Heh. It's ironic that XML was designed to represent text documents, but is now mostly used to hold data. Maybe if they had named it eXtensible Table Language, they would have enticed people to put text into it like they do with the <table> element.
Well, there's democracy and then there's mobocracy.
Democracy says that this place is peopled with hackers and if the hacker citizens upvote a story then it is, ipso facto, of interest to hackers.
Mobocracy says that demi-hackers trickle in and start upvoting stories and posting comments that attract quasi-hackers. The quasi-hackers then attract non-hackers and you eventually no longer have a narrow community. The stories that appeal to the lowest common denominator then rise to the top, due to sheer statistics.
I didn't have a problem with the layout, since I tend to use lynx. I thought it was a shame, though, that the author isn't a better writer. The content is fascinating, but it took some effort to follow along. (I guess I'm too accustomed to PG and JS :)
You can get all of that by using mod_rewrite/mod_fastcgi/mod_wsgi to passthrough to a full-blown Python app server running behind the web server as a separate process. All of the other mod_* authentication and authorization hurdles will still be evaluated first.
For me, eBay was never about the auctions. I could care less about auctions - they're usually more of a nuisance than anything. It's about finding low-cost surplus or used products in a structured and organized shop.
It's a one-stop antique store, swap-meet, and Crazy Louie's surplus store. I'd much prefer for the sellers to lower their prices to attract the customers, rather than vice-versa.
If that's what they'll eventually evolve into, good on them.
With each level of indirection, you get one more level of sophistication, but at the cost of one more level of complexity. OO has tons of indirection (+cough+ polymorphism +cough+).
Back in the old C++ days, before decent IDE's, I remember tracking through multiple code files in several different directories, just to figure out if an add operator had been overloaded - and if so, how. Man, was that a complex pain!
Lately, with Java, I've found myself in the same situation, but with XML config files. Some Java developers just love XML config files and often use them to direct reflective code execution (dynamic language envy). Needless to say, my IDE's are failing me again.
Indeed, I found that this statement sounded alarms in my critical thinking cortex:
"the Singleton "pattern" encourages you to forget everything you know about OO design, since OO is hard, and procedural is easy."
Why, oh why, are we encouraging people to use OO 100% of the time, when it's admittedly harder than the alternatives? (I'm looking at you, Java.) Methinks the bandwagon continues to play on, even after two decades...
For me, it's about passion and interest. I'd much rather be in a creation role: building, coding, designing. [Middle] Management, on the other hand, seems to be more about babby-sitting other people's kids.
Suddenly, being an IT professional doesn't seem that bad...