skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I meant to write a blog post about implementing the Oil language, but this blurb gives a lot of info!

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/07/blog-roadmap.html#how-...

The algebraic data types alone give a huge leg up, but there's more than that. The spec is the code! That's why it's written in an unusual style with a high level language:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/06/17.html#why-is-it-writt...

At the end of every release there are some links to key source files. At some point these could be nice HTML diagrams rather than raw source code, but the info is concisely encoded:

https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.9.2/ (scroll down to "Source Code")

Also, I don't expect much of this to be intelligible at first... It's a bunch of pointers to start. Anyone who wants to go down this path this will have to ask a lot of questions on Zulip, which will motivate updates to the docs.

-----

I will write a FAQ about OSH vs Oil, since that has come up several times, and it has evolved over time.

There is only a single binary and single interpreter, but there are two entry points bin/osh and bin/oil, which basically correspond to the OSH and Oil languages.

So the interpreter is parameterized by parsing and runtime options. They are all under this group:

shopt --set oil:all # turn on everything as if you were running bin/oil

That is what this Tour doc refers to -- a shared interpreter data model, and a shared process model.

So we talk about them and document them as separate languages. But really it's a graceful upgrade of a single language. If you want you can even set individual options like shopt --set parse_paren.

-----

The syntax

const v = max(1, 2)

is valid in both bin/osh and bin/oil, since nobody has complained the taking 'const' breaks anything. (We try to minimize new keywords -- e.g. 'pass' was removed from the language based on feedback). Whether you want to consider it OSH or Oil is up for debate :) The meanings of OSH and Oil have slightly changed as the project evolves, but OSH means roughly "compatible features" and Oil means "new, incompatible features". It's a spectrum.

(I think I have written all of this in various places, but it does need to be put in a more central place on the site)

----

pyp looks interesting, I added it here under Awk-like DSLs: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Internal-DSLs-for-Shell
Rarity I guess? Computers were formerly even rarer. But everyone's got one in their pocket now.
Yeah, a civil case is easy enough once the prosecutor has collected all of the evidence you need in the first place.
I had a .co domain, and it was a pain to spell it out to people. "It's like .com, but without m" and people usually got confused, or thought it was a typo and "fixed" it as .com.

I have a .dev domain now and everything seems to be running smoothly, plus it's +20% cheaper.
UK pledges to restore pounds and ounces as Brexit benefit
Started with a ZX-81 clone. The factor I liked most was the attention with the manuals, they really cared to teach the basics of programming, even low-level things, to the layman.
"If the crapflood made people like facebook less, or get more skeptical, or made the company get serious about not shoveling manipulative garbage down people psyches then I'd be pleased."

I believe that experiment has already been run.
AH, Just the person I have in mind for my Florida waterfront property. Only 6 feet deep at the shore at low tide.....
I say that because of your belief in the humanitarian nature of the sacklers.
The sacklers wove a web of fraud and arm's length de-facto murder that they need to be tried, one at a time for them, with no trial bail allowed.
I fully expect the sacklers to run for it one day to a place they can not be extradited from, or even vanish off shore if it looks like they will ever get called on to pay for their crimes. Without their actions perhaps 400,000 to 450,000 of their victims might be alive.
They were, for the most parts, people led down a garden path of inexorable addiction and death. There are a few million, who were damaged, but lived. (why do you think the sacklers want immunity forever?)The toll of human suffering and death that leads directly to their front door - that is what the Justice Department knows and pursues. They were not criminals - at the start, they followed the $$, to our cost.
Some people can resist addiction - cold turkey people, like me. I had flesh eating disease after my legs being crushed in a car accident. (pix available, PM me, I still have persistent muscle loss areas) They used, on me, a cocktail of antibiotics fed by an auto-pump, that also created intense pain. The infection was defeated, and the pain was suppressed by oxy-contin.
After the infection subsided and the pain left, the oxy-contin was cut off by the doctors. It was then that I felt what addiction was like - intense fidgets(but no more pain), twitch, sleeplessness, etc. I was one of those who are capable of cutting it off, cold turkey, which is what I did. After 2 weeks it was gone. I still have some of the pills left - in case the pain returned.
Apparently a high % of people can not self cold turkey like I can. I also do not drink at all, never liked booze in any form. I could never understand alcoholics either? If I have 8 drinks, I get woozy, lose co-ordination etc - it is pleasant, being drunk, but I can take it it leave it.
I suspect that alcohol and oxy-contin addicts must get a supreme pleasure - I pleasure I do not get. It is possible that if I got the intense addict's pleasure that I would also be unable to resist it as well, I am lucky to be in that segment of mankind that does not get this intense pleasure - if only we could bottle it and end addictions??.
Sorry for the rant, but I hate to see the sacklers skate free with their billions, which others suffered and suffer on.
sackler = lower case, they are low grade people in all respects.
You could replace many ICs with just your fingers or a screwdriver. On the C64 the main ones like the CPU, graphics, sound and IO chips were in sockets, and that was similar on many home computers of the era.

