mlLK

Although this might not be applicable given the topic, someone might as well say it:

> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. --Jamie Zawinski

As a sort of 'untold' rule of thumb, I avoid writing regex scripts like the plague and let my macros do all the globbing. Although I'm sure writing stuff in bash or C on a regular basis would trump this rule altogether, but, then again, I also avoid writing/reading anything in bash or C like the plague as well. sighs

I wonder how they (or are even required to) test for Windows machines...my guess is that Microsoft products aren't even in their requirements.

Does anyone else dismiss this phenomenon as just a generation misusing an interactive medium? I think the "noob" label is misleading given the scope of the problem.

Especially Teddy. He was like this darker, fantastic exaggeration of Holden.

One of my favorite quotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404402

Even if the public hardly knew you, we knew you through your work, and will always remember you through the characters you shared with us. Their insight and perspective will continue to remind those lost in adolescence, the adult world, or the nostalgia of innocence that they are not alone.

RIP

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to devalue the 'interestingness' of your post. So I suppose I owe you two putups ;)

1. I didn't know what Baidu was, let alone expect a search-engine to have so much more traffic than Google, although it doesn't surprise me given China's agenda.

2. I thought your 'bar scene' metaphor was very clever.

For the most part though, China's behavior does not surprise me, and although I have never been to China the current contract does a majority of it's business in China and even has an office there. Where one my duties was 'unblock their web-site from the internet' because their site was hosted here in the states and shared an IP with a naughty domain name. If China really thinks they can censor the internet, so be it, it's a pipe dream thanks to proxy servers that remain unblocked. China's effort is merely an inconvenience if a citizen is so inclined to getting the information they want on the web.

As far as Google goes, at least they tried and I salute them for at least making the effort, no matter how many features they removed and constraints they implemented at least they tried to show the people of China what they were about, and I am hoping they are not going to give up in that regard. If anything I think Google should wage an 'information war' on China in order to reverse the Governments efforts of censoring the web.

EDIT: just realized that you replied to a deleted post and not my own. :3

> I've lurked HN for a while, but haven't given back in any way until today. My friend enjoyed this piece and encouraged me to share it to a wider audience, so here you are.

Off-topic, there, you were warned, but I've never understood lurking HN, reddit, digg, or any other karma-driven web community since all it takes is an upvote or downvote and suddenly you are no longer lurking. I mean why not create an account to simply save what you like? I think there is this sensitivity towards karma that affects HN more so than other communities, both good and bad, given it's intellectual user base and it's alliance to pg. IMO, karma is merely an indicator of user input and a value the rest of that community (the hive-mind) assigns for each input; my point being that as long as you're upvoting and downvoting anything you're still contributing, not lurking.

I think 'old parents' losing all touch with fun is an unfair stereotype, but I think I understand where you're coming from by narrowing the generational/cultural divide between you and your son or daughter you're minimizing the difference in how you communicate and think.

Somebody(geek) please reassure me that these 'changes in behavior' are not paramount to becoming a parent because this premise seemed pretty implicit throughout most items in this list. It's hard enough for me to grow up as is; it's especially harder if you still love being immature (yet playful) towards your peers and are older than twenty-two.

EDIT: I've been fired from a marketing firm for forgetting to remove my test word 'Poopy' from a Fortune500 company's web-site (running on WebLogic, yikes). No one knew the word was there for like a week since 'Poopy' was not an actual product it only showed up in their glossary. A week later I told my boss after releasing the next update and removing the test word: she flipped out, told the client, and fired me that following Monday because word got around their (the client's) IT department resulting in someone digging up a cached copy of their web-site's glossary and passing it on to someone higher up the corporate ladder. I'm an idiot for using such a vulgar test word but I had no business working there (in a marketing firm), let alone no business editing 14,000-20,000 lines of XML. (seriously, there were about 3-4 XML files that long) In retrospect though, I'm glad it happened because now (then) I finally had a reason to learn Mercurial (or why version-control is important and how branching could have saved my ass) :P

Still though, the shitty thing with Steam (or why Valve is so evil) is the fact that the customer can not act as a reseller if he/she is either unsatisfied with the game or is just tired of playing it.

I don't really know what sort of model (subscription?) Steam has implemented here, but it appears very monopolistic and evil given the PC gaming market.

http://www.digitalruin.net/node/55

I don't know how many signs Microsoft needs in order to understand that the success of their operating-system is not correlated to how many features it has or secure it is; in fact, it is almost the opposite. . .if Microsoft spent less time building Cathedrals and more time sharing their source code (a portion at a time given the problem and the community) then maybe they could finally start iterating in the right direction, rather than attempting to integrate their next-gen 'space station' of an OS on planet made up of pueblos.

As terse as downloadsquad.com articles are, it seemed unfair to include this domain in your submission filter (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044). Unless of course they were doing the spamming, which it appears they were not, but given how interesting the article's outbound links are and the fact that this article could server as an interesting entry-point for discussion, I submitted a cached copy.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ easily brings down this bogus claim. I honestly don't think much would change even if they did open-source their PageRank algorithm because the people willing and able enough to exploit it already do, and regardless of how much their PageRank increases Google will send your domain deep into an internet abyss and out of their index.

I pretty ignorant when it comes to mobile apps, so please excuse me for asking, why is developing another interface for web-site X such a common phenomena? It seems redundant and unnecessary to create this extra interface and call it an application when a browser would do just fine.

I am going to extend the discussion by asking this, how do you recognize a good programmer who wasn't born from the culture of academia?

