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apple open source site
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so what's the purpose of this site? to attract learners and contributors? to build a better source code browsing system? to build an open-source ecosystem? to promote the spirit of open-source softwares?the half-assed design of the webpage indicates that apple is probably not paying attention to it at all. so what's the purpose of this site exactly?
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researchkit and more <link>
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apple open source site
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researchkit and more <link>
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bummed there is no real ability to contribute. or if there is, i'd love to hear more. i found a bug in an xnu syscall, submitted it and the fix to bugreports.apple.com a year ago and i don't even know if anyone has seen it.
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apple open source site
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bummed there is no real ability to contribute. or if there is, i'd love to hear more. i found a bug in an xnu syscall, submitted it and the fix to bugreports.apple.com a year ago and i don't even know if anyone has seen it.
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being famous for its designs, apple should have redesign this site. i am not good at ui/ux, but this looks ugly.
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apple open source site
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being famous for its designs, apple should have redesign this site. i am not good at ui/ux, but this looks ugly.
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<link> much is missing from that list that would be needed for opendarwin to work again?
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ask hn: what was the windows “refresh” button for?
why there was a "refresh" button in the context menu when you right click on desktop in windows?
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like other people said, it is about refreshing the view for changes that didn't trigger an automatic refresh.if you dig the details, behind the scenes an api called readdirectorychangesw is called, which uses a notification-like system to report changes within a directory. however, that api is weird, so various types of changes are not correctly reported and explorer.exe is stuck with outdated data. the refresh forces it to update the view.disclaimer: i've had to use that api recently to code a simple python file monitor in windows. <link> in case anyone is interested.
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back in windows 98 there was a feature called 'active desktop' that could use web pages as desktop wallpaper (or partial desktop wallpaper). it was intended to be an early version of desktop widgets like stock tickers. as these were basically web pages, you could refresh for the same reasons you might refresh in a web browser.as you could execute javascript it was also possible to do things like change your desktop wallpaper when you resized or rotated your screen. but active desktop was never heavily used enough to have all the bugs in it sorted out - if you widget's javascript tried to display a message box you could trigger a crash, for example.i assume that feature is gone now - but presumably you can still put files on the desktop, so presumably there's a refresh button in case you have some strange configuration like your desktop folder mounted from a network share.
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ask hn: what was the windows “refresh” button for?
why there was a "refresh" button in the context menu when you right click on desktop in windows?
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back in windows 98 there was a feature called 'active desktop' that could use web pages as desktop wallpaper (or partial desktop wallpaper). it was intended to be an early version of desktop widgets like stock tickers. as these were basically web pages, you could refresh for the same reasons you might refresh in a web browser.as you could execute javascript it was also possible to do things like change your desktop wallpaper when you resized or rotated your screen. but active desktop was never heavily used enough to have all the bugs in it sorted out - if you widget's javascript tried to display a message box you could trigger a crash, for example.i assume that feature is gone now - but presumably you can still put files on the desktop, so presumably there's a refresh button in case you have some strange configuration like your desktop folder mounted from a network share.
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it is possible, although rare, for windows explorer to get out of sync with what exists on the file system or virtual filesystem(s). the refresh button re-acquires the data from the source and re-draws the result for the user.for example, if you open a network share, delete a file using another machine that file might take between several seconds to a minute to disappear visually (although if you try to use the file you'll get an error and it will refresh removing it). you can alternatively use the refresh button to get an updated view instantly.it is mostly useful with non-standard virtual file system services rather than the normal ntfs/fat32 file systems windows uses.
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ask hn: what was the windows “refresh” button for?
why there was a "refresh" button in the context menu when you right click on desktop in windows?
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it is possible, although rare, for windows explorer to get out of sync with what exists on the file system or virtual filesystem(s). the refresh button re-acquires the data from the source and re-draws the result for the user.for example, if you open a network share, delete a file using another machine that file might take between several seconds to a minute to disappear visually (although if you try to use the file you'll get an error and it will refresh removing it). you can alternatively use the refresh button to get an updated view instantly.it is mostly useful with non-standard virtual file system services rather than the normal ntfs/fat32 file systems windows uses.
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to add to the comments about file listings not refreshing, note that the desktop is just a fancy-looking explorer file listing widget ("control" in windows-speak).
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ask hn: what was the windows “refresh” button for?
why there was a "refresh" button in the context menu when you right click on desktop in windows?
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to add to the comments about file listings not refreshing, note that the desktop is just a fancy-looking explorer file listing widget ("control" in windows-speak).
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you could refresh any folder in explorer, not just your desktop. it's not just about active desktop 'michaelt mentioned (which had a refresh, but i guess it was a different refresh, coming from ie and not explorer.exe), but - as 'unoriginalguy hinted - because explorer could, and often did, go out of sync for various reasons. it didn't affect only networked drives, it happened equally well when you had enough many files in a folder (something must have been timing out) or your computer was overloaded. the most common case i recall - explorer didn't automatically show files created by other programs, sometimes it didn't even show a folder or a file you created via context menu.actually, i'm pretty sure some of this still happens today, in particular i remember noticing on vista/win7 that explorer sometimes doesn't immediately refresh the folder contents when there's a new file created by external application (e.g. a log file), and refresh/f5 is useful to get this file visible immediately.funny thing, per the phenomenon of operant conditioning, over the years of using windows i learned to regularly refresh explorer windows via f5 to ensure i always see what's really there, sometimes just for my own peace of mind.
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javascript best practices
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loads of bullshit if you ask me.e.g. "singleton pattern in js": var x = {}, that’s enough, folks, do not write pages of code when all you need is just one line.
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this is great, but what i think is sorely needed is a roadmap to navigating the maze of module systems, transpilers, preprocessors, packagers, etc.why do npm and bower both exist? what is the difference between uglifyjs and closure compiler? do i want webpack or browserify? should i use these standalone or should i use them together with gulp, grunt, or another build tool? which of the hundreds or thousands of plugins for the build tools should i use (gulp has 1,532 plugins and grunt has 4,403!!)? should i use commonjs, es6 modules, amd, umd, or something else? don't even get me started on application-level frameworks like react, angular, ember, etc.i have reasonably good answers to these questions in my head right now, but three days ago i had no clue. and it really is a maze, because while all of these projects have flashy web pages and nifty "getting started" guides, their docs rarely explain the role of their tool in the big picture, and its relationship to other tools, they just give you examples and point to recipes. and there aren't a set of best practices for setting up a project that cover 99% of common needs painlessly -- you really have to get your hands dirty and configure the tools, in my experience.i mean, take a step back and writing javascript in 2015 is pretty weird. writing javascript in node.js involves writing things like require() that the browser doesn't understand at all. so you have to run code like that through a tool before you can use it in a browser at all. but what tool exactly? there are so many to choose from, all of which have their own way of being configured. to write javascript in 2015, you basically have to sit down and choose a language dialect design a compiler pipeline to match.i mean, just look at the babel "setup" guide and how many different variations there are in the instructions based on what tools/frameworks you are using! <link> point of all this isn't to criticize, but more to offer my experience of being extremely confused/overwhelmed.hopefully a lot of this will get better once es6 is ubiquitous.
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javascript best practices
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this is great, but what i think is sorely needed is a roadmap to navigating the maze of module systems, transpilers, preprocessors, packagers, etc.why do npm and bower both exist? what is the difference between uglifyjs and closure compiler? do i want webpack or browserify? should i use these standalone or should i use them together with gulp, grunt, or another build tool? which of the hundreds or thousands of plugins for the build tools should i use (gulp has 1,532 plugins and grunt has 4,403!!)? should i use commonjs, es6 modules, amd, umd, or something else? don't even get me started on application-level frameworks like react, angular, ember, etc.i have reasonably good answers to these questions in my head right now, but three days ago i had no clue. and it really is a maze, because while all of these projects have flashy web pages and nifty "getting started" guides, their docs rarely explain the role of their tool in the big picture, and its relationship to other tools, they just give you examples and point to recipes. and there aren't a set of best practices for setting up a project that cover 99% of common needs painlessly -- you really have to get your hands dirty and configure the tools, in my experience.i mean, take a step back and writing javascript in 2015 is pretty weird. writing javascript in node.js involves writing things like require() that the browser doesn't understand at all. so you have to run code like that through a tool before you can use it in a browser at all. but what tool exactly? there are so many to choose from, all of which have their own way of being configured. to write javascript in 2015, you basically have to sit down and choose a language dialect design a compiler pipeline to match.i mean, just look at the babel "setup" guide and how many different variations there are in the instructions based on what tools/frameworks you are using! <link> point of all this isn't to criticize, but more to offer my experience of being extremely confused/overwhelmed.hopefully a lot of this will get better once es6 is ubiquitous.
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was hoping this would be similar to php: the right way (<link> where everything you need to know is on the one page with links for more information available, rather than just links to other sites.
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javascript best practices
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was hoping this would be similar to php: the right way (<link> where everything you need to know is on the one page with links for more information available, rather than just links to other sites.
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this is a mostly garbage. it doesn't even mention control flow; callbacks, promises.a big problem with js is in part its best quality; flexibility. new and old developers need to be shown how js has evolved to be written. i see massive code-quality and structure discrepancies in various large modules throughout the js community and it only serves to dissuade contribution.i'm not sure if it exists, but there should instead be a site dedicated to: "js, done right."it could outline actual best practices.
- building, usage of precompilers
- control flow
- code structures
- tests
- everything in betweenusage of precompilers.
- browserify, for modularity
- babel, for next-gen features and code elegancecontrol flow
- bluebird, for promisestests
- what libraries to use
- how to build tests and how the big guys do it
- guides for complex teststhen you could introduce other somewhat subjective deviations, like coffeescript, other promise libraries, other control flow techniques.describing code structures is another big one.
with the use of babel, the example-code can feature es6 classes which would remove a nice chunk of the confusion newbs might associate with js's prototype system (not to say it shouldn't be introduced).then describe when to use each code structure.my last thought would be to link to github repos; for example, applications in both node.js and the client, which could describe a standardized filestructure, explain build steps, introduce tests, supply a step by step guide, etc..then i might say that if someone makes it through that gauntlet (and everything i missed in between), they might just be a competent js dev.
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javascript best practices
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this is a mostly garbage. it doesn't even mention control flow; callbacks, promises.a big problem with js is in part its best quality; flexibility. new and old developers need to be shown how js has evolved to be written. i see massive code-quality and structure discrepancies in various large modules throughout the js community and it only serves to dissuade contribution.i'm not sure if it exists, but there should instead be a site dedicated to: "js, done right."it could outline actual best practices.
- building, usage of precompilers
- control flow
- code structures
- tests
- everything in betweenusage of precompilers.
- browserify, for modularity
- babel, for next-gen features and code elegancecontrol flow
- bluebird, for promisestests
- what libraries to use
- how to build tests and how the big guys do it
- guides for complex teststhen you could introduce other somewhat subjective deviations, like coffeescript, other promise libraries, other control flow techniques.describing code structures is another big one.
with the use of babel, the example-code can feature es6 classes which would remove a nice chunk of the confusion newbs might associate with js's prototype system (not to say it shouldn't be introduced).then describe when to use each code structure.my last thought would be to link to github repos; for example, applications in both node.js and the client, which could describe a standardized filestructure, explain build steps, introduce tests, supply a step by step guide, etc..then i might say that if someone makes it through that gauntlet (and everything i missed in between), they might just be a competent js dev.
