saturn

Let me second this recommendation that anyone with a genuine interest in this topic check out The Algebraist; it's a truly excellent book. I wouldn't say it's Hard SF but it's pretty firm and, IMO, a far more considered and imaginative vision of viable-ish space battle than the linked article manages.

I mean, the article hardly even mentions antimatter, aka the most potent energy store in the known physical universe, aka God's battery. Who's going to be frigging around with some stupid dirty fission reactor when the local Dyson Sphere is producing cheap (by military standards) AM by the kilo?

> At any given time, about 10 percent of Americans are completely incapacitated by their lumbar regions

How can this possibly be true? Completely incapacitated, ie bedridden and immobile? Surely the country would be in near collapse if 30+ million of its inhabitants were randomly bedridden at any one time just by that one medical issue.

Wanted: Hegemony of International Elites looking for despicable candidates for Two Minutes Hate media roles. Slightly senile, doddering old men preferred. Work remote!

The author claims using "they" is common, but grammatically incorrect - then recommends some arbitrary (and currently unknown and incorrect) set of replacement words to be adopted and thus become correct by weight of numbers.

Why not just continue using "they" until it is widely accepted enough to be correct? Frankly, I don't think we're too far off that. The supposedly erroneous example he quoted read fine to me.

on a 10G planet, 200 miles at 0˚ would be plenty fun to walk..

Not that I'm trying to turn HN into a jobs board but if you're finding it hard to get freelance work, an email and a portfolio in your profile would help.

I have to say, this is great and very timely. I have lost track of how many conversations I've had in the last year where I lament the shocking state of home automation. If there's anywhere REST standardisation is welcome, it's in the home.

That said, the home page needs a lot of work. It's garish and the english is terrible. And does anyone really say "mashup" these days?

What exactly was a hoax? The document pasted was rather detailed and, while somewhat overblown, was obviously written by someone who knew what they were talking about. It contains a lot of criticism of design decisions by MongoDB; these are pretty common and being opinion, can't really be called a hoax.

There's also a couple of anecdotes of MongoDB supposedly failing in various ways in the author's experience. Are you saying those were fake?

Just because you submitted the document here does not mean you wrote it. Pastebin logs the document as being submitted on 5th Nov. http://pastebin.com/FD3xe6Jt

I don't buy it. I don't think nmongo wrote the doc on pastebin. Maybe I'm overrating my character-detection abilities, but it didn't smell like it was written by some immature time-wasting kid.

edit: I use mongo in prod; very much a student of the "right tool for the job" school. Not trying to add or subtract weight from the original text; ambivalence reigns supreme regarding internet nosql battles. Just saying that my possibly unreliable circuits detect quite a gulf between the original document and the OP's hysterical, caps-lock-engaged cry for attention here.

The one thing I miss after switching to PostgreSQL from MySQL is Sequel Pro. pgAdmin 3, sorry to say, sucks, and I grow tired of rails dbconsole - but that's my only option, really.

Please, someone, make a good osx pg client. Just copy Sequel Pro if you don't know what I mean by that. I would pay a lot of money for a good osx client, I am not kidding, I have to deal with this every day. I cannot be the only one..

Nice article, I guess, but overly complex; it really is a very simple set of reasons. Here goes:

  1. There is a large startup community in the US
  2. Many people interested in startups already went to 
     the US because of (1)
  3. The barrier to moving to the US because of (1) is far
     lower than trying to recreate the environment locally
  4. This is a strongly self-reinforcing phenomenon

Wash, rinse, repeat. You can say the exact same thing for films and music.

Spoken as an Australian who is likely moving to NYC in the coming months. The startup environment just does not exist in AU. I have the petri dish, I have the bacteria, what I need now is agar, and there is precious little to be found down under.

I was going to write that I didn't think it very good form to post failing code tests on the net, but having looked at the code - my god. I still think it's questionable manners but man that code is shocking.

I was also going to say that I thought the naming of WebForm2 was the least of the code sample's problems, but on reflection, I think the writer is onto something - it really is quite emblematic of the lazy, sloppy thinking on display here. The same kind of person who thinks this code is acceptable is the exact same type of person who is too unbelievably lazy to even think of a better name than WebForm2.aspx.

