phr

Last time I looked, MacPorts had a more paranoid approach to dependencies. That can be good and bad. Homebrew can be easier to use, until you run into a corner case that trips it up. MacPorts can be frustrating in how many dependencies it will insist on installing its own version even though the system-provided version might have worked.

I've gone back and forth. For a while homebrew could install a working GHC for me while I wasn't having any luck with MacPorts. Later something else caused me to switch back to MacPorts. Neither is perfect. Even MacPorts only allows dependencies at the package level, without regard to variants, or versions, if I recall correctly.

Intriguing idea.

Extending it to absurdity:

All functions should be stored in a searchable key/value database, where the key is a cryptographically signed canonical representation of the function source code. By "canonical representation" I mean a translation to a canonical form of the lambda calculus, so as to capture the complete meaning unambiguously.

This database would, of course, translate the lambda calculus to erlang, lisp, haskell, php, what-have-you, on demand at the view layer.

Metadata would need to be extensive, but we could crowd-source that Wikipedia-fashion.

Wooden boat building is a lot of fun, and doesn't have to take a lot of space. There are kits available for beautiful kayaks and such that people have built in their apartments. Be sure to plan how to get it out of the house if you build something bigger inside :) Also, beware of potentially toxic chemicals. Some wood dust (cedar) is dangerous.

Steve Yegge says every programmer should be a fast, accurate, touch-typist:

  http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html

When receiving criticism, I should do as you say, and assume my mistakes are the target, not my (oh so sensitive) self. But when handing out criticism, I should assume the other person will take it personally. It's like that principal for Internet robustness: be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept.

If, like me, you have heard bits and pieces about McLuhan, but never delved deeper, the 20 minute introduction by Tom Wolfe is well worth your time.

I thought EMC bought VMWare?

I can't judge how useful the data-mining stuff is, but there's some nice Lisp code in there. Simple, powerful, and makes it look easy.

If you own several different media properties like this guy, is it a good strategy to incorporate each one separately, to keep an unintentional Adsense TOS violation from affecting all the others?

Any thoughts on Heroku, now that you have some paid experience with it?

16/19: No surprise that I missed php and groovy, but I should have guessed fortran. I read somewhere that Backus was involved in the early stages of the functional programming language movement, and got sidetracked by that. He is also the B in BNF, of course.

Same on Mac Safari. Webkit bug?

A cancel button?

Very cool.

I didn't see a link to back out of the page for adding a component, for example a hard drive, other than the browser back button of course. Maybe it's there and I'm blind?

I'm also strongly against drug use, and think society should discourage it through education.

On the other hand, the war on drugs is destroying Mexico, and is not stopping drug use here in the States. I just don't think we can afford the drug war's costs (social, foreign policy, and monetary) any more. If you can't teach your kids to stay off drugs, I'm sorry, but they're on their own, as far as I'm concerned.

Edit: I don't live in California, and haven't looked at Prop 19 in detail.

I'd rather see a fairly low karma and a few weeks or months account age thresholds, but then I'm biased, being mostly a lurker here.

Several comments mention the upcoming intersection as if crossing traffic were likely. It is actually a classic cloverleaf. Search google maps for Renton Washington and look for highway 167, where the incident occurred, and its intersection with I-405. I haven't been over there for several months, so I'm not sure how up-to-date the satellite view is, but it looks right to me.

Two questions:

1) What is best for my business?

The answer may well mean sticking with a flawed technology that nonetheless is serving the business well. Remember there is still lots of COBOL chugging away.

2) What is best for me?

If it's my business, but I'm sick of PHP and would like to switch to Ruby, Lisp, Haskell, whatever, it might be better to sell the business and start a new one based on the new language, rather than risk a rewrite. Isn't that part of the freedom being a founder was supposed to buy?

I have to agree that the higher-education bubble is just as cruel in its way as the real estate bubble was. Please don't let yourself rot away at your parents' house: work on open source projects, build a web app, do some on-your-own learning, etc.

