joeclark77

I think you first need to explain what "the Etsy of Food" is. What do you have in mind, exactly?

It's easy for beginners to learn programming, and it doesn't necessarily ever reach a performance bottleneck where you outgrow it and need something different. Python has libraries for practically everything, so you can use it for everything from coding a web app, to automating server administration tasks, to statistical analyis and data graphics, to orchestrating a MapReduce job on a cluster, so you also never really come to a task that forces you to choose a new language.

Therefore, even if other languages are better for certain tasks, the Python programmer is rarely ever forced to go looking for them.

Mainly I got into it because I hated debugging code for missing semicolons and curly braces. I'm a neat freak, and Python is, too.

Yeah, it just means that you can distribute the system across a cluster. Since we only talk about the CAP theorem in the context of distributed systems, you have to assume "P" has already been chosen. So the theorem is really about a trade-off between "C" and "A".

Thanks for the link, that's just the kind of thing I've been gobbling up lately.

I think there's opportunities in manufacturing high quality goods, "made in USA", even in small quantities. Tools, knives, furniture, machines... things that will last. Check out reddit's r/BuyItForLife/ -- a forum for people looking for the best quality stuff. Read "Shop Class as Soulcraft" -- with the skilled trades there's a lot less BS, a lot less politics, because there are honest objective standards for good and bad performance.

This is what I've been thinking about for my own life, anyway. YMMV.

I find this question interesting because over the past year I've been reading everything I can find in the library about work, the history of work, pride of workmanship, craft, job satisfaction, motivation, and so on. There are two schools of thought (at least). On the one hand, some people strive to find a great job that's instrinsically stimulating and motivating. On the other hand, that can't be a universal human need: the world needs ditch diggers, too, right? So the other angle is that it's not what work you do, but why and how you're doing it that matters. Are you finding/creating challenges at work and growing in your skill? Are you using the excess money surplus for worthy causes, or are you squandering it on empty entertainment and vain pursuits?

I don't know which view is right, but the philosophy is fascinating.

RDBMS is probably fine. If you want to try something new and shiny, a document store (like MongoDB) is probably better than a graph DB, because nested comments and replies can be easily and naturally represented by nested documents -- objects containing lists of embedded objects containing lists of [etc...]

Does anybody know how to get themes working properly in iTerm2 on a Mac? I've downloaded all kinds of themes and some look good, others look bad, but not one of them looks like it's "supposed" to look like from screenshots online.

so then we'll have two options: the Kernel's original recipe and the extra Rust-y flavor

And add to that that the 3-4-5 triangle is still a useful way to establish a right angle without any tools (apart from a piece of string).

One UX design firm I know uses cheap document cameras (I believe IPEVO makes several inexpensive and portable models) so they do pen-and-paper prototyping during videoconferences without any need to scan things in. It's much more interactive to see someone drawing and talk to them as they're doing it, rather than only seeing scans of the finished product afterward.

I'm thinking cow.

Grinberg's tutorial is pretty good. The book version is "Flask Web Development" (O'Reilly). There are some bits of it that are out of date. You can use my "flaskula" repo as a reference with some fixes: https://github.com/joeclark-phd/flaskula

There's a game called Fruit Ninja where you can do this.

I actually wrote a blog post about my experimentation with ORM (here: https://joeclark.svbtle.com/understanding-the-m-in-mvc). From the viewpoint of a database geek, somebody who cares about his database, those gadgets you linked are further reasons to dislike ORM, because they do more of what ORM does: take away transparency and control in exchange for "shortcuts". And what happens when those tools fail? ("migrate" is particularly screwy).

No, it's a matter of philosophy. The newbie who has learned to code without ever being taught SQL, and the employee of an "agile" app sweatshop who doesn't care about the quality of his code or data, may prefer ORM for its' quick-and-dirtiness, or may use it by default because he knows no better way. I'm not saying that's wrong, but, there are other philosophies. There is the whole "craftsmanship" idea out there, that we should actually care about making things well. Jobs and Wozniak for example supposedly were adamant that the insides of Apple computers were designed well. If you care about your database and want to use special features like triggers, procedures, recursive queries in Postgres, etc., then ORM is about as helpful as clamshell packaging.

It depends on the application. Do you care about how things work inside your database? Do you want to understand how the subsystems of your app (like authentication, security, the API, etc) work? Flask allows you (and forces you) to make your choices explicit. Django makes the decisions for you and hides its workings under layers of abstraction.

I can see using Django to rapidly prototype some kind of CRUD app, but on the other hand, you could just use Wordpress for that. Flask seems like it would be a superior platform for engineering anything non-trivial, especially if you care about how it works.

I think the first objection one would raise is that you don't need an ORM at all. It all depends on the application, of course, but ORM means giving up a lot of control (and transparency, and understanding) of your database in exchange for a few shortcuts regarding things like M:M links.

Queen Victoria supposedly told her daughter on her wedding night, "Just lie back and think of England." Whenever I have to deal with PayPal, I think to myself "Just lie back and think of SpaceX." If Paypal helps Elon Musk take us to Mars, maybe it's worth putting up with at least occasionally. (You can think of Tesla if you prefer.)

