Shamanmuni

Have you read about all the oil and coal companies that the Foundation invested in? Or the private prisons and military contractors? I mean, maybe they aren't a part of Bill's current pet project, but climate change and human rights are both very important issues, as important as diseases.

I'm shocked that the response seems to be "Where's the problem in investing in companies that make the world a worse place if he uses that money for other good purposes?". The good you can make doesn't magically erase the bad you made.

The article starts saying that Scala gives you lots of options while Clojure guides you to a certain style, but the Scala example takes the most complicated solution as if every programmer would solve it that way. He's contradicting himself.

Scala can solve it in a way quite similar to Clojure. The author is trying to hammer a point about Clojure which doesn't emerge from the example, as most Scala programmers can notice.

It would have been great if he had listed all the possible solutions and told us "Scala lets you solve it in all these very different ways without the language guiding you, Clojure guides you to the simpler solution". That's a fair point, and one Scala programmers will tend to agree with.

As far as I understand, the point of the article is to simulate a working backend in order to concentrate only in the frontend, the choice of AngularJS is contingent, you could do it with another framework (or none) but they chose this one. They aren't saying "Hey, Angular is the best for prototyping" but "Hey, not worrying about the backend is great for prototyping, and we do it in this way with Angular".

The interesting part is that you don't have to worry about web servers, server software, databases, scalability or server deployment; just simulate what kind of responses you'd get with the complete web application and iterate from there until you are happy with your frontend. This is particularly useful if your development process is driven by UX.

Go is a language, but its standard library is very comprehensive for most things Internet related and you can build web applications quite easily using just that. You also have similar examples in the benchmark using nodejs and php, which aren't exactly frameworks.

I know there should be some overhead when using a framework, but sometimes the cost is too high and it's useful to know it (compare php and symfony2, for example).

You can look at the Revel benchmark, a web framework written in Go which did quite well in the benchmark.

I'd like to learn Prolog and Logic Programming but I don't know when it's better than the other paradigms, its shining moment. Could anybody help me?

I mean, Imperative Programming shines when you aim for efficiency in the usage of the computer resources. Functional Programming shines when you need concurrency and parallelism. Object Oriented Programming shines when you are building a GUI. All these paradigms have their sweet spot and will make your life easier in certain situations.

What's Logic Programming sweet spot? I've read about puzzle games as good examples for this paradigm, but I suppose there are stronger examples for it. Maybe AI? Is it used in that field?

Edit: I have just read roberthahn comment, thanks for your insight and the link!

This discussion is turning useless, you are arguing with an imaginary strawman that isn't me. You are assuming and stating things about me and this community and it's becoming tedious.

Reread this thread, I didn't claim fiction as a whole is better than non-fiction in any way, but you did claim non-fiction as a whole gives you more information about the world by default, irrespective of individual examples. I'd be thankful if you stopped denying that you said what you said, or at least admit that you were mistaken.

You can't make blanket statements about categories like that, it's a futile exercise because you are putting great books and garbage books in the same box. They aren't all the same, neither in fiction nor in non-fiction. That's the critique we made to Bill Gates' blanket statement.

Instead of arguing for argument's sake, read what I wrote calmly and analyse it, none of your previous answers apply and I don't have the time to answer to each part of your comment. I'll just answer the only one in which you could have a point.

About Paris Hilton's book, it's true that there's some value in it, but you can't compare it to the value that you can take from 1984 and the insights it can give you about society and the human condition. And that was my point, a counterexample to the blanket statement "non-fiction gives you more information about the world than fiction by default". It simply isn't true. Literature is much more complex than that.

And by literature I talk both about fiction and non-fiction, I don't redefine things or refer to an imaginary "most of us".

>Mr. Gates didn't say that non-fiction is always better for learning about the world.

Of course he didn't, he said something worse. The literal quote from Bill Gates is: "But I read mostly nonfiction because I always want to learn more about how the world works".

The immediate conclusion that you can take from that is "if you want to learn more about how the world works, then don't read fiction". It's the assumption that fiction has value only as entertainment.

I'll give you just one example of the opposite. If you want to learn how people in the past thought and viewed the world, then an excellent way is reading the popular fiction of that time. Bonus points if you get to know how they read it.

>Sorry, but it does. Easily testable hypothesis; go to the NY Times Bestsellers lists and compare, book-for-book, what can be "learned" from each (as most of us understand "learning").

Sorry, but if you get to redefine things in order to suit your argument (the word learn), then you are right by default and there can't be any discussion. I won't follow you there.

I know there are excellent non-fiction books that teach you lots of things. But the reverse is true, there are garbage non-fiction books that teach you nothing.

For example: read "Confessions of a Heiress" by Paris Hilton. It's non-fiction, so by your logic, you will surely learn more about the world reading that than something like "1984" by George Orwell, right? Give me a break.

Apparently he read Gates' fictional biography...

What are you arguing against? He didn't say that fiction is always better than non-fiction for learning about the world.

