skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've done a very sensible thing. Yet, I'm pretty sure that most if not all the features you've decided to use are found in Kotlin. I'm not saying you should use Kotlin, as it's not ready. I'm bringing it up to demonstrate that what people want from Scala and what its designers had in mind are two completely different things. What people want from Scala is Kotlin, but what its designers built is a Java-Haskell hybrid with macros.

And there's a bigger problem. Do you shy away from Scala collections? Because I have no idea how the types works there, I didn't want to spend who knows how many hours just to understand how a simple list is coded, and I certainly wasn't going to use something I couldn't understand. So while you may easily understand your own code, I don't know if your team understands this simplest, most basic of libraries.
Java and .NET are the only strongly typed languages used heavily as a web backend. Python, PHP, Ruby, and Node.js are all weakly typed.
http://gnunet.org deserves a shout-out too I believe.
At our company, we use our own solution: "nCryptedCloud" (http://ncryptedcloud.com), client-side encryption software that secures your files before they go into the cloud (Dropbox). We don't keep the data, just the knowledge how to open that data (key). We don't even have a link between the file and the key, the file contains the key's information. This way, using dropbox shared folder, you can manage a secure sharing experience that allows you to revoke access to anyone in the future. It's free. Check it out and let me know if you have any question :)
I might be biased, but I think your new blog on silvrback looks way better than your old one. The presentation of your code is much more enjoyable to read, as well. Just my 2 cents.
There are arguable shades of gray in those examples but the JSON one and this one:

> X says - Lets make those by copy-pasting - and later we will think about making it generic

... are pretty ill-informed. That just reeks of sloppy and lazy and not particularly concerned about his craft. If you're looking for a mentor I would think you'd want to align yourself with someone who is mindful of their craft, no?
Your #2 -- every so often there's a news story about some fast food worker that calls the cops on a customer that tries to pay with either a $2 bill, or one of the old 20's that has the small portrait. Hilarity ensues.

I also seem to recall that a lot of each new version gets shipped overseas right away. People there hold onto US dollars as protection against their weak government/banks, but they're used to having their old currency being declared null & void and having to exchange them (with government imposed exchange limits and poor exchange rates). So they want to have the newest bills even though the old ones are still valid currency.
Force them to declare war against crypto then.
Yeah...I was talking about classes through upper division coursework not just the introductory classes.
3-4 releases a year sounds like there might be a solid QA cycle involved. e.g. I used to work on a webapp for flight planning: how much fuel should go in the plane's tanks, etc. It's not the sort of application that should be live-updated by the developers every 2 weeks. Maybe the mentor here has a clear view of the product lifecycles appropriate for this organization.

I don't think we have enough information to decide who's right in any of the OP's situations.
(oops, yes, I didn't read it very carefully)
I think you need to do both and that's why building great products/software is hard. You need to see the big picture yet deliver against it in bite-sized chunks. Good PMs and Engs are capable of doing both at the same time. That's they key. Give folks responsibility for owning big ideas and allow them to get their in an agile, incremental way.
I'm a fan of both PHP AND Javascript! Take that, haters!
Also, "special delimiters" probably just means

import 'csv'
I don't get it. If Linux or Windows is the end goal, why not start with a Surface Pro (2)?

The startup popup is annoying, but that's at most a one-off per day. It's the pixel's trackpad, mushy keyboard, and weak screen hinge that turns me off from using it as a dev machine.

It's great for couch surfing or as an ipad replacement, but I expect a dev machine to be more than a screen and a cheap price.
Just download a torrent and use your own copies; I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that plan?
The tech lead sounds like a very pragmatic developer who just wants to get work done quickly without hassle. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it does not mean he is always right either. He probably has most likely opened up a few cans of worms and as a result is very conservative in his approach. Younger people tend to bring a lot of energy, but sometimes come into a company and want to shake things up - then they get bored and leave a bunch of fad-oriented programming code for the remaining team to maintain for 5 years.

The copy/paste would be a warning sign to me, but it could also be that he knows a generic solution would become extremely complex with problems that you do not yet have the experience to forsee. It's not really possible to understand which is true based on your email.

Anyway, I would try to get more information from him to see if he is being lazy or pragmatic. When he says thing that you disagree with - have him explain it to you. It might be that he has very good reasons - or that he is just resisting new technology that he doesn't understand. I would try to find that out first.

