skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely agree with you on most of the points. A couple of quibbles - Django now supports multiple databases (as of 1.2) and South (http://south.aeracode.org/) is more or less the default migration tool nowadays and is OK for most jobs.

Personally, I find generic views to be useless for anything but the simplest of prototyping. Making them functions rather than callable classes was a big mistake IMHO. I very rarely use them in a serious project.

Another pet hate is UserProfiles - you have to use a separate model if you want any custom fields for your users which entails a join whenever you want to use it. It's been a ticket for years but nobody seems willing to fix it.

I agree with you 200% on templates and am in a very similar situation. Having to write convoluted code in template tags for the simplest of things is frustrating, when you can have simple function calls and template macros in Mako and Jinja2.

I'm not hugely fussed about AJAX myself - I tend to keep things simple in the views and just pass JSON back and forth and jQuery does most of the front-end work. I disliked the Rails way of binding everything to a particular JS library, not sure if it's still done that way any more.

Django is OK for certain projects. What annoys me though is that like Rails, it has gotten such mindshare in certain companies that they call themselves "Django shops" and want to use it for everything, without considering alternatives. Personally I stay well clear of it for my own projects - Pylons, Werkzeug, SQLAlchemy et al are a lot more fun to work with.
Three big things that I can see:

1. Lots of things in similar categories take pictures, so it just feels like an oversight.

2. Video chat is one of the applications that would seem right up the iPad's alley.

3. The number and types of augmented reality applications (such as the ones already appearing on iPhone) are more likely to increase in the future and the iPad as is would be left out of any of those developments.
Humans Were Born To Run Barefoot
Boo hoo... You proclaim that the problem with the iPad is the restricted environment for 3rd party applications, and then justify this by saying that the iPad would make a great multi-touch VNC client if only Apple would allow. I say "VNC client" instead of mouse because I think this accentuates the lack of creativity on your part in dealing with what are quite minor restrictions. Here are Apple's restrictions (simplified):

You can't write an arbitrary code execution environment.
You can't publish someone else's software.
Your software must carry an appropriate age rating.
Hardware devices have to go through the dock connector.
Only one app can run at a time.
You cannot access the data of other applications.

For a low resources, everyday user device, none of these are unreasonable. You can even run unsigned code on any device you want, it just costs you a developer license.

BTW, there are already both traditional VNC clients and multi-touch "mouse" applications for the iPhone.
I am beginning to dislike articles such as this. Satire every once in a while is fine, but if you have nothing positive to contribute during it, I really do not find it fun or interesting. I did not get much out of this article in terms of entertainment or knowledge even though it appears to be positioning itself to try to do both.
Well, if Apple did it, it wouldn't be "jailbroken," would it? The point would be the same as Apple selling the Aluminum towers. If you want freedom and flexibility coupled with world-class design, then you do buy an Apple -- with top dollar, meaning high margins for them.

Apple's been doing that gig for years.
Google Reader Watcher ; Checks your Google Reader for unread feeds
J.D. Salinger Dead at 91
From acangiano's profile:

"I'm a Software Engineer & Technical Evangelist at IBM in Toronto, Canada."
I see genetic programming as an interesting solution to lots of different problems, but I don't think debugging is one of them.

Bugs in my code usually reflect errors in my thinking (or typos). The genetic program would likely come up with the quickest hack that will get the code working, not the correct redesign that will be easiest to read and maintain for humans.
Retric you are right that it is a very complex analysis. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. Given the present composition of the atmosphere, the contribution to the total heating rate in the troposphere is around 5 percent from carbon dioxide and around 95 percent from water vapor. See for example http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/environment/appd.... If we assume that temperatures rise, evaporation will rise with the result of reducing the solar insolation at surface. If we had the models we could predict the weather months ahead, which we can't.

I quote a more qualified person than me, Prof. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service (See http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html)

There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures -- one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. "

There are a lot of low cost solutions, starting from not falling prey to marketing and consumerism. I am all for a pro-environment world, but I learnt not to buy into the politics and the lobbies of the day.
This is, by far, a much more enlightened post than the article in the submission.
Am I buying this device from apple, or am I licensing it? Why on Earth should I have to pay $99/year fee to run code on my own device?
> it suddenly offered the deep, unheard of cultural need to have the world in your pocket and have it be so small and sleek that you forget what that means

Maybe I missed those adverts, but the Razr was just a sleek design. Its claim to fame was how small it was. It was still just a phone though. It didn't offer 'the world in your pocket' unless you define 'the world' to mean 'a phone line and my contacts book.'
> I'm sorry, but I don't think 30% is an unreasonable cut.

