stevekl's comments

And don't forget the end-to-end project[1], which is the javascript crypto library by google.

The significance of these types of project extend beyond browser privacy. As crypto-currency become more prominent, we NEED better, carefully auditted javascript crypto-libraries.

Right now, all the crypto-code are home baked. e.g.: https://github.com/bitcoinjs/bitcoinjs-lib/blob/master/src/e...

While, I think they are all doing a fine job. It is not settling to think that these mission critical, crypto-code is not vetted by cryptographers.

In fact, a few months ago, there was a bug where the nonce for each signature was not set properly that basically meant you were able to work out the private key for 2 different signatures. Some users lost funds due to the bug.

These open initiatives will lay an important foundation.

[1]https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/

Great, another proprietary format.

While I want everything to be open and interoperable, I personally work in a startup that aims to make profit. So I also understand the commercial reasons of proprietary technologies.

So, I am torn, what should be proprietary and what should be open?

I always have a mixed feeling about ruby. The "magic-ism" of ruby is something that I just cannot deal with.

"require" gives you methods that appear out of nowhere (unlike other language where they are name spaced), method call without perens (so what is an attribute, what is a method call)

All of these look nice at first but kills maintainability later

Yeah right. Good luck getting me back onto their platform.

Last year, our startup was heavily relying on their yahoo local API.

One day, we started having a lot of errors. We inspected the errors and it said "NO RESPONSE".

We started googling why and realized that yahoo basically just decided to shutdown the servers with ZERO notice.

Of course, There were tons of complaints about it on the forum. There were no response from yahoo. For us, The API was an important part of the product, and suddenly, our product was taken away from us.

No notice, no deprecation warning. Just one big middle finger.

There is NO WAY I am ever using yahoo with that kind of attitude.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19386027/yahoo-local-sear...

I want to use this opportunity to open a discussion and get hacker news community's thoughts on preparing code examples.

I always find many contrieved examples in coding guides such as:

  class Bicycle
    def initialize(size_of_wheels)
      # blah
    end

    def run
      # blah
    end
  end

These are fine. But as such, the examples always fit well with the principles and you try to implement the principles, reality is a always far more messier.

Are there a better way to write coding examples? does it ever make sense, to grab snippets from a real code base and so that it is in touch with reality

I am not a functional programmer and I always find that when I read clojure it just looks like layers and layers of nested code. Personally, I find it visually hard to parse.

Can someone enlighten me why clojure seems to be the trending language?

I use TOR and I would really like to get a call from comcast so that I can inform Comcast I am using a Navy funded project.

I am so glad that this started off with REGEX.

So many coding lessons are so irrelevant to business / law people. No, business people don't need to really learn how to code. They want to learn how to parse / clean messy spreadsheet data.

REGEX + basic loops and conditional in VBA will do wonders to the productivity of business people.

On a separate note, I am surprized that there is still no good graphical way to build regexes

Does it mean we can finally have web-based popcorn time?

This is REVOLUTIONARY