mikedougherty

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
28
Submissions
18
Member since
Nov 9
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mikedougherty; my proof: https://keybase.io/mikedougherty/sigs/H2RxgX0zW4VVclmxeaXWNGui-GqAxV-XjqmdpqUtlAA ]
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 14 years ago
Comment · 14 years ago
Anyone that's surprised has not been paying attention.
Comment · 14 years ago
Negatively named bools bother me. e.g.:

  while notDone: { if condition() notDone = false; };
Comment · 14 years ago
depending on your chosen minecraft server, his first game was an MMO too!
Comment · 14 years ago
Additionally, while the author is correct that a bad developer is a bad developer regardless of toolset, it's much easier to completely fuck everything up in certain languages. It's quite easy to write code that allows for buffer overflows or XSS vulnerabilities in some languages, and not quite so easy in others.

The important thing, to me, is that the language's path of least resistance leads you to The Right Thing. This generally improves quality of life for good devs and reduces the amount of harm bad devs can cause.

Comment · 14 years ago
I'm only done with the first page so far, but I wouldn't call most of these "hidden". Many of them are oft-touted selling points of the language or appear in basic tutorials.

That being said, today I learned about the two-argument form of iter, `iter(f, until)`. So I guess I can't complain too much :D

Comment · 15 years ago
As others have said previously: too little, too late.
Comment · 15 years ago
"Scandal"? Really?
Comment · 15 years ago
Apparently it's a heat map of courier paths, not endpoints. So the dots on the bridges just signify that deliveries are going out of the city.
Comment · 15 years ago
Yea, this just seems like rearranging the tokens to achieve the same result. Though, the same sort of thing could be said about path.py, which I absolutely love using.
Comment · 15 years ago
I wouldn't have ever seen this submission if it weren't for RSS. Along with almost everything else I'm going to read online today.
Comment · 15 years ago
This article is just false comparisons and strawman arguments.

Why is Facebook's IPO anything like GroupOn's? Completely different business models.

G+'s existence is used as an excuse to compare Google with Facebook, but G+ wasn't even a thought when Google IPO'd. Again, completely different business models.

The author then makes up the particular case of an "Ivy League Northeast pet lovers" demographic and says that things like Tide, Mission Impossible, car companies don't want to market to them. This is not how targeted advertisement would ever work.

* You market Tide to demographics that are in charge of the buying decision for laundry detergent in the household (this knowledge has been around for literally decades: soap operas) - how about people who talk about doing laundry in their status messages? Or how about people who list their children on their facebook profile and don't list an employer?

* You market Mission Impossible to people who say they like Mission Impossible (and similar movies/series) in their "Stuff I like" section or by using their "likes" from sources like IMDb, etc. Maybe they also check in to movie theaters regularly - especially if they often check in with a certain group of friends. Show those friends the same ad.

* You market cars to people who seem to have the income to afford a car (using job descriptions, maybe seeing how often and where they eat out using checkin information to get some sort of estimate on disposable income) and maybe you even filter that to people who complain about their car. On top of that you could even filter by the last time the user got a vehicle - this is now an event you can add to your timeline.

Comment · 15 years ago
I prefer to think that if an HTML parser can't parse an HTML page, then I either don't have an HTML parser or I don't have an HTML page. ;D
Comment · 15 years ago
I'm not expecting Amazon to hand out money to developers. But, as a developer* , I don't want to put myself in a situation where my work (that I would have otherwise charged for) is being given away for free.

Conversely, as a user, if there aren't quality free apps in the amazon store, why would I use it in the first place? I can get the same content from the built-in Market.

So, from both a developer and user standpoint I see no reason why Amazon should "take over Android app distribution".

* Hypothetical, I don't develop for mobile at this time.

Comment · 15 years ago
Even with the pre-paids, they'd stil be able to see where a person with one of those is going and their shopping patterns, therefore giving them exactly what they're looking for. They're tracking the movement of dots to analyze shopping patterns. If a dot is prepaid it doesn't make it a "fake" dot. What would really confuse them (maybe?) is getting as many phones on your person as possible then running around in circles.

Why they would choose to attempt to discover patterns on black friday though is beyond me - consumer behavior on that day is completely wacky and inconsistent with any other day of the year.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton