skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've presented numerous topics to consider, many deserving of discussion beyond what this thread can supply. If you don't mind, I'll try and give some guidance/advice on the aspects I can.

Recognizing "the churn" so often present in our industry is a major milestone in maturation as a person delivering solutions to problems via creating software. The rush many initially experience when exposed to the fact that their thoughts can be reified as programs which dutifully encode their wishes is quite intoxicating. Key here is "initially."

Progression from "I can make a computer do what I want" to "I can make my favourite environment do what other environments do" is a short leap indeed. Herein begins "the churn." Specifically, I mean that problems previously solved in other environments present themselves as an opportunity to be transcoded into (insert environment here). It is far easier to dissect an existing solution and produce an equivalent in another language than it is to tackle something new.

With this background established, let's discuss some of the specific points you have broached.

> I used to love software/programming but it's getting boring now.

A lot of responses have said you might be burnt out. I do not belive this is the case based on what you have written and the title of this thread. Instead, perhaps the fact you are "bored with life and software industry" is because the passion you have for what you love to do has been muted (more on that in just a moment and not the same as burnout).

> It seems so clear to me that so much futile effort is being put into building yet another language, yet another editor, yet another UI rework, yet another infrastructure rework. And for what, just because people would have something to show for.

This is experiencing enlightenment. When this sort of epiphany happens, seeing efforts addressing the same things over and over again becomes obvious (as you state). And once our eyes are open, we cannot close them again. Given a situation where a person has experienced this type of growth, yet may not feel they are in a position to progress with it, some combination of boredom/frustration/dejection/futility are sure to follow.

> Does it get any better ?

Yes. And you are at the precipice of it being so.

It gets better by accepting that those junior in the field experience the aforementioned progression and will duplicate projects often for the ease of being able to simply transcode. And that's OK, as they are in a period of discovery which is entirely new to them.

It gets better by recognizing that still others will reinvent the wheel just because that is all they can do. Their growth has stopped for whatever reason. And that's sad, but their choice.

It gets better by realizing that you have reached the point where you can discern duplicate efforts and choose what of those offerings are best for your way of thinking and/or working.

Finally, it gets better by allowing yourself to choose your own path, trusting your awareness/experience, with what you feel is best for how you can optimally do what you love to do, and eschewing what others espouse since they simply are not you.
Here's how you can read the article ;)

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
"Having to deal with people" is not limited to the software industry.
One of the problems with wine as an investment is it is not very liquid - sorry I could not help myself with this one :)

Actually the bigger problems are storage costs (the back of your cupboard just won’t cut it) and the less than reliable advice you will get buying in the futures market (the number of “vintages of the century” we have had in the last 15 years defies statistical plausibility). Of course if you like fine wine then even if it turns out to be a disaster of an investment you can at least drown your sorrows.
How did you go about converting the Excel workbooks into a usable program which you can feed data into and get back computed results?
I'm there. I decided one day that it's just a job and found what I really wanted to do.

So I'm reading maths and physics now. The joy in my life is actually from taking things to pieces and seeing how they work and there is plenty of that there.

For more of being with you, my company drank the microservices kool aid. Rather than concentrate on building a quality product we've got buzzword soaked boiled shit that doesn't work properly. There's nothing wrong with microservices in principle but they lack the talent and experience to pull it off. So there I am, a doomsayer, a figurehead on a ship of fools.

Edit: Just to add, I work for liars and a personality cult and that is the root cause. Why don't I leave? Money is amazing and that gives me the freedom I need.
I wrote about Kotlin quite some time ago.[0] I have to say that at the time, I was quite impressed by it all. There were some really good features, it had a much smaller dependency compared to Scala, and so packaging a Kotlin application was a lot easier than say an application in Scala. But to answer your question, there are a few benefits and drawbacks of Kotlin as a language and a platform:

+ World class IDE support.

+ Simple Language, that isn't as complicated as Scala (but this really depends on what features you end up using) but is expressive nonetheless.

+ Really good Java compatibility (if that matters to you that is).

- Language still does not have a 1.0 (although for a few GUI apps I've done, things are pretty stable)

- Language has poor documentation compared to the likes of Java and Scala

- Language has few learning resources (but two people in the Kotlin team are working to change that)

As far as Android development goes, Android Studio is built on top of the IntelliJ platform (which is Jetbrains' product) so I think you'll get really good android development support for Kotlin although I'm a little indifferent to this. I think that at one point go is going to become the defacto language for Android since google likes to keep everything in-house.

