Why is Ember fading away? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jorgelainfiesta/why-is-ember-fading-away-13da2aa65a06 <comment><USER5> As someone who has moved from using Ember daily for 2+ years to now using React/Redux, I miss Ember on a daily basis. React suffers from lack of standardization like no other. I hate starting a new project or working on an existing project and having to think about where to put things. Ember grew from developers who existed in the Rails space and understood that convention over configuration is the way to go. React devs likely came from Express land where everything is composed of tiny modules that you'll spend days carefully putting them all together.

The React world is the wild west. Libraries come and go so quickly that you're better off building it yourself if you see your app as long living. Ember, on the other hand, does a great job of keeping everything in check. Because the community is so small, things just work because there's less things to maintain.

Admittedly, when I first got into Ember, it was pre 1.0 days. Even prior to v2.0, Ember struggled to keep things working as intended. Now that the framework has matured, most pain points have gone away. The way they do their versioning is the smartest in the industry. React has been around for years and still the community seems fragmented.

What it boils down to is:

Is your app fairly small and intended to only last about a year? Use React

Is your app core to your business used by many and intended to last for the foreseeable future? Use Ember

<comment><USER6> > _As someone who has moved from using Ember daily for 2+ years to now using > React /Redux, I miss Ember on a daily basis. React suffers from lack of > standardization like no other. I hate starting a new project or working on > an existing project and having to think about where to put things._

And it shouldn't even have to sacrifice it's "open/modular" nature to fix that.

The core team (Dan, etc) could just adopt/suggest a few specific companions (router, redux, etc) that they consider "official" part of React, and still allow open interfaces for people to be able to replace them with whatever they want.

<comment><USER5> Sure they could but they haven't, yet.

And there doesn't seem to be anything on the radar to do so. While I've played with enough boilerplate projects in the React/Redux world, there's nothing considered to be officially supported and even the most popular ones have stagnant development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I still strongly favor Ember for exactly the reasons React and other frameworks simply haven't caught up: the out of the box experience.

I can start building an actual app within 3 minutes of typing "ember new" – with React, I'd spend the first couple of days just fiddling around with build scripts.

Sure, there are now react boilerplates that do this, but there are too many out there to properly evaluate what to use. Why not just make it a part of the framework?

I think one of the reasons React has been successful is that most developers inherently enjoy the actual act of tinkering as much as they do actually building something. They are ok with spending the first 72 hours of their project picking and setting up their build tools.

On the other hand, I can't stand that stuff.

That's what's so weird to me about all this. Ember is to front end JS exactly what Rails was. Yet rails was successful and Ember wasn't. I think it's the difference between front-end culture and back-end culture.

<comment><USER8> > I can start building an actual app within 3 minutes of typing "ember new" – > with React, I'd spend the first couple of days just fiddling around with > build scripts.

> Sure, there are now react boilerplates that do this, but there are too many > out there to properly evaluate what to use. Why not just make it a part of > the framework?

create-react-app [1] is the official out-of-the-box CLI for React apps. It's maintained by the React team and has been around for a while now too. I may occasionally disagree with what gets included (e.g. service workers) but overall it's been a massive bootstrapping productivity booster for me.

[1] [https://github.com/facebook/create-react- app](https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app)

<comment><USER7> As recently as 6 months ago I had react developers point me to a couple different boilerplates. So my info on this is a bit skewed. Good to check into this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm just going to say it: Their mascot was an annoying hamster.

This was their downfall.

Angular, sexy geometric design. React, sexy nuclear design. Vue, Sexy V geometric design. Ember, a big goofy rodent looking at you lol. "But abledon, what about GOlang? they have a rodent too?" Yes but golang resides in backend land where designers and frontend visual brains are lacking, only performance matters, doesnt matter if your framework's logo is a steaming pile of poo, if its fast and easy to write concurrent code in, it will win the backend holy wars.

<comment><USER10> I think it's more about corporate sponsorship and branding.

Angular is seen as "The Google Solution" (disregarding that Google doesn't actually use it as much as people think). React is seen as "The Facebook Solution". Ember is more decentralized, and lacking a strong primary champion/sponsor. Something that developers SAY we like in open source projects, but which frankly doesn't really match our actions so much.

I chuckled a bit at the parent comment, but I won't say that logos don't matter to front-end developers (half of the HN discussion threads about a link seem to be about its font and CSS choices rather than its substantive content). But that's only a slice of what I think is the overall reason. Ember just doesn't have strong corporate brand muscle behind it.

<comment><USER11> Sure that has some value, but Angular and React brought in new ideas for their time.

I think the react 'view as a function of state' makes a ton of things easier to reason about, and will probably last for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think there is a lot of tribalism in the js community and liking one framework (often the one you use for work) is synonymous with hating the others. Take this survey done where the people who have "heard of Ember and would NOT use it" is completely outsized with the rest of the data. ([https://stateofjs.com/2017/front- end/results/](https://stateofjs.com/2017/front-end/results/))

I've been developing professionally for 15 years and even in that short a time I've had to frequently start fresh in new frameworks or languages as the old ones lost their edge. The concept that someone would all-caps "NOT" use something is hilariously junior to me because the sands _will_ shift and you _will_ one day face the cliff of: my existing skills have no job demand, do I learn new skills or change profession? Harboring tribalism toward frameworks will not help you make the right decision in times like these.

<comment><USER6> > _I think there is a lot of tribalism in the js community and liking one > framework (often the one you use for work) is synonymous with hating the > others._

As in nature in general, it helps, from an evolutionary standpoint.

Having too many, and letting them all be, instead of people rooting for their favorite and having one or two emerge as the leaders, leads to dispersion of resources, confusion for newcomers, and multiple weaker implementations of the same thing...

Even if the emergent leader is not the best, the mere fact of it having eclipsed the others, means tons of work, libs, documentation, books, support etc will be concentrated towards it.

And it's better to have one leading framework that's 3/5 good with huge community and support, than a 5/5 good framework with lackluster community and support.

<comment><USER12> There's no reason you can't have a 5/5 framework with huge community and support.

Tribalism leads to choosing between two hobbled solutions because it closes the door on teamwork across tribes. Ember has its flaws but their upgrade strategy is world class. Every maintainer of an open source project should at least be familiar; but how can that happen when ppl happily report they "have heard of Ember and would NOT use it"?

<comment><USER6> > _There 's no reason you can't have a 5/5 framework with huge community and > support._

There's no law of physics preventing it. I'll give you that.

But between fragmentation of effort, few full-time collaborators, no funding for less interesting work, and other such things, there are many reasons we can't (and don't) have any 5/5 frameworks with huge community and support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll take a counter view here.

Ember shines best when building very UI rich, complex front end apps. Not apps that need to work on shitty connections or devices. Apps you would use from your office in NY or Toronto.

But the sad fact is that there just aren't that many frontend apps out there, relatively speaking. Ember is hard to learn because you need to learn a lot to get things done, and most people building something simple are lazy. By the time their project is a huge mess they're already locked in. Take HN for instance, the tech powering it is dead simple. It doesn't need to be giant frontend app.

Ember is a really solid framework that I love that is never going away, but it isn't for everyone and that is ok. Ember devs make a higher salary because they generally need to know more and the apps are more maintainable and generally run by pro dev shops, but it's not for everyone.

One thing I think that could really help Ember is a version of Rails or some other backend that required less mucking around to get everything working. It's such a chore to fully follow JSON API v1.1. But relation links and cursor based pagination are great with tools like Ember Data, so it's worth the effort.

<comment><USER14> > Not apps that need to work on shitty connections or devices.

