skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Moreover, the idea that Urbit thinks of the network as "a series of procedure calls somehow knitted together" is a very, very gross distortion. (I guess if you think of "'80s networking" as RPC-heavy, you might have sort of a point about that '80s thing. For me, RPC is already in the OS layer.)

Granted, the high-level interface you want to present to the programmer is something like RPC. The two application-level communication paradigms in Urbit are a transactional "poke" and publish-subscribe.

A key difference is that a successful poke (a) contains no return data and (b) is piggybacked on the packet ack. Actually the whole transaction is piggybacked on the packet ack ("single acknowledgment" or "E2E acknowledgment.") Oh yeah, that's another feature that crosses OS/protocol lines.

This lets us produce a particularly non-leaky network abstraction against not procedure/function calls, but Arvo's stacked event calls (if normal events are a lot like GOTOs, Arvo events are more like GOSUBs). So it's not quite RPC. But it's fair to be reminded of RPC.

But at the actual packet layer, a network is a bus for sharing large (but not too large) unsigned integers, which may or may not arrive anywhere. (Network programming is quite a bit easier, by the way, given a bus-width-independent language that can just model packets and blobs as big atoms, then operate on them functionally.)

Effectively, a packet you hear is something that someone said, not something that someone told you to do. Hearing it is learning something. Idempotence at the packet level is crucial, because if someone tells you something twice, it's the same as telling you once. The protocol exists to answer the question: what happens to me if I learn this number?

It's only a short step from here to defining the entire state of an endpoint as a permanently fixed function of the list of numbers you've learned. The computer's state is a function of its packet log. What could be more natural? Why would anyone define a computer in any other way?

But of course, defining a computer as a pure function of its packet history requires you to define its VM and OS as part of defining the protocol.

And a general rule of protocol design is that your chance of achieving a compatible protocol is inversely proportional to the square of the length of the specification. It's also inversely proportional to the extensibility of the protocol.

So you're going to squeeze all of Unix into your RFC? Or even all of JS, bless its soul? And again, you wind up looking for something like Urbit. You may just be interested in the cow head, but you can't get to it without building the whole cow.
Narrowing. Read all about it: C-x n C-h

Narrowing to defun is particularly useful. It usually knows what "defun" means in language.
> And what precisely is a fact, but an argument about the state of the world being a specific way?

Thankfully not. A "fact" is something that can be measured in such a way that even if you are totally antagonistic to my arguments, we will get the same result.

Now your "argument" may attempt to prove the irrelevancy or inadequacy of my facts, but the facts themselves should be unfudgeable.
Parallel computing with CUDA and Thrust
You forgot h.323. On the surface, it looks to me like a "saner SIP", or XMPP with working, standard audio/video support -- but I might be wrong.

I'm not sure why people claim IRC lacks archiving support. Isn't a bit like saying SMTP lacks archiving support? And doesn't basic IRC always go through a server? So there shouldn't be any technical barrier against a server archiving all chats (private and in channels)?

As for NNTP, I'm not sure if NNTP over TLS, peering with only trusted sites (aka for internal use) would make sense or not. I never did use Usenet much. At least the D language forums have made an effort to bring NNTP into the www era[d].

It's interesting that no one seems to do a decent job of (server side) archiving for XMPP -- partly I think it's because as you state, the XEPs have gotten out of hand -- and partly XMPP appears to be especially popular for users that want privacy -- and treat ephemeral chat as a feature.

[d] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

(format note, you probably should've just listed the protocols in separate paragraphs, as indented blocks with lines longer than ~50 characters doesn't format very well on hn).
I notice many blogs and wikis have this problem. It's like they have a separate piece of software for that component of their site, and don't bother to integrate it with their main page.
Show HN: Exclusive search engine for web apps
we are targeting C99 via the new Clang / C2 hybrid compiler. We demoed it on stage at CppCon this week.
Isn't that just a statement of contemporary popular standards? They're not rules set in stone. The definitions of "underage" and "consent" are not nearly as clear cut as you might hope. Lots of people (in couples) have sex as a kind of trade for something they want. Is that consensual? What if it's a trade for something really really important to them? What if it's a trade to avoid being verbally abused by your partner? What if it's for money you need to survive?

Regarding age of consent, what if a mature 15yr old seduces a naive and vulnerable 21yr old and causes lasting emotional harm? How is that "none of my business" but the reverse isn't?

What if a 16 year old from England travels to America and has sex with a 20 year old? Is that OK (UK law) or not (US law)?

What you call a revolution sounds more like the way it already is for many people, and is full of arbitrary and changeable definitions that unfairly discriminate against harmless activity while also allowing harmful activity.
Since a riverside highway is usually several meters above the water level, an underpass offers direct access to water. An overpass, on the other hand, would need to come down steeply on the other side, which is not only inconvenient but also very ugly.

