dogas

I think the author is missing the point. Some data just looks and acts beautifully in tabular / spreadsheet form, and if you have an app where that is the case, then by all means, use a tabular layout.

Does that mean you are just remaking a spreadsheet? Cmon. No. There is all sorts of added value for using a webapp that has a tabular data view. Maybe it's nicer to use. Maybe it comes with choices pre-filled out for you for certain columns. Maybe you provide user/team visibility, or sharing, or all sorts of other stuff that a simple spreadsheet could never provide standalone.

The point is, don't shoot yourself in the foot because 37signals forgot to put a tabular view of their data in. That means nothing. You should be thinking -- does a tabular view add value to your app? Yes? Great, then provide a tabular view for your users.

It took me > 60 seconds to figure out how to turn the page. My feedback is this: I hate it. When I'm using my ipad, every blog that has onswipe enabled leaves me frustrated. The UX feels slow, choppy, and unnecessary.

I don't understand what problem is trying to be solved. Browsing web pages on the ipad is a pleasant experience. I can scroll with my finger. With onswipe, I can no longer scroll with my finger. Why was that a problem? that's not a problem. It doesn't need solving. Please tell us explicitly the value you are trying to add, because I cannot see it.

I'd appreciate an invite as well! gammons at gmail. Thanks in advance.

Granted my above idea would sort of overlap you with railscasts or asciicasts, however the one issue is that thoses casts go out of date. If your site or another site focused on idioms only, and the best practice to use those idioms, peer-reviewed with comments and maybe versioning, then it would easily become a go-to reference for developers, that would always contain the most up-to-date method of implementing said idiom.

For instance, you want to implement authentication. Right now the best thing you can do is head to railscasts, see what the latest screencast is for authenticaiton. Ah, november 2010. Might as well be ancient history! Perhaps there's a newer, easier, more-accepted authentication gem out there. Or maybe not! You just don't know. So what's next, maybe check some blogs, github, do some date-specific searches on google, etc.

If you or someone else had a site that basically said, "here's the current accepted practice for implementing authentication, and here's why", then that saves so much time!

I think this is a great idea, but mainly because it provides a template for the best practices when implementing a particular item, like file uploading or infinite scrolling.

Given that, I'd love to see the code for these scaffolds directly on the site, with an explanation about what it's doing and why it's doing it that way, as well as the ability to comment on a particular implementation. I would think that type of community-driven peer-reviewed best practices for common feature implementations would be very valuable indeed.

I think the other article (http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201105) written about bitcoin failing is more detailed and contains potentially more plausible ways of how bitcoin can fail. The openwarr article refers to potential failures with the SHA256 backbone of bitcoins.

"With bitcoin, a single failure of the cryptosystem could result in an utter collapse of the entire financial network. Unlimited inflation. Fake transactions. People not getting paid when they thought they were getting paid. And the perpetrators of the attack would make so much money, so fast, that they could apply their fraud at Internet Scale on Internet Time.)"

IANA cryptography expert. Is this feasible in the way the author predicts? Could SHA256 be cracked quickly, a la MD5? My gut is that it won't be able to, but I can't back up my argument.

I'm just not buying it. Look at his example erb code, compared to haml. Which would you rather be typing day in and day out?

In terms of learnability, it takes 15 minutes to learn 95% of the haml featureset. So you spend 15 minutes, then presto, less repetitive stress injuries from hitting the shift key all the time when creating view templates. AND it's much easier to read, and it forces correct indentation. That's just a whole lot of win.

Also, haml and sass are not mutually exclusive, nor are they a pair. They are 2 different tools that work with 2 different things.

Regardless of how you feel about the article, the wikipedia link for Technological Singularity is just facinating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

This is incorrect. EBS is part of the issue, as well as intermittent connectivity failures for EC2 instances.

We're also seeing connectivity issues with our elastic load balancers.

While I absolutely agree with you, I believe you were looking to use the word precedent.

This seems like shoehorning a JavaScript-based web framework on top of an existing web framework, which looks like it adds a lot of work.

I almost threw myself out the window after seeing that hard-coded HTML in a JavaScript string. How is that maintainable or even nice to look at? It's not.

Am I crazy? What is the benefit of this? With a bit of customization rails could do this out of the box without a duplicate MVC arch.

I get the same results.

PipelineDeals (http://www.pipelinedeals.com) is looking for a full-time senior sysadmin to maintain our production stack, hosted on amazon ec2.

If load balancing, Mysql clustering, maintaining dozens of servers, working with a great group of smart guys, and having an endless supply of fun and interesting projects to work on sounds like your cup of tea, drop me a line.

grant@pipelinedealsco.com

PipelineDeals is 5 years old, bootstrapped, quite profitable, and steadily growing. We are based in Seattle and Philadelphia. Remote applicants no problem!

It's because android does not take advantage of the GPU to render the scrolling effect. The iPhone does. This was a design decision early on, and has caused plenty of ire.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914

Another reason this was a poor decision is that since the phone has to use the main CPU to render the scrolling effect, the battery drains very quickly while scrolling through a webpage. Scrolling around on webpages for around 20 minutes usually drains my battery 25% or more on my HTC EVO.

Rumor is that android will use the GPU for its UI in honeycomb, and looking at the tablet they were showing off, the effects and scrolling looked very fluid.

I seriously cannot wait for this book to arrive in the mail.

same here. And then, the page crashed.

