CmdrSprinkles

I would argue that the problem is that it IS targeted toward developers. In the sense of those who are developing new methods and making proof of concepts.

Admittedly, most of my experience is with ipython but it is perfect for that. If there is a new algorithm/method I want to explore or I am figuring out an interface/structure, it is great. And I tend to not have to reset the kernel too often.

In that sense, jupyter was a great idea as you can now integrate documentation with code in a nice format.

Unfortunately, it also led to a strong focus on treating them as containers for the purpose of deploying code (more traditional software development).

Pretty much.

Our firm is actively not in Silicon Valley (or CA at all). And as such, we don't offer six figure starting salaries. And that does hurt us when it comes to getting new grads as they say "I can go work for Google and get paid X. Or I can work for you and get a fraction of that"

But the smart ones realize that cost of living is a LOT cheaper out here and that fraction goes a lot farther. I have colleagues who went the SV-industry route and one weekend over beers we realized I had saved more per year AND had far more "dicking around" money than they did. And I live by myself (no SO not by choice, but no flatmates is) rather than having three flatmates. Their salaries are still a fair amount higher than mine, but my cost of living is a tiny fraction of theirs.

I am not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, this would theoretically guarantee a minimum user experience. Which is nice. And a lot of those changes sound stupid and dangerous.

On the other hand, many of these changes may be with the intent of providing a better user experience as the goal of the provider is a sandbox or a temporary resource where security and updates are less of a concern.

But mostly, this fills me with concern over what this means for Ubuntu. It is clear that this is about ensuring a strong brand, and I am not sure why they would need that now. Is it just concern over other distros (like Mint) accomplishing what they spent decades trying (being a desktop Linux worth using for sane people)? Are they losing out on the server-space too now? Or are we looking at something else?

WoW I would be very surprised by. But all the MOBAs and esport FPSes and the like are fair game.

Mostly because, with the latter, improved AI means better competition and a deeper understanding (which boosts sales). With the former, improved AI means improved automation which means imbalanced economies.

Not aware of any cards specifically (outside of European chip-and-pin, but I don't think those usually work online), but this is the big argument for things like android/apple/firebomb pay.

Make a purchase, then sign off on your phone (or fingerprint reader on your laptop).

It obviously won't resolve the issue posed in the article, but it is definitely a step in the right direction and many of the major CC companies are integrating more and more. In five or six years I can easily see Chase and the like giving an option to only let the physical card be used in chip-and-pin mode and to require the use of an approved service for any contactless/online orders.

Obviously the approved services thing is a concern, but not a huge one.

Could we not have the editor wars?

Aside from that: I love vim and use it any time I work remotely (via ssh). But I spend good chunks of my time in Linux (Mint), Windows, and Mac. And Vim is great for the first and the last, but is awkward for Windows. And even if I don't mind the gui that looks like it came out of a dog's derriere, it makes synchronizing my settings a pain in the same region just because I need to change filenames (.vimrc becomes _vimrc, if memory serves), add a bunch of conditionals to handle different features, and possibly also change line endings (I forget if that is needed). Whereas atom is easily synced with a single mostly automated plugin that pushes everything I need to a gist.

I still prefer vim on my primary work station, but I am also eagerly following atom development in the hopes of filetype specific tab/indent/linelength rules to be better supported and various improvements to performance.

And on a less usability note: Atom looks REALLY good when you are doing a code demo or a presentation.

Ah. My apologies

Because your government said reprocessing was not allowed because they base their decisions on decades old technology and ignore any advances, there is now an excess of nuclear material. Ergo, reprocessing is a bad technology

Aside from that: If anyone who can avoid calling people "idiotic" and cares to read (I addressed the Chernobyl and Fukishima issues) wishes to continue discussion, feel free. I would love to. But I don't really see a point with this person though.

The ars technical article covers it better http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/11/after-mothballing-comma-...

But in a nutshell:

The company was approached by agencies that had severe concerns over safety and if this would have the required regulations in place.

So the company folded and released this instead.

The 10% overhead is largely advertising and a way to get preorders (after you are established)

But, while software (gaming), take a look at some interviews with Larian and Obsidian/inExile (I forget which one of those... probably both). They keep returning to the KS for fundraising and a large part of it is that even a successful campaign and perfect release doesn't necessarily give them the capital to start the next project without investors.

Personally: I backed the first pebble KS and got an okay product (looked like crap and not a lot of utility, but what it did, it did well). But I definitely got turned off by the multiple campaign thing (and the frequency of them) as it suggested a lack of long term support for the product.

