Hacker News Reader

octopuson Clang 5 in a Docker container for C++17 development

People had all sort of problems when using Apple unsanctioned Clang binaries (problems when Xcode updates, other software gets confused if you add your new Clang to the system PATH). It is easy to get in trouble, better to avoid the problem.

In theory, yes, you should be able to run a different version of Clang side by side.

octopuson Ask HN: Linode wants photos of the back of my credit card. Alternatives?

I didn't need to send anything to Digital Ocean except my credit card infos.

What country are you from and what credit card you use ?

octopuson We have C++14

I have both, "The C++ Programming Language" as a physical book and "A Tour of C++" as an ebook. "A Tour of C++" is self contained.

octopuson We have C++14

Try "A Tour of C++" by Bjarne Stroustroup it has less than 200 pages.

octopuson Installing Nvidia CUDA on Mac OS X for GPU-Based Parallel Computing

Easier to program (at least for me it is easier to understand a piece of CUDA code) and there is a lot of good documentation for CUDA.

Another plus for CUDA is that it lets you use C++.

octopuson Ask HN: If you have written and sold Ebooks, please share

Nathan Barry http://nathanbarry.com/ writes on his websites about writing and self publishing.

octopuson Ask HN: What Open Source FEA Software Do You Use?

FreeFEM++ was a good choice last time I checked.

octopuson Ask HN: How to get started deploying an Online Game?

Try to ask the same question on the HTML5 Game Devs Forums http://www.html5gamedevs.com/ . Lot of online game developers there and friendly too.

octopuson Ask HN: Fastest static site host?

You could try a VPS from Digital Ocean, cheapest option is $5 and gives you 1TB of bandwidth.

octopuson Fastest Growing New Languages on GitHub are R, Rust and TypeScript (and Swift)

Keep in mind that S and R were targeted toward Statistics and Finance. Not everybody has a background in the above.

octopuson Master Emacs in one year

The entire paragraph is about Lisp if you read carefully. The mother tongue of the author is irrelevant, he clearly thinks that Lisp is a superior language for a possibly more intelligent coder:

Emacs is developed by Lisp whose syntax is different from common programming languages. A developer who is curious enough to try Lisp is possibly more intelligent than average. Lisp is often the third language he/she learns (Java/C/C# is the first, a script language like Bash/Python/Perl/Ruby is the second).

octopuson Master Emacs in one year

A developer who is curious enough to try Lisp is possibly more intelligent than average

This is the kind of exaggeration that makes a lot of people to avoid even trying Lisp. Any programming language that uses a different programming paradigm than the one you are familiar with will make you a better programmer.

octopuson DigitalOcean now asks for customers to upload photos of their ID via imgur

DO didn't ask me for any kind of ID, I just used a plain old credit card to pay for their services ...

octopuson Google offers free Android development Udacity course

Android Studio is based on IntelliJ (the Community Edition if I remember correctly).

octopuson So I Finally Took Time to Make a Game

Android 4.0 is the minimum required version, the game runs just fine on KitKat.

octopuson Swift is not

Interesting, did you run your tests on iOS8, OS X 10.10 or on OS X 10.9.3 ?

Xcode or command line ?

octopuson It's time: bring Dart to Android

Probably the best move for Google would be to write a super fast WebView implementation. This will let the huge mass of web developers to use JavaScript at a speed comparable to Java.

octopuson Do not learn another programming language

It is the job of a programmer to learn/try new programming languages and always improve his skills.

octopuson Introducing Swift

Open source or not, Swift will never be appealing for the world outside Apple's garden if it will be as intertwined with Cocoa as Objective-C currently is. It will be nice however to see how well Swift could be ported to Android.

octopuson Introducing Swift

Yes, you need a Mac, especially if you want to be able to use Xcode and Swift.

If you are short on money, you can try to buy a second hand iMac or a MacMini (just be sure it will support the next OS X version 10.10).

octopuson Introducing Swift

This is probably the biggest announcement from a developer perspective. Swift looks like a language in which you can code as fast as you code in languages like Ruby or Python, while having the speed and performance of a language like Objective-C.

octopuson Introducing Swift

Swift looks a lot like a scripting/dynamic programming language. For e.g. this is a complete Swift program:

    println("Hello")

I think the idea was that Swift will be as easy to code as Python and faster than Objective-C.

octopuson RubyMotion 3.0 Sneak Peek: Android Support

Agreed, RubyMotion is appealing if you prefer a fast development cycle. I tend to use C++ for most of my programming projects but every time I've used a more "dynamic" language (Python or JavaScript in my case) I was amazed at how fast I can try/drop/improve on an idea and see the code running. The only problem I had with the "dynamic" languages was the speed of the resulting code, RubyMotion seems to be in the sweet spot between a statically typed language and a dynamic (usually interpreted) language.

octopuson RubyMotion 3.0 Sneak Peek: Android Support

This is great news, it will boost the adoption of Ruby and RubyMotion in the huge Android market.

Finally I have a reason to give RubyMotion a try. I'm curious how much productivity gain can one achieve with a language like Ruby once it is compiled (which will ensure the speed of the resulting application).

octopuson Why I'm ditching my Amazon account

If you tend to buy books in the $15-20 range doesn't make much sense to do an extensive search using a lot of sellers, but you can give Amazon.ca a try. I've found that it is cheaper to buy from Amazon than directly from a Canadian online seller and the effort is minimal.

For reference books you should definitely check alternative sellers, I've seen programming books priced at $120 in Canadian bookstore at $20 (or less for the international edition).

octopuson Why I'm ditching my Amazon account

As long as the price is better it is not really important to me if I buy from an independent Abebooks or from an Amazon subsidiary.

octopuson Announcing Xamarin 3

Except that you need to use Lua (and most Xamarin customers are C# shops) and you don't have any control on the build process of the app. I hate waiting for some cloud service to send me back a binary version of my app. A slightly better alternative for Lua coders is to use Corona Cards (you do the building on your own machine) but this doesn't have a free version.

octopuson Why I'm ditching my Amazon account

You should always search for the best deal for your money. For e.g. I prefer to buy books from Amazon, but I always check Abebooks where sometime you find the international edition of the same book at 20% the price from Amazon (this doesn't really work for literature, but for Math or Programming books you have a good chance to find a better deal).

As a side note, you should probably check Amazon.ca where you have free shipment for Canada for order over $25.

octopuson Why I'm ditching my Amazon account

As a buyer all I care about is to find the product I want at the lowest possible price. I will let the publisher worry about how Amazon compete with them.

octopuson Python 3 can revive Python

Do you really think Ubuntu will destabilize their current LTS release by switching to Python3 and removing Python2 ? I don't know what Canonical will do for the next LTS release, but for the near future (read like 4 years) Python3 will not be a first class citizen in the Ubuntu world.