skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, maybe he was talking about type providers? These let you "customize" F# (kind of like macros) but not really implement a new language.

But I'd definitely be interested in that talk if you can remember the name of the speaker or the venue/conference so I can try to Google it.
It is an alternative, for certain users like me: I occasionally dabble in .NET development. If I had time to spend with Visual Studio, I can tell it would be the better tool, but SharpDevelop is free, fast, and has everything I know enough to use anyway.
Yes...this guy is the devil himself, I bet he spends his free time wondering how he could make other people's life worse.
do you mean the runtime, rather than the framework? my limited understanding of Mono is that it will _run_ most .Net libraries, albeit not as fast.
I'm not sorry. He can disagree with other people and make decisions about his own life, but once he gives money to a cause that is working to restrict the basic rights and freedoms of others he's crossed the line.

I'm not sorry one bit.
I agree that even the CLR itself needs improvements for functional programming. Besides the tail calls link you gave, there is also (according to MS) inability to implement type classes because of CLR changes that would be necessary: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

I think F# would benefit a lot from either ML's module system or at least type classes as a simpler case. As it is it can only (directly) do single virtual dispatch (mainstream OO dispatch), which is pretty limiting and makes it more of a C# with different syntax.
Lots of them, but two key ones:

1. You have much richer libraries available. There's a
decent amount of stuff in OPAM these days, but that's
dwarfed by what you can grab out of NuGet.
2. You have a great asynchronous/multithreading story. The F# async
workflow makes it trivial to write multithreaded apps in
a similar way to C#'s async/await calls (in fact, F# is
the origin of that design), and it performs very well.
OCaml still doesn't do very well with multithreaded
programs.

You also lose some things, two of which that are most poignant to me:

1. OCaml is faster than F# for single-threaded programs.
This has nothing to do with Mono's maturity or speed as
such, but does have to do with its garbage collector,
which has not historically dealt well with F#'s allocation
patterns. I have not taken time since SGen landed to
revisit that, though, so the situation might be much
better.
2. OCaml can produce tiny self-contained binaries. Mono's
AOT gets you the self-contained easily, but you'll be
looking at relatively large executables.
And Ksplice.
This article seems to give a view of the UK system from a US perspective (mostly English, the Scottish education system is different but closer to the English that the US, I suspect):

http://www.education.com/reference/article/british-universit...

Out of interest, when does the US school system have kids specializing in particular areas? In Scotland it's ~14 - which I think is a bit young...
You don't seem to understand: they can be rational and maintain that a relationship between two people categorically incapable of producing children together biologically, two people of the same sex, can’t be a marriage.

That's explicitly not rational, unless you are going to deny marriage rights to opposite sex couples who are "categorically incapable of producing children together biologically."
Many of the core F# developers develop on Mono first, so I think it's probably reasonable to run F# on something other than Microsoft's VM.
A harsh but useful lesson in dealing with technology, I guess.
Absolutely - you don't need to protect people from the consequences of their speech.

So why are there no consequences for the sort of person who's not professional enough to keep a person's activities outside work separate from their work itself?

Most hiring managers wouldn't hire a bully. Why do they continue to hire people who have a history of disruptive behavior, calling for the firing of others over things that happen outside of their workplace?

The Eich situation will repeat itself again and again and again (and at lower levels, and perhaps next time over an unfashionable political opinion that you just happened to hold a year longer than the President of the United States) unless there's real consequences for being an unpleasant, uncivil busybody who goes around demanding people get sacked for their behavior outside of work.

If we're really so incensed by the way Brendan Eich was treated, and we're not just being mouthy on the Internet, I ask you all - where are these consequences?
Wondering something a little bit close to strong AI and how it could be .. "The robots already have some autonomy and can make decisions about taking steps and moving their joints, McKenna said. However, a human will still supervisor the robot and will control the machine from a safe distance and make decisions about whether the robot is ready to take on its next task."..
Oh, I know this project wasn't to create an entire compiler. But it's a great explanation of a missing puzzle piece in my own project.

Hope I didn't offend by suggesting donations -- wasn't my intent.

Anyway, thanks again for putting this out there. It will be a big help.

Edit: Wow, plzoo is another great resource, thank you. I found a reference to the plzoo project and website at one point but the site itself no longer seems operational ("no one here but us chickens", it says) and I didn't think the source code would be available anywhere. Very happy to see it's up on github.
What's that «guillemets» nonsense??
> JVM doesn't even have value types or generics making it practically unusable in some scenarios

Like what?

The CLR is unusable for dynamic languages for example. I was using Ruby back in the day, when both IronRuby and JRuby were active at the same time, with IronRuby/IronPython being developed by Microsoft ... there was no comparison to speak of, JRuby was beating the pants out of IronRuby in terms of everything.

