It's weird, it's like in Chicago they don't have multiplication or something.
Oh, and New York smells. (take that!)
Two of my heroes dragging discourse on hacker news into the toilet. What's the world coming to?
Oh, and New York smells. (take that!)
Two of my heroes dragging discourse on hacker news into the toilet. What's the world coming to?
Is the problem that they're sitting there in a city without any other Internet industry, stewing in their own witty ideas, listening only to the adoring comments they get from the groupies?
.. is a often genuine criticism of 37s here on HN. Probably part of the reason the joke was missed.
Warning: Prolonged exposure to HN comment sections may blunt your sense of humor, too.
Do they have some history or it's just impulsive?
I do remember some post from 37 signals commenting about Joel's taking investment; not sure if it was David or someone else though.
A very thin line divides frank and honest speech and rude and arrogant statements. Most of the internet celebs sit on the fence and cross it every now and then - Linus Torvalds (Open BSD devs are a bunch of masturbating monkeys), Zed Shaw(Rails is a ghetto) etc etc.
That being said, there always is a take-away as these people are one of the most hardworking and talented people in the industry but the sad thing is it makes it difficult for people not familiar with their style to neglect the firework and just consume the good parts(not that it would matter to any of them).
On this one, I am with David. Joel pretty much negates his point about using something battle tested and mainstream in the end when he mentions using some proprietary language for his product, which translates to a couple of mainstream languages. I don't really see the point of cross-compiling to multiple languages. The work and time invested in maintaining the proprietary language can be better invested on other critical activities. If language interoperability is an issue, thrift or message queues is there to the rescue.
Why he would use some fancy stuff when he himself is advocating using mainstream stuff is beyond me. I sure would be betting on ruby being more robust than whatever he is using in-house (preposterous claim; I have no ideas what they have in-house)
IMO the only valid complain about Ruby was lack of good unicode support at the time post was written.
He's a New Yorker, it's in his DNA.
HackerNews: battlebots for geeks who can't build an ashtray without a makerbot