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We Are All Equal T-Shirt | I'd much rather buy one of these than just change my facebook profile picture. | This is awesome! Good to know someone is doing more than just changing a profile pic. |
We Are All Equal T-Shirt | This is awesome! Good to know someone is doing more than just changing a profile pic. | I guess this is slightly less "slacktivism" than the facebook profile pic changes. |
We Are All Equal T-Shirt | I guess this is slightly less "slacktivism" than the facebook profile pic changes. | Too bad these weren't out for people to wear today. |
We Are All Equal T-Shirt | Too bad these weren't out for people to wear today. | Really cool! A viral tee? |
Performance Improvements Using Judy Arrays | While this is very interesting, the real problem here is not Linguist stuff, but the fact that it's crammed into the web app.A web app involved in a site as complex as Github's should really contain only the parts required to service web pages. A service like language classification is clearly better designed as a standalone service.Aside from working around GC overhead, compositing big app from many smaller apps have many advantages. You force yourself to encapsulate complexity with strictly focused, network-friendly APIs (we use REST ourselves), which changes the way you have to think about programs. Hiding the implementation behind an API also allows you to swap out the implementation without the client ever knowing. Since the client and server are separated, you have fine-grained control over how much resources you are willing to spend on which components. And so on.Having done monolithic Rails apps for many years, it's a model I am not going to back. Today, our web apps contain only UI logic. No database, no models, no data logic, just UI all the way. Everything else is handled by specialized components. | The article's credibility is significantly reduced by referring to Judy Trie lookups as O(log n) operations. They're actually O(log w) operations: the number of operations is bounded by the array's word size, not the size of the Judy array. A million elements in a Judy32 array will cause at most 7 node hops, not the 20 you'd expect from a binary tree. |
Performance Improvements Using Judy Arrays | The article's credibility is significantly reduced by referring to Judy Trie lookups as O(log n) operations. They're actually O(log w) operations: the number of operations is bounded by the array's word size, not the size of the Judy array. A million elements in a Judy32 array will cause at most 7 node hops, not the 20 you'd expect from a binary tree. | There is some interesting things in this post but the main problem is not using Judy or something else, or talking about memory or complexity. The main problem I see here is using the wrong tool.Replace the token matcher with a simple classifier (a maxent will work very well here) with n-gram of characters features through a hash-kernel and you get a very accurate, fast and low memory system.I've build one two-years ago who accurately classified a bit over 100 different languages with only 64k features in the end. (So requiring only 8*64ko of memory) And this was without using file extensions as they weren't available in our case.Before any hard optimizations, first check the methods used, and next the algorithm, anything else should go after. |
Performance Improvements Using Judy Arrays | There is some interesting things in this post but the main problem is not using Judy or something else, or talking about memory or complexity. The main problem I see here is using the wrong tool.Replace the token matcher with a simple classifier (a maxent will work very well here) with n-gram of characters features through a hash-kernel and you get a very accurate, fast and low memory system.I've build one two-years ago who accurately classified a bit over 100 different languages with only 64k features in the end. (So requiring only 8*64ko of memory) And this was without using file extensions as they weren't available in our case.Before any hard optimizations, first check the methods used, and next the algorithm, anything else should go after. | Some previous discussion on Judy Arrays [0]. Apparently they are patented![0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5043667 |
Performance Improvements Using Judy Arrays | Some previous discussion on Judy Arrays [0]. Apparently they are patented![0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5043667 | Wow this is an incredibly interesting and accessible article on performance tuning. I have two questions:1) Is there an easy tutorial somewhere on calling out to native code from Ruby?2) Could the team at Github possible give a little more detail on what you did to get all of those pretty benchmarking graphs? How did you get all of the info on memory usage and CPU activity (I assume it wasn't just time {command} > file.txt) |
Moto X Feature Video Leaks | I'm going to guess that it is a little fancier than that, because simply being "always on" would kill the battery, the CPU would have to be constantly running hotword detection. It needs to have some kind of extremely low-power hotword detection for this to work. Like with Glass, some of the conspiracy nuts in other forums are out with ideas that its recording everything and piping it to the NSA, but that's unlikely for a device where they've hinted battery life was a major thing they're concentrating on. | The article mentions Rogers as 'one of the most popular Canadian cellular companies' but the term 'popular' implies Rogers is liked, however in my limited experience they are either universally reviled or many feel indifference towards them.They are effectively Canada's Comcast (largest cable company) so take that as you will. |
Moto X Feature Video Leaks | The article mentions Rogers as 'one of the most popular Canadian cellular companies' but the term 'popular' implies Rogers is liked, however in my limited experience they are either universally reviled or many feel indifference towards them.They are effectively Canada's Comcast (largest cable company) so take that as you will. | Are we really moving to a space where always listening devices are going to be common? If so they might be taking their first step at the wrongest possible time (Ongoing NSA paranoia).Everyone is throwing the Xbox One under a bus for having a always listening device, I wonder how receptive those same people would be to this, especially if it gets added to the core functionality of Android. |
Moto X Feature Video Leaks | Are we really moving to a space where always listening devices are going to be common? If so they might be taking their first step at the wrongest possible time (Ongoing NSA paranoia).Everyone is throwing the Xbox One under a bus for having a always listening device, I wonder how receptive those same people would be to this, especially if it gets added to the core functionality of Android. | Very reassuring, after recent news about spying and whatnot, and uploading of credentials to motorolla servers |
Moto X Feature Video Leaks | Very reassuring, after recent news about spying and whatnot, and uploading of credentials to motorolla servers | It's like Google doesn't even realize. |
A Use Of Drones Nearly Everyone Will Like | My freshman and sophomore years in college, I worked in the big cat house at a fairly prestigious zoo in the US (mostly feeding them and cleaning up their shit). But in addition to the cats we took care of, we had many programs around the world to protect animals from poachers and environmental encroachment. In almost every poaching context, the most successful experiments were always the simplest:Pay the poachers to be rangers instead.We found that the primary motivation for poachers was profit, so we approached them and essentially said "We'll pay you more if you protect the cats instead of hunting them." The 180s we observed were remarkable, and the money they made from poaching was usually so small that beating it was almost trivial for us. So while the price of drones (and program maintenance) are decreasing, I can't help but wonder how many ranger salaries could have been paid instead. | I hate hate hate the idea of the use of drones by police fishing for crimes to prosecute. OTOH, I agree with the sentiment of the article on the notion that drones are simply a new (as in newly economical) technology, and neither good nor bad. One of my favorite ideas for drones is scouting for forest fires during drought. Finding a forest fire before it becomes too large to fight could save lives and property. |
