skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Engineer working on Hack here.

Yeah, I think Hack is a good language to start a new project in. For as much flak as PHP gets, there are actually a lot of good things about the language. The fast development cycle -- edit php script, refresh -- is something amazing that you don't get in a lot of statically typed languages, which usually have a compilation step. The crazy dynamic things you can do also occasionally have their place, though it's certainly easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

On the other hand, a lot of the time you want the safety that strong static typing can give you. Even just the null propagation checking can immediately find tons and tons of silly little bugs without even running the code, and ensure that the code stays consistent as a "mini unit test" if you will.

Hack hits the sweet spot of both. Wiring the Hack typechecker into vim was really revolutionary for me -- having both the immediate feedback of the type system for all the silly bugs that I was writing, along with the fast reload/test cycle from PHP, is great.
Snopes has covered it already: http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/malaysiapatent.asp
It is just made up rules with (maybe) good intentions and catastrophic consequences.

Not necessarily catastrophic though I can see this as an argument to defeat patent trolls.

My main point is that in a market where can freely consume a freeware, free software and fully proprietary software is a free market. A world with only free software is still one sided.

The act of being proprietary adds no value to any software. It only serves to take away potential value in the ability to trust, understand, reuse, and modify it.

There isn't always a need to actually understand, reuse and modify a software if the user only wants to use it. Proprietary software cannot be studied and trusted fully -- that's true, but if there is no free alternative competitive sacrificing is how we live in this world.

You probably (assumptions here) have done no part to fund or participate in the continued development of LibreOffice, while you have paid Microsoft for their Office suite. You are directly incentively the continued usage and development of proprietary software without doing anything for the free alternatives. Even if you have contributed to LibreOffice in some way, you are still sustaining the proprietary freedom depriving Microsoft suite through both your purchase and usage of it.

Using a software is already participating in the continued development of LibreOffice.

If I could take a train to get to work in 15 minutes, why would I bike for 45 minutes to work every day? I may bike occasionally, but definitely not everyday. If LibreOffice is convinent to do everything I need to do with MS Office, I'd switch permanently. If not, they will both co-exist on my computer.

How will removing MS Office do any good to free software if I don't actually write code for LibreOffice in the first place?

Is there not enough people already writing code and plugins for LibreOffice suite? Sounds like free software moment is pushing people to write free software because they don't have enough developers who are willing to put time writing code for free software.

Implicit to Steam is a violation of (at least) one of those freedoms. You are free to not consider them freedoms in your ethical outlook.

That's why free software movement from R.S. is radical to me.

It isn't about forcing anyone to do anything, it is about removing the force already imparted upon you by proprietary software vendors that restrict your ability to modify or redistribute software.

The force imparted upon me is due to the fact the free alternatives aren't good enough or just don't exist. If there exists one that works really well, like proprietary software, the force is not as strong as you think.

If we shall, free software is awesome, it has the ability to study and modify the software in any way the user wants, now, how do I make a living off my work?
Those other services have people engaging with them many times per day thus the traffic. Invoicing is a task that you would do maybe once or twice per week ?

Also the live PDF view, which clever, is really also annoying as any typing or mouse hovering makes that area flash.
The more sensible countries heavily tax fuel and have historically let the market determine vehicle fuel economy (correct me if I'm wrong). Consumers choose smaller, less-powerful (but more affordable) vehicles and don't drive them as much.

Americans can't stand to pay the true cost of anything, so rather than raising the price of gas, we spend vast sums chasing ever smaller incremental improvements in fuel economy. So consumers choose huge, powerful, expensive cars and then drive them everywhere.

