skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like there's a new language popping up every few weeks. This seems strange when the trend in human languages seems to be towards a single common tongue, or at least a common lingua franca.

The same seems true of mathematics. At least in the parts that get commonly taught, we trend toward a common representation.

In programming, it seemed like we might move toward a core "C-like" syntax with various derivatives, for a while.

But now we seem to be moving toward a world where everyone wants to create their own domain-specific language.

I can't help but long for a common tongue. One which allows developers in different domains to understand at least the functionality, if not the motivation without having to learn a new language.
To most people, there is no difference between "your chances to to carry or possibly have or develop health issues" and a diagnosis. Sure, I suppose I can see some small technicality that makes them different, but really, the way you react to either is about the same, which makes them about the same.
> Now, HN has a HUGE misogyny problem

[citation needed]
Keeble and Shuchat to close Palo Alto camera stores
Yup, that's what I meant too - I just mangled the sentence badly, sorry.
Right... which comes down to: "it's easy for them to measure and understand".

And ultimately investors say they want hardware/science. But they don't really...?
Actually, he does need Spice if he wants to do layout, and worries about timings.
I'm completely outside your target market but one thing that if you can identify would no doubt be useful: long term stability/viability of the app due to eg business model, company history, likelihood of acquisitions affecting it, (eg VC funded are much more likely than self funded), and even follow through to data viability in the event of a shutdown. Can the user get their data out and keep using it ?
Another graphical programming environment for kids is Snap! http://snap.berkeley.edu/

From the about page: One of the limitations of Scratch as a language for computer science education is that its lists are not first class, so you can’t have a list of lists. Making lists first class is enough of an extension to Scratch to allow the creation of any other data structures (trees, heaps, hash tables, dictionaries, and so on) in user-defined Snap! code, implemented as lists of lists. via https://snap.berkeley.edu/about.html
OK: "When I use the mouse wheel, either spinning or clicking and drag, the page lurches briefly, but I'd expect it to scroll."

Initially, after I clicked to dismiss the overlay that begs for money to support "quality journalism," it wouldn't scroll at all, but now, on a return visit where the overlay doesn't show up, I can read the rest of the page by dragging the scrollbar at right. So there's that.

Naturally, the begging prompt worked fine, as do all of the animated ads in the margins and the autoplaying video ad immediately below the fold.

Plenty of pages break scrolling, but the combination of the potentially-interesting content, the begging-for-money routine, and the over-the-top advertising assault makes the act of complaining not just cathartic, but (IMHO) obligatory. I'm sure no one here is responsible for that particular site, but hey, it's an influential crowd, right?

Of course, I'm sure that if I did subscribe, all of those dancing animated ads and unsolicited videos would go away, leaving me to read in peace. (Right?)
From the perspective of someone on the other side (a hirer of freelancers) I do hire people with empty profiles provided you show me you know what you are doing. Read the proposal carefully and put in some time and effort into showing you can do the job well on time and budget.
Very nice. Something to keep an eye on.
> I think my parents were just baffled, thought I was moody/cynical.

> There needs to be a blood test, or something like it, rather than having to rely on baffled parents, or patients who might not even realize certain symptoms are even worth bringing up at all.

And that's relying on the parents to even be looking for issues in their offspring. If they're narcissistic, the child could go undiagnosed.
I've always found MS-SQL pretty impressive in terms of features/value, though they get pricey pretty quickly, I've always found it nicer to work with than Oracle or DB2 by comparison... Although, I do wish they'd support the more common LIMIT syntax that many other DBs use. That said, from a devops perspective MSSQL doesn't have any real peers.

Some of the analytical tooling around MSSQL is pretty good too. Have had to track performance issues in the past. Even the general query analyzer integrated with Management Studio is great.

I do hope they consider going the electron route for cross-platform management studio, it's worked really well for VS Code, and can imagine it would be a great fit for this as well. Even if quite a bit outside their current tooling.
I dunno.
I've known IBM's primary copyright counsel (Terry Ilardi) for many years, and he's very friendly to open source (and very smart).