A Use Of Drones Nearly Everyone Will Like | I hate hate hate the idea of the use of drones by police fishing for crimes to prosecute. OTOH, I agree with the sentiment of the article on the notion that drones are simply a new (as in newly economical) technology, and neither good nor bad. One of my favorite ideas for drones is scouting for forest fires during drought. Finding a forest fire before it becomes too large to fight could save lives and property. | Unfortunately while this helps it's not a panacea. I wrote a previous comment on HN [1] on the same subject, which I'll paste here as the points still apply:This is welcome from Google, as focused aid of this sort can often have an outsize effect, but we must be careful to avoid believing this can solve the problem.For one, sophisticated UAVs that are much more capable than those the WWF is getting are already being used to combat rhino poaching. SANParks, the state agency responsible for South Africa's state-run national parks, has deployed the Seeker II military-spec UAV[0], ground radar, thermal imagers, cameras and dedicated teams of heavily armed rangers in the Kruger National Park, one of Africa's largest wildlife reserves. All anti-poaching resources have been placed under the command of Major General Johan Jooste, a highly-regarded retired military commander and a rewards program giving approximately US$ 10 000 to anybody whose tip-off results in the arrest of a poacher and about US$ 100 000 for a tip-off leading to the arrest of the head of a poaching syndicate has been created. At the same time the South African Army has deployed units in both the border patrol and anti-poaching role in certain parks.These measures are all helping, but it's important to understand just what an impossible task this is. SANParks's 19 national parks alone cover 37 000 km², that's larger than Belgium, Israel and Lebanon. Moreover those 19 parks are dispersed across South Africa's 1.2 million km² and many of them are on the border of neighbouring countries from which many of these poachers come. It also doesn't include the hundreds of private wildlife reserves across the country which have been badly hit by rhino poaching. As the US has discovered on its southern border with Mexico, trying to prevent small bands of people from crossing a border this large is impossible even with UAVs, manned aircraft and massive resources.So technology alone is not going to solve this, though it and other measures are hopefully going to help reduce the rate at which rhinos are being killed. The only long-term solution is to somehow stop the demand for rhino horn from Asia and thus remove the profit motive for poaching rhinos in the first place.[0] The Seeker II is a 9-12 hour endurance UAV with all the standard surveillance gear such as FLIR cameras that is being provided free of charge by Denel, a South African arms manufacturer. The intention is to supplement that with a longer-ranged model, the Seeker 400, sometime next year. At the same time they're finalising development of a much smaller UAV, the Hungwe, that can be deployed by ranger teams for short-range surveillance.[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4936947 |
A Use Of Drones Nearly Everyone Will Like | Unfortunately while this helps it's not a panacea. I wrote a previous comment on HN [1] on the same subject, which I'll paste here as the points still apply:This is welcome from Google, as focused aid of this sort can often have an outsize effect, but we must be careful to avoid believing this can solve the problem.For one, sophisticated UAVs that are much more capable than those the WWF is getting are already being used to combat rhino poaching. SANParks, the state agency responsible for South Africa's state-run national parks, has deployed the Seeker II military-spec UAV[0], ground radar, thermal imagers, cameras and dedicated teams of heavily armed rangers in the Kruger National Park, one of Africa's largest wildlife reserves. All anti-poaching resources have been placed under the command of Major General Johan Jooste, a highly-regarded retired military commander and a rewards program giving approximately US$ 10 000 to anybody whose tip-off results in the arrest of a poacher and about US$ 100 000 for a tip-off leading to the arrest of the head of a poaching syndicate has been created. At the same time the South African Army has deployed units in both the border patrol and anti-poaching role in certain parks.These measures are all helping, but it's important to understand just what an impossible task this is. SANParks's 19 national parks alone cover 37 000 km², that's larger than Belgium, Israel and Lebanon. Moreover those 19 parks are dispersed across South Africa's 1.2 million km² and many of them are on the border of neighbouring countries from which many of these poachers come. It also doesn't include the hundreds of private wildlife reserves across the country which have been badly hit by rhino poaching. As the US has discovered on its southern border with Mexico, trying to prevent small bands of people from crossing a border this large is impossible even with UAVs, manned aircraft and massive resources.So technology alone is not going to solve this, though it and other measures are hopefully going to help reduce the rate at which rhinos are being killed. The only long-term solution is to somehow stop the demand for rhino horn from Asia and thus remove the profit motive for poaching rhinos in the first place.[0] The Seeker II is a 9-12 hour endurance UAV with all the standard surveillance gear such as FLIR cameras that is being provided free of charge by Denel, a South African arms manufacturer. The intention is to supplement that with a longer-ranged model, the Seeker 400, sometime next year. At the same time they're finalising development of a much smaller UAV, the Hungwe, that can be deployed by ranger teams for short-range surveillance.[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4936947 | If I am correct, this is a law enforcement task, so it is again police work. I think there are better uses of drones for now, for which reason our company created some ethical guidelines: http://www.dobots.nl/ethical-policy. One of our statements is "Helping, not harming!". It is better to first develop technologies where we can help people, and consider them as victims, rather than searching for scenarios where we can identify perpetrators. The suggestion in the article is to destroy the vehicles of the poachers, but where does it stop... There are so many situations where we can help. People that drown at sea, early detection of forest fires, environmental monitoring, crowdsourcing journalism, etc.PS: I am the PI of the Dutch http://www.fireswarm.nl project in which a group of companies and universities use drones to detect a fire as quick as possible. |
A Use Of Drones Nearly Everyone Will Like | If I am correct, this is a law enforcement task, so it is again police work. I think there are better uses of drones for now, for which reason our company created some ethical guidelines: http://www.dobots.nl/ethical-policy. One of our statements is "Helping, not harming!". It is better to first develop technologies where we can help people, and consider them as victims, rather than searching for scenarios where we can identify perpetrators. The suggestion in the article is to destroy the vehicles of the poachers, but where does it stop... There are so many situations where we can help. People that drown at sea, early detection of forest fires, environmental monitoring, crowdsourcing journalism, etc.PS: I am the PI of the Dutch http://www.fireswarm.nl project in which a group of companies and universities use drones to detect a fire as quick as possible. | I wonder how long it will be until a specific anti-drone gun is invented. Seems like there will be a strong market for one soon. |
A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy | That's probably one of the best articles I've read on the real nature of 'alternative' energy in a while.My rule of thumb is simple : if someone calls it 'Alternative Energy', it means it's an alternate to having a cheap, ready supply of energy. Otherwise, it would just be called 'energy'. Nobody calls Nuclear power alternate energy, even though it's radically different to anything else that came before it in terms of generating power.The percentage of power generated from wind globally, currently, rounded to the nearest decimal place is zero.Trillions of dollars have been spent on windfarms and solar panels around the world, and, as the article notes, it has made zero difference to the overall energy mix. Yet it has affected national economies in real ways - the bankruptcies in Germany, Spain and elsewhere have real costs, as does taking the most basic economic input - energy - and making it more expensive for zero environmental gain at the global level. Despite the countless examples of failures to point to, the boosters insist that it's the right course, when any plain analysis shows the exact opposite.There are plenty of people who hand-wave around the very real problems as outlined in the article, and say things like 'give it time, it will work out'. But you have to be a starry-eyed believer who trusts in state-coerced solutions to gloss over the myriad of problems of trying to jump-start essentially niche technologies into mainstream adoption.It takes real courage to rely on human ingenuity to solve problems and come up with solutions. It's frightening to look at an issue and realise you have no answers at all.But what's worse is to set off on a futile and damaging strategy just to be seen to be doing something, when that thing is ineffective at best, and damaging at worst due to the self-delusion inherent. This holds at the personal, family, business, state, national and global level. | The future of energy is natural gas. End of story.Alternative natural gas production -- "fracking" generally -- has been researched, prototyped, implemented, and grown over the past 15-20 years to the point where one can reasonably envision a future where natural gas displaces coal and crude oil to become the most important energy sources in the world.It emits way less carbon than coal or oil, it is everywhere, it can be liquified relatively cheaply and transported around the world by super tanker, people are less afraid of it than nuclear power, and the technology to actually use it has been around forever. Electricity...home heating...hydrogen fuel cells...all easy with natural gas.As a general rule, when The Economist publishes a 14-page spread about something, it's pretty much hit the mainstream. They did that 2 weeks ago. http://www.economist.com/node/21558432 |
