chl

Given how threat-, or, let's say, notification-happy Landmark was just a while ago [1], does anyone have an idea regarding the patent situation? Is this implementation different enough to be considered (reasonably) "safe"?

[1] http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/

According to the most recent information on hand, even the British are considered Europeans.

(More seriously, I wish people wouldn't submit interesting articles and then sullen them with dumbed-down, incendiary headlines.)

Because we invented the web and since then ... Farmville.

I prefer to think of it as stored-up innovation.

I recently read "More With Less", Paul Ciottis biography of Paul MacCready; if you want to dive deeper into the fascinating story of the creation of the Gossamer planes (starting with MacCready's unique background and network, the team re-shuffles [and alienations], tons and tons of iterations, all the downs for several very big ups; sounds like a start-up, doesn't it?), I certainly recommend it.

It required a man of extraordinary skills _and_ stubbornness to pull it all off. Only in retrospect, the solution seems (kinda) obvious.

http://www.amazon.com/More-Less-MacCready-Efficient-Flight/d...

That'd be great!

I've been keeping millions of files in single directories on XFS without problems. The big upside is that you won't need to learn any funky/new management tools.

Pray tell me how you got inside my brain and found _that_ out!

Seriously, whether I'll like your feedback or not doesn't really matter; I'm certain it will be valuable in either case.

A+ has an ASCII mode, activate w/:

  $mode ascii

For a mapping between ASCII tokens and APL glyphs, see:

- http://www.vector.org.uk/aflat/tutor/index.htm

- http://www.aplusdev.org/APlusRefV2_15.html#HEADING349

Yes, you can easily switch between K and Q (and call functions defined in either language from the other [side of the same coin]).

K4 is a significantly more powerful language (tables are a first-class data type). Stevan Apter summarized the differences here:

http://groups.google.com/group/personal-kdbplus/msg/f18fb3a8...

Things I like about RingoJS:

- Supports (most of) JavaScript 1.8 (thanks to Rhino): list comprehensions, destructuring assignments, expression closures &c. - those features [1] give the language a distinctly Pythonic feel and can lead to significantly more compact code.

- The CommonJS module system: works as expected. Not having a proper module system was one of the few drawbacks of Helma (the predecessor of RingoJS).

- Having full and easy access to the whole JVM ecosystem often makes it easy to bootstrap things, even if they're later rewritten in pure JavaScript.

- Some very exciting packages are starting to appear [2]; a current favorite of mine is berkeleystore (essentially an automatically-indexing JSON store): http://github.com/hns/berkeleystore#readme

- (Usually) laid-back, friendly & competent community (#ringojs!).

I wouldn't consider RingoJS "mature"; while it can be extremely useful in its current state (it certainly is for me) and the core functionality is stable, there's also a lot of (important) work left to do, especially when it comes to the "batteries".

In other words: For people who enjoy API and library design, RingoJS is an excellent project to contribute to right now ;-).

[1] Added to the language by Brendan Eich, more information here: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/new_in_javascript_1.8

[2] http://ringojs.org/wiki/Packages/

I'd appreciate a couple of observations regarding what you "didn't like at all"; while I don't think that every tool has to cater to every taste or requirement, you are, AFAIK, a long-time (client-side) JavaScript developer, and getting honest feedback from that clientele would be extremely beneficial for the project.

Banning the platform most of your users are using doesn't sound like a great idea to me. There's enormous value in eating one's own dogfood (and stuff running in Chrome is an entirely different kind of dogfood than stuff running in IE, on Windows).

I was thinking about games and (potentially design-heavy) simple apps (quizzes, educational apps &c.) mostly.

Regarding the "feel" of Flash's standard UI controls: I agree (and apparently, so does Adobe, as they continue to ship a completely new framework with just about every major release).

Tangential hypothesis du jour: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash (in the "middleware" sense, ignoring Flash-as-plug-in) on their iAppliances because it would offer a _significantly_ superior development experience when compared to Objective-C/Cocoa? From my experience w/ Flash development, it would be _perfect_ for at least ~50% of the (rather) simple games and applications that are on the App Store nowadays.

In other words: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash because it's so bad, but because it's too good?

Maybe it's worth _more_ pre-IPO!

The div element?

What if the reason for the (undisputed) Flash crash-happiness on OSX isn't only Adobe's laziness (what a ridiculous statement), but also some sub-par OSX system components that almost always seem to be involved when Flash crashes or performance goes down to nil (e.g., on my machine, ATSserver)?

What if Apple's C/C++ compiler (i.e. gcc) just doesn't optimize as well as Microsoft's (which, from my experience, it certainly doesn't)?

Let's not forget that it was Adobe who tried to firmly establish SVG (and burned a lot of money in the process). I for one can't blame them for investing where content creators and the users are.

As an aside, I'd rather focus on having more people exposed to fresh stories; that'd make "cabal upvoting" much tougher.

Probably because the votes weren't all that suspicious: two semi-regular HN readers who upvote a story in quick succession, but certainly not simultaneously - I have no idea how you'd like to "catch" those (or even whether that would be all that desirable).

BTW, have you ever thought about making other people's "saved" views (i.e. their upvotes) public (maybe w/ opt-in)? It would be an awesome data set for collaborative filtering ...

Interesting. What's the difference between the default frontpage and /classic?

Update: Thanks to SearchYC.com, I found the answer here --

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024293

Right now, upvoting conflates at least three (relatively) distinct intents:

- "save for later"

- "looks interesting"

- "did read; was interesting; would recommend"

It's the same w/ many other services, e.g. Twitter's stars. It would be rather interesting to see whether a service offering finer-grained options would add much in terms of actual usefulness.

No, that the story didn't get any votes just made it a good opportunity to test a long-standing pet hypothesis of mine.

Well, that's exactly the point; followers in the database != followers that actually pay attention.

That'd help explain why they aren't paying affiliate commissions for e-books. Apparently being able to sell at $10 is seen as more effective at building a customer base.

NumPy.