The JVM can inline virtual method calls, the JVM can do escape analysis for getting rid of unneeded locks or to allocate short-term objects on the stack, the JVM can de-optimize previous optimizations in case assumptions have changed or in case it doesn't see a performance improvement, the JVM has a GC that can cope with the garbage produced by dynamic or FP languages. The JVM has invokeDynamic.

As a result we now have - JRuby, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Jython, Kotlin, Rhino, Nashorn (as a new Java 8 thing) and many others, including a Haskell port. All of them with thriving communities.

> Not to mention CIL was designed to be a Common Intermediate Language from start

That was just marketing. The JVM's bytecode is actually better for other languages. At the very least, the debugging symbols are part of that bytecode and the format is documented.
Unreal Engine 4.1 Update Preview
Developing a mobile cross-platform library in JavaScript
Do you have any links on this? I had a quick duckduck but sadly nothing much came up.

My understanding of 'type erasure' is that it is a compiler step, that un-does all the generic information.

This means that you could just ignore CLR generics, interop not withstanding, to get it to run.

Why would this prevent anything been ported?
Congress's Scientific Illiterates Are Resigning the World to Ruin
5-year-old Ocean Beach boy exposes Microsoft Xbox vulnerability
I felt smoke alarm was un-natural product for Nest, but again they were the men in arena and its their company - much respect there. I was anticipating something like a device that lets timing for water heater and calibrate the temperature etc. but I guess there are just too much variety of water heater systems for that, but it would be cool and reduce gas bill and in a true nest fashion would pay_for_itself.

But this device also show-cases how bringing "smartness" into safety devices is fraught with risk and in the case smoke detector the convenience is not worth the economics. The Nest thermostat was true win-win value proposition - where as the Smoke detector is just not that.
If you think observation is "preliminary" to science, then you fundamentally misunderstand the scientific method.

The reason Astrologers are not scientists is not that they don't try to work out why the positions of planets might affect the future.

The reason they are not scientists is that they don't observe the world to see if they actually do.
There are a few reasons why I use it on Linux over OCaml.

1) Familiarity, if you already know the language, tooling and libraries then you might be better off sticking F# than learning OCaml.

2) Size of community. I'm willing to be proved wrong here, but I find it alot easier to get an F# question, and often more importantly, a question about a library I'm using when I write F# than when I write OCaml.

3) Libraries, Libraries, libraries...

Also the mono runtime is pretty darn good. I agree its not as tuned to handle the small object and lifetimes that functional languages generate but I'm not really running into that limit currently.
>Old smoke detectors had this feature. You just take the battery out.

The feature was having the detector unknowingly disabled. A better analogy would be the batteries in your smoke detector running out.
A Mono developer should avoid looking at the .NET code at all costs. That would only set them up for patent law suits.
Went to the same school as the girl who got the Spanish degree, Kennnesaw State University. I had no shortage of finding job opportunity. Its all about the degree, most of the business school kids were finding decent jobs too.

Even though its a lesser known college most of us in STEM majors easily found jobs with small-large companies in Atlanta.

Its all about your what your degree is in, not how many you have.
Yet the CLR model is apparently not flexible enough to implement type classes, which Scala can handle in a very flexible way. Here's Microsoft's rejection claiming that the current CLR can't practically support type classes: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

Apparently baking the generics into the generated bytecode has downsides in flexibility.
Freddie Mercury was bisexual, at least according to Brian May's account of Mercury having sexual relations with many women. Elton John too was married and in interview said he was bisexual, but yes more recently has stated his behaviour is homosexual.

I wonder why people find it so important to note a person had/have homosexual sex but not mention they had/have heterosexual sex.
The Illusion of Good Business
Well, it's not like the police and the state don't do "revenge harassment" for tons of people, from journalists and activists to artists, and hasn't done that historically far before McCarthy and Hoover.

From "This Lennon guy speaks against Vietnam war, let's revoke his visa", to "talk to his boss and create commotion to get this guy fired, he's a commie", to "he refused to cooperate with the TSA, let's show him who's the boss here", to far worse.

But if you start with the assumption that such things don't happen or only happened "in the past" (perhaps because of a few bad apples), everything sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. Mainly this stems from a lack of historical knowledge and perspective, so people cannot estimate correctly how possible (and frequent) those kind of events have been (and how little concrete proof is usually available, until decades later, when those things get declassified or a leak happens). They try to comprehend them armed with mass media news reports and school level history knowledge.
Another excellent decision made by the MEPs that the general public will simply not give a shit about. Your cynicism is too high. Votes for "tax the right", "throw out the immigrants", "abandon the EU" are popularism. Good science and technology votes stand by themselves.
It isn't a new one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I wish she would not have mentioned the kids' issues without their permission. Just the mention of such potentially brings social stigma to their life.
Something like this?

http://mcgarnagle.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/jur.png
Open Technology Fund: CryptoCat iOS  Application Penetration Test
I caught a bit of the Build live stream yesterday. Showed some R# like code cleanup in the next version of VS.
That's opt-in using a <meta> tag:

https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender
"The company also gave him four free games, $50 (£30), and a year-long subscription to Xbox Live." .. wondering the titles!
Apple buys tech that could take Siri offline
> A little difficult to do when part of what made the Mozilla Foundation what it is is supporting equality.

