skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see a need for the snark. I don't see this as a troll question at all. Python is obviously thriving for scientific programming but it's not hard to tell that the question being asked is about whether Python is losing popularity as a general purpose web programming language.

If someone wanted to get into building web apps would Python be a good choice?

The answer is likely to be colored by your experience. I'd say yes, it is losing ground to other languages in the context of programming for the web. The people who use it know why they're using it. Othetwise you don't see many coding boot camps teaching Python. It's all about Ruby and Node.

But is Python dying? Not by a long shot. It's just getting less attention right now because of some of the other new toys that are making a lot of noise right now.
Do you really use one editor for everything?

When I'm working on Python code, I'm in PyCharm. My C++ work on Windows is in Visual Studio. When I ssh into the Linux machine that serves our in-house documentation to make changes, I'm using vim. On OSX, I use BBEDit most of the time. When I'm writing a letter, I'm usually in Word or Google Docs.

I think if I spent all day every day in one environment, I would get bored.
Economic Integration is undeniably a threat to American sovereignty and classical liberalism. The evidence is overwhelming.

The entire concept is that the centralization of power is always a good thing. There is no acknowledgement of natural rights in the European Union.

So a supranational world government that replaces the American Constitution and Bill of Rights is going to be rooted in popular sovereignty? Ha.

You are being overly optimistic in a world full of powerhungry collectivists who certainly see classical liberalism as an impediment to world peace and a perfect society.

"The Difference Between the U.S. Constitution and EU Constitution - MEP Dan Hannan"
https://youtu.be/dS6hQQ2pyco
This is good advice - I did this when I turned 30 - spent my 30th on a beach in Chile having the time of my life - then spent the next 7 months backpacking around south america - and it was the best time of my life. After I came back I worked for a few months to save some $ then moved to the other side of the world - that gave me enough interesting stuff to keep doing something I wasnt so interested in anymore - but I found unusual work opportunities that never would have happened if id stayed in the same place
I've never used helm, so I don't have any experience there. I can't say that I've felt like I'm missing anything by not using it though.

I'll give it a try on my system, maybe that will give some insight.

--
update
--
I installed a bunch of helm stuff, it didn't slow anything down for me. try doing a clean pull from my repo and then adding your helm packages and see if that helps.

emacs starts up in about 1.2 seconds for me.
In all of the author's partisan rants, he fails to include a single quote supporting his perception.
Based on my recent experiences, the modern app developer would write a slow, bloated web app that takes ages to produce a result but has a slick UI with awesome animations.
Verizon Acquisition Deal Could Save Yahoo $12B in Alibaba Taxes
The DSA is very real[1] - they must have had a bad link.

"Direct Sales" is the euphemism we in the business prefer to "MLM". We don't say MLM very often, and we never ever ever never ever say the P word.

[1] http://www.dsa.org
Under the current regulatory schemes and market rules the low capacity factor of solar is absolutely a problem. I guess I'm saying that more flexibility for smaller systems to play in the markets will be important to increase renewable energy production. The advent of cost effective storage will obviously make the whole discussion easier.
You make a fair point. I'm not rubbishing Wikipedia, just questioning the supposed USP. I would also point out in response to your argument that a Wikipedia article and a set of search results are apples and oranges.

The article is written once then modified or evolved occasionally by (almost exclusively) humans, but very frequently read. It is intended to be intelligible, being structured and based in natural language. It has a very well defined scope within a flat namespace, and often clear relations to multiple formal ontologies. It is structured to be consumed in part or in whole, and may contain rich media and strong supporting contextual information (related pages).

By contrast a search result summarizes a set of potential information sources that may answer a search query in whole or in part, to various definitions of "answer". It is generally written once, by a computer, and thrown away after some period of caching. It is intended to be concise. Each component result has relatively poor context, relying upon the searcher to interpret timeliness, authority, notability, uniqueness, comprehensibility, etc. with the limited information presented, typically a very short content excerpt. It is structured to be scanned, classically in a ranked fashion from "best hit" to "worst hit", and is generally a wall of text.

Wikipedia successfully attracts people to contribute to the former, but the latter - where the information product is generated on the fly and lasting impact is amorphous (nothing particularly concrete for contributors to point to and say "I did that! Warm and fuzzies!") - is a very different beast.

I too believe there is room for innovation ... there are potentially low hanging fruit like inter-linguistic semantic queries (not keyword search) ... but there are no such key problem areas identified in the paper's summary.
It's not really large in terms of memory on any remotely modern system.

But it is large in terms of learning curve. Emacs has a ton of concepts and interface quirks that don't transfer to or from other common software. It has it's own keybindings, even it's own way of documenting it's keybindings, that shares no similarity with what the OS considers standard.

