PLejeck

It's absolutely genius, I just wish Apple had executed their part in it better. They needed to position the holes properly for this usage, and they failed to align them properly.

Materials required: 1 roll of duct tape, 1 old physical game

I'm rather disappointed by Onavo, despite getting in early and falling in love. They had a great product, but they kept having bugs and UX mistakes.

But good for them, getting acquired. Assuming this wasn't a burning-building acquire, which I sincerely hope it wasn't. I liked Onavo.

I dual boot OS X to be able to use Photoshop. It's slower and feels awkward coming from Linux, though, so I try to limit my stays.

Not at all. I'm suggesting that arguing that doing nothing is better than doing something is something people do to promote complacency, and has no place in the world.

My configuration for Linux is so much of a productivity boost to me that I'm planning to make my next laptop a Thinkpad, just to avoid the hardware issues.

OS X just held me back. It was locking up at 20% CPU and 40% RAM usage, and I could never figure it out. Linux doesn't do that (especially since I threw a bunch of swap space on, now it's incredibly stable)

As for defaults, I find it's faster in the short term to start with defaults and work from there, but it'll just come back and bite you that you're using somebody else's workflow. I start from scratch (for the most part) with Arch, and build my workflow on top.

I've wasted probably two weeks to get my workflow configured perfectly, but now I can spit out code at such a rate that I find myself doing more projects than ever before.

Complacency and apathy are not a form of protest.

Linux is harder to learn and get set up, but it's just spending a bit more time now to be more productive in the long run. Of course, it's not more productive for everybody, but it is for some of us.

Plus we have Docker.io instead of Vagrant. Way nicer.

I see everybody with the view that OSX is so much more productive, but I'll give a different view, as an OS X user turned Linux user. I switched entirely about 6 months ago, and it just sort of happened once Linux was set up to my liking.

Positives:

* Tiling WMs - I have always found myself working primarily in fullscreen applications like in OSX, but it's nice to have a small status bar at the top still and splitscreen capabilities. My WM of choice, AwesomeWM, provides this, and does it really well.

* Docker.io - Docker is infinitely better than Vagrant. It starts faster, it's thinner, and it's easier to interact with. And it only runs on Linux (at least for now, but it'd be hard to add OSX support probably, due to the use of cgroups and other Linux APIs)

* Better Package Management - Yes, OS X has homebrew, and it's great, but it has to compile from source, which takes a while and spins up your fans usually. It's just troublesome. And on Linux, if we want to compile, we can usually use distcc to distribute that load to a cluster. I do, and I know many others do as well.

* Choice of Workflow - OS X has a wonderful workflow, but it's not perfect. Sometimes it's nice to be able to pick the workflow that is almost exactly perfect for you, and tweak it until it's ideal. That's what I did, and it's been a huge boon for my productivity.

* Homogeneity with Deployment - this is a lesser positive, but it's still nice in many cases. Most of the good distros will teach you at least basic sysadmin skills over a shot period of time, through immersion. This means you can spend less money on sysadmins and do it yourself as long as possible, assuming you deploy on bare EC2

Negatives:

* More downtime - this is an issue with distros like Arch and Gentoo, and it does get to be a problem from time to time. I mean, it's hard to work when X11 won't start or a driver is broken (I'm looking at you, Broadcom)

* Learning curve - Linux really is as hard as it seems to learn, I'm not gonna lie. It's not perfect.

* You look like an "Engineer" not a "Hacker" - Lots of people will view the fact that you spent time customizing your work environment as you playing around with your OS. It's not really that way (unless you're a Gentoo user) but it gives that view to some people.

* Lack of support for multitouch trackpads - I'm sure this is less of an issue for other people, but it really was a dealbreaker early on for me. It killed all the ways I interacted with OS X. It was terrible for a while, then I got over it.

Honestly, I dual booted Arch and OS X for about 8 months before I ended up tipping over to Arch. It took me setting up a shared partition and AwesomeWM before I could convince myself to use it daily. But it's the best decision I've ever made, because I find myself being infinitely more productive with my new workflow. I'm done with OSX entirely, I only use it for Photoshop now.

It's entertaining for people who aren't perfect at it. Same goes for things like Tic Tac Toe.

Entropy = entertainment

It's rather disappointing that the case doesn't fit perfectly in that direction. Would've worked better on the iPhone 4-style symmetrical-side design. Pity they dropped that for the 5c.

I've never been able to fully grasp mocking and stubbing.

Linksys is owned by Cisco, who are well-known for their incredible spinelessness and ability to give into the US Government's requests. Their backdoors are intentional.