Could you elaborate? I'm really not aware of the internals of the company.
> It's not like Scala has generics interop with Java

Oh, but it does. The type constructor (e.g. List<T>) does end up documented in the bytecode. Both Scala and Java need this because the libraries are distributed as compiled bytecode.

> you can't use advanced Scala generics from Java

I cannot parse that. Of course you can use generified Scala classes and methods from Java. They get interpreted as Java wildcards for the co/contra-variance rules. For site-wide variance rules - Java just interprets those as being invariant. Because Scala does not reify generics, classes and methods defined in Scala are usable from Java - get it?

> I'm sure they could have erased the extra stuff on CIL

Except that it's a pain in the neck to do so. For your own standard library, sure it's not that big of a deal, but if you want to reuse .NET's standard library, good luck erasing those generics.

As a consequence, F# has 2 generics type systems in the same language, one for Hindley-Milner that is type-erased and one for interoperability with C# and OOP. And even so, this is limiting F#, as F# does not do higher kinded types or type-classes and the OOP variance rules are quire limited, but because it has to interoperate with .NET - it's already too complex and I'm not seeing it evolve towards something better (yes, I believe Scala's type system is much better, warts and all).

> Generics in .NET combined with value types are much stronger than Java/Scala generics, there's no boxing/casting of value types.

That's not true. Reified generics isn't the only solution to this problem you know. Scala can specialize the generic types for primitives ... http://www.scala-lang.org/api/2.10.4/index.html#scala.specia...
I think a combination of some level of autonomy and remote control by human works well in this usage. I don't believe the AI technology is advanced enough to handle such a hostile environment. But I believe there are many applications of robotics where full autonomy can be achieved in time.
Thanks, the multithreading is definitely a compelling reason
Did Google make you dumber?
That would be an evil prank on us all though... We'll have job offers with "12 years of Coffee experience with jQuery".
What "technicality"? Does he own the house? Have they been renting it for 52 years? If so, from whom?
Re McCarthyism, this seems particularly relevant: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Anticomm...
This is bullshit. I am not discriminating him. I am punishing him with the power I have (my freedom to not use the products of his company) to punish his discriminating point of view. The same way he has the right to use his money to help a discriminating law go ahead, I have the right not to use his products and criticize his opinions.
Ask HN: Ideas on promoting an open source project?
I released an open source project a few weeks ago ( http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/ ) and I haven't done much publicizing other than asking for some feedback here (which was great btw!)

It already has some 700 github stars, and I've been getting a lot of positive feedback, so clearly there's some interest in it.

I was wondering how do people here go about promoting their open source projects to a wider audience. Any ideas, tips, experiences? Thanks in advance.
If it is true as alleged, this sort of article does a disservice to him and what he's working for (to me). I look at something like this and see someone who has messed up and is blaming someone else. There is a "technicality" involved but it can't be mentioned apparently. A technicality would normally be something very specific that would be easy to mention, I would think.

On the other hand, I'm sure a bunch of hysterical people will be linking this on facebook as proof that the man is out to get them.
What are the downsides of regulation? Who would impose that regulation?
arXiv.org, back when it was still xxx.lanl.gov had a similar trap. Yes, I clicked on it. It gave a warning of the sort "don't this again, here's what's happening, if we see many more requests from your site then we'll shut off access."

This was in the late 1990s.
You can find all the chrome URLs here : chrome://chrome-urls/
I think it's part of the concern that our politicians (at least from the main 2 parties) are basically all the same but are only differentiated by the color of badges they wear.

Historically we had a bit more diversity.
Either way, politics don't really belong here. Article flagged.

Here are the guidelines, folks: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To use some other broad strokes.. Are there actually any large performance sensitive ruby projects? Python has quite a following in scientific computing and there are some people trying to do some large performance matters projects in python.

I can also tell you that the idea of simply using c for the slow parts is good but it's not too difficult to build a largish project in a dynamic language where that's very difficult. A high speed kernel with slow control plane can still be slow.

Pyston seems like it has some interesting goals and it might achieve them. There are some substantial ones they haven't addressed yet, cough Gil cough. If they are good, it'll just be a faster python, whereas pypy is very good and if the community embraces what they are doing, it's a new kid of thing.
I would really love to have a better alternative for C++ development.
> Google also lets me target only Desktop users. If Facebook would allow this same control, I could run this test again with more confidence.

