portal_narlish

Strong point! As a non-CS engineering student learning C++ for the first time, the compiler all but turned me off from wanting to be a programmer. No one explained why the compiler was even there, it just seemed like an annoying hindrance stopping me from getting good grades on the homework.

Fast forward a decade and I'm evangelizing statically typed FP at conferences. The value of the compiler is redeemed after self-teaching and learning the "Whys".

Agree.

But is it just programmers that don't care about the thinness of their keyboards and want something functional and high performing?

It perplexes me why non-programmer consumers wouldn't want the same. Who is Apple aiming at?

Technically the C preprocessor is purely functional!

It seems people are conflating "low adversity score" with "my perfect SAT score is ruined because my family lives in the nice suburbs".

I think this is just meant to add some standardized and measured context for admissions officers, like an objective version of other "adversity factors" already present in the admissions packet.

However, I think College Board have no business doing this themselves. Seems out of line and very different from standardized testing.

JEP draft: Remove NullPointerException from language

Capitalism 101

1) Syllabus for the accompanying Harvard course https://cs121.boazbarak.org/syllabus/

2) Author is heavily inspired by Sipser and the previous CS121 course taught by Harry Lewis. So this is your natural follow-up.

He also encourages students to make a pull requests when they find errata.

I can see the argument that this "open sources" the literature and brings students closer to it.

However - students are not experts in the subject matter and this makes for anxiety-inducing and frankly ineffective pedagogy. You are there to learn, but never know if the proof you are reading is correct or not. The errors get in the way.

I just took CS121 recently and echo this. Theoretical CS is really a broad topic to cover in a semester. The early sections on computability theory, CFGs, regex are really good. Once it gets into complexity classes things kind of stop making sense.

Doesn't help that the textbook is still a buggy WIP, and there are no written solutions to problems in the book or the homeworks.

How are the "algebraic data types" algebraic if they don't express any relation to each other?

This seems like a cool syntactic layer for people that are already writing Python and wishing for a more functional style. However to call this a functional language would betray the definition.

This seems psychotic. Why not put the same energy into rewriting this code correctly in a statically typed functional language?

What about hackathons? Open source sprees? Meeting people from your language/framework/trade IRL and forming relationships?

It's starch, dairy and processed/cured meat regardless how you make it. Usually meetups serve from counter takeout chains which makes it even worse. There is no argument for pizza not being a junk food.

Why is it called LambdaSchool when they teach "JavaScript, Python and C"?

Clicked hoping to see a functional programming oriented bootcamp. We need one of those.

This is a common paradigm in object-functional programming, as it further emphasizes the duality of functions and the data they return. Scala allows one to do this, however one could ostensibly pack a bunch of side effects into a method and call it this way. Stylistically, these situations are supposed to be differentiated. myObject.method() should be reserved for effectful functions, and myObject.method for pure functions.

I refer to this as the "spaghetti law of attraction". The burden of refactoring things gets higher and higher and no one wants to touch it. So they just add another try-catch block and do some side effect and get the PR merged.

I sometimes wonder if programmers instinctively overcomplicate things in interest of collective job security. Some of the stuff I've seen in (particularly awful) Java code bases is perplexing to the point where it seems intentional.

Data scientist, programmer and software engineer are different things. They are not disjoint by any means, but this guy is conflating them in a way that's totally wrong.

Software engineers have to engineer things. They deal with production applications, distributed systems, concurrency, build systems, microservices... coding is sometimes only a small part of the job.

Data scientists nowadays do programming in interest of research, modeling and data visualization. But they are not only programmers - they are usually supposed to have an applied statistics or research background. Some also do software engineering, especially at companies serving data science/ML in their products.

A programmer is actually someone like a data analyst or business systems developer. They don't have to build systems themselves, they just write loosely structured code against existing systems. Like writing SQL queries for dashboards, or drop-in code for things like Salesforce. This is probably the closest thing to what he's describing as the "70s archetype". Minus the deep optimization stuff.

didn't they deprecate the gateway last year?

This type of signaling is very real and present in functional programming languages specifically. Java programmers feel insecure because they're not writing Scala, the Scala people wish they were as functional as the Haskell people, the Haskell people wish they were as advanced as the academic Idris people.

It's a never ending comparison contest. And despite functional programming having an objectively higher barrier to entry, it is entirely possible to write absolute garbage code in an FP language as well.

Your story sounds too familiar. I worked at a snake oil startup for almost 2 years, essentially a "Theranos" for food (google "vegan mayo scandal" to get the incredible whole story).

The CEO dramatically changed the focus and pitch of the company on a dime multiple times just to impress potential investors. The pitch at many points included "AI" (scientists using R to run regression models). Later it evolved into claiming we'd be in the "cellular agriculture" space before anyone else. At best, he was exaggerating and extrapolating minor discoveries. At worst, it was full blown fabrication, total vaporware. And to make things even more frustrating, he was brazenly uninterested in the science (and the input from the actual experts in the room). Everything was about a compelling sales pitch and continuing to buy the company time and funding.

I watched multiple waves of incredibly talented scientific and technical staff be sold by the vision then run for the hills after a year or two of working there. My advice is - if your ethics are being compromised, get the hell out of there.

I get so many robocalls I don't even bother with call notifications anymore. If they're a friend, they'll probably text instead. If it's a business matter, they'll leave a message.

Regardless of efficacy, it's the law in SF to wear a helmet on those things

It indeed seems like the companies are playing dumb w.r.t. sidewalk riding and helmets. Are they really assuming people will be walking around with helmets just to ride a scooter for .5 mi? And it's definitely scarier to ride in the street compared to a bicycle.

they were never the refs -- CEO has controlled the board's vote since 2015

The brogrammer archetype is an interesting phenomenon in Silicon Valley, and he shares similarities with his East Coast cousin the finance/banking bro. I believe he is the product of "learned manhood" and status gained through a highly paid and respected profession.

He excelled in math and science in high school, but dedicated studying and social anxiety caused him to miss out on traditional jockery like sports, partying and getting girls. Sometime during or after college, he began applying his objective mind to solving his perceived shortcomings. He read PUA books and started dating through Tinder. He got an Equinox gym membership and lurked bodybuilding forums to learn powerlifting technique and dieting. He picked up a hobby like craft beer or playing an instrument. He spends his software engineering salary on travel and music festivals.

But ultimately he is not a real jock - he's still deeply insecure and feels the need to overcompensate.

Crazy Taxi is already out and it's surprisingly good.

This story is everywhere for the same reason it's a top story on HN. Startup scandals are entertaining and tech people love rubbernecking.

Side note, Olivia Zaleski has made a name for herself with these kinds of stories.

https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ASoef4w-oqQ/olivia-zaleski

On a trip to Europe last winter, United Airlines lost my luggage during a connection at ORD. I landed in Germany in the dead middle of winter without any clothing, and not a single United employee in person or on the phone could tell me what had happened. Two days later, after dozens of calls and an accumulated 8 hours on the phone (90% of that time was spent on hold), my luggage was finally found. But the issues didn't end there. The flight number of the flight I was told the bag would come in on was incorrect, twice, and their incident tracking website (BagTrack) did not update once during the entire fiasco. My luggage was delivered 4 days late, unannounced, by a random third party courier. Mind you, this happened merely 12 hours before we had to leave the city we were staying in.

I spent over a thousand dollars in the first couple days attempting to repurchase the contents of my bag, assuming it was lost for good. The only silver lining to this nightmare of an experience was the fact that United refunded me the cost of replacing my clothes... a whopping 6 months after filing a claim. Needless to say, I'm ecstatically cheering on their demise.