skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a partial example of worse-is-better. No one wants to have 10 languages in their toolbelt.

I personally find I use C# for almost everything. You can find good libraries for virtually everything you need. And it has the best tooling I've found. Is it actually the best language for everything? Absolutely not, but its close enough that I'm probably the most productive in virtually everything with it.
No. People don't use them. Stores/brands/agencies use them less. I don't see VCs funding them.

Sorry if it's not what you want to hear, but you should stop. Don't fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
Um, I'm sure the NSA would be happy to implement a strong password generator if you asked nicely. Seriously, if we aren't willing to trust the NSA to generate strong passwords for us, is it really a good idea to trust DDG (or any remote web service) to generate a strong password?
The ultimate irony would be to submit a patent application on this software that generates patents.
You have unusually good insight.

> Not about programming itself.

Basically correct. So, the grades 1-8 or so
work in 'computer science' will
be of questionable value.

E.g., my wife had no background in
computing at all.
I taught her
programming at the level of
if-then-else, do-while, allocate-free,
call-return, try-catch, plus quite a lot in about a week.
Then I gave her a lecture on 'rule-based', 'expert system',
'artificial intelligence' (AI)
programming, and right away she wrote a nice, first
program. I gave her a second lecture,
and right away she wrote the
best, early AI program I and my
research group ever saw. No biggie.
For 'computer science' in grades 1-8,
looks like mostly a waste of time.

> All the basic algorithms we use in programming today were invented before computers.

Not really. E.g., there are books with collections of algorithms by, say, Knuth, Sedgewick, and others, and more on, say, error correcting codes and how transactions work in
relational database, that really are "basic"
but were invented just for the world of computing and
digital communications.
The easy objection is that none of what he's doing actually depends on Python; those libraries could have been as easily linked to Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Clojure, etc, the critical point: NumPy does not really take advantage of any specific feature of Python other than its popularity. Python isn't really taking over when most of the actual code that runs was written in C, but it's the best glue right now.

But really, just this second part is the point. Why wasn't this post written five years ago, when Python had already become a popular and established language? Well, if you look at it a little differently, it took roughly five years from the time Python took over undergrad CS courses to the time it became the lingua franca of scientific computing -- see a connection?
I disagree with the comment syntax highlighting. If I'm trying to fix a bug in some code, I'll read all the comments and then try to focus on what the code is actually doing. I don't need the comments trying to steal my focus away. Some times, I'll get vim to color comments the same as my background so they'll be invisible.
Software eats law?
Thank you. I simply cannot fathom why people seem to believ that service providers can be held liable for their own stupid decisions. Putting hot coffee in your lap is a stupid decision.

When I was a kid, I got a pretty decent electric shock from a neighbor's improperly mounted doorbell. The doorbell did not work, so I flipped it over (it was dangling on some wires) and tried to fix it on the spot (as if I knew what I was doing...) and got shocked.

From that moment on, I knew not to touch exposed wires. I knew that it was my own damn fault for touching the wires and getting shocked. My parents got really angry at my neighbors for having exposed wires like that, but I was scolded too for doing something I had no business doing.

The point is if the coffee lady had any common sense she would not have put coffee between her legs (I feel bad for her injuries as any person would, but I still fail to see McDonalds' responsibility here). The worst thing to happen to our judicial system isn't the hot coffee case - it's shifting the onus of personal responsibility to the service or product providers.

edit: I'm speaking strictly about the hot coffee case and ones similar to it. The article goes on about medical cases which are obviously much more complex
CoffeeScript proved to a lot of people how much more enjoyable JS could be with some of the lessons in language ergonomics learned from Python and Ruby. I think that ES6 really reflects this. With some of the long awaited improvements, like better lambdas, generators, Set/Map, assignment sugar, better metaprogramming of objects, and standard-blessed implementations promises and classes, I think that JS is finally close to being able to compete in the multi-paradigm space. Sweet.js (or some other macro layer) will also really help in letting people develop new syntactic abstractions for domain-specific stuff. It'll be interesting to see how it all develops.
"You are better off pursuing a stupid idea than not pursuing any ideas."

