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Sometimes I feel that the openness of development in some projects today (especially in open source ones) somehow nullify the charm of finding a new release and discovering all the little new bells and whistles.

I remember many years ago when I was young and didn't have an internet connection, my friend got the new version of a music player we used on a CD from another friend. I hadn't seen it or read about it before installing it, and had a genuinely fresh and enjoyable experience trying it out.

An open source project that I like, follow and contribute to had a new stable release a while back. While reading the release notes, I noticed the number of new features added in the span of a few months were staggering, but the magnitude of which I never noticed because I was always on the trunk build.

Sometimes I wish for that childlike curiosity, suspense and surprise that accompanied these kind of things.

I'm sure all the Textmate users will be pleasantly surprised when a new, rewritten, fully polished version of their editor will be made available.
This is what I love so much about Linuxes and package management. I set them up, software update notifications pop-up (I liked it best when they appeared in the notification area) and everything is quickly updated mostly behind the scenes.

I find the idea of every program having its own independent self-update mechanism ludicrously primitive.
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I have a box full of brio from my childhood at home - and, yeh, they did have blocks to let you make raised track.

(it was a pain though because it was easiest to build the bridges first - and then just as you laid the last piece of track a trip/wobble/stumble collapsed the raised bits :P)
Does anyone know if this is going to be released as an open source Project, I couldn't find any info on the site.
Reading the keyboard directly at the lowest level would probably just make the program bigger

Generally, another ROM routine call.

Thats @tezza's point. (Edit For Clarity): Since its just one instruction, you can shrink the size of your program, making fitting it into a small space less impressive (though, not unimpressive).

Not a lot of text in a chess program.

Fair enough, so that one doesn't help, but the other two do.
Personally I've always found Larry's talks very poor. They seem to wander all over the place, full of buzzwords and much of what he claims doesn't seem to have any connection to what he actually did.

Huffman encoding? Then why are so many of the defaults wrong? Nearly any perl programmer would tell you that your programs should start with "use strict", so wouldn't Huffman encoding dictate that "strict" would need to be turned off if you didn't want it? And choosing "special return value" to signal failure can't possibly be shorter than using exceptions, it can only be as good if you don't handle any errors.

He's always reminded me of someone trying to be "deep" after smoking a joint.
http://searchengineland.com/islam-is-blocked-by-google-sugge...

A [Google] spokesperson tells us: "This is a bug and we’re working to fix it as quickly as we can."
what would keep you from going to O2? network performance? i'm curious and have no idea how to compare the providers' networks.
I would suggest you start with WikiPedia.

Main page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon

Relationship with Earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth-Moon.PNG

Details of the orbit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon

Relevant terms and parameters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Orbit1.svg

Then decide what you want to know next.

And while I applaud your interest and enthusiasm, why didn't you simply use Google to get started?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+moon

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+moon+orbit
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But "the placebo" is not a static thing. If we designed experiments differently, the placebo effect might be able to be reduced (say to 3%), in which case drug A would now beat it.
They said they're setting up a SourceForge project for it.

See http://www.mathjax.org/?p=200 .
Not yet. Verizon and Vodafone coming in Spring '10.
Lots of the plan9 code is written in a style like this but with enums

A bit tricky to find the best example on my phone while on the bus but here's a flavour, the in-memory file system

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/ramfs.c

Edit : can anyone see how to add a comment to the article, I wanted to share the above info with him but comments don't seem open to me now I'm at my desk.

The plan9 way uses an interface style, the sort that is made explicit in Go :

from http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/nntpfs....

Srv nntpsrv = {
.destroyfid=	fsdestroyfid,
.attach=	fsattach,
.clone=	fsclone,
.walk1=	fswalk1,
.open=	fsopen,
.read=	fsread,
.write=	fswrite,
.stat=	fsstat,
};

These file systems all run in user mode btw (as can all the disk based ones). Mycrotiv has even done a kernel with a built in rc shell that you attach your file systems after booting as yourself - a disk failure will not take down your system!
Do you bother doubling up with Windows Defender at all? Or just recommend running Avira solo? The reason I ask is that Defender is a bit of a memory hog and I wouldn't be unhappy about getting rid of it.

What about SpywareGuard and SpywareBlaster?

I previously used AVG but found it very annoying. Currently using Defender, SG, SB and then any clean-ups with MBAM.
That's also true in the US
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Weird HN caching bug: I appear logged in as other HN users sometimes
HN seems not to produce correct no-cache headers, so sometimes I appear logged in as other users. Kinda eerie, though I suppose with HN there's no major privacy issue :-), and it's not like I can do actual operations logged in as the other users, just viewing.

