skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it's something like Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit only.

Not in Sandstorm's case. We depend only on the kernel, coreutils, curl, and bash. You can even have them all statically linked, with no shared libraries installed. Sandstorm self-containerizes in a chroot to avoid dependencies. This is actually a big reason we prefer an installer script: it works everywhere.

We also include an auto-updater and push often multiple times per week, so likely Sandstorm's deps will be more up-to-date than your system's.
John Carmack on VR at UT Dallas (2015)
I use vim. I think there are a few reasons for me. And these are not the best rationalizations I could think of but rather the the actual causes.

One is that since its a text mode editor it is easy to use in an ssh session. So I don't have to set up sshfs or something.

Two is that it seems less complicated than emacs but is still credited with being a 'real' programmer's editor. And I know it has support for almost every language.

The biggest thing is something like network effects or social dynamics. Hardcore Unix programmers use 'real' text editors and nobody wants them to have one over on them. And its nice to feel like your are part of an 'elite' club of 80s power text editor users.

The 80s era text editors are not the best text editors, realistically. And I will go ahead and admit that I use the arrow keys in vim
Dropbox has great designers, surprised they couldn't have found a few hours to spruce this up in the year and a half since it was acquired :)
I've sold a website with them and I thought they actually priced it incredibly low.

I have my own review of their service coming up, but I think the quality you're gonna get from EF is infinitely higher than something you'd pick up off of flippa.
Then don't use them when you have arbitrary unbounded inputs or maybe even don't use them if you care about security.

In many applications you don't care about those things (like say writing a game engine). They come in handy there.
I mean, it's not a some kind of critical feature but some code use it and it's nice to be able to compile it. They are also quite convenient and in rare cases the best solution performance wise.
Square to file for IPO in the next two weeks
A good understanding of how email protocols work, their risks, and why certain tradeoffs are made in practice. It helps inform the designer of how to best secure them without breaking stuff. Just using 3rd party libraries or throwing shit together hoping for the best isn't safe in high-security engineering.
Elixir/Erlang aren't purely functional either (eg: ets), but they're enough functional to eliminate many common bugs and they still allow you to get stuff done. :)
> does not even have linked lists

Conses are different in newlisp, but it certainly does have linked lists:

> In newLISP, there are no dotted pairs. Instead, each newLISP cell contains one object and a pointer to another object if the cell is part of a list.

> different evaluation model

That one is true, yes.

> no GC

No, but it implements McCarthy's original intent through the ORO scheme. NewLisp's ORO thing is very annoying if you ask me, but it does its job; it achieves the same thing that McCarthy mentioned in his paper: "This process [...] is more convenient for the programmer than a system in which he has to keep track of and erase unwanted lists. Its efficiency depends upon not coming close to exhausting the available memory with accessible lists etc."

Let's not delude ourselves here. NewLisp is not necessarily one of the "better" Lisp implementations, but it has S-expressions, Scheme-like function application and automatic memory management. I think that's reason enough to call it SomethingLisp.
Powering CRISPR with AWS Lambda
This may be a "feature" but it's a kludge.

I can appreciate that for many consumers, having your card expire is an annoying anachronism with no benefit. They simply want it to keep working so that their Netflix account keeps working.

The fact that this "feature" exists suggests that the credit card companies have realized and accepted this, and wish to offer a way to effectively circumvent card expiration. That is reasonable, but instead of refactoring the status quo to enable cards with longer (or simply indefinite) expiration periods, they implement this "feature". And now credit cards and payment processing becomes even more complicated. Bleh.

I'm sure there is substantial regulatory and technical inertia that can explain why they're doing it this way, but still.. Bleh.
This sounds somewhat like the "worse is better" philosophy - optimizing for virality/simplicity over quality and completeness.
Awesome.

'For example, %= sounds like "centis" rather than "percent equals." Since even a silent reader will subvocalize, the length and complexity of the sound is a tax on reading the code.' This is great. Clever how some of the sounds are reminiscent of existing readings.
Please don't use visual gimmicks like "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" in titles.
Selling your stuff really is the only way to make fast cash. If you're not willing to sell your things, then it's going to be your time you need to sell unfortunately and you don't have much of that.

Also https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoney
I'll have to check those out when I go to the area in the future.

In SF there are a few spots where active use occurs underneath freeways. Also, in Taipei I saw a huge marketplace for jade and for flowers underneath freeways.