A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy | The future of energy is natural gas. End of story.Alternative natural gas production -- "fracking" generally -- has been researched, prototyped, implemented, and grown over the past 15-20 years to the point where one can reasonably envision a future where natural gas displaces coal and crude oil to become the most important energy sources in the world.It emits way less carbon than coal or oil, it is everywhere, it can be liquified relatively cheaply and transported around the world by super tanker, people are less afraid of it than nuclear power, and the technology to actually use it has been around forever. Electricity...home heating...hydrogen fuel cells...all easy with natural gas.As a general rule, when The Economist publishes a 14-page spread about something, it's pretty much hit the mainstream. They did that 2 weeks ago. http://www.economist.com/node/21558432 | 3 immediate flaws:He ignores completely hydro and geothermal power. They help Iceland (100%) and New Zealand (77%) amongst others to near complete sustainability for electricity generation.While mentioned, the cost of co2e emissions from gas is glossed over. Charge the true economic value for emissions and hydrocarbon sources are going to be wildly more expensive.He criticizes China for unfairly subsidizing wind on the one hand (their solar story is amazing btw) then complains China is building too many coal plants shortly thereafter. |
A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy | 3 immediate flaws:He ignores completely hydro and geothermal power. They help Iceland (100%) and New Zealand (77%) amongst others to near complete sustainability for electricity generation.While mentioned, the cost of co2e emissions from gas is glossed over. Charge the true economic value for emissions and hydrocarbon sources are going to be wildly more expensive.He criticizes China for unfairly subsidizing wind on the one hand (their solar story is amazing btw) then complains China is building too many coal plants shortly thereafter. | Clean energy is expensive, takes a long time to build, and introduces more problems, but we have no other choice! We can either suffer the consequences of global warming or try to avoid the worst of it. Sticking with fossil fuels is not a choice unless we can somehow make them out of C02 we remove from the atmosphere for that purpose. All the choices we could make to deal with the global energy crisis are terrible, we have to pick the one that hurts the least. We can hurt the economy and stop burning fossil fuels, or we can take almost certainly catastrophic risks with the only planet we have to live on.People love to blame China, but they are polluting to make goods we then import in many cases and are not responsible for squandering the giant fossil fuel inheritance of the modern age. Of course they may wish to get their share of what remains as long as everyone else is burning it anyway. |
A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy | Clean energy is expensive, takes a long time to build, and introduces more problems, but we have no other choice! We can either suffer the consequences of global warming or try to avoid the worst of it. Sticking with fossil fuels is not a choice unless we can somehow make them out of C02 we remove from the atmosphere for that purpose. All the choices we could make to deal with the global energy crisis are terrible, we have to pick the one that hurts the least. We can hurt the economy and stop burning fossil fuels, or we can take almost certainly catastrophic risks with the only planet we have to live on.People love to blame China, but they are polluting to make goods we then import in many cases and are not responsible for squandering the giant fossil fuel inheritance of the modern age. Of course they may wish to get their share of what remains as long as everyone else is burning it anyway. | I started reading it and admiring their attention to detail with the first two charts. Extremely clear and informative:http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/07OLAltEnergytechfig3-134088965...Then it went down hill fast, culminating in stuff like this:http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/07OLAltEnergyFigIcon3-134012678... and http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/07OLAltEnergyFigIcon5-134020183...Edit: spelling. |
C++ For C Programmers | Imho, C++ should be thought of as a new language with a degree of backward compatibility with old C code, not as a 'bigger C'.How I'd start: Lesson 1: Pointers don't exist in C++, we
have references.
Lesson 2: malloc() doesn't exist in C++
Lesson 3: Templates are awesome.
Lesson 4: Smart pointers are awesome.
Lesson 5: 'Structs' can have constructors, and
they're awesome!
Lesson 5.5: Exceptions are awesome!
Lesson 6: 'Structs' can have copy constructors and
assignment operators, but the default ones do
exactly what you'd expect so you shouldn't have
to write them often.
Lesson 7: OK, OK... pointers still exist in C++ but
smart pointers and references make them almost
deprecated, right?
Lesson 8: ...oh, and if you use raw C pointers you
need to do all this extra donkey work when it
comes to handling exceptions, and write a lot
more of those pesky copy and move constructors
and assignment operators I told you you didn't
need to write.
Example: writing a smart pointer (with C pointers!)
Lesson 9: Implementing a safe, dynamic, exception-safe
array in C++ using templates and C pointers.
Lesson 10: back to sanity, the ease of using <vector>
(or the output of lesson 9) in every day code.
Introduction to the STL, <string>, etc.
...and so on. The idea is to first teach the common C++ way, and then teach the penalty of ignoring it and going the C way, and then the places where you need to pay that penalty.Imho teaching inheritance or virtual functions early is also a bad sign. I'd go with public/private access control first (leaving protected), then member functions, then pure virtual member functions and basic inheritance, all the while presenting no hint of Circles and Ellipses, just interfaces. | Nice! However, I'd appreciate the converse more.I'm pretty well versed in C++, and every time I try to write something in C, I fall back to C++. I find memory management a pain without RAII, error handling a hassle without exceptions, and, well, anything really a pain without some sort of standard container library.I have the idea that there's good alternatives for these in C-land, but I'm unfamiliar with them and would love for an expert to teach me.In general, I wonder whether there's really that many people who know C but not C++. This might just be me projecting myself onto the world, though. Anyone? |
C++ For C Programmers | Nice! However, I'd appreciate the converse more.I'm pretty well versed in C++, and every time I try to write something in C, I fall back to C++. I find memory management a pain without RAII, error handling a hassle without exceptions, and, well, anything really a pain without some sort of standard container library.I have the idea that there's good alternatives for these in C-land, but I'm unfamiliar with them and would love for an expert to teach me.In general, I wonder whether there's really that many people who know C but not C++. This might just be me projecting myself onto the world, though. Anyone? | I heard awful things about this course.
Just check the reviews for it's textbook: http://tinyurl.com/cppcprogIn general, anything that says "X for Y programmers" is not worth it.If you really want to learn C++, and you already know C, I suggest either "Accelerated C++" or "The C++ Programming language" |
C++ For C Programmers | I heard awful things about this course.
