Bluem00

While you can use prototype, why do you need to? What specifically do you mean by "the article is wrong?"

I didn't realize how integral the numbers were to how I read HN until now. It's taken me a while to stop feeling lost without them, but with the orange dot present, I at least feel like I'm getting the insightful comments after a quick scan of the page.

Do you know why it was designed this way? Was 'new' added to javascript after the behavior of 'this' was already well defined and the creators did not feel comfortable changing it?

Aboodman seems to have a better handle on it than I do. I think what I said about the dom object is correct, but he point out that window is the default value of this for other function calls.

This article does a good job of explaining a concept I had trouble with when first using javascript. Now, I usually use the approach recommended in the article of setting a private variable (e.g. self, or my) to the current value of 'this' in a javascript class.

However, I think the article is slightly incorrect on one minor point. It states, "this wants to be window whenever possible, which is not always what you want." I believe the correct description is: the 'this' variable in a function called in response to an event on dom object is set to that dom object. For the example given in the article, this is set to the window object because setTimeout causes an event on window to fire, not because there's any inherent preference for the window object.

Here's an anecdote from my experience:

The majority of the users of my company's web application use IE6 on Windows 2000. Additionally, many of these computers have Vista stickers on them, and are quite powerful. Their IT groups already have established practices to support the machines, and they are used almost exclusively to surf the web and run software that was purchased 5 years ago. Our users aren't even unhappy, as their work does not center around a computer; thus, the corporate IT infrastructure has no motivation to upgrade them.

That said, we still pressure them to upgrade, and I'll be extremely happy when they eventually do.

My physics is a little rusty, so please forgive me if I'm wrong. I think the law you're referring to is the Law of Conservation of Mass. As energy has mass and subatomic particles have mass, you can convert back and forth between them all day (good luck with that), and never violate it. In particular, Einstein's E=mc^2 is applicable here.

It was a surprise to me to find that the term 'matter' is actually poorly defined. At least according to Wikipedia.

You might want to check out tup. It uses the dependency tree in a fundamentally different way from make, in order to improve build times. http://gittup.org/tup/

I think the essay agrees more with your second statement than first -- that copyright is a trade-off between the public interest in using published works and an interest in encouraging publication through some kind of incentive system.

This is off of a posting over on the GNU Make Help mailing list: http://www.nabble.com/build-system-rules---algorithms-td2395...

I have a morning ritual that involves an hour of preparation before doing anything else on a given day. I'd never even considered the proposal in this article, and I suspect others haven't either. As I can think of several situations in which I might try it out, I'm glad he wrote the article.

The curve I fit to the leader board is,

  karma = 25343 * rank^(-.465)

Which has an R-squared value of 0.9791.

Unfortunately, this isn't a good enough fit to meaningfully extrapolate very far.

The exponential delay on the "reply" link's appearance means that sometimes the link is sometimes not present on the page. I believe that this reduces the ease with which someone can scan a thread, because it changes the layout and spacing of comments later in the thread.

My suggestion is that rather than not displaying the reply link, display greyed out text in its place that reads "reply", with hover text explaining why you cannot currently click it.

Different URL. Here's the original posting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433456

It points at semyon.com, which now redirects to blogspot.

Definitely worth reading if you missed it the first time!

Good idea! Any idea how to convert this post into a poll?

If I had to guess (which I do), I'd say you were down-modded due to the way you expressed your opinion, not that anyone necessarily disagrees with you...

I'll consider a comment for a down-vote if it negatively affects the conversation. Usually this means it's off-topic for the conversation that it replies to (including insults and just plain meanness).

However, when I determine whether to down-vote, I first figure out what I think the score should be, and only down-vote if it's above that value. I've even up-voted comments that I thought were bad because I felt the author was being punished too harshly for saying something they obviously didn't realize would be bad.

Facebook uses the Aurigma Image Uploader, which is implemented both in Java and as an ActiveX control.

For anyone who uses Visual Studio, here's an accompanying vsdoc for jquery-1.3: http://blogs.ipona.com/james/archive/2009/01/14/jquery-1.3-a...

You could create an LLC once, and use that for all of your side projects. I did this myself, and it's even kinda fun; my state has good reference material, and the applicable laws are available online.

In Virginia, the requirements boiled down to (1) pick a name that isn't taken, (2) fill out and mail a particular form with a $100 check, (3) keep some paperwork that tracks shareholders - in your case there's just one - and assets.

You probably won't do as good a job as if you were a lawyer, so deciding to do it yourself depends on how seriously you think you need protection.

I'm sure there are a variety of reasons that you could have posted that and not know who it is :)

I trust you, though.

Tried to create a profile, but failed when I got to the picture step. In my first attempt I tried to upload a bitmap. I don't see any reason why you don't support this format. Size isn't the reason, as it's already been uploaded to your servers when you reject it. I converted the file to a tiff, uploaded it, and was stuck staring at a "Loading" screen. I tried both IE and Firefox, but never got past that point.

I think that his argument is based on fundamentally different assumptions than the Agile practices. One of the most obvious is the idea that programming is engineering or architecture; however, there are quite a few people who disagree that software can be developed this way. Robert Martin suggests that programmers are craftsmen, not engineers; others suggest that gardening is a good metaphor (http://www.artima.com/intv/gardenP.html).

The article implies that one must write all of your tests first when using TDD, but it fails to mention that they don't need to all be written before the first line of non-test code. When designing a bridge, one does need to design it in great detail before beginning construction, but gardening can be more...organic :)

Searched for: "best techno music". I was ready for more results on the initial page and tried to scroll down to them. All I got to see was a screen of whitespace. I don't think it would hurt to increase the number of results that you show. Also, I didn't bother to hit the more links button; I guess I've been trained by existing search engines not to do that, and I expect that other people are the same.

"You can see that Homespring programs have a very poetic and expressive quality. Although it is said that artists must suffer for their work, this does not apply to HOtMEfSPRIbNG as suffering is not included among its features."

He seems to have embraced it, regardless of his earlier opinions on the subject: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/11b.html

Anecdotal evidence in support of your request, I just had the following happen: Read a headline I'm interested in. Looked at the flag button because it's new and interesting. Decided to check out the comments for the headline...And clicked flag.

Maybe incidence of this will go down in the future, but the link I'm least likely to click is right next to the one I'm most likely to click, so the mistake is easy.

I had almost exactly the same experience, through the error message when I submitted my comment to their "customer service" people. The message still went through and they did cancel my unintentional "subscription". My error occured because the system somehow decided that I wanted to create an account at the same time as I submitted my message, but an account with my email address already exists (for obvious reasons).

Hope your email goes through as well.

You'll have a problem if updates involve more than code changes. Any database scripts or configuration changes will be left undone, potentially breaking the site.

You may choose to use a tool to run your update scripts automatically and create configuration files correctly, but you'll want to think it through in advance. A particular problem I have is that certain sensitive passwords should not exist anywhere but in the locations they are required, so even pre-created configuration files still require me to manually enter the password once installed on the server.

This is an old comic and normally I'd be annoyed, but this one is an exception: Reflecting on my dreams, even if I've chosen not to pursue some of them, has greatly improved my mood on this particular day.

Do it again tomorrow? :)