Viewing profile — pencilhappen

Dropbox's core product is trying to tack on P to CA systems. The CAP theorem explains how well this will actually work out. It's good they raised a bunch of cash, because they need…

Not my tweet, but so so relevant: https://twitter.com/littleidea/status/532927711472549888

Node is adequate at async, but not excellent. As I said in a sibling comment, things that are synchronous still, like GC, make it fall down at scale. Isomorphic JS isn't that usefu…

Node isn't great at async, despite the hype. Important things are still synchronous, most notably the GC, so you can very easily wind up with service stalls at scale. The module ch…

> Each language has special strengths and weaknesses, there is no silver bullet that excels at everything. Go, C/C++, Lua, Ruby, Perl, Scala, Node.js, Python... each of these are T…

This sort of anecdata always crops up on airline threads. Flight experience can vary pretty wildly by airline, even on the same type of plane, since the interior layout and ameniti…

What's funny is the article says this about the Navier-Stokes equations: "The equations work. They describe fluid flows as reliably as Newton’s equations predict the future positio…

> but the recent years brought quite some progress. Go makes it easy ... It actually feels like the recent years have been pretty disappointing. Go is one of the few places where t…

> Parallel Universe's Quasar is basically OTP for Java, so I know logically that Java is basically a superset of Erlang at this point It's not really a superset. The JVM has a sing…

A thread pool is far from "ergonomic", it's accidental complexity with numerous gotchas.

async/await still has the fundamental problem of composability that all the other attempts at sugaring around an event loop have (aka the "functions have colors" problem [1]). It s…

Thank you for articulating what was behind the Mossberg phenomenon in a positive way. An anecdote: About a decade ago, I was working at a startup. The VP of Marketing got it into h…