The interesting thing is that Apple just released the ability to remap Caps-Lock to Esc. natively in macOS 10.12.1, which doesn't seem to be incidental.
I'm very interested in learning Clojure. Would you care to share more of your experience learning the language in terms of learning curve, useful libraries or just general tips. I'm sure that would benefit the community at large.
I approached learning Clojure the way I approach learning everything else. I survey the resources available, then pick the two best books. Ideally, I want them to come at it from different perspectives. e.g. one may place an emphasis on doing stuff with Clojure while another may be more about functional programming.
I then wrote a data processing app in Clojure; consuming financial data and finding patterns in it.
My suggestions are:
1) If this is your first time learning a functionally-oriented language, clear your mind from any kind of assumptions picked up from other languages.
2) Get a handle on the core tenets of functional programming: immutability, purity, composition, and functions as objects. If you know Javascript, then a lot of this stuff may already be familiar to you. JS is underrated in that department imo.
3) To me, writing programs with Clojure is akin to playing with Lego. You write your base functions, then higher-level functions which use those base functions, and so on. Functions all the way down.
4) Write something with it; it'll force you to decompose your program and think functionally.
Clojure is a simple, opinionated language. I don't think you'll have a hard time picking it up at all. The hard part will be to think in a manner amenable to it.
These days, I think Clojurescript has overtaken Clojure in terms of traction, so if you're into webdev, then CJS would be a natural next step.
> You write your base functions, then higher-level functions which use those base functions, and so on. Functions all the way down.
I'm hoping to follow a similar trajectory to you, but with Elixir instead of closure. At the moment though, I tend to do things the other way around: write the top level functions and then fill out the base functions.
Then I'll write function1, 2, and 3 and whatever helper functions they need. And so on until it works. Maybe doing it your way is a better approach: helps you think it through first.
(although I'm aware some would say that tests should come before everything else anyway)
It is useful and necessary to use both directions at times. You can't always presuppose the relevant details. But do be ready to factor away functions at a moments notice
Where did you get this financial data for your first project? Is it a public feed / API? This sounds like exactly the sort of thing that I would like to start playing and eventually working with. I had been assuming that this type of data would only be available to the kind of entities that have a compliance officer, but I would love to have that assumption proven wrong.
I'm in NYC too. Github.com is resolving/working fine. Netflix.com is resolved but all assets (probably) weren't loading. Additionally Zendesk is also affected.
NYC, fios: github, twitter, soundcloud, heroku back up for me. Tunneling through an ec2 instance on us-east-1d gives the same results - can't find anything that is unreachable now.
As a user and supporter of RethinkDB I hope (and expect!) that the engineering team joining Stripe is a sign that Stripe will be able to take part in further development of the product.
On a sidenote, for people unfamiliar with RethinkDB, this episode of The Changelog with Slava explains some of the history and choices behind RethinkDB ; I found it really interesting. https://changelog.com/114/
The team at Stripe has been absolutely phenomenal throughout this process, they've gone above and beyond in finding high-impact projects for our team. We're brainstorming together how to transition RethinkDB to a self-sustaining open-source project, and Stripe is super-supportive of that too. If there is a way for RethinkDB to live on, we'll find it!
I can't describe how sad I am over this. RethinkDB is not just excellent db, but it is yardstick on how future db's should look like. What you accomplished there is excellent balance on features, great ui. We really need this project to go on, even if slower.
We use RethinkDB at CertSimple. It's always been a great DB with safe defaults, excellent documentation and it's always just worked. Trickier ReQL queries are intuitive. It deserved wider support than what it got.
It's depressing that a half-baked constantly problematic effort like MongoDB wins while this gets neglected. Unfortunately we still live in a world where marketing beats merit.
It's always like this. Just look at Windows; if people cared about quality, no one would be complaining about Windows 10 giving them grief because Microsoft would be out of business or relegated to some business software niche, and we'd all be running some kind of Unix variant or maybe some descendant of BeOS or OS/2.
