skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Does that at least work for all Unicode characters that support case distinction...

Erlang was designed and first written back in the 1980's, so characters that fall within the latin1 encoding are the only acceptable characters in atom and variable names. However, UTF-8 source files are fully supported, as is Unicode in lists and binaries. There is a proposal to make Unicode characters accepted for atom and variable names, but it hasn't been accepted yet, as the details are (as you allude to) tricky. [0]

> The designer of a non-clusterfuck syntax would be offended by [the conclusion that I came to].

I can't agree with that. Initially, I thought that the case-significance was strange, but -as I used the language- I quickly found that the ability to distinguish at a glance between an atom and non-atom type is very valuable. These are things that you don't understand until you learn about the language, and maybe actually use it some.

Erlang's syntax is strange, but not even within ICBM distance to being a clusterfuck. Frankly, Python's significant whitespace has caused me far more lost hours than any strangeness in Erlang's syntax.

> I only formed this hypothesis because I'm jaded.

Heh. I expect that the fact that you've likely seen many imperative and some functional languages in your day, and that Erlang is -despite its syntax quirks- a language that is rather well designed and makes sense once you look at it for a few minutes, has far more to do with it than your disaffectedness. :) [1]

From your other comment:

> I promise you, I will not write another word anywhere about Erlang.

That's a pity. Erlang is rather quite good at what it's designed to do, and a real pleasure to use. Many folks report that Elixir is at least as rewarding to work with.

[0] http://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0040.html

[1] As an aside, I note that in your opening comment, you mention that the syntax is "incomprehensible rubbish", but yet you correctly determined a pertinent feature of the language syntax in very little time at all. This kinda puts the lie to your claims of incomprehensibility. ;)
Offtopic, but I think it's high time to reverse the discounts - students should have it more expensive than employed people. Right now in my country, as a student you get discounts everywhere - in restaurations, cinemas, in transportation, etc. And the country also suffers from having way too many people with degrees and no job. Those discounts serve as a big incentive for people to stay in "education" (it's hard to call it an actual education) as long as they can.
'determine' does not mean 'change' - does it?
"Hacker" "News"
> What is the printing technology? Typebar, daisy-wheel, dot-matrix?

Judging by the ribbon cartridge type and the spec of 20-22 characters per second I expect they're daisywheel printers. Also if you look closely at the clear cased versions you can see the head assembly which has a daisywheel loaded

http://www.swintec.com/clear-typewriters/21-2410cc-michigan....

http://www.swintec.com/15-print-wheels

> What does the "display" provide, one line of type you can correct before printing?

If you have a read of the spec here:

http://www.swintec.com/48-2640-electronic-display-typewriter...

700-character Correction Memory ( within 10 lines)

You can do some basic correction. I used to maintain/repair this kind of thing back in the late 80's early 90's when I worked as a field service engineer. Some more advanced units could store whole documents and do more clever things.
The federal government, defense in particular, has been moving to awarding large omnibus-style "contract vehicles" to a set of companies (like a first gate check), then out of those contract vehicles awarding Firm Fixed-Price contracts.

It helps stop the government from telling the contractor to do something new half-way through the contract, and for the contractor to then bump billing without new competition (the race condition leading to a 400% expected cost in a jet engine for example...). Instead, the contract terms are battled over in the beginning to line out exactly what the contractor will deliver, and up to how much they can bill for it (the government, and public, always appreciate it if you can find a way to not spend all the money).

If the government decides, part way through the contract period, that it wishes the contractor to do something extra, a new supplemental contract is drawn up and new extra funding requested and maybe approved. This supplement generally has to be published I think, so other contractors and watch-dogs can call foul if the extra work is significant enough that it should be re-competed.

The risk is that if the terms aren't fantastic and the goal of the contract complex, that you can end up in a quagmire of supplemental contract nightmares.

Some further reading on the benefits and risks of the method:

0 - memo with recommendations of FFP as a more prominent consideration in new contracts to reduce potential costs to the government.

1 - presser on Office of Management and Budgets' directives to retool contract staffs toward FFP.

2 - Discussion in WSJ of why it's not always the best idea.

3 - best practices in the contract writing process.

0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/pr...

1: http://archive.federaltimes.com/article/20091102/ACQUISITION...

2: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487041215045745936...

3: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/procurement_guide_pbsc
> (From Article) Congress wants to phase out the use of the RD-180 engine for national security launches by 2019 as a result of Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

I have't been paying close attention, but maybe you know this. Didn't Russia actually ban export of engines for military launches over Crimea before congress?

