skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?
I'm coming from Python world and I just started learning F# for fun (and profit ;)). So far, my experience with the language was quite positive, so I was bit surprised to see that F# is not more popular. I guess I wasn't able to see its downsides just yet.

My question for more experienced F# programmers: What are the F#'s downsides which prevent its more widespread usage?

For other people who have tried F# and didn't continue to use it: Why did you stop? Do you use other functional languages instead?

General questions: Is it because of its ties to Microsoft and/or Windows? Is F# not as good as other functional languages (which ones are better, and why?)? Not enough learning resources, examples, etc.?
Node.js isn’t good enough
I can't speak to consultants, but as an experienced conference speaker I can tell you that it vastly improves my employability.

I cannot stress enough how much some modicum of "fame" in a community greases the wheels of employment. You don't need to be at the Guido van Rossum level of famous to get this benefit: just being known and respected by enough of the "right people" helps enormously.

Software engineers often underestimate how much of our industry is built on "who respects you". If respected people trust you to know what you're talking about and to do good work, it makes it much easier to find good jobs and get well paid.

(For those who hate public speaking, similar benefits accrue to those who write great blogs or notable, innovative OSS projects.)
Just had my weekly Wednesday off (oceanic the zone) and spent 3 hours working on my side hussle that is a web store. Tweaked the theme, analysed ad data and set up some new ad tests. I felt super productive getting as much done as might take 8 hours if the work was "jobified".

Spent rest of day trying out mattresses, getting a massage, cooking fish and watching star trek. Hoping I'm successful so that every day can be like this!
Feedback after coding interview
Yesterday I've applied to a job and as a first step there were a coding challenge.
So, I've spend about an hour to complete this.

And the only feedback I received was:
"Dear %name%,
thank you so much for applying at %company% and taking the time to do our coding challenge.
We discussed your results within the team and unfortunately need to tell you that we are not able to offer you a position at this point in time.
I wish you all the best in your professional endeavors."

Basically no real feedback what I do good, what I do bad or wrong.
And when I've asked abut feedback, reply was:
"unfortunately we have not enough capacity to provide feedback to every applicant."

I do not want to say that I'm the best developer ever, but when I invest my time I expect that company will provide a feedback.

What do you think guys?
Is that ok? Is that common case?
Do you have same experience and what do you feel about this?
You're talking about a pretty massive field. That being said The Nature of Mathematical Modeling by Neil Gershenfeld might be what you're looking for. Each chapter is a short (15-25 page) introduction to one common tool in applied mathematics. In that space you'll get an overview of when you might want to use that technique, a brief description of the basic mathematical theory underlying the method and a few examples of how it can be applied.

Of course you won't learn enough about any topic to be able to actually tackle any but the most trivial of problems, but you will come away with a good understanding of which technique you should use for which kind of problem and have a good enough of a basis to be able to understand the more advanced books on the given topics. Each chapter also ends with a recommendation of 3-4 books which you can check out if you want to dig deeper into that particular topic.
1.    Top Hotel Management Colleges in Hyderabad
May I humbly suggest a basic course of reading comprehension?
BAR Gossip (2006)
For those who, like me, didn't know what Kaggle is, here's a description from Wikipedia:

> [Kaggle is] a platform for predictive modelling and analytics competitions on which companies and researchers post their data and statisticians and data miners from all over the world compete to produce the best models.
I'm white. So you like all other than white? Isn't it racist and hateful?
Essential Home is an Amazon Echo competitor that puts privacy first
I mean, sure, but this isn't exactly "the worse, the better", is it? If that were what I was after, I'd have been out canvassing for Hillary and doing everything in my power to ensure she got elected - because if we do end up with a revolution in this country, make no mistake: it's the left, not the right, that's going to be getting revolved against.

But an outbreak of violent revolution in the United States - regardless of where it originates and whom it targets - is exactly what I don't want; I am too old to any longer love such destructive chaos. I don't think we are yet so far gone that such an outcome is inevitable - no more than one long step away, perhaps, but that's a step we don't have to take.

So, with no better option presenting itself, I sought to frighten people into thinking twice about taking that step. Perhaps this was a mistake. Or perhaps not; the jury of history has yet to return a verdict. But in either case I should like to hope that my purpose in so doing was more clearly understood than your prior comment evinces.
In my personal experience, the codebase is not the problem, but the people and the culture who made the codebase.

We sent people to the moon with the computing power of a calculator, and with enough good people and effort, and version control, you can rewrite any legacy codebase to meet rigorous standards and meet the performance needs of the users.

Out of all the things humanity is trying and has accomplished, this is not unacheivable.

