AndrewO

Wow—that's a great way to explain those concepts to the layman.

To add to your point on bribery, let's not forget that many countries have laws against bribing foreign officials. In the US it's the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act). I'd assume Europe has something similar (Wikipedia brings up a missing link to a European "Criminal Law Convention on Corruption", but I haven't looked into it).

Even if the host country is somewhat lax in its own enforcement, laws like this could make returning home rather dicey should one find themselves paying "unofficial costs".

This is really awesome, but I have no idea what this is a reproduction of. (I haven't seen a Daft Punk video in at least 5 years). Anyone who's more versed in Daft Punkology have a link to whatever this came from?

I've been a little wary of the MongoHQ option because it's a separate service and I was worried about latency. But, I guess if it's all hosted on EC2 that doesn't matter as much...?

Does anyone have any experience using MongoHQ on Heroku?

(You meant "The Russians (land of Pavlov...", right?)

Very interesting, although it seems odd to hear a software engineering describe Gödel's incompleteness theorems as a "cheap trick used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties."

Still, I chuckled when I read it.

Here's the post this one is follow-up to, which has a little more background:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486017

...also, it looks like some of the links didn't make it in. This one (http://github.com/rjurney/Cloud-Stenography) showing the code driving the Pig editor in the demo was one I particularly wanted to see in the parent.

Just remember that we're talking about a company that managed to migrate its entire product line to an entirely new processor with few people (inside and outside the company) really knowing until they unveiled the first demo machines.

Compared to that, adding a new programming language (that doesn't even affect their existing 3rd party applications) to a platform they own completely is child's play.

MacRuby has already reimplemented most of Ruby's classes on top of equivalent Cocoa ones (String < NSString, Hash < NSDictionary, Array < NSArray). That removes a big part of bridging problem that existed with things like RubyCocoa.

Not to mention the ability to call existing APIs and the fact that C and MacRuby will both be running on LLVM—I think it's less crazy than it appears.

Apple is fortunate that they're the only ones they have to check with to change 3.3.1. When the hardware has gotten ample and the software is mature enough, I for one won't be surprised if we see revisions.

Meanwhile, a blanket ban will accomplish their goals just fine (take your choice: blocking Adobe, preventing fragmentation, making developers choose single platforms, etc).

Stephen Fry touched on this in his book/miniseries on the US and made a pretty interesting observation: in his opinion, the flag takes the place in Americans' minds that is occupied by a royal family in other countries. The problem is that a flag can't ask a chief of government to justify his policies in the same way a monarch with decades of experience can.

As an American, I can see how having a head of state with decades of experience who's nominally higher than the chief of government, but with no formal power might help check corrupting influences and promote accountability. Of course, it's rife with problems of its own.

Anyone know why this wasn't tried earlier? Lower estimated chance of success than other previous strategies? Would have precluded other options if it failed? Some other kind of complication?

Anyone know if this includes Rough Cuts?

Ok, I think I missed the genesis of whole rainbows and ponies meme. Someone mind clueing me in?

I seem to recall first hearing it connected with Django somehow, but I figured it was a reference to something I didn't get...

Well, let's not forget that the pay-off for that particular thought experiment was relativity. :)

I (and possibly others) would probably be a little less cranky about the whole article if he'd followed his steps rigorously and arrived at something interesting. And I don't mean it has to be revolutionary like relativity, but something better than just highlighting his new favorite language.

    if (you_have_to_learn_one_language) {
      make_highly_subjective_claims();
      eliminate_good_candidates_for_specious_reasons(); 
      arrive_at_questionable_conclusion();
    } else {
      broaden_your_understanding_of_programming();
      be_able_to_evaluate_multiple_solutions_for_problem();
    }

The underlying premise is flawed. No one has to learn just one language and anyone who stops at one is limiting themselves to being a journeyman programmer for the rest of their career. At that point they should be asking "do I really like programming?" and if not, move along to something else.

A much better question is "If you have to start with just one programming language...".

