CmdrSprinkles

I am definitely biased, but I think the includes are important and are almost part of the lesson. Teach someone how to write their own containers and classes, then show them that there is a library they can easily access that does a much better job than they ever will and just how easy it is to use.

And while there are better languages from an educational standpoint, having something that is usable/"real" is quite valuable.

But I definitely approach things from a more practical/industry oriented perspective. so grain of salt.

As someone who has recently spent a few months in various Western European countries for work: You would be surprised

In many urban areas, it is basically NYC. Which is great, and makes getting around easy. But once you get farther out, things dry up fast. And a good comparison would actually be Amtrak and the like on the East Coast of the US. Considerably cheaper (I would guess, off the top of my head, 60% of the cost for a comparable trip). But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time. And a lot of the time, those savings aren't particularly significant once you factor that in.

As someone who travels a lot for work, I didn't see a huge difference in how I approached things while working on budgets. Fly to major city nearby and then get a train/rent a car to go to a smaller town (if needed). The former was more of an option, which was nice, but the latter was a lot faster if there were a few connections. And even when there was the option to just do pure train, the amount of time versus savings wasn't worth it.

And for personal travel? Even then, a flight was a lot more logical and not a lot more expensive once I factored in vacation hours and the like to handle transit times.

In terms of cities? Yeah, we are horrible (although, the UK and Ireland is almost as crap as we are once you get out of London). In terms of general (inter)national travel? A car is a lot less required, but not to the extent that a lot of us would think.

Interesting, but am I missing something or is that just a lot of fancy branding to say "We looked at twitter data"?

Still, good to know REI is doing well as I do like that overpriced store. But I also wonder how important it is for people to talk about Amazon. At this point they may very well be so ubiquitous that people know to go there.

And I think that is the way to go. I am personally a fan of having more sciencey programs use matlab and more "pure" CS use python as the first languages. Save C/C++ for the lower level stuff (as in OSes and hardware interfaces and optimization). Although, I would argue that nothing beats C++ for teaching OOP and data structures

My problem is the almost dogmatic indoctrination that goes along with it. My cousin's Intro to CS class was taught by a professor who spent about a third of the time basically parroting Stallman (he actually would regularly bring up blog posts and articles on the screen and read them to the class...) and screaming about how everyone needs to use either Vim or Jetbrains tools. That isn't teaching. That is pushing an agenda. And it just makes for worse students and hell for those of us who still spend some time with the interns and new hires.

Always explore new and better tools. But understand why. Sous-vide is awesome and has the potential to make some of the best food you will ever eat. But it also understand that even a "worse" method can be much more efficient or effective.

While I am all about C/C++ (even if I hate it), it makes sense

HN is probably something like 99% web and app developers (I would argue that all are the former, but my definition may be a bit old). In those cases, you actively don't want to ever use C and anyone who does is kind of an idiot. It is the logic by which "systems project" means "script to run on a server" for a lot of people around here.

And that is fine. But just like this place's obsession with Rust would lead to derisive mockery by "real" systems people, so too is C hated here.

It also doesn't help that universities, at least in the US, seem hellbent on teaching along these lines. A few years ago Eclipse was "the thing you use when you are poor or doing Java". These days? I am seeing disturbing numbers of graduates who refuse to use Visual Studio for a project on Windows and insist on boostrapping together something that is only half functional. And talking to my academia friends (and even doing a fair amount of guest lecturing for them), I know where the indoctrination is coming from.

Ars is good for high level stuff and to get a recap of the major keynote speeches.

Technology Review is nice, but having a hard cap on the number of articles I can read per month for free is just a huge no-go though. I get the Wired approach of blocking blockers (even if that is triggered by every company firewall I have ever been behind...) as that still provides content for free. Whereas these approaches strongly encourage catering to a specific demographic which tends to drastically limit the kind of critiques and coverage.

Yes. Economically, my bank account gets larger every year. Ergo, I must be saving up all my birthday cash

I don't have an estimate. My point was simply to explain to you why your logic was flawed as we are nearing the limits of what Moore's Law can give us without some pretty massive changes. This isn't a case of "Clock speeds are capped. We are doomed. Oh, wait, we can just put two slower ones on the same die" and is more "So... we are out of physical space..."

Trends are great when you are trying to make sense of data and estimate how to move forward. But they should not be used in a manner that ignores actual data.

> Would anyone choose C for a new systems project with no legacy baggage or dependencies, in a world with Rust and Go?

From a professional standpoint, you might as well be asking if I have infinite money and time. Nothing happens in a vacuum

But ignoring that, I would say, for me, it boils down to:

1. How important is performance? Is this a case where all that really matter is that it works? That I have a decent algorithm? Or am I going to be doing "real" optimization, even if only for a single platform? Even at just the "is my algorithm good?" stage I would lean toward C/C++ for systems work.

2. And this is the important one: Do I need this code to exist and be usable in one year? Five? Ten? Stuff like Rust might be fine for the one year frame, but for even as few as five I am going to want something established that I know will have support. And that means C/C++ for systems development (python, ruby, and js for scripting, and so forth).

