skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see the potential benefit in that, if there are specific types of business rules that really need to be configurable by the users.

However I think that if overused, this not only makes your system slow due to excessive string-comparing, it also leads to a potentially awful antipattern that I'm all too familiar with from my own experiences in enterprise software dev.

Add a few more features to this Aristotle language, and pretty soon you may have just invented yourself an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a new programming language.

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Enterprise_Rules_Engine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

If you really need configurable rules in a rails app though, I'd think it would be faster and more maintainable to just create a DSL within Ruby code rather than parsing a text file. Then you could use the if-this-then-that type business logic syntax but still have it be legal Ruby code and get all the tooling support that comes with it.
Most of the discussion is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8541997
(distractify.com)

More discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8606715
(grist.org)

Another submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595563
(citylab.com)
The whole article is a straw man.

Yes, if things further down your stack are not capable of handling the load in decent time your queue is going to overflow (assuming a fixed capacity). No, it does not make your entire stack faster -- it just defers processing in a way you can manage and tame it. What can become faster is things like front-end requests, which are no longer held up by blocking operations or a starved CPU. Either way, it buys you some time to actually re-engineer your stack to work faster and at greater scale.
Define "understand the fundamentals".

If you mean "the theoretical underpinnings", then, yes, we think we do. Turing machines and Church calculus provide solid theoretical underpinnings, that (as far as we know now) are complete. (Of course, the future could show us that they are incomplete. That's the problem with knowing whether your current understanding is proper - you don't know what gaps the future will reveal.)

However, if you mean "we know how to build programs so they work", there's massive empirical evidence that says that we don't. (That is, we can do it... sometimes. And sometimes we can do it after it takes five times as much money as we expected. And sometimes we can't make it work, ever. And we can't tell up front which will happen.) So in terms of this being engineering - as opposed to computer science - saying that we don't properly understand the fundamentals seems like an entirely reasonable statement.
They've had it since 2009 and this apparently is the first time they've been called out on how they actually got the evidence. Pretty good ROI, illegal or not.
Interestingly, science fiction author Larry Niven called it decades ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
I understand your frustration and anger. I've been there myself. However, I think you should be angry at Kickstarter.

They've created an environment where people can make promises they don't keep. After all, Kickstarter makes more money if promises are convincing (as opposed to realistic).

So far, I've never backed a project that delivered what they promised. They've certainly never delivered it on-time.

Kickstarter is, and should be marketed as, a gamble. You should never buy something you need there, nor should you expect to get what you "bought". It's not a marketplace.

Kickstarter is asinine for letting these disappointments continue because they're letting the "Kickstarter is full of empty promises" stereotype take hold.
Interesting but silly title both as noted in the opening paragraph and as the 'd' in 'CAD' means design already (computer aided design design)
It does go to show you that you need to understand the limitations of a hammer before starting to whack things with it. This is true of any framework or library you use. Even more necessary if you are processing billions of things with it.
James McKinsey Fixed Problems by Looking at Your Stationery
More weird panels, please! I still want a bare-bones monochrome laptop.
Have something to show. I don't know what technologies/languages you have experience in and/or are looking to interview in, but having a single example of a fully completed app/webapp will get you to the interview portion in a fair number of places.
I wondered the same thing too. I think the answer is here:

> people using closed source will start delivering faster and faster as they effectively partition the review/quality question to the person selling them the software

I guess the theory is that if you have a customer/vendor, contractual relationship, then you can task the closed-source vendor to describe, fix, or alter their API.

But my (albeit limited) experience is that the customer is not always right; sometimes the vendor just says "that's the way it is" and you're stuck either living with it or porting to a different company/technology. Conversely, it's often possible to hire a vendor or consultant to provide expertise and support for some aspect of an open-source stack. And because it's open-source, if you don't like your consultant you can go find another one without having to change your technology.

In short, I think the speed of innovation thing might have more to do with internal teams trying to manage too much diversity of technology, than with some inherent shortcoming of open source.
What did you have used to make the content on your ebook readable online? CMS?
Argh, thank you, you're right, I edited my post to reflect that.

