dr42's comments

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Some things beginners might not know about Sublime Text

Nope, didn't hurt my feelings at all, I was trying to help you learn the ropes.

My comment was really pretty clear, and easy to follow, ST doesn't have a code formatter, you know, like textmate and eclipse do. It's a feature that lets you take poorly aligned code that is difficult to read, and fix up the alignment a la K&R et al. Hope that's clear enough for you :)

If you want to find out if someone is a newcomer, you can click on their profile and see pretty easily.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Some things beginners might not know about Sublime Text

Obviously you didn't actually try what you suggested, if you had you'd have found there are plugins for JSON and XML and probably a few other formats, but was hoping ST2 would have what textmate and eclipse has had for a long time, code formatting, java, XML, xsl, JavaScript, c etc.

I know you're new here, but a little reminder about etiquette, even if you haven't gotten laid in a while, the community here is based on people being helpful rather than trying to be superior. The problem with that attitude is that it backfires and just makes you look insecure.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: 10 Years of Atari/Atari Games VaxMail

This is the same as usenet. Back in the 80's and 90's the expectation of posting to say alt.tasteless.jokes was that it would happily scroll off into infinity. Then a million years later google has the whole damn lot indexed.

The all-caps thing was just the times, terminals were in transition and people were learning how to use the types of services that today have a highly developed etiquette expectation.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

Well first off, you're talking to a European, and while I'm sympathetic to the fear of the encroaching 'nanny state', I just don't share your solution (guns)

If you want to get yourself fucked up then you're most likely quite happy to have the rest of society bear the burden of your subsequent health care, ditto for your diabetes care etc. I'm sure you get what I'm trying to say.

None of us live on an island, our actions impact others and when it does so (as Spock said) the needs of the many outweigh the needs if the few.

This country (America) is already being financially crippled by health care costs so reducing sugar and fat and car accidents seems to make perfect sense, even at the cost of a few's peoples' adrenaline fixes.

I don't disagree with you on Spanish flu (50m people died), or on the corrupt financial system, but that's a fragile house of cards. Economics is a complex system and it's all based on a mutual agreement in the value of little pieces of paper. It's a social contract that is holding together the fabric of capitalism. While that night not be the perfect system, it's so far the least bad that we've found.

"why do you need to be productive" - maybe I came across as being a little self righteous (which is far from the truth), I was just trying to say that one persons fun is very often a ton is work for the rest of society, those that scrape up the parts after a motorcycle accident, those that provide health care and those of us (all of us) that pay for it in our insurance premiums. Why should I, someone who is fit and healthy pay for everyone else's indulgence in fat and sugars that bought about heart disease and diabetes. The answer of course is that same one that is the reason why fixing cars safety is important, because the individual sometimes has to sacrifice something for the success of the rest of society.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Free Chrome CDs in Best Buy

Yes, there are probably some people that cannot figure out how to download chrome, but those people would also not likely notice any difference between chrome and the browser they already have.

I was referring to the person that commented, reading hacker news probably means this person is both aware and capable of downloading it.

It's just a waste of resources.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

I think DDG is best considered a search broker, it federates the queries out to other engines, like bing, or others under query syntax control, and I believe they are also crawling some or their own content, although that's mostly beyond any individuals capability at this point because the internet has become quite large. The broker also merges federation sources, however it isn't a search engine in the traditional sense because the indexes (posting lists) are in google, bing, lucene etc.

* edited for autocorrect errors

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

This is ridiculous. You're seriously suggesting that you're going to shoot your way to mobility :) I'm assuming that's just some macho bullshit because it's insane.

What you're not realizing is that it's often not the person causing the accident that gets hurt, the idea of making something as tedious as driving automated is that it's safer for everyone.

Drugs already are banned. The ones you're most likely talking about are anyway. And the reason is because they fuck people up.

How about people do something productive with their lives instead of taking drugs, developing diabetes from sugar, overweight from fat, and kill people with large heavy steel motorized machines?

