skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really think that's the TLDR, it rather seems to be that memristors are as fast as RAM yet store data permanently, and that using photons to transmit information is faster than copper wires.
If I recall correctly, the "big idea" here was to eliminate the distinction between RAM and disk. That would be huge for both servers and PCs.
You have to admit that for coders, the joy of writing helps a lot for job satisfaction. I write both Java and Python (for very different applications) and I just always feel like Java makes it hard to write anything elegant almost on purpose. The proliferation of huge frameworks and FactoryFactories clearly doesn't help.

I think you can underestimate the value in actually enjoying writing - I'm just more motivated every day I can write elegant python code. Conversely every day I spend fighting Java for an elegant solution and winding up inevitably with something a bit half-arsed because of some limitation in the language I just feel grumpy.
Is there a decent article on the architecture of this thing? All I can find is PR.
Besides the industries pjmlp mentioned (finance and insurance/banking), F# is also being used for data science/analytics/machine learning, distributed applications (on Azure and AWS) and bioinformatics. I also know there are at least a few companies building mobile apps and games with F# (e.g., in combination with the Xamarin toolchain).
> the undesireables are the poor

No, that doesn't work. The inequality here is minimal.
If the engineering effort is anything like the focus grouping effort, it should be amazing.
Is that accurate? I haven't bothered chasing down a cache of the page but as I remember "The Machine" the concept is to have a huge, flat, persistent memory built on memristors. No CPU cache, no main memory, no separate storage.

If they dropped all that to do a standard architecture with faster interconnects, I'm rather disappointed.
Why not just use Groovy for everything instead of java ?
It's also worth pointing out that Parisians hated the Eiffel Tower when it was first built.
Realtime is a significant change, especially since Django wasn't made to handle long-lived client connections. SwampDragon uses Tornado to overcome this limitation. Plus it comes with a JavaScript component. It nearly turns Django into Meteor! Definitely more than "just another commit". :)
Two Farmers and Common Knowledge
(Edit: strike point about Chrome release date; had the release-release date, parent probably means when beta started.)

I'll also note that in the past, I've purposefully not upgraded due to serious bugs in the present version of Chrome. (There was a great one a while ago where entire websites — notably Wikipedia — were rendering in the wrong font, for example.)

> a browser that silently auto-updates

While I'll grant that this is true for the majority of users:

1. It requires a user to restart their browser. For me, this usually means the next weekend or Chrome/OS X crash, since during the week I'm usually busy with things other than restarting the browser…

2. Not all OS's auto-update, though this is a very small minority.
Android/Replicant on GTA04
It is sad that most of such research (on psychoactives, etc.) is happening in the UK, and not the US (which has a lot more resources). Our Drug War(TM) at work.

Aside: "... Paul Expert at King’s College London ..." : this guy was born to be a researcher. :-D
I think the difference is that stuff is less hastily cobbled together. People use additional libraries because they add value, not because they paper over ugliness and holes of existing libraries.

Scala feels "designed", while Java feels "evolved".
I've never even used use-package..

Is this just to eliminate dependency ordering? With things like package-initialize, most every package in my system is autoloaded before any of my init.el really runs.

It's a nice visual structure to look at, though, that's for sure.
Companies themselves buy and sell their own stock when they believe it is under/overvalued. And there will always be people out there who believe they have an edge and can pick undervalued stocks.

These days I think in reality most people who have been into indexing for a while give themselves a bit of play money to invest in something more speculative.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Zurich was particularly hurting for losing the CHF 12 million in the first place. It's not that much money for a jurisdiction of rather affluent 1.4 million people. That they made more is bonus.
> It would seem prudent to invest a bit more time to understand why a particular thing doesn't work, for such a critical bit of code (I'm not implying I know that this is the cause or related to these new found bugs, but the article mentions it, so I'm just a little surprised).

It would indeed. That's no reason not to post the patch though. Welcome to the imperfect world of software development.
The audience for the Internet changed. IRC was great when everyone on the 'net was tech savvy, but look at what happened when people were able to pick between AOL and direct dial-up connections. Facebook is so simple my grandmother could figure it out, but even with decent clients like Colloquy, I wouldn't expect her to find her way around IRC. As for the Enterprise, HipChat and the like, especially when served via SaaS, offers more than just a chat server - server management, auditing, easy user setup, integrations to other tools.

For what it's worth, I agree that it's a shame that we are barely better off than we were 20 years ago, but I'm willing to accept that if it means widening the audience of the Internet for everyone. You shouldn't need a CS degree to surf the world's information.
If you don't want to read a book on diversification, look at this picture: http://fycs.ifas.ufl.edu/younginvestor/images/unsystemic-ris...

