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...funny, that's basically the same thing Spez said about what he did.

I would argue that a moderator shutting down a community of 25,000 individuals because of their own personal opinions is just as much if not the greater abuse of power.

I'm in a similar boat, and that repo looks very useful! Thanks.

If you're at all into Python or R I'd suggest Jose Portilla's courses on Udemy as well, they're very good at covering the applied aspects.

I'd venture a guess that implementing any string encoding support in a language I'm not that familiar with would likely be quite an undertaking.

If not, then it also begs the question - if it's just that simple, why's it not already there in the core alongside UTF-8?

Anyone new to the language working through data problems is going to pick it up and start at the data collection/wrangling stage, and immediately run into the 'you can implement that yourself/run it through a converter' mentality, and likely go back to whatever they were using before. I know we did.

Well - that's my point. I do use a converter, as it's built into python at every intersection that I need it, reading CSV, XLSX, database calls, etc.

Having to stick python scripts in front of all my Julia scripts everywhere that it would perform data access doesn't really seem viable. Thus, my beef with Julia.

My beef with Julia when I last tried it out was the lack of flexibility within the 'data munging' sphere. The assumption appeared to be that all of your data would come in to as UTF-8, whereas in my org we need strong support for Latin1/cp1252, and UTF-16LE BOM. Is this something that has changed recently, or are these traders are economists just working with more sane data?

There's nothing that's really comparable at the moment, so far as I know. It's not one of the pieces we've been able to replace.

> The Microsoft brand has been completely reborn in the eyes of developers over the past few years. The lows of 2007-2010 seem a distant memory.

Maybe in the eyes of some developers - for many of us who are still dependent on MS products that haven't been getting much attention (SQL Server and it's related BI tools), the lows are still getting lower. Sure, there's improvements in the overall functionality (with SQL 2016) - but trying to get bugs fixed (or even acknowledged) for anyone but a fortune 500 company is still an exercise in futility. Trying to get support via MSDN forums (as is a purported benefit of our multiple MSDN developer licenses) is a joke.

We're dropping any MS related tech that we can, because frankly it feels like we're throwing money away when we could be getting the same (or, most likely better) support using open source technologies instead.

I have connect issues that have been open and unacknowledged for going on 4 years now. Meanwhile, I have posted bug reports to open source projects on github and received responses back with 5 minutes of hitting submit.

VS Code is great, don't get me wrong - but the experience with that project is a far cry from the products we've PAID MS to use and develop with.

You're probably better off with alienware for processing power and hardcore specs, unless you're doing CAD and need the certified drivers/hardware. Workstation model laptops have a huge markup, and gaming models often meet or beat their specs for less.

Any way I could trade my Surface Pro 3 for an old MacBook? I'm tired of MS breaking it every 2nd week with 'updates'.

I'm not sure that makes a difference here, since a lot of the issues reported are with Surface devices.

At my org we found that Surface+WSUS+ Anniversary Update=dead Surface... And this is just 2 weeks after they fixed the issue where the batteries would stop charging.

I know python fairly well, and had previously done most web development with flask or django. I had to learn JS so that I could do front end web dev, things like D3 and such for visualizations of data. I tried out a few of the frameworks that I came across for back-end web dev as well, things like Koa, knex, passport, etc - and I have to say that these days I start far more projects as JS/Node.JS projects than I do python.

I still love and use python quite often, but more in data analysis/manipulation projects with Jupyter - Node definitely doesn't have anything on python in that dept.

p.s., check out pandas if you're not already familiar with it.

...except for the whole sync/async (libuv) thing. And the bits they added on top of V8, like Buffers.

Maybe Javascript == Node.JS then?

Intellisense can be difficult with JavaScript inside an IDE. I've had some luck with WebStorm and their typescript stubs though.

It's done with Node.js and nginx all the time. Other than the initial configuration nginx is essentially stateless, and there's simple setups out there to automate the nginx config as well, with docker for example: https://github.com/jwilder/nginx-proxy.

Clearly Palm OS is making a comeback!

I think the idea of this is great, but I suspect it'll become far more useful given larger aggregate ranges. Last week, last month, last six months - etc. As it stands, many books (like the Palm OS one) may only get mentioned once by someone with a lot of karma - which leads to another issue, since the algorithm is known it's now open to abuse by the HN karma-rich.

In my books it's an instant reason to not visit any website that does it. I also feel that the people who do give out their email address within the first 15 seconds of visiting a website are probably not likely to use their real e-mail address, or likely to unsubscribe just as quickly as they gave it out.

