skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is missing the point somewhat. The thread starter specifically linked to the FreeBSD handbook. Manual isn't [limited to] man pages here.
There aren't that many languages backed by a giant corporation (=> tools and docs). And no, we just need C# (multi-paradigm, multi-typed) with better performance - which is what they are doing.
I just found my new favorite sorting algorithm.
Looks like AT&T syntax: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/boot/...
Yes, we need more. There are many ideas to explore still.

The "do we really need more languages?" argument predates most of my preferred languages(and that probably includes C and Pascal).

I like Haxe, Rust is looking like being really good also. I don't like Go but others do, and that is a really important point. You don't have to like, or use the new languages. As long as someone finds them useful they have a place.
Top 5 Startups In 2013
Nexus 5 handily beats the iPhone in most categories, save perhaps the camera. Not to mention it is half the cost.
Night Mode The new feature that kill the white CSS background.
We do, because if you reduce languages to their fundamental core, we had around... 3 - 6 languages in wide use.

Note that this means we need a language which has certain fundamental differences to existing languages, so we don't need YAJAWiSS (yet another java with syntactic sugar), but something that takes a step forward. Their error model, first class immutability and RAII outside of C++ might be something like this, if done well.
There aren't that many languages in the systems space.
I'm really appalled by the hostility that's being displayed here. This is Microsoft research in Cambridge, not the Xbox one marketing department. You know, the guys who work on Haskell, ported OCAML to .net and generally do a lot of awesome stuff.

What have you created that justifies this kind of an attitude?
IOS-Blog gets a new, responsive flat design
also from MSR, Koka[0] has effect types and a sweet online repl!

[0] http://rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial
> I also hear songs everywhere. That trumpet note held on the jazz recording you are listening to? That's the same guitar note that starts this other song, and now I'm stuck hearing it in my head. What, that doorbell doesn't remind you of the beginning of a Haydn symphony? Well now I know what's playing in my head for the next hour.

Interesting. I've had no musical training, but I end up noticing "matches" like these constantly. Is there a way to test one's pitch sensitivity?
Well really we just need C, now get off my lawn.
I'm going to ramble a little below, so I'll get to the point up front: is there even a new language here? I don't mean in the sense that Rust seems to attempt what is being hand waved about in the submission, but that the linked blog post states

> I’ve given a few glimpses into this work over the years. In the months to come, I will start sharing more details. My goal is to eventually open source this thing, but...

We'll have to wait and see, I guess. I also found this quote a bit odd

> There are other candidates early in their lives, too, most notably Rust and D. But hey, my team works at Microsoft, where there is ample C# talent and community just an arm’s length away.

D is hardly early in its life, but there is something about the whole "my team works at Microsoft, where there is ample C# talent" bit that is so very Microsoft, and I don't mean because it mentions Microsoft and C#, but in the sense of how they tend to work there. At least, this is my outside view, based mostly on what they promise vs. actually deliver in the C++ world, and where their interest constantly seem to fall short. Of course, you can't blame Microsoft for being interested in advancing Microsoft.

With that out of the way, and being up front that the rest of this comment is unnecessary, I wonder why this is on the front page of Lambda the Ultimate. It's become a favourite site of mine as I've recently become a lot more interested in language implementations. I'm certain the comments on the article will make it worthy, but as it stands, and with my comments above out of the way, I don't see what it offers. It's just hand waving about some ideal language that doesn't (fully) exist yet. The actual answer to my question of why it is on the front page is because Charles Torre can make front page posts, but just be aware that he works at Microsoft and hypes up their behaviour (that I'm admittedly not so pleased with) often. I know he is, like me, actually interested in language implementations, and has made far more worthy contributions on LtU than I ever have, but the front page of LtU is usually a bit more grounded.
Here it is: http://erlangonxen.org/
For #2 I think it would be nice to see greater availability of "virtual CC numbers", where you can set some arbitrary limit for and it is not exceeded.

