nathanielksmith

I still fail to see the commercial/hobbyist/* appeal of C#/.NET/mono.

I really like this project. It was by far my favorite Django Dash entry this year--I couldn't believe how low it ended up in the rankings.

It looks nice, it works, and it actually fills a real need in the Django ecosystem.

I'm also a pretty consistent Adagio customer. Lapsang is my favorite by far. I wish Adagio's was just a tad bit stronger, though. Even with longer steep times (5-6 minutes) I don't quite get the smoky pungency I recall years ago when I had some loose Twinings Lapsang...

I'm pleased by the attitude/tone of this author; this doesn't read like a polemic or even opinion piece, but rather a well thought out and well reasoned argument.

I am curious to hear the opinions of some of the people in this comment thread regarding the downloading of copyrighted music, torrenting copyrighted films, downloading copyrighted books, or otherwise illegally using copyrighted content.

I'm not defending this woman as she did do something wrong. However, I think it's distressing that people are celebrating her "defeat," especially as (I would guess) most of her critics are avid supporters of pirated content. Isn't there some statistic about how every American violates some copyright law just about every day?

Cooks Source was a small, free, regional publication--the kind you ignore at the dentist's. This doesn't excuse Cooks Source and doesn't mean that Monica shouldn't have taken issue like she did. But in the end, I just don't see a david vs. goliath story: I just see a bunch of people ganging up on one person.

Same with me. I tend to use sitting as a way to let go of something frustrating/troublesome that came up while working on something.

It's makes getting back to work much easier.

Divine Invasion, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (perhaps not in that order).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS_trilogy

This sounds like a really interesting story. Thanks for the tip.

I alluded to this in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865350 , but want to respond to your comment about reading "making you think."

I had a major breakthrough in my creative (programming, music) life when I realized that my most intensely creative periods were fueled by reading.

What would happen is that I would work tirelessly drafting ideas, hacking or making music until I burned out and got very depressed. I stayed like this and, through some accident, started reading as a way to pass time. Before I got through more than one or two books, I'd have forgotten the depression and be back to creating stuff again.

Now, I try to make time for reading daily (instead of binging/purging). It helps me avoid burnout on creative projects and gives me new ideas all the time.

For the past two years I've been reading a handful of authors and will recommend them instead of specific books: HP Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Haruki Murakami, Philip K Dick, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Franz Kafka.

I also very much enjoyed a book called Science and Society in the 16th and 17th Centuries that I picked up at a college library booksale. I don't recall the author, unfortunately.

Just finished Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson). About 100 pages into the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (Haruki Murakami). Next is The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares).

I find that reading recharges my creative thinking. I used to think it was purely relaxation, but now consider it as essential as sleeping / eating well.

I agree. The issue is not "I do or do not want $instance->method() in my code" but rather "Do I have state to encapsulate?"

I'm a full time perl programmer and often run into people from the perl community who think OO is just a calling convention or a style instead of a tool with a specific purpose. It's very frustrating. The fact that Perl's native OO support is incomplete and obtuse just makes it worse. This module follows that pattern of thought. Using it would just add arbitrary and unnecessary complexity to a project.

github (or something similar, but only if used heavily) is the most paramount, I'd say.

By looking at a well-used github (/gitorius/bitbucket...) account you can evaluate someone's: - communication skills - code quality - areas of expertise - creativity - ability to see things through to the end

I agree; the article is fluff. I upvoted for the discussion.

My partner and I are vegan and it has long been our experience that it's a cheaper way to live, especially given that vegan staples like grains / legumes can be bought in bulk at low prices.

The way I think about it is that meat eaters tend to eat herbivores, meaning that if you're buying meat you're paying for both the production of plant life to feed some animal as well as the cost of raising / slaughtering / packaging that animal. A plant-based diet will always be less expensive as you are just eating the plant material that would otherwise be fed to a cow, pig, or whomever (a simplification, but a helpful one, I think).

Where it does get expensive is with processed cheese/meat alternatives (eg, Daiya and Gardein). My gut feeling is, though, that purchasing these occasionally would at most make our budget match (not exceed) that of a meat eater's.

In the end, saving money is one of the many, many reasons we are vegan.

I agree. I don't think offending people is what's at stake--just turning people off purely based on the name. As a vegan, I'd be offended if someone tried to serve me meat knowing I was vegan. I'm simply put off by a name involving a meat product and far less likely to use it because of the strong mental and moral connotations I have for such words.

It reminds me of a large percentage of screenshots that come from certain Linux projects. Wallpapers and themes often have scantily clad women on them. I can imagine that this would put a lot of folks off from contributing to or using those products.

I'd consider "Tempeh Bacon" as name, but I'm biased, as my partner made a delicious batch of it the other day :)

I feel pain when I see the word "recurse."

Though I really like the concept, I'm concerned by package availability (or a lack thereof). It's frustrating to have to take a big detour when developing to circumvent my linux's preferred way of package installation in order to get some newer version of a library.

On the other hand, I've almost just as many headaches with outdated libraries in the current Ubuntu repo (like anything Ruby, which is all for 1.9.1 and older, iirc).

I went with Arch for a while, but missed a lot of the conveniences of Ubuntu. I stick with Ubuntu since of all the distros I've used in 5 years of using Linux, it's given me the least friction when I just want to get stuff done.

Why continue to develop proprietary software for problems that have been solved over and over in open source (code editing, code compilers, browsers, email clients, word processing, the list is endless)? People--and businesses--are not going to continue being okay with shelling out hundreds/thousands of dollars for something they can get for free. It may be profitable now, but it won't be in the future.

Despite being excessive at points ("disgusting flaunting of privilege") I think the article points out a real problem. In my experience, the only way to fill this gap is to actively--as adult programmers--"bootstrap" the computing lives of lower class children in our communities.

For example, I volunteer with a church ministry that refurbishes old machines, installs Ubuntu, and gives them / grants them to those who need them (we just call it the Hardware Cooperative).

Our last machine went to a child who just turned 10. His family is low-income and their lone computer was a decade old HP running a virus-filled XP that rebooted every few minutes.

We gave him a speedy little box with Edubuntu on it and he was thrilled by it. He took to it immediately and was engrossed by Tux4Kids and more.

Without our donation, it was obvious that he wasn't going to go anywhere with computers on that XP machine. Without us "bootstrapping" the process for him, I don't see how he ever could have developed an interest in computers, but now I'd say there's a fairly big chance.

So yes: check your privilege if you've got it. But more proactively, look to see how you can prevent these kinds of gaps in the future.