i-blis

Still one of the best, by far.

Surely a factor. As is the deregulation.

I've been living in Germany for a very long time and the real decline started some ten years ago. At the beginning mostly because of poor maintenance. My first years with the DB 100 card (allowing to travel on all trains) were a pleasure then it deteriote to the point where you start yourself: where is this heading. As I said, the ban of SBB on German trains was a turning point for me.

But You're right about the networks being different (mostly because France suppressed many local lines in the last 20 years.

When I was young (70s-80s), we were all amazed by Deutsche Bahn's punctuality and quality of service (second only to the Chemins de fer fédéraux suisses). Now, French and Italian trains are a lot more reliable, which is rather strange.

The Swiss Federal Railways asked German trains to wait at the border and has even ban many German trains to enter Switzerland over excessive delays to prevent their train schedule from being affected.

The site is hilarious by the way. I hope it will have an effect on DB, even though I doubt it.

This is NOT a genuine gambling site but a take on DB to remind them of the issue and take it seriously.

knowledge is transferable

I concur: Perl taught me to mentally parse and build (complex) regexes, a highly transferable skill. The Lisp course I was taught in the late 80s, certainly helped me grok Clojure and find it a pretty natural fit. I think this is a very common trope.

A similar kind of observation made a profound impression on me some 30 years ago. A team of primatologists filmed Macaques in northern Japan. A female had two consecutive baby loss, the second one at least being stillborn. She successively acknowledges the death, takes care of the newborn as if it was alive, hit it furiously on rocks in despair and then again care for it, carry as if alive, get angry at it and so on. Her behaviour displays of acting as if knowing it's not, in this case in a pathological way. (She ends up being rejected by the group.)

Despite the Bonobo case being even more striking an example of being able to do as if, both shows that the behaviour is not unique to humans.

I was already horrified by what I heard in the Netflix documentary (some five years back, I guess). One frightening aspect was that some victims, despite having terribly suffered themselves, introduced him 10, 20 of their friends and acquaintances. One young lady among the victims even confessed with deep remorse to have sent, among others, her own under-aged sister.

You might be right about a Leetcode effect and the difficulty to find new interesting positions. But OP wasn't stressing that at all but the desire to architect and manage. I might have put to much emphasis of the managing and too less on the urge to architect and see things from above. I agree.

I am scientist and worked from time to time as a research engineer merely to pay the bills, so I may see things differently. I always like doing lab / field work and first-hand data analysis. Many engineers I know would likely never stop tinkering and building stuff. It may be easier for a scientist than for an engineer to still get trilled, I don't know.

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue.

Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it.

Science and the academic world

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue.

Is it to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it.

Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.

Very much to the point. "Bots to remind one to check one's reminder" summarizes it all.

Note that the tendency to feel overwhelmed is rather widespread, particularly among those who need to believe that what they do is of great import, even when it isn't.

J is, within the APL family of languages, the one I have always found the most useful. I reach for it as I used to reach for my HP calculator in the past, to quickly compute or numerically model things. I always have it running in a terminal window.

Contrary to popular belief, its learning curve isn't steep. I once introduced it to high school freshmen who had no real experience with programming. I recommend the series of booklets by Kenneth Iverson himself: Arithmetic, Algebra, Calculus — there is even a Concrete Mathematics companion to accompany the book of the same name by Graham, Knuth et alii. They're all available for download on the site.

Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life.

I disagree. The backbone of democratic life are the rule of law and freedom of speech, which makes a big difference. The press has historically been a counter-power inquiring into privileges and breaches of the rule of the law and thus promoted freedom of speech but almost only inasmuch it served the interest of the emerging merchant bourgeoisie . And we are long past that. Universities never have been liberal forces: they backed the Church and refused paradigm shifts. They still are very conservative even though in a peculiar sense, as leftist conservatives.

Related argument (as to SKILL.md not being a big thing) in the following blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644086

The value of HN lies in its community, which you won't — most probably — be ever able to reproduce.

After almost fifteen years of skimming once a day or two through the comments on the topics that interest me most, I am still amazed by the wide of range of old-and-new school engineers of all trade who share their experience and opinions. This is invaluable and does not necessarily need any fancy UI.

