It's nice but it still doesn't fix the issue with people who have medium end machines where you develop in a VM full time and want to be able to run a VM within a VM.
For example with fairly old but still reasonable hardware you cannot run virtualbox inside of an existing virtualbox instance.
If you have a windows box and develop full time in a linux VM you cannot run vagrant inside of that linux VM because unless you have a modern CPU it lacks the instruction sets required to run virtualization within virtualization.
Now using docker instead of a VM would work but docker only supports 64 bit operating systems so anyone stuck with a 32bit host OS still can't use vagrant and has to resort to using raw linux containers without docker which is really cumbersome.
If you have a great dev box with a ton of ram then using docker or a VM is irrelevant. You can just set the whole thing up in a ram drive and things are nearly instant, assuming you're using virtualization for short lived tests on some provisioned server that matches your prod env.
With an older machine and a 32bit OS (ie. 2 gigs of ram) you can't do anything except run 2x 512mb VMs side by side within a host or a single ~1GB VM on its own so it's a real let down to see they decided to use docker instead of just plain LXCs which do work with a 32bit OS.
I've also noticed that really in depth questions with a lot of code examples and explanations doesn't help either because then they get no responses or votes.
It's funny when you're asked to supply detail but when you supply detail no one replies because they can't be bothered to spend 4 minutes reading the setup/code details.
Because tacitly the point is to stand around jumping on newbies or people you perceive to be doing things wrong.
If you can't quickly get that gratification you just move along to the next guy who left out a semicolon that wasn't germane to his question. Who has time to deal with other people's real problems?
I wish Netflix would just deny access to every Comcast subscriber. Maybe that will knock Comcast into reality after like 20% of their subscribers instantly cancel their account.
Are you a Netflix subscriber? Their interface is pretty good. It's about as good as you can ask for given the technology we have and the selection that Netflix has.
Things are broken up by genre or new releases just like they used to be in video stores because it's pretty intuitive way to browse movies. "I feel like watching something funny, show me all comedies". Netflix also takes it 1 step further and tries to sort it by relevance based on previous watches.
Their interface for DVD players is quite good too. The search is smart and it only takes seconds to go from the DVD player being off to watching a stream from Netflix.
I rarely load up Netflix knowing exactly what I want to watch. I have ideas based on genre what I want and Netflix lets me browse reasonably. I've been a sub for almost as long as they've been around and I still find good stuff. The only thing that lacks is newer releases on stream but you can blame the media providers for that.
My cable provider sometimes offers free access for a month to their on demand/pay per month movie service and it's a joke. Things are listed alphabetically with 90 pages to go through or it's by genre but you're stuck going through 28 pages of alphabetical results where you see nothing but the movie title and a 1 sentence plot. It's an awful user experience.
I think you're being biased here. Netflix's device interface is ho-hum (eg on the playstation entering text for search strings is painful) and they only have a 1-2 sentence description as well. They do try to sort things by relevance but they frequently get it wrong and I can 't depend on the same genres being there from session to session or having the same names. For example, I used to have a genre called 'horror movies'; after I watched a few different cartoon shows in a row one weekend that went away and instead I got a new genre called 'Scary Movies' with mostly PG-13 rather than R-rated content. Now I wasn't so into horror movies to begin with, but if I was this would be quite annoying. I do like Sci-Fi movies but but my options for curating my own genre selections are very limited, so I wind up thorwing everything into 'my list' in case I can't find again later.
The cable interface is also bad, but things are broken out by genre and broadcast station (eg some people prefer HBO stuff). It's a bit annoying because it's slower and I have to use a remote control, but that hasn't prevented my finding things I want to watch. Neither side is going to win by interface, but on selection; Netflix has fewer hits but more depth, Cable offers more populist and newer stuff.
I never tried accessing it through a console. Only through a fairly modern $40ish DVD player and a web browser, no complaints.
I'd drop them instantly without thinking twice if a better solution existed with equal or better selection, cheaper prices and more promising short term goals.
You still need to think about what you want to watch, and deliberately make it happen. A very large market segment wants no more than a half-dozen choices, pick one, and let it run indefinitely.
For the same reason, the 90 page channel listing, dominated by "your not subscribed to this but we're going to show it to you anyway in hopes you might upgrade to include it" and "here's 37 duplicate channels all showing the same movie at slightly offset timeslots", has got to be driving people away - many staying only because there isn't a brain-dead-easy option hearkening to the days of 4 channels.
The menu I was talking about wasn't the typical channel listing. That's even worse to the point where I never use it. When I goto my friend's house where he has a ton of premium channels you can literally spend 3 hours just looking through that list to find something.
I hope that market segment with half a dozen choices never becomes fully main stream. I like choice in moderation (ie. web frameworks with opinions) but movies are just entirely different.
There's just too many interesting genres and type of movies to filter a list of 100,000 movies down to a handful. It's a very complicated problem to solve and might be unsolvable until we have huge break throughs in how machines process human input.
Example, how would you solve this problem:
Customer A watches 5 comedies in a row then is proposed a choice of 3 movies. 1 comedy, 1 sci-fi and 1 romance.
