Hacker News Reader

barrydahlbergon British minister hails NZ military's Power Point might

Nice to know where my tax dollars are going...

barrydahlbergon Ask HN: How do I contact pg or an administrator about Hacker News?

I think you just did...

barrydahlbergon Thoughts on Webmatrix (Microsoft's simple website development tool)

I haven't used Scala but I certainly rate C# over Java at this point in time.

barrydahlbergon Poll: Which web browser do you use?

I guess I'll just reuse this comment from another thread...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2091539

barrydahlbergon Thoughts on Webmatrix (Microsoft's simple website development tool)

You get to use C# which really is rather a pleasant language and is a huge win over PHP. The Web.config has been shrunk a huge amount in recent versions of .Net as more sensible defaults for the new frameworks get built in.

barrydahlbergon Ask HN: How to handle one (of several) co-founders providing seed funding?

6%?

barrydahlbergon It's a polyglot world after all - Lift adding support for JRuby

Lift is hands-down the best web framework available today...

Can someone a little less involved please comment on the validity of this and the claims that follow it? Is it something I should be checking out?

barrydahlbergon Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?

Isn't this something HN's analytics should be answering?

barrydahlbergon DotCloud (YC S10) Mix and Match Cloud Platform Launches

Yes, if the host is good. I love .Net but I'm continually jealous of things like Heroku which really support a fast and nimble development approach favouring smart developers rather than heavyweight process. Azure isn't quite there.

Azure's addon options are pretty limited too.

barrydahlbergon DotCloud (YC S10) Mix and Match Cloud Platform Launches

How's the Mono / .Net support coming along?

barrydahlbergon Why old people make better entrepreneurs than young ones

That thought was your next mistake!

barrydahlbergon Offer HN: I'll answer your javascript questions

Have you tried CoffeeScript and what are your thoughts on it? It's clearly not 'done' yet but I found it really helps clean up my scripts, reduce the amount of typing and avoid a lot of tricky JavaScript mistakes.

barrydahlbergon Offer HN: I'll answer your javascript questions

Python is generally considered to be the stronger language and certainly the one I would recommend.

barrydahlbergon The secret to fighting poverty is New Zealand

If anything I would expect a highly skilled worker (doctor, programmer etc) to be taking an income loss coming here.

barrydahlbergon Learn Clojure

I recently started learning and it's quite a shock to the system coming from certain other main stream environments.

I found the best route for me was Emacs, the Emacs Starter Kit and Leiningen. Everything is evolving so quickly that I didn't find a decent set of instructions for setting up Emacs manually that worked for me.

The learning curve is bit steep but the tools really are great once you get the hang of it.

barrydahlbergon Ask HN: Getting back to software development at mid 30s

I would be wary of someone with only 2 years experience and a 5 year absence. In short, you need some way to prove your technical capability to counter that.

Open source work, blogs etc are commonly suggested as easy ways to do this. Don't worry about a big portfolio and power brand name, just being able to send a link with your application and say here's an interesting bit of code I wrote will put you way ahead of most applications. For example I recently wrote around 1,000 lines of code to do some experiments with Node.js, Socket.IO and Coffee Script. That would be perfect.

It also gives you a great talking point for when you do get an interview.

barrydahlbergon Ask HN: Can Startups Do Well AND Good?

The most recent example that comes to mind is Duck Duck Go:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/help-me-start-a-...

In this case the founder is obviously not critically in need of money, it still helps though.

barrydahlbergon Heroku: Announcing PG Backups

Did anyone else immediately think "I can download a backup of Paul Graham? AWESOME!"?

barrydahlbergon Ask HN: Seriously, what's wrong with HTML tables?

It's a tool and just like a hammer, a little experience will tell you when to use it and when not too. I personally think using them for forms is a reasonable case if it suits you, I prefer the lighter markup I get with simple divs in forms though. You will find eventually that the rigid structure of tables gets a little annoying.

In the past we've seen huge messes of tables nested upon tables which creates bloated, inflexible HTML. This is usually done by people who would create huge bloated messes of divs anyway. What you should really be focusing on is creating clean, valid markup written with a sense of style and care.

CSS frameworks like Blueprint can make getting started with layout a lot easier for you if don't mind having an argument about the abuse of CSS as well.

barrydahlbergon The MailChimp API accepts serialized LOLCODE?

Additional links:

An example: http://www.mailchimp.com/api/downloads/mc_lolclient.lol

MailChimp's interpreter: http://code.google.com/p/mailchimp-lolcode-interpreter/

barrydahlbergon The MailChimp API accepts serialized LOLCODE?

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried it, yet.

barrydahlbergon Google Bowls a Googly - Possible invalidation of Oracle's patents

And for those of us NOT in the US a splitter is...

barrydahlbergon The Evolution Of C#

Thanks for the tip, I'll check them out.

barrydahlbergon The Evolution Of C#

That makes sense and sounds a lot simpler than how I was trying to read the samples at first.

barrydahlbergon The Evolution Of C#

I should have but I haven't had time to look into it and understand it yet, maybe a future post. There's a lot of stuff in the framework for parallel programming now, time to figure out which is still relevant.

barrydahlbergon The Evolution Of C#

Hi HN, I wrote this post because I wanted to point out how far C# has come from it's V1 and suggest you have another look if you haven't seen it since then. Sometimes its reputation isn't deserved, though sometimes it is.

I'd really appreciate any feedback on my writing style, presentation etc. The site around it is obviously still a big work in progress so don't worry too much about the design!

barrydahlbergon Solving a fun little geometry problem in C# and F#

Took me a moment to realise the code is so weird because he's doing this in AutoCAD. My brain blocked out most of the site and went straight to the middle of the code.

barrydahlbergon Simple bouncing ball puzzle, with $50 prize

Hah! Let's hope it wasn't the little boy on his home page then... http://sam.ai.ki/

barrydahlbergon Simple bouncing ball puzzle, with $50 prize

The little boy picks it up and throws it again?

barrydahlbergon Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

That's why it's nice that everything you need is free including web, Windows and even SQL. http://www.microsoft.com/express/

I think the best argument here is regard students running Macs at home which I have no reasonable counter to.