What's up with FizzBuzz post commenters? - <AUTHOR> http://www.leaseweblabs.com/2015/05/fizzbuzz-post-commenters/

<comment><USER2> A question for the author.

In my personal experience, a significant proportion of the people applying for programming positions have been unable to write programs. And as the original articles about FizzBuzz say, not just unable to write big programs, but unable to write even small programs.

I want to make sure I don't waste my time or theirs, so I need a quick, effective filter to allow me to terminate an interview early, assuming they've got that far.

Currently I sit them at a laptop, or allow them to bring their own, and ask them to write a program in the language of their choice to perform a simple task, similar to FizzBuzz. Depending on the position they're applying for I will sometimes be a little more specific about the language, but usually I'm pretty relaxed. If someone can program in any language then they've passed this filter and we can get down to bigger issues such as system design, decoupling, testing, logging, debugging, inter-process communications, security, and more.

I need something that is so simple that it won't faze a nervous, inexperienced applicant.

For information, we've asked some applicants to submit as part of their application a program in Python that will, given a parameter of length _n,_ print all the strings obtained by deleting a single character. Thus their program should print _n_ strings, each of length _n-1._ One applicant did so, and then when asked in interview about his program he couldn't identify the place the argument was first used. It turned out he'd had someone else write the code for him.

I've also had an applicant refuse to do it, claiming to be too senior to be bothered with such trivialities. He said he was an analyst and system architect/designer, since that's what we were asking for. So I invited him to perform a cost/benefit analysis of a trivial test to decide whether a reported bug actually existed, and he ended up arguing that a test such as FizzBuzz is the right thing to be doing. He then did it. And we hired him.

The FizzBuzz test is not intended to discover if the applicant can program. It's intended purely to identify those who genuinely cannot program. At all. And it's amazingly effective.

What would you suggest?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Colin, I like your approach. I would also be letting somebody do a programming exercise for an hour or so. With an Internet connection and a editor and runtime of choice. I guess you could even consider to hire a company/service to perform coding tests on applicants for you. That may save you even more time.

<comment><USER2>
      > I would also be letting somebody do a
      > programming exercise for an hour or so.

Aye, but that comes after the filter. In particular, with FizzBuzz there are loads of follow-up questions you can ask to find out which way the applicant thinks. For example:

* Can you clean the logic flow to avoid duplicating tests?

* What if the tests are actually very expensive?

* Did they combine the mod 3 and mod 5 tests into a mod 15 test?

* What if that's not possible?

* What happens if you unroll the loop?

* When might that be a reasonable thing to do?

Most of these are structural questions that have analogs in live code, and serve as good starting points. They need to be adapted for the different types of work.

Programming exercises are well and good, but if the applicant passes the filter, and can discuss the various issues it raises, a "programming exercise" is really a bit marginal. I'd rather move on to pairing with them on some real code that they'd be likely to be working on.

Currently there's no service I know of that I would trust to run a coding test for me.

I still start with FizzBuzz (or similar).</comment></comment></comment>


The peer review industry: implausible and outrageous - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/peer-review-industry-implausible-outrageous/ <comment><USER2> Open access, as is mentioned in the article, is both important and difficult to achieve. As a PhD student or associate professor, you work on a strict schedule to publish or perish. The only acceptable publication venues are the 4-6 respectable journals in your field. You have no time or power to push for open access.

Only large research institutions like (I'm familiar only with the CS research community) MSR, Google Research, Facebook Research, ... as well as already tenured professors can really force the issue.

I work at a smaller industrial research lab. We try to push for open access whenever we publish, but publishing in non open access journals is important to maintaining our perceived prestige, which in turn is important in hiring (especially when we poach from academia).

I publish pretty regularly and try to be selective, but ultimately the push has to come from an institutional level such as universities or large industrial research labs to say "we will only publish in open access journals". This is especially true in the US where EU style legislation is a long way off.

<comment><USER3> Large industrial research labs have the same problem. They need to maintain their prestige for recruiting purposes.

<comment><USER4> At the same time, this seems to select the worst of the candidates: those who care about prestige.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What to do about the entrenched scientific publishing-funding complex has been a concern since the first full text of journal articles started appearing in the 1990s.

The response to date has been for funding agencies (nonprofits and governments) to require publication in open access journals as a condition of funding research. This has happened in both the US and EU.

However, I'm pessimistic this approach will address the problem, and it could well create a number of unintended consequences. For one, publishers that have introduced OA models can charge thousands of dollars to the research teams publishing the work. That could mean fewer publications, and more information silos.

The article hints at, but doesn't fully describe another, more pressing problem. Peer review is in trouble. The number of papers the average researcher is being asked to review is increasing while the abundance of papers means the few bother to read them.

I suspect the solution lies somewhere else entirely. Post-publication peer review is one option, and Fighare has built an interesting model that could be a component of a future system:

[https://figshare.com](https://figshare.com)

Regardless, the problem is cultural, not technical. The crazy economic incentives described in the article work because everyone involved has a (sometimes perverse) incentive to keep it in place. Until that changes, it will be mostly status quo ante.

<comment><USER6> > the number of papers the average researcher is being asked to review is > increasing

The quality of review becomes proportional to the impact factor of the journal. And given that the high impact journals have not substantially expanded the number of articles they publish, it might mean that there are now _more_ candidate reviewers.

What _has_ become substantially more burdensome is the number of funding applications that (esp. young) investigators have to submit per year. [http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/313](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/313)

> Post-publication peer review is one option, and Fighare

There are interesting proposals. E.g. elifesciences proposes to publish everything, under the condition that the reviews will be published eponymously along with the paper

<comment><USER7> no proposals, the review feedback and author response to the review _are_ published. Here is an example: [https://elifesciences.org/articles/35082#SA2](https://elifesciences.org/articles/35082#SA2)

Peer review at elife works slightly differently. The author(s) are not subjected to multiple rounds with multiple reviewers, instead the review feedback from the peer reviewers is aggregated by the editorial staff before being sent back to the author. There may be multiple rounds of this however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just realized that this analogy of the academic publishing industry is also quite similar to that of the search engine industry.

Most web pages are provided to the public free of charge, but they typically don't obtain them directly (technically they can, but it's often too tedious). A search engine takes them and redistribute to the public. They do it by using the metrics mostly provided by the (unpaid) public: PageRank. And they make a hefty profit for doing that. They also amass a lot of power. Both industries are essentially doing the same thing: content curation.

The difference is that search engines don't get complaints like academic publishers.

I think the reason is that the academic publishing is much simpler and actually more transparent than search engines; you can easily see the inner workings and the flow of money. On the other hand, people don't really understand how Google makes so much money. We're effectively blinded by the complexity.

<comment><USER9> The search engines have sidestepped grief because of their third-party pays model - advertisers fund their content curation and discovery expenses and the system retains open access at no (direct, monetary) cost to the consumers.

The peer review process might be more expensive/intensive than PageRank for all I know, so perhaps journal publishers are doing much more work than search engines.

Perhaps if journal publishers used an ad-supported model they wouldn't be demonized so readily since they'd be incentivized for open access since they're selling eyeballs

I'm not advocating, just working with the parent's comparison.

<comment><USER10> > The peer review process might be more expensive/intensive than PageRank for > all I know, so perhaps journal publishers are doing much more work than > search engines.

The peer review process is labor intensive, but to add insult to injury, publishers aren't the ones doing it and they don't pay reviewers. It's all done for free by researchers.

At best publishers add some proof reading services, but in many cases not even that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > (4 paragraph analogy of implausible and outrageous scheme of bakeries which > is total fiction). > ...Yet the story is broadly analogous to what happens > in the publication of academic journals.

While I think there are lots of problems with the academic journal system, please, please, please do not reason from analogy like this article does. This is a complex topic that deserves being reasoned about directly. Presenting an analogy which is obviously artificial just primes readers with a false, oversimplified narrative. Don't do this. This is highly misleading, and the bias that results from the priming is corrosive to clear reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER12> What I don't understand is why peer reviewers agree to perform uncompensated labor on behalf of these gargantuan, highly profitable publishers. What is the benefit to them, other than the warm glow of fulfilling one's professional obligations?

<comment><USER13> Mostly it's the latter, out of a sense of duty.

But there are other motives. Regular reviews give you some perspective that you otherwise wouldn't get. For example, you see what mistakes others make and that can help you improve your own papers. Another motivation for me is sometimes that I don't want the paper to be reviewed by someone less qualified in my areas of specialization.

<comment> 08-15 Ever noticed that the person who appeals to your sense of duty is always your boss who doesn't want to give you a raise?</comment></comment></comment>


Safety messages written in the sand on Cornish beaches - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-48842068 <comment><AUTHOR> Ideally have an API that can take an image, or SVG file and orchestrate robots to rake the sand.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Such a simple idea, as ever obvious in hindsight.

How long before people start to use this for advertising.</comment>


Ship Serverless FaaS functions with ease - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alexellis.io/build-and-deploy-with-faas/ <comment><USER2> OpenFaaS is looking to be one of the most interesting FaaS frameworks. I like that it on the whole doesn't try force you into anything, its mainly just "Hi you know containers... great so you also know FaaS" It's good to see something that adds just the right amount of "Framework" to be useful, but not enough to feel bloated, or get in the way of just making stuff...</comment>


Amazon barring third party sales of Nintendo products - <AUTHOR> http://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/selling-nintendo-products/526870 <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like they can deal with counterfeiters when they actually want to.

