skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In low level languages such as C, I imagine it was an attempt to map to the machines of the day. It isn't hard to come up with an ABI that allows for returning multiple values, and with registers being thrown into CPUs left and right now days, using 1 more register to allow two return parameters would actually be really nice.

(Of course you'd have to dump anything beyond that onto the stack!)

I imagine the world would be a lot different (or at least a bit less buggy!) if C had allowed for returning an error code in addition to a return value.

Once you get to higher level languages though, the need sort of falls away. Put data into a container of some type, call it a day.
Trying to stop it is impossible, and merely complaining about it gets us nowhere.

On the contrary. I fully expect that in many places, overtly creepy technology like Google Glass will shift a long-overdue privacy debate that seems to be gathering momentum. If technology like Google Glass becomes socially unacceptable and illegal, it will not become pervasive in the manner you described.
So basically you are saying, that capitalism can not tolerate people who cheat out of their self interest, but if only we had the "Austrian New Man" to build a society on, it would work wonderful?
It's either you let the lower classes decide what self serving causes they want to support (near as in low price, or far as in environmental concerns), or you force these choices on them by the way of regulation.

Other than that, the middle-upper class is becoming more aware, informed and caring, and that more than makes up for the lack of involvement of the lower classes.
Transitioning the web to Namecoin by addressing name-squatters
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.6.0.1/docs/Prelude...

It's exactly like that in Haskell. If it makes sense to return 2 values — return tuple. Works really well with pattern matching. Syntactic overhead = 0.
Basically what they're saying is "we're ok with subverting the constitution if it fits our needs".

The executive branch's power has gotten completely out of hand in the past decade, all under the guise of "security" and preventing "terrorism". The reason the judicial branch exists is to stop crap like this. If they can't do their job constitutional balance of power doesn't exist.
Only a few languages are the product of that theoretical discipline. There is, for example, a clear theoretical reason why Haskell functions are single input single output. But its inapplicable to nearly all languages. The languages people use are mostly the result of cargo cultism.
I know that in New England, where I'm from, it's only major state govt subsidies that make home PV economically viable. Even then, it takes 15-20 years to break even.
Bear in mind that "income" is a loose concept in India. A lot of the economy is 'under the table'. So while someone may report an "income" of $1000/month, their actual take may be 10x or more. Most Indians outside the salaried sector don't pay income taxes. And there are tax loopholes (agricultural income comes to mind) which allow people to shield massive amounts of income.
our disagreement on the suitability of the candidates is the entire point of voting. and I think it is important to note: of the people who could have voted, only 28% chose to vote and vote for Obama. and going around, telling people to not vote for your preferred candidate, that is the entire point of campaigning.
Sorry steveklabnik, I would have replied sooner but got stuck on a long phone call.

I'm not angry. I thought the post was worthy of a reasonably harsh takedown comment (sidenote: HN loves harsh takedown comments) because of its hubris. "Ho hum. We SF computer guys have got this shit all figured out. Paper currencies are bullshit because x, y, z. Also U.S.A. will bomb you if you don't agree." It's so completely fallacious and it ignores the decades experience that have got us to where we are.

I'm a tech person as I'm sure all of you are, but I think we are doing ourselves a disservice when we show up in other fields as arrogant outsiders proclaiming truth without understanding any of the details. I follow you on twitter and I think you understand this in terms of employment gender and discrimination issues but maybe not so much in terms of macroeconomic topics. That's all.
I misread you sentences. I thought you meant Python and Java fails memory management than OS. That caused me to ask the question. Thank you for getting back to me.
I used to believe that at least the consumer market economy would start to correct itself once we reached the point where there were no longer enough gainfully employed people to buy the goods and services being offered. And that would push corporations to start to re-hire the unemployed and not slash to the bone in pursuit of astronomical quarterly gains.

But that was a very myopic, "developed" nation view. I hadn't considered the use of cheap global labor and the rise of the middle and upper classes in developing nations that would provide the necessary demand for goods and services, making the "workers" in developed nations mere surplus to be discarded/ignored. (I'm watching "A Christmas Carol" right now.)
Makes me wonder why the US is so cavalier about selling top end warplanes to weird foreign countries like Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it's because they can't stand up to unmanned aircraft.
Unsure of how you inferred all that from the words OP actually wrote.

I do not see any proclamations of what capitalism can and cannot tolerate. Just a statement that we've never seen an actual free market, since we regulate the hell out of everything.

I did not see anything about an "Austrian New Man", or even the characteristics necessary for market participants. Just a statement that we've never seen an actual free market, since we regulate the hell out of everything.
Let me put it this way: they go up together far, far, far more than whatever BTC or Dogecoin is doing.

