Hacker News Reader

clutchskion How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

I loved this talk on Toxo and its effects on freewill by the always incredible Robert Sapolsky.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sapolsky09/sapolsky09_index....

clutchskion What The Heck Is Responsive Web Design?

Anyone have any thoughts or opinions on the books listed in the presentation?

clutchskion John Carmack on the importance of Static Code Analysis

That sounds like a great tool. But your whole team might not use that editor or have it enabled or pay attention or whatever. If you run linters in continuous integration your style guide is applied on every commit.

clutchskion Making Coffeescript’s Whitespace More Significant

It's being discussed here (along with some alternate syntax ideas):

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1889

clutchskion You Can't Hack Photography

“You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”

- Charlie Parker

clutchskion "..best direction for evolving Java is to encourage a more functional style"

Using objects and a functional style aren't mutually exclusive. Use objects for encapsulation and abstraction and use a functional style for clarity, conciseness, expressiveness and less mutating state.

clutchskion Mythbusters: Stored Procedures Edition

I work at a company who's entire business was written in stored procedures and it has been a massive source of complexity and pain for us. Here are my issues with it:

- Most web languages have a wealth of tools for testing, introspection and instrumentation that don't exist or are hacks in PL/SQL. Unit tests, basic logging, aspects that log function execution time, posting to error tracking & app metrics services, etc.

- PL/SQL is not expressive or concise. String processing, in particular, is a nightmare. This means more code, buggier code & thus reduced developer happiness.

- At scale, developers need to be parsimonious with joins in the data layer, otherwise partitioning is impossible. This is technically possible in PL/SQL, but runs completely against the grain of SQL, so I can't imagine this actually happening in the real world. This is probably my company's biggest source of technical debt.

- SQLPlus doesn't return a non-zero error code when certain errors happen when installing PL/SQL, so release scripts have to install then assert the user_errror table is empty. This is just ugly.

clutchskion Matz (creator of Ruby) joins Heroku

It's very interesting that the creators of Python and Ruby are working on PaaS hosting solutions for their languages: Guido at Google App Engine and Matz at Heroku.

clutchskion Ultra minimal CSS grid utility

"Am I the only one that doesn't understand everyone's obsession with CSS grids"

I saw a great talk by Nicole Sullivan on CSS last week. She said that many sites lack a meaningful high-level abstraction for their visual layout, and end up with a tangled mess of float, padding & margin declarations on every element. This complexity, she said, is more clearly and concisely handled at a higher, site-wide level and suggested using a grid.

I've wasted an insane amount of time pushing one element four pixels this way and another element three pixels that way, so I'm definitely eager to try a grid on my next project.

Links to her slides (with some other great info) and her grid framework:

http://www.slideshare.net/stubbornella/our-best-practices-ar... https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/blob/master/core/grid/...

clutchskion Jeff Bezos commissioning a giant clock to last 10,000 years.

Alas, how we'll hollow out a mountain that'll stand for ages, so a rich man has a place for his wrist watch.

clutchskion GitHub for Mac

It's interesting to see such a killer web company start investing in native apps.

clutchskion Ask HN: What is the greatest book you've ever read?

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.

clutchskion Visualize your iPhone's location tracking map in 100% client-side Javascript

No. This is different. You can choose to upload to this visualizer or not.

clutchskion Ask HN: What are your side projects?

http://showbomber.com

A youtube/nyc concert listing mash-up site.

clutchskion Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

"Fox was a closed source company"

Wow. I didn't know such a thing existed. Was no open source software used? From databases to javascript libraries?

clutchskion Continuous Deployment

"At Etsy, they push out code about 25 times per day. It has worked out very well for Etsy and has led to [...] improved morale."

I am in the opposite situation at work. My company has scheduled, monolithic, all hands on deck releases once a month. It's an insane legacy policy from a time before our dev team had scripted releases and automated tests running against every commit in development. We've solved the technical issues of continuous deployment, but socially, we're stuck in the dark ages. It's a huge morale killer. We've had several great developers rally to change this policy and were stonewalled, and eventually left.

clutchskion Fast Iterations: How Napoleon Managed the French Army

War is usually business though.

clutchskion Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?

Release It.

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/mnee/release-it

clutchskion Zencoder joins the Heroku Add-on catalog

Yea. I just added the New Relic analytics add-on and was pretty astonished at how much valuable information you get with _zero_ configuration. Totally worth checking out.

clutchskion 1.0 Is The Loneliest Number

I love the design of the comments section. Is this a common wordpress theme on handrolled?

clutchskion Ask HN: What are your regrets?

(totally off-topic)

and plus a few more points for having the same as this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-PQbdmQRwc

clutchskion Pylons & repoze.bfg Merge

Yeah, I just got my company to go with Pylons 1.0. Wondering if I made a good choice.

clutchskion Ask HN: What version of Python do you use?

2.6

clutchskion Phono - JQuery plugin to create a phone in your browser

Aside from the cool plugin, the site design is great.

clutchskion Python 101: Introspection

Also check out the "see" module. A human readable version of dir():

http://github.com/inky/see

clutchskion Ubuntu.StackExchange.com is now AskUbuntu.com

Yeah, I always end up searching "my random problem karmic".

clutchskion The tricks behind nature documentaries

I was up in Churchill, Manitoba this past summer, home to many polar bears. Some locals told me stories about film makers who come to the North with their "the bears are all dying" narrative already set, and being very distraught when they couldn't be taken to a skinny polar bear, because they were, indeed, all fat at that time of year.

clutchskion Historians rethink key Soviet role in Japan defeat

In "People's History of the US", Howard Zinn adds another angle to this story. He suggests that the Americans, knowing an overwhelming Soviet invasion was imminent, used nuclear weapons to force the Japanese surrender to immediately. Then the US would be the only power negotiating the terms of surrender and could guarantee they'd be favourable to American economic interests.

Fascinating read, it's highly suggested.

clutchskion Feedback on my startup job aggregator

This might seem crazy, but I keep reading the url as "startup shiring". Too much LOTR, maybe.

clutchskion The History of Python: New-style Classes

"I do not like Guido's language design instincts"

I am curious. What don't you like?