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glancing at this, it has some clearly outdated information... and it has a lot of links but i don't see a lot of meaty information. it's very shallow.js best practices are questionable at best. as an example, when react came out everyone was saying how much of a terrible idea it was (with me being one of those people, unfortunately), and how templates and code should be kept separate... but then i tried it, and i realized just how wrong i was. it makes a lot of sense to keep related things together. your component's logic / template can be in one place, and your application logic is kept elsewhere.i read a lot about js, and i get the impression a lot of people are just hacking together websites with js sprinkled on top, or hackathon-style apps that they don't plan on maintaining for longer that a few weeks. so their "best practices" end up being questionable at best. basically, who are you to claim that whatever you're doing is a "best practice"? it seems like a pretty bold claim, so i'd argue that it's not unreasonable to expect someone to back up their claims.as a side-note, why don't people ever talk about testing? and not just linking to some tools, but actually talking about how you figure out what things are worth testing, and how you test em.
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what happens to my late husband’s digital life now he’s gone?
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i've solved this the easy way. the only "online service" i use is an imap box and run that using inbox zero. everything important is archived on disk in eml files. we share all our passwords in a single keepaas database and everything we have data-wise is in a shared folder on a shared computer. backups are all in known locations. we regularly empty our phones an cameras and transcode everything into neutral formats.the digital life is 22gb of photos and videos spanning 13 years so far.so there isn't a digital life as such, just a pool of electronic memories and information which we share. i couldn't use anything deeper after watching a friend go through the painful process of losing everything tied to an ecosystem of a software vendor.oh and i'll only use a system that respects my control for my data. currently this is windows 8.1 but with the introduction of 10, it appears i'm not going to have to dump that due to the incoming app ecosystem and hit linux.if this all looks like a lot of effort, you're only doing the work up front. retrospectively if you don't do this, you're deferring a world of pain.
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apple (in england) copper-bottoms laws, and require too much documentation.when a person dies their estate goes through probabte. you get official documents as a result. that documentarion is effectively a court order - they are good enough to get banks to release funds from the dead person's account to the executor of the will.apple sometimes do not recognise those documents and refuse to unlock devices that used to belong to dead people, even if the device is mentioned in the dead person's will.<link> they're not asking for access to the information - they just want the device to be unlocked. apple recognised, after publication, that they'd made an error in this case, but they maintain that a court order is required for access to icloud accounts. but they don't recognise grants of probate as valid court orders.
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what happens to my late husband’s digital life now he’s gone?
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apple (in england) copper-bottoms laws, and require too much documentation.when a person dies their estate goes through probabte. you get official documents as a result. that documentarion is effectively a court order - they are good enough to get banks to release funds from the dead person's account to the executor of the will.apple sometimes do not recognise those documents and refuse to unlock devices that used to belong to dead people, even if the device is mentioned in the dead person's will.<link> they're not asking for access to the information - they just want the device to be unlocked. apple recognised, after publication, that they'd made an error in this case, but they maintain that a court order is required for access to icloud accounts. but they don't recognise grants of probate as valid court orders.
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the only digital life i'm worried about in the event of my untimely death is the few irc channels i frequent. just let those guys know i'm gone, put up a "he's dead, jim, take what you want." on my github and leave the rest to bit-rot. i don't think the cloud cares that i won't feed it data no more.
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what happens to my late husband’s digital life now he’s gone?
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the only digital life i'm worried about in the event of my untimely death is the few irc channels i frequent. just let those guys know i'm gone, put up a "he's dead, jim, take what you want." on my github and leave the rest to bit-rot. i don't think the cloud cares that i won't feed it data no more.
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skype is one of my most hated programs.and a reason for that is the utter absurdity in regards to account deletion. you have to do fairly standard things like identify email, password and some contacts.... but you also have to know the exact month and year of which you signed up. and unless you got lucky and didn't delete your sign up email up there is no possible way to find out. when i first signed up, i had a ridiculous name like everyone else did back in the day, and i wanted to just move on. not very serious, i know, but this issue can be for many circumstances.i really wish that some legislation would be passed for a "nuke" button standard on all digital platforms that allows you or a designed individual to erase profiles at will.
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what happens to my late husband’s digital life now he’s gone?
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skype is one of my most hated programs.and a reason for that is the utter absurdity in regards to account deletion. you have to do fairly standard things like identify email, password and some contacts.... but you also have to know the exact month and year of which you signed up. and unless you got lucky and didn't delete your sign up email up there is no possible way to find out. when i first signed up, i had a ridiculous name like everyone else did back in the day, and i wanted to just move on. not very serious, i know, but this issue can be for many circumstances.i really wish that some legislation would be passed for a "nuke" button standard on all digital platforms that allows you or a designed individual to erase profiles at will.
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"facebook tends to “memorialise” their account – freeze them so they can be viewed, but providing no access to past messages. [...] facebook also offended a fair number of bereaved people with its year in review clips [...] the problem was that for some, these were pictures of dead loved ones."here is something i really don't understand. for some reason it's apparently preferred, both by facebook as well as people overall, to rub out a deceased person's digital existence - as opposed to preserving a bit of their life and writing for posterity.to me, the "memorialization" of fb accounts looks like an almost cynical choice of words considering what it actually entails. do we really prefer to pretend dead people never existed in the first place?
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ask hn: is a red newspaper plausible?
by "red" i mean a newspaper which challenges group thinking and comes up with alternative theories backed by facts.the word red comes from military intelligence agencies around the world generally calling such a unit a red unit.<p>for a clearer picture imagine the tenth man rule from world war z which says that in a council of 10 men if 9 men agree, the tenth man has to disagree.<p>if such a paper was to exist what would stop it from simply becoming a conspiracy theory newspaper? would people be interested in such a newspaper?
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if such a paper was to exist what would stop it from simply becoming a conspiracy theory newspaper?as long as the people that make the paper are on the premise that the facts gathered and presented are verifiable (in principle) by anyone, there is little danger.
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if i were to take you literally, i imagine the newspaper would serve as a few things1) devil's advocate - this would be the worst it can do2) speak the opinions people would rather hide - this would be the best it can do3) break down pros and cons of equal two sided debates - i'm a big believer in give people as much information as possible to make decisionsmaybe more. conspiracy enters into hidden opinions however, if we are talking about the "tenth man rule" then i doubt leaking private information would be this newspaper's bread and butter.honestly, i skim through things to try to get to the meat of materials. so if you provide information that was easy to sort through, about current and heated topics and attempt to hit every angle with logical arguments, i would read it.
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ask hn: is a red newspaper plausible?
by "red" i mean a newspaper which challenges group thinking and comes up with alternative theories backed by facts.the word red comes from military intelligence agencies around the world generally calling such a unit a red unit.<p>for a clearer picture imagine the tenth man rule from world war z which says that in a council of 10 men if 9 men agree, the tenth man has to disagree.<p>if such a paper was to exist what would stop it from simply becoming a conspiracy theory newspaper? would people be interested in such a newspaper?
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if i were to take you literally, i imagine the newspaper would serve as a few things1) devil's advocate - this would be the worst it can do2) speak the opinions people would rather hide - this would be the best it can do3) break down pros and cons of equal two sided debates - i'm a big believer in give people as much information as possible to make decisionsmaybe more. conspiracy enters into hidden opinions however, if we are talking about the "tenth man rule" then i doubt leaking private information would be this newspaper's bread and butter.honestly, i skim through things to try to get to the meat of materials. so if you provide information that was easy to sort through, about current and heated topics and attempt to hit every angle with logical arguments, i would read it.
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anything sufficiently challenging and plain-spoken will experience external forces that attempt to dismiss, discredit or co-opt it - starting with one's own self.as well, ideas that are serious and challenging require the reader to make a great, intentional effort to understand them. rationalization mechanisms will always find ways to avoid understanding otherwise. a narrow band of "interesting" is allowed, but not something which triggers defensiveness.thus, the optimal way to teach the reader is to find a way for them to engage in play with the idea and solve a mystery that unlocks the real information, creating the intentional effort without waking up the rationalization guards.conspiracy theories act as the foil to "mainstream" propaganda by presenting a story which is just fractionally harder to follow, but not tremendously so; the initial reader effort is basically one of "what if they are lying to me?" subsequently the reader is showered with evidence that yes, they are being lied to. this point and counter-point effort allows people to remain anchored in a binary, yes-or-no, right-or-wrong framing of events and actions, where their identity and opinions can remain stable and confident.there is an inevitability that a popular medium will hew close to surface dualism. anything that achieves more in that realm hides something of itself.another way to think about it is that understanding is concentric - the group in the innermost circle can't directly speak to the folks far in the outside. they have to teach the people they're adjacent to, first. in the process the understanding may become a little more basic and limited, but still more "correct" to the expert's understanding.
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ask hn: is a red newspaper plausible?
by "red" i mean a newspaper which challenges group thinking and comes up with alternative theories backed by facts.the word red comes from military intelligence agencies around the world generally calling such a unit a red unit.<p>for a clearer picture imagine the tenth man rule from world war z which says that in a council of 10 men if 9 men agree, the tenth man has to disagree.<p>if such a paper was to exist what would stop it from simply becoming a conspiracy theory newspaper? would people be interested in such a newspaper?
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anything sufficiently challenging and plain-spoken will experience external forces that attempt to dismiss, discredit or co-opt it - starting with one's own self.as well, ideas that are serious and challenging require the reader to make a great, intentional effort to understand them. rationalization mechanisms will always find ways to avoid understanding otherwise. a narrow band of "interesting" is allowed, but not something which triggers defensiveness.thus, the optimal way to teach the reader is to find a way for them to engage in play with the idea and solve a mystery that unlocks the real information, creating the intentional effort without waking up the rationalization guards.conspiracy theories act as the foil to "mainstream" propaganda by presenting a story which is just fractionally harder to follow, but not tremendously so; the initial reader effort is basically one of "what if they are lying to me?" subsequently the reader is showered with evidence that yes, they are being lied to. this point and counter-point effort allows people to remain anchored in a binary, yes-or-no, right-or-wrong framing of events and actions, where their identity and opinions can remain stable and confident.there is an inevitability that a popular medium will hew close to surface dualism. anything that achieves more in that realm hides something of itself.another way to think about it is that understanding is concentric - the group in the innermost circle can't directly speak to the folks far in the outside. they have to teach the people they're adjacent to, first. in the process the understanding may become a little more basic and limited, but still more "correct" to the expert's understanding.
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theories backed by interpretations of the facts that most experts disagree with? you mean like scientific racism, anti-vaccing and climate change denial?there would certainly be an audience for such a publication, though whether you'd want to pander to it is another question...
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ask hn: is a red newspaper plausible?
by "red" i mean a newspaper which challenges group thinking and comes up with alternative theories backed by facts.the word red comes from military intelligence agencies around the world generally calling such a unit a red unit.<p>for a clearer picture imagine the tenth man rule from world war z which says that in a council of 10 men if 9 men agree, the tenth man has to disagree.<p>if such a paper was to exist what would stop it from simply becoming a conspiracy theory newspaper? would people be interested in such a newspaper?
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theories backed by interpretations of the facts that most experts disagree with? you mean like scientific racism, anti-vaccing and climate change denial?there would certainly be an audience for such a publication, though whether you'd want to pander to it is another question...
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your main problem would be getting enough paid subscribers to cover the cost.also, you should do it as a website rather than a print newspaper.there already are several "conspiracy theory" websites.
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redux: atomic flux with hot reloading
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here's the video about it from react europe: <link>
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redux is a major improvement over flux libraries because it removes a lot of boilerplate while not removing functionality (in fact, enabling more features). in flux libraries, it's common for an entity to take inputs and simply produce outputs. that's not the use case for a class. it's the use case for a function, and that's why redux removes boilerplate.however, i think it's time we stop calling everything flux. just because an architecture is unidirectional doesn't mean it's flux. facebook described it clearly as an architecture structured with: dispatcher, stores, actions, action creators, and components (sometimes even with the distinction of view and controller view). redux is flux-inspired, but has significant differences. maybe we should call it just flux-inspired architecture. the distinction is important because there are other unidirectional data flow architectures such as in elm (<link> and cycle.js (<link> we might be creating confusion when mentioning "flux" and meaning different things.
