cmallen

NYC here, and I am really sick of hearing about this.

I just don't care anymore.

>In the unlikely case I end up working a day-job for the rest of my life

Statistically, that's an incorrect statement despite the best wishes of all present.

You also failed to present anything remotely resembling a sane value equation. The only product of yours that the mass market would've been interested in, you managed to crash and burn.

You're not exactly offering anything in return for the money at the moment, and you don't have that large of an audience either.

Not even Joel would have had the gall to try something like this.

Please breed.

A lot.

The lack of good debugging tools continually stymies me.

We don't do a lot of flashy animations or anything like that at my place of employment, so generally it's a, "get it working, get it working reliably" priority order.

Server-side js is something I'd like to do more of, but I rarely have an excuse to whip it out, at home or work. I'm in the process of learning rails with an old friend at home, simply for a change of pace.

I'm a back-end programmer by day who dreams of doing embedded work. Hacking the DOM in js is not my specialty.

That said, I've hacked around with node.js.

I continue to get better, and I'm almost to the 4 year mark. I've improved more in the last year than I did in my second year. (First year programming professionally remains the largest leap, although perhaps the least significant.)

As to how I become better, I am an obsessive generalist. I don't like not understanding the stack that makes my projects tick. I don't get into wasteful/unproductive levels of implementation detail, but I do my best to grok the things I'm working with.

(I'm capable of patching django core for custom purposes if I need to, for example.)

I was pretty clueless on CSS until recently. Now I'm very slightly better than clueless. (I have a better grasp of display and position now, for example.)

I continue to use tables where they're (probably) inappropriate but for my users, it doesn't matter. Too many IE users and not enough mobile users to really care.

I just keep learning unfamiliar things and re-integrating what I learn into my daily grind. Everything I've ever learned about computers and programming and front-web web dev makes me a better Python programmer.

Actually, I talked to him about librelist and Lamson in an email exchange awhile back. Cool guy.

I don't totally grasp his reasons for moving from rails to python other than culture, but I don't really care.

Neither, I just take lumps and work out of them. There's no real trend.

COOL.

Too bad I work in Python at home and work.

Balls. :| Rubyists always get the pretty toys.

Given enough human effort and turing completeness you can make anything with anything.

Everything is feasibility and pain.

They're didn't really write a web app framework in brainfuck, they just plugged a PHP interpreter of brainfuck into a module for apache.

I mean, yeah, you can make web pages, but that hardly justifies the nomenclature "framework".

Am I the only one tired of mathematical tests? I'd rather see a test comparing the relative speed and scalability of various web app implementations.

And don't give me that line about scaling not mattering, I have to cope with a cantankerous server and database at work, I know full well what my problem sets are.

We aren't really trying to get YCNews embroiled in environmental politics are we?

Come now. I'd rather read about A/B testing on Erlang.

An encrypted tunnel that isn't initiated at the database level should work fine.

Addendum: I'm more than a little puzzled that someone would be aware that a particular nosql database didn't support encryption natively and yet wasn't aware how tunneling works.

This is marketing trash. Life is too short, don't watch.

>Maverick, haha, I'm far from it. Just tired of the restrictions on computing devices I buy.

Me too, I dream of computers that are designed from the ground up to be accessible to the curious (in the vein of the PCs from the 80s).

I am however, extremely pragmatic.

>If what you say is true, than I'll have the same woes with Android. In that case it's a shame there's not really an open mobile hardware device out there.

OpenMoko. Too bad it sucked as a product.

>I liken the Apple version of the net to AOL. It's a fully controlled interface with one corporate interest at heart. If Google's no better that doesn't mean I should be stuck with Apple.

Ah, Google is better, but they're annoying in less visible ways. Apple doesn't control the net, their browsers support open standards several orders of magnitude better than everyone but Chrome.

>What I want is a framework where I don't need approval to copy files to and from my device. That's it.

You still need to pay money to get an API key for Android. As for copying files to and fro, I know nothing of that.

>"This whole post was poorly written, sophomoric and not thought out at all." I challenge you to do better (I'm serious I get a lot out of well written conflicting views).

I don't care enough about the subject. Ask me about something else. I'm only replying out of respect.

>I admit to being a very challenged writer. It takes hours of effort for me to write something that comes across as coherent, but it's good practice.

Writing is good, but don't make disingenuous posts that look past the faults of the alternative.

This faux disgruntled move from Apple to Android trend is kind of sad. They're showing it off and blogging it like it makes them a 'maverick' when in fact it's just a "Grass Greener" situation.

