Hacker News Reader

BrianHammondon Streaming UTF-8 (with node.js)

For those using Node.js, the same is

    var len = Buffer.byteLength(a_string, 'utf8')

BrianHammondon Alternative monospace fonts for programmers

I enjoy TheSansMonoCd by LucasFonts. It costs money though.

http://imgur.com/kBpMI.png

BrianHammondon Alternative monospace fonts for programmers

http://steveblock.com/r/sgiscreen-ttf.tar.gz

Looks pretty good at 14pt in Terminal.app. Thanks.

BrianHammondon When can I use... (Browser Compatibility tables - HTML5, CSS3, SVG, & new tech)

WebGL is mentioned on that page. I'm not sure if it was updated since you looked.

"Conclusion: Not ready*. Waiting for Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4, Opera 10.5 to expire"

BrianHammondon Erlang vs node.js

"This can get sloppy."

Indeed it can. I am a fan of flow-js however. It has really helped me to avoid getting sloppy in Node.js.

http://github.com/willconant/flow-js

BrianHammondon Heroku Node.js Support (experimental)

The big question is if Heroku will suddenly support a fairly large number of long-lived connections to a Node.js hosted app, and how pricing would work. Developing real-time apps and custom servers are how Node.js really shines. A WebSockets module took only a few hours to develop for instance.

BrianHammondon A HTTP Proxy Server in 20 Lines of node.js Code

Thanks for the shout-out in the slides about the Redis client for Node.js.

http://github.com/fictorial/redis-node-client

BrianHammondon Node.js fanout pubsub server for real-time apps

I'm curious about the "fanout" name which immediately made me think of a message broker like RabbitMQ on the backend somewhere. I guess "fanout" here means 1 client to fanout.js to N >> 1 other clients.

There are a number of similar projects popping up like this one as of late for Node.js. NodeRed, fanout, dealer, etc.

That's great. Node.js makes previously "complex" things a little easier to setup and play with.

BrianHammondon Slides and notes from my three hour Redis tutorial

Redis has native pubsub for a few weeks. A client can subscribe to channels by name or pattern, and publishers can publish messages to channels.

The ruby, python, and node.js clients support non-BLPOP pubsub. We are starting to see some layers added atop this (e.g. NodeRed).

BrianHammondon PubSub messaging: scala, Redis , Akka Actors

I am working on something similar for Node.js called NodeRed:

http://github.com/fictorial/nodered

BrianHammondon Concert pianist plays iPad onstage

menu > settings > songbook no-fail mode: on

menu > songbook > flight of the bumblebee

tap, tap, tap, tap...

BrianHammondon 360° video from the inside of a stadium demolition

I fully admit to having no idea what this refers to, but I'm scared anyway.

BrianHammondon 360° video from the inside of a stadium demolition

Wow! That was really neat!

As someone who witnessed the events of 9/11 in NY from across the river in Hoboken, NJ this was fairly terrifying too. I was not expecting to have that association when I clicked the link!

BrianHammondon HTML5 Game Engine

mootools made javascript a better language? Javascript is a wonderful language regardless of the availability of good tools and libraries.

BrianHammondon Open Source Dynamics Engine

ODE has been around for years. Did something big happen? Why is this here?

BrianHammondon Mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy

Somewhere Jodie Foster just threw off her headphones, jumped off the hood of her car, and frantically went to investigate. She won't find much. (hint: 3-D, not 2-D).

BrianHammondon Nodule: A Node.js Pub-Sub Key-Value Store in 185 Lines

I just uploaded the first version of NodeRed:

http://github.com/fictorial/nodered

BrianHammondon Nodule: A Node.js Pub-Sub Key-Value Store in 185 Lines

Nice, good to see more people coming to Node.js. These things are like the modern "Hello, World!".

Here's one I hacked up in 10 minutes. It's 40 LOC. http://gist.github.com/366590

The big problem with this is that it's just one server. I'm working on something called "NodeRed" (har har) that lets one scale out the frontend using Redis for communication. It's generic enough to do PUBSUB, chat, games, etc.

Here's an overview. http://fictorial.com/NodeRed.png

I developed the/a Node.js client for Redis if you care to dive into this stuff: http://github.com/fictorial/redis-node-client

BrianHammondon Nodule: A Node.js Pub-Sub Key-Value Store in 185 Lines

I am doing something similar with my redis-node-client as a base.

BrianHammondon Please Make the iPhone Weather Application Location Aware

Rejected: location-aware weather can be obtained by looking out the window.

BrianHammondon Ask HN: What would life be like as an Android Developer?

Ask tocomment: try it and let us know!

BrianHammondon Ask HN: Review my side project - Reel Roulette

Suggestion: temporarily disable the "next reel" button for a duration of time proportional to the frequency of my clicks thereupon. Make me watch the reels instead of trying to satisfy my urge to see "what's next?"

BrianHammondon Functional Fluid Dynamics in Clojure

"The weird thing about C is that its not even prefixed like Clojure (+ 2 2), instead all operators are scattered between the arguments!"

Please tell me he is kidding. Maybe I don't get out of my cave often enough but it seems uncommon that someone could grok FP bypassing C altogether.

BrianHammondon EventMachine: scalable non-blocking i/o in ruby

I see. My (wrong) understanding was that EM used a thread pool to do file I/O like Node.js. It appears to add the file descriptor to the event loop's watch list.

BrianHammondon EventMachine: scalable non-blocking i/o in ruby

Honest question: is there a purely event-driven I/O framework (no threads anywhere)?

The one that a lot of people have gotten excited about recently is Node.js and that uses threads for file I/O (libeio).

BrianHammondon EventMachine: scalable non-blocking i/o in ruby

I learned Tcl back in college (say 15 years ago) and have not used it since. However, while investigating things like EM and Twisted, I for some reason thought of Tcl. I (and others [1]) asked on the Tcl mailing list about creating a "C10K" server in Tcl but unfortunately Tcl does not have support for epoll, kqueue, etc. at this time.

[1] http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/tcl-core/37509...