skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congrats to all developers on the release! Here's a selection of some of my personal favorite changes in this release cycle:

* Automatically-generated nightly binaries for all first-tier platforms [1]

* Switching the default hashmap over to Robin Hood hashing [2]

* Turning on native threading by default, in lieu of the green thread runtime [3]

* The removal of conditions in favor of a standardized type for returning I/O results, which will (by default) generate a warning if the result is ignored [4]

* The extension of the lifetimes of temporary values, which should greatly reduce the occasions where you have to assign a name to a temporary result in an effort to please the compiler [5] [6]

And if you're thrown by the idea that version 0.10 follows version 0.9, know that I voted for 0.A (alas). 1.0 is still expected for later this year, though no promises!

Remember, Rust 1.0 is not the milestone when the language is finished, but rather the milestone when backwards-incompatible changes to the language will no longer be made. See the "backcompat-lang" tag on the issue tracker for a list of outstanding blockers. [7]

[1] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2014-March/00922...

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12081

[3] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12833

[4] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2014-February/00...

[5] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/01/09/rval...

[6] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/11585

[7] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues?direction=asc&labels=...
So it comes down to "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." You just recite a long litany of naturalistic fallacies and claims that marriage is X because marriage is X.

Yeah, there's a reason people think people who support straight marriage while opposing gay marriage are homophobic bigots.
It shows that Tarsnap is a very serious open source project, of a vaguely FreeBSD lineage. Since that's not actually what Tarsnap is, the site design is doing him an obvious disservice.
One of his other businesses sells an 'appointment reminder' service to businesses. It's wildly successful.

One could argue that perhaps that gives him some insight into the B2B sales process, which is a large content of the article.
Eh, I think everyone has a pain tolerance and he definitely met his.

Personally, I would have preferred he said his mind had changed over the intervening years and that he had made a mistake. Then stayed CEO, of course.

I think the real reason he left is the fact he had enough ethical integrity to realize his brand damaged Mozilla's brand. That, and his beliefs were unchanged so he could not offer a genuine retraction.
TLDR: You can't write the first compiler for a language in the language. However, you can write the second compiler in the language and use the first compiler to compile it.

If you already have a compiler in the language you're compiling, you can update the compiler with new features by the following process, called "bootstrapping". This process is used in gcc for example:

1. Use the old binary version to compile the new source version.

2. Use the binary produced in step 1 to compile the new source version.

3. Use the binary provided in step 2 to compile the new source version.

The results of stages 2 and 3 should be the same (assuming the old and new compilers assign the same semantics to the compiler source code and don't have non-determinism, e.g. using wall-clock time to determine when to stop searching for optimizations).

The bootstrap process can't be used on the first compiler for a brand-new language, because there is no "old compiler" that can be used in stage 1. The only way around this is to write the first compiler in a different language that already exists.

Of course, if a self-hosted compiler is your goal, you can afford letting the very first compiler (the one written in another language) be limited, "dirty," or "hacky". You don't have to implement the entire language in the first compiler; the first compiler just has to support enough of the new language to allow you to write the second compiler.

Anyway, once you have the first compiler, you write the first version of the second compiler in whatever subset of the language the first compiler supports. Once the first compiler builds the first version of the second compiler, the first compiler is no longer needed; you can add all new features to the second compiler only.

New versions of the second compiler (perhaps supporting more language features) can now be produced by bootstrapping. Of course, you can also use the second compiler to compile a totally different compiler implementation written in the new language (this would be the third compiler for the new language).
But patio11's redesign would actually appeal to the executives in suits who make the purchasing decisions, while you HNers would still trust it because it's run by cperciva.
Who is "this mob"?
Not to mention it's GPL (and BSD) compatible, which makes it so much more useful than the various Corporate Public Licences that have been wrapped around similar projects in the past (Sun/Oracle and MS).
Very nice. Is there an XMPP gateway?
That would be nice I agree ! Care to open an issue/pull request ?
I'm nobody in particular. Nobody ever anointed me the designated software sales and marketing consultant. I sort of fell backwards into consulting after the bingo card thing. My shtick was mostly "I make software companies money by applying engineering tactics to marketing goals."

I do not have a page specifically bragging about that partly because I hate bragging, partly because I hung up my consulting spurs last year, and partly because c.f. XKCD 125. Some of my clients are fairly well-known. Some of them are pretty technical. You have no particular reason to trust this representation, but "I've been involved in engagements which resulted in millions of dollars of improvement to businesses selling things approximately as technical as backup software" is a true statement.