Talking about very normal inflation in order to make make BTC/Dogecoin look bad is just weird. BTC dropped 50% in a day. And it could go up 100% tomorrow. That's volatility. Denying this just comes off as trolling.
Things Successful People Do Every Day
Yeah, just realized it shows it next to each of my comments on the "threads" page, sorry. Thanks.
Perhaps the more interesting question is why do most programming languages allow several input values?

I'll make the argument that in Haskell, functions BOTH support only a single input value and a single output value. For example, consider the function (+) which takes two numbers and returns their sum. The type of (+) is (+) :: Num a => a -> (a -> a). I have added the parentheses to emphasize the syntax of the type. (+) is a function which takes a single number as input and gives a single function as output!

Now, we can do something like f :: (a,b) -> (x,y,z) and write:

let (x0,y0,z0) = f (a0,b0)

But this isn't really multiple input or return values. We are just inputting or returning a struct (with constructor (,) or (,,), respectively), and we can pattern match against it for the return value.

I think that any elegant language should support as few "primitive features" as possible - it should be simple, and let a few powerful ideas (e.g., first-class functions, currying, and pattern matching) let the rest fall out. I think Haskell really embodies this idea.
I don't use Facebook, and my friends and family know that and understand that I would prefer not to have them share information about me with Facebook either. As far as I'm aware, everyone I know respects this, and it has caused 0 awkward social moments.

So you'd better believe I would ask someone to turn off recording devices if they're not being used for a sensible reason. I'd be polite about it, of course, the first time. After that, well, anyone who would need asking twice isn't likely to be someone whose opinion of me I care about very much anyway. And I'm willing to bet that any resulting footage of me educating the offending party about privacy and manners right to their Google Glassed face is not going to cause anyone I care about to think less of me either.
> Open source doesn't help here, if the flaw is in the algorithm or the seeds of it.

Don't be so cynical about the intelligence of the smart cow. The smart cows were able to figure out that the elliptic curve proposed by NIST was backdoored by the NSA because it was basically choosing public keys to which the NSA had the private keys. The smart cows actually figured this out a long time ago, way before the Snowden leaks. So far, free access to the source has enabled us to find the holes.
For the argument, see Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
The poster isn't painting capitalism with a broad brush, we're specifically talking about a free market economy.

We've never seen how a free market economy actually works because we don't let free market economies form without first destroying them via regulation.

We have models which persuasively suggest that a free market economy would be the most efficient possible form of trade, or at least way more efficient than our overrregulated fustercluck.

So the poster seems to be saying "jeeze, why don't we try an actual free market economy"!

Which seems eminently reasonable to me, and not at all "imposing his story on reality".
It looks like some of them are only the way the word was used in that particular part of speech. For example, orbit is listed as 1946 as a verb - but the word was used for much longer as a noun.
> Then explain the proven successes of state regulatory mechanisms.

Easy: they are simply less efficient than market solutions to the same problems.
>Capitalism needs consumerism to deal with its overproduction crises.

No it doesn't. Capitalism still works just fine if people decide to work less and spend less.
Some people got beanie babies because they liked them, others because they thought their value would increase. The same thinking drives Dogecoin.
> inferior hardware

For an inferior price, you should add to that. It's kind of obvious that expensive products have decent hardware.

I'm not against apple and this is not Apple bashing (I'm even considering buying a Macbook) but telling the whole truth.
And how about government? Are we insane to keep trying that as well?
SiVal, your comment makes all of us at HN expect that every Article has such a TL;DR

anyhow, thanks for summing it up. Saves quite some time, when people do this. I am really glad, when there is an article where the top-voted comment says, "you must read all of this, really" or something with along that lines or sentient. Because that's the main reason HN exists, to provide resources that ARE valuable for y-combinator people and their friends.
Technical correction: not

(let (x y) (f 12) ...)

but

(multiple-value-bind (x y) (f 12) ...)

(There are also multiple-value-call and multiple-value-list, which are more powerful than multiple-value-bind because they let you get all the values returned without knowing in advance how many there are, but usually less convenient.)
It's a real term...
I ran Ubuntu with gnome after Unity came out, tried Linux Mint, LMDE, pure Debian, then back to pure Ubuntu with Unity. Nothing worked as well in 2013 on my several year old laptop as it had several years before, when I first got it - sluggish, slower, "crufty" feel.

When it came time to upgrade hardware, nothing rivaled the Air in terms of weight, capabilities, "feel".

I thought it would take me longer to feel "at home" on OSX, since I'd been a UNIX guy for ages, and was quite comfortable with XP, Win7, and, of course, Linux.

But it took minutes. Many, many "oh wow" moments. Right now, I am 3-fingering back and forth between FF full screen as I write this and FF streaming a bowl game. Gestures are the bomb.

