skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And chances of Snapchat existing in its current form in 10-15 years are microscopic.
You're missing the point. It's not about being offensive but about being self-explanatory. For this initiative to be successful it needs to have a wide support and large user base which is not gonna happen with a name based on an insider joke only.

Just look at the effort and energy dispersed in discussing the name here that could have been used to improve their database if they had chosen a good name for their tool.
"Famous strongbad line".

It's bizarre that this guy would refer to something so obscure as famous, and yet I knew exactly what he was talking about (put mouse over 'email'):

http://homestarrunner.com/main13.html
Python has the "fractions" module which provides a more powerful abstraction: It's not restricted to denominators that are powers of 10.

> I don't know their performance characteristics

It's easy to make some good guesses.

Since (I'm guessing) it's implemented with pairs of integers, adding probably uses

a / b + c / d = (ad + bc) / (cd)

which is 3 multiplications and an addition, and multiplication probably uses

(a / b) (c / d) = (ac) / (bd)

so only two multiplications. So it's a small constant factor times the cost of integer multiplication, plus a bit of overhead for the wrapper class.

So my back-of-the-envelope guess is that the fractions module is less than 10x slower than the same operation with integers, or fast enough for just about anything you do in a beginner level class.

These numbers will change significantly if fractions are automatically reduced by gcd of numerator and denominator; I'm not sure about this point.
Well only a casual peruse[0][1][2] tells me that I'm confident that it has happened on multiple occasions, has been reported on by media (at least for drones) to some degree, and that we most likely that haven't had the opportunity to see how far down the rabbit hole this can go.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=drones+are+hackable

[1]: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/drone-virus-kept-qui...

[2]: http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/19/aerial-drones-vulne...
Is it a fact that the 3 letter "bro" reference bro culture and not brother?

Man, woman, brother... next command should be sister. Its a themed naming scheme.

But my point is that very few people will even think about a command they type in, especially if its just 3 letters. There are only so many 3 letter combinations, and even fewer that represent words.
Hey, is the domain still available? Would fit in neatly here.
Since when has the military been concerned about safety? They kill for a living and have demonstrated they don't give a shit about the aftermath (depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bomblets, land mines and indiscriminate, lengthy kill lists forging fresh terrorists). Also, previously discarded technologies like thorium are being reconsidered because of advances in nanofabrication. So they claim it won't be like your grandfather's navigation beacon (RTGs) because a much smaller amount of isotope is used to thermally vibrate quartz structures.
"Did you consider" that by using 'bro' as a pun on 'man', it inherently makes it about gender?
Is the domain still available? Would fit in great with a project here.
That is an excellent point. I had never thought of Siri as a woman. Its just a program.
Obligatory reference to Atwood's Law, etc. etc.
I use IPython whenever possible. But I recently started looking at DreamPie (http://www.dreampie.org/) because I was getting tired of the interpreter line break mode. I'd like to write in a text-file mode and then run. I know I can do this with Vim already but maybe I am just too noob running Python from vim sometimes crash my program or accidentally enter some hell state I can't re-enter my file. I am giving DreamPie a try now.
> but if you were look them up, they're twittering and having fun more than building.

The irony of this comment being in a long-winded post on Hacker News is lost, perhaps? You do realize the vast majority of "programmers" aren't building 100% of the time.

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.
I'm surprised people aren't quicker to mention the fact that PHP was (and still is!) responsible for many simple SQL injection database dumps/hacks. A simple string termination was all it took. That I felt gave PHP a massively bad rap as they spent versions after that trying to figure out a way to prevent/deter it.

Nowadays with wrappers it's thankfully less of a problem.

Having just come off a Drupal project myself but having looked at the latest PHP additions as well as Laravel though, it seems to me that many languages are converging and borrowing from each other, which I love. Latest PHP is pretty sweet.
I agree, there's been too much a wait already for a good XML document editor, not a mere markup tool. It does not look like bigger players like Google and Facebook have interest in building components for this. Hopefully with LT, Brackets, Mondrian and now WebODF the necessary pieces are finally coming together.

Good to know you have already started the more generic XML work. I'll take a look and see if I can find something to dig in.
In my college experience it depends on the teacher that wrote the page. I had several professors that had formerly been developers, their course pages were lightyears ahead of the blackboard pages used by the rest of the faculty.
Been a Ruby programmer for 5 years now and I find that this is dodging the issue. Sure the productivity is higher but what happens when you're finished developing and your code is now running in production? What happens when it's slow at serving requests, slow at any form of computations, slow when a rake task is starting?

