theshadow

A lot of what he mentioned can be done without writing a line of code. He is basically talking about a large scale home automation system with a voice interface to it

Even if you can find your package in the repos, you can always build from source if you like. In that case it a ./configure && make && make install away

I can't speak for OSX, but Ubuntu beats Windows these days in terms of usability, mainly because the software ecosystem is not polluted with crapware like it is with windows. If I want to find a tool to do x, it is an 'apt-get install' away where as with windows I have trawl through pages of google search results, trudging through trial versions before I find something that does what I want. If you are a developer, even just the basic unix tools are a god send in saving hours every week, on windows you have to deal with cygwin just to get something approximating those great tools.

This has to be a joke site satirically poking fun at all the "learn to code" sites that seem to be popping up every day.

Fascinating. This article (esp the part about young people not even thinking about their future knowing its already decided for them) reminds me of the novel 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro. Great novel but one of the criticism directed at the novel is "why are certain characters so passive towards their condition", "why don't they do something about it"? An instilled sense of duty is indeed a very powerful motivator.

Makes perfect sense to me. Webber and RedBull are not on good terms therefore RedBull doesn't give him Traction Control esp since there's a good possibility that he might blow the whistle on the whole operation if he finds out. In a lot of F1 circles there are conspiracy theories that RedBull is actively sabotaging Webber and there might be some truth to that as Webber is constantly at the receiving end of reliability problems, mechanical failures and botched pitstops whereas Vettel's car runs smooth without a glitch. I very much doubt that those two guys have the same machinery underneath them.

I'm sure if a starving child in Africa read your post they would be angry that someone went out of their way to get angry over another person making very personal decision. There are greater things in life to angry over than another person making a decision which they believe will make them happier.

Just because you can't seem to fathom how someone might leave behind a cushy job does not give you the right to be judgemental. World is a suckier place when people can't seem to see the world without their tunnel vision.

Shocked that the top comment is not just another one criticizing or trying to diminish something about the article/story.

You are right. When I first joined HN reading comments was my favourite part. I would be in awe of all these intelligent and insightful people, I would often skip entire articles and read the comments first. Things have really taken a major turn for worse in the last 6-8 months. Almost every single thing posted gets picked apart to bits and not in a good way. It has gotten so bad that I have actively started avoiding the comment section. My rule of thumb these days is only read comments in threads below 20 posts as these low comment threads are the ones with the highest chance of reading something interesting rather than just typical tired criticism of the of the article. I don't even consider threads with over 50 comments as these are almost always a complete cesspool of negatively.

I see nothing in what you said other than subjective anecdotes.

>> How exactly have their decisions "paid off"?

The main complaint over the last year and a half against ubuntu esp in 11.* days was Unity. At this stage in its life can anyone with a straight face claim that Unity on 12.04 is a substandard experience? I highly doubt it, and if there is that person is most likely still holding on to the bitterness of their initial experience with it rather than any substantial criticism against how it is currently.

>> Clearly, the growth isn't there. Android has become the most popular Linux distribution around. DistroWatch shows more interest in Linux Mint, and a declining interest in Ubuntu. The general sentiment when following discussion online is that people are unhappy with Ubuntu, and trying alternatives, including Windows and OS X.

Saying that Android is the most popular Linux distro out there is grasping for straws, our discussion here is obviously in context of desktop OSs, bringing up Android is a non-sequitur and like comparing apples and oranges.

>> The same goes for Firefox and GNOME. The sentiment within the existing user communities is not pleasant. The only "positive" (more like non-negative) articles are coming from the leadership of these projects, and they often read much more like advertising or propaganda than informative articles. Much of the user-generated discussion is some expression of displeasure.

Once again this is all anecdotes. It's funny you mention Firefox, I use both Chrome and Firefox but the strongest criticism I see against Firefox is something as trivial as version numbers. In pretty much every Firefox related thread there is atleast one person complaining about the rate at which new versions are being churned out all the while not appreciating the irony of being a Chrome user and making that complaint. I read an article today with some guy ranting and leaving Ubuntu for Windows after his web-cam stopped working in a newer release, I consider this kind of trivial criticism to be irrelevant and sadly that's the kind of criticism that is directed at these projects these days.

This post is nothing but a nice heaping of FUD. Looking at it from a distance the decisions made the Ubuntu brass have largely paid off. I like many others had my doubts when I initially played with Unity in 11.04 when it was slow and lumbering, however in 12.04 I doubt there are many people who would categorize Unity as a substandard experience. I haven't played with the latest GNOME so I can't comment there but Unity definitely blows KDE out of the water. I doubt lens-shopping makes it into the next LTS released, if it does it will be turned off by default.

I know we live in the age of hyperbole but statements like this "There are other major open source projects that have started to actively defecate upon their existing user base." are not constructive in any way. Ubuntu adoption is growing not shrinking, Firefox market share while not growing is holding steady. Claiming that these projects are going down is nothing but FUD. (I know many people would love to see Ubuntu and Firefox go down just so they can have a chance to see their pet distro on top and Chrome on top but alas it ain't happening any-time soon)

This goes without saying but no one is forcing you to upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10. 12.10 is not an LTS release so naturally you should stick to 12.04 if you don't want any of the kinks that are a side-effect of being on the bleeding edge. For me personally, I upgraded from 12.04 -> 12.10 last week and after a 'apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping' I can barely even tell I'm running 12.10!