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redux: atomic flux with hot reloading
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redux is a major improvement over flux libraries because it removes a lot of boilerplate while not removing functionality (in fact, enabling more features). in flux libraries, it's common for an entity to take inputs and simply produce outputs. that's not the use case for a class. it's the use case for a function, and that's why redux removes boilerplate.however, i think it's time we stop calling everything flux. just because an architecture is unidirectional doesn't mean it's flux. facebook described it clearly as an architecture structured with: dispatcher, stores, actions, action creators, and components (sometimes even with the distinction of view and controller view). redux is flux-inspired, but has significant differences. maybe we should call it just flux-inspired architecture. the distinction is important because there are other unidirectional data flow architectures such as in elm (<link> and cycle.js (<link> we might be creating confusion when mentioning "flux" and meaning different things.
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hey, lib author here.let me first explain flux in five seconds.instead of mutating your models, any data mutation in your app is described as a plain object describing “what happened” (e.g. { type: liked_post, postid: 42 }) and broadcasted globally. models (called stores in flux) have no setters and change their internal state in response to specific mutation objects (called actions).the goal of flux is to have single source of truth and make it easy to avoid race conditions and cascading updates. if some data is wrong, just repeat the same actions in the same order, and you'll get the same data in stores. very easy to debug.now, for redux.it keeps the properties of flux (mutations described as objects), but instead of stores mutating internal state, it has reducers—pure functions with (state, action) => state signature. while writing flux apps, i noticed that the _essence_ of every store i ever wrote was a reducer function.it turns out that using pure functions instead of event emitters has many benefits: they are composable (<link>, it is possible to hot reload their logic (<link> wrote redux for my react europe talk about hot reloading and time travel (<link> it got popular before i explained _why_ i made it. in my talk i show what kind of powerful devtools it is possible to build on top of redux. the video of my talk will be up soon, you can check when it appears here: <link> check out my article on the subject: <link> the video is up! <link>
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redux: atomic flux with hot reloading
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hey, lib author here.let me first explain flux in five seconds.instead of mutating your models, any data mutation in your app is described as a plain object describing “what happened” (e.g. { type: liked_post, postid: 42 }) and broadcasted globally. models (called stores in flux) have no setters and change their internal state in response to specific mutation objects (called actions).the goal of flux is to have single source of truth and make it easy to avoid race conditions and cascading updates. if some data is wrong, just repeat the same actions in the same order, and you'll get the same data in stores. very easy to debug.now, for redux.it keeps the properties of flux (mutations described as objects), but instead of stores mutating internal state, it has reducers—pure functions with (state, action) => state signature. while writing flux apps, i noticed that the _essence_ of every store i ever wrote was a reducer function.it turns out that using pure functions instead of event emitters has many benefits: they are composable (<link>, it is possible to hot reload their logic (<link> wrote redux for my react europe talk about hot reloading and time travel (<link> it got popular before i explained _why_ i made it. in my talk i show what kind of powerful devtools it is possible to build on top of redux. the video of my talk will be up soon, you can check when it appears here: <link> check out my article on the subject: <link> the video is up! <link>
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the hardest part of learning react is trying to figure out which incarnation of flux one should use.
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redux: atomic flux with hot reloading
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the hardest part of learning react is trying to figure out which incarnation of flux one should use.
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this is pretty much elm (<link> and elm architecture (<link>
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the man who saw time stand still
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i'm surprised they don't cite the research of david eagleman. he's done very solid research to untangle the questions of subjective time perception:<link> (posted here before i believe)<link> (a talk by him on subjective time)
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this does not in the slightest sound like time standing still.instead it sounds exactly like the symptoms when the motion-detection parts of the eye are not working.the brain does not detect visual motion, instead the eye does that. it is one of the "layers" of information sent, and this is the symptom when it doesn't work.more info: <link>
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the man who saw time stand still
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this does not in the slightest sound like time standing still.instead it sounds exactly like the symptoms when the motion-detection parts of the eye are not working.the brain does not detect visual motion, instead the eye does that. it is one of the "layers" of information sent, and this is the symptom when it doesn't work.more info: <link>
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i used to suffer from alice in wonderland syndrome [1]. the first time i noticed symptoms was when i thought my cd player was broken because it was playing music slowly.i asked other people if it sounded slow to them and they didn't think so. there was nothing wrong with the cd player.[1] <link>
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the man who saw time stand still
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i used to suffer from alice in wonderland syndrome [1]. the first time i noticed symptoms was when i thought my cd player was broken because it was playing music slowly.i asked other people if it sounded slow to them and they didn't think so. there was nothing wrong with the cd player.[1] <link>
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this reminded me the description of tibetan buddhist teachings about the nature of the mind from the book "the joy of living" by yongey mingyur rinpoche:"later, when i came to the west, i heard a number of psychologists compare the experience of 'mind' or 'self' to watching a movie. when we watch a movie, they explained, we seem to experience a continuous flow of sound and motion as individual frames pass through a projector. the experience would be drastically different, however, if we had the chance to look at the film frame by frame."this is exactly how my father [tulku urgyen rinpoche] began to teach me to look at my mind. if i observed every thought, feeling, and sensation that passed through my mind, the illusion of a limited self would dissolve, to be replaced by a sense of awareness that is much more calm, spacious, and serene. and what i learned from other scientists was that because experience changes the neuronal structure of the brain, when we observe the mind this way, we can change the cellular gossip that perpetuates our experience of our 'self'."
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the man who saw time stand still
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this reminded me the description of tibetan buddhist teachings about the nature of the mind from the book "the joy of living" by yongey mingyur rinpoche:"later, when i came to the west, i heard a number of psychologists compare the experience of 'mind' or 'self' to watching a movie. when we watch a movie, they explained, we seem to experience a continuous flow of sound and motion as individual frames pass through a projector. the experience would be drastically different, however, if we had the chance to look at the film frame by frame."this is exactly how my father [tulku urgyen rinpoche] began to teach me to look at my mind. if i observed every thought, feeling, and sensation that passed through my mind, the illusion of a limited self would dissolve, to be replaced by a sense of awareness that is much more calm, spacious, and serene. and what i learned from other scientists was that because experience changes the neuronal structure of the brain, when we observe the mind this way, we can change the cellular gossip that perpetuates our experience of our 'self'."
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"reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter, arstila concludes that an automatic mechanism, triggered by stress hormones, might speed up the brain’s internal processing to help it handle the life or death situation.[1] “our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” he says. it is even possible that some athletes have deliberately trained themselves to create a time warp on demand[2]: surfers, for instance, can often adjust their angle in the split second it takes to launch off steep waves, as the water rises overhead."that might possibly be true for life-or-death situations, but i believe the second statement is overreaching. i don't believe that the individuals have "trained themselves to create a time warp on demand", but rather that it is an effect of having learned the specific skills involved.having learned new skills several times over the years, one thing that i have constantly noticed is that, initially, things happen fast. events appear quickly and it is not apparent what is important and what is not. on the other hand, after you have some experience and can recognize what events are important and which are about to occur, and have the skill to respond appropriately, the speed of events is no longer a problem for performance.in fact, at some point common events cease to be consciously perceptible---the reaction to them is instinctive.[1] <link>[2] <link>
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alternatives to wordprocessors
i'm looking for a general purpose writing tool, for writing letters, documentation, jot down notes and so on in pure text, and not be dependent on a certain piece of software like word for the writing part but it could be as simple as notepad or as advanced as vim.<p>at some point i might need these writings to be presentable to others in form of a pdf, with formatting: like headers, bold, italic, having a page header, a footer and so on.<p>any pointers to where i might look to?
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i use several things:leanpub: for writing books. uses dropbox, web services to produce books from markdown. i can edit markdon files on my phone, ipad, chromebook, and kaptops.google docs: quick notes that i might need in the future; having search helps find stuff latermicrosoft onenote - for notebooks for travel planning, research, etc.emacs: org mode, but it takes effort to get started
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abiword is a lightweight word processor. you'd probably want to use abiword's template feature to set defaults to what you want. eg i prefer light text on dark backgrounds. i like monospaced fonts. i have all the toolbars turned off.this allows me to do basic "text editor like" typing, but with the option to apply styling and export to pdf.<link>, any text editor you like for most of the stuff and the tools you need for the other stuff. gedit for all the texty stuff, and then import it into a wp to apply styles and export to pdf.i guess i misunderstand your question: why don't you just use a word-processor for everything, and save as text? why don't you just use a text editor and then import into a wp when needed?
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alternatives to wordprocessors
i'm looking for a general purpose writing tool, for writing letters, documentation, jot down notes and so on in pure text, and not be dependent on a certain piece of software like word for the writing part but it could be as simple as notepad or as advanced as vim.<p>at some point i might need these writings to be presentable to others in form of a pdf, with formatting: like headers, bold, italic, having a page header, a footer and so on.<p>any pointers to where i might look to?
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abiword is a lightweight word processor. you'd probably want to use abiword's template feature to set defaults to what you want. eg i prefer light text on dark backgrounds. i like monospaced fonts. i have all the toolbars turned off.this allows me to do basic "text editor like" typing, but with the option to apply styling and export to pdf.<link>, any text editor you like for most of the stuff and the tools you need for the other stuff. gedit for all the texty stuff, and then import it into a wp to apply styles and export to pdf.i guess i misunderstand your question: why don't you just use a word-processor for everything, and save as text? why don't you just use a text editor and then import into a wp when needed?
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i use bbedit for its text-only and regex and really enjoy it. i must admit, i do like ms onenote as i can write a note and see it on all my devices.
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alternatives to wordprocessors
i'm looking for a general purpose writing tool, for writing letters, documentation, jot down notes and so on in pure text, and not be dependent on a certain piece of software like word for the writing part but it could be as simple as notepad or as advanced as vim.<p>at some point i might need these writings to be presentable to others in form of a pdf, with formatting: like headers, bold, italic, having a page header, a footer and so on.<p>any pointers to where i might look to?
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i use bbedit for its text-only and regex and really enjoy it. i must admit, i do like ms onenote as i can write a note and see it on all my devices.
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like others, i use whatever text editor i find most convenient and write it in markdown-like syntax (on windows, that's markdownpad). when i want to get it into pdf, i'll either use leanpub to make it into an ebook, or i'll convert it into latex and use something like <link> (wysiwyg preview of your latex) to improve the formatting (or do things that markdown-like syntax doesn't handle).
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alternatives to wordprocessors
i'm looking for a general purpose writing tool, for writing letters, documentation, jot down notes and so on in pure text, and not be dependent on a certain piece of software like word for the writing part but it could be as simple as notepad or as advanced as vim.<p>at some point i might need these writings to be presentable to others in form of a pdf, with formatting: like headers, bold, italic, having a page header, a footer and so on.<p>any pointers to where i might look to?
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like others, i use whatever text editor i find most convenient and write it in markdown-like syntax (on windows, that's markdownpad). when i want to get it into pdf, i'll either use leanpub to make it into an ebook, or i'll convert it into latex and use something like <link> (wysiwyg preview of your latex) to improve the formatting (or do things that markdown-like syntax doesn't handle).
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<link> ?
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ask hn: you can only be fluent in 3 programming languages. which ones?
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scala, c, javascript.scala covers mainstream oo-programming and haskell-style modern functional programming (monads, higher-kinded types). moreover via akka you have access to erlang-style distributed programming.c is vital for low-level programming like operating sytems and network stacks. c might be replaced eventually by rust but if that happens at all, it will take at a decade or so.javascript is without competition for anything in the browser.all three languages have vast library and tool ecosystems at their disposal.