All that being said - you can learn a lot from a bad situation as well as a good one. You can learn what not to do!
With regard to #5, I'd say they're actually doing a pretty good job in terms of art direction, though it's definitely an iOS 7 sort of thing – there's an emphasis on highly functional security elements that are rendered with unabashedly high contrast, giving it an updated look to compete with the Euro, but it's still very much the same old green-and-black Federal Reserve Note underneath the new colors and geometry.
NTFS is actually a pretty glorious filesystem. It even includes support for soft and hard links.. but for some reason Windows doesn't use them and instead prefers it's weird shortcut file abstraction which never works outside of Explorer
The nodes will not "mirror" content of other nodes, no. The nodes will be just storing their own data + provide a UI for browsing content of that node as well as the content of other nodes. So technically you're not hosting anything illegal even if some other node does.
Right now, sure. But suppose some piece of software goes rogue and starts creating dirs and files. Further suppose that there's enough of them to fill the disk. OK, now your disk is full and nothing on the machine works, so you need to delete those deeply-nested files. Except, whoops!, the paths are too long, so you can't delete them with the command line. OK, now you're writing a script or burning some godawful boot CD to try to get to a safe mode or Linux kernel. All in order to delete some silly unnecessary files.

Problems like this aren't problems when everything is working normally. But that's beside the point. When the shit hits the fan and the system is only getting in your way and adding to the problems instead of helping solve them, it's really really really not fun.
The point I am trying to make is the following: I think you need to do both and that's why building great products/software is hard. You need to see the big picture yet deliver against it in bite-sized chunks. Good PMs and Engs are capable of doing both at the same time. That's the key. Give folks responsibility for owning big ideas and allow them to get their in an agile, incremental way. Kanban really is about the incremental "getting there" part.
> When the time comes to build a framework you'll know it

You know it, but how do you know the old fart in the article knows it?

I think the question being asked is whether the old fart has wisdom, or is just a mediocre/bad developer who's been around a while.

I think the point of the examples, was to provide context for people to help the asker determine the answer.

tldr, You address the specific examples well, but I think maybe you haven't answered the real question.
What's the best book/video/article that explained how to get customers in tech?
What's the best advice (or book or video) you've seen that explained how to get customers (or small businesses as customers) in the tech industry?

Thus far the best advice I've seen is to where similar companies are getting their customers and aim for the same, but that seems a bit abstract.<p>Any suggestions?
I think that we will see much more interaction of companies with consumers in a way that goes beyond advertising. Maybe some people will get used to optimise every little bit of their time and life and others will opt out, or maybe both. Service needs to be provided to both sides. I'm so curious to see how Asia, Africa and South America will develop and what Hot Asia, Africa & Middle East Startup's we will see by 2022. I also think that people will be more and more aware of what is happening in the world and they will start to say themselves more often stuff like: If the government doesn't solve it, let's crowdfund it and solve it. I don't know maybe we can crowdfund Mozambique or Ivory Coast and get a week at a beach resort for our funds?
While "better" is of course subjective in many, many ways, Javascript on V8 via Node is much faster in most computations:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...

Obviously, performance isn't always a good reason to pick a language. I'm certainly not looking to write stuff in C, despite the performance benefits. Just pointing out that there are some solid reasons to prefer JS to PHP. ClojureScript alone is enough of a reason for me.
FP Complete Launches FP Haskell Center--Personal
You weren't around for DeCSS, I guess?
Keeping mothers occupied.
Actually the last few iterations of VS and Office skinning have gotten added into MFC and can be enabled pretty easily for any app. The Ribbon UI is also fully available in MFC and VS. Just no one uses any of this stuff for obvious reasons.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/cc137831.asp...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee354408.aspx

Spotify actually uses Qt but with a custom stylesheet that makes it look more like iTunes. I have no idea why they did this, I think it makes it look terrible and clunky. Read this for more info:

http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2007/11/27/theming-qt-for-fun-...
Yikes. Who vets what comes down the line vs the key business objectives? And who is looking out past three months to make sure you are building what will matter as the market shifts? I feel for you.
The trouble isn't that "Windows can't be ported to ARM, etc." but more that Intel and Microsoft have, together, been making consistently bad decisions for a long time.

For instance, I'd say the tablet experience is more defined by having an SSD than having a touch screen. The hybrid hard drive that has been pushed in the WinTel ecosystem (including ReadyBoost) is a joke.

Customers don't feel minimum latency, mean latency, or median latency. They feel maximum latency. An SSD reduces maximum latency, but half-baked caching schemes don't. Yes, they improve measurable things like boot time, but a quick boot is little solace when your web browser regularly locks up for 20 seconds. (Even if the machine could reboot faster than the time the browser is locked up)

If there was one fundamental tenant of the anti-customer corporate ideology it is "throughput computing", or, the idea that nine woman can produce a baby in one month.

Customers don't perceive throughput, they perceive latency. When you're stuck on the 405 going 5 mph you aren't going to be philosophical and multiply that 5 mph by the density of vehicles, you're going to feel like it's slow for me...