This is one area of the economy where the inkjet printer model would actually be an improvement over the status quo.
Ubuntu provides five years of support for their LTS releases. The oldest OS that Ubuntu support is from 2010. Red Hat just EOLed an OS from 2003. Debian provides support for previous releases for "about a year or so". While Windows XP was released in 2002, over 12 years ago and Windows XP Embedded will be supported until 2016. So it looks like if you want the longest period of support, your best bet is Windows not Linux.
What the f! am I doing?
The GNU project even has a full list of GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibl...
Hi Bryan,

How do you protect from type errors when a value crosses from the untyped to typed fragment? Do you use contracts?
First Thoughts: “Coders at Work” by Peter Seibel
I've never seen a case where an card wouldn't work in another bank's automated ATM machine. I know this used to be the case, but there are a bunch of logos on the back of my card, and a bunch of logos on various ATMs, and as long as there is an intersection of at least on of those logos it should work.

And there is a big difference between giving basic proof of ID information to a regulated financial institution, vs. handing it over to an unknown entity.
Commenting on this incredibly late, but I knew there'd be some good fodder in this comment thread.

You have a good point, but unfortunately you're still missing the point. Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing. As others have said, as software engineers, we would have gone to school to do bioinformatics and study the natural sciences if that's what we wanted. The issue is that a vast number of people are working on shitty, pointless, worthless apps.

It has nothing to do with barriers to entry. What kind of problems do you learn to solve in this field? Computational ones, i.e. things involving facets of computing. So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems? Things that software engineers should have plenty of knowledge on, and would be much more beneficial to society than the next bullshit social app. Why is this not the case?

That is what the author is addressing. Churning out photosharing app #35875 isn't helping anyone. But maybe if people started taking pride in the notion of being a hacker and a computer scientist, and actually solving shit worth solving instead of stamping those phrases on their Twitter pages for social approval, then just maybe the Valley could gain some credibility back.
Why App-Makers Care Less About .COM
Go home, close the doors, windows and get some food. Goodies is out.
It should be, but the actual premium is the result of a human decision, and humans sometimes make very bad decisions. (See, for instance, the purchase of Skype by eBay a decade ago. Also on the value of a network that was an alternative to phone calls.)
"BSD" -- take it, do whatever you want

GPL -- keep it free

The latter allows us to program in 20 years without asking a corporation for permission.
KYC regulations were in effect way before 9/11, same for currency trading restrictions (made ineffective/impossible with Bitcoin).

Oh, and indeed I forgot another point, the "OMG child porn!" faction...

edit: Oh, of course no amount of KYC regulations prevented big banks from doing business for and with big drug cartels... I wonder whom those regulations were drafted for, anyway. Can't be drug lords or terrorists, so whom else?
80k in NYC. It sucks since I see so little of that (<2k per month) after tax and rent.

Are you hiring, boredeasy?
A tool for exporting and importing all environment variables
Visualized sorting algorithms
Aren't promises just callbacks?
GMail HTTPS-only
> I wish these extensions came by way of the PHP core

Well where is PHP core then? to my knowledge while PHP 5 was a huge step forward, PHP core did little to fix PHP stupid design flaws,for the sake of backward compatibility.

We are in a new era, libraries are more and more decoupled,so they are easy to write or rewrite,backward compatibily shouldnt be an issue when libraries are well versioned and tested across different versions.

And Wordpress folks dont care about PHP.next.Why bother with them?
Well, it's not all about the language. For me, and others, who are aware and have dwelved in advanced languages (such as Scala, Haskell, Lisp family), Java is often our choice for even hobby projects. It's not that we cannot see other languages's benefits. It's that in our opinion it's the best choice all things considered (how efficiently one can write readable/refactorable code being one of the most important things).

Kotlin seems to be one very good alternative in the future.
I too programmed for a long time in AS3/Haxe, and while I prefer variable:type as I think it's more readable, most static languages (java, C#) do it the other way.
It has to do with the "rawness" of the industry around Bitcoin. The laws around financial instruments don't magically disappear just because it's technically possible to make transactions without them. They exist for a reason, and if you want to make a business that deals in financial instruments, you have to follow them.
So, assuming unlimited developer time, you would want Scribe to correct this?

