robmil

I wrote one years ago, but I suspect the schema has drifted quite far out of sync: https://github.com/robmiller/ruby-wpdb

Rory Stewart, the speaker here, is a slightly unconventional politician, having in 2002 walked across Afghanistan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Stewart

Vim ships with a command called `view` that will start it in read-only mode, and makes it very much a viewer — not just an editor.

…and Ruby has the PTY module which includes an `expect` method, which is in the same ballpark:

http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.2.0/libdoc/pty/rdoc/PTY.html

mailto: is the same principle and has been around since the 90s.

If you don't want to appear rich or a good robbery target, why buy a Ferrari in the first place? Plenty of other rich people somehow manage to get by without such extravagant displays of wealth.

I'm using MailMate[1], which is a brilliant client developed by the Danish coder Benny Kjaer Nielsen. It has too many neat features to name, but the one I absolutely couldn't live without is the ability to write emails in Markdown.

[1]: http://freron.com/

It's at such a fragile point, though. Monetising a previously entirely free service is risky at any time, but there's lots more risk than usual here (fickleness of audience, existence of competitors, fundamental simplicity of offering).

We've seen plenty of startups fail at this point before; is there anything to suggest Snapchat will beat the odds?

Isn't the problem that, while the house may cost $30,000, the land on which it would have to reside will inevitably cost far more than that?

Did pg really invent backend web development?

Mean, surely?

Ruby is gradually adding the ability to monkey patch without polluting the global scope via Refinements:

http://timelessrepo.com/refinements-in-ruby

You don't need to take the brain-space — use a password manager like 1Password or LastPass, plus a YubiKey for two-factor auth, and you can use unique passwords everywhere.

Such as doctors who are further on in their careers — it's actually rather a nice system, where those who have been lucky enough to be successful can help out those who need it, and all benefit.

Personal, with Hyperoptic. It's £60/month, but that includes a phone service.

Youth Defence are, in case anyone doesn't know and given that the defacement is now gone, a fairly unpleasant, far-right, anti-abortion group in Ireland:

http://www.conorfarrell.com/wordpress/social-issues/the-prob... http://www.politicalworld.org/showthread.php?14529-Youth-Def...

As a Londoner who recently got a 1Gbps up/down connection, I can't wait for this; the limiting factor in saturating my connection is now the rest of the 'net, rather than my own connection — which is actually oddly frustrating. Catch up already!

There's also the issue of repository size; both BitBucket and GitHub have (entirely reasonable) fair use policies that seem to limit repos' sizes to 1GB or so. Yes, Git sucks with big files, but sometimes it's necessary to exceed this total size.

Yes indeed; it's particularly odd to see in the eyes, where the milky blankness we're used to seeing in marble statues actually used to have a painted iris and pupil on them.

It's hard to know whether it's just a bias from a life spent associating unpainted statues with high culture, but I much prefer them unpainted.

As ever, profiting (and in this case, presumably profiting wildly) from copyright infringement is usually enough to earn the ire of most decent people. "Information wants to be free" is one thing; profiting entirely parasitically from the work of others is another.

The fine has both to be punitive and to serve as a deterrent to others — so to be punitive, it has to be relative to the income of the person/company being fined, and to be a deterrent it also needs to be severe. I don't see any reason it has to be similar to the direct cost of the damage caused.

In the UK, we call it "cut and shut": http://www.autotrader.co.uk/safety_and_security/cut_and_shut...

I'm not sure what this sub-Breivik material is doing on HN, but there we go.

SCSS actually makes this easier, given that you can have partials; it makes it easy to separate out layout and visual style and then combine them into a compressed stylesheet automatically.

It's happened quite a lot in the last few years, e.g. following the collapse of a black football player, Fabrice Muamba.[1]

You have to consider the different context at play here; the UK has never had a history of "fundamentalist" (for want of a better word) free speech like there is in the US. There are plenty of laws on the books, from sending malicious communications to inciting racial hatred, that prevent speech that would be entirely legal in the US.

I think that's something that's reflected (either a cause or an effect, I'm not sure which) in public opinion, too; there's certainly no widespread outcry here at these types of arrest. The only recent case I can think of where the ruling was against free speech and where public opinion was significantly against the ruling was the Robin Hood Airport tweet, where someone tweeted an obviously incredible threat to blow up an airport.[2]

[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/27/student-jailed-fabr...

[2]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344

Also available is the brilliant underscore-cli[1], which brings the functional programming of _.js to the command line.

There's an examples page, if you're struggling to see how it might be useful[2], but I find myself using 'extract', 'find', and 'pluck' on a daily basis.

[1]: https://github.com/ddopson/underscore-cli

[2]: https://github.com/ddopson/underscore-cli/blob/master/Exampl...

Is there any way to get around the fact that adding a new machine involves adding N*2 remotes? (That is, one remote on each of the current machines to represent the new one; and then on the new machine, one remote for each existing machine). This seems like it would be the sticking point with Git annex.

I was hoping this was going to be something where the files themselves were distributed so that they didn't take up space on everyone's machines, a la MogileFS[1], but alas.

This is always a point of pain for us: in our studios we work from a central file server, so our shiny iMacs with their 1TB drives all have about 90% capacity on them — but we don't have any easy way to pool all that extra capacity and use it even as overflow for our central fileserver.

The search continues...

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/mogilefs/

For anyone who's after a book: I've found Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto's "The Web Application Hacker's Handbook" to be invaluable.

I've long since abandoned trying to do programming tests when interviewing coders. Instead, I work through a problem with them in a sort of socratic method; I play devil's advocate to them while they flesh out how they'd approach the problem.

It's far more illuminating, and a far better reflection of their worth as a candidate, than their ability to go off into a room somewhere and work through a problem alone. I'm much more interested in someone who thinks well than who codes well (since the latter can easily be trained).