tannerburson

I've met Noah on at least one occasion. He's a very nice, and very bright guy. But he is a completely accidental entrepreneur, so I'm not surprised at all that he struggled in an interview like this. In fact, this might be the first big real-time interview he's done.

My reading of the situation tells me that he's just really uncomfortable talking about the conversations he's had with VCs, and doesn't know how to convey that without being awkward.

That said I've never really understood his motivation for handling TwitPic the way that he does, but that's definitely not my place to criticise.

Define an anonymous function that takes no arguments, and execute it without assigning it to a variable. It's often used in javascript to keep things out of the global scope.

I don't have such a simple example handy, but it's not drastically different from your setup except I subclass an Application class, which subclasses Sinatra::Base. I'm loading about 10 subclasses, not 3. I don't have the numbers handy but when I last tested it, adding subclasses did add several MB of memory per instance.

The issue is with subclass style applications. If you use multiple sublcass apps mounted at different URLs via Rack you incur the full overhead of the framework for each subclass instance. It's not a bug, it's just the way it's designed.

Well that gives you some of the extensions, but it doesn't give you a lot of things on the 'view' end of the equation. You're handling your forms yourself, you're handling URL generation yourself, etc. Of course those are the things that attracted me to Sinatra, so I don't see them as problems so much as things to be aware of.

I think the hope is that the broader Android scripting and JRuby communities will step up to help. There is already a project[0] that allows bridged access to a lot of Android APIs via Python, and Lua. Getting JRuby to this level wouldn't be a huge effort, and would definitely give people a bit of motivation to move forward

That said, I think in the short term it's a pipe-dream. Getting the code going is the easier part, building the development infrastructure around it is a lot harder.

I'd love to write Android apps in Ruby, but I'm not holding my breath.

[0]http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

Sinatra is great. I've been working with it for the last eight or nine months on various projects and I'm extremely glad about that choice. But I wouldn't call it "hyper fast" in any sense.

From a raw performance perspective, it's faster than Rails, but it has some issues with it's design that can cause extremely bloated memory footprints.

From a developer sense, it doesn't come with a lot (hardly any) of helpers, generators, or other fancy tools. So depending on your use case you could end up re-inventing some wheels.

It's biggest advantage is that it's small, lacks a lot of magic code, and doesn't force you into a specific structure. This makes it great for web services, small apps, or even small components of larger apps. But like anything else it's definitely not a silver-bullet.

By design it doesn't have a lot of helpers, generators, or other tools. Depending on your usage this could mean a lot of re-inventing the wheel.

I've been pondering what about this whole mess it is that keeps mentally poking me. And the problem I have is the blatant hypocrisy of Arrington et al in the handling of this story.

The first post he made about this attempted to make the case that this was standard operating procedure, and really isn't anything out of line with the way things are normally handled. If that's the case, then why write a story talking about the fact that you've been given stolen documents containing large amounts of previously secret information. Then go on to say you won't post the personal information, and you're only posting the parts you find newsworthy.

If it's so normal, wouldn't you just post the stories, and mention that your source was some leaked documents you'd been given? You only do that if you feel you have something to justify, something to explain. In otherwords, you think you might be wrong.

So instead of handling this like they would any other source, for any other article, they've justified the source well in advance of actually using it. It's hypocritical and proves that all of this was just another stunt to drum up traffic.

Personally I'm done with TechCrunch. I won't follow links there, if I end up there by mistake, I'm closing quickly. I won't support this sort of blatant hypocrisy and grandstanding. It's not professional. It's not needed.

I think one of the most exciting points here is that they were able to get one of the most popular Rails applications running on JRuby without too much apparent hassle. Hopefully we'll hear a bit more from them about this process and how it went, but this is an exciting announcement for the Ruby community!

So why even use it? If you're on linux grab Gedit or Kate, on OSX just use the built in textpad, and on windows, you've obviously got Notepad.

I'm a big fan of the ForwardAgent option. It allows you to, based on destination, pass your SSH key forward and have it used as the private key on the destination server as well. This allows me to ssh into a remote server, but keep my key based access rights on other servers (or github).

Your grandmother used the tools that she was taught the trade with. She used simple tools that she'd spent years learning to use properly. She spent years learning how to read the products that her craft relied on. She was passionate about what she did, and it showed. Stories like that just reinforce the idea that it almost doesn't matter what the tool is as long as you take the time to truly master its use.

PHP doesn't get mentioned, because it isn't interesting. I've done a lot of PHP work, and still do. But there's not a lot of NEW going on in the PHP world. Their latest earth shattering move is namespaces. The only interesting thing about PHP's namespace support is how awful it is.

Almost all of the cool concurrency, natural language, efficiency, functional programming, and what-have-you research and development, is going on outside of the PHP community. Those are topics that HN collectively finds interesting, so PHP gets left out.

That said, just because PHP itself isn't particularly interesting, doesn't mean people don't build interesting things using it, and doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.

I think it goes just a bit further than this, but not a lot. He tried to play off of the "rock star" persona that surrounds the Rails community in an over the top and humorous way. He failed, miserably.