Curious, why would you say that? I've only ever dabbled with Ember a little, never built anything production-ready with it. But I did have to maintain an Angular (1) app. And that thing was chatty as hell. I was the backend dev, and developed the REST api that our apps and this Angular bowl-of-spagetti communicated with.

Where ember has, built in, localstorage caching and even some cool REST-sync systems, angular has none of that. The closest I could get was angular- resources, which is a ORM-alike-approach to communicating with a REST backend. Proper HTTP-caching headers, Etag caching and so on, allowed leveraging the browsers-caching to avoid some calls, but Ember has a far neater and cleaner way to talk to such a backend.

This is just an anecdote, but I was pretty convinced that from all the JS- frameworks, ember had the "get data in- and out of a REST backend" solved the nicest, fastest and cleanest.

<comment><USER13> It's more the type of app that you build with Ember. It ends up just being so much more complex and that requires multiple requests. You can't locally store everything, and you often can't do everything on the first request, so if you're on a connection where packet loss is an issue instead of 3 or 4 round trips you end up having 16 or 20. With a shitty device the commutative lag between janky animations (which ember makes easy with libraries like Ember- Concurrency) it just destroys the experience.

Whereas the other frameworks don't make things as app-y as easily so its more like a local template language than an app builder. So people don't go as hog wild.

That plus a larger initial JS file than something slimmed down like React. It kinda adds up even if in theory it shouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it's the natural evolution of frameworks. About 5 years ago, we had the Cambrian explosion of front-end frameworks -- Angular, React, Ember, Meteor, Backbone, even jQuery was still hot back then, and certainly dozens more. Technology had advanced enough that we finally were seeing new innovative ways of building web apps, and everyone had their own opinion on how to do it the Right Way.

This was certainly good for technological progress, but if anyone recalls the arduous process of "which frontend stack should I choose?" back then, it was an absolute nightmare. I had no idea which framework was production-ready, which framework would be around in 2 years, and heck, which framework even worked as advertised (and I remember distinctly wasting two weeks of my life trying to get a-then-very-beta ember-data to even fetch correctly, and eventually gave up and apologized to the client that their project wouldn't be done on time).

Fast forward to 2018, as happens with basically every technological advancement ever, we are starting to standardize. Most of the evolutionary branches are dying out in favor of one or two of the strongest candidates (in this case, React, as far as I can see). This has resulted in huge maturity gains, performance improvements, library standardization, lower training costs, generally lower software maintenance costs, and overall stability in the ecosystem. And as someone who is generally a fan of the "more wood behind fewer arrows" philosophy, having suffered through the world war that was JavaScript in 2013, I am really enjoying the calm before the next storm.

Because, as always, the next wave of disruption will rise again. This current consolidation is at the expense of change -- there will be less paradigm shifts, there will be less new ways of doing things, and that both provides for stability and stagnation. But like clockwork, come about 2020, there will be a new catalyst for change (maybe our next Cambrian explosion will be thanks to WebAssembly?).

So in short order, don't worry, we'll get to play the "which of these libraries even works" game in no time.

<comment><USER16> Angular 1 and Backbone belong to an older generation of frameworks imo and shouldn't be lumped in with React and Meteor.

<comment><USER17> So Precambrian?

I'd argue that Backbone is from an even older generation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We've been using Ember at Intercom for over 4 years to build our main app.

We continue to be super productive with Ember, our customers love our product, our code base has never been healthier and Ember's careful upgrade path and approach to deprecations means that we don't spend much energy or time thinking about non-product related technical challenges.

We've grown from 10 to 150 engineers in that time and Ember's strong conventions has helped us continue our tradition of enabling new engineers shipping to production on their first day and shipping a feature to production in their first week.

Ember is not fading away for us, it's enabling us to focus on continuously shipping better and better features to our customers.

</comment><comment><USER19> In my mind, if you need a large framework that a whole team can use day in and day out, Ember is the go-to choice. It's got a lot of batteries included and the learning curve is pretty steep, but it has patterns and a way to do things for just about everything. It's also been rapidly absorbing the best parts of other frameworks and approaches -- fastboot, glimmer, etc.

\- Angular had the spot, then bumbled the transition from 1->2->5.

\- Durandal died/was transformed into Aurelia, whose hype never materialized.

\- Backbone +/\- Marionette seems to be in super slow decline, but doesn't update as fast as Ember.

\- I don't know much about Polymer but it just seems like an interesting project, not something I'd suggest an org to use (I'm probably wrong).

Ember shouldn't be compared to tools like React/Vue because it's almost _never_ just React/Vue, and Ember itself has lots of plugins that come into play. "React" =~ React + React-Router + Redux/Reflux/Fluxxor/Flux/whatever, and roughly the same with Vue -- though you can choose to extend Ember with plugins, by default everything you need is baked in, with ONE set of well- written if not long documentation. I can certainly say that Ember is more coherently put together than react/vue + react-router/vue-router + redux/vuex.

One of the biggest problems with ember of course, is the breakneck pace of change. I think it's slowed down somewhat recently, but keeping up with it can feel like a full time job sometimes, if you get stuck behind for too long, it gets harder and harder to update your codebase.

As far as I'm concerned, Ember should keep doing what it's doing, it's basically the only worthwhile competitor these days in the most-batteries- included (aka frontend framework rather than frontend library) space. If anything these days, Angular (5?) is looking like it's pivoted it's way to essentially emulating Ember, so I'd place it second.

<comment><USER20> > One of the biggest problems with ember of course, is the breakneck pace of > change. I think it's slowed down somewhat recently, but keeping up with it > can feel like a full time job sometimes, if you get stuck behind for too > long, it gets harder and harder to update your codebase.

If there's somewhere in the front-end world where this is not the case, short of going back to jQuery spaghetti, I'd love to find it. We're largely settled in with AngularJS, having caught it after the crest, so that is largely settled, but everything around it is moving and breaking and deprecating things left and right. I always feel like we're standing on quicksand, just waiting for some bower or npm package to get yanked out from under our feet.

Compared to the back-end, where things move at a much, much slower rate of change, it is a little maddening to see the churn in JS-land. I have NuGet packages that I use all the time that haven't seen more than minor-minor version updates in three years - and that's fine, they work, they're stable, there's no reason to burn it down and flex it all around every three months. But that's also a benefit of being in the Microsoft ecosystem, where backwards-compatibility is prized.

<comment><USER19> I actually made that statement with the pace of the front-end world taken into account -- ember actually churns additionally :( . Part of Ember's openness to doing things better often involves deprecating/removing parts of their API that they're convinced was wrong before -- it's not a bad thing, but it means that if you get stuck on some version, and the next version has gone a different way on some concept/part of the framework, you're going to have a bad time, even if the landscape hasn't moved much yet.

I spend a lot in frontend land and I've grown somewhat accustomed to it's insanity. I actually even like it at this point -- Let everyone go insane in all the different directions, watch how they fare, then let the good stuff rise to the top, and pull out the interesting paradigm shifts if there are any. Platforms like C# often have a lot more enterprise weight behind them and "stable" takes on a completely different meaning.

I might even say that churn in .NET is happening too, it's just way way more localized. For example the .NET core/standard move is happening right now, but I can only assume that the vast majority of codebases on .NET 4.x don't care at all, and are letting it work itself out maybe over the next year before they even consider moving (if they ever move at all). As a person who's struggled with porting a .NET 4.x package to .NET core/standard, and with some associated libraries (EF, mostly), it was not a pleasant experience, but by the time it gets to everyone else, it probably will be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really feel for Ember - we picked it for a project we started a few years ago because react was still very new and angular was in the middle of the 2.0 transition. The Ember folks really made sure that transitioning to new Ember versions is straightforward. I don't even enjoy writing javascript, but I have really nothing but good things to say about it overall.

