skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We already have all the of the technology we would need to build a document-only web now. The biggest unresolved problems are asset caching[0] and IP addresses[1]. But for the most part, nobody would even have to build a new browser, they could just distribute a custom build of Firefox that turned off Javascript and a few other features.

It would be very fast, reasonably private, probably a lot nicer to use (at least where documents are concerned), and nobody would use it. I don't necessarily disagree with your goal -- it seems very reasonable to want a document distribution platform that isn't encumbered with JS. But given that news sites can already speed up their pages dramatically by removing JS, and they don't, why would they support this new browser or platform? And without them supporting it, why would users move to it?

We've seen this play out with AMP. AMP is fundamentally flawed, but it did get one thing right: that news sites only care about search engine placement, and they do not care about user experience past that point.

I would (very cautiously) suggest that it might actually be easier to implement a VM that safely runs arbitrary code, than it would be to convince publishers to move to a user-friendly platform that only distributed documents. The only success I've seen in getting publishers to abandon scripting is via platforms like Facebook and Medium -- maybe that's replicable with a new browser or distribution layer on top of the web[2]? I dunno; I think that also might just be a really, really hard problem.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, I would happily start using a ubiquitous, script-free platform for document distribution.

---

[0]: We maybe need to just bite the bullet and get rid of asset caching, or at least give asset caches a very short expiration date (<1 day). I guess making them domain-specific could help too.

[1]: IP addresses are a huge issue, and I don't think the tech community talks about them enough. TOR is not really scaling. The best solution for ordinary consumers is a VPN, and VPNs have a lot of pretty obvious problems.

[2]: My guess would be, someone would need to make publishing much easier than building a website (ie, Medium), maybe by adopting the DAT protocol and just offering free hosting for everyone. That runs into the same IP address problems (DAT and IPFS are not privacy friendly), but there's progress being made in that area. Or someone would need to find a way to get users to en-mass abandon the web and move to the new platform.
Electronic Products from Hell
I think the author’s conclusion is in line with my own thought: If JSON is the problem, YAML isn’t the solution.

I recall the first time I saw YAML and all I could think to myself was that I have to learn yet another syntax. I find it far less readable than JSON or XML and made me pine for the latter.
Not a bad list for software project managers to follow.
YAML is horrible. Toml is much better. Even Json is not that messy.
Like other people, the startup isn't much of a problem to me since I can easily adapt (and even prefer) a REPL based development and for the stuff I use Julia that one time cost is more than worth it, but the problem of the initial JIT lag is that it affects the first impression of the language, which probably has a significant effect in adoption and good word of mouth from people who didn't stay enough to appreciate the compromises being done.

Julia language development seems to be guided towards avoiding making damaging mistakes on the long run (for example focusing early on having a stable programmable multi-stage compilation, very efficient union-types and state of the art multithreading so the library ecosystem can grow with the correct assumptions). But the "time to first plot" is something that can be solved (regardless of it being hard or easy) at any time "with no consequences", since libraries written with the expectation of a slow startup will work just as well when that problem is solved. Though the compiler team did acknowledge the issue and are prioritizing it post 1.3.

I do wonder if focusing on doing the very simple things well first (like python does right now), would be a better strategy, or it would just make people ignore the language because the simple things are already covered everywhere and not interesting enough for bringing people (compared to the amazing stuff Julia can do with supercomputers/clusters and state of the art stuff like Zygote).
I think you're wrong. I think companies are completely correct in assessing the cost of a bad hire to be much greater than the loss of a good hire, assuming you're getting enough good hires to fill the positions available.

Now, this assumes that you're not missing out on great hires; in other words, it assumes that the good hires you miss are at the bottom of your hiring range. Your point might be that this can't be guaranteed, and while that may be true, it's unlikely that any tweaks to a given hiring process are going to bring them in either.
The perfect tool for a lot of work communication would be newsgroups served by an NNTP server. I never understood why that was not more widely used.
I haven't understood it as benchmark, rather a smell "they did not bother to optimize this?". The computers are so fast today, that instant startup time is low hanging fruit for a language.
"According to a Firefox developer most of Google Analytics’ data will be unaffected, which is great news for SEOs and site owners."

Seems like most of the basic GA data will still be available to site owners. It's the remarketing features that are affected.
Please don't break the site guidelines by posting insinuations of astroturfing, shilling, spying, or other abuse on HN. If you think you're seeing abuse, the guidelines ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.

I've posted a zillion explanations of this if you (or anyone) want more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://noyaml.com/

YAML is bad.

Every YAML parser is a custom YAML parser.

https://matrix.yaml.io/valid.html
Not OP but will check those out, thanks!
> and although transistor count continues to increase it is noticeably slower.

