skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I looked at the contents of the Voyager Golden Record a while ago (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_Voyager_Golden...). Frankly, it's underwhelming. There's lots of arbitrary sentimental data that will make very little sense to another civilization, no matter how smart they are.
It appears that it's more of a message to ourselves, demonstrating our cultural diversity.

The first few images stored on the disk are interesting. They establish our location in the Milky Way as well as our math and physics.
Yes, I know that. We are talking about a public communications medium. If they can throttle hate speech, they can throttle Netflix. So they won't host it, they won't provide DNS resolution. How far does it go? Can't get a static IP?
Would you call Erlang/Elixir actor-based or just having actor-like features?

Actors in Erlang seem more emergent to me than fundamental. To first order, Go and Erlang use similar concurrency strategies with cheap green threads and channels for communication. The main difference being that Go has channels as separates objects that can be passed around (leaving the goroutine anonymous), while Erlang fuses the channels into the process. In this respect, they both have similar levels of "actor-ness" in my mind. The biggest upside that I can see to channels being separate is that a goroutine can have multiple channels, they can be sent around (though so can PIDs), etc. This matters a lot because the channels in Go are statically typed, while Erlang/Elixir's dynamic typing makes this less meaningful since you can send anything on the same channel.

Of course, I supposed if one defines an actor as a sequential threaded process with a built in (dynamically-typed) channel, then Erlang is actor-based, so maybe I contradicted myself. In Erlang/OTP, the actor part is important to the supervision tree error handling strategy, which I think is the biggest upside, but it's not obvious to me that you need the channel and the process totally fused together to handle that.

Specifically in response to your "cheap concurrency good, actors bad" thought, my hypothesis is that actors are at least the more natural strategy in a dynamically typed language, which is why they seem to work well in Erlange/Elixir, but don't see much use in languages like Haskell (or Scala, it seems, where I at least though the Akka actors were kind of awful). Meanwhile, channels seem to fit better with static typing, though I can't quite put my finger on why.
Small world indeed :) that's really old code, I don't remember much about it :)
One of the stars of comptuing, Grace Hopper, rarely mentions her sex.

She talks of inspiring young people, her talks are technical.

I think we are too quick to get wrapped up in identity politics.
There is a lot wrong here, but what bothers me right this minute is the idea that computer programming has "changed beyond recognition" between 1950 and 1980 and that is the cause of the gender imbalance we see today. For sure, a lot of progress was made in the field during that time span. But did the work materially change? I don't think that's the case at all, we simply saw huge steps made in the quality of the tooling and the machines; they didn't fundamentally transform into different things. The tools improved a great deal and allowed the same amount of people to accomplish more work in the same amount of time, progress that continues to this day (we can complain about Electron until we're hoarse, but it does make it easier to get an application out on every device and one person could conceivably so just that).

This is just more painful gymnastics and contortions trying to find another reason for the gender imbalance when the actual cause is obvious and well documented: one gender is working to keep the other out. Damore's memo is an example of this: entirely lacking in applicable science and with a basis grounded almost entirely in the man's existing biases.

Talk to some of the people of another gender currently in the field and just listen to what they are saying. You'll hear about educators with axes to grind, encouraging them to pursue another field. You'll hear about coworkers and employers who suspect their work is not their own. You'll hear about job interviews where no answers are correct. And you'll come to Hacker News and read posts like these, from people in the field, insisting that there is no problem.
>Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.

+1 - that's how I remember it too!

I asked the following 12 days ago [0]:

>One thing I'd like to ask the women in this forum:

>If you'd grown up back in the day before tech was cool and techies were (generally) just nerds with no money, would you have still been interested in tech?

>...

I didn't get any replies though ...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956137
I agree with you.

We're in such a state of things that people feel compelled to upfront state that while they don't support the thoughts of these sites, they support their right to free speech.

It used to be assumed that in supporting free speech one did not agree with the most vile of those expressions. Now we're compelled to say that up front lest someone conflate the two.

This re-interpretation of free speech is just as likely to come back to apply to the people now in favor of kerbing free speech.

One of the most obvious is religion and people holding views opposite to it. Or, what if you espouse Marxism. That could be incitement to violence, in this interpretation.

