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  Why PHP is (so much) better than Ruby?

I attended this weekend my first Ruby conference, Ruby Lugdunum in Lyon. Besides cool talks and the fun of meeting people like Nick, Blake, or Laetitia, my friend Camille & I did a surprise lightning talk about how PHP is better than Ruby. Here are the slides and a more detailed transcript: A lot of free hosts: it’s easy to find a PHP host, you just have to google “free php host” and you find a ton of free PHP/MySQL hostsBigger community: The PHP community is really huge,...

   PHP,Ruby,Comparism,Difference,Advantage     2011-06-29 08:34:12

  A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy

A programmer’s greatest enemy is getting stuck. A crucial skill in programming—and one that many of my beginning game programming students lack—is the ability to recognize when they’re stuck, to get out of being stuck, and to avoid getting stuck in the first place.Indeed, it’s a skill I’m still learning myself, although the contexts in which I still get stuck are shrinking with time, study, and experience.This morning, as I downloaded crash reports ...

   Programming,Enemy,Stuck,Game design,Crash     2011-10-15 15:06:46

  On Programming Deadlines

There are a lot of differences between programming, and programming professionally. The most notorious of which, is deadlines.DeadlinesWhen you're writing code for yourself, you can spend as much (or as little time) on it as you please--but when you're writing code for other people, you've got only a limited amount of time and resources to get the job done. In my experience, this typically leads to one of two situations:You've got to extend the deadline to finish the job properly.You've got to w...

   Programming,Deadline,Transparent,Test,TODO     2011-11-01 07:10:21

  Why programmers work at night

A popular saying goes that Programmers are machines that turn caffeine into code. And sure enough, ask a random programmer when they do their best work and there’s a high chance they will admit to a lot of late nights. Some earlier, some later. A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am. At the gist of all this is avoiding distractions. But you could just lock the door, what’s so special a...

   Programmer,Sleep,Later,Efficiency,Habit     2011-12-16 10:13:27

  Should a startup focus on good user experience or ship something out quickly?

For a startup, there are always arguments about whether to build a good experience or instead ship something workable out quickly. These two seem contradict with each other and it is usually hard to decide for many startup founders. But in order to win over competitors and gain large portion of market shares as soon as possible, founders must think fast and make their life change decisions. So how should we decide whether we should focus on good user experience or we should ship out the product...

   User experience,Startup     2014-01-20 06:48:28

  What Level Programmer Are You?

Everybody's talking about how programming is the skill that we all are going to need. [Except those folks who might feel that most programming could be turned into wizard-like tools. Insert long discussion about Strong AI.] But what's a programmer? Is the guy who set up his own Apache Web Server a programmer? How about the guy who created a complex Excel spreadsheet? The guy who made his own RPG level? Minecraft players? When we say "Everybody is going to have to know programming" what, e...

   Programmer,Skill,Level,Criteria     2012-02-08 10:07:41

  How does Class box get 1 million users with only 4 people?

"Class box" is an app which helps students create course plan developed by 4 Chinese. This app was created in 2012. They get over 1 million users with only 4 people. How do they make this? The co-founder of "Class box" Tianfang Li explains this on Zhihu. Here is what he said: About millions of users, in the mobile Internet era what we need to do is just find a good entry point, rapid iteration and with a little luck, a small team or even an independent developer can make millions user level prod...

   class box,team size,sillicon valley     2013-04-03 08:08:21

  The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language

A few years ago I visited a friend who is a graduate student in linguistics. After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chomsky on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chomsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science. More than that, I was glad to learn that there was something technical that I could share and discuss with other people in linguistics. At the time I found this was just a great coincidence. It was only recently, though, t...

   Programming language,Human language,Chomsky     2011-11-28 10:36:34

  A Solution to CPU-intensive Tasks in IO Loops

Back in October 2011, Ted Dziuba infamously said that Node.js is Cancer.  A provocative title to a provocative article.  The only thing it didn’t really provoke in the commentary was much thought ;)  Zing. My interpretation of the article is that Ted holds up the classic blocking-IO process-per-request (or  thread per request; same difference) model as superior.  Yet we all remember where the blocking-IO forking model got Apache in the early days.  ...

   CPU,Intensive IO loops,Solution,C++     2012-02-06 07:42:40

  Microsoft is filing a new patent about transparent display

Microsoft is filing a new patent about transparent display screen, it may be used on augmented reality technologies of tablets, phones and laptops. Similar to the scenes in the movie Minority Report. Minority Report was showed in 2002, it described a world of 2054, at that time 3D technology is mature. But after 10 years of this movie, Microsoft not only invented the basis of this technology, but also make it more portable.Patent Bolt recently revealed a patent application of Microsoft about tra...

   Microsoft,Transparent display,3D,Patent     2012-05-10 05:31:16

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