I freaked my parents out by switching chips between our C64 and the floppy drive to see what would happen (they had almost compatible CPUs and IO chips - many things kept working).

Also: Repairing by touching chips to see if any of them were unusually hot was fun...

EDIT: to bring this more back to the thread subject, as a Commodore user at the time we used to make fun of the Spectrums, but they absolutely had a massive impact on the market. Including on competitors - e.g. Tramiel got spooked by how cheap the ZX81 was, and it certainly contributed to choices made at Commodore. Sinclair's influence as a result spread wide and far beyond the sizable direct influence of his own machines.
Use signal. If you're encrypting your message, they can't filter your message out.
I've taken to simply waste interviewer's time at this point. I'll schedule an interview, find out it's a leetcode one, and still plan to attend. With everything remote now, I can just completely check out. Watch a video on another screen while just completely wasting the person on the other end's time.

Even better if I can somehow get to a "virtual onsite" where I likely get to waste 4+ people's time.

If there was a viable solution to pushing for real change in the industry, I'd do that. But there really isn't.
Yeah, in my personal experience, the biggest problem in very early stage startups has always been figuring out what the right thing to build is, and actually building a version of it that people can use. Customer development and product development. If you build the wrong thing or you never actually get the thing built, any marketing effort is wasted effort.

Nail those things first, then hire someone to do your marketing.
I don’t think I’m changing the subject, I am asking you to look at the bigger picture. Your comment may not have been about facebook specifically, but we are in a thread about a new facebook initiative regarding yet another form of censorship. You list an opinion that you say has more merit than another, and fine, let’s say I agree. My problem with looking at things through such a small lens is that “merit” seems pretty subjective, and if we continue to stand by as we let these tech companies decide what merit means, one day they will go too far, and it’ll be too late.

Here’s an example of two opinions that I think are unequal. “the government has the right to confine people who have not broken any laws to their homes” and “the government does not have the right to confine people who have not broken any laws to their homes.” In Australia, the government has decreed that the first opinion has more merit than the second. Should facebook follow suit, and censor anyone in australia who disagrees?
The languages that have proven to be effective for high-performance computing are Fortran, Julia, C, and C++; but only the first two are convenient media for the scientific programmer. Recent activity in scientific computation is moving to Julia, but the vast amount of existing Fortran code makes this effort around tooling worthwhile.
> Social media is a cancer that's growing on society. We need to go back to smaller online presences instead of a "global village" as it were. Too many things to worry about in the world, and too many companies want to sell you fear with advertising.

I feel like this is a big part of why Discord has gotten hugely popular. Communities are isolated and only semi-publicly accessible; most critically, they're not indexed by Google. On most servers, people are using aliases which are not (directly) linked to their real-life identities, but they're still people you get to know and befriend, unlike Reddit-likes where the people commenting are mostly interchangeable. These things make the internet feel a lot closer to how it was in the 90s and early 00s, where you could talk freely with your friends without worrying if someone with a grudge would take what you wrote and turn it into a mob-driven character assassination.
Yes, that is how a PoW system functions. Your transaction needs to be included in a block
There's a saying when I was in the military: "If it affects you, it's your problem".

If your code blows up, it will come back to haunt you. Now you get to fix your code, except it involves a bunch of other teams. Maybe that's what you want, but most likely not.
But if I understand the party is usually on the street or yards (I could be wrong, I’ve never lived in that type of suburb). People generally don’t open their homes, right?
Right. Arrow's theorem just says it's impossible to do it in all cases. It's still quite possible to get an improvement in a large proportion of cases, as you're proposing.
I do not think it is SÄPO you need to worry about, it is FRA who does most spying.
> Still, one of the first signs of a society approaching tyranny is the government cracking down on guns

In a dictatorship, yes.
ABL Space Systems to launch NASA technology demonstration mission
> So I guess you don't have fire extinguishers in your house, car or place of work, only buy car liability insurance because it's the law, or home insurance because it's required by your mortgage holder? No insurance for your personal property?

GP said he didn't know anybody who needed to use a gun.

