skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For one, a language specification is mandatory if you want to standardize it (ECMA, ISO, JIS, ...).

Secondly, it paves the way for competing implementations. Having more implementations automatically means more performance, because they compete with each other.

And finally, a language specification is also super useful to people who create tools such as IDEs, linters, or compilers/transpilers.
Can you go into further detail about your betting pattern?
Parent was talking about complexity, I simply corrected them to say that it was about abstraction, and why it mattered. I was not making any point about the novelty or other quality metrics of the patent.

However, now that you've brought it up, possibly outside of material science, every invention in the history of engineering falls under the description of "old elements doing old things producing expected results". Taking that quote out of context misses a very important question: was it obvious beforehand that such a result was desirable enough to put those elements together?

The answer to your question of "what's novel" is, literally, the combination of elements and the difference it presents over prior art. However, at a higher level, what this quantitative approach misses is this: slide-to-unlock provides a convenient, usable and visually appealing way to unlock a phone. You'll note that these adjectives are some that Apple users regularly attribute to Apple products (since before the iPhone!). These qualities are arguably a primary reason for their success.

Sure, when boiled down to their implementation, they don't look so impressive, yet few others are said to match Apple's level of polish. Why is that the case if such features are so easy to implement? Maybe because the feature itself is not obvious. Such qualitative aspects are not always apparent from looking at the claims alone.
Don't think of it as optimizing around context switches—think of it as just omitting what you don't need, and losing context-switches as a side benefit. A multi-user OS has a lot of stuff which might not be necessary for a single virtualized service (various security mechanisms, lots of file system niceties, running other services, &c), so writing a unikernel like this allows you to select exactly as much as you need for your particular service.

OCaml isn't all that much slower than C++. To use the Programming Language Shootout as a rough esimation[^1], it can even come close to matching C++ in certain programs, and is rarely more than three times as slow. And of course—your type system will catch more errors and your resulting code will be much shorter (and in my opinion, at least, easier to understand.)

Finally: the article didn't say "the Linux kernel"—it said "Ubuntu." The kernel itself might be secure and reliable, but a running Linux system is much, much more than just the kernel. And while C can be security-audited, many of the properties that are important to verify in a C program come entirely for free from something like OCaml—e.g., an arbitrary piece of C code might not segfault given certain input, but a given piece of OCaml code definitely won't. So maybe a running Linux system is "secure enough", but a unikernel like this will have a much smaller attack surface and stronger inherent security properties with basically no extra work.

Disclaimer: I'm not the original author, I'm just speaking generally.

[^1]: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...
Depends on the size of the company for them $500,000 is not a huge amount these days.

Back in the day I looked at using a neural network for an experiment to measure the efficiency of toilets that would have been £250,000 in 1982 just for the hardware - that was a bit to much.

Though back then for a single piece of HP test gear we spent around a 100 grand.
Count Zero, by Gibson.

Just finished Neuromancer (for the first time! Bad geek! No cookie!), and plan to read Mona Lisa Overdrive next.
Appears to work as an Opera extension in both Opera & Opera Next by enabling developer mode in opera://extensions and dragging the wsj.crx into the window and installing...
Like the previous commenter said, it's not aimed at small businesses. At my last job (ClearChannel), we were considering switching to Brightcove for 38 web properties, including Rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, Sean Hannity, AT40, and there was a minimum you had to commit to for a contract. Something like Amazon would be ideal since your costs would be pennies to start if you have no traffic. If you are pushing terabytes of video per month, providers like Akamai or Brightcove can do it cheaper if you commit to a minimum level of traffic.
Often I wonder if going without Spec is a good thing. Ruby doesn't want a Spec because Matz said Ruby is an always evolving languages. But the same could be said about HTML 5 where it does have a living spec.
A robot should have much faster reflexes than you do. Robots should be able to compensate for people actively running or diving in front of them. The situation you describe should be very easy to compensate for.

Don't bother relying on body language or eye contact, just automatically sense the person shaped object, if it is close to the roadway, slow to a speed where you can avoid easily if they step out. Assume that they will. Heck, add in a buffer so you don't bother the passengers of the car by having to slam on the brakes.
This happens at most colleges every year. It's a goldmine for dumpster divers or even just locals who don't mind hauling it back to their house and possibly selling it.

I've thrown away some perfectly good furniture just because it wasn't worth hauling it across the state or I didn't end up having room in the moving truck I had rented.