When this originally hit HN last night, I didn't get paranoid.

You see, if you read the backwards name, you'd realize it was some programmer who did it, not the NSA.

Stop being paranoid, guys. It was just an idiot who got this through code review.

I do the same at my college. During my college's ongoing remodel of the library, they're increasing the coworking space and decreasing the shelving space. I think this is the future, and some libraries already realize that.

We only need a few large libraries to store books, and that is well-served by Archive.org on the digital layer, and the Library Of Congress in the physical layer.

I once read a post (that I can't seem to find now) talking about how startups need a "hacker, a hustler, and a hipster" to succeed.

We still have huge user experience issues with decentralized systems which make it more awkward for the average person. It's sad, because I (like most programmers) want a distributed system, but it's rather hard to get it right.

The problem I ran into was that I needed to perform roughly 20 interdependent queries in a short period of time. At most, I could do 5 queries in parallel due to the interdependent nature, but I still ran into trouble with the database being slow.

In the end, I added Redis as a caching layer, which cut time-per-query down a few ms per request, which was significant in this case.

I can only imagine how bad it could've been if I had block for each request instead of using the asynchronicity of node.

It's okay, I totally just made up "documentation-driven development" too. And yeah, that's the best way I find. Always build a consumer and then build the supplier, you'll usually end up with a great experience.

I don't think we should view tax increases as a serious solution to debt so much as a means to combat income disparity and provide safety nets.

The US government has shown us that tax increases usually go to fund irrelevant wars on other continents or NSA spying. Very little goes to worthy programs like NASA or helping the poor.

While I agree the rich should pay more, I think that we need to really take a good hard look at what that increase in revenue would actually pay for, and see if it's absolutely necessary.

When developing an API, I like to practice "documentation-oriented design." The first thing I do is write documentation of the API, and then I write APIs to fit that documentation (iterating both in parallel once I start writing the API).

I figure that the documentation is the first thing a developer faces when using an API, so it should also be the first thing I write.

I've always been curious how people do integration tests on things with multiple servers (like SOA stuff), it seems like it'd be dreadful, unless you use Vagrant to (quite slowly) spawn a new VM every time you want to test.

Anyone with experience care to enlighten me?

The article makes the implication that MVC is inherently slow. It's not, in fact it can be quite fast if you use the right framework.

I'm assuming they only know that Rails is slow (which it can be, especially for a case where caching can't help much like in an API) and assume that's because of MVC and not because Rails is monolithic and Ruby-based.

Before I used Rails, I used an MVC consisting of Mongoose + Handlebars + Express in Node.js, and I regularly had pages render in under 10ms. The biggest bottleneck was consistently the communication with MongoDB, something I had very little control over.

So to conclude, stop blaming the architecture, start blaming the frameworks.

Okay yeah it was rather bullshit to say that, but part of me just wanted to fulfill Godwin's Law nice and early and get that out of the way.

Anyways, it's hard to argue that genetics control anything in humans very heavily: evidence shows that almost anything genetic can be overridden by later events, and there's so much variance as it is.

And not to mention the fact that gene expression is affected by environmental factors!

I wouldn't say it has no effect, it's just so minor that it would be silly to base our educational plans on it.

To imply that strengths are determined by genetics is to ignore the fact that genetics are naught but a starting point.

Humans are just complex chemical reactions. Yes, genetics determine the beginning state, but the experiences determine the future.

Arguing that student genetics have any substantial influence on student success is a load of bullshit. It's the same argument that has been used in favor of organized eugenics, and, just to fulfill Godwin's Law, also used in favor of the holocaust.

But seriously, this is detrimental to improvements in education. All this will do is push us backwards, and delay actual improvements.

EDIT: I guess I should've been more clear: I was being sarcastic with my comparisons to hitler, for the sake of fulfilling Godwin's Law early and being done with that stupid.

I think there were some people trying to apply machine learning and genetic algorithms to it.

I love the idea of alternative keyboards, and I spent a few months trying to learn Dvorak, but no matter what I stop because it screws all my keyboard shortcuts.

OSX's "Cmd Qwerty" feature was nice, but didn't help in Inkscape (since it uses Ctrl) or Vim.

I wish the Programmer's Layout of this would take HJKL into account at least. That's and :wq being a nice "roll" down the top left of my keyboard are what keep me on QWERTY.

This seems like it would be good for filling a similar role to LLVM, providing a framework to take an object and turn it into CSS. I'm not so sure it makes sense as a language to directly use: JSON is nice as a data serialization format, but it's not very fun to author complex things in it.