room271

Thinking about 'us' is definitely the best thing to do and it is definitely a failing of (some) young but talented programmers to develop a certain arrogance which only puts others off.

However, at some point it will become obvious that you can/can't effect change in a meaningful timeframe. And if the latter, you should move on.

The sad truth is that often the bad type of programmers the author describes are unwilling to learn, and are especially reluctant to take lessons from a new/young colleague.

That is very similar to my first job. The truth is that most programmers are not very good at writing software. Some don't care about code quality, and others haven't learnt (yet) how to program well.

When you apply for your next job be careful to ask about their coding practices. Ideally you should be able to find their lead devs on github or somesuch and view their code to get a sense of how good their work is.

I like a lot of things about Erlang. But the main reason I would be wary of using it is that it seems like an all-or-nothing kind of thing. The distributed actor model effectively means Erlang everywhere. This contrasts with RPC, queues, http, etc. where a variety of technologies (and languages) can be combined together. And an all-in approach seems laden with risk - all devs and relevant technologies need to fit in with the Erlang stack.

And if you are not using distributed actors, then why bother with Erlang at all?! (It's a nice language to be sure, but there are lots of nice functional languages available so the competition is pretty fierce).

I think you are slightly underplaying the challenges of making one of the biggest domain changes ever.

Yes, the technical details are not too complex. But the risk is massive and the legwork still considerable.

If you work for a very large website and want to change domain you will have been following The Guardian's move closely.

Ha, the issue there is really about domain availability and cost.

They do for large organisations like The Guardian.

This may require a bit more lengthy answer than makes sense here, but I'm curious about what was causing your GC issues and how you fixed them (we have GC issues at the moment).

I'm not sure you have this right. CAP says nothing about ACID - it only mentions consistency.

NoSQL was in large part about precisely what the name implies - giving up relational (SQL) data in exchange for better performance and the ability to have a distibuted store. Yes, part of this is also about being willing to trade off consistency for availability. But Elasticsearch is an example of a NoSQL store which does focus on consistency (in this case at the expense of availability and, to some extent, partition tolerance).

No. The choice of datastore is still incredibly complicated in the distributed world; it's all about tradeoffs really.

For example, Elasticsearch has poor availability characteristics - both because it is master-slave and because it focuses on ensuring consistency - relative to, for example, something like Riak.

I would learn (as someone who is interested in backend stuff - scalability, high-performance systems, apis) related to web-work:

- HTTP - C (because it teaches you how computers work a bit) - One of the new JVM languages (either Clojure or Scala, preferably the first) - some bash (for scripting)

Realistically that is a lot to learn in a year.

On top of that I'd start dabbling with Javascript but not expect to learn it this year (that's for next year).

Do you think that private companies that use bug bounties are being inefficient then?

How did this make it onto Hacker News? Squabbles like this happen at every university (or at least the ones I have been to). Universities are often quite conservative places with a tendency to restrict student activity beyond what is sensible and students often fight back.

This is a run of the mill occurrence.

Mobile phones (via apps) are a lot more monetisable. Part of the decision may have been motivated by this (i.e. push mobile users towards the apps by limiting the responsiveness of the main website).

I'm not saying I agree with this (and I don't have any real evidence that this guided the decision) but it is a possibility.

I sympathise to some extent. But this is not an entirely scientific perspective. The NYT will undoubtedly have performed significant user testing and also looked at the metrics (articles read, time spent, etc.) before making this switch.

He actually addresses this question. His advice is: start with any idea, even a bad one, and write about it. You're ideas will develop (and new ones will emerge) as you go. (Thoughtful) writing is the discovery mechanism.

I'm surprised you describe Europe as lacking in world class innovators. There are loads of conferences in most of Europe and the scientific and academic output in general of European countries is incredibly high. The same is likely true for lots of Asia and Africa too, though I lack first hand knowledge.

While I do not agree with much of the sentiment, I enjoyed the article.

My question to the OP: even if you believe that at the moment abuses are rare and that your colleagues are trustworthy and law-abiding, does the capability and level of information concern you in terms of the potential for future abuse it enables?

I use Scala in my job and, though I never formally studied CS, I would be concerned at using it for an introductory course at university.

Scala is fundamentally a pragmatic language - it is about compromise between functional purity and JVM/Java-style (OOP-based) mutation. As such, it's hard to really identify the distinctive features of either because Scala is so liberal in what it allows.

I wonder whether students would be better off learning something like Haskell along with (e.g.) Python or Java. And of course a Lisp of some kind(!).

Not true. I don't have time to complain about most things that upset me. Of course, I will complain about the very worst things, but this is a pretty high bar.

I was upset by this but have not complained anywhere.

The author is very clear that you can scale Java and Scala in the same ways. But doing this in Scala is much more idiomatic and concise.

People might be thinking of scripts here. I did when I first responded.

Set a minimum wage to a reasonable level (i.e. enough that you can eat without extra support if earning it) and the issue goes away.

The idea that you can shame companies into action doesn't work - it might in one or two cases, but people quickly forget, and there are too many companies to target anyway.

Healthcare strikes unevenly and can cost for more than most people could ever earn - so an insurance scheme of some kind seems sensible. In practice the state can often provide this more efficiently than the private sector.

Food on the other hand, costs a non-variable amount and is relatively inexpensive.

The two examples you give are not at all similar.

I don't hate these companies. But I do think their existence is damaging to society. The world is a big place, but these companies operate in the country I live in, invariably pay no tax (or little enough so as not to be meaningful), and generate/perpetuate inequality - which itself is associated with a host of problems from crime to mental well-being to economic growth itself.

While I enjoyed the Bing search :) the existence of one or two other search engines with meaningful market share does not show that Google is not a monopoly.

Being a monopoly (at least in economics) does not mean being the only player in a market, but rather about being big enough to affect/set prices in the market.

A powerful critique. As developers we have the ability to effect profound change. But mostly we funnel our expertise into better advertising solutions.

Our industry leaders (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) are all monopolies which pay little tax and employ anti-competitive practices to squeeze out competitors.

And few seem concerned with inequality.

Let's shape our companies towards something better.

Scala is a great alternative. The Java interop is great and the tooling is good, certainly good enough. It's statically typed, but much more expressive and productive than Java.

It sounds like the poster has a bit of a rubbishy job/one not suited to them.

Yes, all jobs have some boring bits, but if it's always boring then you should change!

There are really enjoyable programming jobs out there. It depends on:

- the tech-culture and environment at your work - your manager(s) and colleagues (kind of related to the previous point) - your problem space

Identify why your current work sucks and then either move or change it!

I found this too. Not sure why. Perhaps it just fell off the front page?

The article is slightly tongue-in-cheek (I'm pretty sure Henry Porter does not want the UN to intervene militarily in the US!).

But it does express, quite forcefully, the simple point that if the US is concerned about the safety of its citizens it might do better to focus on gun safety and ownership than on the so-called war on terrorism.