xradionut

Dell XPS 17 bought on sale.

Originally got it for MS SQL Server development work, soon switched to Ubuntu and running the MS OSes under VMWare after a zero day exploit jacked the Windows 7 install. (Fix your f*king fonts Redmond!)

It's not light, but it's really a semi-portable desktop for on-site data crunching and development. Doing more with Python and on Linux now.

Interesting site. I'm using pandas, Python and a few other tools to do analysis of public domain data for training and analysis, mainly that from the FDIC, NCUA and FCC. Understanding the "domain" and doing the ETL is 90% of the work, so having "clean" data for others is a nice service.

"I like Python, but keeping both 2 and 3 alive for so long has caused problems that make it hard to justify for serious projects."

Sounds like a strawman arguement to me. People in the community are aware of the different versions of Python and know how to deal with it. This "issue" hasn't affected Google, NASA or the millions of developers/users that utilize Python to the extent that they are in crisis mode. You can run multiple versions of Python on the same system, there are utilities that make this manageable.

What other language is "your" boss going to pick that you can't find issues with? Does he actually understand the technical details and history of said language? You can find all sorts of issues with any programming language, all of them are "Hopper complete."

Currently the ICIJ web site is buckling from the traffic, but the article and the various summaries elsewhere make for interesting reads.

I can't say I'm not surprised about these revelations, there have been other leaks, articles and essays discussing the problem, but not with the specific details. I'd love to get the full set of documents and run it against specific individuals/corporations in my area, but it would probably confirm what I already suspect.

The point of the book is obvious, once completely read. In fact it's wickedly delightful and has nothing to do with Azad.

Not all of his work is great, but the "Thousand Cultures" series and "Century Next Door" series are the great reads.

Note: The dark anti-hero in "Kaleidoscope Century" is probably the reason he hasn't won many major awards. You can't write such a character and not piss off the various sci-fi author and fandom cliches.

I think that Bitcoins are a sign of mistrust that people have in corrupt banks and governments.

I rank him in my top tier of writers along with John Barnes.

The Player of Games is one of the few sci-fi books I recommend to readers interested in the genre.

Most people live in the Box, some live outside and some collect the rent.

The cynical developer inside me thought, "Windows 8 has so little traction among Windows developers, Redmond is trying to attract Apple developers out of desperation."

The problem isn't just the relationship that Microsoft has with OSS, but with developers in general. As developer in their "ecosystem" for years, I've come to the conclusion that the majority of the Redmond management is totally out of touch with the third party developers. Crap like Windows 8, "flat" interfaces, abandonment of APIs, NIH, reinventing the wheel, ignoring requests and feedback, etc, doesn't make it better.

Having been a developer through the last couple of decades, I've appreciated some of the books that ORA has published. But I'm wary of Tim pimping the the latest wave that sells books and conferences. The current wave is "Big Data" and my spam folder has countless missives promoting this conference or that gathering. Sigh...

Good grief! Do you want this team to build the computer from discrete components, then custom code their OS using dip switches too?

This advice is coming from someone who probably isn't married and doesn't live next to an noisy elementary school and a community park. :)

They might get some of the bad human traits. Consider religious wars over brands of cheese or colors of automotive electrical wires.

Why not? That's the question to ask. :)

Considering features sets, an Odroid wouldn't be as cost effective.

Is it wrong of me that I wouldn't mind turning one into a Linux system and not run Android or play games? (After all this is Hacker News...)

Really? Another re-hash of this incident by someone outside of the development community with an biased agenda?

Painting the everyone in the technical field with a broad brush doesn't fix any problems. Especially insulting the people who are professional, respectful and trying to fix some of the problems.

You can use Python on top of Erlang.

Looking at his pedigree and the Scalzi difficulty scale, he was in the right place when he was born.

It's probably already being done covertly. I assume anything done on the internet or the normal banking/financial/credit system is subject to capture. Combine that with all the social media and other government agency , and you could build a reasonable compete profile on any individual participating.

To truely understand what's going on here you have to follow the money. All of the money.

This is not a simple story of a hard working smart kid winning the tech lottery with a hot app/technology going from rags to riches. This is an arranged marriage, a PR stunt and a good-ole-boy deal all rolled into one. It's a VC fuck-you to all people that truly have innovative ideas, viable businesses, and dedicated employees that are trying to get management to notice solutions instead of golfing with "consultants" or blowing big money on solutions that could be built in-house for 1% of the costs.

The kid was born on third base, got home on a wild pitch and some folks think he hit a home run.

As a counterpoint, there are real sharp people of all ages. At local meetups, I've met a couple of retirees not orignally in the programming field, (medical doctor, aerospace tech) that have picked up Linux and programming well enough, I'd hire them to build software/hardware for me if they weren't pursuing their own projects. Or the older opera singer that helped me debug code while on a flight and joked, "Programming is music for those that can't sing...". I believe she could succeed in any field, scary, scary, scary smart.

98: Programming subject matter books have errors and practices that don't always apply to real world programming.

Having been involved in computers since the 70's, the internet before WWW, and the web since, I come to the conclusion that the Web succeeded because it was barely good enough to work for amateurs, but no better. As hypertext it sucks. As a application platform it sucks too. But for allowing free exchange of information, it's been pretty damn good for such a crufty piece of tech.

"Application programming tends to be far more complex, far more planned, and far slower. Applications last for years and years, and new releases might take multiple years."

Really? You can build non-web apps just as fast as web apps. There are decades of tools and programmer experience doing this daily. You can't build Autocad or Photoshop as quick as you can churn out a buggy Rails site, but that's comparing apples to oranges.

There's alternatives to all of the Google services, although some will be harder to replace in the short term than others.

In terms of usefulness, Reader, as an information sieve, is a tool that saved me hours a week. If Google had offered a paid version to keep Reader going instead of shutting Reader down, I would have paid. Now I don't trust any "free" service they offer to be there in the long term. I guess Google "free" isn't "free". Explains why both OSS and commercial software(with long term agreements) are better choices.

Worked for three start ups in the Web 1.0 days. Silly hours and silly promises of shares... Never again.