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
>C# and java are definitely not the solution for new applications which are expected to generate revenue for the next 10 years.

That doesn't even make sense. Both C# and Java (and JVM, CLR languages) will be used in new billion generating applications in the next 10 years and more.

batista··on Ask HN: is the Sublime Text 2 development kind of slowing down?
I think he (the primary developer) did a crazy push to put out Sublime Text 2, and is now taking a break.

That's the idea behind making a product: passive income. You don't expect him to work his ass out day in, day out, do you?

That said, I'm fairly certain, after some time development will pick up pace again, for Sublime Text 3 or 2.x.

batista··on TV Will Be Apple's Undoing
>TV won't be Apple's undoing but it also isn't obvious that they can win big there. It is a complicated business with a number of interlocking players at different levels and vested business interests. It is also a global business with rights packaged up at a very national level and sold with exclusive deals.

Funny, they said the exact same thing about mobile...

batista··on TV Will Be Apple's Undoing
>TV won't be Apple's undoing but it also isn't obvious that they can win big there. It is a complicated business with a number of interlocking players at different levels and vested business interests. It is also a global business with rights packaged up at a very national level and sold with exclusive deals.

Funny, the said the exact same thing about mobile...

batista··on Wordpress.com serves 70k requests/second using Nginx
>For one author, that can be managed. Many authors, the cache is constantly being defeated.

That's irrelevant. It's the pages view count that counts, not how many authors are in the same cms.

batista··on Apple's iOS 6 Wi-Fi problems linger on
Like having ONE issue, the Maps, and everything else being better?
batista··on The Flat Design Era
>Isn't this what denotes an era or school of design/architecture/art though, like realism, romanticism, bauhaus, modernism, industrialism, etc? Changes in the approach and visual style.

Yes, only those were major art movements, this "flat" thing is this month's design fad...

batista··on The Flat Design Era
>I can't stand all the chrome and bevels and transparent bobbles on Macs for instance.

As someone started with a 286 EGA graphics PC from the eighties, boy are we spoiled...

batista··on Data Breach Reveals 100k IEEE.org Members' Plaintext Passwords
No, it won't. They can just write a new password + salt in the db and get in as that user.
batista··on Why Apple will move away from Intel and towards ARM 64 bit
>So Apple is really one flip of the switch away ...

And how is that different from OS X 10.1?

batista··on Why Apple will move away from Intel and towards ARM 64 bit
>If you can tell me how to set up Lion to use my preferred Snow Leopard hot corner settings, I'll be forever grateful

This is not the kind of the locking and freedom removal the article is talking about.

This is a feature that's changed, removed, as they experiment to find the best (according to their team) way to implement it. I, for one, never use Hot Corners (find them disturbing), and I also hate "autohide dock". So it's not like it was a feature with unanimous love that got removed (something like Maps on iOS or Rosetta that people either needed or didn't care about).

batista··on Go Bloviations
The if/else is no more explicit than the ternary operator.

On the contrary, the ternary operator makes the specific operation (setting ONE variable) more explicit, and ensures you only set one var. Consider:

if a == 1: foo = "PASS" else: foo = "FAIL"

and

foo = (A == 1) ? "PASS" : "FAIL"

Why repeat the foo (and risk an error by mistyping it the second time, especially in a dynamic language or with type inference)?

And they add the same amount of cyclomatic complexity (not that you implied otherwise, just sayin').

batista··on Go Bloviations
>Many people are not looking for a "better C++", in the land of C++ it seems "better" means "more features", and some of us are not interested in more features, but in a better selection of fewer useful features.

This is a knee jerk cliche reaction.

D is much better designed than C++.

batista··on Go Bloviations
>All of the thumbs-up opinions I share, with the emphasis on that Go fills a niche that is otherwise a relative vacuum as-is.

D, Rust, modern C++, ...

batista··on Mypy - An experimental Python variant with dynamic and static typing
>And I don't see why performance is suddenly used as a deal breaker for a language primarily used for scripting and other non-CPU-bound purposes.

People want to use Python for lots of CPU bound processes. A big Python niche is numeric and scientific computing.

You say that it is "primarily used for scripting and other non-CPU-bound purposes", but this is also a consequence of it being slow. If it was faster it would open MORE uses. LUA and C# got the games action. Go gets attention on the networking apps end, etc...

batista··on In Response to Paul Graham's "Startup = Growth"
>But the part about businesses building value is what is a little fuzzy? What is value, anyway?

Apple giving affordable Apple IIs to american homes, or Ford, making cars available.

Not "getting a million people to sign up" as a "revenue to be exploited".

In that sense, customers DON'T define value, they just define profits.

He meant value the ethical and "make society better", way.

batista··on In Response to Paul Graham's "Startup = Growth"
>Well, I think most refutations to PG's essay are based on an assumption: "Focusing on growth leads to being evil". It is probably due to too many negative stories in media about cheaters. But as we all know, cheaters can not sustain their own games forever due to the cheats violate some underlying fundamentals.

The idea behind startups is that they don't have to "sustain their own games forever", just until they get bought...

batista··on Has Apple Peaked?
Oh, read it now. My bad!
batista··on Chinese families' worldly goods in Huang Qinqjun's pictures
Probably never watched Chinese TV...
batista··on Has Apple Peaked?
No, it's like that at all.

