skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe the fundamental pain of xslt was... that it was an FP language. When teaching XSLT, the difference between those who said "its elegant" vs. those who said "its pain" - is whether the individual could grok FP.

Angle bracket overload, verbosity of end tags, library support, poor whitespace handling, namespace pain were all obstacles too but it was FP that made standard problems feel like math proofs and for developers to take days to solve problems they could code in minutes in their usual OO/imperative language.

When I see the pain FP causes in the real world I'm never quite sure whether its nature or nurture. I currently believe its a bit of both but the nature part will always hobble FP adoption - if you find algebraic proofs elegant, you will like FP. If you are "normal" and proving a theorem fills you with terror then you would prefer your programming language to resemble a a cookery recipe.

I also believe all templating, especially for code-generation, requires three brains - understanding the input data-structure, understanding the processing of the template and understanding the behaviour of the output. Each keystroke in your templating language has to be carried out with full understanding of all three parts. Its too much for those if they still struggle with more common two brain programming problems.
Open to everyone who will sign up for a trial account with IBM?

Or did they post the code somewhere?
This guys hacks become the mainstream implementation. Ever used qemu or ffmpeg?
REALLY? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT#Example_1_.28transforming_...
The following 45 lines of XSL code transforms a simple XML document into XHTML DIV tags that mirror the input structure:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:output
indent="no"
method="html"
doctype-system="about:legacy-compat"
encoding="utf-8"/>

<!-- Action parser that responds to HTTP requests. -->
<xsl:param name="action" select="'do.dhtml'"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<head>
<meta charset='utf-8'/>
<title>Title</title>

<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='css/common.css'/>
</head>
<body>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
<script type='text/javascript' src='js/common.js'></script>
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>

<!-- Make the document complete with div elements and classes. -->
<xsl:template match="*">
<div class="{local-name()}"><xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/></div>
</xsl:template>

<!-- The 'id' attribute indicates a link. -->
<xsl:template match="*[@id]">
<div class="{local-name()}"><a
href="{$action}?action={local-name()}&amp;id={@id}"><xsl:apply-templates
select="node()|*"/></a></div>
</xsl:template>

<!-- Retain the attributes (except if named "class"). -->
<xsl:template match="@*">
<xsl:if test="name() != 'class'"><xsl:copy-of select="."/></xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

CSS is then used to customize the presentation layer. For example, all the pages in the following website (click only "Next" and Safari is broken) are completely client-side XSLT, but use an XML document as a starting point:

http://djarvis.bitbucket.org/xml/

The pie chart on the following page was also generated using client-side XSLT:

http://djarvis.bitbucket.org/xml/resources.xml

The only "trick" that was required was to load CSS (and some JavaScript) based on the current filename in the URL:

http://djarvis.bitbucket.org/xml/js/common.js

Most people write one XSLT page per web page to transform, but by using structured DIVs with classes that correspond to the XML element names, only one general-purpose XSL page is required.

This demonstrates the separation of content (XML) from presentation (XHTML/CSS).
~ 99% of all varnish instances run on Linux. FreeBSD is still important.
Varnish Software doesn't currently have any customers who are planning on staying on FreeBSD. They are all migrating to Linux.
Many people, myself included, use facebook primarily for chatting with friends, staying up to date on particular things, and organizing things with a group. The newsfeed is all but irrelevant. I can see a use case for that in developing countries.

Not to mention the fact that in my experience people in developing countries are just as human as we are, and like showing off their relative superiority to others in all but the most dire situations.
mixu's book turned out to be a gem. He does a wonderful job of what he claims in the introduction:

I've tried to provide a more accessible introduction to distributed systems. To me, that means two things: introducing the key concepts that you will need in order to have a good time reading more serious texts, and providing a narrative that covers things in enough detail that you get a gist of what's going on without getting stuck on details.
That's why you should only run down Lombard Street!
mmap a file into memory. As you touch a page the CPU generates a page fault and invokes the kernel. The kernel merges the partially written page with the underlying data. As there is no way to avoid the merge you end up doing write() instead.

The page fault is a synchronous read. Horrible for performance.
>Benefit #1: Portability

You know that a technology has got serious problems when the best thing you can say about it is "well, it is at least preinstalled everywhere"!

