Teckla

When searching for Go related information, use "golang" instead of "go".

e.g., golang channels; golang web sockets; golang slices; etc.

My work around for the "unknown or expired link" bug is to open page 1 of HN, then immediately open pages 2, 3, and 4, but in separate tabs.

That way, I never run afoul of that bug, and opening tabs is really easy in every modern browser.

I'd be interested to know how other people work around the bug.

I use Thunderbird + IMAP to sync a local copy of my Gmail email every week or two.

It does not sync anything except your email, but even that much is pretty nice, for peace of mind.

You can also click on the Compose button normally, then click on the "In new window" icon, in the upper right hand corner.

Most web browsers then offer the ability to drag that new window back into your main browser window which turns it into a tab.

Kind of a hassle, but it does work, and someone might find this information useful...

My family owns one Mac and two PCs. When the Mac needed some minor servicing, the value of a local Apple Store became really apparent: we called, made a same-day appointment, went in, had the Mac serviced, and left happy customers in a very short period of time.

When a PC problem occurs, I call, wait on hold, slowly convince the technical support person whose first language isn't English that it needs to be shipped back for servicing, pack it up, label is properly, drive to a FedEx or UPS shop, ... it goes on and on, and it's a real hassle. Also, very stressful: who knows if you'll ever actually see your PC again? Even if you do, who knows when it'll come back?

My PC is due for replacement. Now that I'm older and have a family and many responsibilities, I'm willing to pay a premium for fast, hassle-free, local service. I'm not yet 100% sure I'll switch to Mac, but I might... and that's in large part because there's a few local Apple Stores near by.

There have been a number of web sites I could not interact with because the carousel swamped my bandwidth with the constantly changing images, when I was accessing a machine remotely.

When that happens, I have no choice but to close the tab and not navigate back to the web site...or visit it later, non-remotely, if I bother going back at all.

It's a shameful rhetorical trick that degrades the HN experience.

I'm glad it's not just me.

Last year, I installed Ubuntu Linux via WUBI. After an update, some GRUB/kernel incompatibility left Ubuntu Linux unbootable. (At least, after far too much research, my best estimate was that it was a GRUB/kernel incompatibility.)

I was laughed at for using WUBI at all, and in shame, decided to install Ubuntu Linux in a dual boot configuration. Which worked... for a while.

At some point, Ubuntu Linux offered to upgrade itself to a newer version. It failed part way through with some obscure error message, and left Ubuntu Linux... you guessed it... unbootable.

Once again, I was laughed at. "Everyone knows you shouldn't try to upgrade Ubuntu Linux; do a fresh install instead." sigh

Also, Ubuntu Linux got fat (for lack of a better word). In the past, I could count on Ubuntu Linux to extend the life of old hardware, but frankly, modern versions do not appear to perform any better than Windows 7.

All of these problems, and Ubuntu Linux is supposed to be the easy distribution? For now, I've given up, and I'm back on Windows 7, which hasn't caused me any trouble.

The "display side" of Web apps can do a lot of useful processing which cannot be done on the "display side" of X apps. JavaScript is not my favorite technology, and the performance is, at best, mediocre, but you can perform useful computations with it.

Also, well written Web apps can reduce network activity to a minimum.

Consider, for a moment, if ten thousand people were using HN via an X app. HN would need monster servers and monster bandwidth to handle all that load, even if the users were only scrolling through comments or spending minutes typing up replies.

During the time I've been typing this reply, the Web app side of HN is making no network calls and putting no demand on HN's servers at all.

I've seen people vaguely equate X apps and Web apps before, and I'm always bothered by it since they have such important fundamental differences that change everything.

In preferences, you can set it so Fn+F1 through Fn+F12 trigger the usual features, so that you can still have easy access to vanilla F1 through F12.

Take some time to dig through the preferences menu on OS X, you'll be surprised how configurable things can be.

"After residing in unix-land for almost a year I decided to come back to Mac OSX..."

OS X is a UNIX. A real, actual UNIX.

"...in unix-land no such jokes were pulled."

I am going to guess you were using Linux, which is not, in fact, a UNIX.

For what it's worth, I spent some time in Linux land. Over the course of a year:

1. One update left my system non-booting. After considerable research, I think I discovered it was a grub/kernel incompatibility.

2. An upgrade left my system non-booting. It was an Ubuntu upgrade from one version to the next, which failed with a mysterious and non-helpful error.

3. Another update caused my external monitor to no longer display the desktop correctly. I was forced to use the 1024x600 display on my netbook instead.

I am now very skeptical of Linux (on the desktop) land. All these issues resulted in a considerable time expense for me.

Now I'm thinking I'm happy to pay $x for operating systems like OS X or Windows...

I often hear developers talking about how C is a simple language, but it may or may not be, depending on how you define "simple". For example, a written alphabet with only two letters -- A and B -- is "simple" to grasp (there's only two letters to learn!), but it would be very difficult, in the real world, to read and write such a language.

