skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We've reached the turning point where you hear far more about big companies moving from rails, than switching to it.

A lot of this is because
1) they jumped on the rails bandwagon without understanding it or if it suited their needs
2) after using rails to prototype their site, they now understand what their architecture should look like and want to start fresh
3) because they've joined the next circle jerk such ask nodejs

All the rest of your post is overly vague, or simply untrue. People pick rails because it has sane defaults eg. ActiveRecord but there are plenty of other gems for other database persistence layers.
Anyone done a benchmark of this vs AVISynth? I have software I wrote in AVISynth for doing 2d to 3d Stereoscopic upconversion based on motion and parallax. I have often wished I had it in something more "real" like Python.
You are absolutely right OP is unclear if he is just part of an IT division at a non engineering company. The vibe of his statement made it feel to me that he was working for a software company which is why I responded in that context.
..
Assuming the case you present:
If the OP is even a goodish engineer there are lots of opportunities out their and companies that have internal IT have to be conscientious of the fact that they are hiring from a pool of people in a high demand sector. Standard methods for managing other departments may not hold up in the IT department at a company that has decided decided to internalize dev. The decision to force this square peg through the round hole of the rest of your company culture may lead to the failure of the goal of internal dev at your company.
..
For a number of years I worked for a large org that had decided to internalize some dev. The engineering division functioned very differently than the rest of the company. Meetings were more flexible there was no way to predict when developers might actually be on site or working from home (something that was rigidly controlled in the rest of the organization). Friends in other sections would ooze with jealousy over our lifestyle... usually right up to the point where I started talking about the average number of hours engineers in our department billed to the organization. I was part of a team that regularly worked 15 to 18 hour days and was happy doing it. The fact of the matter was growing the development team was difficult, candidates with the appropriate skills were scarce. When I was hired the company had spent 2 years looking for someone to fill the position and it was another year of serious looking before we were able to hire another. Keeping in mind the company spent serious time and resources trying to grow this team which it wanted to be bigger. The company recognized the support provided by our scarce resource by affording developers with the leeway to live in a way were they might produce their best work.
...
the is a great story about Jeff Bezos telling an employee how to deal with a bad manager by voting with their feet:
http://lifehacker.com/5921729/jeff-bezos-taught-me-when-to-q...
The fact of the matter is there are a management success is dependent on cultural buy-in and a manager who was very successful at one company may fail at another because of a predetermining culture that they don't fit into. This is a risk companies in general have to manage and not figuring it out can cost money over time and potentially lead to failure.
..
Also I know this is Y combinator but I think that it is weird the way that people use the word startup to mean software company and talk about it like its an industry instead of a phase. sorry if this is lexically nit picky of me but i feel like the fact that you called me out for assuming that the poster works at a software company and not in the IT shop of a larger org puts you in a sort of glass houses and stones situation when it comes to word choices.
and push a button on that side of the door to open it.
Either the latter, or the moment I save a bookmark it should archive a backup copy.
Is this the part where I should say something about how they need to "toughen up" and they must be "too sensitive"? jk. That's actually a real shame. I'm not going to venture a guess at the % of threads that any woman would find offensive but always thought HN was roughest on people's work when seeking feedback, etc.
For pity's sake, it's not like I said that his patriarchal name encourages rape-culture and that he needs to check his privilege and properly understand the intersectionality of female geeks.

I said it was funny, but that it's probably best for the health of our industry that we try to avoid the whole "gender" subject matter when it comes to jokes.

A little professionalism never hurt anyone.
The fundamental assumption they were making, though, was that they would be using parallel algorithms. They intended to do things like finite-element analysis where each element would be pinned to a particular processor, and would only need to communicate with neighbours, which was exactly the kind of thing this architecture was designed to do.
US retailer Michaels warns of possible payment card breach
This is why you don't get a terrible name for your idea if you want it to succeed.
OP here again. This was such a good idea, we decided to do it. :)

Here are the same queries tested on MySQL, MSSQL and Oracle as well: https://periscope.io/blog/count-distinct-in-mysql-postgres-s...

tl;dr: Oracle and MSSQL do very well, and even better on the more specific queries. Postgres's naive query is much worse than all the others.
What you're overlooking here is the "model" part of an MVC application is not limited to being an Active Record object. Indeed, many experienced Rails developers are also major proponents of the use of service objects and "domain models" which can exist outside of the database.

