possibilistic

I wholeheartedly agree. Methods associated with mutation should raise exceptions. If errors aren't eagerly generated, assumptions about behaviour might be made. Not to mention this will make testing harder.

Readability is impacted as well. Building a mutable copy from an immutable should be explicit. These calls should have a very prominent call signature that is easily read, not skimmed over.

Very cool library, but I can sense lots of confusion and debugging resulting from accidental misuse.

Guava's immutables are pretty solid and serve as a great reference.

What kind of job are you looking for right now?

Yeah, you have to change this right away.

It's unfortunate that you have to white wash your appearance, but you have to realize that any negative signal will be interpreted by HR. Sometimes it's actually a pretty good filter regarding personality.

In any case, the rest of your profile/resume looks slick. Good luck!

I've never done any Windows development, so I'm curious as to why C# might be considered superior to Java (especially Java 8).

Is it simply better language features ( typing, generics, etc.?), or does the argument also include .NET and the CLR?

Will Microsoft open up development on unix systems (not mono)? I've interpreted signals from the CEO as an indication this could happen. What about visual studio?

I don't know why the GP poster is being downvoted. For most of the world's population, $500 is not cheap.

I find it difficult to categorize the desk, a tool for productivity, as a luxury. I know that's just personal bias speaking, though.

The market supplies alternatives of varying degrees of quality, functionality, and design for ordinary desks. I wish there was equal demand for standing desks. Nothing ever seems to bring down the prices for them.

This is an incredibly biased op-ed piece by a member of the FCC. I personally think that this research is fascinating and will lead to mathematical insight on how political memes and outcomes are influenced by social media astroturfing.

Edit: I read the abstract, conclusion, and a few figures from the linked paper. Nothing about it seems nefariously political. The author doesn't seem to grok science.

The paper was fantastic! The discussion section is a must-read for seeing where this is going.

The calcium ion flux response to glucose challenge was neat. Demonstrates the signaling mechanics being as expected.

The mice were SCID mice. They have no adaptive immune system to speak of. I made another post in this thread and included some links.

This is a very incredible result though. Even if immunosuppressants are required, think of all the non-patient outcomes: easily sourced human SC-beta cells for research and high throughput study. This stuff can be grown at volume, and the techniques will only improve. The results will also inform research into other cell lines. Bottom line, this is yet another step forward for stem cell tech.

The mice used in the protocol were SCID mice [1]. They do not produce B or T lymphocytes (and thus no Ig either). Pretty much no adaptive immune system to speak of. These are a mainstay of murine study.

The discussion section referred to the existing technique of islet transplantation [2]. This is sourced from cadaver tissue, and as such requires immunosuppressants. Obviously needed to counteract host v. graft, but I wouldn't be surprised if it masked the autoimmune recognition.

The discussion section alludes to several future hurdles: gene expression differences from primary cell sources, transduction response, local tissue effects (need for tissue engineering), need to produce alpha, gamma, delta, and epsilon cells (alpha and gamma may be important to precise beta function), questions regarding long-term maintenance of phenotype, ...

Nevertheless, this is very exciting! Stem cell researchers are truly hackers in every sense. The results here aren't only applicable to diabetes research, either. Patients aren't the only ones that need these cells.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_combined_immunodeficienc...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islet_cell_transplantation

This is really awesome, and at its core a powerful concept. After checking the diva out, a thought occurred to me: any new language revision should come with an officially supported tool from the authors to translate changes backwards.

Counter to the logic of tools like Python's 2to3, I think the more important need is to start writing new code, not porting old code. If you can run new code on the old runtime / interpreter / whatever, you get all the good feels. Porting sucks. New features rock. It just seems like a far superior experience for everyone involved. If happiness is how infomemes spread, assuaging the porting woes couldn't hurt.

I realize there could be concerns involving performance, changes to semantics, etc. that may make back-transliterated (transpiled?) code inherently worse. But if language designers took design of a backwards compiler into consideration when writing the new grammar and semantics, we might see smaller changes brought about in an overall faster pace of iteration.

Just a thought.

This tool is neat. :)

This is just my personal experience, but once you try to do certain things with Django, you start to butt heads with it. Django relies far too much on convention, and it shoehorns you into their tooling patterns.

I think the most exciting and flexible way to do things these days is with a collection of microservices. You can do feature work independently, test small isolable units of functionality, and achieve scale.That said, we could use cross-cutting libraries to make microservice implementation easier...

I think it's incredibly interesting that Apple is one of but a handful of companies that seems to enjoy a steady proliferation and preservation of its past company lore, both in the popular media and amongst technologists. People take a great deal of interest in the historical artifacts this company produces; for an outsider, it really stands out as unusual.

I can only think of a few other companies that manage this feat. Nintendo's history seems to be rather frequently circulated (and I don't follow video gaming blogs, though I do occasionally play their games). Intel, Compaq, and IBM also see historical items published, but it's mostly concerning events that predate the 90's, a time when these companies were either much more visible or had a more prominent role. I've not seen much published about the past two decades of history for any other tech company at the same level as Apple.