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i used to be a fan of polyglotism and knew a bunch of languages to various degrees of profiency. but the market pays much , much more for depth than breadth. the tools that pulled me into the quarter million paycheck territory were -1. good scala - fpish scala, coupled with scala libraries such as spark, mllib, scalaz, scalding, apache math, colt, akka.2. bad scala - using scala much more as an imperative lang, primarily for 3 purposes - shell scripting, web front-end html5 graphics and dom manipulation with scalajs and web back-end with scalatra.3. r - this one is not going anywhere in a million years thanks to hadley wickam and co. now with sparkr i get to use #1 and #2 with #3.my one desire is that styla becomes a first class citizen in this ecosystem as well - when you need prolog, there is often no easy substitute.
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ask hn: you can only be fluent in 3 programming languages. which ones?
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i used to be a fan of polyglotism and knew a bunch of languages to various degrees of profiency. but the market pays much , much more for depth than breadth. the tools that pulled me into the quarter million paycheck territory were -1. good scala - fpish scala, coupled with scala libraries such as spark, mllib, scalaz, scalding, apache math, colt, akka.2. bad scala - using scala much more as an imperative lang, primarily for 3 purposes - shell scripting, web front-end html5 graphics and dom manipulation with scalajs and web back-end with scalatra.3. r - this one is not going anywhere in a million years thanks to hadley wickam and co. now with sparkr i get to use #1 and #2 with #3.my one desire is that styla becomes a first class citizen in this ecosystem as well - when you need prolog, there is often no easy substitute.
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- c
- python
- javascriptthis is, of course, only based off of what i know so far and what i would find most useful. i could probably trade js for a sql, though, if i was thinking purely in terms of work that i'm into now. i don't use c at all, except to look at python bindings occasionally...but all the concepts i've learned from learning c are vital, even when working with high-level languages. plus, it'd be nice to switch to ios development at some point.
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ask hn: you can only be fluent in 3 programming languages. which ones?
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- c
- python
- javascriptthis is, of course, only based off of what i know so far and what i would find most useful. i could probably trade js for a sql, though, if i was thinking purely in terms of work that i'm into now. i don't use c at all, except to look at python bindings occasionally...but all the concepts i've learned from learning c are vital, even when working with high-level languages. plus, it'd be nice to switch to ios development at some point.
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i don't think there's a reason to be limited to 3 programming languages. perhaps you can only be fluent in 3 languages at once, but knowing more languages is definitely not harmful. i know more than 10 languages to a degree where i have written at least one non-trivial project with them. i can't claim to be fluent in all of them at this moment, but i can quickly ramp up to a productive level in a matter of a few days.now if i had to pick three languages, they would probably be something along the lines of:1. c. this language has been relevant for 40 years, and will remain relevant for at least another 40 years. low level understanding of computer operation is paramount for a lot of advanced tasks.2. python/ruby/lua. a dynamic "scripting" language is very useful to get stuff done quickly when you need it.3. a functional language: haskell, ml or lisp. knowledge of this paradigm will make you a better programmer, regardless whether or not you get to use it in your day job.there are languages i'd like to add to this list, namely something like java/c# (a "managed" imperative language). and then some "brain teaser" languages to expand your horizons, prolog is a good one for a rainy weekend and doing some simple brainfuck programming because brainfuck is to turing machines what lisp is to lambda calculus.but i disagree with the "3 languages" rule here, i'd recommend trying to learn a little bit of a new language every year. next on my list is rust.
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ask hn: you can only be fluent in 3 programming languages. which ones?
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i don't think there's a reason to be limited to 3 programming languages. perhaps you can only be fluent in 3 languages at once, but knowing more languages is definitely not harmful. i know more than 10 languages to a degree where i have written at least one non-trivial project with them. i can't claim to be fluent in all of them at this moment, but i can quickly ramp up to a productive level in a matter of a few days.now if i had to pick three languages, they would probably be something along the lines of:1. c. this language has been relevant for 40 years, and will remain relevant for at least another 40 years. low level understanding of computer operation is paramount for a lot of advanced tasks.2. python/ruby/lua. a dynamic "scripting" language is very useful to get stuff done quickly when you need it.3. a functional language: haskell, ml or lisp. knowledge of this paradigm will make you a better programmer, regardless whether or not you get to use it in your day job.there are languages i'd like to add to this list, namely something like java/c# (a "managed" imperative language). and then some "brain teaser" languages to expand your horizons, prolog is a good one for a rainy weekend and doing some simple brainfuck programming because brainfuck is to turing machines what lisp is to lambda calculus.but i disagree with the "3 languages" rule here, i'd recommend trying to learn a little bit of a new language every year. next on my list is rust.
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python - c - javascript/dompython - python is by far the best 'glue' language out there. there are things python isn't good for, bit it's far far easier to replace the performance critical bits of a python impl with a faster module, than the other way roundc - gives you a good understanding of what the actual impact of each line of code has. unlike asm, it's still fairly approachable, and useful at scale. unlike java, you retain a good feeling of the instruction-level impact of each statement you makejs/dom - html + javascript is the future of user interfaces (for the next 5-10 years anyway). qt/gtk/win32/ios/swift all have their places, but for a dev speed / cost-benefit payoff point of view, just do it in html. a deeper understanding of the dom api will allow you to make better choices that mean you don't end up with a sluggish, unusable interface
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git-meld-index: run meld or any git difftool to interactively stage changes
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that looks great, i'll give it a try at work!basically, if i understand well, it's a gui over `git add -p`. instead of the cli short diff, you get a `meld` instance that computes the diff between two (virtual) directories, one with the modified files of your git, one with the current index. and like `git -p`, you select what you want to add to the index.that seems great to have a global vision of modifications, and to be able to navigate between the differents files to remember exactly what belongs to the commit!i had such a tool in mind since i discovered `git add -p`, thanks for working on it!
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sourcetree also has this functionality.
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git-meld-index: run meld or any git difftool to interactively stage changes
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sourcetree also has this functionality.
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vim plugin fugitive [1] effectively allows editing files in index.[1] <link>
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git-meld-index: run meld or any git difftool to interactively stage changes
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vim plugin fugitive [1] effectively allows editing files in index.[1] <link>
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> navigate to a change without saying 'n' to every change you want to skipthis tool sounds great, but in case you didn't know, 'git add -p' supports '/' to search for a matching hunk.
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git-meld-index: run meld or any git difftool to interactively stage changes
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> navigate to a change without saying 'n' to every change you want to skipthis tool sounds great, but in case you didn't know, 'git add -p' supports '/' to search for a matching hunk.
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if you use emacs - make sure you're using magit!
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ask hn: do companies accept self-taught programmers?
i'm really bored in college help me(don't know what to do,waiting few hours just for college instructor,learning classic turbo c++, always get distracted by foolish when i'm thinking about my project/an idea)
i living in indonesia,
is there any website out there to find a job. thank you very much!
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tl;dr --> you can find programming jobs flooding on the internet 24/7/365. if you have confidence in your skill, theoretically speaking, you'll get a job in an hour or less. just search for "freelance programming jobs online".learning c++ course on college may not do much to enhancing your problem solving capabilities in programming because when the classes are not fun itself (as you mentioned), i can assure you that you will not learn much but detest the programming classes itself and i regret to tell you this but you may end up renouncing programming itself, which you just said you want a job in. albert einstein said that after a year or more of mind-numbing classes in highschool that did nothing to excite his creative potential, he found that the same scientific concepts that fascinated him in the past felt utterly distasteful for almost a year when he entered college.finally, after reading half of the internet's how-to on "how to code" and "how to be a skilled programmer", one answer was always common in all of them:- think of an idea and work on it.they mention that if you don't have a purpose to learn to code, you shouldn't learn to code at all. so, let me link to eye-opening articles that debunk the myths of programming i found in this thread: <link> <link>
- <link>
- <link>
- <link> you build apps or websites that do something you wanted, only then you gain the confidence and skill to work for others on their projects, isn't it? and that time will come when you will be overwhelmed by the number of jobs you can apply to. so, "no skill, no job". :-)
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i don't have degree and i worked in the second largest internet company in russia (where university degree is mandatory for 90% of population due to soviet mindset).currently, i'm in process of interviewing with london office of facebook. they told me that they don't care about my degree. the only important thing is my skills. also, i had conversation with google hr, he told me the same. ripple labs has very advanced position for c++ developer and they don't care about your degree at all.but i found that average tech companies care much more about degree than google and facebook.so answer to your question:yes, top-tier employers in tech industry don't care about degree. but in order to get there you have to gain your first experience in average companies and it will be harder than with degree (but it's not impossible).degree is very important to getting work permit in usa (h1b visa), canada and many other western countries.i got my work permit in sweden without any degree, but salaries here are low.if you dream about california, you have to get your degree even if it's super boring.
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ask hn: do companies accept self-taught programmers?
i'm really bored in college help me(don't know what to do,waiting few hours just for college instructor,learning classic turbo c++, always get distracted by foolish when i'm thinking about my project/an idea)
i living in indonesia,
is there any website out there to find a job. thank you very much!
|
i don't have degree and i worked in the second largest internet company in russia (where university degree is mandatory for 90% of population due to soviet mindset).currently, i'm in process of interviewing with london office of facebook. they told me that they don't care about my degree. the only important thing is my skills. also, i had conversation with google hr, he told me the same. ripple labs has very advanced position for c++ developer and they don't care about your degree at all.but i found that average tech companies care much more about degree than google and facebook.so answer to your question:yes, top-tier employers in tech industry don't care about degree. but in order to get there you have to gain your first experience in average companies and it will be harder than with degree (but it's not impossible).degree is very important to getting work permit in usa (h1b visa), canada and many other western countries.i got my work permit in sweden without any degree, but salaries here are low.if you dream about california, you have to get your degree even if it's super boring.
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yes.i've hired >50 engineer in the last 12-18 months. they are experienced hires i will grant you, but education is something i barely look at on a resume. in fact, i can't even tell you how many are self taught vs not, but i suspect it's 30%+.it's a little different for junior engineers, as it can make a difference, but in my experience the only thing you can ask for from any engineer, which is especially true for junior engineers, is: attitude and aptitude.
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ask hn: do companies accept self-taught programmers?
i'm really bored in college help me(don't know what to do,waiting few hours just for college instructor,learning classic turbo c++, always get distracted by foolish when i'm thinking about my project/an idea)
i living in indonesia,
is there any website out there to find a job. thank you very much!
|
yes.i've hired >50 engineer in the last 12-18 months. they are experienced hires i will grant you, but education is something i barely look at on a resume. in fact, i can't even tell you how many are self taught vs not, but i suspect it's 30%+.it's a little different for junior engineers, as it can make a difference, but in my experience the only thing you can ask for from any engineer, which is especially true for junior engineers, is: attitude and aptitude.
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typically with years of experience substituted for a degree.for example, if hiring someone with a cs/mis/cis degree with 4 years experience. we'd accept 8 years experience in lieu of a degree.if you find learning in college boring, what do you think this field holds for you? you have a world full of knowledge you could be learning if you're bored, no professor is preventing you from becoming knowledgeable across many programming disciplines.it seems you don't even have a rudimentary idea of what goes into building software yet, you just want to skip ahead to the getting paid part.if you can't build your project/idea already, why would someone pay you to work?keep learning, you've got a very long way to go. good luck!
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ask hn: do companies accept self-taught programmers?
i'm really bored in college help me(don't know what to do,waiting few hours just for college instructor,learning classic turbo c++, always get distracted by foolish when i'm thinking about my project/an idea)
i living in indonesia,
is there any website out there to find a job. thank you very much!
|
typically with years of experience substituted for a degree.for example, if hiring someone with a cs/mis/cis degree with 4 years experience. we'd accept 8 years experience in lieu of a degree.if you find learning in college boring, what do you think this field holds for you? you have a world full of knowledge you could be learning if you're bored, no professor is preventing you from becoming knowledgeable across many programming disciplines.it seems you don't even have a rudimentary idea of what goes into building software yet, you just want to skip ahead to the getting paid part.if you can't build your project/idea already, why would someone pay you to work?keep learning, you've got a very long way to go. good luck!
