"An opposing view: "Code you can reason about is better than code you can't. Rely on libraries written and tested by other smart people to reduce the insane quantity of stuff you have to understand. If you don't get how to test that your merge function is associative, commutative, and idempotent, maybe you shouldn't be writing your own CRDTs just yet. Implementing two-phase commit on top of your database may be a warning sign." http://aphyr.com/posts/286-cal..."
- Kartik Agaram
"The first four bullets are really just different implications of the same rationale, and I'm not sure I buy that avoiding spaces or requiring capitals has any affect on converging the vocabulary. CamelCase is very common in programming, for example, and the vast majority of codebases never converge :) It seems pretty weird to suggest that Java makes for better code than C because it uses camel-case rather than underscores. Convergence requires discipline and gradual cultivation; no naming convention will get around that. (And it's fine for 'outlying regions' to never converge; they drive the engine of creativity that cultivates the center.) The fifth bullet is valid. But it's not always a huge factor."
- Kartik Agaram
"When people delete a key like this, is the money destroyed from the bitcoin economy? Is the asymptotic size now 21 million less 90 BTC?"
- Kartik Agaram
18 months ago, TermKit, a next-generation terminal, was revealed to the world. It got 977 upvotes here and over 3,500 stars on GitHub. Yet the last activity was over a year ago. Is the project dead? Why? - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"That's a good question. I'm not sure, but I just thought of the idea of giving tags profiles like wiki pages, so the community could arrive at a consensus on what each tag is suitable for."
- Kartik Agaram
"Thanks! You raise an interesting point about coupling. Codebases without information hiding are paradoxically more likely to be loosely coupled than going through contortions to play to a fixed interface. Another way to look at it: designing and software organizing software is hard enough to do right. Minimizing impedance mismatch between pieces gives us half a chance of focussing on the actual problem of loose coupling."
- Kartik Agaram
"Me too, but that's because of the size of the 'community' at the frontpage. Back when reddit was far smaller we didn't need subreddits because the community at the frontpage was cohesive enough to provide a nice experience. Hubski's still in that phase, but with one difference: as it grows it would like to keep the frontpage as useful as ever. With subreddits we try to recreate that sense of cohesion. But they're just one possible solution. When communities grow too unwieldy somebody has to make the explicit choice to fork a new subreddit. What if members could instead continually refine what their community was? Then you wouldn't need a centralized decision to bud off a new subreddit. You'd also be able to adapt to shrinking numbers by coalescing communities when it turns out a subreddit wasn't actually large enough to be viable in the long term. The implementation of subreddits makes these kinds of group action less convenient. *(Disclosure: I help build hubski.)*"
- Kartik Agaram
Maui -- A custom graphical extension builder for the Smalltalk IDE. Blurs the distinction between GUI design and programming - http://www.reddit.com/r...
Private-equity firms are adding debt to the companies they own in order to fund payouts to themselves, a controversial practice now reaching a record pace. - http://www.reddit.com/r...