Why I made this post? I wanted to help Colin out, I really enjoy making and selling software, and oh my goodness does that picodollar thing do it for me. Seriously, I have known my wife for less time than I have known the Tarsnap pricing strategy. Every year, like clockwork, it causes me to erupt volcanically. It is my Moby Dick. I will hunt it forever until it dies.
I think pessimizer was saying that the relative return to the labour at the bottom end is low

At which end of the economic ladder do you think improvements occur for there to be a dramatic reduction in poverty within a whole society?
I think you're setting up a false dichotomy here. The best job offers I've had in the past have been from people seeking me out and where the interview process was mostly a formality. I think that's true of a lot of folks out there (I can certainly point to a butt-load of examples I've witnessed). The idea of a random person walking in off the street and being assessed as being the norm for an interview process is, I think, erroneous. As too the idea that merely giving someone an audition project will ensure they are of the highest quality. Hell, I'd say that sometimes it's even possible to code side by side with someone for a year and not truly understand their potential. There's no silver bullet for assessing dev. skill level. The biggest fallacy is believing that whatever method you come up with won't have huge flaws and gaps in one way or another. I think the best to hope for is ending up with a good enough "batting average" to build a talented team.
Rust for Rubyists is a great resource I can vouch for (not just for Rubyists): http://www.rustforrubyists.com/
I received the same email. I am assuming what is happening is that someone downloaded their app and connected it to LinkedIn. LinkedIn has your current job and email, so they used this information to spam you. Do you have Picutive.com as one of your jobs on LinkedIn? My theory at least.
Market makers are in the business of selling liquidity. They're saying "maybe no one else wants to buy/sell this stock but here I am and I always have a bid/ask on the table." You don't have to trade with them. But a lot of people do every day.

Why do you think those people are trading with market makers if they're doing such shady things?

I don't think you really understand the business that market makers are in. They aren't in the business of trying to front run people. They're in the business of making a penny a share on all the trades that go back and forth. But they face a big risk. When they're busy buying/selling for $50.00/$50.01 what happens when a big & smart hedge fund guy comes along who has new information and knows the price should really be $50.10. They try to buy up as many shares as possible at $50.00 and suddenly the market maker is fucked because they're no longer market making in a stable market.

So the market maker has this big challenge where they have to do a good as job as possible detecting the big & smart hedge fund guy and quickly adjusting the price so they don't get squashed. If they can't do a very good job they have to increase spreads so they make more money in the steady state to make up for their bigger losses. If they do a really good job in this detecting they can lower spreads.

It turns out that HFTers are really good market makers. You can see this because they've successfully competed against each other to the point that they can lower spreads all the way to a penny (a 10x reduction of where they used to be!).

When you look at it this way you can see that market makers aren't trying to screw the big traders, they're trying to avoid getting screwed so that they can better serve everyone else by offering lower prices (lower spreads).

The nice side effect of all of this is that price information gets better communicated to the market faster. If you happen to be randomly selling your MSFT when Mr. Big & Smart shows up you're more likely to get the best possible price due to all the information being correctly communicated to the market.
Try applying to Human Longevity, Craig Venter's latest startup in San Diego. http://www.humanlongevity.com/careers/open-positions/ Nothing like Craig Venter's network to jumpstart your career.
Wow, this was a very interesting read and if forget all the minor changes like the site design his argument cracks open an argument against the way Tarsnap is run. Forget all silicon valley, photo sharing, selling coffee to 20-somethings startups, it seems to me Tarsnap is running inside its own Silicon Valley bubble.

The argument here is Tarsnap is a great product but the way its being sold actively discriminates those who would be best served by their offering, but are not run by unix wizards, and I think we should all care about this issue as well. If it means a company like Target is easily convinced to use a solution like Tarsnap, instead of a competitors, or worse, rolling their own - I think we would be all much better off.

With a great tool like Tarsnap, no matter how its priced, or how its sold, or what CSS is loaded - it should be clear that it provides a great value add and most people are better off with Tarsnap's solution in an enterprise setting. We shouldn't forget its incredibly easy to say "Well things are great now" when they are only great for you.
As a former user of this system at FB, I'm really excited it's being open sourced. Eytan, Dean et al are some of the sharpest experimental design people going round, and the paper (at https://www.facebook.com/download/255785951270811/planout.pd...) is worth checking out for a more formal introduction.
That's true if and only if the codebase is something that's easy to set up. I tend to get these assignments from companies that are like "Here's our Github repo. Clone it and fix issue #12345." When I get to the repo, there's an INSTALL.MD file a mile long, where I have to install a dozen dependencies and so on. And it never, ever goes as smoothly as it should. They inevitably forget to document some quirk or another.

That's not true for everyone, but it seems like it's the rule rather than the exception.