Not often you see code so bad that it feels almost voyeuristic looking at it.

Shouldn't it be "Netflix reverts Qwikster split"? I don't "revert from" a misguided commit, I revert it.

I do like the metaphor though.

I have always thought that quote was ridiculous. What is unreasonable about noticing an improvement can be made in your surroundings, and endeavouring to make it?

There is a grain of truth I suppose, vis-a-vis humanity's general restlessness, fixing what ain't broke, etc, but I think that this generalisation that anyone who isn't perfectly happy and satisfied with the exact present state of things is "unreasonable" is not true at all.

When the farming jobs left, the unskilled could get manufacturing jobs. When they left, they got service industry jobs. What happens when they leave? What will the millions upon millions of basically unskilled labourers do then?

I am tempted to say "personal servants for the rich" and I am only half joking. As you say, history repeats itself.

I also interpreted the word as randomdata did.

I think this is an American thing. When I think of sharecropping it makes me think of farmers under a landlord in medieval England or something. Not a great power dynamic but the word isn't all that negative, it just emphasises (when used as a metaphor elsewhere) that you work and stay at the landlord's pleasure.

I've heard americans use the word before but didn't realise it came loaded with all this historical meaning from the slavery era, turning it into a highly negative concept.

Biased? That article? I thought it a very fair analysis, evenhanded almost to a fault.

You might not agree, of course, but bias isn't about whether you agree or not. It's a systematic favouring of one side of an argument over others, regardless of facts. I don't see much evidence of that in the article, which is a fairly dry analysis of the realpolitik affecting the region and the coming UN vote.

> The world does not need 200 programming languages, 1000 javascript frameworks, 500 different web servers and 20-odd social platforms

But .. that is the way we find the way forward. It's like evolution. We may not need 500 different web servers but .. that's a lot of different ideas, a lot of variation, and in the long run, a lot of innovation. Eventually the "best" way is chosen and we go to the next generation.

I actually think the proliferation of programming languages and frameworks, especially open source, is one of the purest meritocracies you can find. They live or die by their quality, innovation, new features. And the whole community is dragged forward. What you are advocating is basically central planning. Did you realise that?

> I can still deliver the same output as node.js with classic ASP/Jscript from 1998 arguably with less code and time spent.

LOL. Dude. No way.

Something you said earlier was instructive as to the mistake you are making with this line of thought. You said that "programmers can't do anything more today than they could in 2001" - or something similar. Or that other guy said it and you agreed, whatever.

Look, that's literally true. In fact it's literally true to say that any programmer can do anything as long as they use a turing complete language. This has been true since the days of ENIAC.

What has advanced, massively, is the knowledge of the best ways of doing things. Design. Efficiency. Elegance, maintainability, scalability. That is what has mainly improved. Knowledge. The laws of the universe have not changed, everyone agrees with that, but we have worked out, a little more, what works and what doesn't.

And I'm afraid your ASP/Jscript falls into the latter category. I'm sure you could mimic some tiny subset of node.js using that toolset. But it would be a hideous mess of spaghetti code. Unless, of course, you used the knowledge you gained over the last 10 years to basically reimplement node.js in ASP, presumably gaining express pre-approved VIP entry to Hell in the process. So things have advanced, haven't they?

I thought you were a sockpuppet ..

I wouldn't know anything about the stack you describe. Seems to me the barriers there are all Enterprise related; framework innovation isn't the bottleneck. Big business software - perhaps that's something that hasn't improved much, if at all.

But this is a startups related site, in case you hadn't noticed. Web programmer here. Web frameworks have improved immeasurably. If you tried to tell a web programmer that nothing has improved since 2001 you would just be laughed at, and rightly so.

It's not just about the web though. Look at the new functional languages. Look at the message queues, the image libraries, computer vision, sound .. bloody everything. Tell me, is h264 better than mpg videos from 2001?

Step outside your bubble man. In fact, leave your bubble, it sounds pretty depressing in there. This is a very exciting time to be a programmer.