</comment><comment><USER2> It's about time they did something about the fakes!</comment>


The 10,000 Year Clock - <AUTHOR> http://longnow.org/clock/

<comment><USER2> You may also want to read:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665380>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665398>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665463>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2688332>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2690257>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2691452></comment>


Drone Kickstarter "Zano" goes bust after burning 3.6m in crowdfunding - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/19/9759834/zano-drone-bankrupt-liquidation-kickstarter?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter <comment><USER2> We'll see a lot more of these as groups that had only ever made one prototype raised millions or tens of millions pre-selling products whose bill of materials cost they did not even understand.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention how they get taken to the cleaners by suppliers who can see the public side of the project's finances and make rapacious demands on the cost of that BoM after the fundraising closes. Projects would be well advised to have hidden backers as well, to prevent all the money from being in sight, even if they get multiple cost quotes before the Kickstarter.</comment></comment>


iPhone wallpapers made from Aerial images - <AUTHOR> http://aerialwallpapers.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> <tongue-in-cheek>They also work on Android devices, you could say they are cross-platform wallpapers</tongue-in-cheek>

</comment><comment><USER3> too bad the guy who created these photos didn't give details as to the long & lat where these photos were taken. Shame on that guy.</comment>


Is it just me or past few days we are seeing lot of Echo related news/stories? - <AUTHOR> Amazon Echo marketing team campaign? I also see it in comments. Lot of responses look like canned comments. <comment><USER2> If it's the marketing team, the intern isn't working out: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519090)

</comment><comment><USER3> something something echo chamber.</comment>


Show HN: Sway – i3 for wayland - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway

<comment><USER2> shouldn't that be

      if(parent == NULL || parent->children == NULL) {

in get_swayc_for_handle ?

<comment><USER3> Because get_swayc_for_handle is always called using the root container, when it recurses down it should never end up checking a parent which is NULL.</comment></comment>


Rolling Up My Sleeves - <AUTHOR> http://cmdrtaco.net/2012/03/rolling-up-my-sleeves/ <comment><USER2> This has to be one of the most forward-thinking hires ever by a news organization. There are great tech people involved in journalism, but few are at a position of authority.

The news industry, sadly, has plenty of people with ideas but very few who have any idea how to implement them. They need someone who can understand and influence the logistics...I would not be surprised if a large part of why innovation is stifled by something as mundane as a poorly-implemented CMS.

I do see the potential for cmdrtaco to have minimal impact, through no fault of his own. Something as mundane as office politics (I'm assuming editor-at- large is a position outside of the chain of command) also stifles innovation.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.

But the fact that they've setup an internal division to explore the changes in technology and their impact on publishing is a solid positive indicator.

That said, large models are slow to shift, and there's plenty of examples of boneheaded executives within all media clinging helplessly to the titanic.

Hopefully the leaders at WaPo are genuinely interested in the lifeboat that cmdrtaco is sure to provide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the friendlies HN.

<comment><USER5> Well done and congrats. Glad we nabbed you for a visit to New Zealand before you got lost in work again. Good luck in your new job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Make it easy for me to pay for great articles. Make it easy for me to subscribe to online content (and maybe give online subscribers an ad-free Readability option). Consider a scheme for people to subscribe and donate the dead-tree paper to schools / colleges / prisons / hospitals / etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Out of curiosity, what other well known corporate R&D / internal incubators exist out there?

<comment><USER8> Bell Labs immediately comes to mind.

<comment><USER9> They've changed hands so many times between AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel and Alcatel- Lucent that they're long gone. I think Alcatel-Lucent said they were basically disbanding the sliver of Bell Labs that was left around the 2007 time frame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No link to WaPo Labs :(

<http://www.wapolabs.com/team/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Congrats. I hope it works out well. They're lucky to get him.

</comment><comment><USER12> Congrats Rob! WaPo Labs is lucky to have you. Excited to see 14 years of slashdot learnings applied to Social Reader/Trove and to reinvigorate journalism-at-large.

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome to hear! The post newspaper journalism world is just taking shape, wonderful to see such a strong voice riding that wave.

</comment><comment><USER14> Alas, it is newspaper distribution and not newsrooms that consume the vast majority of profits at most newspapers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats! Glad to hear you working for an org down in my area that's _not_ the government!</comment>


Your Thoughts on SSD 10GBPS Hybrid Compute Solution From NephoScale? - <AUTHOR> http://nephoscale.com/ssd-hybrid-compute-cloud/

<comment><AUTHOR> I ran across a Silicon Valley provider that's launching a SSD 10GBPS Hybrid Compute Solution (Hybrid Environment).

It's interesting that they let you mix and match virtual and dedicated servers. They also have decent prices based on their comparison table published.

I'm going to take them up on their $300 platform credit to take a test drive, thoughts?

Thanks,

A.</comment>


Cairo Desktop Environment - <AUTHOR> https://cairoshell.com/ <comment><USER2> It looks rather interesting. I didn't realize Windows 10 was hackable enough to do this. The name made me think of the Cairo graphics drawling library initially.

<comment><USER3> I was sad when shell replacements stopped being as much of a thing; all the way back to Windows 3 and up to ar least Windows XP there were well designed alternatives to the default Windows shell environment.

A good example of an early one is Norton Shell for Windows:

[http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html)

Then later there were things such as LiteStep, bbZero and even KDE at a time.

Personally, I actually used ReactOS shell as my default shell briefly, judging its workspaces functionality to be worth other trade offs at the time. I believe it still works in Windows to this day, though it may still have bugs that don't happen on ReactOS itself.

Even though Windows isn't really "hackable" for a long time people found a way to do many things, especially companies like Stardock, using API hooking and other somewhat brittle tricks, and Microsoft somewhat embraced it. For some good reasons and some bad, modern Windows is a lot more limited in this regard and there's not much to replace the old hackability.

<comment><USER4> Do you know what changed recently? The last one I used with an alternative shell was windows 2k and the shells replaced shell.exe. is that not doable these days?

<comment><USER3> The old method of changing the default shell still works. Although I don't think you replace/move explorer.exe anymore, but just change registry keys. When used in embedded systems or kiosks, this type of functionality is commonly needed, so it is unlikely to change.

When I talked about things changing, it was more regarding changes that:

\- Improve security and stability by disallowing software from invading other address spaces to do patching.

\- Prevent modification of the operating system itself, by more thoroughly enforcing signature checking, file integrity, and with periodic large system updates that are effectively like full Windows version upgrades.

These improvements may make Windows more secure and stable for users, but combined with modern PCs that come with Secure Boot enabled by default (and unfortunately, some that came with Secure Boot forcibly enabled during the Windows 8 era,) it makes modifications and customizations more challenging.

There's no clean mechanism for which a piece of software like WindowBlinds can exist, and indeed, sometimes running Stardock software in modern Windows can be troublesome. A while back I hit a bug in WindowFX that effectively bricked your Windows install if you were running with Hyper-V enabled. It was fixed by Stardock but nonetheless, with a living OS like Windows 10, breaks like this can happen more often, without warning, and there's still not good alternatives for lots of customization stuff.

It's interesting because there are actually still lots of ways in which Windows lets software extend the operating system - probably more than any other operating system, but most of them are very old and not very reliable/stable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Like others, I clicked on it because I thought it was related to the Linux project.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks very cool for an alternative shell for Windows, which is what I am seeing here but in all honesty, as soon I saw the title, it was easy to get this confused with the Cairo drawing library and associating that as a potentially new Linux "Desktop Environment" as the title outlines.

The project is technically very interesting for Windows 10 customisation, but the name is very similar with another established project in the same technical area of graphics, which may cause some confusion.

Perhaps the naming of this project was derived from Microsoft Cairo that was never released. [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_\(operating_system\))

<comment><USER7> This part of the description really hit home:

"Never again waste time hunting for applications in poorly organized menus."

The Windows Start menu is terrible, and it's the most iconic part of MS Windows, or it has been to me since the "Start me up" campaign for W95 (one of the best tech ad campaigns not made by Apple in my opinion). And now it is a place where I struggle to activate (?!) the scrollbar. It's an alphabetized list, but I can't tap a keyboard letter to jump down the list, which kills me a little every time I do it and nothing happens. I use the Start menu primarily for locating items to drag to my Taskbar, so I never have to unwillingly scroll past Candy Crush Slot Machine Simular Redux or You Didn't Install This! Saga.

<comment><USER8> _but I can 't tap a keyboard letter to jump down the list_

Works for me: Win key, down arrow to get into list (otherwise it will search everything), typing a letter jumps to that letter. Bonus tip, sometimes useful: Ctrl+arrows resizes start menu.

 _Candy Crush Slot Machine Simular Redux_

That sucks, yes, but right-click + uninstall seems to get rid of it once and for all.

<comment><USER9> That Ctl+arrows key to resize the Start Menu I didn't know about. Thanks!

<comment><USER8> Figuring out these things is fairly easy: Windows is quite involved when it comes to using keyboard, so usually when I'm in a new environment I try a bunch of typical keyboard strokes to see which ones react.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone actually tried this? I'm curious but if I don't like it and uninstall it I'm afraid of weird glitchy behaviors and a broken shell and I really don't feel like reinstalling Windows right now.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps you could install it with Windows Sandbox. Low risk.

<comment><USER10> I completely forgot about Sandbox - fantastic idea!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using search for everything since Windows 7. Just have to remember the first 3-5 letters, or a word, and I could open any programs and folders/files. The windows key was my desktop, the actual desktop is blank and black.