Getting Linux to the point where it "just works" like my Mac just works takes time. My Mac "just works" out of the box. The longest thing it took me to figure out was how to get tab completion to ignore case.

And that's another thing: The OSX community is more up to date and more consistent on their platform than the Linux community. And they're more polite.

Google the same thing on both platforms. Under Linux, you'll find many old and badly wrong answers and many more "I think it's this" written by people who barely understand the question and haven't bothered to test their hypothesis. More recent answers will generally be worse, sadly. And there will be much snark. Much much much.

The answers from OSX users will be fresher and more consistent. It used to take me hours to wade through all of the Linux resources to figure out where the quality lay.

It takes minutes on OSX - the community is simply better and more consistently informed, and more polite and more helpful.

EDIT: Bear in mind that "the user experience" includes the hardware. This beast is just that - a beast, and a very light one at that. I never get the impression that I'm going to break my machine or that it will respond oddly. Overall, the OSX GUI plus UNIX under the covers with all the CLI I love plus the Air HW is an awesome UX.
I've found returning type and boolean useful more than once, usually 'data of type and false if something went wrong or the return data is invalid, data of type and true if valid.'

std::pair<T, boolean> was like a gift from the gods when I found out about it
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3180321085

Tigard, OR, USA

Down: 25.48

Up: 20.93

ISP: Frontier Communications
Better still, fund TextSecure not Telegram.
It is considered cargo-cultism mostly because none of the languages ever have any scientific data to support decisions on various syntax choices. There are some very obvious bad choices of course, because of the large amount of bugs involving them, like manual memory management and pointer arithmetic, but other than that it's all just a hunch.
I cannot find anything on the PC side that rivals this stuff. $1000 buys something that feels solid, really well built. I've looked, I really wanted to stay on Linux, I was even willing to pay the Windows tax (but wasn't looking forward to the tweaking that was getting more and more necessary)...

...until I switched. Now I cannot imagine going back.
Why support multiple arguments?
>> More seriously, ask the question: what relationship between multiple values is useful for returning from functions but not useful enough to be a data structure that can be used in other parts of code?

Any metadata about that particular function call.

E.g. function success / effectiveness (did state change?). Runtime. Memory usage.

EDIT: I think co-dependants are still the primary use case, im just suggesting another less obvious use case.
Nonsense. Blocking HTTPS traffic rules out far too many useful/essential things: e-commerce for home users, VPNs for business users away from the office, online banking and other financial services, any sort of government service that requires authentication. The list goes on and on, and the people most likely to defend secure browsing are going to be the likes of governments and financial institutions.
I invite anyone who thinks C is low level to try their hand at CUDA or OpenCL.

You think C is bad? Those are far worse.

This is at least a great step in the right direction. It's not "low level" as you describe just because it's C.
This is a different article and more into Data Structures.
I do the same thing. I've spent countless hours just randomly exploring.
"They seem to think that if they keep pushing this issue under the rug that it'll just go away."

That's definitely a time-honored political ploy, but it doesn't look like this issue will go away any time soon since most of Snowden's massive cache of information hasn't been published yet. As more NSA documents come to light, this will keep generating new headlines. It's likely to still be in the news during the next presidential election.
Demoralized twice, first for finding a flaw, second for not giving the prize.
Those let forms ares not Common Lisp. However, they could be mplemented by a user with a lisp macro.
Wow! Last night I picked up Dirac's little "Lectures on Quantum Mechanics" and stumbled at the start because my '60s mechanics education didn't include the Lagrangian, much less the Hamiltonian.

Today comes this and it should be more than enough for me to give Dirac another solid whack! Maybe enough, even, to come out the other side given another fundamental or two.
That's a good point - but truth be told, I'd stopped testing a few years ago. I really only threw that out to show "my commitment" :-> - for a couple of years I did quite a lot of it - but work and other bits of life required me to wind down, so in the last few years, I've been trying to be "just a dumb user".

Being a dumb user - and a dumb power user - are easier under OSX, it's a lot easier to tweak than Unity, ironically - and needs less tweaking.
Wayland actually provides fd passing as part of its X-like protocol / IPC layer. Pretty nifty.
tl;dr: pixar combines good cinematography with good animations (and writing and characters and voice talent and storyline), really exploiting the freedom from constraints they have as animators.
I don't understand why there is there a connection between syntax choice and cargo cult design? If anything syntax is the most solved part of language design.
> Yes, there is: governments are run by people, subject to the same incentives as people in any other part of society, including the perverse and misaligned incentives that cause "market failures" in other parts of society.

