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  Don't Overload #nil?

There’s a popular post on Hacker News about writing confident code by, among other things, overloading Object#nil? and returning “null objects” instead of nil itself.DO NOT DO THIS.In Ruby, all objects (except nil itself) coerce to the boolean value true. Your object will be nil and true at the same time. Bad things will happen. Your coworkers will cry. Sad people from around the world will ask bewildering questions on your mailing list.Here’s what happen...

   Ruby,#nil,Overload,Object     2011-11-10 10:50:22

  Innovation Works CEO Kai-Fu Lee is diagnosed with cancer

Innovation Works CEO Kai-Fu Lee is diagnosed with lymph cancer. He posted one weibo(Chinese version of Tweet) which indicates that his health in a bad condition at 10:17pm on 5 September Beijing time.   Later Innovation Works spokesman Zhaohui Wang confirmed this news. And Mr Lee is currently receiving treatment following doctor's instructions. But now we still don't know how severe it is. Post Mr Lee's weibo, many Chinese netizens expressed their concerns for his health and wished hi...

   Kai-Fu Lee,Cancer,Innovation works     2013-09-05 10:57:39

  Vine video sharing drops significantly

According to Sina Tech, social media analytics site Topsy data shows that Vine's short video sharing has dropped significantly since Facebook's photo sharing service Instagram launched the video sharing feature.Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom announced on Thursday that Instagram supported short video sharing. Vine was once called the Instagram in video sharing world, but now, Instagram has launched its own 15-second short video sharing feature for its 130 million users.Vine, was acquired by T...

   Vine,Instagram,Twitter,topsy     2013-06-24 00:16:32

  10 Questions with Facebook Research Engineer – Andrei Alexandrescu

Today we caught up with Andrei Alexandrescu for a “10 Question” interview. He is a Romanian born research engineer at Facebook living in the US, you can contact him on his website erdani.com or @incomputable. We will talk about some of the juicy stuff that going on at Facebook, so let’s get started. Hello Andrei, welcome on Server-Side Magazine. 1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where and what do you work? Who am I? Ah, the coffee breath of one talki...

   C++,Facebook,PHP,Future,Machine learning     2012-02-06 08:08:12

  Can API be copyrighted? At least Oracle hopes so

  The result of the lawsuit case war between Oracle and Google is clearer now. The court said that 9 lines of code of Android has violated intellectual property right, these 9 lines of code can be ignored relative to the number of codes for the whole Android system. But just like LinuxToy points out that the reasons why this case catches so much attention are : 1). The amount of money Oracle asked from Google is $1 billion; 2). The statement says Java language itself doesn't violate the int...

   Oracle,Google,API,Copyright,Lawsuit case     2012-05-11 00:47:58

  7 Resources Every JavaScript Developer Should Know

A web developer today is expected to be an expert in every aspect of their craft and JavaScript is no exception.  Years ago JavaScript seemed to be more of an annoyance, producing those trailers at the bottom of the browser.  This has changed and JavaScript is a first-class citizen as a functional programming language and what seems like an unlimited number of resources covering the language. I have been doing more and more JavaScript lately, both on the front-end and some node.js...

   JavaScript,Resource,Study,Website     2012-03-15 12:54:40

  Lots of Chinese users experienced Samsung phone crashes

Starting from 23 May morning(Beijing time), lots of Samsung phone users in China suddenly experienced system crashes and couldn't use the phone anymore.   The symptoms the users saw were that the phone started to restart infinitely and the screen turned into dark screen and nothing can be done to get it recovered. Based on the reports, the impacted models include Samsung Galaxy S8, S9, S10 and S20 series,  Other models don't receive many reports yet. After receiving the reports,...

   SAMSUNG,SAMSUNG GALAXY,SYSTEM CRASH,AUTO UPDATE,NEWS     2020-05-23 05:23:55

  How does CSDN dare to use plain text as password?

Recently, the China's largest Chinese IT community website named CSDN leaked its user's account information. Later today CSDN made an announcements to its users on their website. The announcement said that some user account information was leaked and the passwords of the accounts were stored as plain text in their database before 2009, and after 2009, they adopted an encryption algorithm to encrypt user password. They urged all users who registered the account before 2009 to change their passwor...

   Security,Information leak,CSDN,Plain text     2011-12-22 09:10:01

  Fear of Ignorance

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll ...

   Leader,Team,Technical,Leadership,Ignorence     2011-11-21 10:03:03

  Jack Ma retires from Alibaba today

Jack Ma, Alibaba founder and chairman, retires today. Today is the Teacher's day in China and also the 20th anniversary of Alibaba. It's a special day and also a memorable day for all Alibaba employees including employee No.1 Jack Ma. Ma steps down as chairman today as he promised 10 years ago when he was 45. Just a few years back in 2013, he left his position as Alibaba CEO. His successor will be Daniel Zhang who is the current CEO of Alibaba. After today, Jack will start his new life out...

   ALIBABA,RETIREMENT,JACK MA,NEWS,CHAIRMAN     2019-09-10 09:24:43