mwotton

6 ms·

1.
by mwotton 3mo ago
I had some code for the Servant type-level HTTP API library in Haskell that does type-correct property testing on arbitrary web apis without user input, then Servant changed their type structure from a basic list-based format to a record-ba
2.
by mwotton 9y ago
I used sqlite as a backend for scraping 160 million websites a day. It works extraordinarily well if you hold it right - in my case, that meant devoting a database file to each thread. (Arguably in this context, it's competing with fla
3.
by mwotton 10y ago
Me too. Got its quirks (I wish it noticed stack-relevant changes and ran intero-restart itself) but I find it really valuable, especially with Anthony Cowley's suggestion-handling stuff.
4.
by mwotton 12y ago
I've implemented this. It isn't too bad up to a certain point. You have to be a bit careful about your filesystem/layout of files, lots of filesystems don't particularly like it when you have a few hundred million files
5.
by mwotton 12y ago
I have a crawler downloading 160 million websites a day, almost all in Haskell. It is a much more practical language than the alternatives.
6.
by mwotton 12y ago
yeah - worked on it a bit with Ollie Charles. https://github.com/ocharles/Elasticsearch it's not very principled, tbh. uses error etc rather than proper sum types for returning errors.
7.
by mwotton 12y ago
as a contributor to the other ElasticSearch client - kudos. This is much nicer than ours in many ways :)
8.
by mwotton 13y ago
yes, I probably should have mentioned the other 90% of the project, hey :)
9.
by mwotton 13y ago
This is true :) been a great tool to write a spider in, fast native code, a strict type system and very cheap threads has made it much faster than it otherwise would have been. ZeroMQ has also been a great help in modularising it. I'll
10.
by mwotton 13y ago
What benefit does that have over what's actually there?
11.
by mwotton 13y ago
Row polymorphism has something to say about this, doesn't it? Coming from Haskell, I'm still finding concatenative programming hard to handle.
12.
by mwotton 14y ago
well, let's look. map f (h:t) = f h:map f t map f [] = [] member x (h:t) = x == h || member x t member _ [] = False I think the only difference is that you can't match for equality directly in the pattern.
13.
by mwotton 14y ago
My startup involved custom hardware and realtime messaging. I still would have been better off in the early stages writing it in Ruby.
14.
by mwotton 14y ago
ha. I didn't think that at all when I was writing it, but I can see how it's applicable. I'll be sure to analyse that more explicitly next time I write a presentation.
15.
by mwotton 14y ago
not caremad, just clarifying. I'm as baffled as you are.
16.
by mwotton 14y ago
It really depends on the type of risk. My assertion is that most startups have most of their risk in the market bucket rather than the technical bucket. If you can move some risk from the market bucket to the technical bucket, and compensat
17.
by mwotton 14y ago
A lot of context is lost in a slideshow. I am very much a fan of the experience of developing in Haskell. My problem was tangential stuff like Cabal & the difficulty of operationalising Haskell. It's the reason I spent a few fruitless w
18.
by mwotton 14y ago
It wasn't really intended to make much sense by itself. I find if I make slides that stand alone, the audience reads the slides and ignores me. I put the slides up as a courtesy to the people in the audience. There was less than zero market
19.
by mwotton 14y ago
Copy-on-write.
20.
by mwotton 14y ago
http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Starter+the+Architect+the+Deb... seems relevant here. I often have the same problem - once the crazy technical stuff is done, I lose interest in the mundane details of packaging, finish, promotion... you kno
21.
by mwotton 15y ago
good idea - i might even manage a complete and coherent sentence.
22.
by mwotton 15y ago
I'm interested in this for ninjablocks, too - I think we're currently bundling a small number of resources (SMSes etc) with each account, but then perhaps more fine-grained tracking.
23.
by mwotton 15y ago
Privacy is a legitimate concern, but there are useful things you can do that you might feel comfortable sharing with our servers. Zero-information computing is really hard, and we didn't feel it was worth the time it'd take to give that kin
24.
by mwotton 15y ago
It's coming.
25.
by mwotton 15y ago
no, it's a beaglebone and an arduino. we looked at the raspberry pi, but availability wasn't great.
26.
by mwotton 15y ago
yes, we're mainly focused on plugged-in hardware. there'll probably be a battery pack made at some point, but it's not our first priority.
27.
by mwotton 15y ago
Yep. But we're aiming this at beneath "Hello World" level electronics knowledge, and at people who _could_ do the work but appreciate being able to work with it at a more abstract level.
28.
by mwotton 15y ago
yes, we're investigating this. arduinos are a bit tricky because the hardware either needs a general-purpose interpreter which can load new code at runtime, or needs to be able to reprogram itself wholesale over the net. It's doable, I thin
29.
by mwotton 15y ago
yes, exactly. there are a heap of markets that are expensive to target because they're so small - we're in talks with research labs to do experiment automation,for instance, and their equipment is usually priced in the hundreds of thousands
30.
by mwotton 15y ago
Hi - I'm one of the hackers behind Ninja Blocks. We're not actually getting funding from Kickstarter - we're just pre-selling the product.

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