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/15/us-space-mili...
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-russian-rocket-ban-201...
Preschool Coding Classes Latest Craze for Chinese Parents
These models are based on cortical columns, and therefore only pertain to cortical activity. It would be interesting to see how other parts of the brain could be modeled, like the thalamus and hippocampus.

Anyhow, it would also be great to see if this could reproduce the ocular dominance column patterns.
React_on_rails gem uses webpack, react, redux, server rendering
Not sure if "principle" is the best word, but I wanted to keep the post short. Better would be to say that it's against assumptions which make free markets at least theoretically efficient.

The other response to you is correct, and on top of that:

When you have discrimination, you're effectively making multiple different "equilibria" on the demand curve (instead of one intersection with supply curve). Once you admit multiple equilibria, all the bets about efficiency (and also fairness) are off.

Alternatively you can look at it as follows: The free market can be characterized by existence of market price, on which the participants converge... If you have discrimination, they won't converge on market price and so you don't really have free market (free as in speech).

> Due to one time expenses, some kinds of goods cannot exist without discriminatory pricing.

I don't think it's true. Linux does exist, for instance.
Fascinating reading, thanks for that.
Teaching a 3-Year-Old to Program Without a Computer Screen
What's Behind the Exodus from Rent the Runway?
> We're all used to the physical metaphor of keys as security, and needing a physical key to get into things.

I was hoping this will go away in my lifetime.
If you have HP-48/49 you can get an HP-41 emulator from http://www.hrastprogrammer.com/emulators.htm. You can do synthetic programming on it.
Maybe try Elixir if you don't like the syntax of Erlang, because it's really a pleasure to work with Elixir/Erlang.
Well, it has 2GBs of RAM so (given you can install a different OS) and that will be the limiting factor for the vast majority of recently released games. You might be able use it for some retro or minimal games though. There are plenty of alternatives, which I was surprised by, on Amazon around $100-150 with Windows installed[0] so you might have some luck.

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-Compute-Stick-Windows-Upgrade/...
No one signed a covenant saying that they would point their eyeballs towards ads, be they web surfers with ad block or television audiences with TiVo.

The flip side being, no one (or very few) ever signed a covenant saying they would not spy on you and sell the information you handed over to them, intentionally or not.

It is not stealing to install ad blockers. It is not stealing to fingerprint browsers.
But on the contrary, template languages are useful because it lets you trivially templatize any text-based file regardless of the file syntax (as long as the template delimiters are customizable, or at least don't conflict with the file syntax). Building HTML? Sure, use a proper builder API. But for almost anything else, templates can be quite effective.
A Guide to Understanding Security Modeling in Trusted Systems (1992)
The Chromebit is similar to the Asus C201 ("Flip") Chromebook.

Chromecast has very different lineage.
I wonder what the price of entry is to that market. If they're doing something so obviously flawed and if the price of entry is low, it strikes me it'd be relatively easy to make something decent that isn't crippled and sell it with all the bells and whistles.
I mostly agree that this is a solution in search of a problem, but I have two problems these things solve for me...

Not relevant for this one, but I've been keeping my eye on this market since it has cheap x86 devices for doing dynamic malware analysis on real hardware, rather than VMs which can be detected. Sadly I haven't seen anything with PXE or Intel's network boot tech, which would make life a lot easier, but maybe I can flash one.

I might get this one to manage app store uploads/SaaS deployments for some side projects, since having all my key material isolated on a totally separate computer would make me feel a lot better that other people won't get as easily hacked if I mess up the security of my dev machine.
I hadn’t heard of any of the tools in the post, so when I read the first paragraph, I thought it was satire of the proliferation of bizarrely named JavaScript frameworks.
> This is standard in aviation (which is why structural failure airplane crashes of production aircraft are very rare) but something Space-X wasn't doing.

That is going to require sources. Primary responsibility for quality is going to have been the original manufacturer's. SpaceX of course will have had to (and I don't believe didn't) done their own check testing of components, but you write a contract with a supplier to put the risk on them for the timely supply of to-spec and to-tolerance parts.

And then you take it to your supplier when they've failed to meet their contracted failure rates, which could also be called "tightening up your supply chain."

I'm sure there'll be more quality involvement on SpaceX's side but I'd be awfully surprised if they weren't generally following industry standards.

