mjs

Thanks for breaking that down, it's all, uh, a little terse.

The ..^ operator (including the right endpoint?) doesn't do what I was expecting:

  > 1, 2, * + * ..^ * >= 100;
  1 2 _block298

Also, this seems a little unfortunate:

  > 1, * + * ...^ * >= 100;
  ===SORRY!===
  Method 'Bridge' not found for invocant of class 'Failure'

(I was expecting some warning about the closure expecting two arguments, and only getting one.)

If you do have an account but your password is not a dictionary word and it's been hashed and salted, do you care?

What's the point of these tools that let you know whether Gawker's database held my email address? It's no secret that I have a Gawker account, and a Twitter account, and a Facebook account... What I would like to know is how likely it is that my password could be compromised. How were the passwords stored? Hashed? Salted and hashed?

Really? If my original Palm Pre has a curved screen, it's basically imperceptible. (And if anything, looks to be convex, not concave.)

Excellent! Yes it seems a bunch of people like to visualise how the repo changes via these sorts of diagrams. http://marklodato.github.com/visual-git-guide/index-en.html has similar stuff.

How does the privacy features (i.e. restricting access to certain information to certain people) work if the information is embedded in DNS? (Also, how can you use "dig" or similar to extract the information from a *.tel address? Everything I try seems to return the same sort of information I'd get from any other domain.)

There's a decent Microsoft blog post explaining which aspects of browser performance the different benchmarks test:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/09/14/performance-wh...

On SunSpider: "The WebKit SunSpider tests exercise less than 10% of the API’s available from JavaScript and many of the tests loop through the same code thousands of times. This approach is not representative of real world scenarios and favors some JavaScript engine architectures over others."

My comment was more of an observation rather than a telling point for or against git, but I don't think it's a huge advantage of git that everyone has a backup copy of the repo that can be used for failover. github is essentially a central point of failure for many teams. You're going to change the location your CI checks out from if github goes down? Are you using github for issue tracking? Code reviews? What's more likely, I think, is that you just wait for a few minutes or hours until it comes up again, which is what you'd do with svn.

It occurs to me just now that it's kinda weird that subversion repositories are pretty much distributed everywhere; git repositories generally end up on github.

This should be at the top of the post, rather than right at the bottom... (Another case of malice or stupidity--stupidity wins a lot of the time.)

The reason for refunds in the hosting business is not to compensate the buyer for any loss of business they might suffer if their site goes down (this will probably be many times what the service provider would make from the account); it's to tie the failure of the buyer's systems to something the service provider would self-evidently prefer to avoid.

Service providers could also signal their reliability by offering "loss of business" insurance at low premiums. If a service provider will pay you $10,000/day in the event that your site is unavailable, and the premium on this insurance is $5/month, it's pretty likely that they're not expecting to have to pay this out very often.

(Royal Mail offers fairly cheap loss/damage insurance, which is a good sign their service is reliable. Not sure about DHL/Fedex.)

This is also pertinent:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/How+does+concurrency+wor...

Note that whilst a write blocks all other writes, the time you need to wait is the time it takes for the in-memory data structure to be modified; you don't have to wait for the write to hit disk. (Writes are only persisted to disk every so often.)

There's a blog post where the MongoDB people explain why they haven't prioritised single server durability:

http://blog.mongodb.org/post/381927266/what-about-durability

Basically: (a) for real single server durability you need to turn off hardware buffering or have a battery-backed RAID controller to ensure your write really hit disk; (b) this won't help you if your disks fail, and this failure mode is as likely as any other; and (c) for some applications, the delay required to replay a transaction log in unacceptable--you need 100% uptime.

I am thinking though, that the fact that MongoDB writes to files at all is somewhat misleading, and that they may as well say that all your data is loaded into virtual memory. (Since they make no guarantees that the database files will be consistent except in the case of a controlled shutdown. Neither does MySQL, they point out, but I think in practice MySQL database files will be easier to recover from, since their structure is presumably more regular.)

TC is trolling for pageviews perhaps, but I did like copy-and-paste of an entire AP story at the end.

Does the preprocessor generate raw (i.e. conventional) CSS, which it then convinces the browser to evaluate or re-evaluate as necessary, or does it actually apply the styles itself with JS? i.e. something equivalent to jQuery('.heading').css("color", "red").

