delluminatus

It is compared to a "long weekend" as described in the parent comment. Although it would be nice, taking a month off every year would be grail-status vacation time for a US employee I think.

Also, I don't work in Silicon Valley.

I'm curious to read about what it means to "de-stress" from work but I think you forgot the [1] citation.

Maybe this is not common, but if I worked at a company with "unlimited vacation", I would definitely take extended vacations occasionally. I think as long as you timed them appropriately and gave advance notice, you could easily take a week or more off.

I'm not the author, but there are no hover classes for tables or alternating rows, as seen in the source, which is very readable [0]. Also, each additional level of list-nesting requires additional CSS, so it's actually impossible to support arbitrarily nested lists as seen in most word processors.

[0] https://github.com/dhg/Skeleton/blob/master/css/skeleton.css

The * operator made me laugh out loud. Only Perl would have an operator called a "Whatever star".

Although, I actually think a lot of the stuff Perl does is really cool. I wouldn't want to have to maintain a codebase of it, but it never fails to be interesting. Like the whatever star. "*.value" basically saying, "Whatever value is here, gimme the value of it". It's different from a typical lambda declaration, but intuitive in its own way.

It's too confusing, I think. The effort it takes to try to understand what's going on is too great. You can explain our REST service infrastructure to a developer in a few hours. I don't know how long it would take to explain the SOAP infrastructure, because I don't think anybody understands the whole thing.

If you are trying to communicate with a vendor that uses SOAP 1.2, it almost always seems to come down to guesswork. What set of properties do I need to specify before they accept my request? The WSDL gives you an object schema but it's not sufficient for the masses of WS-* extensions that you might have to support. Meanwhile, the vendor just exposes the WSDL and assumes that's sufficient "documentation" for clients and you don't need any examples or explanations or other info. I find the best way to approach this is to open Soap UI and start messing with settings until requests are accepted. There's no point asking the vendor for documentation because they probably don't know themselves.

Also, speaking from the perspective of a framework developer, I mainly start to pay attention when things stop working or clients are having problems. SOAP 1.2 doesn't have any more problems, but the problems are proportionally harder to solve. No matter how good your tooling is, it's not perfect, and it's a lot easier to look "under the covers" for RESTful services than for SOAP services. Of course that could also be attributed to the hellish nature of WCF, and not SOAP 1.2 per se.

I work on an SOA platform for a very large software company. We offer both REST and SOAP versions of our RPCs. In my experience, SOAP services are okay plug-and-play if you own both the provider and the consumer. But consuming external APIs can be nightmarish, especially with SOAP 1.2. SOAP exists in our organization for legacy reasons but we recommend all new consumers use RESTful services.

Our mobile clients like REST because it's faster and easier to consume from outside the .NET platform than SOAP. Even within the .NET platform, a client can get up and running consuming a "RESTful" service in fewer lines of code than a SOAPy one. Not only SOAP tooling, but HTTP client tooling in general, is a lot easier to use these days.

WSDLs are cool because they are a fairly standard metadata format. Our clients like them because they can perform data validation with proxy/firewall systems before the request ever enters the corporate network. I've yet to see a concrete benefit from that kind of strictness, though. IMO, SOAP schema validation is so brittle that it causes more problems than it fixes.

Of course, you can also use non-SOAP document description formats like RAML for describing your RESTful services. It's not like SOAP offers anything you can't get for REST. But once you start adding all that on top of your REST API stack, you might as well use SOAP 1.1. (Never use SOAP 1.2).

I don't think the main problem with SOAP is that it's over-engineered, although it is. The issue is that the supposed benefit of "interoperability" was never really realized. It's supposedly protocol-agnostic, but nobody cares. It's supposedly interoperable, but everyone implements it differently.

It never equates XML with SOAP. The point is that even while SOAP was being pushed by Microsoft, JSON was gaining mindshare among API developers, and API design was moving away from complex XML documents.

Using a simpler format for object serialization into XML is definitely an option, and it's a perfectly fine middle-ground between SOAPy verbosity and JSON compactness, but IMO it doesn't really have a lot to offer over a JSON version of the same API. Many API providers support both formats using content-type detection.

I'm psyched for the changes in the way .NET applications are being deployed. NuGet was already a great step, and having a well-factored .NET core framework in NuGet is only going to make it better.