That's all fine and good. Why do they need access to my google contacts?

I stand corrected, it does look like you can log in via openid.

However, I attempted to log in via google, and I was taken to this site called clickpass.com, which then asked for access to my google contacts. No thank you...

Is HN using some sort of 3rd party to accomplish openid logins with google? If so, why? It's very easy to implement google openid logins.

Leads to another discussion, should HN support openid login, via google or any other openid provider? That way I wouldn't have to remember yet another password.

If that were the case however, I have yet to see a mobile (iphone, android) app that does openid authentication nicely.

What would really be interesting is tying openid to a hardware identifier in a mobile phone...

As a web developer, I've wasted countless hours attempting to fix things that rendered poorly in IE 6,7, and 8.

I think back of all the hacks to fix the many many css bugs out there, and at least for me, dealing with and debugging older versions of IE has left a very bitter taste in my mouth.

A couple years ago it was even worse when IE8 was not out yet and there were zero developer tools to help try to understand how IE was rendering things.

And, the final kick in the pants is that IE7 and IE8 are still very pervasive and will not go away quickly, AND IE9 is for windows 7 and greater only, and thus the entire state of the art of modern web development will still be as follows: - design and test using modern browsers and tools like firebug - test in IE and realize there are rendering bugs everywhere - look longingly at the awesome strides that HTML5 and CSS3 are making, and realize that these awesome things are at least 5 years away from the mainstream, once IE9 and other modern browsers get more of a foothold.

If microsoft really wanted to push the state of web development, they would build IE9 for earlier versions of windows, OR retrofit the rendering engine of IE9 into earlier versions of IE.

Thanks microsoft, for finally giving a fuck. But fuck you for taking so long.

As much as I love the daily show (and the article was nice too), this does not belong on HN.

I stand corrected. The net effect is the same however.

This article has some incorrect facts.

"Members such as HTC have gone off and added lots of their own software and customizations to their Android devices without contributing any code back to the Alliance"

That's not true. HTC added sense UI on top of android. They are 100% allowed to do that. Android is licenced under the GPL, and HTC came along forked it, and added their own stuff to it, then released the source code (http://developer.htc.com/). The alliance is free to take whatever HTC does and merge it into the android core if they are so inclined.

I'm not buying that carriers and are gaining 100% control of the software. They are legally bound to release the source code. That would have never happened before the open software alliance and android, ergo, the OHA is not "in shambles", and is working as intended.

Carriers are free to charge for whatever services they want to provide. The market should take care of most of that. If sprint wants to charge $30 for tethering, but T-mobile will let you do it for free, then it's advantage T-mobile.

Id agree with that proposal if Philly taxes were lower than or on par with the national average, but the fact is philadelphians already shoulder one of the highest tax burdons in the US.

Glad to see some light shed on how business-unfriendly Philadelphia is, with their exorbitantly high gross receipts tax and city wage tax.

The city wage tax is responsible for the city's 40 year long population decline, and most people now do the reverse commute to neighboring counties, because no business owners in their right minds would begin or continue operations in philadelphia county. In fact, there's a good amount of large companies set up right across the city line. The net effect is you see shuttered store fronts and blight on nearly every street, regardless of how nice the neighborhood is.

And, of course, nobody in city hall understands this. The entire political scene in philly is entrenched, pay to play politics.

Don't get me wrong, if these taxes were making philly a great place to live, I wouldn't be bitching. If they had an amazing transportation system, the streets were nice and pothole free, the services provided were amazing, the homeless had a place to go, the police coverage was very effective, then sure, I'll pay for those great things. However absolutely none of that exists in philly, which makes living and starting a business in a neighboring county that much more attractive.

Sarcasm aside, is that really what motivates people in china to regularly pull off attacks like this?

It's pretty well documented that uhaul's online reservation system is 100% a scam. They take a $50 reservation fee, and never actually perform a reservation. Then when you go to pick up the truck that you "reserved", no such truck exists.

I've gotten bitten by this and we basically had to get our local news station involved to get my $50 back. Very shady company.

http://dontuseuhaul.com/

Agreed. They could become an amazing conduit for innovation if they switched their pricing model to being subscription-based by account, or per-user within the account.

Either way, it needs to be a flat fee. The per-minute price point sucks because because for webapps, they would need to pass that cost on directly to the customers, and it would be variable, and customers would never pay it.

Imagine if your application was some sort of dialer app, and you wanted to use twilio for transcription. To connect, users click on a number in your app, twilio dials you, then dials the contact you are calling. That's cool, but if you have a customer doing that 10 hours a day all day, there's no way they would pay $.06/minute for that. No way.

Twilio, you listening? Get a subscription-based pricing model now and watch as the flood gates open!

I have an evo. It's really a nice phone, however the battery life is indeed a major issue. However, better software will help fix the issue and make it a great phone.

Currently there's a couple of hackers attempting to open the NAND and make the filesystem read/write. This is a crucial step and needs help! Any low level guys or just general hackers should help the cause!

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=694034

Well that's fucked. Talk about a bait and switch for iPad 3G users. 2Gb is a joke.

What's also interesting is it's starting June 7, the same day as WWDC. I guess that means the next iphone is dropping that day. I can't see how the new iphone will be on multiple carriers, because I think any other carrier would win by offering an unlimited (or at least more attractive) data plan. ATT (for now) knows that their network sucks and they have the upper hand, which is why they are able to get away with offering such shitty plans.