So there's a huge amount of pain in switching too or from Emacs.
> Mathematics is an excellent proxy for problem-solving

In my experience, earning a PhD in [redacted] was excellent training in problem solving. And in developing working expertise in new areas. I suspect that the choice of field is indeed irrelevant.

> Mathematics embeds character in students

I'd say that actually finishing a PhD does that.

> Mathematics is fun

Whatever you pick for your dissertation topic had better be fun ;)
It may be of little importance vs your excellent references and what they show but... does anyone else notice how she worded that message is just... so... weird? The wording comes off like a combination of academia, PR, and email scams to me. Just straight BS that no normal, caring person in a mission-oriented organization should ever say.

I mean, there's certainly styles I'm unfamiliar with. I'm always open to new experiences. Could be the case here. Hers just instantly set off red flags in my intuition. I hope she didn't always write like that as it might mean whoever brought her in either fell for a con or were part of it.
States consider allowing kids to learn coding instead of foreign languages
Thanks for making the above clear. I should probably have made that explicit in the article but I was so focused on hard cancellation that all I've said about soft cancellation was, basically, "do it by hand", without going into details.

In fact, being able to share single channel between multiple goroutines and using "close" as a broadcast mechanism is one of the best -- if rarely mentioned -- ideas in Go.
> We have duckduckgo already

DuckDuckGo a meta-search-engine! It relies mainly on Yahoo Boss API which uses Bing search (for most countries)! Yahoo Boss API turned from free to expensive in early 2015 and the future of Yahoo (tech company, not Alibaba stock) is uncertain.

We definitely need more search engines, only 6-7 exist that cover a wider range (international). Search on HN to retrieve the list, we had this discussion before.
Elixir is promising.

http://elixir-lang.org/
I thought Ford was the only one which didn't need a bailout.
In PostgreSQL you could use a native type to store your IP addresses and subnets (even for IPv6): http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/datatype-net-types...
Nonsense. It means content will be filtered through the lens of one or more individuals. The results vary dramatically. Mob-rule is one possibility. Yahoo Directory used to be a great example of mid-level of quality where it gave nice start and obscure stuff people overlooked. On high end, the link below shows Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy set a pretty awesome precedent for high-quality curation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10266103
The paper details its model for the graph structure and attributes, and it shows results for the different approaches they evaluated -- in the end, they propose a novel approach of using rows/columns for adjacency lists and JSON blobs for properties/attributes.

The paper references 3 relational DBs: DB2, Oracle, and PostgreSQL...

Most modern relational databases such as DB2, Oracle or
Postgresql have features to support both relational and
nonrelational storage within the same database engine,
making it possible to perform an empirical comparison of
the utility of relational versus non-relational storage
structures for property graphs.

Presumably they used PostgreSQL since it's the only open-source RDBMS referenced, and it supports CET translations, which they used.

The Berkeley DB reference is regarding the Titan backend datastore they used. Presumably they chose BDB over one of Titan's distributed backeds like Cassandra or HBase since BDB is single server so it's a more apt comparison to the other DBs.
That's how much 5 qualified software engineers would cost to employ for a year (gross, including compensation, benefits, payroll taxes, office space, hardware, etc, and that's on the low end of the range). Good luck with that.
Amongst what bubble of people you're entangled with?

I consider this a troll question because frequently I see HN questions like this completely disconnected from programming communities at large (which do not participate in HN), extrapolated to the wider web of all programmers. By this factor alone I'd expect Java to be completely obsolete by now.... but obviously no one is oblivious enough to reality to suggest that.

As for that question, if you want to build webapps right now, then yes, Python, as well as Ruby, and PHP, would be absolutely fantastic choices. The library ecosystems for all three of these are incredibly rich, mature, and well supported. Choose the language of these 3 that appeals to you the most, you will not be disappointed. I'm not going to tell you which one to choose, I think you'll be happy with whichever of these 3 languages appeals to you the most.

If you don't mind filling in the occasional gap, and like the bleeding edge of newness, try Rust, or Go. I've done both, they're fun languages with interesting paradigms (built-in lightweight threads vs. memory-safety at all costs FIGHT!).

Getting less attention? According to what? Did you see the the link about dominating science? Attention according to what group of people?
FWIW, you can do that stuff with helm as well. Except it's C-l to go up a directory by default, IIRC.
Harvey Levin's TMZ
I too use LyX a lot but it is a pig upon which we should not place too much in the way of lipstick. While it has all the power of LaTeX, it only succeeds in hiding the complexity some of the time and does introduce its own issues. To assert that it is easy to use is simply betraying personal experience limited to a relatively simple use case. Multilingual issues mean manual configuration of XeTeX + font hacks + painstaking per-phrase language markup for simple stuff like including quotes from foreign languages. It's often necessary to manually fiddle your LaTeX preamble, or drop little raw LaTeX boxes in the middle of your text. Seemingly basic features on other authoring platforms (timelines come to mind) are virtually impossible in LyX. That said, it's the only way to author some documents, is highly reliable, and well worth supporting as a project.
Agreed that it's my moral stance (I have lots more) but doctors for example take a moral stance as part of their profession, why shouldn't developers also do this? When software is creeping into all areas of endeavour, refusing to think about the moral consequences of one's actions is dangerous negligence. Shouldn't we have a crowdsourced Hippocratic oath for developers?