Talking about productivity is a good thing because raw "power" doesn't mean anything, but I really wish we could admit publicly that Ruby is really not a race horse. It does other things awfully well and I wouldn't trade language for the world, but man, I wish it could get a free speed jump like Javascript got a few years ago.
I like these shorter articles. There a good size.
Actually there are several really good books in this list, also available as paper copies if you want (albeit quite expensive if you go that route. ESL for example is $70+).

But I do agree, a good textbook is well worth the investment over some free poorly written one.
Good on your for sticking up to these jackasses. I've long since given up arguing it here, but it makes me so happy to see folks like you and others in this thread shouting these idiots down.
This is a few versions old, but here's a graph I made showing which values PHP considers "equal"

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dgymauqggtyurvp/phpeq.png
With a user provided content database, you have a problem: users can input crap content. So you devise a way for user to sort the crappiest from the less crappy and now you have two problems, and so on.
I keep reading always the same things from people who simply don't know how to use it properly and feels hurted by a different-than-what-studied-at-school syntax.
Caltrain trains has 2 types of cars, with doors at different locations, which makes this solution not trivial. I guess you could have 2 sets of doors, to open depending on the car model, but even that has the alignment problem.
Because a shortening of "Manual" is not gendered. "Bro" is.
Depends on the institution. MIT is incredibly committed to trying to get anyone admitted to graduate, and apparently that includes a lot of free psych services. I know students who dropped out for years and subsequently continued by simply registering and paying tuition.
because the bean counter making the purchase will get 10% in gifts. and he want those gifts. so you better don't bad mount bb.

and now going to be downvoted by the blissful ignorant of how large universities works in the daily grinding of the gears.
considering that in the mid-80s 38% of the workforce in computer science was female with a decline to ~30% in 1999, I would not say that it has been 'historically an exclusive culture'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#Statistics_...
Apple Originally Tried To Give GPL'ed LLVM To GCC
I'm pretty sure the term "bro" was being used in particularly boneheaded circles as a term of misogynistic 'banter' way before the word 'brogrammer'.
The problem with Jeff's writing isn't that he ever says one big thing that's just obviously wrong, but his pieces are full of bits that just sort of don't make sense.

Remember the immediate visceral reaction you had to the double-clawed hammer? That's exactly the reaction most sane programmers have to their first encounter with the web programming language PHP.

First of all, I didn't have a visceral reaction to that image (and I'm not sure Jeff knows what that word means), but setting that aside, the second sentiment is just wrong. PHP doesn't cause that reaction on your first encounter. Most of its ugliness is in a bunch of little things that you learn to deal with over time.

Another example. He says:

What we ought to be talking about is not how terrible PHP is – although its continued terribleness is a particularly damning indictment – but how we programmers can culturally displace a deeply flawed tool with a better one. How do we encourage new programmers to avoid picking up the double clawed hammer in favor of, well, a regular hammer?

And in the very next paragraph:

Despite the serious problems with PHP, I was forced to consider it. If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option.

I don't know how he doesn't think that contradicts his previous point. Actually, now I'm not even sure what his previous point was. Inexperienced programmers are wrong to choose PHP. But, also, PHP is the best choice available.

I won't go paragraph by paragraph, but these things really add up when reading his writing.
The more a language is used the more its hated. The ones everyone complains about are most likely to be the ones you will use to make money.
Before today, I always thought "brogrammer" was just a joke phrase, not serious.
Well, i like PHP but i see your point. To me, re-writing everything and introducing tests (PHPUnit: Ohhhhhh) is exciting.
Crunchbase data (1) shows the following:

Jonathan Sposato - CEO

Darrin Massena - Co-founder, CTO

Mike Harrington - Co-founder, COO

1. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/picnik
I had not seen that before, that's perfect. I had been looking for something like that but some time ago when I had looked it wasn't so easy to do.
No. I said it is ridiculous to turn everything into a sexism discussion. Look, I said if people are making fun of female, like "sudo make me sandwich" that's sexist and we better make sure we correct that idea. It might be okay with a close friend but a public statement like that is obviously not acceptable.

bro-page is not in the same category as "sudo make me sandwich". There is no sexism in that name. Just because it is named "bro" doesn't mean it's sexist. We have girls who like to be called bro. I remember in one of the earliest episode in Family Guys, Lorie said "I respect your feminist initiative and being feminist means I have a choice and I choose not to be like you."

