skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, stops working until it is reinstalled. Messages are marked as being successfully sent, but they're not being received by the recipient. All my friends have the same issue.

Since it's only on Android I can't use it as the single app for all messaging. I certainly type much faster on my desktop keyboard than I do on my cell phone, so I need something with desktop support too. A lot of my friends also have iOS, which also is an issue.

Telegram's crypto is pretty weird, and potentially insecure - no doubt. However, it's the only messaging app I've found with good clients (superb in fact) on all platforms that has some level of encryption. I don't "need" (although I would certainly prefer) to be protected from targeted attacks, I need to be protected from mass surveillance.
I'm looking up the clinical trial description (check out ref. 1) but I think these researchers are moving directly to a double-blind study because this drug is already FDA-approved (ref. 2).

Typically, clinical trials occur in three phases (ref. 3). Since this drug's side effects have been studied, the researchers are moving directly to test the drug's effects.

As a final point, open label studies suffer from bias due to a person's expectations of improved health. A double-blind study minimizes this. Why spend money on a biased test that you'll need to redo instead of just doing the right test the first time?

[1] clinicaltrials.gov

[2] http://www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch/SafetyInformation/ucm1729...

[3] http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/help/glossary/phase
Astronauts put GoPro into a floating ball of water
How Secure is TextSecure: Paper's co-author replies to comments by developer
You are not weighing in the cons as well. You could drop dead, you could end up with liver failure causing more costs and pain.

Early access only serves the pharmaceuticals to sell more.

Medicine is a science which needs to keep its rigour in the face of emotion.
From the link:

* tls_connect() connects a client context to the server named by host. The port may be numeric or a service name. If it is NULL then a host of the format "hostname:port" is permitted.

* tls_connect_fds() connects a client context to a pair of existing file descriptors.

* tls_connect_socket() connects a client context to an already established socket connection.
There's a reason this has "archive" in its URL :-)

Rather consult this instead, which is maintained:
http://faq.perl6.org/#features
I love Erlang (and it's younger sibling Elixir). I love reading about it. I enjoy following tutorials about it. I love its simplicity.

But when I try to come up with scenarios/ideas where Erlang might be a good fit, I realize I'm not smart/motivated enough (yet?) to tackle such problems.

Erlang isn't difficult. It's the problems it was designed to solve that are difficult.
Huh?

"Hardcore feel" is definitely there and the language is anything but "writing config txt files to some underlying system".

I've built applications in the > 10k SLOC range that use a consensus algorithm for distributed computing and it was hard but made tremendously easier because of Erlang's built in primitives.

No hardcore feel was lost at all and neither was it writing a config txt file...

[EDIT] I would love to know why the downvoter disagrees with me, unless you're being a downvote kiddie.
It's a matter of economics. If you have the resources to throw at a problem and write it in C++, it'll probably be faster, in the end. However, it might also take longer and be less flexible. And with networked stuff, you want to be really careful, too.

Facebook has the money to throw at something like that with no problems. Not everyone does.
Twitter to open office in Hong Kong
> and Erlang is perhaps the most commercially successful functional language.

Out of interest, what makes you say that?

Looking at the TIOBE rankings (not that this is definitive), Erlang doesn't even make the top 20 languages, when F# and R do:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Is there a reason you think it's more successful in the commercial world?

(btw, I'm a fan of Erlang - unfortunately I don't get to use it on a regular basis; other than products built on it: RabbitMQ mainly)
Ghost Story: Low Frequency Illusions Created by Standing Waves? (2013)
108 GOOD COMEBACKS
I doubt Trusty will get the upstream release in its repositories.
My first job (at 14) was a dishwasher. Not as bad as yours by the sound of it, but it was filthy and disgusting and I got paid $3.35 per hour.

Having that job put all my programming jobs in perspective. To preserve that I have a picture of a dude in a coal mine by my phone at work. Any time I'm asked to submit a pointless form, I think of that guy. I don't do this to shame myself but rather to put my work problems into perspective which helps me.
As someone who was once quite depressed and is now reliably happy, an incredibly surprising amount of motivation. Truly.
I did read the linked page, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding something. To me, this looks like it still requires sockets or fds. I want to be able to grab the TLS-protected byte stream conveniently and transport it to the other endpoint however I see fit. This would make it possible to use this TLS implementation easier on top of I/O-frameworks that don't necessarily map immediately down to sockets/fds. Again, for improved composability and code reuse.
I'd put it a different way: Ruby stole all the useful syntactic shortcuts from Perl and ignored all the cruft and ugliness.

