Hacker News: intranation

New comment by intranation in "Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router"

intranation — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 12:39:12 +0000

Openresty and Lua are great, but Go is a more generally applicable language for building web services. So when taken in that context Go makes more sense if we look at it as a learning exercise as well as a new part of the stack.

New comment by intranation in "Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router"

intranation — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 12:13:32 +0000

We did have some configuration - it was stored in Varnish and Nginx. The time cost of shipping new redirects when content is moved or new routing configuration for new tools coming online is non-negligible, particularly as we're in the middle of moving 300+ government agencies onto the GOV.UK platform. Also having all those redirects, friendly URLs, and application mappings in static configuration makes self-service publishing tools very difficult to build.

This is all outlined in the blog post - perhaps not as clearly as I would have liked, though!

New comment by intranation in "Cargo Cult CSS"

intranation — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:59:38 +0000

Not sure what that has to do with semantics. Are you saying that NAV etc. aren't valid semantics on applications?

New comment by intranation in "Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners"

intranation — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 09:59:09 +0000

PATH, exec-path etc. are mangled because of the way OSX loads environment variables. Here's an Emacs package that fixes that:

https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell

New comment by intranation in "Feedbin is Open Source"

intranation — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:40:14 +0000

This is a great move for me, and I hope ultimately for Ben. This way I'm empowered to fix my own issues, and pay someone else to run it for me.

New comment by intranation in "GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper"

intranation — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:44:50 +0000

It didn't test well:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/03/why-weve-chan...

Tmux 1.7 released

intranation — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:18:41 +0000

Article URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmux/files/tmux/tmux-1.7/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4652683

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by intranation in "GNU Emacs 24.1 released"

intranation — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 14:31:25 +0000

It's opt-in, otherwise most packages would break.

To enable it per-file use a file-local variable:

  ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

New comment by intranation in "Take my money, HBO"

intranation — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 06:07:43 +0000

Not sure about radio, but black and white TVs are cheaper (£49 vs £145.50).

http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/media-centre/news/black-a...

Opera confirms support for WebKit vendor prefixes

intranation — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:13:04 +0000

Article URL: http://www.netmagazine.com/news/opera-confirms-webkit-prefix-usage-121923

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889172

Points: 47

# Comments: 48

New comment by intranation in "The 501 Developer Manifesto"

intranation — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:57:44 +0000

I think the learning programming thing falls under "personal creative projects", and I am with you 100%.

New comment by intranation in "Show HN: I decided to document and share my high-level CSS best practices"

intranation — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:57:42 +0000

Dashes map more cleanly to existing CSS syntax, eg nth-child, background-color, etc. Much like camelCase looks more like Javascript than my_variable.

New comment by intranation in "Dear Github, please fix the Watch-Button"

intranation — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 08:08:11 +0000

It might force the developers to commit more in the granular Git way, but it doesn't force bug reporters and discussions to be more mindful. Looking at my timeline, and following Backbone.js and Handlebars, about half my feed on any given day is discussion from 2 or 3 bugs on each of those projects.

So even though the committers might be mindful, doesn't mean all the users of a project are.

New comment by intranation in "WebSockets versus REST?"

intranation — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:05:19 +0000

WebSockets don't have much startup time at all really. If you're using Socket.io or another Flash-based abstraction you can expect long lead/start up times due to the Flash policy file, but plain old WebSockets should be as fast as any other TCP connection.

New comment by intranation in "Why I Still Use Emacs"

intranation — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:10:16 +0000

Emacs gets a new release frequently. 24.0 is about to come out (it's in pretest), and 23.4 was just released.

Also, since it's a Lisp machine, it doesn't necessarily need to have IDE features added - you can just write your own extension in Emacs Lisp.

New comment by intranation in "Why I Still Use Emacs"

intranation — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:20:47 +0000

Multi-threading is asked for because when you run a complex thing in a single buffer (i.e editing something over Tramp mode, compilation, magit doing Git operations etc.) it can block the editor.

Hence, multi-threading is a potential solution to that.

Edit: spelling

New comment by intranation in "RBS shuts down startup accounts (Smarkets and others)"

intranation — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:57:34 +0000

I was specifically addressing the notion that gambling is risky or "low profile" (which I assume to be a synonym for shady) with regards to the "appetite for risk" reason stated by RBS in their letter.

New comment by intranation in "RBS shuts down startup accounts (Smarkets and others)"

intranation — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:06:18 +0000

Disclaimer: I'm a Smarkets employee.

Well it's not entirely clear that it's just related to gambling - Betfair, the UK's largest betting exchange, do all their merchant transactions (customer deposits and withdrawals) through RBS as well - given they're directly linked to credit cards the risk of chargebacks etc. is clearly higher than a day-to-day business account that is mostly used to pay employee salaries (as presented in the article, Smarkets client funds are ring-fenced in a Maltese bank). The obvious difference to me is that Betfair is a multi-million pound company and Smarkets isn't.

New comment by intranation in "Bootstrap 2.0, From Twitter"

intranation — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:42:25 +0000

`i` is for "italic", and that quote means that you should be using `font-style` instead of an HTML element to make your text italic.

New comment by intranation in "Mail Pilot: Email Reimagined"

intranation — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:47:49 +0000

Because it's not an app in the regular sense, it's an email filtering and tagging web service. You'd be paying for their servers crunching your emails over the time you were subscribed to them.

Edit: From their FAQ:

  Mail Pilot is more than an app; it's a comprehensive online software
  service. It runs on servers, and delivers and syncs content between
  every Mail Pilot app that you might use.

  You can access Mail Pilot through a number of desktop, native
  mobile, and web applications. To make this possible, Mail Pilot adds
  services to your existing mail accounts that it syncs between all of
  your devices. Our servers store metadata about your messages (not
  the messages themselves, however!) to bring to you the reimagination
  of email that so many have come to love.

  Mail clients can get away with charging one time. Our apps are all
  free, but the service is paid for, much like other online
  productivity and email enhancement services.