Windows 10 has a messed up search, it shows useless (for me) stuff first, and never learns to prioritize results based on previous searches/keywords/accessed files. Maybe there's a way to fix that, that would be great.

<comment><USER13> Have you tried Ueli? Has been working great for me: [https://ueli.oliverschwendener.ch/](https://ueli.oliverschwendener.ch/)

<comment><USER14> Wox and keyperinha are 2 more alternatives (wox with more plugins but less maintained). Both integrate "everything" for filesearch (it's a pity they don't use the 100 times faster WizFile)

<comment><USER15> I use keypiranha as well. Great tool!

> it's a pity they don't use the 100 times faster WizFile

100 times faster? Everything is instant for me, never had any kind of delay. What things are slow enough with it that something else could be faster?

<comment><USER14> Indexing. Everything traverses your folders to find everything and make an index from that, WizFile reads this from some hard drive tables directly.

So the first indexing with everything takes maybe 30 minutes or more (I actually have no Idea how long it took exactly..) and wizfile is done in under a minute. With slower drives (e.g. external USB2) the difference should be even more dramatic.

The only downside appart from missing integrations is that it doesn't support full regex.

<comment><USER16> I don't think that's true. Everything takes ~20 seconds to index my machine. I think Everything reads NTFS file table directly. Maybe you didn't give it Admin privileges?

<comment><USER14> Ooops, I think you are right!

Here is where I mixed up things: WizTree does what WinDirStat does, but here it's really quicker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if the name is inspired by this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_\(operating_system\))

<comment><USER18> Probably. Or possibly by Windows Chi-Rho (the same source of the name of the city "Cairo"), which is more popularly known by the English names of those letters, which is often looked at as the peak of Windows UX with later iterations as regressions (though sometimes Windows 7 gets that honor.)

<comment><USER19> Chi-Rho is not at all the source of the name of the city Cairo.

Cairo was founded by the Fatimid's and called al-Qāhirah, and this is the etymology of the anglicisation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wait what? I remember seeing this around 2010 - 2012, eagerly following it because it looked pretty good, and it turning out to bee mostly vaporware at some point. Did not expect this to make a comeback!

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I also would have said ~2010. After looking it up it traces back to at least 2008. I remember trying out the leaked alpha version, and it was incredibly unstable, and missing all the core features, and Milestone 1 wasn't any better.

Kinda interesting that they still continued with the project for 10 years, despite most of the core productivity features becoming mainstream during the time, and it not offering that much of an upside compared to the standard Windows UI.

<comment><USER22> Good to see at least two people remember the old Cairo shell :) I remember trying it out on Windows XP long time ago. I'd say it was even before 2010, as the alpha supported Windows XP and Vista.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Like others, I did not know of the Linux Cairo project and was enlightened by all the people telling interesting things about it in the comments to a totally different project.

</comment><comment><USER24> Reminds me of the good ol' days of Litestep. Before I discovered Linux I customized my windows shell to the max on XP

</comment><comment><USER25> No relation to the Cairo vector graphics API I assume?

<comment><USER26> No, none

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> For the record, you can add custom folders to your toolbar. Since Windows 95 I've found it useful to have Desktop and Downloads there, so you can quickly access stuff. I only use those folders plus one root for projects, so don't really have this problem of getting lost in various folders or regularly needing Explorer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to love this once, when you're a child it feels like hacking, like forcing Windows to have a second start menu (if you make the new toolbar small enough, the folder contents appear as a menu).

<comment><USER27> Yeah, you have to fiddle a bit to get them to minimum width with the ">>" menu and no extra space. Obvious search is more or less good enough now, but you still can't drag from the start menu.

<comment><USER28> A long time ago (Windows 98? 2000?), you can add the IE address bar to the taskbar, but it also had auto-complete for directories, so if you wanted to open C:\Projects\Foobar\main.c you could just type a few letters and open that file. It also let you drag and drop the icon (where IE would show you the favicon) to any open program. Sadly this behavior got changed later, so drag & drop no longer works...

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I think I used this, even justifying a two-row taskbar for a while. There even used to be a Google widget to search from the taskbar (and yet here I am instantly turning off web searches in the start menu out of sheer disgust).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> While this looks cool, I learned over time that basic Windows shell works just fine for productivity purposes: [https://i.imgur.com/HC4evaK.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/HC4evaK.jpg), and this would just add another layer on top which potentially requires maintenance, troubleshooting or debugging.

The only additional customization I have is a little utility I wrote in C++ that runs in background and provides hotkeys to launch Chrome, Sublime Text, Total Commander and Cmder via Win+1, Win+2, etc hotkeys.

And to run any other program, it is enough to hit Win key and start typing that programs name.

<comment><USER30> > The only additional customization I have is a little utility I wrote in C++ > that runs in background and provides hotkeys to launch Chrome, Sublime Text, > Total Commander and Cmder via Win+1, Win+2, etc hotkeys.

Why not just pin those programs to the taskbar?

<comment><USER29> I prefer to use keyboard instead mouse.

<comment><USER31> But if you pin them on the taskbar you can launch them with win + x in the order you have pinned them. I'm assuming that's why the other person asked.

<comment><USER29> I didn't know this was possible, thanks!

<comment><USER32> shift-win-# opens a new instance/window of an app that is already open, and alt-win-# closes that app (which can be sorta weird with multiple windows of an app open.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Back in 2003 I used Litestep. It was scriptable modular windows shell. It had integration with IMs (Miranda), mail, weather, voice control... Sometimes I feel like technology is evolving backwards.

</comment><comment><USER34> _Cairo is a customizable, intuitive desktop environment for Windows._

 _Cairo requires Windows 7 or later, including Windows 10, and .NET 4.7.1 or later (already included with Windows 10 1709 and newer)_

Looks like it's a alternative windows shell, and not a cross platform Desktop Environment like KDE/GNOME etc.

</comment><comment><USER35> Instead of replacing windows shell like this I currently use Rainmeter. Very flexible on what you can do. I currently have a shortcut bar, a datetime display, a spotify now playing and controller, a sound spectrum viewer, system stats like processor, ram, hd space etc. Really useful; The best thing is that you download these elements as Skins, and then you can modify their code and assets at will. Really easy to do so. Very little processing power required too.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow! This is awesome! I really did think Windows 10 removed most customization capabilities. Glad I thought wrong.

This seems like WindowBlinds [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds)] for 2020. Ah, XP with transparency... memories :)

<comment><USER22> Oh boy, Windows Blinds were the thing for Windows XP. Longhorn theme for Windows XP? Remember Windows Blackcomb theme? I also remember customizing msgina.dll :)

<comment><AUTHOR> One could also use the built-in visual style engine by patching uxtheme.dll or by using StyleXP which patched it in RAM

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This looks like a big improvement to Windows. It's as though they've borrowed some elements of the desktop Mac/Linux experience (such as Latte dock).

This would have been really useful for me a few years ago, however I've migrated to Linux/KDE (Precisely for a more customisable desktop as this).

</comment><comment><USER38> I used to use this on a regular basis, unfortunately it still has a lot of bugs (sometimes reproducible, sometimes not) which made me switch to classic windows environment with conemu maximus.

</comment><comment><USER39> Why didn't they use CDE as abbreviation. It makes so much sense!

<comment><USER40> Are you punning on Common Desktop Environment?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment)

I for one don't miss CDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The main reason to use the default shell is that it is pretty much the same desktop as server. So why learn how bad things are if I'm never going to put this on a server?

</comment><comment><USER42> Wow, I thought this was dead. I don't remember when I first saw it but it must have been more than a decade ago.

I was amped for it but it never released until now.

</comment><comment><USER43> I would love to see mininalistic design. There are way too many choices available to me and most of them are of no or minimal use.

</comment><comment><USER44> Since it has not been mentioned (maybe it's common knowledge): cairo is a (wrong) pronunciation of Greek chi rho (XP).

</comment><comment><USER45> Does this also replace the file explorer?

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks pretty neat, but most features listed are sort of customised clones of standard Windows behavior so I'm not sure it's compelling enough to switch (or, the explanation isn't doing justice to what it actually does)? For example:

\- The Cairo taskbar preserves desktop area for your wallpaper and applications

I think I've yet to see a taskbar which doesn't do that :)

\- The list button shows your open windows in an organized, easy to understand layout.

Alt/win-tab isn't a flat list, but I'm not convinced this is faster or easier. Part of this is learning process though: I know the icons of the applications I use most, making alt-tab fast because in a glance I know where to be.

\- Never again waste time hunting for applications in poorly organized menus.

Win key and starting to type is usually faster than clicking, at least for me. As another poster mentioned this doesn't seem to always work as good depdning on the exact Windows build, but I've never really had problems and it works well for me, applications/documents/directories I use often are at the top of the list.

\- Cairo lets you organize your apps into categories that make sense to you, using an easy drag-and-drop interface.

This is nice, and looks faster than the alternative (pin folder to taskbar as 'toolbar', populate folder with shortcuts).

\- Tired of hunting for the same files over and over again, interrupting your work?

No because of win-key + typing, or pinning to taskbar, or fzf or similar in commandline shells. Though I think this might be something which I can only really figure out by trying.

tldr; maybe the front page, or a link on it, should provide some more detail about the features listed?

</comment><comment><USER46> 47 comments and at least 24 of them are about reading comprehension..

</comment><comment><USER47> Was Cairo not a Linux Desktop at some point?

<comment><USER48> There is indeed cairo-dock / glx-dock [1], that can probably be used as a desktop environment too by using a separate window manager like Compiz.

