731 karma · joined January 15, 2009
Martin Fowler is often credited with coming up with the distinction between the two. The concept is similar to a "fluent interface" from a different point of view.
http://martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html#Inte...
That being said, I don't mean to take away from Randi's personal decision to come out and the hardships he had to endure for the last 70 years. This comment is my own little part of the "murmur of acceptance" he expected and I hope that he would appreciate me asking (as an honest question for the purpose of social insight), why did you, as an HN reader find this newsworthy?
Have you actually done that, Tom? Or are you just reselling us your same old fantasy story about how easy it is to coordinate a bunch of companies from a bunch of different countries and actually bring a product to market?
I can't even remember all of the other stories I've heard about multiple rounds of prototypes, production problems, sub-standard end products, etc (some of which requiring extensive travel to sort out). Or perhaps a partner company dissolves its relationship with you and decides to market the product on its own. Sure, it has to work out some of the time, but stop presenting this idea that international business is somehow this miraculously effortless process.
I know this wasn't the central point of a piece nominally about immigration and youth achievement, but the fact that he had throw in the same stale scenario that he's been writing about for over a decade makes it entirely impossible for me to take this guy seriously anymore.
Well that pinged the old poppycock meter. Turing definitely knew of machines that weren't just used for executing instructions. He briefly alludes to so-called "choice machines" that interacted with an operator in his paper on the Entscheidungsproblem—they're just not his focus.
There are also so called "Multitrack Turing Machines" that seem to fit the author's idea of a parallel machine (multiple heads, multiple tracks). However, these are Turing equivalent (and I believe, but can't find a citation, that Turing was the one who proved that, or at least was aware of it).
The author should read this before he proposes any "new" models of computation which Turing "probably never thought of":
It sounds like the author was just mad that the US-Canada hockey game was pushed to MSNBC. I would have loved to have seen that game in HD on the main NBC, but that's a long way from the coverage being "broken".
And hey, storage is cheap (and only getting cheaper). Even if Github, Sourceforge, etc are gone, barring a major calamity, I think it's safe to assume there will be a backup of those somewhere, even if it's offline.
(Although I guess it's valid to wager what will last longer: Rails or LOLCats. IMHO, Rails has a slight edge.)
> Does the Touch Book support multitouch?
> No. And we don't think that it's an issue. Multitouch is interesting when you want to zoom in / zoom out. At 1024×600, the Touch Book screen is big enough so that you don't need to zoom all the time as you have to do it on the iPhone.
Hmm, that seems to be missing the point a little bit... It's like saying, "Does this laptop have a trackpad?" "No. The mouse is great and all when you want to highlight text, but we find that using shift and an arrow key works just fine. And now you won't have to worry about accidentally moving the pointer like on some _other_ computers."
I just find it funny that Steve had to be "wrong"* about something just to show how right he was about something else...
[*] open to interpretation of course, depending on how you feel about the SDK and the AppStore.
Pretty much everything that comes up when you google the name is about this, so it doesn't look like anything came of this, which is a shame. Also, it being 1999, I'm guessing the only videos that may exist would be sitting on someone's shelf somewhere (if they weren't taped over or thrown out...). :(
Any Minicon 1999 organizers or attendees in the house?
> It will never happen of course. But I wish someone would do it.
Amen.
(I looked at the "Discover more newspapers..." link and most seem to be ones people just started to play around with and gave up on.)
http://github.com/protocool/ack-tmbundle
Sure, it's not the native find in project, but it's way faster. Not a day goes by that I don't use it.
1) JSON gives no benefit over a Ruby DSL (like ActiveRecord migrations). Is the schema file going to be consumed by client programs written in other languages? (Even so, in that case, you should probably just define ActiveRecord::Base.to_json_schema). Two languages are unnecessary when one will suffice.
2) When you start to define the schema in code[ft. 1], rather than in the database itself, you're leaving the Active Record pattern (as defined in PoEAA) and should probably look at other patterns (and the libraries that implement them). Data Mapper/DataMapper would probably be a good fit here.
Also, you're loosing the benefits that migrations give of dealing with changes to the schema over time non-destructively. Dr Nic's Sexy Migrations did something that would diff a single schema file with the existing DB schema, but this is not the default solution.
3) Automatically generating forms from a model has tempted many Rails developers over the years. A rudimentary method would be possible using the existing reflection data (i.e. no need for a JSON schema DSL) and some added metadata. Google "rails admin ui" for some examples.
However, "metadata" can easily turn into "writing forms in the model instead of the view" (I've seen it happen). That's why I'd avoid this.
Also any forms more advanced than a simple create/edit interface and you're probably going to end up writing a partial anyway, especially if you need to add markup for formatting (e.g. how do you control if the generated form vertically or horizontally oriented? Meant to go in a table with others or independent?).
ft. 1: Rails' Migrations are a special case. They should be a seen as a separate system from the ORM that was created later on to manage the complexity of changing schema. ActiveRecord classes still define their fields based on reflection from the database.
How is that lazy?
I have to say, the whole glider idea is pretty cool.
One of the better comments (by "Matt"): "I really don't see 'meta-atheism' as explaining anything that can't be accounted for by the limits of human discernment, prudence, and will."
Although this one's good too (especially out of context): "People simply don't posess the capacity to behave in a way that reflects perfectly consistent intertemporal preferences. Many of the people I cite above know perfectly well the bad fates that await them for their poor choices. It's just that at the time, Salma Hayek's heaving bosom seems more urgent than whatever might happen the following day."
Still, Fusion Garage has a lot of explaining to do.