Just check the reviews for it's textbook: http://tinyurl.com/cppcprogIn general, anything that says "X for Y programmers" is not worth it.If you really want to learn C++, and you already know C, I suggest either "Accelerated C++" or "The C++ Programming language" | I'm slightly afraid to learn C++ after being told so many horror stories. But for the low low price of free? Count me in. |
C++ For C Programmers | I'm slightly afraid to learn C++ after being told so many horror stories. But for the low low price of free? Count me in. | On another note: people claiming "C/C++" skills usually have neither. |
The stigma of being an atheist in the US | When a Pew survey says that atheists are seen as less trustworthy than rapists in the US, you know the stigma is real.When a whopping 78.4% (Pew 2014) identify as Christian, you know that Christian complaints that they are stigmatized by mainstream society are greatly overblown.Name a single non-Christian President. The best you will be able to do is to speculate that one might have been Deist a very long time ago. According to these surveys, an atheist simply could not be elected President today. Christians occupy most political offices, so they cannot plausibly claim to lack political representation.Rank and file Christians are just ordinary people, but they are manipulated by politicians and political preachers to believe they are being persecuted, that there is a War on Christmas, that Sharia will rule over them in their towns, etc. and that they must claim ever greater control of society in order to protect Christianity. Of course this means they should donate money to certain organizations, vote for certain candidates and silence religious minorities.It also extends to more militant means. Nobody wants to discuss this in polite company, because it's unsettling and it makes many Christians angry and defensive, but a certain number of followers will respond violently, as in the case of abortion clinic bombers who are encouraged to escape from law enforcement, or men who are widely though quietly praised for shooting up a Unitarian church during Sunday morning service. I could go on. This isn't a majority of Christians, but the violence feeds on that substantial supporting population, and it relates to the way many Christians have been politically manipulated into hate.Several recent popular movies present near future scenarios where Christians are systematically persecuted by non-Christians. Convincing people of this kind of falsehood is essential to building hate. This is widely seen as a plausible scenario, despite the fact that the majority of the country identifies as Christian and a disproportionate majority of our politicians identify as Christian. When you assume that this is reality, it feels more justified to infringe on others' constitutional rights and even to harm them. Whether you want to admit it or not, this is the same mechanism used to justify violence against Jews in Weimar Germany.If Christianity is a religion of love and tolerance rather than hate and intolerance, then Christians should at least respect the Constitutional rights of religious minorities, including atheists, even if they disagree with them. A few denominations have good records for this, while others do not. But the former are quiet, and the latter control the drift of Christian politics in the US, which is to attack religious minorities and insist on absolute Christian supremacy as if it were a condition of survival. | I personally feel like the "Atheist" position in the US is much more vocal than in the rest of the world.I'm an Atheist, but I leave people alone and don't try to press my view on the rest of mankind, just like I like to be treated by religious people. I feel there is a strong "anti-religion" movement that calls itself Atheist, and I feel it's giving the rest of us a bad rap.tl;dr: I don't believe in god but don't care if you do. |
The stigma of being an atheist in the US | I personally feel like the "Atheist" position in the US is much more vocal than in the rest of the world.I'm an Atheist, but I leave people alone and don't try to press my view on the rest of mankind, just like I like to be treated by religious people. I feel there is a strong "anti-religion" movement that calls itself Atheist, and I feel it's giving the rest of us a bad rap.tl;dr: I don't believe in god but don't care if you do. | "dedicated to those who do not believe in God, Atheist TV."Wouldn't you have to phrase this as "... those who do not believe in any god, ..." ?ie no capital, and catering for the multitude of deities they do not believe in. |
The stigma of being an atheist in the US | "dedicated to those who do not believe in God, Atheist TV."Wouldn't you have to phrase this as "... those who do not believe in any god, ..." ?ie no capital, and catering for the multitude of deities they do not believe in. | > "It's one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life and I completely advocate people 'coming out'," says Mark Hatcher, from Black Atheists of America.I am always amazed by how the American society seems to be divided. I don't understand much the rationale of having a 'black' atheist society, or rather I should understand that experiences are so different that a white non-believer can't even relate with a black non-believer ? |
The stigma of being an atheist in the US | > "It's one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life and I completely advocate people 'coming out'," says Mark Hatcher, from Black Atheists of America.I am always amazed by how the American society seems to be divided. I don't understand much the rationale of having a 'black' atheist society, or rather I should understand that experiences are so different that a white non-believer can't even relate with a black non-believer ? | In the UK, we have a different name for atheists. We call it "Church of England". |
Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse | I have some experience in this area. My first startup: Grazr (http://tcrn.ch/aUqiIb), the back end was mostly Perl with some custom C modules. Grazr was started in 2005 when Perl was already out of fashion.So why did we choose Perl, practical reasons mostly. My co-founder had previously been the CTO of the company that owned Slashdot and he had a team of top-notch Perl people that he thought would want to join us. I had worked a lot with Perl in a previous life so it seemed like a natural fit.Perl has many strengths. You can "just get stuff done" with Perl. The module library is obviously a huge strength. The first version (effectively a public prototype) of Grazr went live very quickly (days). If you’re careful with it, you can also build some fairly complex projects using Perl. The machinery for Grazr processed a huge amount of data (for the time) multiple terabytes of feed data and had a lot of advanced features like: processing of normalized feeds, an embedded scripting language, cross link analysis, a search engine, and most of the heavy lifting was Perl. Think of the system as an advanced form of the feed API that Google Reader eventually released, nearly real-time (unlike the Reader API we updated feeds upon request) with the addition of a scripting layer on top. I'm very proud of what we built, technology-wise. We failed in other ways (UX, marketing and sales mainly) but the underlying system was quite impressive.When the feed application language and processing engine stopped being the focus of the company, the Grazr system ran on only a few virtual servers, responsively and smoothly for over a year with steadily growing traffic. That was with the whole company ignoring it and focusing on other 'pivots' (before pivot was the term-du-jour for that). Why the company ignored a service that was steadily growing traffic with absolutely no input from the team/company is a rant for another day. :)When I co-founded my next company, Smarterer (http://smarterer.com/), I vowed gone-with-the-wind-style that as God as my witness, I would never write a big startup-project in Perl again. Smarterer is written mainly in Python.Why the Perl hate? First, I still think Perl is a fine language. You can get a lot done with it. But as other's have pointed out, one of the primary design philosophies of the language make it painful in some cases. Large, evolving projects with multiple contributors seems to be the axis of evil for Perl. Startups exacerbate this problem because they exhibit most of these factors and compound it with unrealistic functional time pressure.What I observed as problems were:First, with Perl there is always a temptation to be clever. It's a lot of fun, but one of the underlying philosophies of Perl, the "Tim Toady" thing, opens up a lot of temptation to show just how clever you are, usually too clever by half. That always leads to the WTF moments as you’re reading any code you haven’t written in the last week. I started to feel each WTF moment as a tax on our tech team.When you have a big Perl project with several contributors, coming up with coding standards is a must but usually in a startup environment getting something working is almost always the first priority. Also, coding standards only get you so far with Perl because it's so flexible. If you spend any reasonable amount of time, the unwritten standards of how people write Perl code subtly shifts over time. Usually the code get better as contributors influence each others coding styles, but this makes going back to read working code that’s 6 months to a year old a massive pain in the ass.Lastly, having coding standards doesn’t protect you against other peoples modules. If you have a large and complex enough system, you’re going to start tripping over the bugs and corner cases in