skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> drawbacks that complicated type systems have: hellish compiler messages and long compile times

Scala has incredibly nice compiler messages and you can see Rust for an example of a language with complex types and short compile times.

These issues have _nothing_ to do with complicated type systems - you're projecting the failures of the C++ template system - failures which stem in fair part from the fact that it's not really a type system but simply a templater.

Finally, it's worth recognising that Scala goes to lengths to keep messy features inside their own compilation unit - for example, macros appear as functions to the outside and complex features such as implicit conversions must be explicitly imported for use.

I tried building our project in Go and Node.js explicitly to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute, irrespective of their background. It turned out that the additional complexity I had to pump into abstractions to make it happen made the code just as complex to understand.

It's quite possible that projects just have a natural complexity level and it's worth picking the language to match. There are certainly different times for different languages.
> 'Pumping water uphill' will likely always be a very good way to store power at those scales.

... but not when it's ice.
"Its only major counterfactual assumption is that the political will to avert carbon emissions can be converted into cash, but I’m going to assume that particular can opener for the sake of argument... If the damage from climate change is as severe as the establishment consensus argues, future Americans will not begrudge us this investment."

This smells like A Modest Proposal.
She's a victim because the consequences were completely out of proportion to her transgression.
I couldn't agree more.

I tried to get an Azure WebSites with an Azure SQL instance of Wordpress working. Getting PHP to run on Azure WebSites was easy/pleasant, getting Azure SQL to talk to PHP was an absolute nightmare and then even once that is done you have issues with instance naming and paths.

To be honest I completely gave up. I spent three days on the above setup, and never did get Wordpress working. Then after I gave up I spent one afternoon setting up the same thing using an Azure VM.

I like the concept of Azure Websites, but Azure SQL is just "meh." It isn't compatible with MS SQL which is a big problem frankly. A lot of stuff supports MS SQL out of the box, but it seems like Azure SQL is something else entirely.

PS - Azure does have an MySQL compatible offering, but it is by a third party. Nothing by MS themselves. So the pricing model is awkward.
Racist jokes are never harmless.
My Friend's Professor Uses This to Motivate His Students
I realized just as I started my last semester of a bachelor's degree that I was currently writing bullshit papers that I had to pay the professor to read and critique. If I followed my academic advisor's recommendations, I would eventually be paid to read and critique bullshit papers from people who would be just like I had been then, and possibly continue writing bullshit papers for an audience numbering, at most, in the hundreds, who all trade fictional reputation points to each other instead of the money they don't have. All the while, other people would be reaping immense profits from their work and consuming the greatest part of it before possibly giving a portion to the ones most directly responsible.

At this point, having just completed my Cognitive Science minor, I determined that the entire system of academia used avoidance of cognitive dissonance as one of its foundation stones. People become academics because they have already invested a colossal amount of effort into becoming an academic, and endured painful hardship in doing so. To turn their backs upon it would be to admit to themselves that they wasted a good portion of the best years of their lives on a fool's errand. Most people can't bring themselves to do that without the help of some major psychedelics.

Whenever I feel a twinge of regret, I select a random university, check their job postings and pay scales, and discover that they pay half what I currently earn for jobs with quadruple the responsibilities and equal or greater amounts of administrative hoop-jumping.

Teaching jobs pay peanuts because too many people are willing to do the work for peanuts. Do not trust your professors. They have a vested interest in creating clueless underlings who can take their place as they claw their way upwards.

If it is your passion to teach, use the extra money and leisure time you will have with a non-academic job to create a series of videos, and post them on the network.
People get offended, you might think that's right, wrong or whatever but it happens. And you certainly wouldn't make that joke outside of your close circle of friends.

Mob justice mentality certainly sucks though, imagine someone simply inspects one of your tweets, rewrites it and posts it somewhere and says "hey this person's racist, call their employer #{employer-number}".
I'd like to think that as the world gets more saturated in constant social media and sharing, that we'd have a higher tolerance for things...in this case, a joke that if a person told it to you, with the right tone of voice, it'd be funny...imagine Louis CK making that quip. But no, I doubt it...I think it's more a physical limitation of our brains...we just don't have the brain system designed to adequately consider all the context of all the messages we might consume in day...It's just easier to assume that a 140-character message really is an adequate reflection of someone who we have never met, and who we would have never been exposed to before the Internet. And it feels good to pat yourself on the back as you think, "Jeez, I can't believe such racist people still exist"

To paraphrase the famous comic from the New Yorker, "On the Internet, no one knows that you have nuance"
Wonderful analogy! I liked it, anyway.
Link for anyone interested: http://www.powershellserver.com/overview/ssh/
Please elaborate on the harm caused by her tweet.