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yes and no.do startups accept self-taught programmers - definitely yes.do companies in general accept self-taught programmers - yes.do large fortune 500 companies accept self-taught programmers - generally no.there are exceptions to this rule. if you're self-taught and have done something amazing, like created your own programming language used by thousands of programmers, or you've got years of experience in some area thats hard to find experts in, like realtime systems programming then they'll make exceptions and you can get in.if you want to work in r&d you're going to need a phd, the only exception here might be in startups.but aside from the big players, you can almost always substitute experience over education. given two programmers, one with 3-4 years experience and the other with a bachelors degree and no experience, its actually the case that exp will trump education just about every time, especially on general programming positions and in the startup community, where all that matters is what you can do and have already done.overall though, do yourself a favor and finish up your degree, you'll always have the advantage over candidates that don't have one.
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why feminists are so annoying
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the article seems to say: "feminists annoy me because they are right".this is not why feminists annoy me, though. i don't think they are right at all. so the title of the blog post seems to extrapolate her own views out into a universal truth.this sort of thinking is especially dangerous:> with the same high school grades a white person has a 78% higher chance of being admitted to a university than a person of colori do not know where this stat comes from as she provides a cartoon instead of a reference, but assuming it's not a trivially bogus stat (e.g. because of differences in application rates), it sounds a lot like it could be a simpson's paradox:<link>'s_paradoxthe very same argument was made to suggest a gender bias in admissions at an american university (berkeley): when you selected just people with the same grades, more men were accepted than women. sexual discrimination!!!the problem is, when they tried to figure out which department was discriminating, the bias disappeared (actually became slightly in favour of women). it turned out to be a statistical anomaly caused by the fact that women tended to apply for much more competitive courses than men, like english lit, so they were rejected more often due to overcapacity - not due to their gender. when you select only application rates and gender, this type of data abuse causes misleading conclusions.i don't know that the race stat is another example of this, but i find it hard to believe that such a dramatic case of racism across so many institutions could persist for so long without severe legal problems, if it was as open and shut as felienne suggests.final issue i have with this blog post:> you believe god put dinosaur bones in the earth to test your faith, you think vaccines cause autism? yes, that’s crazy but also funny haha who cares?the first is harmless belief that doesn't normally impact other people, the second triggers preventable outbreaks of exceptionally serious diseases. so lots of people care and parents opting out of vaccinations is a very controversial issue right now! it seems very strange to use this as an example!
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> 1 they remind us that the world is not a fair place, which contradict the just world hypothesis. simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction. so if girls in tech say they have less opportunity, we all love to believe they are wrong. the world cannot be unfair, could it? so: they must be wrong. this is, of course, untrue. there are many studies done proving that there is some subtle bias, like the one where resumes with a male name were rated as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant.i've often wondered how much being asian-american has contributed to my current life of being a programmer. throughout school and college, i've never shown any particular passion or innate skill. but i got a lot of subtle encouragement, such as from my immigrant parents who thought majoring in computer engineering would be practical even though i was much more into journalism. after college i didn't even bother looking for programming jobs, but i gradually got moved more and more into programming roles...the engineering degree helped, but i have to guess that some of it was a lot of benefit of the doubt given to me, based on me looking like a computer nerd or having the stereotypical math aptitude attributed to asians (i'm also pretty average at math). after enough years of this, i'm not a pretty competent and passionate programming...but it seems hardly by active choice. i believe the average young woman probably doesn't get as many chances or benefits of the doubt that i have.
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why feminists are so annoying
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> 1 they remind us that the world is not a fair place, which contradict the just world hypothesis. simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction. so if girls in tech say they have less opportunity, we all love to believe they are wrong. the world cannot be unfair, could it? so: they must be wrong. this is, of course, untrue. there are many studies done proving that there is some subtle bias, like the one where resumes with a male name were rated as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant.i've often wondered how much being asian-american has contributed to my current life of being a programmer. throughout school and college, i've never shown any particular passion or innate skill. but i got a lot of subtle encouragement, such as from my immigrant parents who thought majoring in computer engineering would be practical even though i was much more into journalism. after college i didn't even bother looking for programming jobs, but i gradually got moved more and more into programming roles...the engineering degree helped, but i have to guess that some of it was a lot of benefit of the doubt given to me, based on me looking like a computer nerd or having the stereotypical math aptitude attributed to asians (i'm also pretty average at math). after enough years of this, i'm not a pretty competent and passionate programming...but it seems hardly by active choice. i believe the average young woman probably doesn't get as many chances or benefits of the doubt that i have.
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ok, i'll bite.> women ‘nagging’ about equal rights are so annoyingnow, let's talk about the three concepts op introduced.1. simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction.2. people want to believe they are reasonable creatures themselves.3. accepting that there is a bias against women, means you must accept there is a bias in favor of men.the problem here is not that women want equal rights. no rational actor wants equal rights, only increased rights. it is very disingenuous to talk about a "white privilege" or a "male privilege" without acknowledging there are privileges that come from being $input_race and $input_gender. of course, people of $input_race and $input_gender will usually not complain about the privileges they get.it is absolutely ok to seek parity in terms of rights. it is understandable that people seek greater rewards for themselves. lets just not delude ourselves into thinking that what we want is equality when what we really want is better rights and greater rewards for ourselves.if feminism is about equality in rights and responsibility regardless of gender or sexual identity, there are a lot of people around who go by the wrong name.downvoters: please leave a note.
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why feminists are so annoying
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ok, i'll bite.> women ‘nagging’ about equal rights are so annoyingnow, let's talk about the three concepts op introduced.1. simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction.2. people want to believe they are reasonable creatures themselves.3. accepting that there is a bias against women, means you must accept there is a bias in favor of men.the problem here is not that women want equal rights. no rational actor wants equal rights, only increased rights. it is very disingenuous to talk about a "white privilege" or a "male privilege" without acknowledging there are privileges that come from being $input_race and $input_gender. of course, people of $input_race and $input_gender will usually not complain about the privileges they get.it is absolutely ok to seek parity in terms of rights. it is understandable that people seek greater rewards for themselves. lets just not delude ourselves into thinking that what we want is equality when what we really want is better rights and greater rewards for ourselves.if feminism is about equality in rights and responsibility regardless of gender or sexual identity, there are a lot of people around who go by the wrong name.downvoters: please leave a note.
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this post is weird. there are a lot of reasons to be annoyed and most of those have nothing to do with the cause, but the means employed.riddle me this: let's say some tech company has to match a man/woman quota of at least 40% on a cs position. (this is a pretty common theme in various places)going by the numbers in this post, there's a 1.6% ratio in the author's class. let's be extremely generous and say there's a 9:1 male/female ratio in cs.with those numbers, there's a 30% skew in favour of female employees. in a sector with a 9:1 male ratio, that means one in three male employee is rejected because of numbers. the real ratio is actually much higher, remember. and on the other side of the equation, female employees would be very aggressively sought after because positions are not actually easy to fill and just because you can find the bodies doesn't mean the employees are good. is this where we want to end up?end sidetrack. there's a lot of causes out there. discrimination, everything. but feminism, i think, annoys more than others because it promotes unhealthy "fixes" such as this one above. you don't want to force people into a new belief system, you want to change their belief system. the former is super awkward for places where discrimination doesn't happen, and imho just perpetuates the issue.you want more women in cs? make technology look like less of a boy's club at an early age (and leading into tech education) and wait 15 years for the results. i think the minecraft kids generation will yield some pretty fantastic surprises on that level.
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why feminists are so annoying
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this post is weird. there are a lot of reasons to be annoyed and most of those have nothing to do with the cause, but the means employed.riddle me this: let's say some tech company has to match a man/woman quota of at least 40% on a cs position. (this is a pretty common theme in various places)going by the numbers in this post, there's a 1.6% ratio in the author's class. let's be extremely generous and say there's a 9:1 male/female ratio in cs.with those numbers, there's a 30% skew in favour of female employees. in a sector with a 9:1 male ratio, that means one in three male employee is rejected because of numbers. the real ratio is actually much higher, remember. and on the other side of the equation, female employees would be very aggressively sought after because positions are not actually easy to fill and just because you can find the bodies doesn't mean the employees are good. is this where we want to end up?end sidetrack. there's a lot of causes out there. discrimination, everything. but feminism, i think, annoys more than others because it promotes unhealthy "fixes" such as this one above. you don't want to force people into a new belief system, you want to change their belief system. the former is super awkward for places where discrimination doesn't happen, and imho just perpetuates the issue.you want more women in cs? make technology look like less of a boy's club at an early age (and leading into tech education) and wait 15 years for the results. i think the minecraft kids generation will yield some pretty fantastic surprises on that level.
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that's one classic "pro-social justice" blogpost written in a didactic tone, touting some anecdotes, making a point of a statistic without any references and conflating all sort of social issues (women in it? college admissions? bachelor degrees?). funny thing is, the post itself if a perfect answer for why feminists are so annoying.
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toys from trash
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these are great.always funny what these "make toys at home" folks think people have lying around their homes:
<link>
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it's not trash, though.
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toys from trash
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it's not trash, though.
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wow, this is really cool. i feel the quote on the front page is apt for a lot of us here at hn:"and somewhere there are engineers helping others fly faster than sound.
but, where are the engineers helping those who must live on the ground?"we live in a world where return on capital and/or time invested is the common measure of success, but someone like this is having untold impact on many people's lives simply by applying their brilliant mind in a less commercially incentivised way.
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toys from trash
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wow, this is really cool. i feel the quote on the front page is apt for a lot of us here at hn:"and somewhere there are engineers helping others fly faster than sound.
but, where are the engineers helping those who must live on the ground?"we live in a world where return on capital and/or time invested is the common measure of success, but someone like this is having untold impact on many people's lives simply by applying their brilliant mind in a less commercially incentivised way.
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i particularly like:cd spectrascope: <link> polarised light to see stress in plastic: <link>
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toys from trash
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i particularly like:cd spectrascope: <link> polarised light to see stress in plastic: <link>
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great resource.discovered the site several years and helped in creating an offline version (only ios) with all the content (as of 2012):<link>
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this isn't an outtake from blade runner – it's the real beijing
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go see hong kong sometime, same thing, massive screens taking up entire sides of enormous tower blocks. shenzhen too.
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as answer tweet indicates <link> where it's due, twitter. that beijing photo is by @nntd and first appeared here <link>
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this isn't an outtake from blade runner – it's the real beijing
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as answer tweet indicates <link> where it's due, twitter. that beijing photo is by @nntd and first appeared here <link>
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i still remember 2001 when i first arrived at hongkong to work. my first day at the office, i got teary eyed. i told my boss why is it so..he told me it's because of the pollution and i should drink lots of water.it is probably way lot worse now. i saw this documentary recently, <link> it is a good watch. fyi china is also destroying marine life in the west philippine sea <link>
<link>
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this isn't an outtake from blade runner – it's the real beijing
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i still remember 2001 when i first arrived at hongkong to work. my first day at the office, i got teary eyed. i told my boss why is it so..he told me it's because of the pollution and i should drink lots of water.it is probably way lot worse now. i saw this documentary recently, <link> it is a good watch. fyi china is also destroying marine life in the west philippine sea <link>
<link>
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a genuine question for the people on hn who think government should be as small as possible, and that there shouldn't be agencies like the epa: what would be your non-government fix for this?
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this isn't an outtake from blade runner – it's the real beijing
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a genuine question for the people on hn who think government should be as small as possible, and that there shouldn't be agencies like the epa: what would be your non-government fix for this?