Well, if you look at it that way, a blog isn't any different than a traditional homepage either. :) But if not for the structure that blogs impose and the fact that non-technical people can edit them, the web would still be majority "Welcome to the Jones Family Homepage: Click to look at our vacation pictures from 2 years ago! (We can't update anymore because our kid moved out and we don't know how to change anything.)"

That aside, it looks like they're building in GPG based sharing (to limit _who_ you're actually sharing with—a more and more common problem these days) and some kind of capability to automatically publish to/subscribe from friends' nodes.

Answering my own question here from the linked Q&A with Luis Villa: http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.ht...

I was just searching for something like this yesterday. I came across DiSo (http://code.google.com/p/diso/), which at first glance appears to be somewhat stale and a bit of a protocol soup.

Anyone know if that effort is still under way? (and if there are any lessons to be learned from it?)

I dunno—the Star Trek reboot reinvigorated the series after lackluster box office performance. If you're looking for things ignored by the active user base and promptly forgotten, I think a better comparison would be the Ewoks movie... :-)

Thanks—I'll check those out!

  It has been said that Ruby is Smalltalk with a perly syntax. 
  Perl6 extends on that: Perl 6 is Lisp with a perly syntax.

Interesting idea, but I would have loved to see some examples or comparisons. For all of the mindshare that Perl has, I haven't seen much content (especially code) about Perl 6 over the last couple of years.

I think most of these are probably still valid (haven't paid much attention in the last year)—which in itself is probably a good point to make.

Katz intentionally chose an inflammatory and attention-grabbing title. Although the overall message of the article is "I love you, but I hate things about you", it's probably good to provide some time context. Especially so that short attention span people don't come away with the idea that Damien Katz suddenly realized Erlang has a bunch of ugly parts after working with it for 4+ years.

It's probably worth mentioning that this is over 2 years old.

While Adobe is going to bear the brunt of this, this looks like a calculated move against Android as well. By precluding things like PhoneGap (if it turns out that it's "an intermediary translation or compatibility layer"), they're forcing developers that can only afford to write an application once to choose one platform. Right now, iPhone is the easy choice for a lot of developers, just based on market.

The end result being fewer apps for Android and a less vibrant software ecosystem.

Agree 100% about the Path Finder music (and the Prince pricing).

This was a job for a professional publishing house, so the cost was justified. At the time I used it, that was about the only way to use general CSS3 features. It was like tasting the future.

Things I couldn't live without (or at least would push back on if pressured to use something different):

git (GitX for viewing), TextMate (AckMate bundle for searching w/in a project), Basecamp, Chrome (any WebKit or Gecko browser will do though), two Fluid SSBs for personal and business Gmail, Homebrew for Mac package management, Hex Fiend for looking at/searching through raw files (priceless for diagnosing character set issues).

I'm using Sequel Pro, but I've found it a bit unstable and would love to see something better.

I just discovered Path Finder, a finder replacement that looks like it fixes my common gripes. I'll probably end up buying it when the demo expires.

Lastly, one I haven't used in awhile and is a little project specific is Prince for HTML->PDF conversion using CSS3 Print Profiles (and this was back when it looked like CSS3 would never happen). Here's a rundown: http://tomayko.com/writings/princexml

Ugh, April is the cruelest month for techies if only because of today.

  Ok, so the answer is, "because Rubyists have redefined that phrase"? ;-)

Well, by name dropping I was hoping to avoid the appearance of that. :-) Fowler certainly writes about Ruby a lot, but I'd hope he's perceived as general enough to not just be a "Rubyist" (I don't know what he primarily uses). But he also points out that Lisp is a perfectly good host environment for internal DSLs (he calls it the "doyen of internal DSL thinking").

And I also brought up the "fluent interface" thing to suggest that you could call it that if it made you happier. For my tastes, I'm fine with the idea that a "language" reuses a more general purpose language's interpreter and libraries. YMMV.

  I assume it's something like:...

http://github.com/bmizerany/sinatra/blob/work/lib/sinatra/ba...

Sure looks similar, but as you can see from all the code above the method there's a lot more going on. But hey, at least they didn't need to write a parser. ;-)