The same incentives exist in any system. In fact, in what you might call 'pro-market' sytems, you often find business people closely involved with regulation, and also a lot of government services sub-contracted out to private companies, which makes the incentives shift the other way. So, for instance, the incentives inherent in for-profit prisons led to the judge-kickback scandal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

You're also going up against the lack of evidence for your position. As I say, in Europe, the countries with the highest levels of taxation and regulation often have the best anti-corruption reputations, the most well-functioning regulatory systems, and the most buoyant economies.
Well, if I hadn't known about it until now, there's not much between the two scenarios for me, is there?
Half of the world looks empty? Something wrong with the data?
Fair point. I should have specified that I was referring to personal servers - OSX Mavericks server edition is pretty cool. For enterprise, different question, different answers.
You can afford dozens of $10 domain names, but dozens of $10 SSL certs would break the bank?
Theory aside, it would seem natural that a language that doesn't enforce 1-argument functions would have n-argument functions. Seems like the only logical two choices on the matter. Where does the cargo-cult in this decision come in?
Why expose this publicly you wont get anything, save it and sell it.
Workers using more of their potential is labor better utilized to improve the economy. When minimum wage workers become software developers a software company arises, and then a restaurant to serve them, and so on. A basic income (welfare for anyone) would work even better to improve the average standard of living, but not necessarily the economy.
My theory: cmder is more palpable to the HN crowd because it fits several hipster criteria:

* The name, while not as cool as these examples -- cmdr, cmd.io, cmd.ly, cmdhub -- is much more hip than ConEmu.

* Design snob approved website, complete with almost Apple marketing levels of condescension: you won't see those other projects talking about "amazing software" or how you can "carry it with you ... anywhere you go".

In all seriousness though, if I hadn't seen cmder mentioned on HN I probably wouldn't have heard of the interesting stuff it is based on, so I give them some credit. (Though I looked at some source code, and cringed a little bit on how these things work: injecting foreign code into the existing cmd.exe process... Yikes.)
I've thought about switching to only one input value for Rust, but it's needed for the FFI, so once we're paying the complexity there we might as well pay it everywhere. Besides, it'll make it easier to add optional and named parameters if we ever do in the future.
wrong. The federal government has only been broadly funding academic research for the past 50 years or so. While there was scattered early research (such as the Michelson-Morley experiments done at the USNA), and the land-grant acts. Big guided research operations such as NIH and NCI were largely internal, small research operations from the 30s through the 50s. NIH first issued grants in 1967.
>Cold Email to Mark Cuban Turns Into Investment

Future news title: Story of how "cold email to Mark Cuban turned into investment" results into thousands of cold emails with BS business ideas send to Mark Cuban.
It's not about liquidity. EURUSD is one of the most liquid currency pairs in the world. You can exchange millions or tens of millions in one trade at a firm price. That's liquidity at scale. In spite of that, Euro is still completely useless as a currency in the U.S. The liquidity argument is not a real argument.
Yes, anything at all would have worked since those planes are only meant to keep neighboring countries and drug smugglers minimally in check, so the choice was 100% political. It is pretty clear though that the government was going to award the contract to Boeing for political reasons, which was going to align nicely with the state visit to the US.

Then the NSA thing happened, the state visit didn't happen and some people in Sweden will forever thank the US government, since keeping logs of Brazilians chatting about TV celebrities and football was somehow worth losing 4.5 billion dollars to them.
When I was about your age I've joined IBM for 6 years. The work was great and I liked everything I did there (well, at least for the first 3 years). In the hindsight though I realize that I basically wasted these years.
Discussion for part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920151
How large does a market have to be to "legitimately" place a value on something? If there exists one person who will pay you $10 for your used tissues, are they worth $10? What if there are 10 such people, or 100?

I'd say the market has to be 1 person, but I suppose the IRS has a different definition.
>It was just a matter of adding the mount option.

I find this JWZ quote applicable: You have invoked the "Oh, but there's a preference to turn off that stupid behavior" defense. I am showering you with negativity.

(well, in this case it's about turning the right behavior on, but still).
It's all good. I enjoy your other comments on HN, i've upvoted many of them. I probably should have been working today rather than writing blog posts, oh well.

I do not think paper currencies are bullshit. I really really hate it when people say 'fiat' as a derogatory term. I also agree that SF techies running into other people's fields is terrible. However, economics is a field that I have actually attempted to educate myself on. This post was written with my 'junior economist' hat on, not my 'software dev' hat.

I think that you undervalue the role of imperialism with regards to the purchasing power of USD, but really, that whole thing is a sidenote anyway.

I still am unclear as to what your actual objection is. My assertion is that Dogecoin is just as legitimate of a currency as every other currency, as long as enough people believe in it as a medium of exchange, and that as long as the BTC <-> USD exchanges hold up, that it provides legitimacy (and liquidity) for all other cryptocurrencies. That's basically it. Oh, and that lack of consumer protection, like the FDIC insurance you mention, will harm people until we take cryptocurrency seriously and regulate it like we do other financial instruments.