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beijinger since a year here. that's the famous "dragon tower" [1] where ibm china is having its offices, located north of beijing nearby the 4th ring and olympic park. franckly, it is very rarely that bad, maybe 10-15 days a year with pm2.5 levels over 400 µg/m3.that picture might even have been taken during the impressive sand storm over beijing in april this year [2], that's the most foggy day i've seen in the last 12 months here. looking at the sand storm coming and swallowing the buildings from our offices on 10th floor was quite impressive. :-)also, if you live in a big city on any continent, you might want to check your own pollution levels using the aqi site [3], you might be surprised by the results. ;-)[1] <link>[2] <link>[3] <link>
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gluten intolerance may really be immune dysfunction
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my wife doesn't have celiac disease. her knee suffered some damage some years ago. if she adds gluten to her diet, it swells up like crazy and hurts. if she removes gluten from her diet, within two days it shrinks back down and looks like a normal knee again and feels (mostly) fine. i won't pretend to understand how gluten affects everyone's body, but i know something about what it does to hers.it's odd to use the word "myth" in the title, but then leave the door open in the penultimate paragraph to immune system issues being wrapped up in all of this because i think it's entirely possible that for some people (like my wife), the immune system is counterproductively stimulated by gluten.having said that, i think a lot of this current gf stuff is simply a fad. but fad or not i'm grateful for it because it gives my wife, who really does have a problem with gluten, many more options when shopping than she had just ten years ago.
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here is an alternative theory that tries to explain why people in the united states don't tolerate wheat very well: <link>
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gluten intolerance may really be immune dysfunction
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here is an alternative theory that tries to explain why people in the united states don't tolerate wheat very well: <link>
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not one single mention of roundup or any of the other toxic chemicals farmers spray on crops (especially wheat) right before/during harvest to kill them and dry them out faster. like the article says, we as a species have eaten wheat for thousands of years with little problem. why now? the correlation between gluten intolerance and the rise of late-crop roundup raises some big questions.
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gluten intolerance may really be immune dysfunction
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not one single mention of roundup or any of the other toxic chemicals farmers spray on crops (especially wheat) right before/during harvest to kill them and dry them out faster. like the article says, we as a species have eaten wheat for thousands of years with little problem. why now? the correlation between gluten intolerance and the rise of late-crop roundup raises some big questions.
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this is a much better summary of the evidence, in my opinion: <link>
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gluten intolerance may really be immune dysfunction
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this is a much better summary of the evidence, in my opinion: <link>
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the editorializing of the headline here is changing the argument. the article (titled "the myth of big, bad gluten") is arguing that gluten may not itself be bad, but rather the body's reaction. this new title implies gluten intolerance is a myth, which is contradicted by stuff like <link> .
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ask hn: any c programming postgres wizards willing to port 460 lines of code?
i'd really like to use postgres as a backing store for libgit2 <link><p>i wonder if there are any kind c programming wizards who know postgres and might consider doing the open source port? it's beyond my python programming skills and i dare not write crappy c code for fear of creating something nasty and insecure.<p>i can repay either by reciprocating with python/web development/linux/aws knowledge, or if i have nothing of value to offer then i can offer thanks and praise.<p>the existing mysql implementation is 460 lines of code.<p>there's a mysql implementation here:
<link><p>there's a sqlite implementation too:
<link><p>some relevant links:
<link>
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lucky for you i actually did exactly this over a year ago. we're not using it anymore so i'll just open source it for you: <link> note that i also don't know much c, but this implementation does work. also included is a postgres version of the ref db backend (so nothing hits the filesystem). there are a few bits that are not implemented since we didn't have use for the reflog and those parts are technically optional.would probably be good to get another set of eyes on this from someone much more familiar with c.hope this helps!
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have you tried <link> i know nothing about libgit2, but came across this repo while looking it up. if it's got some issues it's a great place to start from, since it also gives you somebody who could code review and you don't need to start completely from scratch.
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ask hn: any c programming postgres wizards willing to port 460 lines of code?
i'd really like to use postgres as a backing store for libgit2 <link><p>i wonder if there are any kind c programming wizards who know postgres and might consider doing the open source port? it's beyond my python programming skills and i dare not write crappy c code for fear of creating something nasty and insecure.<p>i can repay either by reciprocating with python/web development/linux/aws knowledge, or if i have nothing of value to offer then i can offer thanks and praise.<p>the existing mysql implementation is 460 lines of code.<p>there's a mysql implementation here:
<link><p>there's a sqlite implementation too:
<link><p>some relevant links:
<link>
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have you tried <link> i know nothing about libgit2, but came across this repo while looking it up. if it's got some issues it's a great place to start from, since it also gives you somebody who could code review and you don't need to start completely from scratch.
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i have no problem with such requests, and i think there should be more. but there is one issue with that. what's your motive?are you looking for this to complete a $xxk client project? or are you looking for this to help students understand a c implementation?it makes a world of difference. if you are getting paid for the result, then you should share with the developer. if you are not, and doing this for the greater good, then it's fine.we should really define the line here. there is enough exploitation in the dev world and the last thing we want is developers exploiting other developers.
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ask hn: any c programming postgres wizards willing to port 460 lines of code?
i'd really like to use postgres as a backing store for libgit2 <link><p>i wonder if there are any kind c programming wizards who know postgres and might consider doing the open source port? it's beyond my python programming skills and i dare not write crappy c code for fear of creating something nasty and insecure.<p>i can repay either by reciprocating with python/web development/linux/aws knowledge, or if i have nothing of value to offer then i can offer thanks and praise.<p>the existing mysql implementation is 460 lines of code.<p>there's a mysql implementation here:
<link><p>there's a sqlite implementation too:
<link><p>some relevant links:
<link>
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i have no problem with such requests, and i think there should be more. but there is one issue with that. what's your motive?are you looking for this to complete a $xxk client project? or are you looking for this to help students understand a c implementation?it makes a world of difference. if you are getting paid for the result, then you should share with the developer. if you are not, and doing this for the greater good, then it's fine.we should really define the line here. there is enough exploitation in the dev world and the last thing we want is developers exploiting other developers.
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if it's so short, why not give it a shot and put it up for code review so others can catch the nasty and insecure bits? great learning experience :)
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ask hn: any c programming postgres wizards willing to port 460 lines of code?
i'd really like to use postgres as a backing store for libgit2 <link><p>i wonder if there are any kind c programming wizards who know postgres and might consider doing the open source port? it's beyond my python programming skills and i dare not write crappy c code for fear of creating something nasty and insecure.<p>i can repay either by reciprocating with python/web development/linux/aws knowledge, or if i have nothing of value to offer then i can offer thanks and praise.<p>the existing mysql implementation is 460 lines of code.<p>there's a mysql implementation here:
<link><p>there's a sqlite implementation too:
<link><p>some relevant links:
<link>
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if it's so short, why not give it a shot and put it up for code review so others can catch the nasty and insecure bits? great learning experience :)
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i wish there were more ask hn posts like this.it's also a great chance for someone who perhaps is looking for a gig to put some code up here that quite a few people will review.
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after simple dental surgery, william lost his ability to form new memories
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i would strongly question the idea that he has "no structural abnormality".it would be very interesting to see exactly what type of imaging they performed on him. bear in mind, an abnormality in the hippocampus or other memory related structures could be sub-mm in size and result in a significant impairment.if, for example, he did not have an mri with diffusion weighted imaging with a sufficiently high b value (gradient value) they may be missing/have missed a very small stroke (this test is also time sensitive -only positive within the first few days of insult).if they did not perform susceptibility weighted imaging, they may have missed a tiny micro-haemorrhage. both of these scenarios can result in memory loss if critical structures are involved.there are also several technical issues that may have resulted in a sub-optimal scan, precluding finding a tiny abnormality. there's also the question of whether the person reading the scan got it right or whether the strength of the magnet/technical parameters of the study were sufficient to resolve a tiny abnormality.either of these scenarios could have been a consequence of reduced blood flow (hypoperfusion), a small clot (embolus) or a tiny blood vessel injury (dissection) that could have occurred during the procedure - possibly related to the anaesthetic but not definitively so.i suspect there is a definitive abnormality that the clinicians that saw him were unable to pick up. this seams a lot more likely than the idea that we need to revise our entire conceptualisation of memory formation to suit a psychological theory.
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this is the condition that was described in memento. really fascinating stuff. it makes me want to keep notes on everything, because most people rely on their memory for a lot of things. when we forget something we are frustrated "oh darn, i forgot it again!". imagine not being able to remember anything at all...
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after simple dental surgery, william lost his ability to form new memories
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this is the condition that was described in memento. really fascinating stuff. it makes me want to keep notes on everything, because most people rely on their memory for a lot of things. when we forget something we are frustrated "oh darn, i forgot it again!". imagine not being able to remember anything at all...
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oliver sacks, in his wonderful essay collection "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" [1], describes a similar case of a soldier, "jimmy g.", who lost his ability to form memories after being wounded in 1945. every half an hour or so his memory resets, and so 20 or 30 years later he still thinks that he's an 18 year-old man who just got wounded in the war. there's a particularly poignant moment in the story where his brother comes to visit the man in hospital in the 1970s, and how jimmy is puzzled why his brother looks so old.another well-known case of retrograde amnesia is clive wearing, a british pianist who was the subject of a bbc documentary, "man without a memory" [2]. i recommend watching the clip. he describes his "resets" rather terrifyingly as slowly emerging from a sleepless coma. whenever he sees his wife after such a reset, he leaps up to greet her as if they have been apart for a long time, and his evident happiness and inability to recognize his situation is heartbreaking. (his wife, unbeknownst to him, of course, has since divorced him, which only adds to the poignancy of the scene.)[1] <link>[2] <link>
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after simple dental surgery, william lost his ability to form new memories
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oliver sacks, in his wonderful essay collection "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" [1], describes a similar case of a soldier, "jimmy g.", who lost his ability to form memories after being wounded in 1945. every half an hour or so his memory resets, and so 20 or 30 years later he still thinks that he's an 18 year-old man who just got wounded in the war. there's a particularly poignant moment in the story where his brother comes to visit the man in hospital in the 1970s, and how jimmy is puzzled why his brother looks so old.another well-known case of retrograde amnesia is clive wearing, a british pianist who was the subject of a bbc documentary, "man without a memory" [2]. i recommend watching the clip. he describes his "resets" rather terrifyingly as slowly emerging from a sleepless coma. whenever he sees his wife after such a reset, he leaps up to greet her as if they have been apart for a long time, and his evident happiness and inability to recognize his situation is heartbreaking. (his wife, unbeknownst to him, of course, has since divorced him, which only adds to the poignancy of the scene.)[1] <link>[2] <link>
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the doctors initially suspected that he’d reacted badly to the anaesthetic, causing a brain haemorrhage – yet they failed to find evidence of injury. so he was discharged with the mystery still hanging over him, and the family moved back to england, where he was referred to the office of gerald burgess, a clinical psychologist in leicester.scouring the medical literature, he found five similar cases of mysterious memory loss without brain damage. although none occurred during a trip to the dentist, they do seem to follow other periods of physiological stress during a medical emergency.that doesn't prove that the anaesthetic isn't the root cause. the article title sounds link-baity.
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after simple dental surgery, william lost his ability to form new memories
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the doctors initially suspected that he’d reacted badly to the anaesthetic, causing a brain haemorrhage – yet they failed to find evidence of injury. so he was discharged with the mystery still hanging over him, and the family moved back to england, where he was referred to the office of gerald burgess, a clinical psychologist in leicester.scouring the medical literature, he found five similar cases of mysterious memory loss without brain damage. although none occurred during a trip to the dentist, they do seem to follow other periods of physiological stress during a medical emergency.that doesn't prove that the anaesthetic isn't the root cause. the article title sounds link-baity.
