Hacker News Reader

rnicholsonon Oracle shuts down PostgreSQL test servers

I think it was more about Solaris support than just the mere fact of having another build server.

Sun Microsystems - and for a short time its new owner Oracle - had provided three member servers to ensure PostgreSQL was stable on the Solaris operating system.

rnicholsonon Oracle shuts down PostgreSQL test servers

I wonder if this move has more to do with killing off Solaris than with Oracle directly trying to screw PostgreSQL.

rnicholsonon Ask HN: How many people here use iPad?

I have a 32GB wifi-only model. I use it daily, and I would buy it again. I use it for surfing, watching videos off iTunes U, reading (via Kindle app), checking mail, etc. It basically replaced my Kindle DX and ThinkPad but, not my iMac or other desktop.

Sometimes I wish Safari could be a little more stable. I'm finding that when I go to a page (like The Big Picture) that has lots of large images on it, Safari on the iPad will crash.

rnicholsonon The Rust programming language

Well, I initially just saw it as 'just more of the same' -- and questioned why is that good? Don't know. Trying to find out. Amongst all these other improvements over other C family languages that I read, why not syntax too? Perhaps as alnayyir said above, I'm bikeshedding and shouldn't care so much... Again, I'm not well versed in programming language design, etc so my original comment (and probably this one) certainly has an amount of naïveté.

rnicholsonon The Rust programming language

From the PDF:

Rust is a curly-brace, block-structured statement language. It visually resembles the C language family, but differs significantly in syntactic and semantic details.

I'm not a programming language buff, but why curly-braces and C-style still in 2010?

rnicholsonon A (fab) Approach To Web Apps

sorry didn't know it was a dupe.

rnicholsonon Mensch -- A coding font

I like to use 'particular' instead

rnicholsonon PR: Apple releases Safari 5 (Since It Has Been Wiped From PRNewswire)

Interesting move here. Apple is essentially providing a baked-in capability to "skip" ads within Safari on the desktop while simultaneously preparing to launch their own Mobile ad service.

rnicholsonon Kaleidoscope - File comparison for Mac released

Yeah the only thing that found that is close for Mac is Changes - http://connectedflow.com/changes/

rnicholsonon Kaleidoscope - File comparison for Mac released

Seems nice. Although, just makes me wish Beyond Compare was available on the Mac as a native app.

rnicholsonon The Vast and Endless Sea

Could something as niche as StackOverflow be supported through a donation system like Wikipedia?

rnicholsonon Ask HN: Which technology should I use for client-side web encryption?

You should read http://corte.si/posts/security/hostproof.html and http://corte.si/posts/security/crypsr.html. Was also discussed here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226277

rnicholsonon Calacanis vs DHH on This Week in Startups

http://thisweekinstartups.com/2010/03/twist-46-with-david-he...

rnicholsonon Why Subversion is better than Git

He also talks about the upcoming changes in Subversion, such as Working Copy Next Generation (WC-NG), which he believes will cause a number of Git users to convert back to Subversion.

If I've already left for git (or other dvcs) why would I come back just for "working copy"? I moved on from Subversion for much more than that...

rnicholsonon Deleting omgs out of Rails

  rake notes:custom ANNOTATION=fucked

rnicholsonon Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009?

Finally got around to reading 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' Blew me away. So much better than the film adaptation.

rnicholsonon Flipping Out (Flickr doesn't branch)

Also, after launching a feature, we have to go back in the code base and remove the old version (maintaining separate versions of all features on Flickr would be a nightmare). But overall, we find it helps us develop new features faster and with fewer bugs.

Its crazy to me to think that a high profile site like flickr would push impure code into production with the promise of "we'll clean it up after launch". I guess if you've got the right culture and discipline, it can work. Just seems so fragile.

rnicholsonon How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball

This article reminded me of this documentary - http://www.tilt-movie.com/

rnicholsonon I have already used the name "Go" for *MY* programming language

Dupe from yesterday - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934752 but is marked [dead] for some reason.

rnicholsonon Go lanuage performance test vs C, Erlang and Java

Isn't a little early to be doing performance comparisons for Go?

rnicholsonon [dead]

I think its time we stopped with that madness.