>Benefit #2: Separation of concerns

If you want to put business logic in your XSLT, you can. It is a turing complete language (unlike, say, jinja2).

True, the language is so terrible that you will probably do everything possible to avoid putting business logic in your XSLT and that would help with your separation of concerns. I do not consider this a benefit, however.

>Benefit #3: Transformations

This is not a benefit of the language. This simply what it was originally intended to do.

>Benefit #4: Focus on API: The focus on XML as the result of a controller naturally focuses development on the application API

As opposed to other languages where you don't focus development on the application API?

>Benefit #5: Sand-boxed

Definitely a benefit but far from a unique one. It is also doesn't have particularly good sandbox implementations: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...

>Benefit #5: Ease of testing

Compared to what?
BPG/JPEG Side by Side
The point with namespaces leads me to think that the main problem with XML is that on the surface it looks very simple but in fact it's not. It is tempting to take shortcuts to process the XML: for example parsing with regexes, looking at the namespace prefix and not at its definition, producing XML without proper escaping. There are also some gotchas like certain characters being non-representable in XML.

I personally like XML and XSLT (2.0) but to be able to work efficiently you need to spend some time learning which is not obvious on the first sight.

What about the alternatives?

JSON has a big advantage which is its unambiguous automapping to objects. This benefit is not that apparent in languages like Java where you'd still declare a class to represent either the XML or the JSON document. Moreover, there are projects which essentially try to bring schema and namespaces to JSON. JSON-LD is an example of a namespace without an explicit support in the underlying format. There is even a command-line tool jq big part of which is an engine similar to XPath.

S-expressions if used widely would probably go the same path as JSON - recreating a lot of what is considered as bloat in XML.

Another mentioned alternative was a custom text format. I assume the author meant just to design a format from scratch. I wrote that to use XML efficiently, you need to put in some work. But compared to making a backwards (and forwards?) compatible text format which correctly handles malformed and malicious input requires much more effort.

I don't know anything about ndb.
I tried, for several years, to run the company by giving all the software we wrote and selling support agreements. Didn't fly.
Barefoot running is mostly just a trade off of one type of injuries for another. And it's not just "use no/special shoes". It requires learning a different way to run. If you run "normally" you're going to severely hurt yourself.
You do realise that what you have written makes no sense. How could it be possible to determine that one isomer has low toxicity unless it is possible to separate them?

I am not 100% up to date in this area, but the last time I looked into the isomer theory of thalidomide toxicity it was not well supported by the experimental evidence.
Apiary: Next Version of API Documentation
We (Varnish Software) still use mmap, just not for writing. The problem with mmap is that you can't use it to wrote whole pages at a time as the CPU will trap and ask the OS to merge the page you're writing to.

mmaps are still great as the page cache still manages the split cache between disk and memory.
>First, I don't understand what's with the complaints about the syntax. It's just a flavor of XML.

People who hate XSLT are not usually fans of XML either.

>But even if you don't like the syntax, so what - there aren't any alternatives to XSLT.

There are hundreds. Simply use any normal programming language (javascript, python, perl, ruby, etc.) with a templating language (handlebars, jinja2, etc.).

The results will be much cleaner, easier to debug, and will remain cleaner as your transformations get ever more complex (code has a habit of doing that).
Global OCTG Market Segmentation by Products (Seamless and Welded)
India Engineering Plastics Market Outlook to 2019
It is. That's the truly awful thing about it - it is a turing complete language that kind of pretends not to be.

This is why templating languages are better at helping you maintain separation of concerns - they physically won't let you put business logic in the view layer because they aren't turing complete. XSLT will.
Little Bits
He was definitely being sarcastic. Look at his previous posts.
Hello there,

We know that this has been done before, we however are not happy about the UX experience on both those platforms and wanted to improve this.

The other reason that we did this is because our vision is to completely streamline the Social media usage on the internet. We are working heavily on this and will be moving towards this goal more and more. What you see now is thus a small preview of what is coming next.

Kind regards,
Xavier
If you can't link me straight to what you're talking about, then it isn't good enough yet. If I had to attempt to verify every bullshit sounding argument that I came across, I'd never get any work done.

