Disqus - Latest Comments for SamStokes

Re: What Programming Is Like - Coding with Honour

Sam Stokes — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 21:37:27 -0000

I posted a follow-up post about comparing programming to magic. I think we could do better with a different analogy: http://blog.samstokes.co.uk...

Re: What Programming Is Like - Coding with Honour

Sam Stokes — Mon, 26 May 2014 18:14:29 -0000

Hey John, long time! I think The Social Network was actually part of the problem. Sean Parker was portrayed as "cool", but he was also portrayed as an asshole. Ditto Zuck. I'd like to see a portrayal of a programmer that shows them doing their job, but also as a social person capable of sensitivity and friendship - like the real programmers I know!

Re: What Programming Is Like - Coding with Honour

Sam Stokes — Fri, 02 May 2014 21:58:46 -0000

You're right, of course - I'm sure the conceptions people have of cops and lawyers don't bear much resemblance to those professions' daily lives. Maybe the difference is I think people can still *relate* to the caricatures of cops and lawyers, and the problems and people they deal with; I don't think the same is true for the "hacker" caricatures. As for the "nerd" caricatures, those are usually so obviously negative portrayals that it's no wonder more people don't consider programming as a career.

Re: What Programming Is Like - Coding with Honour

Sam Stokes — Fri, 02 May 2014 21:54:25 -0000

Totally, that was the first thing that stopped me emailing "Programming Sucks" to my friends and family - thinking they'd respond "oh you poor thing"!

Re: What Programming Is Like - Coding with Honour

Sam Stokes — Fri, 02 May 2014 21:52:50 -0000

Please do! I wrote this in the hope it would inspire people to learn to program. I would be very happy if it worked!

Re: What Programming Is Like - Coding with Honour

Sam Stokes — Fri, 02 May 2014 21:51:25 -0000

I think the "magic" angle came across a bit stronger than I'd hoped. (The Fred Brooks quote actually goes on to explicitly compare programming to "the magic of myth and legend", but I trimmed it.) Magic suggests something hard to learn or accessible only to a few, which is an impression I want to change.

But when it works, it does feel that way sometimes... :-)

Re: Haskell Buildpack for Heroku - BAM Weblog

Sam Stokes — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:15:13 -0000

Thanks very much for posting that. I can indeed deploy the test app - I'll keep digging for why mine doesn't work.

Re: Haskell Buildpack for Heroku - BAM Weblog

Sam Stokes — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:58:59 -0000

Brian, thanks for getting this working, and blogging about it! I fiddled around with Haskell on Heroku too and couldn't get it to go (for other reasons).

I hate to respond to something awesome with a bug report, but: when I try to deploy my Yesod app with this, the Cabal dependency resolver keeps complaining that it can't find a library with the same name as my app. Initially I thought it couldn't cope with Yesod's scaffolded cabal file, which builds a library with all the code and an executable that depends on it; but I tried coalescing the "executable" and "library" section into one and still got the same error.

Any chance you could post the cabal file of the Yesod app you've managed to deploy this way? I'm a Cabal beginner so I'm not really sure what's unusual about my situation, but it would help if I could compare with a known-working setup.

Mine is here if you're interested: https://github.com/samstoke...

I'm on ghc 7.0.4, cabal-install 0.10.2 and Cabal library 1.10.2.0.

Re: Gain productivity by having different vim settings for every project - Vim plugins, tips, tricks and tutorials

Sam Stokes — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:06:47 -0000

I'm probably missing something, but how is this different from the built-in feature that searches for a ".vimrc" file in the current directory? You have to enable it via "set exrc", but then it works pretty similarly to what you describe. (:help 'exrc' for details.)

Re: Evaluating alternative Decorator implementations in Ruby

Sam Stokes — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:09:41 -0000

At least in terms of Ruby semantics, module inclusion *is* inheritance, and *does* imply an "is-a" relationship:

[].is_a? Enumerable # => true

Modules like Enumerable and Comparable define a protocol: given certain methods (#each, #<=>) being defined on a class, they provide a standard API for using that class in a certain way (#map, #select, #<, etc). For those, the "is-a" makes sense: an array *is* a kind of enumerable thing. Any code expecting an Enumerable can operate on an Array without needing to know that it's an Array.

Of course not all modules have such well-defined interfaces. It's not clear that "foo.is_a? UsersHelper" is a useful concept, because Rails view helpers are basically just a convenient way of organising related methods.

Re: Rapportive For Gmail – More Outstanding Than Ever!

Sam Stokes — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:56:44 -0000

Craig, thanks very much for the recommendation and kind words! I just wanted to let your readers know that as well as Firefox and Chrome, we fully support Safari and Mailplane, and we have a bookmarklet that works in other browsers.

Re: Heroku For... - Morethanseven

Sam Stokes — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:33:17 -0000

There's DotCloud (.com), which isn't exactly "Heroku for X" but is positioned at least somewhere nearby (application stacks with common sysadmin tasks abstracted away). They're somewhere in between Heroku and EC2 on the abstraction scale. (Disclosure: friends of mine.)