I'm just trying to get a feel of Scribe's scope... Does it want to fix all inconsistencies, even pure UI irritants, or is it mostly about ensuring correct content?

I'm tempted to write a plugin that "types" space-delete after every CR. That's the quickest and nastiest fix I can think of...
Sneaky "pileup" malware can exploit Android upgrades, say researchers
Larry Page Spoke At TED, And Everyone Freaked Out Over His Ideas
When you shake the bag, smaller candies settle down to the bottom, the larger ones get to the top. So even if someone tries to shake the bag to get a 'random' sample, they will be getting a biased sample if they pick all 5 candies from the same layer (usually the top).
Oh! When I saw Top Colour I thought it was referring to the order of the list as the most used colours first, in descending order.

Haha. I just realised it means the colour of the top bar the logo is on.
just gone though the slides of a Hack Talk (https://raw.github.com/strangeloop/StrangeLoop2013/master/sl...)

> • [ X ] The name of your language makes it impossible to
find on Google”

appending "-lang" certainly gives you better results but still does not find you a lot of un-tagged good blog posts
Logstash steps up as Splunk's latest challenger
It's almost as if authentication is a service that doesn't need to be replicated across services.
Just FYI: ATM stands for Automated Teller Machine, so your sentence expands to "automated automated teller machine machine" :)
Could you connect to other players automatically ?
Ugh, I hate that SMS is conflated with Hangouts as it is. It causes notifications for work-related chat to get mixed in with notifications for personal text messages on my phone. Can anyone suggest alternative SMS clients for Android?
Probably better for them if they be upfront by showing buy and sell rates like other money changers.
Very true. However, network effects at the scale of an individual decision are weak. If I am considering taking some package proprietary, adding a feature, and selling the modified package, I am faced with the decision of whether or not to give myself a strong, if temporary competitive advantage. Sure, the original package may catch up with me, but if I play my cards right I'll be playing Scrooge McDuck in my basement vault by that time. Further, the catch-up date can be delayed if I hire as many smart people from the package as possible to work on my fork.

Or, it may never catch up, if fragmentation (or any other effect) destroys the market for the product in the mean time. I've wondered if that had any role in the rise and fall of Lisp machines; I'm a little too young to have direct experience there.
I used to use ChompSMS and liked it.
We currently don't have Sublime Text 2 support, but it shouldn't be too hard to do, given Sublime's excellent plug-in design.

Feel free to send us a pull request: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/tree/master/hphp/hack/edito...
Improve your Analytics skills with free online courses from Google
Feel free to disagree, but think of it this way: ideas are possibilities. Until they are attempted, sometimes repeatedly, they are in-flux.

It's the same as the concept of "desire" vs. "intention" vs. "goal" vs. "reality". Ideas without work put into their execution are still in the "intention" phase. Yes, they are boundless, but practically aren't worth anything until they are actualized... that takes a lot of hard work.
Are there any plans for a Hack -> PHP transpiler? Or is that impossible? It would be nice to develop on Hack, transpile back to vanilla PHP where we still have to use the PHP.net runtime (shared hosts, Google app engine, Engine Yard, etc)
Airbnb Said to Pursue Valuation Above $10 Billion in New Fund-Raising Round
But how many people buy cars? Dealerships profits / car salesmen's wages come at the expense of car buyers as much as car manufacturers.
What It’s Like To Come Back
It is interesting to read this through the eyes of the burgeoning Open Source Hardware (OSH) community. There seems to be an Free Hardware Foundation in Italy, but I have never seen it mentioned before, and rarely do I see discussion of the sort of essential freedoms I see Stallman is talking about. However, I often see people struggling with (and reverse engineering) proprietary hardware, firmware and software. Hardware tools often come feature locked and internals are intentionally obscured, down to sanding the labels off chips. When the question of open tools comes up, the response is usually something like this: "How much demand is there for, say, a 100 MHz open 'scope that costs a bit more than a Rigol?" Taken from a recent discussion about Free/Open Hardware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375771