other people’s modules. Perl has the strength of CPAN, but because you can’t enforce a coding standard across all of Perl, debugging into other people’s modules can be an exercise in frustration. When some bug is tracked down to a third-party module, treating it as a black box is no longer an option.When faced with these problems you can usually work through each case. In the best case it just takes a few minutes of working through the cognitive dissonance, but in other cases you end up breaking out the print statements and/or debugger to instrument code just to figure out what the heck was the intent here.As a startup guy, the energy required to “re parse” code that’s already been written in subtly different ways starts to drive you crazy because that’s time and energy that could be being applied to solving the bug and tackling the new problem at hand. That re-read and re-parse tax gets worse and worse the large the project becomes and the more people that are involved.That’s, generally, why I wouldn’t recommend Perl as a language for a startup project, but every case is different. If you're not in the axis-of-evil for Perl, you have incredible discipline and you only rely on a limited number of third-party modules you may be OK. | I really don't like the hate for perl. Sure, it's got some stuff which can be a bit difficult to understand at first, but that flexibility is nice when you just want to whip something up quickly. It reminds me of how people love to hate Java because of it's verbose code (myself included). At the end of the day, if you know what you're doing it really doesn't get in your way.I do a lot of metaprogramming and text processing at my job. Using regex as much as I need to in most other languages just feels clumsy compared to perl. It's a great language for sysadmin type stuff. It has a good niche. I wouldn't use it for what this guy did, but I have no doubt that tons of stuff in CPAN probably made his job significantly easier.I don't think perl is hard to learn - I spent a few days with the camel book and was able to pick it up fairly quickly - and as others have said any language can be unreadable or abused. Also, I don't use Moose or objects in perl and I think that OOP can be cool but can also be abused just as much as perl's nonstandard syntax.When it comes to other types of projects, I don't think your language of choice makes a huge difference in theory. I think javascript, perl, python are all pretty good and not too hard to pick up if you already have programming experience (don't know about ruby, although I assume that the same holds true). What really makes a difference in practice is the network effects, though. I really love perl, but I'm going to go out of my way to learn other languages because no one respects it and the job market isn't as good for it. Oh well. I don't really mind having to choose based on fads because I honestly think that my choice of programming languages won't make much of a difference on my performance. |
Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse | I really don't like the hate for perl. Sure, it's got some stuff which can be a bit difficult to understand at first, but that flexibility is nice when you just want to whip something up quickly. It reminds me of how people love to hate Java because of it's verbose code (myself included). At the end of the day, if you know what you're doing it really doesn't get in your way.I do a lot of metaprogramming and text processing at my job. Using regex as much as I need to in most other languages just feels clumsy compared to perl. It's a great language for sysadmin type stuff. It has a good niche. I wouldn't use it for what this guy did, but I have no doubt that tons of stuff in CPAN probably made his job significantly easier.I don't think perl is hard to learn - I spent a few days with the camel book and was able to pick it up fairly quickly - and as others have said any language can be unreadable or abused. Also, I don't use Moose or objects in perl and I think that OOP can be cool but can also be abused just as much as perl's nonstandard syntax.When it comes to other types of projects, I don't think your language of choice makes a huge difference in theory. I think javascript, perl, python are all pretty good and not too hard to pick up if you already have programming experience (don't know about ruby, although I assume that the same holds true). What really makes a difference in practice is the network effects, though. I really love perl, but I'm going to go out of my way to learn other languages because no one respects it and the job market isn't as good for it. Oh well. I don't really mind having to choose based on fads because I honestly think that my choice of programming languages won't make much of a difference on my performance. | I think "I just like it" or "it feels right to use it" should be enough explanation.There's a tendency for people to demand a rational list of reasons for any choice (very academic thinking) but more often than not that results in tacked on reasoning anyways...oh sure I use it because of X,Y,Z while in reality we just picked it because it "seemed cool"I think people are too scared to regret their choices. Just picking something and "muddling through" tends to be pretty awesome. Sometimes you'll just find out it won't click and then you can pick something else (you should find out pretty quickly because it just won't feel right)Instead there's often a tendency to read "haha IF ONLY YOU HAD THOUGHT ABOUT THIS BEFORE...FOOL" responses instead of "cool that you jumped into the pool, I hope you learned a lot"/rambling and ranting |
Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse | I think "I just like it" or "it feels right to use it" should be enough explanation.There's a tendency for people to demand a rational list of reasons for any choice (very academic thinking) but more often than not that results in tacked on reasoning anyways...oh sure I use it because of X,Y,Z while in reality we just picked it because it "seemed cool"I think people are too scared to regret their choices. Just picking something and "muddling through" tends to be pretty awesome. Sometimes you'll just find out it won't click and then you can pick something else (you should find out pretty quickly because it just won't feel right)Instead there's often a tendency to read "haha IF ONLY YOU HAD THOUGHT ABOUT THIS BEFORE...FOOL" responses instead of "cool that you jumped into the pool, I hope you learned a lot"/rambling and ranting | >Ruby - Now that Perl has Dancer/Plack/Moose, Ruby has nothing that Perl doesn't have (at least that I've seen). Therefore no reason to switch.>Python - Basically the same argument as Ruby, except that in my opinion Python isn't half as good of a language as Ruby.IMO he kinda missed the main ideological differences, benefits, pros, cons of both ruby and python. |
Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse | >Ruby - Now that Perl has Dancer/Plack/Moose, Ruby has nothing that Perl doesn't have (at least that I've seen). Therefore no reason to switch.>Python - Basically the same argument as Ruby, except that in my opinion Python isn't half as good of a language as Ruby.IMO he kinda missed the main ideological differences, benefits, pros, cons of both ruby and python. | We need posts like this for every language. Nowadays, thanks to the open-source culture, the ease of sharing and installing libraries, you can do just about anything with any language.You can run a start-up on Python, Ruby, Java, Scala, C#, Haskell, OCaml, Clojure, Common Lisp, C++, etc... Programmer familiarity with language semantics and tools is likely going to make a bigger difference than the language itself.Google runs on Python/Java/C++, Facebook runs on PHP/C++, Twitter on Scala/Ruby, and a number of large sites run on all sorts of other crazy languages.Hearing about the pros of Perl from a Perl programmer is nice, even though I'm not particularly fond of Perl. I'm personally building apps in Clojure, because I like Lisps, Clojure has great features and a great environment, and it just suits the way I like to think about problems. I think it's the best language ever, but I also understand why people would think the same about Ruby, Python, Scala, JS, etc...I think some people make too much out of posts like this, yes he thinks Perl is the best language, and it probably is for him. At the very least, he gives compelling reasons for Perl programmers to continue in Perl, and not feel like they 'need' to switch to Python or Ruby... |
Codeq. Code quality as a service | This isn't static analysis.Compare the output of a "real" static analysis tool that finds logic bugs[0]https://www.dropbox.com/s/md35ca9mjrny4o1/Screen%20Shot%2020...With their whitespace recommendationshttps://codeq.io/github/tianyang-li/rna-seq-len-est-0/master...Which seem to mostly be a wrapper around autopep8: https://github.com/hhatto/autopep8.Even Pylint / Pyflakes would be more "static analyzer" than this tool, although it's a stretch.[0] In this case it trips an assert, so the bug can't "really" happen. Still, it's pretty impressive stuff. | In the case of this tool, it seem that "code quality" means "formatted the way this tool's author believes is correct." I disagree with this definition.When I think of code quality, I consider things like: - consistent memory management practices
- consistent use of accessor methods vs. direct ivar access
- descriptive method, function, and variable names
- commentary to describe caveats and tricky functionality
Those first two (as well as formatting concerns) can be handled by tools while the next two are very "human" and subjective. |
