undees

The dollar-bill one? I'm curious as to why that post is the one that killed it for you -- I thought it was kind of cute. There have been a couple of posts that have prompted me to wonder why I bother reading SvN, but that one seemed harmless.

It probably goes without saying, but the source behind the calagator.org site is freely available: http://github.com/calagator

Yeah, I read DDJ back in the day. And yes, I felt that sense of excitement. What I was wondering is, how did they do it? I think you're onto something with the two-fold "Here's something new to do, and here's how you can do it."

What would it take for a publication to have that feel?

I've seen dozens of those "personal failures." :-)

Granted, backwards ABI compatibility is a huge, complicated, thankless task for which you get no notice if you do the job perfectly. The ideal spot for the "break old programs" vs. "cripple new programs to avoid breaking old ones" dial is different for every project. Sometimes the right thing to do is keep the code base from degenerating into a pile of back-hacks. Sometimes it's all about bending over backwards to keep a long-gone vendor's bug from biting your end users.

Exactly! I've worked for big companies that have done dumb things, and my bosses and co-workers have consistently taken the attitude of, "I'm sorry this has happened. I'm forwarding the information about this problem to so-and-so." Then they've followed up a couple of weeks later with, "Did so-and-so get back to you? Were they able to fix the problem?"

It's a nice example to try to live up to.

With Mercurial, you can either use queues and the "qref" command to continually prep a commit in progress, or use the "record" extension (like an interactive Git commit) to pick and choose parts of the working tree to commit.

I suppose it's a matter of what the common case is. For me, the majority of my commits are either one or two files, or the whole working tree -- so Mercurial's defaults make sense with that usage pattern. Of course, other usage patterns would dictate more of a "massage the commit" style.

It certainly reads like a deliberately over-the-top rant, mixing in a little comic exaggeration as a spoonful of sugar to help the "TDD won't solve all your problems" medicine go down.

Alas, it's difficult to tell if the strawmen being setting up (e.g., tests preclude estimation) are part of a serious argument or just more dramatic effect to help underscore the general point.

I wish this post were separated into two articles, one of which discussed the genuine tradeoffs of TDD (such as the possibility of painting yourself into a corner), and the other of which contained all the spurious, unsupported assertions (tests cause scope creep, tests are blinders, etc.) One would make excellent discussion fodder, and the other, well, the Delete key is right over there.

On the upside, it may be easier to add keys to the ring, since you can grip it by the fixed key while you're forcing the new key through the tracks.

On the downside, how do you remove a key from the ring without the other keys getting in the way? Wouldn't the fixed key get in the way of being able to slide other keys aside?

Is there a topologist in the house?

I did. It was actually TextMate that got me back into Emacs after all these years. I needed something at work on my not-a-Mac that was as good as TM. e and InType were close, but fell into the (sorry in advance for the cliche) uncanny valley, where any minor shortcoming relative to TM was doubly unsettling. It was actually easier to adjust to Emacs than to the also-rans.

Believe it or not, this is still better than ClearCase.

"The lawyer who volunteers at a soup kitchen... is giving up X dollars per hour of income to provide far less than X dollars per hour of charity."

What about the lawyer who does pro bono legal work for the same soup kitchen? Or (closer to the HN crowd) the coder who puts up a website for a charity?

"it seems clear that people who primarily give time are donating for reputation"

Reputation is one possible motive, but I could imagine others: warm-fuzzy feelings, a desire to connect to one's community, a lack of funds to donate (if a second job is out of the question), and so on.

One might also choose volunteering as an alternative to other non-working activities. The soup kitchen lawyer guy wasn't exactly going to be pulling down $100/hr watching SportsCenter that Saturday.

"And Arthur Brooks told me that giving goes beyond their own religious organization"

I'm curious as to the percentage that goes outside givers' own churches.

"when they give, they give more money"

I'd also be curious to find out whether or not the less religious give more time, and how much money that time is worth.

I've used forests on a few projects. On the upside, the commands don't cause unpleasant surprises; it's easy to guess what they'll do. But there are still far too many extra steps to do simple things like clone a remote forest and get all the sub-projects up to date. They need an "hg jfdi" command.

Except that they didn't even quite get that right. The article seems to contrast git and hg's versioning schemes, when in reality they're both hashes of the content (the non-unique hg version numbers referred to are merely local aliases).

The one I keep forgetting is ":q!" (really!). I think it's some kind of brain defect on my part.

Hell yeah!

InType and e are fairly TextMate-ish. The latter costs money, and the former has announced plans to set a price. They're both basic but usable, and compatible to some degree with TextMate snippets / bundles.

I find it hard to imagine _any_ API more nightmarish than Win32 + COM + MFC + ....