Incidentally, reddit had this exact bug almost two years ago, and spez fixed it: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6b2kq/

It happens because our ISP is caching the other guy's logged in page, and then serving it up to me (and vice versa, I suppose). I'm pretty sure my ISP's caching proxy is following the HTTP spec. HN can fix it by giving more stringent no-cache headers. At the moment HN says "Cache-Control: max-age=0". reddit serves "Cache-Control: no-cache" as well as "Pragma: no-cache" and that seems to do it.
Thanks, we are aware of that bug, just haven't got around to fixing it.
Invoking functional pointers (call eax) is very very slow. If you're using C chances are you're using it because you need the extra performance.
Every other review mentions usability, why does this one need to? since the writer probably hasn't used them all anyway.
Thanks roundsquare.

For reference to my original post: I wasn't trying to deny that this program is amazing... it is.

I was intending to illustrate that you could do a lot more with 1k historically than you can nowadays, and that some of the worst offenders to bulking out a process don't apply on older computers in assembly.

That doesn't take away from the brilliance of AI in 1k, but rather I think the focus should be on that and not the chessy bit.
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Allan was saying "the end is in sight" 6 months ago.

http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/

This really reminds me of a series of blog posts by Chad Fowler, warning against the "big rewrite."

http://chadfowler.com/2006/12/27/the-big-rewrite

Now he says the next version will be out "maybe in 6 more months if everything goes right." In other words: "I have absolutely no idea when or if I'm ever going to finish it."

Which, of course, is fine. It's his project and he has every right to develop/mismanage it as he sees fit. But I got tired of waiting for basic things like split-window to be implemented and went back to vim a while ago. If 2.0 ever comes out I'll definitely check it out but for now I'm happily using vim.
you can only compare the cost in a meaningful way if you know the product features are similar, otherwise it's a apples and oranges comparison.
It doesn't make any claims (aside from claims about the behaviour of the Google search field, which are easily verified). It asks a question. But don't feel bad - whether your submission gets voted up is half luck: either a couple of people spot it and vote it up so it becomes visible to everyone, or not.
True. Although if Apple produces as much of a leap forward with its tablet as it did with the iPhone it'll probably make most of the existing market look archaic.
This is an incredibly neat site. Click "Feel".
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As far as I know ESPN is one of the few channels left in the US with a decent bitrate (~18mbps) and using 720p (end-to-end) which is why it looks so good.
Sounds like a great app for Google Wave.
Wow, that's gorgeous. Something I'd been thinking of working on was a tool to produce really beautiful printed maps from the OSM data. The existing OSM renderers are screen-oriented and fairly utilitarian, and their output isn't nearly as pretty (or as high-resolution) as a good paper map. But the data is all there; it's just a matter of rendering it better. This is definitely in the direction that I was thinking of.
Joel also wrote a pretty popular piece about big rewrites a decade ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

The title is "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"
To actually run that on the PC I'm using right now, I would presumably need to also download an emulator for the machine it was designed for, which is presumably larger than 1K. Just saying.
Using a local text editor when everything else is in the browser doesn't make as much sense as it once did.

Textmate is Cocoa right? I'd be useful if they could produce a web version with cappuccino. It'd be great to fire up a browser, point Textmate.com to my Github repository, and work.
I'm going to have to disagree with just about everything you wrote there...

However, twitter isn't about engagement. It's not about communication. It's about broadcasting 1->many

Why does "communication" only count on a 1 to 1 sense? Furthermore how can we possibly jump to the conclusion that just because it's about broadcasting 1 to many, that it is not about engagement? As a service I find it's engagement has a much longer-tail than that of facebook's. Once you've seen all the pictures, added all the obscure acquaintances, and checked all the relationship updates facebook becomes more of a weekly "check to keep up" service than one of daily engagement. Twitter on the other hand is constantly engaging because it's one and only service is to allow people to bring fresh content/media/insight to many people with one update. There's no dilution of which feature i'm going to use now, or which one i'm going to get good at.

As a business decision, giving away access to 3rd party developers seems like favoring short term growth well above profit and the future

Really? If you realized your main product was this successful communication protocol (pg's words, not mine) you would want to limit it's usage to just your own domain? Your value is in the protocol itself, not where it's being used. If I was an investor, worrying why people don't use twitter.com would fall somewhere between "did i leave the coffee maker on this morning?" and "where did i park my car?".
Not at this time. We rely on the whole song analisys for much of precision improvements.

There is some literature out there on real-time beat following but the precision is poor so far
I love how "a simple remote" evolved into a qwerty keyboard.