Google are increasingly adding offline commands

There is some work regarding making transistors out of different materials as a way to eke a bit more out. Similarly, there is a lot of work regarding layering circuitry to an even greater degree. And, of course, there is the usual pie in the sky solutions.

But none seem all that promising and my gut is that we'll focus more on interconnects and algorithmic improvements.

But time will tell.

Different kinds of applications. Think of it like public transportation versus owning a car.

For highly parallelizable and distributable applications (anything where mapreduce makes sense), commodity clouds are awesome. Just like relying on the subway in a city. You'll have a bit of a hassle when you need to go shopping, but your normal use case is such that it is worth the hassle.

Now let's say you have a code where your tasks require much tighter coupling due to communication (basically "Science codes"). In these cases, what you want is the interconnect. You want to be able to get a physical block of nodes in a very short amount of time for a somewhat long amount of time. In terms of cars, imagine that you live outside of a city or tend to do a lot of shopping or long distance driving.

And that is basically the logic here. It sounds like the Japanese rig is intended to be similar to the US's ORNL Titan in that it is primarily a capacity machine for science in general. So people with those kinds of jobs can buy time and run their large simulations with ease while still relying on stuff like AWS for postprocessing and the like. In that case, even though this is a 130 petaflop machine, it will likely only ever run one or two jobs at that scale and will instead operate as a "cloud" with a focus on large contiguous allocations.

Whereas the other form of SuperComputer are the ones meant for large jobs for a small subset of users. Those are the ones that tend to be owned directly by governments and involve a fair amount of effort to get access to. Those run a mixture of the above kinds of jobs (for the target community) as well as actual large scale simulations. As for what they are simulating: Think about what would need really detailed simulations using codes and data that probably should never be near Amazon's servers.

And ignores what Moore's Law is.

In a (simplified) nutshell: We can fit more transistors in a given unit of area because we make them smaller. That used to just mean we increased clock frequencies (make it faster) but comparatively recently (decade or two) meant we increased parallelism.

Moore's Law is expected to fail because we are now reaching the point where smaller transistors are very heavily impacted by actual limitations imposed by physics.

So while it is possible we'll have a technology shift and see similar performance gains, it won't really be Moore's Law anymore (unless we start using Pym Particles or something).

Keep in mind that the target demographic of this site are college students and people who are goofing off when they should be working (or are talking on a message board when they are done for the day)

In my experience: Solo is best when you are doing grunt work. If I can autopilot, then sure.

Pair is great for when you are starting out and implementing a complex feature or tool. We generally don't do a lot of actual coding (just structures and pseudocode), but will do a LOT of whiteboard drawing and talking through logic. Multiple brains are what you want at this stage, and if you have a co-worker who complements your thoughts well, you can do a lot of great work.

And for bug fixing, pair programming is hands down amazing.

Mob programming I personally dislike, but it has its uses. I would argue this also belongs more at the high level planning stage, but it can work well when you are adding a new feature where you would benefit from a few different disciplines.

In large part because python 3 just wasn't worth using for the first few (probably five or six) years. The big reason so many of us use python is because of the wide range of libraries and modules that no longer worked.

And when selling it to people, it was usually "Oh, just do X, Y, and Z and you can port this library to Python 3". Not to mention all of the "Just write your python scripts to be backwards compatible".

So, as a user, I saw no reason to push it. A lot of hassle to not even really take advantage of anything to stay backwards compatible. And the moment we found a library that wasn't ported, we were back to 2.x.

Not to mention the zealots who would then explain to me how I was horribly wrong and that my firm is wrong and that we are bad people and blah blah blah blah blah.

These days it is a much easier sell in terms of compatibility as most (not all) major libraries have migrated. My personal work tends to be in python 3 and we try to make our in-house tools work for both (but 2.x is the priority). But most of our users are still going to use 2.x simply because there is no compelling reason to migrate (even if the migration is "Put parentheses after 'print'").

And the zealots are still annoying as hell.

And if 2.x really stops getting supported? I hope we'll migrate to 3, but there will be a lot of research and soul-searching first. Because now there are other languages with similar capabilities and if we are going to have to teach everyone something new, we might as well do it right.

God help them if they ever visit Chicago...

You're right. In fact, late 30s and early 40s is generally when people traditionally started companies.

But when I say "start up culture" I basically mean "silicon valley startup culture" and HN is basically that and its fan club. Mostly the latter. It is the difference between being part of "the gig economy" and just a part time/contract worker.

Yeah, there are some older people around here, just like there are at reddit and the like. But just reading and engaging in threads, it is very clear that this also skews pretty young.

And a large part of it is that the people who are in their 30s and beyond tend to either not have time to hang out on a message board and discuss things with kids in college (in my defense, I am between projects and killing time).

Well, the whackjob subreddit was a threat to the org because they were organizing harassment and slander/libel from there and it is a matter of time until there is a lawsuit for damages

And one can argue that the trump subreddit does the same in light of Twitter allegedly not being bought out because of the hate and toxicity. If Reddit can't secure investors and funding because of notoriety, they have to do something.