Yeah, I could have probably made some money if I sold it on craigslist.
If you watch this video you can see that Google's cars doe exactly this. You even see the car pick up on hand signals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3oc1Hr62g Realistically you would have to modify the software to pass the test for stupid reasons, for example the vehicle might refuse to function at all without it's LIDAR, insisting on slowing to stop and pulling over, where the video wants to continue driving.
Why not the ipython notebook, in that case?
Rookie question, but what does a language specification for PHP do or mean? I assume this is good, but don't know why. :)
(I've yet to read TFA, but:)

I'm all for privacy in email, but if we're doing analogies, unencrypted email is more like postcards, than letters. And metadata is more like what's written on the letter than in it. (And SMTP over TLS would be like the mailboxes you're not allowed to look in, unless you're delivering mail, or are the recipient...)

As far as I can gather, the US has pretty shoddy laws guarding personal information from corporations -- so a change wrt email might be a win. But I don't know if this is the best way.

As long as there doesn't appear to be any viable way to get most people to use gpg/smime -- I'm not sure we're likely to get anywhere. Perhaps that is what Microsoft should do: leverage S/MIME for outlook.com (with the caveat that they would have to keep the encrypted private keys, and being a web service, could be forced to backdoor the clients in order to get the pass-phrases/passwords...).

Hm, I wonder if there's an IMAP extension for storing encrypted key-pairs?
And based on their past performance quite likely to be later than that date as well. I would expect it done by ~2020.
I doubt anyone following Jesus wants to see him as profane, pot-smoking, alcohol-drinking character. That is how this series portrays him. This does not look evolutionary by any means, it is blasphemy.
I sure hope Sara Golemon gets the recognition out of this that she deserves (and which the article starts to build.) Having met her at a couple conferences, she continues to demonstrate a brilliant understanding of what it takes to build a programming language WHILE being a tremendous advocate and builder of a community where being a member isn't always... popular.

Rock on, @saramg
Most will close the tab... or wait a free digest from a third-party... but the few that will pay will help validate the business model, help journalists to earn their lives and do their job, and ultimatly keep the freedom of information.

However I can agree with that kind of behaviour against business monopolies (for example microsoft few years ago, before gDocs and OpenOffice) because they're not playing by the rules (so they deserve it).

But in this case: I can see everyday what "free newspapers" (using advertising & students copying Reuters newsfeed) did to "real newspapers": now it seems here, in France, that journalists just don't have any time to check, to think, to explain... to do their job in fact. When they have a paid job. And, at the end, it's the information freedom for everybody that has been hurt.
> Contrary to what many HN hipsters seems to believe, PHP is quite a capable language, and HHVM / Hack is really pushing things forward.

This attitude really frustrates me. I'm a developer with over 20 years of experience. I don't use PHP because (a) I have had poor experiences with it in the past, (b) I am enjoying my current stack (Java8/Clojure/Groovy), and (c) would go with stacks like RoR over PHP if I had to choose, simply because I've had good experiences with Rails.

You're implication that this has something to do with trendiness is frankly insulting.
Techcrunch domain expired?
Ah, thanks, so it's like Coinbase's Bitcoin thing, except with no fees. Very nice.

I don't much understand why people worry about the "free forever" part, though. Surely, if they become too expensive, you can just switch?
Boxes of unsold books? Not just the covers?

Publishers don't want paperbacks back, they just want proof that the book didn't sell. That was always just the front cover. You may have shipped the books to someone who did the stripping, but I very much doubt the publisher ever saw the text block.
Completely true. I would also suggest to write a bit more about your security. Just SSL doesn't sound convincing to me.
Louis CK in Google Groups: Are you a healthy comedian? (2005)
While I was listening to that particular part I had a very distinct feeling that he was reffering to what could be called "nation-hacking". While it's certainly not the only way to change the world, changing laws drastically it's still the most efficient way. And there is really not enough experimenting getting done in this area.

On a related note, I feel that some of the things that might be interesting to study/experiment with might be at the intersection between these three items: anthropology, information technology and law.
I really enjoyed this - really energizing and inspiring. It's always great to get that jolt once in a while.

>> "We now, for the first time ever, have the technology and resources necessary to make the world a great place for everyone. We can provide adequate food, housing, education, and healthcare for everyone, using only a fraction of our labor and resources. This means that we can put an end to wage-slavery. I don't have to work. I choose to work. And I believe that everyone deserves the same freedom I have. If done right, it's also economically superior, meaning that we will all have more wealth."

This is some deep stuff. This would really change everything, and mark a major turning point in human history I think. And the statement that providing these things to everyone would only require a fraction of our resources I think is actually true. The capitalist in me feels that this could never happen, but the pragmatist in me feels there's nothing better we could do to dramatically improve the lives of just about everyone on the planet.

There are so many questions though... forms of collectivism have been tried and have failed many times. Are things different now?
Google Hangouts ditches Google+ requirement
According to the agreements (that used to be) in place between publishers, distributors, and booksellers, that would be a very serious no-no.
(2004) Dangers of Statin Drugs, the Popular Cholesterol-Lowering Medicines
What is Fast IT?
It's also one of those scary questions we'd all like a clear answer to before we depend on the technology. However it's exactly the kind of question the courts were invented to answer.

