bxr

I could trudge around in my databases to read direct user to user messages. Should I? Should I sell a tool to facilitate doing so?

edit: re: downvotes, Yes I was using argumentum ad absurdum, but I was trying to show that just because you have data doesn't mean analysis of it isn't intrusive.

>It's not actually loaded, it's prerendered.

And how exactly does the browser render assets without loading them? Is there some sort of time-traveling HTTP google is hiding under the curtain with this feature?

>it can make life difficult once you start straying from "their way" even if you know exactly what you're doing for even simple things like mapping to a legacy DB with schema intact (not gonna happen)

Yikes, unfortunately this knocks rails off of my to-try list. I've got a non-web application with an unusual, but by no means bad, schema. I've found it makes a good measuring stick for frameworks/tools. I have nothing against doing things in the way of a particular framework, but I have existing code to bring to the party too, if something isn't going to play nice I ignore it. I can't live with building something that exists in isolation. Its either not going to work with what I have, or hold me back when I want to build on top of it with something else.

> Or security on all of these websites really sucks

Yup. The status quo / baseline of security online is terrible.

Slashdot rumor has it they've got themselves an Apache 0-day, but other hypothesizes have then SQL injecting or otherwise exploiting the webapps themselves.

Either way, the rate of attacks in the world hasn't changed, just these guys have gone back to the old way of yelling about what they accomplish rather than remaining silent.

Thank you for making "You just don't get it" point number 1. I like to know early on when I should bail out and stop reading something.

You have very funny definition of "solve". In my day we would have called that a workaround.

Ugh, I hate it when people ignore their comedic ineptitude just because they happen to be discussing involving comedy. I much rather this article over an unintentional cringe-fest because they author decided to venture into comedy.

I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. It may not be the tool that replaces the current html/css set, it doesn't even have any mention of how javascript fits in, but its very encouraging to see that it is getting worked on. We do need to replace them, and playing with things like axr is a start.

Our current web programming stack is a depressing, ugly hacked together kludge with painfully limited capabilities, even how HTTP fits in needs to be examined, it has its place but it can't remain the only option. Websockets are a solution to a problem that doesn't have to exist. I have nothing against the fact that we're wedging more and more into technology that it was never designed for, but the seams have been showing for quite some time how.

You can block specific applications from ever being shown to you. If it wasn't for that feature Zynga games would have made me quit facebook a few times already.

Game updates are annoying, but they aren't much better than anything else anybody posts, ever.

It is USB, and the host could lose power at any time (it doesn't have to be a laptop). Communication interruption is a likely case they should plan for.

A more probable explanation is that even with a magnet the devices are light enough that a yank on the cable would send the device flying before the magnet connection came loose.

The strain to break the bond of the magnet is much more than the strain needed to bend the cable to an angle that will (over time) damage the wire.

Ios transfers should prepared for a disconnection anyway, it is usb, plus power failures could take the host offline.

I didn't say that they should have tested it on every target, just that they didn't. They accepted the risks and were bitten by it.

Have you tried emailing them? They don't have a way to let you do it but might be able to do it manually. And either way you let them know that there is a desire for a feature they're not going to magically know about just because they have funding.

>They never actually came out and said it in the article, but it sounds like the thing that shut down was just squeaking by and distracting their core, profitable, business.

I sure hope that is the case. The only other take-away I saw in that article was that they're so incompetent at management that they couldn't even clean up the organization of a profitable entity. That the management was just so bad its a better decision to kill the product than let it bumble around until it was no longer profitable.

>which I'm not sure you fully understand.

Ah, condescension, now that is a perfect example of a typical HN comment.

>he is testing one aspect in isolation of others. This is a good thing, and is generally the way in which scientific tests advance knowledge.

Yes, maintaining constants and only altering one variable. But this test has an 2nd variable, that is altered into a special state for all of the experimentation, and then we make the leap into assuming that these results are anything other than pretty to look at when the 2nd variable is in any other position.

This is a good test for seeing which server runs best with a load testing client competing for resources on the box and using the loopback network. Thats it.