The histories of other companies seem to be given a much more technical treatment: hardware schematics, design constraints, sourcing problems, blow-by-blow accounts, etc. That might just be because many of the Apple anecdotes are published as "fluff" for non-technologists; Apple also sees its share of technical history published, too.

Maybe I'm just blind to everything else or I'm biased in a particular way, but it certainly feels like we're telling a particular narrative here. If I were a future historian looking back, this might cloud my perspective. Everything seems to be about Apple. Am I wrong?

If a first-class, distributed VR world became a thing, I could get lost in such a world forever. I would stay logging in for work, hobbies, friends, adventure, and romance. Perhaps I would log off a few times a day for food, sleep, hygiene, and exercise; I could imagine that being the extent of my physical world interaction if the VR tech were good enough. (It has a long road ahead to reach that point though. Ancillary technologies would also need to evolve for closer to brain/full-sensory I/O.)

Given tools to continually innovate and improve the digital world, I don't think I could ever grow bored of it. There would be endless permutations of possibility with which to express myself. I could make games, movies, physics, patch the stack. I could play God. Or I could let someone else play God and adventure through the worlds that they create. Then perhaps send a pull request.

An all-enveloping creative world sounds so much more exciting than the life I'm living right now. I could finally be anyone I wanted. Make anything I wanted. You might say I have this freedom now, but none of us really do. In a virtual world there is no central society to tell us how to conform and fit in, no traditional family structure. No tradition. Just feeding your short life's want for expression. I want that so much.

I can see so many people like me preferring a life like this. With this level of freedom. Imagine: Religion, money, and power could have little bearing. Meritocracy reigns, but even that could be ignored if you wanted.

Furthermore, I can see costs as becoming nearly negligible. No more consumption of material things beyond bare necessities: food, shelter, hygeine, and healthcare. Nobody needs a physical high rise view when the digital world can give that to anyone. I don't see why anyone else would need to buy the things we are trained to as consumers. (Would that be an economic problem? It very well could...) I don't see this necessarily ruling out a digital economy, but unless things are contracted and paid for on a per-demand basis, digital assets can easily be copied... an economic problem that might need to be considered.

If this were widely adopted (and barring societal collapse stemming from large swaths of society switching to a VR lifestyle), I can see it bringing ungodly amounts of funding to biochem research. We might elevate our concern for solving our biochemical longevity problems above all else.

Sorry for rambling and wasting your cognition with this idle pipe dream. I'm actually pretty pragmatic and don't expect for much of this to happen while I'm still young enough to enjoy it. Or at all.

Don't forget mtDNA. That's maternal.

Edit: usually. As for nuclear DNA, keep in mind all of the weird crossover failures that are rather common in a large population. These typically result in gene dosing problems and can lead to fetus inviability.

Then consider the epigenome, selected immune recognition, and microbiome. These can be/are environmental.

50/50 is the textbook story we teach before undergrad. It's easier to learn and still conveys the central idea of the model.

Any chance you'll put this on github? It would be amazing to use this style of retro-futuristic UI to control my laser hardware in realtime. Plus it's Star Wars. :)

Great work! It looks fantastic.

Is semantic web tech being reliably employed to solve any big problems? (RDF, RDFa, OWL, SPARQL, triple stores, graph dbs...?) Is it fast?

I've always been curious--what's the use case for the backlit keyboard?

At the surface, backlighting seems largely aesthetic to me; I have muscle memory of my keyboard layout and do not need to reference the keys at all while in the dark. (A huge tactile cue is the TrackPoint in the keyboard.) I understand that there are lots of variables: not everyone uses their machine as frequently or may not have a keyboard amenable to this.

Does anyone here feel backlit keyboards are essential? Why or why not? What is the consensus rationales?

I accidentally downvoted you when attempting to pinch-zoom on my phone. I'm sorry! I didn't mean to make that mistake. I wish we had the feature to undo things like that.

To both parent and GP:

Please don't comment on HN like you would on Reddit. If you don't have questions or information to add to the thread, you should probably use that as a cue to refrain from posting.

Joke posts might not seem bad, but in aggregate they lower the signal to noise ratio we have come to appreciate about HN. Additionally, once these kinds of jocular posts start, it becomes infectious.

I'm not trying to be mean; I'm guilty of making posts like this too. Many of us simply do not want to see HN devolve into the equivalent of a spammy subreddit. It's important that we all remind each other of the value of this community so that we can protect it from spiraling into a bad state.

Sometimes RAM is cheaper than engineer salaries. Sometimes it isn't. It depends on problem domain, scale, and what you're tying to optimize for. Debating this just seems pointless.

In any case, the number one evaluation criterion for browsers is not the RAM profile.

If performance matters that much, perhaps you should instead be asking why we are writing applications and UI in an ugly evolution of SGML.

Before you fault the Moz devs, ask yourself why we have CSS for high DPI images and why designers embed videos into website headers. Maybe your needs aren't at all times reflective of the majority. The browser serves the spec. The spec serves every case you care to imagine. Because that's what we evolved a doc format to do.

(Just imagine a parallel universe where it was instead MS Word that evolved into a facebooking client!)

How is it the handheld console of today when there are so few good games on the platform? I personally find the touchscreen a terrible input device for most game genres and play styles.