I wonder if you could accelerate the whole way in a giant ship, and only slow down a tiny capsule at your 'destination' - maybe just a tiny self-replicating robot factory and some data storage. Decelerate that, land it, have it build you a new body, some tools, etc., etc.
The comment wasn't to serious but it just happened a couple of times recently that I spotted similar headings and after excitingly clicking on them expecting or at least hoping for a major breakthrough like a superpartner or magnetic monopoles it turns out to be a tetraquark, a quasi monopole or now a Xi. Not that these are not interesting or that a single click matters.
That is an excellent point. That we're building primarily distributed software rather than point software has two effects, one that the number of failure modes are quite high, and two that the 2nd and 3rd order interactions are not easily deduced by inspection. I like the organisms picture. I think of them as 'atoms' in a molecule but organisms is much better, it includes their own idiosyncratic behavior into the mix.
I think most of the people creating and using these libraries would use F# if they could sadly. (However I am one of the lucky ones doing clojure in my day job.) Also a lot of existing software that needs to be maintained in C# would benefit from this library or others like it, just like they would benefit from having tools like linq, immutable collections, tpl available.
Actually, open source allows something that is not possible with commercial software. You don't have to read all of the code and understand all of the implementation details, but you have that option if you need to. I think having the option is a great benefit as we can see from this example. When they started debugging they could reference the express source and figure out what was going on. If they were using some sort of commercial framework they would have had to either refer to the docs or call the help desk.

Just because you have the option to read the implementation details of every library and service you are using doesn't mean that you have to. You only have to learn enough about it to decide whether you think it is a good addition to your stack, and to use it to do whatever you are trying to get done. But open source gives you the ability to figure out why you're using it wrong, or how it is broken when that time comes.

If you are saying that open source is not documented well enough because the developers fall back on "check the source," that is a different argument where commercial software may be better, but this is not true for any of the more common open source software I've used.

Making a decision of which software to depend on in your application is something that is always difficult whether you have access to the source code of all of the choices or not. It's a decision that you make with limited information. You only have extensive knowledge of the tools that you already have experience with, so using alternatives is always a risk, but understanding and managing that risk is part of the developer's job.

And with regard to keeping up with changes, you always can remain with previous versions for some time to avoid the slowdown associated with shifting to new APIs.
> Our own solar system is outside the central part of the galaxy and a bit off the ecliptic plane. There isn't that much around us. The central core of the Galaxy could be populated, wars raging around us, and we're the equivalent of a mountain village in Laos.

The mountain village might be the only place survivable. The center is a lot more dynamic environment. Radiation levels also increase really close to the center.

> But could you imagine being one of these floater solar systems? We at least can reach some star systems in generation ships. They would would need much more.

If more than the resources of one stellar system are required for intergalactic travel, then they are stranded there forever. They will die with their star.
Doesn't like 30 seconds of exercise beat caffeine as well? Seems like if you just want a jolt of energy and cognitive capacity, coffee is a bad choice. It is, on the other hand, delicious.
I'm not an American, so financing is a little more difficult but if you are willing to put down 25%, it's doable. With 50% down, almost anyone will give you financing. This is institutional financing...there's always private money with higher interest rates...they are much more flexible with the terms.

Cash is king. You can get better deals if you have all-cash and can close quickly.
As you say the overhead should be similar to Nullable. And the struct should be allocated on the stack, but the CLR doesn't guarantee that, so it can be on the heap too.

There is however an 'if' in the constructor of Option<T>, so there's a little extra potential branching overhead. For most scenarios I suspect this is all moot, but if you're looking for the absolute maximum performance then you would probably want to do some profiling before committing too heavily.
Makezine gave it a pretty nice review after using it: http://makezine.com/2014/11/19/the-light-blue-bean-goes-mobi...
You are correct. I figure that HN and the commenters on the articles about the issue are the people who know about this issue, the general public perhaps not so much.

Going by those assumptions, rule out the general public, and while I still don't have a random sample, I have something. Pretty much the only thing around without actually polling. And that only thing concludes the opposite of "lots of people are supporting them." But whatever, that's all smoke.
Or they will have to wait to be visited by someone with more resources!
1. Because many people can easily afford the tools you need to learn programming (like the author said, a used MacBook, or any computer that can run Ubuntu). I'm pretty sure getting a hold of all the gear you need to be a practicing dentist will be much more expensive.

2. Because you can probably learn enough software development to do something useful in several months, maybe even enough to succeed in an entry level job. I think learning enough dentistry to actually practice it will take longer.

3. Because programming is much more lax about credentials. Sure, many employers require a CS degree for anyone they hire, but many do not.
Gah! Thanks for mentioning this. What browser did you try it with?
At that size something like 2880x2880 would be more "modern"
Use of this word predates Sacha Baron Cohen's entire existence.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1335...
page 10 but I'm not sure if it's only about organizations up to 5 but it's fine if you are Individual?? :
"Example 2: A Fortune 500 firm has outsourced the development of its store-locator mobile application to a small agency. The application is not an open source project. The agency has 5 employees working on the project and would like to use Visual Studio Community 2013. Since the agency is a contractor developing this application for the Fortune 500 firm, and since the application is not an open source project, the agency cannot use Visual Studio Community 2013 for developing and testing the application. "
You can't accelerate the mass of even a single human at 1g for 6 years using current physics and a feasible ship design. You'll need generation ships to get anywhere.