I suspect there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Reading the reddit, etc, it's really unclear what the history is.
I read the DMCA request, which seems straightfoward, and the counternotice, which reads like someone who probably shoudl have consulted a lawyer (it makes legal claims about their non-disclosure/etc obligations) :P

Even looking at wikipedia, it looks ... complicated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_LSF)

Given a counternotice was filed, it's also not clear what is getting shutdown and why (IE lack of details), etc.

Lot of panic, little details.
Sounds really interesting! Have you written anywhere about how you got involved in that? I'd be curious to know how one sells into the airline industry.

When you say "not safety related in any way", do you mean that your code runs on auxiliary systems, like the entertainment platform?
Is this a famous ~confirmed incident?
Update on Oracle Layoffs
He didn't submit the post, it was his perspective on 10 years, not a writeup aimed for HN.
Right. CNN now has over 50 trackers and other junk blocked by Ghostery.
REST in Peace: Microservices vs. monoliths in real-life examples
Dirtypcbs[1] did a bang up job with amazingly fast turn around. Even got 4 extra boards; we used them for our alienflight[2] builds.

[1]: http://www.dirtypcbs.com
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LCuZCmttIQ
My guess would be the integration with everything that wasn't a columnstore... Being able to do both in the same dbms is an advantage. Also, doing everything in Cassandra is hard, and takes a lot of planning and effort that may have not been available.

I can't speak to their specific use cases though. I've been a bit of a RethinkDB fan myself in terms of straddling paradigms. I hope they shake out into a foundation structure with as much as possible in tact.

I do think that once PostgreSQL gets some of the clustering/HA features in the box and shaken out, it will become the default option for most uses. As it stands MSSQL does have some compelling advantages, some of which you pay for.
War and Order Hack Tool for Android/iOS (Limitless Gems, Food)
So in my previous life as a physics student I did talk to many physicists about why Fortran was popular (and later when I discovered Rust, discussed Rust with them).

The main blocker is just that fortran has a wonderful ecosystem of scientific computing packages and you can find almost any operation you need out there. This is not true of even Matlab or Mathematica. I have often had to reimplement random algorithms in Mathematica. Fortunately mathematica gives some pretty good high-level tools, so it's not that bad, but it's still annoying.

Multidimensional arrays was brought up as an issue with C/++. AIUI using macros in C++ makes it tolerable, but not great. I did ask about `arr[(1, 2, 3)]` and folks seemed okay with it. Many have used mathematica where indexing is done with double braces (`arr[[1,2,3]]`) so it isn't too bad.

Implicit bounds checking was something that was frowned upon. Could even be a dealbreaker. While usually bounds checking can get elided by llvm, scientific computing does tons of indexing and the overhead might crop up in the profile. I'm not actually sure of how well this maps to the real world, and never got a chance to profile this, but it's a concern.

Libraries like ndarray could turn it off but it would basically be unsafe :|

-------

I did use Rust for some scientific computing. At the time, IIRC numeric types had to be more explicit, which was annoying, but that was pretty much my only issue with it (I didn't need any existing scientific libraries). I didn't know of any good visualization libraries so I would usually output to json/csv and visualize in Mathematica. But I have done the same for Fortran code; Mathematica is just awesome at visualization and analysis.

I recall having access to a scientific computing cluster where the only up to date thing was ifort. It had an ancient python, and icc (IIRC it was ancient too, but I'm not sure). Had to compile a bunch of compilers myself to get my own code to run. Asked about this and apparently everyone just used fortran. Python is common in post-processing but a lot of the tools they were using were ancient or maintained by people with similarly ancient toolchains so stuff still worked on it.
Not sure if the tilda is meant as a negation (unfortunately, many people also use it for "approximately", which is a near-antonym), but:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1769642.stm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jan/19/news/mn-23654

It probably did happen.
As a Steven Universe fan, I got quite a chuckle out of this.
There are probably as many languages using "nil" as there are ones that call it "null".