Yes, I would be surprised if the rate manages to be even linear - it can never be exponential as it was with process shrinkage because now the opposite is happening - we are increasing the total die size, but without changing the frequency. The first problem of this method is dealing with increased propagation delay between distant blocks, requiring different architecture and scheduling (assuming we just accept parallel computing as the only way forward). Then there is the much harder problem to sustainably solve: power consumption and heat dissipation, requirements that grow in proportion to the transistor count.

... all of these issues were naturally avoided with process shrinkage, propagation delay reduced in proportion, and the power density per unit area remained roughly the same, and so up to the physical limits of the material it was a truly sustainable window of exponential growth.
It is my opinion this action could be criminal under existing law.

Basic misrepresentation.

Closed has a clear and expected meaning.

FWIW, last time I closed a bank account I asked for a signature indicating I had no further financial obligation.

This crap has happened before.
Aren't we just reinventing the wheel, though? Got your structured data format, now you need parsers (tons available for XML, incl SAX, DOM parsers, SimpleXML, Nokogiri...) a schema and validation tools (XSD), a templating mechanism (XSLT), a query language (XPath), ...

JSON was a reaction to the verbosity of XML, but a better reaction would have been to work harder on our text editors so that working with XML would be just as easy as working with JSON in terms of the numbers of keystrokes needed. Better parser interfaces that help you treat the dataformat more like it's part of the language would also help (i.e. SAX and DOMDocument suck to work with, but SimpleXML is almost idiomatic).
> and how quick Arch gets updated

> and how often Arch will be broken after updates

If You Have Said A, You Must Also Say B (c)
*AVs
Depends on the XML. When you start mixing in namespaces (like trying to parse Maven pom.xml files in Python), it quickly becomes a mess.
"The amount of time the universe itself has left—around 0.65 billion billion years."

Is this true?? I've never heard this claimed before.
This is great, I love languages and writing systems. My own heritage is Irish so I can see how language and culture are linked so strongly to writing the words to speak the language of that culture.

It's amazing how dismissive we can be too. A friend of mine who is Mi'kmaq (pronounced mig-maw) a First Nations/Native American was showing me ancient glyph symbols of his language. I had been telling him about languages I liked and that's why he showed me the Mi'kmaq alphabet/syllabary for their writing system. They aren't used Latin letters are used but it shows how even me as a fan of languages assumed First Nations peoples in the Americas did not develop writing systems. https://www.omniglot.com/writing/mikmaq.htm

I can spend hours looking at Omniglot.com I strongly recommend it.
the difference is that AFDX is a "closed" network. If you attached anything to it directly, you're already past the security boundary, as timing and reliability is more important than verifying identities in it.
I like Julia a lot, but the lack of row indices for the data frames is very annoying. I’m used to pandas and saddle and row indices are essential. Can they express anything just columns cannot? No, but they are a useful idea. I just use the Julia pandas wrapper when coding Julia and it works better than the native one. Also the performance is pretty good to.

Also I don’t like the begin/end block delimiters, but it’s not a huge deal. The Julia people keep repeating that curly brackets are too valuable, but I’m not at all convinced.

In addition, Julia should just give up on dynamic typing and make static typing mandatory. I understand why they allow it, but I still don’t agree.
Erlang's ETS also has ordered_set tables which is a C based set, most likely better for performance, although certainly not as transparent.
> JSON was a reaction to the verbosity of XML, but a better reaction would have been to work harder on our text editors so that working with XML would be just as easy as working with JSON in terms of the numbers of keystrokes needed.

Isn't that only solving half the problem? XML is also pretty difficult to read
I agree. And, I also wrote a NNTP server software (and I run it on my computer), which is smaller than the other ones (it is a single source file with less than 2600 lines of code), and uses a SQLite database to store the data. (You could also provide other interfaces to the same data, such as a mailing list and a web interface, although my software does not currently have these features.)

(I don't use Slack myself, and I do not intend to. For my own projects I can use IRC and NNTP.)
Nothing you're saying makes any sense. As others have tried to say, the population + landmass of NZ make it statistically insignificant compared to US.
Architect is a bs title.
I think the language benchmarks game or the techempower benchmarks are fairly widely known and are a step or two above comparing hello world performance.
“People who put pictures on their resumes” are not a protected class.
Snopes rates this as False
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/unsold-cars/
Sounds like you're inventing anti-Republican conspiracy theories to explain the failure of states and cities that have been totally dominated by the Democratic Party for 50 years.

In doing so you're preventing the Democratic Party from being held accountable, so that they may be pressured to fix the serious problems that exist with their ideology and political structure, which ensures that more people are drawn to the Republican party, simply as the less unpalatable one of the two.

