skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why condemn Smalltalk for its idealistic vision when a lot of functional languages that are so trending are just as idealistic?

I don't think she condemned Smalltalk for being idealistic. I think she said that Smalltalk condemned itself to irrelevance by being idealistic. And, yes, that's a danger for the currently trendy functional languages, too.

If your language is harder to get real work done in than the alternatives, your language won't get used. So if your commitment to your version of "purity" is making it harder for your language to be used in the wider programming world, then you are dooming your language to irrelevance. And that's your choice, if you want to make it. If you want your ideas to be useful to people, though, you have to care about making your language usable by people for the tasks that people need to do.
Notes has a Hackpad importer that lets teams migrate their pads into Dropbox Notes, so you don't have to worry about losing a place where you can lee your Notes.
A better argument is that the kind of people you probably want to attract to your open source project are most likely already using Git and so making them learn another DVCS to contribute to your project merely increases the barrier to entry at no benefit to the project.
I worked at bitly for a couple of years, we used mongodb for one of our secondary datastores. We had the expertise to keep it working, but we really hated it.

It's this funny situation where some engineer starts off using it because it's very convenient to run, and maybe the data model is convenient. You scale it up a bit, debug it, tune it, stuff you'd have to do with any system. At the point when you're sure mongo really sucks, it's too late. The business and even technical management side always prioritizes some other project over replacing it, even though you spend a surprising amount of time each month maintaining the mongodb cluster (performance degredation that compaction doesn't completely fix, and other stuff...).

I get the sense that with 3.0.3 or so, mongodb is a real database now. But it's been years of pain and false advertising. I'd still always vote against it. (Even though at my current place some people started using it for a service... :(
> Stormfront? Is that you? Everything you claim is utter tripe.

From the HN guidelines: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."

The rest of your comment does do that, but please edit out the rude and uncivil bits from now on.
Redundant storage of the meta data - not the actual blocks. But at least you know they're corrupted if the become corrupted ;)
I think in cases like this, especially if it's recursive, the search should redirect to `//censored.google.eu/?q=...` with a big notice at the top noting that the results excludes links that were specifically censored by EU law, with maybe a link to an article, or two about said law at the top of the page.
It's baked into the VM.

When they say that in Smalltalk, everything's an object, they're seriously not kidding. Everything is an object, including compiled code, stack frames, execution contexts, threads, etc. A traditional Smalltalk system uses an object table, where all object pointers are really references to a slot in the table; this allows the garbage collector to move objects around in memory easily.

This means that it becomes trivial to dump everything out to disk, reload it later, update the object table, and suddenly the entire state of your system is restored (ignoring host OS resources, of course, but traditionally Smalltalk didn't use an operating system).

I did have a handy sample for GNU Smalltalk that would snapshot an image containing a running thread which, when the thread was reloaded, would seamlessly resume but, er, I seem to have lost it.
*BSD guys seem to do pretty good without a GNU coreutils.
I'd be interested in helping out, if you decide to take this further. I'm a passionate learner of French and Arabic but I am not deeply familiar with either language yet. I do know some people who are native speakers though.
I think it's more that nowadays the browser is the most important, if not the only way users interact with a computer, so any change in look/functionality is going to have an enormous impact on their digital lives.

Due to the ongoing nature of threats and exploits users also cannot opt for not upgrading, like they could for, say, a text editor, a painting program, etc. they are more or less implicitly forced to keep up with the releases, which means they are at the mercy of the browser developer's decisions a lot more than other software users.

It is understandable from a development perspective that there is a tying of functionality and security upgrades, on the other hand it is not the most user friendly paradigm around for those who prefer their customized environments not to have unintended changes.
> add-ons that modify our code via regular expressions

That's... actually kinda terrifying.
It's true, but the article almost sounds like "Lol Pluto shouldn't have nitrogen anymore but it has. Santa Claus?"
You're violating the site guidelines egregiously. We ban accounts for this. Please don't do it again.
...is a class issue.
Also see Amber, which is not technically a Smalltalk but fakes it very convincingly. It runs in a web browser, compiling to Javascript.

http://amber-lang.net/

Load up that page and press the button, and a Smalltalk IDE will pop up for you to play with. (It sounds like an amazing way to write web apps, actually, as it supports writing changes back to the server; but the backend infrastructure is heavier-weight than I'm happy with.)
For the Government to run at a surplus the private sector must run at a deficit which is clearly not good for the economy.
Off topic. The url reads like down-the-mall in all lower case. s/Can be a pivot if no backoff from Mozilla/s
I would be careful making analogies with temperature, it can be important when actually making a judicious choice of how to calculate observables! cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_quantum_field_theory
How much of that was just communication difficulties?
We always put a new CFO in the company. But non of them are from the VC firm.

