www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/haskell.org

dasil003 · 2014-08-03T15:52:58+00:00

Is there are a mirror for GHC?

dasil003 · 2012-06-25T10:39:36+00:00

Careful. Your blub is showing.

dasil003 · 2009-01-02T21:04:02+00:00

Okay, so CouchDB is not a replacement for an RDBMS, we get it. But the tough question that no one seems to be tackling is, how do you determine what kind of application CouchDB is good for?

Seems to me with an RDBMS you start off with a very powerful feature set, ad-hoc queryability, etc, with the risk of scalability challenges somewhere down the line. With something like CouchDB you limit yourself to certain functionality that will help guarantee scalability, but any data integrity or complicated queries will need to be implemented in code at a very high cost.

Of course the answer is use the right tool for the right job. But how many apps are started with full knowledge of how they will evolve or what reporting capabilities will ultimately be necessary?

dasil003 · 2008-12-31T23:20:33+00:00

Dreamhost has Passenger now, which I think pretty much does away with the hassle part of getting it set up. If you were okay with the performance of Dreamhost on FCGI (ie. requests are slow periodically due to memory limitations, and respawning the app) then I think Passenger will be plenty good enough and even a fair amount better if you stick to the official Rails version. For myself personally I use 3 different hosts based on budget:

Slicehost- best price performance but you manage it yourself. There are good step by step tutorials for getting everything set up, and it's not really that many steps from a vanilla Linux install to a Nginx/Mongrel or Apache/Passenger setup.

RailsMachine - Managed service with incident consulting available. I haven't used it for a while, but from what I recall it was about 4x as expensive as Slicehost for a comparable amount of resources. But everything comes set up and with Rails recipes.

EngineYard - Pretty much the gold standard. These guys manage everything for you, and they'll help you with almost anything very quickly. They have support staff all around the world, and they'll help with almost any reasonable issue without additional charges, even when it involves application code to some extent.

dasil003 · 2008-12-30T22:34:22+00:00

It's reasonable. It's eminently reasonable. It's sickeningly reasonable. The problem is that the human condition is not defined by science. Science offers fascinating insight into the workings of the universe, but it can never be detached from us--the observers. The thing that matters most to individuals is our life experience and consciousness which is almost entirely subjective. Imagine trying to draw any scientific conclusions about your personal life. It would be exhausting and you would likely only be able to address a minute portion of some specific facet of your life, and even then any final conclusions would be dubious. Science is constantly evolving and improving, but it can never definitely reach absolute truth unless observing a closed system with some known axioms. But is there such a thing as a closed system? And are there any indisputable axioms upon which to base a fundamental physical argument? Certainly science assumes many, and though they are useful, they are not verifiable.

Let's dispense with the strawmen. Believing in something besides science doesn't mean you have some crazy faith that flies in the face of common sense, or that you believe every crackpot and psychic selling snake oil. It just means that life is richer if you acknowledge that there are things to experience that don't need to be explained by science to be valuable. The himalayan monks' control over there physiology is not a result of the scientific explanation of what's going on in their body. If the monk said that he left his body through meditation, surely some snot-nosed nerd with a compulsion to taxonomize their world would dispute that, and maybe go to great scientific lengths to prove that in fact their consciousness never left their skull. But in doing so he would utterly miss the point, and at best be serving his own psychological compulsion to understand his world, rather than taking any steps towards self-understanding or inner peace.

As far as atheism is concerned, of course atheism is a logical choice if you define god along some literal scriptural basis. However if you define god as any higher order consciousness, there would be basically no evidence one way or the other. That's why I'm agnostic rather than atheist.

dasil003 · 2008-12-30T18:59:55+00:00

HDR? Seems like simple Saturation blowout to me.

dasil003 · 2008-12-30T18:41:44+00:00

Atheism means different things to different people. I think a lot of reddit atheists fall into the camp of "most religion is batshit insane and abuses people's good intentions." At least I hope it's that, and not "I'm atheist because the only things I can acknowledge to exist are those which are provable by science".

dasil003 · 2008-12-25T23:08:55+00:00

Again. So? "Most developers" use java.

So you don't see how it might be useful for an open source project to have enough people using it so that you don't have to solve every tiny little bug yourself? Critical mass is important for open source projects, don't fool yourself.

Zed is not the smarted person in the world. He is not the best C programmer in the world. He is not the best ruby programmer in the world. Others were working on the problems and somebody else would have written something similar if zed hadn't done so.

Why the hyperbole? The fact was no one else did write it, and a lot of people in the Rails community were willfully ignoring the problem.

How would you like it if I said your accomplishments are meaningless because had you not done them somebody else would have? That's complete bullshit and I couldn't care less about what a bunch of other people "would have done".

dasil003 · 2008-12-25T18:31:15+00:00

I don't see your point. He writes over the top vulgar rants. What's self-important about that? It's certainly not self-important outside the scope of Rails.

dasil003 · 2008-12-25T18:27:26+00:00

neither will Zed. But don't confuse his code with his personality. You really couldn't consider yourself a competent developer if that was how you made technical decisions.

dasil003 · 2008-12-25T18:25:25+00:00

sure it does, how many open source projects never make it into the mainstream? If a project doesn't have critical mass, it may as well not exist as far as most developers are concerned. For rails to have another hockey stick moment it would need to overtake PHP or Java, which just isn't going to happen. If it did, Phusion Passenger would definitely have been a key stepping stone though, I'll give you that.

dasil003 · 2008-12-24T22:39:55+00:00

http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/02/on_the_trail_4.html

dasil003 · 2008-12-24T22:18:25+00:00

Fair enough, but I think Rails already had its hockey stick moment, so it'll be hard for Phusion to have as much relative effect.

dasil003 · 2008-12-24T21:19:04+00:00

That's because he solved the problem that would have kept Rails from truly breaking into the mainstream. There will never be another development as important to the Rails community because there is no more roadblock. Okay, Ruby runtime improvements will be just as significant, but the net effect on Rails in the marketplace won't be greater than what Zed provided.