Today one groups is in control of what acceptable speech is. Tomorrow it will be someone else. And I will still be supporting free speech whoever is under attack by the contextual free speechers.
I guess I won't be down-voted for posting this, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Thanks. Looking forward to the live stream.
Perhaps, but even if the article is correct, and male programmers in the 1960s did intentionally crowd out women, doesn't that demonstrate what Damore posited when he said women are less assertive and less aggressive, in general? It seems disingenuous for the author of the article to declare Damore "wrong," when studies back up what Damore said, and this article itself suggests those tendencies to be accurate, at least to some degree.
This may be what you're looking for: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

According to that table, women's bachelor's degrees in computer science:

* were low in the 1970's, about 15% average

* were higher in the 1980's, about 35% average

* declined in the 1990's to about 25-30%

* steadily declined from 27 to 17% in the 2000's
> They found some predictable ones: a love of solving puzzles, for example. But the only “striking characteristic” that defined successful male programmers was “their disinterest in people.” A subsequent study -- one that was overlooked in subsequent years -- found this to be true of female programmers as well.

Isn't this trait much more prevalent among males though? Could explain why we saw women flock to more social fields when the barriers were removed.
Not an ideal article for anything. Looks like written with limited research, that by the end of it I an hardly keep focus.

> Bloated stack.
True, there are options which author hasn't discussed.

> A new filesystem and a new video encoding format.
Apple created new FS and video format. These are far more fundamental changes to be glossed over as trivial in a single line.

> CMD.exe, the terminal program which essentially still lets you run DOS apps was only replaced in 2016. And the biggest new feature of the latest Windows 10 release? They added a Linux subsystem. More layers piled on top.
Linux subsytem is a great feature of Windows. Ability to run bash on Windows natively, what's the author complaining about?

> but how about a system wide clipboard that holds more than one item at a time? That hasn't changed since the 80s!
Heard of Klipper and similar app in KDE5/Plasma. Its been there for so long and keeps text, images and file paths in clipboard.

> Why can't I have a file in two places at once on my filesystem?
Hard links and soft links??

> Filesystem tags
Are there!

What I feel about the article is: OSes have these capabilities since long, where are the killers applications written for these?
When centralization occurs, you lose
Thanks! Hope to take this discussion further on Github one day :)
There a difference between healthy living or occasional dangerous behaviour compared to an addiction that needs individual medical intervention.

I find it a strange case for a male person with an addiction problem (which is what we are talking, AA style intervention) thinking 'sometimes as many as' 20 drinks to be a statement of supprise.
Indeed, and it appears that the guy has some relation to Mozilla
Good suggestion, thanks -- I've just added an update to the top of the post, and mentioned it there :)

Edit: just a note to say that I added this update to http://johnhammersley.com/?p=428 as that's where this HN story originally pointed to.
Use ‘maybe’ to See What a Command or Script Will Do, Without Running It
JetBrains was and largely still is a Russian company. The Kotlin developers are all based in St Petersburg for example.
That's kind of (partially) the point for me on the UBI subject. Fear.

We are moving to a world where work as we know it will be more and more rare.

So why not provide every one a roof, to eat, and health care ? The most part of the population live in fear. Fear if you loose your job you won't be able to live in decent conditions.

So you keep on working a sh*tty job you don't like just because you have no choice. You restrain yourself of doing things you like because you come home exhausted (physically or mentally. Or both).

Some will say that it have been attempted in USSR. And failed. And it's very true.

But now is a time where most of the basic jobs can be done automatically. Where you can build a house in less than a day. Even print it !

May be it's a good time to change paradigm.

PS : I'm a 46 yo software engineer. So far so good. Crossing fingers ;)
Considering how many people are preaching "do not use electron, write true native apps", the argument is the same (use lower level tools) and reply to it also stays the same:

Dev time is the most expensive resource.
China's AI medical center goes online in east China province – Mpelembe Media
Profit is definitely a driver for much open-source software, Google pushes Android so they can control mobile advertising, Oracle pushes Java to stop Microsoft having a stranglehold on corporate development, RedHat pushes Linux so it can sell services. There aren't many big open source projects that are purely altruistic.
> How will they cope with signs/marking intentionally designed to fool machine vision systems.

They won't, but neither can humans. Signs aren't secure. Anyone with a wrench can take down a stop sign or put up a fake speed limit.
You don't need a route library. You don't need a form library.

What do you need a routing library for? Have a single controller component (usually the most outer shell app component) and sprinkle in further functionality (e.g. history pushState) as necessary. Don't build it out until you actually need it.

I've never needed a "form library" because forms are almost always interactive in some specific way. Using a form library is almost always guaranteed to just get in the way.

You don't need to have a global state management library either if you have a good grasp of your apps data structures and how they need to be passed into components.

