mileszs

Nice. I love the vim keybindings and markdown support.

I was unable to bring up the help modal box when pressing '?'. The only way to get to it was to use my mouse to press the question mark link at the top right.

This seems an odd place for this sort of feedback, but I saw no other avenue.

The parent article makes clear that they will be on the analytics team because of Trendly, sir. I promise it's a quick and easy read.

Smart, greedy people are never going to let emotion get in the way of making money. That's just the way it is. We're never going to return to an era where a significant amount of people make investment choices with a significant basis on how they feel about the company. It's not a rational way to meet the end goal of making money.

Sad, though, yes.

I don't think it's hand-wavy. I think you're upset about something else related to Cassandra that perhaps you read recently -- not tlack's comment. Suggesting it would make more sense to compare an in-memory data store to another in-memory data store would be a more interesting comparison seems a perfectly valid suggestion.

"This is so silly. Wait -- hand wavy -- that's right, nothing can be compared to Cassandra but pure love itself."

C'mon, man. That doesn't further discussion. That sort of statement serves only to incite anger.

search.twitter.com is still a separate app all-together (purchased from I-don't-remember-whom). Twitter officially intends to roll it into the rest of their internal apps and API at some point. You're right, it is inconsistent, but at least there is some sort of excuse.

Finally? This was posted in September of 2007. You can see the section under "The Rails Way" used in a large number of plugins and gems, as well. The pattern is no secret.

That said, it is a nice article. It's just not new.

There's been a fairly large refactoring/re-architecting for Rails 3, including, unless I'm mistaken, avoiding alias_method_chain.

(I want to say that this whole pattern or ruby-ism is now being avoided in Rails proper, but that would only be hearsay based on something I think I read many months ago. ... Yehuda?)

I don't understand what about it is 'fake'. Could you elaborate?

Do you mean that you believe the seller colluded with the buyer in some way? Some other shady situation?

Interesting metaphor. At least speed bumps often increase the safety of some group of people. This sort of speed bump does nothing but infuriate those who pass over it, and perhaps inflate the ego of the owner of the bump -- or, in this case, crash the bump, er, blog.

I imagine this to be a fairly significant caveat, though perhaps that's more theory than practice. Am I wrong? :

"Note however that it is a requirement of the Maps API Terms of Service that you use the Geocoding Web Service in conjunction with a Google map. This means that when it comes time to use cached geocoder results in an application, the application must display the results or any data derived from them on a map generated using one of the Google Maps APIs or Google Earth API."

Oops, that's me. I'll get that app tweeting again. Sorry.

As I understand it, the iPhone is capable of sending MMS, but AT&T is afraid that a few million iPhone users suddenly having that ability will burn their infrastructure to the ground in a day[1]. So, they are presumably doing their best to strengthen their infrastructure before making the feature available.

I believe several non-U.S. carriers with iPhone users have it enabled already (on the iPhone), but I do not have first hand knowledge that this is true.

[1] I'm exaggerating for effect, of course.

I probably use the plugin 'tComment' more than any other plugin. It toggles code comments, based on filetype. I often try to toggle comments by hitting 'gc' on machines that don't have that ability. Very simple, but has quickly become indispensable.

I keep a list of links to things related to Vim, and the list of plugins I use is at the very bottom, if you're interested: http://mileszs.github.com/

A large number of people have iPhones, relative to other phones on which web browsing is usable. Also, the iPhone is the first phone worth using for browsing the web, for many people. It's nothing about which to be upset. It is simply a way for the author to easily convey the goal of the article in the title.

I don't recall see this functionality in my one previous 'smart phone' (a Treo 650), but perhaps my memory has failed me.

This argument has been hashed, re-hashed, and re-re-hashed on here a million times -- well, variants of it, at least, such as "HN uses a table-based layout, which offends me".

You can find some here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...

In particular, pg responds somewhere in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100460). I might be carefully building a straw man here, as you are speaking to valid xhtml, not necessarily semantic xhtml. I hope you'll forgive me. I think the two topics are related, and that some of the arguments overlap.

The bottom line seems to be "Who cares? It works fine."

Aside from Slicehost[1], has anyone found a host to be happy to let you run a Tor relay? I'm thinking of emailing the prgmr.com gentleman (who I know is around here somewhere... hi!).

[1] A couple articles about running Tor on your Slicehost slice: http://www.tequilafish.com/2009/06/21/slicehost-setting-up-a... http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3622

For those worried about running a relay and dealing with people abusing you as an exit node, here is a good article from Tor about minimizing abuse of your node: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tips-running-exit-node-mini...

One tip that you should immediately be aware of is that you don't _have_ to run an exit node. You can force your relay to act only as an intermediary, in which case you almost certainly are not going to get any calls about abuse (because you won't exist in any server logs).

What is the chance they are doing anything new in a 100 level CS course? Interesting, perhaps, but new? Couldn't one find answers to most of the problems in 4+ languages with a single search? I understand the argument, to an extent, that the student is simply lowering the barrier to cheating, but isn't it he really just lowering it from just above the knee to just below the knee?

It was easy to cheat 8 years ago (from what I remember), it's surely easier to cheat now, and it's certainly not because this one kid stood up for something in which he believes.