The people who are going to agree with your tenuous explanations for the failure of Democratic-run cities were always going to vote Democrat anyway. It's those people who are on the fence who are not in your political bubble who you are going to push away by turning the Democratic party into one that does not accept criticism and does not operate in the realm of evidence and reality.
This sounds like an awfully naive question. There are many things that are technically illegal, e.g., pot that people buy frequently but would not want their purchases tracked.

Not to mention the very common practice of buying a used car in cash but declaring the minimum allowable purchase price to the DMV to save on sales taxes.

Cash is King for a reason.
happy group of business people jumping – isolated over a white background
There's a heritage minutes video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8G9sFOK5w ~1 min long) about John Cabot who's ship got slowed down because there were so many cod in the water. It ends with him going back to england and saying that there's enough fish to feed people until the end of time.

We really fucked things up.
You should actually read the linked article.

It's relatively sparse on technical details, but it does mention:

- Renewable hydrogen

- Compressed Air Energy Storage

- Large scale flow batteries

- Solid oxide fuel cells

Seems like hydrogen is not actually used as a storage mechanism. They convert to hydrogen on demand to power turbines.
Sure... and it means that Swift and Clojure are just as useless as Julia for numerous use cases where start-up times matter, like piping CLI commands together, in Julia's case you're looking at pathetic 3 execs per second.

Moreover, even in some server-side applications it's super neat to have the luxury to spawn a new process to service certain requests, not having to worry about memory leaks. It's a perfect "API" which allows multiple languages to interact together.

It always bothered me when people dismiss the start-up time by adding "just" in front of it. We're not talking about web frameworks, these are _general purpose_ programming languages, and horrendous start-up time automatically disqualifies them from being general purpose and places them into a niche category, in my humble opinion.
Unlike flash player, this runs in the browser sandbox. It's limited to what WASM and JS can access. It's also OSS, so definitely not proprietary. I can't answer the resource usage part.
Physics usually works in cycles. Someone finds some new weird observation that our current models don't yet explain. People swarm it, poking at the edge trying to find cases that the current model fails to explain. Eventually someone comes up with a new model that fits all the newly found observations in addition to all the old observations. Sometimes the new model is an addendum/special case/clarification of the existing model, sometimes it's a 'deeper' more fundamental model from which the entire old model is a special case. The new model's predictions are exercised and stretched until some prediction that the new model makes doesn't line up with experiment and the whole thing starts over.

This process is happening for basically every aspect of every model all the time, all at different stages and timescales.

We've known that all kinds of weird states of matter exist for quite a while now, but all these observations have so far resisted being made into nice, neat predictive models. So in this case the 'poking it' stage has been decades long, and we're stuck on the modeling stage. Hopefully the team in the article has found a model that can be useful and kicks us over the hump.

It is an endless loop, but it's not irony. It's just the way science works.
Who to Blame for the Bytes in the WASM?
Show me a filesystem that can efficiently hold onto all the inode information for a blockchain represented as files and directories. (Hint: not even LevelDB can hold onto all the trie information efficiently; solutions are being sought that pack things tighter than LevelDB.)
Not really. BTC has no value other than its ability to be exchanged for USD. If BTC is cracked no one will trade their USD for it anymore and it will be worthless.
The jury's not for show, but their decision has no bearing on whether or not I want to employ a contractor in an at-will capacity.
You understood it correctly. Named dimensions is certainly a good idea even in dynamic languages as a way of documentation and runtime errors that actually make sense (instead of stuff like "expected shape (24, 128, 32) but got (32, 128, 24)"). I hope it catches on.
I'm doubtful that humanity will be able to resolve its plastics crisis without a radical, 'immediate' shift in how nations manufacture and consume product. No matter what great research or innovations exist or are on the horizon, we've long passed the point of no return and are entrenched in our habits. There's been a profusion of news illustrating how egregious our situation is and I'm always left wondering how the future is going to look like and in what new ways people are going to adapt.
I think that XML is often used for stuff that it shouldn't be used for. It could be almost OK (there are still a few problems though) for stuff containing text with other stuff inside that may in turn contain text, and so on. For other stuff, JSON or RDF or TSV or other formats can be good.
In a worse case scenario, you would barter. If the government has access to every single database, and a PROMIS-tier search engine, that is.
Good example of this is just last week when texas almost had an energy shortage and power skyrocketed to $9/kwh for a few hours. It was due to being super hot and not windy. Texas shut down many coal plants and replaced with wind.
Buy Negative Yellow Page Reviews – Buy Bad Yellow Reviews
OP, your shift changes. You no longer work 9-6. You now work 4-12. How easy is it?

You now no longer live in a metropolis. You live in a town of maybe 15,000 people. The nearest Trader Joes is an hour drive away. Again, how easy it is?