What it suffers from is a small community: we depended on a table component someone wrote which used some weird internal APIs and never got properly upgraded to ember 2.0 so we got stuck with ember 1.x until now because the overhead cost of switching to another library was too high to be worth it. Even then, the maturity of the project has been great and things don't break all the time. The API has been improving and the ember developers are proactive about pulling in the best ideas from newer projects. If you read the Ember RFCs they're always introspective and future-conscious and great. I really hope the project survives, not that I had much doubt. I think there is still quite a dedicated crowd.

</comment><comment><USER22> > What are your thoughts? What, if anything, should be done to make Ember > relevant in the JavaScript horizon again?

As a total outsider to Ember, but an insider in the JS community, having worked in various web-dev roles for 10 years and served as tech lead on a full-stack ReactJS app, my recommendation is to double down on production of junior developers (yes, I said "production" instead of education, and that is how you should look at it; producing capable workers).

High barrier to entry is the Achilles' Heel of ReactJS. It's in a very similar position to Ruby on Rails five years ago. If you want to kill React, go for the low-hanging fruit: the juniors. Take a lesson from Python. It doesn't matter how old you are; capture Programming 101 and the future is yours.

</comment><comment><USER23> We us Ember at my company. We started using it around the 1.0 release. We have been very happy with it. But as a shop that doesn't really have any dedicated front end developers the most frustrating thing for us is that their conventions are always changing or worse threatening to change but don't so your left always wondering if what you are doing is the right thing. People have been waiting for controllers to be deprecated for years. That being said I think they do have to make these changes to keep the framework moving forward and I appreciate the amount of effort they put in to keep things backward compatible. I think now that they are providing code mods for a lot of the new conventions people won't be as hesitant to upgrade. Before there was a lot of friction when upgrading to a new version that had different conventions and you felt you should go and modify your existing code to follow the new conventions. I have confidence that with their strong user base they will stay relevant for many types of applications. If people are hesitant to try it I'd tell them to keep in mind that even though Ember has conventions and provides the ember way of doing things it is possible to integrate most of the exciting things going on in the js world with Ember. Some people even use react components in their ember apps.

</comment><comment><USER24> I invested a lot of my time over the last few years into Ember and though it was a difficult decision I eventually had to accept that I would be better off moving to Vue.js. I have written a bit about my decision here: [https://hackernoon.com/why-i-am-migrating- propertywebbuilder...](https://hackernoon.com/why-i-am-migrating- propertywebbuilder-from-ember-js-to-vue-js-ca40925fa633)

Its a shame but the reality is that ember will not stand the test of time.

<comment><USER25> "...will not stand the test of time" Based upon what math do you qualify that statement? What equations do you apply to support this?

<comment><USER26> Since when did such a statement rely on hard emperical evidence?

<comment><USER27> You can certainly state it as an opinion, but calling it "the reality" does typically mean backing the assertion up with some substance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was confused by the title but this is about EmberJS, the web front-web framework.

From what I have seen from my peers, EmberJS is indeed often ignored :/ The developers I know that are using it at work seem very satisfied AND very productive with it though. And the same core team also released GlimmerJS which is very interesting: [https://glimmerjs.com](https://glimmerjs.com).

</comment><comment><USER29> The premise seems to be that popularity is what's important. I'd say the useful metric is whether or not you can be productive with the tool at hand. Popularity is sometimes something that can make a framework more productive (as tutorials, documentation and libraries are released), however popularity is hardly a prerequisite.

<comment><USER30> Popularity is important if you want to hire developers - developers are generally less interested in moving their career in a different direction than the industry trends.

Popularity for frameworks is also important if the framework needs adapters to enable third-party libraries to work with the framework. Depending on how opinionated the framework is, the friction in embedding libraries may hamper productivity indirectly.

If you're a one man band, then it's definitely less important. If the framework is a really good fit for the job, likewise. Otherwise, there's safety in numbers.

<comment><USER25> "Popularity is important if you want to hire developers" 15+ year vet here. I'd have to disagree. Popularity is important if you want to hire green developers. Not if you want good ones.

<comment><USER30> I've been coding for 25 years, getting paid for it for 21 years.

If you want to grow a team, you need to hire a mix of experience levels. With younger devs, talent is correlated with being opinionated - they have passion that hasn't been balanced by broad experience. And opinions are fashion-led. Find me a young dev who has no real opinions, and I'll show you a dev who has no taste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am a junior frontend dev working on my first dev job and both the main web apps (customer facing web app and internal tools web app) are in Ember.

I like it, I could do real, valuable (if small) contributions within a month. I am 9 months in it now and I can handle significantly more complex features.

As it was explained to me, this was part of the decision of choosing Ember.

I will try to list the reasons for us:

\- Timing: it was a time when the Angular broken upgrade from 1 to 2 was happening and React was starting to get traction.

\- Ember was a solid and mature framework, stable enough to use on a startup with product-market fit entering the growth phase.

\- There were clear signs that the framework was not going to be abandoned by its developers. Not only the maturity, but its future seemed solid. In retrospect, this was right. Ember keeps staying as a modern framework (even if not hyped that way).

\- Its _" conventions over configuration"_ approach was very important as we hadn't enough experienced software developers in the team. It made it welcoming to junior developers (like myself) that could not properly anticipate all the possible outcomes of early configuration and architectural decisions. React is very tricky in this aspect. I believe a lot of React applications being created these days by not so experience engineers will cause a lot of problems in the future.

The downside is mostly human capital. Hard to find Ember developers these days. But not such a big deal, as our hiring policy focus on more fundamental frontend skills rather than framework knowledge, so we hired good frontend developers that first got in touch with Ember here. And it is fairly easy to pick up Ember for junior and senior developers both.

That said, talking to some senior developers here, it appears that, were they doing that decision today, they would probably go with React. Being easier to attract new hires is a big deal of that decision, as we are growing a lot our development team and if we could offer React options we would certainly attract an order of magnitude more candidates.

Also, React is more mature and we have more developers that are experienced enough to make the right calls on its architecture and configuration.

But, my personal opinion, is that Ember would still be the right choice for our situation today. Something solid, with a large enough range of problems already solved, welcoming to new developers, easy enough to be productive from start.

</comment><comment><USER32> Right now there are three main frameworks. Angular, React, and, Vue.

Ember has always been the little guy even in the days when Backbone dominated. But it seems to have been replaced by Vue in this regard.

<comment><USER33> That's me understanding as well. NG and React are the top players and VueJS and EmberJS are niche. On stackoverflow jobs looks like around the end of 2017 Vue jobs > Ember jobs. [http://reallyhyped.com/?keywords=vue.js%2Cember.js](http://reallyhyped.com/?keywords=vue.js%2Cember.js)

<comment><USER32> Taking it a step further it seems to be broken down:

Enteprise - <USER2>

Startups and Larger Agencies - <USER3>

Smaller Agencies - <USER4>

Angular is dominant because large Enterprises are slow to adopt and Angular is really great because it works so well and everything is packaged out of the box.

React is still new compared to Angular which is why Startups are adopting it. Kind of like how Rails was popular with the Startups a few years ago.

Vue is universally loved by Developers but is not backed by the big companies in the States (it's bigger in China apparently?). It's considered Indie in North America so it's relegated to low budget projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My very first job after University was creating a large app in Ember. I had no modern Javascript experience but I was productive enough with it to build a pretty complex SPA with a lot of bells and whistles. So Ember has a fond place in my heart.

I think Ember is fading because it's just pretty different from other frameworks and there is a pretty big learning curve. But once you get up the curb you become super-productive and it's really nice.

It's a shame.