It seems limited to a few banks that I choose not to be customers of though, so maybe the feature doesn't work as well as I hope it would.

I would certainly like to see better tools as a card owner, which I could use to better protect myself.
Said it completely true. This how any brand which has got manually penalized need to work out.
Our choices may not always be made for reasons we can articulate or even know.

Simon Norton (finite group theory, worked with Conway) also finds close companionship with numbers and had a less intensely isolated childhood than Erdos but one that has similarities.

I think we may have to agree to disagree here.
To be fair, the 5S is an incremental upgrade in many ways, much like the 4S or 3GS - little different in form or features, some minor enhancements, and a spec bump. If anything, the inclusion of touch ID, the 64-bit transition and the M7 make it a bit more of a bump than usual!

I expect we'll see more of a difference when the next iPhone is released.
Learning Scala by building Scala - Lists and Option
I'm a bit leery of that argument, because in my experience the most important component of a language is its ecosystem. By far.

I've played with many really nice languages, but never used them seriously because they had no libraries (let alone quality libraries), had poor tooling, poor documentation, buggy runtime, and almost nobody to compare notes with. In my experience, the largest jump in productivity is libraries, not some feature of a language.

On the one hand, languages are useful to explore a space. On the other, there's a lot of reinvented wheels going on here. If all languages stuck with the same ABI (e.g. C), it'd be one thing, because then you could use the same libraries and many tools between languages. Unfortunately, they often cannot, and thus you can't. There's some serious opportunity cost going on here.

I'm happy using node.js at the moment (ooh, shiny!), but the current situation with a plethora of languages isn't exactly great either.
> You know, the guys who work on Haskell, ported OCAML to .net and generally do a lot of awesome stuff.

Not exactly. The guys who developed F# based the core language mostly on OCaml and borrowed some ideas from Haskell, but are not the same as the people who developed Haskell.
I agree with you. That's why the US troops are still in South Korea. South Korea is perfectly capable of defending itself but if there are no US troops to die in the first strike the US can do the sensible thing. But with them there North Korea soon becomes former North Korea.

And South Korea has slightly fewer people than France. It's not Minnesota.
Computer games which are impacted by performance the most are written in what language?
Show HN: iOS-Blog gets a beautiful new flat and responsive design
Which India Matters?
I am a ployglot and know several indian and foreign languages. My favourite is Sanskrit. Why? Once I learnt Sanskrit, esp. the grammar, learning other languages was really easy. You easy almost all languages have their roots from Sanskrit. The grammar rules for German and Finnish, for example, are a subset of Sanskrit.
>isn't being held captive behind closed doors waiting for Sanskrit-speaking liberators

Over-dramatizing the other guy's statement does not constitute a response.

Even ignoring the religious angle, Sanskrit was the primary language of literature, science and philosophy in India for over a millennium. Surely a person might want to read some of that without being employed as a researcher.

(And before you ask, most of it hasn't been translated and will probably never be translated. See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/pollock_... )
Sweet, in 4 years they can completely remove all support for it and start again!
Since your using Euros, check out equity crowdfunding. Crowdcube.com lets you invest in startups. My recommendation is you take that 10k and put into into 10 different investments and hope that one is a banger.
I strongly recommend reading Witold Rybczynski's "The Most Beautiful House in the World" for an interesting study in how one's ideas evolve over time...
Why ditch bzip2 and not gzip ? It was clearly for storage space.
Insult + straw man position. Not worthy of a serious reply.
Ask HN: CS mentoring program in the bay area
My friend recently started a mentorship where he teaches photography skills to interested students. The kids are from public schools, and generally from a disadvantaged background, but have expressed -- and demonstrated -- real interest in photography. The teaching is done 1 to 1 in a group setting, and lasts for about a semester or a year. Meets on the weekend and is a couple hours a week. It seems like a totally great experience for everyone involved. Problem, I don't know anything about photography. Solution, I know about computer science. Does anyone know if there is something similar already established for computer science? Would anyone be interested in working on establishing something like this if there isn't?
The idea that MS is out to envelope developers by enticing
them into a language that requires massive cash outlays or
*ongoing licensing fees* is not supported by reality.