Unfortunately the one thing Ruby didn't steal from Perl was its speed.
The approach they seemed to take to deal with this was bringing in an outside developer. I'm not a fan of this approach for a number of reasons - but mainly because then you've got a dependency on a single outside person or firm to maintain that application going forward.
How does one poll for socket activity using this API, given that a read on a socket doesn't necessarily mean that decrypted data is available, and yet that socket writes may be required?
It would be more an extended-family or small social scene kind of credit. You know Bob. Every week he buys ale from you. Some weeks he doesn't have cash on the nail. So you let him pay next week. It's not like he's going to run off and you know where he lives. This is a kind of credit, although with bookkeeping no more complicated than a slate (hence the "clean slate" idiom).
“The ping is coming from inside the house.”
Thanks for the link.

We merge feature into dev when we want to show a feature to a fellow developer.

We merge feature into staging when a feature is ready to be tested by non-developers and to be included in documentation.

We merge feature into production when it's ready for all users.

Has been working out well so far.
It seems that we have a global undersupply of city centers and oversupply of boring places noone really wants to live in.
But I don't always know it will require more work.
Wow, thank you, again. I have to definitely take a look this. My use cases tend to vary so much that creating a Hadoop like system would require too much custom coding.

I wonder if it is possible to have compression and de-duplication, so that there could be a one big base dataset and lots of containers that only add what new data they generate.

Anyhow, looking at this it feels really approachable. What I have in mind are quick-and-dirty data-sciency scripts for ad hoc use cases, like diffing structured files and combing over matrix data.
Global Web Crackdown Arrests 17, Seizes Hundreds Of Dark Net Domains
Why would we need a dev branch at all then, and not just work on our local branches and merge with staging?
Noah here from Percolate. I agree and what's interesting is I also think these are pretty classic values for enterprise (or b2b) software in general. Without the centralized data it's really hard to build any of the workflows or other tools.
Added in edit: Seeing that this is getting down-votes suggests either that I've not been sufficiently clear in the point I'm trying to make, or that you think I've phrased it in an unacceptable way. Either way, sorry you don't think this fits here, but I'll leave it for others to down-vote, correct, reply to, or support, as they see fit.

Another edit: Getting more down-votes, but not learning anything. Do you think this is the wrong place to say this? Or do you think I'm just wrong to worry about this level of precision in "normal" speech? Reply! Engage! Tell me why I'm wrong.

========

I'm going to be "that guy" ... warning: Rant ahead.

The wording of this question is like sandpaper on my brain - for me, the "only" is misplaced. Assuming he is asking:

What is there that I can do in Erlang,
but cannot do (or is significantly more
difficult to do) in other languages?

With that reading, I feel the question should be:

What can I do only in Erlang?

The question as phrased, to me, admits the alternate interpretation of:

What does Erlang force me to do?

English, and natural languages in general, are weird things. To quote the great Terry Pratchett:

It's very hard to talk quantum using a language
originally designed to tell other monkeys where
the ripe fruit is. -- (Night Watch, 2002)

I'm sure I've seen it before, but Google searches are just turning up places where I've re-quoted it, but:

When using plain language is it difficult
to construct a sentence that a determined
adversary cannot misconstrue.

You may argue that in this case it doesn't matter, but I would suggest that practising precision in language is important, and helps to avoid sloppy thinking.

This comment is intended to be constructive, although I admit freely that it is off-topic for the submission. Even so, I think it's useful to think about these things. I wonder if Erlang makes it easier to be truly precise about something.
> Since it's only on Android I can't use it as the single app for all messaging.

messaging is expected to be rolled into the Signal iOS app quite soon, as I understand it
Erlang's strength is in its virtual machine which has supervision trees built-in, a built-in DNS system, built-in inter-node RPC, hot code reloading, massive concurrency, etc...

I still haven't experienced a programming environment that replicates the Erlang/OTP environment. Period.

Haskell is amazing, I've built my company on it, but we're also building our company on Erlang - Haskell's tooling around distributed computing is much more immature than Erlang's (although Haskell's concurrency primitives and STM libraries are extremely mature and arguably better than Erlang's actor model).
People ignore the systems surrounding themselves. Their life, the things supporting their happiness, and the things put in place to ensure your work functions in your absence, even just in the absence of being at home for dinner every night.

Put the right systems in place, whether it be delegation, or software, or a personal task management system (GTD is all about systems), and you don't have to worry about work all the time. You lead it by leading the right systems to function and continually improve themselves.

A systems-focused approach to work would improve every company because it's closer to reality. The reason we don't have the ability to put things down is because we make ourselves into the critical system of function, and that makes us part of the machine. Build a better machine you can trust instead. Remove yourself as a dependency.

