skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd make yet a different account of the benefit of dynamic typing. My reasoning skills exceed that of my compiler and I can thus determine that certain designs are type-safe that my compiler cannot. This means that in static languages I end up either 1) spending a lot of time convincing the compiler my design is type-safe, 2) am restricted in the designs I can choose 3) casting types losing the advantage of static typing. With dynamic typing I'm free to just write the code.

Having said that, I now really like Rust which goes all the way in the other direction.
Why not just pay a few bucks a month for a social network, and get all the benefits of centralization without the evils of ad-supported corporations? Most of us here use and trust GitHub, and imho that's what we need more of.

While I'm a huge supporter of blockchain projects and their allies, in the case of social networks I don't see how this is going to turn out any differently than FOAF.
> It's also very nearly your only option when learning something new.

Also your only option when working with other developers.
A fingerprint? Like this thing?

https://panopticlick.eff.org
Just the other day I threw together a landing page for a whale watch crypto app and posted about it on Facebook. It had a conversation rate of 70%, an oddity I’ve never before accomplished. Point being, it’s all about relevance to a very very specific audience.
MLton Compiler Overview
Pamfil Şeicaru despre trădarea regală de la 23 august 1944 (I)
Please can anyone who understood the math explain in simpler terms how eigenvalues are related to gradient norm?
True, sexual drive can be a great motivator. Porn users are tolerant of a lot (popup ads, etc.)
China, in typical China fashion, denied they lost control of the station right up to the end.

"Western space experts say they believe China has lost control of the station. China's chief space laboratory designer Zhu Zongpeng has denied Tiangong was out of control, but hasn't provided specifics on what, if anything, China is doing to guide the craft's re-entry."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiangong-1-tracking-the-chinese...
It looks good! Could you add a plain-text (or even markdown) field as an input option? I'd be interested in trying this with blog posts and magazine articles.

(P.S. Kudos for the "Accelerando")
> they're just complaining about the typed languages they know -- more often than not Java.

Java has a particularly bad type system, and it used to be even worse.
Not really. I can concur with HN and developers in general not giving a shit about design. I can’t tell you how many developers I’ve spoken to who tried launching their own product only to go silent after I sent them a design proposal. Devs seem to have a very limited understanding of value of design.
> But even if both of your points were true, the point is to look at what is happening in other languages and frameworks. Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places.

Which of those languages give you NaCl out of the box?
It was not too long ago that facebook attempted a surreptitious mission of "making the world a better place" with the failed attempt of "free basics" and "internet.org"
Does it make it ok for Facebook to do it just because similar other companies do it? I say no, all of them should delete something I say to delete. And "everyone does it" is makes it a bigger problem, not a smaller one.
I'd be very curious to hear from any current (or recent) FB employees on what the internal climate is like lately. Do the rank and file view the recent controversy with distaste towards the company, or towards the media/press?
Is Learning Rust Worth It?
File systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?
Every day you spend learning about PHP is a day that you are not learning about the languages that are really moving the industry forward to interesting new places.

I continue to be baffled by this sort of "novelty-chasing" --- do I really care about "interesting new places" or "interesting new ideas"? No; and in fact I'd rather not, because it takes time and energy away from actually solving useful practical problems, besides the ones you create yourself in chasing after the latest cruft.

PHP is slow on an absolute scale, but chances are that a minimal, straightforward application written with it can perform better than something with a bloated framework on top in a different language. That takes true skill and experience, not something you can get if you're continuously jumping around trying to chase the fashion trends.

As someone who has witnessed several major trends in programming come and fall, the amount of churn (and encouragement thereof) in the web community is astoundingly unsettling.

"It's not about the tool, it's how you use it."
As someone who travels into Britain on a regular basis and interacting with British police and customs officers:

You are delusional if you think your police force isn't racist. ESPECIALLY the customs officers, but also regular police.

I was watching some mental health videos online just last weekend, and I watched some from britain. And ... firstly minorities and the very poor are obviously overrepresented in these "groups". Second the "patients" are terrified of these mental health professionals. Utterly terrified. Thirdly, there is a clear difference in reaction patterns between white and black patients, and between muslim and non-muslim ones.

So just stop. Your police, and many other parts of the British state is explicitly attacking these people, on racist motives.

Just stop claiming otherwise. This is not incredible, this is normal.
Guaranteed Carding Methods
I went off on a rant rather than address your post, I'm sorry.

Let me try and do a better job this time around:

I believe, then, that viewing programming languages (PL) through a lens of human-computer interaction (HCI) is the most critical meta-problem in the field today. More than ever, we need surveys, interviews, user studies, sociologists, psychologists, and so on to provide data-driven hypotheses about the hard parts of programming.