While ORM level validations are nice to have, they are in no way substitutes for database level constraints. Just relying on ORM level validations is like saying "hey I'm doing error checking in my javascript code and therefore checking for errors on the server side is redundant and unnecessary". It's not, DB level "redundant checking" is worth it. All it takes is for one guy to "just quickly try something" in the db by trying to manipulate it directly without the ORM layer to have your db end up in an inconsistent state. ORMs have their own conventions on how they handle validations which maynot be completely obvious to a new developer on your team who is not familiar with it, whereas everyone understands how db level constraints operate. I'd rather put a few lines of extra code at the db level to make sure the data is safe than risk having the db end up in an inconsistent state, you are not only doing this for the customer but also for yourself. You don't want to be the developer who has to go in and figure out why certain queries are not returning the correct results after your db is in an inconsistent state.

Did you read the article? It clearly states that the "species" is unstable, prone to health problems and has major reproductive issues. What do you expect is going to happen if they are in the wild?

The entire thing is solved by bothering to look at the caption on top of the info-graphic. Even if you don't read the associated article, it's reasonable to expect that a viewer is going to atleast look at the caption that describes what they are actually looking at

It's a shame that the ridiculous amount of hyperbole involved in anything that Stallman seems to say these days is probably reducing his stature among the tech community and the history books. IMO his opinions would be more constructive if he tones it down every now and then.

Using D3 for simple straightforward graphs (ie. where you just wanna throw some data in and get a generic graph out) is like using Rails for a simple 1 page static html site.

Why would having a fix width be a problem? In my mind the alternative is the canvas automatically expanding to the right and thereby requiring horizontal scrolling through the browser. Flot.js supports panning if you need to stretch out your xaxis which seems cleaner to me than horizontal scrolling in the browser.

It might be, the design was different but this seems like an excellent resource too. Thanks!

This is slightly offtopic but there used to be a clone of Hacker News that someone created. It was HN without all the startup stuff, instead focusing on hardcore technical topics. I lost the bookmark a while ago and have never found it again. If anyone has a link, it will be greatly appreciated!

Every developer is familiar with Shell and Unix tools, it's trivially simple to lookup documentation and get something working really quick with unix utilities even if you are not familiar with the tool in the beginning. On the other hand the idea of learning an entirely new programming language for quick and dirty trivial stuff is a little off-putting. That being said I did not know how simple it is in R to play with data, will have to check it out.

I don't see this as a problem at all. I don't know if remembering the entire body of knowledge by heart is even possible for the average human being. I like to compare learning in University and schools similar to how memory works in computers. When you are taking a course it is similar to transferring data over a slow 28 kbps modem onto the computer, the process is slow and frustrating however as the course goes on and you understand the material better it starts to percolate up to faster caches. When you write a final exam the material is in the L1 cache, you can instantaneously rattle off answers to complex problems like it's no one's business, there's a question on Red-Black Tree deletion- no problem, question about quick select - too easy! 5 years go by and you've not touched the subject in any meaningful way so of-course if someone asks you to write a Red-Black Tree or implement Quick Select you probably will not be able to do it from the top of your head. There's a cache miss as the material is no longer in the L1 cache, you have to go down to perhaps the harddrive, which involves dusting off that copy of CLRS and reviewing what all the cases of a Red-Black tree insertion and deletion are and within a couple of hours you'll be able to start implementing it. Sure it's not the same as writing the answer in 15 minutes on the exam but it's significantly faster than learning the material for the first time which would the equivalent of getting data over a network. This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.

This property of brain to forget less use facts to make room for what you use more often has been acquired over a very long period of evolution. I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.

It's amazing that considering Ruby's philosphy we didn't have named arguments until now. I think this was a case where the idiom of using hashes as named arguments working well enough that the core team didn't feel the need to address it earlier, still proper keyword arguments are going to be great.

I thought Matz was going to drop refinements for 2.0 for now?

BB10 does indeed have an Android Player and in my experience it works pretty well. I played with it earlier in the year and while it did not support apps that made JNI calls at that time, it worked pretty well for vanilla Android applications. I assume JNI support will be added or perhaps has already been added since it's been while since I last looked at it.

I don't see why people would complain about no backwards compatibility with BB7. BB7 is legacy OS and almost a relic of another era compared to Android, iOS and QNX in BB10. If you are going to support apps for one other OS, Android is a much better target due to the sheer amount of apps out there.

While this had a happy ending, can you imagine an alternate universe where the founders for whatever reason decided not to hire the guy? Leading him on for several months, making him jump through hoops and then not hiring him would have been a huge waste of time and energy, esp considering they seem pretty disinterested through most of the process. People sometimes greatly undervalue the value of a polite 'no'.

The Ruby Way is missing in the Ruby section. One of the better Ruby books out there

Very cool. What's the software stack if you don't mind me asking?

It's possible that he/she is already familiar with the material but is reading it as review, in which case 10 days sounds more than reasonable.

Seems to cover less than CLRS. I find that most algorithm books cover the same general (beginner to intermediate) set of topics as CLRS does. I was hoping to find something that goes beyond the stuff covered in CLRS but not as far as the level of TAOCP. Any recommendations will be appreciated.

Seems like a hell of a lot of trouble just to write ios apps. I love Ruby as much as the next guy but sometimes you just have to invest some time into learning the native language rather than go through these elaborate and expensive workarounds