Codeq. Code quality as a service | In the case of this tool, it seem that "code quality" means "formatted the way this tool's author believes is correct." I disagree with this definition.When I think of code quality, I consider things like: - consistent memory management practices
- consistent use of accessor methods vs. direct ivar access
- descriptive method, function, and variable names
- commentary to describe caveats and tricky functionality
Those first two (as well as formatting concerns) can be handled by tools while the next two are very "human" and subjective. | 'codeq' is also the name of the static analysis tool released late last yearhttps://github.com/Datomic/codeq |
Codeq. Code quality as a service | 'codeq' is also the name of the static analysis tool released late last yearhttps://github.com/Datomic/codeq | So, PEP8 as a service...http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ |
Codeq. Code quality as a service | So, PEP8 as a service...http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ | Code Climate (https://codeclimate.com/) is a similar service for Ruby projects that I think does a really good job of this. |
Too old to start web programming career? | If you're too old at 33, then I'm too old at 34. :) I'm an ER nurse by trade, but I'm one or two semesters shy of finishing my degree in CS. I'm going back and getting in touch with my inner geek after years of having a "safe" job. I was talked out of getting into CS in 1992, because "there's not that much need for computer programmers". Sigh... I'd only recently moved to the states from overseas, so I believed them. Argh!Anyway, what I'm focused on now is web development. There's nothing to stop us from learning this stuff. All of the important training materials for these technologies are on line or on Safari. There is a pretty steep learning curve, and expect it to take a while to become really proficient at it, but go for it.And, I've spent the last 3 years paying off debt, moving to Silicon Valley, and getting ready to be a founder as soon as I'm done with school. So, don't let the kids scare you off. Dive on in, the water's great. :) | I turned 50 last September. Ten years earlier I started playing with Linux and learned very quickly I knew nothing about Unix. In 5 months I was rolling my own kernels, mainly out of need; apmd wasn't in the default Red Hat kernel, and I needed it for my laptop. A few months after that I was one of Those People who helped bring Linux into the corporate world when people could get fired for having done so.Five years ago I proposed - and was awarded - a research project at work (internal r&d money). I chose at that time to use Python to develop a tool to design airspace for air traffic control purposes. I didn't know Python other than having played with it in console mode. In my experience it was the language to use, and it worked like a champ for us.I'll "retire" in 15 years. When I do so, I fully intend to be employable at that time (re: current).Start now. Get into it. 33 isn't too old to start, but it is too young to stop.Btw, I have a BS in applied math from a small state college - Keene State College in NH. Degrees from good schools might help, but passion for what you do can go a very long way. (^_^) Go for it and good luck!!!! |
Too old to start web programming career? | I turned 50 last September. Ten years earlier I started playing with Linux and learned very quickly I knew nothing about Unix. In 5 months I was rolling my own kernels, mainly out of need; apmd wasn't in the default Red Hat kernel, and I needed it for my laptop. A few months after that I was one of Those People who helped bring Linux into the corporate world when people could get fired for having done so.Five years ago I proposed - and was awarded - a research project at work (internal r&d money). I chose at that time to use Python to develop a tool to design airspace for air traffic control purposes. I didn't know Python other than having played with it in console mode. In my experience it was the language to use, and it worked like a champ for us.I'll "retire" in 15 years. When I do so, I fully intend to be employable at that time (re: current).Start now. Get into it. 33 isn't too old to start, but it is too young to stop.Btw, I have a BS in applied math from a small state college - Keene State College in NH. Degrees from good schools might help, but passion for what you do can go a very long way. (^_^) Go for it and good luck!!!! | It's harder to compete on technical merit, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.I'll quote Drucker again here: "Concentrate on what you're good at." At 33, you've probably got a decent amount of experience in the business world, plus some additional formal education. Work on finding and solving problems that aren't apparent to the young turks just out of college, because they don't have the work experience. I'm 26 and I've had 2 salaried jobs, both in the computer field. There are whole industries that I've never worked in - those are probably ripe for a web solution, because you don't have swarms of college kids picking over every opportunity.Don't expect to compete in the web2.0/social networking sphere. The kids that are 2 years out of college still have friends in that demographic, they grew up with the technology, and so they know more about both the technology and the market. Look for markets that all the young technophiles know nothing about. |
Too old to start web programming career? | It's harder to compete on technical merit, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.I'll quote Drucker again here: "Concentrate on what you're good at." At 33, you've probably got a decent amount of experience in the business world, plus some additional formal education. Work on finding and solving problems that aren't apparent to the young turks just out of college, because they don't have the work experience. I'm 26 and I've had 2 salaried jobs, both in the computer field. There are whole industries that I've never worked in - those are probably ripe for a web solution, because you don't have swarms of college kids picking over every opportunity.Don't expect to compete in the web2.0/social networking sphere. The kids that are 2 years out of college still have friends in that demographic, they grew up with the technology, and so they know more about both the technology and the market. Look for markets that all the young technophiles know nothing about. | Why don't you combine the two?IMO the people who do the best are those that have more than one area of expertise. In other words: no business wants to buy software. They don't care about it at all. What they want is something that will help their business, and someone who knows both the software and the business is better able to connect the two.BTW, ditch the PHP and Mysql and look at some other stuff like Ruby on Rails, Django, Postgresql, and, yes, Javascript. Some PHP won't hurt, but I don't think it's the "state of the art", although you can certainly still get things done with it. |
Too old to start web programming career? | Why don't you combine the two?IMO the people who do the best are those that have more than one area of expertise. In other words: no business wants to buy software. They don't care about it at all. What they want is something that will help their business, and someone who knows both the software and the business is better able to connect the two.BTW, ditch the PHP and Mysql and look at some other stuff like Ruby on Rails, Django, Postgresql, and, yes, Javascript. Some PHP won't hurt, but I don't think it's the "state of the art", although you can certainly still get things done with it. | I admire your courage. It's so easy to stay in the comfort zone of a daily/weekly/yearly/ad to boredom routine (for example, do you know anyone who drives the same route and parks in the same parking spot in a big lot.. Everyday?) Moving your career is bold and the nay-Sayers probably envy your courage and determination. As someone famous wrote - most people die at 30 and are buried later. Negativity criticism etc. is the easy path to take - anyone can point out a problem but how many will fix it.I firmly believe that we as humans all are creative. And that expressing our creativity, our imagination, our mind allows us to be less unhappy. I like programming because it is a creative form of writing - taking half-baked requirements and turning it into something people might find of value/help their daily job/life. I read once that the IDE or your editor is like a word processor for abstraction - the building and invariancing of data structures.My point here is it sounds like you enjoy programming at an emotional, mental, and maybe even spiritual level. I think you'll do fine - the young bright things probably are still learning that there is more to life than technology. My second point here is you won't regret taking on this suite of opportunities.And when you talk about your job, please don't tell them you are a programmer. Ask the person asking "what do you do for a living" what they do when they use a computer - and tell them you make that stuff work (and ask them if they have any ideas of stuff that could be useful for them) |
A Hackathon for High Schoolers | Thank you so much for posting this. Sent this to my brother who is in high school. I wish this stuff was around when I was in high school. | This looks awesome. One thing I'd like to see not only high school hackathons talk about but hackathons in general is encouraging non-coder participants. This seems to focus on "come here to code" or "come here to learn how to code", which don't get me wrong is completely awesome but there are plenty of other opportunities for non-coders to participate. Most notably people interested in design and business. |