That's good for you. Did you negotiate with Apple?

Or did you find that since there can not be any competition that it was 30% or forget it?

> When I sell my current indie Mac/Win software through resellers, I have to give them at least 25% to make it worth their while.

Ah, but the interesting bit here is that apparently there you can negotiate.
I'm not sure how much you should trust their numbers, because this:

>25% of homeowners are underwater

is probably not true. In the US less than 2/3 of houses even have mortgages and most of them are not in areas that dropped in value significantly (my house's appraisal went up slightly last year, after going down about a third of that 3 years before that). And from what I have read, most countries have a smaller percentage of home mortgages than the US does.

(This is from memory from general reading - that's why I wrote probably - I didn't feel like digging for the specific numbers.)
The Battle Over Rare Earth Metals
... the only way to compare them is to write reasonably optimized programs in each of them and compare that.

That's one valid method. Another is to compare idiomatic programs from each language. Both are valid and both measure different things.
Definitely. This requirement made sense for the iPod/iPhone, since it was an extension of your PC. For the iPad to really take hold as a standalone device, it should be able to update over the air.

Then again, they could always offer some sort of update program at Apple stores. They could even charge for it.
You have to have a filesystem for this, though. At least, if you download from some random source, w/o any official application.

From what I see, there's no classical filesystem on Apple iPad - just per application resources - so it won't work easily.

Obviously, there are some fixes to this particular problem. However, keep in mind, that I just wanted to give few examples of possible confusions.

Without the actual device, it's hard to give more specific examples of complains.
Was this ever in doubt?
15% is a bit higher than I benchmark, but here is a version that is guaranteed to do the correct number of iterations, increments in floating point instead of performing the slow cast, and is faster than performing the comparison in floating point math (because it occupies a different execution unit). Note that it is also less accurate than the cast for most definitions of what this function might be attempting to measure.

http://gist.github.com/288980
Rapping grandmas and Ninja-Rockstar fatigue
The idea of typing shell commands on a touchpad makes me cringe...do people really do this?

Yeah. Not for day-to-day work, mind, but if I am on-call say, this is the difference between being able to go out in the evening and just check something quickly if I have to, or restart sommething, or lugging a laptop around and needing to find some space to set it down, connect the 3G dongle, log in, blah blah, all that business takes longer than actually fixing whatever's gone wrong sometimes! I am really looking forward to the iPad, it will be liberating.
They do: it's called the Developer Program.

(Expansion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084640)
I just posted a comment similar to yours. I browsed over the comments here really fast to be sure no one said exactly what I did first, but I must have overlooked yours. I do not understand the appeal to do this either. It seems a bit pretentious in a way to make satirical articles such as the ones demonstrated here.
Crowdsourcing is Broken: How to Fix It
OS X is easy to use ... compared to other PCs. But this thing is easy to use the way your car is easy to use.
How Secure Is Your iPad?
beanstalkd is not really a message queue, its a job queue. I understand that job vs message can get into semantic nonsense, but in essence a message queue can and will send any given message to n people. A job queue will only send it to the first requester. Redis does kick butt, but a k/v store is not the same as a broacast (or 1toMany, or many to one) meassage store, is not the same as a 'give me the next job' (1toAny) server either.
Agree. Apple's iTunes game will sooner or later be over. Having to keep mp3s the iTunes way is just funny and one of the greatest indicators of Apple seeing the user as a money machine. Solely the looks and good design of iPhone will no longer be able to hide this truth.
Except that the iPad runs iPhone OS not Mac OS. Well, I guess you could be running the iPhone OS on your MacBook...
I also think there'll be some persistent indicator...So people won't have background tasks eating up their battery/RAM without knowing they're still running.

They can do this in such a way that it's useful if the user's running a 3-4 apps, but it's downright ugly if they're running an excessive amount.
Costs: developing and supporting a new version of the OS, introducing confusion into their famously stripped-down product lines, complicating the product's reputation as an easy-to-use consumer-oriented device.

Benefits: sales to the tiny minority of people who won't buy an iPad now, but would if they were more 'sandboxy.'

Doesn't sound 'very tasty' to me.
If they had done anything with the Mac, then maybe. But they haven't, and they have little reason to if only because they need to sell Macs to iPhone/iPad developers.
How about criticizing them for an inaccurate comparison?
The Curry-Howard isomorphism (types are theorems, programs are proofs)
Yes, I think it's safe to say that the middle ages/dark ages of personal computing are over.
No need for seed for the "connections." In fact a seed investment can kinda screw things up because you're deal won't be as clean.