There are advantages and disadvantages to either platform, but don't pretend Android is a panacea of freedom. My friend has a t-mo MyTouch and it STILL doesn't have Android 2.0 available. The carrier/manufacturer refuse to put in the effort to deploy it for his handset.

He's completely fucked and if he wants the new OS he has to buy a new phone.

If Apple forced people to buy a new phone to upgrade their OS (with all the benefits thereof) they'd file a class action lawsuit.

But as soon as it's Google/Carrier-Not-AT&T/manufacturer with them waving the "FREEDOM" flag next to a sign that says, "Don't be evil", they get a free pass.

Give me a break. This whole post was poorly written, sophomoric and not thought out at all. He's making a buying decision based on pure conjecture based upon the "FREEDOM" advertising Google has been doing.

Personally, as someone who is planning to begin deploying mobile apps soon, I'll be deploying to Apple.

You can keep your rose-colored glasses.

Utter foolishness.

Could someone please explain this (joke?) to me?

It would certainly make sense to do compression while it's stored server-side in RAM if they're RAM capacity limited.

Well, I guess for their scale, CPU-limiting factors would make compression not worthwhile.

That said, for more common scaling issues, I think compression would be a huge win, especially with Redis-style backends.

Am I the only one wondering why facebook hasn't implemented a compression backend into memcache much like Reiser4 and ZFS has done?

They've made it very clear that they're RAM limited (in particular with respect to capacity), so why not just have the processor compress/decompress memcache operations back and forth with a highly efficient and relatively low compression algorithm?

It's not even like you couldn't tune the algorithm to detect duplicate/similar data and create atomic globs of data that represent multiple informational objects.

It seems like their big cost is putting together machines with tons of RAM for their memcache clusters, so why not bring that cost down?

>preverbal

proverbial

Am I the only person in NYC rolling their eyes at this continual barrage of "IN NYC IT RAINS MANNA FROM THE SKY!" ?

When we run out, we've struck upon post-scarcity and you'll have no needs that won't be attended to.

Wants? I'm not so sure about that part.

Edit: You may however, be forced out of your comfort zone as more problem space gets explored. Don't expect to be able to use Rails and Django to solve everything.

This is potentially the most adorable thing I've ever seen on this site.

That's what I did, initially. I don't know how long ago he's talking though.

It took me about ~2 months to get to an OS that could boot from an MBR, get into a raw kernel that only used memory space (no filesystem or persistence, this was intentional), and had a basic prompt running in kernel mode.

What I really want to return to is what I call dual-mode programming. Taking the older Apple computers and the Commodore 64 as an example, they were comparatively speaking an absolutely joy to program on. You started with BASIC and then eventually progressed towards manipulating memory locations in asm to draw graphics and make whatever you wanted.

Wasn't because the programming languages used were anymore powerful (asm and BASIC? Come on...), it was because they were frankly better designed as far as "whole systems" go.

Functionality isn't exposed the way it used to be. It's difficult to put anything functional together on a computer these days if you're a rank beginner.

Sure, I can slap something together in Python, but that's because they're walking right around the system's complexity by living in their own little world (the interpreter and the .py libraries).

I guess I'm hoping for what no one really cares about anymore. They just want to add more layers of abstraction to compensate for their own short-sightedness and poor discipline.

>Pointers are absolutely part of the average Haskell and Python work environment -- it's impossible to get reasonable performance without them.

I think that making calls to functions implemented in C via the FFI would be more productive. I've never heard of anyone using pointers in Python for anything.

>This sentence makes no sense, and makes me think you've never (or seldom) used Haskell before.

Sure it does, performing an arbitrary mutation on an already known variable (location in memory) in Haskell is very intentionally non-trivial due to striving for purity as a functional language. (Copy rather than overwrite behavior as a default.)

>That's because C is used in code where performance is absolutely critical, which demands having control over memory layout and management. Pointers aren't a symptom of using C -- using C is a result of needing pointers.

Uh, the whole, "C only uses pointers for speed" thing is completely incorrect. All the experienced C programmers I know use pointers simply because they're the most direct and portable means of writing terse code that is still performant in spite of the brevity. I mentioned functors for a reason.

This is more pedantic than some of the conversations I've witnessed in ##C on Freenode, come on.

You're missing the point by a greater distance than Christopher Columbus missed the West Indies in the late 15th century.

I'd love to build a non-trivial operating system, but all I've made thus far has been written in assembler and extremely minimal.

If one wanted to bootstrap and get an OS running quickly, I wonder what the best approach or language would be?

Renraku is interesting just for the sake of the horror of building something on Mono/.NET.

I just wonder what kind of OS would result if you applied new-age MVC and rapid dev principles to the design of a new OS. Would the concept of a kernel even be totally relevant?