But I've heard that some species don't like to go through tunnels, because predators might lurk in the dark corners (or something like that). So the architecture will have to adapt to the species it is designed for.
Sure there is. A person of enough collective benefit becomes valuable enough to the surrounding world that they can be ignorant of their own selfish needs. They will simply be satisfied. You needn't be sacrificial about it. That wouldn't be altruistic. It's just a strategy that can become sort of a fetish. I wouldn't call it a fantasy. It's just got some blind spots that promote a pleasant state of mind. If you're not aware of your own envy for such a state you might not notice yourself contriving reasons for it's absurdity or invalidity. It's really more of an ignorance. While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined. You will always be ignorant. To be so affronted by your own ignorance that you only conceptualize it to immediately and compulsively destroy it is a gross limitation. You have the opportunity to accept more ignorance in yourself such that you can then optimize it.
Nathaniel Boronstein has interesting take on this. You might describe him as an old-school left-winger, as anti-war as they get (ok, that's my description, not sure if he'd agree!), but somehow he ended up consulting for NATO, right smack in the middle of defense-contracting madness.

He found the experience rather surprising in many ways, and you might say his viewpoint was a bit more nuanced afterwards....

http://guppylake.com/~nsb/WarSpy/SpyInHouseOfWar.pdf
Any species capable of interstellar travel would probably also be capable of harnessing enough power to reduce our entire planet to ashes on a whim. The legal implications would probably be that the concept of human law is no longer relevant if they turn out to be hostile.

Paraphrasing a comment on that site paraphrasing a line from the movie Battleship: "If aliens show up, it'll be like an atomic bomb against an anthill, and we're the ants."
A couple of Zulip questions:

1) Is there any support for federation? At first glance it looks like every installation might have multiple servers, but more for balancing load, than federation?

2) How well is the protocol specified? How hard would it be to par down the requirements to eg: just python and sqlite/lmdb or redis (or zodb...)? Say if one wants to support just ~100 users or so?
Actually, alloca is even less portable than VLAs.
I accept session cookies only, I keep Javascript turned off except when I am forced to turn it on (banking, etc.), and I really do not like frames.

If there is some site with frames that I willingly use regularly, I just bust out of the frame and access the contents directly.

Hence what you are describing does not sound like something I desperately need to do.

The only way I can answer your question is if you give me an example: a website with ads to block. Then I'll test it.

I should note though that cookies are not ads; the original topic was blocking ads - you are shifting the goalposts.
I've been working on this side project. It is a little search engine for indexing web apps/services ONLY. I keep going to blogs & forums to collect all web apps URL and put them together. If traditional search engines take you to the front-end of a website, this search engine will take you to the back-end. As a result, you will mostly end up in the login page of each app. Please try out and let me know your opinion!
we made a bunch of improvements to build throughput especially for incremental builds. many improvements to our handling of template code as well. -- steve, vc dev mgr
its features are comparable to old Lisps from the 70's, prior to Scheme and Common Lisp. Nothing really new here at all and lots of old bugs passing for features.
Or people with health problems unlikely to retire later.
Depends on how much gravitas their spaceship names have. If it's sufficiently lacking, sign me up.
see replies elsewhere. We demo'd C99 support via Clang / C2 on stage at CppCon.
How about New Zealand?

IIRC I heard that some kiwis actively encourage drivers to run over anything that ventures onto the road, since any medium-sized animal that doesn't have wings is an invasive species in New Zealand. Not sure if it was a joke.
>The technique to edit genomes is only a decade old

In America, this tech will be patented and regulated to within an inch of its life. I'm hoping China will be more sensible.
In Czech/Slovak Republic, it would sound quite preposterous and pathetic if someone claimed "and this will change the world" or "this will make the world a better place", so thankfully we do not usually get this nonsense, although generally the pathetic PR-speak continues to creep in into public communications. I recall there is a nice Czech song by the old group Nedvědi+Brontosauři with a verse going "...I wished to rebuild the world, yeah that happens, so many of us did and still nothing...".
Why would you want to be a landlord in SF? Even if its not rent controlled, a bad tenant is going to be a nightmare to get rid of.
Yeah, he starts by talking about how the power dynamic is so key, especially in sales recruiting, and can get in the way. Good point. But as you say his proposed solutions all seem to put him, the interviewer, in more of a power position.
Uh, "request a demo"? I was expecting a little bit more of juicy info in those pages after reading some bold statements. I can't sign up either (even if you tell me in green letters no credit card is required), sorry. You should have just provided maybe a better overview of the service in the landing page. Dunno, maybe a full-featured video of the revolutionary features described there. I really think a nice detailed video of the unique features of the service would be great to have. It's hard to visualize what you mean with those static screenshots and text.
Which seems like a paraphrase of a scene in Contact, on why scientists ("egghead types" in the movie) believe aliens would be friendly to us.