I remember when "structured programming" was the new silver bullet all the guru's were talking about. This must have been the late 70's or early 80's. I was programming in DEC Basic-Plus on the RSTS/E operating system on a PDP-11. All variables were global, as I recall. We had subroutines and user defined functions with arguments but no local variable scope. We had if-then-else, but I think only a single statement was allowed for the "then" branch, so the cleanest way was often "if condition then gosub 1000 else gosub 2000" or something like that. A lot of the legacy code I had to work with was classic spaghetti-code with goto for flow control. Oh, I think we had only single-character variable names. Those were the days.

But I worked out how to adopt the new structured style to the limitations of the language, and learned a lot. Better languages make better tools, of course, but it's the hacker's attitude that really matters.

One small thing I noticed is that selecting a white background on the main screen doesn't "stick" when you choose news/america.

Another small UI thing: the choice of large font is welcome, but didn't go as large as I wanted. When I used command-+ on Chrome (Mac) to go a bit larger, I ended up with horizontal scrollbars. This is a pet peeve of mine. Why can't you use percentage measures for the different regions? I don't mind some vertical scrolling, but horizontal is much worse.

Edit: I forgot to say: Nice job overall, despite my nit picking above. Also, where did the name come from?

Edit 2: The title of the news / america section comes out as "Amerika". Is that just a typo, or a political statement? (I've seen that spelling used to imply the U.S. is being taken over by Facists or something.)

I spent this spring and summer walking about an hour a day, first in Vibram Five-fingers. I have a funny twist in my step on the left side which wore holes in a couple toes in the first 30 miles, so I switched to cheap Wal-Mart sneakers (it's hard to find ones with no arch-support), and eventually flip-flops. Once I got used to the flip-flops, I started taking them off on a smooth asphalt road that climbs a gentle hill near my house. I keep an eye out for obvious dirty spots, and figure several hours of Eastern Washington summer sun probably kills most of the really nasty stuff. Once my feet toughened up a bit, I added another stretch of asphalt that's quite a bit rougher.

My feet feel better than they have in years, and I now seem to have arches! Both feet were pretty flat, but I now have a nice arch on the right side, and some on the left.

If I had built a working time machine in my garage, I'm pretty sure mass production would not be my next step.

Typical grade school teachers spend their days on their feet, rushing from one crisis to another, trying to help mainstreamed kids with serious disabilities, kids with chaotic home-lives and resulting learning and behavior problems, political mandates to teach to a standardized test regardless of what they think the kids really need, and so on. They don't feel they have time to figure out simple user interface problems like where did all these IE windows and tabs come from, let alone learn a new software suite.

Michael,

I've been working through the HTML version; great job! I especially appreciate the coverage of Ruby Version Manager, git (topic branches, merging), Heroku deployment via git, and TDD via rspec. You can read all about something, but it doesn't really sink in until you've typed the commands yourself -- even if those commands are dictated word-for-word by a tutorial. I generally dislike video tutorials, but will take a look at yours.

You graduated shortly after 9/11/2001 and you feel old already? You're just a kid! Take some of the great advice here and be glad you got to this point so early in your life.

Yes, we pay by tolerating ads and nosy engagement ploys, but we receive in exchange, curation of the raw news. On places like HN, we can participate in that curation process, which, if the community is a good match for our interests, can do a far better job than the mass media. How is the Magic Brick going to replace that?

Emacs is suggesting improvements? I want that extension!

Oh, you're right. I was thinking a parable didn't necessarily have to be fictional. So I looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable

"The word "parable" comes from the Greek "παραβολή" (parabolē), the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative, generally referring to something that might naturally occur, by which spiritual and moral matters might be conveyed.[3]"

On the other hand, while the story sounds like a parable, I didn't notice anything in the text that actually implies that it is fictional. In any case, it was highly effective for Steve to get his point across to me. Whether the point is true is another question which I can't answer from experience.

Absolutely: the plural of anecdote is not data. But Steve is not marshaling evidence for a proposition here, he's teaching a concept by telling a story to bring the concept alive. That's quite a different thing, and exactly what parables are for.