tophat02

But one of Joel's points is that, by the time you get around to rewriting something, you usually aren't dealing with the same programmers.

If this isn't the case, and you have the same core team available, then I agree, it is sometimes better to rewrite. But these days, refactoring techniques and testing methodologies are much more concretely defined and practice, so it still may be possible to essentially "rewrite" the code without having an X year shipping delay.

Yes, the article is quite conservative, but on the upside, you can clearly tell he's talking not only to the people listening to his speech today, but also directly to readers who may be revisiting this speech in 2032.

As you know, we seem to have a fascination with reading long ago predictions of the "future" that is now today... and we really like to laugh at them.

I believe his tone is one of "I know you're reading this in 2032, so I'm going to try my best not to be silly."

What's going on with Hackety Hack anyway? The website still says March 7th, which has, obviously, come and gone.

He's obviously free to release it whenever he feels like it (or never), I'm just curious.

Of course they're proud. They realize they're on the right side: the first amendment's side.

You do NOT have the right to squelch speech simply because it's unpopular, controversial, or distasteful. If Facebook pulls these groups, it should be because of market pressure (advertising boycots and so forth), not some government mandate. That's going in the WRONG direction. What's so hard to understand about that?

You have $3000 speaker cables suspended from the floor on little plastic feet, don't you? :)

Isn't conformity sometimes appropriate? It seems to me that the trick is knowing when to follow the rules (including your own) and when to bend or break them.

Constantly railing against conformity sounds like a teenager attempting to be "edgy".

I made an app called "Recall". It's a simple Simon-style game. I made it not to make millions, but as sort of a full-stack "hello world", from design to implementation to submitting to the app store to the first update.

I'll probably do some more stuff with it, but I'm already designing my second app.

Shouldn't they just buy Twitter?

It's like APL all over again.

It's actually not that bad. I updated my little game "Recall" coughshameless plugcough and it only took a few days from submitting the new binary to getting it pushed through.

True, but you could also look at it this way: perhaps these 37signals articles are helping to illuminate WHY some of these things survive.

After all, success criteria in iPhone apps (or apps in general) may not be objectively quantifiable, but I'm sure there are plenty of do's and don'ts that will help.

Short version: There's no traffic jam on the extra mile.

That line doesn't appear to go there.

At some point (I'd say in less than five years) we won't have to worry much about this situation as I envision having 2-4GB of RAM on these devices along with perhaps 100s of GBs of FLASH.

But for now, iPhone applications should implement their own paging system by creating an architecture that allows them to listen to the "applicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning:" message and effectively page parts of itself out of memory and in to flash until needed again.

Are you essentially writing your own MMU? Yes! But that's ok, it's a temporary solution to a temporary problem.

Didn't I just see something a month or so ago about how scientists now think Alcubierre drive IS impossible...

Ahh yes: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23292/

Can I just say: I LOVE posterous. Excellent startup, YC!

Oops! I told you I didn't know the area!

As someone not familiar with the Boston area, I found I really missed having a "you are here" indicator when it came time to select my destination. I became disoriented and worried about traveling too far, even though I "knew" I was just playing with a web mockup.

Ahhh... an unfortunate - but all too common - collection of personality traits. I propose that those people should be given lots of power but not be promoted to package maintainers. Of course, it's open source, so it's not like we can decree this or anything, but it sure would make many open source projects easier to contribute to.

Anything that moves power away from Ulrich Drepper and back to the community is a good thing. He is a poison to the open source community, and causes so much bad PR I'm amazed that he's still around.

Why is he still around, anyway?

Man I can't wait until we can put a bunch of stem cells on scaffolding and reactivate certain embryogenic pathways to grow organs. Maybe even faces, though what you'd get is a baby face.

I really love hearing advice from people who just "took the risk" and quit their job. It's one thing to take a risk, but what I want to know is how they could actually DO it and still, you know, pay the mortgage and pay for food and such.

Is it just that they accumulate massive savings for just this purpose, or what?

I think the question posed by the author is misfocused. The right question, in my mind, is:

Will there ever be "one paradigm to rule them all"?