If you force people to feel like the name is sexist, you are making it sexist. If you are so paranoid about sexism that's because we have made many things sexist. Do people ever call a poem using masculine words sexist when some are just completely fine and have nothing to do with people degrading female or male? Ever heard of that?
> he has me to help him, and I'm proficient in all these languages

I think we have different assumptions about the goal of teaching your child programming. Your goal appears to be "create an activity where parent and child can spend time together." My goal (if I had children) would be "get them to be able to program independently as soon as possible," because IMHO that will ultimately both increase the amount they learn (because they'll start learning on their own time to scratch their own itch, just like mature hackers do, so the amount of learning your child does is no longer so dependent on the amount of time you spend teaching them) and increase the probability they'll stick with it for the long term (because being able to do their own projects and have their own ideas makes it much more attractive, especially as they head into the teenage years and start to establish their own identity).

Having an activity parent and child do together which increases emotional family bonds is great, but I think the more important goal is the transfer of knowledge, skills and the hacker mindset.

Disclaimer: I don't actually have kids, but if I did, the above would describe my philosophy.
Internet-plus-Equality: A userscript that Equalises the Internet.
Shameless plug, I'm a member of FenixEdu, a open source academic and learning management system. I think that people might find it interesting.

http://fenixedu.org

FenixEdu was designed for a single school for the past 10 years and now we are trying to refactor it to be installed anywhere. We want to create that can tackle the needs for the next decade of teaching. If people are interested in this kind of thing please talk with us, we are most welcome to receive any kind of suggestion or feedback.
As someone making a very niche LMS offering, it makes me very happy to read this thread.

I'm so sorry.
I don't think there's enough attention on the fact that the strict MVC approach of big old school web frameworks like Rails is an increasingly glaring architectural dead-end. The "model" part of an MVC application is invariably far too complex to crowbar inside a couple of dozen Active Record subclasses. And you can't prescribe a one-size-fits-all architecture for the model from a framework level. That part has to emerge from the business and technical constraints of the specific application in order to be correct.
As an aside, Perl's uniq is in List::MoreUtils [1].

[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/List::MoreUtils
"You genuinely think that 'software tool with female name' is as 'bad' as 'software tool with male name?"

No, I said that a software tool with a male or female name would not be sexist by definition and I wouldn't find them exclusionary either. Edit: So yes, I'm equally unoffended by both.

As for the rest of your comments, I'm in a thread about a software tool named "bro". I understand the word "bro" to be a casual greeting, predominately male in nature (like "dude"). Looked it up in Merriam Webster[1] & it says something similar. So, when I read "misogynistic", "humanity loses out", "male-centric", "frat-boy", "oppressed" in the span of a couple sentences in reference to my non-offense at gender specific names for software, I think it's fair to say we're probably not going to be able to have a rational conversation.

[1] —used as a friendly way of addressing a man or boy
I can see two important things to say in response here:

1. I'm surprised that you don't know what "brogrammer culture" is, but that's okay. The point, though, is that for a lot of other people (particularly women) it is a familiar thing and it makes them feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. You may not have had that experience, but part of having empathy for others is respecting that their experiences are still legitimate even if yours has been different.

2. It's been a lengthy discussion here, so maybe it's not repeating myself too much to say again that "offensive" really isn't an accurate characterization of the objections here. Plenty of people who have wonderfully off-color senses of humor might still consider this inappropriate. The issue isn't "this makes me feel offended", it's "this makes me feel excluded". That's a really important distinction.

(And to tie this in with point 1, even if you personally do not experience this sort of thing in a way that feels like it's excluding people, it's important to listen when substantial numbers of other people tell you that they do have that experience.)
different isn't always a virtue.
And anybody who learnt of their own accord probably had Google rapidly lead them to w3schools, and if they were really unlucky they might have noticed they have PHP tutorials. Their database query code used to use mysql_query with absolutely no protection, the basic sql injection disaster scenario. It now uses non-prepared mysqli_query, which a quick Google tells me still isn't safe. I'm sure everyone here knows it, but w3schools is seriously dangerous and seems like it will indefinitely damage the image of PHP.
I never understood the idea of being offended. It's probably because I'm nigh unoffendable (?).

Also, I share the sentiment of Steve Hughes - "So what? be offended! nothing happens!"[1]

[1]: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b48_1305790944
>The only way to fight moralfags

That does wonders for your argument.
TL;DR -- it doesn't have to be difficult or expensive.

It's not as hard as you make it out to be. I live in Japan where these (very effective) safety doors have been rolling out for more than a decade.

I don't think there is any need for computerized stop-assist. On at least some of the trains here, and I think most, it is up to the driver top stop the train. Once in a great while, they accidentally overshoot by a foot or two, apologize on the loudspeaker, and back the train up to align it properly.

There is not need for a homogeneous vehicle fleet, either. In fact, in Japan just about every line gets a unique train design (which does seem weirdly inefficient, but whatever). At first they we in fact designing different safety doors to match every train. But later, to cut costs and make it possible to have safety gates at stations featuring trains with different door configurations stop, they just designed wider safety gate that can open more on one side than the other.