A Hackathon for High Schoolers | This looks awesome. One thing I'd like to see not only high school hackathons talk about but hackathons in general is encouraging non-coder participants. This seems to focus on "come here to code" or "come here to learn how to code", which don't get me wrong is completely awesome but there are plenty of other opportunities for non-coders to participate. Most notably people interested in design and business. | Oh man, sounds fun. As a high school pupil myself, I'd go to one of these if there was one here (Scotland). |
A Hackathon for High Schoolers | Oh man, sounds fun. As a high school pupil myself, I'd go to one of these if there was one here (Scotland). | > "hackBCA is open to all high school students, from the absolute beginner to the experienced developer. Spend 24 hours turning an idea into reality."What can an absolute beginner do in such a venue? |
A Hackathon for High Schoolers | > "hackBCA is open to all high school students, from the absolute beginner to the experienced developer. Spend 24 hours turning an idea into reality."What can an absolute beginner do in such a venue? | Loving the HS Hacker movement! Nicely done to whoever organizes this :) |
Ask HN: Stripe equivalent in the EU? | There's GoCardless (https://gocardless.com), currently UK only, but their FAQ says they're planning a European rollout by mid-2012. | You can get started with 2Checkout or PayPal, get some traction and include multiple gateway support when you are ready to get a merchant account. You could also use a good subscription billing abstraction service to use like ours who do not charge minimums. ;)Your customer card info stays with PayPal or 2CO and if you are building a business focused product that requires beta with fewer customers initially, you could request them to migrate over in the interim if that is possible.The place I come from most startups are at a disadvantage with gateways demanding huge upfront fees or yearly minimums and this is one approach that generally works. See Deskaway or VisualWebsiteOptimizer that have built their entire business around 2CO or a combination of 2CO & a local gateway. |
Ask HN: Stripe equivalent in the EU? | You can get started with 2Checkout or PayPal, get some traction and include multiple gateway support when you are ready to get a merchant account. You could also use a good subscription billing abstraction service to use like ours who do not charge minimums. ;)Your customer card info stays with PayPal or 2CO and if you are building a business focused product that requires beta with fewer customers initially, you could request them to migrate over in the interim if that is possible.The place I come from most startups are at a disadvantage with gateways demanding huge upfront fees or yearly minimums and this is one approach that generally works. See Deskaway or VisualWebsiteOptimizer that have built their entire business around 2CO or a combination of 2CO & a local gateway. | I think payments in Europe are beginning to catch up with the US services of stripe and square.iZettle are running a beta test and you can request an invite on Twitter. However, no stripe equivalent yet..... |
Ask HN: Stripe equivalent in the EU? | I think payments in Europe are beginning to catch up with the US services of stripe and square.iZettle are running a beta test and you can request an invite on Twitter. However, no stripe equivalent yet..... | Just use Paypal, don't violate their terms and conditions, sweep payments to your back account daily and move to another solution when it's commercially viable. |
Ask HN: Stripe equivalent in the EU? | Just use Paypal, don't violate their terms and conditions, sweep payments to your back account daily and move to another solution when it's commercially viable. | This question regularly pops up here on HN.Seems nobody is bold enough to tackle this problem :) |
Show HN: Simplest chat for platforms and marketplaces | Olark and other live chat systems work well when you want to provide all of your own customer support... you're basically in the middle of the transaction. This doesn't scale too well, especially when you have to query both parties to get answers and provide them. You have to become good at knowing the transaction, have good answers and information beforehand, and become good at knowing what questions to ask to reduce loops. Real time support on a marketplace this way is a challenge.This system allows you to onboard all of the costs above onto the sellers in the marketplace.My feeling is this would well in a marketplace where your supply side is tech-savvy. Otherwise you'll need a desktop client to keep them signed on.Even if your sellers are tech savvy, they'll need to keep your browser window open all the time. Sure, you could build an app and push notifications, but it's hard to provide real time chat support on your mobile device. Integrating with Google Chat, Skype, etc... may be the way to go (this works well for me when using snapengage). I'd be really interesting in using this as soon as that ability is offered on the buyer-side. | This is a wide open space, and I think a tool like this definitely adds a lot of value to engagement on e-commerce sites. Everytime I've bought an item on eBay, I've had questions for the seller, and getting the answers quickly on chat would definitely have helped me a lot. From what I understand, that is exactly the use-case that Gaglers is targeting. |
Show HN: Simplest chat for platforms and marketplaces | This is a wide open space, and I think a tool like this definitely adds a lot of value to engagement on e-commerce sites. Everytime I've bought an item on eBay, I've had questions for the seller, and getting the answers quickly on chat would definitely have helped me a lot. From what I understand, that is exactly the use-case that Gaglers is targeting. | Cheers for the MVP, but jeers for the copying of Olark's branding.I used to work for a business chat company and I bet moderation will be your biggest challenge. When you put an open chat box online, the amount of times it ends up as sex chat approaches 100%. Think chatroulette, but text. |
Show HN: Simplest chat for platforms and marketplaces | Cheers for the MVP, but jeers for the copying of Olark's branding.I used to work for a business chat company and I bet moderation will be your biggest challenge. When you put an open chat box online, the amount of times it ends up as sex chat approaches 100%. Think chatroulette, but text. | Very similar color scheme, layout, and design in general. Big no-no for me, but I applaud the effort. |
Show HN: Simplest chat for platforms and marketplaces | Very similar color scheme, layout, and design in general. Big no-no for me, but I applaud the effort. | Why is the logo of such poor quality? |
Torvalds: git vs CVS | But if you have hundreds of developers, and you have a dynamic trust network (I trust some people, they trust others, and we all tend to trust people more or less depending on what they work on), the CVS model is absolutely HORRID. It just doesn't work.I can count on one hand the number of projects described by that sentence. No surprise, the Linux kernel is one of them. Linus built a tool to satisfy his needs. But most developers work in smaller groups, and these groups have explicit trust. Working at a company, the trust network isn't dynamic. Even in large open source projects, most of the commits are by a handful of individuals. It's not a big deal if the occasional one-time contributor e-mails a patch.But most of my gripes with git don't have to do with its ideas. Although it's distributed revision control, in my experience everyone designates one repo as authoritative. Like centralized RVCs, certain users are explicitly granted write access to said authoritative repo. So git ends up working like an svn repo with a ton of branches.My complaints about git have to do with its interface. Coming from svn, git is very frustrating to use. Certain benign commands in svn will erase your data in git-land. For example, "git checkout filename" is the equivalent of "svn revert filename"; it erases any uncommitted changes. Of course, git has a revert command as well, but it doesn't behave like other RVCs. Git checkout can bite you if you have a branch with the same name as a file or directory in your source tree.My biggest annoyance is if I accidentally commit and push something. Usually it's when I forget which branch I've checked out. Undoing a commit/push means rebasing or resetting, and that's where git drives me insane. I have used subversion, CVS, and even Visual SourceSafe, but only in git have I lost previous commits. Again with the misleading terminology. Why call them commits if you can destroy them with a single command? | This is a super level headed response from Linus on a topic that he usually rants about. That's pretty cool. |
Torvalds: git vs CVS | This is a super level headed response from Linus on a topic that he usually rants about. That's pretty cool. | We just made a selection of version control system at http://getnightingale.org, and Git isn't that great either (it's over-hyped). CVS does suck (and SVN does too for our purposes). But Git requires that users either use cygwin or install half a linux environment in Windows. Just because Git is coded by Linus, doesn't instantly make it a good product. In the case of Git, I REFUSE to force newbie windows developers who want to mess around with our project to be forced to install 2 linuxy environments, or have to integrate it into mozilla build (every other system is just a simple file you can add to path).We settled with Mercurial, because hgweb isn't that memory intensive and our 512MB RAM prgmr VPS can handle it (although, we hope to upgrade the VPS, to allow more checkout's simultaneously). SVN/CVS also consume little ram on the server too though.People who wish to make a selection should try them all out, and ask around. Because whilst Git users are very passionate about Git, I couldn't find a single one on IRC who had recently tried mercurial or Bazaar. Furthermore very few (if any) actively used Git in WindowsBut that's just what I found. I didn't run proper benchmarks and things would be different if we had a better server (Loggerhead for bazaar wanted 2gb when running). |
