Disqus - Friends of kyleburton

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

Jonathan Tran — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:52:05 -0000

Despite me wishing people would use Tumblr and reblog, I figured I'd try Disqus. I found that it and Clickpass are great.

Mark another one up for separation of concerns.

Re: The Phase Concept

Jonathan Tran — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:25:24 -0000

This is one of those projects that is on-going. I haven't gotten very far b/c I keep changing things. (At one point, I even tried writing it in Java, but I soon learned that was a huge mistake.)

Traditionally though, I've used immutable association lists as environments, mostly for simplicity since performance isn't a big issue in the prototype. Immutable data-structures are nice for representing environments b/c you often want to "push" lexically-scoped symbols and later "pop" them off, without affecting any closures you may have created in the interim. Closures must capture the environment they are created in so that they can later be applied in that environment.

Re: The Primal Element

Jonathan Tran — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:45:34 -0000

My bad for conflating the two. I see these as separate.

I hear about how soccer players might get angry at a member of the opposing team after that person played dirty. In the heat of the moment, his ego might take over and try to get back at that person. Get revenge, if you will. But this could cause poor judgment in terms of game play.

On the other hand, a soccer player in the zone is ego-less. There is nothing but the ball, the goal, the game, and it all flows effortlessly. In these times, a player plays his best.

I know about the zone in programming. But I'm curious about the heat of the moment. (That is, in addition to other things like instantaneous feedback, improvisation, captivation.)

Re: http://aleeshka.com/post/42241319

Jonathan Tran — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:38:06 -0000

All my friends have switched to FriendFeed for commenting and following. Have you tried it?

Re: Programming Concepts People Just "Don't Get"

Jonathan Tran — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:49:02 -0000

I don't mean to make experts out of people on these topics. That takes time and experience.

If you (or others?) don't understand the concept of BigTable or column-oriented storage, that's one thing. And I could try to show it to people so that they grasp it enough to evaluate its use in a given situation.

But if you already know what it is, you're just not that good with it, I would say... practice!

Re: Programming Concepts People Just "Don't Get"

Jonathan Tran — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:39:12 -0000

For reference, I asked Reddit. Interesting...

Re: Please help us test Tumblr v4! We’re getting... | Tumblr Staff

Jonathan Tran — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:15:53 -0000

This new design is absolutely beautiful! The over-sized everything makes it feel even simpler. The curvy tab on the top right of the dashboard is just great. The full-size icons of other users is nice, allowing people to actually see much more detailed icons. Shrinking and showing the titles of things I follow is also a great change, obvious in hindsight.

One thing I'm not feeling is the enlarged pics for photo posts in the dashboard. It makes me have to scroll a lot. Also, when other people post things nsfw, I could easily get away with the shrunken image thumbnails. Now I have to look over my shoulder before I refresh my dashboard :-(

Re: Programming Concepts People Just "Don't Get"

Jonathan Tran — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:54:50 -0000

I haven't forgotten about this. A few topics I will definitely cover based on feedback: closures, currying, monads, and continuations. I will also talk about the CSS box model, staging, and aspect-oriented programming.

Please, keep pushing me to do this!

Re: Code Maintenance Tool Wish-List

Jonathan Tran — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:44:40 -0000

I haven't. Thanks. That is a very good list of code-editing features.

I really think SCID — source code in database — is a bad name though. It could turn people away who mistakenly interpret it as "relational database", and that's not what it means at all. Perhaps "source code as data structure" instead.

Re: Programming Concepts People Just "Don't Get"

Jonathan Tran — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:16:34 -0000

Yes, I can see how it can be confusing. Web 2.0 vs. semantic web vs. Semantic Web (capitalized) vs. Web 3.0.

I haven't heard anyone else mention this. I may have unintentionally excluded some topics though by saying "programming concepts". ... I'll see what I can do, but I think I've accumulated enough topics for one presentation.

Re: 1, 2, n

Jonathan Tran — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:32:07 -0000

I've been quoted in a white paper called A Framework for Semantic-Aware Editors in Eclipse [pdf]. Block quote opens the introduction. How flattering :-)

Re: Hacking FriendFeed with Metafeeds

Jonathan Tran — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:27:33 -0000

Seeing the feedback loop of posts takes a little while to update.

To speed the process, go to your page (i.e. friendfeed.com/yourusername), click Add/edit services, click the self-referential feed in the My Services list, then click Refresh Blog.

BTW I'm not encouraging anyone to actually do this. It was fun just to try out.

