username223

Pathetic, Google. Just pick a single chat app that uses data on top of SMS.

WhatsApp and the other Facebook messaging apps won in Latin America because they’re zero-rated, like SMS effectively is within the US. If you want to make a popular chat app, pay those telcos.

Props for the Andy Kirkpatrick link. He’s a no-nonsense guy with a ton of experience.

Climbers like to get way into the weeds on knots (“but if this one is loaded with a wet dyneema sling around a deciduous tree…”), so I thought this article was admirably restrained, and does a good job explaining why you’d use each. I’d personally say that a figure eight and overhand are necessary, followed by the clove hitch and prusik. The double fisherman is mostly useful for soloing what you just abseiled after your rope gets stuck. ;-)

> I bought the Hackers Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond

That hurts a bit to read. Raymond is/was a huckster who took the original Hackers Dictionary, a communal MIT project, and made some edits. He went on to annoy the Linux community with his CML2 antics around the build system. Lisp/MIT, BSD, and Linux all have their own histories, a mixture of forgettable drama and fundamental difference.

I hesitate to post this, but Canada is in a lot of ways a museum of the American West. The first time I visited BC, I turned on public radio and heard a story about tailings ponds collapsing into rivers. The logging is beyond what you get used to in modern OR, WA, and MT. The boarding schools that tried to eradicate native languages in the 1900s were like the ones the States had a few decades earlier.

It’s a hard land inhabited by a hard people.

> explicit constructors and destructors in C

Exactly, and that’s the right way to do it. In a language without implicit destructors/finalizers, you need a way for callers to say “okay, I’m done with this thing.” And even with GC, you need finalizers to take care of non-memory resources. This may be clunky in C, but that’s what you get in a language that makes you be explicit.

If they want to work with their hands, there aren't many good reasons.

If they want to work with words or numbers, some basic programming will let them automate repetitive tasks and eliminate lots of boring work. Examples include simple calculations in spreadsheets, formatting writing for publication, filing work email, and automating invoices. It's a useful skill like being able to touch-type.

In any case, they should not be forced to program for its own sake, since that has a narrow appeal. Instead, they should program only to do things they actually care about.

Sadly, while it can buy mansions, islands, planes, and even rockets, money can buy neither love nor self-awareness.

I always feel strange seeing these walls of pseudo-scientific marketroid babble. Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate, or vice versa, but they've fallen so far down the rabbit-hole of this mundane task that they can come up with competing "models" and multi-thousand-word articles promoting and explaining them.

From an ordinary human's perspective, it's like shopping for groceries and getting side-tracked into a discussion of the natures of free will and the fundamental building blocks of matter. I just want to buy some decent-tasting apples, not grasp the neural correlates of my apparent "choice," or the string-theoretic basis of their multicolored skins.

That's not to say there aren't useful nuggets to be gleaned. For example, the fact that "third-party consumer data" and "customer matching" are the highest form of marketing surveillance tells me they're buying data from credit card companies and shady "data brokers," and correlating that using whatever identifiers they can. So I should probably keep entering fake phone numbers, zip codes, and email addresses when I can.

Cutting the free tier from 3 GB to 500 MB makes it useless for many people: that's 500 images at okay resolution, and lots of people like to put photos on their blogs. And 300 "visits" (page hits?) per day is almost as bad, as a runaway crawler or minor spike in interest can blow through that in no time.

I moved away from WP.com when they started putting ads on the free tier. I thought their business model was upselling some people, so monetizing the free version felt scummy. The fact that they're crippling the free version now makes me even more glad I moved away.

It's amazing how long such people can avoid facing those long-term consequences, while benefiting from the powerful ego-defense of being "often wrong, never in doubt."

Actually, all of the scripting languages developed packed arrays and BLAS bindings around the same time -- Python with numpy, Ruby with narray, Perl with PDL, and I think Common Lisp and some of the Schemes did, too. Python won that race for other reasons, I think mostly because its syntax looked pretty.

