skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The argument Microsoft make that you can have your cake and eat it, have a device that's an ideal tablet and an ideal laptop, has failed.

Wait, it has? It has evolved, and continues to evolve; but I see no evidence that it has "failed." The Surface line has swelled to over $1 Billion, and hybrid devices are the fastest growing segment of the OEM market (the only growing segment, really.) The design process of apps is changing, in the same that is changed for the web. Apps will become responsive, and change with use input and share the same codebase. That's Microsoft's vision, and I think it makes the most sense. Even Google is starting to bend to this. Apple will be next.

And in the same context, some apps don't need to evolve with input. Some apps just aren't meant to work with touch or vice versa, and that's ok. No one is going to run their IDE in touch, and no one is going to run their drawing program with a mouse. But the ability to dock and switch with the same device is appealing to customers and businesses. It saves money on device costs, and it has the possibility to save money on the development of software that wants to live in multiple worlds with multiple inputs.
Rust is more focused on C compatibility and simple (dumb) operational semantics than Idris and other dependently typed languages. Rust will never require GC, for example; maybe Idris doesn't now but is that a focus for them?
Perhaps but I'm not sure it's healthy to be nostalgic for the Macintosh line of 20 years ago. It was a train wreck, really.
> (49% of voters supported Trump!).

No. Facts still matter. As of today, Trump has received just 46.6% of the vote.
Does the Apple educational pricing discounts still not make it worthwhile? I have no idea what the discount percentage is now, but I remember years ago some teacher (and tertiary student) friends of mine being delighted in being able to afford and Apple Macbook due to this incentive.
> Would anyone choose C for a new systems project with no legacy baggage or dependencies, in a world with Rust and Go?

While Rust might be feasible, Go can't really provide libraries like SQLite: Go's C compatibility story is disappointing and awkward.
It is interesting how in half of computing we are lamenting how badly trust can cause issues, and then in another half we are saying you can trust parts of the code to not modify your objects that you are passing.

That is, there is nothing that guarantees foreign code doesn't modify your "immutable" data. You can start building in checks into the system to make sure they were not modified, but you will eventually get to the point where you are basically locking on your data. Or just sending a copy of just enough of the data for the other end to work. (Which, if you are at all distributed, can make some sense anyway.)

I get it, in that if you are sticking to the contract, than immutable leads to this. So, in a very real sense, it helps an individual (or small team) stick to the convention of "initialize and then use" data structures.

None of this is to say that immutable data can not be really useful. It can be. Awesomely so. I just get a little worried at the benefits being touted as absolute.

To me, the much more interesting aspect of immutable structures are the ones that let you run something in an append only way. Or in a method where you can effectively recreate a local history of an object from the data. (Neither of these things are "new", btw. In a simplistic sense, this is refinding that assoc lists can be useful.)
ASCE is hardly a disinterested party here. More infrastructure projects means more money and influence for ASCE.
I confess to having been genuinely baffled as to why people were discussing HN libertarian biases in the comment section of an article about librarians. Oh.
Agree on all points.

iOS is limited by the inability to develop iOS apps on iOS devices, because software not hardware. (Same for Android of course.) Swift Playgrounds suggests they're moving in that direction, but it looks like a very far cry from Xcode.

Hardware-wise, the iPad Pro, new MacBook, and new MBP seem to be closing in on convergence to an "iPadBook" (too bad the iBooks app means no resurrection of the iBook brand...), i.e. dual screen iPad. When I first typed on a new MB, I got the feeling the flat keys were partly preparing people to transition to touchscreen typing. The touchbar is another step in that direction.

Something a bit like this feels inevitable:

https://bencollier.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/20101021-0...

Software-wise, macOS and iOS still seem far apart though. But I'm no Mac or iOS developer. Hell, at this point I basically only use iOS for testing my company's apps before a release.

(Funny that the reasons I went to, and have stayed on, Android this year have zero to do with software, i.e. USB-C, fingerprint sensor on the back, and Project Fi. All the apps I want are on both platforms, and I would never develop for either.)
Databases have been written in Java, too; but the combination of performance unpredictability (not something Go has addressed, since it is also garbage-collected) and a bad C compatibility story has proven to limit the reach of these projects.
Ironically, not quite "it all".

Look again; the Emacs lineage is disconnected.
How to Give Yourself Hiring Superpowers
This was my post to alt.folklore.computers. Nice to see it reappear after all these years!
I always wondered why people didn't do this.
It's trivially true. Garbage men could pick up the trash 5x as often. Individual people could come cook for everyone. Parks could be maintained 10x as much. Trash collectors could clean up the streets all the time. More people could help the IRS catch crooks. etc. All of those things happen but 5x more people could do those jobs as well, but that would make them unprofitable to shareholders i.e. not worth paying someone minimum wage to do it. So this system doesn't get people to do that work.
Anybody got it working with cloudflare? Support is helping me but there are some setup problems
I agree the language you were responding to was unnecessarily emotionally charged ("tragedy", "addiction", suffering children). It's possible to advocate a radical position (near-complete elimination of refined sugar) without making the reader feel bad.
Speed of Light Was Faster in the Early Universe“ --Theory Soon to Be Tested
In my tests I was getting around 70MB/s routing with a few dozen firewall rules. However I'm not sure if this was a limit of the APU2, or the devices I was using to generate the traffic.

