Category Archives: software

Toy

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Don’t be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that’s a good sign. That’s probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.

— Paul Graham

2014.02.12 Wednesday ACHK

Hardware designers 4

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One of Alan Kay’s numerous oft-cited quotations is, “People who are really serious about software should partner with an OEM in Asia.” No, wait, that’s not what he said. What he said is, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

— On Google’s Acquisition of Nest

— Monday, 13 January 2014

— John Gruber

2014.01.25 Saturday ACHK

Deal only with natural numbers

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Fortunately for us, mathematicians of the twentieth century realized this problem and proposed solutions. In order to focus on the essential problems at hand, we will deal only with natural numbers, and functions on natural numbers. This turns out to not be a serious restriction since natural numbers are robust enough to encode many objects (after all, our modern digital computers work with only zeros and ones).

— Computability Theory

— Joe Mileti

2013.12.25 Wednesday ACHK

Make customers awesome

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1. You’re not a “tech company”—you’re a “make customers awesome” company

People don’t pay you because you have amazing programming skills and can write nginx configurations blindfolded. People pay you money because the product you sell to them saves them time, money, effort and nerves. It’s your job to make your customer more awesome. Every decision you make for your product and business should revolve around that.

— 5 things I’ve learned in 5 years of running a SaaS

— Thomas Fuchs

2013.12.24 Tuesday ACHK

Perl

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心懷混亂 4

As we all know, reality is a mess.

This is a picture of many things. It’s a picture of air molecules bouncing around. It’s a picture of the economy. It’s a picture of all the relationships of the people in this room. It’s a picture of what the typical human language looks like. It’s a picture of your company’s information systems. It’s a picture of the World Wide Web. It’s a picture of chaos, and of complexity.

It’s certainly a picture of how Perl is organized, since Perl is modeled on human languages. And the reason human languages are complex is because they have to deal with reality.

…

Now, you may be wondering what all this has to do with Perl. The fact is, your brain is built to do Perl programming. You have a deep desire to turn the complex into the simple, and Perl is just another tool to help you do that–just as I am using English right now to try to simplify reality. I can use English for that because English is a mess.

This is important, and a little hard to understand. English is useful because it’s a mess. Since English is a mess, it maps well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess (though in the nicest of possible ways).

This is counterintuitive, so let me explain. If you’ve been educated as any kind of an engineer, it has been pounded into your skull that great engineering is simple engineering. We are taught to admire suspension bridges more than railroad trestles. We are taught to value simplicity and beauty. That’s nice. I like circles too.

However, complexity is not always the enemy. What’s important is not simplicity or complexity, but how you bridge the two.

— Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

2013.11.30 Saturday ACHK

Infinite loop 2

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Recursion 12.3 | Paradox 6 | Life as a recursion, 3

Paradox is due to the mixing of para-level (meta-level) and original level.

— Me@2012-09-29 02:22:14 PM

The mixing of levels creates a causal/reasoning loop, resulting an infinite long chain.

In short, infinite loop is due to mixing levels.

— Me@2012.10.15

If there is no progress or no terminating condition, a loop cannot stop.

With progress (change of some values of some variables), each iteration is different. In this sense, each iteration is at a different level.

Without progress, all iterations are at the same level, creating a mixing-level problem, aka “a paradox”.

— Me@2013-11-16 5:55 AM

Level 1: Life is a repetition.  /* an infinite loop */

Level 2: Life is an iteration.

Level 3: Life is a recursion.

— Me@2011.12.24

— Me@2013.11.16

2013.11.16 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Transparency and Privacy

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Ygg2 4 days ago

Power demands transparency. Lack of power should give you some privacy.

An individual has right to privacy and to waive said privacy when it considers appropriate. The case with Stallman you mention was waiving some of his rights to give his colleagues easier access.

Powerful organization should be forced to be transparent to maximum extent that is reasonable – you shouldn’t be forced to give out your trade/state secrets, but classifying everything as such and hiding is a worse transgression. They don’t have the right to waive their transparency when it suits them.

— Hacker News

2013.10.26 Saturday ACHK

Idea babies 4

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On why failing in the startup world is normal

“In the startup world, ‘not working’ is normal … You might wonder why ships have [bilge] pumps [to remove water from below the deck] … Why don’t they just make one that’s waterproof, right? And the fact is, one way or another, all ships take on water … and one way or another, practically all startups internally are disasters. And they just hide this from the outside world.“

— Paul Graham

— Failure: The F-Word Silicon Valley Loves And Hates

— NPR Staff

2013.09.22 Sunday ACHK

Usability 2

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One good way to evaluate the usability of a program or dialog is to… try to use the mouse with just one finger.

— Joel Spolsky

2013.09.12 Thursday ACHK

The Illusion of Gravity, 2

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We are also familiar with some curved spaces. Curvature comes in two forms, positive and negative. The simplest space with positive curvature is the surface of a sphere. A sphere has constant positive curvature. That is, it has the same degree of curvature at every location (unlike an egg, say, which has more curvature at the pointy end).

The simplest space with negative curvature is called hyperbolic space, which is defined as space with constant negative curvature. This kind of space has long fascinated scientists and artists alike. Indeed, M. C. Escher produced several beautiful pictures of hyperbolic space …

— The Illusion of Gravity

— Juan Maldacena

2013.09.09 Monday ACHK

Functional programming 6.3

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Just because a functional language is functional ([maybe] even completely pure like Haskell!), it doesn’t mean that programs written in that language must be pure when [run].

Haskell’s approach, for example, when dealing with side-effects, can be explained rather simply: Let the whole program itself be pure (meaning that functions always return the same values for the same arguments and don’t have any side effect), but let the return value of the main function be an action that can be [run].

— answered Dec 6 ’11 at 21:32, dflemstr

— Stack Overflow

2013.09.03 Tuesday ACHK