I agree that tooling for programmers is awful - I disagree that it is because we haven't done studies. My point was that studies will absolutely not help, for anything but incremental improvements that hardly matter. I also don't think it's the most critical problem - I'd agree that it is the lowest hanging fruit, however.

Meaning, I think there can be significant improvements to programmer tooling, within the next 5 years, and I also think the problem again lies in funding, programmers not willing to pay for better tooling (lack of imagination) and lack of imagination of the big companies.

One glaring example of lack of imagination is our current state of using the internet - html/css/javascript in a web browser is a completely broken paradigm and yet, no big company has done anything to actually fix it, some spend millions of dollars each year to keep it going in fact! Thousands upon thousands of people have spent optimizing, writing libraries for, and using a fundamentally mediocre language. That does not give me much hope frankly.

I am being quite negative so let me propose what I think is the future of programming languages: a dependent type system language with incredible documentation, standard library and an ability to drop down into a language like rust, for pieces of code that need performance.

The current trend of Swift/Kotlin is imho a syntactic and minor improvement over Java/C#, and moving in the direction you've mentioned - I think object oriented programming, dynamic languages and mutable state by default, or even having to think of managing memory, are ideas that will only be used in niche circumstances 30-40 years from now. OO for UI, dynamic languages for what bash scripts are currently used for, managing memory via rust for performance critical apps.

This is all assuming we wake up and start reading scientific papers from 30-40 years ago and actually using those ideas, rather than cherry-picking ideas to glue onto a fundamentally broken existing paradigm.

One last thought - these are all thoughts of someone who's frankly quite uneducated. I'd love to know what people who actually design languages/compilers/proof assistants for a living think.
BTW, you'll need the feediron plugin for the functionality I was talking about.
> "The HN community thinks that..."

As one HN member to another, please don't do this. HN members are not some monolithic block; they hold diverse opinions. You yourself are a member of this community. Just as you disagree with the opinions of some members, they may disagree with yours. And on other opinions you may even agree!

Just present your reasons without assuming or generalizing the opinions of others. Your statement works equally well as "Some think that intelligent people make highly informed decisions...."
Ronald McDonald House[1] genuinely does make the world a better place, and I assume receives at least some funding from McDonalds(?).

But yeah, the restaurant chain doesn’t claim to.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_McDonald_House_Charit...
Because not all of my friends and family are willing to pay a subscription fee :-/
The fact that you ask disqualifies you.
Show HN: Rick Roller, a Chrome Extension to rick roll coworkers
Hey HN, Rick Roller is a Chrome Extension that will randomly rick roll the user.

I wanted to pull a fun and harmless prank on some of the officemates who are always leaving their computers unlocked when they leave their desk, especially for April Fools' Day. So I put together a quick extension for Rick Rolling them :) The results have been pretty great so far. Hope you like it!
This is totally the norm in Silicon Valley / lots of startups.
Mms2text: Let your computer look at your message pics so you don’t have to
I see. I know my comments are often intended to strike debate, rather than state something I already know all will agree with. But maybe I should have been more clear that I am against waste and for better effective improvements in human welfare and dignity. I'm not againdt redistribution, just the way it is done.
"Look at enough bullshit highly curated vacation photos on Facebook and you're bound to find the truth of your life gradually, then suddenly, more depressing than it probably is.

...

I quit Facebook a year ago, and when people ask me why, I tell them candidly: I don't want to look in people's windows anymore to see what they're doing. Even if they want me to. Especially if they want me to.

Don't waste your life crafting an advertisement for how great your life is. Get out there and live a great life."

Source:

http://time.com/5208108/facebook-cheating-infidelity-divorce...
MySpace allowed extensive customization. MySpace failed. Facebook wants to avoid the same fate, so they avoid presenting users with the paradox of choice. This could be scientifically grounded or it could be UX-design voodoo, but "any color you want as long as it's black" is gospel among those designing products/services to be used by the hoi polloi.
And that's what happens when noprocrast interacts with the lack of preview and time-limited editing. This is what I meant:

2007/01 m.facebook.com launched
2007/05 Facebook Platform launched
2007/11 Facebook removes "is" from status updates
2008/06 Facebook settled with the Winklevii
2008/11 Facebook Credits launched
2009/02 The like button is added [1]
2009/09 Facebook announces they are cash flow positive
2009/09 Facebook launches @-tagging friends
2010/06 Comments now have like buttons
2010/10 Fincher's movie The Social Network is released

Ahem.
This is awesome. But doesn't Amazon bill you for usage? What's keeping you afloat?
Music Festival Themed Hackathon
Microsoft Reorganizes to Fuel Cloud and A.I. Businesses
> how many interesting new ideas will you learn from studying PHP, versus [...] languages such as Javascript/Node

This is on point! Programming PHP is not about diving deep into interesting language constructs or creating beautifully structured software - PHP is about getting things done, about starting hurdle-free and progressing rapidly. It goes against some "good development practices" but it works, see for example the single-file website remoteok.io from Pieter Levels: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/938707166508154880
Bad advice. While this works in some cases, you’d lose a lot of money on some products because the would be customer has not realized the full value of your product. A product generating 500% roi may mean $100 to one business and 1 million to another - should they pay the same price?
> I needed a DNS server which supported ordinary SQL and a relational database on the backend.

