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asmala

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In some of these countries, nationality is a weak proxy for what actually matters for name order; ethnicity. Take for example Malaysia. Yes, ~70% of the population are Malay Muslims who (mostly) follow the convention mentioned here. But you also have 20%+ Chinese, ~7% Indians (with considerable ethnic diversity!), and an assortment of native peoples, all who follow their own conventions.

If I’m mostly writing Finnish text, then the native Finnish layout (with separate keys for Å, Ä, and Ö) seems better. And if I’m coding, I personally prefer the US English layout where [, {, ;, etc. are more easily accessible. But I could see this layout being a better fit if I’d need to frequently swap between multiple different languages and still have convenient access to the most common symbols used in coding.

Ah, you’re right, Medium was blocked in Malaysia for a few years for hosting Sarawak Report, a publication that shed light on the 1MDB scandal. Wikipedia tells me the ban was lifted in 2018.

Neither bbc.com nor medium.com are blocked in Malaysia (source: I’m there presently), and I don’t recall either being blocked in Singapore or Indonesia. The sites blocked in Indonesia (e.g. Reddit) cannot be accessed by using an alternate DNS (e.g. Google’s) but are available via VPN.

In my experience, the size of the collection in any given library building is never much of an issue as you can always order books for very low fees from any library in the country. Because of this, the other facilities are a much bigger value-add than a larger on-site collection.

While “herbal tea” is indeed a very loosely used term, botanically speaking “tea” refers to the species camellia sinensis. Hongyacha is, to my knowledge, the only known case of a caffeine free camellia sinensis.

In Nordic countries, the order is reversed. We wear simple bands after the engagement, and give the fancier ring during the wedding.

The Finnish news sources I follow paint this as a pilot initiative trialed primarily in Helsinki, and even then limited to a few courses. A country-wide scrapping of subjects seems still a long way off. The following passage from The Independent article seems the closest to the truth:

"Finnish schools are obliged to introduce a period of “phenomenon-based teaching” at least once a year. These projects can last several weeks. In Helsinki, they are pushing the reforms at a faster pace with schools encouraged to set aside two periods during the year for adopting the new approach. Ms Kyllonen’s blueprint, to be published later this month, envisages the reforms will be in place across all Finnish schools by 2020."

I think you're right in that this won't have much immediate impact on the service providers.

But think of this as a step towards commoditization of services. It's a small step from "Hey Siri, get me an Uber" to "Hey Siri get me a ride", whereupon an Apple bidding algorithm gets you an Uber, a Lyft, a GrabCar, etc. based on e.g. price, wait time, and reviews. As a user, I wouldn't necessarily care which platform got used as long as it meets my need.

This is an interesting line of inquiry. I wonder, though, what would be a good way to quantify accessibility. I find myself doubting your statement that even non-programmers would find JavaScript or PHP easier than Lisp due to syntax, given the latter's extreme simplicity of syntax. Programmers with C/Java/etc. experience would of course likely find JS and PHP more familiar and hence accessible.

Hmm, I wonder though, is this any more complex than a client plus server combo of MVC frameworks like, say, Ember and Rails? It certainly took me a while to wrap my head around how Pedestal apps are structured but once I managed to do that, the jump didn't seem much different than the one it took me to move from ad hoc PHP to MVC in Rails back in 2007.

That being said, Pedestal's sweet spot definitely doesn't seem to be simple interactivity sugar a là jQuery, but I would by no means say it's not suited for startups. Scalability just happens to be one of the benefits of the architecture they chose.

My example above was possibly too simplistic. I'm not using Enlive at the moment but am merely trying to gauge what kinds of contracts would allow the developers and designers work together most efficiently. I can imagine a fairly big difference between, for example, the following two contracts:

a) "Don't touch the markup without an explicit agreement between the two of us."

b) "Please make sure you have an element with a data-content-for='user.username' somewhere in the HTML."

Gotcha. How would you handle minor HTML changes, e.g. something like this:

  <!-- Original -->
  <span class="username">joe</span>
  
  <!-- New -->
  <span class="username"><strong>joe</strong></span>
Updating the selector in the template is easy enough but seems a bit tedious if the design team decides to go for italics next week. Another option would be adding another CSS class or a data attribute to indicate which element should wrap username.

How do you usually handle such scenarios?

Coming from Rails, I tend to agree that the Clojure ecosystem is still less mature, but not by as much as I initially thought.

Missing Rails I18n, SimpleForm, or validations? Clojure has you covered:

* https://github.com/ptaoussanis/tower

* https://github.com/asmala/clj-simple-form

* http://clojurevalidations.info/

Need more specialized libraries? Take a look at ClojureWerkz:

* http://clojurewerkz.org/

Having tried hard to understand the rather labyrinthine source of the original SimpleForm library, I was astonished by how easy Clojure made writing a similar library, clj-simple-form. The key contributing factors were Clojure's emphasis on simple data structures and powerful functions as opposed to classes, and the ability to pass around functions just like any other objects. For a lot of projects, I find ease of extensibility to be more important than ready libraries.

Based on my experience, Hiccup is more productive than just about anything else if the frontend person is the backend person or otherwise comfortable with Clojure. The ability to easily and cleanly define and combine abstractions in the presentation layer has been big productivity boost for me as a solo developer.

As a concrete example, a small hobby project I did resulted in a fairly comprehensive library of Bootstrap helpers with very little effort:

* https://github.com/asmala/giddyup

I don't have much experience with Enlive but I find the approach is intriguing. On paper it seems perfect for clean separation of markup and logic, but you're right that careless use of the library leads to tight coupling due to the selector naming. I wonder if it would be possible to circumvent this issue using custom HTML attributes or even pseudo-CFML custom tags to indicate logical units in HTML?

Java 8 Lambdas 14 years ago

I'm curious to see what the implications are for other JVM languages given the promise of more efficient byte code.

Indeed, I'm very curious about this one as well.

Going for YC is clearly a great starting point for building a scalable business, so I wonder what the business logic will look like. As in genuinely, positively interested to know. :-)

Having followed this case for some time now, I almost get the feeling that the judge is taking sides.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm definitely cheering on Google and find Oracle's case despicable and absurd, but still.