Kartik Agaram › Comments

"Why not just a greasemonkey plugin?" - Kartik Agaram

"I don't see why the first type is beneficial. It creates the same sorts of incentives to be conservative as the second. Your technology examples have two properties: they're non-essentials, and they're seldom more than a small fraction of most people's assets. If productivity caused more widespread deflation it would cause the same ill-effects and compromise money's major role: investment. You're right that too much 'margin of safety' leads to bubbles. My favorite test comes from Keynes: http://akkartik.name/blog..." - Kartik Agaram

"To be more precise: inflation is a margin of safety against deflation. Imagine a medieval world where the money supply is fixed. New money is never created, it can only be transferred back and forth. Now imagine somebody invents and rents out a steam engine. The world is now richer by this new technology. Your money's purchasing power just went up, since it can buy something useful that it couldn't before. Since the total amount of money is fixed, other unrelated goods will go down in price. If this becomes a common occurrence people will hoard money rather than buy stuff. This conservatism reduces investment in new ventures, and the overall growth of the economy suffers. In an ideal world we'd be able to measure just how much the economy grew by and add just that much money into the economy. But we don't know how to do that without avoiding a command economy. And perhaps the question is ill-posed anyway. Inflation is hard to control, and it can be 'captured' by special interests,..." - Kartik Agaram

"It's science fiction, but (the better) half of Stephen Baxter's Coalescent (http://www.amazon.com/Coalesc......) is set in 4th c. Britain. Nothing else has given me that sense of being there when the wavefront of the empire receded." - Kartik Agaram

"An awesome example of script+effects: Who Framed Roger Rabbit" - Kartik Agaram

"I'm not clear on what their model is. They're generating their own ideas. Is that like an incubator? Are they looking for founders, or are they going to retain control over all the spin-offs? "Polaris Ventures will have first dibs on these independent companies for investment." http://gigaom.com/2009...... i.e. startups that Polaris doesn't fund get hosed. But perhaps that isn't an issue since they're not really looking for founders?" - Kartik Agaram

via http://news.ycombinator.com/item.... I love the internet. - Kartik Agaram

"Thucydides' account of the war between Athens and Sparta has become an allegory of modern conflicts like the Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But a new book about the ancient historian shows he may not quite have been telling the truth." - Kartik Agaram

"Most interesting summary. The one thing that's kept me from trying out linode is slicehost's support for whole-slice backups. Linode doesn't have backups, right?" - Kartik Agaram

"I try not to have a 'fundamental design'. If you rely wholly on caching, you have no intermediate data structures, and code becomes easier to change in dramatic ways. This is the ideal I've been striving for. Check out arc's defmemo function. Given the ability to memoize (or cache) function invocations, changing your data structures can become simply a matter of refactoring your function boundaries and deciding which ones perform caching." - Kartik Agaram

""software engineers in general have become too averse to rewriting code" Fervently agree. No amount of rewriting is too much - as long as you constantly have a working app." - Kartik Agaram

"I usually don't think about performance. nostrademons sounds right: "minimize transformations when you productionize." I don't have experience with productionizing. So far when I've found myself scaling one piece of my pipeline up, I do one of two things: 1) I switch key pieces from arc to scheme or C. 2) I add a periodic precompute stage to reduce cache misses. Like pg said somewhere, the goal isn't optimizing but keeping performance mediocre as you scale up." - Kartik Agaram

"I find it useful to consciously separate input data structures from intermediate data structures (accidental complexity). I try to structure my code so it doesn't rely on intermediate data structures, it knows how to recompute them. When this works it can be very pleasing: just input data structures with caching all over the place." - Kartik Agaram

"I can think of two (related) reasons: a) We're more into entrepreneurship than open source. My record is unfortunately one sample point in support. I've put code up, but never contributed to an existing project. b) It hasn't filtered through certain social networks. Like say the indians in universities." - Kartik Agaram

"Again (http://news.ycombinator.com/item...), there's no mention of PLT scheme. I've been noticing this lately to understand why it took me so long to notice mzscheme. I kinda was aware of it, but I didn't really focus on it until arc came out. It's a weird blindspot.." - Kartik Agaram