Of course a one liner on HN is not perfectly formulated but I think the sentiment is right.

I would rather people not get addicted at all. Alcohol I have nothing to do with, but the people who made Candy Crush are my colleagues and I feel they should have considered their actions.
I can't imagine any politician making that claim publicly. It'd be political suicide. Their opponent would immediately run "I am susceptible to conflicts of interest" attack ads.

(Not denying that the original statement is unrealistic and that political donations are problematic.)
If you're going to make an irrational decision, do it out of love, not hate.

When was the last time you fell in love? Maybe it was a girlfriend, perhaps it was a language? Perhaps it was with an apple product?

I realize your questioning why I'm asking this. But here's the thing. If you're going to make an irrational decision, do it out of love, not out of hate.

My love is photography, I fell in love with it while taking a camera to a juggling convention, and shooting a friend on stage. Nowadays, I can take a camera in my hand, and what ever is bothering me starts to disappear when the camera clicks. The how or why doesn't matter to me -- what matters is that I feel better after.

So, what makes you feel better?
From a game theoretic point of view, you can easily see why they raise this much much money. While I think it's obscene that 1 billion will be spent on the campaign of one candidate, this is necessarily a problem with the system rather than the actors within it.
Not sure why you're getting downvotes. The 2 vs 3 has already split part of Python's userbase.

Another change that broke significant amounts of code would just make things even worse.
With the way that foreign languages are taught in American schools (rote learning, treated like any other subject, lack of practical application), it is not really a loss to learn the ongoing process of how to be a creator v. a consumer with the ugly magic of coding.

That being said, moving from AP CS to a more structured, less-niche curriculum has its own fundamental challenges.

> “The types of learning that schools were set up for isn’t going to continue to prepare students for the world they’re entering. Knowledge is not the commodity—the commodity is being able to take these various parts of a problem and put them together in a new creative way,” Steele says.

From http://qz.com/608355/education-in-america-is-on-the-cusp-of-...
I agree with you, but this quote was in the context of the claim of a privacy USP. You have taken it out of context.
Ex-employees and Silicon Valley insiders often do have valuable insight, including foresight.

Boards generally hire a CEO to sort out the issues rather than "crowd-sourcing", so even informed opinion is not used.

Marissa was a better choice than the previous bozos, but still a bozo - somebody who only had one job since uni, dated the founder of Google, and never was a CxO in a public company. Shame on the Yahoo board, yet again.

In other words, not a businessperson.
The best advertisements have

display:none;

no but seriously, the whole idea of adverts is to "push" you to buy things you don't need, so how could they ever be good?

Also the general idea of selling my website visitors eyeballs to a third party is very difficult to swallow for me. If I run a content website and I put adverts on it, selling to the highest bidder, what respect to I have for my readers?
Uber ruling out move to B.C. until province can develop regulations
I don't know. Even though there were and still are problems with Python, especially on the basis of this 2/3 thing, I wouldn't say it feels dead. Well, I mean, of course I do understand that enormous amount of people still use Java, but me personally, since I quit my job as a Java programmer it honestly feels like it doesn't exist. Except for Android it's like there's no real need to use it for anything. Unlike Python, which is pretty much go-to for any scripting and usual CLI tools, go-to for heavily domain-specific stuff, prototyping for any sciency stuff, almost go-to for statistics and ML, still among 3 first choices for web backends. Still new interesting libraries appear which you might want to use. Well, it surely feels like it's still around and relevant when starting something new. Java seems to still be heavily in use because of existing infrastructure (all banks that use Java, that is), not because it has something (maybe even some domain-specific library) which is appealing all by itself.
Are you familiar with the AIPP? I hadn't heard of it before I moved here.

http://www.arts.wa.gov/public-art
If only Cuil came about after the Snowden revelations, they might have been able to make a real name for themselves.
It costs half a million to employ one software engineer for a year?
That os what the UNIX-like expression is for.
How did you arrive at 20 million? This sounds like one of those "technically true" facts that are cooked up for investors. http://wikis.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Wikia_wikis puts the combined total of the top 1,000 wikis (in all languages) at 12.4m.
Yeah, read it, along with other works by Sartre, Camus, all the way down to Kierkergaard and earlier examples of this line of thinking (note: European and older, so those works were like Star Wars movies to us at the time, in the sense that everybody read them, not just students dressed in black).

