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werg

148 karma · joined May 23, 2010

http://twitter.com/werg
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werg··on Show HN: Spatially Embedded Video Chat
oh yeah that makes sense! I just drop people into the space -- it's supposed to be a 2D space for video chat, including a sense of distance, i.e. there are people who are in earshot and others who aren't!

I'll figure out a way to explain things when people enter.

werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Thanks for posting this! So happy to see some real academic interest in these topics!
werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
What a cool extension! I'll give it a whirl!

On impact: I've been running the numbers for a tool I'm working on and the projected savings for the industry look insane! Just by shaving off 10 minutes here or there you can contribute a lot.

werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Too often, "tests are required" -- but as you say it's very hard to test anything meaningful, so developers "test something" and call it a day.
werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Interesting, what example would come to mind?
werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
We need to find our equivalent of a printing press! For what it's worth, possibly that won't be just one thing, but a wide array of tools?
werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
I couldn't agree more!

Why doesn't every error message have a link to a specific page with discussions, instructions, etc. Or maybe even a button you can click where the machine tries a best guess at an automatic fix?

werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
The question is: how do you grow up from there, in terms of expressive power? I.e. is it possible to find more middle ground between Python and Scratch?
werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Atlassian truly is the Harbor Freight of developer tools!

I'm a bit hopeful that DX might finally start getting the love it deserves. -- For better or worse, Microsoft seems to understand the potential that lies in building better tools and seducing programmers to join their fold.

werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
You are so right, those "build a website in 15 minutes" demos hit like a bomb back in the day!
werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Yes, you are right I didn't put that very well. Modal editing really has a lot of benefits, even if I personally don't go for them (am more of an Emacs guy).

What I would say is that vi really doesn't give you a lot of interactive context -- and it's hard to add it on.

werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Oh yes, that is certainly what we do. And there's nothing wrong about that. We are definitely in the business of building tools for professionals, i.e. a bit of a learning curve is not the issue. The "professional hazing process" isn't necessarily bad. What I would say is that there is some (maybe a lot of) potential value that vi cannot develop simply due to the very reduced form factor that it has. I believe this never really has come to the fore because most programming languages are designed in a fairly limited way. I.e. they don't really take into account that they are a User Interface.

As positive examples I would point out the kind of interactive editing mode that you can find in dependently typed programming languages. I believe e.g. Idris has a pretty cool Emacs mode.

werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
This looks fantastic! What a treasure trove.
werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Haha, I agree. Sorry.
werg··on Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
I was wondering about this -- but how would CAD or Photoshop be more than a Context Free language? In particular, consider Feature Structure Grammars which are equivalent to CFGs and can really capture a lot of inter-context agreement without needing to be Context-Sensitive.

I certainly may be wrong though, all sorts of stuff ends up being Turing-Complete.

werg··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (February 2020)
SEEKING WORK | SF Bay Area & Austin,TX | Remote OK

Fullstack Data Scientist & Engineer

NLP, Distributed Computing, Functional Programming

I have mainly done product driven work that involves Distributed Computing and Machine Learning, leading teams of Data Scientists and Engineers.

Experience with:

- Spark / PySpark & Hadoop MapReduce

- MLlib, sklearn, PyTorch Deep Learning, even that IBM Watson thing

- Python, Clojure, JS/Node.js, TypeScript, Prolog, Erlang, Java.. Perl?

