skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Python is the most popular language at 30% in 2014? I've worked for a lot of big corporations and interviewed at hundreds more over the last few years. Not a single one used Python in any way, shape or form.

Maybe that's changing, but I find it hard to believe.
SEEKING WORK - REMOTE - India.

Creator of xtopdf, a PDF creation toolkit for Python (used by Packt Publishing, the Software Freedom Law Center, ESRI.nl and others.) xtopdf can create both business reports and ebooks, and currently has support for the following input formats: text, DBF, CSV, TSV/TDV, XLS, XLSX, DOCX, ODBC, SQLAlchemy, MongoDB, XML, Microsoft Access, SQLite, Berkeley DB, and standard input. xtopdf runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It includes both a library you can call from your apps, and command-line tools, GUI tools (in wxPython), and web-based tools (Flask, Bottle and CherryPy).

xtopdf links:

http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf

http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/xtopdf

https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf

http://www.packtpub.com/article/Using_xtopdf

http://google.com/search?q=xtopdf

Independent developer for the last several years, with many years of experience in many tech areas. Contracted/consulted to multiple startups based in USA and India. Earlier worked for large well-known US and Indian software companies.

Skills: Good - Python, C, Linux, UNIX, many open source technologies, databases, XML-RPC, PDF programming, file and data format conversion, data munging, command-line utility development. Some: Flask, MongoDB, Bottle, various others.

Worked on Ruby, Rails and Java some time earlier. Server lead / senior engineer for two commercial Rails-based dot-com products earlier, by US companies.

Databases worked on: Oracle, Sybase, Informix, MySQL, SQLite, HSQLDB, MS-Access, Postgres.

Worked on a best-selling retail banking product (earlier, in C with proprietary DB and UI libs). Was team leader for a database middleware product widely used in client projects by a top software company.

Relevant links:

Biz site: http://www.dancingbison.com (see Home, Products, Services, About pages there)

http://www.binpress.com/profile/vasudev-ram/3425

Posts about Python:

http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/python

Posts about xtopdf:

http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/xtopdf

Blog: http://jugad2.blogspot.com

Article by me about "Developing a Linux command-line utility" (in C) was published on IBM developerWorks and translated by IBM into Chinese and Japanese for those versions of their site. Some organizations have developed production command line tools using that article as a guide.

Contact info: http://dancingbison.com/contact.html (email, Skype).
Twitter: @vasudevram
Why does Comcast use so few peering locations?

Because its cheaper to build and maintain only a few hubs. It's also cheaper for them to only onboard traffic a specific centers. JFK is the big US routing hub for Cogent and has the benefit(?) for Comcast of being where all the other big US ISPs onboard Cogent traffic. This lets them collectively bully Cogent (and other providers) into paying higher access fees.

Why do they route packets from their network to a university in the same city across half a dozen states?

I couldn't really say, likely its more related to what that university is paying for. I don't see any unis in Comcast's BGP announcement meaning they're probably going over Comcast's "Business" or "Corporate" network (higher priority traffic, same network). Comcast does not have very fine-grain regional routing, especially in the Midwest, so you'll see connections that cover a short LOS take a long path due to lack of routing
Exactly.

It's not like the ISPs and making a profit. They are extremely profitable and just want more.

Makes me wonder how much this discussion is being atrsoturfed.
>No one is suggesting culture should be ignored. It's pride that's the problem. Did you do something to earn your nationality?

A nationality is a collective endeavour -- it's the people of a country moving the country forward together (each according to his ideas of course). Even by paying taxes and cleaning some beach of garbage, or building a business in your country, you're DOING something.

And people do much more than that, from political action to take down a dictatorship to fighting to keep the nazis out, to tons of other things.

Plus, you don't have to "earn" something to feel pride about it. It just means you love it, and you want the best for it. Do people feel pride about their brothers and sisters? I know I do.
Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox 360... yeah, sorry, they pretty much perfectly illustrated that point.