As I mentioned elsewhere I'd suggest comparing any 'business' (or 'workstation') laptop with an Alienware equivalent. I found that very often you're paying premium prices for CAD certified graphics cards and other drivers, when if you're not doing CAD it's generally wasted money.

You may want to look into Alienware - they tend to have a way better build quality than the Dell machines, and you can get better bang for your buck than typical 'workstation' builds for laptops. I'm not sure how well their smaller form factors are, as I've always gone big - but I've used various Dell and Lenovo 'workstation' laptops and I will be sticking with Alienware for the foreseeable future.

Edit: Also, my use case tends to be database development, data analysis, and virtualization.

Daniel Gardner actually had a pretty good book on this topic as well [1] where he found that often times expert predictions were actually worse than those of an average person (or the flip of a coin, for that matter). On the Pundits and Policy wonks bit I think Nate Silver also had a good write-up in his book on Fox vs. Hedgehog [2] mentality, and why experts are so often wrong when they cannot incorporate as much experience from outside their own fields.

[1](https://www.amazon.com/Future-Babble-Expert-Predictions-Beli...) [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox)

There's s lot more options in Python for data viz other than matplotlib. Pandas has several built ins as well, so in many cases simple plots on existing data frames can be a one liner.

Sadly this is not a two year issue, it's been going on for at least the last 10 years. I mainly deal with SQL Server, so maybe it's just particularly bad there - I haven't seen anything to indicate the rest of their products aren't like this to some degree though.

There are active bug reports and feature suggestions for SQL Server that are more than a decade old.

They do this for bugs that are easily reproducible on all versions of these products as well.

I received a similar response to a bug report a few years back, it had been open for a couple of years without even being acknowledged, then one day they decided to close it with a form letter listing possible reasons. People continued to upvote it, and finally 3 1/2 years after it was filed it finally got fixed. No interaction from anyone at MS other than the form response, and the final status change. I've filed about a dozen bugs reports on connect - and this is one of the few 'success' stories, sadly.

User engagement at MS is very broken.

I already gave up on filing bug reports for MS products years ago for this exact reason.

This is not a case of it's fixed in x, or you should upgrade to y, it is neglect plain and simple.

I asked about this exact issue when they did an AMA in the SQL Server subreddit a while back, and I shit you not the response was that 'for a few years the team didn't have a lot of resources'... That's right, MS doesn't have the resources to properly support and develop SQL Server and the surrounding development tools.

They were also encouraging everyone to vote on the connect items, as they were using vote count as the priority indicator for addressing issues. No intake triage, just get enough votes and maybe then they'll think about fixing some bugs.

I simply don't use their tools any more where I can avoid it, and where I can't I'm looking for longer term replacement plans.

It's definitely doable, I ran across some examples [1] while looking for an automated process for renewing within docker.

[1]: https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

Containerization on it's own can have benefits even in smaller deployments - separating your different server concerns to the bare minimum can be very useful.

There's also other aspects, like being able to spin up the newest PostgreSQL within minutes, and when you're done you rm the container and image and have no trace and/or side effects.

There's some pretty useful multi-container configurations out there too, like a dockerized gitlab environment: https://github.com/sameersbn/docker-gitlab

You're not weird, just likely introverted. This book may help: https://www.amazon.com/Introvert-Advantage-People-Thrive-Ext...

The 5% was for eligibility, because other treatment options had been exhausted for that group - but presumably it could be made available for a wider range as well. Due to the intensity of the treatment the other 95% may opt for a different path.

The treatment is definitely rough on the body as they appear to wipe out the entire immune system via chemo, but the person who died did not die from the treatment itself.

The number of patients experiencing some sort of reversal was 8 out of the 24, or 33%. There were also 7 (I believe) who had the progress of the disease halted. The last 8 did not see the progress reversed or halted, but I was unclear on whether it progressed at the same rate or not. Regardless, it would seem that at least 70% of the participants saw a benefit.

They did also mention that of the 8 that did not see a regression or halt they believed that the cause may have been the timing of the treatment and the prior progress of the disease in those patients. I wonder if the treatment could be started quickly enough if it would be possible to see a regression in a higher number of cases?

Anyways, I wouldn't say it's really hype in any way. There's clear results, and they can likely be improved on to increase the efficacy and availability for those who suffer from MS.

It's not a stretch of the imagination by any means, this and similar accusations/lawsuits have been around spanning the last decade.

Locking users into their service would seem like a pretty good reason.

I don't necessarily believe that's what they're doing, or that this is intentional or malicious.