I think C is similar: "simple" in a sense, but very, very complex in another sense. C could use some massive clean-up, in my opinion. Much of its design was so that it could be ported to CPUs which haven't really existed in the wild in a long time in great enough numbers to warrant all the undefined and implementation dependent behavior.

The language could be hugely simplified, in the usage sense, if much of the cruft were jettisoned.

while (len = getline(line, MAXLINE), len > 0) ...

I've never seen anyone else use it, though.

Have you tried Cygwin? I've been using it for years, with no problems. Unix command line goodness in Windows.

Also, you can install vim from the Cygwin packages, or install native Windows vim. Both solutions work well.

It's also unreliable.

I used wubi to install Linux on my Windows 7 machine, and it worked well...for a while. At some point, Ubuntu installed some updates, and then told me it needed to reboot. I rebooted, and Ubuntu never successfully booted up again.

The culprit, I think, was an update of grub, but I'm not 100% sure. Be careful with wubi.

My PC is a single core 1.66 GHz Atom running Windows 7 Professional in 1 GB of RAM.

I can assure you multi-process Chrome outperforms Firefox on this machine, both in performance and memory use for real-world browsing.

You should double check your assumption about separate processes increasing resource usage.

All that extra work to support an additional 0.5% to 1% of the market does not seem worth it.

The company I work for uses Java and targets Windows, AIX, HP-UX, AS/400, and Linux. We have remarkably few portability problems with our Java code. It all "just works", as advertised.

I'd be curious to know where all your Java portability problems stem from. The UI (Swing)?

In any case, I do share some concern and skepticism that web apps will rule the roost. At least one company, Microsoft, would seem motivated to make sure web apps cannot completely replace desktop apps, and thus will always subtly cripple IE, the dominant web browser.

For example, if I were writing this comment in IE9, I would not be able to see what spelling errors I made. It's 2011, and IE still does not have spell checking on text elements.

The IE9 GUI has also become unresponsive for me for double digit seconds several times.

There are literally dozens of little annoyances like these.

How these glaring issues continue to exist really is a good question. I think some of the other posts on this subject probably hit the nail on the head: Microsoft doesn't want the browser too good (since replacing native apps with web apps helps out competing operating systems), but at the same time, can't allow their browser to get too far behind, because with or without Microsoft's blessing, the web has made huge market advances.

Thus, they kind of catch up, making their browser just barely good enough for most people, but always fairly mediocre. It's the only reasonable explanation I can think of.

I'm getting so tired of this blame-the-user-for-everything attitude on Slashdot, HN, and elsewhere.

Some of the blame belongs to Apple/Safari. You see, Safari's default settings allow for the automatic download and execution of "safe content".

The clever authors of MacDefender/MacProtector packaged things up so that by merely visiting a hostile web page in Safari, it causes Safari to automatically download and automatically run the MacDefender/MacProtector installer.

For example, you may be browsing Google Images. You click on one. The next thing you know, and this happens in just a second or two on a broadband connection, the installer program for MacDefender/MacProtector is running.

Now fortunately, the installer process itself is benign. If you quit the installer, you won't get infected. If you continue through the installer, however, the Trojan will be installed.

I can see how a lot of people might think Apple automatically pushed out an anti-virus, or something, and that's why the installer starting running automatically.

Feel free to blame the user all you want...right now, it seems very popular to blame "those stupid users" for everything. But in this case, Apple/Safari deserve a nontrivial share of the blame for Safari's outstandingly asinine defaults.

Are your Bitcoins gone forever, with no recourse? Do those Bitcoins effectively leave the limited Bitcoin money supply forever?

Please stop using the phrase "tax burden". It's loaded language and not-so-subtly encourages a biased interpretation. It would be like saying "tax opportunity"; i.e., "an opportunity to pay tax".

The small pixel people are winning. :(

(This is tongue-in-cheek! I use Vim!)

There's still room in the standard for one's complement, it denies all knowledge of multi-threaded programming, it has a bunch of impossible-to-use-safely functions in its standard library, etc. (This is just a tiny sample, there's so much else wrong that you could almost write an entire book about it.)

In my opinion, they should start by removing the substantial cruft. That would leave plenty of room for some sorely needed additions/modernizations.

In the name of backwards compatibility, they'll remove too little, they'll add too much unnecessarily stuff, and eventually, another systems programming language will catch on and start to slowly-but-surely replace C.

Humans are visual creatures. It really is easy to get lost in Lisp's parentheses.

Languages whose blocks are easier to identify at a glance really are easier to read.

The attitude of far too many Lisp developers seems to be that Lisp has failed to dominate after all these many decades because people are just too stupid to realize how great Lisp is.

If Lisp hasn't dominated by now, rather than arrogance and superiority, it would be better to think about why Lisp continues to fail to dominate.

By the way, I'm not suggesting you're one of those people.