...

The only requirement being that they run on a Windows OS

Mhm.

Yes, I suppose you can run some C# on a non-windows machine, but it'll have bugs, break, some libraries won't be supported and there's no tooling support.

...but don't worry, you can happily tell everyone how free and open source it is. That's really important!

(by comparison, have a look at go which actually bothered to make a commitment to supporting various platforms; and don't even start with that whole 'xamarin is awesome' stuff; yes it is, but it in no ways acts as a caveat for microsoft's 'we'll make the spec public, that's good enough right?' behaviour)
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/

Yes, I'm aware that it's not the Haskell core team who is working on this new language. But they probably have their offices across the floor.
> You easy almost all languages have their roots from Sanskrit. The grammar rules for German and Finnish, for example, are a subset of Sanskrit.

Your claims are a subset of the “everything comes from India” school of BSology.[1]

German is related to Sanskrit but does not descend from it.[2] Finnish belongs to a different language family entirely.[3]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln5QgeCL1fs

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IndoEuropeanTree.svg

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages
Plenty of people don't know that Zune existed.
The Architecture of Uncertainty (Kevlin Henney)
Using a captcha to annoy and drive away users. It was super effective.

Please, just stahp.
How do you practice or make yourself not forget the several languages you know? I find it really hard to be proficient in a language unless you live among native speakers?
I find the pluginName parameter excessive.
This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language.

But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops into everything that's promised, you're left with something on which you can't do mobile, can't do big data, probably won't work very well for scientific computing. In fact, basically you're still stuck with the same LoB apps and ETL tools that C#'s already great at. And probably the same second rate (not awful, not great) web experience.

So the best you can hope for, basically, is a better C#. But not good enough to take on Java.

Don't get me wrong, it sounds exciting, but equally I worry that it'll be used as a way to generate patents to prevent the ideas being used elsewhere in environments where, tbh, they'd find more use.
Of course we need more languages. We need to continue evolving languages until we get better and better ones. When languages stop improving so significantly from generation to generation then we can start settling down into a smaller number of languages.

We still haven't figured out the best tradeoffs between dynamism and type safety. And we definitely haven't sorted out the best set of features for memory management and error handling. And after that there are a lot of even bigger fish to fry.
Could you please elaborate on this a little more? How did German and Finnish derive from Sanskrit? Could you give examples?
FYI, this isn't really an MSR project. It (the OS project that spawned the language) was run under the "Startup Business Group" until recently, and developed in Redmond.
You're not necessarily wrong, but uIP may not be the best example of a good minimal TCP implementation. I've seen it routinely put the wrong value into the TCP window-size field. This creates an illusion of packet loss, causing senders to retransmit and performance to drop exponentially to zero.

As a workaround, I wrote a custom tool that avoids sending more than one TCP segment at a time:

https://github.com/dlitz/dlink-firmware-uploader/blob/581b64...
It is true that most of the best supported languages have been around for a good ten years. But each of those languages had a time when they were only a year old.

I don't deny languages take time to mature. I feel like Haxe is about two-thirds of the way towards being properly Mature. It is approaching 10 years old, yet I feel like it is only just getting started, A lot of people still haven't even heard of it.
I would imagine that language like that would be one of the best you could hope for. I hope this language will fit all the bullets.

- C# syntactic sugar

- As fast as C++

- Does not require .NET

- Runs on Windows/Linux/Unix with no problems
My favourite way goes like this

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8158332

Basically, each thread sleeps for the time corresponding to the number
>Sanskrit was the primary language of literature

was one of the.. FIFY.
C# developer here, also love the language.

