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Pistos2on Ask HN: Tips for Hackers having Kids?

My regrets in life are extremely few, but one of them is this: If I could go back in time and do things differently, one thing I would change would be my attitude about debt when I was young[er]. My kids are growing up, but the months are floating by, and my time at home is eaten up with contract work I'm doing on top of my day job. I look forward to the day that our financial footing is firm enough for me to go back to just one source of income. To me, being a father is the fullness of manhood, and it kills me that I am not always there for my family. So, my advice is this: Don't let yourself get significantly into debt. From my vantage point, it is completely not worth it.

Pistos2on Helicopter Game using HTML5 (Canvas / font-face etc)

It works quite well under Opera 10.61.

Pistos2on Pastebin, compiler, and debugger supporting 40+ languages

Yesterday and today, I quickly wrote up a Ruby interface to the API: http://github.com/Pistos/ideone-gem

Pistos2on Ruby Benchmark

Although it usually only matters when compared code scores similarly, it is important to be able to know when benchmark comparisons are statistically significant[1]. I wrote a library[2] a while back to do this. This becomes even more of a concern when the benchmarked code is running on a machine which is not well-isolated and dedicated to running the benchmark.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance

[2]: http://github.com/Pistos/better-benchmark

Pistos2on Ruby Benchmark

[Setting Rails aside, ]the Ruby community needs help to move forward into the world of 1.9. 1.9 has many improvements that most people would benefit from, but many folks are either afraid to get their feet wet with 1.9, or have to support legacy applications. If anyone would be writing anything new in Ruby, I encourage them to write it for 1.9 and to leave 1.8 behind. For the past year or so, only about 5% of my stuff has been written to support 1.8. The rest has been written for 1.9, usually with syntax or feature usage that will not work under 1.8.

When developing new Ruby stuff, one thing to watch for is interoperability with old gems that are not 1.9-ready. But the good news is, most gems work just fine under 1.9 -- at least in the non-Rails world. I think I recall only one or two gems I tried to use that weren't updated to work with 1.9 yet, out of many that I use or discovered.

Pistos2on Ask HN: Music while coding

I've come to conclude that I am alone in the world in this respect: I deliberately do not listen to music when coding (or studying) because I find it way too distracting. I end up listening to the music; enjoying it; analysing it. I would liken it to putting my favourite television show up on a jumbotron while playing tennis. It either is going to distract me terribly, or, if not, it is borderline pointless to have it playing.

Pistos2on Ask HN: What are you working on today?

Cool. A couple suggestions: When you get your result, make the name clickable, and go to some sensible place, like a Wikipedia page, or such. Also, to be able to see a listing of all possible names, and perhaps a few stats (how many people get each name as a result, etc.) would be cool. :)

Good work; show me more (I subscribed).

Pistos2on Ask HN: What are you working on today?

Last night, I set up IMAP, TLS/SSL, and webmail on a server for myself, to liberate myself from third parties (i.e. GMail) having a searchable corpus of my email history.

In addition to that, I recently adjusted my fork of RVM[1] to work with Gentoo again (installed and managed systemwide as root, with users read-only).

Also, for the past week or two, I've been helping with RDBI[2], a new project aiming to be to database access what Rack is to web servers and web frameworks.

[1]: http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/

[2]: http://github.com/RDBI

Pistos2on Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

To be honest, my primary goal in life is to be a saint. Second to that is helping others with the same.

Roadblocks: Human nature. But grace overcomes that.

Pistos2on Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

[My First Aid training tells me that] although brain death occurs in just a few minutes once the brain ceases to get oxygen supplied to it, if CPR is applied to a casualty, and the casualty can get in an ambulance and into a hospital within an hour or so (the "Golden Hour"), he or she stands a decent chance of surviving. The CPR would provide some oxygen to the brain and the rest of the body (while the ambulance makes its way to the scene), so if you can bring the casualty to shore within 2 or 3 minutes of them going unconscious, there's still reason for optimism.

As such, I would say it's not unreasonable to wait for the drowning person to lose consciousness if you aren't confident you could prevent or deal with him or her dragging you down.

Pistos2on Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

I'm not a lifeguard -- I'm not even much of a swimmer -- but I am trained in First Aid. One of the things we were taught is not to just rush to be a hero when you come upon an apparent trouble situation. You first need to assess the situation and area with respect to the safety of yourself, and any bystanders.

Example scenario (based on a real life occurrence, as related by my instructor): You approach an indoor pool, and see what looks to be a child floating face down in the water, and an adult also floating similarly nearby. Your first instinct might be to dive in to save one or both of them, but a subtle clue is present: while the child is in swimming attire, the adult is in street clothes. In actual fact, a live wire has somehow come to be in contact with the water -- the adult had dived in to try to save the child, but was electrocuted.