The fact is there appears to be a serious water shortage while the 'authorities' have supposedly been taking care of it for decades.

The argument that was made was that we should assume the farmers have "thought about it more than we have", with the implication that we should heed their opinion because they've been sioled away for decades, 'thinking about it'.

Show me the dashboard that shows real-time estimates for total water reserves and all the charts about how long that will last us under all scenarios.

I was able to find this: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...

But that's just an image posted on top of the state's ubiquitous CMS showing how far below average the water levels have fallen under the stewardship of the current authorities. It's not terrible, but the problem is that it provides very little context for what those water levels mean. How long is that water going to last (it seems like we want to find a way to make this 'indefinite')? How should water usage be modified to make it last longer? What are the effects going to be on food production?

These are the questions that we need to know the answers to. Furthermore,this information should be accessible to everyone through a URL so that most of us who don't have time to look back through ~45 years of data to figure out what is going on, can get the current, most relevant information to form rational opinions, instead of just trusting that the 'people in charge' are on top of it.
>So how about "write the definitive library for X so that nobody needs to write this code again?" That ought to count for something.

That sounds like a job for the open-source world.
Except, at least in the UK, judges have an ancient tradition of independence from the executive and maintain considerable power. Judges at all levels up to the Supreme Court regularly find against the government on all sorts of cases include national security ones.

Attempting to intimidate a judge would be a shockingly risky thing to do, because if the judge complained it would probably bring down the Government - which is surprisingly easy thing to do if there's a major scandal with our Parliamentary system. Let alone that appeals are made in front of several judges the prospect of nobbling all of them seems remote to me.

It's a conspiracy theory too far, in the UK at least.
CMU-SAFARI/rowhammer
Thanks for commenting!

I'll be happy to answer any question about my implementation and testing.

In this test I'm using a standard SQS service i region EU-west. My integration with SQS is done from a simple application written in Node.js. My application is put inside an autoscaling group which scales up when the load on the servers is above my threshold. At the end of the last test I was pushing messages from 18 different servers at the same time. The request rate was above 6K/sec but the insert rate into the SQS queue only managed to peak aroud 2.3K message insert/sec.

I agree that this is strange. But I've also experienced strange stuff with Amazon ELB: http://litt.no/tech%20stuff/amazon-elb-latency-problems

Best regards,
-sorenso-
Yeah I was wondering if our storm-water sewage system is sucking the water out of our lands. But how much does this really matter? There would have to be some analysis of these systems vs land with no such system vs where they are to rain sources etc.
Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List
The server could encode it. So the designer can still upload a known format.

The only problem I see for now is SEO. Ofcourse the title and alt attributes can give some context but the images wont get indexed
How to Play Android Lollipop Version of Flappy Bird
Thanks for commenting!

What is your traffic rate in request pr second? I would be interesting to know.

SQS is a simple and easy to use service. I really like it, but as you read in my post. I'm a bit concerned about the scaling. We are expecting to reach a peak traffic of 3K req/sec next year.

Best regards,
-sorenso-
It seems they have a C version of Saxon in the works. Also, I was surprised to learn there's a JavaScript version: Saxon-CE.
Kholsa ordered to open the gate to Martins beach
Kholsas tone deafness never ceases to amaze me.
Hi mbell,

Thanks for commenting!

What kind of application are you using with the SQS (language, purpose, usage)? It would be interesting to know for me :)

This test was only running for 50 minutes, maybe this could be the issue?

Best regards,
-sorenso-
To be honest, I think gcc has pretty much caught up with clang with gcc-4.9 when it comes to error message quality.

I have a slight preference for the way clang chooses to highlight the entire AST parent node that it thinks is responsible for the error, but the approach g++ takes is perfectly clear.
Gmail for Mac app promises to unchain Gmail from browser tabs
Thank you for your comment!

Please do a write up on your experience. I'll be happy to read about it.

Best regards,
-sorenso-
I am 27 years old and after few months of intensive running I got a spinal disc herniation. It took me about a half a year to recover from it. So my advice is not to rush into running without learning proper techniques and getting guidance from professionals.
Sleipnir for Mac
What caused the drop? Or rather the spike?! How strange.
I've tried it with a picture of mine. The encoding process was painfully slow, but I guess that does not concern the end-user much. The file size went from 1.2M in jepg to 164K in bpg, and the decoding was fairly fast. After turning the image back into PNG the quality seemed OK but that's tough to assess objectively.