You now are paid $15 an hour instead of what you are making. Is it sill not a burden?

I think people here need to really keep in mind how much life situations differ in the USA before they consider something to be a burden or not. A lot of people here at HN live like college students; very close to their work/study, no family, no children, and with generally small footprints in a closely clustered urban area that caters to them. Even the focus on metal work is the same.

It really changes if you aren't this type of person an yes it's a burden. You simply don't have the disposable time if you have kids for one, unless your wife is stay at home.
That's a good point. The amount of resources we waste on bioethanol are huge.
I’ve never seen it framed that way, but they may be referencing the estimated timeframe for the “heat death” of the universe:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
Managing applications in a multi-cloud world on K8s – CochroachDB example
This article talks about either the insignificant (startup time, syntax), the fairly straightforward to fix (FFI, documentation), or both (printf performance). The title of the page implies that these are intractable problems, and nothing in the content suggests otherwise.

As far as Julia criticisms go, the Dan Luu post felt like it focused more on the right things (https://danluu.com/julialang/, circa late 2014). Of the two, that's the one I'd like to see a follow-up for.
I hate yaml but I have yet to find a better option for deeply nested confog files. Toml is the closest thing I have seen. Toml support is also not that great.

Yaml despite its flaws works pretty well for Ansible playbooks and for storing localizations.
this burning will lead to toxic gas being released that will increase cancer rate. I bet wealthy people see this as a money making proposition for their pharmaceutical companies.
So what's the HN consensus on the best format for config files?

Is it TOML as the author seems to prefer at the end?
That's why StrictYAML always interprets as string unless there's a schema. Cuts out the surprise type conversions.
I really hope that the web archive can put this to good use, similar to how they emulate MS-DOS games in browser.
Porting TiDB to ARM64 for Greater Flexibility
Rust Futures: hold my beer.
Why doesn't mathematics collapse, though humans often make mistakes in proofs?
Look. I am just a web guy.

But why is XML so freaking great? We can’t even tell if whitespace is significant or not. If a schema says it’s insignificant then that’s that!

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/wang-whitespace-...
That alone is TERRIBLE! (Same problem with YML.) Why should I bother with that? JSON can encode strings, hashes, arrays etc. in a way that’s instantly interoperable with JS and is far far more unambiguous.

What exactly is so great about XML that you can’t do with JSON in a better way? Schemas can be stored in JSON. XPATH can specified for JSON. Seriously I never got the appeal of XML except that it was first.
Let's start by stopping to insult people based on their skin color for some unproven and unscientific 'white privilege'.

"I rarely questioned whether the way I addressed their white privilege was actually counterproductive. They barely understood what it meant to be white women in the system of white supremacy."

Of course it's counterproductive to address something that doesn't exist.

"In 2017, as a college professor in Massachusetts, I accidentally misgendered a student of mine during a lecture. I froze in shame, expecting to be blasted. Instead, my student said, “That’s all right; I misgender myself sometimes.” We need more of this kind of grace."

No, we need more mental health support in the US for people like that.
It's a matter of degree (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I agree with you that that comment implied that the person being addressed didn't know what they were talking about, which is arguably a swipe and should have been replaced with something with no such insinuation. But "You are completely missing the point" is much worse.

It's easy to understand how a mild swipe provokes a more aggressive one; indeed it's hard to resist being carried by that current, but that's just what the site guidelines ask us all to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The first person to assume custody of a large amount of bitcoin will sell and be incredibly rich

They can siphon off a lot before other people catch on to people’s complaints and realize the best practices were followed
>Go ahead and get your free copy of Avi Wigderson's Mathematics and Computation https://www.math.ias.edu/avi/book.

i've seen some ridiculous virtue signaling recommendations on hn before but this takes the cake. have you actually read the book? wigderson is an IAS professor (for those that don't know, einstein and godel were IAS professors) and this book is a research survey (most of the theorems have refs to papers). i've read both sipser and hopcroft ullman and i'm still pretty far away from being able to easily read it. and you're recommending this to someone that learned js from a bootcamp. you think maybe she's not the target audience?

so that i'm not labeled as just a critic: the standard formal languages book is sipser

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Micha...

it's colloquial and has a lot of diagrams and "intuition". people really like it but i actually think hopcruft ullman is better because it's more structured

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Automata-Theory-Language...
Disclosure: I work on Tree Notation. It’s the future of file formats, IMO.

The idea is to have 2 levels: a simple, minimal syntax/notation (think binary) called Tree Notation, and then have higher level grammars on top of that, called tree languages.

It works for encoding data and also for programming languages, regardless of paradigm.

https://github.com/treenotation/jtree
You can still do that, but no one bothers unless they need to get something inside. e.g., soda, food, use bathroom, etc.