codingthebeach

For stuff I need to be remotely accessible, I use BitBucket and a commercial GitHub Private account. For stuff that can be local only, a series of local git repos.

If security is a concern, I trust a provider like GitHub or BitBucket to secure my data better than I trust myself to secure it, esp. if I also want to be able to access that data remotely.

Then there's the ability to easily convert projects between public and private. Publicize that private side project when it's ready, or privatize the open project that you want to take commercial.

There are a ton of integrations built in to GitHub (not just GitHub Pages) that to me make it a clear win for now with BitBucket a strong 2nd in my mind.

Also useful in HTML/CSS/JS-driven desktop UI through Chromium or similar as a way of preventing selection on user interface chassis elements.

Interesting ah..perspective.

To me, and to most builders, Windows desktops, and OS X / Linux desktops, are far more viable than iOS or Android; not less. Even John Gruber admits that the iOS app store is rotting.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/12/01/sketch-leaves-m...

Desktop machines may not be sexy -- unless you happen to like games, your example of choice -- but they're reliable, users understand them, they exist in huge numbers, and they're never going away, because humans will always like large, high-resolution displays, and whatever computing device provides that will be "the desktop" going forward.

The comment about "infesting Windows PC with viruses and software" is also inaccurate, and has been since about 2008 or so.

@sprucely -- thanks for the downvote -- you prove my point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sprucely

"In preparation to join US wars, Japan dismantles freedom of the press". What US wars? Populist hogswaddle. Such assertions should be backed up if you're going to make them. As for the supposed rise of "nationalism", to the average liberal, ANY movement in the direction of national security, or any display of pride in one's country, is not just nationalism but fascism, racism, and worse.

Secretly one of the better authoring tools out there, but handicapped by an association with "Windows Live" (worst brand ever) and by an overly Windows-centric architecture. This tool should be rebuilt not under .NET (even with MONO) but under something like Electron, for the 3 major desktops, keeping the same clean round-trip HTML/Preview we loved in the old, and adding Markdown support.

Also:

http://jsonresume.org https://github.com/jsonresume/resume-cli https://github.com/fluentdesk/fluentcv

Possibly just Round 2 of the massive DDOS from March:

https://github.com/blog/1981-large-scale-ddos-attack-on-gith...

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/ddos-attacks-that-cr...

Nice! I had fun with this, especially comparing Ember's half a meg footprint to Backbone's 20K. One helpful data point could be whether the library supports a (formal) custom build apparatus, since you can often get a sizable reduction that way. Full jQuery UI clocks in at ~242K, but using http://jqueryui.com/download/ you can often strip it down to 20K or less. Similarly with THREE.js and several others. Going in the other direction, a library that seems small (Backbone.js, @ ~20K) may actually end up being relatively heavy because of required external dependencies. A more explicit side-by-side "compare" function would also be nice here, comparing library size along with other metrics like script loader compatibility, maintenance frequency, different flavors of popularity, etc.

Location: Charlotte, NC (USA)

Remote: Your choice

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Grue hunting and delousing and left-handed spin-widget analysis. Also any major web or desktop stack, from client-side framework-driven JS backed by your choice of Ruby, PHP, Python, C#, or Node under LAMP/WAMP/WIMP/WISC to cross-platform C++ targeting OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Resume: Inquire within. 10+ years commercial dev exp.

Email: james@indevious.com

Most recent employer: UPS

Most recent project: http://extrovert3d.com

Thanks!

It would be nice if you wouldn't derail the conversation with another tired old "but it's not as good as gcc when it comes to X". This is a CTP. You split hairs over minor points of standards compliance that many devs won't even use on gcc yet because the features are so new, and completely avoid mentioning that the productivity of Visual Studio (for both .NET as well as native C++, including cross-platform C++) arguably dwarfs any other IDE on the market. Have you used, I mean really used, a recent version of Visual Studio for C++ work? Or are you making this comment because you haven't and you find it threatening? Tell you what. You build your C++ app with Xcode 6 or command-line gcc for all it matters. I'll build mine with Visual Studio 2013 or later. We'll see who wins. By the way, I love gcc. Love, love, love. That doesn't mean I have to take pot shots at Visual Studio, which is tooled to the Nth, completely stable, and not at all the old restrictive MS dev environment of yore. The times have changed.

This is just outright disingenuous. Both books have ample violence and the Quran specifically commands followers to chop off the body parts of the infidels. I can quote you the verses if you'd like. The Bible has its share of violence and gore too. What game are you playing at?

Atwood was (is) a C# developer, and before that he was a VB.NET developer. These days he also does some Ruby and a bunch of other stuff. His initial MS/.NET focus and more generic usability rants were half the reason I started reading Coding Horror. Which is 100% of the reason why I joined the StackOverflow beta. And blogged about it. And rewrote my site from the ground up in one of the ASP.NET MVC release candidates.

You're correct that ASP.NET MVC was new at the time, but with guys like Scott Hanselmann comparing it to an acoustic guitar production versus WebForms more full-studio approach, and with Phil Haack on the squad, and with the corporate blessing from Microsoft and promises of future integrations, this was not some fly-by-night project that required a lot of faith to invest in. It was a clear case where Microsoft got something right, thanks to a small team of talented devs.