Does the Free Hardware movement need a Stallman?
Voice never came to the UK anyway...
I don't have objection to people benefiting from my work monetarily. I have some objection to people benefiting from my work by exerting power over others. How much objection and whether it is sufficient to motivate GPL (or AGPL) depends on a whole host of factors, definitely including the nature and extent of that power.
PHP is based on C. It's way more consistent with C, Java, C# , etc to do the former. So the real question is why

function foobar() : int { .. }

instead of

function int foobar() { .. }
"Frankly, Ford doesn't need its dealer network any more than Tesla does now, or they shouldn't. "

So you are suggesting that Ford is interested in replacing the franchised model and operating and owning the establishments themselves?

Car dealerships in many areas are basically small businesses.

They are a model that work in the same way that many bakeries have route drivers that are one step away from being employees in a sense (Fedex also uses this in some areas).

I don't buy the idea that it's a given that a large existing car manufacturer would rather just build out and operate car dealerships and that there is no value to an entrepreneur owning that dealership. Or that that even adds to significant extra costs for the consumer. By "significant" I mean the extra cost per car because there is a dealer. (Which by the way you do need a place to get service (even with electric) and you do need a showroom and a local point of contact).

How much profit per car do you think the dealer makes exactly that the consumer will save?
Microsoft also does a lot of hardware research and innovation: XBox Kinect, Surface, etc.

To some extent, hardware research requires more dedicated facilities than software research.
I'm quite a fan of Hello, but you need to explicitly turn off a "feature" that tells people you message you send it with Hello. I have no idea why they don't just charge a dollar for it.
For people like me who follow this space closely, this is not news. And to be fair, the article doesn't really claim it as news.

The Google Voice team was rolled into the Hangouts team long ago. The only thing they haven't done is roll the Google Voice app's functionality into the Hangouts app.
Like matchmaking? Yes, planning that. This was literally hacked up in 2 days. Please don't look at the source haha.
I've hand assembled (small) bits of Z-80 code and toggled it via switches a byte at a time in to bootstrap old CP/M machines. Interesting, but not much fun.

Commercially, we commonly used cross assemblers or cross compilers and simulators that ran on minicomputers (like DEC VAXen). We could then burn the output to PROMs to put in the target machine for final debugging. Later we used a more specialized cross development environment (HP 64000 and Intel MDS) which had a big cable tied to a pod that plugged into the CPU socket on the target, allowing much more sophisticated debugging.
I saw this coming once Hangouts gained SMS compatibility. The nice thing is, I won't have 2 separate apps to view all my messages. I'll be able to make calls and text via Voice(within hangouts) for work, receive normal texts and calls in hangouts, and still be able to chat up with my circles!
I think you are mixing up cause and effect. XKCD is based on this game.
That's one of many such companies.

It's simpler than that, though. On a local level, away from the large cities, it's not uncommon for the guy or gal that owns (not necessarily the same as the name is on the sign though) the local dealership to be the area's state senator or state representative. No amount of lobbying or money from tesla, etc, are going to convince him to vote against his/her own business.
If you allow for the possibility of child abuse, neglect, and favoritism in your analogy, sure.

EDIT: Also, the children work and the parent collects an allowance.
Nothing about proprietary software reflects a free market. The entire proprietary software industry can only exist through the existence and practice of copyright law.

Not exactly, since Freedoms 1 and 3 could still be abridged even without copyright, by just releasing binaries.
Making OpenCL look more like CUDA
Oh, I'm not arguing in favor of the rent-seeking of car dealerships -- I just think it's important to remember that not every legal regime is the natural end result of corruption. The car dealerships have this cozy arrangement because they pay loads of local taxes, employ lots of people, and have a strong and well organized lobby.
Also see Higher-Order Javascript by Sean M. Burke which is a "JavaScriptish companion" to Mark-Jason Dominus's Higher-Order Perl book - http://interglacial.com/hoj/
Pretty star-studded cast you have on the core team, there.