However, many people (Bill Gates included apparently) operate under the opposite assumption that non-fiction gives you more information about the world by default. And that's simply not true. Fiction can change your views, give you new ideas and insights, challenge your beliefs, etc.

Fiction writers create based on their life experiences, their feelings and ideas and also the information they got from different sources. It's pure ignorance to assume they only offer brainless entertainment.

Neither software nor architecture are easy to understand.

The wall example is similar to "Write a simple calculator capable of doing addition, substraction, division and multiplication". Anyone can tell if that software works as expected or not and have some idea if it's well done or not.

A similar comparison would be a team designing and building a fully functional house on a budget. In that example it's not easy at all to assert how well they are working, as happens in software development.

Probably by talking to him. It's not hard to tell if a manager has no clue about what you do.

If he doesn't, then he's probably using some silly and lazy metric like "hours in the office" or "lines of code written per day". If he does, he probably took the time to learn about your job and make a more accurate assesment of your work.

Really, as a programmer you are supposed to know lots of things, learn some more and work hard; but the guy above you cannot be bothered to learn some useful skills in order to asses your work? What kind of logic is that?

They don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk. Typesafe (the company founded by Martin Odersky) offers Typesafe Console as a part of their Reactive Platform.

There you can see lots of data related to an application using Akka, including its performance and possible bottlenecks.

You can use it easily from the web browser, the only downside is the large amount of RAM used.

That's true, but the statistics tend to show that consumption rate is unrelated to its legal status.

As far as I know, there aren't any records of a boom in consumption just because a drug was legalized. And I'm not talking about marijuana only, but drugs in general, alcohol included.

Considering that, we can say that the fear of people going mad about a drug just because it was legalized is another myth of the "war on drugs".

Well, history teaches us that it probably is the case. During the alcohol prohibition in the USA, the situation was more or less equal than before it.

There aren't hard numbers of consumption during the prohibition (obviously) but statistics of alcohol related deaths and arrests seem to show that there was a serious decrease just before the prohibition, and after a few years it returns to its previous state, and was worse in some aspects.

http://www.druglibrary.org/prohibitionresults.htm

Also, in the Netherlands the marijuana consumption rate is less than in the USA, despite it being almost legal.

So, don't worry, things won't change much, except for those people who won't have to be worried about being arrested for smoking a plant.

Again, I'm not disagreeing (at least completely) with you. Research is necessary.

I would like to try this for those times when I'm short of time to cook and resort to ordering a pizza for example, not as a complete replacement. And I think it would be advisable for the people interested to do that as long as there's not serious research.

However, currently there are serious studies about the bad effects of fast food on your health, it's not an unknown. The way I see it, you are more worried about something that could be bad than about something we know is bad. It doesn't add up to me. Sounds like neophobia. And I'm sorry in advance if I seem rude.

Sure, but if your regular meals are pizza, hamburguers, instant noodles, junk food and the like then you are on your way to malnutrition already. Soylent could be a very positive change for those people.

It's not like meals are an arcane science working some unknown magic on your body, it's about biological needs and chemistry. And it's not like there are chefs cooking healthy food in every home. I don't claim anything about Soylent, I have never consumed it, but it sounds like a possible solution to a big problem. Time will tell.

I'm no expert, but as I understand Ensure is a supplement for your meals, Soylent is a replacement for them.

You shouldn't consume only Ensure, but you could do it with Soylent. They are completely different products.

This simply isn't true. The jump from Mac OS to Mac OS X was huge and Mac users ranted for years about it. You had different file structures, compatibility issues, and Mac OS Classic prided itself in its "out of your way, no nonsense" GUI while OS X started the "Fisher Price" GUI era.

More than a decade has passed since then, so I don't remember all the details, but you certainly had to learn the OS X way, just like the man learning Windows 8.

I agree with you, it's a myth, there's just one comment which is similar to what the parent states, and his objection about not solving the connectivity issue is completely valid. I still use a pendrive in case there's no internet connection. Most of them are congratulations.

What most people don't notice is that many votes don't necesarily mean "everybody agrees with him/her". Many times I have upvoted comments with which I didn't agree but I thought were well reasoned and had validity because I think those comments improve the conversation.

On the other hand, I could agree with comments stating "Great work guys!" but I wouldn't vote them as they offer little to no substance.

I'm in complete agreement with you, but I think we wouldn't need to rely on personal interpretations and recommended practices if the SA licenses stated clearly something akin to:

If a copy or a derivative work of the licensed material is to be included in a piece of software under the General Public License or other strong copyleft license, then it must be licensed under that license for compliance.

I don't speak legalese, so I'm sure that text is full of holes and possible misinterpretations, but surely a group of experts could come up with something legally viable in that spirit.

If you want to have control about how your creative works are reused, then you should choose to stay with plain-old Copyright and grant (or deny) authorizations as requested.