Start with Deming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
The added fault tolerance of Erlang is not free - it adds complexity and overhead. Would you rather maintain an distributed Erlang system running 100s of tasks on 10s of machines, or a simpler C++ based system that due to performance can run on a single machine? Erlang may scale out, but does it scale down?

This is similar to the ADA argument -- it's great and can be used to write safe software, but do you need safe software a month from now or unsafe a week from now? Global networks with millions of users are extreme outliers.
I would generally agree with that and we had many instances where we chose to have people perfect workflows prior to fully automating them (and there are lots of situations where that remains the case now). With that said, and I don't know that it was perfectly expressed in the piece, I do think there's a concept that engineers take for granted around the attitude that goes into creating products and automation that needs to be pushed hard throughout the whole organization.
How strange! The only issue I've seen has been to do with changing handset and needing to re-associate a phone number with a new key. There's a menu option for that which was quite well hidden.

I shall watch out for new issues as the iOS version gains functionality.
Twiddle Fingers – New Android Word Game
To answer both: On the division side, we have found a number of people who are simply more passionate about building products for their peers than building products for customers. I interviewed one last night, so I can confirm this is the case. Because the job includes a bit of product management and a bit of design, it ends up being something fundamentally different than what we ask engineers to do.

As for the outside devs, I agree that is a challenge and one of the things that ultimately led to us hiring internally to help support and continue to grow those internal products.
I disagree with your final conclusion. You also aren't considering the number of unspoken (big, as in banks, or the DoD) users of, say, Haskell because for many it's a competitive edge.
To better understand the basic reasoning behind this API, I recommend to read the last section ("ressl") of:

"LibreSSL: More Than 30 Days Later"

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2014-libressl.html
Go will not eat into Erlang. Go's type system is deplorable and an embarrassment, it lacks a virtual machine to do the things Erlang can do, it lacks all of OTP, etc...

What I do see eating into Erlang is Scala and Akka, though.
where the author sees an echo chamber that portrays false success, i see a bias on behalf of the author that blinds him to some seemingly obvious truths. others have already pointed out the demonstrably false assertion that "no one makes money selling media for consumption any more." a statement like that seems to only be able to come from a blind spot.

i bought 7 kindle fires for my household (i have 6 kids) largely because it's the best deal you can get on a tablet and it performs it's function extremely well (i.e. media consumption device coupled with some games here and there). i don't think any objective measure of kindle fire can relegate it to failure just because it doesn't have the premium experience you get with a tablet that is 6 times the price. i personally do not think the apple experience is worth 6 times the price.

i've no idea if the the fire tv stick is going to be a good device, but the fact that it cost me $20 coupled with the positive media experience i get on our multiple fire tablets was enough to get me to buy one and try it out.

similarly, i can get amazon echo for $99 and i just signed up to try it out. i've long wanted a device with the presence and interface of a star trek computer. i'm skeptical that the technology is there yet to provide the kind of experience that i know will enhance the life of my family, but it's promise is exactly what i want and i don't see anyone else out there trying it esp. at the price point.

i think it's a bit myopic to relegate all of amazon's hardware strategy to the failure bin just because they had a clear failure in the fire phone. the other devices all seem to offer compelling reasons to try them out (not the least of which is price point).
For what kind of embedded thing? We're using it for embedded things too...
Isn't this patently false?

If it's not listening how can it hear the wake word?
Every time I try to write ruby or python code, as soon as I need to write classes I realise just how much boilerplate they require compared to Moose and how depressing not having first-class attributes, method modifiers and roles is, and end up back writing perl5.
Better yet: ZeroMQ is not even a language. What ZMQ does it lets your write extremely performant and reliable distributed systems in any language. It is a layer over sockets. Any complex system will have to interact with other complex systems, which are written in other languages. Say you develop a service and a lot of people want to use it. What API are you going to expose? One that is only based on Erlang primitives? Certainly not, because then you have limited your user-base to a small number of people.
I want to see Perl 6 push the boundaries but the world isn't quite like it was when Perl 5 made using regex seemless. Competition is much more stiff.

Even in C you can use something like Ian Piumarta's PEG generator[0] that let's you embed semantic actions written in C. For regular grammars, scanners and lexers you have powerful tools like Ragel[1] (which targets 7 languages)

I'm not a Python person, so if the Python libraries proved inadequate I'd probably resort to these tools and then push out a Python module using Cyphon[2].

Personally I'm not a fan of using semantic actions for AST construction. I generally prefer the 'attribute' approach taken by libraries like Spirit (C++) which make the process feel a lot more like deserialization. SAs are still useful however for rejecting or accepting rules based on complex requirements (like "is this IP address routable"?).