Nice tip! One small problem: if I set .ssh/config to do the RemoteForward, if I open up two shells to the same host, the second shell complains that it can't set up the remote forward (because the first shell has already set it up). Of course it's not necessary for the remote forward to be established twice--is there any way to get the port forwarding set up once, and only once, for a given host?

True, but I don't think Math Overflow and SO are really equivalent: most of the Math Overflow participants are academics; if you asked the same question on a SO for academic computer scientists I think you'd get similar results, especially if you restricted the answers to universal truths, rather than things which may or may not be true at some point in time, or under some conditions. (i.e. Apache is a better web server than nginx is not a universal truth, and neither is OO is better than procedural, etc.)

I might have missed it, but does Conway concede at any point that there's anything he (or the Perl 6 development process) should've done differently, or better? From the interview, it seems that the last 10 years turned out as entirely as he was expecting and hoping, and that he has no regrets.

He's like: "Some people think Perl is dead ... but they're so wrong I won't even bother correcting their misconception."

Or: "It's taken 10 years ... but designing Python took 10 years as well, and since Python is popular, we'll be popular too."

Interesting that he's now giving a date for a Perl 6 release. (6-12 months.)

--post-* is pretty sensible for POST. Unfortunately wget doesn't do PUT or DELETE.

wget has a better-designed command line API and documentation, although its inability to PUT or POST is rather unhelpful. For example, curl uses --include to output full headers (wget uses --save-headers) and, more inexplicably, --request to change the request method, even though --method is available.

The do say that it does fuzzy matching, so it can still work with minor changes.

I don't think any program guarantees that the GUI is a stable API! I do wonder about its ability to handle unexpected conditions, or for the scripter to know that these conditions exist in the first case. For example, if the GUI changes based on the day of week, the script will probably either get very confused, or do the wrong thing. I imagine there's some way to do conditionals (if you see this, then do thing 1, otherwise do thing 2) but it's hard for the scripter to discover all the possibilities. Still, might be useful for some things.

Hey, that's some quality XML they're pumping out there. From their population data:

  <ROWSET>
    <ROW>
      <Area_Code>00AA</Area_Code>
      <Area_Name>City of London</Area_Name>
      <Persons-1801>129000</Persons-1801>
      <Persons-1811>121000</Persons-1811>
      <Persons-1821>125000</Persons-1821>
      <!-- ... -->
    </ROW>
  </ROWSET>

http://data.london.gov.uk/datastore/package/historic-census-...

Embedding the year into the element name, useful that.

"Ford’s version of radar prepares the brakes so that all you need to do is touch them to get full braking pressure if the car thinks it’s headed for a collision."

That sounds like a really good way to get hit from behind. Does the system try to stop you as fast as possible, or as slow as possible while still avoiding the car in front? The second option is kinder to cars behind without such sophisticated safety systems.

Well, that page says "The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is realized by a grant from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation." So I'm not entirely sure if this explains it. (Nearly a million dollars seems a lot of money for a redesign + usability study, as well.)

"The foundation also invested $890,000 in a new design for the site ..." Yow! I'm sure that's wrong/misleading in some way, but what does this figure actually include?

In what other ways is Android splintering?? This post talks about the sort of splintering I thought everyone was talking about when they talked about splintering: multiple devices, different hardware capabilities, different versions, carrier and manufacturer-applied customisations.

Contrary to the article, I don't think node.js uses Python at all. (Apart from the build system.)

I think the name was meaningful in this case, and that this is true in most cases.

I'm not especially interested in a random person's thoughts on Go. I may be interested in their thoughts on Go if their post happens to make it to the top of YC: this probably indicates that they have something interesting to say. And I'm also interested in their thoughts on Go if they're someone who is a recognised as an authority in the field, as is the case with Bram Cohen. Or: I might be interested if they have a history of writing good posts.

So names in titles do usually convey useful information for me. (Even if I don't recognise it, the fact that the submitter used a name is informative.)

Interesting. Thanks.

Well, is there any real different between a first-class function and a closure that closes over nothing?

Is it possible for a language to support closures without first-class functions? How common is it to have first-class functions without closures? (I think Python sort of had this arrangement, but I think this is fixed now.)