It's a little bit crazy to say "Yeah, this license gives you total freedom to reuse this work however you want without asking permission, except when the original author doesn't like the result". Where do you draw the line? It defeats the purpose of the license.

You can make a parallel with FOSS, your software could be used to run nuclear missiles, a pedophilia network or other nasty things. I don't like it quite a bit, but the other option is a slippery slope in my opinion.

I think the problem is that both GPL and CC-BY-SA require you to license derivative works with that same license. And sometimes it's not easy to tell if something is or isn't software in a clear way.

For example, if you modify an image of a map licensed with CC-BY-SA for it to be used in a level of a game licensed with GPL, which license should you use for the derivative work? Is it data, code or both at the same time? What's the status of an image or a sound made with a script (think about fractals, for example)?

Both licenses are "viral" and require you to use that and not the other. You are on a deadlock.

Odd, I have a Nokia N9 with Meego in front of me, works perfectly and was cheaper than a similar Android phone. I'm completely aware of this family problems, but you can't say that it hasn't delivered.

The Jolla devs have promised a guide for installing Sailfish OS in this phone, so I will happily make the switch when they publish it.

We are in Hacker News, today you can't find a more hacker-friendly OS for your phone (well, maybe Firefox OS is on par, I haven't used it). I think that's what the parent was talking about.

As the article states, a patch exists which implements the functionality required by the author, so the only 'demand' is to apply that patch, hardly a monumental task.

The problem here is that Nginx developers refuse to implement a free patch which already exists for a feature easily found in the competition in order to protect their business model.

Sure, what Nginx devs do is a legitimate practice, as legitimate as the author complaining about it and proposing a change of software or a fork. I don't understand why many get so upset about it.

So, are you saying that Apple, probably one of the most secretive and PR savvy companies in the world, doesn't give much thought about its relations with the media? Really?

The article wasn't talking about a conspiracy, read it again. It's just what you said, Apple doing PR control.

If they think that criticisng Apple or its products makes someone a bad journalist or unfair and they are blacklisted, then in actuality they do care a lot about journalists.

A tech journalist is at a disadvantage with the rest if he is denied early access to products, and he won't get that unless he writes pretty things about Apple. We have a word for that: blackmail.

I recommend you Good Math by Mark C. Chu-Carroll; it's a fantastic book for programmers who don't know higher math and it explains well how Lambda Calculus works. You can also find useful explanations about logic programming, turing completeness, etc. You can take it as an introductory book in Computer Science and read the books mentioned by the author to deepen your knowledge.

You can do that perfectly well with R. Heck, R was designed with that kind of workloads in mind. With RStudio you can even present a table which the non-programmers can directly manipulate to test those conditions.

I usually use spreadsheets only as data entry software and then R does the rest.

CAP is about choosing which are the main guarantees of a system. When you say P in CAP it means "If there's a network partition which affects n machines, the rest of the system will take charge of that load and continue working just fine" for a variable number of n. Saying "they chose CA" means they don't provide that guarantee and there could be problems related to a network partition (which by the way is how SQL databases usually operate). In RethinkDB's case they chose to sacrifice availability by default in those cases (but you can tune it).

Take for example Riak, they chose "AP" which means the system will continue working just fine through a network partition at the expense of not giving a strong consistency guarantee (eventual consistency). That doesn't mean that the data isn't consistent at all, just that it isn't its main concern.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it very difficult to understand how your comment relates to the article.

maddog mentioned Chavez and the cuban embargo in order to illustrate a point, which is completely valid: Brazil and any other sovereign nation (excluding the USA... maybe) should be wary about using closed source software and computers made in a foreign country. You can never completely trust them; but there exist alternatives which you can implement right now.

Sorry if you had bad experiences in Venezuela, but you don't need to freak out and start a commie witch-hunt any time Chavez is mentioned. And I live Argentina, so I also have experience with enduring populist governments; but this article isn't about them, at all.

You are just taking one data point and assuming it proves something other than Yammer had problems with Scala. Check this list of companies using Scala: http://www.scala-lang.org/old/node/1658.html

Some examples: Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare. All of them pretty big and in the same space of Yammer; they seem quite happy and don't plan to move away from Scala.

And here you can find a clarification from Yammer about that issue: http://eng.yammer.com/scala-at-yammer/

TL;DR: They liked Scala but it has rough edges, every programming language has rough edges (yes, including Java). They found Scala was not the best option for some particular situations and Java was a better fit. End of story.

That's fine and completely reasonable, I think nobody said Scala is the Holy Grail in programming languages. As for your preference, you seem to be looking for a "nicer than Java, but OOP all the way" (don't know about Julia, haven't used it), which is OK as a preference but many of us find it a kludge to work with. I found something like Scala (multi-paradigm, I mean) helps me a lot in reasoning about code. As I said, you use the paradigm that makes more sense.

For complexity and ugliness, you have my previous answer. About compile time, you have a sophisticated type system and type inference which come at a cost, but it's not such a big deal when you run it with fsc (which stands for fast scala compiler).