Torvalds: git vs CVS | We just made a selection of version control system at http://getnightingale.org, and Git isn't that great either (it's over-hyped). CVS does suck (and SVN does too for our purposes). But Git requires that users either use cygwin or install half a linux environment in Windows. Just because Git is coded by Linus, doesn't instantly make it a good product. In the case of Git, I REFUSE to force newbie windows developers who want to mess around with our project to be forced to install 2 linuxy environments, or have to integrate it into mozilla build (every other system is just a simple file you can add to path).We settled with Mercurial, because hgweb isn't that memory intensive and our 512MB RAM prgmr VPS can handle it (although, we hope to upgrade the VPS, to allow more checkout's simultaneously). SVN/CVS also consume little ram on the server too though.People who wish to make a selection should try them all out, and ask around. Because whilst Git users are very passionate about Git, I couldn't find a single one on IRC who had recently tried mercurial or Bazaar. Furthermore very few (if any) actively used Git in WindowsBut that's just what I found. I didn't run proper benchmarks and things would be different if we had a better server (Loggerhead for bazaar wanted 2gb when running). | This is effectively a summary of his Google Tech Talk on git.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 |
Torvalds: git vs CVS | This is effectively a summary of his Google Tech Talk on git.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 | Exercise: what are the downsides of the current generation of DVCS ?(Assume you may be something other than a coder that carries all files in a laptop.) |
Ask HN: Why not Java for web development? | And why are all these companies ignoring the fact that there is a shortage of Ruby and Python developers because most college students are learning Java?I'll answer your other question as it seems to have been ignored:I don't think anyone is actively ignoring these other great languages. It has more to do with inertia. Once a company invests X in their software (where X can be 100K to 100M), they're reluctant to throw that away when it works. We as engineers may like the hot new thing, but the company having paid for the hot old thing isn't just going to throw it out because you don't like it anymore. :)This is why we had the Y2K problem from a massive investment in COBOL. We'll have other issues from a massive investment in Java over the next few decades as well. It is what it is. Learn Java. Learn Play. Learn Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, whatever you want to learn. You'll be learning all your career. The more languages you know, the better a developer you will be. Embrace it now, forever will it dominate your destiny. | Why not Java for web development?
People do use Java for web dev. Google uses it almost exclusively as far as I know. You will find that Java is in fact very prominent in large companies.What's wrong with Play?
Nothing is "wrong" with Play
You just don't hear about it as much because you read HN. HN is about startups. Startups like to be on the bleeding edge and boast very rapid development cycles. Java is just not conducive to this. (I would like to note that I have never personally used Play) As far as I know, Play has not gained the traction that other event driven frameworks have. This has a lot to do with the fact that Play didn't really start to come to light until after Node.JS started to explode and server-side javascript became heralded as the second coming of Christ (by some, not most).And why are all these companies ignoring the fact that there is a shortage of Ruby and Python developers because most college students are learning Java?
Because it doesn't matter what the college students are learning. Java is a good language to teach OOP with. But that doesn't mean it is always the best tool for the job.Very few of these colleges have a single class that teaches web development. For someone who wants to pursue a career in web development, this is highly discouraging because I feel I am not learning the technologies I need for a job (such as Ruby and Python).
You aren't learning them. Just like you probably won't learn the technologies you need for the next job you want at your current job. Welcome to development. Never stop learning. You stop learning, you're dead. I'm serious. Who knows what the cool thing will be five years from now? Doesn't matter, you're going to have to learn it anyway.I would like to elaborate further, but don't have the time at the moment. Please feel free to ask me anything else you're curious about. |
Ask HN: Why not Java for web development? | Why not Java for web development?
People do use Java for web dev. Google uses it almost exclusively as far as I know. You will find that Java is in fact very prominent in large companies.What's wrong with Play?
Nothing is "wrong" with Play
You just don't hear about it as much because you read HN. HN is about startups. Startups like to be on the bleeding edge and boast very rapid development cycles. Java is just not conducive to this. (I would like to note that I have never personally used Play) As far as I know, Play has not gained the traction that other event driven frameworks have. This has a lot to do with the fact that Play didn't really start to come to light until after Node.JS started to explode and server-side javascript became heralded as the second coming of Christ (by some, not most).And why are all these companies ignoring the fact that there is a shortage of Ruby and Python developers because most college students are learning Java?
Because it doesn't matter what the college students are learning. Java is a good language to teach OOP with. But that doesn't mean it is always the best tool for the job.Very few of these colleges have a single class that teaches web development. For someone who wants to pursue a career in web development, this is highly discouraging because I feel I am not learning the technologies I need for a job (such as Ruby and Python).
You aren't learning them. Just like you probably won't learn the technologies you need for the next job you want at your current job. Welcome to development. Never stop learning. You stop learning, you're dead. I'm serious. Who knows what the cool thing will be five years from now? Doesn't matter, you're going to have to learn it anyway.I would like to elaborate further, but don't have the time at the moment. Please feel free to ask me anything else you're curious about. | In production Java has a lot of upside. Compared to ruby or python it is screaming fast. Twitter has moved large portions of their app to java from rails because of this.The reason why interpreted languages are hot with startups and why twitter was originally built on rails is the speed you get in development. Also production speed differences are being offset by cheaper faster hardware.If you hit twitter or facebook scale issues and need more of a speed bump than you can get by throwing more boxes at the problem. Congratulations you've won and if you built on ruby you can go from mri to jruby and get all the java production speed without giving up the ruby development speed. |
Ask HN: Why not Java for web development? | In production Java has a lot of upside. Compared to ruby or python it is screaming fast. Twitter has moved large portions of their app to java from rails because of this.The reason why interpreted languages are hot with startups and why twitter was originally built on rails is the speed you get in development. Also production speed differences are being offset by cheaper faster hardware.If you hit twitter or facebook scale issues and need more of a speed bump than you can get by throwing more boxes at the problem. Congratulations you've won and if you built on ruby you can go from mri to jruby and get all the java production speed without giving up the ruby development speed. | There is nothing wrong with it per se. It's more of a cultural thing.Web application development culture tries to be fast, both in terms of developing the initial application as quickly as possible, and rolling changes out to the user as quickly as possible. Having to compile code has traditionally made Java less desirable than Python/Ruby/Perl etc. for the fast cycle of web development.The Play framework eliminates this problem, but there's cultural momentum built up. After eschewing Java for years due to this, it seems unlikely that Java will quickly recover any warranted popularity amongst web developers.Java also tends to be more verbose as a language. This can be a good thing in certain settings, but again goes against the desire for fast development.There is in fact a lot of Java web development going on, but more in situations like developing internal web applications for use within big corporations rather than developing nimble startup code. If you wanted to get a job doing internal web applications for some place like Transamerica or AT&T, Java skills would be good to have.That said, if you're really into Java/Play, then there might not be a lot of competition to become a leading expert... |