EliAndrewC

12 ms·

61.
Apple's Mistake(paulgraham.com)
723 points by EliAndrewC 17y ago|269 comments
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
contactRecords = [r for r in contactRecords if r[1] == "1"]
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
I was pleasantly surprised that this article was not simply bashing Vista (whether it could do so justifiably or not), but rather focused on the observation that nowadays there's hardly ever a reason for average computer users to upgrade th
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
'Tap the person on the shoulder and say "Hey, do you know you really shouldn't be distributing those?" Take ten minutes to figure out that leading with lawyers is both overkill and one of the worst sins you can commit in this community.' Th
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
I don't think we should treat this as a discussion of good coders and bad coders. "I wouldn't hire someone who ____" is a hiring filter. And ANY worthwhile hiring filter will be over-aggressive. So it's more a distinction between groups
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
MadnessOrSparta.com This would be a silly time-wasting site like KittenWar but with much less cuteness and slightly more pointlessness. People can upload pictures and visitors are presented with one picture at a time. For every picture, v
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
This was the most interesting thing about the "Don't tase me, bro" incident - tasers and clubs are roughly equivalent, yet a picture of someone being tasered isn't nearly as provocative as a picture of someone being beaten with nightstick.
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
> Maybe the first time you see it, for at most two minutes once in your entire life. To the contrary, the main problem I've seen and experienced with Perl is that it's very hard to look up syntax. If I had no idea what that code was do
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
My main problem with Perl is references and contexts. Most of the experienced programmers I work with find themselves unable to write or debug code that requires the use of these Perl concepts. For example, my co-workers and I find it easy
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
It can definitely be misleading, but it's still a useful metric. When I read "Android barcode scanner in 6 lines of Python code" my thought is, cool, there's clearly a good barcode scanning library for Android in Python and I can look and
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
I also end up disagreeing with the FQA's underlying conclusions about C++. Nevertheless, I highly recommend everyone who uses C++ to read through the FQA in its entirety. It's well written and highly entertaining and gives you insight int
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by EliAndrewC 17y ago
I think this comment sums it up nicely: http://blog.ianbicking.org/php-ghetto-comment-11.html It basically argues that in PHP there's often an easy, insecure way to do something and a verbose, secure way to do it. With regards to SQL inj
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
One important difference between credit card buckets and marijuana legalization is that the latter can be done in increments. With credit card buckets, you'd have to produce a complete working system before it benefits a single person. With
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
Typically sites with multiple servers put there web and database server software on different machines. Hacker News doesn't use a database and stores everything in memory, so this wouldn't make any sense for this codebase.
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
The most interesting passage to me was: "Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users," said Lt. Col. Guimard. One of the main barriers to Linux adoption i
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
Actually I think the more common hack was a = cond and x or y which had the downside that if the second part (in this case x) evaluates to False then a ends up equal to y even through that's not what you were trying to do. Sometim
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
Will we eventually get an online transcript of this talk?
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
JWZ's complains can broadly be broken into 2 categories: Java lacks advanced programming features, and Java doesn't perform well. Some of the features have been added (enums, weak pointers, etc) and some will probably never be added because
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
Does anyone here know anything about whether PyQT is planning on also switching to LGPL? On their license page, they say: "Like Qt itself, PyQt is provided under a number of licenses depending on how it is going to be used. In fact, we try
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
That's definitely a good distinction; that clients CAN tell you what they need by if you ask the right questions. Of course, one major constraint in large corporate/government development is not being able to speak directly to the people wh
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
The most interesting and difficult part about business programming is that your clients rarely have a good idea what they want. They say they want searching, but what searches will they commonly want to perform? What type of data are they
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
HTTP isn't perfect, and there are plenty of times when a custom protocol makes sense. However, I think the author is arguing against the "everything needs its own custom protocol" mindset which is all to prevalent in the corporate world.
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
Agreed, with the addendum that you should learn on Python version 2.6, which lets you import many of the features from 3.0 on a per-file basis to make the transition to 3.0 easier.
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
Interesting; why do you see Clojure as more geared towards that goal than Arc? Although I haven't used Clojure, it seems like more of a compromise intended to bring Lisp to the JVM than a language designed to last into the next century.
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
I think the common case could be even simpler Document doc = DocumentBuilder.parse("test.xml"); no need to manually create an instance of the builder.
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
From the PyQT website: "Like Qt itself, PyQt is provided under a number of licenses depending on how it is going to be used. In fact, we try and follow Trolltech's licensing model as closely as we can." - http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.u
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
On a similar note, the code parse an XML document in Java: Document doc = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder().parse("test.xml"); That's not even a framework; it's just what's in the standard library for parsin
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
It would make the datetime class look more like other class names, but I'd strongly recommend against doing this. The Python community values consistency in the way that code is written (TOOWTDI) and this would be a sharp departure from th
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
If he does decide to pursue this project, probably the most important thing that will affect whether it gets completed is how useful it is to him and how much fun he has while doing it. I'd definitely love to see a more generic system that
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by EliAndrewC 18y ago
I haven't tried out Git yet, but I think this feature may be the most impressive example of what Linus Torvalds said awhile back about Git: that perhaps its most significant advantage would be the tools that people will be able to build on

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