Though I do like some scifi stories I've read where the first humans went our on generation ships and in the meantime a new physics was developed that allowed those target stars to be colonized hundreds and even a thousand years before they arrive.

But developing a new physics presumes much.
Given that the second most prolific committer to the ConsoleKit git repository is a certain Lennart P. it is reasonable to assume that the systemd people did not decide to implement logind from scratch because of NIH syndrome.
Essentially, any civilization that developed outside of galaxies would need to invent one of two technologies.

The first is the technology to support their culture for a very long time without the support of a nearby star. In that case, there is no particular reason for them to visit galaxies at all. They simply pick a direction and go. Galaxies would be of no particular interest to a civilization that doesn't even need one star, nor would they need to travel at particularly high accelerations.

The second is a propulsion technology that does not require reaction mass (or reaction energy, as with laser propulsion). You would have to devise a way to move something without throwing something in the opposite direction. Thanks to the equations involved, trying to get a long distance away with decent speed using only chemical rockets basically means your ship will start the trip as more than 99.9% fuel by mass.

That is what prompts the imagining of alternate propulsion technologies, such as the Orion nuclear rocket, solar/laser sails, Bussard ramjets, slingshot orbits, and magnetic braking loops. Accelerating the fuel that you will later need to decelerate is a huge problem just for inter-system travel; you can't even bother with it for inter-galactic travel.
Thanks for the pointer, I will investigate. Also found this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gearmand/+bug/1150071
All stars you see at night with naked eye are within this galaxy. All of them.

Yes, Andromeda (M31) is visible to the naked eye, but it's pretty huge and quite close to us.

Orbiting a lone star, the naked eye at night would see something between absolutely nothing, and maybe a few faint patches of light. And that's in perfect conditions - middle of desert or ocean, zero light pollution.
(I'm coming from the perspective of having to use Oracle at work - and I'm happy to be corrected if my experiences do not match your wishlist)

> Easy sharding, a la Elasticsearch

Oracle RAC lets you add nodes to the cluster. Helps with CPU - doesn't really help with disk contention

> Fucking SQL. If I want a new feature, then dammit, build on top of SQL the way PostgreSQL has.

There is no good story here for Oracle. Postgres is amazing (and has the potential for more amazing) here. I'm surprised the legions of NoSQL developers aren't contributing to psql.

> For example, I want to make a materialized view that's the result of a query, but that gets updated as new rows get inserted or as the rows it uses gets updated. Let's call it a continuous view or something. Eventual consistency is fine.

This is how (certain) [1] Oracle Materialised Views already work (.. with some effort..) unless I've misunderstood you.

But you have to:

1. Define "logs" on all the included tables (observables)

2. Only define certain types of queries, otherwise they won't dynamically update

3. If not 2, then schedule the updates on a timer/job (eventually consistent)

4. Write your joins with the old syntax (WHERE A.fieldd = (+) B.field)

> I want to be able to choose if a table/db is always in memory or not. I don't care about individual rows - that sounds like someone else's problem

Oracle's In memory feature[0] supposedly offers this though I haven't had a chance to get at it yet.

> While I'm at it, I want a pony, too.

If you've got the money to pay for all the Oracle gear above, then you have more than enough money for a few Ponies ;)

[0] http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/database-in-memo...

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28286/state...
FTR: We use (Resque/Jesque) redis-backed queues extensively in our applications/APIs for interprocess communication, off-loading messages that don't have to be processed immediately, and for sharing load between servers.

This article could have been "X Don't Fix Overload". If you're not looking for, and fixing, the actual bottleneck, then any improperly implemented solution could be in that title.

With that being said, there is good information in there. I just didn't agree with the strong bias against queues.
How Samsung's OS stumbled – and aims to rise again
Not all panels have this problem. Of my monitors, only the one with the cheap TN panel has it (and it's so obvious it would drive me mad if I had to use it vertically). My screen with a PVA panel is fine.
I love Knockout. It's no more complex than it needs to be to get the job done, and works amazingly well. The new version supports reusable control element templates.

