mibbit

> There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.

If that's true, can programmers today do things they couldn't do 10 years ago? Can they program faster than they could 10 years ago due to all these innovations in languages and frameworks? I'd say no on both counts.

List 10 distinct careers where programming is a fundamental skill.

Perhaps if more programmers were working on a solution to cancer, instead of a social webapp to allow people to share photos of their dogs...

Not to mention the number of programmers who waste their time creating new languages and frameworks. Then they spend years rewriting everything in node.js or whatever the fashion of the day is.

I'd say there's more than enough programmers.

BASIC worked just fine as a first language for most people who grew up in the 80s.

But as I said earlier in the thread. We shouldn't teach them programming, or specific languages. We should teach them general problem solving.

Agree. Kids need to learn logical thought processes and problem solving. They don't need to know how to 'program'.

How do we even know 'programming' will be a relevant skill in 30 years time?

Buy every kid of 3 a tub of Lego bricks (Not a 'set'). That would go a long way to getting them thinking, problem solving, and building stuff.

And don't get me started on the "There aren't enough females in programming" BS rolleyes

FWIW, I would happily sign against this petition. I do not think teaching kids to 'program' at school so early is worthwhile. Programming is an extremely niche career, and anyone who is interested in it can easily learn.

You're likely to bore 90% because they're not interested in learning programming, and the other 10% will have learnt it all at home years ago and will also be bored.

</rant>

hint: You don't need 48gb ram to run a social bookmarking site.

In the example, the current hosting is $24k/yr. If that can be slashed to $2.4k/yr, you've saved $21.6k a year in hosting.

For $21.6k/yr I'd say it's worth a week or two re-architecting.

Yes, it's a different game if you're profitable and $21.6k is negligible, but if you're a startup you should be spending time to optimize things.

The other point is one of scaling. If you're paying $2k/mo to support 15k users, when you scale to 15m users, you could be paying $2m/mo unless you fix things early on.

Well, my own data point is Mibbit. And I can tell you I certainly don't spend that much on hosting.

Still, easy to criticize without knowing the full facts...

...then don't use magento.

What I said was that for the functionality pinboard provides, and the number of users using it, the hosting costs are extremely high.

If the hosting costs are high because of inefficient software, or bad architecture decisions, then those should be changed.

That's an amazing amount of money to be spending on hosting.

Should be spending nearer $200/mo total for hosting a service like this with that number of users IMHO.

tl;dr; = It's an array with a few utility methods, but can also hold 'infinite' things like "all the positive even numbers".

Not terribly useful imho and certainly doesn't live up to the hyped intro.

XHR was introduced many years after js was extremely popular. Also XHR doesn't add anything technically. The same thing can be achieved with dynamically adding <script> tags, or using an iframe, or a number of other methods.

The introduction of the buzzword 'ajax' certainly popularized what people had already been doing for years though.

Imagine a world where instead of writing books, authors spent forever needlessly inventing new languages to write them in.

BS. Syntax is exactly like fashionable clothes. It's irrelevant to how warm your clothes are.

The number of developer years wasted coming up with yet another programming language or syntax is staggering.

It's a solved problem. Pick an existing syntax and use it.

You don't see people endlessly coming up with new syntax for math do you. We've got one, it works well, so we use it.

I think the problem was they couldn't find enough people who wanted to use it for free, to bother trying to charge some of them with a premium package.

> Conde Nast buys reddit, and people predict a train wreck.

Has it not been a train wreck in terms of profitability? Or is Reddit making a few hundred million in profit nowadays?

The question is, does growing a loss making company make sense? Or should you solve the monetization issue first.

Reddit doesn't need more money, it needs to be brave, slap up some real advertising, and start generating real revenue.

A website that does 100m pageviews, but makes $10m/yr profit is better than one that does 500m pageviews but makes no profit.

From the other posted article it looks like it will make it easier for them to start selling it off...

"The move comes after Conde talked to several investors about selling off a chunk of the company as part of the spinout;"

> Also, anyone think 200mil is a bit cheap for reddit?

Are they profitable yet after 6 years? I'd say 200mil is ridiculously expensive.

But then we live in an age where a location based photo sharing app for dogs is probably worth a few billion to some investor.

"drag stickers to upvote" sounds like it would very very quickly get boring.

Also IMHO infinite scrollbars make for a terrible confusing and broken user experience.

Nice design apart from that though.

OK football was a bad choice. A better one would be learning about history. Some people enjoy learning history. Some don't.

Travel is something some people enjoy. Like playing football. Sure it's a skill, but it's one that not everyone will be good at, or enjoy.

Just to provide a counterpoint... If you don't enjoy, or want to travel, don't. Find something you do enjoy and do that instead.

It sounds like filling out TPS reports to me I'm afraid.

Some authors probably have tons of concurrent drafts of a novel they're writing. But I'll bet most have a single draft.

I'm afraid (to a fault), I am primarily a lone developer so this is the angle I come at these things from...

And there's a hell of a lot of bad developers out there.

As I say, I've worked in a team where branching was tried. It was a hinderance and slowed down development. I've never seen the point of branching for my own personal use.

Others may have different experiences, especially if they work on large teams.

The only reason I can see to "branch" is when you deploy code, make a copy of it in the repos, so that you can fix any bugs off it quickly.

A good developer can work with crappy tools and make great things.

Your last point is a good one, but it's sort of like arguing over gentoo/ubuntu/centOS. At the end of the day who really cares - none of them are windows, so they're all good enough.

Some people love working with branches. I don't.

It's down to how you work, who you're working with, and the processes you have in place.

My personal motto is just "don't break the build". It seems messy to me to create a ton of branches with broken stuff on them, having to remember the state of everything, what's been merged, what hasn't. I'd rather just write code to a single trunk. If I need to do big arch changes, I do them in bits that don't break the build.

Time is linear. So is my trunk. I develop linearly. I don't think in branches.

I can totally understand that other people see things a different way, and prefer to work like that. But I cannot. I tried. It was awful, painful and a waste of time.

So enough with the "This is better than this" mentality :)

The auto-update process should be far more secure than SSL certificates. They'll have keys in the current Chrome which it'll use to check any updates are legitimate before they get unpacked/installed.

Has IE switched to auto updating or anything?

I love the fact that Google can push changes out to Chrome users immediately. That's a massive win for everyone.