I completely agree and I only hope that this new thing will be just as good as C# but fully cross-platform. It would be great.

>mobile

Xamarin is pretty solid, although it costs a lot.
Different types of support and different designs of company.

Call centre workers can process refunds, send out replacement items and do similar routine things - and they're not that well paid. It's unlikely there will be other more profitable ways to deploy them in the company. Programmers who can make code changes to fix faults in production software cost a lot more. And there will be other departments (which make a bigger contribution to the bottom line) trying to attract your most talented people.

By design of company I mean some tech companies only employ a small number of non-programmers, so they can afford to give programmer-level salaries, benefits and working enviroment to all employees. Google could give free food / laundry / busses / nerf guns to all employees and might think the equality is culturally important. Amazon on the other hand has radically different pay/benefits/working enviroments for programmers vs call centre workers vs warehouse workers.
Easy way to manage multiple Server Configurations with WordPress
Judging by the CAPTCHAs I've been getting lately, OCR is pretty much as good as humans. I used to always be able to solve them, but reCAPTCHAs have recently become ridiculous, requiring four or five tries to solve.
When I bought my MBA back in 2011 or so, I wanted 4G of memory. I didn't want a bigger SSD, but I had to get one - no choice. I didn't want a faster processor, but I had to get one - no choice. I ended up paying a lot more for stuff I didn't want or need, simply because the device wasn't upgradeable - not by the user nor the store I bought it from. How was my user experience? What was Apple's profit?

Apple segment their product range just like any sensible company. There's a range of products that increase in power, and in profit margin. People who can afford to buy the highest end products end up paying over the odds, because they're usually the least sensitive to price.

This doesn't mean that Apple is about user experience. Frankly, that's hogwash. They're about corporate profit, in the medium term. And if people end up buying lower end devices and upgrading it themselves, I can easily see them seeing this as a lost profit opportunity, and doing something like whitelisting. It's little different than Intel eventually getting around to locking down frequency multipliers, and selling unlocked chips at a premium.
I guess I don't have to build this myself anymore! Great UX by the way, pretty impressed. Are you going to expose an API?

e: It looks like the answer to my question is 'yes'. I would like to note that your gains/loses pages for legacy/vintage/all are very noisy due to low trade volume. I suggest putting in some filters.
I think what you ran into was the problems of getting a Samsung phone rather than Android. Full size S4's (I assume mini's are similar) come with 7+ GB of software on top of Google's Android. If you got it from a carrier there may be more.

Samsung provides it's own version of everything, on top of the default apps. So what you get is:

* AOSP, OS and Open Source default apps.
* Google Play stuff. Google requires devices with Google Play store to also include all Google apps. (Eg Gmail)
* Samsung's apps. Samsung provides apps and includes all of them on full feature phones. Along with the Samsung phones.

If you try a Nexus 4 or a MotoG you will get something much closer to what should be on Android no Samsung bloated package.
Dammit, another reason I should have waited for the Z1.
No, they are convinced that the speakers look gorgeous.

Besides, I think looks are quite important. You have to live with those things in the end and I do not want to have ugly boxes in my living space.
Well, there are clear information theoretic limits on how much you can compress something, so any improvements are necessarily going to be incremental and converging to the theoretical limit. The more special-purpose the compression algorithm, the more assumptions it can make, the better it can perform on the sort of data it's designed for, at the expense of behaving poorly in the general case. Indeed, it can be shown that any possible lossless compression algorithm, on average, will yield an output larger than its input; it's just that most "interesting" data contains plenty of redundancy that's reliably compressible.
Where did you see him being portrayed as a hero?
Your body in a microchip
For compatibility and speed, gzip is a winner. It's fast and it's everywhere (plus it compresses text well enough that it makes sense to use in place of non-compressed files).

For strong compression, there are better options than bzip2.