Re: Socialize Gmail with Rapportive

Sam Stokes — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:37:24 -0000

Hmmm, there seems to be an echo in here :)

Re: Socialize Gmail with Rapportive

Sam Stokes — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:35:35 -0000

Hi Sarah, it's Sam from Rapportive. Thanks very much for your post! Sorry you've not been able to log in with your business account - if you drop us an email at support@rapportive.com with the error you're seeing, we'll get that sorted right away.

Re: Inception isn’t science fiction (spoilers!)

Sam Stokes — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 06:20:35 -0000

Thanks for all the discussion! If you found my post interesting (or indeed if you found it obvious and uninteresting and want those 15 minutes of your life back) you might like this analysis, which goes a bit deeper into the message of the film than I did: http://chud.com/articles/ar...

Re: Samppot, On "three strikes": email to my MP

Sam Stokes — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:09:12 -0000

Thanks for posting this. Good idea to focus on the economic angle and new powers for the Secretary - when I wrote the full horror of the Bill had not yet been revealed, so I didn't know about the "Pirate-Finder General" proposals.

I'd be interested to know whether you've had a response from Mr Howarth. My own MP responded noncommittally - I'll blog about it soon.

(Sorry for not replying to this earlier - there's a problem with the comment system I was hoping would be resolved first, but the nice people at Disqus are still working on it.)

Re: Samppot, On "three strikes": email to my MP

Sam Stokes — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:08:48 -0000

Since a couple of people have asked me: please feel free to use the text of this email to send to your own MP. It'll probably have more impact if you paraphrase or personalise it though - particularly if the same MP gets the same email twice!

If you were to leave a comment here saying you did so, that would be cool, but no obligation :)

Re: Brewing a Better Rating System

Sam Stokes — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:08:08 -0000

I'm late to comment on this post, but I've read several posts on rating systems recently and not many seemed to mention this. (This is cross-posted from Hacker News.)

Have you tested the theory that response bias is skewing the ratings upward?

In other words, given that not every tea drinker is going to bother logging on to your site, finding each tea they've tasted and leaving a rating, it seems plausible to me that people who've had a good tea-drinking experience are more likely to make that effort than those who've had an unremarkable tea.

The figures that you quote seem to support this theory. With a yes/no rating system you had 90% yes votes, or an average vote (assuming one yes vote cancels out one no) of 0.8, skewed 80% up from the unweighted mean you'd expect. With a 5-star rating you expect an average rating of 4.3, which is 65% up from the unweighted mean ((4.3 - 3.0) / (5.0 - 3.0)). So adding granularity is decreasing the skew, but not very rapidly. I'd be very interested to know what your averages are like now, with your new system.

Granted, some of the skew is due to what teas are available to be rated: presumably people are less likely to enter awful teas into your system in the first place. I realise the point of your article is about redesigning the rating to combat that skew, rather than necessarily about finding the one true rating. But if you're concerned about bias, it seems worth at least investigating all possible sources of bias.

There's an obvious asymmetry in this hypothesis - why would the response bias be in favour of strong *positive* experiences, rather than just strong experiences in general? Even if drinkers of mediocre tea can't be bothered to vote, why wouldn't people who've had terrible tea be just as likely to vote as those who've had great tea? I can think of two explanations. One is an innate sense that a good experience is worth more effort than a bad one - so after a bad pot of tea, there's less of an impulse to run off and tell everyone how bad it was, more to just write it off and go do something else. Another is that people motivated to tell people about bad experiences might want to do so in words, to explain what was so bad about it.

I realise this is all hand-waving - I don't have hard evidence to back up this theory. I do think it would be an interesting theory to test, for those with sufficient levels of usage of a rating system to do so.

Some anecdotal evidence comes from my use of other UGC review sites, particularly restaurant reviews. These sites usually have a disproportionately large number of negative reviews. Reading reviews for nearly any restaurant leads you to conclude that restaurant has terrible service - apparently because those who've had bad experiences are always keen to vent about them. Yet nearly all restaurants, even those with tens of vocal unhappy customers, have above-average ratings.

Re: On learning Vim

Sam Stokes — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:17:40 -0000

I'm not totally sure I buy the whole hjkl thing. The version of vim I learned on had the arrow keys set up by default, and I don't think I've ever used one where they didn't work. I still use arrow keys for navigation (when I'm not using more vimmy motions like w, $ or regex search).

I know hjkl keeps your hands on the home row - with qwerty anyway! - but it just doesn't seem worth the effort to me. I hate to think what it's like learning hjkl on a dvorak keyboard where they're not even adjacent *or* on the home row.

[EDIT] having said that, I have found one place where knowing hjkl is useful: Google Reader! jk to quickly navigate entries in a feed.

Re: Variable Scoping with gcc

Sam Stokes — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:41:53 -0000

I didn't know you could do this with C (even gcc-specific C). Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Regarding your comment about garbage collection in your last paragraph: in my experience garbage collection is pretty suckful for managing resources other than memory, because it's usually only memory conditions that trigger a collection, and your object finaliser that's supposed to release a file descriptor never actually gets called. I don't know whether there are GC implementations where other types of resource starvation can trigger a GC.