I use a function that looks like this:

  find $1 -name $2 | xargs egrep -nC3 $3 | less

So, say:

  find ./ -name "*.rb" | xargs egrep -nC3 'gsub' | less

You'll get the matching line, three lines before and three lines after, as well as file name and line numbers.

From their 'Help' section:

---

Is it possible to host my own copy of Tracker?

We do not offer a self-installed version of Tracker. However, a dedicated instance may be possible for organizations with a large number of users. Please email us at tracker@pivotallabs.com for details and pricing information.

---

I really, really like PT for agile or semi-agile or aspiring-agile teams.

In defense of 'release early and often', the 'often' part is more difficult (from what I understand) on the iPhone. Each update must go through the approval process. That takes time -- time during which you are getting no feedback about the updates you've made. "Release early and often" is a lot easier when you're talking about a web app on server that you control.

I do agree that the 37s post seems contradictory in light of that.

I've met a couple of the SproutBox founders at Indianapolis' Startup Weekend last year. I can't speak to their business savvy, but they were nice, and enthusiastic about their business. In my opinion, they would be a lot of fun with which to work. Indiana University is in Bloomington. IU has a top 20 business school (undergrad and grad, according to BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/). SproutBox intend to take advantage of (in a good way) the dreamers in the business program and the low cost of living. Indianapolis is only 1 - 1.5 hours to the north.

Incidentally, another top 20 business program resides in northern Indiana at Notre Dame.

Also worth mentioning, before taking any applications, SproutBox developed a couple apps for themselves (http://sproutbox.com/sprouts).

I think he is likely talking about this one:

http://devblog.rorcraft.com/2008/8/13/the-facebook-autocompl...

From their "How It Works" section:

    "A dyno is roughly equivalent to a Mongrel, except that 
    dynos are spread across multiple servers, so 
    performance in most cases is greater.

    4 dynos are equivalent to the compute power of one 
    CPU-core on other systems."

A dyno is different from the common RAM+Bandwidth VPS slice, so it's difficult to make a comparison. (I'm going to do it anyway...) I would say that a 4 dyno machine, with everything else dialed down to the lowest value (so, free), you're roughly equivalent to Slicehost's 1024MB slice. (That's roughly $108/mo at Heroku, $70 at Slicehost.) You've got more storage space (so, the db can grow) on Slicehost, but you have to setup everything yourself, and adding power will take longer than a couple seconds.

It should be stressed that Heroku makes everything really simple. You can save a lot of time and energy if you've got the money to get started with Heroku up front.

I like setting up and tweaking a VPS, though. I haven't seen any benchmarks to show that Heroku with 4 dynos performs as well or better than 4 mongrels, or Apache + mod_rails on the 1024 slice, etc.

I think it's a bit expensive, but, man, it's really cool, too.

It is my opinion that the limit forces those who would be verbose to get to the point. It's nearly mandating conciseness. I tend to be very 'wordy', so I think it's a good thing for me (or, for those who would follow me). Far from horrible, it's actually a plus for Twitter, I think.

This link is only interesting when coupled with your comment. I clicked the comments link with a head full of steam, itching to justify flagging the post due to lack of content or some other such excuse.

The almost-a-cliche-easy example is Twitter: I have never been able to explain Twitter sufficiently to those who do not follow web tech closely. Suddenly, Oprah is banging out tweets in capital letters, and Shaq is correcting her 'netiquette. What happened?

For the record, you're preaching to the choir. I'm a Ruby/Rails developer, and I'm quite happy about it.

I was only intending to comment that titling an article "Rails won" without qualification, or without clearly making a decisive argument, lacks substance, in my opinion. It's an anecdotal piece with which I sympathize, but that perhaps would have been better titled "Rails won again", which would elicit thoughts of Rails being chosen over other frameworks (and CMSs, in this case) in a particular project, as opposed to Rails winning some epic arms race.

I probably just should've kept the last line of that last comment to myself. :-)

Wildcard certs are more expensive because they cover any and all subdomains. (The perception is that they "do" more, so the price is hiked. I have not the expertise to know whether the issuer actually has to do more, or it's just a bit of a racket.)

The other difference is High-Assurance certs, which involve someone from (for example) GoDaddy calling your business-use land-line phone (which is required) and verifying some information, if I recall correctly.

Other than that, as far as I can tell, you're paying for the opportunity to put some silly seal on your site, bearing the name of whatever company of theoretically good repute, to make your users feel safe from the conniving, thieving, drooling hackers lurking behind each form button.

The URL to which the original poster points is to a wildcard certificate. GoDaddy's cheapest wildcard offering is $199.99/yr. https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/ssl/ssl.asp

I think the article reads much differently if you picture the author saying, "Rails won in this particular instance, for me/us." Perhaps that is not what the author intended, but that is how I read it. It's much less polarizing that way.

I do agree that it lacks substance.

They switched to OOo in 2005, and to Firefox and Thunderbird a year later, according to this article: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iU4Lq7tOR_WVOJLZ3IeRaIH0...

You were right. They moved their 'Human Resource' application to the browser at some point, as well. See this article: http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-gendarmerie-saves-millions-with-o...