pmilot

> Real education superpowers are those with top UNIVERSITIES which in turn produce economic gains/growth/etc.

Why is your metric considered more apt than the article's? Good student performance consistently correlates with higher-paying jobs and higher quality of life. At the nation level, this correlates to higher Human-Development Index, which is generally considered a pretty good thing to have...

> If canada was a true economic superpower, we'd see them producing Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

That is utter nonsense. What does this have to do with education at all? Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Steve Jobs were all college dropouts. They simply had the right idea at the right time. Their economic success has very little to do with the U.S. education system.

This is good news, but it doesn't tell the whole story. What's important to remember is that each Canadian province has its own education system, so mileage may greatly vary depending on where you live in Canada.

In Québec, where I live, the drop-out rate is abysmal compared to other provinces, especially in french-speaking school boards [1] (which are much more numerous in Québec):

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/dismal-dropout-rates-...

In the fourth paragraph, Dr. Adam Russell (the interviewee) is quoted as saying: "I wouldn’t characterize it [as a bullshit detector], and I think it’s important not to". Then the author titles his article "DARPA WANTS TO BUILD A BS DETECTOR FOR SCIENCE".

That's not just weasel-y journalism, it's downright disrespectful to the person you're interviewing. If I was in Russell's shoes, I'd be insulted.

Theoretically, yes, but WSL is still beta and performance (especially filesystem I/O) is mediocre at best. They'll get there eventually!

That's an unfair judgement toward the C development community as a whole.

There are legitimate use cases for C. If you're writing low-level, bare-metal programs then there is no other portable programming language that offers better semantics. C programmers often laud that language because they can easily reason what the output of the compiler will be. That is an extremely important and rare property for a portable programming language.

But hey, don't listen to me, listen to an actual experienced C programmer: https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=20m45s

My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Québec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability" doesn't work in a unionized system.

Complacency a systemic problem. When your union protects your job, you don't need to actually put effort into doing the job. Of course, that doesn't mean ALL teachers are lazy; but it does mean that a teacher who works hard and gets better results than average is not rewarded for it. It also means that bad teachers cannot be replaced by good ones.

Of course, preventing public school teachers from unionizing will simply allow the government to exploit them. Perhaps the solution would be to replace unions with a professional order, similar to how engineers and lawyers are regulated.

Welcome to The Cloud, where you basically void all rights for long-term support of any product.

It may sound farfetched to you, but I assure you that some people who read Hacker News regularly don't actually use Linux on a day-to-day basis.

> What does Haskell have to show for, besides badly documented libraries and compiler implementations?

Off the top of my head, the Darcs revision control system, the awesome Pandoc tool (http://pandoc.org/), and the Xmonad window manager. All of these are fully-featured and battle-tested software that don't require any knowledge of Haskell to use on a day-to-day basis.

Facebook also uses Haskell to write parts of its software stack, but most of that code is proprietary and not available for reading.

There are many more examples:

https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_practice

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-famous-software-writ...

Even when talking about driver updates, the argument is nonsensical. Android updates already require a full reboot of the device at the end of the update process, so new drivers can (and are) already be loaded into the kernel.

The update problem on Android is indeed a policy issue, not a technical one.

You may be looking for React PHP (http://reactphp.org). No relation to the JS library. It is an asynchronous event loop implementation, and there is a native HTTP stack built on top of it.

Surprisingly, a lot of people in this thread hesitate to recommend Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". I'm not sure why this book is somehow surrounded with overblown controversy.

I think it is an excellent book on historical economics. His conclusions are drawn from an extremely large dataset that is publicly available and downloadable here: https://www.quandl.com/data/PIKETTY

It's by no means an Economics 101 book, but it should definitely be part of any economist's personal library in my opinion.

Sadly, there has been comparatively few developments in keyboard hardware and input schemes since the 60s.

The article explains an alternative authentication scheme, it has no bearing on how session is managed after authentication took place. That's a fancy way of saying "same as before": some sites will stop session when the browser is closed, some will keep the session for days or weeks, and some will offer a "remember me" option at login.

To be fair, people also think "rest and relaxation" is amazing, and we probably need to capture some of the value of this technology via a for-profit company as well.