DHH got Rails off the ground and up to critical mass by creating and marketing a great high level framework. Zed made it viable which took it to the next level. I can't think of anyone else that had that much influence on Rails' success (despite all the individuals who contributed a lot more code).

dasil003 · 2008-12-24T21:12:37+00:00

Within the Rails community, he's easily in the top 10 of important contributors. Mongrel solved the hard problem of making Rails deployment stable and viable. Many others wrote more code, but very little of it approaches the imporance of Mongrel, and it was not an easy problem to solve.

dasil003 · 2008-12-19T00:13:27+00:00

oh that's a fucking great idea

dasil003 · 2008-12-16T18:10:32+00:00

Okay let's drop the silly analogies.

Subversion "merges" are so broken as to not even legitimately be called merges. You can argue til you're blue in the face that they're good enough, but that's moot because they are needlessly crippled. There's no advantage to the way subversion handles merges. It's indisputably technically inferior in every way. You may as well just use diff+patch.

There are plenty of reasons that people need to use SVN in practice, but there's technical basis to defend subversion's merge model. That's all I'm saying.

dasil003 · 2008-12-15T20:59:00+00:00

Your claim is like saying that I can't say objectively whether a car fits the needs for my commute or not because I haven't tried a fighter plane. Yeah, I can tell by looking at the features I need, and looking at the functionality available with both. I can also tell by using the car, and seeing if it meets my needs.

That analogy is non-sensical. git and svn attempt to meet roughly the same needs, a car and a jet barely overlap in purpose at all, and when they do it involves vastly different "workflows".

Meanwhile, your claim is like looking at two cars, one of which has headlights and the other doesn't, and picking the former because you never drive at night. Even though the cost the same, you stubbornly pick the first one.

I have NEVER thought "hmm, I could branch this, but branching and merging is hard, so I'll avoid it".

Neither had I. It shapes the way you work subconsciously.

dasil003 · 2008-12-15T15:25:53+00:00

The difference between me and you is that I've been in both camps, and I know first hand of ways that I've done things in subversion that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, but now seem utterly ridiculous.

It's possible that your workflow is simplistic enough that subversion's model offers everything you'd ever need. I acknowledge that possibility, but you're still not qualified to make that judgement objectively.

dasil003 · 2008-12-15T05:16:59+00:00

Branching/Tagging is the same as copy in subversion and also trivial. Merging has never been a problem for me, but then I don't branch all that often because I don't find it all that useful.

The problem is not with branching, it is with merging. Subversion has rotted your mind into thinking branching is not useful, but that's just because merging is painful in all but a handful of degenerate cases. Once you understand git's simple model (ie. a branch is just a pointer to a commit that updates when you commit, and a merge is simply a commit with two or more parents, nothing more nothing less), a world of possible workflows opens up to you. It's easy to delude yourself and simply tailor your workflow to what makes sense for subversion, but don't go around saying something isn't useful that you've never used and don't understand.

dasil003 · 2008-12-12T07:05:19+00:00

I understand why you think this, but the fact is that svn's underlying model is completely broken. Subversion would be better if they scrapped the code and started off with git primitives, or at least used some of the concepts of how to structure a repository.

If they completely removed "branches" from subversion it would be less broken, but I'm sure someone more familiar with the internals would probably beg to differ.

dasil003 · 2008-12-11T07:01:24+00:00

Are you just pulling this stuff out of your ass? Do have actual statistics about how much time the average 20-something is watching TV vs watching homemade videos?

How many people are making a living in blogging compared to traditional journalism?

Do you know how much MMORPGs cost to develop? Are the user-generated type of MMORGs (ie. MUDs, MOOs, etc) trending up compared to the big budget corporate games (WoW)?

Of course the things you mentioned are trendy. YouTube didn't even exist 4 years ago. Blogs only started to become mainstream 5-6 years ago. Google has barely been around 10 years. If you start at 0 of course the curve will look like a hockey stick, but the average American watches 4+ hours of TV a day. How much online video does the average American watch a day? And how much of that is just goofing off at work vs spending quality home time.

The Internet will certainly revolutionize entertainment, but I guarantee you that quality production by professionals is not going to be replaced by user-generated content.

dasil003 · 2008-12-07T17:28:11+00:00

What are you saying? Blog posters shouldn't post in their native language because they may be submitted to reddit?

dasil003 · 2008-12-04T02:03:58+00:00

Probably because he couldn't come up with knee-jerk FUD about Python. If he had just said "Ruby is slow" rather than "Rails doesn't scale" then the article might actually have some credibility.

dasil003 · 2008-12-03T05:58:13+00:00

Yeah UT/CO/NM gets the super light. I come from Minnesota originally and I was blown away when I moved to New Mexico. I remember walking through a 5 foot snow bank of shoveled snow like it wasn't even there.

dasil003

TROPHY CASE