News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

syntax-case

Re:What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science? on Sunday November 23, 2008 @06:26AM (#373657)
"How do you write women so well?" ...
Server-side is probably the right place to fix it, but I tend to be impatient when it comes to security.
Re:Becoming Screen Literate on Sunday November 23, 2008 @06:14AM (#373649)
Whoa! A NY Times article about mastering GNU Screen! I can't believe it!
Re:Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day? on Saturday November 22, 2008 @05:52AM (#372886)
This site is mostly populated by wanna-bes anyway. So I upvoted both options (your voting system sucks).

Also, PLEASE stop calling yourselves hackers. Real hackers use languages that allow them to exploit buffer overflows and such, not Ruby, etc.

I guess the solution is to use Gmail in a separate browser profile that you won't use for anything else.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles

Re:Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective on Friday November 21, 2008 @04:28PM (#372352)
I bet if some famous gay hacker (you know who you are) wrote a book with this title, it would sell.
Re:Simon Peyton Jones on Mainstream Programming Languages on Friday November 21, 2008 @04:26PM (#372350)
Is anyone using Haskell as their main programming language in their (web) startups?
Re:My Public Apology on Friday November 21, 2008 @04:24PM (#372348)
-75 comment votes; +125 article points - you are a genius. As to your company, I'd never even heard of it before. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
Re:Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective on Friday November 21, 2008 @01:53PM (#372188)
I'll get downmodded for saying this, but HN is basically: web programming - the gay perspective.
Re:TicketStumbler.com Founder Puts Foot in His Mouth on Friday November 21, 2008 @05:15AM (#371756)
I hate bloggers. If there was a Japanese TV show where they torture bloggers, I'd watch it.
Re:Fat chicks get laid more. on Thursday November 20, 2008 @04:28PM (#371043)
> The male has virtually no choice in the matter.

Non sequitur.

Re:Mathematica 7.0 Released Today on Thursday November 20, 2008 @06:04AM (#370518)
I haven't used Mathematica 9.0 and its chemistry-related functions, but from the presentations, they look like practically useless toys for dabbles.

Can Mathematica do raytracing, display secondary structure, semi-transparent molecular surface and allow you to select coloring patterns? Is it easy to predict protonation states of molecules at different pH levels and electrostatic potentials? Can it do molecular dynamics?

Who cares that they have built-in access to the melting point of caffeine?!

Re:Mathematica 7.0 Released Today on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @03:15AM (#369309)
4 characters with PyMOL:

Click Plugin, then PDB Load; then type 1UBQ

Re:Mathematica 7.0 Released Today on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @02:21AM (#369278)
Mathematica's bugginess (on SGI) is what prompted me to learn "real" programming languages some years ago.
Re:Mathematica 7.0 Released Today on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @02:18AM (#369276)
Why? Do you think there's something special about displaying molecules? Or do you think Mathematica does it better than anything else?

Try PyMOL - the most widely used molecular graphics software, probably.

Re:What Python learned from economics on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @01:30AM (#369247)
> Ultimately, this is why I like Python. The belief that best practices shouldn't be optional, and that they shouldn't be difficult creates a community where you actively want to go and learn from people's code.

This place I know was one of the earliest adopters of Python, and the code they barfed up must be the buggiest, ugliest (GUI), slowest in its class software I've ever seen. It's so buggy, it's insane: typos, calling methods that don't exist, assuming arbitrary user input does not have 'keywords' in them...

They couldn't write code in C, so they thought the problem was with the language and switched to Python.

I say, lousy programmers, if they don't want to look for another occupation, should stick with Java - at least the typos will be caught more frequently.

Re:Balsamiq hits $100,000 in revenue on Friday November 14, 2008 @01:37PM (#364615)
To what extent did the publicity contribute to his success though?