It also has accelerated crypto, so ipsec/openvpn shouldn't be much slower than routing.
He's missing the big picture, in my mind. Pc sales may be in decline but aside from a few quarters, Apple has sold more macs by more than 6 times it did when it plateaued ten years ago. Sales have been on a steady incline because they were always selling miniscule amounts compared to the other cheap brands on the market. There was almost no where to go but up. It's not milking anything.
Surface didn't work? Its current generation is making a profit and is well-reviewed by users and tech journalists alike.

For what it's worth, Surface products are exactly what I want in a portable computer. I find both traditional tablets (such as Android tablets and iPads) and legacy-style laptops (including the new Macbook Pro) unexciting and ultimately not worth my money.
Actually removable batteries should be less likely to spontaneously combust. Most battery failures seem to be caused by short circuits due to compression or flexing. Removable batteries are mechanically stronger because they have integral cases instead of just relying on the device casing for protection.

Personally I would never buy a cell phone with a built in battery. I always have spare batteries for my phones and frequently swap them out. It sure beats being tied to a charger, or plugging an external battery to an awkward and fragile USB connector.
Vim is not instant. Moreover, it has annoying TTY handling behaviors; it flushes the TTY when starting.

So if I type

$ vim file

and start entering editing commands, often I do it so fast that some of the characters get cut off, like the leading colon of an ex command or what have you.

There is no good reason for this. It will not happen with any reasonable command line utility.

I reported this to the Vim mailing list not long ago and was basically brushed off.
There is still no root cause for the Note 7 issue, apparently.
I remember reading a long time ago about the syntaxes and the author said that it is because AT&T assembled faster.
Makes sense considering that the intel syntax requires some backtracking (or more of temporary data).

(please don't upvote if you agree, i'm at 69 points :)
When you SSH from your iPad, do you use the touch keys or do you have a physical keyboard?
I got 91/100 mobile, 90/100 desktop for a site that is 4.95kb.

Reasons?

* Apparently the HTML should be minified.

* Apparently I should use gzip, because 4.95kb is too big.

* The inline styles are below the content to prevent showing the user nothing as it paints. Google thinks the 594 bytes of styles needs to be in a separate request.

I think insights is pretty useless at analysing sites below a certain size threshold.

At these sizes, network latency is the biggest drain on loading a page... Which effectively means users don't notice loading times when they click a link.
There's a danger of that.

It is worth noting that many of SV's most interesting projects are comprehensively dosed with political ideals.

Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Urbit. I'm sure you can think of more. I would also claim Google as a successful utopian project. And they're incubating more of them. One day Google will go 'pop' and thousands of spores will fly through the atmosphere to land on strange and alien shores.

Of course there is the Dark Side. The gravitational strength of the left/right divide across the whole Net is extraordinary. There isn't a prominent forum where partisans haven't dueled. Facebook is like Belgium, a hapless neutral buffer and yet the air rings with the whine of dogfighting and the report of the occasional sniper. The Great Project of moderation, to harness or vanquish these forces, is understated but probably matters more than most for the emerging Internet Culture.

tldr; You can dial it back from the worst extremes but you can't get rid of it because tribalism is human nature's firmware.
> Putting the universe back as it was except for you is time travel. You've traveled your state to a different time (previous state) of the universe.

> Your semantic game sounds very clever, but is actually just inconsistent and borderline ignorant of what people mean by those terms.

I don't think that's how most people think of time travel.

For example, say I proceeded to invoke reactions to get all particles back to exactly how they were on Jan.1 2000. Say this took me a year, and finally, in 2018, I execute the final reaction that places the last particle, so that the universe is exactly like it was Jan.1, 2000. Have I been time travelling for a year? Does making 2018 look like 2000 what people generally think of as time travel? What about that you yourself did not change, where are those particles coming from? What about the old you existing in that time as well, there aren't enough particles in the universe to have two you's. What about the time you travelled from remaining in existence while you're gone, and the changes you invoke in the "past" propagating there?

I get that it would provide a similar experience in many ways, but it doesn't involve travelling, nor time, just changes in particle positions - which is the nuance I am highlighting.
It's hard to create a good menu. The lower priced options will often be good enough that folks who would have bought the higher priced item will buy the lower instead. This lost revenue will often be greater than the total new revenue for folks that would have otherwise bought nothing from you.

