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dsberkholz

232 karma · joined February 9, 2012

IT industry analyst at RedMonk
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dsberkholz··on Ask HN: I'm So Lonely
After working remotely or with distributed teams for 20+ years, my go-to is finding a way to be around people without directly and deeply interacting with them. I spend a ton of time in coffee shops, bookstores, that sort of thing. Many people have mentioned gyms, which aren't my thing, but it conceptually aligns. Many people join various sorts of interest-driven clubs, social fraternities, charities, etc.

Also, I definitely second the recommendation of meetups. There are so many out there, and not at all limited to tech-related stuff.

Overall, pick something you care about and invest in it in a socially discoverable way, and you'll run into others who share your interests.

dsberkholz··on Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error
Must be counting the two after the decimal point. =)
dsberkholz··on Microservices and the migrating Unix philosophy
Right on target, and very apt considering that I'm boarding a plane to GlueCon this afternoon. =)
dsberkholz··on The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2014
Not for public repos. Scroll on down to the "hosting provider" section of some research I did on forges to get a better idea (http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/04/22/the-size-of-open-sou...).
dsberkholz··on Useful Unix commands for data science
That was mostly fixed. http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?14472
dsberkholz··on Programming languages ranked by expressiveness
I started with a hypothesis that LOC/commit might be an interesting way to compare the productivity of languages, and I frankly had no clue whether it would produce anything useful or interpretable at all. When it did, I figured it was cool enough to write it up, although it's definitely fairly noisy data.
dsberkholz··on Programming languages ranked by expressiveness
APL is insufficiently popular to be considered here, otherwise I'm sure you would be right.
dsberkholz··on Programming languages ranked by expressiveness
I quickly mentioned it in the caveats section up top. The underlying justification/assumption is that commits are generally used to add a single conceptual piece regardless of which language it’s programmed in.

As for why this metric and not others, it's the one I could actually get the data for. I don't have the time or space to download literally millions of repositories myself, so I used what I could get access to.

dsberkholz··on Programming languages ranked by expressiveness
That's certainly a possibility in some cases and communities (perhaps at a sub-language level or for very niche languages), but I find it rather unlikely on a global level considering the trends across many languages and language classes that you can see here.
dsberkholz··on Programming languages ranked by expressiveness
No, it's a combined total across all ~7.5 million open-source projects in Ohloh, so (potentially real) effects like that are averaged out.
dsberkholz··on Programming languages ranked by expressiveness
Right, I did restrict languages to a popular subset defined in another post: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/02/28/language-rankings-1-13...
dsberkholz··on Programming languages ranked by expressiveness
Yeah, I agree — I really doubt it's that large of a shift, as I mentioned under "Specific language effects." I find it hard to believe that JavaScript could really be less expressive than C and assembly.
dsberkholz··on Tesla vs NY Times: A deeper look at the data
> What the article is explaining can be summarized in this chart: http://i.imgur.com/mNcGdfS.png

Precisely, the slope indicates the same thing. Unfortunately the vast majority of a general audience has forgotten what a slope is, so rather than confuse them, I explained it differently.

> Musk and Broder 'agree' that the vehicle's actual range was greater than it estimated.

Isn't that explained by the reserve power noted in Musk's blog?

dsberkholz··on Do developers really love beer, or is it just a myth?
Even without the contrast (impossible given this particular dataset since the survey wasn't given to a control), it's still interesting. Here's why -- when you consider the broader context of the outlash against beer/alcohol at conferences, notice that only 5% of developers said they hated beer. That apparently means a tiny minority of people could have an outsized influence on conference behavior. Note that this survey wasn't given purely to conference-goers, so it's not selection bias.
dsberkholz··on Do developers really love beer, or is it just a myth?
s/do didn't/didn't/
dsberkholz··on Do developers really love beer, or is it just a myth?
Maybe you do didn't notice, but it wasn't our survey, and we had nothing to do with its design. I agree that the design is not great, but c'mon, this is just for fun. When you can select multiple answers, the percentages no longer total 100 across options, only within each option vs all respondents.