How about you can leave no inheritance to your kids if you want to, but you keep your hands off the rest of us's stuff? If you want to talk about "fairness", freedom is fair. Stealing from others (even if done through the mechanism of government) cannot be.

I've heard it said that to kick an addiction, you have to achieve a mental change where you stop wanting the thing you're addicted to. Consider someone who is addicted to overeating. He could go on a fast for a while, as long as he has the willpower, but eventually the willpower is going to run out and he's going to cheat. By contrast, if he were to make a positive decision to become an athlete, or a bodybuilder or model or something, he would be able to control his diet not as a strenuous act of self-deprivation but because he now sees himself differently, as someone with a mission, and snacking starts to seem really irritating to him.

So my unsolicited advice is that you need to come up with a way to see yourself differently. Maybe as a man of faith. Maybe as a mountain climber or something. Consider giving yourself a mission that will get you the heck out of your apartment and take up all your free time, so that your addiction becomes an annoyance that you won't want to bother with.

And good luck!

A number of last-minute executive orders have been coming out. For example, he deliberately expanded the number of people who would have access to the Flynn wiretaps in the last few days of his Presidency. This can only have been done on purpose to help criminals to leak secrets (b/c if only a few people have access, they're easy to identify, but if hundreds do, they can do it). He also messed with the chain of command at DOJ in the last few days, as a trap so that when Jeff Sessions recused himself from a case, one of Obama's lieutenants would be in charge and be able to create havoc. There's more coming out every day.

Wouldn't it be funny if all of Obama's sleazy tricks orchestrating leaks, etc, ended up making Trump stronger and putting Obama in prison?

IMHO if reverse time travel were possible, we'd be up to our ears in tourists from the future already, so it's not.

However maybe forward time travel (faster than usual I mean) could be possible. But... how would it make any money? As soon as you've delivered the service, the deadbeat customer may not be back in town to pay his bill for decades or centuries! And 30-day jumps just seems silly.

I agree they need to go back to the chronological ordering of tweets. It would also be nice to have a couple levels of tweeting, like "conversational message" versus "I really mean it this time", so followers could filter by importance. I've unfollowed several great people because they just kept tweeting nonsense comments throughout the day in between a couple of really interesting posts.

I think it could be possible to launch the rocket from space, using a booster of some kind to get it out of Earth's gravity. The bigger problems, I think, are (1) navigation, given that we don't have precise measurements of how those planets are moving, and a rocket with such slow acceleration can't just turn on a dime; and (2) maintenance and repair during a decades-long journey at ludicrous speed.

The probe would have to be self-navigating to a certain extent, because we can't locate and measure the exoplanets with precision and won't be able to communicate in near-real-time to guide it in. It would have to be built for long endurance and have the capability to repair itself, too.

The final practical problem is that we wouldn't know for decades whether the probe had been successful, partially successful, or a total waste of time. It could land on an exoplanet and do wonderful science but not be able to communicate due to a broken radio. Or it could blow up in year one and we might not notice.

I suspect the first insterstellar probes instead will be inexpensive and disposable "fire and forget it" types launched with a booster rocket (maybe like the one Elon Musk is building) and no intention of decelerating or landing. They might spend centuries in flight and be designed to send pictures and data back to whoever might be listening in the future. If they're cheap enough and we have extra thrust, I could see rich people and governments launching these in hopes of a sort of future glory, knowing that each individual probe faces long odds but a thousand of them should produce at least a few winners.

I would think the biggest problem is convincing them that you're reliable enough to show up at work on time every day, respond to questions and problems professionally, etc.

Technical skills can be learned and demonstrated, but being 19 years old carries some doubts along with it. Maybe you would need to prove yourself by putting in some time at the IT help desk just to show that you are mature enough to handle responsibility.

I had a conversation with some researchers at a major biology/genomics research lab in Maine last week and they pushed back hard when I asked if they were mainly looking to hire PhD candidates. Apparently it's a real problem that grad students and postdocs come onto their projects for just a couple of years and then move on, leading to frankenstein code and unfinished projects that no one can easily pick up and continue. They claim that they would very much like to hire developers who wanted to work long-term on bioinformatics software not just as a means to a PhD.

"Self service" checkouts at grocery stores. I get the idea that the bagging area is also a scale, and that's supposed to keep customers honest. But it leads to so many darn problems, the devices aren't really "self service". And moreover, every time it malfunctions you're reminded by the store that we don't trust you which seems like a terrible way to treat good customers.

Still, I don't know if it's fair to pick on a technology that's so new. In a way, they're still learning, and they're following the advice that many in the design thinking movement would give: make a prototype, even if it's not perfect, and try it out with real customers.

There was an Ask HN about backpacks just about 40 days ago (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13369197), and a lot of good recommendations were made there. I ended up buying an Osprey Flapjack, which has been the best bag I ever owned. As a Mainer, I own about a dozen LL Bean bags, and am bordering on heresy by speaking up for the Osprey...