FB do let you set a Desktop Only audience for ads. You need to use Power Editor (Google Chrome only) and select Desktop under Placements.

I'd like to see a re-run with Desktop targeting only.

Edit: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/targe...
Totally agreed here. I don't understand people who discourage others from taking medication to treat a medical problem, its akin to somebody suggesting that a diabetic should stop taking insulin and just man up instead.

In some cases doctors over prescribe to people who are suffering from situational depression, giving out medication instead of treating the root cause and finding a way to tackle the problems in somebody's life, but for others it is a medical complaint. Without knowing which category somebody falls into its grossly irresponsible to tell them they shouldn't be taking medication which in many cases quite literally keeps them alive.
I imagine if the goal is to design from the ground up, you wouldn't be using a generator.
So you say you are a witch smeller? You can smell Clinton is pro LGBT, and Moz-CEO was not. Good set of nostrils you got there.
> self-reliant autodidacts

What happens when your self-reliance fails you?

> meritocracy of tech

This is a pleasant lie we tell ourselves. Even open source (which is 100% unpaid labor) is not meritocratic. Witness how quickly employers clamor for credentials.

> We like the fact that better skills mean higher pay, regardless of seniority

This is only half true. You generally don't get a massive raise by being a much better developer. You do get to the developer salary ceiling faster than others, of course. But the fact that there is a ceiling (despite the immense value a good dev can generate) is troubling. Casting aspersions about experience (in the guise of seniority) is also troubling.

Perhaps the primary reason there's no collective action for developers is that a substantial number of developers are still in their twenties, and lack the perspective + career experience to realize what it could do for them. They're still mentally invincible, striving for the next big thing, and they don't want anyone's help.
In other news ... don't use C#, PHP or any other language for the same reason.
Huhwhat? Contact lenses wouldn't hide the fact that your eyes were closed (not many people can sleep with their eyes open). And sleeping while wearing contact lenses is dangerous (they limit oxygen to the eyeball).
The Prisoner (video game – 1980)
The warning message returned by the spider-trap says that it banned a particular IP address. How does this cut off the entire university? Is everyone behind a NAT?
He paid his money to take away some rights from some people. He wanted a certain group of people to not have the same status in society he himself enjoys. That goes beyond expression. That's using your money, effectively your power in society, to step on some elements of that society.
github.com/Connexions - does a lot of epub output from HTNL5.
Phil Schatz is very good there and might be worth following up with.

cheers
Yep - the naughtiness you could get up to with this is almost endless. I get the feeling that this will not be with us for much longer as every university in the world is about to get locked out.
This is an important topic, but that blog entry was not very well written. If I hadn't heard about this before already I would have been very confused what they actually wanted to say with this convoluted story.
Step on white tile you die
The Based on a very addictive Japanese game "Don't Step the White Tile" where you should not tap on white tile, it's realy amusing parody to the game. Don't Step on The White Tile is an extremely simple and extremely difficult new game for the iOS and Android platforms.
> Having looked at various large SaaS companies (SF, Workday, etc) the variable costs appear to be quite high.

Yeah, I've seen some of that too, but I still think that outside of certain specialized markets and products, that the variable costs shouldn't approach 60%+ on the LTV of a sale. I would also tend to calculate commissions and one-time marketing expenses not only against the first month or payment period, but on the total LTV of the sale.
If you're a student / novice working on small projects, aiming to learn and improve yourself maybe. If you work in a production environment "learning" isn't a strong enough reason.
Team Rarebit, two developers who are a gay couple, have made several blog posts about how support for Prop 8 affected them from an immigration perspective, which of course had both personal and professional consequences.

They also posted about how Eich's resignation is not their preferred outcome, and they would have preferred to see him acknowledge that his past actions had an impact on the Mozilla team and community that extended beyond personal feelings http://www.teamrarebit.com/blog/2014/04/03/a-sad-victory/
You can get a used copy of the Dragon book for relatively cheap. The PDF is probably floating around on the internet somewhere as well.
Ludicrous speed?! I bet they have hyperjets on that thing!

(ducks)
"here in the UK for example the Unions have a bad reputation for been difficult to work with and older people remember their role in the late 70's"

Of course, that depends on your political persuasion: a lot of us have sympathy for the union workers who were brutally crushed by Thatcher's government in the 80's. Speaking as a programmer who has been a union member in a previous job, I would be supportive of a programmer's union.
I was just going to post this.
Uh, no.

I downvoted because I want to keep discussions civil and technical. Questioning peoples competency because they name a directory '~/Script' instead of '~/js' or whatever just won't fly here.

This isn't slashdot. You'll get used to it.
“Unbreakable” security codes inspired by nature