The one aspect that concerns me about that is the bootstrap step of resolving the database server name. How is that done? hosts file?
https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog49/presentations/Monday/...
>Facebook has exposed their own duplicity.

Or possibly they just screwed up. Perhaps the "soft delete" was originally intended to allow "undelete" by the user with delayed purge, and/or single-instance storage with reference counting that they never quite got around to finishing.
Do you plan to share yours? Looks very interesting from the dual modality. I would definitely try it out.
Let's be clear here: I'm not the Facebook user in question. I've never uploaded a video to Facebook and never will.

Users didn't sign or agree to anything just because they checked a checkbox next to a link to an ever-changing jumble of legalese to get past a screen. This isn't agreement, it's manufactured consent.
> unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?

Hehe, you mean, like... Facebook? They respect advertisers with money, not users.
Users didn't accept anything just because they checked a checkbox next to a link to an ever-changing jumble of legalese to get past a screen. This isn't agreement, it's manufactured consent.
I made something similar to what's described in the article: https://static.network (https://github.com/olivernyc/static)

It's an IPFS based social network, running entirely in the browser. Posts are JSON objects of content and metadata, with links to the previous post and the author's profile. Currently updates are propagated over a single pubsub channel, so it only works for real time communication. I plan to replace this with IPNS once it is implemented in js-ipfs.

Long term, I want to implement a web of trust to facilitate search, discovery and spam control. Here's some good reading about how this might be done without central authorities: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/stories/using-trust-in-open-netwo...
I would like to try to use this as default manager for things like `open .` and `reveal in finder` actions. `defaults write -g NSFileViewer -string org.yanex.marta` did a pretty good job with some things but others still don't work.

Is there any way to set it as default?
Julia Evans is the best. I've been following her on Twitter for years because she brings so much enthusiasm about learning technology that she makes me see familiar things anew. By the end of an exploration, even it it's something I know well, I end up saying, "Holy shit, strace is cool."

To get a feel for her work, a bunch of her posts are here: https://jvns.ca/categories/favorite/
Yeah, this is not happening. I don't think a world conqueror + decree would do it, no one would do it and it'd just be the end of the world ruler. I suppose the mostly likely route might be a nuclear war or something. Chernobyl has apparently turned into a nature preserve since the nuclear meltdown 30 years ago (1). But even radiation probably couldn't keep people out if it was half the world we were talking about.

1: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl...
Interesting. The MetaMask phishing detector keeps a blacklist of URLs/domains and compares a site's domain against it using the levenshtein distance algorithm. So it could be a false positive. After a quick check I didn't find Auditus on there:

https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/blob/master/...
You're thinking of distributed. Decentralized is broader than that. Really anything that isn't centralized like Facebook is.

Obviously a lot of this is very squishy and overlaps a lot even within the same system.

Look at DNS. It's nominally a centrally-rooted hierarchy, but the root is operated by consensus rather than monarchy, so how do you classify that? Then each domain can be operated by a separate organization, so essentially federated but not exactly because it's still a hierarchy. Meanwhile the recursive resolvers and caches are fully distributed -- use any of them and the results are (supposed to be) the same.
That would be somewhat reasonable if it were just an implementation detail. But unfortunately, it's not just an implementation detail. When a filesystem has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, it overwrites the data which was flagged for deletion. But when a web 2.0 company has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, they buy more hard drive space, usually automatically.
In twenty five years with various *NIX-based OSes, I've encountered a few of these. You spend hours and hours and sometimes data digging to get to the root of some bug and it feels so awesome when you find the ultimate cause and fix it. Then you step back and say, what did I just do for the last two days? Two days of your very finite existence on this Earth, spent chasing some stupid software bug! I hope that it makes some difference in the grand scheme of things but it almost never does. We fix these things because they are there.
If it falls in Australia, the Chinese will probably have to pay a fine. But they can just not pay, I think the Americans never did for Skylab.
Disclaimer: I deleted my Facebook account a couple years ago and never looked back.