Only take on seed if you think it would improve your "funding profile" to VC's. So you need to evaluate 1. what your funding profile looks like now. 2. what it would look like after a seed investment. And remember more is not always better (meaning, sometime its better to show a little less results than more. ie "wow, these guys raised a $500k seed and still only grew at 2x...")

PM me if you want to talk about your current vc fundability (i'm ex-vc, current ceo of startup)
Data Tables In Modern Web Design
Steve Jobs’ iPad Keynote Speech (Video)
While I generally agree, I think it's a mistake to blame users for the fact that any PC software they want to even try is given rights to fully hijack their machine and muck things up. (Yes, it's a lesser issue on the Macs, but as you note: it's still an issue)

That was, and is, a serious design failure.
> (and I still very much believe that Apple TV is due for a near-term reboot to plug into the same ecosystem).

How would that work? All of the other devices are based on a touch interface. Is Apple going to break into the television market with a multi-touch TV?

Not to mention that all of the Apps are based on the touch interface, so you would have a hard time using them out of the box on an iPhoneOS-based Apple TV.
"To another programmer, the programmer they are most likely to want to go into battle with is the superstar."

This is true, my company recently fired the programmer I most respected. His code was elegant, reusable, always well thought out. However he wasn't good at estimating how long something would take him, and after missing a few important deadlines they canned him :(
But market share does not equate with revenue.

As highlighted in the iPad launch, Apple introduced the modern laptop with the first ever PowerBook. The laptop market is now definitely commoditized but that doesn't stop Apple from making a lot of money selling fewer highly profitable laptops.

They have something under 10% of the total laptop market but 90% or more of the segment > $1,000 per computer.
All Hacker Newsies are sufficiently tech literate that the costs of the device in terms of lost freedoms outweigh the ease-of-use gains.

I don't think that's true. We're regular folks too, you know. We want to, like, just do stuff sometimes. Hands up who owns a phone? What, you don't exclusively use your GPL Ruby VOIP client you wrote yourself one afternoon? Shame on you! :-P
New in Campfire: Formatted Tweets
How do you know that the best policies do not involve taxation? (If it's because you take it as an axiom that no good policy involves taxation, then the fact that you don't want taxation in this particular case is perfectly uninformative.)
People who complain about CSS should try changing the look/feel of an entire desktop app. People who complain of HTML should try building PDFs or Word Docs on the fly.

Actually, those two capabilities were two things that VisualWorks Smalltalk has had for something like a decade? Want your App to look OS X Aqua? One line of code, boom! Building apps on the fly? Business as usual for Smalltalk.

(To be fair, the Aqua/Motif/Windows emulated UI was half-baked appearance wise, but the underlying framework was good.)
AppleTV is just waiting for the content producers to come into the store. I think perhaps the tail of the announcement where Jobs discloses that there are 125 million accounts with credit cards at the iTunes store is aimed at the content producers.
Three Reasons Why the iPad WILL Kill Amazon’s Kindle
Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?

I believe I did Bob.
The title is pretentious link bait.

Let's see. Who has "Check Mate"d who?? CheckMate is the end of a chess game where one side unambigously wins over the other.

If anything the game is just beginning.

Oh yeah and what is "Google's Next move?" Does the author ever make that clear? Or did he just throw it into the title for effect?
"Well, if Apple did it, it wouldn't be "jailbroken," would it?"

It's still a jail, and if Apple officially removed it - you can still say 'jailbroken' but that's a minor point.

"If you want freedom and flexibility coupled with world-class design, then you do buy an Apple -- with top dollar, meaning high margins for them."

Not true. I can't officially run OS X on non-official Apple hardware with official Apple suppport. Not to mention if I didn't buy Apple hardware then it would most likely kill their margins ;) iPad will eventually have the same 'freedom' as OS X and iPhone.

What most of us don't see right away is that there are financial costs for supporting freedom and flexibility. These costs are in marketing, support (reliability and usability), and security. Given the right target techie segment, these costs don't matter for freedom. Unfortunately if you're targeting the masses of non-techies, that's a completely different story.

(FYI I am an OS X user)
I'll be there!
What happened to all the online tutorials?
The article makes note that rare earth metals have a huge application in green energy, and that 95% of the world's rare metals are in China. It's ironic that, of all countries, China would have a monopoly on natural resources that can help reduce pollution. Especially after the recent events at the Copenhagen climate summit. I hope that altruism can prevail over selfishness.
What's the ratio of node.js web frameworks to sites that actually use them?
I'm sad he's gone, 9 stories upset me in ways few books ever have. At the same time, I've wanted to read those unpublished books for a while. I guess he'd be satisfied with a melancholy response.
A table with a column for "A bazillion other tablets in 2010?"

