levbrie

This doesn't work.

There is just so much awesome stuff in this article. Finite State Entropy and Asymmetric Numeral System are completely new concepts to me (I've got 7 open tabs just from references FB supplied in the article), as is repcode modeling. I love that they've already built in granular control over the compression tradeoffs you can make, and I can't wait to look into Huff0. If anyone outside of Facebook has started playing with it or is planning to put it into production right away I'd love to hear about it.

Agreed. How did they not call it "Pied Piper"?

Another way to put it might be to say that because neighborhoods near the center are more valuable and attract more people, they also tend to attract other desirables, and that those other desirables tend to further drive up their value. When you rent in New York, you pay for location. A big part of the location equation is your commute. Another huge chunk of it is your neighborhood. And because the two are heavily correlated, commute time by itself tends to track total value of location quite accurately, to the point where on average every minute in reduced commute results in a $56/month increase in rent.

I think you can reframe this debate pragmatically and widen its applicability significantly: At what point is "bad" code more effective than the alternatives. If you get down into a debate about "best practices" you'll have to concede that anyone writing the code the author is talking about might be using "best practices" in some explicit way, but isn't "following best practices", which are designed to avoid precisely the difficulties he outlines. On the other hand, it's true that most code out there is bad code, and that heavily architecting a system with bad code can be even more of a nightmare than more straightforward bad code. The real question is, when should scientists favor bad code? I'm a huge fan of best practices and of thoughtful and elegant coding, but I could see an argument being made that in most circumstances, scientific code is better off being bad code, as long as you keep it isolated. I'd love to see someone make that argument.

My vote is for electron, although I'm following how React Native develops really closely. From what I've seen, the best new "Desktop" apps tend to be built with electron. We've been using it in production and, despite having to make pull requests for framework-level bugs fairly regularly, we've haad a pretty good experience overall, and far better than anything else we've tried - although, as I said, we have yet to seriously look into React Native. Also, by cross-platform I'm assuming you mean OS X, Windows, and Linux. If you also want to include mobile, then there are so few options there's no longer any real reason to debate.