That said, Facebook is who is just getting collectively stabbed with the pitchfork right now. Engineering best practices are one thing. My right to privacy is another. As an engineer I care about efficiency. As a human I care about privacy. My rights win over any technocratic babble. Sorry if I am being harsh. I am, of course not surprised. Engineers are lazy at best and at worst, something truly sinister is brewing.
Exactly. The maximum efficiency of conversion to electricity in a thermal plant is maybe 30-40% even ignoring losses in converting back to hydrocarbons. But even 99% would be a loss relative to simply using the original hydrocarbons.

This is a rube goldberg machine, taking high value hydrocarbons that could be converted to commodity and fine chemicals and instead burning them and taking the released carbon and... putting it back together? It's not even a very efficient perpetual motion machine.
Thanks! That actually fixes my biggest problem with Feedly if this Inoreader trial doesn't work out for me.
The article asks if "anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online" and then offers choices which are either hosted web services or proprietary programs, both of which grant someone else the power to control what you see via that reader. So even though standards everyone is free to implement (RSS is certainly in that set) are critically important it's hard to take some of the article seriously.

The real way to avoid the problem of non-freedom and deny the admins/programmers the power to control your reading is to use free software RSS feed readers instead of hosted services you don't host yourself or proprietary programs. Choose RSS readers that respect a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program. https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Internet-application... points to some.
> Or how about let's make sure at risk people are fully informed?

You didn't say they were poorly informed, you said they lack judgment. That's something usually said about a group of people to blame them for what happened and write the situation off as "not a problem, those people just suck".

So I'm not sure how you intended for that to go over as "those people are poorly informed". Of course they aren't, but that's not "poor judgment", it's a completely different statement to make, effectively an opposite one.

> Feeling like you have wasted 5-10 years of your life - some of your best years.

Why does a feeling indicate "poor judgment"? Do people who develop depression have poor judgment? Do people with midlife crisis? Do people with PTSD? Do failed athletes?
Stewart Brand is now hosting Seminars at the Long Now Foundation http://longnow.org/

RSS feed at http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml
But php is going to have some inherent latency starting up a process for each request and an overhead of spinning up a new process for every request. If you need speed you shouldn't use any of three languages you just mentioned though. These days I think it's easier to find nodeJS developers. You can take a frontend developer and teach them nodeJS very quickly also. It's arguably just as easy to proxy from nginx as it is to setup a PHP sapi
I used to never get these back when I used Chrome. I started getting them once I switched to Firefox. Is this a thing? or was it coincidence?
Unfortunately it wasn't a complete failure. While India did reject Zuckerberg's attempt to become the internet there, it is my understanding that the program is widespread in other parts of the world.
United States Passed a Law Giving the Government Access to Foreign Information
As a language nerd I would like to praise naming the project after a Latin past participle.
Love the idea about the project. I tried to upload a Epub and got an error page. I tried 3 times and different voices. I look forward to seeing more of it and think it's an awesome idea.
I can understand childhood friendship that's preserved in adulthood but honestly as someone who moved around a lot as a kid I don't have many of those - when I tried to reconnect with my childhood friends the gap was too wide.
When you look at it from a marginal utility standpoint, it would have to be thousands of times more wasteful for it to be as wasteful as not redistributing it from the top.
Linkedin unread notifications count is open for everyone
Whenever I see this, I intentionally select incorrect boxes. Let the AI eat those incorrect data.
If sufficient people do this, these AI free loading stuff will stop.
Fine Print: Unusual legal footnotes
just as a point of optimistic contrast, i've taken only three required courses over my PhD. some of my peers (who came in with better undergrad prereqs) have taken less, and in a few cases, none
> in today's political climate

Like how Macron was savaged for stating that African women having 7-8 children on average, as in Niger, is unsustainable:

https://www.politico.eu/article/macron-g20-angry-reaction-to...

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/07/11/5364454...
Gentle ribbing is how I'd put it.

I'm a very happy customer, btw. Thanks for your work!
Pope Reveals Hell Does Not Exist: Satan Homeless, Relocates to San Francisco
Alice profits by not having her post be drowned out by a flood of automated spam. 4chan's users benefit by not having to look for interesting content among a flood of automated spam. 4chan's operators benefit by not having to moderate a flood of automated spam.

If captchas weren't useful to 4chan, they wouldn't make use of it. When you see a system that's obviously not beneficial to anyone, it's useful to take a step back and think about the incentives that keep things as they are. Because if it's so obviously wrong, why hasn't it been changed yet?

I'm not sure how a content-addressed web would handle these problems, but there'll need to be some hoops to jump through before a significant number of other people become willing to look at your content.
NASA didn't, but IIRC a 3rd party paid it out, sourced from donations.
Mobile App Marketing: Plans and Strategies