Kidding aside, as a Boxee user, text entry without a keyboard is a major PITA, so I'm glad to see they're not ignoring that fact.
I worked in the US aerospace engineer as a stress analyst: I can confirm that bit about feedback cycles. For missiles, the feedback cycle is years.
Man that sucks. I can understand all of the US using a different standard from the rest of the world (like with NTSC and imperial measurement) but having the US use two standards at once is clearly not in their own interest.
Isn't this essentially what a virtual function call does in C++? It can be slow if the code isn't in cache yet, but otherwise it's not that bad.
I remember when I was six, my dad programmed a chess game on the Sinclar ZX81. He used to play real-life chess a lot so naturally, this was his first use for this little box. It was slow as hell and he had to pause screen rendering to make it faster. If you call simple backtracking "AI" then I think my dad wrote that "greatest program ever" too without knowing David Horne. (And my dad is definitely no urban myth, either...)
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I was actually reminded of a couple of aspects of the Duke Nukem Forever story - http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/

Duke Nukem Forever was self funded, so there was no commercial pressure to finish it. Since Allan is essentially a one-man shop I imagine the revenue from TextMate 1.0 has him set for life.

TextMate 1.0 was also a runaway hit, so the pressure for TextMate 2.0 to be an equally impressive release must be pretty intense.
Could you specify where "here" is, please. :)
I think it's designed for the number crunchers out there. A GPU can crush a CPU for some applications but there is a huge middle ground between a GPU and a CPU.
This is not about the instruction cache. This is about branch prediction. Calling a function pointer (almost?) guarantees that the branch prediction will fail, unlike a switch statement. Not cool in inner loops.
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not trying to ignite yet another tiring round of the age-old mac-versus-pc debate (really!), but it's only fair to point out that macs do come with a 'clean os'. no trialware, spyware, or junky oem apps or drivers, ever.
What about when you don't have internet access? I know it is increasingly ubiquitous, but sometimes it's pretty handy to be able to function without it.

That said, perhaps it just needs a Gears-like ability to work in a disconnected state.
It's not really a fair comparison. Apple essentially built Quicksilver into the OS starting with 10.5 in the form of Spotlight.
In the case of the Nexus, the two prices are $529.00 and $179.00, and on the basis of that number alone, I know which I'd rather pay.

That article is all hype because the people this is news to, and the target market for a $500 cellphone don't have that big an intersection. I think everyone with a cellphone by now has been exposed to a carrier's store and seen prices for an off-contract phone. Hell, I'm guessing a lot of people have broken phones and been forced to pay off-contract prices - forcing the savvy to at least price out similar phones via alternate channels cough ebay. Pre-iPhone, they'd have a bigger point, but I'd think by now, the consumer smart-phone market (vs big-business' blackberries) is aware of certain things.

Am I being too hopeful?
Leopard changed added app launching functionality to Spotlight, which is certainly why I stopped using it.
Thanks, I somehow missed it.
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Offtopic. That pipe(3) function I saw in ramfx.c is cool (http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man3/pipe.html). Bidirectional - unlike *nix. I think life would be easier if it were more straightforward to build applications as chains of little utilities with one-to-one protocols of integer exchange, rather than having to go to socket (more complex, and port management overhead) or file (ugly). I have a things-might-have-been-very-different feeling.

When is Team Plan9 going to produce a distribution that we can get into using as easily as Linux or the BSD kernels? :) (Or would inferno be a better focus? Same issue though - it's not as easy as ubuntu or even small projects like haiku)

Also offtopic - I like doing switch statements in python like this:

def fn_a(input_tokens): pass

def fn_b(input_tokens): pass

user_cmd = raw_input().split()

# look mum, no hands
{ 'a': fn_a
, 'b': fn_b
}[user_cmd[0]](usr_cmd)
I'd rather have Textmate provide a browser plugin, so I can use it in any textarea.
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No shame there. I'll take you up on that offer, e-mailing you now. Thank you!!
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This was making the rounds just yesterday:

http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/
The iPhone is a smartphone with a touch screen,
The Nexus is a smartphone with a touch screen,
Therefore the Nexus is an iPhone :)
Nobody is claiming it's a technological marvel, and I certainly didn't mention economics.

I'm just saying that it's kind of strange seeing people say so-and-so is doing essential-thing to successful-product completely wrong.

I mean, maybe, just maybe, part of Twitter's success is due to it being so simple. Due to the 140 character limit, due to the lack of features like image uploading, etc. Maybe, just maybe, the ecosystem that has been built around Twitter — largely due to lack of features — actually plays in their favor?