They could also have a table column for "A bazillion other tablets in 2005!"

(Don't get me wrong, I like the iPad very much. But it's Apple once again using 20/20 hindsight by looking at what the Wintel world did wrong in the past.)

Another nitpick: you technically can use media from a non-Apple Amazon store. You download and run the Kindle iPhone app, get on Safari, buy a Kindle book from Amazon, and it will "Whispernet" to your device automagically.
They want one computer that does everything and lasts forever - not a niche device that has to be tethered to a real PC anyway.

Yeah, that's a lot closer to describing my mom - housewive all her life, approaching 70 - but since the kids left home she has gotten one laptop after another, and her use is actually quite sophisticated by now - certainly beyond "browser only". I did give her an iPod touch but her only interest in it is inflicting pictures of her grandchildren on innocent civilians while she's out on the town - she uses her laptop for everything else. She has no particular interest in spending money on something like a tablet.

And don't forget the generational thing too - I'm going to be the mythical "grandma" one day, and when I retire and have an empty nest I am going to tweak my gentoo box all day long :-)
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
While I know this work was satire, in some cases, it is advised to leave out comments in code. While some comments are necessary, they should exist merely to state what the code does not. The best written code often explains itself through easy to read layout, variable naming, and intelligent function and class development procedures. If the code already says what it is doing, there is no reason to repeat it in a comment. A good programmer is always trying to write code like this.

As for having a set of rules to become a superstar developer... you would need to actually be a superstar developer to make the rules. If they are extremely rare, we should rarely have any rules because there would be few people posting such rules. Therefore, I am skeptical of any such lists unless they are from someone I recognize as extremely gifted prior to the writing of the rules.
I'll probably just wait for a more open android tablet to be released like this one:

http://convergeddevices.net/products/vega.html
There are numerous ways built-in to iTunes that allow you to not sync Billy Joel.
Something is only user programmable insofar as the user has the capability to program it.

An open device today still wouldn't be user programmable because most people would not have the ability to do so even if they had the desire. For those people (read >95% of the market), functionality and ease of use are so, SO much more important than theoretical freedom.
For the moment I wouldn't worry and would expect them to come back ... although maybe they'll need some prodding for some of the things that fall through the cracks.
A_Digital_Food_Journal
> "you can't protect against stupidity."

Trusting that an app on the Android marketplace is who it says it is is not stupidity. Honestly, this sort of geek arrogance ("but surely you must've known to discombobulate the zorgotron before you bazzed the foobar!") is what turns people off to geek-friendly platforms.

> "if something like that were to happen to the iphone?"

Apple at least vets who you say you are supposed to be before publishing your app. It's questionable if they will take responsibility if something makes it through, but the idea is that they're doing due diligence up front, Android is apparently not.

> "Besides, I already said I'm fine with malware scans"

This isn't malware that a malware scan will pick up. It doesn't try to take root, it doesn't nuke your files, and in fact it doesn't do anything a banking app is not expected to do. No amount of port blocking will save you, since everything this app does (according to the OS) is fully expected.

> "If you install an app that was not vetted you're on your own."

Yet... One side vets the app for you, the other one carries itself like an authoritative safe haven, but in fact isn't. Any wonder why people flock to the iPhone App Store?
Agreed. The OLPC had a sandboxing feature to prevent this.
Stuff like (fab) and CoffeeScript* show how easy it is to build on top of the V8 and node.js platform. And these toy languages/frameworks also have great perfomance given the non-blocking nature of node.js and the optimizations of V8. Amazing and happy to see more of these projects :)

* http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
"When building a big system you need uninterrupted hacking time to make sure you can keep all that state in your head."

I think that this is wrong.
Or at least it should be wrong.
I used to think it was true.

State is another way of saying 'Number of things I have to hold in my head'.

So what you are saying is that because you have a too many things to hold in your head at one time, you need uninterrupted hacking time. Otherwise something gets forced out and you make mistakes.

But another option here would be to increase the amount of abstraction within the code. If you increase abstraction, you reduce the amount of state, and reduce the chances of something important getting pushed out.

A side benefit of this would be to increase the readability of the code. If it is very well abstracted, it will be easy to understand when you come back to it.
No. I didn't do any ad hominem until now:

Dear Mr Brain Police, I did back up my point in another subthread. You were busy here with proving how silly I am so you haven't noticed.

Again, please digest a feedback you're receiving (votes!) and rethink.
Wow! Catcher in the Rye is still an excellent book.