</comment><comment><USER35> For any indie developers, Ember can be extremely productive. In the past year, I have pushed out 3 moderately complex Ember apps in addition to having a full time job. I've reused some code for each application, have been able to depend on backwards compatibility for addons and always have received lots of help from other community members here: embercommunity.slack.com

This is mainly due to my ability to focus on shipping features rather than build processes. Also, depending on Ember Data, ember-cli-mirage, and the JSONAPI spec have allowed me quickly spec out how my schema will look, allowing me to move from the frontend to backend quite seamlessly. I've used React as well to develop widgets and such, but nothing has matched my ability to build, test, and ship features more than Ember.

We are all in this together and should focus on lifting all of us up. Positivity begets positivity.

</comment><comment><USER36> I moved away from it because the object model is too prescriptive.

<comment><USER37> Would you be able to elaborate on that a bit?

<comment><USER36> The extra layer of EmberObject between my domain objects and the templates was tedious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Having worked with React and Ember, in Ember I am super productive. I can setup a whole app in a couple of days. I think the market is so big in front- end that even a relatively small market share is actually quite big in absolute numbers.

Having said that, one of the reasons that Ember's core development seems so slow is because everything is announced beforehand, even discussed before hand. So if a feature A is proposed, it first needs to be submitted through RFC, go through a long period of discussion in Github then implemented and only then released. So it appears that it takes a long time to deliver features but it isn't really like that.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm not surprised, I've had mostly negative experiences with Ember. We wrote a pretty small web app and several of my colleagues had immense problems getting into it and making changes. (People who had JS experience and had used other stuff in the past.) We ended up rewriting it completely in a week (as I said, it was small) into AngularJS and no one ever complained again.

</comment><comment><USER40> It came and went, plain and simple. It made assumptions and design choices which at the time seemed sound but by today's standards look silly. Mustache templates for instance. Separating logic from presentation should be a choice not a hard/fast rule with a severely limited templating engine.

<comment><USER10> > _... a retarded (not using this term in the inflammatory sense)..._

Umm, I'm not sure that a "disclaimer" actually nullifies that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't think it's any fault of Ember, but more that there are now other competing options in the front-end Javascript space, and these will naturally suit some other use-cases more.

</comment><comment><USER42> I see a lot of people who like ember-cli, but after the first few minutes I just found it frustrating. Granted, this was a little over a year ago, but at that time if you simply wanted a npm module in your code you had to do all the extra work to wrap it in an ember plugin. IMO, this severely slowed down the ecosystem.

<comment><USER43> As far as I know it has never been required to wrap an NPM module in an add- on. I have used Ember since pre 1.0 and you could have just ember-browserify for the last 3-4 years to pull in an npm module.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Nominative determinism?

</comment><comment><USER45> Ember felt very Rails-y to me. The ember community felt entrenched in rails, and rails is reaching end-of-life. It is old-school thought. Ember made existing ideas better, a 2x gain maybe. I want new ideas, the 100x leap.

<comment><USER7> And have you found that yet?

<comment><USER45> I have! Karl and I made this: [http://www.hyperfiddle.net/](http://www.hyperfiddle.net/) Not possible to build on ember. React.js in May 2013 was final missing piece that made Hyperfiddle possible and our first commit was in Dec 2013.</comment></comment></comment>


The Copyright Mavericks - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/11/the_sonny_bono_memorial_collection_fights_copyright_creep.html <comment><USER2> "Nobody wants to deny creators a living"

I don't know, it might still be better than the current system.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the matter of paying authors: _pay them_ , but decouple that payment from distribution of works.

There are several models, the two of which that strike me as most viable being an income or wealth based tax, and/or an Arbitron or ASCAP-based royalties scheme based on distribution.

There's the age-old problem that high-quality, high-preparation-cost works tend to see vastly less distribution, despite their value to society as a whole. Coming up with a set of tiers or categories of work and determining the funding, and consequent number of authors who can be supported, might be one approach.

And there's still space for direct physical-copy sales where that's appropriate. A book _is_ a nice thing to have and hold, remarkably durable, and can be a treasured possession and an exchange-token in trade. But the present copyright model is clearly an impediment to the dissemination of knowledge, not a promoter of it, as the stated intent indicates.

I've made my own proposal, it's similar to numerous others:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/)

On information and markets:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_information_goods_and_markets_are_a_poor_match/)

Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.

[http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...](http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf)</comment>


Python standard library in Native Client (AKA Python in the browser) - <AUTHOR> http://lackingrhoticity.blogspot.com/2009/06/python-standard-library-in-native.html

<comment><USER2> I love Python, but I keep asking myself if this is a good idea. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all language.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know I am shocked and suprised to see support for Python in a Google product.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you working on tonight? - <AUTHOR> What's everybody working on right now? I'll start:
I'm putting together a quick custom todo list app to organize my main project, because I'm not happy with the vanilla one in Basecamp.
What about you? <comment><USER2> Improving HN's performance. Voting is horribly expensive. That wasn't a problem originally but it's starting to become one now that there are so many users.

<comment><USER3> I feel like upvoting your comment because that sounds interesting and concerning everyone here, but I don't want to be part of the problem!

<comment><USER4> You're not. You're helping him test his improvements

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Got an email from Microsoft -- I discovered a new bug in their F# compiler that breaks my startup app. I'm the first to find this fairly significant bug. I should be so proud.

So now I'm deciding how best to hack up my code to get around the bug.

Can't say I'm very happy about where I am, but I'll get it fixed soon enough.

It's very cool being on the cutting edge, as long as you don't bleed too much!

<comment><USER6> ooh... what bug? and are you doing f# for web or just f#?

<comment><USER5> I was going to blog about it tomorrow (never ruin a good chance to blog)

Basically for some reason F# barfs on large types, say types with 500 fields in them. I think the breaking point is 300 or so. There's also another bug that I'll save for the blog entry.

Microsoft was responsive as hell -- I had an email response within minutes and the engineer and I were emailing back and forth all afternoon. I was very impressed. The F# dev guys rock, even though I'm not happy at all with having a broken app.

<comment><USER6> yeah - that's been my experience too. the few times i've dealt with them, they've been back at me in hours tops. hopefully that'll continue despite them hitting RC

<comment><USER5> The odd thing was that the code was working in 2010Beta, but fell completely apart in 2010RC. It was a case of upgrading the IDE and having my app crash and burn. First thing we did was up the stack size, but no matter how big we made the stack, it didn't work.

<comment><USER6> interesting. well - we had the same problem with ndjango. worked fine with beta, crapped out with rc. that, and the shifty api is getting annoying. their last minute shift away from ocaml naming was pretty annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Winning National Novel Writing Month. I know that NaNoWriMo is in November, but I reserve the right to change February into another November in my personal timeline. I just have 618 words left. I've never written anything longer than about twenty pages before, and no fiction, so this was really a new and exciting experience for me. To my surprise, the book is actually pretty fun to read; I was expecting it to suck. I didn't know that any of this was even possible for me. This really has been an amazing month, and I look forward to doing it again when the _official_ November comes around.

(On a more nerdy note, none of the existing word processors really felt right to me, so I'm using a text format of my own devising, a python script to convert it into TeX with the memoir document class, and emacs. And org-mode to handle the story notes. It's remarkably pleasant, and it was a fun way of procrastinating. Much like writing this post.)

<comment><USER8> Good for you :) please post it when it's done. I got a chuckle out of the python/Tex thing - I was chatting with a friend recently about how we both want to start writing, but none of the writing apps feel right, if only there was a markdown-simple native mac app that would spit out latex, etc etc. We ended up agreeing we'd probably spend more time on the app than actually writing - kudos on doing both.

<comment><USER7> I think you're overestimating how long it would take to get something usable put together, if you're only trying to make it usable by _you._ It took me about one hour to write the python scripts, and another hour to learn the appropriate LaTeX document class, and then I just opened up Aquamacs and started typing.