If the people don't want it, and the culture does not lend itself to high standards, often people will not see the same pain a developer will experience when they see poor code performing poorly. They may complain about the output and all the other things wrong about the platform, but that doesn't mean the company is going to support a legacy reboot, that just means the company has an accepted culture of low performance and complaining.

I say this in the context of a non software development company relying on alot of software.

my most recent form of personal torture I have endured is watching my IT department take a 45 yr old blackbox piece of software from a very old outdated engineering firm who never specialized in software, and actually trying to port it to AWS, thinking it will speed up performance AND save costs. They have no idea if there is capability for the kernel to exploit concurrency of the algorithms on the inside.

What they do know is there was a bug in the code, and it took 8 months to fix embedded in 1500 lines of code, it had no API and all the developers were dead or unemployed by the original company. They pay millions of dollars annually for this liscense and additionally millions more for an "HPC" to run it on.

They would never consider rewriting it, or contracting a new firm with a timeline, performance standards, needs and competitive cost recruiting. They don't know how. They don't understand how.

This is the way of the world outside of software development companies.

It's....painful...

If youre wondering how I exist in such a painful environment, I'm an Electrical Engineer, and I do not work for a software company. I get to mentor under some of the most brilliant and game changing Engineers in my industry, but it has very little to do with software development.

It could have alot to do with it, but the engineers have no interest in taking advantage of software. They have to be able to first understand the advantages software can provide but..I mean, some of the engineers I work with don't know what a GPU is. Never heard of it.

I write all my own code for my own work from scratch.
Great idea but...

The word "run" is a relatively high frequency word. How many different meanings for "run" does a learner need to know? Is that in isolation? With collocations? As phrasal verbs?

In many languages, the most frequently appearing words also have the most varied meanings. Interestingly, many highly vernacular languages also use relatively few words, but those words have a lot of meanings that are clearly known by the speech communities.

FWIW, some theoretical linguists consider this a non-issue. People in the field (i.e., people might die if I get this wrong) know otherwise.

While your idea sounds nice in principle, I hope you will accept the idea that reality may be slightly more complex.

* Collins Cobuild has 50+ meanings for "run" if phrasal verbs are included. Most non-native speakers are not even aware of the potential breadth of meanings it offers.
> I cannot stand people who complain when they live in a first world country. I find it so insulting for the entirety of the third world out there.

Don't forget that there are still people living in terrible poverty, people imprisoned unjustly and slaves in every "first world" country. Equally there are people who are extremely wealthy and people above the law in every "third world" country :-)
Add the State to Your Shop's Address in PrestaShop Invoices – NemoPS
Startup Growth
Banks control western politicians who will put who ever is in power under pressure to pay of the debt. I used to think people that talk like that are same as the ones that wear tin foil hats. But the last 6-7 years has made me realise that they are not completely bat shit crazy. And the world of power is power is most corrupted and the least in the news.
Needs a way to get the ball back up again, at a different point depending on where it came out. That way you can do recursion.
Show HN: Commandir 1.0.0 Released – Effortless mkdir and rmdir for Node.js
On Sweden's 6-hour workday: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-...
We all benefit when AMD is a player.

And this player is fighting HARD right now. Me gusta.
> True that with low level languages like C++, Java

This guy doesn't even know what he's talking about...
Show HN: Django-slack-events-api – A minimal Django app for making Slack bots
The huge number of PCIe lanes is pretty exciting to me. For consumers, the limiting factor in PCs these days tends to be I/O. With this, you could have 4 PCIe M2 SSDs (that's a bit under 16Gbps bandwidth, assuming RAID0), and still have 44 lanes (the number in the top-end Intel CPU) to spare for GPUs and other peripherals.
The biggest codebases in history
LA VIDEO DES 1'000 ABONNES (Intense Action)
Seven wonders: tech stocks
Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump
On the order of one trillion edges like Giraph.
Intel's Compute Card, a Credit Card-Sized PC, Will Ship in August – The Verge
http://www.linklaters.com/Insights/Publication1403Newsletter...

> On 3 July 2012, the ECJ handed down its landmark decision in UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle International Corp (C-128/11), ruling that the owner of copyright in software cannot prevent a perpetual licensee who has downloaded the software from the internet from selling his ‘used’ licence. This decision has significant implications for the software and other digital industries.
Companies should provide constructive feedback to any candidate that invests time into a test or an interview process but the reality is that the majority don't.

