morganherlocker

I have always found geometry to be the most similar in terms of content. Geometry is where most people are introduced to proofs, which are similar in a lot of ways to programming. Also, you often need to know some amount of geometry in even CRUD apps to properly deal with interfaces, charts, etc.

That said, I spend 90% of my time writing geometric analysis libraries, so I am biased.

Microphone injection reminds of the picture going around with the person who taped a sql injection attack over their license plate to screw with the traffic cams.

> It is never moral and often unwise to support a system you would not support if you did not have a favorable position within it.

Is this an intentional reference to John Rawls' concept of the 'veil of ignorance' laid out in Theory of Justice? If not, you would definitely enjoy the ideas in the book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

> you can download the code and data and run it yourself if you like.

Check out Gisgraphy:

http://www.gisgraphy.com/

You install it and basically get a local Nominatim.

I only know of android apps, but all of the backend services are available and should be pretty easy to splice together for someone looking for an interesting open source project to hack on. I am swamped at the moment, but would be happy to guide someone motivated through the process (I work quite a bit with traffic and routing algorithms optimized for the web).

There were a lot of things discussed here in the original post of this that were lost in the HN outage. Things that stood out to me from memory/ links and stuff/ some of my own thoughts:

- OSM does not always show some data. This does not really matter because the vector data is all available, and the openstreetmaps.org basemap is just one rendering of many. A good example of this is mapbox, which is one of the most beautiful basemaps out there.

- If you see something wrong, you can just hit the edit button and use the web editor (Id), which is super easy and contains more metadata than any other map app in this category. For example, I used this yesterday to find the type of pavement on a bike route near my house.

- Google spends 1 billion + per year on maps. This is likely primarily a) streets and b) data/company aquisitions which may not meet quite the same standards as OSM. The fact that OSM editors are obsessed with detail in their local area probably explains a lot.

- A map of the world should be something we all own. No company should have a monopoly on how we perceive the world around us, but companies should still be able to commercialize this stuff (like mapbox and others are doing).

- One point of contention that came up in the discussion was whether or not OSS can really compete with commercial solutions when there is so much money involved. Counter points to this are that mapping the whole world is something that requires a large networking effect and is not efficient for a company to do.

- GIS is one industry that has been seriously plagued by corporate wrangling. From the servers to the analysis apps to the geoprocessing engines to the underlying data; much of the innovation is hindered by companies locking down what they have (often with governmental tacit support, which exacerbates the problem quite a bit).

- There are many efforts to combat the monopoly-holder's/government's iron grip on this information and processing ability. Among these efforts that are hot on my radar include:

- QGIS: an open source gis desktop application that just saw amazing improvements with a 2.0.

http://www.qgis.org/en/site/

- TileMill: an application that allows you to create custom basemaps. This was previously a process that required a expensive software and collection of phds.

https://www.mapbox.com/tilemill/

- OSM: open map data that allows for almost infinite possibilities, since it lets you easily correct an error or download data and render it however you want.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/51.500/-0.100

- mapschool: A cool intro to GIS which has the potential to displace a lot of the overcomplicated training programs that have an inherent bias towards particular proprietary tools.

http://macwright.org/mapschool/

- Leaflet: a js library for client side map rendering. It is without a doubt easier to use than any of the alternatives, and tends to handle mobile better to boot.

http://leafletjs.com/

- d3: A slick data visualization js lib sort of like jquery for data that can create mind blowing charts and maps.

http://d3js.org/

- turf: a node.js library I have been working on (yeah, shameless plug) that aims to create a server side or client side full featured geospatial processing/stats engine with an easy to use api. The inspiration was largely taken from GRASS and my main goal was beating the hell out of arcpy on performance (it is orders of magnitude faster on the metrics I cared about when writing it).

http://morganherlocker.com/post/turf

I was bummed that the conversation around openstreetmaps got killed in the middle of it, and now I do not see it on the front page. Does anyone have a link to that thread or did it disappear?

Plain text loses much of the most important data that people store in notes. If I imagine my notes minus formatting... not pretty.

This could happen in segments of the industry. We see a similar pattern with new just-out-of-school backend devs being put in testing or QA Developer roles for the first few years. I generally thing this is a bad idea, since testing is often more difficult than writing the code itself and requires lots of experience, but that might not apply here if the work of the "paralegal" dev was properly defined (I have no clue how, since it seems the only way to learn these standards is repeated failure and iteration).

When I read the OP's comment all I could think about was what it would be like writing a decent web app in the bad ol' IE days if it also had to work in most of those crappy symbian flip phone browsers. I agree with you completely. Meeting expectations today is really tough, but the expectations are much higher in most ways.

There are lots of people on the web design via graphic design that fit into this category. Of course there is a range of competency in this group, but at the top end you have the sort of people that can do absolutely amazing things with just HTML and CSS. As someone who focuses on backend and can build an acceptable looking front end, I am blown away by a lot of the examples I see on codepen from people who use no javascript at all.

This cannot be understated. Different company and a smaller niche, but proprietary file formats have plagued the GIS industry for decades. The most widely used format (shapefile) is about as terrible as it gets as far as functionality goes, but it is used everywhere. There has been a mounting effort to persuade governments to use open formats for publishing data, but it has been slow going.

> you explained how you made a new language from scratch in five weekends with no experience in compiler theory or language design.

I agree that the term is pretty meaningless, but I am pretty certain this would qualify under the most stringent of definitions. Personally, I prefer the term 'tinkerer', since it does not come with all the baggage but captures the spirit.