Considering the early advantage Java had over C#, who seems to be laughing now? Business apps (you know, the boring 90% of software) seems overwhelmingly in favor of those two languages, with C# doing a bit better.

I think you're rather wrong.
DigitalOcean supports Docker within a Droplet, so you can use DO as a VPS, a Docker host, or both.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-use-t...
In the US, Pharmacies are basically just convenience stores with an actual pharmacy/prescription pill-dispensary in the back. Not sure what they are like in the UK, are they more formal?
That's clearly not how it's being used in this case.
Its how many professionals that smoke, let alone smoke at work that forever astounds me. Especially when these same people will belittle others over quirks or other actions they deem stupid.

Got to love it when my friend goes on about how unsafe my motorcycling is while she is taking a drag.

My favorite bit about smoking, people will go into the gas station and buy a pack of smokes and a lottery ticket ignoring the near certain outcomes.
Didn't ISP's in the USA get a whole bunch of money in the past from the government to improve infrastructure but they didn't which now led to the current state of USA not being an internet leader?
Good arguments, I like in particular the insight that different business circumstances call for different database designs, and different compromises between consistency and availability. Google is of course a different player than most others on this planet.
If the tech world could survive on the promises of companies that have done acquisitions and "committed to keeping [a product] running + growing"...

... well, the web would be a very different place than it is now.
It's great to see an Irish start-up having such a big impact globally.
Ask yourself whether that ISP allowing speeds to languish for more than a decade such that they provide one ~100x increase instead of six or seven generations of ~2x increases has made their total costs lower or higher. The fact that they've been screwing over their customers to save a buck for a long time is not a thing that should inspire sympathy for their expenditures.
One can get nicotine through e-cigs, patches, or gum. There's no need to inhale a bunch of things that are bad for you.

Even if tobacco was perfectly healthy, it has other issues. It ruins your sense of taste, making foods bland. Many people dislike the smell. And smoking just one cigarette a day requires near-superhuman willpower. It would likely become an expensive habit.
Is there something similar to this that exists that also caches s3 objects locally?
- Dwindling resource utilization
- Privacy and clarity of governments actions
- The widening class gap
I never understood why people take it up either but I had a friend a long time ago that tried a couple of cigarettes on a night out (the usual, out for a drink, people were smoking so he tried it - it was a long time ago when smoking was 'normal'). Anyway, months later he started lighting up and I asked him what he was doing ? He said he just couldn't stop; I was incredulous and said but you just had a few draws on a night out how does that work? He was adamant that the addiction was immediate and there was nothing he could do to stop.

Some people just seem to be wired differently and even a small exposure is all it takes. I think other addictions to [illegal] drugs are the same - smoking has a little less stigma since it is legal (but's it's certainly not socially acceptable like it used to be 'in the old-en days' when I was younger).
CVS/Caremark is trying to be a real healthcare company (Caremark is a massive prescription drug benefit management subsidiary).

But, in some places in the US, CVS the store is more like a general store or even a corner grocery. Some CVS stores do not sell prescription drugs at all.
Bill Nye debates the origins of life
I've found that referring to someone as "wide" really doesn't translate well from the UK to the US.

What are the US equivalents for UK "wide" or "blagging"? :-)
Well this is the main reason I prefer to buy farm raised fish. It might not do much to help the eco system, or my health, but I feel at least the fish I am eating was raised with the purpose of being eaten. Further, I find it rather gross that fishermen essentially "throw away" everything they don't want.
"Facebook Effect" Author: Four Reasons Facebook Became A Colossus
Game ist not over
Maths, Maths, Maths What Satya Nadella cared about
>> No fees for PUT, POST, LIST, HEAD, GET, DELETE...no extra fees for Akamai CDN requests

or you can say the fee is bundled, i.e.

(Rackspace) vs (S3 us-east-1)

Storage: 0.105/GB/mo vs 0.085/GB/mo

Bandwidth out: 0.20/GB/mo vs 0.120/GB/mo
So what does this mean for the future of Campfire and Highrise?
Not everything needs to be real time. In fact, most web sites and apps do not.
Water, Water, and Water.