Had the Windows 8 requirements included "no HDD", people would be saying "Wow, Windows 8 is fast!", instead a touch screen adds $100 to the cost, as does the Windows license, so users get shortchanged on the fundamental performance of the machine when they are trying to hit a given price point.
In this case, I get the feeling they might make as much money from application fees as they might make from the actual program, There are lots of people who will can't make it to the US due to visa who will love a degree from a US university. Online or not.
I would look at: http://www.letscodejavascript.com/

The first few episodes will help you get setup with an actual development environment and set of tools so you can code on your own machine (as opposed to the magic "just type things into this web browser"). The series is also a very good introduction to testing and TDD.

If that is too overwhelming, try some of the Code School Javascript courses - they are similar in that you will be typing code into the browser but they should have some new material.
omg i'm still digesting it

The story then went full-on Breaking Bad nuts, with
Redandwhite demanding $150,000 for a "non-clean" kill and
$300,000 for a "clean" version. Roberts said that he knew
the value of such things; he claimed to have paid $80,000
for a previous "clean" hit, and he wanted a discount.

Did I say earlier that the story had already gone off the
rails into Crazytown? Reader—I was wrong. Because a
federal indictment unsealed separately today in a Maryland
court says that Roberts had in fact arranged such an
$80,000 hit just a few weeks earlier. Not crazy enough?
Turns out that the "hitman" in this first attempt was
actually a federal agent.

Roberts was upset that one of his employees—records show
these employees were paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a week
—had stolen from Roberts and eventually managed to get
himself arrested by dealing with an undercover agent.
Roberts wanted the employee tortured so that he would
return the missing Bitcoins. Not knowing much about
hitmen, Roberts ended up talking to the very undercover
agent who had helped bust his employee.
There was this guy: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/programmer-sentenced-to...

* He built some software to upload images to a web site.

* A porn site then used it without his knowledge.

* He was sentenced to death.
Awesome, looking forward to your guide.
tell that to TPB, I think anyone hosting a node in such a network would be risking having their boxes seized.
Online hackathon for education tonight – $5K in cash prizes
* in Iran.

Miss a detail, change the story.
Yup. Each version of the .NET framework makes developers go through a cycle of excitement and disappointment when they find out that (1) there's all these neat new awesome libraries, but (2) the new libs take weeks to properly understand and (3) are just as baroque and poorly-thought-out as their predecessors, but in completely new ways and (4) the old ones will never be fixed and are effectively deprecated (but nobody formally admits it).

So many opportunities to settle down the MS development ecosystem into something sensible and consistent... so many pathetic missteps. Linq2SQL getting deprecated almost as soon as it was launched, Click Once installers just being an unusable mess (and now they've killed the old-but-usable installer projects), the endless shuffle of GUI frameworks, etc.

So many talented people firing out projects that are almost good.
It's said that more than half of all software projects fail, in that they're canceled, fail hard, or severely under-preform/under-deliver but victory must be declared. Many organizations can get by for years mostly failing in software development.

For a while I've wondered if the true attraction of this sort of outsourcing is that it's a cheaper way to fail.
We got rid of the penny in Canada. Seemed pretty painless lol. Everything is rounded to 5 cents now.

Also, I think we're a lot more guilty of changing our money's 'look' lol. USD looks quite old in comparison.
I wonder if you could pool money to have spacex or some other company launch a satellite/set of servers into orbit as opposed to some country somewhere. That'd be pretty expensive for them to take (physically) out of service then!
Let bad drivers know who they are with this new app
> "not necessarily better or worse"

I don't agree with that. Sure, comparing something from completely different domains (for example, SQL and HTML) doesn't make sense. However, for some languages (e.g. C#/Java, Python/Ruby, etc.) it is entirely possible to compare them and point out which is better in some aspects or worse in others.

What I'm saying is that Javascript and PHP are comparable (now that node.js exists and it's possible to write server-side javascript), however, I don't see much advantage over PHP other than being more trendy.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And in these cases, when risk is unbounded, it is better to be cautious. Simple antifragility heuristic. [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/...
I like your point#4. We should be able to phone a central server to check if that number is actually the hash of an hidden number in the bill.

But that would actually defeat point #8: you can print out bills but they won't be verified by the server at the gubment.

And I like the QR code too.
http://users.aber.ac.uk/cwl/ruby/shroeder-slides.pdf
"At best, the role of "proof of work" systems here is in combating sybil attacks, which is only relevant if you want to remove the requirement that I know the people I am issuing shares to."

That seems pretty fundamental to making the mechanism accessible. If are talking about switches as a service if there is a "fixed" pool of switches and an exploit is found that allows you to compromise each switch component you are out of luck because you didn't actually make materializing the secret difficult.