What's your motivation, aside from modernizing Facebook's code base? What language niche does Hack serve which is not served by other languages? Why Facebook at all (aside from the rarity of finding a company to pay you to write a compiler :))?
I'm not a Fluke junkie either, but I don't buy the "functional colors" argument. Nobody made a multimeter that looked like that until Fluke started doing it. Fluke also makes a range of "intrinsically safe" multimeters with a red instead of orange border. Are those less "functional?" They are certainly less well-known, so it wouldn't make sense to copy them.

It's the same as the cheapo "bench" multimeters that have five input terminals and the same layout as an Agilent 344xxA (or Fluke 88xx) but don't have a 4-wire Ohms function (or even a low-enough range to need 4-wire Ohms) or a proper guard connection (which is the purpose of the the 5th terminal).
A wonderful demonstration of statistics.

On similar ground, this reminds me of Deming's red bead demonstration, relating statistics to corporations and management practices. Best explained dynamically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeWTD-0BRS4 (delightfully, this is posted by the Mayo Clinic).
Its not just inconsistent with other languages, its consistent with their own language.

Property types are declared before the property name, while function return types are declared after (and with a colon).

Very strange.
It looks promising, I highly dislike writing PHP and this seems like it might ease the pain, but they could've gotten rid of the damn dollar sign in front of variables, how ugly is this? "return ($y) ==> { return $y + 1; }"
Agree. Cars are an emotional purchase. The dealer motivated by profit serves a function in that process.

That is one of the reasons that by and large fixed pricing hasn't worked with autos as much as everyone seems to think that it's such a great idea.

Negotiation and "buy now" kicks people off of fences. (So does inventory and other factors to be sure..)
Well, this kind of sucks.

I use a Google Voice number that is associated with a Gmail account that I do not use for any other purpose (Hangouts/Talk or otherwise). It doesn't even have a Google+ account associated with it.

It's nice to have single number that can ring all my lines.

If/when this is killed, what's the alternative?

(Article appears to be down/inaccessible for me).
You're young, you're immature, and sounds like you're prone to drama. What you're doing isn't working.

Go back to school and finish.
> I am baffled as to why you'd build your castle atop a crumbling foundation.

> I have wondered why FB didn't use a proper language with proper typing to begin with.

I would suggest watching Keith Adams's talk, "Taking PHP Seriously": http://www.infoq.com/presentations/php-history

He goes through why Facebook uses PHP and decided to build upon it to create Hack. I highly recommend watching the whole thing, but the main three things he points to are:

1. Frictionless programmer workflow with a short feedback cycle

2. All PHP requests start out with the same consistent state by default

3. Rigid style of concurrency
What are the browser requirements? I cannot get it to work.
I suspect the best way to make rich text editing work across browsers is to do what the current google docs editor does: Drop contentEditable and just implement your own editor in javascript. Read key and mouse events and manipulate the DOM.

It's a bit more work up front, but possibly less work than trying to get four different implementations of contentEditable to behave the way you want. And this way you own the editing logic.
Not Bryan, but I am an engineer who works on Hack :)

We don't (statically) protect against type errors when you cross from untyped into typed code. If you call an untyped function, we assume the programmer knows what they are doing -- just like PHP does. You might get a runtime exception if you are calling a method on null, for example.

This is actually a pretty important part of the conversion process. You don't have to convert all your code all at once. Typed code can be verified statically; untyped code is assumed to work just as before.

Parameter and return type annotations are enforced at runtime by HHVM (just like you can add a class type annotations to a parameter in PHP). This will protect against some inconsistencies -- again, just as if you weren't using Hack.
PhpStorm support issue
http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-21737
I don't see why not. It's possible to have done it any any mainstream language.
Latest versions of Chrome or Firefox.