obeattie

The "in multiple categories" part is pretty key here. What he's talking about is being able to combine the results from multiple queries, not simply returning more results in a page for a given query.

Or Raphaël

I think when I saw it the entire theatre burst out laughing…

Oh, I love this: "Smart Tags caused immediate and vocal backlash among webmasters and content creators who sill harbor quaint notions that they, not Microsoft, should be in control the content and advertising at the sites they create."

It's worth noting that Nokia have had self-updating operating systems (ie. over-the-air) for years now. Admittedly, I wouldn't expect it to get much of a note in this article, but it's definitely not something that nobody has pulled off yet.

This is part of the original script, out of my control.

All the extension actually does is load the original script when you visit HN.

Also replying to this even though I commented below (definitely relevant).

I made it into a Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/abjhkncpebiaepcp...

This is awesome.

So awesome in fact, that I really wanted this as a browser extension. I quickly packaged it for Chrome, and have published it on the Extension Gallery for all you hackers. Get it while it's fresh: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/abjhkncpebiaepcpeo...

Enjoy :)

P.S. The (very minimal) source is on GitHub, too: https://github.com/obeattie/HackemUp-extension

Interesting, front-page-worthy subject but holy god is that a badly written/"put-together" article.

I've always been fond of Slashdot's X-Fry, X-Bender and X-Leela headers and their random quotes.

As I remember, permissions on FB used to be exactly this back in the olden days of connect (you'd get a dialogue for each permission with an accept/reject, rather than a batched one). I can see why they removed that implementation because clicking "Allow" 5 times was obnoxious, but it's not exactly impossible for them to put a checkbox next to each one instead.

The short answer: no, from what I understand. A more thorough explanation was posted as part of a bit of a diatribe on Ruby development in general to HN a couple of weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059964

Undo is really the only thing I think it's missing too. Absolutely love the site… beautiful work, guys!

Take a look at London and you'll see it's not only dead-ends that get this treatment. I think there's more going on here… the roads I see showing up less prominently here are the kind that are difficult to drive down (I've been looking around my neighborhood, so speaking from experience)… however they're actually calculating this prominence, it's damned clever.

Edit: in fact, it can even be segments of roads. See https://img.skitch.com/20110104-d3k9f76gttjqbtsg94m85qb3nh.j... (that's all the same street if you zoom in)

I hate to say it… but you do realize this is an article by Fox news right? FOX.

As I posted on the article:

To me it feels a little like you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Just about everyone is familiar with the username/password paradigm, and honestly I've never seen anyone have a problem with it.

Usernames (or email addresses, as is common) and passwords are two distinct pieces of data, they are not one, so why should they be presented as one? Basically, the only advantage here is that you can hit space instead of tab as far as I can see it… and the time needed to read the helper text above the input field far outweighs the time novice users who click in each field will take to do so. This seems to me like a net loss, and source of "WTFery" for everyone. Separating username and password is not some senseless convention or relic from the past, it's the logical visual result of this authentication model.

(I disagree with those saying that OpenID is a great login experience; for me, it's by far the worst login experience I've seen. The example given [StackOverflow] caters to a very technical audience anyway, so it's a non-issue there, but for Joe Public it's just a constant source of confusion. This has been debated to death elsewhere, though.)

So, in summary:

"So how would I have approached my dudes problem? [8 step list follows]

How his friend tried to solve the provlem? [1 step list]

Following this line of thought to its logical conclusion, if everyone thought thing was such a bad thing, Hacker News would likely not even exist. Sharing knowledge is what the internet does best.

(Disclaimer: I'm not advocating never reading source code, I do it all the time for topics I truly want/need a deeper level of understanding on, but for the rest of the time…)

Not really too helpful that it only goes to 2006. It would be interesting to see how this looks with PEP 3003 in place (the moratorium on syntax changes) — maybe not much different, but maybe a lot different…

Similar to this one is also used on their 404 page: http://dropbox.com/404 — freaking awesome

Three words: only in Perl.

I'm still divided how I feel about these things. On the one hand, I actually find them very useful for staging and unstaging changes and visualizing branch/merge history, but on the other I worry for the people whose only interaction with git is via one of these GUI wrappers. To my mind, they keep you "too far away" from the gears of the version control system, and in this case a distributed version control system — a very important point to remember, as people who only use this and never a command line wouldn't have a hope in hell of using the distributed part of git — rebase a branch? merge in several heads? I'd like to see them try.

As for this particular one, though, I can't see it offers any advantage over GitX, apart from the "it's not a RubyCocoa app", which isn't really that great an advantage to my mind…

Wasn't this on HN a few weeks ago?

I imagine it would if Google Maps had National Rail data for the UK

A lot of the points are certainly valid, though somewhat debatable. The #1 one-up (Multitasking) is set to become an iPhone feature in about a month. As for no notifications on the lock screen, have the authors never received a push notification? Again though, local notifications are coming in iPhone OS 4.

It is amazing how well-designed Mac apps are in general — it's a shame the trend doesn't really seem to have translated quite as well to the iPhone. Don't get me wrong, some iPhone apps are amazingly well-designed — I guess it's probably down to most Mac apps (at least the ones I use) being produced by indie software houses that really care about experience, whereas most apps on Windows et al are generally developed by large corporations that don't care as much about their apps' aesthetic, and on the iPhone it's those big companies employing outside contractors that are never going to care as much.

Also, that may well be the longest sentence ever penned.

Absolutely beautiful UI, icon and website… but it doesn't do merge resolution. This is practically all I use opendiff (Filemerge) for, so it's useless for me. Add it, and my €29 are yours in a heartbeat — I tend to do lots of merges, and I find this is one of the very few cases where a proper desktop app can make the job so much easier than a command-line tool like vimdiff/emacs. And let's face it, Filemerge is pretty horrid… having to quit the entire app to move onto the next conflict and watch as it spews SIMBL errors over your terminal is hardly ideal.

Agree. This is just full of fail. Also, anyone could see this is likely to be an IO-bound operation, not a CPU-bound one. The smallest instance going should be just fine, and you should be able to parallelize the hell out of deleting this stuff.

I do think you should at least take a look at SQLAlchemy's code before saying it isn't clean. I can tell you that SA's code is exceptionally clean and easy-to-follow (so long as you're comfortable with the 'a-class-for-everything' way of working, which is what makes sense in their case).

As for messy code in Django, well that really isn't that fair. Sure, some of the things they do with imports is, frankly, scary, but there are very few cases where this becomes a problem, and when it does, there is always a workaround. Where, in my opinion, Django's ORM falls short is it doesn't really like you to think you're interacting with a database… many things that would be very useful just aren't there (swapping out ORM-generated SQL with a hand-written counterpart, for instance, is next to impossible). The typical solution to this seems to be "well, you can get a database cursor and do as you please"… but there comes a point where this just isn't good enough.

However, if Django's ORM just can't cut it for you on a project for whatever reason, it really isn't that hard to ditch and switch to something else (like SA). Yes, you will lose the admin, and you'll lose the authentication and session components (though these are actually easier than one might assume to get working under another ORM with their 'backends' concept), but you still have an amazing framework without these components.

Reading this article seems, to me, like the guy has taken one brief look at Django's internals before going on to condemn them as ugly in this post. And that's really not cool.

"The archaic C language". Alrighty.