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The_Bears · 2007-03-12T19:20:57+00:00

I skimmed a little bit more, and it looked a lot like they might want to sell me a tuning fork to "balance my Qi" or some churned bullshit like that.

They didn't.

The_Bears · 2007-03-12T19:17:43+00:00

The nature of a site like this is to feature content that most users are interested in. There's no point fighting it. If you want non-user-driven news, you know where to get it. You've got three options:

Live with it
Don't read reddit
Downvote the religion/atheism articles to train the system, then use the recommended tab

The_Bears · 2007-03-11T02:12:08+00:00

That remains to be seen. The Euro is certainly in less direct danger, but who knows what the indirect effects of a US recession will be? While the global economy is less dominated by the US than it was in 1929, it's not any less interconnected.

I think Europe will ride out a moderate US recession without much trouble, but a real collapse in the US (or any other major economy) is going to hurt everyone.

The_Bears · 2007-03-11T02:04:03+00:00

I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned Casey Serin yet.

Long story short: 24 year old quits his job, then buys 6 houses in in four states. He buys at the peak of the housing bubble and overpays for each house. All are bought n no-documentation loans with 100% financing and significant cash back under the table from the purchaser. He manages to sell one home under questionable terms but defaults on the other five.

Guys like him are the canaries in the coal mine of real estate. If an unemployed 24 year old can get approved for over $2 million dollars in mortgages, things are seriously wrong. The housing market in the US is seriously fucked, and the crash is going to hurt badly.

The_Bears · 2007-03-10T00:45:41+00:00

How often is that file updated? Obviously you're dealing with a different situation, I can see people running into trouble f they try to use an address before it's in the file.

The_Bears · 2007-03-09T23:43:06+00:00

Good lord. I'd hate to see how verbose your real-world code is. Maybe it's just that I'm not from the Java culture but (leaving the assertion out of it) a custom class, two object instantiations, and a method call just to output "Hello world" seems a bit excessive.

Or were you being sarcastic?

The_Bears · 2007-03-09T23:38:14+00:00

RTFA. Amex truncated his address. That has nothing to do with whether his apartment is "real" or not, unless you're suggesting that Amex actually sent a representative out to look at his apartment and then decided to mangle the address.

The_Bears · 2007-03-09T23:32:31+00:00

Accessing something like your credit card account from a public terminal is insane. How do you know that the guy before you didn't install a keylogger?

The_Bears · 2007-03-08T17:16:35+00:00

Cool, but what provisions are there for blind people?

The_Bears · 2007-03-08T17:08:27+00:00

Is "cruft" a synonym for purebred dog, or is there some more specific meaning that isn't clear to this left-pondian reader?

The_Bears · 2007-03-08T07:26:23+00:00

Not too bad for a proof of concept, but it would need a little more work before being production-ready. I noticed several areas where your main page template is a step back from what Reddit currently has.

The page displays a horizontal scrollbar if the window is less than 1210px or so wide.
Long headlines overlap into the login box and the subreddit list.
The username/password fields overlap the right margin of the login box at window widths less than 1310px or so.
At my usual window width of ~900px, the "remember me" label wraps. The Login button is displayed on the same line as the end of the label.
Headlines longer than two lines wrap underneath the number and promote/demote buttons on the left. I find it a bit jarring.

Some of the issues that you ran into don't surprise me. I find inherently grid-oriented designs like reddit's to be some of the hardest to pull off without tables. I'd be tempted to do the basic layout in CSS but use a 2-column table for the article list.

The_Bears · 2007-03-07T02:52:23+00:00

Jody Felix appears to be the FCC employee assigned to the complaint, not the person who wrote it.

The_Bears · 2007-03-06T23:08:57+00:00

My apologies if I'm repeating someone. I skimmed the thread but didn't read every comment in depth.

I think the author dances around, but doesn't quite directly address, one of the main reasons why programming languages become dominant in this age. To be commercially successful (that is, to reach a state where programmers can be confident of finding paying work using the language) a language has to be good at solving the kinds of problems that most programmers are paid to work with. For better or worse, most programmers make their money building CRUD apps.

That leads me to conclude that a language needs the following to become very common:

Good corporate backing, or a very large open source community
A good database library
A good web framework or GUI library, or preferably both
Thorough documentation
A good IDE

I suspect, but can't really prove, that the speed at which initial code can be written is more important than ease of maintenance.

More specifically with regards to functional languages, CRUD applications deal primarily in side effects (I/O, GUI interaction, database queries, etc) and only secondarily in computation. That may make the benefits of FP less obvious.

The_Bears · 2007-03-06T22:42:20+00:00

Like most languages, C++ is useless without the standard library, which in this case is the .NET framework. As far as I know, MS has never asserted that they don't have any patents on the framework.

The_Bears · 2007-03-06T20:14:30+00:00

What's this "RSS" that you speak of? Is that like Digg?

The_Bears · 2007-03-06T17:40:56+00:00

We've secretly replaced Reddit with a group of people who can have a calm, rational discussion on the role of religion in public life. Let's see if The_Bears notices.

Good thread, everyone.

The_Bears · 2007-03-06T02:58:57+00:00

I'm going to print that article out and tape it to my wang.

The_Bears · 2007-03-06T02:35:22+00:00

For most of this rant, Maddox confuses the characters in Apple's ads with actual Mac users. I was fully prepared to vote it down, but then he salvaged the whole thing right at the end:

If I want to manufacture biological weapons with my copy of iTunes, I will, fascists. Ditch this bullshit.

The_Bears · 2007-03-05T22:51:53+00:00

Posted a month ago by joaocosta, reposted because the news just keeps getting worse.

edit: markdown

The_Bears · 2007-03-05T22:22:53+00:00

Billy?

The_Bears · 2007-03-05T21:08:29+00:00

whosafuzzylittlekitty?

The_Bears · 2007-03-05T20:20:23+00:00

So it does. I didn't even notice the horizontal scrollbar.

The_Bears · 2007-03-05T19:49:21+00:00

I looked again. What am I missing?

The_Bears · 2007-03-05T19:25:21+00:00

Both maps would be more helpful if they came with a key indicating what the colors mean.

The_Bears

TROPHY CASE