jamesroseman

It's not completely separate. The maintainer of Absinthe got started working with the maintainer of GraphQL-Elixir. I'm not purporting they still work together, just that they have common roots.

Though that's cool a book is coming out! I remember when these projects were just getting started.

This is a pretty informative article. A coworker recently gave a very basic introductory tech talk at lunch about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency fundamentals, so this article hit me at the perfect time.

For anyone perusing comments to see if a link is worth their time, I'd say the writing is pretty opinionated, but the fact nuggets are worth the digging.

Applications of triple-entry accounting on voting is something I'd never thought of, and it's actually fascinating. I don't necessarily think that concept has to be tied to computing either. You still go to the voting booth, but you get some printed out ID in return for your vote that acts as the private key. You can check the blockchain for your voting ID. There are still obvious issues, but my only point is that it doesn't necessarily need to be tied to voting on your computer.

Self-driving cars have been in the development phase for so long, I'm really excited to see them start rolling out in these beta tests.

I'm curious what sort of unconsidered edge cases they'll find out in the real world. I'm sure test passengers are much more "disciplined" than real world ones.

As someone with a few years in the industry who's currently volunteering to help teach high school kids coding for the first time -- you have no idea how easily code confuses newbies.

Take even the smallest snippet:

while (Count <= 3) {

To you or me, this is pretty obvious. I've had kids ask me questions I'd never have thought of because I know this stuff already:

* What do the parentheses mean? * What is Count, is it a Javascript thing? * Is Count being set to 3? (<= looks like an arrow, not necessarily less than or equal to) * What is that squiggle? (meaning the '{') * Is this a program?

I'm with you, the Blockly stuff is hardly legible to me. But to kids learning this for the first time, I can tell you from first hand experience the color/shape/block aspect makes a huge difference.

Twitter employee here.

Admittedly I work in a remote office and not in HQ, but I've noticed NO day-to-day changes. The work, the management, the atmosphere have all been remarkably consistent despite wild rumors and general craziness.

I can't speak to the financials, but this...

> Additional cuts, along with internal management turmoil, are likely to effect your day to day job there to some degree.

...is false (in my, and every employee I've spoken to about this, opinion).

I'm not saying you shouldn't consider these points, but if you turn down Twitter expressly because you imagine the madhouse inside, I'm here to report no such thing.

I think the answer is that when Twitter IPO'd there were very clear expectations for the company to perform similar to its perceived contemporaries: Facebook and Google. If you look at the perpetually meteoric rise of GOOGL or FB, it's understandable why shareholders are disappointed -- Twitter burns a lot of capital.

So, if its growth has petered out and this is as much money as it can produce, it's understandable to me the line of thinking would then be to cut costs as much as possible so the profit margin can grow. 4k people makes sense when your company is adding value every day, but to these shareholders those aren't translating into results.

My $0.02 -- thoughts?

> Personally I dream of making a living establishing a patio11-type software business. Something where I can do a high quality job and own all of the decision-making.

I have that dream too, but when I have it I always wonder if given that situation I'd be able to stop myself from wanting my baby to keep growing, even if it meant giving up those decision-making abilities and taking on investors.

From public news sources, I imagine it's the value prop of live streaming sports games -- ESPN is largely owned by Disney, and from what I've heard it's failing as of late.

Issue with Disney from a customer side is censorship.

I really don't think this is it.

I think more than anything it's the amount children share in common. Adults are lame. The world is big. There's a lot to do and a lot of time to do it in. If you're a kid and you meet another kid odds are you live in the same town or at least region, go through the same school system, are roughly socioeconomically similar, and (thus) have a lot of things you can do together.

At work I really don't know much about my co-workers. I would go grab a beer and watch the game with someone if I knew they were interested, and from there we could hang out more -- but I don't. We spend all day near each other, at the EOD I just want to go home.

So my theory is that as adults most of us have fulltime jobs where we're always near people we don't spend much time with, and have no time to enter social circles afterwards.

$0.02

This is fantastic, thanks for sharing it!

On another note, I'm a huge fan of small utilities like this. Sometimes cruising HN it's easy to get it in my head that a project isn't worth doing unless it's a scalable VC business ready to submit to YC, or a community-supported FOSS. It's nice to see a little web utility doing its thing online.

I can't speak to the technical specifics of the story, but it was riveting regardless! I can't really fathom why someone would go through all of this trouble, was it obvious and I just missed it? It almost seemed as if the grad student was just actively trying to be difficult.

In any case, it seemed pretty phenomenally sneaky and well done.

In my (somewhat limited) experience, there's no such thing as writing code without testing it. The question is: are you testing this manually every time or are you automating it? I think that's a valuable way to phrase it to a non-technical manager, phrase in terms of limited situations:

A. I never test my code. When we go to ship the code, it breaks, and I have no idea where it's broken. So now I'm forced to take pieces out to see which piece is broken, then take functionality out of that piece until I find the piece that's broken. This is a process that actually takes longer than writing code, and it prevents me from working on new projects. If this is given to someone else, it will take them twice as long because they don't have the context of how the pieces work, and they'll wind up asking me about it anyways.

B. I never write tests for my code. After every piece I write, I test the project in entirety to see if that piece works and does what I want it to do. After the project is done, suppose we want to change that piece. Because there's nothing written that will test these pieces alone, someone now has to do work I've already done, which will keep them from working on something else.

C. I write tests before or as I write my code. I know when the pieces I write are done when they pass those tests. It takes around as long to write tests as to write code, so this process is faster. When we want to change a piece later on, we just change the tests to express the new desirable functionality, then rewrite the piece to pass those tests.

When I'm troubleshooting my code, I'm not adding value to the product or company. Therefore, the shortest amount of time spent troubleshooting is in turn the most profitable. C is clearly the shortest amount of time, because by writing tests I ideally spend no time troubleshooting. In reality, things will slip through the cracks, but those cracks are a lot smaller.

Passive aggression. I was searching for the noun of passive aggressive recently and someone corrected me, and I'm glad they did! (Hopefully this is helpful not hurtful).