Just to make sure I am following your understanding that is based solely on politics:

Because your government said reprocessing was not allowed, there is now an excess of nuclear material. Ergo, reprocessing is a bad technology

Thank you for illustrating my point. The tech is sound. Getting past the fearmongers and actually using it is the problem. We have had some ridiculously safe reactors for decades, we just aren't allowed to build or use them anywhere. We have ways to deal with waste, but we aren't allowed to do it... and then get yelled at for having excess waste.

Seriously. Put your prejudices and patriotism at the door and actually do some research on the subject. Yes, a lot of this hasn't been tested at scale (in large part because politicians and Activists won't let anyone) but they have been researched VERY heavily, tested at varying scales, and are a more viable alternative than anything else right now. But because there is a "nuclear" in the name, it is inherently evil and wrong.

I would imagine agreements regarding distribution rights. Netflix (distributor) can only offline stuff they have the rights to.

HK in particular I would assume Netflix (content producer) are interested in partnering with a Chinese company as that region tends to favour those quite heavily.

Take a gander at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

Technology has advanced a lot since Homer got out of the lead suit. A lot of nations just refuse to use said technology out of fears that there will be another Chernobyl (human error and poor maintenance) or Fukishima. Fukishima is a very real danger, but partially avoidable through contained systems [0] and a comparable threat for other power plant models)

Yes, you will eventually have some waste. But nowhere near as much as we used to. And there have been quite a few studies (and "common sense") to indicate that greenhouse gas emissions are MUCH MUCH lower [1] than most of the alternatives.

So it is a tradeoff. Obviously solar/wind/geothermal/hydro [2] are the best choices where feasible. But if you can't use those reliably in a manner that is able to provide required energy at all hours of the day (including peak usage), you are stuck with dirty approaches. And of those, nuclear is pretty gosh darned "clean".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small,_sealed,_transportable,_...

[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-basics/greenhouse-gas-e...

[2] Hydro actually tends to cause a lot of problems for wildlife and the like. Not aware of any drawbacks for the other three though

Except, what is the threshold? Are MS responsible for every time a 20 year old machine running windows 98 because nothing else can run the data collection software crashes? Should I give Linus a ring every time my aunt breaks her laptop that I installed Mint on?

Assuming the software itself has no meaningful or significant bugs (a hard thing to prove), it likely IS a problem of training. I know that my travel request time went from 5 minutes to closer to an hour for the first few times I used it after we switched to a new system. And while the admins were trained properly, the rest of us just were told "Ask an admin if you need help"

Similarly, it might actually BE the third party systems. I know that every time we upgrade part of our infrastructure we have to deal with the hell of components that should, but don't, interface well. And as often as I scream profanities and talk about how much I hate a certain vendor, I also know it isn't their responsibility to ensure that their software works with a different vendor's (I do yell at our procurement people though since they should make it so).

Do I think Tyler Tech should try to help? Of course, this is bad PR. And if they were the ones providing the training, address what went wrong and update the training and possibly GUI to resolve this. But so long as they met the requirements of the contract, I see no reason they should be held responsible or penalized.

Not necessarily. If maintenance costs outweigh the savings (compared to "clean" coal or something, let alone sources that are even remotely close to clean like nuclear) then it never will.

Regardless, this is still pretty awesome and my (limited) understanding of India suggests that it has the kind of climate that would really let this shine (pun intended).

The issue isn't the capabilities of Make. The issue is that those incremental constructions are largely a case of implementing your own version of CMake (yay) or Autoconf (boo). And I guess scons sort of counts too.

Sometimes that is a good thing (strange build platforms). Sometimes that is a huge waste of time (most of the time).

What.cd reminded me a lot of the abandonware sites.

I may have allegedly been a pirate years ago. And I may have allegedly spent a lot of time at various abandonware sites because I like older games. And those sites seemed great. They had strict rules on what could and could not be uploaded and very much took the approach of "this is an archive". Then GoG launched and made it reasonable to buy those older games in a format that would (usually) work on modern systems.

Great right? We won! Nope. All four of the sites I used to (allegedly) frequent had responses ranging from "They aren't the creators so we are still going to let you upload these files" to "Some of our uploads are in iso format so it is still required". Hell, one even allowed people to upload the gog installers.

I am mostly good with archive.org (I have some reservations but feel them to be a net good), but my general experience is that most "archive" sites tend to just be pirates who think they understand the legal system.

Definitely ignorant on the subject, but are there ANY nations that would meet that requirement? I would assume any that are savvy enough to detect tor AND care about it would probably not just say "Oh you crazy kids. Be more careful next time"

I don't really see how anything there was "disruptive" and it seems like this is less a factor of technology and more just societal change.