Consider: for the first time in history, you had the ability to write clean C# code in a web context with full control of markup and proper separation of concerns, sans cruft or baggage imposed by attempting to stretch a "desktop" metaphor over an request/response medium. Don't underestimate the psychological effect of this on programmers who'd been spending their days in the trenches builting line-of-business CRUD apps with ASP.NET WebForms and unbridled VIEWSTATE. So to me, ASP.NET MVC was the clear and obvious choice for StackOverflow. If you accept that, what better language than the C# he already knew?

I don't think they would've chosen C# at all were it not for ASP.NET MVC. It was the MVC, more than anything else, that made lean-and-mean WISA stacks possible. C# with ASP.NET MVC under recent versions of Visual Studio is tooled to the Nth degree, performant, and yet and manages to stay clean. Not so under ASP.NET WebForms and even less so under classic ASP.

It was difficult for me to get past the self-referential (and reverential) tone of the writing, which felt more like an advertisement for the author's cleverness than a real discussion of the pros and cons of SSH, but it could be I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

I've always thought of a lot of DFW's writing as a kind of programming. There's the main narrative thread of whatever he's talking about at a given time-slice, then there are the "worker threads" he spins off from that in the form of random lateral jumps to stream-of-consciousness, the 24-page footnote containing a single run-on sentence, etc. Certainly in IJ, and to a lesser degree in his other works, there are multiple "paths" the thread of execution can take to reach the end of the book. Put another way: are DFW's footnotes intended to be read synchronously or asynchronously? If you read them synchronously, it tends to interrupt the flow of the main narrative (context switches are expensive). If you read them asynchronously, you miss a lot of context and, possibly, the author's intended ordering/synchronization of the ideas. And of course all of this is intentional, and gives his writing a "meta" dimension that standard English don't usually have (usually for good reasons).

Grew up in Boston and spent more nights in the stacks at the BU bookstore than I can remember (third floor). I never met him and wouldn't have recognized him if I had but I stumbled across IJ years later.

I think people tend to focus too much on the "gen X" factor when they put on their DFW hats, as if he were a precocious but emotionally fragile teenager who missed some key lessons in life. I think there was more vigor to DFW's vision of the world than that. He called it an "extrapolation" but it's an extrapolation that carries a lot of insight about the thing it's extrapolating from. Also he had too much humor, wit, and insight to be "gen-X" in the sense it's used in this interview. DFW was a once-in-a-generation writer. Maybe once in a lifetime. I would've loved to have seen what he could've produced by the time he turned 50.

Yay. I would really like to see Digg take a swing at this and said as much a couple weeks ago.

http://www.codingthewheel.com/internet/could-digg-replace-go...

Digg is the dark horse in this race. It will be interesting to see how well they can execute.

If that's true then G+ is more of a danger to Google than Facebook ever was. Using the index as a way to strong-arm publishers into using a half-baked Facebook clone may even work, short-term. Long-term this is one way Google can lose Search.

You're not alone. Bruce Schneier on migrating away from Google:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5425713

Om Malik:

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to...

James Whittaker:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-...

Many others.

That's a pertinent question. For me the loss here isn't so much the present utility of the API, but where they could've taken the API in the future. This seems like a step away from whatever that would've been.

MS revenues have grown by 45 billion dollars under Ballmer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer). Without Ballmer .NET would not have existed and the XBox would not exist as it exists today. I have no great love for the guy but I've yet to read a convincing argument for his ouster. Just priggish former executives badmouthing the company that lifted them into the 1%.

You can give users a proper RSS/ATOM URL in your domain space and still use Feedburner -- redirect "mysite.com/feed" to your Feedburner URL. People started doing this years ago as a hedge against this exact situation, so that if Feedburner went down, your users' RSS clients will still point to an address under your control. For a while it was even an unofficial Feedburner recommendation. They had a blog post about it and everything. :)

OS X manages just fine without a formal "Start" button. Who needs Start buttons when you can pin, search from the desktop, or use Launchpad? So goodbye, old Start Button, we've had a good run. You will be remembered.

Interesting point. Wavatars are Shamus Young's original work.[1] Identicons[2] and monsterids[3] are Scott Sherill-Mix's work. I don't think those guys were shooting for "ugly", but I agree an ugly or nondescript avatar could incentivize users to upload a custom one. And that may have played into Gravatar's decision to support these avatar types.

[1] http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1462

[2] http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_identicon/

[3] http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_monsterid/

The industry's not quite to the point where you can get rid of text-as-images. @font-face is supported in maybe 50% of browser versions, requires several different font formats, and even if you get it to work uniformly, you still have to deal with licensing issues.

http://caniuse.com/#search=font-face

I agree you should prefer text to images of text, but sometimes you can't escape it. EDIT: And I agree that in this particular case, he could've just used appropriately-styled text. :)

Truer words were never spoken. "What's that, you expect me to produce 40 pages of technical-but-intelligible copy for procedures on your plastic surgery website? But that's why I gave you [insert CMS of choice here], so your people could log in and edit that themselves...my god man, I'm a web developer, not a medical research technician...what's that? You don't have people? Sigh."

I agree. From what I can tell, the site appears to be a platform for launching sidebar ads. The content seems to be an afterthought.

Just look at their definition of Chrome OS. "Chrome OS is basically a crippled netbook that currently requires constant internet connection to function, and to allow Google data-mining and ad serving."

Last time I checked, Chrome OS was an operating system, not a netbook. And a netbook whose main job is to surf the web isn't a "crippled" netbook...it's just a netbook.