skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And yet, Russia has in the past done just that. The Fins don't maintain their extremely vigilant conscripted military for shits and giggles.

And in the past Sweden attacked Russia. We're talking about current situation. In 1930s whole world was preparing for a big war (even regular people 1935 were discussing and guessing when the war will erupt) and it has nothing to do with modern situation.

> More generally, your hyper-active argumentation all over this thread is just weird

I'm just trying to hold civil discussion, what's the problem here?

> all countries develop military contingency plans, and everyone within artillery range of Russia's border is legitimately concerned about the threat of Russian military action. Plain and simple.

That's the point of discussion - only Sweden has become lately very worried about being attacked by Russia. And my point is there's no any possibility of such attack, and protecting from this is just waste of resources. Also, Sweden is out of artillery range from Russian border.
Not me. But to paraphrase PT Barnum, there's a sucker born every minute.
VB6 and (especially) Delphi continue to have many fans. Sadly, there is little effort seemingly being expended in simplifying programming for normal people, so a lot of modern visual environments just haven't taken off, which further reduces incentives for investment in the field, and leads to them being (correctly) perceived as crippled and unsound.

Also high-mean IQ dev outfits are likely to produce tools for people like themselves. "Cognitive empathy" is not going to be a strong point for the framework creators at Google or Facebook. Microsoft seems to have quietly abandoned Lightswitch, which was their last high-profile attempt in this space.

Finally market forces mean that working developers have no incentive to adopt simpler technologies, so there is no pressure on vendors to simplify things either.
I don't think that meaningful whitespace counts as "visual programming." That just means that a whitespace character has meaning, just like a word character or a punctuation character. It's still purely text-based. I think that "visual programming" means that the editing environment to some extent visually represents the intended outcome of the program. WYSIWYG web editing is the obvious extreme example of this. Whitespace in a Python program has no visual correlation to the output of the program.
My first paid programming job was on one of these (the 5120). Too young/inexperienced to appreciate the hardware at the time.
That's not an honest representation of the argument given there is no parallel you can make between today's world of electronic communication passing over centralized infrastructure to however people communicated before.

There was no ability for the government to read everyone's (or anyone's) mail at once in the past.
Note that this dates back to Rust 1.0, and although the macro system hasn't changed since then, plans are in the works to succeed this original system ("macros 1.0") with an improved one ("macros 2.0"), culminating in the deprecation of the original. The two systems won't differ that much, so the documentation will remain mostly the same and the transition should be very straightforward.

The impetus for this is that the macro system was unanimously considered the least mature feature of pre-1.0 Rust, but there was little will to delay Rust 1.0 even further solely for the sake of macros. Instead, some expedient band-aids were slapped over it during the run-up to 1.0, with the intent to eventually fix the whole thing properly when time allowed.

To wit, the main problems with macros 1.0 were that macro "importing" is an ugly hack that stands out like a sore thumb from how modules work in the rest of the language; in addition, despite supposedly being hygenic, there are some edge cases where hygiene does not hold. The new system will make the language overall more consistent and reliable (and might bring some minor syntactic improvements), with the obvious downside that making the macro system nicer to use means that people might actually start using it. :P
There's another angle to this. In her previous role, Theresa May presided over record police cuts with utmost arrogance. It turns out that even if we had everything in plaintext, that there almost certainly isn't the manpower to follow up leads generated from a mass surveillance programme.

If we assume that May is competent and not exploiting a tragic attack to engage in jingoistic gesture politics for the election on Thursday, then this can only be about making sure that law-abiding dissidents cannot communicate with each other in secret to hold the powerful to account.
The first 12 years is general knowledge: how to interact, read, write, basic knowledge, etc. Also has the purpose of acting as a binding agent for the local community: children make friends, join teams/clubs, etc.

College / university is specialized knowledge that is typically used for career and social status advancement. Its helpful and has utility, but it's not necessarily required to be a functioning adult that lives in and contributes to society
My partner and I are always on the lookout for good two player games to fit into the gaps. Here are a few:

Morels - A game about gathering mushrooms and cooking them for points. The game simulates a walk through the forest with a rotating track of decaying mushroom cards. A really pleasant game for a Sunday morning.

Trambahn - Building tram tracks in Germany (Austria?) from horse-drawn buggies to more modern electric trams. Completely card based and has some clever mechanics re: scoring and building stations.

The Bloody Inn - You and a partner(s) are running an inn with the sole purpose of amassing money, usually by robbing/murdering people in their sleep. Fun game that can actually play up to 4 but works well with 2.