Freeways cause so many ill social and economic effects on neighborhoods, billions are wasted every year in the big cities on dead space. There should be a huge investment toward restoring the urban fabric and bringing out the full value of neighborhoods around these structures.
Awesome, my pin is 4444
Zulip: Supporting OSS at the Recurse Center
Just yesterday I found a haskellcast where the host mentioned IDEs, but said he still uses vi personally. A tiny timeless comment on text editors ensues.

https://youtu.be/4YfkwfZ7AV4?t=1521
> [JustFab] was valued at $1 billion by investors, making it a “unicorn,” Silicon Valley’s most coveted achievement.

Rookie mistake. The most coveted achievement is to exit for over a billion dollars.
VW 404s “clean disel” page, here's the web archive copy
> newlisp does not even have linked lists

No, it does. Linked list are the fundamental data structure; the difference with respect to linked list from other lisps is, in fact, that in newLisp linked lists are fundamental, not just one application of cons cells, so you can't have a cons cell where cdr is not a proper list.
If you want an approach to functional programming that is "concurrent, pragmatic, fun."

https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir

This is a very nice book that introduces functional programming in a way that's very accessible to people coming from Python or Ruby. Elixir is probably more accessible than, say, Haskell or Scala for someone coming from one of those languages.

Have not coded Elixir in anger, but from the look of it the immutability and composability and other benefits of debugging functional programs could be a big win over writing the same program in Ruby or Python.
Feedback for Justin & Team - these types of posts would do really well to have a written explanation of it all along with it.

For me, while I can get a lot out of podcasts, when it comes to business deal specifically (or strategies), I like to have something to look at that I can read 2 or 3 times rather than have to re-listen or take notes during a podcast.
Crazy. Was thinking the same.. "Fab is back alive now as JustFab?"
Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list.
I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.
> For some reason

Wouldn't 99% of people see GPL and move on?
Zoyo, Thanks for the kind words.

Regarding the GPG signing, currently we sign every executable and jar inside the zip file, and rely on SHA checksums to allow users to verify the content. If you think that's insufficient, could I ask that you open a bug explaining your reasoning?

There are ARM builds available at fedora.org. But I agree that getting those available somewhere on eclipse.org would be sweet.

I think high DPI is on the list of things to do. Contributions are always gratefully accepted :)

Thanks for using Eclipse!
Would nice if it were easier to self-host. Requiring Ubuntu 14.04 with 2GB RAM minimum...not terrible, but could point at a lot of work to be done to broaden the appeal. (Edit: And of course, a thank you to Dropbox for releasing it, this does look like a nice little setup)
I was just about to try out Mattermost for our company communications. It integrates with a few things including gitlab, but Zulip seems to have a larger number of integration options, which is awesome. Anybody tried both and have thoughts on them?

I still prefer to host my own infrastructure, and I want to be able to archive and categorize a discussion (after it's happened) for searchability, but a couple of our people want an alternative to email and Google Hangouts for communications, and are pushing for Slack or XMPP. I've never been a big chat user and another of our people doesn't do chat at all (so we'd likely need some kind of email gateway for him). I'm not convinced anything exists that answers all these needs, but maybe I'm just way out of the loop.

Also, do any of these integrate with XMPP? Googling is inconclusive, but it seems neither connects to XMPP directly, which is unfortunate. I'd like to see an open standard backing whatever chat we choose.
Chromebooks only write protect half of the flash, the ME partition is in the other half.
You can nitpick like this about just about anything — "Erlang has immutable data? Yes, but so does Haskell etc.".

That's missing the point that Erlang/OTP (and therefore also Elixir) is attractive because it's already a complete package. It's the intersection of a lot of different, neat technologies that becomes magical.

Try to accomplish the same things in Haskell or Clojure or Go and you'll find that you simply don't have the same tools available to you, and often they cannot be built as well as in Erlang because the foundation wasn't designed for it. And there's always some piece missing.

For example, you can build an approximation of supervisor trees in Go, but since goroutines cannot be killed, you're at the mercy of the runtime. (I also wonder if goroutines scale as well as Erlang's.) Similarly, no one has actually built a functional, immutable, process-oriented call-by-name-and-signature RPC mechanism for Go, so you'll have to invent your own. And so forth.

As a specific example, I was recently investigating OCaml to see if someone had implemented something similar to OTP. I found a couple of promising, nascent projects, but their activity all ended around 2009. Apparently nobody is doing it, even though the language seems damn near perfect for it. Never mind distributed processes; LWT is pretty weak even as an approximation of Go's goroutines.

> [downtime] This doesn't need to be a language feature ...