[0] http://nafiulis.me/kotlin-koans-i.html
Well, C was designed for the purpose of writing Unix.
Add VisiCalc and TurboCalc to that list and I'll have to say "Yeah, me too!".
What strikes me as strange is that you don't usually ask others to maintain your unmaintained labor of love for you, because you don't have the time and manpower. Plus, it sounded like they were complaining that they "weren't keeping up".
Lots of answers to this one, including "It's not really", but the most commonly cited connection would probably be Dennis Ritchie.

He was half of the original Unix team, and most of the original C team.

There are also cross-overs in terms of "design ethos". (complex structures should be comprised of well-composed combinations of simple structures)
New Horizons: Pluto may have 'nitrogen glaciers'
Today, of course, the NUMMI plant belongs to Tesla.

For a good book on the subject, see "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters", by GM's Bob Lutz. He was the one who insisted that GM improve their sheet metal fit and paint quality. Neither was really that hard, but GM hadn't focused on perceived quality.

Lutz points out that at one point, the NUMMI plant was making a model which shipped with both Toyota and GM badges. The Toyota model was getting better reviews on quality, even though it was the same car made on the same assembly line by the same people.
> Feminists saying women shouldn't be jailed for anything https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/06/...

My reading of that is that she wants nobody to be imprisoned, she just thinks that for various reasons, the argument is more realistic for women right now -- for instance, the far lower incarceration rate of women, and the otherwise-irrelevant practical reason that there's a O(number of incarcerated genders) monetary cost in prisons with a high constant factor. Getting all the women out of prison is a greater cost savings than getting the same number of men out, and easier than getting all the men out. But I don't see any indication that she thinks her arguments wouldn't apply to men as well: "Essentially, the case for closing women’s prisons is the same as the case for imprisoning fewer men."
I'm trying to think what you'd use compressed air for here, and the only thing I'm coming up with is some sort of parcel cannon, which while awesome does seem to have a few issues.

What am I missing?
I'm surprised that no one mentioned Functional Programming languages. I think the way they think would be quite refreshing for someone get bored of OO.
I don't think you can say "Haskell is nowhere near an ML-like language" based on just lazy vs eager evaluation.

See here[0]:

> Since Haskell is inevitably an ML (descending from Lazy ML) derivative, one might begin by pointing out the similarities:

- First-class support for algebraic datatypes (disjoint unions)
- Pattern matching on primitive and custom values
- Arbitrarily higher order functions
- Type synonyms
- Hindley-Milner Type Inference
- Parametric Polymorphism (define arbitrary Functors etc.)
- Ad-hoc polymorphism (Haskell through type classes, SML through modules)
- scorn of inclusion polymorphism (sub-type relations, a la object-wise inheritance)
- Monads (and other exotic algebraic structures)—"Haskell has monads" is a common claim of superiority, but the reality is that at the language level a monad is nothing more than an abstraction pattern, and hence every language (can) have monads. Including a monad or not in any given language is a library-level decision.

> While the bread-and-butter language features may be similar, building software in Haskell vs SML is actually quite a different affair:

So we can see a lot in common there.

0: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-key-differences-between-Ha...
I cook everyday, often 2 meals, while going to university and working. I used to be a chef, and while it's much different cooking at home, I now feel I have a pretty good handle on it.

My advice:

- Buy a pressure-cooker and learn to use it

- Salads are great - no cooking, healthy, tasty (for dressing use just lemon/balsamic/flavoured vinegar and olive oil)

- Eat more vegetables (healthy, and easier/quicker to cook than meat)

- Eat more fish (fish cooks in less time than meat, is easier to cook, and is healthy)

- Buy seasonal - you can get great quality products for cheap - especially if you go to the farmer's market and buy near the end of the day

What dinner looked like today - grilled halibut, rice, tomato/spinach/goat cheese salad. Total time from start to finish - 20 minutes. Probably only 10 minutes of my actual time, as I sat around watching TV while the rice cooked and the fish was on the grill.

As for the article on meal-kits, while it's an interesting idea, I don't see the 'value' in simply assembling a few raw ingredients in a box. It saves what, 5-10 minutes at most, for a decent mark-up in price. If anything, people just need to practice cooking with raw ingredients (and pay less attention to the food networks).
Ah that's some good analysis. I would love seeing this calculation done precisely, for that 30 light year figure (and other distances). There's other factors to put in too whose significance idk like the size of the sun -- if it's much larger this increases significantly the range of angles in which occlusion occurs.
I experienced this, to some degree, a few years ago; I was mid-thirties at the time. I bought a motorhome and started driving. I traveled for about four years; my business and my income suffered for it, but my mental health improved. I started another non-tech company, a worker-owned cooperative, and mostly failed at it (it never made much money, but I had fun, helped make some really cool stuff happen in my community, and learned some things).

