tyler

Except not really. You hire an employee with the intentions that they'll be worth more to the company than the money the money they cost it. It could be more accurately stated as...

Cutting out a _worthless_ employee with $100k in salary is just as good as blah blah blah.

If the employee is not worth more than they cost the company you should not be hiring them recession or not.

As someone who left Pennsylvania: Dead on.

Hack.

It's all just an abstraction. You could sub in any of the other layers of abstraction in place of "terminal" and it would make just as much (and little) sense.

It's also built into Rails.

QBasic.

I got a BASIC programming book from the library when I was 11... despite not knowingly having anything to program BASIC in. Poking around in my MSDOS system files I saw this mysterious program "qbasic". Holy crap! It was there all along and I didn't know about it...

In a free market, the idea of a particular profession being "overpaid" is just silly. People are paid exactly as much as they are worth to their employer... If there was someone better who would do the job for less, they would be replaced.

I've used both to a limited degree. The only thing I can say is that RSpec felt more "natural". I suppose it's up to you whether feeling natural is compelling or not.

Sadly, the Davis Square McIntyre & Moore closed recently.

I'm willing to bet that most people here aren't familiar with Sheetz considering it is primarily a Pennsylvania thing. Sheetz is famous in the area for having really decent food, orderable through little kiosks at every store.

They pretty well own their niche at least in the area I'm familiar with. They're a good example of a business entering a saturated market (gas stations) but doing it better than everyone else to the point that most people that I know will go out of their way to go to a Sheetz rather than any other gas station.

Typically, they have their gas just a little below the average in the area, surcharge free ATMs, the Made-To-Order kiosks (sometimes located at the gas pumps), clean bathrooms, and a bit of a more friendly atmosphere than other gas stations.

They're actually a rather good example for startups.

He mentioned drinks on the rocks, which would indicate alcohol. It was probably just confirming their age.

I'm not sure I agree that we're not talking about relational data. I mean... each record is -related- to others in a parent-child sort of way. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by relational?

I question the premise that a fast moving market is negative for startups. In fact, its precisely these things that makes it possible for startups to compete with big players. A quickly changing market will just make it easier for small companies to grab a niche and hold on to (or sell) it.

Theres a rather good explanation of MapReduce in the book "Beautiful Code". (Its just a rather good book, period.)

Well... Meaningful communication between members of families prone to domestic violence, certainly could be helpful.

I was a pretty skeptical regarding the Air. But, just today I went down to the CambridgeSide Apple Store and played with one of them. Its really quite nifty. The weight and thickness are really astounding. The numbers don't really mean much to me... having felt it now though, I can understand why some people love it.

"...and has already categorized them using Bayesian filtering."

I've been doing a couple side projects in Io over the last few months. It really is a beautiful language. Honestly, it reminds me of what would be the love child of Lisp and Ecmascript.

What really struck me was when I realized that I could get it to do Ruby style hash and array literals, from completely within the language. Really cool stuff.

Also, doing a Markaby clone was remarkably (hah) easy.

Oh, and the Regex library is rather nice.

Yep. Thats correct. Although, at the last point I looked into it, there were some firewall-related problems with using Flash for that purpose. I don't remember the details though...

This is an argument that has been going on since the first web apps started to emerge. The general argument is this: "You can't implement feature x in a browser". Initially the list of features that could not be implemented was quite long.

Things like rich-text editing, asynchronous communication, audio, video, drag and drop, sliders, etc. were very hard, or impossible. So, things like complex games, email clients, im clients, text editors, spreadsheets, and media players were out.

And that leads to the problem with his argument. The list of things which cannot be done on the web is constantly being reduced. Everything on that list can now be done... and fairly easily. (Which isn't to say they don't take time. Complex things take time... easy or not.)

So, now people have started saying things like "Well you can't implement (Photoshop|GIMP|text editors|IDEs|.+) on the web". That may be true for some limited amount of time, however, even now inroads are being made in all of the above. (See Heroku)

In short, people are going to continue clinging to the sinking ship that is this argument until they finally run out of applications to point at. If theres one thing I've learned from recent history... its best not to bet against the advancement of technology.

In the past 24 hours we've had... rain, thunderstorm, sleet, hail, and snow. "Unbearably shitty" is an understatement at times...

I had a very similar experience. My wife hits the sack at 11-ish, and I'm up until 3 or 4 working on side projects. It has worked out very well for us.

I asked her to read "Hackers and Painters" while we were dating. She did and said that it made her understand why I am the way I am. So, if you're early in a relationship and want her/him to "get it"... I highly recommend the book.

I got to personally thank PG for it a couple years ago... but... thanks again!

Hm. I'm really more of a Lisp person than an OCaml person. I just find the language interesting. And specifically, I was responding to the comment "studios moving away from C/C++". Which, of itself, has nothing to do with Lisp.

Regardless, I'll take that as a "no".

I'd like to see a move toward OCaml, with regards to that. All the (albeit amateur) game developers I know cling to their C or C++ because of performance concerns.

I tend to think these performance concerns are overstated. However, if they will insist on believing these myths, then OCaml might be the right way to go. Its, generally, just as fast as C++. Often faster. And it has some great libraries for graphics.

Is anyone here working with OCaml?

California's coastline. The views while driving across western states. The buildings in old Boston. Country roads in Pennsylvania.

Oh, you meant it in a socio political sense. Well, in that case...

Ah, I've got this one figured out. I'm going to use it to implement another dialect of CL... in which I will implement a dialect of Scheme... in which I will reimplement Arc. I'd like to see how many iterations of this one could go through before it becomes completely unusable even for simple arithmetic.

Assuming each one interprets the next.

For what its worth, you certainly don't have to generate a Rails controller from the terminal. Its just a convenience method.

A question though: Several times throughout the article it talks about how Ramaze is not like Merb. However, based on the things they've said, it sounds a lot like Merb. (ORM agnosticim, for instance) Does anyone know how they actually differ?

Putting Linux on it really isn't as big of a deal as it was at one point. I've only tried with Ubuntu though, for what thats worth.

7.04 was somewhat of a nightmare. Off the top of my head... you couldn't use the normal installation media, graphics drivers had to be installed manually, likewise with sound drivers, likewise with wireless drivers.

7.10 on the otherhand was simple and straightforward. Everything except for the wireless card worked right out of the box. I'm quite happy with it and use it most of the time on my MBP.

No one said anything about truth or falsehood. The truth, unfortunately, does not just automatically win in an argument.

I'm so tired of that comparison.

Heres the difference: Rails is programmed on Ruby.

Rails in itself is, to me, not that impressive. It does a lot of things right, but it does probably just as many wrong. Not the least of which is scaling.

But the advantage that Rails has is that its programmed on top of Ruby. And for that reason it will never be truly akin to the monstrosity that was VB.

Except in that it attracts poor developers. But, thats simply because its easy. The trick is finding the people who use Rails because of Ruby... not the other way around.