By requiring actual work to be done and allowing the difficulty of the work to be tuned based on the capacity of the network you make an adversary go up against the math instead of against the people.
Microsoft Ignores PRISM Claims, Dumps P2P and Moves Skype Entirely to the Cloud
D3 is awesome. We use it a lot.
I think the problem is many people mistake CS programs for some sort of vocational education.
As far as I have oberseved, Python is more widely used than Ruby as a scientific tool.

The reasons are great libraries like numpy, scipy and sympy (for symbolic expressions). Also, I think the standard library of Python is better designed more consistent.
Exactly my point... The motto of keep it simple what is simple generally works.
Sure, if you are excessively habituated to reading Language X and have some kind of barrier to learning new things, Language X will be better for you for most uses. That's not really a feature of Language X, though.
* to enforce the absence of certain classes of incorrect program behaviour
Problems like I look at a function and have no clue about what it's arguments are.
Sounds like Scintilla http://www.scintilla.org/
Yeah, we're pretty sure the back end has been converted as well.

It was amusing to watch their first effort to convert the front end fail, then when they got it right, for a while people were watching as more and more of the front end machines were switched over.
IMO, the latter example is more readably because you're describing the result of the function rather than the outlining the operation itself.
It comes from the operating system pathname parsing code. That is why you can do things with a deeper current working directory.

There is an alternate parser, but the name has to start with \\? and then it takes up to 32kb of text.
What does that have to do with my point about gentrification? The finances of the local government are related to but not coextensive with the economic health of the surrounding region. At the end of the day, changes in the $500+ billion GDP of the Chicago metro area are going to have a much bigger impact on gentrification in Chicago than the deficits in the $3 billion Chicago city budget.

The danger is, of course, that pension obligations cause a rise in taxes that push out wealthy people and businesses, hitting GDP. That's a concern, but I think at least Chicago will fight to reneg on pension obligations before raising taxes. Rahm may be corrupt, but he's corrupt in the right direction. He sounds like a republican these days. Controlled bankruptcies may be the smartest course of action for cities like Chicago, allowing them to avoid the choice between raising taxes and cutting crucial services. The key thing to watch is whether Detroit's bankruptcy results in significantly reduced pension liabilities.

Which circles back to my point about embracing the 1%. The way to see continued improvement in your city is to keep your 1% where they are, and ideally attract new 1%. Those few condos here and there are upper middle class/rich people moving into Chicago and spending money and paying taxes. Since major U.S. cities have a dearth of middle class people (who mostly live in the suburbs), and poor people don't really pay much taxes, it's these folks that keep the show going. You can't afford to let writers like the OP push for policies that encourage these people to move out.
Are they going to offer the course materials for free as well?
Cryptocat?
Build a stripped-down 6502 simulator in JRuby
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity
I think the answers is Yes, absolutely. But I think I have a different idea about what the mentorship should involve then you do. I think you can learn more from studying his thought process and his experiences with sr. management, customers and partners then you will from simply following his technical suggestions.

I also think you should bring a couple things to the table that you want to teach him. It could be some new fancy tech, or some online community or something that will help expand his perspective and better understand where you are coming from.

At the end of the day, it is really relationship problems that hold us back - not technology problems. And your ability to form successful mentor/mentee relationships will help you much more in the future than learning new tech of the week. (It will also give you perspective when your future mentee posts to hacker news v.next about her stodgy old mentor that doesn't know anything ;)
In addition to Octave, PARI/GP and Singular should be mentioned, especially for number theory and algebraic computations:

http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/

http://www.singular.uni-kl.de/
A hidden number would defeat the purpose, I'm thinking of something like the (sort of) well known social security death index, where if you try to get credit using a known dead psuedorandom serial number, the bank gets all wound up, and you get lots of attention from cops.

So try to buy a soda with a known shredded $1, the vending machine doesn't accept it, you'll have a strange conversation at the bank. Of course we're rapidly nearing the point where a smartphone could just hold the numbers in its memory, which is a strange form of digital cash but it could kinda work.
Different people crave different things in a place to live. Big metropolitan cities have a certain allure to many. They're exciting, happening, and full of intersting people.

One of my goals is to put myself in a situation to live comfortably on the North Shore of Oahu in the future, because that's where I want to be.
Why I'm Glad the Governments Shut Down
I want to see this implemented for buying/selling designs for 3D printable things, and other supplies for Makers. I'm talking really basic things like the OSE's tractor designs.

Also: is there any way to use these scripts as a form of DRM? The biggest weakness to current DRM schemes is that the validity of a license depends on a trusted party -- the seller, or something like Steam. While such a scheme won't keep people from outright pirating digital goods, I think I would rather trust a p2p DRM scheme than depending on say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble to stay in business.
Why Facebook's Building Doggy Daycare But Not Child Care For Kids
I've never heard of languages being synchronous or asynchronous before. It looks like PHP ships with asynchronous DB APIs.