youngnh

oh snap! really appreciate the bug report. we'll fix it.

1. oops. thanks for the report, we'll look into it

2. that's kind of our thing, we're gonna stick with it for a while longer :)

For $150, this conference is unbelievable.

Guy Steele giving the keynote on day one, Douglas Crockford talking day two.

Bradford Cross from Flightcaster, Chris Houser (Clojure), Jeff Brown (Grails), Kevin Well (analytics lead at Twitter) it's story-time with some of the world's greatest programmers and problem-solvers.

I was wholly expecting his argument to address this quote:

If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

with respect to "private api" arguments made here: http://www.marco.org/500743718

I actually did a === check for just that reason, since if you define _ = {}, then passing in a real object that is {} will also return true for _ == {}

feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that GreaseMonkey scripts run on the same page, but in no way _replace_ the scripts a site serves.

what, I think, Stallman envisions is being able to use your local copy of Gmail instead of the one Google's serving you without any loss of functionality.

I'd like to see this applied as an embeddable feature in hacker news. see who writes comments, which comments get commented on and what people really have to say before they hit that 'add comment' button

See http://www.sothebyshomes.com/ I know a little about the Sothebys site, as the company I work for created it, and I wrote a fair bit of the Javascript myself.

The original site makes extensive use of js to load content, and anywhere data is missing on the pirated site, that's why.

What we can't figure out here in the office, is why they did it? How much of this is going on?

the trans-equatorial railway express, of course, ol chap!

but, uh, (slightly) more seriously, if one big transmitter is the problem, then isn't the solution multiple small transmitters in the the same orbit, repeated at increasingly closer-to-earth orbits? then you could just run a wire up to a transmitter in geostationary orbit.

A compiler that takes Sed programs and produces Parrot interpreter code. It was a project in a college Compilers class that I didn't take seriously enough, so I'm revisiting it to see if I've actually grown better at this programming thing since I've graduated.

I'm as against censorship as the next guy, but the government is filtering content, they're not taking protocols away from us. Worst case, the government gets the backbone. Wasn't this scenario the design target of the original ARPAnet? Network survivability in the face of massive topography holes?

> But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos.

I'm a miltary brat, so I've been in and out of a half-dozen public and private schools in my K-12 education. Everywhere I went there were private schools significantly better than the public ones.

The chaos seems to be confined along socioeconomic lines. The best teachers in the world can't teach kids that don't show up for class, and I'd say America is pretty split as to whether showing up for class is strictly necessary for future success.

while I agree that the prevailing attitude is "if you're not a hacker/programmer, use Windows, not Linux" I guess I don't really get why.

Your comment on the fact that software needs to come with a nice printed manual highlights why: of my mother, my sister and my wife, I'm the only one that reads the damn things.

edit: this http://contentconsumer.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enou... makes me think we don't give non-hackers/programmers enough credit.

huh, I didn't think it would be a social lesson, I was expecting something more along the lines of: use compilers and high-level languages and don't care what your object code looks like

If you enjoyed learning/using sed, awk, grep and other Unix text processing utils, you'll love this: http://borel.slu.edu/obair/ufp.pdf

Its called Unix For Poets and it'll show you just how far you can really push these tools.

I'm a developer, I've run various OS's over the years, Windows first, Mac OS X after that, and after my iBook's hard drive failed, I now run Linux on a refurbed ThinkPad. Windows was the only environment that I had to get out of. The amount of friction Windows created in my everyday development was enough that I felt it necessary to switch to maintain productivity.

The difference, though, to me, between working on OS X or Linux, though, is negligible. I suspect that most conference goers with glowing Apple laptop lids can be just as productive in Linux as they can in OS X. (I'm not a Mac developer, I imagine that crowd would disagree)

I use a text editor and a browser to get my work done, Macs don't offer me any software advantages in that department.

with all the furor, it seems like its only a matter of time until someone actually redoes this guy's interface for him.

before clicking through, I thought this was a joke judging from the url.

"Gears of War II will take several years, hundreds of people, and tens of millions of dollars to create."

I read that it was actually 10 programmers working on the Unreal engine and tools and 20 artists doing something with their efforts for 2 years. They did have a $10 million budget, though.

C-M-\ actually only indents the 'region', which is the text between the point (your cursor) and the mark (C-Space). The neat thing about this is that yank (C-y) automatically sets the point and the mark at opposite sides of the yanked text. After copying an expression written in the slime repl to a buffer, C-M-\ works without having to move your cursor to the beginning of the expression.

wrong. The sum of an infinite geometric series is a finite sum. If an infinite parade of new languages each drag us halfway to lisp eventually we'll all be programming in it

so its cheaper for software startups only, then?

heh, I'd like to see Anybot's Dexter bounding around on the moon. "One small step for man..."

I hate being mislead as much as the next guy, and the article is depressingly short on citations (probably to rally skeptics to buy the book) but I'll quote Peter Norvig here and say, "do your own research": http://norvig.com/oreskes.html I don't care where the ideas come from if they're verifiable.

This all goes away with bigger pipes. If there's enough room to provide all of the content customers demand, then this whole debate won't matter. But if the FCC stays out and the netops are allowed to decide how they want to manage the tiny pipes they currently have, they can stave off upgrading them for a lot longer.

Sounds like an opportunity.

> They care about usability

I don't think so, I think most users will put up with a painfully unusable site if its the first one they come across that fulfills their need. Only software designers care about usability.

hmm, out of habit, I hit [] with my middle and ring fingers, which requires the same slight movement of my right hand that typing () does. maybe I need to break the habit.

So...its not enough to be good at something to make it in business, you have to be good at the thing that you're not good at to be able to continue doing the thing that you're actually good at.

Which makes me think that there will be no "last great battle" for the PC. Just sync your iPhone with every piece of data in the universe by plugging it into some to-be-determined shaped hole in your wall.

I would love to see something like this for every state. If nothing else, as a list of alternatives to moving to the Bay Area.