ianb

26 ms·

1. 181.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   Like many people running Linux I also have a Thinkpad (T400). It works okay, but it still has some significant issues. The specific things I have problems with: * Sleep; unlike some previous experiences the laptop does pretty reliably com
2. 182.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   Why do these systems have such tiny amounts of RAM? Every dinky little device seems to have a few megabytes of RAM, so it's kind of baffling to me how limited these hacker systems seem to be. Is there some important constraint I'm not und
3. 183.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   They seem to be kind of enterprisey, which kind of makes sense because (a) you can get paid to make enterprisey stuff, and (b) no one likes enterprisey stuff so no one wants to make it without being paid. And usually enterprises ask for
4. 184.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   * You only get the GAE database, no RDBMS, not even alternate nosql things like Mongo. * Doing geo stuff on GAE is pretty infeasible. * You can't run other commands, e.g., shell out to git. * You can't connect to any services except HTTP
5. 185.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   If I saw "# FIXME: check perms" in that code I'd have said, sure, it's alpha, no biggie. But without any acknowledgement of what should be a totally obvious security hole, it makes one question what other holes there might be, and maybe
6. 186.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   The post features four anime characters. Two of the characters are clearly blonde... and I'm pretty sure this isn't my whiteness just projecting blondeness. Very few Japanese people are blonde. Is it racist for me to notice this?
7. 187.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   I think dynamically typed languages represent a kind of history of thought about programming, while statically typed languages have developed largely along their own path. Dynamically typed languages declared victory over "types" decades a
8. 188.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   Yes, I'm referring to those states (at least I believe it's both North and South Dakota, though maybe it's only the South?) being lax on financial regulation of companies.
9. 189.▲
   by ianb 16y ago

   It would also be wrong to think that lowering taxes would change something dramatically; . The Dakotas were in bad shape economically and could sacrifice existing tax revenue and responsible fiscal oversight (remembering a lot of what they
10. 190.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    There are equivalents to many testing tools: rspec: I'd argue doctest does the same thing, but without being clever consultantware. I've seen passing mentions to similar things in Python. cucumber: http://lettuce.it/ factory_girl: I can'
11. 191.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    libxml2's parser (which lxml uses) was written before HTML 5. It generally works quite well, but I've found a bug or two in it, and it doesn't get updated much. For instance, weird things can happen with tags after the </body> tag
12. 192.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    I don't think anyone could argue that if you had an AGPL HTTP server that the AGPL would be applicable to browsers that connected to the server. So if the Mongo protocol is presented as an open protocol it seems unambiguous. Though if som
13. 193.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    It mostly does, except that the environment is restrictive enough it's not like normal Python, everyone who uses App Engine really writes for App Engine.
14. 194.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    Python? Come help! http://cloudsilverlining.org
15. 195.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    But... if the standard library gets fixed, what then? Do we say "WSGI is only compatible with Python 3.3+"? That's just... crazy.
16. 196.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    I joined Mozilla just a couple months ago (and honestly I personally was using Chrome a lot before that -- I'm not on the browser team). From what I've seen talking to people I feel like what the author promotes is what's already been happ
17. 197.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    Have you looked at Bespin for an editor/IDE?
18. 198.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    I'd like to see a clearer up-front description on the front page. This is clearly for people-in-the-know, so just letting me categorize this quickly would be really helpful. I think this is something for doing server-side Javascript deve
19. 199.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    You've selected one option where Perl looks sane, while leaving out cases like "[ [1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6] ]" or "( (1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6) )". And of course there's other cases like lists containing hashes, and hashes containing lists. All of t
20. 200.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    Are there languages which don't require some special syntax for accessing nested data structures? Isn't that true for... most languages? Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, Smalltalk. And any language created in modern times. Perl in this respect
21. 201.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    If you put a list in a list in Perl, don't you have to specifically dereference the sublist when accessing it? Otherwise you get what looks to my eye like a pointer (a weird random number). The first google result I get is this: http://w
22. 202.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    Delphi is #9?!? This does not make sense to me. And Go is #15? Are people actually using Go? This seems a little implausible.
23. 203.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    I consider Perl's data structures to be genuinely inferior. Lists that cannot contain other lists are not reasonable in a high level language. Pointers are not reasonable in a high level language. Explicit function signatures are a super
24. 204.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    I've been thinking about this too ( http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/05/04/browser-desktop-develo... ) -- but I figured I'd just let go of Emacs in the process, presumably to replace it with Bespin: http://mozillalabs.com/bespin -- it is p
25. 205.▲
    by ianb 16y ago

    Silver Lining has some similarities: http://cloudsilverlining.org
26. 206.▲
    by ianb 17y ago

    All of these keep a pool of worker processes, they don't fork each request. With a non-trivial application the speed difference is negligible, though the memory difference is not. PHP also has language-level isolation from request to reque
27. 207.▲
    by ianb 17y ago

    PHP successfully recovers from memory leaks, runaway processes, and any kind of deadlock. App Engine does too. And so does mod_wsgi. It can be done.
28. 208.▲
    by ianb 17y ago

    For a better toppcloud link: http://toppcloud.colorstudy.com
29. 209.▲
    by ianb 17y ago

    well thank you
30. 210.▲
    by ianb 17y ago

    "Bob can incorporate Alice's code without making any changes to his license terms, while Alice would have to change her license terms in order to incorporate Bob's code" This is an inaccurate way of describing what happens. It buys into an