If customer A picks the sci-fi movie you cannot conclude that he didn't like the comedy or romance choices. He just happened to prefer watching a sci-fi movie that night. You don't even know the outside conditions too. Maybe his friend is over sitting in the room while they pick the movie, you simply cannot know.
This is a great point. The 8 billion channel situation with an unusable guide channel seems like it was put together and maintained by a bunch of cokeheads with no sense of a sane user experience.
While we're at it, let's get down to just cooking and forget food science. Never mind how a recipe should be adjusted at altitude. Or what to substitute when the person eating your minimally viable meal has a food allergy to an ingredient. Or what other things go well with your main entree. We're just cooking up things we got out of a can, after all.
Don't learn any patterns. Except the ones DHH wants you to—those are ok. All the rest of them just get in the way of writing software.
He never said don't learn patterns. He said it's not worth spending all your time trying to memorize them before you even write a line of code.
Memorizing about 20 patterns for 3 months before you really write any code is way worse than just hacking together something and improving it because after enough time you know what's wrong.
The "you just know" thing is really powerful. I'm not a professional artist but I just know that if you had a yellow background and you drew something in the foreground with the same yellow code it wouldn't work because you couldn't see it.
When writing shitty code I just know it's bad because I find myself having to copy/paste something 8 times or maybe it's close enough to a copy/paste that it still feels wrong so then I fix it.
I think that's good advice—great, even—for the person just learning to code. Its terrible advice for someone who is or wants to be a professional in a field in which continuous self-education is an imperative to stay employed. Patterns provide both a vocabulary and a toolbox to go to when you're solving a problem. If you don't learn the vocabulary and the tools that are available, you don't recognize problems when they arise, or you only recognize them because you're no longer able to constructively execute on new features.
To take your example, yellow-on-yellow isn't an aesthetic assessment, its a functional one. You recognize that functional anti-pattern because you've experienced, at some point in your life, what happens with a lack of contrast. If you aren't colorblind, you probably don't (intuitively) recognize that red on green is also a functional anti-pattern. When you extrapolate to the world of software development, without having previously learned these patterns or something resembling them, you don't recognize the antipatterns when they occur.
I'm not saying "Don't write software until you know all the patterns, ever." I'm saying that DHH has a traditional antipathy for any pattern he hasn't deigned fit to include in Rails canon, and that when you're coding solutions that need to scale in both performance and complexity, you probably don't want to take advice from someone who thinks a formalization of the AR pattern is the height of domain modeling.
A beginner with a passion and goal to improve will eventually become a professional. You don't get to professional status by just research and reading, you have to actually do things and figure out first hand what works and what doesn't.
Then you eventually learn to see things on your own. I don't need to read a popular programming pattern book to know how to structure my code. I know how to structure it based on feedback of using it on a regular basis while having a solid base of information to work off of.
If something feels off, I fix it where the solution is it no longer feels off. Until it feels off I'll likely leave it as is because at this point I haven't experienced the problem.
If something isn't a problem to me then it's not a problem. It's only a problem when it causes me to react in a negative way or is causing the system to react in a way that is bad.
I wouldn't recognize first hand that red on green is a problem for color blind people because I'm not color blind. If this hypothetical app had to work for color blind people then I would open a ticket and flag it as a feature request and then get feedback from someone who is color blind.
That's a good example of it's not a problem until it's a problem.
You can still constantly learn and keep up with things while taking DHH's advice btw. I have been coding and working with his mentality for quite some time now despite working with rails for only a year.
Yeah, look me up when you've been cleaning up Rails code from developers who didn't bother to understand solid design principles for several years... that whole "wait til its a problem" thing falls apart pretty quickly in non-trivial domains.
What makes you think someone will do this for free for you?
You're asking for a custom site with custom data that is searchable in many different ways. You're asking someone to come up with an entire implementation to your idea.
I can't give you an accurate quote with such little info but what you're looking at is likely going to be north of free. I'd expect somewhere in the few thousand dollar range.
I said free or low cost. I'm not looking to low-ball anyone here or ask for free work on one of my ideas from the HN community. I'm looking for something out there that I can shoehorn my idea into at a low cost. It seems like what I'm looking for is done a lot on the web, and I was looking for ideas on who does it at a low cost. I can get a cheap e-commerce site done for practically free or for $7-$30 a month that charges cards, ships packages, calculates taxes and has stats and searches. It seems like someone, somewhere would be offering something less technical for the same price or less. So do you know of anyone?
Comparing an e-commerce site to what you want is like trying to compare a tarantula's fangs to the rudders on a speed boat.
I'm not trying to bust your chops but I'd be curious as to what makes you think your idea is less technical than an e-commerce site. What basis did you use to make that conclusion?
Well, it seems that a shopper would search for different characteristics of a product and be given search results, much like I want a user to be able to do. They could then calculate shipping, which is analogous to calculating distances between two points. A user could enter product data, much like I want users to do, and site registration could keep data from different users separate.
I'm actually thinking of using an e-commerce site and just not putting product data in, rather each "farm" would be a product and have tags associated with it and when you narrow down the tags you get the farms as a result. Seems like the cheapest option at the moment given the other answers in this thread.
