Aykroyd

You can catch garbage comments in code reviews just as easily as you can catch other forms of programming garbage during review. The fact that someone might make a lot of bad comments is not a good argument against commenting, it's a good argument against bad commenting.

I also think that if people are in the habit of having to comment it makes them more likely to document things like expected values of the input, what the return could be expected to be, and if there are any caveats.

If I wasn't going to get the benefit of my data automatically being distributed across servers, why would I use this? In many cases, NoSQL solutions seem to be a compromise that you make, giving up ACID (yes I know this has it) and other nice query features of databases and in return gaining the ability to scale to much larger amounts of data and having redundancy without needing to think about it.

In this case though, it's all embedded so I don't gain any of the benefits.

Yes, it is a creative process. I think that a better analogy is to a scientist though. Sometimes, scientists spend a lot of time thinking about what an experimental result means and planning out their next set of experiments. But oftentimes, they also have to crank through a bunch of experiments that they've planned. The more time they spend at that point, the further they get.

I wonder about that kind of argument. I find it super appealing because I would love to work a lot less and yet get more done. Unfortunately I've found that if I work more, I do get more done. Granted, there's a time for stepping back and thinking about a problem rather than continuing to brute force your way through it. And you can get to a point where you spin your wheels and it's better to stop. But generally, more time spent does mean more done, no?

Whether or not it was a good idea for Musk to respond to the review is almost aside the point. It seems as though that is just a part of his nature. If he wasn't the type of CEO who would respond like that, he likely would also not be the type of CEO who could run SpaceX and Tesla.

Right. It's a tricky line to walk. But the TedX name grants a certain level of mainstream acceptance to ideas. And it seems like they're trying to prevent people from taking advantage of that to pimp their latest miracle, effort free, libido enhancing, hair increasing, bicep growing treatment.

An earlier comment mentioned that it's a question of what's the right forum to debate new ideas. Going to direct to the public is probably not the right one. Another hallmark of these hoaxes tends to be the notion that "main stream scientists don't want you to know" etc... It's trash.

I wish the letter had ended by admitting that it's tough to exactly define bad science but it's a lot like porn, you know it when you see it.

Agreed. I use python a lot and I hadn't seen that dict comprehensions had been back-ported to 2.7. So while the rest of it wasn't super useful to me, that was.

This seems like a nice addition. I would love to see conditional writes eventually as well. I wonder if cassandra ends up evolving into something that looks kind of like a database. It's definitely taken some steps in that direction before this. I haven't read the paper yet, but Google's spanner gives me hope that at some point in the near? future I won't have to worry about the details of consistency myself anymore.

That argument doesn't make sense. My outlet for creativity is the content of my code not when new lines happen or how I indent. On the other hand, if everything in the codebase is formatted uniformly it's a lot easier to scan through and you don't end up with diffs filled with reformatting kruft as each team member walks over the others' formatting style.

If you're feeling extra creative, you could always change your font, font size, and syntax highlighting scheme. ;)

Agreed. It seems like you'd also want the ability to occasionally hook up to a bigger monitor. Do you find the 11" screen bothers you at all, or have you gotten used to it?

I'll be curious to see how he finds the surface keyboard. I'm dubious of the one that doesn't have physical keys on it. I find it really hard to type effectively without that physical feedback.

Great to read the year-after follow up, by the way. Really well done.

Sorry that was unclear. I was referring to the modern backlash against multitasking. Specifically, I'm sure that I can't think productively about more than one thing at a time.

There's no question that this system was a technological achievement though and that having access to more than one running program at a time is a good thing.

I love that line about playing asteroids.

I was also entertained by the line towards the end of video: "I've always been able to think about multiple things at once but the terminal held me back."

It seems like we all very much doubt that was ever true now.

It sounds like you do know how to prioritize. It doesn't make sense to talk about priorities and ignore family and life responsibilities; they obviously come out of the same pool of time as work/career priorities.

Oddly, I didn't run away from Objective-C and Xcode screaming. But I have run screaming away from Ruby on Rails a number of times. I do acknowledge that this is likely a personal shortcoming though.

I think there's a kernel of truth to that but it's not entirely right. I use Pycharm for my python coding and still like named parameters because it makes clear at a glance what each parameter is in the function call. Otherwise, I'd need to click through to each function definition or use the "show doc" command to figure it out. It's much better to be able to scan through the code and understand it without intervention from IDE features.

