Viewing profile — mwilliamson

My favourite date is Erlang Day, after a request from pg to have more technical content: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

Although the linked article is missing its images (at least for me), the archived version from tor.com has them: https://web.archive.org/web/20160305081415/https://www.tor.c...

I had a similar problem loading the page on Firefox for desktop with private browsing. It turns out service workers don't work in private browsing, which it seems Bene (the softwar…

The JEP itself has a motivation section, including issues with the existing mechanism for interop with C, JNI: https://openjdk.org/jeps/454

I don't know about other distros, but Debian makes it extremely easy to download both the binary package and the source package. For instance, on the page for the jq package [1], y…

For packages where I don't include tests, I've had at least one downstream distro maintainer request that I include tests, since at least some of them treat npm or PyPI or whatever…

Reminds me of the four types of documentation that sometimes get listed: tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation. (Usual caveat of all models are wrong but so…

To expand on listening to your gut instinct: I find taking a "trust but verify" approach useful. Take the time to dig into what your instinct is telling you, try to match it up in …

I GM an online TTRPG, and I wanted to replicate the experience of the players drawing the map themselves as they go along. We use Roll20, but didn't find the tools particularly wel…

Two thoughts: 1. I think it's worth considering how much the Baumol effect is responsible for the price changes described. Specifically: we'd expect those industries that don't ben…

An app for quickly and collaboratively drawing maps for tabletop RPGs. I run a tabletop RPG for some friends over the Internet using Roll20. As a player in other (in-person) games,…

I'm not sure how well it would work (if at all!), but an alternative could be for a specific prediction to become less valuable as it becomes more popular. In other words, reward p…

Location: Cambridge, UK Remote: Yes, or hybrid/office in Cambridge Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Most recent experience is with Python, TypeScript, React, GraphQL and Postg…

I've also gotten a Framework laptop, and am happily running XFCE on Debian testing. One thing I'm curious about is how other people are handling the resolution of the screen on Lin…

Author here! The open sourced code was rewritten from scratch, not least because the original version was in C# while the open source version is in JavaScript. So, the same idea, b…

Yup, precisely should work fine with mutable / unhashable types -- it just relies on equality to check the elements in an iterable. More specifically, writing: contains_exactly("a"…

(I'm the author of precisely) If you were to ask me "Should I use precisely in my tests?", my answer would be: it depends. The main benefit is to better describe the intent of your…

(I'm the author of precisely) Better error messages was the motivation: PyHamcrest tends to put everything onto one line, which makes it hard to discern structure. In contrast, pre…

Similarly, I've found one of the most useful questions to pose for each option is "What would need to be true for this to be a good idea?". This is helpful whether you're initially…

I would expect the material stay up: at the moment, everything back to 1998/1999 is still accessible: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/material.html

> The cynic in me says it's because many of them are cheap generics that have little financial upside for large pharmaceuticals. Social impact bonds are an interesting idea that mi…

The solution we use at work is to put all of the GraphQL strings in separate `.graphql.ts` files. A script then scans the code base for such files, requires them, and converts quer…

Rapid feedback and short iteration cycles are often considered to be an important part of agile development. TDD suggests that you write a test first, and try to make that test the…