Even little things like renaming the NuGet packages so that they are the same name as the assembly (hopefully "System.Web.Mvc" instead of "Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc" or whatever it is now) are a good sign to me that this push to create a cohesive .NET ecosystem around NuGet might actually succeed.

Unfortunately at least at our company this will take a long time to be fully embraced, but I look forward to the day when you can update the version of System.X that your team depends on without making it a system-wide upgrade initiative to move from one version to the next.

it compiles to JS. See: http://spiderlang.org/

Video lectures during the meditation? That sounds bad... the only things that I think would be acceptable are guided meditations, where you focus on different parts of your body, or moving your energy or whatever. If they legitimately had video lectures unrelated to instruction or chanting that seemed to have an agenda, I would also have left.

Personally, I think the only thing you should hear during meditation is nothing. A guided relaxation process is fine for a half hour but after that you need to leave people to their thoughts (or lack thereof :). I wonder if you would have felt better at a more Zen-style meditation where anyone talking gets hit with a stick? That's the kind of place I would want to go.

If you're using Web API (built on ASP.NET) then you're not using Node, which is a Web server written in Javascript.

But I do think it's cool that someone can transition from WPF to Web development with Angular without feeling too lost. Dynamic Web development used to be a very, very different ballgame from client application development.

They are also moving to a Flux-inspired application structure which is supposedly very similar to functional reactive programming, which is what the OP was referencing.

I believe we get puzzles randomly selected from a pool. Mine was about date parsing. Yours?

Semi-related, Google does base conversions too. You can type "8660 in hexadecimal" in Google and get the answer. Seems strangely appropriate since this is a Google game.

Nothing. At least at level 1, I made an incorrect submission multiple times without apparent reprisal.

Obstreperous doesn't mean "stubborn" (at least not in the definition given), it means that you are "defiant", and that defiance is stubbornly maintained. I don't think you did this deliberately, but it seems like a mistake to just assume "stubbornly defiant" == "stubborn".

edit to elaborate: IMO, "defiance" is a positive trait, because you have to be willing to defy others in order to be able to assert yourself. In that sense, it is an integral part of self-confident action. On the other hand, unqualified stubbornness is a sign of insecurity in my opinion. People use "stubborn" as a positive descriptor, but my experience is that stubbornness is a mistake based on an assumption that changing your opinion or ideas makes you seem weak.

So, I for one would like to describe myself as "stubbornly defiant" but not "stubborn" in general. I am only stubborn with respect to a few key things which I think should never be permitted to be compromised, and one of those is my independence and self-determinism. But I am not stubborn about ideas or even beliefs.

Hmm... maybe this is just me not being familiar with the literature, but from that link, it looks like there are very mixed results (some studies report no difference based on age of acquisition, whereas others report that children learn more quickly/effectively). It does seem like the percentage weighs in your favor though, so I suppose I should adjust my beliefs on the matter.

> [...] there's a limit to the amount of language learning most 50 year olds can undergo, even in a decade.

I wonder why you think this is true? I have personally never been given any reason to believe that a 50 year old is any less able to learn a language than a 0 year old. In fact, if you took a 50 year old and dumped them alone in a foreign country and gave them one or two dedicated language teachers and left them there for many years (which is the environment in which most children learn a language), I expect they would learn the language just as well as the child, if not better.

Well, I was trying to start a discussion over semantics anyway.

"Science" is already a very vague term, and I think it's important to keep it as concrete as possible in meaning. In my mind, science is associated with testable hypotheses. The generation of hypotheses could be considered part of science, but only if those hypotheses are testable, and in fact tested through experimentation. Otherwise you are simply making guesses. I think this article falls into the "guessing" category.

I don't want "prescientific" to be seen as derogatory, though, which I think may confuse people. It's an important stage in the development of a field of thought. As they say, a field of human endeavor progresses through three stages as our understanding grows: first it's a philosophy, then a science, then an art.

It's only once people start saying anything and everything that improves human knowledge is "science" that "unscientific" becomes insulting. I think, if we keep the meaning of "science" concrete and explicit, then we can acknowledge that there are unscientific ways of learning and advancing without sounding insulting.

I think this is related to an implicit assumption that startups are for twentysomethings, where you have to have started early in order to have much experience at all.

