goof

I agree with your sentiment and hate the lame titles programmers apply to themselves, but you're missing a key point. Calling yourself a programmer is fine when your company's product is the software you write. If I work at id or at a company that sells iPhone apps and I call myself a programmer, it's obvious what value I create. But for the people making internal business software (90% of programming jobs according to Patrick) a programmer is associated with costs rather than profits, so it's a bad idea to craft an identify as a "programmer".

We're not talking about replacing TCP as the standard transport protocol. But if you're a mobile app developer and you control both the client (via a native app) and the server you can use whatever you want. If someone provided client and server implementations of a more efficient networking protocol it could become popular.

I have no idea about monetization though. I doubt just charging for the code would work.

What time of the week was it previously posted to HN? Something like this will likely do better on the weekend, when there's less going on in general, and people have more time to watch hour long videos.

Oh come on, I think we're intelligent enough here to consider a metaphor without getting emotionally twisted out of shape.

The infantilizing of movies has been very disappointing for me personally. I seem to have a lot of friends that only want to see CG movies, usually from Pixar or Dreamworks. Sit them down to watch a live action drama and in fifteen minutes the iphones come out to play Angry Birds. Very frustrating.

I agree the developers aren't entitled to these improvements from Google, but if I were Google I'd be doing everything I can to pacify developers.

> Are they really that horrified by game mods containing nudity, or are they just control freaks?

I'm sure it's the latter. Having complete control over distribution makes it far easier to monetize the content. See the iphone app store for example.

> Not sure what to call the iPhone, what category it is, but did they erect any barriers to keep Google out of it?

The "no developing apps with cross-platform toolkits" policy is pretty anti-competitive.

> As long as they control their own platform they're happy.

Then why the patent suit against HTC?

Every company would describe itself as a meritocracy though. In github's case they're probably still small enough for that to be true.

I agree that constantly being nagged about updating sucks. What's worse though: update nagging or occasionally having an app or service you depend on breaking temporarily due to a bad update?

If regressions are somewhat rare then I think I prefer automatic updates, even with the risks.

I map right alt to ctrl. This gives you alt with your left thumb and ctrl with your right thumb, which is pretty intuitive once you get used to it.

Yeah, he's referring to Big Design Up Front. It just means doing specs and schedules instead of PG style exploratory programming.

e.g. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html

I had a brief fling with Common Lisp a few years ago and I definitely miss Slime. I wish other language implementations would provide a networked repl and tight emacs integration. Neither of the Schemes I use (plt, gambit) work with Slime and Clojure's Slime integration had some annoying issues when I last checked about 6 months ago.

Yeah, misleading article title.

I really like Norvig's attitude. When big companies start worrying about how powerful they're going to be in 10 years it's a bad thing. It leads to fear and paranoia, which makes it harder to not be evil.

People always talk about making caps lock a ctrl key, but I've found making right alt a ctrl is more comfortable. My thumb is far more dexterous than my pinky. Unfortunately on many keyboards the right alt key is unusable due to awkward positioning.

> With a mad sprint starting in July, we shipped Microsoft Merchant Server 1.0 in October, 1996.

Sounds like it was a direct competitor to Viaweb.