wastedbrains

Yeah I have been coming and participating in this community for a very long time, but I am just not that incredibly active. I don't post many stories, and I don't comment very often.

It is funny how many times the HN community it trying to protect themselves from 'noobs', I feel like they push the more casual users a bit further away.

Yeah many times when you are 'spiking' and idea you can work through a simple small example fastest without testing. I agree when you are quickly just trying to see if something is possible testing will slow you down, and isn't worth the benefits of TDD.

Then when I start to integrate that solution into real production code I go back and add some tests. (mostly integration tests)

We are very test focused, but I wouldn't claim we are TDD. We also have layers of testing which I consider important.

We have a quick set of unit tests that we run before very check in (10 seconds).

Next our CI kicks off after check in and runs 10 minutes worth of full system tests, booting up opensource software and running it against the system, destroying DBs and recreating them from scratch and running again, etc.

* Finally we have nightly test which run for a few hours, at this point we have 15 projects run against our system. We run projects over and over to test stability, we do security testing against the current code. We have multiple simulated users running against the system checking for performance bottle necks. This phase doesn't catch new issues that often, but helps us to assure we don't regress in performance, security, or overall compatibility support.

yeah I have as well, since the default iGoogle tasks don't sync / work well on the iphone

that is great, I was sad when they shut off iphone iGoolge just cause that is how i kept my task synced... now a truly supported version with a better interface should make keeping my todo list up to date much easier.

following up, finished reading it awhile ago, but finally wrote up a review... So here were my thoughts

http://www.mayerdan.com/2009/01/cryptonomicon_book_review_1....

up next Snowcrash

Our quick list...

github, lighthouse, AWS, Broadband, wireless broadband, Vonage, 1 server off amazon...

that is about it for us.

The more I use git the more impressed I am with it. We now use git to control access and distribution of distributed files. Previously we did that via NFS, but git was cleaner and simpler to manage access restrictions.

nope I haven't ever played it.

I would love to take this course. Starcraft has got to be the only game that after 10 years I still frequently play.

Sorry. I typed it all out quickly, I kind of in a rush to get back to some coding.

I also called it 'Google Gears' and not it is only called 'Gears'

I am not really one to follow or believe in grammar for a simple link though, but I will say that many errors in a single line might be a bit over the top.

if you are into netflix, hulu, and other streaming stuff (nbc,cnn,etc) I highly recommend checking out boxee, http://boxee.tv/ it has a great user interface and works with the apple remote.

I love netflix, I also have been really happy with their netflix streaming service... If netflix keeps leading the way I doubt the movie industry will end up as screwed as the music industry.

Interesting point, but for a long time I think linux on the desktop really just couldn't cut it for a decent experience. Apple before OSX was untouchable as far as development experience... So there was a long period that I would say Windows was the best tech in the OS market, by quite a bit.

I am just not really surprised. Their tech is just not the best in any category.

I hosted on windows server, now Linux I had my PC on windows, now I run OSX and Linux. I had a pocketpc phone which killed the palm and then completely stopped innovating and was in some cases still very buggy, now I have an iPhone. I used Office, then switched to open office and now 80% google docs. I have never liked MS browsers, Firefox all the way. I can't think of a single web property from MS I use...

With them loosing all the developers, developers, developers... It doesn't take long until they start to loose people that are leading everyone elses technology choices.

(I admit visual studio is pretty sweet, but I use Ruby)

awesome... not a great solution, but this will definitely help. Thanks for the tip.

Just a small problem on macs, when I switch from single monitor to dual and visa versa I want the previous state restored. I want it to store the state of the windows and restore as many as it can from the last state... It would be great to keep all my terminals in the same location.

The reason rephrasing is valuable is that it stop people from taking out or removing needed cases. If there is a test and someone changes that logic, it forces them to at least realize someone else tested and wanted that logic. Then if you search through the code and no something is unnecessary you can change the logic and the test.

Nice I enjoyed doing some AI at CU,good to see there is still some interesting AI work being done there. I worked a lot on text categorization with SVMs and LSA/i while there. I did some NN stuff, but I always wished I got to do more of it.

If there are any other great source for what is going on in the Ruby community I would like to know... So point things out to me that I might have missed.

That is the guidelines for news submissions, it doesn't say that discussion and comments on submissions can't discuss any topic users find interesting. I think it was related and on topic to the thread.

There has been several threads on HN about what music people listen to while programming.

Hmmm really voting with your wallet to not buy DRM music and then supporting the release of not DRM music is a bad thing?

Awesome so any good music recommendations, I have never bought from iTunes and I can now, so what should I get?

My goal over the holidays is to become much better with my editor (emacs). I am also trying to contribute a bit to open source and release some Merb and DataMapper code onto github.

OK everyone share your personal pages / github user names...

http://danmayer.github.com

(lame site but just put it up for the hell of it)

not really news, but it is just to much fun to care about that. StartUps are a tough roller coaster of ups and downs so you have to find little ways to enjoy your ups when you have them. I know a couple of the teams in this video and it looks like a good time.

I ordered the chocolates awhile ago for my girlfriend... It was delicious.

That is a pretty cool use of the twitter API, interesting. Next time I need a chat room, I will try to set one of these up.

I switched to mac and couldn't have been happier, but admittedly I was a Ruby programmer on windows, which Ruby on windows has always kind of sucked, so I left.

very cool good luck with this... might have to install it and give it a shot on the next web interface I work on.