This method you talk about is way more commom on large deal, like Private Equity, LBO, etc. Those companies make 2 to 4 deals a year. 10-15 deals isn't a small number of deals.
There are substantial remedies. Civil courts allow actions for restitution and punitive awards.

If the fraud rises to a sufficient level, you can attempt to have the state lock the person up and/or prevent the person from interacting with you.
Well there are work around options to the restriction with SQLAlchemy that you mention here.

You can use SQLAlchemy core instead of ORM and write your models independent of web context.

Check out
https://github.com/gouthambs/flask-blogging

for example!
I enjoyed it. I was excited to see when I would switch from one column to the next. I would probably get annoyed if I had to read this more than once a week, though.
> No bounty if you're in Iran, North Korea, or some other problem countries.

I’m a Tarsnap user from Iran. I’m not interested in these bounties anyways, but the phrase “problem countries” feels a little strange to me.
Users can't flag or downvote direct replies.

You're right that what that user did was not ok. Unfortunately comments like this one just compound the problem. When you can't flag a comment, someone else probably will. Or you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com. But please resist getting into a personal spat.
That is insane... I want to be found online... so if someone else with my name files a request, people will no longer be able to google my name? You do something stupid online, and regret it? Sucks to be you.

I have a common name, and the idea that someone with the same name could wipe me from all of google's results is ridiculous to say the least. It's a stupid law written by people with no understanding of technical limitations or the competence to think these things through, much like the people using this law.
> Pretty obvious isn't it? If no-one knows about your search engine, they're not going to petition to have your results altered.

You're a little confused, it is irrelevant if someone does a petition or not, every search engine has to comply the law and have the mechanisms available.

> I don't know why you're grasping at this 'cost' straw

When I have said anything about cost?

> And on top of that, now we all know if you've got a search engine gathering data on EU soil you need to comply with EU law

Really? Contradicting yourself?
BTW, 1994 saw the release of some of the greatest classics in PC gaming:

X-COM,
Doom 2,
Warcraft,
Colonization,
Panzer General

And quite a few others.
I'm not going to take my shoes of in a common area until I absolutely have to. I think it's a stupid law anyway, and my not disrobing early is a form of protest at the indignity.
They are going to spend the rest of their lives helping those with less ability -- who do they have to be handicapped in school so as to be less capable of doing so? And have a miserable time of it to boot?
It's so you don't hear stories like "He was unarmed and did nothing wrong but was shot and killed by police." being followed up with "During investigation it was found he had murdered 2 children years ago, held his grandmother hostage, spent 8 years in prison for drug/gang charges, and has warrants for his arrest in 15 states."

I can understand why they would argue for something like this - as it's essentially poisoning the well.

If it was found the person hadn't done any of that previous stuff, would it make them being shot while unarmed "not okay" but because they did all that stuff previously it is suddenly "okay"?

It's distracting from the issue of "this man was shot and killed by police" by trying to justify it with the man's past offenses - even if the past offenses are not relevant to the man being shot.

Note: Unarmed does not mean not dangerous, but that's an argument for another time.

E:

In response to below, I somehow missed that context when looking at it, so apologize for my reply missing the bigger context.
Uncertainty is bad, but it's unavoidable in this case, for two reasons:

* They need feedback from addon makers in order to design the new API.

* Mozilla does all its work in the open anyhow.

There is no way to avoid an announcement about an intention to change the API, before stating the API in full. Yes, it caused uncertainty, and that's a downside, but open development is generally worth it.
"I’ve seen people use GMV for revenue or refer to an LOI as a contract many times in the past year when talking to investors. This is a felony."

This is only a problem when you're asking investors for more money. That's when you need an accountant to review what you're telling them. You need an accountant and a lawyer at that point anyway, or you're going to get screwed.
> recalling C++ & Java, not crazy about the idea of going back to having to specify types for everything.

I want to reiterate the other comments and clarify: C++ & Java have poor type systems compared to Haskell. Haskell's not only is much safer, but it also allows for much much better inference, so you rarely ever need to add type annotations. People do typically add top-level annotations, for documentation's sake, in most cases, but they are not required.
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Jetpack was such a clusterfuck. Horribly documented, released while not ready for prime time, missing basic functionality, and progressing as slowly as Italian criminal trials. I can see the point of them starting from scratch.