The aviation industry is a fantastic parallel that should be modelled after.
LibreOffice under the hood: progress to 4.3.0
If you want to order your program in a specific way, you introduce the appropriate level of abstraction. Same as with any other language.

EDIT: i totally agree that the standard functions are a complete mess in PHP. But they have to stay around for backwards compatibility. Have a look at the SPL classes: http://php.net/manual/en/book.spl-types.php
Paul seems to have failed somewhat in his objective to find deep, if narrow, appeal with this talk. People I talked to were unanimous that it was the highlight of the day, and I agree.

In fact, if YC is taking feedback on these events, I'd suggest having more talks like this, and less of founders chronologically going through their story. That type of talk is also very interesting, but can get a bit repetitive, especially for people who have seen videos of previous startup school talks.
Probably been addressed already elsewhere, but for a relatively static non-tech-dependent product, did you ever figure out why these were such epic months?

9/12	$6,399.30
10/12	$7,811.95
11/12	$6,169.70
12/12	$7,063.20
1/13	$5,221.25
2/13	$8,236.25

If at all repeatable, that's a fairly attractive revenue level...
yes, you can also use the "Download Zip" button there: https://github.com/php/php-spec

PHP ships with a lot of third party C libraries that are exposed in PHP with usually their original function names. Object orientation came with PHP 4 and later with PHP 5 the new better one (5.3+ with namespace support, traits, etc.).

You can think of PHP as a mixture of C, C++ and Java for web development and CLI tools. I personally use all four languages, each one for specific purposes where the fit best. You can find function names like strstr in C, C++ and PHP (= indexOf in Java and JavaScript) - not a big deal.
Thank you. May be we are not right here, but we didn't want to write how secure Amazon is. Probably we'll have to do that.
Even if you have your own hardware there are scenarios where you might want stronger isolation, increased density and/or heterogeneous deployments. All of which is achievable with Unikernels running on Xen.
The fact that the author is trying to make the argument that (I'm exaggerating here) "All Americans must be poor, because the walls in YouTube videos are white" doesn't make any sense. The author even alludes to this briefly in talking about "YouTube Teens." Yes, author, younger people tend to a) rent more and b) not have as many things to hang.

As someone under 30 who moves across states every few years, I have no desire to collect a bunch of stuff to hang on my walls.
I like your design, and the message was quite clear. It didn't take very long to find out was your product does and was value it can add to a group workflow.

The parallax effects on the front page aren't very smooth when scrolling though, and my personal opinion would be to have the Russia/English navigation item displayed as the last item rather than the first. Other than that, it looks great!
> would there be regular sensor cleaning/calibration tasks that need to be met before the manufacturer is deemed liable? What about tire pressure?

As someone from the UK, I'm amazed that isn't the case. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOT_test#Overview_of_the_test
You just mentioned examples that are very likely patentable. The difference is, you cannot try to patent a recipe if your only "utility" is "it helps my restaurant run better" or "it can help my book sell better". The test is fuzzy, sure, but it's an important grounds for rejection since any invention must be novel, non-obvious and useful. You could try to patent recipes and novel structures, but whether the PTO or the courts will buy your claim to usefulness is another matter.
Talks about YouTube?
I can, I just don't care enough to know the ratio between kilograms and pounds, and metres and feet - both pounds and feet are so exotic in my country you only hear about them on the TV sometimes so I do not bother my head with those units.
Ditch the broken scrolling. It's jerky and jumpy on a MacBook Pro.
I thought something along the lines of keeping the existing global namespace mess but also add in namespaced, consistent aliases like you've suggested, i.e. myStr.replace()

As the new ones get more use, slowly deprecate and remove the original global namespaced functions, in the same way they phased out register_globals
I don't see how this, "...does the exact opposite," of what Docker does—both are very different approaches to the similar goals of having individual processes run in isolated ways. Docker does it by isolating individual running Linux processes under a single kernel, whereas unikernel-based systems do it by building those processes as lightweight programs that get compiled to their own kernel images and then running those on a hypervisor to achieve isolation.
The obvious thing it does is lays the groundwork for multiple first-class implementations. As it stands, the program php essentially is the reference: whatever it does, implementation quirks, bugs, and all, is what php should do.
Nikita proposes methods on primitive types: http://nikic.github.io/2014/03/14/Methods-on-primitive-types...

Myself, I like this proposal.
Sounds like Dropbox + Messaging? Looks interesting...looking forward to trying it out.
While it's understandable to feel down about the fact that Microsoft used to feel it was ok to hand over emails, there's a more positive way to look at it: this article is strong evidence that the public opinion regarding online privacy has changed such that, were Microsoft to give up these emails, it's own business would suffer negatively.

