skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's actually a good question. I don't know if you gain much from that objection besides clarity. After all, both "kinds" of probabilities share the same mathematics.

I think it's the other way around. People have certain intuitions, or prejudices if you wish, and it's useful to have terms that match your intuitions - even if they are slightly redundant. I find it helps me understand and explain statistical problems better.

About the coin: I think you have to distinguish between one concrete flip of the coin, and the coin itself. The coin itself has certain probabilities for generating heads and tails, and they don't change.

A concrete flipping of the coin is a different situation. You might see the coin, and know with near 100% certainty what it shows. Or you might have some machine which detects whether it is heads or tails, and this machine has a certain accuracy. When it signals heads, you might say it has a 95% plausibility to really be heads. And before you measured the state of the coin, you might say the plausibility is 50%, assuming the coin is fair. So the plausibility does change at time of observation (or when you get new information).

What about the time of the flip? Well, after the flip has occurred, this concrete instance is either 100% heads or 100% tails of course. If I repeat this exact coin toss (which I can't do in reality), I will always get the same result. And the probability to have heads, when you have heads, is 100% (P(toss #1 is heads | toss #1 is heads) = 100%).

This statement is a bit silly, but I think it shows that the probability of a thrown, lying coin to be heads or tails is not a very interesting quantity. Our degree of belief, given certain facts, that it is heads or tails, is interesting. And the probability of the coin in general, determined by its geometry, is interesting. And especially interesting is how you get from one to the other, which is where Bayesian inference, hypothesis testing, and so on come in (The coin is known to be rigged with heads=99%. My flawed detector says it is tails. What should I believe is the state of the coin, or what should I bet on?).

Finally, I should note that you should take what I've said with a grain of salt. I'm at best an armchair statistician, although I do get to think about stuff like this a lot at work (as a physicist).
Personally, I perceive the 'complexity as a status marker' less a technological or programmer culture problem and more as one of business and job culture.

You won't find someone building needless complexity into something if the fundamental goal pushes the limits of their abilities. Basically, starving men don't build Rube Goldberg Machines to crack their eggs.

In technology in general, the majority of jobs seem to be been-done implementation while the education and training continues to stress design and engineering.

Complexity is an outlet for every boilerplate operator who would rather be engineering and a differentiator to remind him/herself and signal to others a greater capability.
100%. The advice against skimming is sound. Read this like you would read the bible if you were a priest.
> Yes. But isn't HTML itself the flashy & pretty (and often non-value-added) alternative to plaintext, the functional & ugly interface?

No, HTML's improvement over plaintext isn't cosmetic, its functional. (E.g., automatically traversable hyperlinks.)
Programming languages are so previous century. The future is environments that move away from the machine and deep inside the user's mind. Automation taken into extremes.
The main benefit is support. Both in package updates and longevity.

Also you may want things like their software collections (which have had a hard time making it into centos).

Cost can be a little much especially if you don't need support other than package updates.

Also workstation in the minimum if you are going to do any development as desktop doesn't come with dev tools as far as I remember.
The more generalized a tool is, the more special knowledge you need to use it for specific tasks. The advantage of stored-program computing is that we can take a general tool (a computer) and package it with a set of automated instructions (the stored program) to turn it into a specialized tool that you can use with general knowledge. That's pretty much the fundamental endeavor of the software profession.

Compilers, IDEs, etc. are themselves generalized tools to produce more specialized tools; as a result of being generalized, they require special knowledge to use. A programming environment that allowed you to create an arbitrary specialized application using only general knowledge of computing would certainly be a great thing to have -- in fact, I'd describe it as the holy grail of computing.

People have been pursuing that goal for decades. Partial solutions have been discovered in the past (the OP mentions Hypercard, Visual Basic, etc.) but have generally been insufficiently powerful. It is also frequently difficult to keep them up to date with changes in the underlying technology.
Especially key is also what the bad reviews are for. Like in your case, you identify the bad reviews are unreasonable expectations. Bad reviews with claimed reasonable cause may be worth a little more pause.

Also important is number of reviews. I'd rather have a solid 4/5 product with 100 reviews than a straight 5 star product reviewed only 3 times.
It seems you're misinformed as well.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BehaviourDrivenDevelopment

Again, nothing to do with silly syntax. It's about acceptance testing.
Would you say that FP itself (not the thought process it generates) would benefit me in mobile application devlopment. It's mostly gaining data and then setting it.
Probably, but in this case, somehow Microsoft discovered they were using the noip.com's Dynamic DNS service... perhaps the Control servers "floated" around on the net and Dynamic DNS discovery was the best option?
The entire purpose of no-ip is so a server can keep the same domain easily while their IP changes (Dynamic DNS). I'm guessing that these servers were either rapidly changing IP addresses or being brought online/offline quickly and Microsoft wanted to locate them by hijacking no-ip so those servers told Microsoft directly when they were changing IP address.