It would have been nice if they had learnt their lesson and actually started communicating changes after they had something real to show, but alas, it seems like they're doing the same thing, just a little bit faster (maybe).
Basic real-time system information in Node.js
Intuit puts venerable Quicken up on the block
Is that enough?
Oh look another C++ article about tricky, clever nonsense with no general application at all.
I don't think any of the "big" free-software projects do, though some do have mirrors on GitHub. The Linux kernel, the FreeBSD project, LLVM, Firefox, etc. all host their own version-control infrastructure (which makes sense to me).
Something I just thought of... if these changes are presumably meant to keep malware addons out of the browser, then it's necessarily operating in an infected environment.

(I.e. something already had the ability to do things in the context of the user without that user's permission, and we're just preventing it from doing this one thing via restricting what the user can do)

In what way does this meaningfully secure the browser from malware, with that in mind? If I've got code running in the user's account, I don't need to hook into the browser engine to direct the user at popup ads, phishing sites, harvest their keystrokes, or do any number of other evil things. Hooking into the browser is one of the least interesting things that evil me could be doing. I've got access to the browser's memory, the TCP stream, the ability to launch whatever programs the user does, and am probably traveling along with a payload to allow for privilege escalation.

So, WTF?
Amber has a really nice interactive tutorial:

http://amber-lang.net/learn.html

It's actually running in your browser, and the whole thing is a live coding environment in disguise. Well worth a play.
Well, from a business point of view it makes sense for them to assimilate (see Hotelling's law[0])

As a user I am unhappy about their decision. For me, the whole point of the existence of Firefox is the freedom to customize the browser in whatever way I want to. They shouldn't change that. If they really think that all their users are stupid then perhaps they could display a special warning when a "dangerous" piece of software (i.e one that uses XUL) is about to be installed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
True, but... do you claim that in the UN, things do get done fast enough to react to a crisis?
Yeah, to say the same basic thing as the other commenter, but to use a different analogy, the "fully fledged VM" of Smalltalk is (or has been, in my experience) more like running a different OS in a VirtualBox window than like running a Java program. I think the JVM is a bit misleadingly named, or at least uses the VM terminology in a different way; it's really "just" an interpreter for a fairly simple assembly-ish language with a large runtime.
If it were illegal, you could then file takedowns from the publishers, and it wouldn't show up in google anymore... Google should not be an enforcement arm for internet censorship... the end.
The people that I tend to respect most in these areas tell me that (at least in fundamental physics/particle physics) fields are reality, and that it's our perceptions of particle behavior that are an illusion. (Just for example, an accelerating observer will count a different particle density than an inertial observer for the same underlying field state: that's known as the Unruh effect.) So at its deepest level, reality appears to obey the rules of field theory: the fields themselves are the fabric of the universe.

In condensed matter physics (and thus in most familiar many-particle systems), I tend to give the opposite answer. Field theory is a great tool for describing or approximating many condensed matter systems, but my sense is that it's less fundamental there. But that's also less my area of expertise.
“With war looming, it’s time to be prepared. So last week I switched to a fixed-rate mortgage. It means higher monthly payments, but I’m terrified about what will happen to interest rates once financial markets wake up to the implications of skyrocketing budget deficits. From a fiscal point of view the impending war is a lose-lose proposition. If it goes badly, the resulting mess will be a disaster for the budget. If it goes well, administration officials have made it clear that they will use any bump in the polls to ram through more big tax cuts, which will also be a disaster for the budget. Either way, the tide of red ink will keep on rising.”—Paul Krugman, New York Times, March 11, 2003
Damn, Trofim. You promised :(

> I've explained numerous times [...]

"Shut up," he explained.
Amazing story but the interview is not interesting at all. Doesn't talk about his struggles. Just generic fluff.

Here is the link to reviews for his book.

http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Spaceman-Boyhood-Dreams-Astro...
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> So, is there any chance of something OTHER than the heat death or the decay of all matter?

I might have misunderstood the article but I thought the idea is that after the death of matter in this universe the expansion of space will continue. Quantum fluctuations will continue as well and one of them will be the right size that it will be stretched out by the expanding space and a new universe will be born.
Jailhouse: Linux-based partitioning hypervisor
I tried web2py a little bit. I liked the fact that a lot of basic things get setup initially. But all the globals confused the heck out of me. Couldn't quite understand the right way to test. It could be just me though!

I am happy using Flask these days!
This policy is in regard to the police officer. If the officer shoots someone and is investigated, evidence of prior crimes the police officer committed can not be prosecuted.

It certainly doesn't apply to normal citizens. That's why the police sometimes try to catch someone on a minor violation to obtain a search warrant for their home in hopes of uncovering larger crimes.
Maybe start with "Smalltalk 80: The Language", and just read the first three chapters:

http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....