The big factors are

1. Tourists who don't know (or care) what a geisha really is. While the article is awkwardly vague about it, a good way to think of it is that a geisha is a combination of hostess/server with entertainer specializing in small crowds and individuals. A Geisha is not actually a prostitute (but they can be). And tourists have cared about as little as they ever did

2. The younger generation just not caring either. A large part of this can be seen as a mixture of Japanese culture encouraging a "work hard, play hard" mentality where sitting around and having a nice quiet evening out isn't desired coupled with the same "rebellion against the elite" that we see in western nations

3. The older generation who is interested and does appreciate it being, well, older. Family men are less likely to spend money on many evenings out and the particularly well off are either adopting the "party hard" life style or just outright hiring the more talented geishas as a mark of status.

Tech itself barely factors in to any of that and nothing seems "disruptive" in the slightest.

You may be missing the point

A lot of things have lua bindings and a lua interface. But once you stop being your own boss, your control over which interfaces and bindings to use shrinks drastically.

I believe the question was more: What fields/industries are actually USING the lua interface by default? Where would being able to say "I am very experienced with lua scripting" be a particularly strong asset.

Because you need to get to the interview stage AND seem good during it

Here is how the hiring process works from the end of the people on the committee:

1. Get all the CVs. Let's say this is either an entry level position or a particularly good one and say we have 100 CVs

2. We break it up into groups with each CV looked at by at least two people

3. If there is not an applicable degree, it is almost instantly binned. The only exception is if they have a fair amount of experience (at least 1 year of contiguous work on a related project for an entry level position) or are otherwise exceptional.

4. We continue to filter and iterate until we have it down to about 10 applicants. We have yet to really talk to anyone as part of the hiring process and are solely reading papers and looking at them based on their CV.

5. Then we do phone interviews where it is about seeing if they sound remotely competent and would potentially be a decent fit. And if there was any question about you making it through the filters, expect it to be brought up

6. For the last few (let's say 5) we'll do an actual in-person interview with whiteboard coding exercises and lots of discussion.

You don't have a degree. Bachelor's is bare minimum, but we prefer at least a Master's. You are in the bin. You didn't invent sliced bread, you are really in the bin.

Maybe you are the smartest person in the world, maybe you are a really earnest kid, and maybe you are someone we could never have worked with in the first place. We'll never know because you won't get past the initial filtering.

------

In short: Finish HS and at least get a community college Bachelor's degree. And if you are truly hellbent on not getting an education (a red flag, by the way, since it suggests you'll clash with people), start making the greatest project ever.

Sounds reasonable (to the extent any of this does).

In the event of an actual terrorist, this gives them a lot of data so that they can argue they have the UK equivalent of probable cause to subpoena various sites for more detailed browsing history.

In theory, it would be something like "Crazy Joe Devola spent 16 hours a day at some hacking site. Better find out what he was looking at". In practice it will be "Facebook, give us access to his file"

For the more self-righteous startups (the kind that will grill you on engineering ethics when the job is to make a plugin to add a squiggly line filter to instagram), you are probably screwed as they will basically invoke Godwin's Law instantly. Similarly, for the companies that have to deal with real ethical concerns(government/charity work, etc) you are also probably screwed just because you are a liability (nobody wants to be the one who hired a Theranos employee if poop hits the fan).

But for the majority of firms, it is just a job. Just be very clear on what your job responsibilities were and that you did them.

But one thing to be very wary of that others haven't addressed (and have basically given horrible advice on): Be careful. What you say can be viewed in a very negative light if poop continues to hit the fan. Do not "dish" or air any dirty laundry. Depending upon how your branch is handled, consider actually talking with your manager/HR on the proper way to respond to any questions. Yes, it can screw you there. But they will know you are leaving the moment a reference is checked so it might be worthwhile to cover your butt.

I am not a lawyer and this may actually be a case where consulting one is not a bad idea, but my personal suggestion from similar (but not as high profile) situations is:

"I am not at liberty to discuss any ongoing investigations or court cases. And besides, even if I was, I wouldn't know anything anyway. I was just responsible for coding widgets 4-30 and improving our infrastructure for STUFF."

Covers your butt as you aren't disclosing anything and reasserts that you were a code monkey.

And for actual publications and the like, latex is indeed awesome and there is a strong argument for superiority.

But the ``problem'' is people who insist on using it for everything. Have a memo? Better set up a repo. Writing a report for a manger? Latex!