I refrained to install Bartender on a new machine (despite having a license) because of the scary permissions it want me to grant it. I found an open source alternative that fits my needs. Check if fits yours.

https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

C-h v - display the full documentation of variable C-h k - display documentation of the function invoked by key

The cleanest explanation I read of information / state linearity properties of quantum operators. Thanks! (Working through Brian Hall's Quantum Theory for Mathematicians and Frederic Schuller's course at the moment, both highly recommended).

Unfortunately, PV market price drops do not reach the EU market, due to the anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on crystalline silicon modules and cells originating from China in place since 2013. These protective measures have caused the solar module prices to even rise during the last two years (and certainly hampered solar deployment in Europe).

I remember that a significant part — up to a fifth, I would say — of the researchers and lecturers whose seminars I followed in the late 80s in France, either did not hold a doctorate or used to publish a big thing only once in a while but were nonetheless respected by their peers for their knowledge and commitment to science, and enjoyed secure academic positions. Nowadays, surviving in the academy without a PhD (or even, in countries like Germany, without the higher "habilitation") and without abiding to the "publish or perish" rule has become increasingly unrealistic.

But it still happens, albeit at the margins. I have been working myself as a scientist in the academy for the last twenty years and even held assistant professorship positions in prestigious universities in Germany for almost ten years without a PhD and without much publications. In my case, that was most of the time due to a combination of factors: 1) the need for an outsider in the lab (particularly to avoid conflicts over scarce tenured professorship positions) 2) being able to teach and research topics for which more than one person would have been needed otherwise 3) being (a little) known in the field, and known as eccentric but proficient at the job.

Funding is certainly an issue. You do need an academic affiliation (at least a formal one) to apply for grants. But I do not feel I have been less successful in securing funding from European and German research funds than colleagues with PhDs and habilitations and lots of publications. As soon as past projects were successfully completed, it has never been a big issue. The real problem is that in my field only fashionable and pointless projects are being funded lately.

As a consequence, I have come to carry my research almost completely independently. Coding and data analysis for private corporations and casual teaching at the university pay the bills. From time to time, I still rely on academic grants to fund field research. My wife and I work together and we have a very spartan way of life, dedicated to science and study.

Doing science at the margins of the academy implies its share of abnegation, is certainly viewed as bizarre by many but it happens. Although I do not complain, I won't recommend it either.

Definitively Turkish. And pretty standard dialect.

'd be happy to get one (mail in profile), thanks

Precisely. This is at least how I do it.

It is also pretty nice to have an Instarepl where you can see live changes, either in your source files or in a separate repl. Don't forget that if your paths and namespaces match you can require your namespaces at will.

1. make a new lein project

2. fill in the dependencies in project.clj

3. open your src/core.clj (or whatever) in LT

4. start coding

LT will automatically launch a client and connect to it. In between lein will have seamlessly fetched the dependencies for you (this happens automatically each time you launch or relaunch a client).

You can do manual (C-Enter) or live (Instarepl) inline evaluation in any of your project file or even connect a new fresh repl to the client to experiment from scratch.

This is my understanding too. (This is why I said yet).

I am expecting a lot from the forthcoming plugin system. It will be nice to be able to script LT in ClojureScript (the language in which LT is mostly developed).

This is an impressive release. They move forwards at an amazing pace. I had already been using LT 0.3.9 almost exclusively for my ongoing Clojure projects during the last month, switching back to Emacs only for heavy editing tasks.

I was really missing but the ability to (de-/re-)connect to a given client, which 0.4.0 provides. In my opinion LT is not just a code editor (editing features are pretty poor yet indeed) but a code experimenting platform. And there it rocks. Even in alpha, it compares pretty well with Emacs Live in terms of stability and usability.

ClojureScript, Node and JS support is a terrific move. This means I may even soon use Brackets (another nice node-webkit project) less for live JS HTML coding and debugging and live mostly in LT.

Congratulations Chris and Co!

and the guy who does that seems interesting and relying: http://www.poeschko.com/

Mathics (http://www.mathics.org/) is a pretty useful online algebra system (with MathJax display) for symbolic computing à la Mathematica, backed by SymPy for most tasks and Sage for advanced stuff. You can check gallery and docs at http://www.mathics.net/

This is a pretty well known text, almost a classical on procrastination. Posted on HN at least once in 6 months.

Linux Journal (2010-02) did an overall positive review of the device, well, a least for the technical-savy geeks who like to tinker with their machine. The software part, still in beta, seems a little bugy.