My point being that you're not just asking me to fix a to-do item, you're asking me to recreate your dev environment locally, research your codebase (to isolate the bug and figure out a fix), and then actually fix it. And if this takes more than a few hours, I may not have time to do it whether you pay me or not. Like I said, I'm looking for full-time work, not contract work...

That's all I'm really saying. I agree with you, though, that the to-do thing is a good idea. I just think there might be some middle ground, like if your task is "Build a feature to send verification codes through Twilio", then instead of using your codebase, I do it on my own in my own way. Then you can use my code as a model for your own. You don't have to research the whole problem -- just port my code into your codebase. And I don't have to fiddle with your codebase until you hire me.

Something like that. (Just thinking out loud here.)
My #1 question -- is Eich returning to CTO, another position, or quitting altogether?

All in all, I think this was a pragmatic move. I am not a fan of this "CEO = literally the company" logic, though. I saw no reason to believe that he would use Mozilla to further an anti-gay agenda.
Thanks for the feedback. We'll look into fixing this. Keep in mind we built GitBook in our spare time over the past 3 days.

Feel free to contribute with Pull Requests ! (the beauty of being open)
10 comes after 9. The previous release was 0.9, not 0.90.
I completely get that. I've had to fire people, and it really really sucks. But that's the point: you don't get to externalize that onto your candidates.
It's all of us.
Rust uses semantic versioning (http://semver.org/). The number after the dot is simply a minor version revision, and can increment without bound.

A 1.0 release of Rust is targeted for later this year. There will be at least one more minor version (0.11), and possibly more, before that point.
I wonder how much of an impact if any this will have on hiring at Mozilla.
From the recode recap - http://recode.net/2014/04/03/mozilla-co-founder-brendan-eich...

>“It’s clear that Brendan cannot lead Mozilla in this setting,” said Baker, who added that she would not and could not speak for Eich. “The ability to lead — particularly for the CEO — is fundamental to the role and that is not possible here.”

The most damning aspect of this was their a) inability to predict this would be an issue and b) their inability to deal with it once it did.

All he had to do was lie and say "I understand how my activities can be seen as divisive and wrong and inconsistent with my commitment to upholding the diverse values underpinning the Mozilla community and I apologize for my behaviour at the time. I will do everything in my power to make up for it and I hope the community can judge me based me on my record from this point onwards".

Then, find ways to anonymously engage in whatever political causes he supports, or wait till he's no longer CEO.

The tone deafness of his last interview was kind of the last straw.
From the article: "We have employees with a wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public."

Clearly people with socially conservative views are not welcome at Mozilla.
Over one hundred in 8 minutes now!
movies are representational of reality, some more than others. How is this so far from "life is but a stage"?

It seems like a short-handed narrative for purpose of communicating a train of thought to me.
People with their own opinions and beliefs apparently.
So with Cassandra you have a pretty nice, scalable, columnar DB with a SQL interface[0]. Not to mention, it's free and apache licensed so you can distribute it as part of your own software. I guess I've only looked at cassandra from the scope of a developer. Would a DBA prefer using a columnar version of PostgreSQL rather than using cassandra for free?

0:http://cassandra.apache.org/doc/cql/CQL.html

Edit: I didn't realize Citus Data was making the columnar postgres offering open source...that's great!
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/01/mozilla-ce...
Is there anything besides his donation to the Prop 8 effort that led to the controversy and him stepping down?
This is terrible. Way to go, Internets.
Yeah they have a great medical system! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD7mLp9j-3k

People repeat what they hear without knowing the reality. I'm sure everyone in NK has the same standard of living as Pyongyang too.

/Sarcasm
Well it happened. I think this is a little extreme and that he shouldn't have succumbed to the pressure. Apparently freedom of speech is no longer accepted by plenty of people in the US. It is okay to put money towards and protest for equal rights, but anytime someone says something negative against it all hell breaks loose. That being said, in general, I think people are a little too sensitive toward anything non-politically-correct these days. At the end of the day, everyone can voice their own opinion. Some people will be supportive, some won't.
> We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.

So Mozilla has to "act" the way some people "expect them to act". There was not even a ballot, poll or evaluation of the man in the position. It was a pretty ridiculous move to avoid bad press. Talk about to sticking to values like meritocracy.
I have never actually read it myself, and I don't know what version of Rust it currently targets, but I've heard good things about Rust For Rubyists (http://www.rustforrubyists.com), written by Steve Klabnik.
A leader stepping down due to death threats is a terrible thing for an organization.
This is standard practice. The decimal points are generally dividers between major, minor, and patch numbers. Hence why it is not uncommon to see something with a version number like 2.1.4 or similar.
HEAD-DESK.