That is very good to hear. We just ported our backend to use it after evaluating many other options including managed databases.
It's really a top quality piece of software in every respect, combining much of what's good about nosql with relational features and robustness. The ease of clustering across data centers is just phenomenal.
Would still recommend it in spite of this bit of uncertainty.
It's licensed under the Affero GPLv3, but I don't think AGPL license requires you to open source your code, if you're just using ReQL (the API/interface for RethinkDB).
GPL/AGPL requires you to share your code if you statically (or dynamically) link (which is a C language family concept) to GPL code, but I don't know if calling an API is considered "linking".
I don't think most companies really make any contributions or modifications to the databases they use that they absolutely do not want to share back to the community.
(If using ReQL constitutes "linking" under AGPLv3, then that's a very serious matter. Perhaps re-licensing under LGPLv3 would make sense then.)
But overall, I think it's fair that they used AGPL. I especially like that they opted for the Affero version, since companies that do make useful changes can't just hold onto it , and not share it back.
I've worked in a project that used some AGPL component. There were some many doubts on what should be open-sourced/which licenses were possible that we dropped that component and invested or time modification another one.
After some while, that component changed its licensing model. It was too late.
The GPL is of course completely commerce-friendly, as it permits anyone to resell the original or modifications to it. What you're asking for is a license friendly to proprietary software[1].
Why on earth would they want to enable someone to close his modifications to RethinkDB? How does that make the world a better place? How does that encourage the growth of RethinkDB (vice the proliferation of closed, proprietary forks of RethinkDB)?
[1] Which is to say, user-hostile software. Users should be free to use, modify & distribute software.
Proprietary software is not by definition "user-hostile," and hyperbole like this does much more harm than good to people like me who would like to see more open source and less proprietary software in the world simply as a matter of principle.
I can see why you're sometimes labeled as "fanatics" and "zealots". You speak in religious-like absolute terms and use circular logic to "prove" you're correct. The GPL's biggest enemy are its most ardent supporters. Truly.
I disagree. Most of those are things that most users don't give a damn about in most cases (because they're meaningless unless you have certain unusual skills), which means they don't make for a sensible definition of "hostile".
Do pirate bay support your statement or proof that it is wrong? Maybe it just that "most users don't give a damn" about copyright, and as such don't care if what they do is legal or illegal with current copyright laws. In order to care about copyright licenses, first users need to care about what happens when they don't follow it.
So you care more about having the entire pie, than about how much pie you have?
If you have a license that "permits" commercial sales in a way that by design makes most business models completely unfeasible... guess what? You'll only get contributions from those with one of the handful of blessed business models. Which will work or not depending on what sorts of businesses models your project is suited for.
Copyleft works fine for things like the kernel that are complementary to tons of different expensive things and nobody cares about otherwise. Permissive works well for Postgres.
At the same time, you're arguing that you should be able to take the work they've done, add to it, but not give back, despite having received a HUGE base to start with.
I would go and say that when flickr will be gone we will enter a different era of the web. Flickr has been such a great influence over the years that internet without flickr will be a different internet altogether
I find it difficult to relate to you. I have been an active internet user since 1997 and have never used flickr a lot and don't feel I will miss anything if it goes away. Also, if Flickr is such a seminal piece of property, its usage would have been through the roof which is clearly not the case.
Yes - it was popular during its heydays but now it is just another photo storing/sharing app.
Flickr was the first "web 2.0" site. It was the first social network. It was the first really global photo publishing website. So I agree with heyts above. Flickr repeatedly becomes a shadow of its former self, and that is really very sad. It could have been more, but Yahoo just drove it into the ground - they did it slowly enough however that it did remain relevant for a long time, but it missed just about every boat that came along.
Friendster pre-dated it by 2-3 years, MySpace and Facebook by a year.
I have to agree with product50, I am an avid photographer but Flickr was never compelling for me. I would only ever see it when someone would post a link to Facebook...
