skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“Both were wildly frustrating to work with because the real knowledge was all tribal”

I suppose it depends on what you mean by “tribal”. A good DSL is naturally tribal: it serves a very specific user base in a very specific field. If you aren’t one of that audience already educated in that field, of course it won’t make much sense to you. A language tailor-made for the medical industry might well seem alien to a non-medic. Unfriendliness to outsiders does not mean it’s a bad language, it just means outsiders have a far larger learning curve to climb to get anywhere productive.

I suspect in MUMPS’ case, its <cough>issues spring more from being a Product Of Its Time; passed through software, hardware, and wetware of the same. It’s of the same generation as COBOL, when language design itself was an unexplored territory. It wasn’t until the likes of Algol 60—and Algol 68(!)—that programming languages really fell into the “standard ways” of doing common things. And even that’s proved a double-edged sword, as the established ways of doing many things have long since proven unreliable unscalable crap; Peter Principle in code.

As for Mason, show us an HTML templating language that isn’t the size of Trump Tower, and I’ve no doubt behind it you’ll find at least two of its predecessors that were. Programmers just LOVE generating Complexity—it’s exciting! Plus, until you’ve really worked a problem and solved it a couple times over already, it’s tough enough just getting to something that works; never mind works well and is as simple as it possibly can be too.

[Aside] Funny enough, it was HTML templating where I cut my own design teeth. Truly, every programmer and their mother seems to write one. Took me three attempts to get from grotesque unmanageable monstrosity, or SOP, down to something that was just three methods long. Which, it turns out, is all that job actually takes: insert, iterate, and delete; everything beyond that is just ego-inflating bullshit. But I never knew that going in, and neither, clearly, does anyone else as programmers are still inventing vast baroque HTML templating languages that take Greenspun’s Tenth Rule and delightedly poop all over it.

Thus, I’d say MUMPS and Mason are fine examples of at least one, probably two, custom languages that should long since have been superseded by newer and better solutions but haven’t been, at least in part because no-one in this industry can be bothered to learn from what has gone before. Or, as Keith Braithwaite put it:

“It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes.”

And if ever there was an acid test for this, I’d say languages are it.

--

TL;DR: While niche domain languages are at least as subject to Sturgeon’s Law as mainstream industry ones are, what actually differentiates the two is that all of the former’s frank fuckups are entirely random and unique, instead of ISO standardized and taught in school.

See also: http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
Most software companies ignore user behavior
by design, the police concentrate force in a separate group of people who then specialize in that use of force. residents relinquish that (threat of) force voluntarily to the police to enjoy being a citizen of a (hopefully) more peaceful society in exchange.

part of the problem is that we naturally conflate (1) knowing and enforcing rules and (2) the use of force. despite the similarity of the words, enforcement doesn't necessarily require direct force. such intertwined subtleties make your entreaty to "institute checks and balances" hard to realize.

and this disjunction is problematic; i think it's better to have a little force spread widely throughout communities, rather than a lot of force concentrated in one sub-group, as its less risk of catastrophic use of force and a more even application all around (more fair). but that's a challenge in the increasingly specialized social groupings (and identities) we live in.

even so, "police" is too much of an identity separate from the society to which they're enjoined. i think policemen/women should be community members first, and enforcers second, not the other way around.
In the case of Thunderbird, there is also shared code with Firefox, and so any core architecture and design changes in Firefox necessitate that the same be adopted in Thunderbird too, as quickly as possible. The mail client code is also very old. Last I recall, there was a plan to rewrite it completely using web technologies.
It sounds like I've upset you. Could you actually make the effort and point out a 'falsehood'?
Relax, it's an honest bug in open source software and they're working on fixing it (edit: they've already fixed it in trunk). What more do you expect?
Compatibility.