Just a guess.
Yes. If you have RHEL installed on hundreds (or thousands) of HP/Dell servers at a Fortune 1000 company, you'll have someone to call if the kernel on some production machine keeps dumping.

I can see a bootstrapped company using CentOS, or a company running on angel/seed money. Once a company gets Series A funding though, you have to start wondering why they wouldn't upgrade to Red Hat. The message from the company basically is they'd prefer the sysadmin to spend their nights and weekends figuring out problems, instead of making a small payment for support service. This is the type of position you want to run, not walk from.

On a job interview, a good question for a sysadmin to ask an interviewer when they say "do you have any questions to ask me?", is, "Will I support any machines, operating systems or applications that are not under a vendor support contract?" Inevitably there will be one or two legacy machines or applications, but if you get a laundry list in response, run.
1) Lennart Poettering

2) MAH FREEDOMS!

There are technical reasons people don't like systemd that are valid, but usually the die hard anti-systemd people boil down to hating Lennart Poettering and complaining about how the US Constitution must some where say they never have to use systemd.

There are some valid concerns (big scope, bloat, feature creep, etc) but they really haven't come to fruition, although are still valid concerns.

At the end of the day, without much effort or trouble of switching to systemd from OpenRC, my system boots faster, which is great.
I think a lot of people are misinterpreting what the article is saying (and maybe it wasn't expressed that well). The author is not saying that we need a tool that lets literally anyone be a developer ("So easy even a manager can use it!"), but rather that the current technology stack is so hacky that it gets in the way of progress, and demands levels of specialized knowledge that are tangential to the task of building web applications: that is, a higher-level set of development tools. Just as (to pick a high-level, desktop-oriented language at semi-random) C# is easier to work with than x86 assembly language, because it hides the messy details, I think the author would like a world where building a web application is as easy as building a desktop application: a world where issues like data serialization, browser-specific JavaScript hacks (and the hacky frameworks meant to solve them), incompatible databases, constant vigilance against easily preventable attacks (cross-site scripting, SQL injection, etc), and the necessity of juggling at least 3 different languages (JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and whatever you have on the backend) do not occupy valuable developer brainspace.

The issue is that the current web technology stack was never meant for building applications. HTML was designed for static documents. JavaScript's early development was mainly for making terrible mouseover-effects on links. XMLHttpRequest is a historical accident. So, yeah, it all works together, somehow, but it wasn't designed to be used as it is today, and it shows. And it's the developers who carry the burden of integrating these hacks. I, like the author of this article, wonder if it wouldn't be nice to design a system to provide the advantages of the web (distributed client-server applications with highly-customizable, visually attractive front-ends delivered on-demand) with a slightly more human development process. If we can't replace the web outright, maybe we can build better tools ontop of it.

I agree that current web technology is a horrible pile of kludges. Let's try to build something better. Some attempts are already being made. Please check out the amazing Ur/Web language [1] that lets you write front-end code, back-end code (compiled to native), and database code in a single, type-safe language that statically guards against errors that are rife in dynamically-typed web scripting languages. It abstracts the database, without wrapping your data in an annoying object layer; it lets you write front-end and back-end code in one language that communicate transparently. It is far from a finished product but it is an amazing glimpse and what could be with intelligent develop tools. There are some great examples on-line that show how easy it could be. Easy for a developer, of course, not for a layperson.

[1] http://www.impredicative.com/ur/
Happy to talk to you about this if you'd like. Contact info is in my profile.
> The web won because it has the least barriers to entry for a new developer and solves a lot of difficult problems
> that the old-school application stack had. This is all from my history and point of view so I'm sure a lot of people will disagree.

In my hindsight, the web won in the enterprise because deployment was free. When the web was developed, in the early 1990s, vendors charged per seat for PC runtimes (Powerbuilder, Unify Vision, etc.). You got zero-cost runtimes, free client distribution (IE on windows) and application version control (server-sode managed code). The low barriers to entry probably exacerbated the hodge podge, but I'm happy to bill hours cleaning up after people.
You’re part of a preternaturally enlightened dev team, and have set aside an entire day for nothing but code review. However, after the first 2 hours, you realise that you have forgotten your glasses and have just been staring at colourful blurs all morning. What do you do?