(A nice advantage of this is that I programmed it to tell me how far I've gotten on my daily word goals. I don't know any word processor that does exactly this, and it's _really_ handy.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Working on my awesome blogging software. Here's the gorgeous coming soon page: <http://www.heyreverie.com>. Email me if you're frustrated with Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, etc. and I'd love to have you test my site before I make it public.

<comment><USER10> I thought you were being sarcastic, but that is indeed gorgeous.

<comment><USER9> Thank you! Took a lot of time and work. And the landing page is pure art, serves no purpose whatsoever. Still a lot of fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tonight? Nothing aside from routine email. I need a mental health day.

Saturday? Nothing aside from routine email. 10 hours of day job followed by going out with friends to karaoke.

Sunday: Church, gym, minimum viable achievement system in Rails (was supposed to happen last Sunday but I broke site -- scratch one work day), A/B tests incorporating it, deploy live, blog post about solo founderhood.

</comment><comment><USER12> I hope to finish the Rails Tutorial (<http://www.railstutorial.org/>) and then begin reading (and experimenting with) Agile Web Developing with Rails ([http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails- Programmer...](http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails- Programmers/)).

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm localising the latest Flash game I sold, I was fortunate enough to get a good price and a great buyer on it. It's a ton of work setting up their multilingual and branding requirements but I have to get it done tonight, I got bogged down on my little startup (<http://www.swfstats.com/>) all week and next week I'm off to San Francisco for the Flash Gaming Summit so that really only leaves today and worst case scenario some of tomorrow to get this sorted out. : )

This is my game: [http://www.flashgamelicense.com/screenshots/ss_8ih6r76u9701....](http://www.flashgamelicense.com/screenshots/ss_8ih6r76u9701.jpg)

11:23pm

<comment><USER13> 2:30am and dare I say it .... progress!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Drawing Feynman diagrams for my Modern Physics class. Here's the link to the assignment if you want to join in the fun: <http://phys309.physics.tamu.edu/PA5.pdf>

Thanks HN for the great timing on this post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1150224>

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm writing a local HTTP proxy that connects to a remote JAWs [1] server, so that users behind a proxy that blocks proxy requests can still get to an unfiltered Internet.

[1] <http://github.com/jrockway/jaws>

Entities that think they can censor the Internet amuse me.

</comment><comment><USER6> the same thing we do every night, pinky... plotting to take over the world... this time with a shivaplug.

<comment><USER16> Maybe the upcoming revision will tip the balance. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The baby my wife had on Tuesday, I guess. We just got home.

<comment><USER18> Congratulations. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Working on a Clojure client for Facebook:

<http://www.github.com/myfit/clj-facebook/>

</comment><comment><USER20> Writing an iPhone app / webapp for givingturtle.org to release before SXSW. For that matter, for anyone looking for something worthwhile to spend a few hours on, let me know...

</comment><comment><USER21> Documentation. Or if my eyeballs start falling out from that, a mass mailing engine in PHP for use on commodity-type PHP hosting. (For non-evil purposes, I promise.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Working on a quickie startup using a domain name I've had since '03 which is foreverlist.com. It's a paid classified ads site where, for $5, you can list an ad with unlimited images that never expires and which you can change to anything at any time.

So, as an example, you have a classic car which just sits in your garage collecting dust. You're somewhat interested in selling it, but only for the right price, and definitely don't want to fuss with relisting the ad every 30 or 60 days like ebay, craigslist or kijiji. So, one day you sell the car and then want to sell your snowblower. Just change the listing.

Cheaper than ebay's fees by far, less hassle than CL or kijiji. The $5 keeps out the spammers and scammers. Yeah, I know, it's extremely saturated but like I said, it's a quickie.

<comment><USER22> I'd love to hear the reasoning behind down-voting this. In a thread with 225 comments, only my post and one making a pun about gays is down-voted to 0. If you have something to say, say it. sheesh

<comment><USER23> I was wondering the same thing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Reviewing the more esoteric Category Theory bits of Haskell.

A (commercial) Haskell + C project kicks off on March 4th.

I am looking forward to my first major project in Haskell but it will be hectic once it starts and I won't have too much time for lazing around or reading :-(.

Enjoying the last few days of peace :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> I finished up a lexical analyzer I was writing in Ruby for a pascal variant we're using throughout the semester in my Compilers class. Now it's done and submitted, so time to relax and have a cup of tea before I start considering writing the parser.

<comment><USER26> This sounds like real fun! My compilers class was a joke, we made it as far as generating ASTs, then the semester ended. Laughable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Drinking...

<comment><USER28> I'm trying to get laid, actually. And failing thus far :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My interactive search engine for short available domains: <http://www.nxdom.com/>

I'm working to bring the advanced weighted sort order back, but optional so that new users can play with the simple sort order until they understand what it does. Work in progress is here, and full source code: <http://master.latest.scoretool.appspot.com/> <http://github.com/jcrocholl/nxdom>

My 2-year-old son doesn't want to go to sleep yet, so he's climbing around on me while I write this.

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, On Ubuntu/Chrome, the 'find available domains, starts with and ends with' lines are all on top of each other.

<comment><USER29> Thank you, I see what you mean. The headline wraps because the font is too wide on Ubuntu (in Firefox too), hope to fix it soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Submitting our latest film to IMDB: <http://2soc.net/americancafe>

</comment><comment><USER31> A Python compiler using Flex, Bison and C++.

<comment><USER32> Is this for CS164 at Berkeley? It sounds like the 164 project.

<comment><USER31> Yep, Hilfinger is teaching the class this semester.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A website for people to post latin texts, collaboratively annotate them with grammer information, and read both.

<comment><USER34> What's the site? I have a couple of latin grad student friends that would probably enjoy that.

<comment><USER33> It's not in any state for public use yet. The UI is very buggy, and the annotation system doesn't support more than the latin equivalent of "See Spot Run".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Starting an artisan-bread "sponge" which is a starter for the bread I hope to bake tomorrow (have started trying to teach myself to cook/bake). With cooking, you can pretty much cover yourself if you don't do something right; baking is much more of a "discipline"...

Hacker wise, thinking about ways to use Twitter and Facebook after listening to the recent Mixergy interview about it (Vanderchuyk? I think). I have a friend with a profitable site but it has stagnated and he has asked me to think about ways to improve it.

</comment><comment><USER36> Working on a new website for a client to help pay for the bootstrapping of my own startup. Getting to mess around with a custom mootools carousel with some nice UX stuff goin on.

</comment><comment><USER37> I scratched an itch today while collecting research materials. I had trouble keeping track of all the pages I was referencing, quotes I liked, etc.

So I made an app and then open sourced it: <http://github.com/pplante/yourcached.info>

Not totally finished yet. Waiting on DNS to resolve so I can add FBConnect to it and spread the word.

I only spent 4 hours on this so far. So it wasn't a complete distraction from what I needed to do...not yet at least!

<comment><USER37> Oooops, forgot the screenshot: <http://grab.by/2GVy>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just made a little jQuery plugin:

<http://github.com/zef/jquery_form_toggle>

It makes it easy to show and hide elements based on the state of a checkbox, radio button, or select menu.

Demo: <http://madebykiwi.com/files/jquery_form_toggle/>

I'd be surprised if there isn't something like this out there already, but I couldn't find one.

If you have a suggestion for a better name, I'd be happy to hear it.

<comment><USER4> chide? It's a real word, but also mix of checkbox and hide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm working on a Flash game using Flixel for a contest on Newgrounds. There haven't been many submissions so I'm basically just trying to get it done by the deadline :)

</comment><comment><USER40> <http://emp.ly/> \- a job posting and sharing tool for hiring via social networks.