How much does it cost to pursue that bad idea? If it is for free, then you are right. If it costs to pursue that idea, then you might have been better off pursuing nothing.
How about swapping it the other way around; what about using journald or logind without the rest of systemd, in the future?
I hate Cython that much. I mean, find it non-optimal in a disagreeable way.
What would be more useful is to transform a patent to plain non-BS language. Its probably hard but it should help developers understand patents quickly(one point of patents is to release trade secrets to researchers). And yes I know the risk of treble damages from intentional infringement if the patent was read. Also, hopefully such a tool will prevent some folks from knee jerk reactions based on patent titles(who am I kidding :). I bet it would be very hard to make such a tool though
Thanks. Burying as dupe.
2048 MULTIPLE BOARD/NEW THEMES
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/2048-multiple-boards/id867840426?ls=1&mt=8
Information about me (Developer): I'm A 14 year old app developer from Albany, NY. I recently have developer my very first app. Don't let that fact turn you away, check out my app for yourself! Application Information: My app is based off of the largely popular puzzle game "2048". Mine offers a much smoother UI Interface. Its designed so the user has easy access to all the different features. It contains a 3x3 board, 4x4 board, and a 5x5 board. It also has three different color ways/themes. It has 3 separate numbering systems so the everyday user will have many different goals to complete.
Good old times :)
Man, if Python is the second best in readability, I want to become best friends with number one. (and I don't mean ugly syntax like forwarded arguments that makes Python look like ass, I mean normal scripts that read like prose)
The autocomplete is certainly nice, but it doesn't help lead towards what you might want for a particular search.
I use NoScript but have enabled the option "Temporarily allow top-level sites by default". That means any site I directly visit is allowed to run JS. But any references to scripts on other domains are blocked. That makes the web pretty usable but more secure.
Simply run the essay through the patent generator!
The submitter included a link to a launch announcement, but the text field doesn't get posted when there's a url. Here's the link: http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2014/05/04/streamparse
Why are you so worried about the opinions of others? Do you have more passion than other people who do what you do? Then that will be good enough.
Ah thanks for that, I commented on the twitter thread as well.

Interesting that was the conclusion someone projected though.
Actually, one of the goals of systemd is to standardize all Linux distros on a single set of tools. Which means that, yes, alternatives will go insupported. But in order for Linux to transition from just a kernel to a platform, you must have ONE userland stack and ONE set of APIs to cide to... for everything from system calls to UI layers and system management. This is an advantage that Windows had, and systemd finally brings it to Linux
But he also talks about document parsing and web dev. I think Python finds its edge when you have to combine things on the sciencey/mathy side of things with more user-facing software development. As the author said, it's nice not having to code switch between the a dozen best-in-field languages, when Python is highly capable across the board. Besides maybe C# and maybe Java, what other languages are as versatile?
systemd goes out of its way to fix the massive integration failures we've had for decades (and seen as almost unfixable) because Linux is so focused on modularity to a fault. And because of systemd, we're finally starting to get a level of integration that previously only appeared in proprietary operating systems. http://islinuxaboutchoice.com

So, basically you're advocating for a walled garden approach, then you link to a novelty domain that points to a Red Hat mailing list discussion where some person rants like a demagogue in a disjointed fashion that doesn't prove jack shit.

Quite impressive.

Linux is good at evolutionary changes, but not nearly as good at escaping local maxima via large-scale cross-project changes. Not least of which because anyone attempting to make such changes has to be prepared for the anti-change "but the UNIX way!" flames.

Or because Linux userland developers have historically been bad at cathedrals? The bazaar has always been more suited to the Linux community, and makes Linux distinct and refreshing compared to BSDs (which are an example of cathedral done right, by the way).

I've also found that well-articulated and well-founded arguments about problems in systemd don't tend to last long, because systemd will fix them. I'd encourage people who see a legitimate technical problem with systemd to go discuss it on the systemd mailing list; you might be surprised how quickly it gets fixed, if it has substance.

If the systemd team's insistence on not taking patches for alternative libcs, Lennart's circular argument on why you should adopt systemd because of systemd-logind being tightly coupled and hard to reimplement (https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...), the recent Kay Sievers controversy and other issues are anything to show, it is that the systemd team very much have their own convictions that are at odds with anyone else.
I too have had trouble finding where the bang codes are.

I think the easiest is this: Go to the ddg home page, click on the drop down to the right of the search field, and at the bottom of that is "By category (!bang)"

Click that and you'll go to https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Or you could just remember duckduckgo.com/bang :)
> it really a good idea to trust DDG (or any remote web service) to generate a strong password?

Probably not, but for ease of use, I've used it a couple of times to generate temporary passwords that users are forced to change on login.
Whenever someone calls me and asks me to confirm something - that is, reveal something - I always intentionally get it wrong the first time. If they carry on as if what I said was correct, I can be sure that it's a scam.
There is a related post from David Lowery (2013), sorry if someone already mentionned this (link is from his own blog):

http://thetrichordist.com/2013/06/24/my-song-got-played-on-p...

His songs seem to have a little bit more exposure than in the discussed article.
Lucid dreaming can be induced by electric scalp stimulation, study finds
I just hope that the UE3 desaster (promised port to Linux never happened) won't happen again.