It's not a signal of the end of our battle for privacy, but it's something.
rwhitman thanks for the tip! I don't require the login / signup until the user checkout. You can view all listings, add to cart, view cart, etc. It's only when you click checkout that you are required to login.

Can you let me know how you reached the required login page so I can fixe that?

Thanks again!
Pretty much entire engineering industry in the US uses metric units, so this is what counts. I am actually surprised that a web programmer would use imperial units on their website.
I think you give Microsoft too much credit. But, you correctly identified the importance of this case.

Interestingly, I predict that if your outcome were to happen then Google will rapidly invest in Gmail to turn it into more than an email system, so that they'd have reason to argue that the messages are business records.
Spend it for products or services - sure. Immediately exchange all of it for a fiat currency - not so much.
Same answer as always: it's interesting to a number of HN readers and got voted up.
We need to put that on a tshirt.
The point is exactly that; the valuation is completely ephemeral without a demonstration that this business can actually make money. The user stats are great, but right now these guys are underpants gnomes trying to figure out how that crucial middle step. This company makes no money at all.
And link to it from a social network with a narrow band of interests so they can comment snarkily.
Thanks a lot! Yeah, we probably need to optimise that parallax. And you are right about the RU/EN navigation , don't know how we've missed that.
I definitely don't want to be too much below 25!
When you're talking about the core libraries that ship with the language, it seems unreasonable for every PHP developer to have to introduce it themselves.
> so writing a unikernel like this allows you to select exactly as much as you need for your particular service.

I agree this is a big upside of the authors approach. Less dependencies lead to fewer problems caused by external/upstream changes.

> OCaml isn't all that much slower than C++. To use the Programming Language Shootout as a rough esimation[^1], it can even come close to matching C++ in certain programs, and is rarely more than three times as slow.

I wasn't only referring to raw execution performance but also to GC pauses and GC overhead which I think are the bigger issue. The benchmark you linked tests for compute load so this doesn't really show up. Anecdotal point; in most real world apps I have worked on the GC was a limiting factor.

> Finally: the article didn't say, "the Linux kernel"—it said, "Ubuntu." The kernel itself might be secure and reliable, but a running Linux system is much, much more than just the kernel.

That's the beauty of having a kernel though. If one of those userland processes is broken it won't affect the whole system.

> an arbitrary piece of C code might not segfault given certain input, but a given piece of OCaml code definitely won't.

This assumes that the OCaml compiler/interpreter and the hardware are free of bugs...
Who needs in this: php or hhvm?
Many years the language grow without spec and no way?

Strong spec its good but users needs with other...

Its more features and clean internal API without tainting something like...you know...
But then we are leaving comments on HN, not on his website. And HN has a much larger non-US audience(than his website), so if something gets to the front site we would also like to enjoy it. I think we would complain just as loud if the top link on HN was in German or French .
Thanks for advice, sorry for a headache, we'll fix that.
right this is a one-way, not two-way.
> I perceive your comment as passive aggressive, but more importantly you drag the discussion to areas that are beside the point.

And that's not what you're doing with this entire post? You keep trying to turn this into some kind of nerd fight when my comment was nothing but a statement of facts.
They will feel like elevator operators do.
That's exactly how the initial concept sounded like. So glad to see this "formula" here. Thank you.
Scholars Say No to FAA's Model Aircraft Regulations
Owners do this because they believe their house is an investment and they want to be ready to move whenever someone waves that wad of cash in their face. Apparently people buying don't realize they can repaint because coloured walls are a reason people won't make an offer on a house.

Personally, I can't stand white/beige rooms. I want colour in my life. When I bought a house, we painted half of it before I moved in. The kitchen is a yellow, the living room has a peach/seashell thing going on, the guest/spare room is a light lavender and the office is a blue that almost glows in sunlight.

This is supposed to be my house, I want to like living in it. It should be colourful. Maybe it's because we rented several houses when I was growing up.

God I hate white and beige.
> PHP is quite a capable language

I don't think anyone is complaining that it's not turing complete (or whatever), it's all the times php has dropped the ball in the std library, both with respect to being consistent with itself and just being plain broken. I don't think any sane person would switch from a language INTO php, given how many languages that are just as capable as php without having all of its various historical burdens (sigils, stdlib, mediocre type system).
Car Dealers Conundrum: When Customers Think You're More Profitable Than You Are
Python has a spec[0] and Python is an always-evolving language as well[1], so I'll just go ahead and say that it's probably an excuse for laziness rather than an actual justification for not having a spec.

[0] https://docs.python.org/2/reference/

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/reference/
Me vs. IT 2.0 vs. Enterprise 2.0
Alibaba may be in funding talks with SnapChat
Why haven't you joined the ACM?
ODROID-W: The First Raspberry Pi Compatible Development Board
Evading Lastline's “Unbeatable” Protection