Somewhere along the way I started to regain some of my joy in technology (mostly I realized how much magic I have at my disposal compared to most people who can't program, can't build/deploy/administer servers, etc.), and have begun several new projects and begun to refocus on my primary project/business in a manner I haven't been able to do for a while. I moved into a regular house a year ago, but decided I didn't like it, so two days ago I bought an old Avion travel trailer (one of the shiny silver classic kind) and will be moving the rest of my stuff into it tomorrow.

I'll be hitting the road again...but, will do so in a way that enables me to be connected to tech more deeply, rather than almost completely disconnected. I'll spend some time in Silicon Valley, will catch several relevant Open Source conferences, etc.

I'm not telling you to buy an RV and travel from Alaska to southern Mexico for four years. But, it worked for me. Maybe a major change really is what you need. If you've been reasonably successful with your tech work, you probably have some flexibility in what you do, at least for a little while. Make use of it. I wound up quite broke in the process of all this, so maybe don't go as far off the reservation as I did; that may be part of my impetus for getting back into tech with such gusto...money comes so much more easily for tech work than any other work I've ever done (maybe partially because I'm so much better at it than any other work I've ever done).
Marketing automation and crm
We talk about our experience in running a CRM company, as well as foibles from our sales guys and product guys.
Surprised how many people are talking about currency/government protection and so few people about engineering.
I am trying to download the latest release (1.12.4a) but I am caught in a never ending loop http://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/files/.

Edit: okay, sourceforge is broken for me for any download, no matter the browser.

Let's consider that my sourceforge rant of the week.
We really like this post from a sales guy about trying to sell to customers who are too hard- but want your time. http://blog.stackcrm.io/2015/04/29/the-power-of-blocking-cus...
Having spent moderate to significant time with bjam, waf, qmake, make and cmake, I more or less settled on cmake because:

A. It's what everyone else is using.

B. It's simple to do common things.

C. It's pretty darn fast with the Ninja backend.

The only downside seems to be that the cmake language is ugly and limited. Fortunately, I only need to write a tiny amount of cmake code to build most of my projects, since find_package is so good. (Though, it probably sucks to be the guys making that work.)

To be honest, every tool I've tried has kind of sucked. cmake just sucks the least. One day I'd like to investigate tup and shake, though.
Do you have any particular technologies in mind?
Rounding happens when the value is displayed. To see the raw value, try: =(0.1+0.2)
That seems to be a problem with sourceforge. I was trying to download something else earlier today and had the same problem.
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> And what does WordPress do for humanity that makes this legal spat of any interest?

By some estimates, it powers 25% of all sites on the internet (http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all)! I am not a fan of wordpress from a technical perspective, but you can't deny that it has had a HUGE impact on people having their own websites.
The First Gogoro Smartscooters Will Start Shipping Tomorrow
I'd go one further.

Why are there so very few programs written in say, haskell, that you actually want to use?

This is a serious question that I haven't found the answer for. Around here people suggest pandoc, shellcheck and sometimes the xmonad window manager as pretty much the full list of things you can install, use and hack on written in haskell whose purpose isn't writing haskell code.

Given the popularity of haskell amongst hackers and the various claims about its benefits and strengths, the fact this list is so small (if it's larger and I'm missing a bunch - please DO let me know, I want to play with them and hack on them!) Is something I have difficulty reconciling with haskell being a useful general purpose programming language. Maybe they're being written now and they're on their way? But haskell has been around for more than a few years now. Maybe haskell hackers just mostly hate open source & free software unless it's GHC or a general purpose library? Seems unlikely. So maybe something else I don't yet understand. It is puzzling when I don't code in the language fluently enough to understand its weaknesses as opposed to my own in coding in the language and it's a point the many lovers of haskell never seem to address other than with extreme defensiveness which kind of misses the point of the question.
I have to tell you, when I see GPL license on a game, I see the good intention you have.

Have you considered changing the license of Wesnoth to MIT so commercial game developers can use their time and effort on components can port them to their own projects too?

I can't justify investing hundreds of hours programming new components a project (even one I'm passionate about) that a later derivative can't be used by my company.

I could elaborate.
But as noted above, python is not copyleft.

The (now obsolete) GNU implementation of the java class libraries was GPL licensed, and had a special exception just for this, called the "classpath exception": http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html

The Sun Java implementation was not GPL until 2006/2007. And since Oracle successfully sued Google for making its own compatible function prototypes and class definitions and such ... well I'll agree that the java situation may in fact be a shitshow.

Also, did you know that the GPL has a system library exception? So you can legally dynamically link to OS X's libc or Windows' win32 as needed to run a normal process. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SystemLibraryExcep...