Nil: Ruby, Go, Oberon, Modula-2, Swift, various Pascal dialects, Lisp?.

Null: C/C++, Java, Rust, JavaScript, Ada.

Then, of course, there's Python with None.
Is graphene even a thing? Last I checked it was still a magical hypothetical substance made with pencil shavings and duct tape (that's an exaggeration but only a mild one). Every now and then I see news about graphene being the next big thing, like, very soon, but the results I see fail to prove that it's even an actual substance, and the evidence is the lab that made it swearing that it's totally a thing.
I just use a cron:

/path/to/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto -d domain.con certonly && service nginx reload
Why hasn't your toolbox evolved to a single hammer?

Besides, even if one language ends up being the only one needed, I'd be pretty confident that it's way too early in the study of programming languages, compilers and runtimes too try to stop experimenting and look some language to settle down.
You can do `arr[(1,2,3)]` in Rust (not pretty, but ok). Assuming you've marked the indexers as inline, LLVM should be able to optimize it pretty well. If it doesn't, optimizations can be added.

Rust can't enforce "one way to do it" since this would be done as a library. Currently there's only one library offering this (ndarray), so in a sense there's only one way to do it :)
> "Seems like there's a new language popping up every few weeks"

Crystal was started like 5 years ago.

> "the trend in human languages seems to be towards a single common tongue"

One of the clear goals of the creator was to make it as similar to Ruby as possible; the creator was striving for some kind of "common tongue", no doubt. Its not some strange eccentric new language.
I'm sorry if I'm missing this, but what's the distribution story? Does it produce stand-alone binaries? In other words, can you just distribute the generated binary without requiring the user to install a runtime package or a bunch of libraries or whatever?
That's one area, where at the time (about 4 years ago), Mongo worked out really well for me... iirc there was a bug I experienced with ElasticSearch, and RethinkDB didn't have geo indexing yet.

It doesn't surprise me though... MSSQL tends to do very well out of the box for most workloads.
One possible reason that this is not the case is that natural languages and math have been around for a lot longer.

Another one is that programming languages have more in common with mechanisms that natural languages.

You could also say that we do have a few lingua franca programming languages which are also very similar to each other, to the point that someone fluent in one can easily read another.

Also, what do you think are the odds that a mathematician can understand the intricacies of a fluid engineering paper (in a natural language) and vice versa?
This was the most interesting comment on that thread

I need to step in here,

Considering *I* was the one who packaged Lava, the original sources are here:

https://spstarr.fedorapeople.org/ocs-rhhpc/trunk/src/kits/la...

IBM has no right to claim nor any DMCA claim that can revoke this as we released this long before IBM bought the company and they bought the company afterf I had left Platform Computing.

IBM has no standing to DMCA this source code if you forked it from my original RPMs we released.

Thanks,

Shawn
He does come off as pretty arrogant, but in the cap table example I thought it was the raising new money at a lower valuation that was the problem. Most investors wouldn't want to be in such a down round; and I guess one source of down rounds is too rich initial investors?
False dichotomy, dude. You can also look like Vint Cerf or Peter Norvig and be high-ranking high-paid Chief Scientists and the like.
Machinio Triples Revenue and Expands to Europe with Launch of New Websites
Machinio.com, the fastest-growing used machinery website in the world, has recently launched new websites focused on the European used machinery market (Machinio.DE, Machinio.FR, Machinio.NL, Machinio.IT, and Machinio.ES).

In the last year, Machinio has tripled their core metrics of revenue, web traffic, and buyer requests on Machinio.com. The company believes they are the future of the used machinery industry, and big players seem to agree. Ritchie Brothers, the world’s largest equipment auctioneer, led an investment of $3M into Machinio earlier this year. The Chicago-based Machinio will continue to expand globally, and has plans to open a European headquarters in Berlin in 2017.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve grown tremendously in Europe, which now accounts for 40% of our total revenue. We recognize there is a huge opportunity for us to keep growing in this region and continue to help users find the exact machine they are looking for, no matter where they are located and what language they search in,” said Dmitriy Rokhfeld, CEO.