As someone who grew up thinking he wanted to be an attorney (until I realized how much paper work there was), I grew up participating in debate club and mock court. My sister grew up wanting to be a doctor and would research various illnesses and learn all about them; she is now in school for medicine. This sort of thing might not happen in every field, but the two you pointed to are probably not the best examples, since both of these behaviors are pretty common for kids interested in law and medicine.

> If you flip a coin 10 times and you will get 10 tails it doesn't mean that the coin is broken or faulty.

It might be. At a certain point, the coin is more likely "broken" (or rigged somehow) than actually flipping tails every time. The chances of flipping a coin 10 times in a row tails are ~1/1000, so I do not think this is in the range, but at 100 flips, I would say that it is much more likely that the coin has been tampered with.

Its been a while since I did any ASP.Net, but I remember some sort of error that would be thrown by default for common sql injection or script injection patterns on user inputs. There were still many many ways to screw things up, but this probably prevented quite a few attacks for extra lazy/ignorant coders (we have all been there at one point or another).

The most common vulnerabilities are in the frameworks and libraries surrounding a language, not the actual language (there are exceptions). On top of that, user/developer sloppiness is even more common than security bugs in common frameworks. I would bet most servers that get compromised do so through having things like root/password1 credentials or extremely obvious sql injectable code.

There are sub genres of the beautiful headshot as well. In the open GIS world, the trend is towards beautiful people hanging out on the side of a mountain. Although there are notable exceptions (my not-so-notable self included) most of these people seem to be from Colorado or Sweden.

Has anyone else noticed sub-themes within github headshots or is gis an anomaly?

That makes sense to me and all... but the difference is quite noticeable. As in, I need to take off some layers if I am doing something on my imac, but not with the others.

If I had to guess, it probably has mostly to do with the imac sitting closer to me while typing, and also that I tend towards using it for more graphics heavy tasks (since it has the largest screen). Also, I am in the southeast, so heat changes are unusually noticeable, especially in the summer.

You are right though, the imac probably is as efficient or even more efficient than my other machines, however it is more noticeable when the heat is in your face instead of blowing out off next to a baseboard.

I use the todo.txt cli and it is awesome.

    t add "complete the pricing mocks"
    t 1 pri A
    t do 1

Nice and simple, and I can always open it up in a text editor if I need to. I might write something similar at some point though that would work with csv instead of txt. It would be a bit easier to use with a text editor (since there is no special syntax other than the csv standard), and could be passed around to excel users.

10 days plus ~10-15 days of holidays is pretty standard in the US software world.

'Copied' is completely the wrong word here. This really has nothing to do with Apple at all.

I use a MBPr for general development, have an imac close to top specs and have a beefy windows/linux box. Of the 3, my imac gets the least use, and I will probably be retiring it fairly soon. For development, I really do not need a power house machine.

I code with a focus on TDD and small unit tests, so even though I do mostly statistical computing work, my development tests use small amounts of data and low computing power. When I actually need to run big production stuff, it goes off to the Linux box or a Linux server cluster.

My beef with the imac is that it is not really that much faster than my MBPr, but has terrible heat management. When I am running big jobs on it, it gets a few degrees off from a toaster and heats up my office. A 2.5k linux box would not have this problem and would be way faster.

> I really doubt too many people who are in the market for an HP or Dell workstation are going to consider a Mac Pro

Especially with the gap in Mac Pro releases over the past few years, I have seen many people deciding between Mac Pro and a custom built hackintosh. For the stuff that really justifies a Mac Pro, these were the only two options for some time (short of moving off of an OSX stack). Sure, someone custom building a multi thousand dollar work station is not your typical consumer, but neither is your typical buyer of a spec'd out Mac Pro.

I would prefer to keep the name out of the comments, just to prevent mud-slinging. That said, it is a proprietary language built for a niche data analysis market. It is basically a BASIC variant that probably came out around 95, and the application I now work with was started around that time. It was probably a great choice at the time, as its lack of extendibility was balanced by its performance and feature list in this particular space (GIS). Unfortunately, GIS has traditionally been a huge pain to develop for. The proprietary libraries really sink their teeth in on licensing and the open source modules are notoriously difficult to get up and running, especially in a server environment.

In response to this, I began building an open source javascript library that is nearing 1.0, and I am using it in new production work with great success. I chose javascript (node.js specifically) due mostly to performance with IO (huge in GIS) and its awesome ecosystem around npm. I am finding it much easier to build that one tricky library you need than to get the one tricky library for free and build everything else.

http://morganherlocker.com/post/turf

As to the 5 people... yep about 5-10, and my company employed a few of them. The rest are academics. The 'bus-factor' was pretty high before we switched off of it.

> First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project.

I think there is a minimum threshold to this. I support a large application written in an extremely obscure language (it's basically me and 5 other people on an old yahoo mailing list that make up the entire community). It is terrible. No unit testing frameworks, no http framework for rest calls, no decent UI templating, and on and on. 100% of functionality that I need comes in the form of calls to command line tools.

Obviously, Ruby is way past that threshold, so I do not disagree with what you said at all, but just wanted to point out there is a limit. I would not write a new commercial application in any language today that did not already have strong package system. As one person, you can write a few essential modules that you need, but you cannot write all of them.

It would make it an argument, which I guess you could say is a subset of opinion. A proof goes back to an argument and shows that its conclusions must follow from its premises.

They have a right to an opinion, but that does not necessarily mean that their opinion is valid. From Wikipedia on Validity: "an argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is logically entailed by its premises."

While the whole "if we do X then the terrorists win" phrase might be largely accurate, I kind of doubt that it is planned that way.

I do not know if I would vote for him necessarily (not knowing much about the rest of his views), but a candidate who promised to pardon Snowden would receive a couple "get-out-of-terrible-policy-suggestion free cards" in my book.