Most will state that it's too laborious to provide individual feedback which is simply nonsense and insulting to the candidate. The reality is that most companies shy away from providing feedback for two key reasons. It becomes difficult and more time intensive to deal with a candidate who challenges the feedback and it can also potentially expose the company to a liability risk if the feedback isn't completely objective and factually based.
UK Home Office to charge £5.48 to send email to its visa service
I was of the opinion that Intel will only face real competition when arm reaches parity with desktop class cpu. Nice to see AMD rise back up again. Hope Intel is not able to strong arm the oems like last time when AMD had design wins but Intel using anti competitive practice stalled its growth till it was able to catch-up and later go ahead.
Requiring new apartments to have chargers is the wrong direction if you consider that it just increases costs for people who don't own automobiles (in my building of seven apartments one person owns a vehicle).

Electric cars have a lot of advantages but they still have enormous negative externalities on cities.
Paypal express payment gateway for WooCommerce
> Although lyrics change over time, folk songs are often a good record of events

On the other hand, these songs could be disingenuous romanticizing of criminal lifestyles. Just look at the narcocorrido genre in Mexico -- two centuries from now, do you think it would be reasonable for people to examine then and think that their subjects were decent, hardworking folk being unnecessarily hassled by The Man?
I appreciate you taking the time to try to allay my fear! But your comment lends itself to no other conclusion, on my part, save that you have fundamentally misgathered its origin.

There's a lot to unpack here, too, and doing so will, I suspect, require considerable time and effort. Unfortunately, at the moment I haven't sufficient of either to spare for such a task. No doubt, too, you have many more demands upon your time than I do on mine, and I'm not inclined to presume upon that precious resource. So: If you're interested in pursuing the matter further, then say as much, and in response I'll put together the reply that I'd have given here had I the time. Otherwise, I'll refrain.

(Or maybe I should just start a damned blog, the way some people here have suggested. But it doesn't feel right, not having anyone to talk to. And why should anyone bother to read it?)
I've tried both 5 short workdays and 3 longer workdays. I like 3 longer workdays better. A full day for work and a full day for something else mean, to me, that I can focus more fully on work and then focus more fully on something else. A "half work, half not work" day means, to me, that I can't quite focus on either.

TFA presents the shorter week [the alternative to a shorter day] as 3 consecutive days; I prefer interleaving work and non-work days, so as to neither be absent from work for 2 days in a row, nor work for 2 days in a row.
"And the Weak Suffer What They Must?" by Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek finance minster) has an interesting view on the mess that Greece (and indeed Europe and the rest of the world) is in. I don't think it's without flaws but it is certainly interesting - particularly his view of EU/ECB bureaucrats:

"a clueless, inefficient bureaucracy... working tirelessly for politicians with an infinite capacity to recite unenforceable rules"
This seems paradox. Did he perhaps say that on a weekend?

Most paradoxes are actually solvable, so I take issue with this metamathematical dissonance. I'll take it as a humble admission of ignorance and a resolution to (syn-)tactfully avoid getting into philosophical (sem-)antics to, instead, teach the first ground truth of the fight club by example (don't talk about it, do it).
Show HN: Netdata, static binary builds available for any Linux system
"I live in LA."

You live in nearly the most bicycling-hostile place on the planet. This is important context for your comment.

Everyone's different, but my experience was that leaving LA did wonders for my mindset, health, and general well-being. Though, rather paradoxically, 90% of my bike commute (Santa Monica to El Segundo via Venice and Dockweiler beach) was great. That other 10% was brutal, and my ribs still hurt.

Also - "Nobody will use the bikes because the infrastructure doesn't exist." - perhaps that money could be used to build it?
>As happened in Greece

Greece had the largest default in history[0], virtually all private debt holders were forced to take a ~70% haircut.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sector_involvement
IMO any company that is using words like buy, sell, sale, purchase, get, of a product and not specifying they are selling only a _license agreement_ are committing a heinous fraud and should be fined no less than a years median profit (or, let's say, 5% of revenue as an underpin).

Sure, advertise "get license to use Wandows for a limited period, further restrictions on use apply" but if you say "get Wandows for $100" then you sold it and no EULA or other additional restrictions can apply; and no, small-print doesn't count.
I meant not getting approval for necessary work, and therefore not being able to do the necessary work, is inefficient. Not needing approval for necessary work is great; we agree on that.

You're right about having to make a choice between fixing the place you're at or finding a new place to be. There are many factors to consider, and sometimes trying to fix the place you're at can be worth the effort.
I think the opportunity is definitely there.

The problem is the Microsoft has been changing their mind so many times about technical things (remember silverlight? or XNA? How about hardware support for WP7.8? WP8.1? W10 before creators update?) that a lot of developers just left the platform in anger and Microsoft now has to attract new developers.
hehe
In Soviet Russia, essay orders you on writing services
State of Origin 2017 live stream [pdf]
"The problem is not that there is not enough copper in the world, but its conversion to copper foil that is the problem." That's only ever going to be a very short term problem.
bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart-static64.sh)

For any 64bit Linux system. Check the wiki if bash is not available on the target system.