You can try to belittle 30,000 people but if you stop cleaning your guns to think about it long enough you might actually appreciate that all those people probably didn't want to die from theirs and other people's driving mistakes.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Free Chrome CDs in Best Buy

Why would you pick one up? Why not simply download chrome. Having a cd is just going to be obsolete by the time you get home. Doesn't make any sense. If you're reading hn, you're probably already quite capable of downloading and installing the software.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: ZeroCater (YC W11) is Feeding Silicon Valley

the free-food culture is so ingrained in the tech world that it would be much harder to eliminate there.

free food in tech startups isn't free at all. You (as the employee) are just donating more time & money to the employer.

I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that has a fabulous suite of cafeterias that host a huge variety of foods, but in the startup world, free food just felt like the NYC power lunches of the 80's

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: One Year, Six Products: What I’ve Built and Learned

I'd strongly advise looking at other areas than the memcache cloud service. The whole point of memcache is to be incredibly fast to prevent having to do a much heavier weight process, like making requests to databases.

While you offer locating the memcachier product within some datacenters this is such a narrow offering, and for something that's already mind numbingly simple to automate anyway.

While 'cloud' anything is hot right now, this just doesn't solve a real problem.

I think you're rushing into building something, without looking at the market and what problem you're trying to solve for customers.

If you'd had a good mentor they would have saved you a lot of hours wasting time in ideas that are obviously doomed, they neither solved a problem, nor provided entertainment.

Except one you discarded, the celebrity photos from twitter. With a great front end, and preferably an iPhone app that served up celebrity photos in a magazine style format might very well have legs. People seem to love celebrities, and they seem to love looking at what they are getting up to. This app would have the advantage of twitter's speed at disseminating information, and people like knowing first so they can send the photo to their friends and show how cool they are.

Forget the tech for a moment, think about psychology - what human need are you targeting, then think about the business, the market, how you'll reach them and finally the tech. I hope this helps.

*edited for spelling and typos.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Apple Releases Final Mac OS X Mountain Lion to Developers

The cost has nothing to do with the product, that's determined based on other factors, like how many Mac's OSX sells. There's no straightforward relationship between price number of features.

The direction appears to be cheap upgrades, and merging feature sets between IOS and OSX so eventually there's one operating system that changes in unison.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Windows 8 Available in October

python's yield and the windows api yield() do quite different things, but at some abstract level, in windows 3.1 the yield() function would let the UI service the main event loop, thus keeping your ui responsive to user activity. yield in python is abstractly similar but returns control along with a reference to the generator. Why I said these are abstractly similar is because in python the yield function saves away the stack frame and restores it upon the next iteration of the generator. In this respect it's similar to windows 3.1 yield because when the event loop comes back to your process, you have a minimal 'stack' consisting of the original hwnd, along with wParam, lParam, where the lParam was a ub4 that could be used for a pointer allowing a larger 'stack frame'.

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Windows 8 Available in October

I'm a bit curious why you'd never consider Ubuntu for development.

I intended my words to mean the exact opposite of that. Unix for development gets my vote every day.

Also, dev's don't use store bought computer operating systems, they install the best one for the job, which back then was NT. OS/2 was good but nobody else was running it, except Lotus Notes shops.

*edited for typos

dr42 | 13 years ago | on: Windows 8 Available in October

Assuming you're a developer, why would you have clung to 3.1? NT was available then and was considerably better operating system for development.

I maintain an XP partition for when the corp I work for require mandatory training (ethics, insider trading, workplace safety etc) but there's no way I'd ever consider using it over Ubuntu for development. I suppose if you're coding in python then the underlying os makes little difference, the abstraction level is so high. Personally even in python missing the unix toolset is a primary reason to stick to unix-like operating systems. I couldn't imagine not having sed, awk, grep, vim, wc etc. I am aware of ports and even the Cygwin environment, but it's just a lot easier to skip the whole thing.

Speaking as someone who started his career on hp-ux and since then included probably every major unix distribution both proprietary and open source, having an intimate knowledge of unix has served me well. Windows has finally caught up and (despite still getting the path delimiter wrong) is now a robust and usable operating system. The two worlds have merged, unix added curses, then x, and now looks as pretty as anything else out there, meanwhile windows added multitasking (yield didn't count) and ever wider addressing, a native tcp/ip stack, support for larger drives and so on.

Unlike you I have no good memories of windows 3.11

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