I just don't see how you can be so sure that everything they're doing is wrong, and they're successful in spite of it, rather than successful because of exactly what they are doing.
Actually its not dead, just the developer (Nicholas Jitkoff) stopped developing it but did make it opensource: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/blacktree-quicksilver

Jitkoff works at Google and went on to produce QS "clones" called Google Desktop & Google Quick Search Box: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-google-qui...

I'm still using the original non-opensource QS here with no problems (well at least no probs on Tiger!).
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This has already been posted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029069

(Awesome article though).
Nice, a perl fan saw this post and actually appears to have gone through all of my posts and voted them down (bringing some to 0). Welcome to reddit!
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Straw man. What if you turned it around to say, "Are there intelligent Black people in America? Sure, they are just not in charge in jail, or they've been murdered already."

Bigoted.

Americans don't Otherize Russians the way they do Arabs or Black people, because Russians are white. Totally different case.

The most despicable of the oil regimes is probably Saudi Arabia, which the United States supports whether you buy gas or not. Maybe you should consider lobbying your congressperson.
Why aren't GPS with POV displays considered a crude precursor of augmented reality?
I think most "functional programmers" will agree on this definition: avoid (side) effects, or at least try to isolate them from the rest of your program.

It doesn't mention functions at all, which can confuse programmers unfamiliar with Lisp, ML, or Haskell. However, when you actually program with such restrictions, your only choice is closures or insanity.
This blogger barely paid attention to him until now. I had no idea he said those kinds of things, trust me.
I would not consider this a "considered approach." He's doing a multi-year, ground-up rewrite of a highly successful product in order to add a list of features geared towards Textmate developers (of which there are roughly 1), rather than end-users.

Meanwhile, he gets so many complaints from dissatisfied users wanting a few core features added to the 1.x version they paid for, that every 6 months he writes plaintive blog posts telling people "I'll release it in another 6 months: software is hard!"

This is the portrait of a project that's being sadly mismanaged into irrelevance, not one that's being carefully honed to perfection.

What I find amazing is the sheer cognitive dissonance of Textmate's popularity in the Ruby community; the same community that has enthusiastically embraced Agile developer practices and whose leaders tend to speak as often about the importance of good project management as they do about good coding.
That's exactly as I understand it.
Another sign: the US military uses it in the field. Augmented Reality falls into this category.
He called them savages. How is that not bigoted?
[Edit] Thanks for the links.

"why didn't you simply use Google to get started"

Because I wanted a book I could sit down with and read. Wikipedia is nice and I have and will check out these resources, but a book, which someone took the time to write, often has more character and is more interesting than the web.
Another symptom: does the US military use it in the field? Augmented Reality also falls into this category.
This is a textbook for how to set up a high-traffic web site. It's remarkable because of the openness. I was surprised at how many Squid machines they're running, but really, that makes sense.
Some people might want a pure and objective cost comparison. This comparison is therefore not pointless.
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I think that an approach like that would have severe performance implications. The really impressive thing about Textmate is how fast it is in relation to Eclipse and Netbeans.
Can't say that's me, but it's a good idea. I'll have to bug my wife about getting a blog up.
Are you sure the ZX81 he was using didn't have a 16Kb ram pack attached? Most people I know (me included) had one, since it was hard to do anything without it.
Setting either "Cache-Control: no-cache" or "Cache-Control: private" should fix it.
I thought the link text was misleading - I expected it to be a company that helped you do screen shots!
Anyone have a mirror? The site does not respond for me.
I went to LaunchBar http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
I think it is nice that we get submissions from older articles that are a few years old every once and awhile. They're healthy reminders of popular articles of days gone by.
At the same time, there seems to be a lot of recycling of older posts going on lately in attempts to grab karma. I feel like this is a too-cheap way to gain these points-- instead of sharing new useful information with colleagues, the system can be gamed by sharing too much of yesterday's useful information.

Flagging something as [old] would be useful -- perhaps some of the folks who've been here for awhile can opt to ignore them a la a browsing interface like /classic/ while still having the option of getting to these useful artifacts if we want.
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The smart "if" template tag (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2-alpha-1/#s...) was quite the welcome surprise for me in the release notes! I swear I've written a dozen custom template tags all because it wasn't possible to perform simple comparisons in the if condition.
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You're linking to information on a ZX Spectrum which is not a ZX81. The ZX81 had a monochrome character mapped display with no pixel access (well - there were tricks that could sort of give you pixel access but they came much later than the time 1k chess was written)
Get them playing each other and then pick a winner that way.