I find with React I get the opposite of javascript fatigue: it's so easy to build anything you need once you understand react that you won't need to search for all those libraries and code snippets.
I've come to realise that if I'm run down or hungover or guilty in some way then my mind automatically starts to relive old resentments. I think it's a form of projection. There's a bad feeling internally and so memories are activated to 'explain' the badness and direct blame elsewhere.
It was pretty prestigious in the 90's and seems to remain so today. At parties where I'm required to mix with other adults from varying backgrounds (i.e. a child's birthday party), they are almost universally impressed that I am in software development. As a child, people did seem impressed (in the 80's) that my father was a developer and we were one of the few families in town that had a proper computer (not an Atari 2600 or an Intellivison).
> While G2 lacks any trust mechanisms there are a few projects working in the problem space of trusted decentralized stacks

Search engines need to solve the spam issue.

Without central control you lack any solid ground for eradicating spam, preventing fake accounts, and exploits to your protocols. Building trust is not easy. The only progress we made in the past decade was with Bitcoin, proof-of-work. Bittorrent relies on either a central tracker or the DHT(==not very secure).

For the past 12 years I've dedicated my academic career to building trust without any central control or central servers. It's hard.
<plug> We enhanced a Bittorrent client with a web-of-trust plus distributed torrent search and replaced tit-for-tat with a ledger. We using an incremental PageRank-like trust model. https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki#current-items-under-...
People clamor for more censorship

It's the 20-somethings that are doing this, the 40- and 50-somethings I know are generally horrified. But those are old enough to remember the Internet before it retreated into walled gardens, the old days of Usenet.
Rolling Your Own Blockchain in Haskell
Python is my favorite language and I really liked Go as I read about it. When time came to actually learn and use it, I was... Disappointed.

Sticking with python still, for the time being.
I've used neither of those libraries in any of the production React apps I've made.
Even if the author's premise that women were "crowded out" of programming 40 years ago is true, that does not imply that “innate dispositional differences” between sexes don't influence one's tendency towards pursuing certain fields.

The author suggests that the current stereotypical portrait of a geeky socially awkward neckbearded male engineer was socially engineered, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's idiotic conspiracy nonsense. Geeky reclusive men tend to pursue computer programming because dealing with a machine doesn't involve dealing with a human, not due to society's marketing of computer engineers as geeks.

The author is clearly not a computer programmer (professor of history apparently), nor someone capable of basic logic. If you're going to cash in on the diversity scandal for views, at least make a coherent argument.

(Also this post is a dupe, I submitted the same post before this and this is a copy and paste of my comment on the original thread)
James Damore asserted that women are less aggressive than men because of mostly biological factors which is ridiculous if one has ever at all paid attention to the social signals given to women.

Also, why the fuck would we ever stand for our industry to be organized along hierarchies of dominance and aggression? What exactly is the argument here?
That guy continues to find ways to damage every project he touches, one way or another.
If you’re a startup, you should not use React
Luckily programming or computing hasn't changed at all since the 50s and 60s, so we can effortlessly assume that what people said about it then still applies perfectly to today's distributed, abstract, always-on landscape.

Even more, we can use the view from the 50s and 60s, a time which was not sexist at all, to explain why today is more sexist than ever.

Women outnumber men in colleges. Women have an easier time getting jobs. Single, childless women outearn men in that category.

Women just aren't choosing STEM. And apparently the solution is to tell them loudly how horrible the people they'd get to work with are. Who are some bizarre amalgam of a Goldman Sachs elevator and the cast of Big Bang Theory. Which you can effortlessly get a flood of coverage about, even though you're supposedly oppressed and are fighting the status quo.

Go away old media, go away tech feminists, go away white knights. If people stopped seeing women as victims, you'd lose your meal ticket, your power fetish and your moral superiority.
This is an aspect that has always been bugging me as well. There is this implied notion that for men, it was ok or even encouraged to be nerdy and spend all their spare time in front of a screen.

In my experience, committing to this lifestyle meant being socially crowded out. Some people were unpopular to begin with and sort of found refuge in the computer world out of necessity, some of us accepted being unpopular/uncool because we did not care.

One possible explanation, but potentially an offensive one, and only based on personal experience: fewer women were willing to make this sacrifice, at least in school. Interestingly, this was not because boys would be unwelcoming but because other women would judge them harshly for stepping out.

On a related anecdote, I frequently observed girls in school downplaying their math abilities in front of their friends - not because men judged them, but because they did not want to stand out in front of their friends.

I suppose the interesting question is why they felt this way, and I would not wager to answer it. I just think the theory 'men are not letting women into tech' simply does not hold up in the formative school years.

Only very recently (since the social network movie) there has been this glorification of tech in combination with the startup lifestyle.
Some apparently regularly updated benchmarks comparing implementations of scheme: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/benchmark.html

Chez isn't always the fastest, but it's the fastest so often that I wouldn't look much beyond it if performance were of major importance to me. It's been written about here on HN before, but the next major version of Racket will be based on Chez. Chez will get package management, libraries, and modern tooling of Racket, and Racket will (presumably) be able to capitalize on the performance of Chez.

