philcrissman

Thanks!

Re the margin notes, the footnote numbers are clickable to toggle them inline when the width is too small... I should add a bit of color or underline to them in the css so that this is easier to intuit. :/

I was actually asked Fizz Buzz in an interview once, but I did not have this solution at the time.

My favorite FizzBuzz solution is actually:

``` ->(n){[[["Fizz"][n%3],["Buzz"][n%5]].join].find(->{n}){|w| w if !w.empty?}} ```

This is Ruby, of course, probably something very similar can be done in several other languages.

Not sure how this came back around into the zeitgeist today, but this is my post from awhile back. Thanks to all who had nice things to say about it.

I'm definitely an amateur mathematician, though I tried my best to write the post like I think I'd try to write a proof. It came about because I stumbled across the equation, but I did not know _why_ it worked, so I was semi-obsessed with figuring out the _why_ for a long time.

I have nothing else to promote, haven't even put anything on the site since this one and only post... Anyways, thanks, news-YC.

Congrats, guys!

I don't even ask anymore. If I'm writing an app for you, I'm starting with tests, before I even write a line of executable code. If you don't want tests for your app, you'll need to find a different developer. It's not an optional part of the process, it's how the app is developed.

Maybe this is nitpicking, but did the author this article do zero fact-checking?

>Mr. Mitnick, who ... is publishing his first book in August...

Er... Following the link to his "first book" leads to Mr. Mitnick's website, whose products page lists his... other books...

Not to mention the well-known tech writer Stevy Levy. :-)

Rspec doesn't really need to be in the default stack; switching to it takes what; a minute? That's not a benchmarked timestamp, but I'm just saying... :-)

April 1st was 19 days ago... ;-)

Totally agree. Reading HN, blogs/etc is fine, but the net result is: more time reading == less time doing [whatever].

Play + Build should absolutely be 90% of the activity of a would-be developer. Most of the rest of the list could go away. Research is fine, but really only if you're going to _use_ it.

I do find local meetups beneficial, _particularly_ if you can work yourself up to do a presentation on something. Presenting on a topic is a great way to make yourself learn it better.

++FIND A CUSTOMER: Maybe the best advice ever. Has the additional benefit that unless you completely mess up, you get paid. And if you do mess up so badly that you don't get paid, hopefully you learn something about how not to repeat that.

I have to add (since this is a list for people learning): learn git or mercurial. If you know one, you can pick up the other. I don't really think this is optional.

Mini-ask HN: Why link to a techcruch article when you could just link to the startup's website? I'm not trying to be ornery, sincerely asking.

I'm not interested in reading a techcrunch article about a new startup. I'd rather go straight to the startup and look at it.

I'm not sure about it being the "first"; The Minnesota Cup (http://breakthroughideas.org/) has been around for awhile, and http://minnestar.org has done some micro-seed funding.

http://speedylemur.com is also local to Minneapolis, though I don't know how many startups they've funded yet.

Regardless, still cool news for entrepreneurs in this part of the midwest...

toto!

http://cloudhead.io/toto

Overwhelmed with traffic?

Would really like to see this. :-) If it has an API I'd love to tie something like this to http://tldrd.com to auto-generate summaries of various texts.

Does this mean there's no place for http://tldrd.com ? :-)

But "Really?" is actually a very good question; it's an appeal to common sense. Do we all work at places where only 1% of the programmers can actually program? I know I haven't... even when I just started and was clearly the least experienced person on the team, I could still get things done...

That might get into a distinction between programming (let's make the computer do what we tell it) and developing (let's follow these processes while we program).

But it's a good point. That said, if I were interviewing someone who was clearly a good coder but who said they didn't test their code, I would still hire them as long as they would be willing to start writing some tests.

Ooh, I kinda like that. Maybe sometime this weekend. Thanks.

I think I also need to make it so you can edit your own summaries... at the very least for a short time after you post them.

Yes, it's true, there's not a whole lot to it. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I made it. I'm honestly not sure if enough people will find it useful for it to gain a community.

Feedback, criticism, questions, are welcome.

Yeah, Gentoo and Arch are both good (or were when I last tried them, several years back).

Daniel Robbins is also working on new Gentoo kernels and portage trees (and has a _ton_ of Linux documentation/tutorials) over at http://funtoo.org

I never actually did the LFS process, but I used various linuxes as a main desktop for about 4 years.

It depends what your goal is. Linux from scratch will mainly teach you (wait for it) how to build linux from scratch. Systems that are not quite "from scratch" but are lower level than Ubuntu (eg, Gentoo, Arch (others?)) will also teach you some of this. I used Gentoo for years, and after compiling about a dozen kernels in a row to get things to work how I wanted, I guess you could say I'd learned something, if only 'what kernel options I want to enable on this hardware'. :)

But building Linux won't really teach you to _use_ it. If you want to be a power user in the long run, your time (and LFS will take a _lot_ of time!) might be better spent learning your shell/package manager/scripting language of choice in greater depth, compiling your own kernels and adding them as options in grub/lifo, that sort of thing.

All that said, if the LFS process sounds really appealing to you, go for it. You'll definitely learn _something_, but just maybe not as much as you're hoping.

Well, it has to be. How could it remain eternal vaporware if someone isn't continuously claiming that they're working on it?

This is actually a really good question. I would think the copyright of each article is owned by the blogger or media outlet which produced it. While bloggers in general probably universally love more exposure, I can't imagine that as a group they would love the idea of someone reprinting their articles for profit... ?

Yes.

#rubymn (Minnesota ftw)

#railsbridge (if you're interested in ruby on rails; the http://railsbridge.com community)

the FB connect button did not appear for me, either (also in Chrome). Saw it in Firefox; but... I'm not interested in logging in with my facebook account, so I guess I won't be using the site.

If it had you create a new account, quick and simple like, I would have checked it out.

> But after some follow-up questions, I'd soon find out they don't even read TechCrunch ...

And here I thought not reading TechCrunch was a positive attribute.

hoodwink.d was great. Something like that needs a larger community, though. Even at its most active, hoodwink.d didn't have a whole lot of chatter. Was always fun to use, though.

There is a hornswaggl.d (a new instance of hoodwinkd) in the wild, but I don't think there is very much activity there.

I've had duckduckgo as my default search engine in Chrome for over a month and have been pretty happy.

Occasionally to look up a technical error/issue I have to go back to google; but you can search google directly from duckduckgo with "g! [your-query]"

Selecting white still leaves the logo, other text, as white with a drop-shadow. Echh.

So true. When you work for cheap, the client can still reasonably justify asking for all sorts of changes (after all, they are _paying_ you), without considering that by giving them a discount you are already essentially doing some of the work for free.

If you want to help out a friend/non-profit and actually have the time to do it, "free" is usually a better option. That said, you still need to keep the scope of what you intend to do for "free" ironclad, otherwise it will probably creep out of control just like any other project.

IIRC, offering a hosted version ala Wordpress.com is part of their plan. I'm not positive they'll succeed, but I don't think there's an intrinsic reason their plan can't succeed.

Depends on the quality of what they build (apologies for this blatantly obvious commentary, but really, that's what will matter, I think).