Failures of novel engineering happens sometimes.
Show HN: Tired of Lorem Ipsum, I made my own generator with badass movie quotes
Looks comical at first, but this type of thing can have great benefits for people who are not hardcore techies. Things can be done with a physical metaphor in everyday language. Shut down this server, make a copy, and so forth.
UK's coal plants to be phased out within 10 years
I didn't see any assembler code in libmill, nor does it use ucontext. Not sure what you are talking about here?
Some (older) people have biases towards laptops (since their experience is limited mostly to older crappy laptops) and just suggesting that a laptop would be better than their current, ancient, desktop is met with refusal and denial.

I know this situation since my mother falls into this camp. When she last moved I tried to convince her to buy a laptop, but she refused. Later I got her Chromebook which she likes on travels, but still refused to use at home, but continuously complains how slow her desktop is.

I'm seriously considering if getting one of these for her would fix the situation. She could still use her old keyboard, mouse and display, but I bet performance would go through the roof (compared to her old PC), but I don't know how compatible things like printers and scanners are with this and would running mouse, keyboard, printer, scanner and external HDD off of same USB port introduce some bottlenecking
man this is so good .... in the future we will have kids playing/working for free (just joking)
Currently the Broadcom GL driver and Webkit2 do not play well together. http://dabase.com/blog/Webkit_on_Rpi2/

I got burnt by this.
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."

― William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
I remember that roughly around the time Google declared that they were deactivating XMPP federation, I was suddenly unable to make -IIRC- s2s connections between Google Talk and my XMPP server, and message delivery failed 100% of the time. This situation persisted for quite a while (weeks? months?), and I -having noone to talk to- shut down my server.

Google might have changed their mind and quietly started federating again. I haven't checked in ages. Guess I have another project to complete this weekend. :)
Each container should have a cake inside. That should solve the problem.
> the guy who wrote the education curriculum ought to be paid

He absolutely should be!

> how are they supposed to get a reasonable amount of money without denying non-payers access to their works

Good question! But I don't think there is a good answer to it that doesn't involve society at large, in one way or another. Why is enforcing DRM in order to protect some monopoly by society at large better than community investment into the technology by society at large?

> the "other ways" that we're trying to steer manufacturers away from are not a clearly delineated set of behaviors

I think that's case with all laws and all human behaviors. That's why we have judges, to make judgements.

> they'll cripple them in hardware

I think they should try that. So far they didn't - that's why they are doing it in software, because they now can.

> two different products with different features at two different prices

Yep, and if that happens, it's bad for economy overall, that's what I argue.
It's a pity that it needs a power adapter though, with the standard USB port not sufficing for the needed power. That ruins the feng shui.
really nice and inspiring.
- how did you reach out to so many customers ?
- i see the UX of your apps are good. did you do them or you got a design agency doing it for you ?
It limits useful things that can be done, but comes up with worse way to do the same.

Code/view reuse for example is done through partials in template languages: you can either learn `<%= render partial: "filename" %>` syntax for ERB (with Rails), or `include filename` syntax for JADE, or the `{% include template_name %}` syntax in Django.

Or you could simply use functions: compose them, curry them, put them in objects and call them, and even remote execute them; it is all code.

Logic is similar: every template language has their own syntax for conditionals and loops. Learning these does not teach us anything new nor make us better at our craft. These are simply useless tediums.

Another pet peeve is Template Inheritance. Jade has `block` and `extends` keywords; RABL similarly has an `extend` keyword. Programming languages have an arguably better way to do inheritance.

This is my rule of thumb: if a library/template language brings its own semantics for inheritance, be wary.
I don't use Tcl but that looks nice.

> You can do concurrency on a single thread. This is the message I find it hard to get across when explaining CSP concurrency libraries.

Heck, there's an entire language built around single-threaded concurrency! Compiles to C, coincidentally - it targets embedded platforms. It's not quite CSP style though, it takes after Esterel and uses synchronous reactive concurrency:

http://ceu-lang.org/

However, as soon as you have multiple Céu programs communicating (for example, multiple Arduino's) the program-to-program communication is fairly CSP-like.
I think the fact that it's purely in software now only serves to highlight how market segmentation is a shitty practice. It's like planed obsolescence - just because it's standard practice, doesn't mean it's ok.
A daring lander for Jupiter’s icy moon
Unpacking Platform Cooperativism
That's a good and interesting point. I guess I have less moral problem with it if the item in question is a final product (such as work of art) than a tool, and if the price difference is not large (say up to half of order of magnitude).