Ellie: "We pose no threat to them. It would like us going out of our way to destroy a few microbes on some ant hill in Africa."

Drummond: "Interesting analogy. And how guilty would we feel if we went and destroyed a few microbes on an ant hill in Africa?"

I know many find that movie cliche, but I actually loved it. One of my favorites. The book was superior, but the movie got a lot of my friends talking about science in a non-judgmental way, and as a total space nerd, that made my day.
Persona was great and it's a bit sad to see it dead after investing a lot of time in it but - one big architectural problem was there was no way to support delegation (the problem OAuth was originally designed to solve).
I think this is great, previously it took long time to open after saying "OK, Google".
(1) Not currently, though you can certainly imagine doing it and having it work well; the core data model doesn't change very much over time.

(2) There's a reasonably well-specific API, and you could imagine building an independent implementation that fit that API and feeling good about doing so. But I feel like that would probably be a lot of work and you could probably much more easier achieve whatever your actual goal without paring down the dependencies very much.

E.g. the relatively high minimum recommended RAM for a Zulip server is mostly due to running 20 Python processes for all the queue workers, most of which are idle all the time. If we wanted to decrease the memory requirements, there's a variety of ways to solve that problem directly that are a lot easier than doing a rewrite :).
I don't really disagree with you... but I often wonder how much Slack actually adds to IRC. We use it at work (and as a 100% remote person in a mostly co-located team, it is a godsend). I can't really think of anything in Slack that wouldn't be easy to implement with IRC bots.

Persistent history is easy. Email notification is easy. Storage of various assets like text snippets and pictures is easy. I've never used any, but I'm assuming that at least one of the web interfaces for IRC works well...

I think the main thing that Slack has done is package it up so that you don't need to cobble together 100 different things -- which is, of course, very valuable. Or at least more valuable than the monthly cost that they charge ;-)

To be honest, I would really rather be using free software. I would be quite happy to pay for a service that made it easy for me (as Slack does), but software freedom is valuable to me.
This has to be the nail on the coffin. They're spying on our porn. Those are personal details about myself I would never share with anybody and wouldn't want anybody to know. Fine, keep an image of my penis, but knowing details about my porn usage?
A human has to refill the bottles.
racket is a superset of scheme. I write perfectly valid scheme code and run in racket even with the #lang racket tag... now, let's not get started on RxRS compatibility...
wadr why is any of this "bad". I agree 100% with everything you said about built in assumptions in our laws yet I come to the opposite conclusion that such laws ought to be diminished. IMO the assumption of stability creates a de facto serfdom in which people are tied to the land and don't even realize it. If the best opportunity of your life suddenly popped up half way around the globe, how fast can you be on a plane? For me the answer is "next flight out".

I do not mean to say that having a permanent traditional life is less desirable to some people. I simply think that the laws of our land should respect freedom of choice and thus not bias any particular lifestyle. I think it is especially egregious to have laws telling people what they can and cannot do with their own home in a manner that has no tangible effect on their neighbors. I find it dubious (and empirically unsupported) that the presence of airbnb guests has any measurable effect on any neighborhood.
Aka how pretty much everybody stores logs already.
VLAs in reality are just as dangerous as allocating from the heap. I would agree not everything should be allocated on the stack, but you can overflow the heap just as you can overflow the stack.

Unless people are completely irresponsible, they query the stack limit and subtract the current stack bound before using the heap for large objects. Freeing memory is even simpler than using the heap, and faster as well. I think the only real concern is people being responsible about using them.
Another mechanical approach that is relatively cheap and doesn't require refilling bottles is to use a closed system of a hydraulic cylinder and two exposed freon tanks, one facing east and one facing west: http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/solar-tracker-zmaz77ndzgo...

These mechanical approaches are generally awesome because they hold up well in bad weather.

If you wanted to go all out I don't see why you couldn't combine the gravity system and the freon system and track on 2 axes! (Anybody got a clever idea how to make one system or the other neatly handle the axis corresponding to the height of the sun?)
This guy would be fired if he were objective. Of course he sees his opposition as unethical.
Emacs org-mode supports a lot of languages [1] and you can mix and match within a file. Howard Abrams literate devops is an interesting example of what org-mode code blocks can do. [2][3]

Org-mode also allows embedding images or source blocks in languages like LaTeX that resolve to rendered images.

[1]: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages.html

[2]: http://www.howardism.org/

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljNabciEGg
> But I don't suspect they have revolutionary breakthroughs ala the NSA with crypto.