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a few comments in this thread mention "genera anaesthesia side effects" and long-term problems. i have never heard of this and a quick wikipedia/google search is not bringing up good source on the topic. is this substantiated or another "vaccines cause autism" kind of thing?
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teenager’s jailing brings a call to fix sex offender registries
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more people have to become aware of the fact that being on the "sex offender" registry most likely means you urinated in public or some such other small offense. how are we safer from actual predators by doing that?
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yes, he can be a welder, or a truck driver. i can not think of better occupations for someone who was previously studying computer science./sthe sex offender registry is, well, offending. it negates the concept of serving a sentence - it's a life sentence whose impacts are ridiculously out of scale with the original offense. "sorry, you peed on a statue. enjoy being on the list for the rest of your life!"it's sad that the advice most often given to those looking to move on with their lives is to move out of country.
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teenager’s jailing brings a call to fix sex offender registries
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yes, he can be a welder, or a truck driver. i can not think of better occupations for someone who was previously studying computer science./sthe sex offender registry is, well, offending. it negates the concept of serving a sentence - it's a life sentence whose impacts are ridiculously out of scale with the original offense. "sorry, you peed on a statue. enjoy being on the list for the rest of your life!"it's sad that the advice most often given to those looking to move on with their lives is to move out of country.
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cruel and unusual punishment plain and simple. it disgusts me that we're this vindictive a society; that's all this is - vindictiveness because who's going to stand up for sex offenders when our -children- are at stake.
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teenager’s jailing brings a call to fix sex offender registries
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cruel and unusual punishment plain and simple. it disgusts me that we're this vindictive a society; that's all this is - vindictiveness because who's going to stand up for sex offenders when our -children- are at stake.
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aside from the multiple levels of stupidity involved with these registries, it's (sadly not really) amazing to me that the judge and prosecutor in this case essentially admit that they feel good about ruining this young man's entire life simply because they personally believe it's icky and immoral for people to have casual sex.(and they're using apps! on them smartphones! on the sinternet!)ridiculous.
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teenager’s jailing brings a call to fix sex offender registries
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aside from the multiple levels of stupidity involved with these registries, it's (sadly not really) amazing to me that the judge and prosecutor in this case essentially admit that they feel good about ruining this young man's entire life simply because they personally believe it's icky and immoral for people to have casual sex.(and they're using apps! on them smartphones! on the sinternet!)ridiculous.
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> his probation will also require him to stay off the internet, though he needs it to study computer science.imagine a probation condition that forbade you from using a telephone. or from reading newspapers, or watching television, or using a debit/credit card.
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sloppy: an error-tolerant python interpreter that facilitates sloppy programming
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the author has another few interesting tools:incpy: automatic memoization for python: <link> automatically create portable linux applications :
<link> rethinking the electronic lab notebook :
<link>
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i'm not really sure that i see the advantage here. rather than understand the semantics of the n/a values and what effect this would have on your program, why not just add a try block around the inner part of your loop? it's an extra 2 lines of code, and you'll get the same sort of yolo behavior you get with the intepreter.perhaps this would be better represented as a simple library you can use to catch the error, log it, and then continue with your loop.and of course, this technique totally fails if you're trying to accumulate anything as you process the data that might end up depending on these n/a values: you'll run your whole program for many hours and at the end it will print the final result: n/a
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sloppy: an error-tolerant python interpreter that facilitates sloppy programming
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i'm not really sure that i see the advantage here. rather than understand the semantics of the n/a values and what effect this would have on your program, why not just add a try block around the inner part of your loop? it's an extra 2 lines of code, and you'll get the same sort of yolo behavior you get with the intepreter.perhaps this would be better represented as a simple library you can use to catch the error, log it, and then continue with your loop.and of course, this technique totally fails if you're trying to accumulate anything as you process the data that might end up depending on these n/a values: you'll run your whole program for many hours and at the end it will print the final result: n/a
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> if you don't want to go through this hassle (compiling from source), please email me at ... and i will try my best to compile a custom version for your computer and to guide you through the setup process.that's wild. i wonder how frequently someone tries to take him up on the offer.
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sloppy: an error-tolerant python interpreter that facilitates sloppy programming
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> if you don't want to go through this hassle (compiling from source), please email me at ... and i will try my best to compile a custom version for your computer and to guide you through the setup process.that's wild. i wonder how frequently someone tries to take him up on the offer.
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wow, this is a really old project that was a two-month-long hack culminating in a workshop paper:
<link> haven't maintained the code for ~5 years, so ymmv
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sloppy: an error-tolerant python interpreter that facilitates sloppy programming
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wow, this is a really old project that was a two-month-long hack culminating in a workshop paper:
<link> haven't maintained the code for ~5 years, so ymmv
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interesting! the approach i take to the "script fails after running for an hour" problem is to drop into a debugger on an exception. i use <link> for this but you can also use "python -m pdb myscript.py" or "python -i myscript.py" and then "import pdb; pdb.pm()" when your script fails.
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graphic presentation (1939)
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> how charts ought not to be made<link> years later, it seems bad habits die hard.
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it's fascinating to see a book approaching data visualization from first principles, without any preconceived notions or the baggage and confusion of modern tools and techniques
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graphic presentation (1939)
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it's fascinating to see a book approaching data visualization from first principles, without any preconceived notions or the baggage and confusion of modern tools and techniques
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wow! this is truly incredible!
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graphic presentation (1939)
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wow! this is truly incredible!
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a quick skim through the preview of it reminds me of how improved technologies bring ideas to our daily life. only with the matured tools, we see more and more applications of many of the ideas from the book. the time/energy cost of bringing them to us was too high.
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graphic presentation (1939)
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a quick skim through the preview of it reminds me of how improved technologies bring ideas to our daily life. only with the matured tools, we see more and more applications of many of the ideas from the book. the time/energy cost of bringing them to us was too high.
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by capturing abstractions over graphic formats it reminds me a bit of alexander's a pattern language and its relationship to buildings. the chapter on quantitative cartoons gave me one of those "that thing has a name" moments and afterwhich a previously unremarkable piece of the cultural furniture becomes remarkable because we get a new way of seeing.
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a year of spaced repetition software in the classroom
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classics:sivers: "memorizing a programming language using spaced repetition software" ( 2013)<link> ( hn: <link> )---janki method: using spaced repetition systems to learn and retain technical knowledge.<link> spaced repetition : <link>
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i overestimated the effect of spaced repetition. for six months, i used anki every day to recap chinese characters. at the end of the term i was perfectly prepared for the test. afterwards, i didn't study my flash cards again. only a few weeks later i found out that i've forgotten most characters or at least some of their details. i expected that after six months of daily practice (about 20 minutes per day) i would have stored at least some characters in my long term memory.
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a year of spaced repetition software in the classroom
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i overestimated the effect of spaced repetition. for six months, i used anki every day to recap chinese characters. at the end of the term i was perfectly prepared for the test. afterwards, i didn't study my flash cards again. only a few weeks later i found out that i've forgotten most characters or at least some of their details. i expected that after six months of daily practice (about 20 minutes per day) i would have stored at least some characters in my long term memory.
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as someone who has dabbled in both biology/chemistry and now computer science academically, my thoughts on flash cards and spaced repetition software has changed over the years.on one side you have the biology/chemistry guys who tend to use a lot of flashcards, and have a reputation for "just memorizing" facts. then on the other end you have the physics/computer science guys who often refer to themselves as "lazy" for lack of memorizing and have a reputation for only focusing on conceptual ideas.it seems to me that the people who succeed utilize a mixture of both approaches ("memorization" and "conceptual understanding"). i'm not sure when these two approaches suddenly became mutually exclusive.as an example, although there were some classes in biology that required a heavy amount of memorization, without the flash cards it would have been very hard for me to make the conceptual connections during lectures, while reading, etc.knowledge and understanding is kind of like a spider web, the more you have, the more you are able to grasp.purely focusing on conceptualizing the topics at hand has never worked out as well as i had hoped.
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a year of spaced repetition software in the classroom
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as someone who has dabbled in both biology/chemistry and now computer science academically, my thoughts on flash cards and spaced repetition software has changed over the years.on one side you have the biology/chemistry guys who tend to use a lot of flashcards, and have a reputation for "just memorizing" facts. then on the other end you have the physics/computer science guys who often refer to themselves as "lazy" for lack of memorizing and have a reputation for only focusing on conceptual ideas.it seems to me that the people who succeed utilize a mixture of both approaches ("memorization" and "conceptual understanding"). i'm not sure when these two approaches suddenly became mutually exclusive.as an example, although there were some classes in biology that required a heavy amount of memorization, without the flash cards it would have been very hard for me to make the conceptual connections during lectures, while reading, etc.knowledge and understanding is kind of like a spider web, the more you have, the more you are able to grasp.purely focusing on conceptualizing the topics at hand has never worked out as well as i had hoped.
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for those interested in memory and learning and who want some hints on why srs work, make it stick[1] is probably a must-read.[1] <link>
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a year of spaced repetition software in the classroom
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for those interested in memory and learning and who want some hints on why srs work, make it stick[1] is probably a must-read.[1] <link>
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i used to be very excited about spaced repetition, but haven't taken it as seriously in several years. yes, it is superior to more ordinary methods of quizzing vocabulary, and i would still use it if i had to pass a vocabulary/fact test on a subject i didn't care about.as a method of developing real competency in a subject or practice, though, it offers none of the benefits of immersion as it keeps the student just on the edge of full engagement (and if we add immersion, we lose the time-savings that spaced repetition offers.) it introduces a fragility into the student's schedule that make lapses in 'discipline' more likely (not everyone has a teacher and regular subject periods to keep them on task.) for anything beyond basic key-value learning, it requires too many contortions and restatements of the subject -- to fit the format -- to be feasible for many students/subjects. the packaged decks available online help but usually don't meet the needs of the specific course or subject concentration the student requires. we can introduce variability to space how to solve a problem instead of a 'what' answer, but then we need to consider muscle memory, developing intuition and other things that the spaced repetition model does not address.
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show hn: ifloop, a new programming style, designed for mobile phones and tablets
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i'm confused - you say it's designed for mobile - but the link requires flash and therefore i'm unable to use it on mobile.
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it's an interesting idea, but it's hampered by a few things. first, you can only use variables or direct values as conditions, or as arguments to functions, etc. that's a severe restriction, and it feels time consuming to keep creating local variables to put those values into before-hand.speaking of which, it would be nice if you could tap on an if-expression condition, and create a new local variable from inside that screen. it would save several clicks to get to the local variables screen.
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show hn: ifloop, a new programming style, designed for mobile phones and tablets
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it's an interesting idea, but it's hampered by a few things. first, you can only use variables or direct values as conditions, or as arguments to functions, etc. that's a severe restriction, and it feels time consuming to keep creating local variables to put those values into before-hand.speaking of which, it would be nice if you could tap on an if-expression condition, and create a new local variable from inside that screen. it would save several clicks to get to the local variables screen.
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if you're interested in coding interfaces on mobile, i've yet to see an on-mobile coding app as slick as lisping[1].touch c[2] on wp8 showed potential, but sadly seems to be all but abandoned.[1] <link>
[2] <link>
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show hn: ifloop, a new programming style, designed for mobile phones and tablets
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if you're interested in coding interfaces on mobile, i've yet to see an on-mobile coding app as slick as lisping[1].touch c[2] on wp8 showed potential, but sadly seems to be all but abandoned.[1] <link>
[2] <link>
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i like it. example of what's cool:syntax is just a themeyou program can look like a python program, a golang program, or any other ones. each code line can end with ; or not, etc.is there program samples somewhere? is there any lib for it?