Re: Techies Vs. The Business

Jonathan Tran — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:27:28 -0000

One comment I had over email that I had to share:

"Investors reading this, looking for a bargain? I'm interested in funding. jtran@alumni.cmu.edu"

Er, that's a bit...Strange? Especially weird - aren't the VC's then the 'master's and the entrepeneurs the slaves? :)

That's a very good point. But they won't own 100% and it can lead to something that frees the entrepreneur.

Re: Techies Vs. The Business

Jonathan Tran — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:35:38 -0000

Short answer: Yes, I have a conscience.

Long answer: Having a conscience is bad for ~~business~~ making money. Like cheating or stealing (and getting away with it), it's easier to be bad. But I think if you find the right people, it's in your best interest in the long-run to compensate them for whatever value they're contributing. Why breed bitterness when you can make workers feel appreciated? Workers are, after all, customers of an organization. Make them feel good, and they will pass that on to the end-users. In other words, I don't think it's necessary to be a slave-driver, in the same way that it's not necessary to cheat or steal to be successful.

No rules are absolute, though. I think seeing 2 opposing perspectives and looking at them from the outside is proof of that.

Re: Comment formatting?

Jonathan Tran — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:05:40 -0000

Having strikeout would be very useful for when you need to edit comments. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's run into this problem.

Re: Techies Vs. The Business

Jonathan Tran — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:19:45 -0000

Your overall argument seems to be that managers get paid more because it's harder to get people to follow a process than it is to get computers to follow a process.

You said yourself, though, that with computers, you have to specify all the details that for a human would be obvious, increasing complexity. So both have their pros and cons.

This supports the idea that neither people nor computers should be chosen blindly -- another example of "the right tool for the right job".

Re: Techies Vs. The Business

Jonathan Tran — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:31:18 -0000

Jeff Atwood, author of Coding Horror, seems to have similar ideas about coders learning marketing and sales: The One Thing Every Software Engineer Should Know.

Re: Techies Vs. The Business

Jonathan Tran — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:23:06 -0000

Got some good comments on HN.

Re: The Abstraction Machine

Jonathan Tran — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:14:00 -0000

I am far from being an expert at neuroscience

I've drawn terminology from Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence. But what makes a neuroscientist qualified besides his understanding of how the mind works? Everyone, including you, has intimate access to a mind if they train themselves to be aware of it.

They were both guilty of learning from experience.

But how did they learn? What does it mean to learn? This is exactly my point.

They each remembered their past observations/experiences, abstracted away the insignificant details (like the time of day, the weather at the time, which direction the animal was coming from), and hypothesized (or predicted) a way of escaping.

The first man abstracted away the type of animal and predicted that climbing a tree would save him. Since some animals can climb trees and others can't (an important point in this case), his prediction failed.

The second man, after seeing this, abstracted away many of the same unimportant things (like the time of day and the weather at the time) and which man was being chased, and hypothesized (or predicted) that a leopard would kill him if he ran up a tree also. At this point, he probably drew on other experiences in which running away allowed a person to escape, an even more abstract pattern not necessarily having to do with animals, but chasers and chasees.

Ahh but that might be a consequence of not having experienced otherwise

Very true. Any ideas on making the quantum leap of "mutation" that you describe?

Re: We’ve had a few weeks to observe “Likes” effects... | Tumblr Staff

Jonathan Tran — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:54:16 -0000

I've always wondered if likes affect what shows up on http://www.tumblr.com/explore

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

Jonathan Tran — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:29:45 -0000

I'm glad you like it! No, I don't know of anything to move back. But I've heard someone mention he moved to WordPress, and then from there, to Blogger.

Re: What Web Frameworks Are Missing

Jonathan Tran — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:59:08 -0000

Will do. ... Do you guys have a website yet? When you do, post it here.

Re: think4yourself - Joe Loves Crappy Movies

Jonathan Tran — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:06:16 -0000

I went to reblog this and found the Tumblr Reblog link in the top-right corner missing. I figured out a way to get it back using Firebug (you're missing a /script tag on pageTracker stuff), but is this intentional? If it is, you're breaking the community and making it difficult for others to reblog your posts and follow you. If not, you might want to fix that.

Re: think4yourself - Joe Loves Crappy Movies

Jonathan Tran — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:17:50 -0000

Yeah, i see it now. Cool!

Re: Moving from Blogger to Tumblr

Jonathan Tran — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:36:54 -0000

Since Blogger's integration with FeedBurner, others might have this problem. I haven't used Blogger since I made the switch way back in June so I haven't kept up with the changes. But I'd like to continue helping people switch to Tumblr.

Any idea how I can change the program to ease the process for others? Did your FeedBurner URL default to RSS? b/c the code expects an Atom feed. It would be nice if it just worked on the FeedBurner feed.

btw, nice blog. Both layouts are nice, but the new one looks even cleaner and more organized.