skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I convinced patio11 to tell everybody that Tarsnap was awesome but far too cheap.

Well, sort of. Tarsnap was quite profitable by the time Patrick wrote that blog post; but its growth has always been driven primarily by word of mouth, and blog posts like Patrick's are a large part of that. The only sort of advertising I've found to be useful is sponsoring open source software.
Au contraire, I'm happy that the last-seen-state is preserved and I'm given the option to refresh to see the current state should I chose to.
Aleph – an open source analytics platform for redshift from Lumosity
Jaron Lanier mentioned you as part of the, "humanistic thread within computing." I understood him to mean folks who have a much broader appreciation of human experience than the average technologist.

Who are "humanistic technologists" you admire? Critics, artists, experimenters, even trolls... Which especially creative technologists inspire you?

I imagine people like Jonathan Harris, Ze Frank, Jaron Lanier, Ben Huh, danah boyd, Sherry Turkle, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Rushkoff, etc....
I've been constantly surprised about how what I called "object-oriented" and "system-oriented" got neutered into Abstract Data Types, etc., (I think because people wanted to retain the old ways of programming with procedures, assignment statements, and data structures. These don't scale well, but enormous amounts of effort have been expended to retain the old paradigms ...
What most recent topic in the field of programming languages, or computing more broadly, have you changed your mind about in a substantial way?
Fun and Profit with Reverse SSH Tunnels and AutoSSH
I can see your point, insofar at CF is biased to provide HA for all its foundational components.

It's actually possible to consolidate it down to fewer machines if you want. But it requires BOSH knowledge and the willingness to surrender the HA guarantees.

If you only need to deploy a handful of apps, it'd be easier to start with a hosted service and go from there. We have one in Pivotal Web Services[0], pricing is based on RAM usage. IBM have BlueMix, there are also service installations managed by CenturyLink, AnyNines and Swisscom.

[0] https://run.pivotal.io/
Thank you very much for all you have done and will do.

How can we apply to join the HARC and make the Dynabook a reality?
The scroll bar style is an option, anyways: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/playground.html#cu...
> and it's wrong.

Fair enough. Just saying that's the impression I get.

> even those focused on specific high level tasks tend to depend on tons of lower level modules

Yes. Good libraries do that. Smaller bits are made from bigger bits.

> living them open to things like the "leftpad" fiasco

I don't think you understand what the "leftpad fiasco" was. Small modules doesn't have anything to do with it - people who unpublish their modules on a whim does. And that's not been prevented.

> And using "github and npm to track how active projects are before installing them" is not really an answer to the UNIX way described.

Indeed. It's an answer to your concern about "npm module du jour that gets abandoned 2-3 years later or completely rewritten".

I'm not sure that npm, gulp changing significantly is a bad thing. Good software evolves over times. As long as the changes are clearly communicated I'm 100% down with that. Look how much better express got!
I consider things like pivot tables to be more mainstream and not relegated to just power users.

So the statement I responded to:

>"Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google."

...is just not accurate. Not to mention other super basic things like a lot of the formatting options, etc. Those most certainly are basic user needs, and you can't do half the formatting things you can do in Excel.
I like it that etcd is self-contained and easy to troubleshoot, as opposed to a blackbox with tons of magic.

The demo for `docker swarm` was great but as an infrastructure engineer, it worries me. First because of the blackbox effect I mentioned above and secondly because I'm not sure how much flexibility is compromised to achiveve that.

Sure, it's awesome to quickly have a cluster up for your app and the user experience is phenomenal... but what about storage, network, firewalls, integrating with my linux distro, etc. Things are never this simple when they reach a certain scale and/or number of requirements deviate from those of a simple app.

From a quick look at the docs and watching the demo, Kubernetes still feels like a safer option, today. That being said, it's nice to see competition in this space. I guess this will put pressure on Kubernetes and others to improve the user experience further.
Bad Ways to Ask for Investor Help
Exactly.
Then you install the receipts app if you're there type of person who photographs lots of receipts, and no one else suffers bloat in their upstream photo app.
We could use a few "good ones" (meaning ones that really are about the realities, needs and scales of the 21st century).
SQLite is not a competitor to SQL Express, because the latter is still an out-of-proc server. It is a competitor to SQL CE (which shipped its last release to date in 2011, so...).

The nice thing about SQLite is how little it assumes about the world outside. That made it easy to run in WinRT application sandbox with minimal changes; and for quite a while, it was the only local DB readily available to WinRT code written in C# or C++ (JS got IndexedDB).
Hi Alan,

Do you think the object ~ biological cells metaphor can be related somehow to automated programming using GP or neural networks? (I've sometimes imagined neural networks as networks of many small objects with probability-based inheritance)
Secure, Distributed Password Resources with GPG, Git and VIM
Does anyone know on a technical level why the Monaco editor feels so much faster than the Atom editor? Is there any mechanism Microsoft is employing that Atom could adopt, or are the two editors that fundamentally different?
HN feels old school. That's why I like it. (I'm considered a fossil by all of my 20, 30-something colleagues.)
Dag Kittlaus (co-founder of Siri) Interview with Charlie Rose
What exactly does it mean to become the "next Silicon Valley"?