Erlang's live code replacement changes how you mentally think about versioning, I think. Instead of designing every piece of your infrastructure to transparently transition to a new version — using load balancers, multiple processes accept()ing on the same port, and so forth — you get a first-class language construct. This also opens possibilities beyond code deploys, such as temporarily injecting tracing into a running program. Also not often mentioned is how powerful it is to be able to connect to a running process and run the REPL inside it. (Ruby comes close here, but it's never been something you get for free.)
Google Analytics introduces Postbacks: Inching towards full-service marketing
This is why I said

> where every vehicle on the road is self-driving

Once everything is self-driving, they can coordinate much better than humans and fill roads to their capacity (as well as routing intelligently since we'll be able to have completely accurate traffic predictions, although that demands a level of widespread coordination that won't necessarily come at the same time as 100% self-driving vehicles). You can also throw vans/busses into the mix if the roads still can't keep up, or automated carpooling services.

100% self-driving vehicles will be able to fill roads to capacity for 2 reasons:

1. It's all automated, so most of the common causes for traffic jams simply won't happen (most traffic jams happen spontaneously once the road reaches a high percentage of capacity, rather than for any concrete reason that demands a jam, and self-driving cars will be able to avoid the turbulence that causes the jams).
2. Because it's automated, cars can also drive faster while remaining safe, and drive closer together as well. By the time we're at 100% self-driving cars the driving software will be pretty well-tested, so the only significant risk* will be a mechanical failure in the car, and even if that happens, because everything's automated the surrounding cars will be able to adapt much better.

*I'm talking here about accidental risk. Any kind of intentional issues (hacking the car, throwing heavy stuff at the car from another vehicle, etc) are not particularly relevant here.
AFAIK current ASR systems uses grapheme transcriptions for training their acoustic models. So they have the speech and the transcription "Hello World" and during training, they are automatically converted to phones kind of "hələʊ wɜ:ld" using extensive phonetic dictionaries and some algorithms. 9287 is context dependent phones. like "a" but there is a "b" on the left and "r" on the right. Theoretically for 40 phones you end up 40^3 context dependent phones. But in practice this number is much lower.
> oh, so newlisp is not that much new then.

Well, its new compared to Lisp in general.
A better analogy would be a modern day SSB [0] proposing a constitutional amendment to officially rename federal offices by their standardized acronyms, e.g. "President of the United States" to "POTUS", "Supreme Court of the United States" to "SCOTUS", etc., especially as this would be an equally superficial distraction from this hypothetical neo-SSB's real goal of replacing all Congressmen with AIs and relocating the capitol to Kansas City.

As it happens, "green" exists linguistically, so one is not compelled to wax artfully about the "yellow-blue blades [of grass] laced in dew". However, it used to be that the only way to talk of "orange" was as "yellow-red" or similar, until the simplifying convention of a new word for a distinct entity took hold.

Edit: Further, Urbit's equivalent of the Sunflower State Congress plan gloms enough together that an atomistically novel domain specific vocabulary is at least as useful.

Edit: As one effectively lay to the many disciplines of the professional field of computation, I use this forum to advertise my continued interest in a critical audit of Urbit. If Keean Schupke and Thomas Lord can probe the depths of Carl Hewitt's ActorScript [1] (the true standard for any so accused "obscurantist" software), then a fortiori Urbit's Anathem barrier [2] can be only semi-impermeable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5243

[2] https://xkcd.com/483/
I haven't purchased a site through EF yet, but I've looked at many of their deals and compared to other marketplaces.

They're real businesses with real traffic, cashflow, etc. For as much as the startup world talks about starting a business from scratch, many would do well to pay for something that already has a foundation built for them.
Would be really interesting if one could program a secure way for the individually hosted servers to hook up with each other and verify the correctness of one another while at the same time keeping the messages secure (I guess bitcoins come to mind here..). Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size.
Isn't Java's HCR very limited? You can't introduce incompatible classes, for example.
This definitely counts as a highbrow dismissal!

As I age, I find it harder and harder to remember how easy and natural it is for young people to learn new things: ideas, theories, languages, and yes -- names. Alas, we can't rejuvenate our brains. I know of only one (partial) cure: have your own kids. You'll feel jealous all the time, but it's worth it.

It's painful to admit that I'm probably too old to learn other peoples' new languages. But any new language isn't and can't be designed for 42-year-old silverbacks. It has to be designed for kids -- or at least, people are who are kids now. And believe me, teenagers love this kind of stuff...

[Edit: tptacek, when you edit a comment after posting it, I think it's good etiquette to mark it with an [edit]]?
Oh sure, there's still a need for high-capacity mass transit options. But mass transit cannot go everywhere (or even most places). My argument here is strictly about personal transport (which is what Pods are).
>We run a public buildbot that constantly runs new changes to our code against our test suite on every configuration...

In perforce terminology how is this done? You could use branches, but you could also shelve the change and have the build-bot unshelve it and test.