The number of exFAT filesystems is large. (Perhaps not as big as FAT32, but on the other hand it has fewer limitations.)
The comment was about her being a victim of Clinton, not media.
How does one "post to the top?"
Quick filter is a power user way to clean out email like a hot knife through butter. GMail is a good product but for this particular use case Thunderbird blows it out of the water. I felt, and still feel, that Thunderbird is for 'serious' email users.
Embracing Innovation
I faintly remember that usage was actually growing when Mozilla took the decision to not invest further in Thunderbird.

Of course, in proportion, most people used webmail, I guess.

Some (very) quick internet search reveals the blog post linked below. Cannot remember if that coincides with the time the decision was made, though...

https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...
There are many other instances where ownership/lifetimes kick in in ways that would not be a problem in a different language.

Anywhere you have any kind of containment hiearchy, Rust starts becoming more invasive than other languages. In languages like Go, you can have complex graphs of objects referring to each other, and you can — often arguably safely — work with these structures without thinking about who owns what.

As an example of something that got me stuck, I recently had some code that populated a map of mutable buffers:

struct Builder {
buffers: BTreeMap<Term, RefCell<PostingBuffer>>,
}

At the end of the building, it needs to flush the buffers, in key order, to a file and then empty the map so it can be reused. Turns out this is trickier than expected because the map owns its contents, so you can't take ownership of the RefCell that wraps the buffers:

for (term, buf) in &self.buffers {
// into_inner consumes buf, so it moves; fails with "Cannot move out of borrowed context"
let data = buf.into_inner().get_data();
w.write(term, data)?;
}
self.buffers = BTreeMap::new();

In the end, the trick was to replace the map for the iteration:

for (term, v) in std::mem::replace(&mut self.buffers, BTreeMap::new()) {
let data = v.into_inner().get_data();
w.write(term, data)?;
}

Initially I used a HashMap to optimize for build speed, then sorted its keys at the end. This was also a challenge, because maps apparently have no way of getting a copy of the keys by value. (There might be an easier way, but again, this just illustrates the learning curve for new developers.) In the end, I chose BTreeMap so the keys are already sorted.

This is all probably entirely obvious to Rust experts, but not so to new developers. Swapping out the entire map with std::mem::replace() would never have occurred to me. Even if you understand borrowing in principle, you have think about a container means in terms of borrowing, and how stuff will move in and out of a container. And you have to design the way you interact with them accordingly.

In principle, I think this awareness is a good thing, and that the resultant code will be smarter and more optimal as a result, but at the same time, it doesn't make for such an ergonomic developer experience; so far it's been a drain on my productivity more than a gain. I like to say that Rust "scales down" towards the low levels, but does less well "scaling up"; you can't write high-level code without also thinking about the low levels, when even things like the size of your data type is always in your face.

My solution above may not even be the most optimal, idiomatic way of doing things. I'm sure someone will come along and point out that there's a trick involving using something other than RefCell or whatever that simplifies everything.

Not necessarily a criticism of Rust, just a data point in terms of complexity and learning curve.
In a way Judy arrays illustrate the difference between C's memory model (flat memory) and real hardware (with cache lines).
If avoiding suffering is categorically more important than living, then since all living things suffer, the logical conclusion is that all life should be wiped out.

From my perspective, the conclusion seems to be wrong, and thus I deny the first premise.
Olamide – Pawon (Prod. CrackerMallo)
Right click on menu/tool bar, Customise…
The borrow/lifetime system never changes the behavior of any program, the only thing it can do is to disallow some programs from compiling. This is not how the rest of the type system works.

This means that it's possible to write a compiler that correctly compiles all correct rust programs without having a lifetime system at all. It also means that having the lifetime system in makes writing programs more complicated, but it makes reading them, and understanding what a program does, easier.
> The only way to make passable fake gold bullion based on weight is to use tungsten clad with gold

<hat scientist="mad">
Couldn't you, say, mix plutonium with a small amount of lead to dial in the weight you need?
</hat>
I was absolutely floored when I started seeing advertisements for 'chocolate' diamonds a few years back, and even more floored that people I knew just HAD to have them.