Edit: Maybe I'm not being clear. What I mean is can you point to any harm done by her tweet besides hurt feelings?
Pax Dickinson is still unemployed a year later.

People's names become toxic. Note that the Donglegate guy wouldn't let his name be used, and another woman in the article wouldn't do a followup interview.
This type of mass shaming existed before twitter. The Steve Bartman incident[0] comes to mind. The difference appears to be that it used to only be possible for such things to snowball when the media or a celebrity pushed the issue into the spotlight. Nowadays, twitter allows for quick and easy mass shaming by anyone and everyone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bartman_incident
How was her life ruined? She lost her job, then got a new one. Her life seems fine.
We work at Duke University, and I've reached our to the people who work at the University Archives. They basically mentioned the same thing you did about 20 years being a long time.
As a software developer, I have thought about what it might take to create a system to support this type of use case using various cloud providers on the backend.
Thanks for your offer of assistance. I will certainly let you know should that need arise.
"Looking back, I wasted my time going on job interviews. My first job was actually better than I realized."

this is worth considering, especially when you're just starting out. I had a similar experience to the OP and had a string of 3 jobs where each was worse (in terms of being a mess) than the one before. I still managed to learn a lot along the way and don't really regret any of it, but in retrospect the first place had their shit together.
> Employee-owned co-op?

Employee-owned co-ops often follow the same corporate structure, except that the board is elected by the coop members (generally, non-probationary employees).
If I say something stupid to a group of friends, usually they'll tell me it's stupid or I said something wrong, and everyone moves on. If I say something stupid on twitter, it's literally archived forever. Another reason I'm glad I've disconnected from all social media. I'll keep my stupid, non-politically correct jokes in my own head.
There's nothing inherently unnatural about taking a bottom up approach to solving problems. Sometimes, knowing you're going to need a particular tool and doing that first makes sense. I think of it like the cooking technique Mise en place [1], where you lay out all the ingredients before you start cooking. Neither bottom up, nor top down, is always the most natural way to attack a problem. Sometimes you can attack a problem from both sides at once.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place
Outside of offending people, how exactly did her tweet impact anyone else?
Should clarify that "Priceline" is primarily Booking.com, not the amusing pricing opacity company out of CT (even if they did make the good decision to buy Booking.com years back).
The financial implications of these threats are fairly evident. Start with the increased cost of supporting a network capable of managing and integrating distributed generation sources. Next, under most rate structures, add the decline in revenues attributed to revenues lost from sales foregone. These forces lead to increased revenues required from remaining customers … and sought through rate increases. The result of higher electricity prices and competitive threats will encourage a higher rate of DER additions, or will promote greater use of efficiency or demand-side solutions.

Increased uncertainty and risk will not be welcomed by investors, who will seek a higher return on investment and force defensive-minded investors to reduce exposure to the sector. These competitive and financial risks would likely erode credit quality. The decline in credit quality will lead to a higher cost of capital, putting further pressure on customer rates. Ultimately, capital availability will be reduced, and this will affect future investment plans. The cycle of decline has been previously witnessed in technology-disrupted sectors (such as telecommunications) and other deregulated industries (airlines).

http://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u...
For me it was the fact that it was python, relatively light, designed specifically for load testing, and was able to scale the number of users out of the box with minimal configuration.
How, exactly, did her tweet affect people?

...unless you standard for "affect" covers all communication. In which case, you're saying "People should pay for the sin of expressing an opinion or making a joke".

...and perhaps you are.
In case you still want 2.1 on OS X:

brew tap homebrew/versions
brew install gnupg21
I think the barrier would suddenly rise much higher if you proposed to build a million copies of the unit, and sell them to others. Or if it suddenly became commonplace for people to make their own cars.

Even if self-built automobiles aren't safe, on an absolute scale, there are too few of them to constitute a safety threat compared to other large-scale problems like distracted, reckless, unskilled and impaired driving.

Also, the legislators probably figure that people who build their own car are likely to drive with care. The last thing that a hard working maker wants to do is to wrap years of work around a pole.
Hey, sorry - when I came to Scala I'd seen enough other languages that I read the language spec[1] and learned most of it in a day.

Since I never spent time onboarding myself, I'm not sure I can be any help. :/

The docs website is amazingly good, though - the tutorial[2] covers most of the unusual-in-Scala bases very quickly.

[1]: http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/ScalaReference.pdf
[2]: http://docs.scala-lang.org/tutorials/tour/tour-of-scala.html
Also blank in Chrome (OS X). Or in Safari (iOS).