In a sense, bzip2 is "worse of both worlds".
Ask HN: What are the specs of your programming computer?
Today I saw the Mac Pro 2013 tear-down at various websites. I find myself developing my applications on a 2008 and 2011 computers. To be specific:

1 - The iMac

* Intel Core 2 Duo ("Penryn") - 2.8 Ghz, 64 bit
* 4 GB RAM
* Graphics ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256
* 24 inch screen
* SSD 60GB

2 - The Macbook Air

It is a 2011 model, which has slower CPU (1.8 Ghz) but same specs as the iMac above.

and 3rd I have a FreeBSD 9.1 VPS which has configured ruby + vim + my plugins which I can use from my latest toy, a Samsung 11 inch Chromebook.

I don't play games, I do the occasional family video with iMovie, browse the web use office suites, LATEX and mostly write code in Ruby. I don't feel the need like to upgrade, at all.

I wonder what other amateurs and professional programmer's desktops are like, please share your specs :-)
The distribution doesn't really matter here. I mean, the drivers (modules) are the same: If they work on Debian they will work under Gentoo, Arch, You-Name-It.. Since the kernel is ... the same :-)
I maintain that very few people have a reason to learn Sanskrit. It is a dead/dying language that will add zero value besides the esoteric joy of knowing a language for the sake of knowing it.

If you feel that is not the case, please elucidate your reasons. I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
> yeah, I know about Mono

What's wrong with Mono? I worked with C# only briefly and I really liked it (as opposed to Java.. but maybe I just had better tools). If I'd need something a bit faster than python, C# would probably be my choice. That's assuming it's portable to other platforms...
Perhaps not in the same area, but I would nominate Anand Shimpi from anandtech.com. He writes in depth review of Apple hardware (currently writing a Mac Pro review), and offers fairly deep insight into both the hardware and what the product offers as a whole.

Gruber might do it better; I admit that I don't read any of his posts, not being much of an Apple watcher. I have a slightly negative opinion of him based solely on comments, on HN and elsewhere, that appear on submissions of his articles. They seem to indicate that he has a pair of horse blinders on when it comes to Apple. For people who don't already think what they offer is the best, I can see why it is grating. I would have to read his articles for some time to form an actual opinion, but as it stands I'll stick with Anand, as he covers, in depth, other entrants as well as Apple.
Ha, the Audioengine speakers were the notable exception. I thought they looked ok. In the end I decided against them.

An Airplay speaker is my stopgap measure for my current (tiny) living space and maybe I will take another look in 5-10 years. I prefer listening with my headphones anyway.
Xamarin has been nice so far; it's not that expensive compared to any serious project, but it should be cheaper to capture larger audiences. The free version is very crippled even for trivial projects.
That's about the noise level and sharpness I have on my EOS 40D with ISO 1600. I think I'm going to cry in a corner a little.

That being said, you don't go that high unless you're very desperate and the sensor itself can go up to 6400, the rest is software.
I have had the following laptops - on which I've installed Linux:

- Thinkpad X1 Carbon (works perfectly - ubuntu 12.10)
- Thinkpad T540p (works perfectly - ubuntu 13.10)
- HP Envy 15 (terrible - ubuntu 12.04)

All worked out of the box - except for the HP.

My two cents - get the X1 Carbon on lenovo outlet ($1K for 8GB ram, i7, etc.)

Everything worked on it
- webcam
- suspend, resume
- wireless
- sound
- UEFI settings (for dual boot)
Again, what HN reader (or otherwise), do you think is interested in reading ancient literature written in Sanskrit? A researcher or linguist I'm guessing. And maybe 3 other people.

I'm afraid your arguments in favour of learning Sanskrit are as generic and theoretical as most other comments.
Id like to see OS with exokernel.
I really liked the sound of WinFS with a filesystem that you could query like a database.
Defending Wall St. Earns Academics Financial Reward
This was taking place in the 80s/90s. They flew Koryo to China, then somewhere eastern Europe where they apparently even had private jets stashed back then.
What else do you expect from gruber though?