But I actually think student discounts are wrong for moral reasons, because they discriminate against non-students, but I do find discounts for young people and older people (in most cases) acceptable.
Reddit is not kind of like forums, it's almost Usenet ported to the web.
An easier way to publish engaging content online
SILENT PARTNER quiets snoring noise like magic
> I think they should try that. So far they didn't - that's why they are doing it in software, because they now can.

I heard it's common in computer parts manufacturing - they just add an additional production step where a laser cuts through some traces on the PCB to disconnect the part they don't want you to use in the cheaper model. Apparently customers got too good at reversing the softer methods of market segmentation.
If you know the limiter, you know why it isn't 10x. It's CPU bound. It's disk bound and we're on a single disk. etc.

How do we actually make it 10x? is a follow on question, but as you say, not one that may be easy to answer!
I find that it helps me to think of objects as tiny machines rather than places to hold data.

It then becomes easier to reason about which classes make sense and which don't. A "User" class doesn't make sense, but UserTable (machine to access the users) and Authenticator (machine to authenticate them) do. A BlogPost class doesn't make sense, but a PostRenderer (machine to render blog posts) does.

OOP then becomes about decomposing computers into smaller communicating computers, not about lumping together data and all the possible code related to that data. Which incidentally means that there will be things that are pretty much just dumb data / facts (e.g. User)
Thank you so much for this :)
Death to Ugly Android Screenshots
It is a fair point. But one has to be careful where the balance is.

In the beginning, it would be a text file with a few string interpolation in between, which means we insert logic inside content, and it can remain in the native format.

But over time, as in the HTML generated for web apps, the balance of content inverses. What begins mostly as some logic inside predominantly static content, becomes some static content inside a lot of logic. At that point, it is best to make code the primary medium.
Yep! It is extremely crucial to be positive in the face of tragedy. I think this is where I will start from. Thanks
App Design Cost in USA, UK, Ukraine, India
Yes. I think it is important to come in terms with such things ourselves and then move ahead. Thanks for reminding me that.
Url changed from https://github.com/MeeBlip, which points to this, which gives more context.
Curvature is not "measured with respect to [an embedding] space". If you have a triangle and the sum of the angles is not 180 degrees that's a non-Euclidian (curved) space.
> But I don't see any facilities for waiting on locks, semaphores, etc

There's a very good reason for this. First of all, you can use file descriptors as locks, semaphores, condition variables, etc using pipe(2) and other functions. On Windows you can use WaitForMultipleObjects, etc on Mutex objects.

But select/epoll/kqueue/WaitForMultipleObjects is a system call that goes in to the kernel. That is very inefficient if you want e.g. mutual exclusion using a mutex. In a modern OS, a mutex (or CriticalSection in Windows) is implemented using a futex ("fast userspace mutex"), which is just a spinlock in userspace that only calls to kernel if the mutex is contended. An uncontended futex can be locked and unlocked in less than 20 nanoseconds. A system call can be 100x slower than that.

Some languages, e.g. Haskell have a green threading system that implements mutexes and i/o in a consistent way with i/o using a userspace scheduler. But this depends on language and runtime implementation.
Sorry for the ignorance of a newbie, but I couldn't find any info on whether libmill does anything similar to the M:N multiplexing of light-weight threads upon OS threads?
> it's morally wrong to demand that people who build things should be expected to share the thing they build

They don't have to share them! If you want to invent something and keep it secret, by all means, be my guest! This only concerns people who specifically build things for others (i.e. already sharing them).
It's also in snake case, whereas JavaScriptuses camelCase (with the odd exception, like title case prototypes and lowercase event handlers).
ORWL: A physically secure computer
$1 billion next year. Assume 60% YoY growth -> doing about $600mm this year? Say average $12 a ride...that's 50m rides this year -> 137k rides a day/65 cities served -> 2100 rides/city/day.

That's definitely lower than I expected.
Well, I'am an atheist, but I wouldn't directly compare Christianity to Islam just because they are two Abrahamitic Religions. For example a huge difference is the way the "holy" books of those religions were created and are treated. The content of the Koran is more or less dictated by one person and is seen as the direct word of the religion's god (this is a mainstream islamic view). Bible was written over centuries and is only seen by a fringe group as the direct word of god.

What is your motivation in protecting islam? Why the finger pointing to Christianity and other religions? Sure, they also got problems, but do we currently really have a huge problem with those religions? What you are doing is like saying: "Well national socialism isn't that bad because other totalitarian ideologies also are stupid. Look at communism and how many dead people resultet because Stalin distorted the true teachings of marxism. See, national socialism isn't the problem."