My guess is no. This type of simple, trivial problem screams for a structural, imperative approach. Other problems call clearly for mutable objects, others for declarative DSLs, and yet others for a pure functional approach.

Functional purists will tell you that mutable state is ALWAYS bad. OOP purists will tell you that straight-structured programming is ALWAYS bad, and structural purists will tell you that hand-optimized but difficult to understand assembly code is ALWAYS bad.

They're all wrong, of course. Pick the right tool for the right job. Now, it's true that not all programmers are skilled enough to do that, but I consider that to be a project management/source control problem, not a language problem.

In what I would call "economical security", you're right, it's absolutely relevant.

However, we seem to be entering an age of "ethical security". As computers and software become more powerful and complex, people expect every system that is "secure" to be "absolutely secure", at least up to some fuzzy isomorphism inside different "security classes".

What this leads to is thinking like: "if your website offers to protect my account with a password, it should be as secure as the most secure example of password-protected systems (passwords stored as hashes, strong password requirements, and so on)."

You can see this as well in the emerging (and somewhat stagnant) market of commodity biometric security devices, such as off-the-shelf fingerprint readers. There was a lot of talk about how they could be defeated by lifting your prints, taking impressions of your hand, and so forth. Essentially, the argument was "if you're going to offer biometric security, I expect it to be on par with NSA-class biometric security".

I'm not going to make a judgment as to whether this is the right approach, or not, but I suspect it is beneficial in the long run, even if unesseccarily expensive and overkill at any one point or example.

One way to read it is about a guy who does whatever the hell he wants to do. Reading about such people, I imagine, has a motivating effect on highly ambitious, self-driven people.

I doubt Cuban is a serious objectivist or anything, but I don't doubt that the book can be motivating.

Well I do think 7 is a step in the right direction, but you're right, this dialog is horrible.

You know what I'd like to see? An "Engineering Windows 7" blog entry that explained exactly why Microsoft found it necessary to include this abomination in their flagship product.

The biggest change will not be the HDD -> SSD transition, but rather the SSD -> MRAM transition or, equivalently, the point at which there is suddenly no speed difference between RAM and secondary storage.

At that point, there WILL be no secondary storage. Or, rather, CPU cache will become very large and be the primary storage and (M)RAM will be the secondary storage.

In either case, given that CPU cache is (designed to be) transparent, the whole computing landscape will be irrevocably altered.

Think about it... what would a computing environment look like if it was based around a system in which all your data and code was just as instantly addressable and accessible as all your other data and code, and it was just ONE address space?

This is one of the crappiest articles I've ever read. This tripe doesn't belong on HN!

The author assumes that most people will want to use XPM to run 3d-intensive applications and games, and require access to all their peripherals. Ludicrous.

The author also assures us that there will ZERO 3d support on the VM. Maybe not, but if he were at all familiar with Parallels and VMWare Fusion, he would know that this has been done and Microsoft could do it as well.

He accuses Microsoft of "FUD" while simultaneously refusing to call Vista by its proper name, instead calling it "Broken OS". Hypocrite!

He assumes that everyone else "thinks" that XPM will be some magical transparent layer over 7 that most users won't know about and will magically run all their old applications. He also implicitly accuses Microsoft of misrepresenting XPM in this way. Bullshit! Microsoft has done no such thing. They make clear that this is just a Virtual PC with some Coherence/Unity like functionality, not some magical pixie dust integrated into 7.

Lastly, he completely ignores the potential long term ramifications of this. This is just V1; Microsoft WILL eventually move to a Hyper-V based system in which all previous version of the Windows OS will be transparently virtualized and, if possible, share the hardware. At some point, it WILL be magic pixie dust sprinkled in the operating system, in which your old apps continue to "just work" while Microsoft is finally free to do major housecleaning of the Windows internals.

So, I rest my case. This article is CRAP!

I'm writing my own compiler and designing my own programming language, just like everybody else!

Practical, no. Fun, YES.

True, but just try using them at a Taco Bell. Man, you should hear what happened...