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game & Arkham Horror Card Game - These are both far heavier than the rest, but are great if you're into D&Dish adventure games but don't have a group for D&D. You essentially work through campaigns and scenarios with a character by playing again the deck/board, so no DM necessary. We like both of these a lot.
I am actually working on a react native app with native modules in objc, swift, and a combination of the two. It is stable and easy to work with all three. Just use what you want to use. You wanna make it full swift, go for it. React native, go for it. Stick with objc you know, go for it. No wrong choice here.

ps: Well, maybe pure objc is not the best choice, since it's on its way out, but it's a long way to its end.
Filter Forge is great. I was thinking on doing something similar and will definitely take inspiration on FF.
What will be the use of your next turing complete VPL ?
Your comment about business administration threw me for a loop--I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not anymore.

These sorts of articles always strike me as naive, and the discussions sort of disingenuous.

I'll go along with this thought experiment when I see places stop requiring MBAs of administrators just 'cause (one of the most useless degrees in my opinion), when medical professionals don't need a license to practice, and when companies actually stop looking at degrees when hiring individuals, instead of the exceptions to the rule you always see on the internet ("hey, I hire for my company, and I don't pay attention to degrees. Great. You're like 1/100).

Put aside all the unrealistic assumptions being made, that others are posting, such as that money will just fall from the sky to invest, or that 7% annualized return is actually a value that people can count on.

It's still ignoring questions like: will I be able to do what I want just teaching myself? Could I get hired as a civil engineer? For every one of these articles, there's another talking about how comp sci graduates are just better prepared for software development, etc. on average than people from other majors who are self-taught.

It's funny to me that these statistics and discussions ignore grad school, when a prereq for grad school is going to undergrad.

Believe me, I wish everyone would go along with what someone is capable of rather than what their degree rubber stamps (that is, after all, for all the jokes made, the premise of a liberal arts degree--that you don't need to specialize in school to have any given skill in real life). It would be better in so many ways. But society is more superficial than we let on.
I don't recall saying that it was "game-changing", I said that it was useful for a large number of web pages, unlike webassembly which is useful for a very small number of specialized needs.

Same for modules, or Intersection Observer or many other features that FF is not shipping. Stop trying to prove me wrong and understand my point. Firefox is slow on stuff that makes regular old web developers lives easier, because they're chasing 3d games.
Aaaand we're in the personal attack area. Thanks for the attention, I don't have desire to discuss anything with you any more.
Also, there's asciidoc[1] which is implements the Open Docbook[3] schema. Along with it is the Ruby ecosystem for asciidoctor[2] which is:

* A mature[1], plain-text writing format for authoring notes, articles, documentation, books, ebooks, web pages, slide decks, blog posts, man pages and more.

* A text processor and toolchain for translating AsciiDoc documents into various formats (called backends), including HTML, DocBook, PDF and ePub.

Along with a healthy ecosystem of scripts to convert between basically all the formats, from troff/tex for the academics, org-mode for the emacs nerds, to Markdown for the bloggers. All basically interoperate with

I have a fairly extensive list of typesetting frameworks and document publishing management systems (along the lines of Adobe FrameMaker), but I'm running out the door

[1] http://asciidoc.org
[2] http://asciidoctor.org/docs/what-is-asciidoc/
[3] http://docbook.org/whatis
You're right that young people need to understand the costs of going to college and make an educated decision about whether spending the time and money on a four-year degree in their field of interest is worth it. If you're goal is to become a doctor, you may not have a choice. If you want to become a painter, maybe you don't need the extra burden of debt.

I think you're misguided about the value of a liberal arts education, though. I wish more people had exposure to philosophy, history, and literature classes with teachers with the ability to really illuminate these subjects. Money is important, of course. But then there's becoming a good and thoughtful person. A smartly chosen educational program can help young people with both. (Apologies if you find my attitude frustrating.)

(Also, "college is only about money" feels like a variant of "a company should only care about the shareholders." Well, maybe. But that's also an incredibly reductionistic view that can lead people to think of money and only money as the sole reason to pursue an endeavor. I think there are many, many other ways something can be valuable.)
Open source/volunteer projects are great at building resume pre-employment. With additional bonus that you can actually show the potential employer your code and not just talk about it. And if you managed to actually run an OSS project while being a student, instead of merely submitting patches to it, that's even more excellent news.

College name - sure, if it's MIT, maybe. Or a handful of others. Otherwise - meh, in software world nobody really cares. In business or law maybe different, don't know.
A good place to draw the line is one that places responsibility on the tool-wielders, and not on the mere existence or possession of the tools themselves.