Presumably there's some browser configuration that isn't a blank page. Anybody care to let us know what it does when it's not blank?
Zen Founder, Rob Walling podcast about blending startups, family and life
I'm friends with Dori Hadar, the DJ & record collector who found Mike's albums at the flea market. It's an amazing story and it's been great to see Mike get the attention his art deserves, all the way to inclusion in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian.
Two things: Don't be too clever. People trip over themselves to feel offended. Two, you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online. Not being malicious -just obnoxious.

Yes all the tweets quoted in the article were obnoxious and leveraged stereotypes but I don't think people should be flogged for being like that.

I remember all the obnoxious Polish jokes growing up. They were terrible. But I don't agree that they should be censored. Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes.

It's like with friendships. With good friends you can nettle them; say terrible things and we know that's it's all in good fun, a ritual of sorts. With so so friends you don't make bad jokes because the friendship is too fragile. It's a sign of an immature or fragile society when bad jokes upset the cart.

Edit. An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.
SAE J1772 is a North American standard for electrical connectors for electric vehicles maintained by the Society of Automotive Engineers and has the formal title "SAE Surface Vehicle Recommended Practice J1772, SAE Electric Vehicle Conductive Charge Coupler”.[1] It covers the general physical, electrical, communication protocol, and performance requirements for the electric vehicle conductive charge system and coupler. The intent is to define a common electric vehicle conductive charging system architecture including operational requirements and the functional and dimensional requirements for the vehicle inlet and mating connector.(1)

The SAE J1772-2009 connector specification has been added to the international IEC 62196-2 standard (1)

The SAE J1772-2009 was adopted by the car manufacturers of post-2000 electric vehicles like the third generation of the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf as the early models. The connector became standard equipment on the US-market due to the availability of charging stations with that plug type in the nation's electric vehicle network (with the help of funding such as ChargePoint America program drawing grants from provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).(1)

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772
Being publicly racist harms people towards which said racism is directed at. I honestly thought that was an established truth.
I've used locust before - had a good experience. The benefit here is that you can more easily script and simulate "real"ish looking traffic as opposed to hitting the same 20 random URLs - hopefully that'll give you a better idea of your projected real world performance than running ab on one URL that's cached after the first hit anyway.
I lived in an apartment where 6 out of 8 apartments were occupied by alcoholics or drug addicts.
Nearly every block on that street was the same. This was Glasgow, and the drug of choice was heroin, although everyone also smoked as much marijuana as they could afford. These people's lives weren't particularly shit on a day-by-day basis, but they had nothing but misery on the horizon. If they had kids they would lose them, they would never work, never be praised. They'd never see the world. Most of them hadn't been outside Glasgow for years, if not the whole of their lives. They would probably never go to the beach or on even the shittest package holiday. Those who were obviously junkies (struggling to walk, sunken faces and destroyed skin) were basically seen as an underclass by everyone from their peers, to the rest of the population and the police.
But there were people living in the same street, in the same apartments, with far less money, working shitty jobs, who weren't even open to taking drugs. The structure of this area wasn't bad at all - it could have been Rat Park, if it wasn't filled with drug-addicted rats who just pissed in the common areas and threw their rotting food out of the window.
I don't have any great insight here - but I think there's more to it than environment as suggested by this study. There are people all around the world who live in far worse conditions and who aren't turning to substances, even when they are available.
My feeling is that rats living in cages, who can see rats living in Rat Park would be more likely to seek addiction. And perhaps even more so if they see other rats being moved from cages to Rat Park, but not them. I don't know if rats could understand this concept though, which might be why they aren't all living in Afghanistan's poppy fields.
On the other hand, since his intention is that he is going to be driving it, he's far less likely to make the sort of "value engineering" tradeoffs that mass-production cars are subject to. He certainly won't design for components to fail shortly outside the warranty period, for example. And lacking the advanced computer simulations that are used today to often determine exactly how much material/strength is needed, he'll be inclined to overengineer and make things more robust.

It's going to lack a lot of safety features, but I think that it'd still be better than e.g. a motorcycle.
It would be interesting to see the market statistics for installed generators. I bet propane and natural gas have a lot more of that market than gasoline and diesel.

(for homes with nat gas it's a no brainer)
Geeklander 2014-2015 [video] (NFSW)
Ask HN: Resources/talks/outlines for modern PHP practices?
I first started on PHP 5-7 years ago when PHP was still a mess. I've been coming back to it now via the company I work for. I'm looking to learn best practices and whatnot for modern PHP. What are your favorite resources/talks describing design patterns and best practices for modern PHP? I'm looking for anything from GC optimization to overall structure of PHP libraries, etc.