I thought this link was about it. The name clash is very unfortunate here.

[1] [http://www.glx-dock.org/](http://www.glx-dock.org/)

<comment><USER47> I was looking for the Linux download link.</comment></comment></comment>


Static TypeScript: A Static Compiler for the TypeScript Language - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/static-typescript/ <comment><USER2> This language is quite striking! TypeScript is a superset of JS but here we're going from the other direction. Make a language that is _only_ the TypeScript extensions to JS, and drop all the JS parts.

No Object (!!), no Date, TypedArray, RegExp, almost all the mainstays are gone. It's Java 1.0: static offsets and vtables.

This feels like the beginning of TypeScript throwing its weight around. It has the momentum to supplant JS and this is an exploratory compatibility-breaking step.

<comment><USER3> > Make a language that is only the TypeScript extensions to JS, and drop all > the JS parts.

So? Is there a reason left then to use Typescript instead of C or C++? I cannot think of one. Especially for education you better use a real language that will stay for more than 10 years at least. Microsoft is doing a great job taking over the Javascript community, and now this.., would love to see their hidden agenda.

IMAO Typescript is only interesting as a (painful) intermediate solution for large Javascript code bases until there is a serious replacement for Javascript through WebAssembly. I'd never choose Typescript as a language, even stronger, I recently moved away from full-stack web development partly because of it. Back to C++, what a relief..

<comment><USER4> C++ is the biggest cancer in the industry. I can't really understand how people can easily say its name. A C++ programmer needs to understand not only language syntax but also underlying operating system and its internals. This is completely different job and therefore needs completely different expertise. I don't even want to mention hardware limitations, cpu architectures, etc. So, don't use C++. It is not mainstream anymore and hopefully it will be a thing of past.

<comment><USER5> > A ... programmer needs to understand ... underlying operating system and its > internals

Oh the humanity!

I weep for mankind and for the industry if this is where we have fallen.

Quick question: are you a Javascript programmer?

<comment><USER6> Well I mean that is the point of abstraction.. if we always had to have our heads at the lowest level we would not be productive what-so-ever.

<comment><USER7> "understanding the basics of the operating system internals and how your code interacts with them" is far, _far_ from the lowest level.

It is also an essential understanding for writing quality, performant code in any context--web development included, even frontend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the title it would seem it is boiled down to a completely statically- typed language, but it isn't.

e.g. type casts are no-ops. Instead, every object access is type-checked at runtime. `any` still exists and for unions and complex types it still performs full lookup by name (instead of RTTI/tagged unions or such).

So it's not really a static language, but a cut-down JavaScript runtime that instead of optimizing objects with hidden classes at runtime, does similar thing with vtables ahead of time.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. 'Static' refers to control flow which is static (no eval etc.). Handling of data is dynamic, with static types used as hints.

It's also meant to run on a _very_ constrained microcontrollers (think a few kB of RAM), and compile inside of a client-side webapp (both of which make it hard to use things like AssemblyScript).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> See it in action:

[https://arcade.makecode.com/85409-23773-98992-33605](https://arcade.makecode.com/85409-23773-98992-33605)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I believe this will have major implications for the WebAssembly ecosystem.

It also makes me wonder how AssemblyScript will fit into the picture. Anyone from Microsoft/TypeScript can shed some light on future plans?

<comment><USER11> In its current state, Static TypeScript is a toy compared to AssemblyScript.

It doesn't support much of the original TypeScript features, while AssemblyScript is getting pretty close to the original TypeScript.

AssemblyScript was also specifically designed to target WebAssembly. For example, it supports 64 bit types and has builtins that directly map to WebAssembly opcodes.

Static TypeScript would have to be repurposed as explicitly targeting WebAssembly in order to become a viable alternative.

And Static TypeScript is part of a set of projects with very different goals.

That being said, it could indeed be turned into something targeting WebAssembly. And unless Microsoft goes that route, it may happen as a fork. Still, I'm not sure of the benefits compared to AssemblyScript. I'd rather see Microsoft contribute to AssemblyScript.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same. I'd like to analyze more time into the project, it seems is mainly for education proposes?

Either way, I hope Microsoft pushes AssemblyScript forward :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given that they're both TypeScript subsets with similar goals, how close is STS to AssemblyScript? And is WebAssembly also a planned or possible compilation target of STS?

<comment><USER13> There are no goals to target WebAssembly right now. STS is currently targeted towards MCUs, which makes it more comparable to uPython or AVR than AssemblyScript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's another one (more mature, I'd say) [https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript](https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript)

</comment><comment><USER15> Extremely interesting idea. Sounds like many of the things they get rid of are some of the more problematic features of JS anyway. The end result is fairly Swift-y; a loosely OOP static language that has closures and really convenient hash-map syntax.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey HN, I work at MSFT on MakeCode.com [5] which is the primary user of Static TypeScript. Happy to answer questions. Michal and others who worked on STS more directly will probably be online in a couple hours.

One important clarification: So far STS has been built specifically to target microcontrollers/MCUs. Initially it was targeted at the BBC micro:bit [0] for educational purposes and has since grown to support many more targets ([1],[2],[3],[4],[5]). The other dominant languages in this space are MicroPython and the AVR/Arduino language. The advantages of STS are beginner friendliness (makecode is a CS EDU platform), low-memory, small size and performance (relative to MicroPython). It's worth noting that in general STS is NOT faster than running JS in V8.

How does it compare to MicroPython?

\- Error reporting: Because STS is statically typed and compiled, most program errors are caught in the editor before the program is loaded on the device. Furthermore, STS comes with a simulator that runs in the browser and so programs can be tested there before they run on hardware. For educational purposes, we found diagnosing issues on hardware to be really hard for students, so we try to catch and present errors as early as possible.

\- Performance: [3] is the best example of this. Usually we notice STS is ~10x faster than uPython while having a smaller flash and memory footprint. This makes running a game loop at 30FPS feasible on a 120x160 display (e.g. this [6] $25 device).

How does it compare to AVR/Arduino/C/C++?

\- Modern language: STS, like TypeScript, heavily uses type inference, supports advanced types constructs like algebraic types (i.e. sum/union and product/tuples), supports ducktyping, has easy to use lambdas, has a light- weight syntax, and favors event-based programming.

\- Teachability: Because of the heavy use of type inference, most beginner programs have no type annotations and it looks just like Javascript. So we essentially teach JS to users after they want to move on from blocks.

\- In general STS is not faster or smaller than AVR code!

Happy to answer other questions!

[0] [https://makecode.microbit.org](https://makecode.microbit.org)

[1] [https://makecode.adafruit.com](https://makecode.adafruit.com)

[2] [https://maker.makecode.com](https://maker.makecode.com)

[3] [https://arcade.makecode.com](https://arcade.makecode.com)

[4] [https://makecode.mindstorms.com](https://makecode.mindstorms.com)

[5] [https://makecode.com](https://makecode.com)

[6] [https://www.adafruit.com/product/3939](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3939)

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes! I was waiting for this so long, Typescript is the most flexible typed OOP language and it's way more than just a JS successor.

<comment><USER17> Only that this subset has no objects and is therefore not a OOP language anymore (?)

<comment><USER18> It does have objects:

 _STS has at runtime four kinds of unrelated object types:_

 _1\. a dynamic map type has named (string-indexed) properties that can hold values of any type; 2\. a function (closure) type; 3\. a class type describes instances of a class, which are treated nominally, via an efficient runtime subtype check on each field /method access, as described below; 4\. an array (collection) type._

<comment><USER17> Ok, I did not read the specifications yet and just refered to the other comment. But your quote gives no indication of (prototyp or classical) inheritance?

<comment><USER18> _STS classes are compiled similarly to Java or C# with single inheritance and static memory layout._

Don't know much about STS or TS but I assume the usual JS class syntax works as spelled out here: [https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/classes.html](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/classes.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > As a result, the use of scripting languages (such as JavaScript and Python) > for microcontrollers is on the rise.

I can not think of what they smoke claiming running a scripting language on an MCU.

Microsoft seem to set its sights on breaking the MCU development after nothing has left to break on the desktop.

<comment><USER20> Python was first created in 1991 where a top of a line computer ran at 50mhz and had 50 MIPS. A current generation MCU - ATSAMG51 easily runs at 120mhz, and devices are quickly moving up to the 500mhz range ([https://groboards.com/giant-board/](https://groboards.com/giant-board/)). There clearly is enough processor power to Python. StaticTypescript isn't even running scripted, it is compiled to native and has performance close to C/C++ developed code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are there any plans to release this?

<comment><USER22> Already part of Microsoft MakeCode learn to code ecosystem. Read this blog for more details: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/rocket-fast- em...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/rocket-fast-embedded- typescript-for-makecode-arcade/?ocid=msr_blog_makearcd_tw)</comment></comment>


How Did MH370 Not Trigger Alerts On Direction Change? - <AUTHOR>

I haven't seen anywhere on the news a discussion of how it was even possible that a plane could turn completely off course and not trigger any alerts.
Does anyone know about this?
I mean for example, if a plane is flying London to Paris, I would be extremely surprised if a 270 degree change of course didn't at the very least trigger authorities to investigate and attempt to contact the plane. At the time it turned it was surely in radar range right?
Basically, how could they possibly not have noticed at the time and therefore alerted someone at the time?!
I find this to be extremely scary in itself. <comment><USER2> The first big deviation happened during the handover from Malaysian to Vietnamese ATC... after that the plane was effectively lost and no one on the ground was really responsible for tracking it.