You go talk to your boss and tell them you are taking indefinite sick leave, because if it takes you two hours to realise you can't read the screen you are clearly not accomplishing anything by going to work, you are probably either physically ill or severely burned out, and you will therefore need at least some relaxation time and possibly some medication or therapy to switch your brain back on.
"My problem with that problem is that it's some combination of naive, impractical and pie-in-the-sky."

Is it? We had simple yet general-purpose tools for end-users at various points (eg. Hypercard). Why can't we have them again?
> The web won because it has the least barriers to entry for a new developer and solves a lot of difficult problems that the old-school application stack had.

I believe the point of the article is that you shouldn't have to be a developer, steeped in the arcane knowledge of the LAMP (LNPR, Docker, etc) stack, to create an application.

His example (and seemingly his rose tinted wonder from the past), Hypercard, didn't require any knowledge more than you would need to create a spreadsheet. If you could work a mouse, a keyboard, and had a vision, you could create an application. Certainly a primitive application by today's standards, but I saw interactive games, training applications, presentations, order entry screens... the whole gamut of development potential written by people who didn't know what a Gigabyte was.
>>I do not think it's because most programmers just aren't trying hard enough, or don't know that it's junk.

Actually, that's exactly the reason.

Back in 2003 I was a sophomore in college and I took an intro-level CS class. It was taught in Java. Back then we didn't have sites like Stack Overflow, so if you ran into issues during projects you had to find someone who could tell you what you were doing wrong. Often times this person was the TA or the instructor, and those had limited availability in the form of office hours. So it was super easy to get demotivated and give up -- which is indeed what made a lot of wanna-be programmers (including me) switch majors.

Fast-forward ten years. We now have a plethora of resources you can use to teach yourself "programming." While this is good in the sense that more people are trying to enter the profession, it's not so good because when you teach yourself something complex like programming, it is often difficult to know whether you are learning the correct habits and skills. I've been learning Rails for the past five months and I spend a lot of time obsessing about whether the code I write is high quality, but that's only because I've been an engineer for six years and I'm well-aware of the risks of building something overly complex and unmaintainable. In contrast, most people build something, get it to work, and then call it a day. They don't go the extra distance and learn best practices. As a result, the code they produce is junk.
I don't appreciate the fact that heroku is actively not supporting php. A language which is by far the most widely used language on the net, which has matured in many different dimensions, and they've yet to provide support out of the gate for it.

I guess they don't want my money. Oh well.
Gary Bernhardt is currently working on a book:

https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/485978334434586625

You could do worse than learning from his book when it comes out!
I wouldn't say "broken", but more "stuck in its ways" since it's a huge standard, used by everyone, and as a result, network effects (literally everyone online uses email) keep it from being improved in any way.

It's also hairy, slow, and a bit buggy.

Some concrete issues: https://gist.github.com/mscdex/5329227

Since everyone's using this standard, the only way forward is to either jettison the whole lot and start fresh (network effect means this will never happen), or to wrap it, maintain compatibility, and slowly get your wrapper accepted (which is at least possible in this universe).
Yes, the question was along the lines of, why is Microsoft seizing other company's property, even with a court order... sounds to me like Law Enforcement should have done the actual seizure, even if Microsoft is consulting for them.

And there was no prior warning to noip.com -- they woke up one day and their domains were seized. They only found out why after the fact -- and, given the nature of free Dynamic DNS services, it's very unlikely noip.com was even aware that a botnet was using their services (the justification for the seizure).

And, I can't help but feel Microsoft could have obtained the same data by politely asking noip.com -- nobody likes to harbor botnets (and we have no reason to suspect noip.com of trying to do so). Seems domain seizure was heavy-handed at best.
Nice phrasing.

Programmers swarm to tools that cut to the chase, even if they're quirky. We want instant gratification :-)

The right thing is simple and consistent.
FP has been hard to realize on mobile mostly due to the limited choice of languages available.
YES! First thing I thought of, especially after seeing the wizard dude in panel 12. I am very much reminded of the level in Golbins Quest 3 where Blount is eaten by the wolf and has to put the three lights into the bowl to escape death. That game is an underrated a classic, in my opinion.

I love how this comic conveys the old adventure game feel of discovery and exploration.
>Optional, but enabled by default

Where is it enabled by default? In what distro does gatewayd get pulled in by default?

>No one is saying udev pulls in systemd as a dependency.