P.S. Don't forget: It's the last few days to apply 4 many startup incubators: <http://shrt.st/cs7> (NYC Seedstart, Openfund, i/o ventures, Sproutbox, YC). Great chance to learn from best of the best. Also let me know if I have missed any from the list.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm going to see if I can make zlib a little faster with some SSE intrinsics.

</comment><comment><USER42> Working on a JSON stream parser in AS3, reading data with flash.net.URLStream, for loading up GPS data progressively. The JSON for a ride like this (<http://ridewithgps.com/trips/2000>) is about 300k, and I think it will look much cooler if it draws as it downloads.

<comment><USER43> This sounds very interesting. Will it be open source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> My project: a "Foursquare meets Mafia Wars" game. You claim a real location, name it and defend it. Generate virtual currency over time and spend it on weapons. The code is complete and the family will be running some tests this weekend. Next, we will invite a few friends, get some feedback and figure out the next steps.

<comment><USER22> Interesting. I had a flash of real violence breaking out over the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> There is a merge lane right out my window in NY. Horns honk all day, due to narrowly missed disasters, and occationally theres some contact. Soooooo, I pointed a webcam out my window and created the <http://WorstMergeLaneEver.com>

</comment><comment><USER46> Writing a distributed control system in Io for my robot I'll take to the Sparkfun UAV competition.

</comment><comment><USER47> As part of writing my first Thunderbird addon, started in the way I usually do by doing a demo. Setting up the parallel dev profile was a little tedious and is not explained in the documentation. I wanted to get actual messages into the dev version (because I'll need them) and ended up flying blind (but correctly) by simply copying the right files from out of the default profile into dev.

The exercise itself was very fast - which was nice. There were a number of places where one could go subtly wrong and I managed to miss them all and at the first pass. Which was even more encouraging.

Now I have to grit my teeth a bit and dig into the Thunderbird API to accomplish my real goal. What I do now know is the landscape.

</comment><comment><USER48> This thread looks pretty crowded already, but I'll throw this in anyways.

I'm adding a few screenshots to my part of my team's presentation. We have a program review tomorrow (today).

My project: <http://cusat.cornell.edu/violet/>

</comment><comment><USER49> Working on my online game. Hopefully it will be more in a playable condition soon enough !

</comment><comment><USER50> Trying to learn Django by coding up a new project and working on an existing PHP site.

</comment><comment><USER51> Right now... adding some features to an internal application at work in C# (im at work).

Later tonight though, I should be preparing for my hiking trip tomorrow, and possibly working on some RSS indexing that someone I know wants for their website.

</comment><comment><USER52> Playing Starcraft with my wife, exploring a new tactic, inspired by the discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1150669>

And taking care of my 2-month-old.

<comment><USER53> aw that's awesome. your baby must be asleep now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Finishing up final negotiations on a licensing deal for some of the mapping functionality on ridewithgps.com -- original lawyerspeak in the agreement had too stiff of a non-compete.

Also, put up an issues page for users to publicly register feature requests and bugs, and then comment and vote on them. The idea is that we get alot of duplicate feature requests and reports of errata that take alot of time to personally respond to. By letting users see something is already registered, they can just upvote it and we have one less person to directly contact.

</comment><comment><USER55> Tonight's projects included A/B testing, practicing piano, and making a delicious sausage pizza.

I'm currently considering jumping on the Feynman diagrams posted by dwwoelfel, because I kind of miss doing them.

</comment><comment><USER26> Studying for a Computer Architecture mid-term on Tuesday. I got to program a little bit of a RESTful API for a big school project earlier today though, so the day isn't a total loss.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm actually poring over the list of projects that I'd like to get done one of these days, seeing if there's anything I can get some traction on with just an hour or two of work. I should be sleeping. I have a job interview in 8 hours. Well, by "job interview" I mean I'm talking to yet another headhunter. Mostly to satisfy the unemployment benefit requirement that I meet with at least 3 companies per week. I really don't feel like doing mid-term contract work without benefits.

</comment><comment><USER57> Creating marketing brochures with html, so that I can use css to create a consistent feel across all of them. There's probably a much better way to do this, but I need them for next week.

To do it, I'm using webkit2png to make a png from the html page, and prawn to automatically put the png into a pdf. The whole thing is 6 lines of ruby (which uses python, then prawn), and it's working well so far, but I've had to fuss with the scaling so that it prints without pixelating.

<comment><USER58> Adobe Fireworks might be a good tool for you.

<comment><USER59> If we're going to be using Adobe apps, I would have thought InDesign would be more suitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Trying to find a vt100 emulator for lisp . . . not working out so great. Or is it? I just remembered emacs had one . . . reading the source code now . . . god help me.

</comment><comment><USER61> Trying to get the video done for our YC app. We're seriously bad at saying anything cool or interesting on camera... all we can do so far is laugh at each other. :)

<comment><USER62> Give yourself a 15 minute deadline. Take whatever video is the best when 15 minutes are up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Deployed a small app to appengine , to send voice messages via IM using twilio. Mainly to send my wife important messages without having to dial from work phone.

</comment><comment><USER64> I was sleeping when this was posted, but now I'm working on a consulting project (embedding an existing game into OpenSocial and Facebook apps). Once I finish with that for the week, I'll carry on building the prototype for our SSD-based I/O caching driver. I'm hoping we can finally make that do something useful over the weekend.

</comment><comment><USER65> Listening to jazz, hacking on an iPhone game.

</comment><comment><USER66> Working on multiplayer Minesweeper, web-based: <http://sweepminer.com>

</comment><comment><USER67> Working on an experiment for my psychology class. It's fun because I made it a web application, and it's been a good chance to mess with Couchdb. (project is here(<http://github.com/vault/Word-Superiority-Effect>), it's pretty crappy currently)

</comment><comment><USER68> Just got back from the YC meetup in Seattle!

</comment><comment><USER69> I am working on a fantasy sports business. To be specific, this evening of work had to do not with building features but with actually mending relationships busted up by good ole email miscommunication. My advice is to say what you have to say on the phone or in person. Leave emotional discussions off of paper/email.

</comment><comment><USER70> It's 6.16 am now, and yesterday night I went to bed early so I could work on my projects this morning. So far I've written a guest post for my blog (since 5 am) and I'll now work on the backend of a bog engine I wrote myself in rails. I'll probably do many other things before 9 am where I'll start my day- work.

</comment><comment><USER71> Live jazz hip-hop at a local bar, no cover

</comment><comment><USER72> Just had dinner with my girlfriend. Now finishing up this months pro-bono work to clear my plate for next month.

</comment><comment><USER73> Not yet night here, but I'm just finishing writing up a heat-mapping multi- user system for work.

I should also be working on 10 other programming projects that are due by april 1st, and 2 other personal projects as well, but don't seem to have the time nor inclination.

I think I want to go with MikeMacMan's suggestion and drink. =)

</comment><comment><USER74> Copy for my current project: <http://readwarp.com>. I'm trying to come up with three short sentences for the front page to describe a) What it is, b) What it can do for you, c) What you should do next.

If you can figure out what it does, _you_ tell me :)

<comment><USER75> You should definitely make a <title> for the page

<comment><USER74> Absolutely. I just added a title that updates with the stories. I've also added a (ugly) favicon so it's easy to distinguish from other tabs. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> A raytracer as part of a class project.

<comment><USER77> Raytracers are fun. Tonight I'm hopefully going to start threading my (slow) real-time raytracer. I've never done threading before, and I'm very interested in seeing how the performance plays out, what strategy I should use to optimize cache usage and generally getting stuck in with what has always been an interesting topic to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Using CouchDB to set up various payment methods for a personal project. The schemaless stuff is great.