<comment><AUTHOR> But that's crazy in my view - how can a plane just turn back on itself and fly completely the wrong way for hours without anyone either noticing or alerting a higher authority. I mean, as far as I can tell this just wouldn't happen if flying from one location to another in the west.

Imagine if a plane took off from New York bound for Vancouver, and just turned back on itself and started flying out into the ocean. No one would notice or do anything?!

<comment><USER2> Middle of the night, middle of the ocean, no ATC responsible for it at that moment and likely both controllers were busy with the planes that they were responsible for... don't think its that mysterious.</comment></comment></comment>


Traits Of Stellar Managers, Defined By Googlers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/8-traits-of-stellar-managers-defined-by-googlers-2011-3?op=1

<comment><USER2> What's interesting from the article is the internal Google survey revealed "Technical skill" was the absolute least important trait that Googlers sought in a manager.

This is not unlike the brief failed experiment years ago where Google tried to get rid of managers entirely and have teams report directly to engineers. The lesson from that was engineers are best left to do engineering and managers are best left to manage.</comment>


Is FreeRice.com making $150K a day? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepcspy.com/blog/is_freericecom_making_150k_each_day_in_profits OK -- normally I frown on reposts of stuff on the front page of other major news sites, but I figured this one fits right in here. <comment><USER2> This is cross-posted from reddit.

Answers: no, but still probably a lot. The site is not affiliated with a charity, so who knows if they actually give rice or not.

Anyway, everyone knows that solving hunger is not about quantity of food (there is plenty to be had) but rather about distribution--the places where people are starving are that way because their government is corrupt. It doesn't matter how much food is sent.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't agree with the whole "should register as a charity". This isn't a charity since last time I checked my time is not tax deductible (but if you happen to know a really good tax lawyer that would let me deduct hours spent playing vocab games it would be awesome).

Nobody is essentially donating money to this business, the advertisers pay them for the traffic they generate. It's simply a business with a noble goal.

</comment><comment><USER4> Answer: No. The writer doesn't understand how web advertising works and based it on ludicrous assumptions. The $150k is also sensationalized.

</comment><comment><USER5> No. Not $150k. Not $15k. Not 1k.</comment>


Sentence Based Password Program - <AUTHOR>

http://16s.us/sha1_pass/
I posted this last week. I did not get much feedback then. I wanted to post it to HN one last time. I call it SHA1_Pass. I have compiled Mac, Linux and Windows versions (working on a few BSD builds too). It would be neat if an Android/iOS dev would implement versions for those devices as well.
I won't rehash all the details in this post (read them at the URL if you like). It's not a web 2.0 app, so it's not snazzy and new, but I think it's a good idea. I've used it myself for many years now, and wanted to share it more broadly after the Gawker incident. <comment><USER2> I do like the idea, but there's one problem (though maybe not a big problem.) The user still has to be smart about making passwords. For example, if Alice puts in "password" and clicks SHA-1 (same with another algo), she would get "5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8". If Mallory is smart enough to think she'd choose "password" as her password, and sees "353e8061f2befecb6818ba0c034c632fb0bcae1b" (hash of the hash), he can easily figure it out. Basically, he just hashes all words in a dictionary before attacking via brute-force.

Of course, if Alice chooses "HeLlOWoRlD13485443&$%3" or similar, then it's harder for Mallory and even harder if she hashes it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would hope users would use sentences rather than just one dictionary word. Don't use 'password' for your password. But you have a point, humans will be human. I could do checking for whitespace and length to mitigate that possibility a bit. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Whoops... I did not realize the URL was not clickable when doing a text submission. <http://16s.us/sha1_pass/></comment>


Canadian Spaceport in Nova Scotia Gets Environment Ministry Approval - <AUTHOR> http://spaceq.ca/canadian-spaceport-in-nova-scotia-gets-environment-ministry-approval-to-move-forward/ <comment><AUTHOR> Scan of this docs published on YuzhnoyeSDO twitter.[0]

[0] [https://twitter.com/YuzhnoyeSDO/status/1136535440541065217](https://twitter.com/YuzhnoyeSDO/status/1136535440541065217)</comment>


Tolerance is not a moral precept - <AUTHOR> https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376 <comment><USER2> Yay for nuance and social & historical context!

I'm always seriously surprised by how easily convinced people are of flimsy equivalencies. Every debate on the Internet, it feels like there's a swarm of people that believe that taking a stand against intolerance or bigotry is the same as bigotry itself.

I always encourage everyone to read MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, especially his critique of white moderates: "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

<comment><USER3> My grandfather was a white male police captain during the civil rights troubles in Birmingham, AL. He also gave King the notebook he would use to write Letter from the Birmingham Jail. His quiet support of King literally enabled King's actions in more ways than I can relate.

To divide a people based on skin color is wrong. King, and my grandfather, were not lovers of one skin color over another; they were lovers of respect. It is respect that will break the chains anywhere they are found.

<comment><USER2> Did you just try to say that MLK and his jailer did the same amount of good for Civil Rights????

<comment><USER4> >His quiet support of King literally enabled King's actions in more ways than I can relate.

He genuinely just said a policemans actions during the Civil Rights era enabled MLK. You can't make this up.

And then to talk about respect in the context of race, when black people are routinely disrespected by individuals, institutions and the state in America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this being reposted here today because of the latest scandal inside Google?

If so, do we really feel that the "manifesto", citing gender differences supported by scientific research, was intolerant?

Or is "intolerance" simply being redefined to mean "disagreement with a particular political agenda"?

<comment><USER6> I just read the Google piece (permanent IPFS link: [https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmYSj4Vyq5RW6jiYsiCJx3FiSc2nRiXz...](https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmYSj4Vyq5RW6jiYsiCJx3FiSc2nRiXzrE68CxBmrKG6gn/)) for the first time, after being aware of the outrage, and I found myself agreeing with the part about silencing the opposition. The piece is well- written and makes some good points, but the author is vilified just because he is expressing an opinion that goes against the popular political climate.

The line about "mandating increases for women's representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts" was especially interesting to me, as I can't easily dismiss that point.

Maybe we should engage in discussion, rather than moralizing over diversity, as the piece said?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a little confused by this. Here is how I'd summarize what I think I'm hearing:

1\. Tolerance isn't a moral value, but is a pragmatic value [why?]

2\. Therefore, only people who abide by the terms of tolerance deserve to receive tolerance, else they're in violation of the treaty and excluded [why? where are these terms listed? who agreed to them?]

3\. Suggests due to incompatible interests, constant peace is an impossibility [?]

4\. From a speech from Patrick Henry [Appeal to authority?]

\---

What I find confusing is, to suppose that basic tolerance is subject to a treaty that I don't even know the rules of and never agreed to, then how can I know some stranger's differing ethics (e.g. pro-life) won't say I violated their ethical code and now have am no longer tolerable?

Perhaps this was heavily excerpted? It seems like social contract theory with all of the logistic details left out.

<comment><USER8> Let me see if I can help:

Tolerance is not an end in and of itself. It's sort of a game-theoretic equilibrium, equivalent to an iterated prisoner's dilemma where cooperation is enforced by punishing defectors.

Society is full of unspoken rules that govern how we interact civilly with one another. It's sometimes frustrating that the rules are tacit, but it couldn't really work any other way.

To your point though, there will always be those who use the tacit, emotional nature of the social rules to manipulate others. The "place their nose in the way of other people's fists" as it were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm glad whenever this article shows up — it's so much more _pragmatic_ than a lot of things in its genre. What it talks about is actionable, and makes communities better. Forcefully ejecting Nazis, fascists, Gamergaters, and their fellow-travellers from our communities, is both the morally correct thing to do and deeply practical.

<comment><USER10> The issue is that every new generation of this issue comes up with its own version of "the others" to be suppressed.

The witches, the commies, the nazis, the apostates etc. that people feel morally justified to destroy at all costs. Moral superiority thanks to the ideology du jour is one of the most insidious and hard to fight social forces that brings the worst out of humans.

The Gulag Archipelago should be mandatory reading for contemporary generations that weren't born in a totalitarian regime and want to get a taste of where blind following of ideology can get them.

<comment><USER4> "The witches, the commies, the nazis, the apostates etc"

Surely you can pick the odd one out here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If everyone cherrypicks what they're going to be tolerant of, and declares people expressing ideas that they don't like to be violence, worthy of punching someone in the face, we're in for a bad time. Now is the time to amp up the tolerance, and be willing to give before you get. Almost everyone is capable of putting their various differences aside in a professional environment and get shit done. Honestly it seems like Google is going to have to add a violence component to their training: "It is never OK to punch someone in the face because of something they said."

<comment><USER5> > declares people expressing ideas that they don't like to be violence, worthy > of punching someone in the face

While we're considering that, it's worthing noting that the author did exactly that, writing about James Damore:

> a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you > in the face

Should we accept lessons in tolerance from someone who appears to think violence is justified if someone holds a different opinion?

<comment><USER8> >Should we accept lessons in tolerance from someone who appears to think violence is justified if someone holds a different opinion?

Yes, if their argument is sound.

Edit: of course, we may still ask if they are living up to such standards as they set for others.

<comment><USER5> I suspect Yonatan Zunger would argue that James Damore broke the peace by writing something that hurt people.

(Whether it's true or not is irrelevant in that case; a hurtful truth is still hurtful.)

That would be my first objection to this theory. If tolerance is a peace treaty, then it's easy to argue that the slightest breach of the peace merits the severest response, as a diplomatic insult might lead to a shooting war.