I had dealt with 'chocolate' diamonds for years, I currently have hundreds in my wood shop! My father works as a machinist, and brown, low-quality diamonds are their abrasive of choice for many jobs. They're (or rather, they were) super cheap because they were such low quality. I always swiped a handful when I visited him at work as a kid, because they made great pellets (they were exceptionally tiny and really hard) for my slingshot. I had a whole jug of them and just forgot about the things.

And now here we are.
Really interesting that the Queen of England got involved in this. I do hope they get a deal. Currently here in Ireland and we don't know which way they will go.
Yeah, exactly. Whether someone takes this as a lesson for business owners instead of for consumers tells you something about them.
I am the author - I did 10% of this for my job, but 90% of it has been a nights & weekends activity. I would love feedback. And feel free to ask me anything.
I only have uBlock and disabling it makes no difference. It's been broken like this for at least ~6 months (possibly longer, but I don't use Facebook much).
They already had the same float, though. That's not very likely if the rounding modes were different.

For what it's worth, it looks like different standard libraries make different choices on whether float->string conversion cares about the current rounding mode.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/john-olive...

I loved John Oliver on the Daily Show, but I find Last Week Tonight formulaic and dull. It's the identical shtick every week with a different topic to be outraged over.
Agreed. Those who write and enforce the laws will always know how to circumvent them. Given the endless list of examples, I'm not sure why the rest of continue to have so much (blind) faith in what boils down to (the failure of) self-policing.
I did, naively, make an attempt once and it kinda sorta worked in a horrible "are you mad?" way with shell, ssh, xterm and Xephyr. It only worked with a couple of simple window managers and if you hit ^C at login prompt, it cooperatively dropped you to a prompt owned by root. Oops. Still, not bad for a relatively rapid prototype proof-of-concept.
This reads like a satire. Inconceivable a scientist would say that.
I don't think we need a citation for common knowledge about how OS kernels work
A little-known startup became global politics' secret weapon
Great insights, thanks for replying!
This reminds me of a question I've had for the longest time (+): why is it that in the US wiring money between accounts is so expensive or difficult? Whole ecosystems of companies have sprung up (PayPal and Stripe come to mind, and apps such as TransferWise) to reduce the friction when the banks could easily set up a way cheaper system that would actually be better (privacy etc.) for the consumer. The EU seems to be much better at this .. ?

(+) Partial answer found here, but not satisfying https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/27474/why-are-wire...
Stuff like this is why I really like sel4's approach to verification. They take the compiler out of the TCB by parsing and verifying the underlying binary.
Great, this makes me happy:)

Thanks a lot for mentioning the interesting details!
I couldn't reproduce with 9.1.0 on Arch Linux since it's patched: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk...

However the gcc 9.1.0 in nix/nixos is still affected (but not the default gcc, which is still gcc7).

EDIT: nix just updated to gcc 9.2.0. I was using a slightly outdated release: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/66836
(Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but any opinions expressed here are solely my own and not necessarily the company's.)

I don't know about that. ECS works fine at large scale, but it's not going to replace 4000 tasks immediately. And doing so could potentially be a huge shock to your customers if you tried. (You have to take the time to gracefully drain existing connections, etc.) Nor did the author desire to implement a blue-green type deployment which would use AWS's elasticity to its fullest potential out of unspecified cost concerns.

It's not clear to me that Kubernetes would fare significantly better here. It's not without its own particular performance bottlenecks; and the issues about safely draining connections and blue/green deployments would remain the same there. The issues aren't really related to the particular deployment orchestrator, as much as the fact that 4000 containers is pretty large number by any measure for a single unit of deployment.
Open Source Sustainability Program
Independent performance comparisons: https://nothings.org/computer/judy/
Force of habit... I'm not really sure how I made the move, I grew up on Macs but moved to Linux (for the FREEDOM), and gradually all the GUI apps just fell away. I have a PDF reader and a browser and I think everything else is in the terminal. Occasionally I'm forced to use a Mac or Windows machine in professional situations, and it just annoys the fork out of me. I just prefer typing, and I have all the commands I need memorized to an embarrassing degree.

