madhouse

There is no single code or project that I could name. Not because there are no open source codes or projects that weren't worth reading, because there are thousands of them. I couldn't name any, because people are different, and what one finds good and worthy code, the other finds rubbish - thus, there can be no single project that would make every reader happy.

On the other hand, if you look at the question in a different way, you could say that the code (be it open source or not) every programmer must read before his end, is his own. As one looks at his life in one's deathbed, so should a programmer look at his code.

Hardware: Your average desktop PC OS: Emacs Boot loader: Debian stable

Languages: C, Python, JavaScript, Perl (and various others from time to time)

Other tools: git (along with git-flow and git-annex), zsh, gnus (mail reading; emacs), erc (irc; emacs), empathy (jabber), screen (on my various servers), kvm + virt-manager to manage my virtual machines

Frequently used programs from within my own software: glib, django, zeromq, mongodb, flask, jQuery, TAP::Harness

FireBug is an excellent tool, that is not available for Chrome yet (at least, not with all its bells and whistles, lasts I checked). That's the single reason I still have Firefox installed.

Probably the lack of a single sound format that is supported by all popular browsers on most platforms. And because animations can be easily done with JS/CSS, and that doesn't require all that much bandwidth or space, while good quality sound is considerably larger.

There are exceptions, of course. Try imagining Twitter, Facebook or any of the other popular (not-such-geeky) sites without javascript, or any client-side scripting for that matter.

(FYI, HN has an onclick='return vote(this)' on votes, so it does use javascript too - although, very little, and it's optional)

Whichever your friends or family know best (or lacking that, whichever you find the most readable / enjoyable documentation for).

You can't really go wrong with either of the mainstream languages, so I'd advise you to have a look at the documentation or tutorials for some of them, and choose one that you like best.

It also depends a lot on what you want to write, as certain languages are better for one task than the other. I wouldn't write a web app in C, for example, nor would I write an operating system kernel in python.

The problem is, that with every new development comes new risks. We could go back to living in caves and bashing animals with clubs, and cooking them over fire we set with a bunch of rocks and wood. That would be a lot safer than cycling to work each day, with nuclear missiles looming over our heads, not to mention the countless other risks one takes just by stepping outside of the door.

It's the same with the web. You could take away the scripting, but you'd end up with technology that would be as useless for today's man as a hunt & gather culture of a caveman would be. We've grown to depend on it, just like we depend on cars (that pollute the air, and are the cause of many a deaths - more than client-side code execution, I'd think) and nuclear power.

With technology, comes a risk, and I don't think there's a way around it.

I would recommend PhantomJS: http://www.phantomjs.org/

It's not a crawler per-se, but you can fairly easily build one based on it. It supports everything that modern browsers do - it's a headless WebKit, driven from JavaScript, after all.

As mentioned before, the load time is awful. Furthermore, the white text with a glow effect hurts my eyes: it's very hard to read.

The logo is cool, though. Can't say much more at this time, since all that there is is a signup form.

If you'd 'fix' javascript, you'd still have to wait for browsers to support the new version, and they would have to support the old js until there are pages out there that use it. Which means pretty much forever.

At which point, the fixed language becomes irrelevant, as it cannot replace the older one.

I respectfully disagree. Web browsing is just fine in Emacs (ezbl - uzbl embedded inside a slightly patched emacs - is sweet). And the best and most scalable mail reader I have ever encounter just happens to be Gnus, which is also an Emacs application. I have found no other program that would allow me to work as efficiently as I do with Gnus (and I'm just a novice Gnus user, with a lot to learn about it still).

I have Gnus set up to pop up a desktop notification when important mails arrive (either in my inbox, or on any of the various lists I am on) - but only when it's deemed important by my filters. There's no status area flashing, there's a desktop notification, like in every other email client out there.

I believe the same could be done for Twitter aswell. I know I've done similar things with my IRC client (ERC rocks too, by the way), I can't see why I couldn't do it with Twitter. It's also possible to just run it in a buffer in the background, with no notifications at all.

Emacs works very well with real-time stuff too. And being written in lisp, it's very easy to customize how it behaves to suit one's needs.

That depends: if they will need to write C code, then of course, they need to know the language. But if all they're gonna do is write Haskell, Erlang or Lisp, what's the point of knowing C?