Many of us object to gun control on that basis, and the same reasoning can be applied to encryption.

In fact, there's really not a lot you can say about one that you can't say about the other. No private citizen "needs" access to encryption so strong that even intelligence agencies can't break it, any more than any private citizen "needs" to own a weapon whose only purpose is killing. Right?
TL;DR; Didn't go to college, at first people thought it was a liability, but after working my way up people are blown away.

Here is my experience:

Dad got a masters in Math, couldn't get a job, became a Taxi driver and then took 6mo of community college and got a job writing BASIC in the mid 1980s.

Dad didn't encourage me to go to college, I was a bad student, but taught myself coding and really liked it. Had a C average in high school.

Got a job at the small company my dad worked at, got paid $7 an hour, then $14 an hour the next year.

Decided I needed to go to college to really make it, put my resume out for fun. Got an offer for $65k to work at Microsoft via a recruiter. This was in 1998.

Been working since, learning, making contacts. I make $180k with bonuses now at a Fortune 100 company, I could work into upper management as many have, but I like coding, hate email, hate meetings. I have a Director title.

When people hear that I don't have a college education they are blown away.
This is a great question. I have to say I haven't profiled Postgres to that level of granularity, so I am making an assumption about why my updates are slow. What I notice is relatively slow UPDATE performance, with high total disk writes and a write-ahead-log that seems to be large. The bloat on disk isn't an issue for me (or, rather, I have started using lower fillfactors to reduce the variability in DB size as the rows are updated).

Do you have a favored resource that you can direct me to that would help me identify the factors that you cited and ultimately allow me to make more nuanced criticisms (or to find a fixable error in my approach, which would of course be the ideal result)?
> Why even permit people to have secrets of any kind? The real "problem" is [...] people keeping secrets

You might be on to something! To lead the way to a secret-free world, they might wanna start by dissolving MI5, MI6, etc..
Evidently, most people don't have a problem with it, because that describes the situation at U.S. airports very well.
> The solution is a drivers license to use the internet. No more anonymity.

That's not a solution, that's a failure and a regression. There is nothing wrong with the way the internet works right now.
To all my still-EU-cocitizens: you still have the possibility to leave your neo-facist country for another part of Europe. It will not get better, as the anglo-saxon world is currently destructing itself.
First, there must be a dividing line between when we are no longer going to pay for a persons education. 18 years old is a pretty good dividing line because that when society deems people responsible for themselves.

Second, college is a good cut of because it's highly specialized education.

Third, almost all the benefits are captured by the precipitant of the education.

Finally, most of the country would either be unsuited or uninterested in college education. To a person breaking their back doing roofting, they might as well be buying rich kids trips to Europe instead. Not only does free college only benefit a portion of society, it benefits a portion that doesn't need a subsidy.
> And it's no surprise that COBOL was a historical dead-end. Unlike FORTRAN and Lisp, it begat nothing.

Not entirely true. One obvious thing it influenced was PL/I, which was supposed to unify FORTRAN and COBOL along with block-structured programming from Algol. PL/I was only ever moderately successful. While it saw some use in business data processing, COBOL was always more popular for that task. I think its biggest successes were systems programming (e.g. Multics, CP/M, MVS, Honeywell CP-6) and compiler development (e.g. the compiler for the HAL/S language used to program the space shuttle computers). (In most of those applications, they didn't use pure standard PL/I, rather dialects such as PL/M, PL/S, XPL). In those applications, compound data structures are very important, and the PL/I syntax for those was obviously influenced by COBOL (in the use of level numbers). And PL/I has in turn influenced several other languages, I think the most notable would be REXX, although I'm not sure how much of the COBOL influence survives in those descendant languages.

Other languages COBOL arguably influenced include DIBOL (a business programming language developed by DEC, it was a mishmash of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC) and ABAP (SAP's application programming language, derisively nicknamed "German COBOL").

Ada annex F (Information Systems) was consciously influenced by COBOL, especially in the concept of "picture strings". I think the influence of COBOL picture strings can be seen in other languages also, e.g. the date formatting syntax used by java.text.SimpleDateFormat. So in that small area, arguably Java is descended from COBOL.

I personally think the syntax of SQL shows some definite stylistic influence from COBOL. A similar wordiness and proliferation of keywords. Since SQL was designed by IBM in the 1970s, and the first implementations of it ran on IBM mainframes, obviously the team that invented it were very familiar with COBOL, and it shows.