Maybe it's just me, but I think the startup culture has an emphasis on youth that leads people to wish they "started younger", instead of "finishing older" -- not that you're ever really finished. Perhaps people feel like 35 or 40 is too old to start work at a startup. I wonder if this pressure is particularly noticeable for women, since it seems like most other pressures of aging are exacerbated for them.

Maybe the only difference between a 25 year old with 10 years coding experience and a 35 year old with the same, is that the former is more likely to be accepted into the startup community.

I agree that this is a great project. But, do you think it's right to call this a "scientific process of understanding"?

It seems to me that the field (as it were) is simply in a pre-scientific phase of exploration and experimentation. Once we have a concrete basis for performing repeatable, independent experiments to (dis)prove concrete hypotheses, then the field will have entered a scientific stage.

I disagree. A PL is not a "natural language" by definition (it's eminently artificial). Although PLs do evolve over time, they seem to be essentially different in structure from natural language, in that they have a precise syntax and well-defined semantics, unlike natural language. And, I disagree that fluency -- in a PL or a natural language -- is more easily developed as child than as an adult. Children just have a more powerful learning environment (total immersion).

Having said that, I do think that learning programming young is a good idea, but not because it's "easier" for children. Instead, they simply have a much longer time to get used to the "logical way of thinking" (I don't know of a more concrete term for this, but hopefully you know what I mean).

I would not expect someone who started at 10 and is now 20 (10 years experience) to be a better programmer than someone who started at 20 and is now 30, or even someone who started at 50 and is now 60.

I think the Vertical Flip transition is the one with an issue. Not only does it not work, but it breaks the others.

FWIW, I think this is a really cool idea. When I was trying to imagine use cases, most of them involved a project being generated on only one stack. Mobile apps are the only exception I can think of. Do you expect that most people will only generate their project once, on a single stack?

Absolutely. I even think this, or something like it, will catch on in enterprise development shops for those fringe projects that are done in like a week. Especially if it can be deployed on the same tech stack as that other random thing we built. We use ASP.NET MVC for a lot of this stuff, which combined with ADO.NET and SignalR and a good JS framework, gets you 75% of the way there.

I will tell you what I would like it to be. Maybe it gives you a Visual Studio-style editor for websites, which let you easily lay out a page, edit CSS, add event handlers to elements, link to other pages, and make and use data bindings (which could be configurable: persistent to DB, associated with user account, validated with this function, etc.)

Then you could use the data model created by the bindings, modify it if you want (data model specification is probably integral to everything), add and configure whatever extra stuff is supported (accounts, websockets, whatever).

A cross between Weebly and Visual Studio. It would be great for demo apps and internal utilities.

My understanding is that you "describe" your project using XML or JSON or code (which can be written against libraries in "the language of your choice"). Then, Kozo spits out a skeleton project based on that description in the tech stack of your choice.

So, you would (optionally) write code in unspecified languages to describe your project, and then you would have to actually finish the skeleton project, of course.

I don't know what your question means, especially the "reaching around the HTTP protocol" part, but I'm going to try to answer it anyway.

Mechanize doesn't contain a JS engine, so it can't scrape sites that rely on JS execution. You can't use it, for example, to scrape (or run tests on) content that was loaded via AJAX. The other scrapers in question do include a JS engine, so you can use them to scrape or test pages that load content dynamically.

Because more and more Web sites are implemented as client-side single-page applications (SPAs), the ability to scrape dynamic content is becoming more important.

I think it's stylistic. The anime series (To aru majutsu no index) uses the same style of "to aru <noun>" instead of "<noun> to aru". It reminds me of Latin, where you can adjust the position of phrases in the sentence for emphasis or rhythm.

Personally, I think of the "to" as emphasizing the specificity of the phrase, if that makes sense. It's not just that "an OS", it's this specific OS that's being referenced by "aru".

I would love that. But "to aru" also actually means something in Japanese, which I would translate like, "there is an". Disclaimer: I definitely am not an expert on Japanese.

It's actually kind of hard to translate concisely, IMO the phrase that best captures the meaning of "ToAru-OS" is "There exists an OS". But it's kind of awkward.

If we used the Raildex translation, ToAru-OS would be "A Certain OS".

And yet, if you just google "polyfill", there are no results referring to that usage. So, although polygon filling would also be interesting to read about, it's not really fair to complain about the OP's idiomatic usage of the term.