You mentioned wanting to allow farmers to make an account and add in their details of various stuff along with having their own profile.
That is much different than a typical e-commerce setup. Most product sites have products. Which account added the product doesn't matter. There's no "show me all shoes filtered by the user of Mary", it's "show me all shoes by price filtered by size, etc.".
I also encourage you to research shipping cost calculators that let you use them seamlessly in your custom site.
Also I'm not trying to discourage you from executing your idea. You're free to do whatever you want but I'm just saying you'll have to spend a decent amount of $ to get exactly what you want up and working as a reasonable solution.
The big problem I see is how do you pick the accountability partner?
It needs to be someone who you would trust with an arbitrary amount of money because as soon as there's an ounce of distrust then the entire idea falls apart.
I'm not going to put up $250 if I think there's even a 0.0000001% chance the accountability partner will improperly log that I didn't do it.
The money doesn't go to the accountability partner. So if they place any value at all on your friendship, why would they do that? There's nothing to gain.
Also:
>I'm not going to put up $250 if I think there's even a 0.0000001% chance the accountability partner will improperly log that I didn't do it.
Really? An expected loss of $0.00000025 bothers you?
It doesn't matter where the money goes to in the end, the only thing that matters is the risk taker loses the money.
There's a very big difference between "internet friend I've known for 4 years and I would consider him a decently close friend" and "I'm willing to hold this guy accountable for $1,000".
I think you guys under estimate at how hard it will be to find an accountability partner who is actually worthy. Your family members will have a bias to not let you lose the money. Really close friends (the people you can trust) might too but the questionably close friends aren't quite trustworthy enough to let them decide on your $500, etc..
>It doesn't matter where the money goes to in the end, the only thing that matters is the risk taker loses the money.
Sure it does. It's the difference between expecting people to behave morally and expecting them to behave in their own rational self-interest. The latter isn't completely reliable, but it's a much, much safer bet than the former.
Safe isn't immune, also people are really strange around money.
What if I set a goal for 2 years from now. Suddenly I'm forced into maintaining a friendship with my accountability partner because if I don't then I run the risk of being blackmailed.
For some reason your "I had taken an hour out of my day" comment really bothers me.
The guy you interviewed probably spent ~4 hours preparing for the interview and then all of the time in the actual interview.
Let's say he takes 7 hours out of his life to interview for your place. The least he deserves is a legit reason why he was declined because your company still benefits from not hiring him. You get to refine your interview process based on real feedback.
The interviewee's time is just as valuable as yours. A wall of text complaint sounds pretty good. There's probably a lot of good feedback in there unless it happened to be filled with insults and other garbage in which case you should have been able to figure this out quickly and then not replied.
If you give a reason, there's a small chance that you may have to defend that reason legally. Therefore, it's best to not give a specific reason. It's harsh, but protection of the business is more of a priority than potentially hurting someone's feelings by not giving a reason.
I spent months working with Chef and made a good amount of progress but I feel like it drained years off my life. It's not because "devops" is even hard, but it's because the tooling is still horrible and the community is still split / documentation sucks in general / etc..
It actually killed my motivation to program in general so it's not like I'm some ansible fanboy too. I don't use anything now because I haven't deployed a line of code in about 2 months.
Tooling is still difficult. I've used Puppet, Chef and Ansible all in production environments and though I like Ansible the best I just think none of them are all that great yet. Chef had some major issues between versions (entire suites of cookbooks made obsolete) and certain operations weren't deterministic. Puppet's DSL is just awful in my opinion though they have probably the best feature set . Ansible is definitely much simpler than the other two and easier to use, but a lot of the gotchas are just frustrating, e.g. jinja2 templating issues, a lot of new features that have unintended side effects when used with certain other features, where you can use conditionals and where you can't use conditionals seem arbitrary, etc.
Most people do need simple. Just having 2 or 3 servers is enough to handle quite a bit traffic and you can always vertically scale up to a certain point.
Once I recover from burn out I'll likely look into an alternative to Chef.
I think you're missing an important option. If an issue is on github then I'm much more inclined to report any bug I come across.
If it's on some obscure bug tracker that I don't have an account for then the odds of me reporting it are almost zero because chances are there's an alternative to what your software does if it happens to be a show stopper and most of the time if it's a wide spread project there will be fixes to the bug in other places.
It's annoying to make an account, go through all of that stuff and then realize most of the time nothing happens with your report.
It's nice but it still doesn't fix the issue with people who have medium end machines where you develop in a VM full time and want to be able to run a VM within a VM.
For example with fairly old but still reasonable hardware you cannot run virtualbox inside of an existing virtualbox instance.
If you have a windows box and develop full time in a linux VM you cannot run vagrant inside of that linux VM because unless you have a modern CPU it lacks the instruction sets required to run virtualization within virtualization.
Now using docker instead of a VM would work but docker only supports 64 bit operating systems so anyone stuck with a 32bit host OS still can't use vagrant and has to resort to using raw linux containers without docker which is really cumbersome.