- My wife has used a fire extinguisher

- I have been reimbursed by car insurance

- I have several friends who have been reimbursed by homeowners and renters insurance.
It's not like states without inspections have an endemic of exploding cars as it is. I don't think the justification for inspections is really there.
It is also a favourite far-right bit of ideology.
Maybe if it was the early days of Microsoft. Even then there was a lot more data available about investing in businesses, even revolutionary computer ones. Nobody had knew for sure what was going to happen with Bitcoin, and the plausible outcomes varied hugely.
It's like a private security company employing a former criminal.

I mean... would you hire Kevin Mitnick's company? Lots of people do (apparently, considering they've been in business this long), but yet he's a former "criminal". It really is a tricky analysis. Who knows hackers better than a former hacker? But how can you trust a "former" hacker? Hmm...
The main answer is probably that they don't need to. They have personal assistants and admins who deal with their appointments, their email, etc. And, believe it or not, some of them really do unplug when they go on vacation.

In a former life when internal company email was becoming a thing, there were execs at my computer company that made one of these minicomputer-based office productivity systems who had their admins print out their email, they'd write responses by hand, and have the admin send the response.
And can set an explicit size to prevent layout shift. This certainly feels intentional.
I'm curious how things look for people who are only friends with people of their extreme political persuasion and only likes/follows similarly extreme pages? Does giving some variety of relatively less extreme viewpoints cause a reduction extreme viewpoints?
It is a really fair question. I think there are two lenses. Tobacco does kill people in large numbers although it seems to largely cause issues at the end of their lives. Tobacco also reduces life expectancy, but not as much as opiod users. What I saw said a heavy smoker loses ~13 years and a heroin user ~18 years. Not sure about lighter smokers.

The issue with oxycontin is it helped create a massive generation of addicts who have all sorts of other things associated with them like: rehab, homelessness, and crime. So I'm not sure of the total impact, but likely much higher per person.
Comparing Taliban to individual gun owners is next level absurd.
It's also the case that Church only knew that the notion of function defined by the lambda calculus was coherent once the Church-Rosser property was proven, and that was not published before Turing submitted his article.
Isn't London housing driven largely by foreign investment? As in, wealthy people from across the world who are parking capital there because it's safe, not because they care particularly about returns.

If brexit didn't end this, then it's probably a pretty stable system. It sucks for locals, but there are far worse places to over extend yourself on housing than in London.
In that thread I learned a lot about Mullvad, thanks. Saw a few comments that made me wonder though.
Just don't use Google?! Seriously, it's not that hard to remove google from your personal life. If your job makes you use google, just view your email using the web app or use an email client on phone.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/o...
I’m waking up to dozens of after-hours emails from my boss. Help!
> 1. Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple.

I don't know; roller-delayed blowback took me a long time to wrap my head around.
Stuff That Software Developers Do
Funny that it was inspiring in its frustrating designs / lack of features, rather than a "positive" sort of inspiration.
RIP.

With all due respect, Meta comment here: I imagine computing has become sufficiently ubiquitous such that in ~50 yrs time the HN bar will always be black because we will have > 365 important folks pass away each year.

But will there be a HN then?
If the executive branch can classify things as sensitive to the national security, and there is a state secrets exception to trial, then how on Earth are the judiciary and executive on equal footing if the executive can simply cause a default outcome of any trial against it?

The programs in question here are also clearly not national security matters. They were made public, are illegal, and the security of the nation was not affected in any way.

The whole house is built on a foundation of lies.
Delphi is the product name of the IDE. The programming language that Delphi uses is Object Pascal. Check the wikipedia or Embarcadero's website to confirm.

Object Pascal is an extension of Pascal, that adds OOP. It is much tighter than the relationship of C to C++. You can write Object Pascal procedurally, where it closely resembles ISO 1983 or 1990 Pascal.

By the way, there was a 1993 technical committee to add OOP to Pascal, which a lot comes from the various Object Pascal dialects. Be that as it may, the Borland/Embarcadero Object Pascal became the de facto standard. The other dialects of Object Pascal follows them.

To say nobody uses Pascal/Object Pascal is disingenuous. Clearly people use and pay for Delphi (Embarcadero), Oxygene (Rem Objects), and Smart Pascal. Free Pascal/Lazarus and PascalABC are open-source projects with over 20 year histories, so they are not going anywhere, and are very much used.
The output of the parallelism is itself an algorithm, that can and will be optimized for.
Toward Fast and Accurate Neural Networks for Image Recognition
Is my understanding correct that, essentially, you can violate people's constitutional rights and then if you're sued claim investigating the violation would be a national security threat and therefore you should continue to be allowed to violate people's rights without oversight?
How to make sure millions of secret files are kept safe, secure, and searchable
Living in Romania, the thing I miss mostly when hiking in the mountains is a long rifle. This is for self defence against huge populations of bears and boars, not for anything else. Guns in the country side are also tools, not just weapons.