Well-deserved! Dongarra created ATLAS (automatically-tuned linear algebra software), which made fast linear algebra (BLAS and LAPACK) available to everyone, rather than just those willing to pay the big bucks for chip vendors' proprietary libraries. Basically, ATLAS tries out a bunch of different strategies for each routine at compile/install time, and picks the fastest, adapting to chip pipelines, cache sizes, etc. I'm not sure how it fits in to the modern world of GPUs and TPUs, but it made a lot of scientific software run faster.

I've been writing a non-tech-related Wordpress blog for 12 years, with comments turned on the whole time. Akismet automatically filters out almost all spam, and pre-approval for first-time commenters catches the rest. I find the comments usually positive, sometimes helpful, and never abusive. I can only conclude that some threshold of popularity, and subjects (like politics and maybe tech) that draw the wrong kinds of people, turn comments into cesspools. Since I'm not blogging for money or fame, or about rage-inducing topics, I'm fine.

To me, blogging without comments would feel like being that guy at a party who drones on endlessly about his own pet obsession, oblivious to the fact that his "listeners" are bored or want to add something.

I'm happy to be reminded that Lilypond is still around. I used it to produce scores (and MIDIs) 15+ years ago, because it offered the same experience as LaTeX -- beautiful results if you're willing to code and, occasionally, battle eldritch horrors beneath its surface. Like (La)TeX and Emacs, I hope it becomes one of those rare pieces of software that lasts longer than a human lifetime. Few things we build these days, not just software, endure so long.

> I’m unaware of the state of the Perl ecosystem, does it have something similar [to numpy]?

Perl has PDL (http://pdl.perl.org), which I think predates numpy and does the same kind of array manipulation.

As for the original question, Python's dominance for "data science" projects is just a matter of momentum at this point: it's where Google and others have put their money, and that is now affecting undergraduate and graduate courses. Originally, I think it was just that some people didn't like Perl's syntax.

Personally, I prefer to use a mix of Perl and Julia, each for its respective strengths, and find Python all-around mediocre.

> How to make 1k a day? Write 2 technical articles.

The going rate for a technical article written in ~4 hours is $500? That blows my mind. I'm not saying it doesn't happen -- I've only done non-technical articles -- but that it's hard for me to imagine it being profitable for the publication.

800-1000 words produced from scratch in 4 hours, including research, editing, and graphics, is going to be garbage one step above what you'd find in a content farm. The same derived with minor modifications from an existing article will be little better than scraped content.

> What’s great about HTTP 1.1 is it’s simplicity.

This is an underappreciated feature of the old protocols. You can telnet into an HTTP, SMTP, POP, or even IMAP server and talk to it with your keyboard (using stunnel for the encrypted versions), or dump the traffic to learn the protocol or debug a problem. Good luck doing that with QUIC.

> Should McDonalds be in the business of operating Data Centers? Or should they just buy it from those who do it best and focus on selling food?

Should they be in the business of cleaning bathrooms, or should they just outsource that to a temp agency? Sometimes specialization pays, and sometimes it doesn't. Perhaps it doesn't make sense for McDonalds to run its own web and corporate servers, but doing so might make a lot of sense for more tech-centered companies. And I'd guess a server farm is miniscule compared to the size and complexity of their ingredient supply chains.

Problem: Managing server hardware takes money and people.

Solution: Subscribe to a middle-man that manages it for you.

Problem: The middle-man is slowly turning the screws to increase its profits.

Solution: Subscribe to another middle-man to figure out how to decrease the first middle-man's profits.

It seems to be a universal truth that computing people try to solve all problems with another level of indirection.

On the one hand, it is another step towards more inequality, a society of Eloi and Morlocks, since these treatments will only be available to the very rich who develop them. They claim in the announcement that the costs will (eventually) come down so ordinary people can afford this, but that's not the way all tech goes. As shown by the rising difference in health-span between the wealthy and working poor, medical advances do not always trickle down.

On the other hand, it could actually provide tangible benefits to some human beings. Saying "I was the first to land a human on Mars" has no such advantage.