Given the Steam Box rise, I have a bit of hope left. By the way, has anyone tried porting a 3d FPS over to a Raspberry Pi? I'd really be interested in its performance.
Not outside the HN bubble
Given how much demand there is out there for qualified female engineers, I don't understand why Meagan or any other engineer who works there would stick around feeling uncomfortable. Go work for google or Apple or any of a number of other companies that would love to have you work there and would treat you with the respect you deserve.

As for Bob Martin, looking at the linked posts it seems pretty clear he is a lawsuit waiting to happen. His company should fix the situation, and soon, or they won't be a company very much longer.
Jailbreak tweak brings multitasking to the iPad
True but have you seen most academic websites? They really aren't that into web dev. They are mainly concerned with static publication.
But yes Python is growing in this area and generally as command line scripting glue. I'm not sure its got all our lunch yet though.
Very interesting article; I wasn't aware that the kernel had this level of legalese/license shenaniganery built in.
I can't believe I'm saying this at 28, but that's a really young-person point of view.

I'm 48 and disagree with you completely. Email is long-form written communication - which we've been doing for hundreds of years (letters, essays, books, and much more recently, email). We (my generation, the ones before, and the one or two immediately after) grew up with long-form written communication.

I've long been of the opinion that telephone conversations have no place for serious ideas, because they are conversational, because they are mostly made up on the spot. Serious ideas (business proposals, scientific research, system and software design, novels) require long-form written communication because it forces you to think, to organize, and to express clearly.

Email - and Usenet and modern fora such as this one - can be used effectively for this same long-form written communication.

The generations I am concerned about are those that grew up with PowerPoint and SMS and Twitter: These media favour catchphrases, sound bites, etc.

Yes, there have always been these - but once upon a time they were a specialization that required thought. Witness copywriting and Churchill's famous comment about prepping a two minute speech. More recently, these became the de facto standard, legitimizing the sound bite conversations of a great many second rate thinkers and managers.

The long-form business plan, long-form business communication of any kind, has slowly dwindled, replaced with bullet speak and now tweet.

I would argue that the opinion expressed in the original article is in fact the oldest of old-school ideas: If you cannot take the time to think through what you are trying to say and compose a meaningful email, then I will use that as a first-pass filter and remove you from my overloaded queue.

If you cannot take the time, you are not worth my time. Most of the time.

Yes, email can and often is used for bullets and tweets. Sometimes that's appropriate. That's one of the things I like about email: It is largely content and length agnostic.

I am very much relieved to know that the preference for long-form remains alive and well, even if somewhat hidden. Bullets and tweets and soundbites will grab attention, which can be fine, but will generally fade. Except for those very few well-crafted sentences of lasting impact.

I would guess that the proportion of lasting impact to total expression in long-form is much greater than short-form for two simple reasons: There is far less of the former and its overall quality is simply higher on average, and there is much of the latter with so much noise and so little signal.
What are some good ways for a programmer to balance a day job and side projects?
That's also true about other composers. Some composers we consider cornerstones of classical music today were, for a long time, completely neglected. Hardly anyone today probably realizes that before the 1930s, Antonio Vivaldi was not a household name at all; he was pretty much completely unknown outside the field of musicology.

Vivaldi had been popular in his day as a virtuoso violinist and a composer of operas, until his musical style became too unfashionable for Venice, and he faded into obscurity, and was buried in a pauper's grave. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians of 1910 devotes a scant page to Vivaldi, and while it praises him as a technical innovator, also criticizes him as a style-over-substance showman ("Vivaldi in fact mistook the facility of an expert performer ... for the creative faculty, which he possessed but in a limited degree") and spends much of the article talking about how much better Bach was.

What's also interesting is that, aside from changing tastes, part of the reason was that a large portion of his works were simply considered lost. In 1926, a trove of manuscripts was discovered in an Italian monastery, and this coincided with a concerted effort of evangelism by a group of musicologists, composers and poets (including, interestingly, Ezra Pound, who coincidentally seems to have adopted Vivaldi and Italian fascism with equal passion) who reintroduced Vivaldi into the public and rehabilitated his reputation.

Of course, to the public — ie., people who are not hard-core music buffs — there are still a large number of composers who are completely unknown. For those who enjoy baroque music, I particularly recommend:

- Van Wassenaer: The six Concerti Armonici. A Dutch diplomat who dabbled in music on the side, but published his works pseudonymously; after his death his works were for a long time assumed to be by Pergolesi. The concerti are beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8lzbFkrlUs

- Biber: The Mystery Sonatas, aka the Rosary Sonatas. For someone used to the jollier, frothier side of baroque music, these will seem fantastically bare and stark. One of the monumental masterpieces of the baroque era. I specifically recommend the performance by John Holloway et al: http://open.spotify.com/album/0BJib6o3KcAxlPqwoydZNO. YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU4Xa_sFXak

- Marais: Tombeau de Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe. Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/5oKSW9dTwR7vTK1WEsMJLt. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nlq69pmADo

- Pergolesi: Stabat Mater. One of my favourite sacred works. Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/0WUzijy3MNKxp9OiOdSfhB. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mrVZHPikqM

- Couperin: Leçon de ténèbres (Lessons of darkness). In my opinion one of the finest vocal works of the baroque era. Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/3OfFUiLQ6BtEm7XatiFm72
Jailbreak-Tweak brings multi-window multitasking to the iPad [video]
> That is misleading.