I also appreciate the resource usage. My personal laptop is a Lenovo from 2009, and it never feels slow. It is slow for some things, like compilation, but it never feels laggy in the way a GUI can.

I would never recommend to anyone that they go down this road. It's silly to think how many hours I spent learning what I know, and the main effect is that nobody but me can use my computer and I barely know how to work anyone else's. I'm wicked fast on VIM and that looks cool and all but... the bells and whistles in something like VS Code probably help more in the day-to-day as a developer. But I can't use it. I feel completely lost when I can't Control-Z and git grep, or whatever. I don't even know how to quit a GUI programme anymore.
Unless you actually work there, how are you so confident that Stripe's actual culture has been "maintained" outside of reading company sanctioned blog posts/think pieces...? Or that the actual culture has ever even closely mirrored the one that has been outwardly portrayed?

Glassdoor is not perfect, but I think I get more insight into the reality on the ground looking through recent reviews than a blog post, and at least from what I can see recent reviews over the last few months are extremely mixed.
Still not necessarily victimizing anyone though
Why didn't they do this a decade ago?

Where's the apology for threatening the community with patent lawsuits?
Sobering, softening article.

Perspective.
>A vegan is someone who refuses to eat any animal products

Yes, that is the definition of vegan as a noun. As an adjective vegan is describing food using or containing no animal products

i.e. traditional dishes that don't contain animal products are technically vegan, just like all other dishes that don't contain animal products

It's absolutely not hijacking traditional culture. I'm not mandating they call that dish vegan, I'm not saying that it is an american vegan dish, I'm simply saying that there are plenty of traditional dishes that are vegan by definition. Hummus, as an example
RancherOS/k3os and OpenShift/okd 4 are the more mainstream versions of this philosophy.
Why do you use byobu? Just curious as I only use tmux.
Also currently on the front page:

* An article about a null-pointer bug in GCC that doesn't explain what pointers are

* An article about Stripe that doesn't explain what Stripe is or does

* An article about the programming language Julia that doesn't explain what Julia is.

I think it's your expectations that are out of whack. Not every article needs to explain everything as if the reader is completely unfamiliar with the topic being discussed.
Hm, web based so defeated by CORS (plus privacy issues unless you install it on your own server, but then Postman itself is closed source …). Fortunately there's an Emacs package for this =P http://emacsrocks.com/e15.html
>There's not a lot of nutrients in meat (all you get really is protein and iron), whereas in vegetables/fruits you get a whole vast assortment of proteins

Your whole post is ill-informed, but this is particularly nonsensical. Go look up nutrition information for any muscle meat and you'll see plenty more than just iron, to say nothing of organ meat.

Regarding protein, you get a broader amino acid profile from animals, but this doesn't really matter.
A genetic mutation explains why some people only need 4 to 6 hours of sleep
But that is of course a different question, the mystery is not that mathematics can describe the universe but that relatively simple mathematics does the job. The complexety in our universe is in the enormous number of particles in it. Could it have been different, few particles, complex rules? Maybe, at least I can not immediately come up with a good reason why not.
Probably the US version of European SEPA.
The 4th amendment already say that. Papers and effects cleanly expand to communication in all forms even those not imagined today.

Courts say otherwise sometimes, but they have to use twisted, convoluted reasoning that doesn't really stand up to the written letter of the constitution. Given that nothing more we can do in the constitution is immune from that either so what is the point of another amendment?
Moving from Australia to Canada/US felt like going back in time 20 years when it came to banking.

Even ten years ago in Australia I could do more with my online banking than I can today in North America.

Checks are for what now?
Hiring someone with a reputation of standing up for proper academic conduct would signal to the outside world that you have nothing to hide and that you also stand for those values.