Despite the press we'll be fine for energy and climate.
How to price a hackathon
Keywords humor

This isn't news.
This is satirical, but Bill Gates is well-known for trying to experience his company's products as an end user might and pointing out the problems that no one is really keeping an eye on. See, for example, this email on his bad experiences with Windows usability in 2003:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...

I think it's a good example for any organizational leader.
This decade:
1. Growing sovereign debt - it's not something democratic states seem to be able to solve.
2. Weakened/collapsing states in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, etc. The Arab Spring showed that revolutions rarely lead to stable, prosperous regimes - more often, you just end up with years or decades of anarchy and instability.
3. Global tilt: the relative decline of America, and it's effect on international geopolitics. Westerners will realise how much their preaching to the rest of the world was dependent on having the biggest army. Russia and China grow increasingly more daring. The BRICs build their alternative world bank (it's a real project, Google it) and an alternative international financial system starts to form.

100 years:
1. Climate change/environmental damage. This won't kill us all, I think, but could majorly lower our quality of life.
2. Overpopulation/mass migrations. Nigeria's population is predicted to be over a billion by the end of this century - an 8-fold increase. India's population growth isn't slowing down either. It does look as though humanity's population will peak at around 9/10 billion - but this will be predominantly within the most unstable regimes. Expect mass movement of refuges, further destabilising governments in advanced economies, fuelling further growth in mass surveillance, etc.
3. The singularity. This one could kill us all. Or it could become the AI philosopher-king that solves all our other problems.
New Type of Star Emerges From Inside Black Holes
Try it sometime--you might like it.
Here - someone did the few minutes of Google searching and rational analysis that Dorfman didn't have time for, you know, to keep this piece from being complete bullshit.

http://www.mathofpolitics.com/2014/01/30/poor-work-counting-...
What is that "always" based on? In Qt QML is needed for the interface only. All application logic can be written in C++ so performance is not an issue.
Should the new Asus Chrome machine be your next desktop PC?
The article is satire
This service is temporarily (and ironically) unavailable.
50 years: global shortage of oil and natural gas
I think you'd be surprised.
This could mean that they're moving the cigarettes from the pharmacy proper, to the regular retail area--with a healthy amount of spin.
Just because it's not from the The Onion doesn't mean it's not "The Onion".
Cytoscape.js: A JavaScript graph library for analysis and visualisation
A JavaScript graph library for analysis and visualisation (compatible with CommonJS/Node.js, jQuery 1.4+, and plain JavaScript)

Cytoscape.js separates itself from other JS graph libraries by being a complete graph solution with an interactive visualisation and an accompanying API that is rich, extensible, and natural. The library provides

- a flexible data model,
- natural and complex CSS-like visual styling,
- selectors for querying and styling the graph,
- mapping element data to style,
- fully interactive graphs with a solid event API compatible both on desktop and touch devices (with support for higher level events like `tap`),
- the ability to run the API headlessly if you don't want/need the visualisation component,
- extensibility in the form of reusable widget plugins and extensions (layouts, graph functions, element functions, etc),
- and many more features.
Yes, yes and yes. I've been saying that for years now :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5115839

That, and live sports, should totally obliterate "traditional" cable tv.
Right, but if I were investing in downtown Detroit I'd be wary of the fact that bureaucracy still hasn't been burned to the ground, and if your business succeeds they will leech off it as much as possible.

Detroit unquestionably needs greater amounts of private investment, but the governance has been so bad that it is a significant risk factor. Combine that with the widespread crime and anti-gentrification sentiments that would exist if you tried to do something about it, and it looks difficult.
I don't think people care about dying from smoking.

I think if we could accurately tell people about the effects of smoking at dofferent levels that might make a difference.

Smoking is apparently one of the leading cause of erectile dysfunction. Perhaps it's a sneaky trick to ise that, but if true it could help persuade some men to avoid smoking.