The "Existentialism is a Humanism" presents a more "heroic" outlook of the matter, associated with Sartre's engagement with politics at the time. Even so it deals with anxiety, lack of values, etc. That "in fashioning himself, fashions man" only works as an encouragement if you also believe that people everywhere in large quantities are fashioning the world for the better (as Sartre did with regards to communism).

But for the more bleak outlook that is quite more common, you can read Sartre's own "Nausea" to see how the ideas as described in "E.I.A.H" can play into everyday life. Even the title of the novel ("sea sickness" -- meant about the absurdity of life, is telling). The angst/anxiety etc. is more often than not present without any conveniently comforting heroic ideas of self-fashioning, like in the end of the book, or in E.I.A.H.
You can reconcile those claims under a model in which most politicians (including Clinton) have genuine beliefs that are not corruptible by money, but the Koch brothers can buy political outcomes by bankrolling those politicians whose genuine ideological beliefs align with theirs. That is, they are not changing the beliefs of individual politicians, just replacing politicians that disagree with them with others that don't.

To first order I think this is a pretty good model of money's influence on politics, though it's definitely not the entire story.
There is a lot of voter anger against institutions and established ways of doing things that is emerging in this election. The Clintons are an institution in themselves.
>The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards.

Oh you have no idea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_cadet_keyboard
How do I have private SSL for subdomains?
I'm a recent ST3 to Atom convert.

I've used all sorts of text editors with a shell inside them, and I can't quite fathom why you'd want to do that. What's wrong with bash running in iTerm? Then it's a first-class citizen of your desktop instead of a subprocess of a subprocess of a thing running inside another thing running in the one terminal window you're using for everything.

I've tried using vim and emacs a few times, but I can't quite get to grips with the whole modal editor thing. Feels like a whole huge learning curve just for the sake of it, getting in the way of actually getting things done.

My operating system is a perfectly good operating system, I don't need emacs for that.

On the odd occasion when I need to edit something on a remote server (this is very rare, cos ansible/puppet) I'm quite happy using nano. It has zero learning curve (no modes) and the few shortcuts you do need are marked on the bottom of the screen. Yes it's kind of featureless, but you shouldn't be editing things on your servers anyway.
For the frontend, and asynchronous server backend (Node), JS won hands round. I don't see Python getting there.

More systems and backend use Python (including at Google) than Go.

An insignificant amount of people use (or will use in the next 5 years) Julia for data science. Python (and R, Matlab) rule there almost completely.
It is also possible to know what "the problem" is and still be unable to find and implement "the solution" in the climate a business is in. The reason why new companies are able to succeed where old companies fail is because they don't have to deal with investor expectations or legacy projects that are sucking down talent and resources, but can't be cut because of politics and the fact that you need the income they're bringing in now even though you know they will be deadwood over the long term.
18 Must Have Browser Plugins / Extensions for SysAdmins
really appreciated this b/c I've lately felt bad a/b not "getting it right the first time," and one point here seems to be that that never happens, exactly; that development always involves some amount of evolving a body of code, at one level or another
> never never never

to answer one idiom with another, never say never. if a politician was sufficiently transparent about who they met with and took money from, acknowledged the potential conflicts of interest, documented decisions, sourced research thru firewalls, and generally had a system in place to prevent the temptation from manifesting, i'd be inclined to trust them

a good regulator might benefit from understanding the impact they're having, and that means talking to businesses. and an honest business that works with a bright and honest politician would have an incentive to help them stay in office, even if that money didn't buy them consideration. so there's potential non-corrupt reasons that these "donations" could happen

that said, i'm not claiming that hillary clinton, or any other politician that i'm aware of, has done this
I'm worried about a repeat of the Pascal debacle. Pascal was a good language, invented by Niklaus Wirth. It had some flaws, which were fixable. But Wirth was insistent on not doing anything which would invalidate his elegant, but limited, recursive-descent compiler. He didn't like separate compilation of modules, for example; everything was supposed to be in one big file. He had this thing about conformant-array parameters, where arrays were passed with size info. Strings were limited to 255 characters. The I/O operations all aborted on error. Integers and subranges were designed on the assumption that integers were very big. (The original implementation was for the CDC 6600, with 60-bit integers.) He pushed his version into being an ISO standard.[1]

ISO Standard Pascal is useful mostly as a teaching language. You can't do much real work in it. So Pascal fragmented, badly. There were lots of incompatible variations. In time, Pascal was abandoned.

Sometimes the original language guru has to be pushed aside before they run the language into the ground.

[1] http://www.pascal-central.com/docs/iso7185.pdf
Names for classes, methods, parameters, and variables all suffer from this same problem. I think the solution to align code and comments is code reviews. Not writing comments also works but fails to solve related issues.
That's been a real boost to DuckDuckGo.