"You may have the wrong customer for your business. You may have the right customer who emphasizes the wrong root cause to a problem." - Kartik Agaram

"..with full syntax highlighting, paren matching, jump-to-definition, delete-surrounding-form, surround-form, expand-macro among others. And it's largely written in arc, so you can use all your arc skillz to customise it." via http://arclanguage.org/item... - Kartik Agaram

heh, it was http://twitter.com/malafortune - Kartik Agaram

"Today's URL shorteners are yesterday's redirect links. Twitter has suddenly made them cool. If you get people to use your redirects/shortener you gain access to all those delicious traffic analytics on where the eyeballs are going today. Hence the land grab by google and fb in what was bitly's domain." - Kartik Agaram

"Lua's LPeg lets you create simple recursive grammars to solve problems that are often hard with regular expressions (e.g., matching balanced parentheses). It's the one library from Lua I find myself seriously missing when programming in other languages." - Kartik Agaram

"I've been all over SF and the bay area. No complaints with blackberry. I've never owned an iphone." - Kartik Agaram

not sure they could have used a less flattering photo. - Karoli

I liked it. The sense of occasion came across. - Kartik Agaram

"Is it possible you need business founders more when building something people have to pay for, and tech founders more when building 'consumer web' stuff? If so, that explains several observations: the anecdote-based disagreements that keep coming up about the need for business folks, the general bias of YC for consumer web startups in the early years (I think they tended to fund all-programmer teams more so than they do now) It also seems incredibly useful for figuring out what your startup should do, far more useful than whatever idea you have this week. The skills of the initial team are perhaps the most immutable of resource constraints you have. If you don't have a business/sales guy, don't get into selling software just because "37signals told you to." If you are a business guy, don't waste your time on a twitter app or social network. Like Dijkstra said, "Do what only you can do." And yes, I'm aware of Mark Zuckerberg, patio11 et al. Are they counter-examples or exceptions?" - Kartik Agaram

"Relatively minor?! They failed to do what they said they would. They destroyed data and borked up the backups. If it wasn't Jeff Atwood but me, would it be more their fault? Or would I just be less disingenuous? Nobody's calling them names, or threatening to take business elsewhere or anything. But it's good to get sunlight in there, show them consequences, when they fail you. When a company providing you with service fails, you're allowed to scream it from the rooftops if you feel like it." - Kartik Agaram

"In particular he claims the emails were fabricated.http://twitter.com/SimonEd..." - Kartik Agaram

"I almost became an academic, so let me address the first half. > "It doesn't actually benefit anyone to convince people that anthropogenic climate change exists unless anthropogenic climate change actually exists." Young associate professors have four years to make tenure. It's easier to get funding and get published if you espouse a cause. It makes your work seem 'important' to reviewers. Scientists have a significant (10-20%) probability of getting invested in an ideology in the process of seeking tenure. I agree with the second half." - Kartik Agaram

"I find your statement unfair. You're assuming/implying he's asking for a free product; he's asking for the courtesy of a warning. 1. Nobody's claiming entitlement. If there was entitlement there would be recourse. Asking for warning isn't entitlement. 2. You're implying that he wasn't looking to pay. He's said he would pay if he had warning. 3. You claim he 'depended' on it. I'm not sure that's the case. Not having warning is inconvenient, not catastrophic. 4. The company got its valuation in part from people who didn't pay. I think that entitles them to basic courtesies at least. 5. Companies do good by non-paying customers all the time because they care about goodwill. Google and Etherpad have lost some goodwill here by going against consumer expectations. Basic courtesies aren't paid for and aren't bought. That's why they're courtesies." - Kartik Agaram

"Good news is bad news, because this month's not-too-bad number deflates the sense of urgency. The fact remains that unemployment will remain disastrously high for many years. It’s a tragedy, wrapped in a weird complacency." - Kartik Agaram

"No mention of mzscheme?!" - Kartik Agaram

with:public needs more publicity http://smarterware.org/3536... - Kartik Agaram