According to wikipedia, Facebook was actually started the same month as flickr (Feb. 2004). del.icio.us was another notable "Web 2.0" site that did predate flickr.
It was also one of the first metadata rich photo sets that was publicly available. Prior to every large company seeing data as their primary source of income Flickr had their open data API and a lot of interesting science was done using Flickr's images and metadata.
Unfortunately there's really no equivalent pool of photographic content--including CC and public domain content. If flickr were to shutdown, a huge amount of content would be lost.
I sort of agree with you but in another sense it remained true to its roots as a photo publishing platform, mostly, for amateurs. But the mass market was fine with putting some pics up on facebook. And serious professionals have other markets more explicitly aligned with their needs.
Perhaps this could be a clarion call for volunteers to start transitioning the CC and public domain content to archive.org, assuming Flickr gives enough notice that such a shutdown were to occur.
I think this is a bit of a hyperbole. To me the definitive feature of the internet is the potential it offers in networking services, offering accessibility to great pools of data and serving as a forum to cheaply create networks of value from producers to customers.
In this scope a public repository of photographic data is one embodiment of this potential. Just changing the behaviour of this single embodiment does very little to affect the fabric of the internet.
Maybe there are social bubbles for whom flickr is much more important but if I had to list any number of internet services that I consider markable flickr would have not been on that list.
Ironically, I think the site that has killed the market for commercial photos is Yahoo's other free photo hosting service: Tumblr. Image copyright is now practically a dead letter if you're an amateur.
> Image copyright is now practically a dead letter if you're an amateur.
Why would an amateur care about copyright? The whole point of copyright is to grant a monopoly to a work's creator in order for him to make money. If he's trying to make money, he's not an amateur (viz., someone doing it out of love — hence the word).
An amateur certainly wouldn't care about the market for commercial photos!
If you're an amateur photographer, you don't have the resource to do anything other than occasionally google image search your own stuff and send a few DMCA notices.
Whereas tumblr is built on - literally made out of - the reproduction of images without the permission of the copyright holder.
There's no RIAA or MPAA for photographs that has the clout to force platforms to redesign their systems to pro-actively check for copyright infringement.
(I'm trying to scrupulously avoid saying which side is right here, just describing the situation)
Interesting - it's not an area that I know a lot about. I had just come across a Vancouver company called Copypants (https://www.copypants.com/) that is targeting this issue, (I have no affiliation), and so your comment made me curious.
I agree. My account has grown to over 10,000 photos and videos of my family, from our early dating, wedding, two kids. It's all pretty easily searchable, well-organized, and simple to back up. We've been using it since Bush was in office.
I don't know of any other tool or service that makes it as easy as Flickr does for my wife and I to collectively maintain a library of family photos. I will happily maintain my Flickr Pro subscription for as long as the service stays in business.
I was a heavy Flikr user for quite a long time; until the new laws were pushed (in the UK at least) to allow the likes of google to declare 'untraceable' images as fair game for their own business needs.
It's now too easy for corporation to rip off the work of photographers, so I removed the content I had online, and will only post the odd photo to my G+ these days. Not the 'stream' of stuff I used to do with Flikr back then.
They're laws that don't get enforced because the companies are simply too large and can get away with it. It's more effective and more profitable for the court systems to go after the smaller 'offenders.'
If you plan to use Django as an API server, you might be interested in Lightweight Django (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032502.do), which shows you how to design and build an API server using Django, Django Rest Framework (another great Django related project) and Backbone on the front-end.
Half-implemented, broken and cool is more fun than solid and battle-tested, and that's perfectly fine so long as you don't get yourself fired over a bad choice - have a great time. Honestly, I used to be more novelty-driven, too. But battle-tested and boring has its place.
Admittedly but Backbone is _still_ a good intro to Front-end frameworks because it has a steep learning curve upfront instead of, say, angular that seems easy enough to pick up until you try to tackle non trivial applications.