It seems to me a boring cliché used to make article headlines from nothing.
They've been doing this on purpose for years to signal they no longer have their heads up their own asses. The fact that you haven't noticed until now may indicate...
I actually think this is a valid point, even if somewhat colloquially expressed. I had a lot of trouble getting past that menu bar on Opera Mini and even on an iPad, it's entirely too much.
What do you think about functional languages like Haskell, OCaml etc ?
Object oriented to me has always been about encapsulation, sending messages, and late-binding. You tell me ...
Interesting article. Basically, Kik started off as just-another-mobile-messenger, and they had to compete with Facebook, Google, SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Blackberry, Skype, Snapchat, etc., so they figured bots would eventually set them apart.

Since all links inside their app open in their embedded browser, they can track click-throughs like Google, Facebook, and presumably the quirky 'bot interface' will be popular with people who are already used to chatting. No wonder everyone else is trying to maintain feature parity with them.
How has your relationship with technology changed, especially in regard to its use politically and socially, as you've gotten older?
Hi Alan, do you still do coding (any kind of, for any purpose) these days? If you do, what's your comfortable setup (say, language, editor, tools and etc)?
Hi Alan - the innovation from PARC appears to be the result of a unique confluence of hardware, software, market forces, recent government research investment, and Michelangelo-level talent for bringing big ideas to fruition.

Do you think that any factors that were significant back then are going to be difficult to reproduce now, as HARC gets started? Conversely are there novel aspects of today's environment that you wished for at PARC?
Could you list top 3 good ones as per your opinion?
We're focusing on the US market right now - we'll definitely reach out when we move into the international markets. Stay tuned :)
So what do you think of Scala?
Mine has actually helped me sleep better. I can't hear anything in my left ear (save for the constant ringing and some static accompanying particularly loud noises), so I am able to successfully drown out annoying background noises (like my wife's ridiculously loud alarms that never wake her up) by burying my right ear in my pillow.
And a video game
Yes, I realize that. I was not saying this is the exact same thing that is being discussed in the article.

However, it is similar in that Amazon should be exercising more control over their inventory and logistics, not to mention the case I am talking about is arguably much more egregious and much more within Amazon's control to fix. I think that makes it highly relevant as a comment to this story.
I'd be curious if he's planning on returning to Croquet/OpenCobalt with the VR revolution.
What is so bad about the Github diffs?
It seems that dynamic or at least sloppily typed langauges like javascript and python have become more and more popular. Do you think typeless/dynamic languages are the future? I personally really like "classless OOP[0]".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=6m
Why would they use IE, the use Edge :)
Perhaps a lawyer's working hours tend to be more "efficient" or more stressful. My interaction has been primarily limited to in-house patent attorneys, and they don't seem to work appreciably harder or be more stressed out.

Work-related stress is a big issue. Regardless, putting in long hours at work, regardless of stress level, means less time for family, friends, hobbies, recreation, exercise, sleep, etc.
Hi Alan,

Do you think we'll ever have a programming language that isn't fully text based and gets closer to a direct mapping of our own thoughts than current systems? If so any ideas what properties this language would have?
1. What do you wish someone would ask you so that you could finally share your thoughts, but nobody has broached as a subject?

2. (This question is about interactive coding, as a dialogue).

Human dialogs (conversations) are interactive. I think in the past computers were limited, and computer languages had to be very small (as compared with any human language + culture) so that a programmer could learn what the computer could do. But now that services can be connected (programming as a service?), would it make sense to have a dialogue? My example is that in the 1980s it wouldn't have made sense for any programming language to have a function called double() that just multiplies by 2. There's * 2 for that.

But in 2016, it makes sense for a beginner to write "and double it" and considerably less sense for a beginner to have to learn x *= 2 if they wanted to double a number.

Human language is also ambiguous. It would make sense for an interactive language to ask:

"Did you mean, set x equal to x multiplied by 2?" which most people would select, but maybe someone would select

"Did you mean, set x equal to the string "x" appended to the string "x"?"

For these reasons: do you think it would make sense to have an interactive programming language that is connected with a server you "talk" with interactively?

Or should programmers still have to learn a fixed programming language that has no room for interpretation, but instead a strict meaning.

Among other things, this means programmers can never write "it", "that", "which" to refer to a previous thing (since the referent could be ambiguous if the compiler doesn't confirm.) But every human language includes such shorthand.