The problem is you can't test without a network stack at all, you can only test with a different network stack. Whats to say the particulars of the loopback network aren't causing more issues to be introduced to the validity of the results than the full TCP/IP stack you're trying to avoid influencing the results? Nothing, that's what.

Testing software before shipping found to help reduce undesired behavior in the field, film at 11.

Also, unconditionally opening a connection before finding out if they even have data to shoot across?

The attitude towards android in general is dismissive. You need look no further than this HN thread. Imagine how different the posts would be if the numbers had broken in the other direction, in the iPhone's favor.

>A test might have prevented the typo for the second argument to calculateLine().

If the compiler didn't puke on it in the definition, or if that was the line in the test it would just be a bug in the test. Of course that all depends on the time honored development tradition of running a hastily written online comment in production. As far as the assumption I'm knocking tests for their utility at testing, I'm not, I'm knocking their utility as documentation.

Oh, 'talent Wars' not 'Talent Wars'. A war makes me think of competition over obtaining the big name tech talent, not statistics about the volume of kids hopping around the west cost to the current popular thing. Thanks TechCrunch.

Thats not a documenting test though, thats good choice of names. You don't need tests to have a good choice of names. If I said:

    slope, yintercept = calculateLine(x1, y2, x2, y2)

You wouldn't be using the test as documentation at all. Those names are so goddamn good you don't even need documentation. You would just be using the interface, and basic maths knowledge. (Note: it doesn't actually do that, I just thought of that as something that fits the argument/output count)

But my documentation runs during the hourly and never raises any red flags! That means its right, therefore better than a comment.

edit: You did kind of prove my point by asking for documentation outside of the test. If this "documentation" test isn't enough to find out whats really going on in my 1-line function, what makes you think a test and the best-chosen names in the world would give you any insight to a 2-line function?

I had written a really long response here, drawing on my experience as a software tester.

I've deleted my post and have decided to argue my point in another fashion. Please enlighten me to the meaning foo(), here is the documentation:

    tests = [
       #Format: [InputA, InputB, InputC, InputD, Output1, Output2]
       [1, 2, 3, 4, 12,  -7 ],
       [2, 3, 4, 5, 27,  -14],
       [3, 4, 5, 6, 48,  -23],
       [4, 5, 6, 7, 75,  -34],
       [5, 6, 7, 8, 108, -47],
       [6, 7, 8, 9, 147, -62],
    ]

    for a, b, c, d, o1, o2 in tests:
        failUnlessEqual((o1, o2), foo(a, b, c, d))

Can you tell me what foo() does please? Its a ridiculously simple function. I work with tests like this quite often. It doesn't confuse me though, I like to put comments in my code and even the test code, but you don't need those.

Ah yes, the old "Don't rock the boat, because the gov't says that now freedom is only for people who don't rock the boat" argument.

ssshhhh. This is a technological revolution, don't tell them that the war is already over.

>iCloud heralds an era wherein all of your data is decentralized

You are correct, for all definitions of "decentralized" that are "rigidly centralized, almost appearing decentralized because centralization is so far outside your control"

HTML emails already offer both, hidden in the mime message is a plain text version. Clients just usually don't show the plain text one when there is an html version.

>PG mentioned that his firm never managed to get a NYT article.

At the same time though, this is an airport and government bullying, not some tech startup. I know we have our heads deep in this tech world, but come up for air for a minute and see that the differences in topic area might have had some kind of influence too.

>iOS devices all have to ability to create playlist on the fly to.

The classics don't. It is the single feature that has me using a 3rd party firmware.

>endless playlist building is not a solution to the problem of quickly populating a queue on a whim

Of course it isn't, but browsing to a song/artist/album and being able to say "append to end of playlist" or "insert into queue next" are simple operations that are very friendly on a portable device, and once I had the ability to do so I couldn't go back.

I'm sure plenty of end users would have taken the offer, thats just because they're corporate customers. They never want the brand new thing. Not only is the supporting an os upgrade a pain in the ass long process that will also involve a lot of waiting around for all your vendors to get off their asses about supporting the new thing, at the time the prevailing wisdom was to never use windows before the first service pack. XP didn't really get good until sp2.