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shutteron What's the status of getting .wiki approved as a TLD

Not sure, but if the .com is still available, consider using that instead.

Nah. Netbooks don't have enough CPU cycles or pixels to keep up.

Granted, I haven't owned one, but I do more than browse the internet. Netbooks typically can't provide enough horsepower to run all of the programs I like to run at the same time.

shutteron Ask YC: how to learn computer programming in 8 months?

Start with the basics. Ensure you understand general concepts well before progressing to the details of specific programming languages. Take a trip to your local bookstore and spend a couple hours reading the beginning of several books on programming. I recommend starting with Python because it will remain useful throughout your career while providing a shallow learning curve and stable library, but language choice matters less than the concepts.

I recommend staying away from Microsoft's .NET and other proprietary languages for now; focus instead on more open tools. You'll attain more versatile skills that way.

shutteron Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?

The comments differentiate good links from bad. I rarely read a post without checking the comments first.

(Though I do read the links before voting, of course.)

shutteron Ask HN: Musicians?

Piano, mostly. Actually, I'm graduating this year with a decree in both CS and music.

shutteron JQuery UI 1.6rc3: It’s getting really close

Awesome. I just picked up learning jQuery, considering switching my project away from a mix of YUI 2 and 3. So far, it's been enjoyable, but it'll be even better as jQuery UI improves.

shutteron Ask HN: What editor do you use?

Currently, TextMate. Started learning Emacs, though, and hope to get proficient in that soon (via O'Reilly's "Learning GNU Emacs"). TextMate's showing its age, for me at least, and I'm hopeful that Emacs will be more powerful and faster.

shutteron Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

A better comparison would be with Multiprocessing, or Eventlet/Spawning.

shutteron Ask HN: Do you use your brain or Google to solve your problems?

Google shines when you must deal with a problem that occurs due to third-party code (particularly proprietary code). When things _should_ be working in your code, Google can help sort out an obscure issue much more quickly than trying to search through the source for a third-party library.

Your brain works best to debug your own code, but isn't as efficient to discover flaws quickly in unfamiliar source.

shutteron Mibbit: One year old, and profitable

Congrats. I've enjoyed hearing about your progress over the past year.

shutteron Ask YC: Let's start a Hacker News book club

Skype, Ventrilo or something similar might work, depending on how many people meet at once.

shutteron Ask HN: What's a modern equivalent of the 80's "War Games" movie?

Somewhat related: They made a WarGames sequel. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/

I don't know of any hacker-related movies specifically, but I'd note a few sci-fi movies that inspired technological creativity: Flubber (the hovering robot), I Robot, Ironman. Also Futurama, in a somewhat different way.

shutteron Ask HN: Do you write more/better code when you are drinking/drunk?

I've not tried this, but I would wonder how much the potential for "dumb errors" increases when in that state. I already say "Why the heck did I write that?" too many times even when sober!

shutteron Python Makes Me Nervous

Summary: Author doesn't like these things about python:

- Duck Typing

- No constructor overloading

- Exceptions in Python aren't explicit ("checked")

Eh. You can't approach Python with a Java mindset and expect to be happy, just as you can't approach Java with a Python mindset likewise.

shutteron Let's talk about Python 3.0

http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/library/2to3.html

2to3 will handle that automatically.

shutteron Mercurial 1.1 DVCS Released

Cool. The changelog lists lots of updates; I'd be interested to hear from those who have had more experience with Git as to whether this improves Mercurial's stance versus Git.

shutteron Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?

If you're looking for flexibility, give Pylons a shot. It's often paired with SQLAlchemy, which is an amazing ORM that can be configured to do a lot of things which will make scaling easier in the long run. (Whereas Django doesn't have multiple database support, for instance; SQLAlchemy can even handle sharded data transparently.)

shutteron Ask HN: From where do you buy a domain ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=339823

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186369

I use NameCheap, myself.

shutteron Notify me when it's up

Now what would be really nice is if there was a similarly-easy-to-use "notifymewhenitchanged.com". Every change-notification site I've seen thus far has required a cumbersome signup process.

shutteron The current state of Open Source Hardware 2008 - over 60 projects

I think a lot of it has to do with the cost; software is more or less free to create. So the barrier to entry, hardware-wise, is much higher and requires more capital.

shutteron Ask HN: Why use semicolons to terminate statements in modern JavaScript or ActionScript?

Two areas that I can come up with:

1. Minification -- If you want to minify your JS, you might run into problems if you don't insert all necessary semicolons.

2. Convention -- If you wrote js code with no semicolons and then showed it to other JS programmers, you'll get a funny look, a slap in the face, or a free copy of "Javascript for Dummies", depending on the context.

shutteron LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer

> I used to swear by [LyX].

If I might ask, what do you use now?

shutteron Ask HN: Which revision control system?

I use Mercurial, but have been exploring Git a little because of what you noted -- the community momentum seems to be headed that way.

shutteron Free Dr Pepper Site Down (see the PHP)

<del>Looks like they fixed it -- good.</del> Exposing your web service code is a huge security issue; at least they were prompt about fixing it (says "Service Unavailable" now rather than serving PHP files)

Edit: Apparently not.

shutteron "LoseThos" 64-bit Open Source OS: For Programming as Entertainment

Sounds entertaining. I'll give the developer credit: he/she knows what he wants from that project, and that's half the battle. No feature creep in his mind.

shutteron Hunger among U.S. children skyrockets in 2007

I noticed that too; I wonder how much they had to pay for that (near-ubiquitous) placement.

shutteron Ask HN: Can the iPhone play videos on websites?

If you license it right, anything's possible. (i.e. major corporations can't use your code illegally or they'll get caught.)

Just because the source code is publicly viewable doesn't mean anyone can take it without permission; small people will, but the companies that would pay you for such a thing can't get away with that kind of piracy.

shutteron Ask YC: RSS for each YC discussion

Actually, links work now for some reason. I personally really like this format because it lets me see comments right via RSS. The only problem is that Yahoo then tends to cache them, and so if I want to see the _latest_ comments, I must visit the actual article permalink.

shutteron Ask YC: RSS for each YC discussion

I set up a Yahoo Pipe a while ago for comments (which pulls in each article's URL with comments), but lately all URLs have become unclickable (except for article title). I'm not sure if that was done by HN or Yahoo. Anyway:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=23159aed1a913917f...

shutteron Switching to Disqus has been a "life-transforming experience"

As far as I can recall, you can change just about anything. If CSS can't do it, you can always fallback to a little javascript, but it's pretty simple to customize.