</comment><comment><USER79> Working on my word-learning application. Partly to learn Dutch (though the program can be reused for any pair of languages, with some features (irregular verb forms) making it more suitable for Germanic languages - Dutch, English, German etc), partly to get experience with C#.

</comment><comment><USER80> Trying to deal with hotel issues that come up at the 11th hour of negotiations for my 'Rails 3 on the Beach' event I am hosting in Jamaica in August.

Things never go as planned...I know computers can be difficult to deal with some times, but people are even more unpredictable.

</comment><comment><USER81> Finishing touches on porting my chinese checkers game to Android. It is mostly an exercise in writing a HTML 5 app for Android, as I don't expect many people to be interested in chinese checkers. Then, start working on the next Android app.

</comment><comment><USER82> The Plan: Finish documenting the little i18n library for .NET that I built last week and release it open source.

The Reality: It's 95 degrees here in Cartagena and my fingers are sweating onto the keyboard. Cuba Libres sound like a much more viable option.

</comment><comment><USER83> Playing with bottle.py and Twilio

</comment><comment><USER84> Gutting ADODB from the IMVU website to eliminate pointless data conversions and several hundred microseconds from each cached query.

I love being able to refactor the database layer, relying on automated tests to prevent me from taking down the site.

</comment><comment><USER85> Playing around with streaming video and Adobe Stratus, and contemplating making my own Chatroulette-like site.

Let me know how well it (doesn't) work: <http://cam-mash.appspot.com/listen>

<comment><USER86> working on a similar idea.. :) maybe we should collaborate

<comment><USER85> Sounds interesting. Shoot me an e-mail with more about what you're working on?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Merging the code I wrote on the road last week with the main tree on the dev box.

</comment><comment><USER88> Working on photo upload in a new web app I'm working on. It spawns ImageMagick to do the conversion into multiple photos of different sizes. I had doubts about this until I read that it's the technique Flickr uses.

<comment><USER89> Here's something you might find interesting Gamma error in picture scaling <http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Learning Clojure (by reading Programming Clojure) - oh and trying to setup VimClojure and failing miserably (file detection is working, but everything else including syntax highlighting & indentation isn't).

<comment><USER91> \- ask on freenode #clojure, the guy who wrote vimClojure hangs out pretty frequently

\- the suggested "least stress" alternatives are netBeans/enclojure or emacs via ELPA/swank-clojure

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Packing to drive from Los Angeles to San Jose tomorrow. Spending the weekend watching friends' movies at Cinequest film festival.

Also meeting with a friend in SJ about a facebook app idea we've been kicking around forever.

</comment><comment><USER92> Working on my web based jukebox project: <http://github.com/trevorturk/kzak>

I'm dropping Bundler support right now because it's still broken in so many ways ;(

</comment><comment><USER93> Studying IA for my exam tomorrow. Fortunately, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition)" is a great book. (I said fortunately because I need to read half of it tonight - I`m half done).

</comment><comment><USER94> I'm in the process of leaving my job to start my first company, so my time tonight is split between writing wiki articles for my soon-to-be-ex coworkers and creating a minimally viable product.

<comment><USER95> Hey, me too. It's my last day. It's way out of my comfort zone, but I realized if I don't take these risks now, I never will. I'm oscillating between excited and horrified.

Best of luck to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> This Friday night, I'll be working on getting the Orlando Defcon Group together at Stardust Coffee and Video @ 7pm.

This will be the first time the group has convened since it was marked inactive in 2006.

</comment><comment><USER97> I'm setting up a development environment to work on writing a FTP search engine tomorrow afternoon. It's a new laptop (new to me, Thinkpad T30), so it's not all perl'd up yet.

</comment><comment><USER98> Putting the finishing touches on the app I wrote this week, a co-founder finder.

I also got a Droid this afternoon, so I've been having a hard time avoiding the distracting shiny, shiny new toy.

<comment><USER99> Make sure you test the voice quality when you speak into the microphone: [https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/16215?start=630...](https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/16215?start=630&tstart=0#115129)

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Finishing up a few homework assignments then keep on teaching myself Lisp. I probably should learn a bit more LaTeX at the rate i'm inserting equations in Google docs though.

</comment><comment><USER101> trying to make my way to Brussels, stuck overnight in Chicago due to a maintenance issue followed by a domestic dispute followed by over the maximum time for the crew.

</comment><comment><USER102> A building thermal performance model written in Octave/MATLAB.

</comment><comment><USER103> Working through pickaxe ruby, tinkering with lisp program to decode pcap files and explain packets/protocols, keeping an eye on the Cluster, figuring out xen.

</comment><comment><USER104> Looking into memcache <http://bit.ly/ceIa49> Beepl's (django) eating up 400MB of mem/apache process. :-(

<comment><USER104> Btw, it worked - beepl's now fast like a rocketship!

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Signals and Systems problem set <http://mit.edu/6.003/S10/www/handouts/hw3.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER106> MVP on GAE. Minimum Viable Product on Google App Engine.

<comment><USER107> That's so GAE.

<comment><USER108> I know you meant it as a joke, and it is indeed clever. However, usage of 'gay' as a pejorative is kind of offensive to some of us. Please be careful with your puns.

Edit: Seriously, guys, I'm trying to be as civil as possible here. What's with the downvotes?

<comment><USER107> Civility has nothing to do with it. It was a not-so-clever pun. I wasn't actually using it as a pejorative. That should be _painfully_ obvious.

<comment><USER109> It was a pun on a pejorative use of the word - if you disagree, look up "pejorative".

At the risk of seeming "PC" to oversensitive folks, using social identities as pejoratives is inherently insulting; you're associating their racial/sexual/etc. identity with something undesirable, even if you don't think of it as a slur. "Gay" to mean _stupid or annoying_ is of a piece with terms like "gyp", "indian-giver", or "nigger-rig".

<comment><USER107> EXCEPT THAT I WASN'T USING IT AS A PEJORATIVE. Jesus fucking christ, this isn't "PC" this is just _stupid_.

<comment><USER71> You weren't using it as a pejorative, but your pun was based on its use as a pejorative.

<comment><USER107> And? Some guy posted using the word "nigger". He may not be calling people "nigger", but he used a word that is racially insensitive! Booga booga!

Jesus.

<comment><USER71> This has less to do with political correctness, and more the idea that posts like yours are just kind of annoying. The tone makes the site seem a lot less civil. It didn't add anything to the thread. Now all we have is you acting very annoyed that we didn't like your joke.

Humor is encouraged on Hacker News, but only when it is actually funny. Your joke wasn't funny.

<comment><USER107> Yes, it was funny to no one. This is why the comment has +5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> A designer friend and I will likely play with a redesign of some mutual friends' university club's website.

EDIT: And then I notice that this was posted yesterday. :)

</comment><comment><USER110> Was running database migrations. I'm now rolling back.

</comment><comment><USER111> Filling out paperwork to commit to more bandwidth from our colocation facility as the monthly overages are getting high.

Guess you gotta spend money to make money :-|

</comment><comment><USER112> I am fixing JMathPlot exception so that we can use it for my graduation project (brazos.cs.tcu.edu) Those 3D graphics will look really good !!!

</comment><comment><USER113> I'm working on initialization scripts for my VPS: automatically taking it from newborn to installed infrastructure and security settings.

And a glass of bourbon.

<comment><USER114> Linode StackScripts?

<comment><USER113> simpler, just # do this # do this # do this. On slice. May do something like StackScripts later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> building riak on a couple ubuntu 9.10 virtual servers. checking mem usage n 32bit vs 64bit for a new project. riak > node.js > jquery.

</comment><comment><USER116> Hacking on a GitHub client for Palm's webOS.