That would definitely be a nicer way to do it. Although, using the builder pattern to create parameters for every single method in your API would be a gigantic pain.

Javascript APIs hack this in by taking Objects as params so that you can do {name='Alfred E. Neuman'...}. Unfortunately, Java's syntax isn't nice for creating Maps either, but maybe you could do something with that.

In the end, this seems like a problem with the language syntax and any fix other than one at the language level is going to be a hack.

From their message "We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience. Now we're joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google."

I wonder if that means that they're going to work on plus. What else would Google think of as a bigger vision for how people communicate?

I hope that this means that they're investing in email UX. That's my optimistic take on the acquisition. My pessimistic take on it is that they're just getting talented developers and product folks and they're going to have them working on something completely different.

I love these kinds of demos. REPLs are great... it makes me want to go back to using emacs.

I agree it's too much. It's got to be the amplifier that's pushing the price up so far right? I'm not sure what else it has that the other boxes don't.

These sort of arguments bug me. I won't repeat the great criticisms that have already been made. One of the types of things that he says that get me are completely unsupportable statements like: " Apple products have historically retained their value quite well, in part due to third-party repair manuals, but also due to a number of very modular, very upgradeable designs."

Not only would he probably be unable to find any evidence for that as being a reason but it doesn't pass the common sense test. PCs are very upgradeable as well... I'd argue more so... so clearly that's not the reason that macs have better resale value.

In the end, he sounds like an old mechanic complaining that fuel injection is worse than carburetors because they're less tunable. The car industry has already gone this direction making it harder and harder for amateurs to tinker and fix their vehicles and yet cars today are safer, faster, and more reliable than cars 20 years ago.

I like your first set of examples. I keep thinking it would be great if it were integrated with OpenTable. Then you could ask for recommendations for a restaurant with availability for a reservation at a specific time or time range and then reserve it. That would be a killer experience.

I'm not sure though about Siri asking for more information though. Having your phone start asking you questions would be disruptive -- the audio equivalent of a pop-up on a webpage asking you to fill out a survey. The only thing that would make Siri asking you for information unprompted than the pop-up is that it could happen anywhere.

I don't buy it. Having siri respond to a create reminder command with a bunch of computer-read text about what you could buy nearby would be so obnoxious and disruptive that it would undermine the user experience. Who would want to use that?

Also, it's not clear to me why they would need to create a crap user experience for some ad revenue when they get such high margins on their devices. They don't seem to be having trouble making money.

Which part Gruber's image do you think would be offensive to those that knew him best? The walking, being in the grass, or being with his family and holding hands? Or are you just you looking for a reason why it's wrong for Gruber to have written this?

The New Yorker article was really interesting. This other article's title is pretty annoying. The title is way too exaggerated. I'm tired of these "click-bait" calculations on the part of media outlets.

Wow. Impressive story and an impressive site. Also, thanks for all the details on how your site handled the load. It's a great write-up. Best of luck!

Maybe, I'm mistaken but when I think of desktop Java apps pretty much the only significant ones that I come up with are IntelliJ (which I use) and Eclipse. And I'd much prefer something native to the resource hogging of IntelliJ.

I don't think they're killing off a big industry by ditching java on the mac. It's just potentially going to make things more of a pain for those of us who write server-side java code on our Macs. Do you think their move will have an effect on that industry?

True ediff, vc-dir, and ecb are all in there. And I can only speak for my own work-flow but with each of those I needed to make modifications to have it work in a way that I liked. And ultimately never got to a place where I was totally happy (except with ediff).

I do believe that people have gotten it configured just right and that they are extremely productive with it. But for me there was just always one more thing that I needed to do from change the appearance slightly or override the annoying way that vc-dir takes over existing windows. I end up just wishing that the defaults were a little bit better.

I've been hot and cold on emacs over the years. I've used it enough that there is a lot that I really like about it and that I'm annoyed by not having in other editors. But that list of links is the reason why ultimately I have decided to spend my time in a different editor.

Yes anything is possible and people have done work that probably intersects with what you're looking to do. But rarely does anything just work.

I spend too much time try to make things work and re-implementing features that exist in other environments. I tend to use Textmate and Intellij -- although extending Intellij is such a heavy process that I pretty don't do it.