I do know a lot of people, who are excellent programmers, but their C is read-only at best, because their language of choice has been something else.

I see nothing wrong with that. A good programmer usually doesn't think in a language context anyway, he translates his thoughts to a language, yes, but when designing, he thinks a few levels above the language. Thus, the lack of C knowledge does not, in my opinion, does not mean one's insufficiently skilled. Nor does good knowledge of C mean one's a good programmer.

I've also met with people who were excellent C coders: they could code down whatever they were told to, blazingly fast, using every trick the language had to offer. But they couldn't design their way out of a paper bag, because they lacked vision: they could only think in C, and not beyond that. They couldn't see the bigger picture.

There's flot: http://code.google.com/p/flot/ Raphael.js (along with gRaphael): http://raphaeljs.com/ jqPlot: http://www.jqplot.com/

I'd recommend flot out of these three, had the best experience with that one so far.

Even a short "about" would've been nice, even if it's closed. Knowing that it's a decision making site already tells a lot more than one could figure out just by visiting it.

There's a market for all three. Personally, I'd advise you to look at a few code examples, and pick the one that 'looks' best.

If you need to, have a quick glance at a few tutorials, and decide which one you like best.

You can't misfire all that much.

(Though, I would advise against PHP, but that's just my personal hatred towards the php language and its interpreter, and is a very subjective opinion)

What exactly is the site supposed to be about?

I'm not going to sign up to any beta on a site that tells me nothing about itself.

No, "Ask, Decide, Repeat" doesn't tell me much. Also, the logo being an image, I couldn't even copy & paste the slogan from there.

Which libraries did you check, that did not fulfill your requirements, and why?

I've used both gRaphael (http://g.raphaeljs.com/) and jqPlot (http://www.jqplot.com/) before, and found both to be at least decent (though, I had a few issues with jqPlot, but switching to gRaphael solved those).

External mouse + keyboard helps a lot. Though, I hardly ever use a mouse, so I only have to carry an extra keyboard. Thankfully, my keyboard is small, and isn't that much of a problem to carry it around.

I'm in a similar position, except that instead of adapting my keyboard-use to the average keyboard, where the enter key is out of the normal finger path, I bought a TypeMatrix 2030, where the enter is in the middle: I can reach it without moving my hands, easily.

Reading your post on the other hand, woke up my urge to switch back to my old window manager. ratpoison, here I come! (Though, I do wonder if I even need a window manager.. I could just control everything from Emacs)

Yes. ezbl (emacs + uzbl) works pretty darn well without a mouse.

(I DO have a mouse, and use it when absolutely needed, but thankfully, such cases are fairly rare)

None. I'm not a pointy type, I much prefer navigating with the keyboard.

I have a better solution, which saves me from crashes, and allows me to use the browser of my choice: I don't have flash.

Problem solved!

Last time I met him (though, it was a couple of years ago), he smelled like any other ordinary human being.

A random suit after 8 hours of office work is far worse.

Plenty of mailing lists here (including some high traffic ones like LKML). I use OfflineIMAP to sync my mail.

This results in pretty fast gnus startup times. But then, I only start it up every once in a while when I have to reboot due to a kernel upgrade.

GPLv3, mostly. I've used the Apache License and 3-clause BSD aswell in the past, when those fit my needs better.

I'm using Gnus, problem solved. Only 4 separate mailboxes, but it could scale to any number of sources, without trouble. The UI is the same as the rest of my environment, fits in perfectly, it's flexible beyond imagination, and tailored to my specific needs.

I used to use the gmail web UI before, but due to the problems you yourself outlined, I switched to something much more powerful, something much more flexible.

I love Gnus, now that I managed to set it up after more than 10 years of using Emacs, and resisting the temptation to finally give gnus a real try.

An IPv6 address.

shell, perl & python, whichever fits the particular task best.

Cron jobs & similar are usually shell, various helper scripts are perl, and my deployment system is written in python.

What OS? Client side, or server side?

There's a billion ways to tag email, but which of these are available highly depends on your setup.

From what I've seen, this is common, and to an extent, understandable too: a company does not want its employees to use the knowledge they gained at work in (profitable) side-projects.

Your best bet is to talk with the company and get a written exception, like they gave for open source.

Though, chances are, if both the company and your side-project is in the web development business, they won't make an exception, since the side-project can be seen as a competing product.