Also available for $1.89 (plus shipping) used from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-80-Language-Adele-Goldberg/d...
That loser/winner dichtomy is one of the reasons for that titanic drug problem in the first place.
If you fail and are allready frail, and society has decided to put you in the loser-box, drugs might be the only thing to make life seem bearable.
The idea, that you could just step from the race-track, and be happy - without giving a thought on who is high/low in status - independent and with worth outside of the ratrace, doesent even exist in that animalistic (eat or be eaten) mindset.
For someone who can already program, such things are trivial to learn.

If you class doing basic design work and taking time to document it as "arrogance" then I'm afraid you may be suffering from negative mindset.
Don't be so pessimistic. 18 months are a lot of time, Mozilla folks are smart and often listen to their users, there's the browser.html experiment going on, etc.

I have a gut feeling that in a way or another, things will roughly be the same for extensions developers.
You're breaking the HN guidelines by making unsubstantive comments, going on about downvoting, and engaging in a tedious one-sided flamewar. Downvotes and flags are justified.
Might changeset evolution [1] (e.g. safe collaborative rewriting of public history) be that 500% bonus?

[1] https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution
It looks like a bad case of Big Rewrite. Which is mildly unsurprising, coming from an organization that was created to undertake a Big Rewrite; however, after the dismal Jetpack experience, I'm surprised they want to do it all over again, just harder and with no safety net.

How can you tell your own developer community "what you're doing now, it won't be allowed next year; but what will be, we don't know yet"? You might as well tell them to go home.
If the reason for Smalltalk's failure is simple pragmatism, how could anybody's argument rise above that level?

The "blank canvas" features of Smalltalk like the image, monkey patching, edit and resume, modifying individual object instances, retry, and so on are wonderful for experts and just terrible chaos for everybody else.

When you are designing a language, the thing to keep in mind is that an expert can create a masterpiece even from a Java-style "connect the dots" language, they just don't like to, but when using a language designed for experts the common programmer struggles to even create something common.
I am alum of Sparkbox's apprenticeship program (and builder of https://apprentice.at) and would be happy to share my experience with you. If you'd like to chat, ping me!
He's probably referring to the problem of sending money to those countries from Canada, where he lives.
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Valve and security: One year on from our open letter
I think you are reading into it too much. Those countries are "problem countries" because citizens of many countries cannot legally transfer funds due to sanctions... It has nothing to do with a value judgement on the countries or the culture by the author of this post.
Speaking of Download managers - Chrome still doesn't have a decent one and I for one will miss DownThemAll if it goes away - it is definitely a useful piece of software.

Wonder what the new signing and addon development policies will do to FF market share - there won't be any reason not to just use Chrome anymore. I get the security part but the reason I use FF is because it is less memory hungry and has these extensions that either are not on Chrome or work poorly on it.
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Well I did start out as a mech eng tech on the vocational track so I actually have experience.

Its more the perception that you will give others that "professional" software development is a lesser profession.

The other professions call this CPD imagine a junior doctor being told now you have your md your going to be doing an aprentiship the AMA would go nuts!
It's funny that this is said a lot that the internet can't forget... but the internet can and has forgotten a lot, so to speak... especially with regards to frequency/recent models in Google, Twitter, etc... a lot of stuff falls off relatively quickly... and it's actually hard to find some stuff that happened in the late 90's and early 00's, because you're trying to remember when concert X was, or who was the opening act...

There are plenty of times that the "internet forgets" which archive.org works to prevent, but it still happens.
Wonder if there are any improvements here that could be pulled back into the open source Etherpad-light?
Jason Scott (and all who helped), thanks for all of your work!
Can't transfert money to some countries from banks that also do business in the US...
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So it's ok to make life harder for 1% so the 99% have it easier?

And why make it "safer" for the 99%, considering they have been able to live with the current situation for years?

Shouldn't things be improved for everyone?

And aren't those 1% that tinker those who provide new stuff to the 99%?
The hard work is basically optional. It's very difficult to get fired if you do the bare minimum, and the organization is geared for about half it's staff to not be productive. If you want to move up, you do work and take up the slack. If you're comfortable where you are, you do the minimum, which is very... minimal, and typically no one will stand in the way of either path.
I'm embarrassed I didn't say "please". But thank you!
So is Titan considered alive and actively maintained now?

Back when DataStax acquired Aurelius, they announced [1] that they would stop developing Titan, and for a while it looked like it was completely dead. It seems DataStax are maintaining it somewhat, but there have been only 74 commits this year, all/almost of it from DataStax, and there's not a lot of meat on those commits. Plenty of open issues in the Github tracker.

For example, I noticed that Wikidata was considering Titan but dropped it [2] after the Aurelius announcement, and ended up with a fairly obscure database called BlazeGraph instead.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/aureliusgraphs/c07WE...

[2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-tech/2015-Mar...