I can't imagine Smash Bros. on a phone. Not unless the phone gets analog sticks, face buttons, and shoulder triggers. Maybe there will be a shell that gets wide support, but given the fact that cases come in so many form factors and that Android phones have no standard shape, I doubt that will happen.

I don't mean to be negative, but phones utterly suck at the kind of games I enjoy most. 2048 is genius, but it's a phone thing.

Does anyone foresee a non-casual, non-contol limited future for mobile gaming? What changes could give it the ability to compete with the 3DS and Vita?

Do you think this harms new engineering students in China when they don't have access to tools and knowledge that the rest of the world does? I can't imagine having Github blocked.

Does there seem to be a pattern to the blocks? Or is it just completely random?

I used Janeway's Immunobiology in undergrad. It's not bad and has great figures, but the text is a little dry. This is purely anecdotal; sample size of one.

For what it's worth we relied solely upon the primary literature as the basis for a second semester course, so I'd say it prepared us for at least that much. (Granted you'll also need to study the techniques and assays. Some biochem, molecular, and cell phys also helps.)

Once you delve into the literature the organized rules you spend time memorizing begin to look silly. There is so much behaviour outside the lines that we are only beginning to characterize.

I had no idea people could become allergic to cockroach antigens. That surprised me. It makes sense that they would act as an immunological adjuvant in the presence of the bacteria the cockroaches carry. If you activate the immune system defenses in the presence of a non-self epitope (or sometimes even self in autoimmune diseases), you're going to pick up antigen recognition.

Immunology is a subject all on its own right. Rife with complexities to unravel for centuries to come.

It really sucks that this would take lobster off the menu. I don't have the money or palate to eat them, and I haven't thought much about the ethical questions of boiling them, but what an interesting and long-winded evolutionary anecdote. It's so absurd it feels like a joke. Biology never ceases to be fascinating...

I was thinking of putting together a crude hack to implement just a subset of what this offers. I cannot thank the authors enough. I'm trying this out the moment I get home.

I feel as though we should have had first-class support for portable environments all along, and it shocks me that we haven't considered building this kind of facility before. This could be a game changer. Like vim package managers and other sensibly modern things, I totally expect to see this evolve to become the new norm.

I see this kind of configuration:

* global personal configs (lightweight, truly global settings for work and home)

* local overrides (work, home, per machine, non-SSH)

* remote overrides (SSH machines)

Global configs should be portable everywhere. For everything else, I see a system capable of merging several such configs and matching the current environmental and capability context.

Is the universe inherently nihilist?

I think this is going to catch on.

Blaming skepticism is an interesting point and makes me wonder. What about the publishing culture? Does it map more closely to incrementalism, or is it just that the surface area of the problem space has grown too vast for the human mind to generally see the bigger picture?

Should empiricism be changed to allow fuzziness and uncertainty within the process? Scientific truth seems like a problem space similar to those amenable to metaheuristics. We don't know the form of the optimal / most true model. I'm not positing this for physics. Mainly systems biology and big data fields.

Not to detract from the flow of the conversation, but do any of us Atlanta-area hackers have any formal events or get-togethers? I'd love to meet some of you and hack on stuff.

I have to differ.

All of life on earth operates using mostly the same biochemistry. While there are countless differences and exceptions (eg. different codons, different genome architecture, metabolic and gene product differences), they are vastly outweighed by the vast magnitude of commonality. This is mostly observable at the small scale (nucleic acid, protein, lipid chemistries) but also somewhat true at a larger scale (certain transport processes, etc).

Bacteria have an incredible amount of biochemistry in common with us. And so do all other living things. Bacteria will of course be radically different when we contrast ourselves to other eukaryotes, but we can still see our biochemistry in them.

We all evolved from the same lineage, so all of the "core architectural" decisions were made long ago--before prokaryotes even came into being. The earliest choices made in exploring the chemical-physical fitness landscape turned out to have the greatest impact; all of our biology is expressed in terms of the primitives that were first established. For example, the universal adoption of the amino acid L-isomers. It's a seemingly arbitrary choice of little importance, but once that choice was made, earth biology forever had to live with it.

If there were different paths taken early on, metabolism would be different, polymerization would be different--cellular replication itself might also be different (one can only imagine). I imagine there would be cells. At higher levels, the choice of "building blocks" has an impact on bioinorganic chemistries (think heme groups). How you chelate depends on structure.

I assume that the heme group chemistry only evolved because of a highly oxygenated environment that life could exploit for energy production. Had our aqueous environment (and later atmosphere) been of a different composition, oxygen may not have played the same role.

Further tangent: certain elements are extremely important. Organic (carbon) chemistry is incredible due to the valence. Evolving on a world without oxygen might really suck, because oxygen chemistry is just so perfect for redox. And what of all the other important chemistries? Do they have a bioavailable source?

Anyhow, it's suffice to say that any change in early evolutionary choices would have far-reaching impact on the essential reactions (energetics, thermo, kinetics, dynamics...) and might yield results that are altogether alien to us from an Earth biology standpoint. Once you have your building blocks, you can't exactly backtrack.