Pinboard: bookmarks for vonb tagged 'hacking'

The last time I did a job search, one of the questions I started asking in inter... | Hacker News

The last time I did a job search, one of the questions I started asking in interviews was “what distinguishes an employee at your company who meets your expectations from someone who is truly outstanding”? If the response was phrased in terms of hours per week, I knew that was not the company for me.

hacking interviews interviewing job-hunting
24 days ago by vonb

copy to mine

How does a startup out-recruit Google? Palantir cofounder Stephen Cohen explains. - garry's posterous

the sense you get from college recruiters is that you get to write new code. Most great hackers love to do this. But that's not what you get from a software engineering position at the tech giants. You get to maintain old code. The job should really be called software technician.

philosophy hacking startups
5 weeks ago by vonb

copy to mine

I agree with chromatic below; Java and C++ do not teach you OO. They teach you ... | Hacker News

A better way to program is with interfaces and composition via delegation, something that Java and C++ support but have no syntax for making it easy.

hacking oop java c++
7 weeks ago by vonb

copy to mine

Dynamically Typed Languages

Dynamically typed languages such as Python and Ruby have experienced a rapid grown in popularity in recent times. However, there is much confusion as to what makes these languages interesting relative to statically typed lan- guages, and little knowledge of their rich history. In this chapter I explore the general topic of dynamically typed languages, how they differ from statically typed languages, their history, and their defining features.

hacking programming-languages
9 weeks ago by vonb

copy to mine

Why I'm Interested In Haskell - iRi

CLispScript is:

A mutable-state language
Mixes duck typing for convenience with optional manifest typing for efficiency, with the definition of "type" converging more or less on Java/C# types
Believes "Everything is an object", with composition favored by convention over inheritance, but inheritance still technically supported
Believes "Everything is a reference"
Runs on top of a VM with a JIT compiler that has an internal scheduler for microthreads with minimal-by-convention shared state
Uses Algol-filtered-through-C++-filtered-through-"Ack! C++!" syntax
Offers the powerful approaches for manipulating collections as a whole borrowed from early functional languages like Lisp (map, closures, various syntax sugars like list comprehensions), suitably modified to work on more than just lists
Easily interfaced with C libraries due to significant low-level philosophical compatibility (even if CLispScript is much more advanced)
Does not have full-on Lisp macros, which are just a bit too powerful, but builds many of the classic Lisp macro use cases into the language, including powerful metaprogramming
Embraces a philosophy of empowering the programmer to a significant degree and not putting more than minimal constraints on them

hacking haskell programming-languages
february 2012 by vonb

copy to mine

Every time I read one of these (Github, Etsy, ...), I feel a bit guilty that our... | Hacker News

Assuming your main product is on the web, you really only need a few things to do this right:
- Automated tests that run on push to any branch.
- Rolling deploys (no downtime) from any branch.
- Exception reporting system (Exceptional, Hoptoad, homegrown, whatever).
- Twitter search feed.
Push to a topic branch, wait for the tests to come in green, deploy from topic branch, watch exception notification and twitter. If everything looks okay after 10 minutes, push to master. If exceptions or twitter blows up, redeploy master.
You should be able to setup the whole system in about the same time as it takes to develop a majorish product feature.

hacking deployment ci
february 2012 by vonb

copy to mine

When should I use the Visitor Design Pattern? - Stack Overflow

Visitor lets you define a new operation without changing the classes of the elements on which it operates.

Now, let's think of a simple class hierarchy. I have classes 1, 2, 3 and 4 and methods A, B, C and D. Lay them out like in a spreadsheet: the classes are lines and the methods are columns.

Now, Object Oriented design presumes you are more likely to grow new classes than new methods, so adding more lines, so to speak, is easier. You just add a new class, specify what's different in that class, and inherits the rest.

Sometimes, though, the classes are relatively static, but you need to add more methods frequently -- adding columns. The standard way in an OO design would be to add such methods to all classes, which can be costly. The Visitor pattern makes this easy.

hacking oop design-patterns visitor
february 2012 by vonb

copy to mine

REST is a scam.For most people, REST is simply the negation of SOAP. They shou... | Hacker News

the #1 delusion in distributed systems is that you can compose distributed operations the same way you compose function calls in a normal program.

The issue is that the latency involved in a distributed call is about 100 million times more than that involve in a function call, and the failure rate is more than 10 trillion times more. All of the great distributed algorithms such as Jacobsen's heuristic for TCP and Bittorrent have holistic properties possesed by the system as a whole that are responsible for their success.

Security is another problem with REST. Security rules are usually about state transitions, not about states. To ensure that security (and integrity) constraints are met, REST applications need to contain error prone code that compares the before and after states to check if the transition is legal. This is in contrast to POX/RPC applications in which it is straightforward to analyse the security impacts of individual RPC calls.

hacking REST distributed-systems
february 2012 by vonb

copy to mine