- Database Matters of any denomination

More info on request: wergomat@gmail.com

werg··on NoFlo Kickstarter, the hacker's perspective
Exactly this is the problem with grafting visual programming interfaces onto textual programming semantics. One of the main important reasons to do VP is to be able to inspect the code, to easier see what it does, ideally at a glance. Yet as you point out, simple recursion can make this really difficult to do. My thesis is that we need VPLs that have semantics specifically tailored for the visual interface. It's possible, but takes a bit of thinking to work out
werg··on Distributed Actors in Java and Clojure
Initially when I read the title my mind jumped to assume that you were doing actors distributed across multiple machines, i.e. one actor spread out, possibly in some fault-tolerant, eventually consistent way, in a cluster. But this actually means local actors, accessible across a network, right?
werg··on Clojure Obscura
It's extremely new, see discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/clojure/3...
werg··on Germany’s economy - Modell Deutschland über alles
This is incorrect. The anthem is not Nazi, it is from a poem by Hoffman von Fallersleben, one of the early German democrats. Far from being illegal, the first two stanzas are simply not sung during official occasions and are not (no longer, up to 1991 they were) part of the national anthem. I'm German too and I find this kind of thin-skinnedness a bit embarassing and is not substantiated by the article. Otherwise the article is kind of boring, though it points out some key areas: middle-class not only in terms of individuals, but also in terms of companies, integrating organized labor, the vocational training system. Of these I find the last most interesting, most overlooked, most anachronistic, and factually I'm not quite sure if it actually works all that well (i.e. I believe other countries could improve a lot on the system).

When talking about Germany as a great economic system one must not forget that Germany is nothing more than the economic center of the EU. As a whole, the EU is in economic trouble, and Germany is a part of that trouble.

Also, current prosperity, like the current boom in technology, is largely due to the fact that there aren't that many other places to invest.

werg··on Unbreaking comments on tiny sites and tech blogs
What I already told Esten on twitter: He outlines some aspects of a method to keep the 'good contributors' engaged, even if the community grows, by highlighting their contributions. What interests me is how to scale these good comments without excessive moderation. And also, even on sites that have moderation available over time there's again and again this boom-bust cycle, where comments start out being really insightful when the community is small, which attracts more people which brings down the quality of comments, making people less interested in high quality commentary (and also the general audience less interested in the comments at all).

I think limiting the number of contributors is interesting, but I wouldn't limit the ability to reach a big audience per se. Precisely the possibility to reach an audience entices high-quality comments. Possibly part of the real challenge is actually to keep the non-commenting audience interested in the comments.

So maybe it's about limiting the number of contributor-slots available in any given situation, and then of course think of a non karma-whoric way of assigning those slots... hmm :) Maybe even make it random, so anybody can get one of those slots, so create a sense of urgency not to blow that chance. Might work in some situations.

werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
:) Yes there are a few kinks. Especially if you type quickly and do mult-line replace operations. It also sometimes doesn't register newlines accurately. All this might have to do with the way my code talks to the editor.

Thank you for your appreciation! And I hadn't yet thought about embedding. Technically it actually could be a bit tricky to embed because you can't really mix websocket- with vanilla HTTP servers yet.

werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
Stypi is a more mature project with more features. Also they use the ACE-editor which arguable is more feature-rich (though poorer in documentation IMHO).

My project is open source: https://github.com/werg/snucode So it's also an example use of the Node.js websockets framework SocketStream.

Furthermore I do operational transformation a bit differently (presumably, not sure how they do it): http://gpickard.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/my-approach-to-oper...

werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
Done. Thanks for the input!
werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
Done. not sure if it's optimal this way though... I'll have to think of a nicer interface. Just couldn't make myself put up another bootstrap toolbar.
werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
No I actually cannot play back yet. But it's not hard to implement, it even would be relatively easy to selectively play back only certain edits. I believe in the worst case a few thousand edits would suffice (though it would be rather tedious on the keyboard to do: type - then go back one with the arrow keys and type again).

Collabedit looks nice and solid! (Hadn't been aware of it.) Did you roll your own editor or did you use something like ACE or CodeMirror?

werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
OK I'll make them optional! Will take a few minutes because I do the colors by adding CSS-rules to the DOM on the fly. They look rather petite on my browser though :)
werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
I put up a fix. Does it work now?
werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
Sure. Before I had an way to hide the footer I set it to small text so as to minimize distractions. Should set it back.
werg··on Show HN: A Collaborative Code Editor (like EtherPad with Syntax Highlighting)
Exactly, I just noticed that in terror :) Am working on it... Has to do with the way Backbone.js handles pushState I think,, and the way I handle Backbone's router thingy.
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