The misunderstanding of when an MVC architecture is appropriate, and when to (and not to) use the framework, is the mark of someone who has not yet really understood how to use Rails effectively.
In the absence of evidence either way, do you think that we should assume that people are being marginalised or not? Which is the more compassionate choice?
A conviction is always better than the alternative. The job of detectives and prosecutors is, essentially, to find guilty people and convict them of committing crimes. It's pretty easy for the 'guilty' part of this job to get erased because none of the incentives really discourage the arrest or conviction of innocent people.
In the 1970s, did the term "man" (in that context) have the same frat-boy, jock, alpha-male, etc. set of connotations?
My school dropped Blackboard for their own home-brewed system... FINALLY. http://lsinfo.byu.edu/

However, it has its own share of problems.
There are two kinds of languages, those no one uses and those everyone bitches about.
If you're ever near Maryland head over to the National Cryptologic Museum where you can see a CM-5 still running. I just saw it a couple days ago.
Laravel is a great framework and has really helped push the community towards writing tests and producing packages that can be easily shared via composer. Of course Symfony has a big part to play in Laravel's success to.

2013 was a good year for PHP. Most of the time when I hear people complaining about the language, it's as if things haven't changed since 2005.

There's a lot of horrible, badly written spaghetti code out there in PHP that doesn't exist in other languages, but there's also probably much more decent code written in PHP and I think that trend is only set to continue.
Number 3 is the reason we moved our last PHP "backend" to Java ages ago (2006). I'm surprised it's the first mention I've seen of it here.
...So my neighbor decides to download a torrent and all of a sudden I am hit with a lawsuit? Unless this issue can be solved, no thanks.
This really has been one of the cancers at the heart of PHP development. Most of the reasons people give for hating the language amount to semantic issues which make it different than the language they'd prefer it to be, or syntax which, while annoying, can be dealt with, or edge cases no one is ever likely to encounter in actual practice (although I just recently saw an example of someone's PHP where they were including php files using shell_exec so the rabbithole of 'actual practice' can get pretty deep.)

The way SQL is implemented and executed still primarily is one of the primary arguments against, at the very least, not learning PHP properly. And it's definitely a point in the column of any framework in any language which can say that SQL injection and remote code execution are impossible in frameworks written in that language.
Nukes were a concern. Having an army of terminators controlled by a handful of people gives them the power to hold a lasting monopoly of violence: power. It also removes potential for disobedience and whistleblowers of organic soldiers. It further makes it more palatable to exterminate the troublemakers and keep the rest in line.
Let me fix this with a one-line shell function:

eg(){ man "$@" 2>/dev/null|sed -ne '/^EXAMPLE/{:a;p;n;/^[^ ]/q;ba}'|${MANPAGER:-pager -s};}

Now there’s an “eg” command to display just the EXAMPLES (or EXAMPLE) section of a Unix manual page.

For example:

$ eg cat
EXAMPLES
cat f - g
Output f's contents, then standard input, then g's contents.

cat Copy standard input to standard output.

If the command gives no output, the manual has no EXAMPLES section. Consider writing some examples and submitting a patch to the manual.

There, I fixed it. Now nobody needs this program (or should I say “brogram”) anymore. (Thanks to pbhjpbhj for the name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7122063)
Here's another good 'un:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25861717

But yeah, you're probably right, I'm sure it's always going to be somebody else's problem.
Sure, the phrase certainly has the meaning you refer to, and probably primarily has that meaning, it's just the fact that it comes loaded with other nasty connotations I don't like. If you wish to express a preference for friends over romantic partners, though, I think "mates before dates" is pretty fantastic :)
To me it's not a gender issue, it is that bro is synonym for obnoxious, annoying, stupid, disrespectful among others.
> I really wish we could admit publicly that Ruby is really not a race horse.

Ruby isn't a race horse.

It just turns out that when you're just plowing fields, harnessing up your prize stallion is a waste of resources.
The command “ex” is already taken by an extended version of “ed” (which would later lead to “vi”).
I don't want to make personal examples, if you compare the look at the replies to @defunkt's twitter post, the females cheering - who even go so far as to overly call themselves feminists - have basically no engineer cred to speak for. Not on github, not on LinkedIn.

Judging by that and the fact you throw out "feminist" like it's an insult,
I'm going to say you've got some pretty heavy bias.

Bias? Feminists on twitter? Hypersensitivity and hysteria about sexual harassment at conferences? Spooking male engineers into special consideration just because they're girls? Geekfeminism.org being mentioned by the pycon organizer? Merit being a taboo word?

In engineering culture, we consider this disruptive behavior disruptive and call it trolling.

Our consumer culture makes everything so easy and convenient. Our compassion to woman and how nice we are to them allows some of them to take advantage. This is a case of it.

In any case, removing merit from the dictionary won't get you into an engineer position. These tricks and trolls may have worked for special treatment before, but programming will take honest, hard-work and effort.
Please, you can make your point without profaning the name of Jesus Christ, a man whom many of us worship and who is dear to our hearts. To use the name of any sacred personage in this manner, as an expletive, conveys a lack of understanding and respect for other people.
Here is why.