>We also have a commit queue, which is a way to try a change and have it landed automatically if the try succeeds

What happens if the change becomes incompatible due to other changes over the course of running the test? I assume the commit just fails in this case..
?->building facebook clones->building twitter clones->building slack clones->?

This does look like a good product though. Personally I like the style of this more than slack at first glance. Running your own server and being open source are awesome. I can't wait to see what people build on it.
Yeah good luck with that. I'd say Google's voice recognition is one of their most valuable things. Siri is the nest best but that isn't really close.

It's a shame they haven't done more with it really.
How old school graphics worked [video]
Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.
I thought that was 1999.
I use both Akka and Erlang/BEAM is heavy production. There is a huge difference in multiple aspects.

1. GC and context switching internals. This becomes obvious quickly under load. While you can tune Akka in some ways and Akka will generally kick Erlang's ass in terms of performance, the response times and the number of usable concurrent entities are in favor of Erlang.

2. Libraries - what libraries are you going to use in Akka? JDBC/JPA? java.net? HTTP clients to pass REST requests around to modern integration endpoints? Most if not all are blocking and will bring Akka to it's knees when something freezes. Erlang libs are either non-blocking or blocking doesn't matter because it will handle millions of processes with little overhead.

3. Production ops - deploying and rolling back code in Erlang has tons of gotchas, but you can mostly change code and DB schemas on the fly in production, selectively or even run parts of the production load on your laptop to debug it. And you can deploy changes in small increments many times a day without affecting uptime.

4. Best part is failure recovery. In Akka, the node is a single OS process and single JVM. If you leak a file handle or some resource or lock and a thread blocks nothing will recover you until your OS process dies. Erlang is capable of killing processes everywhere, there is no internal global state. Even if you leak something like a file handle in a process, it will be cleaned up when the process terminates like a real OS process. Even if you leak something in ets/mnesia(the global storage), you can go ahead and clean it up from your erlang shell and production doesn't have to stop. If you leak something in Java and you haven't exposed specific interface to clean it, you will have to kill the JVM.
What annoys me about stuff like Slack is that it's misused. It's made for small teams but I've been 10k people open source projects use it instead of IRC. Of course, it was laggy and they eventually couldn't afford it.
French here, I can guarantee you it's not a solved problem !
Every time I look at Hoon I think "this looks like the same sort of cliff-steep startup followed by 'woah' as vi", but I can never quite get past the cliff as yet.
I would say that it is because we don't reap the benefits of our own work. Our employers do. If you owned a business and had the option of letting me work 3 hours or take a 10 times increase in profits what would you do?

And say you are a good guy, and let me work 3 hours, how would you deal with a competitor who is making 10 times the profit your company is with the same numbers of people and payroll?
I can agree with your reasoning, and I see the value for all parties involved for a relationship to not be disrupted.

Personal story time:

Where I live, the local toll authority has a very bad reputation for their tactics of enforcement (surprise). Well, following the TJMaxx hack, my financial provider saw I shopped there during the window, cancelled the card and got me a new one. Very cool. I updated as many of my accounts as I could remember. Forgot the toll authority, whoops.

They send me a bill in the mail somehow turning 35 unpaid tolls into a fee of $700+ dollars. I wrote them explaning that in good faith I had it on auto pay, and I would be happy to pay the tolls, 1 late fee, and 1 processing charge. A total of ~$70.

They waited until the absolute last day to respond (according to postmark), which meant by the time I got their letter telling me "NO!" they had already sent my information to collections. Eventually a collection letter showed up. I responded in writing noting that the debt was not valid as written ($700+) and if they got the number right, I would pay it...never heard from them again, and it never showed up on my credit report.

Anyway, the feature you describe is good for businesses, but when some businesses act shitty like that toll authority, the feature benefits the consumer in a clear way.
Extreme altruism: caring for strangers at the expense of family
You forgot Glip too.
How does Google get away with not ever supporting previous releases? Don't customers demand this?
>Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size.

This is a group chat. It's value is in being restricted in reach and/or size to the group (team, startup, enterprise) deploying a version of it.
And none of them manage to replicate even the most basic of IRC's network solutions in regards to user count scaling and server network combination.
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277938 and marked it off-topic.
Ask HN: How to find open source project to contribute
Hello hackers,

I'd like to be involved in open source project as developer, but I don't know which one.
I use C/C++ on my daily basis, try to write Go/Python scripts.

How did you choose your open-source project? There are some many of them...
Something like this (or rather, the reverse) was Walt Disney's plan for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow he envisioned: https://youtu.be/UEm-09B0px8?t=15m29s