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show hn: ifloop, a new programming style, designed for mobile phones and tablets
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i like it. example of what's cool:syntax is just a themeyou program can look like a python program, a golang program, or any other ones. each code line can end with ; or not, etc.is there program samples somewhere? is there any lib for it?
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interesting concept. point 3 here is however really worrisome.> your ifloop programs are always runnable, at any time. ifloop programs even has no runtime errors. if you get a property of a null object or get an array element with an index out of range, a null value will be returned. if you use the null value as a number, it will be viewed as 0. if you use the null value as a boolean, it will be viewed as false. if you use the null value as a string, it will be viewed as a blank string.that is not good. programs will just show unexpected behaviour. this is exactly what is terrible in php-land. you should not autocast values to other types.<link>
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why invest in tools?
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"our job is not to just build facebook, our job is to make the world more open and connected — and we in product infrastructure are tasked with giving the whole software industry the tools to help us accomplish this mission."if this is explicitly true, i've never heard of anything like it in a company that doesn't sell to engineering organizations, and it's pretty amazing.
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well our company believes in the power of tools to empower people and developers, and bring about social change. so i can definitely speak about this. and so can my cofounder: <link>;our job is not to just build facebook, our job is to make the world more open and connected — and we in product infrastructure are tasked with giving the whole software industry the tools to help us accomplish this mission."then open source your social network and let it be hosted in a distributed manner around the world. instead of shutting off access to apis like this: <link> i see companies like twitter and facebook become open source like wordpress for blogs, then we can say they really care more about making the world more open and connected instead of building their own silo.
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why invest in tools?
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well our company believes in the power of tools to empower people and developers, and bring about social change. so i can definitely speak about this. and so can my cofounder: <link>;our job is not to just build facebook, our job is to make the world more open and connected — and we in product infrastructure are tasked with giving the whole software industry the tools to help us accomplish this mission."then open source your social network and let it be hosted in a distributed manner around the world. instead of shutting off access to apis like this: <link> i see companies like twitter and facebook become open source like wordpress for blogs, then we can say they really care more about making the world more open and connected instead of building their own silo.
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other than "letting people do whatever they like is good for recruiting", and "my project is really cool, imo" i'm failing to see the argument here. that's a shame, because i think it's important to invest in infrastructure, but the trade-off is never easy, nor clear. it would be great to have some reasoning on how to make that call.rapidly growing companies tend to over-hire, and then have bored engineers that spend lots of time creating wheel-building framework frameworks instead of working on wheels. sometimes good stuff comes out of that, but there's a ton of waste, too -- in the worst case, you end up in a company that has hundreds or thousands of people, but only a core team of a few dozen are doing all of the actual work. so you have to ask yourself: would it just be better not to hire hundreds of engineers, and cut away the complexity and inefficiency that comes with an organization of that size?i've seen it first-hand, and i've also seen friends go to big, famous unicorn companies and work on stuff that is far separated from the company's core business. it's sad, not invigorating.
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why invest in tools?
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other than "letting people do whatever they like is good for recruiting", and "my project is really cool, imo" i'm failing to see the argument here. that's a shame, because i think it's important to invest in infrastructure, but the trade-off is never easy, nor clear. it would be great to have some reasoning on how to make that call.rapidly growing companies tend to over-hire, and then have bored engineers that spend lots of time creating wheel-building framework frameworks instead of working on wheels. sometimes good stuff comes out of that, but there's a ton of waste, too -- in the worst case, you end up in a company that has hundreds or thousands of people, but only a core team of a few dozen are doing all of the actual work. so you have to ask yourself: would it just be better not to hire hundreds of engineers, and cut away the complexity and inefficiency that comes with an organization of that size?i've seen it first-hand, and i've also seen friends go to big, famous unicorn companies and work on stuff that is far separated from the company's core business. it's sad, not invigorating.
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pretty fluffy piece, i'm not sure why it's so high. fb does have some pretty cool stuff though - i've been itching to play with react and graphql.one tangential point i often think about is the importance of investing time in learning tools as a developer. what should the breakdown be? should i spend 20% of my time "sharpening the ax" and the other 80% working on projects? someone else in this thread pointed out that companies face some of the same questions. how many resources should be allocated to things like improving the build system or developing custom tools? where is the break even point where time invested in tools starts saving time for developers working on core products?
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why invest in tools?
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pretty fluffy piece, i'm not sure why it's so high. fb does have some pretty cool stuff though - i've been itching to play with react and graphql.one tangential point i often think about is the importance of investing time in learning tools as a developer. what should the breakdown be? should i spend 20% of my time "sharpening the ax" and the other 80% working on projects? someone else in this thread pointed out that companies face some of the same questions. how many resources should be allocated to things like improving the build system or developing custom tools? where is the break even point where time invested in tools starts saving time for developers working on core products?
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bottom line: invest in good people, delegate responsibility to them, encourage experimentation, and focus on long-term. facebook wasn't the first to try this model. they are one of its recent success stories, though. most companies' it departments won't have similar success due to control-freak management, conformance to established processes/agendas, or focus on quarterly-earnings. we'd all be better off if they switched to the model that actually produces innovation.even shifting a portion to it might send a hell of a shockwave through the industry.
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real time greek referendum results
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goodbye, euro. hello, drachma. the next 10 years are going to be uncomfortable for greece. not so much the rest of the eurozone unless others follow suit.
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clicking on the little great britain flag on the bottom left will change the webpage to english.
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real time greek referendum results
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clicking on the little great britain flag on the bottom left will change the webpage to english.
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good. the conditions set by the troika were shit. even though greece's debt is significantly lower than 2010, their debt/gdp ratio is the highest it's been.europe was trying to influence the referendum with their hard line (ie. blackmail greece into accepting their shit deal), but they'll backpedal, and maybe greece can get a deal that's actually sustainable, and doesn't lead to another 25% contraction in the economy.
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real time greek referendum results
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good. the conditions set by the troika were shit. even though greece's debt is significantly lower than 2010, their debt/gdp ratio is the highest it's been.europe was trying to influence the referendum with their hard line (ie. blackmail greece into accepting their shit deal), but they'll backpedal, and maybe greece can get a deal that's actually sustainable, and doesn't lead to another 25% contraction in the economy.
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as a european, i'm somewhat puzzled by why a greek default has been out of the question.why is it considered a huge threat to the euro, while in america, large public entities like detroit and puerto rico can apparently default without endangering the usd? is that just because dollar stands apart as a global currency?in a reasonable world, the parties who loaned greece all that money for ridiculously low interest rates in 2000-2007 should have suffered the losses. they're the ones who miscalculated the risk, after all. but that ship sailed when the euro countries bailed out most of that toxic debt with public funds. i just can't understand why.merkel was in power back then, tsipras wasn't. hence i have some sympathy for him.
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real time greek referendum results
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as a european, i'm somewhat puzzled by why a greek default has been out of the question.why is it considered a huge threat to the euro, while in america, large public entities like detroit and puerto rico can apparently default without endangering the usd? is that just because dollar stands apart as a global currency?in a reasonable world, the parties who loaned greece all that money for ridiculously low interest rates in 2000-2007 should have suffered the losses. they're the ones who miscalculated the risk, after all. but that ship sailed when the euro countries bailed out most of that toxic debt with public funds. i just can't understand why.merkel was in power back then, tsipras wasn't. hence i have some sympathy for him.
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earlier discussion: <link>
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“we take security seriously”
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the adult friend finder attack in particular is awful - the leaked data is incredibly sensitive and could be used to blackmail or manipulate the victims.
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i don't understand the criticism, what are they supposed to say instead? when an attacked company says "we take security seriously" it's probably a statement made by someone in the company who really does care about it and is probably pretty upset about the whole ordeal and wants to fix it. this whole attitude about corporations always being these evil lifeless monoliths who don't care about anything and are just saying whatever they need to stands in contrast with any place i've ever worked. some of these companies are staffed by people who do care and want to do the right thing and i don't understand what the op thinks they should say instead.
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“we take security seriously”
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i don't understand the criticism, what are they supposed to say instead? when an attacked company says "we take security seriously" it's probably a statement made by someone in the company who really does care about it and is probably pretty upset about the whole ordeal and wants to fix it. this whole attitude about corporations always being these evil lifeless monoliths who don't care about anything and are just saying whatever they need to stands in contrast with any place i've ever worked. some of these companies are staffed by people who do care and want to do the right thing and i don't understand what the op thinks they should say instead.
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anytime i see "we take security seriously" i get double skeptical about their security stance. this is something that's best demonstrated by simply doing it and the results speak for themselves. there's an obvious contrast between organizations with well-managed infosec and those that pretend. especially when a vulnerability is reported or a breach occurs. extra-obvious then.businesses, just practice infosec instead of preaching it. better that way.
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“we take security seriously”
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anytime i see "we take security seriously" i get double skeptical about their security stance. this is something that's best demonstrated by simply doing it and the results speak for themselves. there's an obvious contrast between organizations with well-managed infosec and those that pretend. especially when a vulnerability is reported or a breach occurs. extra-obvious then.businesses, just practice infosec instead of preaching it. better that way.
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this article makes fun of people who get breached. this is less than helpful.> “we take security seriously”, otherwise known as “we didn’t take it seriously enough”this implies that if only the companies that got breached had taken security more seriously, they wouldn't have gotten breached. in a world where databases are valuable (the aff example cited in the post, for example), software is virtually impossible to get to zero defects, and where zero-day vulnerabilities are traded on the open market, some big fish are going to get popped.the idea that getting breached means you're incompetent is toxic and needs to stop; it just means that you're a sufficiently high-value target. it's very possible (and quite likely) that many of those breached expended extensive efforts in defense. the idea that they would've been fine modulo more security expenditure not just a baseless assumption, it is in many cases patently false (granted, there's plenty where it's true). as a security professional working in customer-facing security, i'm helping exactly the people who are getting breached, therefore i say that having a monetary motive to say that they aren't spending enough efforts and should give me more money ;-)the article also ignores that knowing that you got popped probably already means that you're in one of the higher percentiles of security posture... that's sad, but, again, blaming the victims here helps no-one.(by the way, if you too would like to help people who get breached instead of making fun of them, we're hiring. contact info in hn profile.)
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“we take security seriously”
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this article makes fun of people who get breached. this is less than helpful.> “we take security seriously”, otherwise known as “we didn’t take it seriously enough”this implies that if only the companies that got breached had taken security more seriously, they wouldn't have gotten breached. in a world where databases are valuable (the aff example cited in the post, for example), software is virtually impossible to get to zero defects, and where zero-day vulnerabilities are traded on the open market, some big fish are going to get popped.the idea that getting breached means you're incompetent is toxic and needs to stop; it just means that you're a sufficiently high-value target. it's very possible (and quite likely) that many of those breached expended extensive efforts in defense. the idea that they would've been fine modulo more security expenditure not just a baseless assumption, it is in many cases patently false (granted, there's plenty where it's true). as a security professional working in customer-facing security, i'm helping exactly the people who are getting breached, therefore i say that having a monetary motive to say that they aren't spending enough efforts and should give me more money ;-)the article also ignores that knowing that you got popped probably already means that you're in one of the higher percentiles of security posture... that's sad, but, again, blaming the victims here helps no-one.(by the way, if you too would like to help people who get breached instead of making fun of them, we're hiring. contact info in hn profile.)
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security is a business cost like anything else and there are tradeoffs. all of these companies have decided that the risk of losing this data was worth the cost savings of not protecting against the attack. so far they all seem to be right (not even sony went out of business after their massive breach).so it's perfectly reasonable for them to say they take security seriously and then have these breaches. they take it exactly as seriously as needed to keep their business alive.having been on that ebay security team mentioned, i can tell you that we did in fact take security seriously. and sometimes what we recommended was done, and sometimes it was decided the cost wasn't worth the risk. but we were always serious about it.
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