<comment><USER8> > If tolerance is a peace treaty, then it's easy to argue that the slightest > breach of the peace merits the severest response

Certainly some will act that way, but I don't think it necessarily follows. The definition he provides of tolerance rather matches my own intuition when it comes to the mundane form of "tolerance" that neighbors show to one another when putting up with each others quirks.

But in any case, my point is that Zunger's character is irrelevant to whether any particular idea he happens to espouse is good or not. We must judge the idea on its own merits. To judge the idea based on what we think of Zunger himself is to engage in an fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Probably the sanest definition of tolerance I seen.

Of course, the problem then becomes figuring out whether someone has broken the treaty, and what the appropriate response should be.

There are also a lot of tactics around trying to provoke others into breaking the treaty while still keeping your hands clean.

<comment><USER12> There usually is no explicit treaty. That's why it's a hard problem. People become so used to those around them being mostly reasonable* most of the time that when white supremacists show up to promote genocide, no specific line has been crossed, so those around them just continue to act like this is just another thing to be 'tolerated'.

(*reasonable by mainstream standards, which already allows for a lot of unreasonable stuff, like billionares polluting the environment in the name of profit, which is somewhat related in that not bothering to define what is okay and what isn't contributes to the persistence of some really bad problems)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it just me or does reality seem to be decaying into a surreal hallucination the last few years.

While I agree with the thrust of the argument, if I'm reading it correctly, that damaging extremists are probably not worthy of tolerance, I find the chipping-away at fundamental values to be disquieting. Pushing the argument further, at what point is tolerance justified? Only when dealing with people who agree with you? In which case it's no longer "tolerance".

If we're going to chip away at values, why not question all kinds of other fundamentals? Why should people of all types get equal work opportunities, equal pay, when they may have other natural advantages/disadvantages in society at large? Why should talented/smart/beautiful/athletically-endowed people (and, of course, middle-class white males, naturally) get rewarded with much greater wealth-per-effort than others? To what extent should society try to "redress the balance" with taxes/benefits? Why should we reward mere ownership of productive assets, rather than only personal productivity? Then there's a step-back look at modern society, with the nuclear family, work-for- wages, etc, which are relatively new and untested developments in society relative to the age of humanity.

Etc, etc, etc.

I'm not advocating any position on these issues, merely that if we're going to start questioning fundamental assumptions about how society should be, we may as well be comprehensive.

<comment><USER14> > While I agree with the thrust of the argument, if I'm reading it correctly, > that damaging extremists are probably not worthy of tolerance, I find the > chipping-away at fundamental values to be disquieting. Pushing the argument > further, at what point is tolerance justified? Only when dealing with people > who agree with you? In which case it's no longer "tolerance".

by the author's definition, i think that this would be too narrow to qualify as tolerance. according to the author: "Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other's throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn't directly affect our lives, it is none of our business."

for what it's worth, i generally go out of my way to give the benefit of the doubt and to be tolerant. and i very much support erring heavily on the side of free speech when it comes to legislation and government regulation. and while i have zero problem with requesting an explanation from someone as to why they believe what they believe, even if i agree with those beliefs, i also have zero problem lumping someone with strong racist or sexist beliefs in with climate change deniers and anti-vaxers. i'd say flat earthers, but flat earthers are harmless. whereas, people who deny climate change, think that vaccines cause autism, believe that women are genetically predisposed to be less talented engineers, or believe that black people are genetically inclined to criminality: these are people who hurt the rest of society via their idiocy. like anyone else, they deserve a chance at education, and we shouldn't suppress their ability to speak should some agree to broadcast them or to listen. but anyone with any sort of sense should do what they can to convince the rest of the world that those moronic viewpoints aren't worth serious consideration, because they've been refuted many times over, and no novel arguments are being made.

> If we're going to chip away at values, why not question all kinds of other > fundamentals? Why should people of all types get equal work opportunities, > equal pay, when they may have other natural advantages/disadvantages in > society at large? Why should talented/smart/beautiful/athletically-endowed > people (and, of course, middle-class white males, naturally) get rewarded > with much greater wealth-per-effort than others? To what extent should > society try to "redress the balance" with taxes/benefits? Why should we > reward mere ownership of productive assets, rather than only personal > productivity? Then there's a step-back look at modern society, with the > nuclear family, work-for-wages, etc, which are relatively new and untested > developments in society relative to the age of humanity.

fine by me. i am fine questioning literally every single one of those things, and actively evaluating how they fit into our social structure. "why should talented/smart/beautiful/athletically-endowed people (and, of course, midle- class white males...) get rewarded with much greater wealth-per-effort than others?" great question. i can't think of a good moral reason, but i can think of lots of unsatisfactory-on-a-moral-level explanations that sum up to those outcomes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In other words, tolerance is only necessary until _my_ ideas are accepted and become the norm.

Hypocrisy.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was flagged and removed, for no reason that I can see, so I vouched for it to be unremoved (please let me know if I was wrong?).

Overall, this seems like a very insightful take on something that has been troubling me for a while now, namely how do you practice tolerance if you are intolerant of people?

I think there's more room for discussion than TFA goes into, but it strikes me as a very good starting point.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ah yes, let's be lectured on what tolerance really means from people who call everyone to the right of Marx a Nazi and loudly deride white people and cheer on their extinction.

Remember kids, the left is the authority on all that is good and right in this world, and dissent will not be tolerated.

<comment><USER17> Ah yes, everyone left of Gee Dubya is a white-hating antifa marxist.

<comment><USER16> I didn't say that. But the author of this article certainly is.

<comment><USER14> can you cite any evidence from the article to support that claim? the closest thing i can see to that is this statement:

> This is why "white separatism" is, in practice, just a rebranding of white > supremacy; white separatists never seem to suggest that they should be the > ones who should leave their homes and lives behind.

nothing about that implies "white-hating antifa marxist" to me at all. i don't think a strong distaste for white separatism implies hatred of white people, and conflating those viewpoints is highly disingenuous at best (but it seems much more likely to me to be an attempt at trolling, or white supremacist apologetics).

<comment><USER15> Implies "hypocrite" to me.

[https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/888906855044403200](https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/888906855044403200)

"I am unapologetically a Zionist. I believe that the Jews must have a state to exist safely in the world, and that it has the right to exist."

The implication is that Jews would be entitled to separatism because that's the only way they can be safe. Lets admit it is true. But how come, somehow, whites will always be safe and don't need a "white" country?

Pure hypocrisy.

Oh, and for the record, most Jews are "White" as far as my eye can tell.

<comment><USER17> >But how come, somehow, whites will always be safe and don't need a "white" country?

Nobody is at war with us over our country's borders

>Oh, and for the record, most Jews are "White" as far as my eye can tell.

A lot of people disagree, actually. In fact, "white" doesn't refer to skin color, but ethnicity. Hebrews are usually considered to be non-white because of their ethnicity ("Jew" is just a colloquialism and doesn't refer to their religion, but ethnicity).

<comment><USER15> A lot of people disagree with what my eye tells me?

OK. But I still can't distinguish. I have no clue if a person is Jewish or not from just looking at her, unless she's wearing something indicative.

As for people not being at war, even if that was the case now, who's to say it won't be in the future? It was in the past. The Ottoman went all the way to Vienna. The Umayyad conquered the Iberian Peninsula. The Mongol hordes reached central Europe.

I'm sorry, I understand the desire for separatism even if I don't totally agree with it; but to want it for oneself while calling other's "supremacy" is just hypocrisy.

<comment><USER17> >A lot of people disagree with what my eye tells me?

Uhh, that's a straw man. What your eye tells you means jack, and it's also not what I said.

>OK. But I still can't distinguish. I have no clue if a person is Jewish or not from just looking at her, unless she's wearing something indicative.

That's not how race works.

>I'm sorry, I understand the desire for separatism even if I don't totally agree with it; but to want it for oneself while calling other's "supremacy" is just hypocrisy.

This isn't even a straw man. You just threw a bunch of straw on the floor and started yelling at it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Astronomers solve the missing baryon problem - <AUTHOR> https://astronomy.com/news/2020/06/half-the-matter-in-the-cosmos-was-missing-but-astronomers-found-it <comment><USER2> About half of the 5% of regular (ie baryonic) Matter was missing from usual astronomical observations. Some hypothesized it took the form of warm-hot intergalactic gas. This could in principle be detected by looking at the dispersion (ie slightly varying transit speeds of waves) through this gas of fast radio burst from distant galaxies, and we just found like five of these FRBs that showed dispersions that matched the predicted amount of baryonic warm-hot gas. Problem solved.

<comment><USER3> I like concise prose. It saves time and effort.

Similarly, I am frustrated that videos come up as top hits for simple things. While a picture can say a thousand words, the point is communication, not verbosity.

<comment><USER4> American publishers, YouTube and newspapers all suffer from the same affliction of rewarding their content creators for how long they can keep their audience engaged, nudging the content creators toward bury the lede.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Decently covered in 10 minutes or so in video form: [https://youtu.be/Kp_kqamkYpw](https://youtu.be/Kp_kqamkYpw)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_baryon_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_baryon_problem)

<comment><USER5> This is a pretty good video -- not overhyped and not filled with frenetic video clips mashed together from across the internet, and also not overly focused on a Youtuber's overly-bubbly personality seeking self-adulation and clicks...

<comment><USER6> Veritasium is a great channel for such content. He has a degree in online pedagogy, IIRC. So he's particularly good at teaching complex concepts through such a medium. Having a degree in physics helps him too.

