It sucks that your hosting is down, but this is a pretty malicious use of HN considering you paid $200 over 6 years ago for lifetime hosting. Less than $3 per month by now. What SLA were you guaranteed?
The lesson for service hosts, NEVER offer lifetime anything.
No offense, but I find the humor in this reference far more insightful than the majority of the other offhand comments in this thread (that have many up-votes). The satire here is relevant and appropriate in my opinion, not tangential. I understand HN tends to frown on offhand comments (as it generally should), but knee-jerk downvoting humor without considering the context will make HN a dull boy. Voting up or down shouldn't be based on whether you agree or disagree with the comment, but whether the comment has merit. downvotes welcome
I've always found putting the * next to the type instead of the variable, like this, more intuitive. Does anyone know why the other way is used more often? Is it just historic, or is there a more practical reason?
Sorry, that didn't make much sense to me - in your first example, you can't say "foo is an int", because it's not, it's a pointer to an int. And in your last example, you can't say "foo[5] is an int", because it's not, it's a pointer to int.
In response to the original question, I think the answer is that
int *foo;
is a common way of writing it because that's the way the compiler resolves it. As mentioned elsewhere,
int* foo, bar;
is equivalent to
int *foo; int bar
so treating the star as part of the type can cause problems.
But I agree fully - it makes a lot more sense to me to consider the pointer star as a flag on the type, not a modifier to the name. Just one of the many warts on C and C++ that make me happy I have to use them so infrequently...
[Edit: formatting, stars were getting swallowed when put inline]
> [Edit: formatting, stars were getting swallowed when put inline]
The same thing happened to the post you're responding to, and that's why it's not making sense to you. The author really meant to say star-foo and star-foo[5], but instead italicized a bunch of text in between.
Don't know how I didn't realize that, given that my response got messed up so that my "corrected" version read exactly like the one I was confused about...
Please disregard everything I said, in that case. :)
What if he said prioritize instead of kill? Often the number of good ideas and resources required to realize them far exceeds what is available, practical, or realistic. Killing is effectively setting the priority to zero. I don't think it discourages innovation if thought about in this context because it encourages innovation on the critical path.
I define a "good idea" as something that is possible to realize; practical and realistic. If it's not practical business decision, it's probably not a good idea.
Is anyone else mildly depressed by the inequality between money raised and reality here?
It's great that these guys are raising money, I'm all for it. They should take what they can get. But, what about all the brilliant open source projects out there, that people are actually enjoying and using today, not sponsored by large organizations that accept donations from the community. I'm willing to bet that _none_ of them have raised even close to this much money. It saddens me that society is more willing to financially support a statement than something actually useful and real.
Perhaps this turn of events was destined to happen eventually and these lucky guys hit the media jackpot. I still can't be happy about it.
I don't know them, but if the issue is a major fundraising effort to replace Facebook, I would think that selecting teams to implement the new system would need some serious due diligence.
Should someone raise money? Absolutely. Is it these guys? I honestly do not know. More information is needed...
Is that necessarily the case though? I'm hoping to see a lot more open source projects popping up on Kickstarter. While I'm not donating to Diaspora* (yet) I think I would be happy to donate to plenty of open source projects and Kickstarter seems to be a great platform for collecting those donations.
kickstarter isn't about donations, it's supposed to be about microfinancing startups. They are investments.
I'm with GP, these guys wouldn't get an inch with any angel or VC's so why are the general populace giving them their money? just because it's $20 it doesn't mean you shouldn't consider it in the same way as a $20000 investment. A punt is a punt, but you don't put money on a statement, that's what lobby groups are for.
Ah, they are explicitly not investments, so as not to fall afoul of securities laws. Kickstart donors get exactly zero property interest in any IP - check the FAQ. It's a sales outlet for custom products offered on a promissory basis.
Strikes me as not too far off the inequality between "good products" and "successful products" in general. Books, movies, commodities, software -- why should fund-raising be any different?
It's a shame, but I'm pretty numb to the phenomenon at this point.
This is about demand. As happy as certain open source projects are making people, people are willing to pay for the hope of seeing an alternative to Facebook.
The claims merely need to be specific enough to not conflict with other patents (excluding the so called "obvious" and vague notion of "been there, done that"). Design patterns in the general sense are patentable, unfortunately.