Machinio lists over one million used machines for sale, from agriculture and construction equipment, to metalworking and printing, attracting over 500,000 unique buyers every month.

With the aggressive expansion into Europe, Machinio is also growing their European sales team as well, hiring multiple staff members across the continent to generate new business and manage accounts.

About Machinio - Machinio is a global search engine for finding, buying, and selling used machinery and heavy equipment. Machinio serves buyers and sellers in over 190 countries around the world and with more active listings than any other website, Machinio is the most comprehensive real‐time database of for-sale listings. Learn more at machinio.com.
One gripe: the canonical CDNs may have the library already cached from your visits to other sites, which is faster.

I wish that web browsers would use content addressing to load stuff and do SRIs. If I already loaded a javascript file from another url, why load it again?
It's promising, at least. I think a system like this would be the most useful if you're able to layer a query language on top of it, and apparently even FoundationDB (which had an SQL layer on top of a K/V store) didn't perform all that well. The Cockroach guys claim to have found a performant way of doing SQL on top of K/V, if I remember correctly, but we'll see. But having transactions in a distributed K/V store is certainly useful.
> stop using CDNs for jQuery/js libs, those https connections aren't free - they're much more expensive than just serving the same script from your existing connection

Do you have a source for this? My understanding is that, in real usage, it is cheaper to load common libraries from a CDN because in a public CDN (for something like jQuery), the library is likely to already be cached from another website and has a chance to even already have an SSL connection to the CDN.

Obviously 60 separate CDNs is excessive, but I don't know if the practice altogether is a bad idea.
So essentially universal basic income will fail because it won't be implemented universally or basically.
There are always trade-offs. Sometimes you care about performance (C++) and are willing to sacrifice useful features that are costly at runtime. Sometimes you care about individual developer happiness (Python) and you're willing to sacrifice performance.

There's no silver bullet.
you have to do "crystal lang" in your searches.

But yeah a more unique name would have been nice... or even just crystal spelled like "Krystl" or something.
VMS (virtual memory system) was the OS that ran on Digital's VAX machines. Your sibling comments have more info as well.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS

- http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/vms_vs_unix.html
The communist revolution in China was in 1945 so...no, they have not.
Go's PASCAL. :-)

Interesting language, looks especially interesting for rapidly throwing things together. Add a solid API to a window system toolkit and you've got a logical successor to Visual Basic.

Write an editor, cross compiler for some other language, and a shell in it. That will tell you if it is a good "systems" language.

Write a distributed service, a web application, and a database in it. That will tell you if it is a good "web" language.

Write a physics simulator, a responsive AI, and a real time user interaction model in it. That will tell you if it is a good "game" language.

Write a convolution, a linear regression, and a monte carlo simulation in it. That will tell you if it is a good "modeling" language.

In my Christmas wishlist is a language that I can write a good 3D CAD package in. The current choice is C++ but that can be really clumsy in many ways. Such a language would have a strong linear algebra library and a boolean solids package. Nobody is working in that problem space from a language perspective as far as I can tell.
It's probably some kind of comms or navigational software.. not the autopilot
From the timeline, I think Github is in breach of DMCA provisions. The project seemed to provide a proper, valid counter-notice[0].

Unless Github has been served with an an actual judicial injunction, then they should have restored the content after 10 days[1].

[0]: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2016/2016-11-07-I...

[1]: https://help.github.com/articles/guide-to-submitting-a-dmca-...
First hand experience. Personal cards (incl corporate cards) both debit and credit issued by ICICI and AMEX always worked internationally without a problem.