Unsystematic risk means risks tied to holding individual stocks. Notice the x-axis. Holding more stocks (diversifying) means removing individual stock risk.
they're like 20 years too late
Procedural? That's been around for a really long time, and isn't a fad or being pushed by marketers like OO was.
It is a list of quotes from people who have in fact built such "widely-used solutions". How is that being a "web contrarian"? Do you really think Rob Pike has never written any code? How did go happen then? You don't think Carmack has maybe a little bit of experience with large, complex software projects?
Also - don't be surprised if you find out after using one of these prepackaged tools that you really do care about this stuff, and you end up calling bankruptcy on other peoples tools :)
The problem with verbosity and repetition is not that it takes longer to type the code, at all. The problem is that it creates dependencies which you have to manage by hand.

Changing `Foo a = new Foo()` to `Bar a = new Bar()` doesn't seem that bad... except when you have to propagate that change through the code base. Half of Java's tooling is dedicated to solving a problem that doesn't exist in good duck-typed languages or those with type inference.

Verbosity is also a warning sign for lack of expressive power. If you have a pattern like `if (cmd == "run") run();` in multiple places in your codebase, you want to make it so that changing one changes them all. Java won't let you factor this out easily, but worse, it won't catch you when you make a mistake (better languages will either do first-class functions or pattern matching and exhaustiveness checks).

Note that this has nothing to do with static vs. dynamic; verbosity is a problem that can be solved in many ways, but it is a problem. The author also spends a lot of time equating statically typed with fast; well, there are plenty of very fast dynamic languages.

There certainly are reasons to like Java, but these aren't them.
The main ideas seem to be replacing both RAM and storage with memristors, removing the distinction between them architecturally, and using photonic interconnects internally.

So it's a bit confusing where you got your tldr from.
Again with the emacs (2005)
This is assuming the voters know enough to have a coherent volition. The clear majority of the people in the US think the government should spend less on foreign aid. If asked what percentage of government revenue should be spent on foreign aid they would name a figure much higher than we currently spend. But these aren't inconsistent, because the typical voter thinks we spend far, far more on foreign aid than we do. All this means that in terms of referendums there is no such thing as the will of the voters, there is only how you ask the question.

Now, if we could get the entire population of the US into a room to argue over the budget for a week with a vote at the end I'm sure that the result would be better than our legislators would do but of course that's logistically impossible. So barring that I'll take representative democracy over referendums any day. Legislators know that voters have a distinct tendency to vote the bums out of office if they feel things are getting worse.
This is categorically false. The machine is a new computer architecture which merges storage and memory. It is a demonstration of memristors, hardware used to implement low-latency byte-addressable persistent memory.

SOURCE: I work at HP-Labs writing systems software for the machine.
Or you could just use a $2 micro-controller and run the vm in software.
Note to self (2009)
I love this part :

"We’re pushing the boundaries.., using electrons for computation, photons for communication, and ions for storage."
Iirc, memristors (can) have much higher read speeds than capacitor RAM. It makes sense, if you consider how they work.
That's a question we asked ourselves several times. Here are some differences

# There is not one that gives the seller a list of pre-approved buyers

# Most FSBO's are still focused on listing - which in turn leads sellers to the Zillows of the world- back to square one.

# We are all about empowering sellers with a curated buyers list and tools/services to handle the transaction.
You can't make a killing that way.

In general, the market can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent. To win, you basically need more information (in the shannon information theoretic sense) than the market, on average, does. And when you actually compute it, "50% drop every 7-10 years, and not even with 95% certainty" is negligible information.

Shorts and short equivalents are either effectively marked to market (e.g. futures are marked daily, short-sales are effectively as well through margin adjustment) or have a limited time horizon (liquid puts are 3m-6m, illiquid ones can be a couple of years, but with a ridiculously large premium).

Let's say a drop of 50% happens over 1 year - then your 3m/6m "50% drop" puts don't actually net you any money, because it only drops 30% in 6 months. But they keep costing you all the time.

And if you use futures/forwards/short-sales, you might (and often will) get margin called and squeezed on earlier appreciations. Unless you have a really large margin, which -- when you actually earn some money, if ever -- significantly reduces your earning in percentage terms.
React, sort of, if you ignore the underlying clusterfuck that is the DOM.

https://github.com/swannodette/om
New IFTTT Channel: Print Dropbox Photos via Printhug
you are right I'm not native English speaker so thanks for spotting that, I've always used "remote working" or "teleworking" for describing that, but not telecommuting (maybe because commuting means "travelling to work" and tele means "over a distance", so the compound doesn't make too much sense for me, at least if you don't put a negation somewhere :D)
> At bottom, causality requires a temporal order judgment: did my motor act come before or after that sensory signal?

The problem is, the brain is a causality-building machine; it loves to find causality where there is none.