By the eudev hobbyists, whose justification for their fork was largely "we don't want to force people to use systemd" and "no, we didn't contact upstream with fixes before we forked" in their presentation.
You know what the best part about the game industry is? Leaving it.
Intentionally or not, the thought process FP languages generates will creep its way into your programs, and then probably into the way you would write object-oriented programs.
What Separates You from Success with Content Marketing
There is also the argument that in the old days, developers had to think carefully about their code and design. Spend time considering the data, structure and algorithms to be used. Resources were limited, maybe time at the computer was also limited. Inputing programs could have been labourious due to flicking switches or punch cards.

Basically, you had to stop and think a bit first.

Not such a bad thing - pausing to reflect before writing the first thing in the head, and releasing it as soon-to-be-abandoned-Ruby-Gem.

Also, developers of yesteryear may have had a more than passing understanding of the hardware, of how the OS worked, of how to work within the constraints.

Developers these days treat resources as infinite, as something to be allocated by someone else "mooooarr servers - page the devops!" - "but, if we just looked at how the code is performing?..." - "no, moooaarrr servers!".
So, in that first article, the point was not that the person used the sexist gendered pronoun, but _absolutely insisted_ on it.

Here's my example, and if the person in question is reading this, he/she can feel free to chime in. I posted in our internal forums about how I was planning my wedding (to another man) which "was getting very expensive, even without a bride." Someone called me out on sexist language, saying that not all women needed elaborate weddings/dresses/whatnot, and so on and so forth. We debated (privately) for a while. In the end? Honestly? I appreciated her viewpoint a little more, but I still think she was being a little over-sensitive. HOWEVER, I went back and edited my post to remove the offending remark. It was a minor change for me to make (and she wasn't totally wrong), and if it made someone feel a little more comfortable and promoted harmony, great. It ended there. It also would have ended had I _not_ gone back and edited my post. But if I made a giant stink about it, involved other people, treated her poorly thereafter, and otherwise was a giant unpleasant jerk to work with, well then yeah--I'd expect some consequences. Does she hate me now? I don't think so. Am I a terrible misogynist? I hope not. But I got reminded that people with different viewpoints and backgrounds will think differently from me, and I should respect that, and that's a very good thing.
NEWS FLASH,I in 3 AMERICANS HAVE BEEN CHIPPED - YouTube
What makes you different? Why would I use this site instead of Tinder or Match.com or even craigslist? There's a ton of dating sites. What makes your matching algorithm and filtering tools special? The screenshots on the home page don't really communicate this.

Second, I'd allow users to search before registering an account. But contact details are withheld until account creation. That way I can verify the efficacy of the matching and filtering functions before paying money. Or put another way - if I find someone interesting, I'm more likely to whip out my credit card and pay to get in contact with that potential special someone.
I have one rule , "pray .... non stop"
>I'm really surprised camera privacy took this long to arrive, and I wonder what the reasoning was for not implementing it at the same time as microphone permissions arrived in iOS 7.

I don't think apps could take photos without you explicitly triggering the process, so no permission was needed anyway IIRC.
No, I consider anything where step N involves "go to Github..." a non-starter for anyone who's not already a technologist. Self-hosted is great — in the world Snowden has demonstrated we live in, it's probably the best solution — but it needs to be turn-key, "plug it in and enter a username/password and you're done" level of effort, or it will never become widely used.
One of two major problems solved. Now they need to fix block sizes before miners are organized enough and tx fees are high enough to incentivize small block sizes.
Ah, yes, that makes more sense. I was more thinking as a researcher/architect at a private company after getting a phd -- in which case it sounded very low.

I never read op's post as an "actual" "career in computer scinece", more as a "career in software after maybe taking some CS (be that bsc ms phd or just a few courses)".

As for a post-doc in economics -- I would expect them to make more than minimum wage -- but again, if the goal was to make as much money as possible, I'd assume working as a consultant for Pwc or somewhere like that would be much better paid than continuing doing research in academia. Very different career goals though!
Without a doubt it is, for me, "Pat & Hen": "Computer Organization and Design" by Patterson and Hennessy. I was mesmerised by this book as an undergrad and spent night after night devouring every page. It is a true eye-opener, explaining why computers are the way they are from the compiler down to the CPU design. You even get to design a CPU from scratch, i.e., from basic logic gates (in the older editions, at any rate). Magnificent and enlightening, a must read for anyone who really wants to know "what's going on under the hood".
First stable release of Frameworks 5
For one, you can mirror your production environment in dev.