Viewing profile — toadstone

Predator/prey is also a metaphor. People aren't actually being eaten. They are voluntarily sharing data that is used to provide them with a service that they want. I'm so depressed…

It was a predator/prey metaphor, not a individual/group metaphor.

I don't understand this community. I thought you were wolves, but here you are taking the part of the sheep. Instead of being outraged, you should be trying to get your own piece o…

By definition, being social means doing things other people are doing.

I'm more curious about what the alternative is because this is my default mode of programming. I don't see what's backwards about it. You establish what you need in the module firs…

I think the analogy was stated poorly. Here's my take: 1. Big company A sees small company B getting rich off a new market. A forsees B disrupting A. With MS, it was the fear that …

What's the point? He'll never beat LuaJIT. I'd rather see a new language with a "slow, slow, and slow" implementation that had interesting semantics than another python/lua/js cut-…

I know they did shady things in the beginning. A lot of businesses have to do that, and many don't stop. That's just how the game works. As a user, of course you don't have to take…

Current Zynga games aren't that bad. The production values and gameplay are a lot better than the werewolves/vampires style games that they started with. Given a few more years, th…

There's a lot of wishful thinking in these G+ posts of late. People hope that G+ won't have to make the painful compromises FB has, though without much justification. The two are s…

Facebook already has the exact same functionality in friend lists. They're only a small ui tweak away from parity in that respect. As for the drag and drop into circles, it's cute …

I find this absurd. I don't even call them bugs when I get compiler errors. They are typos. They are trivial to fix, and I'd much rather fix them at 3pm before I've checked in the …

Every single story about facebook has a post like this, and I'm so tired of reading them. First of all, why would you even consider competing with Facebook? You do realize that out…

I think you know you've cracked when you prefer bad C# to clean Haskell.

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever written a program that doesn't use containers, manage memory, and handle errors.

Are you really saying that the time and energy you save coding and debugging by using high level features aren't worth a few minutes of compile time? It won't even be a few minutes…

I think http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/08/06/on-seeing-like-a-cat/on... is a more insightful analysis of the cat/dog dichotomy. There's nothing particularly cat like or dog like in…

I remember it being a rare event when 212 created a FP enthusiast. Are the students in the new course liking it or just enduring it?

I'm sure the author wouldn't mind especially if you copied the article into notepad and deleted the first two sentences before reading it.

Sometimes articles are over my head too. Sometimes I work on figuring them out and learn something. Sometimes I give up because I don't have the time or energy. However, I don't bl…

Ah, quit being such a winklevoss. We win when there's competition of implementations.

Yeah, there totally should be a class on how, as an slightly above average programmer, to use open source projects representing man-decades of work by geniuses and millions of doll…

Exactly right, working at Palantir is betting on the status quo.

What are you talking about? Palantir isn't reinventing government or finance, they are making extremely niche data analysis tools for the intelligence services and trading tools fo…

company does some pr. blogger fakes outrage to draw visitors. bored bitter nerds read it and do nothing.