It reminds me of a Soviet political poster I saw about alcohol. It had the male symbol but the arrow was drooping. Funny and quick.

male ♂
I haven't read the New Yorker in a while so while I'm, 98% certain this is satire, there's still that 2% that's telling me it could be true.

This is probably due to my recent experience trying to go from Windows 8.1 RC to the release version. Windows 8.1 is the best version of Windows I've every used (maybe tied with 2000 for it's time) but getting it installed and working was just barely worth it.
While I applaud the stand they are taking against this killer product, it does seem a bit hypocritical that they will continue to sell junk food and liquor.
King of Macedon: "What can I do for you, o wise hobo?"
Philosopher: "Well, you could move over. You block my sun".
I feel that way, especially since I bought the 1.5 version last week, but what are $35 in the large scheme of things ;)

@pydanny Would have been cool to see an errata file for 1.5 since you mentioned some typos were fixed.
It isn't exactly a lottery system, but it is very heavily influenced by one's network, and "life's lottery" rules apply to that at least as much as a person's own efforts. The Tech world is emphatically not the meritocracy some think it is.
Sorry for being a little negative, but "easily"? I think is too much to think that one can find a job that is, well, perfect for their demands, "easily".

I have a job that follows all the requirements you said, but I had to move to a different country for it.
I think Android will always play catch up due to the fragmentation. Great quality apps take a lot refinement and it's near impossible to do when you have > 10 main devices to build/test against.

I think MS took the right approach with the Surface/Metro, they really needed to reconsolidate their consumer software/hardware stack to provide a good user experience.

"When you care enough about software, you'll make your own hardware" -- Alan Kay.
Some shows are just paced too slowly, but still provide entertainment or enlightenment. Who are you to care whether a viewer watches such a show at 1.5x speed?
Why Working Remote Doesn't Mean Working Alone
The same as me :(
theres no way to recover it?
Actually, light smoking is almost as harmful as heavier smoking. Going from zero to one cigarettes is much worse than going from one to two.
In time spans like a decade, what people will think of as most important will be freedom issues (democratic and anti-democratic movements around the world, individual privacy concerns, efforts by religious groups to enforce their preferred societal norms).

In the longer run, the issues that threaten humanity as a whole, rather than as individuals, are as important. Things like: (1) Water/energy availability, both singly and combined. (2) Global climate change. (3) Local environmental quality (air, water, food). Of course, all of these are linked, but when working on solutions it still makes sense to think about them individually.
DevArt: your code belongs in an art gallery
Syngenta has 14B in revenue every year; a few million seems like chump change for a company to use underhanded unethical tactics to protect their flagship product.
And unfunny satire at that.
My experience so far:

I have used Python under IntelliJ IDEA and find it unbearably slow. I am not sure if Pycharm would be faster than IntelliJ IDEA.

Spyder2 is great, except that I have had it crash several times. The deal-breaker has been debugging support. When I hit "step into function" on the current line, it runs out of the current function. And there is no call-stack.

PTVS (Windows-only) seems to be fast enough. In some cases though I see exceptions showing up in the console window that are not reflected in the IDE, leading to confusion. Hope they fix this.
> Vaping

Nicotine on its own is vasoconstrictive. The compounds in tobacco smoke altogether are dialative. Tobacco smoke has MOAB agonists and aromatase inhibitors. Tobacco smoke lowers serotonin sensitivity while I don't think pure nicotine does this.

Vaping is really not a substitute for tobacco smoke as it is missing a bunch of chemicals.
Aristotle (and Seneca but especially Aristotle) meticulously mentioned their sources. They had tons of original and unprecedented thoughts besides those anyway.
>> A Common Lisp-style condition system is a pretty key thing for me.
>What does that mean?

BruceM is referring to how Common Lisp deals with exceptions - http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-co...