English Wikipedia reports that the legacy telecommunications programming language CHILL (CCITT High Level Language) was influenced by COBOL–no idea how true that is. Polish Wikipedia reports the existence of a mid-1960s Soviet language called "Algek", which was based on Algol and COBOL. Around 2000 someone invented a language called "CobolScript", which was supposed to help COBOL programmers get into web development – it didn't take off.

This is all odds-and-ends, but it isn't literally nothing.
Ninja can help a lot, but it won't magically make the cpp file that you're actively working on which takes a minute to compile not take a minute to compile, and that's a very real possibility when you write c++ with no thought to compile times.
Programming languages (and a lot of other things) have essential and accidental complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet?wprov=sfla1

Progress in programming is in removing the accidental complexity to get to the essential.

In the vast majority of domains, visual programming injects huge amounts of accidental complexity utterly irrelevant to the domain. So it isn't really surprising that despite it's superficially appealing elevator pitch and uniquely pretty demos, it doesn't appeal over the long term.

The domains where it works are those where the complexity is limited, or where the usually-accidental complexity is actually fundamental... for instance, in circuit layout the usually-accidental issues involved with layout actually correspond to something.

Visual programming is firmly established in some nights, and I expect it to stay in them indefinitely.
First of all, instead of going all the way to free higher education in one go, try a better loan system.

Basically since educated youth is a national interest, set up an authority that lends money to students with very reasonable interest rates and repayment.

Interest rate can be set at the inflation level plus a small margin, repayment is set as a fraction of annual income, and the loans should not count against future credit. Remaining debt at 65 is written off and absorbed by the public.

This is how I funded my education (or rather, the rent/food/books as there was no tuition).
>See the UK case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murder for shooting robbers who were in his home

Shooting someone in the back whilst they're running away doesn't constitute self-defence.
The end-game of BigSister is probably for ISPs to drop any encrypted packets. This seems doable. She's not as naive as the article makes out and undoubtedly takes advice from very smart people at GCHQ.

I agree that steganography can be a solution to sustain open communication. It's less brittle than crypto but offers weaker guarantees. I know of a suitable system design. Not plain English, rather plain bitfield.
Wow, I really like it!

Although, I think your ui is too verbose. Main indicator, is, well, the size of "blocks of data", where text takes 4 times less space than visual representation. But there is also an information overload: text representation of `map` call has no indication of what kind of arguments it expects, it is implied by order of args and basically is just defined by language. I guess, visual analog of this code should follow the same trope: it should strip type annotations (which probably should be available VP IDE with a shortcut), and imply meaning of args (maybe with colors?)
Because the market automatically adjusts to the highest possible cost in a situation like college (as opposed to pork bellies, for example).

It's the same reason healthcare is so expensive.
Nobody here has mentioned language workbench tools, the best of which is probably Jetbrains MPS:
https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

These language workbench tools make it easy to switch between graphical and textual representations. Also you get intelligent IDE support and typechecking for free.

The primary alternatives to MPS are Xtext and Microsoft's language workbench (formerly known as Intentional Software, Microsoft just bought them).
>If you have a university degree....

Um, the post I was responding to mentioned getting residency in Europe in order to take advantage of the university system, so....
It looks kind of similar to a dream project of my own. It's a project that I've promised myself to take up on one day. I started building a prototype in haskell, with front end in Gloss. Tried to get inspiration from functional reactive programming/modelling.

I thought about using something like a prototype called Hydra (1) as a sort of runtime for evaluating graphs. Anyway, I really want to get back to it at some point but other cool things that are slightly more low hanging tends to get in the way. :)

Another nice inspiration for these things is Ecolanguage (2), not really programming related but a diagram language for visualizing economic transactions.

(1) - https://github.com/giorgidze/Hydra
(2) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QI1iuAvTKE
ptype 'a' is still char when the language is c? (it should be int in C and char in C++).

Also, "ptype TEST" is still int for SIZE macro in the following code fragment?

// Compile with gcc -g3 filename.c
#define SIZE sizeof (int)
That assumes people have saved costs to invest. In practice, people can avoid accumulated debts, not saved costs.
Jon - really enjoyed failing to stump you the other day at the Urban.Us dinner and love what you are doing. Question: "The target tenant earns between $50,000 and $100,000 — the teachers, restaurant servers, police officers and entry-level tech workers who struggle to afford the $2,700 studios or $3,500 one-bedrooms popping up on Rincon Hill or Mission Bay."

Do teachers - let alone restaurant servers - in SF make >$50k?