I'd love to hear your thoughts regarding a connected, interactive programming process similar to the above (or just on whatever lines).
It's a fine line to walk. Performance is a deal breaker for a lot of people, whether it rightly should be of not. It doesn't matter how much safer Rust is if it's not used much.

If your goal is purely to make Rust as safe as possible, then you should advocate the view in your comment.

If your goal is to increase Rust adoption, and/or decrease the use of less safe languages for development in the future (in whichever prioritization of the two you like), then IMO the route described in ekidd's comment seems the quickest route there, IMO.
Global nuclear war sounds immensely more fun than the present.
> Linux/Unix was barely known to most developers.

As a personal machine maybe not, but even in the early heady days of Java, Unix deployment was the norm. I mean, what you're going to pick, one of those new-fangled NT servers or a proper IBM/Sun/HP-UX machine that has almost enough memory to run Oracle properly?

But given the "write once, run anywhere mantra", Java had something to prove, which lead to a lot ot NIH.
No that I know much of Swiss history, but according to that argument, Poland would be by now a footnote in European history, and thy seem to manage...
It's not hardcoded. I just tested it in an actual Code instance and their diff algorithm appears to mark the wrong braces as removed.
I would argue that we should avoid building sentient AI in the first place. Human-level or better problem-solving ability does not require the inclusion of sentience or independent agency.
I'm sorry but Kik didn't predict the Rise of Chat Bots. Kik basically looked at WeChat and said we should do that. Same as Facebook and the others. WeChat showed that micro-apps inside a chat interface worked for their target market. The key is to understand the needs of WeChat's target market and figure out the overlap with the US market then figure out the unique needs of the US market.
For big problems, "finding the problem" is paramount -- this will often suggest representation systems that will help think and do better. A language that allows you to quickly make and refine your sense of the context and discourse -- i.e. to make languages as you need using tools that will automatically provide development environments, etc. and allow practical exploration and progress.
I have, wasn't interested. I'm more interested in Dies since it was rewritten against Kubernetes, and the same with Helm. Thanks for the suggestion though, I had not thought of Flynn in a while.
Ugg, this is simply a list of cities cited in News Articles as being "The Next Silicon Valley". This isn't actually an article itself.
Hi Alan, do you think privacy on the web should be guaranteed by design or malleable such that in special cases the government can look up your google searches and see if you follow terrorists on twitter? When I say guaranteed by design, I mean should people be creating a system to obfuscate, encrypt, and highly confuse the ability of people who wish to track/deduce what people are doing on the web?
Arkansas.

Lol.

I live in northwest Arkansas, soon to move to Denver due to job, and I once had a guy at a party claim that Bentonville/Rogers/Springdale area was going to be the next Austin. I laughed, and overheard another guy at the party joking about how we were going to be called "Silicon Trailer Park."
What is your recommendation to someone wanting to get into the kind of research you do?
It certainly helps when reading long replies, that's for sure. I do think a mini-update box with "click here to load" like on stackoverflow for replies or edits would be an interesting idea.

Of course, the 90's style is pretty hacker-hipster as well...can't deny that.
At least on stairs, I think this is a solvable problem:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601240/an-impressive-walk...

In terms of off-the-shelf:
http://makezine.com/2015/05/01/meet-stair-bear-adorable-clim...

I also vaguely recall seeing some demos of first responder robots and stairs. I don't know about the other issues you've raised...
This seems like a really exciting, albeit natural, evolution of the Docker "platform". It's really true that no one cares about containers, everyone just wants their apps to work.

That being said the one giant omission from Docker is still seems to be management of volumes/data. Great, we can run 100 nodes on AWS in a matter of minutes, but if your system has data storage requirements (ex: Almost every database ever) ... You're kinda left up to your own still. How does Docker Orchestration migrate the data volumes?

They really tried to sell this as "You don't need to do anything but the AWS beta, the DAB and a few commands" which would be wonderful. However with the need for reliable data storage... you're still stuck doing everything "the old fashion way".

(Edit: No, I don't mean store data IN the container, I presume no one is that silly. I meant the attached volumes. No volume mgmt = less greatly less helpful).
Newport Tower was built in America in the year 1670. Now read this quote about how long Thorium will remain dangerous.

"... And now, finally, the really big one: A Thorium Nuclear reactor would make much less radioactive waste than a convention Nuclear Power Plant, and most of the waste that it DOES make would only be dangerous for…. 300 years.
..."

We could totally manage a Thorium nuclear waste site in a 300-year time frame!

*Newport Tower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_buildings_i...
Sorry I misunderstood you, I was thinking about the PDF link.