Herb Sutter's "Back to Basics: Essentials of Modern C++ Style" is an example of one of my favorite such talks for C++. Hopefully that can steer the discussion.
The problem is compounded in that not only are people easily offended, savvy organizations (cough Gawker) have monetized being offended. So not only are our limited monkey brains quick to be insulted, there are now people whose job it is to find the Maximally Offensive Tweets of the day, which only compounds the problem.
Really? She mocked a whole nation, and used a disease that has killed over a million people as a joke in a public forum.
Here's the complete runtime of my garbage-collected self-hosting Lisp-to-C compiler: https://github.com/darius/ichbins/blob/master/ichbins.scm#L2...

(Yes, it's not the world's fastest.)
It's for that exact reason, I never post to Twitter. However, I consume a lot there. And as a consumer of various Twitter Feeds, I have to say I am pretty happy with the product.
The multiple backup solution is the one we're going with for now. I just met with her this week, and she is using an external RAID-1 solution while she is in the process of recording the videos to leave for her children. I'm also actively working with her to select a could provider to host an additional backup.
Her family will need to make a fresh copy of the data every 5 years or so as magnetic media is only so reliable. I told her that I would, of course, make myself available to help with that process. I'm just not sure if they'll remember to do it.
Thanks for your well-wishes.
Please point out the racism in her satire-laden joke about how america perceives the rest of the world?

Am I the only one that "got" what she was saying?
The classic pattern. Have an open API, grow until you think you're large enough that people are locked in, then lock it down.
It seems as though the whole travel industry is excited about the news:

EXPE - 90.45 +15.64%
OWW - 11.65 +21.05%
PCLN - 1092.83 +3.09%
TRIP - 82.03 +21.94%

Worth noting as well that the deal was based upon 115M Orbitz shares @ 12/ each, which makes it a $1.38B. The $1.6B represents the enterprise value.
Send free SMS notifications from your ruby code
Blendoku Puzzle
SLF4J has two ways to do "tagged logging": markers that are passed per-call, and a thread-local mapped diagnostic context (MDC). The latter is useful because you can set it for an entire request and have it included even for code that isn't explicitly aware of e.g. accounts.

Unfortunately Go doesn't have thread-local storage, so that feature may not be feasable. (Except through ugly hacks: https://github.com/jtolds/gls)
Tax Season File yourself and get a bigger return
I think there are multiple factors to Lisp's claim to fame, and other have covered a few of them. But one thing to also keep in mind is the historical context. Lisp had features like garbage collection and much more of a "batteries included" standard library. It was a much higher level language, and more safe to use (memory safe, fewer incidence of off-by-one errors, etc.) compared to most other contemporary languages in the 70s and 80s (C for instance). You might still see a lot of Lisp advocacy aimed at wooing you away from those languages by touting the virtues of bignums/rationals, garbage collection, anonymous functions/closures, etc.. By the time the late 90s and 2000s rolled around pretty much of all of the popular languages had incorporated high-level features pioneered by lisp, and so now-a-days lisp doesn't probably seem quite as attractive to python or ruby or javascript or C# or Haskell users. Also, I think there may just be some personal preferences involved in different language choices. If you like C, and think it is a great language, then I'd say there is a lower probability that you'd like lisp, because they have a different philosophy about how programs could be built.
Locust is really focused on load tests (rather than acceptance tests). It's an alternative to ab rather than one to a headless browser.

You definitely wouldn't use Locust to test a UI, or even to test your API responds correctly, but you'd use it to know how many requests per second that API can serve without falling over.

---

Two key differentiators (advantages?) Locust has over ab are:

+ It's scriptable, so you can design complex interactions like described in the blog post (or even something as simple as logging in prior to hitting the app).

+ It supports clustering. It's easy to setup a multi-host Locust cluster, and results are aggregated to your locust master.

I don't have an affiliation with Locust, but I did find it extremely easy to setup and use when I needed it (for HTTP load tests with ~20K RPS).

I do recall a few scale issues (e.g. running out of client ports would break the clustering), but with a bit of fine-tuning, it runs like a charm.
She paid about a hundred thousand times over for that mistake. Is that fair? Is that justice? No, it's a mob lynching. This is indefensible.
I think you're complicating things. You don't need the car and the battery. Enough cars can act as a distributed power cache.
Another one of those "Why X is the new Y" posts. Gave it a read.
"The woman who took the photograph, Adria Richards, soon felt the wrath of the crowd herself. The man responsible for the dongle joke had posted about losing his job on Hacker News, an online forum popular with developers. This led to a backlash from the other end of the political spectrum. So-called men’s rights activists and anonymous trolls bombarded Richards with death threats on Twitter and Facebook."

Wow, this almost makes it sound as if HN is a bunch of MRA losers :( A pity it's so sloppily worded (unless it's true, in which case, ugh).
Sorry, noticed that you submitted and your name is on the website!
Well, as a sometimes Cubs fan, I have to say Steve deserved what he got.
Hubris is a funny thing, I think it prevents our knowledge from growing far more than it should.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html