The free market finds an equilibrium price such that some demand is not met. To meet all demand, the price would need to be zero or even negative.
Did Elvis miss the cut? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(text_editor)
I think it's a ways off

Want to weigh in on a time line? To misquote Fight Club, “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for every product drops to zero.”

Apple's refusal to evolve in any meaningful way in the space

Given the complaints about the changes Apple made in the most recent MBP update, what evolution are you looking for? Touchbar, larger trackpad, and USB-C aren't meaningful? Continuing to reduce the size of the machine? Those all seem evolutionary (rather than revolutionary), and quite typical of the iterative updates Apple is known for.

Are only increased memory and CPU speeds meaningful? Or the lack of a touch screen? Maybe no equivalent to the MS Surface Book? What would constitute a meaningful change for you?

Feeling my oats a little bit, so feel free to push back. I can understand people not being happy with the new Macbook Pros for a variety of reasons. However, refusal to evolve in any meaningful way sounds unjustified.
Well MIT did have (one of?) the first PDP-1, which is why there are a lot MIT names on the family tree.
I used to work for a native American nation. One of the anecdotes from the guy you could consider to be the CEO was that although he could get a grant for $50k from the federal government for road improvements, it cost him about $35k to jump through all the hoops (filing for the grant, documenting that the appropriate oversight was exercised, etc.). It was still a net win, but he would then add that even $50k wasn't really spit when it came to what he was spending overall.
I appreciate the author building a more efficient alternative to base64, but I had to laugh for a moment at the suggested use case.

Using an alternative to base64 encoded data for web pages and node is a horrible idea. If I came across a code base using that I would scream. A lot. None of my tools work with it, and now my browser has to run a bunch of js for something that's normally native and very fast. Its a 1-2kb savings per page that's going to make somebody jump off bridge one day.

More terrifying is that the JavaScript community is so fascinated by shiny objects that thousands of people are going to use this. I'm not sure if it's more funny or terrifying.

Anyways, this encoding is still useful if you need to pass data between legacy systems. I've used html escapes and ASCII85 before to get around annoying old stuff that doesn't use Unicode many times
I have found that vs code takes too much of battery and RAM, thus I started using Geany, my battery backup has drastically improved. http://geany.org
I Heart NY, TM
Facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript Now Available to Citizen Cryptographers
Wait are we talking about r/programming or HN here???
Why does MIT feel the need to hold forth on this? It sounds a lot like the SJW posturing you see at second- and third-tier public universities and state colleges.

This statement seems a bit below MIT. They should take the high ground, above petty Presidential-cycle politics. Science and all that.
Let's not conflate the text/HTML-based syntax and the distribution channel implemented by Google. You can render an AMP document with your own implementation of the AMP custom elements. Can I do anything remotely similar with Instant Articles?
Or do something radical to kill the need for desktops and laptops. A dock with a monitor and a keyboard you slot your iPhone into? I would say it sounds absurd but given how many people claim, even on HN, to find it satisfactory to program and SSH and everything else on their iPads...
> Now, these things sound nice on paper, but they run completely contrary to my experience in dealing with universities in my community. If you aren't pay tuition, they won't tell you the time of day.

Are you talking about faculty or administration people?

I always try to reply to everyone who contacts me even if they aren't a student. I even respond to the people that email me theories that rely on P=NP.
I am also human driver and I feel safer around "dumb" cars. I don't ever intend to ride a self driving car, and will do my best to avoid being near one.

Aside from being vulnerable to malicious actors, self-driving cars make "cold-hearted" mistakes that don't make sense; mistakes that humans would never make. Sure, the total number of mistakes they make will be lower than the equivalent number of accidents caused by humans. However, having human life lost to the type of mistakes self-driven cars make is, in my opinion, an unacceptable price to pay.

If I must loose my life to a car-related indecent, I want the it to be caused by a human, and not some quirk or edge-case in an algorithm or neural net.
Last time I checked the educational discount was around $100 for a $2K+ laptop. Here is the relevant link http://www.apple.com/us-hed/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch if someone is interested.
MIT only has ~1000 faculty, so it's kinda impressive that 300+ have signed at this point.
The MacBook Air is $999, with plenty of discounts to be found. Also a nearly perfect computer for the vast majority of use cases. Any cheaper, and you're into disposable shittop range.
I absolutely love it. Been a programmer for long time, but love it.
Only concern is that with age, your programming skills matter less and management skills matter more. I am not a very good Manager. But I love what I do.
Ask HN: What are some programming trade offs that are interesting to you?
Examples of this would be a trade off between readability and flexibility, or adding too many comments versus not enough.
The only world in which the 'device adapts to me' model works is where the software adapts as well. If I have software that only works well in tablet mode and other software that only works well in laptop mode, I'm the one who has to do all the adapting to switch between them.