Wiki: https://github.com/firehol/netdata/wiki/Installation
Home: https://my-netdata.io/
javascript is insanely popular and its obviously shitty. popularity correlates very lightly with quality.
The actual official site at https://media.ccc.de/popular has many talks in the hundreds of thousands of views.
That's true, although NaCl's design made that difficult because the native code sandbox had to be a different process so interacting with the page's DOM would have required IPC.
Ah of course it's a Node/Electron thing.
Real Life Bug Prevention in Scala
Glad to see I'm not the only one who relies on scripts.

After having recorded 36 hours worth of video training courses, I've written over 150,000 words of scripts because explaining technical information in a concise way usually depends on thinking about how to word your sentences beforehand.

I'm really envious of people who can wing in depth tech talks amazingly well, but at the same time I'd also be surprised if those people even exist. Winging it "decently" and "amazingly well" are so much different.
It resulted in random, hard to reproduce ENOSPC errors down the line without either data or metadata being anywhere close to full. Neither us nor the btrfs developers that took a look at it were able to figure out what exactly went wrong, but it was something about new blocks not fitting anywhere despite lots of free space.

Someone on #btrfs said that the filesystem layout is a lot different when using the conversion tool and all of the regression testing happens with regular filesystems, not converted ones.

We reinstalled all machines from scratch. Never happened again.
There can be an interesting interaction between booking.com and the hotel's own booking - I mean, booking.com doesn't know how many such rooms the hotel has available, it only knows how many such rooms the hotel has reserved for booking.com that may be booked at any time without a feedback from the hotel.

The hotel wouldn't put all their rooms there because they also have other channels (that also need to promise the customer that they'll get the room, inform the hotel afterwards, and the room must be available), and they don't want to risk overbooking. On the other hand, if they get a booking and see that all their booking.com rooms are taken, they'll likely assign another room or two to booking.com if they have them available.
This is interesting, and I've read the entire thing (in fact, I have much more to say about this then just "interesting"). But how is this relevant to HN?
What the hell are Generics and would I want them in PHP?
Pannenkoek2012 is both genius and crazy awesome at the same time. Its video "0.5x A Key Presses" provoked a riot in video game circles some times ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A
I explained it and provided some references in an earlier post here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483055

Here is another reference you could check:
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/04/the-notorious-n-h-s-t-pre...
im with OP.
if you are alone right now all the extra time you have will be yours alone, and all the money you earn will have to be enough to support you.

If i chose to do it like you sugested. Work 100% and save 50%, there is no way in hell that i would save that 50%. Nobody would. When you only have 10$ in bank to buy a lunch you buy it for max 10$ but if you have 100$ you have to force yourself to spend only 10$. you probably would not. I know that i would not do it 100% of time. So in the end you end up saving alot less then 50%.

when you get your child, the extra time that you have if you work less will be spend between you, your child/family, your alone time ( if you value it, will be not even close to 50% ) and because having a family is way more expensive, all the money you saved when working 100% and supposed to save 50% would be spend 3 times faster then when you where alone, and then you would have to go back to work.
This is a good test of democracy surely. What proportion of the population want EULAs, want not to own stuff they bought? Yet the USA as a supposed democracy has laws that contradicts that position with arguably no benefit to society.
Aplicativo que bloqueia o seu cartão de crédito quando você já bebeu demais
I love that law. I've been putting it to use ever since I read that.
This is a very interesting way to draw music, lately i have done some experiments with something akin to the Russian ANS synthesizer which was a photoelectronic synthesizer where the sound spectrum was sketched onto glass disks, in my program all is driven by visuals produced by a GPU fragment shader, one can use a webcam as a texture to replicate something akin to the ANS workflow where you draw the sound spectrum although it is much less limited, one could also capture a painting software and feed their drawing in realtime.

The synthesizer is available here : https://www.fsynth.com
I'm in the speaking circus now for 12 years, so I will happily admit that I have a solid pool of experience and knowledge to build upon. Preparation as in learning and practising the stuff I talk about is my daily job anyway, so in that sense I prepare a lot.

Some people call my style "storytelling" because that's the new buzzword, I guess. To me it comes very natural to be on stage and entertain the audience while delivering my content.

My main point is that speaking in public is not a one-size-fits-all thing. So what works for most doesn't have to work for all and vice-versa.

As long as the audience feels they learned something and were entertained, I'm happy.