Those he was satirizing thought it was great, and those who should have appreciated the satire were offended. It showed a complete lapse of judgment, and frankly professional taste.

But the amount of hype this whole drama has received is yet another mark against the Rails community. Maybe Zed was more right than everyone thought.

I've seen it go both ways. In some cases people come to rely on this person's intervention, but in others it's seen as a badge of failure to have to call in the "firefighter". I think it all comes down to how management handles the situation, as well as the dynamics of the group itself.

The type of person who consistently pulls off these sorts of tasks, is someone I call "the firefighter". Every good organization has one, the person you call when all hope is nearly lost. The one who always manages to salvage the failing project, to fix that bug before the demo, etc.

The article is a great "how to" on becoming "the firefighter" in any situation. In my experience the big one that people miss is "take an active part". So many people when they hit the wall don't put themselves into the middle of the problem, and just hope that everyone else will follow through in time.

Great article!

I'm not the parent but I'll reply anyway.

I have very few issues with Ruby as a language, in general it let's me get from thought to working code quicker than any other language I've used. Honestly the largest issues I've run into with Ruby typically deal with people trying to be too clever.

Ruby certainly provides a lot of ways for people who want to look incredibly clever to hang themselves and anyone using their code. I typically avoid libraries or frameworks where clever code is the norm (I'm looking at you Rails), and because of this I tend not to have too many problems.

It's certainly not perfect, and I've been frustrated by bad error messages, stupid type system mistakes, etc. But I've found that those issues simply replace issues in other languages.

I still feel that Ruby gets me from Thought to Code quicker, and for the kind of projects I typically do, that's worth dodging a couple of warts.

I agree. I'm soon to be in the market for exactly this kind of service, and seeing email and twitter don't come for free, was an immediate turn off. If I were to use this service (or one like it) I'd be forced to implement email and twitter myself, and just pass through for text messages.

If it connected with Twitter and Email for free, and SMS, phone and even IM were pay to play, I'd be a lot more interested.

But this falls flat once you remove the assumption that a user only accesses the internet from a single ISP. So what happens when I decide to make that purchase on my lunch break at work? Or from the free wifi at the coffee shop?

There was a time that this would have worked, but I think there are too many people that aren't tied to a single physical location for their internet services. And we haven't all switched to something provided by a cell company.

I'm not the poster but the last time I looked into Cake it's internal code was just an utter mess. A lot of the mess is from it's continued support of PHP4 and PHP5 which have a lot of incompatibilities in their object models.

I haven't used Symphony in ages, but it was originally a fork of a project called Mojavi (which I used to work on). It was designed as a pure PHP5 MVC framework with a heavy emphasis on being easy to override or modify any of the components. I don't know how true it's held to that these days, but the original code base was pretty slick.

That said. I don't use either, I've got a little 300 line OOP MVC wrapper I wrote that serves my purposes. But if I were going to look at a framework today it would be Zend or Symphony.

Really? While I agree that a lot of frameworks are a bit on the heavy side I wouldn't advocate against using one. Frameworks do have something to offer that stock PHP doesn't, structure. I can't imagine going back to doing PHP without so much as my little 300 line MVC wrapper to work in. It's certainly possible to write good PHP without any sort of a framework, but it's infinitely easier to write really bad PHP that way too.

Importing to me seems like an odd workflow though. Bookmark with delicious, import to markitforlater, read from there, links expire (or not depending on what you do), but are still hanging out in delicious. Again, the only net-positive workflow I could see would be: bookmark with markitforlater, decide you want to keep it around "permanently" so you push it to delicious. As a delicious user, does that sort of thing have any appeal to you?

Well, what's the user story that you see for delicious? Pushing bookmarks to delicious before they expire? That's the only scenario I can see being worthwhile, but as someone who swore of delicious long, long ago, I'm definitely open to ideas here!

To your points.

I've intentionally left out the delete function, nothing lasts longer than a week without manual intervention. Despite using the service daily, I can't think of any cases outside of me manually messing with data as tests that I've missed having a delete.

This is a great idea, and I'll definitely be making a new initial login "landing" page!

There's something odd in my Apache setup, as the slowness looks like it's from load, but there's not that much strain on the box. The other issue, which I've tried to optimize as much as possible, is that it loads a LOT of JS when you click the bookmarklet, and it doesn't show the message until it's all done. I need really should pare that down some more, thanks for the push!

There really aren't any plans to monetize it. If it manages to cover it's own costs via donations or possibly ad sense, then I'd be happy.

I never claimed it was entirely unique. Bookmarking via a bookmarklet has been around a long while. I took ideas from several places, and then trimmed it down to the simplest set of functions that solved my problem.

If you're happy with Instapaper then there's nothing to apologize for!

It's intentionally non-social, your stuff is yours. It doesn't require a redirect when adding a bookmark, and in general I find it simpler and quicker to work with than delicious (especially the newest version).

Nice catch, thanks!

It's actually an out of context quote from the film "The Big Lebowski". A copy of the quote can be found on this page.

http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm/content_id.20733/M...

As for what makes me zesty, well, you should follow the link for a bit more of an explanation.