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zzaman

17 karma · joined October 18, 2010

Software engineer at Kiva.org. San Francisco transplant from Canada, avid CrossFitter and surfer.
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zzaman··on Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
I'm a little confused as to the need for Hack unless you have a code base in PHP and need to ship tighter code (which is a problem Facebook has and my team probably has as well).

Adding lambdas makes PHP more Ruby-like and generics and type checking are straight out of Java. I'm still unconvinced in how this makes programming websites more efficient or bug-free than existing languages. Can you please elaborate on that?

zzaman··on I put my family business on Facebook. Here’s what happened.
> we even had a Muslim fundamentalist who is very concerned about things in Pakistan.

So, does having an interest in your homeland make you a fundamentalist all of a sudden? I'm Pakistani. I read and share stories about Pakistan all the time. Its offensive to assume that because I have an interest in stories about my homeland (which happens to be a breeding ground for religious fundamentalists), I'm a religious fundamentalist as well. (I'm not at all religious, actually.)

zzaman··on To boldly go where Node man has gone before
In my 6ish months of programming in Nodejs full-time, I have yet to run into a library that only runs on 0.4 only or requires my version of gcc to be patched and re-built. Which Node libraries were you trying to use?
zzaman··on Examples of beautiful Javascript
Just took a look. Underscore.js looks very promising. Thanks for the tip!
zzaman··on Examples of beautiful Javascript
One of the problems I have with articles like these is that they focus on Javascript's use in front-end development so the conversation settles on DOM tools examples of good Javascript.

Using Node.js (i.e. non-DOM server side Javascript) myself, I would love to see examples of beautiful Javascript in general i.e. linguistic best practices, not those specific to DOM programming.

Also, as a side note, for anyone interested in beautiful Javascript in Node.js, I love the examples posted on Express' Github repo: https://github.com/visionmedia/express/tree/master/examples/

zzaman··on How Y Combinator Started
"We realized early on that what we were doing could be national in scope and we didn't want a name that tied us to one place."

Personally I find that one of the most important reasons to think long and hard about a name. Most startups go through many pivot points until they finally get it right. Choosing a name that is overly representative of the present business model can lead to team lock-in that could spell the death of a company before it even gets going.

It seems a wiser decision is to go with a name that represents a startup's future ambitions instead of its present circumstances.

zzaman··on Githug - an interactive way to learn how to use git
Tried playing around and got stuck at the same level. The hint in this case is not very useful unfortunately: "These settings are config settings. You should run `git help config` if you are stuck"