I've seen (experimental) Perl & Ruby modules which provide versions of this but having it baked into your language is very nifty indeed.
Very slick. I like the price as well. Unfortunately it's missing a few things that we need, such as Gantt charts, and a little better CRM features.
yes thats how businesses work - things are meant to be done in a company's best interests - that is also why companies have a board of directors. Furthermore - I cant see how this was in some particular individuals interest. Nor has anything Nadella said or done yet given me the impression that this has anything to do with conservatism. IF you are commenting based on some knowledge that isnt public - thats a different thing. Nadella headed the Cloud and Enterprise division of which Azure is one piece. Azure may have been started when Ballmer was CEO - but he was not running it - a CEO makes larger scale executive decisions.. Nadella was in charge of making it get to where it got in terms of revenues and profitability.
I'd be extremely surprised if you cannot manage to find one solution that fits your agency's needs from the plethora of SaaS products in those categories.
I think it's a mistake to consider our homeworld disposable, regardless of what worlds we may eventually live on.
Also not particularly humorous, just to note.

So I'm really not sure what it is.
William Irvine's book - http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic-ebook/dp...

is a great summary of Seneca and Aristotle's stoic perspectives. It's not a long book and gives a nice overview of the highlights of stoicism.
Most expensive Windows installation ever.
Vending machines were outlawed a couple of years ago:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15132529
Why A “Code Of Conduct” For Coding Academies In California Could Be A Good Thing
No, not really. It's still exceedingly easy to make Google a bit player in your life. For example, I use Apple gear for my home computer / phone / tablet (although I have a custom AOSP tablet for work - we flash our own firmware for it though, so it's not really google-y). I use Google for maybe 5% of my searches, I only use GMail for work, and quite frankly we could switch at a moment's notice to another email solution), and I only use Google Maps when I want to look at a map on my work PC, which runs linux.

Apart from the 5% of search that I find I need Google for, the rest is very easy to switch out. Compare that to the world of computing in the 90s. Your computer needed to be able to read FAT32. Your web site needed to work well for IE. There was only one valid office suite out there. Most peripherals only came with Windows drivers, shutting everyone else out of the fun. Indeed one part of the rebirth of the Mac was the recognition that peripheral driver support would have to be done in-house, rather than relying on 3rd parties to provide Mac drivers for their products.

The Microsoft dominance of the 90s made computing on competing platforms difficult. Google does not have anything like that level of domination / lock-in.
His server's configuration must be elegant.
My first question was how CVS-Caremark, a publicly traded company would be allowed to do this, considering it would hurt their bottom line. I didn't think ethics were a reasonable excuse for knowingly hampering profits, unless they felt there was some long-term benefit to their business of not selling cigarettes. Fiduciary duty trumps morals.

Does it have anything to do with the fact that CVS-Caremark is one of the largest PBMs in the US (second only to ExpressScripts, actually)?

There's more at play here than just a moral action.
10 seconds until someone mentions this benchmark is somehow unfair and nonsensical :)

Still a very informative, promising and well formatted article, props.
I don't know why you are saying the Xbox was never dominant. I don't think anyone could see the 360 doing any better. .NET is doing extremely well given the alternatives.

Azure is picking up speed fairly well too.
> I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too?

Did Xbox or Blackberry serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? No. Have Android and iOS phones and tablets serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? Yes.
>Verizon FIOS has an excellent reputation and the product is far superior to the other choices we have.

Well, that's the crux of the problem, isn't it?

The shitty TWC service I pay for is probably far superior to the more expensive, 500kbps, line-of-sight based wireless network of the only other competitor I know of in the area. Not exactly a glowing testimonial though, is that?
I agree, they should do a full rebrand and only sell organic kale and granola.
It's in no way appropriate. You're purposefully conflating completely different arguments to try to score cheap political points.

And it's almost comic that you're essentially pretending that nobody talked about potential problems and failure modes for various healthcare reforms prior to the passing of Obamacare.

It saddens me that you seem to be an otherwise intelligent person, but you're so blinded by your ideology that you don't realize what intellectually dishonest nonsense you're spewing.