The only reason I ask is that I consider myself a late-bloomer, and after reading Coders at Work (which I highly recommend) I was kind of bummed out that I squandered my opportunity in college by not hanging out with CS crowd. It seemed like so many of Seibel's interview subjects accomplished so much in this period and were more or less born to be programmers. . .it sounds trite when I read it aloud but I can no longer ignore this unspoken caste system amongst programmers.

Yeah no kidding, I want my up-vote back. . .I should have known better, a title like that is to good to be true.

Somebody please kill this.

How hard would it be to implement a 'classic' or 'noobs' controller (filter) for handling how different items are viewed? Easiest hack (from someone ignorant in arc) could be as simple as adding an optional view variable after each id.

Would it be difficult to integrate comment filtering for /classic and /noobs while they act as somewhat of a controller and items behave like views?

Thank you. That was an interesting and insightful observation [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859617]. His argument for reliability made scaling seem almost moot. You rarely see someone toss around the idea of 'reliability' when (they are) discussing whatever they think 'the cloud' means. Nevertheless, it was a refreshing reminder that newer (better) technology is not always about optimization, its about mitigating risk by building a sense of predictability into your solution (application).

Very informative article for NoSQL noobs like myself. If I understood him correctly: Scalability (an implementation) is the partitioning and distribution of data for databases across multiple machines working interdependently. Data and query model (an interface) is the essence of NoSQL since it is the equivalent of what I'm used to doing in SQL, which is hitting the database with a query; yet, the obvious advantage of NoSQL is that we no longer have to hit it (the db) with SQL and can instead take advantage of an API that queries our database specifically designed for however we are storing it (into our data-model). The API is as much as an interface as SQL is in a relational-database design. Lastly, persistence (from what I can tell, an engine optimized for a data-model) is what I think NoSQL is really all about because each engine is storing and fetching data according to specific a data-model which is optimized for run-time.

Please correct if I'm misunderstanding anything or everything. Also would someone care to elaborate more (educate me) on scalability? Is this same sort of scalability Amazon's EC2 servers are optimized for?

Well I'm not gonna blame you for it not working in Firefox. I've actually had to re-write client-side code (generally just quick hacks, similar to your project) solely for Firefox patching some sort of quirk or behavior change into their browser. It can get especially annoying if you're always testing with the most recent version.

Nevertheless its a neat app. ;)

Try this, http://www.youtube.com/html5 and if this will not play then it is most likely an issue with Firefox; try installing Chrome and see if that resolves the playback issue. I was experiencing the same issue in Firefox 3.5.5

Only browser I got your app working in was Chrome. What browser were you primarily testing the application in? What version? Because Firefox just released an update this morning and it could very well be the culprit.

I not only could not get Firefox (3.5.5), IE7, or Safari to work with your HTML5 YouTube app, but I could not get YouTube's app to work either; I hope this fact mitigates your worries.

If I had the luxury of talking with a VC one-on-one I'd formulate very open-ended questions while trying to keep discussion domain as general and abstract as possible.

In other words, steer clear from case studies and CS specific ideas, put yourself in the shoes of a VC, and figure-out what makes this guy tick (milk him for his experience not his judgment).

Keep your questions short, in his/her language, and open.

/nods

These self-appointed titles formulated as acronyms, C[insert domain]O, is the quintessential cue that capitalists are self-important militarists. Of course I mean militarists only in the lightest (and perhaps hyperbolic) terms for how a large corporation organizes their positions (occupations) of power internally and behave or affect some group(s) of society.

Internally, most notable positions of power are denoted by their domain of command then rank (or title), highest obviously being an 'officer.' Externally the company as a whole will only act on its interests while engaging a so-called 'threat' in a 'fight or flight' fashion. I often forget how young capitalism really is, and while this characteristic is certainly less apparent in smaller organizations it is the 'de facto' operative standard in how larger corporations conduct their-self in the market.

Finally a teenager humble enough to address the ad nauseam idea that teenagers can be entrepreneurs to. The media (most esp. major media outlets) have been exploiting this topic ever since they finally acknowledged the internet as a valid 'media contender.'

A teenager with an entrepreneurial spirit is rare as is and perhaps even paradoxical in the most stereotypical case, but a teenager disciplined and willful enough to build a business (web-site/service) attractive enough to sell and humble enough to remind us they still have a lot to learn is probably one in a million.

I don't mean to swing on this kid's nuts, I'm merely trying to make the point that a majority of early-blooming entrepreneurs wearing fancy acronyms/job-titles assume they know too much too soon and have a hard time adapting their business and their ego when X takes a turn for the worse.

+1 for you for using grids. Nowadays I try to design everything for YUI's base CSS library (reset-fonts-grids).

Are there any Facebook employees/ex-employees here on HN? I've often wondered how many PHP developers they have on staff and how they manage deploying/integrating stuff in PHP for production.

An unmonetized (account holders accumulate credit(s) per textbook(s) already traded/donated) college textbook exchange hub.

Kind of like a distributed library of users holding textbooks for a finite period of time until it is eventually re-queued for someone else to checkout. Payment for textbooks exchanged are abstracted as credits according to some scraped average.

+1 for YUI

+2 Grok Douglas Crockford's DOM theory then optimize how your scripts use the DOM, it is very easy to abuse the DOM, don't. Grok the DOM.

I'll join your protest in my paper's lack of LaTeX; although I must admit that I've never felt or even considered anything I've ever published (for someone of higher academic seniority) a serious scientific contribution.

Nevertheless, shame on you for introducing the two following ideas in a complete sentence, Knuth's line terminating algorithm and Word's aesthetics. o_O As soon as my words are worth it, I swear to you that I will start investing my efforts into formatting my thoughts in a language as serious and beautiful as LaTeX. Until then Word is a wonderful canvas for finger-painting.