This brings to mind another simple optimization -- if your trains really suck so much ass that the driver is unable to stop them with reasonable precision, just make the safety gates six feet (or ten feet, whatever) wider than the train doors. (Easier if you make them lift up to open rather than opening laterally.) There is no need for the safety doors to be the same width as the train doors.

They also don't have to be expensive and made of glass. A cheaper gate consisting of a few strong bars is nearly impossible for a human to accidentally fall through.

Finally, it doesn't have to be a track feature. Some of the ones here are essentially the same as an American style garage door opener. When the operator/conductor opens the train doors, he then opens the safety gates.
@throwawaycoder huh, not sure why your comments get downvoted.

The forking I mean is not necessarily the technical part of it, but rather the interactions of people. On the other hand, I also just talked with someone I know who has been in the payment space for a long time -- he says he prefers to keep things simple, so not necessarily a "forking" that happens.

Eh well, something to think about for me. I think the "forking" concept is useful for me when we start talking about markets for which there is oppression. I'm not particularly interested in things like drug or gun trade. I'm much more interested in things like, being able to 3D print a tractor so people can farm land and grow food even if vested interests try to suppress that tractor.
I'm not so sure about that. One big conceptual hurdle that many beginners have is the notion that a program is a sequential sequence of steps, and at any point in time during a program's execution, there is a unique "current statement" [1] and "current state" (content of variables).

Single stepping through your program with a good visual debugger makes these concepts very clear.

[1] Of course this is not true for multi-threaded programs, but multi-threaded programs are well out of "beginner" territory.
Help ACLU tell FCC to preserve Net Neutrality
Changing the default search engine in a user's browser when they did not consciously ask for it counts as malicious data corruption in my book. Can you even begin to imagine how much damage and confusion that causes for "old people"?
FenixEdu, a open source academic and learning management system
Please, "their .bashrc" :-)
This article is written in an "inflammatory" style, but it makes some hard- to- rebut points about PHP. If you're wondering why people hate PHP, like, really wondering, and not just trying to make yourself feel better about the language, try to get past the tone and read the technical content.

(If you're just trying to make yourself feel better about PHP, just remind yourself that Facebook is built in it, as are lots of other credible systems; languages are tools, and while better tools help, skill and discipline are more important).
I had actually taken 'bros before hos' as a reminder of the importance of maintaining your long term friends whilst romantically engaged, expressed through the medium of gender-loaded words that rhyme and assuming the heteronormative paradigm.

My interpretation was that there was no value judgement being made and that this could be equally well articulated using any rhyming words that could indicate a romantic coupling (I've also heard 'chicks before dicks'). That was how I thought about it, but I don't get to choose who feels offended or marginalised by my usage.

Thinking about it now though I've also heard 'mates before dates' which I take to be neutral. Is that a safe way to express the pithy sentiment of prioritising your friends?
Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft. Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science)
Well... it's certainly killing applets, but applications that run on the JRE are going to have a tough time as well.

I have a few applications that suddenly started popping up warnings that they may stop working in a future Java release, because of a missing property in the JAR manifest (no joke, the warning actually included technical language something like this).

Certainly, though, server-side Java is hale & hearty as ever.
Another one which is based in New Zealand coming out this year. http://mepo.co
Exactly the rhetoric which leads to the unfairness of the system.

Yes, if there's a single doubt about the evidence, you _must not_ frame the person.

We're talking here about the justice system refusing to return evidence which could help the defense, and the accused was found innocent. It's not like they acted well anyway. Tampering with jail time _must be_ a high pressure job for those who execute it. No mistake allowed.
There have been some steps in that direction, it seems. At my company, we made a graphics rendering engine in Ruby (haven't released it yet). In testing, it ran steadily, but consumed a lot of resources. But in each new version of Ruby, we saw that resource usage go down. Given that same level of innovation, we will see this graphics engine reach similar speeds as our current, more performant C and Lua implementation eventually.

Ruby 2.0 and 2.1 made incredible improvements to the garbage collector, a major source of our problem. We determined that it was the speed at which we were creating and destroying objects that was causing the GC to work on overdrive, which drove up CPU usage. So with the new GC improvements, we saw that usage go further and further down.
I'm not saying you're an asshole, I don't know enough about you to make that call, but comments like this really make you sound like one. You're basically saying, "I refuse to even try to live harmoniously with others because they're just going to keep demanding shit from me."

If you don't want or care to examine your thoughts and actions, that's fine, but getting all high and mighty about it by invoking Kipling and comparing them to marauding Vikings is just silly.
tinpages. That way the tools do what they say on the tin.