No. Even if you don't agree that a stable release is the correct check point, that means the change was done during Squeeze's testing cycle and thus Lenny's lifetime, which started in 2009. Fact remains that Ubuntu switched years before Debian, as a number of sources confirm such as this LWN post from July 29, 2009[0] noting that, at that time, dash remained a topic of discussion on Debian mailing lists (and an unrealised goal for Lenny) whereas Ubuntu had switched 3 years prior.

> Ubuntu took, as they always do, this unreleased version of Debian and released it as the new version of Ubuntu.

That's not just "misleading", that's outright bullshit. Ubuntu switched to dash as /bin/sh independently from Debian and regardless of what Debian did.

[0] http://lwn.net/Articles/343924/
Python faces the same problem that Clojure does on mobile: start-up times are too slow and battery use is too high.

People have made valient efforts to overcome this issue in both Python and Clojure: Kivy, Py4A and Clojure on Android, in particular. But they still can't provide reasonable performance compared to native mobile frameworks.

It's just a product on Python implementation: too much complexity and too heavyweight objects (and almost everything is an object!).

To a certain extent, the same applies to Clojure -- there is a price to be paid for abstractions and (and in the case of Clojure) immutability, and it rears its ugly head the most when trying to fit these language implementations on resource-constrained mobile platforms.
I like the batsignal in the source
How did the pass up on the opportunity to call this DuckDuckGoodies?
I've always understood it the same way.
Quake was ported to Raspberry PI. It was part of a contest. More information probably on the PI website.
> you upgrade your compiler, and you see some mysterious new backtraces showing up in the crash reporter, then it's entirely possible your compiler is buggy.

IME, there are two more likely causes of this, that are kind of rooted in the same cause:

1. Your code depended on a compiler bug to function, the bug is fixed, and now your code is broken

2. Your code depended on an undefined part of the language semantics, the compiler changed from doing one undefined thing to another, and now your code is broken
Yes. Similar to the hyperbole in the article title, I say "All bugs are logic bugs" (in your code). Now, it's not strictly always true--sometimes it's environmental or in a library you depend on, or it's a garbage collection bug with the language, or what have you.

But some developers (myself included, sometimes) reach for those excuses first because their code couldn't possibly be exhibiting that strange behavior on its own. After all, it worked perfectly in (insert situations).

No, it's almost certainly a logic bug: a race condition, a parallel execution problem, something doesn't get set correctly in a very uncommon case, etc.
Why Most Product Managers Suck
Note that both djbdns and qmail have been in the public domain for years now. The general opposition to their license seems to have long outlived their license.
So, why not fork systemd and modularize it...?
I still sorta look at systemd as a solution looking for a problem.

System V style init is just 'good enough' for most applications - and if there is anything I've found in my time, the only people more adverse to change then telecom folks are Unix system administrators.
There was a lot of repetition about X, Y, and Z being anathema to the systemd people. I would've appreciated some links backing up these claims of their hostility. I've heard so much against systemd, and so little that wasn't hearsay. (This is not a comment on the merits of the objections against systemd, just on the exposure to the arguments I've gotten from casually browsing hackernews.)
People take risks. No-one is going to eliminate all risk from their life. People modify their behaviour according to the risk involved. Putting hot coffee in your lap is a risk, but the level of risk depends on exactly how hot that coffee is. No-one wants coffee of any temperature soaking their lap, but coffee that causes 3rd-degree burns is a lot different from coffee that hurts a bit. I would personally try to avoid spilling coffee in my lap, but I would treat coffee very differently if I knew it would cause 3rd-degree burns, and I would not expect any coffee served to me to ever be that hot. Maybe I'm partly to blame for my own ignorance, but it also seems reasonable that McDonald's either a) remove that risk by serving coffee at a lower temperature b) mitigate that risk by informing customers just how dangerous the coffee they're serving is when in contact with skin.
Lucas paradox
These are sadly, not even close to full.
There are some amazingly hilarious rants missing, like the proper portable way to figure out your hostname (iirc, gethostname or something was allowed to always return localhost), which at one point, someone suggested bouncing mail off sun's mail server and parsing out the response.
I hate the one-letter caption. Upvoted accidentally, I'm sure I'm not the only one. Maybe there should be a minimum amount of characters for the title.