So really there's no language (except maybe sun's java, I dunno) where this is actually a problem.
Yeah. And I thought this experiment was too stupid. I can't beleive how petty Hacker News has gotten to mark me down on this.

Unsubscribe.
Some are still pretty bullshit though.

> Why drop lambda? Most Python users are unfamiliar with Lisp or Scheme, so the name is confusing

To which I'd reply: Why drop class? Most Python users are unfamiliar with C++ or Java, so the name is confusing.
It's absolutely not. Everything I've seen has been 64-bit double. If you need to, you round either intermediate or final calcs to a set precision.

I once worked on replicating a particular index, and the engine used fixed point internally. In order to get the values to match with the ones published officially, we had to emulate Excel floating point: our fixed point values wouldn't line up with theirs.
Previous discussion of Jeep hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9921557
Always looking for something more simple than (my current) Scala.

- Argued with the developers, they have not clue about Option/Maybe and what it's good for. They offer non-nullable type which solves just one - minor - problem with Null

- No deconstruction

- Their documentation in the beginning mixed features and planned features without discrimination. Spend a lot of time to find out trying to make them work that the features they've described in detail were fantasies.

- With deconstruction I would give it a try in a project.
Am I in a time warp? Germany is on the Euro and hasn't been on the Mark for almost 15 years. And the Berlin wall has been gone for 25 years!
I don't think so. A single server sitting behind an advanced firewall/IDS/IPS system and managed by competent IT staff is a much harder target than a multitude of servers I manage myself.

Also note that it's not really an extra step, you put in a ProxyCommand in your .ssh/config file.
When Handwriting Dies, Neural Networks Will Be the Only Calligraphers Left
guile is LGPL, "dynamic" linking is allowed http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=guile.git;a=blob;f=LIC...

(damn it's hard to find a reference to the license on the web site)

EDIT: found a related link; some extra/common libraries are also LGPL http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/gnu-guile-projects.html#Co...
1) You are assuming that the works need to be stored at all. They do not. As long as the same block of text can be located based on the same input, it is just as available as it would be if it were stored on disk or on any other type of storage device you imagine.

2) The PRNG is irrelevant to this point. The article I linked to offers a detailed description of how to generate text without storing it on disk.

3)Your model is identical to JSTOR's, as is libraryofbabel.info's. That's my point - all of these are ways of creating a digital archive (or in your case some sort of quantum archive). The point is that libraryofbabel.info is able to archive more text than your model - more pages of text than there are atoms in the universe.

4)The concepts you should think about more thoroughly are: fiction/reality, existence/nonexistence, actuality/possibility/virtuality. The texts the website contains have a potential existence - each of them can be summoned up at any time. But they do not have the sort of actual existence which would require one or more atoms to be available for the storage of each text. The script capable of generating them all takes up less than a MB.
Excel is either brilliant or horrible (depending on your role in dealing with the output) at being re-purposed to do "the wrong thing".

I've had form templates sent to me in Excel because of the easy-to-use table layout controls. I've had games sent to me in Excel because VBA was so damn easy to program simple ideas in. I've had PoCs of algorithms sent to me in Excel because the graphical chaining of each step is so illustrative.

I've also seen the nightmare that haunts businesses who define their business logic through a bunch of interconnected Excel files. As an aside, this seems like an area ripe for "disruption" (remember when "disruption" was a bad word?), which is where tools like excel_to_code
could probably make a large impact. If you could validate and test the entire business logic, as expressed in Excel files, you could reduce or eliminate the "Excel defined business rules" nightmare. If you can do this, there are thousands of SMEs that will be knocking at your door.

I personally don't use Excel for much, and I used to deride people who used it for "the wrong task", but I've recently had to swallow my pride, and accept that it's a serious power tool for most non-programmer people. I'd even go so far to say that it's the most successful "visual programming" tool out there. And by a long way.
Great insights.

OT, but speaking about quality and the hidden interests of the people making the product: the page works very, very bad on iPhone and iPad. Is it better on other mobile devices or is it the case of developers developing on the desktops and just beleiving it's good enough on anything else?
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Obviously it's going to be different in different places, but gender issues definitely come up here in Australia.
You should probably google what tentacles look like.
That's what I'm saying though: they aren't able to iterate quickly because it's a huge codebase written in a programming language that is quite complex and fairly outdated. Besides, I'd assume that intermediate and experienced C++ developers are probably older on average, and are unlikely to be interested in developing games.
Good engineering has a cost and this cost has to be financed somehow. You cannot operate in an environment where all the other players have large structural advantages due to macro conditions and "play fair" and win.