Pistos2on Gran Turismo 5 [US] Release Date Announced

300+ screenshots: http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/857/857126/imgs_1.html

Visible drivers; car damage (open doors, crunched and torn fenders); breathtaking scenery; visible light from cars (on road, on dust clouds); driver's seat views (dash, steering wheel, rear view mirror, etc.).

Pistos2on How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faster with one line of code

I, for one, would appreciate a browser setting to not prefetch.

Pistos2on What Python Fixes

As a Dvorak user, I can testify that, while it may not be faster (I didn't have an appreciable speed increase after switching), it sure feels more comfortable and natural when you do most of your typing on the home and upper rows, and common key clusters fall nicely in pinky-to-index order.

Pistos2on Inspired by HN: ReadMyCode.org - Idea to reality in 24 hours

I recommend adding an About page which describes the site. Either that, or add something to the landing page. Some sort of quick way to provide feedback would be good, too. What mechanism exactly is up to you: blatant mailto link; JS-based feedback popup; third-party (UserVoice, etc.); mailing list; link to this HN thread; ...

Pistos2on One Sure-Fire Way to Improve Your Coding

> First, note the file structure. This step is aided by an editor that has a folder hierarchy view

http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/

Pistos2on Things That Annoy Programmers

Previously posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289694

Pistos2on Rethinking Cron

http://serverfault.com/questions/85893/running-a-cron-job-ma...

I completely agree that there should be a better, direct way to test cron jobs.

Pistos2on A new type of phishing attack. Works on savvy users.

This is part of the reason I use browser password managers. I'm brazen in activating Opera's password manager, because of this "feature".

Pistos2on Ask HN: How do you begin the process of developing a web application?

mkdir projectdir; cd projectdir; git init; copy in my Ramaze app skeleton; git add .; git commit. For larger projects, I'd very early on enter tasks and milestones into Pivotal Tracker. Next steps: I crack open my editor and begin typing out the DB schema. Move on to ORM Models, and begin to get bare bones, undecorated views + controller methods. Not long after that will be page layout(s) and CSS. By then, the project should be well on its way, with some functionality that actually works as planned.

Usually with these things, once you have your idea, it's just a matter of filling in the blanks. To quote from the movie Amadeus: "The rest is just scribbling."

Pistos2on Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

(To grandparent comment[er]) I also had a similar experience a while ago; but I gave DDG a second change recently, and indeed, the results have improved enough for me to keep DDG as my primary search engine, resorting to Google only once every 50 searches or so.

Pistos2on Say goodbye to search analytics

Honest question: Is adding and deleting a space necessary? I think it is sufficient in all browsers just to focus the address bar and press Enter.

Pistos2on Today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

> You seemed to be confused and to not recognize that religion is intrinsically violent.

You should clarify what you meant by the above.

(a) "You... [do] not recognize that religion [in general] is intrinsically violent." (b) "You... [do] not recognize that [that particular] religion[, Islam,] is intrinsically violent."

Pistos2on DuckDuckGo Searches Are Not Anonymous

In Opera, when setting up search engines [which can be used directly in the address bar], you have the option of using POST instead of GET.

Pistos2on Try Clojure

This only halfway works in Opera [10.53 on Linux]. You can type, but then if you fill the output area, only autoscrolls down after you press Enter. But otherwise, you can't see what you're typing while you type it. And then focus goes all out of whack if you scroll the tutorial, or use up arrow and down arrow. Sometimes it accesses the readline history, sometimes it scrolls the screen, and seems somewhat arbitrary. Some of this could be blamed on the betaness of Opera, though.

Pistos2on Poll: Getting to know you better ...

(At the time of this comment) 25% of HNers "play piano"? Interesting.

Pistos2on HTML 5 Asteroids

Yep. Over here, Opera 10.53 on Linux, on an Athlon X2. Uses about 75% of one of the CPUs. I'm impressed that I can hold any combination of the game-playing keys, and it doesn't falter (thrust + turn + fire). The framerate holds, and everything looks and behaves smoothly, with great responsiveness.

Pistos2on Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

There are already aggregation sites, such as FriendFeed.

Pistos2on Beautiful Image Hover Effect Using Only Webkit CSS (No JS)

In contrast with what others have said, it works for me in Opera 10.53 in Linux.

Pistos2on No upvotes? No problem.

I very often get backlogged, but still try to keep up. I submit comments as distant as 2 days beyond the original submission date. I vote no matter the age of a submission or comment; if something is worth reading, age almost doesn't matter (excepting newsworthiness, etc.). I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that browses HN with a little delay.