With the simpler things where you won't be cross referencing constantly and any figures that you have you want absolute control over placement, Word is the way to go. And pretty much the moment you are done your dissertation, that is the majority of what you'll write. Even in academia you'll likely spend more time writing grants and memos than papers. And, with at least the former, what matters most is having the figure easily seen and fitting the format requirements (specifically page count).

Use the best tool for any given job.

While this is indeed not the target audience (which makes it hilarious), that is a horrible attitude. A lot of the complaints that have been brought up (premium pricing, much cheaper and better alternatives, not actually a new idea, etc) are actually very valid and worth considering.

Now, if those aren't complaints and you are perfectly happy only targeting people who want The Next New Thing, go for it. Otherwise? Take the complaints with a grain of salt, but still take them.

And while true, if that came out today it would probably be called "clickbait"

Yes, 10% sounds about right for un-redeemed gift cards. But tell me, how often do you wear your xmas sweater? Have you ever gotten a gadget from a well-meaning uncle that just seemed stupidly dangerous and worthless?

Gift cards aren't inherently a bad gift. Bad gifts are. If someone gives me a Victoria's Secret GC and I am not in the kind of relationship where I would buy my SO lingerie, then it is not going to get redeemed (and I will forget about it by the time I would have an opportunity to). Whereas, if someone got me a GC for Amazon Kindle or Steam I would use that pretty gosh darned fast.

And obviously a store is going to push the GC. Even if it is a 20 buck card and you buy something for 19.99 they turn a profit. And more likely you'll spend 25 or 30

I am aware of that. The fact of the matter is that I don't mind too much (small towns are great for lowering your expectations when it comes to quality of service...). I can afford amazon prime annually and even just not having to care about making a 20 buck order for free shipping (let alone the video on demand stuff) is worth it to me.

I just recall doing a quick chat to ask where my video game was when it was a day after release and getting offered a full refund and blah blah blah. And now? It can be three or four days outside the window and I just get a "it'll be there eventually"

And I know it is definitely regional as I have had a few friends back where I used to live who still got the borderline obsessive offers of refunds.

Again, the discussion was about why topics like C/C++ are dismissed/disliked around here and I presented an argument based upon observations in threads. That is actually a valid approach.

And if your issue is actually that I very clearly pulled a number out of my arse and went out of my way to make it clear that I had: Are you also going to make it mandatory for everyone to preface every non-cited statement with "in my opinion"?

Look, I get that this is your bread and butter and that it is important for HN to be presented as being THE place for tech and blah blah blah and being pigeonholed into "a site for web and app developers who like silicon valley" isn't necessarily what you want, but trying to pretend that a rule to not "generalize" as a way to not have people speculate and discuss why some topics just aren't particularly welcome here isn't the way to go. Just make it a rule, you aren't fooling anyone.

Also, if you REALLY wanted to improve discussions here: Make a rule against pseudo-technical naval gazing (is there a term for that? "Naval gazing" is more associated with philosophy and potheads) as far too many threads devolve into "We can't help but be introverted because our minds are designed that way and I need to be isolated to code because I need to optimize everything".

Except that this is a discussion on how news and topics are received at HN. So making a projection based on available data is actually quite reasonable and if there is a sample bias, it is a valid one. Because it doesn't matter if there are nine hundred billion hardcore VHDL folk around here. The most popular discussions tend to be tech related to web technologies and the associated tools. If the consistently popular and top discussions on HN aren't adequate to make a generalization of the general makeup of the active HN users, then I don't know what is.

And, I thought it was pretty clear with the "probably something like" and "99%" that it was a number being pulled out of my arse for the sake of discussion.

That being said, actual data on the skillsets and interests of the more active members would be a very interesting bit of data. But it is also really hard to measure as lurkers don't contribute to discussion but will gladly vote in a poll.

Don't forget the horror and shame of helping a friend with the dishes because they weren't allowed to buy a bottle of wine.

I recently moved from being twenty miles from a distribution center to the middle of nowhere.

After eventually getting annoyed enough to contact Amazon, it was explained that Release Date Delivery and Prime 2-Day Shipping aren't actually guarantees.

And that mostly lines up. When I lived next door they were super fast to refund instantly. Now that I don't, they are a lot less likely. A proper return and refund is the same, but just a "So... where the hell is my coffee grinder that I ordered last Friday?" exchange results in "It is on the way. You might see it Thursday" response.

I still prefer Amazon and still go for prime shipping products (it is still worth it price wise), but I am a lot less likely to buy time sensitive stuff through them anymore and a lot more likely to just go with the "I don't care when it gets here, give me some store credit" shipping.