<comment><USER5> I just watched a bunch of his videos -- how interesting! Thanks for the recommendation.

I wonder what his special techniques are to keep viewer engagement and help explanation, and whether he's consciously choosing to do them.

For example, I notice that unlike most Youtubers who'll record the narrated portion purely from their desk (showing their face) perfectly still and nicely lit, he will even handhold his camera and move around a room. Or when interviewing someone, hold a camera himself showing the interviewed person, and yet have _another_ still camera filming him and his other camera and the interviewee. Or standing in front of a wall projector screen video and talking (despite the projected image being mediocre quality) when most people would insert that as a original video source clip and narrate over it.

And yet while this might usually be distracting, for some reason with the quality of the narration, this makes for a nice break from usual. Or makes it seem more "authentic" and engaging.

Interesting!

<comment><USER7> Derek did his PhD on the public education of science. He's been honing his craft for a /long/ time & it really shows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That website is giving me some scammy looking pop ups on mobile.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, I gave up on reading the article it was so bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I should have turned off uBlock and checked it before submitting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Half of baryon mass as million K intergalactic plasma is a lot of matter. Any ideas how can it exist that hot and plentiful and avoid detection?

It has to be rather dense to be that hot for so long, no? Yet it's not some sort of stars?

<comment><USER11> The WHIM is actually extremely non-dense: 1-10 particles per cubic meter. It turns out that matter can be extremely hot without being dense at all, as long as there's nothing to cool the matter off, as is the case in the space between galaxies.

Matter is easy to see when it emits light (like stars) or absorbs light (like uncharged matter). But charged plasma does neither, so it's hard to detect. Fortunately, the WHIM has a prism-like effect, where it smears out light travelling through it, so we can detect it.

<comment><USER12> > Matter is easy to see when it emits light (like stars)

That's the part I don't get; if the intergalactic medium is that hot, shouldn't it be emitting huge amounts of blackbody radiation? Supposedly ionization interferes with that, but even black holes emit blackbody radiation (hawking radiation), so that seems like a insuffient explaination.

<comment><USER13> Blackbody radiation describes an electromagnetic field in thermal equilibrium. Typically, we associate this radiation with a particular source, or boundary; but the blackbody spectrum itself is a Maxwell fact, not a matter fact. Real systems have many degrees of freedom, some matter, some Maxwell. In this particular example, the Maxwell degrees of freedom have a temperature of 3K, while the matter degrees of freedom have a much higher temperature.

Clearly, then, the matter is not in equilibrium with the electromagnetic field. How can this be?

Equilibration is a process that proceeds through a large number of interactions that each exchange energy between two thermal systems (or subsystems). If energy transfer is prevented, for instance by the conservation of mass and momentum, or because no post- states of an appropriate energy are available for one subsystem to evolve into, then the systems may remain far from equilibrium relative to each other.

I'd have to do some homework to verify this, but I think a correct statement is that free massive charged particles don't gain or lose energy in net from passing radiation; and conversely, they cannot radiate. This is guaranteed by Lorentz symmetry, btw: if you examine a million-kelvin electron in a frame of reference moving alongside it, you'd agree there's no way it can be radiating: there's a frame in which it is stationary, and stationary charges don't radiate. If it isn't radiating in one inertial frame, it isn't radiating in any inertial frame.

Only during collisions between charged particles is there a possibility for the matter and Maxwell degrees of freedom to exchange energy: and these are very rare in tenuous plasma. (We would call these "three-body interactions" because the photon counts as one.)

[edit to add] Now one might object that charged particles are always interacting, because their fields fall off like 1/r^2; they don't just end. Indeed! But one of the effects of being in a plasma is that charges are "screened". You can think of that as meaning the net effect of many-body interactions can be described as altering the "effective" field of each particle to fall off much faster, like e^-r.

<comment><USER14> > _If it isn't radiating in one inertial frame, it isn't radiating in any > inertial frame._

Maybe this is the answer to a question I've been harboring in the back of my head since high school: if moving charges radiate, they should lose energy, and thus eventually disappear. Almost nothing ever is stationary, so how come all the charges haven't radiated away?

A quick googling now (I don't know why I never bothered to do that before) pointed me to [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/65339/how-and- wh...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/65339/how-and-why-do- accelerating-charges-radiate-electromagnetic-radiation), which would suggest that it's not movement but _acceleration_ that makes charges radiate. But again, almost nothing ever is stationary, nor is it ever in truly uniform motion, so how come all the charges haven't radiated away?

<comment><USER15> The gas is so not-dense that it's particles effectively never collide, so its acceleration never really changes, so it never radiates.

<comment><USER12> For some reason this (along with piannucci's explaination) really helped it click for me - while the gas has a very high blackbody spectrum temperature, emitting hard radiation when it's particles collide at high speed, it _effectively_ has very little _surface area_ from which to emit that blackbody radiation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A discovery by the ASKAP (I work across the road from their data centre, the Pawsey SC Centre), code on GH, data in CKAN. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER17> They are always in the last place you look.

</comment><comment><USER18> "The "wind resistance" effect on radio waves is incredibly small, but space is big."

This reads like something from XKCD!

</comment><comment><USER19> Now for the small matter of the 95% of unknown Dark Matter.</comment>


John Ruskin: A Prophet for Our Troubled Times - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/02/%20john-ruskin-200-anniversary-to-see-clearly-book-power-seeing-exhibition-review <comment><USER2> Towards the end of Ruskin's life, the famous critic wrote a scathing review of a painting by James Whistler (of "Whistler's Mother"[1] fame):

 _" For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."_

Whistler, who was in dire financial straits at the time, sued Ruskin for libel, saying that his reputation was seriously damaged and asked for 1000 pounds and court costs as compensation.

During the lawsuit, artists, most prominent among them Edward Burne-Jones (one of the greatest artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and a pupil and benefactee of Ruskin's), were brought in to make pronouncements on the worthiness of Whistler's art.

The lawsuit was a rare, perhaps unique, and certainly the most famous example of a trial which hinged on the definition of art.

Ruskin stood for the more traditional view of art as representation of reality, and Whistler for a more modern "art for art's sake" where the artist's sensibilities were more important than how true a representation of reality the artwork was.

Whistler, who had a wit to rival Oscar Wilde, defended his work with dignity, humor, and clever turns of phrase which often drew applause from the audience.

In the end, Whistler won the case, but was awarded only one farthing (1/1000th of a pound) in damages.

Whistler went bankrupt, and remained embittered against Ruskin, publishing acidic pamphlets against art critics and a book called _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ [2] which contained a retelling of this case.

Ruskin, whose mental health was already in decline (so much so that the trial had been delayed a year because of it, and who couldn't be present at the trial itself), suffered a nervous breakdown and resigned from his post at Oxford, saying _" I cannot hold a Chair from which I have no power of expressing judgment without being taxed for it by British Law"_.

More about the case can be read here: [3] [4] [5]

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler%27s_Mother](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler%27s_Mother)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentle_Art_of_Making_Enemi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentle_Art_of_Making_Enemies)

[3] - [http://people.loyno.edu/~history/journal/Landry.htm](http://people.loyno.edu/~history/journal/Landry.htm)

[4] - [http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/jamesh/ruskin.whistler.h...](http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/jamesh/ruskin.whistler.html)

[5] - [https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-james- abbott-m...](https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-james-abbott- mcneill-whistler-sued-harshest-critic-won)</comment>


Write Clean, Professional, Maintainable, Quality Code in Python - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2014/06/write-clean-professional-maintainable-quality-code-in-python/ <comment><USER2> An IDE will never help you develop "Clean, Professional, Maintainable, [and] Quality" code if you're not interested in writing it in the first place. And if you're interested in writing good code in the first place, an IDE is hardly a requirement.

Frankly, as a developer who has tried a number of IDE's and text editors, I'm not sold on the idea that your choice of editing environment has any correlation to any of those titular descriptors in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Nor will python. Python is dynamically typed. It may not be impossible to write big functioning python apps, but it's damn hard.

And specifically, it's a lot harder than doing it in java or C++. I've seen C++ codebases that exceed 8 million lines of code and held together (not without friction, that I guarantee). I've seen java codebases with about half that that held together a lot better than the C++ ones.

Even accounting for the fact that python easily lets you achieve 5 times as much in the same amount of lines (at the cost, imho, of more surprises when wrong types get passed to your functions). I'm not sure "normal python" is more than a little bit more succint than (good) C++ though. Easier to read, sure, if you're allowed to make assumptions about types. But not that much shorter.

I've yet to see the first million line python codebase. And python has certainly had sufficient time to develop such codebases. Why aren't they here already ? Those C++ codebases were almost operating systems though (with extremely tricky threading support libraries, every project it's own of course), something you fundamentally can't do in python. The java codebases were financial stuff though, something that could easily be done in python, and they certainly have the money to absorb the increased hardware cost, and looking to have faster development turnaround. That's another discussion I can guarantee you will have with your boss if your app really grows, the hardware cost. When it comes right down to it, a programmer is worth (rule of thumb) about 15 servers. If python means one less programmer, but 50 extra servers, you will lose that discussion with your boss.

Dynamic typing is certainly a massive advantage for small codebases. It becomes more and more of a disaster on larger ones though. So an IDE for python ... it merely lets you lose the battle with your code that much faster.

<comment><USER2> I have personally worked on a 7 man team on a 2.5m LOC codebase in Python (Python 2.4, to be precise). It wasn't public, though.