You are right about the github one.
Hi Alan,

Whats the next step to improve remote working? Face to face still seems to be so superior for relationship building and problem solving despite the wealth of video conferencing, social and collaboration tools we have. I don't want to wear goggles...

thanks!
This. We actually use non-Windows platforms, too. ;)
Hello Alan,

I'm curious if you've read much about Activity Theory. (in particular, Yrjö Engeström's Learning by Expanding.) I feel like it's compatible with much of what I've heard you discuss in lectures. Is it something you have an opinion on?
It means that marketing agents from the city in question want some Silicon Valley money and they're trying to get some by imitating it.
Odd that both Colorado and Denver are listed...
In terms of real, in use, user interfaces, what do you think are the best examples? What do you like about them?
What if there was an EBay like action site where you couldn't just sign up, and rather someone had to "vouch" for you? When fraud starts happening, you can see who vouched them in and shut down the network. If people start selling vouches online, then you suspend both them and the person who had the bad judgment to vouch them in originally. (maybe they can keep using the site, but not vouch, etc.)

The site would also collect identifying information about everyone who transacts while using it. Maybe phone number, or driver license photo. You are not allowed to have more than one account, although you can have multiple "personas" if you wish, each with their own ratings. (but creating multiple personas cannot fool site anti-abuse staff, who can all obviously see the same account behind it) Creating an account is hard. The site would employ advanced protections against account takeover.

Whenever you buy and sell from someone, perhaps you can see the "7 degrees of Kevin Bacon" style interpersonal connections that link you to them via vouches. If fraud happens, it makes all of your connections look bad, and there would be an incentive for them to shun you, if they care about retaining their access to the site. When fraudsters get onto the platform, you can always trace their vouches back to the "bad apple" who showed poor judgment and began inviting the wrong certain people. Indeed, perhaps in order to retain access to the platform overtime, you have to keep getting vouches every once in a while.

Big sites would not use these policies since they would invoice friction on purchases in result in lower conversion. But perhaps there is a niche somewhere for a highly trusted online auction house.

I wonder how far a system like this could go in stamping out fraud online. It seems like the problem with fraudsters is that they can always keep coming back with new accounts that everyone is forced to treat with the certain default degree of trust, and then the fraudsters exploit that. If you made it difficult for each person in the world to have more than one account on the service, then anyone engaging in repeat fraud would very quickly stand out as such. (As many personas as you want, but only one account)
One of the things I liked about CF was how it encoded application dependencies into the app package. Chef has just recently announced Habitat, which apparently brings that kind of an idea into play.

The thing is though, Kubernetes is a set of lego blocks from which you can compose into CF, but you couldn't create Kubernetes from CF. That makes Kubernetes more interesting to me.
Do you see further research paths for metacompilers [1] to reduce code and enable customizable user interfaces?

With containers and hypervisors now in desktop OSes (Windows, Mac OS, Linux), could an open-source research OS (e.g. KSWorld) be packaged for developers and end-users who want to test your team's experimental UIs?

Is there long-term value in "private machine learning" where some data and algos are focused on user/owner interests, with "public machine learning" providing variably-trusted signals to user-owned algos for intelligence augmentation?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297996
11 SaaS Blogs for Data Lovers and Startup Wonks
> It would be a shame to drain a lake just to get stuff from China to New York a tiny little bit cheaper than it already is.

Perhaps.

There are a whole lot of lakes in the world, and only one shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The problem with these platforms is that they try to do too much. While all we need is a client/server handshake. Kinda like IP white-listing but with public keys instead.
Hi Alan,

One of the concepts I've heard you talk about before in interviews and the like is simulation. I think simulation is huge and we should be seeing products that cater towards it, but largely aren't.

http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=5

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/08/links-1214-come-ye-to-b...

Do you still think simulation is an important promise of the computer revolution, and are there any products you know of or ideas you have that are/would be a step in the right direction?
Yeah, I believe it's by the same Dragonfly developer who also wrote tcplay[1] for TrueCrypt volumes.

[1] https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=tcplay&sec...
So long as all the various agencies still demand paper documents, nobody can ever claim to be "turbotax" for immigration. This is slightly faster/cheaper, but is nowhere near the speed to justify that analogy.

Question: Who actually submits the documents? The 'How it works' is not clear.

"The application, upon completion, is sent to a SimpleCitizen-approved immigration lawyer for review to ensure users have the best application possible." ...But then what?

One of the reasons you hire a lawyer is so that lawyer can stand in for you. Part of that is that they can submit documents and requests on your behalf. Does SimpleCitizen seek power of attorney from customers? That would open a nest of licensing issues. Note the careful language. Are these "review" lawyers giving advice or not?
Obviously it has the resources to do both. The point I'm making (badly) is that if their core product is broken perhaps buying other companies should be put on hold until they fix it.