I like to equate the technical community with the skiing community. The barriers to entry are tough. It takes a lot of practice to become good skier, and many that do become expert skiers instantly elevate themselves above the rest with routes, equipment, and other types of "I'm more technical than you."

So, back to hate for PHP.

The C++ and Clojure and Erlang crowd are the double black diamond skiers, and they are the first to throw hate at the green and blue skiing crowd - because, well, they've mastered everything else and since they mastered it, well, they are just better than you.

Meanwhile, you've got the PHP type skiers who are cruising the groomers, enjoying the sun and living life - pinching themselves because they are just getting the task done. They occasionally hit a black or two, and even hit the moguls to refine their turns and technique, but they are there to get shit done - which means to ski and have fun.

Then you've got the Perl and COBOL guys who just ski around the mountain and complain about all of the above, since they've been skiing for 40+ years.

Disclaimer: I am an avid skier and maintain a number of successful Web properties based on PHP. And I love the groomers...
PHP is the lowest common denominator.

PHP is the ghetto. It might be fun or necessary when you're young and can't afford better. But, eventually people who are able, move somewhere they aren't being mentally stabbed in the face every time they pop down to the corner store. This, of course, reinforces the ghetto. As the people who can't leave are the dregs.

Nothing is as black and white as a couple sentences makes it sound. But, that is the place PHP has (deserved or no) in the programming world.
The first thing they teach you about rescuing drowning people is to make sure you don't drown too.

Key difference is that this probably wasn't something he was _taught_. He was acting purely in the moment.

I think was you take that first step you tend to throw out risk assessment. Once you've looked someone in the eye, made whatever thread of personal connection, to then walk away and choose to let them die is possibly worse than death to some.
The only thing I think I don't like about Laravel is that it doesn't use Twig as the default template engine.
Yeah; all the patent says is "anything the school and its student does over any network, that includes Internet".
Westerners so convinced China is a dystopia they'll share anything confirming it
What Drives Success?
Strange, I learned php before I ever went to college. By time I went to university I knew 11 programming languages, so I don't think this applies to me.
Julia is a first name which is free of negative association.

Bro is associated with obnoxious, stupid, despicable, disrespectful.
Policy, war and business are different arenas for the same game: who gets comfortable and who gets dead.
Wow, surprising. Wasn't really expecting the clone wars to happen during my lifetime. ;)
The job of the military is to kill people and break things in the most efficient manor possible. Everyone seems to forget that of some reason.
It's not ideal to zoom an app and all its GUI components to half its size. It would want to scale UI elements differently. So there's no strong reason to keep the proportions the same.

Also there's all the reasons to choose other screen ratios.
Trains already aim to stop such that a door is adjacent to the wheelchair ramp. Do you think it would need to be any more precise than that?
How clueless is me? I don't know what Blackboard is.
As they say, opinions are like assholes....
Http://fr.kapihospital.com/nickpage/Dr.AnnCHAVATTE/13350417.htm
They're all neutral, indeed. It was a pleonasm. My bad.
> No, I said that a software tool with a male or female name would not be sexist by definition

Sorry, you're right, I totally missed that. I've spotted a huge number of examples of the 'turn it on its head' strawman argument in this thread, and carelessly caught yours up in the same set without reading more carefully - apologies.

Gathering from this thread, the word "bro" obviously has various meanings. Many of us have been exposed to it alongside negative connotations, more negative than just 'predominately male', although even that usage could be considered exclusionary.
Git is associated with completely ignorant, childish, and lacking in manners. So what? It's the name of a piece of software, and if there's sufficient adoption, it starts to lose its old meaning in a tech context.

Which, for "bro", is fine by me.
Programming without examples, demos, documentation?
Hello HN, i'm a informatics engineering student from Portugal.
Lately i found that i almost always over rely on demos or examples to start something quick or solve some problem.
Checking examples is obviously quicker, but that won't do every time.

Last project i did, used apache jena (a java semantic web framework), they provide many examples on their website (i gotta say it needs improvement), if they didn't i'm afraid it would have taken me way too much time to get stuff working.
It has way more classes and patterns that my beginner brain can handle at once. I found generally that is really hard to find the starting points just by looking at javadoc's.
So, how do you manage when something you want to use is complex and there is no examples( or documentation), is this just an endurance problem to figure out how everything works? do you have any special approach?
Thanks
"The agile push came people who were reacting against creating pages of useless design up front documentation"

er, what? The agile push came from people who saw an opportunity to make money [1].

