Hacker News Reader

binbastion Google's Chrome climbs its way to 10% of the browser market

With everyone congratulating the Chromium/Chrome team so much, I'd like to add that none of this would be possible without the WebKit project.

binbastion Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM, Rails, and You

Basing your choice of the framework and even the language for your project on some error during what seems to be your first installation ever of that specific stack is really not a good idea. Installation and deployment are well solved problems with both technologies, and there are so many other factors to consider depending on what you're building.

binbastion Who Writes Wikipedia?

Forking would be the key to eliminate the gatekeeper problem, so that for certain topics people could publish their own articles or make changes to existing ones without needing the approval of some opinionated moderator or admin. On the German Wikipedia this problem is so bad that earlier this year we had a really big discussion that even extended from the blogosphere to the major news outlets.

What I mean is that Wikipedia could learn from GitHub how a lot of forks plus easy pull requests can exponentially increase participation and generation of new content while still being able to retain quality.

It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right?

Why not? You could extend an article or contribute some new articles for a topic, publish the content yourself, and try to get it into the main project. Then on the main site there could be a list of forks, and even a network graph exactly like on GitHub.

binbastion Who Writes Wikipedia?

They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases".

Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal.

Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git repos, which may or may not be a suitable base to build upon: https://github.com/scy/levitation

binbastion Is Chinese The New Language Of The Internet?

I'm starting to think that when an article's title is phrased as a polar question, you can be almost sure the rational answer is a simple "no" (in spite of what the content may suggest).

binbastion A bad design is a good reminder

That's how every dishwasher I ever owned used to work. And it's actually a feature: you can add stuff that you forgot to put in after it starts, and you can take something out, when you need it immediately, and wash it manually.

binbastion Introducing Word Lens

I'd pay at least $50 for a Chinese-English language pack. And even just 50% accuracy would be ok.

binbastion Kickstarting Hubcap: a Socially Aware GitHub Mac App

"I want to create a GitHub app for Mac OS X that will allow you to stay up-to-date on the latest activities of your friends and favorite open-source projects."

The activity stream is just not a good tool to stay on top of what's happening when you're watching hundreds of projects.

binbastion A table that should exist in all projects with a database

Actual conflicts from working with the same fields in the same tables are so rare, I haven't even experienced it once.

However, the second scenario would happen every single day in a team.

binbastion Why I love solo programming (and why I hated working for Pivotal)

When the question is about 100% pair programming I'd say there aren't that many. Hashrocket is one of the few companies (I believe Pivotal is, too) where it seems to be true, but most teams that I know are only pairing part of their time.

binbastion WeTab boss caught posting fake 5-star Amazon reviews, resigns

He used his own Amazon account and his real name was visible on the Amazon Wishlist. And, even more funny, his wife did the same thing. Here's the original blog entry (in German, scroll down for some screenshots):

http://gutjahr.biz/blog/2010/10/wedepp/

binbastion BitTorrent-Only Movie Denied IMDb Listing

There already is a more open movie database:

http://www.omdb.org

binbastion Ask HN: Diaspora hasn't updated their blog in a month.

What's wrong with Passenger (mod_rails)? There's not really a difference to mod_php in terms of deployment, especially if you're not altering the software.

binbastion Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine

I really like the recommendations. Already found a bunch of movies I should've stumbled over before but never have.

Some things, in no particular order:

* The SuperMatch UI needs some more love! Just watch someone new to the site use it and you'll see what I mean.

* I think you should remove the footnote "Clerkdogs supports Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7". If you have requirements show a notice only when they aren't met.

* You need to fix the search field not working as expected as soon as possible. Seriously.

binbastion SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

That's the whole idea of this project, isn't it?

binbastion Allan Odgaard's Latest Comments on TextMate 2

http://redcareditor.com is an open source, cross platform clone of Textmate currently in development. It supports Textmate themes and bundles, and for the split pane guys in here: yes, it does that too.

Last time I checked (a few months ago) it was pretty slow and unstable, but I guess the project is worth watching if you're not on OS X.