In all Honesty, I'd rather carry two different devices completely optimised for the different interaction models than deal with all the compromises of a toasterfridge solution.
I didn't include it, because the original question was where vi and its predecessors came from, not what offspring did it have itself.
As odd as it may seem, the human race is fully capable of accomplishing both space-expansion efforts and cleaning things up here on Earth. More than that, space opens the door to a wealth of possibilities for ameliorating or even solving many of the major problems we face today. That includes environmental efforts and energy production.

Even if we were to pursue a massive space race, it'd only consume a relatively small fraction of humanity's industrial capability and resources as they exist today. In the context of a long-term terraforming effort, after a significant space-borne industry has been created, these sorts of binary comparisons become all the more laughable.
Chess masters show virtues of a slower pace of sport
Mob violence observed in gorillas for the first time
ReactCasts #6: Redux Middleware
As a long-time non-student-but-affiliate MIT person, initially as "some person who volunteered to work on some SIPB project[1]", I've been continuously amazed by the degree of openness of the MIT community. I could just walk in and visit the computer club, or go to an event with friends.

Sure, administration doesn't care, but members of the faculty are regularly willing to help out non-students. (I got a temporary account by asking a staff member nicely, to help me work a project that furthered the goals of computing at MIT)

So, thank you, MIT faculty, for clearly stating that people from all backgrounds are still welcome here[2].

[1]: http://sipb.mit.edu/
[2]: http://yawh.mit.edu/
We need more copyleft not less. I'm glad it is GPL and also plan to use it should I need immutable data structures.
A List of Go Tools for the Acme editor
Hmm, I thought I could remember my friends saying the educational discount was around 20%. Perhaps I am not remembering correctly, or the discount has changed a lot lately.
> The problem with .NET reflection is not that this dynamism exists, it's that everything is bundled together without an opt-out. I would love to have reflection split into small pieces that I could pick and choose from -- maybe I get RTTI, but I can't instantiate arbitrary generic types at runtime, for instance. Or I can't do RefEmit to JIT dynamically generated IL.

Something like mirrors?
I remember larger discounts as well. That said, summer vacation seemed longer, too.
Holla for ASCII85. Used it many times when some of the base64 chars are unusable. A nice thing to know about when working with old systems
The "open source definition"[1] does not agree with your reading. In fact, that annotations appear to entirely skirt around the issue of freedom. For example, their claimed reasoning for freedom 1 (freedom to modify) is:

> The mere ability to read source isn't enough to support independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection. For rapid evolution to happen, people need to be able to experiment with and redistribute modifications.

No mention of user freedoms or why this is important to users, just some nebulous claim that this is related to "evolution" and "experimentation".

The entire OSD is written like this, with claims that the 10 completely-arbitrary-with-no-real-logic-behind-them tennants of "open source" will somehow make your software better. How? They don't say. The four software freedoms make sense if you discuss them from the context of freedom, but the 10 "open source" rights don't make sense outside the context of freedom.

[1]: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
They had to go back to hardware that runs Win10 x64 apps, because nobody wanted to ship WinRT ARM apps.
I think the historical reason for this is that vi (or rather, ex; the "vi" executable was added later) was part of BSD since the original BSD release. From there it got picked up by System V, and then since both BSD and System V had it, it was a shoo-in for the role of the standard POSIX visual editor.
I'd like a mail server for jailbroken iPhones. I tried to install one from Cydia, but it was designed for Apple TV and sent my iPhone into a boot loop and I had to restore.

Having a local mail server would be useful for making local P2P WiFi links, and emailing photos/music/etc directly between phones without Internet access.
Since changed (reverted?) to "The void left by Apple"
What am I missing here?

Apple is confident that in an iPhone/iPad-centric ecosystem consumers will be strongly drawn to Apple computers. It's the same reason OSX is becoming more like iOS, they're not interested in catering to power users - average iPhone/iPad users are a much bigger market.
People like to express their opinions and be heard. If each of these faculty went on HN or reddit or the streets and said "I don't like Donald Trump" nobody would care. However as a collective force people will care enough to open the link and skim through the text. Maybe if they get enough people they'll get a small segment on CNN's morning show.
Well, the source being open means that you are free, if only because any mistreatment occurring, you can open up VIM and delete it.

You can be sure I would have done that with MS Office and OneDrive in the File menu, or reboots without permission on Windows 10 if I could.
Aka MIT values political correctness over free speech. Great. Reminds me of my university, they had a "free speech zone" to sidestep the reality that saying the wrong thing on other parts of campus could get you expelled.

Many have labeled trump as a near fascist and one of the hallmarks of such a regime is suppression of free speech and thought. In banning unpopular speech MIT has become closer to the very thing it's trying to distance itself from