alec

Fortress makes a convincing argument that it must be supported at the language level. It has a smart work splitting algorithm that does for managing parallelism granularity what garbage collection did for managing memory allocation. It works much better when it's baked into the core and is available from the ground up.

I write "real code" in Common Lisp, and I used something like what he dismissed as "useless in practice" twice today to make my code more readable and maintainable. I do not consider myself a Lisp advocate when I bemoan the lack of sane scoping semantics most similar languages just get right; I just want to write better code.

He's not talking about technically superior server-side Javascript environments, he's talking about langauges and frameworks that provide more than just a callback model.

I work at ITA, but not on Needle. I have played around with an internal demo, but not for anything serious; I found it easy to use and to require little or no programming.

Check out the video: http://www.needlebase.com/videos/video1

Part of Needle is a browser interface that helps you click through a website and tell it what to scrape without writing any code. It's pretty smart about reducing the amount of work you have to do; that starts at 1:50 of the video.

Needle is currently in open beta; try it out for yourself!

I think it's a good use of time, especially in an English class, because the beauty of Shakespeare never really came out for me until I read it word by word and knew enough to perform a bit of it. It wasn't created to be read, it was created to be performed, and I didn't pick up on all the nuances, humor, and craft that make it really good until I freed myself from reading it from paper. I'm likely a better writer because I've been forced to read poetry and plays in that way.

I expect that he didn't substantiate his claim for the same reason the original poster didn't substantiate his claim that learning C is a good use of time - people around here who have done both likely appreciate the value of the task.

Meta-point: I think a lot of people around here who argue "school is worthless, why am I doing this useless task" will point to this sort of exercise without asking or understanding why it's done. I certainly felt the same way when I was memorizing Shakespeare. While it's important to think for yourself, it's also important to take the advice of those who have more experience than you do, and when I see these threads I think many of the commentators haven't learned both lessons.

I don't want each language providing its own package manager. Sure, CPAN was a great leap forward back before apt became popular, but now I want to just apt-get install libraries. Language-specific package managers always fall short of apt because they don't deal with external dependencies - cabal isn't going to install the sqlite libraries when I install the bindings, and even if it did, I doubt they're going to take stability and security updates as seriously as Debian does.

The guy just wanted to count how many requests his server gets; seems like that ought to be easy.

They appear to have invested substantial time into integrating it with their deployment system and improving its performance for their particular network situation rather than using off-the-shelf software like uftp.

I think Google recruiters trawl places frequented by programmers and invite them in. A few years ago, when I was more involved in free software, I got an email out of the blue asking me to submit a resume. I was certainly not as visible in the communities I frequented as this guy appears to be in his.

I wonder if they tried multicast. It would be strictly more efficient in terms of bandwidth (one copy per router/hop rather than all the different pieces flying back and forth) and likely less CPU. There's premade software like uftp (http://www.tcnj.edu/~bush/uftp.html) to do this.

In fact, Google has stated they intend to maintain ITA's relationships with companies such as Orbitz and Bing: "Google will honor all existing agreements, and we're also enthusiastic about adding new partners." (http://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html)

If you watch a Lisp-related mailing list, it seems like once a week someone brings up the topic "hey, what if I replaced the parens with significant whitespace?"

I'm the guy from foldl. Thanks for your kind words. I do still want something like foldl, but I don't have time to create it - I got started because I wanted to read less, not more!

I don't think that you can produce a good newsletter/digest just relying on total up/downvotes. I hoped to find time to apply machine learning to the problem, but never have.

The linked article makes a very fundamental mistake. While ITA Software is the search engine "for many major airlines around the world, as well as travel sites such as Kayak, Orbitz, Hotwire and many others", it is not the "reservation systems" for those same companies. It's the difference between being able to search Hacker News and maintaining the database of users, comments, and stories. In fact, "sites such as Kayak, Orbitz, Hotwire and many others" do not have reservation systems of their own.

I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine.

We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com, put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights".

Many of our customers have something similar, but it's not always on the front page.

Another article claimed that AT&T charges a 10% restocking fee, so you couldn't get a full refund.

I suspect he was just trolling.

I looked into buying a used Droid off ebay and doing pay-as-you-go on Verizon; no luck, you must have a $30/month data plan to use a smartphone on Verizon.

There are two things that set StumpWM apart from the others I've tried, like dwm and xmonad. First, you can name desktops. I find this very handy for quickly switching; I don't have to remember that desktop 5 is where my tests are running. Second, there aren't preset tiling algorithms, but rather it works like emacs - split a window horizontally or vertically, and then resize. I find it easier for the limited amount of splitting I do than cycling through layouts.

I use wicd; it sucks less than NetworkManager all around and has interfaces other than an tray applet. It was trivial to swap out on Debian,

I ran the left fold (http://foldl.org) for several months; it focused on the top technical stories from places like here. It was popular (a few thousand readers each week), but I didn't have time to continue it, and to be honest, the material gets very repetitive when you look at it hard each week to hand-pick articles.

I like vnstat: http://humdi.net/vnstat/. It's easy to set up and has almost zero overhead. I have it send me an email from cron estimating monthly usage once a week. It won't break things down per-process, per-port, or per-remote-host, but I haven't found a nice tool to do that yet.

The text only came up when I started using my mouse - if I just started typing, I would never have seen it. Also, the text was white, and happened to be positioned over a very light / white part of the picture, so I can understand how it could be missed.

For "high performance GDB", see tracepoints, which act somewhat like DTrace probes.

GDB 7.1 is a great improvement over previous versions and has a lot of the features LLDB intends to have - better C++ support, better thread debugging, more accurate backtraces, and a Python scripting API - as well as some features that aren't on the LLDB roadmap yet, like tracepoints for debugging time-sensitive code and multi-program debugging. You should check it out if you're unhappy with an older version.

I've recently started toying with the Play Framework, a Rails-alike written in Java. The other Java web development tools I'd seen all primarily featured a suffocating bureaucracy, but this one pulled a number of tricks to appear almost as concise as Ruby. My take-away was that Java didn't have to be as repetitive as I'd thought, just that most of the Java libraries were written to encourage that. Maybe that's easier to make Java more productive than Ruby more efficient.

It seems likely that 37 Signal's primary purpose for doing these posts is to raise brand awareness.

A short tutorial, more interesting than the link's list of dependencies: http://wiki.github.com/bjpop/berp/using-berp

It seems like once a day there's a well-received front-page article on time management, avoid distractions, multitasking, and all that. He claims that his method is a "very efficient use of [his] time". I don't see this as any different.

"I'd imagine your customer felt more involved in the process and felt she had more ownership of the project because of it."

Either that or he wondered why he needed to tell you what to do every hour.