Of course if you come from, say Python, performance shouldn't really matter much to you, as pretty much all the schemes are already playing in a different league: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...
Yes. My obsession with computers, which did not start until after I met some super geeks after college, has COST me tens of thousands of dollars, more if you count rent for my lab and patents.

It has cost me thousands of hours of time when I could've been reading literature, networking, cooking, going to med school, or a hundred other things.

It has been worth every fucking penny and minute and the best joy and highlights of my life have been when I learned about a new idea or created a new algorithm.

We exist. There just aren't that many of us and we don't glamour blog.
> This re-interpretation of
> free speech

This is an exceptionally American-centric view. The rest of the civilised world outlawed hate speech and moved on a long time ago.
Gabriel is a buffoon of the highest order, and tries to sneak his bad attitude into nearly everything he ever contributes to.

Please don't defend him, especially via these kind of tactical omissions.
For me it's quite the opposite. I find that so confusing when you look at html in JavaScript and don't know right away what the result will be. It's like were back in 2002 doing PHP.
Oh, that's interesting to know - I've been following Ceylon for a while, trying to figure out whether it was getting any adoption. My theory is that people don't seem that interested because it's another JVM language, and there are already a number of them, filling different niches - Scala for "more powerful type system", Clojure is the lisp, etc...
SlateStarCodex did an in depth cover of this issue at: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Regex code was probably based on the standard Erlang regex module that Robert Virding wrote. Simplified by skipping the regex syntax and writing the AST directly (like in scsh.)
When do we start looking at articles like this as misandry? The author is seriously implying there was some sort of conspiracy that all men partook in, with the intent to exclude women from software development. Are you fucking kidding me? This shit has gone too far.
I feel like React has hit that tipping point that Rails did several years ago: it's no longer cool but it's still incredibly productive, and literally every new hip
library that is currently flavor of the month is modeled after it in some way.
Ugh. So basically when programming was unskilled and considered one step up from being a secretary, women did that and men built the machines themselves.

As software became a larger and larger component of the machines, and more and more complex, it became dominated by men. This, we learn, is because men made it more rigorous and scientific as part of some bizarre sexist plot.

Or maybe the nature of programming today is pretty different to how it was in the immediate post-war years, and the kinds of jobs women can get changed too.
Yep and given the disaster of WinDev vs DevTools political differences, they are still putting down fires.

If UWP had been there in Windows 8, with something like .NET Standard already in place, the app story would be much different.
Why do sites like bloomberg.com publish such ill-researched propaganda?

Are they acting on behalf of certain interest groups who want more obedient, fungible and cheaper devs?
Why Your Face Will Soon Be the Key to All Your Devices
IOCCC Flight Simulator
I just replied. We exist.

In my case, I did not get exposed to programming or computers until I was 24 yrs. old, though chance employment.
Simplenote takes donations? I thought Automattic bought it.
There are no studies that backup Damore. He cherry picked bits and pieces he liked to tell a story that isn't supported by the sources he quoted.
I used to work like this, and the reason I was productive is I didn't write tests nor did I have to wait around for the compiler to run every few steps. Being able to visualise the result for your code is something that comes with experience, and usually on the web this is a lot easier when you're applying the same ~10 concepts over and over.

But in a team, I would much rather have someone practice TDD than be perceived as more productive. Your code will stand the test of time and be easier for others to work with, which will cost less down the line (maintainability cost + fixing bugs cost, inevitable and a huge time sink without tests). I am now trying to think in a TDD manner and it's frustratingly slower, but ultimately a lot less stressful when I have something I can point to and objectively say it fits the requirements / business rules.
China Set to Launch the World’s First Quantum Communication Network
Thank you. Are you aware of any program that exists or is under development that can import the file format or access the data stored in a notebook? I have never found one and did assume the spec was closed.
Code For Cash – Report for Month Eight
I work in a coworking space in Seattle. Most of the startups here use React and a few Angular. Not one, that I know, uses Vue. This is a fairly large coworking space and while I don't know every company's stack, the reach of React is impressive considering it wasn't that long ago that Angular dominated.
I'm a big fan of TreeSheets and very happy that Wouter decided to open source it. It gives some hope for an Android port ...
I'm used to start working at 5am or early... Just to be on the zone without distractions (email, phone... )
Something tells me that Intellij IDEA fame made people more friendly to kotlin
Good for you. We hold sacrosanct the view that free speech is free speech and governments shouldn't be the arbiters of what is and isn't "hate."
> If one rejection by YC can deter you from your ultimate destiny, don't call yourself an entrepreneur.

Bingo!! this is the ACID test for an entrepreneur/founding team .