> I'd say no on both counts.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion I suppose, but I don't know any professional programmer who would even come close to agreeing with you.

Even if we accept your claim that only 1 in 1000 inventions help the world, which I think is pessimistic, that's still progress. What would you rather people do? Not invent?

A programmer writing a new framework might not directly help cure Neurofibromatosis but they might make it slightly easier for another programmer, which is then inspired to work on his program, which saves a medical researcher a few minutes and gives him the time he needs to have his breakthrough. Or maybe a better search result gave him what he needs. Technology is cumulative. Criticising people because they're not working on your favoured project is pretty lame.

> who waste their time creating new languages and frameworks

Well that's just laughable, and says more about yourself than any of these allegedly offending third parties. There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.

I am yet to hear anyone give a compelling argument in favour of parenthesising arguments to a method:

  def method_name(arg1, arg2)

instead of

  def method_name arg1, arg2

especially when they do not like empty parentheses for no args

  def method_name()

and they just love to omit the parentheses when actually using a method

  puts "odd"

Why the inconsistency? Unnecessary parentheses are unnecessary! When in doubt .. let the args out!

edit:

> Avoid hashes-as-optional-parameters. Does the method do too much?

And I'm totally against this. This is an extremely useful pattern and can be key to increasing readability. I basically insist on opts hashes on any method with more than 2 args. Wow, you can see what is intended rather than Model.do_something(3, false, false).

Any big application has methods that take a lot of switches. The opts hash pattern lets you at least label them, rather than rely on obscure argument order. And it lets you set defaults on the args in a sane way (rails' famous reverse_merge!). Why would anyone be against that?

You gotta remember that 1% of America is still 3 million people. If three million people want a certain kind of high quality unsweetened yoghurt, and you're the first vendor in line, then you may as well put your order in for that G650 because if you can execute you have it made.

That's like saying "It's a little amusing how popular these web reimplementations of 2004-era word processors are". Dude, being on the web makes a huge difference. No software to install is massive. You can't link to a program running on your desktop. It's a great leap forward.

Amazing. We are surely looking at the future of porn.

None of this advice applies to me, of course. As a man and therefore a child molesting rapist just waiting for my chance to strike, the idea that I could have any sort of conversation with a little girl - let alone sit down on a couch and talk privately - is simply laughable.

Well, I can never resist implementing these interview questions! Here's my answer:

  def strip_dupes string
    res = ''
    string.each_char do |char|
      next if char == res[-1]
      res << char
    end
    res
  end

Any improvements?

update: and can never resist reducing them to one-liners either.

  def strip_dupes str
    str.each_char.inject('') {|r,c| r << c unless c == r[-1]; r}
  end

> But I cannot possibly bring myself to throw away books

Don't throw them away! The trick is to give them to a library. Win-win situation.

I recently grabbed a 512GB crucial m4 for $730 delivered, from here http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ (no affiliation) (price has risen slightly since). For some reason I'd been putting it off but seeing it there for less than $1.50 per gig, at the capacity I wanted for my macbook, suddenly seemed to be a no-brainer. Hell, I remember paying $100 per gig back in the '90s. Somehow my mental model of "reasonable prices to pay for storage" has just been totally biased by years and years of dirt cheap HDDs.

Frankly it hasn't been the jaw-dropping entering-hyperdrive performance boost I had kind of hoped for (I'm a rails dev). While a definite improvement, it seems that for many of my most common tasks (read: tests) I have merely pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU. But while it hasn't sped up all that much, it never slows down, which you don't notice at first but over time has a subtle confidence-building effect. Application launch speeds are much improved, for those who spend a good part of their day launching apps, which is not me. I tend to launch a few and then use them for the next two weeks before I restart. I also like how the drive does not make whining sounds when I move the computer before it's gone to sleep.

Recommended, anyway, they're cheap enough now that it's not a luxury, even if like me you use most of it for your work music collection.

> I don't think there's a substitute for having a "when in Rome" attitude

Yeah, this is a good point. I come across as gung-ho in the parent but I have to admit I do submit to the "when in Rome" effect.

That said, if Rome is an absolute shambles, I might feel empowered to start anew ..