There are only four items in the Agile Manifesto. The second item specifically highlights documentation cost overhead of traditional methods as a major grievance: "Working software over comprehensive documentation" (see also [1]). I don't think money is a differentiating factor, we're talking about the software business in the end after all. If you're referring to process snakeoil marketing, I'm against that no matter which side is doing it. I was responding to your assertion that software developers go from "agile" to "design up front" as they "grow up". My view is that the people that began popularizing the agile term were in fact "grown up" programmers. Are we talking about different things when we talk about design? What is the output of "design up front" in the traditional sense if not documentation and diagrams? (for example, see the military standards and ISO standards for what's required for detailed design)

I don't see anything objectionable in the descriptions you give, although I don't view the waterfall process as being predictable in any meaningful sense. Its only predictable in so far as its underlying assumptions hold. And in the software world at large such assumptions (fixed unchanging requirements for example) rarely hold. My claim is that circumstances for the space shuttle software is the exception, not the rule.

[1] http://davidfrico.com/rico08e.pdf
Well for what it's worth, I keep reading that from people whose exposure to programming languages and techniques is limited to making LOB applications in PHP and maybe one or two other lowest-common denominator languages. Most people I know who have any real breadth of programming experience find PHP's language deficiencies glaringly obvious, even if they find it occasionally useful due to deployment requirements, etc.

But more to the point, if anybody knows how to use PHP properly I'd think it is somebody who has worked at Facebook, and you can't just dismiss natmaster's complaints with hand-waving that he must not have been doing it right.
I meant unsafe power sources that the military has/is working on that the public does not know about because the military keeps its research secret. I don't think anyone is under the impression that the military forgoes research for safety reasons.
LOUNGIN' - The drug deal prank
$foo = [];
$foo[$userSuppliedString] = 'foo';
foreach(array_keys($foo) as $userSuppliedString) {
if (! is_string($userSuppliedString)) {
die("I understand all the reasons for this behaviour, but it violates the principle of least astonishment");
}
}

Supply a string. Works fine? Try running with a string that looks numeric.

I use PHP every day, it's a great language for many things including teaching programming. Every language has its quirks and i don't really think PHP's quirks are worse than others.

"The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao - but do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it."
Mac Pro (late 2013) replica inside a real trashcan
this is rather funny because a friend and i were seriously contemplating building this exact thing for a while. unfortunately we deemed it pointless to build because there would just be too many various ramifications when dealing with people attempting to fund other companies.

e.g -- imagine a company like.....amazon gets some "request" to add a feature. say the feature is to add bitcoin as their payments (to use one of your examples from the site). okay, that is a large integration that costs lots of money and a lot of decision making. it will also take quite some time, naturally. it will bounce around the higher ups, then time will be prioritized for it, and a team will be assigned to work on this. thats the ideal situation, correct? except what will really happen is that the higher ups will hear about say....5k people that want bitcoin accepted that have donated maybe...10k-15k total for this cause. they have about 250 other things on their internal company pipeline that are probably higher priority. they will simply throw this request out. it's just too naive to think companies will adhere to the whims of the public. I can perhaps see small indie companies doing this but even then, there will be plenty of hurdles such as "well technically this is impossible in its current state, but we can work on something very similar except now we have $15k to work on this but the similar thing is a bit easier to do and slightly different, so now we need a new campaign to re calculate the costs?" -- it's a great idea, but unless you have some genius way to cope with company internals, i don't see a bright future for this product, unfortunately.
In my school, probably 90% of professors create their own course web sites (I came across only 2 who use blackboard in 2.5 years). We don't have any problems you mentioned, really, most the web sites are very minimal (even without CSS, usually). It does it's job, everyone's happy. Problem solved :) for example: http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/2013/COMP36111/
>The cost of censorship is real

A portion of your potential audience giving you feedback that think that they the name is bad is 'censorship'?
This article's substance is 100% covered by the title. I'd be much more inclined to upvote an article that actually discussed the technical reasons why BlackBoard is bad, as opposed to a long-winded and flowery hyperbole that can be summarized in a single phrase.
Well thanks a lot, now I feel like a jerk for being so uppity. jk. I'd never heard the term brogrammer anywhere but HN and just reading it, no less typing it makes me cringe a little. Take care.
Both me and my girlfriend work in tech and she wasn't offended by the name 'bropages'. Furthermore, she disagreed with your comment completely. She doesn't feel excluded or discriminated from the name 'bropages'. Hell, I even call her dude all the time and it doesn't bother her in the slightest.

There as an episode of a tv show called community where they tried to make a mascot that wasn't offensive to anyone. It ended up being a "human" that had no face and the letter H on the front. I don't think anyone that shows off a project here should be attacked for it being offensive to some subset of people here unless it explicitly encourages hate.