<http://robmerrell.github.com/gitopotamus/>

</comment><comment><USER117> Building a barebones game framework for HTML5 Canvas. Or at least, decoupling the reusable pieces of code from a game I've been building.

</comment><comment><USER118> I'm writing a Bit Error Rate simulator

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_error_rate>

</comment><comment><USER119> Sleeping, I hope. I haven't slept a full night for a while.

G'night.

</comment><comment><USER120> NOW: Working to pay rent

TONIGHT: Adding graphical reporting into Femtoo.com (to view graphs of change history of trackers)...and then getting drunk.

</comment><comment><USER121> Beer.

</comment><comment><USER32> The serial interface for the MIPS microprocessor that I am going to be spending the rest of the semester implementing on an FPGA.

</comment><comment><USER122> Adding more polls into my photo poll page @ <http://i-am-bored.in/polls/>

</comment><comment><USER123> Writing a Python photomosaic generator, and an iPhone app for my university bus system (iPhone apps seem to be popular tonight).

</comment><comment><USER124> Editing a new interview I did earlier in the evening with Steve Welch on getting traction. Hoping to upload and post it today.

</comment><comment><USER125> Working on getting data to be more easily imported for <http://graphbug.com>

</comment><comment><USER126> Continuing to hack away at my Footy Tipping site... the start of the season is casting demonic shadows over my shoulder...

</comment><comment><USER127> Watching some cloudera videos. <http://www.cloudera.com/videos>

</comment><comment><USER128> Trying to figure out how to query the UMLS metathesaurus's WebService (Soap 1.2) API using Ruby. Not having much luck :(

</comment><comment><USER129> Working to get one step closer to nirvana :)

</comment><comment><USER130> Debating adding the deals from my iDealyzer iPhone/Android apps to the supporting website hoping it will help SEO.

</comment><comment><USER131> Building a hotel site. Fixing some irritating join statements when searching by station name (it's for Tokyo).

</comment><comment><USER132> Reverse engineering a C++ game and patching it. The usual thing fans do to fix their favourite broken games :)

</comment><comment><USER133> Writing copy for webpages of a service that helps ecommerce sites with high chargeback rates reduce fraud.

</comment><comment><USER134> Just spent 2 hours rehearsing the Verdi Requiem. Next up is probably looking at a FreeBSD Errata Notice.

</comment><comment><USER135> Writing a lab report for my lab class. I'm using electron diffraction to measure the Planck constant.

</comment><comment><USER136> Making my current project -- a hierarchical outliner -- support multiple documents and user accounts

</comment><comment><USER137> Working on the new financial reporting requirements and preparing my financial courses startup.

</comment><comment> X-Istence Working on my Google AppEngine based website. I hope to launch by the end of this month.

</comment><comment><USER138> Aggregating http log data (request timing, custom fields) in redis. To be open-sourced.

</comment><comment><USER139> Backing out the latest changes we spent the week building because it "wasn't right".

</comment><comment><USER140> Been working on a new bug/ticket tracker for a while... Continuing to do so :)

</comment><comment><USER141> Real C# support for Thrift, consisting of WCF metadata providers and channels.

</comment><comment><USER142> A web interface for MongoDB.

</comment><comment><USER143> Working on chapter two of a book I am writing on how to increase conversion

</comment><comment><USER144> Searching my email / Paypal accounts for orphaned / unlogged receipts.

</comment><comment><USER145> Finishing up a presentation for code show and tell at work tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER146> Creating fixture data for an old project with no test coverage.

</comment><comment><USER147> I'm working on my "day" job. Ask this again on the weekend :p

</comment><comment><USER148> Fixing stupidity, tagging plugins for the cakephp framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seriosuly using cakephp? .......why?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER149> SOAP, WS-BPEL, and supply-chain modeling in Common Lisp :-/

</comment><comment><USER150> trying a programming puzzle on rosettacode <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/24_game/Solve>

</comment><comment><USER151> Trying to get the hang of the Furnace webframework.

</comment><comment><USER152> Deploying a tiny, tiny app onto a public server...

<comment><USER53> not a virus, I hope

</comment></comment><comment><USER153> getting over some kind of sickness (generic cold, perhaps, but it hit hard) and working on setting up my new 55g saltwater reef aquarium.

hooray hobbies

</comment><comment><USER62> Alternately learning twisted and writing software

</comment><comment><USER154> Just finished plugging memory leaks.

</comment><comment><USER155> Coverscans, coverscans, coverscans.

</comment><comment><USER156> Preparing for admissions interview.

</comment><comment><USER114> Helping a friend start a business.

</comment><comment><USER157> Patent office action response.

</comment><comment><USER158> TronBot

</comment><comment><USER159> MW2

</comment><comment><USER58> ZumoDrive.

</comment><comment><USER160> Learning to use Joomla.

</comment><comment><USER53> working on my future...

</comment><comment><USER161> I'm working on Forrst.

</comment><comment><USER162> starring at my phone

</comment><comment><USER163> A better database.

</comment><comment><USER164> writing a SGML parser for a search engine :-P

</comment><comment><USER165> chrome extensions.... still.

</comment><comment><USER166> playing around with android

</comment><comment><USER167> bug fixin'

</comment><comment><USER89> Working on our backup path. I run some Limbo[1] code using Windows Scheduled Tasks. This copies the contents of My Documents and Desktop (or wherever) to a Venti[2] server running on Linux on the LAN. The storage arenas of that server are extracted in 500Mb chunks and encrypted, along with the scores for accessing them, using GPG[3]. These are then copied offsite, via the internet and bundled into DVD sized groups and burned to optical when appropriate. As Venti arenas are append only this is minimum transfer, secure backup. That's obviously just the Windows machiens that use Limbo. Unix likes have native clients. Our Venti store also contains data from other soruces such as the website and imap servers. Though it might make sense to separate them out, that's the decisions I'm working on as I go along.

I would also like to find an encryption method that uses fixed size chunks so I can upload only the appended data. That's something I need to look more into. I know they are around somewhere.

[1] <http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/> [2] <http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/venti.html> [3] <http://www.gnupg.org/>

</comment><comment><USER168> Trying to catch up on way too much Elance work while watching the Olympics... oh and watching Lost that I missed the other day.</comment>


HTTP API Design - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/interagent/http-api-design

<comment><USER2> This seems to be interesting:

      Use UTC times formatted in ISO8601

      Accept and return times in UTC only. Render times in ISO8601 format, e.g.:

      "finished_at": "2012-01-01T12:00:00Z"

So what if the time zone is important? E.g. the time a user purchased a product. The UTC time is obviously consistent throughout the system but presented without a time zone might not make an awful lot of sense to a user, especially if the time zone is something plus or minus 10 hours.

Wouldn't an RFC 2822 formatted date make not more sense; "Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200". You still have your UTC but you are now capable to represent the time to a user within a context that makes sense.

<comment><USER3> "Render" here means "by the API" (emit), not "to the user" (display).

In your example, you'd just present the time in the user's timezone, via a rendering transformation.

The API shouldn't concern itself with formatting details, but absolutely the end user should never see an iso8601 timestamp!

<comment><USER2> I understand what the context of render means here. However, consider you're building a mobile app that calls this API, then where does the correct time zone from? It could come from the user profile or maybe somewhere else. In any case, it's much easier on the client to include the time zone specific to the client making the call in the time stamp it self otherwise all clients will have to do time conversions.

<comment><USER3> The correct timezone comes from the user's device. Mobile or desktop. There's almost never a good reason for the API service to know the user's timezone.

Besides the unnecessary code complication and extra compute cycles on the server side, why destroy your opportunities for caching the data?</comment></comment></comment></comment>