Homicide rate is low in Romania because we don't have violent criminal gangs, almost at all. It is a small country with different policing system. But there are plenty of guns in the hands of criminals, having a very restrictive gun policy does not help the ordinary citizens, just the criminals. Opening up would be leveling the conditions.
Slack's thread UI is simply atrocious. Zulip's UI makes it harder to not be part of an existing thread. In slack, anyone can just wander into room and start typing things that should be in a thread, outside of any thread, even (especially) if the thread they want is right there. That's not impossible with Zulip, just harder enough to do that it's not an issue in the same way.
God created (wo)man. Sam Colt made them equal.

(This is an old tagline for a gun company, in case you are unfamiliar.)
Studying the relationship between exception handling and post-release defects
Whenever someone writes a comment like GP's, it's safe to assume they are not involved in long term maintenance of a system. Or they're like my current team, reveling in the paid OT their shoddy work lets them justify (which is now unpaid for them, but paid for me, watch your contract terms people!).
Sure, it's a fairly commonly expressed sentiment. My question to that is, where are the big, successful, innovative products, services and companies going to come from? Who is going to create them, and who is going to own and control them?

Let's take Isaacman as a fairly randomly selected example. At age 16 he identified poor practices in the payments processing market and started a business. Instead of having to wait a month for card processing to be set up for a business, he would have them up and running in 1 day. How much money has that saved the US economy? Apart from the company itself, how many jobs at other companies has that cumulatively supported?

Aside from that, through his control of the company, Isaacman has steered it to greater and greater success, supporting every more jobs and customer businesses. Clearly he knows what he's doing and is the right person to run the company. So what's the sense in confiscating his share of the company? Who should it be given to, and therefore who instead of Isaacman should run it?

Marxism says Isaacman shouldn't have had the opportunity to start the company in the first place. All capital allocation should be controlled by the state, putting bureaucrats in charge of everything. Collectivists say the employees should own it, but employees don't want to assume the risks that owners and investors do. They generally don't want to have to assume the responsibilities either. There's nothing to stop employee owned companies thriving in most developed countries, that doesn't happen because the dynamics of such enterprises just don't work in practice. Yes of course there are exceptions, great, but why are they so desperately few?

I'm not against employees having a say in company affairs, they're legitimate stakeholders and should rightly have a voice, but control and ownership must be earned and it must come with responsibility and acceptance of risk.
Thunderbird, or Mutt if you like TUIs.
> The pioneer of software dictatorship

Consoles were doing that shit way before, unless you redefine what counts as “software” or “dictatorship”
Sounds pretty accurate.
they create the need for breaks from anything from work to recreational activites, and provide opportunities for interaction with like-minded humans. I'd say that qualifies, and although I never liked smoking and am grateful to have dodged that bullet, I always envied the natural icebreakers that smokers had when stepping outside of a place to smoke with random others.
Only a couple of years a go I replaced a blown cap on a motherboard. It was faster than replacing it with a new board because I happened to have a cap with the right specs. So in principle you still could do this today. If you don't use your soldering iron on the CPU or the RAM or ... well, lots of other parts.
If as developer you find a sales/marketing cofounder that’s really putting in the work, you are golden.

I have partnered a few times with sales guys but they all quickly lost interest once it became clear that they would have to put in a lot of work without any immediate payback.
The Bill of Rights cannot be. This is the fundamental difference between the US and other Western democracies. Consent to be governed rests upon said government respecting those inalienable rights that we have. Those rights are not granted us by the government, they are the rights that we created a government to preserve. Any government violating those rights no longer has the consent of the governed and should be abolished.
Looking back, maybe the lesson is that there are some occasions when giving up on quality in order to make a cheaper product is an excellent idea, and 8-bit computers in the early 80s was one of those occasions.

(While, for example, electric road vehicles in the mid 80s was not.)
While it does sound like a joke I agree to some degree. 3.99 is supposed to make me feel like its 3 bucks instead of 4 and my monkey brain probably can't override the initial emotional response. Knowing this I feel kind of insulted that they think I'm stupid enough to fall for it.
That is not actually true historically. That is popular talking point.

On the other hand, quite a few authoritarian tyrannical movements started by arming themselves and taking it on themselves to get power. Both nazi and communists started as private citizens arming themselves and causing fights in the streets or robbing people.
Insert an obvious and oft-repeated lament that Flickr could have thrived if they had been managed properly.

But gosh, Flickr was and is so good. (At least on desktop.) The simple fact I can link to a photo with an obvious download button and it shows up as a real webpage and not a lightbox or something is sadly remarkable.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/perardi/51209773555/in/album-7...
That's what i meant, thanks.