If you tell a room of 100 people the following story: "A person fell, there was a sound of a gunshot, and another person was seen running", and then ask each member of the audience to retell the story and explain what happened, a majority of the audience will reconstruct the story by placing the gun shot first, and explain that what happened is the person was killed by the gun.

In this example, no perception-lag is involved; if a story doesn't make sense the way it's told, but makes sense with a few "minor" alterations, then the brain automatically makes those alterations in order to generate meaning.

Hence: superstition, unreliability of witnesses, etc.
Mailvelope developers are aware of this, the default is to compose emails in separate window, and not on Gmail.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ffidxl4u4dylsp8/Screenshot%202014-...
I am cringing. Gould was a classic case of projection, having been guilty of everything he accused his opponents of: misreading one's opponents, proneness to ideological bias, and experimental technique so sloppy that deliberate fraud starts to look like the simpler explanation. (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...)

There are other bones to pick with Gould, but these are the ones that make him impossible to read as an interested layperson without personally verifying every sentence.
All right, be honest, that whole post was really just an excuse to show off your cute kids to all of hacker news, right?
The Space Invaders clone at the end of the video blew me away when he explained that it was running on the Z-machine. That is something I never would've thought I'd see.
I didn't (and can't) downvote you, but if I had to guess it's because your comment didn't add much content, but has a very negative tone. HN likes to see commenters being constructive, not just correcting. (And keep in mind that things you write on the internet generally read as more argumentative than you intend them.)
Thanks! Can you promise to care for me in my old age?
For a different take people might be interested in "A Mathematician Plays the Stockmarket", by John Allen Paulos (he also wrote the excellent "Innumeracy").

The book explains a bunch of mistakes he made when investing.

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematician-Plays-The-Stock-Market/d...
Persistence and syncing for non-nerds.

A few years ago, I tried to convince my colleagues (they're more designers than programmers) to use IRC for informal communication. Using IRC was (and still is) a no-brainer for me. My desktop PC runs all day, so I'm in IRC all day. But for them, joining IRC meant opening their laptops, starting their client and then pinging out 15 minutes later when their laptop went to standby.

When they were in IRC, they had this urge to really be there in IRC. I.e. monitoring it, reading everything, responding in seconds, excusing themselves when they had to go to the bathroom, and finally, finding excuses to close their IRC client again.

I have a totally different mode of operation with IRC, where it's OK to have the client open and not respond for hours or at all if you don't fell like it. I guess it's something you have to learn.

Installing BNCs solved some of the issues, but not all. Also, installing a BNC is not something your average designer-type nerd today wants to deal with.

So we ended up with KickOff for a while, but it never really worked reliably. We're now on Slack and quite happy, but I still want to try some of the various IRC "cloud" services; mainly those for self hosting.
The headline does not match his conclusion at all, in my opinion. What he's trying to say is that "dynamic scripting languages are slower and more error-prone than compiled, statically typed languages". And to determine whether or not a scripting language is ever a good idea from 3 or 4 examples does not seem like a good idea. E.g. Lua seems to be a pretty good fit for the WoW UI scripting stuff and EA used Python (apparently successfully) for their Sims 4 scripting (sorry for it both being examples of games, those were just the first that came to my mind :D)
The JVM is not usable for short-living processes such as command-line tools.

Apart from the ecosystem and the language itself, it's often the reference (or only) implementation which makes it unsuitable for a particular job.
If this doesn't work out, it's probably the last Big Idea to come out of HP for a long time.

Here's a blog post with some more detail about the project beyond just hype:

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Cloud-Source-Blog/The-Machine-a...
I've evaluated some solutions recently.
I like Responses, because its API is simple and easy to use.

However we are using directly the Urllib3 library in our code, so I needed to adapt it to mock Urllib3 instead of Requests.

I've published the package:
https://github.com/florentx/urllib3-mock

It can be used either with Urllib3 or Requests.
Thanks. Since these are really the same story with two different URLs, we're demoting this one as a dupe.

See the FAQ (linked to at the bottom of most pages) for the policy on dupes and reposts.
I think I read that MMM was (is?) paying around 250-300$/month for a family of three. So not that much.
For people who'd like to revisit IRC, I highly recommend irccloud.com (I'm unaffiliated with them).

They offer a web client, which also stores channel history when you're away. And there's also an iOS client that will send you push notifications when someone mentions your name...
The direct-democracy thing is unique to Switzerland. I don't know of any other country where politicians threaten each other publicly saying things like "If you continue behaving badly at XY, we're going to make a referendum, the people will decide and you'll be screwed".

Also, Swiss people tend to use "us" when they talk about their politicians whereas Germans use "they". This really shows how Swiss stand behind decision made by their government whereas Germans - in comparison - act like infants being totally at the mercy of their leaders (who are elected every four years and basically do what they want during that time).