It'like responding to some guy saying that it will hit "in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011", to "shut up, stop playing the Oracle, since you suck at it, and just inform us WHEN it hits".

batista··on Mypy - An experimental Python variant with dynamic and static typing
If 99% of your codebase uses one thread, then no, a 2x slow down is not acceptable, even if you can overcome it by using more cores.

Remember, the ideas was not to have CPython and CPython-without-GIL, it was to have one unified GIL-less CPython.

For that, a 2x performance drop would not be acceptable for most code.

batista··on Chinese families' worldly goods in Huang Qinqjun's pictures
No, it really can not.

Except in the Niquist/Shannon sense, or if you work for E channel...

batista··on I Am Worried About The Future Of Python
Because else you end like this Lisp of "20 years ago" ended up: used in some niches, largely forgotten in the main.

For languages, number of programmers translates to: higher quality and number of libs, better tested, more work on the efficiency, compiler, more companies built around the ecosystem, more tools, more books, more tutorials, more open source projects in and with it, more bugfixes, new APIs with support for the language, new bindings etc.

It doesn't have to be "perfect for everything", but it has to be good in the kind of things that interest the most people people now. Scientific computing ain't it.

Much better to use a bad language with 100,000 programmers than a good one with 1,000, as people reluctant of JS in the past have found out.

batista··on Has Apple Peaked?
>Numbers can be manipulated as easily as opinions.

Not Quarterly results and SEC fillings.

>Note the recurring statistic in which Apple's (continuously dropping) market share is compared to that of 15 handset manufacturers who run Android as though that is a reasonable comparison.

"Continuously dropping"? They sell more units with each new device up to now (and the 5's preorders see that trend continuing). So, if their "market share" also drops, then that just means the market is expanding at a faster rate.

>Note the recurring statistic in which Apple's (continuously dropping) market share is compared to that of 15 handset manufacturers who run Android as though that is a reasonable comparison.

In what way is it not?

batista··on Has Apple Peaked?
>While the headline is inflammatory, the article itself is not so bad. He makes some valid observation about how the market and Apple's position in it have changed, making it harder for them to be the new and innovative player as they have more and more to lose by taking risky moves.

They have made the EXACT same arguments since after the iPod.

The Zune was to kill it, cheap alternatives were going to kill it. Didn't happen.

Then they put out the iPhone.

It was doomed, they said at first, then Android was going to kill it, then the Antennagate, then the 4S was not impressive enough, etc.

Then the iPad came out, and at first it was "just a large iPhone" and it will fail, then it was gonna be killed by Windows tablets, then by Android tablets, then the Kindle Fire.

They never stop in the same bloody vein. How about instead of BS predictions they do some REPORTING?

I.e tell how Apple does based on numbers, and report it when they --inevitable at some point-- start losing out? Why do they feel they have to play prophets?

batista··on Apple scrambled to hire iOS 6 maps engineers days before launch
Well, I, for one, still have an iPhone 4. Never updated on 4s (or 5). Never had any reception problems that I can recall (i.e not getting through a call).

It might be that I get a good signal where I live and work (and in 2 different countries, neither of which is the states). So, YMMV.

But, I do remember iPhone 4 owners actually reporting LESS dropped calls than iPhone 3GS:

"iPhone 4 owners are reporting fewer dropped calls than iPhone 3GS owners":

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/08/04/report-iphone-4-owners-report...

And after the media noise blew out, there weren't any complains about it --as if the forums and people forgot all about it--, just people using their phones.

And AT&T could be to blame, not the iPhone. For:

""According to a March study by ChangeWave Research, AT&T is the reason the iPhone drops calls. Users of the Verizon iPhone 4 reported a 1.8% dropped-call rate, the same rate as users of other Verizon phones. Users of the AT&T iPhone 4 reported a 4.8% dropped-call rate, 2.7 times the rate of Verizon iPhone users.""

batista··on Show HN: 5000 best movies
Avengers, Dark Knight and LoTR on the top 5? FAIL.
batista··on Apple scrambled to hire iOS 6 maps engineers days before launch
Steve Jobs: "If you're not failing once in a while, you're not trying hard enough".

iPod: "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame".

iPhone: "What? No copy/paste? No third party apps?"

OS X 10.0/.1 shall we even go there?

Apple's way was always one of iterative enhancement.

The only reason for the current regression was that they started from zero, were the previous offering was from a third party competitor (Google) with 8+ years head-start in mapping.

batista··on Apple scrambled to hire iOS 6 maps engineers days before launch
>The advertisements for employees (whether there were or will be any actual hires is unknown) is Apple's way of controlling the narrative in a case where they have long known they would be shipping an inferior product.

Going out of your way to avoid the Occam razor, aren't you?

Hiring as a conspiracy to spin/control the eventual PR issues that would emerge from shipping an inferior product.

Seriously?

Somehow some job postings would make Apple "control the narrative"? Seriously? And how exactly do they "control it", now that they have made those postings?

How about using the bloody Occam Razor and saying that: Apple started work on their Maps app for iOS 6, saw it needed more manpower, and are expanding their team for the eventual iOS 7 release.

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