[0] http://piumarta.com/software/peg/
[1] http://www.colm.net/open-source/ragel/
[2] http://cython.org/
I believe so too. It seems like a reasonable security tradeoff to limit the kinds of bugs that will be the result of such flexibility.
Ember is for designers
A simple effect idea for a search input
That's actually the first thing the answer in the post addresses:

> Anything can be done in any language, so the technical answer is "nothing". But the spirit of the question begs for an answer, especially in a company situation with deadlines.
This is where many people get confused.

If I have to build a distributed system, I will pick Erlang/OTP over Haskell any day.

Everything in Haskell is wonderful, including concurrency. It does not have a built in DNS system (for node discovery and connection), inter-node RPC in Cloud Haskell is a joke compared to Erlang, and many other issues.

I've built systems where I used Erlang as the distributed "coordinator" and Haskell for on the machine computing.
even if software is formally verified, and even assuming the specification is both totally accurate and complete, there is plenty of room for issues at software deployment in a multi-component system such as this
Show HN: Play any song in the world by saying its name
Adios ruby ;)
I can't find it at the moment, but there was someone who as a research project handmade a linen shirt with medieval techniques, accounted for the hours of time taken, and multiplied by the modern minimum wage, to get a figure of about $3000.

especially if they were, say, 8 years old

From your family?

The extended family was far more an economic unit of organisation than it is in the modern west. It would be understood that your family should feed and clothe you somehow, with whatever assets they had, and in return you laboured in the family trade; generally outdoors / heavy manual for men, indoors / light manual for women. Clothing repair (darning) would be an important part of that.

Textile production would be specialised/industrialised even in the 1200s: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=42274 . That implies a normal commercial flow with working credit of some sort, based around bills of exchange. Note that it was even internationalised at this date, trading from England to Holland and Italy.

Have a look at e.g. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z-uYTzxRUUcC&printsec=fro...
We're an Erlang and Haskell shop, I'm very interested.
Doing 2 on a smartphone feels like it would be something which would start draining battery really quick which would be a giveaway.

With this it's running on mains, it could upload in the middle of the night when it would probably be undetected

Plus, why do one or the other? Sure you want to get someone's phone but why not another device too?
There are multiple checks to ensure prudence of the use of development stage drugs. First of all a physician has to be convinced that the development stage drug could benefit his patient. If that’s the case, the physician can prescribe it to his patient. After that health authorities must grant permission before the physician can start treating his patient. Health authorities only allow treatment with such a development stage drug if it is considered safe and if it concerns a patient with a serious or life threatening disease who has no registered medicinal treatment alternatives left.
As others have said, it's largely an academic debate, but I choose to think that things are not so clear cut; that liberty would not go quietly into the night, that people do have powerful tools and have shown a remarkable ability to organize, and ultimately defend themselves if necessary against great odds.

The government is not a single perfectly cohesive faction. In extraordinary situations, people will do extraordinary things. Surely if you believe such a future is at all possible, then it would be pure insanity to relinquish the 2nd.

But even if you concede such a future is impossible and government is perfectly benevolent, it is the 2nd Amendment, it should be respected or repealed by proper vote, or else in defacing it you deface the whole document.

The reality is that these terrorist attacks (purposely inflicted mass civilian casualties) are horrible and appalling, but thankfully at least incredible rare, shocking, abhorrent events. This is not an excuse for indoctrinating fear into schoolchildren. The response to terrorism must be measured, considered, and appropriate. Or else the 'Terrorists Won', right? I see TFA, to some extent, as the terrorists have one.
> not dying for however many more decades, on the other hand, is a huge upside.

Looking at modern controversial cancer drugs we see that people get maybe six months of extra life, at very great expense, and these are the good drugs. The not so good drugs are even more expensive and provide perhaps two weeks extra life.
Actual title:

Space Station Astronauts Grow
a Water Bubble in Space

And for some reason I don't fully understand you've linked to a time stamp right at the end, rather than to the video itself. Was there a reason for that? It's not too late - you can delete this and resubmit with a better title and link to the non-time-stamped URL.
You shouldn't tell people that what they say might bring the attention of law enforcement - that counts as secondary liability.
Have you looked into W. Edwards Deming at all? His ideas on quality and systems are echoed almost perfectly in this article and in what you're saying here, especially in bringing systems thinking to the entire organization, not just engineering (where abolishing repetitive tasks using scripting comes as second nature). Really astute stuff.

I think he'd reply on the point above, that it's far better to build the system and have it be less than perfect than to rely on a brittle process.

"A bad system will beat a good person every time." - Deming

So, it will probably not be a waste of time. Has your experience proven this out in general?