I was a young-ish dev at a smallish (200 or so people) company in the Bay Area during the dot-com crash. I came in one day to find that something like 1/3 of the people in the company, seemingly chosen at random, no longer worked there. Those of us who remained were consolidated into one floor instead of the two we had before. My salary and options were not affected, and the (basic by modern standards) free food stayed pretty much the same, though I think WebVan was no longer around to deliver it. I left soon after that, and the company lived on in cockroach mode for years. I think it was eventually acquired, but I haven't paid much attention.

One reason my experience wasn't catastrophic was that I was at an infrastructure company, not a hype-driven one like Pets.com. If/when the current ad bubble bursts, average devs will fare best working at companies several steps removed from the hype. People may not want micro-targeted ads, but they'll still need software.

It was an earlier generation, but my grandfather, who was a respected scientist in his field, fell victim to "Fox geezer syndrome" in his final years. I have no idea how much money various Fox-adjacent advertisers scammed out of him.

Fortunately, my parents have never had much interest in Facebook, preferring to socialize with real friends in real life. They have their own bubble to some extent, but it's way less toxic than any online version.

> transit union workers making six figures for things like being bus drivers or ticket collectors

You say that like it's a bad thing. We also have "tech workers making six figures for things like increasing engagement on social networks by 0.1%." What do you think about that?

> Finally you have rude drivers and buses and trains that smell like urine.

This would change right-quick if congestion pricing pushed wealthier people onto public transit.

Once upon a time, there was IRC for single-stream chats, and NNTP for threaded ones, and all was good. Twitter used to be one of the former, but then they noticed that users were using the "@name" convention to simulate replies, and started officially supporting it. Instead of a single conversation, or a tree of nested replies, they created some unholy thing partway between the two, that serves neither role well.

> Steven Webb, Turo’s director of communications, says that 95 percent of the platform’s hosts rent out three or fewer vehicles.

Three or fewer, like the guy his own mini-fleet of two Tesla 3s and an X mentioned earlier in the article? I doubt many people have 3 cars to "share" without having bought at least one purely as a rental. And how many people can afford to buy/lease more than 3 vehicles for their fleets? I'll bet that 95% would be much lower if we looked at "one or two vehicles" instead.

These negative-externality-based "Uber/Airbnb for X" companies are getting ridiculous. Has someone started one for prescription drugs yet? "We're not a pharmacy, we're just a platform facilitating transactions between patients and independent drug contractors." (Or was that Silk Road's business model?)

> ... if you cure aging...

That's a big if. We've spent millions of year evolving to last long enough to reproduce and care for our young. Beyond that, our bodies break down in all sorts of ways ("aging"), and "curing" all of them seems unlikely. Shortening telomeres, reduced muscle and bone mass, slower metabolism, macular degeneration, worn cartilage, arterial plaque...

The ultimately smart thing to do would be to make our current 80 or so years of life as healthy as possible.

Yeah, it is a name for several types of fabric used in a lot of outdoor equipment. They all claim to be both waterproof and breathable, but in reality, they are mostly either one or the other. Waterproof Gore-Tex will fill with condensation, and breathable Gore-Tex will soak through. Pick your poison.

Even 0.1% would probably be enough to tamp down most HFT.

Unfortunately, this exchange doesn't seem to be aimed at that:

> The LTSE is a bid to build a stock exchange... that appeals to hot startups, particularly those that are money-losing...

> ... giving retail investors a chance to cash in on high-growth startups.

That sounds like a private lottery at best, and a scam at worst. Maybe it wouldn't seem so bad if I read through the full SEC document, but I'll steer clear of this until plenty of other people have tried it out.

Isn't this true for all provinces? A friend of mine is a government medical researcher in Alberta, so he makes good money, but is hardly what I would call "rich," at least not in the SV sense. Still, his salary is posted online.

I think this goes overboard: a min/mean/median/max for each job title would be good enough to know where I stand in a salary negotiation. I also like Ms. Zaloom's idea from the article to share salaries among close friends and family.