Deduplication and incremental backups are table-stakes for backup software.

The reason a business would use Tarsnap rather than some other backup service is the level of confidence that Colin can provide that Tarsnap will reliably protect their data from attackers, including compelled insiders at Tarsnap.

In other words, Tarsnap can offer an enterprise an offsite backup service that is demonstrably as safe as backup data that the enterprise retains direct custody of.

That is not an offering other backup providers can reliably duplicate.
You won't have that much pain if you take exercise seriously. And you don't have to work all 40 years if you keep expenses reasonable.
> the people who pushed for this are extremists as well.

Suffragettes were extremists. Worker-rights supporters were extremists. Gandhi was an extremist. M. L. King Jr. was an extremist. Sans-culottes were extremists.

In the history of civilisation, there are winners and there are losers, and when the revelation of who is who eventually comes, it can be a bit ugly to watch.
i don't frequently get excited about randomy stuff, but when I do, its about stuff like this.

- why does your tweet button not mention you guys on twitter ? i'm like, hey I want to start the 'mention train'... but i don't know who to mention ? you could start by mentioning @railstutor ... just sayin !
Sure, but you should complain to the crappy fund manager you hired to do a good job for you not the person who the fund manager was competing against.

You also might want to switch to Vanguard. They do a good job and realize that HFTers have dramatically lowered costs for them and their clients: http://www.cnbc.com/id/49434073
> While I like eclipse for java, are you sure it is great js editor?

For me, for now, yes. Like you I keep an eye on Brackets (and on LightTable as well).
Holy crap, I thought the OKCupid thing was an April Fool's joke. I had no idea.

Whoa.
Additionally, they released the reference source code for .NET[0] a while back, so there is always that to dig through as well.

[0]: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/
It's kind of sad and ironic to see his career take such a beating with what he helped create.
Thank you for eloquently saying what I wanted to say.

It is not about the money. I can guess that his original motivation for creating Tarsnap was to create the most secure backup solution for people who care about their data. The natural progression to this goal would be to let more and more people know about this solution and get them to use it so that data is protected.

Imagine this contrived scenario. Think about all the hospitals storing important health records for patients. Currently, they are not using Tarsnap not because it is technically lacking, but lacking 'business-y' things which are important. What if Colin's hospital mismanages their backup and all records become available to the public.

The irony is that the Colin has solved the hard problem (technical solution) but doesn't want to address the easy problem (business requirements). I sincerely wish Colin would implement these suggestions.

I am seriously thinking of asking to collaborate with him and letting me re-brand Tarsnap and create a backup solution which businesses could buy.
They are not right on this one. Eich was clearly persecuted politically.
Because they make more money this way.
I think you aren't understanding what a bypass kernel does. It literally takes control of the physical resources to the extent kernel interfaces exist that allow it to do so and, at least in the case of Linux, the level of control possible is quite high. That means taking control of the CPU, physical memory, disk I/O, network I/O, etc so that they can be scheduled and managed from userspace. All at the same time starting with bypass kernel initialization. For obvious reasons, it is usually a bad idea to run other non-trivial processes on the same machine because they will tend to be resource starved.

Once you have these resources, you can organize them and use them as you see fit. Because it is not going to the kernel for any resources or buffering or scheduling or memory etc, there is little opportunity for the OS to do the wrong thing with resources that already are tightly controlled by the runtime. However, this is also why it is an "all or nothing" kind of situation.
This is just sad. Brendan was bullied for his personally help views that never once affected a working relationship he had with a colleague. This is the inventor of javascript does he not deserve some respect?
"our large, global, and diverse community is what makes Mozilla special"

Apparently diversity is narrower today.
RMS is not part of the open source commuinty. He doesn't advocate for open source. He advocates for free software.

Edit: why the downvotes? If I started a social movement and everyone associated me with a watered-down alternative that tries to silence my views, I would be a little miffed.
I was aware but thank you for the reminder. I just don't have a need for an image hosting service that meets the"worthy of financial expenditure" qualification. :)

Have you considered ads that don't do retargetting, etc? They would not be as profitable but if it was simple CPM/CPC display ads with the level of transparency you've shown to date, I'm not sure how that would conflict your privacy principles.
He will eventually have to wipe my data. However, as it is quite valuable to me, I want this to happen after actual attempts to contact me, including many emails and actual phonecalls. And at the very least no earlier than many months after payments stop. I'm okay with paying more for the service to get this.
Interesting idea, but I wish it had a larger radius. The area covered goes up with the square of the radius, so even a small increase (say from 1 to 2 miles) would greatly increase the chances of bumping into someone else. As it stands I'm the only one in my area.