And then you get out of high school and you start to actually do research and learn the real answer: Primary sources are always better than secondary or tertiary, so use them when you can.

But Wikipedia IS good for finding those primary/secondary sources. And, depending on the topic, wiki is great for getting a quick primer to a subject or to have an example and is often cited in lectures to students who are expected to be old enough to not stop you and say "Teacher! Teacher! You said to never use Wikipedia!"

Pretty much. Saying Reddit should be like HN is like saying that every car needs to be a four wheel drive monster able to handle actual offroad driving.

HN is largely a tech site geared toward mid-late twenties individuals (the start-up culture, really). Reddit is a social network geared toward late teens to mid twenties (males). Yes, there is overlap, but not to a significant degree.

And it used to be the gold standard of the idiocy that are Reddit Detectives. There is now a new one.

> One seeking a managerial position isn't necessarily asked to demonstrate and perform his skills on spot, are they?

Actually, they are. That is the interview. As a manager, you need to have social skills. And a lot of the questions asked give a good insight into how you approach problems and social situations.

And that is why the better coder interviews are more about talking through a problem with a bit of whiteboard sketching/coding.

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Jesus Hubert Christ I think Reddit managed to out-detective the folk who accused a victim of being a terrorist.

Thanks, I guess. That, in a way that horrifies me due to what it means about my brain, makes sense now.

The same reason youtube and twitch (and youtubers and streamers) seem to have so much difficulty with moderating chat

Yes, getting rid of the hate and the stupid is something the owners of the site (and the content creators) want. It gives them a horrible reputation (and can impact business, as Twitter discovered). But that is still their userbase, and getting rid of the userbase drastically decreases their value.

So it is a balancing act. And the trump subreddit would be a disaster to remove as everyone would REALLY get on them for being "too political"

No problem. And good luck. We are a fairly established firm so our approach is more "We need someone competent who can work well with others". It sounds like start-ups are a lot more willing to take a risk and think outside the proverbial box.

Which I don't at all get as one would think we could absorb a failure or a delay more, but different cultures.

Somewhat off topic and not condoning the editing of comments (I probably will condone the closing of boards once I know more) but:

What the hell is a pizzagate? I saw it mentioned a few times while reading the mess that is the reddit detectiving for Assange but never saw a clear description. And now it is apparently a pro-Trump thing too?

What was the logic behind calling him a pedophile for that?

No... it really isn't. This is abusing power to attempt to manipulate public opinion on a message board. Stalking is a horrible invasion of privacy that has a tendency to escalate into violence. And even when it doesn't, it results in drastically increased anxiety and fear for the person being stalked if they find out.

Might not be full bible level of importance, but if you intend to do any work on Fortran and legacy science codes, "Modern Fortran Explained" by Metcalf, Reid, and Cohen is a must. Better examples and explanations than anything you can find on stack overflow with a focus on f90 (the most commonly accepted flavour) while also discussing the useful parts of 2003.

Be careful with it. Was dealing with credit card stuff (raising limit to go on travel) and when they were verifying my identity the policy was evidently to combine my questions with a "background check"

Said background check basically being they googled my name.

Which you would think isn't a problem until you get to "What school did you graduate from?" and have to go through four levels of reps to explain that (not actually what I typed) "Omelette Du Fromage" was my way of making it harder to social engineer my account.

... are you accusing me of astroturfing? huh

Do you want to know why so many of these initiatives fall apart? Because they get sold as pipe dreams. We'll just throw solar cells on every roof (what I was actually replying to) and free energy for all! Yeah! We'll power the entire planet! Disagree with me? Screw you, you are just working for big oil!

No. We need to be realistic. In some regions, solar is the bomb diggety. In others, wind can generate a lot of watts. And pretty much anywhere that has hydro or geothermal as an option do great. And in a subset of those, it is sufficient to handle power needs.

So sell it that way. Don't perpetuate the myth that we are "just about there" because that makes it an easy target. Explain that it is still mostly about supplementing power and lessening dependencies. Because pushing the former just leads to "Your proposal will handle about a quarter of non-peak energy usage. And it will take at least a decade until it might get to 50?"

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Also, you may want to consider reading other branches as most of your points (aside from the accusations of astroturfing...) were already brought up in other branches. And you'll see that I even praise the UK.

Critical stuff you definitely double bag. But stuff like extra layers or even a sleeping mat are things that can get wet but probably shouldn't and adding the extra bulk of waterproofing them just isn't worth it (to me).

True waterproofing generally isn't worth it. But not having to worry about a light-moderate rain or getting too close to a river/waterfall (obviously not submerged ,but just getting sprayed) is very nice. For the heavier stuff, you should probably throw a tarp/poncho/whatever over even the waterproof bags anyway.

Although my personal feeling is that if I am caught out in a heavy enough rain that just wearing my softshell and relying on zippers isn't sufficient then I don't want to be hiking anyway and should be looking for shelter.