Is it just me or the idea of trusting a random IP as your authoritative DNS server sounds like a phenomenally bad idea in terms of security? At least, when you pay for a service like UnblockUS, there's a contract and a certain understanding of accountability, which you don't have here...

That is a great move no matter how you look at it. I applaud the Slack team for this!

The very fact that this is newsworthy says a lot about the lack of diversity in our industry. As a society we should try to find more ways to encourage women and minorities of all sorts to get into this industry.

Maybe it's just because I don't frequent social networks all that much, but I've never been exposed to this sort of depiction of Edward Snowden. The only coverage I've come across of him focused solely on what he did or his current predicament, not his image.

Even calling that Wired cover "sexualized" seems a little farfetched to me.

This. I don't know what happened (that trend was already well underway before Ballmer stepped down) but lately they've been acting like kids suffering from ADHD.

Developers want stability. They had a good thing going with .NET which they could have simply used as the platform for making Windows Mobile apps as soon as the iPhone took off.

Instead they chose to introduce a whole new platform (Windows Phone 7), then kill it off to make way for Windows RT (Windows Phone 8), then kill it off for Universal Apps (Windows 10 Mobile). You can't expect to build a good ecosystem when you establish a pattern like that.

I'm not familiar with the way syntax highlighting and code indentation logic in text editors is implemented, but using regular expressions to try and parse a CFG like the Go programming language seems like a phenomenally bad idea.

Maybe everyone does it and everybody is happy with it working only in 90% of cases, but it just seems like the wrong approach to me.

Considering these laws are enacted in order to protect private businesses from unfair practice, it makes perfect sense to me.

Of course, whether this particular law is really about fair business practices vs. protecting a monopoly is an entirely different debate.

Right! Longhorn; totally forgot about that and WinFS. Talk about a failed endeavour...

WinRT however is definitely not a replacement for Win32. It's way too sandboxy (last time I checked, you couldn't even pull up a list of fonts installed on the host system using the WinRT APIs only).

I think the difference here is that C# (and the .NET platform) was never meant to completely replace C/C++ Win32 development; it was a higher-level solution for a certain class of Windows applications.

I might be wrong, but I thought Swift was designed as an eventual replacement for Objective-C (with its seamless interoperability, and the fact that it uses the same runtime as Objective-C, it doesn't seem that far-fetched). If it is meant to be Objective-C's successor, then Apple should really be preaching by example at this point.

"Wave" might be too strong a word, but I've seen three or four posts on HN in the last few days that were pretty critical of Github's closed source nature and insufficient transparency.

I'm not sure why offering a free software edition somehow gives you a pass. Both Github and Gitlab are commercial entities as far as I know.

Anyway, my concern wasn't a big deal, I was just a bit taken aback at the opportunism. In retrospect, I think my reaction was a bit overblown.

Yes, that's sort of the point I'm (badly) trying to get across. I think the product speaks for itself. That said, I may have misinterpreted the tone of the article.

This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. Why respond to a letter that's not addressed to you? I would have preferred them to simply post an honest "Why you should migrate from Github to Gitlab" article. The tone just seems a little devious to me.

By the way, we're using self-hosted Gitlab at work and we love it. This isn't a knock against the actual product. In fact, I think Gitlab has improved tremendously in the last 18 months. I just wish they would be a little more up-front about their marketing efforts.

Compilation speed is a very good argument for Go, yeah. That often seems disregarded in a lot of these sorts of comparisons, but it's a really important factor since it directly affects the level of complexity your language can have.

I like this article and I agree with most of what was said there.

Against that type of point-by-point criticism, fans of a language will usually use the argument: "but that language was not designed for that!". Then the question becomes: What was that language designed for? My impression was that Go was meant to be a slightly higher-level systems language with better constructs for concurrent programming. With that in mind, it seems to me that Rust is just a "better Go".

I agree that these are two very important skills, but I have yet to see a "Learn to code" endeavour that actually focuses on teaching these skills.

Usually, these are more focused on I/O and making the machine output interesting things like visual charts and sounds (something that is more immediately satisfying and therefore keeps the student's attention).

I agree. I feel like there are plenty of other choices to pick from for a beginner's first programming language other than Python. Perhaps SmallBasic (http://smallbasic.com/)?