I wouldn't be so sure - GCHQ recruits heavily from Cambridge and Oxford, and I once met a Mathematics PhD who told me in the UK his two main options for employment were academia or the service. They have a lot of crypto talent there and they're not working on the big data systems talked about here.
Algolia (YC W14) is hiring a senior Rails engineer
> India and Africa have enormous birth rates,

I don't get it. India's birth rate was 2.4 children per woman in 2012 and 2.3 children per woman in 2013, barely above replacement. We should expect it to get down below replacement rate in the next five years.

It looks like your post contains interesting thoughts, but it's hard to take the rest of it seriously when there's such extremely obvious inaccuracy.
Indeed. In a situation where the people who have been elected operate in a way that benefits corporations or special interests rather than the people who have elected them, there has to be some way for the people to override the decisions. That's what the referendum process is for.

Similarly, a private right of action is meant to deal with situations when the city isn't willing to act. The article makes valid points about the downsides of this, but it's also an accountability mechanism. Should it apply in this case? Seems like a good question for the voters.
Food porn wasn’t what Wexford man was hoping it would be
If you can't authenticate the platform, you can't defend the user, end of story.

The web "works" insofar as it does because of the margins of abuse are tolerable.

I'm sure those working in "ad tech" have different ideas of how tolerable the abuse is.

I've always wondered about how banks deal with it, but having read through my bank's online ToS, I'm happy with my level of liability, because they're clearly willing to take on more risk than I would given the situation.
But I never suggested any of those statements you are making.

What I was referring to is that Google's "product" is offered free to the user.

What you refer to highlights the importance of the question: if their "product" is not free to produce, then why don't they charge users for it?

No matter how well Google delivers your search results and email, if they cannot serve ads, they are in trouble. They have hundreds of millions of loyal users of these websites, but Google does not ask users for money.

If they did, would you pay?
Slightly off topic, but recently watched Citizenfour - great documentary about Snowden and why he chose to reveal all of this information. It has real footage of Snowden himself right before the leaks, communicating via PGP with journalists, etc.

Even though I already knew most of the stuff, rehashing it all over again makes it so much more impactful. Overall, highly recommended for anyone who cares about our world now and in the future.

P.S.
The government's idea that by somehow ingesting all of this data and effectively spying on everyone collectively will somehow protect us the helpless citizens sounds pretty bonkers (to use an UK phrase) to me. It's all just wasteful money spending as usual.

Stop the scaremongering.
Yes I only meant in context of this program which seems so reprehensible. I don't think anyone has anything against them doing crypto.
>Even if all those problems could be overcome, it would be prohibitively expensive to deploy enough of the airships to protect the United States along its borders and coasts.

Is this even a proposal? I thought they were mostly worried about protecting their own butts in Washington.
> This is a classic case of the just world fallacy.

Who is experiencing the bias here, the founders of the representative democracy or me for pointing to the political theory? I assume you're talking about some system that isn't the US government, because otherwise your recollection of history is way off.
I understand. And it did improve the comment, so I forgive you. But it's just irritating when someone hangs a fat fastball over the plate, you whack it, then find out that the pitch magically turned into a curveball and all you've hit is a ground-ball single.

An XS Nock shirt is a dress for my daughter, but she loves the "code." I guess all kids are different. But you never know what they're ready to learn until you try to teach them.
I brush with circles using more force on the downstroke for the top teeth or upstroke for the bottom teeth.
I wonder about this too. I'm not even sure what this feature is supposed to do?

As best I can gather, this ties signing to keybase.io (which is anchored in a GPG-key). But it's unclear to me how this is an improvement for users. If you sign anything with a nacl sub-key, that can't be verified with gpg? It's not even clear if this will work off-line, when keybase is down, when keybase have revoked your account...?

> Technically, though, this is not a normal 2fa: the devices will share a secret with just each other.

This is exactly 2fa: two devices sharing a secret? Normally your idp and your TOTP app/token share a secret, now two of your devices share a secret?

I very much welcome someone hammering out a standard equivalent to GPG, but based on NaCL, that is: have a master key (off-line), have a private-sub-key (on-line, protected by smart card/pass phrase), enable further sub-keys -- and a companion tool (set) for verifying up the chain (like gpg2 --verify file.asc, but with file.asc being backed by a (device) sub-key, signed by the private key, signed by the "master" off-line key -- and allow for revoking "from this key and down" (eg: I lost my phone, revoke phone-key, my laptop got hacked, revoke my sub-key, and all device keys...)).

But I'm not sure if that is what keybase is trying to do?

I'm not even sure if it really makes sense to keep backwards comparability with GPG -- the main thing would probably be to be compatible with GPG agent and smartcards. For most everything else, I think a new standard would be a good thing. Perhaps with some kind of bridge, for easier transition (eg: nacl-gpg --verify file.asc, which gives similar output/return-codes to gpg, while file.asc can be signed by a "nacl-key" trusted by a gpg key. But the complexity would probably make for a less secure system until everyone could just move on to the new standard).
Microsoft Excel turns 30