This isn't a troublemaker, this is a proper academic who knows the importance of protocol and scientific process.
> Source code is like a written recipe, you absolutely should be able to copyright it.

But you can’t copyright recipies, AFAIK.
Unfortunate,but somewhat expected given their continual operation at a loss. I’m curious who takes more.
can you elaborate more about 'GCP to be quite far ahead of AWS in terms of product design and integrations'?
I expect them to stop playing with fire with useless UB optimizations.
Craft or Directus probably if I had more time.

My requirements at the time were:

- Can be integrated in a Vue static site generator

- Has a free plan (single user)

- Could be hosted for free at least during development

- Could have relations ("Post" can have a "Category" field
that list its content as options)

- Has a admin UI that a non-developer could figure out
>meat substitutes aren’t necessarily any healthier than the meat they replace

uh...duh? That's the point of them. If you want a healthy meat substitute, have a veggie burger. These are not veggie burgers in any traditional sense. Maybe a healthy version will be made, but this is about replacing the absolute terror that is the meat industry.
> but the idea that we drink milk because of marketing, .. milk, is laughable.

What? "Got Milk"? Milk mustaches on famous people and athletes? Come on.

> plant "milk" lobby, on the other hand tries to trick me into buying their product every time

Au contraire! That pesky, evil, plant milk lobby! Are you really that confused when it says "soy", "milk", "oat", "almond" right before "milk"?
Deleting old mail and "compacting folders" might help.

Vacuuming the sqlite files has helped me in the past:

killall thunderbird
find ~/.thund_folder/ -name \*.sqlite -print -exec sqlite3 {} VACUUM \;

Defragmenting the filesystem may still be a thing, depending on your set up.
tip: you can press and hold `back button` in mobile safari to see a tab's history as a list.
Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kronecker
Perhaps those well-versed in such arts can inform me, who knows little about ACH and the rest:

Why is it so slow? I get that this is a system that can work built on top of any number of manual processes, but check-cashing scams are rampant and function in world where a major bank gets a check (apparently) from a different major bank and the customer is told it is all good....and possibly weeks later the check is noted as invalid and the deposit reversed.

...why can't the big players (at least) confirm things quickly? Why can't there be an easy status to say if a check has truly "cleared" or not?

The amount of fraud committed using this must be astronomical, based on how many reports I see without really looking.

What is the piece I'm missing?
Density isn't hard in a technical sense it's just a pain and you have to have the resources to do it. Namely a way to accurately measure the displacement which wasn't something we had.

A majority of our gold testing was designed for jewelry and used a rough glass square and an acid blend for the different major carats of gold we would see. It worked by rubbing off a small part of the gold onto the glass then adding some acid and watching it's reaction, if it wasn't gold or was lower purity it would dissolve and disappear quickly. It was rudimentary but it worked well enough, there were some subtleties with exactly how it should react that you learned over time.
BeeJay (a.k.a. Mr. B.) (the 26 lb cat)
IMO, it could do with a lot of improvement. Search doesn't work very well on larger mailboxes, and filtering search results needs a lot of improvement.

For it to be a bigger contender, I also strongly believe that it needs native support for MS Exchange for email and calendaring (not just relying on IMAP for emails, since IMAP is blocked in many organizations that have switched to Outlook or Outlook365 with 2FA).

P.S.: Just to add further, I donate to Thunderbird regularly. [1]

[1]: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
I thought this discussion was about prioritizing care to children that have a chance at a normal life (e.g. are not "a blind, deaf and mentally retarded baby with a chronic heart condition"), not killing the poor. My bad.
> most libertarian-oriented comments on HN get downvoted into the ground

Speaking of rabid mobs, most anti-capitalism-oriented comments get voted into the ground too. It's almost as if HN has a large group of people who are trying to discourage political fights.
Minecraft link to net's biggest botnet (2017)