My SBI corporate card needed to be "activated" before international travel. It was NOT a Bank policy or Govt policy but something that the finance/accounts dept instructs bank to do to reduce risk of fraud (its nonsense, but there it is).

For all cards, it's between bank and customer. All AMEX and Most (all?) Visa/MasterCard should work internationally.
Licensing is probably a big reason... integration and migration to azure is probably another reason... MS pricing for SQL is pretty competitive in terms of what cloud offerings are available. I wish their compute would come down a bit across the board though.

I keep thinking it would be cool to see an interactive graph of connection latency, and throughput for 1k, 1mb, 1gb xfers between the major data centers for the big cloud providers. If I could get compute from DO/Linode and use services from Azure and have under 20ms latency for data queries, I might use Azure for services, and Linode or DO for compute.

I know that's too much for some things, but may be work the cost in latency for many use cases... saving a few hundred a month on web/service vm's and leverage Azure beyond that.

(as for downvotes, probably mickeysoft)
You can also flash a disguised version (the app will have the name "System Framework" and a stock Android icon)[1].

[1] https://www.cerberusapp.com/get

After that you can set it to be run only with a specific number entered in the phone dialer, so the shortcut isn't visible in the app drawer.

You have to really know about Cerberus to find it, or be knowledgeable to re-flash the device when you steal it. That's what it makes it a very good anti-theft app.
I don't work at Google, but I do work for a "startup" within a different corporate's incubator.

> these "startups" are actually owned by the employees who create them?

They're not. Usually the employees don't even get equity. The reward is running your own team.
They _can_ restore the content, the provider is not obligated to.
Haha, yeah, guess I've turned fanatic over the years. But really, I hear these comments all the time and I can't get my head around them.

1) It's definitely no colder than taking the metro. I put on significantly less clothes when I hop on my bike an hour from now and with proper clothing I stay dry and ventilated.

2) Snow clearance is prioritized on the bike roads. So far this year snow has only been a problem one day. That's when the snow chaos hit Stockholm. My friend got stuck in a car for 7 hours. My bike commute took 20 minutes longer than normal.

3) I have have studded tyres, I have not installed them this year though. Ice is hardly ever a problem. The bike roads are salted, which, ironically is the biggest problem of them all for me. Salt ruins the bikes, so I recommend using a cheaper bike in the winter.

It's faster, I get an hour of "free" workout each day and I can get to wherever I like inside the city without combining different modes of transportation using and app and standing in the cold waiting. When it's cold outside, I'd rather be moving.
> management likes them because the can solve problems, they just don't see the creation of yet more problems.

In fire-fighting situations at least to my experience it is usually about fixing things fast and under stress. Not many devs are interested in doing that. These hotfixers probably know their code sucks, but I don't think they need to feel bad for solving the urgent problems in their own way - in my experience it is not a job that many are that willing to take. Majority like to solve the problems properly in a slow-paced less stressful way.
I think when a startup is bootstrapped and gaining traction it's almost always the opposite nowadays,i.e. 22 reasons why I don't need your money.

Even for my teeny tiny startup (2008) I had several VCs calling us everyday wanting to invest. I really think if you're in a position where your on the VC's mercy for funding, it means your startup needs more work on the product.
Ask HN: What's a good online course for beginning programming?
I have a friend from a designer background who is very experienced in HTML and CSS who wants to learn Javascript primarily for front-end/browser. She looked at some Jarascript tutorials but they all assume you have some programming foundations to start with (i.e. know OO etc). Can you recommend an online course (free or paid) that will help in this case? It doesn't need to be 100% Javascript oriented but it would be a plus.
> This concept implies that it's possible to discover all possible scope before starting a project, which is almost always not the case on any project of relevant scale. This is waterfall.

Difference would be that the team defines their own scope. But I see your point

> The notion of "you'll get the rest of the money when the project is done" is toxic and dangerous, and implies that you can know what done means before you even start, and it's an objective and finite finish line you are approaching.

This one I concede fully