It does have some syntactic inconsistency around how you have to refer to variables in data-bind expressions, but that's the only real headache I've found.
I don't mind the waiting. I've waited an extra 2 months for the desk anyways. If my circumstances hadn't changed, I may have continued waiting. My frustration purely is due to how they handled my request for a refund.

Companies should be built to also take losses too, no? I view it like this... if I bought a product, received it and decided it was too small and wanted to ship it back, that's my fault. I would undoubtedly incur a restocking fee. Also, if I received the desk, it'd now be my responsibility to sell it online if I didn't want it. But I haven't received anything at all, so to me this isn't quite computing.

What you said is indeed a shame about Kickstarter. This is the first and only project I've ever backed, and it'll be my last. Lesson learned. I appreciate your feedback.
Now that's maybe newsworthy. A tutorial is not, however.

Edit: contrary to my assumption, the tut was released very recently, that is today. Still, a news site is not a very good place for announcing tutorial releases, even if the guidelines are broad enough to allow it.

It's Version 0.1. That may be noteworthy in the title.
> Thanks. I don't see a call to test::black_box(x), so I assume that was an empty function optimized out.

black_box is and does nothing, its purpose is to be opaque to the optimiser and make values it is passed "used" for optimiser purposes, otherwise the optimiser would remove the whole thing since it's a noop.
Ancient Survivors Could Redefine Sex
No, dark matter is something that happens within galaxies, affecting their rotation. It's not something outside.
The first step is the hardest. Typically people need some type of life/environment change in order to prod them into additional changes. Moving, getting a new job, throwing away your TV :) might be just the things to facilitate a change.

Unfortunately, friends often get in the way of that change. Few people do it on purpose, but if you suddenly find willpower your friends may feel bad about themselves and then try to pull you back down. You don't need to dump all your friends, but there is certainly value in evaluating each relationship and making sure it is positive and healthy. Some people you may decide not to see again (hopefully not), and others you simply decide to spend less time with. The saying I like to use is you are the average of the 5 people closest to you.
I don't believe it. I can see many galaxies from where I stand. They would appear even brighter without a local galaxy to wash them out. The sky would appear totally covered in fuzzy dots - galaxies.
I'm afraid this is a non-apology that does the same thing all over again.

Let's suppose you're 100% right. Please don't squander that rightness on pejorative epithets and personal attacks. Doing so is wrong, breaks the HN guidelines, makes you look like the jerk in the argument, and makes your position seem weak. That last point is a big deal: since by hypothesis you're right, roiling the waters like this impedes the pursuit of the truth for everyone.

Instead, identify what's wrong and point it out clearly without personal attacks. That's easier said than done, of course, but by hypothesis it has to be possible, and it's your duty to honest readers to try.
Kinda like Captain-Cook-era sailors stranded on Pacific islets.
> I strongly suspect that there is a way in Rust to iterate over a vector with only a single hoisted bounds-check. Hopefully other Rust people can chime in on what this is.

Iterators.
This actually mirrors my own experience a lot, except for a few differences. Biggest one being I haven't actually looked into employment yet.

I too bounced between Vim and Emacs until recently I decided to stick with Emacs. I too switched to Dvorak, later switching to Colemak. I used a typing tutor software with which I was actually able to get up to a respectably 50-60 WPM if I remember correctly. However I eventually switched back to Qwerty after growing tired of keyboard shortcuts never working the way they were supposed to. Sure I could rebind them in my favorite editor (and even that was a pain in the ass) but each time I installed something new I'd have to do it again. One thing I am grateful for from Colemak is rebinding Caps lock to Control, what a great idea.

I've also been dabbling between C, Lisp, C++, Python, Bash, and a few others, but I never really became really good at any of them. It was more than just the OPs 50-page dabble (something like 400 pages into C++ Primer) but I feel like I can relate. Sure I can write basic programs in all of them but I didn't have a "default" so to speak that I've mastered. Only recently I made the decision that Python would be that default. The reasoning behind it is simple, I already kinda knew it and it fit my use case well. I just wanted to do stuff with the language and Python makes it easy with its wealth of libraries and (in my opinion) intuitive structure. Stuff like Lisp and Haskell still have a place in my heart because of how elegant they are, but I just feel more productive in Python.

That's my sort of ongoing story of getting at what I feel is the same kind of focus the OP was talking about. Now if only I could just settle on a Linux distro instead of hopping around every few months (currently messing around in Slackware, though I suspect I'd be better off switching back to Ubuntu which I was using before I switched to Slackware).
College Applicants Sanitizing Social Media Profiles as More Schools Pry