Working on the code base with dynamic typing wasn't _that_ hard. Certainly not as hard as people make it out to be.

<comment><USER3> I'd be interested in hearing more about this codebase. What was it's function ? Are you including libraries ? What is taking up so many lines of python ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Detailed review of PyCharm - Review of PyCharm 3 from a Vim User's Perspective [http://andrewbrookins.com/tech/one-year-later-an-epic- review...](http://andrewbrookins.com/tech/one-year-later-an-epic-review-of- pycharm-2-7-from-a-vim-users-perspective/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have been using PyCharm for few months after using Sublime Text 2 for years. It is very well engineered tool and has greatly improved my code quality.

Just came to know 'Python code compatibility checks' option. Will definitely be helpful as I am starting to write Python 2/3 compatible code.

<comment><USER6> I too am a convert from ST to PyCharm and PHPStorm. Although, I'm still using ST for editing javascript. I need to break that habit.

<comment><USER7> WebStorm is a solid javascript IDE, I recommend giving the trial a shot.

<comment><USER8> PHPStorm is essentially a superset of WebStorm.

<comment><USER9> PyCharm is a superset of WebStorm as well

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, PyCharm is miles ahead of other IDEs or text editors, love it.

I wish they had another big sale so i could afford the latest pycharm again.. :(

<comment><USER11> Me too!

<comment><USER12> You know about the free community edition, right?

<comment><USER13> Or you could throw them a few dollars to maintain a product you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> PyCharm was the reason I started coding in Python. I know it sounds weird, but I was a visual studio addict & going to sublime text or a plain text editor just didn't compare.

I wish they had a "startup" package so even boots trappers can get started right.

<comment><USER15> They actually do. It says "50% OFF for startups" on the pricing page: [http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/buy/](http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/buy/)

More details here: [https://www.jetbrains.com/estore/startup/](https://www.jetbrains.com/estore/startup/)

<comment><USER14> Sweet! Thank you! If you're ever in Melbourne, FL, you can swing by & partake in he extra pizza you just helped us buy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My concern about PyCharm is that it's becoming the Microsoft Office of IDEs. I feel like there's more and more bullet points per release that are more marketing-oriented than widely useful. While my needs remain simple. Maybe everyone needs only 2% of the feature set, and a different 2%, but we all have to pay for the bloat anyway.

I keep repeating a cycle where I try an IDE because it sounds interesting, but a few weeks later I find I'm spending a lot of time doing things like arranging tool windows, dismissing alerts, trying to figure out how to turn off or customize features. So I always go back to a simpler text editor that I've been using for 15+ years and does everything I need very well without the sluggishness of a feature-rich IDE.

For example, every time I open a PyCharm project I get an alert I need to dismiss that managing files will be slow because they're on a network drive. Technically it's a network drive but it's really mounted from a VM on my local machine, so no, it's not slow, and if it was I wouldn't need Clippy telling me so. There may or may not be a way to turn off this alert, but I shouldn't have to hunt for these things so often. I want to use PyCharm but keep getting annoyed with it.

<comment><USER17> If your text editor works better than PyCharm, then by all means use that instead. However, the article is actually trying to make some point about what an IDE can do that text editors can't so perhaps you'd want to respond to that?

> Maybe everyone needs only 2% of the feature set, and a different 2%, but we > all have to pay for the bloat anyway.

This is not a useful mental model for thinking about software. First, big doesn't equal bloated, and one thing my IntelliJ IDEA fanboy colleagues highlight is just how sleek, light weight and fast it is, especially compared with Eclipse (we're in Java land). Second, if everybody only uses 2% of the package, then basic price theory tells us that everybody is only paying for those 2%. (I think, in reality, the number is significantly higher, although I agree that probably nobody uses 100% of the features).

<comment><USER18> I think the OP has a point. I bought WebStorm (the javascript equivalent of PyCharm) last year and loved it. A couple of updates ago, it started exhibiting a strange behavior where the editor will hang for a few seconds while it loads up the intellisense which is annoying since I don't use intellisense all that much.

Jetbrains' products are not immune from bloat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been trying PyCharm for a few days. It doesn't do anything that emacs can't do (maybe refactoring, but that's on the list ahead), but it's easier to setup. If it's really a memory hog like people are saying, I didn't notice, and didn't look, and didn't care, my computer has enough memory.

Maybe it gets better with practice, so I'll keep trying a bit more, but currently, count me as unimpressed:

1 - About code inspection. Well, I fully understand that inspecting Python code is hard, and any tool will have either false positives, or false negatives. But PyCharm gets false positives to the extreme, it complains about not resolving Python standard functions (like open), and it can't find some libraries at my virtualenv. It's so full of false positives that I'm not sure I'll be able to keep reading them - I normaly can't stand code with warnings, but in PyCharm there is no other way.

2 - About formating. It fully enforces PEP8, the most completely enforcement I've seen on any tool (no I didn't try the emacs el for that). That's a good thing if there is an option to turn it off, what I don't know, because I didn't search for it yet.

3 - About refactoring. No, PyCharm, I don't want Django to change because I changed a function name in my code. Maybe there is a way to tell it not to touch some dirs, but the default settings makes PyCharm much less reliable and slower than grepping the old name and replacing it by hand. I'll try to find such setting when I get out of work today, but it's making the case of PyCharm being easier to setup way less appealing.

</comment><comment><USER20> FWIW, if you're a developer who uses IntelliJ's flagship IDEA Ultimate IDE, you can get the Python plugin and get nearly all the functionality of PyCharm. Same goes for most of their other products (WebStorm, PHPStorm, etc.). Fabulous products for those of an IDE-inclination.

</comment><comment><USER21> My biggest problem with the JetBrains IDE is that it scatters file turds through your project; making it a pain for developers to use source control without generating random conflicts. An IDE's files have no reason to be version controlled in every project (nor should a project require every developer to use the same IDE).

If they had a sane way to keep IDE files in a single top level project directory, I would be much happier.

<comment><USER6> I've certainly seen the IDE turd files you mentioned, but I'm pretty sure they all live in .idea. Github has a nice .gitignore build for these (and other common ignores):

[https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Global/JetBr...](https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Global/JetBrains.gitignore)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How do people find PyCharm these days? My brother uses it daily but finds it to be a major memory hog (1G+ of RAM on startup)

<comment><USER23> The compelling use case for me was that I was already used to the Intellij key bindings, which tend to (mostly) remain constant across JetBrains products. It does use a fair amount of RAM, but these days 8GB seems fairly standard and seems to be plenty most of the time. I currently have PyCharm open and it's using 427MB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The linked article is really nothing more than an advertisement for PyCharm. Is it acceptable now for companies to just post links to advertisements for their products on Hacker News?

I'm a fan of JetBrains and I own PyCharm and WebStorm, but I don't want this to become a trend...

</comment><comment><USER25> Now if only they would do a Go-lang IDE with the "extract method" refactoring.

I do mostly Java, and wow I never realized how much I'd miss that until it was gone!

</comment><comment><USER26> vim+python-mode is more than enough for my needs.

<comment><USER27> Same here. It seems like a really solid IDE, but I like a more lightweight development environment, and there's always that one vim command that vim emulator plugins miss. However, I've recommended PyCharm to several of my coworkers who use IntelliJ for Java development, and they love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If this _advertisement_ convinced you to try a Python IDE, consider giving PyDev/LiClipse a try. It's free and open.

<comment><USER29> I have been a long time Eclipse / Aptana user. I gave the community edition for Pycharm a try, but it lacked a number of features. Plus I have used Eclipse for long enough that I have a fair idea what to when it screws itself up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In PyCharm can you set the indentation size (# of spaces per tab) per file type?

I would like 2 spaces for JavaScript and HTML but 4 for Python.

<comment><USER15> Yes, you can. They can be set from: File->Settings->[Project Settings] Code style. You'll then be able to set the indentation level for each filetype separately.

<comment><USER30> Thanks, I always use the Help -> Find Action to get to settings. I never thought to look under File.</comment></comment></comment>


TypeRacer, my bootstrapped game, reaches 1 million users after 5 years - <AUTHOR> http://blog.typeracer.com/2013/08/08/typeracer-5th-anniversary-and-1-million-users/

<comment><USER2> very cool, and insanely addictive. Congrats on the milestone!</comment>


Best Laptops for Web Designers - <AUTHOR> http://www.technogist.com/2013/07/5-best-laptops-for-web-designers.html

<comment><USER2> >There are certain features which Web Designers will be looking for, including: Value for money, speed, Good screen size/resolution, battery life and portability.

I think it's safe to say that everyone in the market for a new laptop will be looking for these qualities.

The article doesn't even explain _why_ these choices would be a good fit for a web designer. It's as if the author just made a list of general-purpose laptops and picked a random profession out of a hat to use for the title.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article screams linkbait. "If you are a web designer, you have to have good equipment in order for you to design a good website." in particular irks me. From my experience, anything that can run vim (virtually every computer ever) is enough for web development.

<comment><USER4> Yep. Linkbait.

Because if they were talking about graphic designer types, it would have been a list of one.

I run Windows in a VM on a Macbook Pro Retina because I use Visual Studio for development. The second machine on the list is passible. The rest are a random joke of every form factor out there.

<comment><USER5> Have you seen this? [http://xamarin.com/studio](http://xamarin.com/studio).

I traded my VM + VS in for that a few months ago, makes a huge difference on my Air. No Resharper but unfortunately.</comment></comment></comment>