The theoretical down-site of direct democracy is that if the population is stupid, you'll get instant stupid decisions forced onto politicians. A small, well-educated population shouldn't have this problem though.

More of my experiences within Switzerland you'll find in here: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" http://goo.gl/EIX4UX (Full disclosure: If you're from the EU and looking for a tech-job over here, I'd be happy to help out).
QE doesn't need to be unwound; bonds can roll off into cash.
I've been following The Machine for a while, a try to summarise:

The Machine is unique in that it can stack huge amounts of memory without communication issues with the CPU because it uses light instead of copper for transacting data internally. The memory is called Memristors and are persistent, just like a harddrive/SSD. They are also much faster since they stack in parallel and can be written/read in parallell, similar to a RAID setup but with better scaling.

These combinations enable extremely fast speeds to access and process data, but it also needs a better and faster back-end (Operating System) to handle the new way of thinking about memory and data processing.

I see a LOT of amazing changes if they manage to launch it.

Like enormous 3D worlds with no texture or model-popping with 4K textures all in real-time and in VR. Stuff of dreams!
This post makes me wonder, what about Jython? I don't use it, but it would be a nice fit for the OP (writing performance critical code in Java, and use Jython as a glue).

Are there any drawbacks with it?
Does it require encrypted connections?
DISCLAIMER: I write mostly java, at home and at work.

Refactoring goes a lot further than just renaming types. A refactor script _WILL_ rename both sides of 'Foo x = new Foo();' to 'Bar x = new Bar();', so given the right utilities (and if you use java for everything, it's _MUCH_ easier to become an expert at the tools!) this is not any more effort at all.

However, there are refactors for things that are much more difficult in a duck typed language. For example, if I have a bunch of methods named 'execute()' in my code, and I decide that this is a sad state of affairs and ripe for a refactor, I can refactor one of them to a different name and the tools will 'get it right', renaming the right calls (calls into this type) and not renaming the wrong ones (calls to another type's execute() method which has no relation to this type's execute() call). In python, you just can't do that. You'd have to rename all of them, defeating the point.

Similar concerns crop up for 'find callers', or 'add argument to method'.

There are also refactor scripts that are equally possible in both python and java, but which nevertheless require either a lot of manual editing, or an intelligent tool that can automate it, such as 'extract method' (taking the selected code and turning it into a (helper) method, figuring out which variable(s) would have to be passed along to make it all work as needed.

The point is: Duck typing does not obviate the need for refactors. It does make certain refactors impossible to 'safely' automate ('safely' in the sense of ensuring that, post-refactor, the code does the same thing as it did pre-refactor).

As far as 'dynamic == slow, static == fast' being a bit of an oversimplification, yup, that's true. Java _IS_ a heck of a lot faster than python, but that's mostly an implementation detail; you could make a pretty quick python. dynamic definitely does not help, but it can be worked around. Javascript JIT engines are seeing a lot of serious improvements right now, and a large part of it is guesstimating type info. They're getting pretty fast.

In the spirit of the article, though, static typing isn't just a boon for speed reasons (based on the practical upshot that java IS fast, and most dynamic solutions simply aren't, even if they could be with more engineering efforts): It becomes quite useful when you start having to read the additions to your code written by someone else, or rereading your own code half a year down the line when updates are required. explicit static typing also helps with refactoring, which is useful especially when you have to fix or extend your project.
I'm talking about those who haven't settle down with a sexual partner, those who keep experimenting are the ones who have the highter probability.
"Java for everything, because it's the only statically type language with a fast runtime I know well".

Ok, Java is not terrible (PHP is terrible), and the JVM is a marvel of eat-your-RAM engineering, but this makes me sad, because there are only two things that can be said about Java: it's not terrible and it has a big ecosystem. There is nothing brilliant about it. It is slowly crawling toward convenient feature, but it's never going to be at the same level as a well-designed functional language in terms of correctness and readability-to-expressiveness ratio.
The phrase "like it or not" can be applied before anything and sounds unnecessarily dickish. Like it or not some of us think deliberate design goes a lot further than accidental design. Like it or not airplanes use a lot of fuel when they travel over the Pacific. Like it or not just isn't needed at the start of a sentence.
That sounds convincing from the seller's perspective. I bought a house a year back through a buyer agent. I don't see any difference as a buyer using this service.
Yeah, I can, of course, see how the modern alternatives are easier to use. I'm just sad that, instead of making simple IRC clients, nicer frontends for newsgroups, easier mailing lists, we now have ad-hoc solutions that are mainly meant to keep you locked into their system.
You mean the IRCv3? I believe encrypted connection is still optional.