The coolest thing is this javascript program that can decode and display the pictures on-the-fly.

Definitely an image format that could save storage space and bandwith, IMHO.
>What I don't understand is why so many people go out of their way to declare their hate of XSLT (and all things XML), especially now that XSLT is all but dead...?

Seriously? It's because we're shocked to find people like you defending it. Incredulously wondering if you've been paying attention to literally any other piece of technology other than XSLT in the meantime.

:(, but, for you.

>and they only work server-side.

I choked on laughter, maybe you can help me take this one seriously, given XSLT and when it was actually even in consideration for being used server-side.
>"written in a better language" doesn't mean much, however. A better language for what?

For general purpose programming, which is what transformations eventually end up requiring. XSLT isn't java or javascript. It theoretically can do everything that those two can do, but we both know in practice that once you don anything sufficiently complex in XSLT it will become horrendous. Even the biggest proponents of XSLT won't argue that you should put business logic in there (I hope, anyway).

>I'm not picking on JavaScript, which I love and use every day; but templating in JS versus XSLT is crazy.

Because?

>The templating languages that you mention are, in my opinion, extremely complex and very unpalatable

What??!? I can get web designers with no coding experience to edit them! Try doing that with xslt. They're that simple! Not only are they conceptually simpler, they are mathematically provably simpler due to their being non-turing complete.

>and they only work server-side.

Am not a client side developer so I don't know what the state of the art is in client side templating languages, but there are a few that look ok (dust, jsrender, handlebars...).

>But that's all a matter of taste, I guess. What I don't understand is why so many people go out of their way to declare their hate of XSLT

Because they have spent time debugging it and know that every second they spent doing that was both painful and unnecessary.

If you don't understand the pain it might mean that you don't even realize that the same pain you felt debugging it wasn't actually necessary.

My sincere hope is that all the people who create business critical XSLT abortions will stop doing it so I won't ever be called in again to fix what they did. That's why I'm passionate in my XSLT (and XML) hate.
"Accessing the server directly via http://213.73.89.123/ currently appears to work quite well, thereby rendering the censorship efforts useless."

So would appear to be at a DNS level of blocking perhaps, tested the internet access I have at hand currently (using ISP's DNS offered to punters and not direct IP access):

Three (Mobile telco) works upon a data dongle. Also O2 (Another mobile network) works just fine with this site. The last also covers a large user base internet access wise and tends to be up there with regards of blocking sites at governmental whims.

So beyond Vodaphone do we know which other UK ISP's also block this site?
The question is wrongly phrased: it's not that we value things in people. People are terminally valuable.
SEEKING WORK - Remote, living in Czech Republic

I'm a web developer with over 6 years of experience. I've worked at agencies and start-ups. I moved to Czech about a year ago. The last job I had was at a start-up where I was responsible for building a platform for online versions of university-level text books. The last year I've been working on my own projects; one to help with collaboration between web and design professionals, the other in the bitcoin space.

I have experience building, deploying, and managing multiple different web applications. My primary focus the last year has been in node.js, but I have years of experience before that using the PHP web stack.

Proficient with: Node.js/PHP, JavaScript, Backbone.js, MySQL, Nginx/Apache, Linux

GitHub: https://github.com/chill117

chill [at] degreesofzero.com
Times in the past that I've seen LAMP explained, I've read that the the P in LAMP was for PHP, Perl, or Python (any one of the 3).
The FP bit was fine. It's wrapping the functional program in the most obtuse syntax known to man (apart from C++ template syntax which at least has the get-out clause that it was never meant to be a turing complete programming language that programmers took seriously and used to get real work done) that's the problem.

Full disclosure: My last exposure to XSLT was a long, long time ago and I've been carefully avoiding it ever since.
> which has plenty of water for it [0]
[0] http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article2598509.html

That link does not support what you've said. It's just an article about there not being enough water for farmers.. really the opposite of what you've said.
Looks like California could benefit from permaculture.
I am working for many years in the publishing business (dealing with structured documents, product data etc.). I can tell you, that all of my customers are more open XML than any other document formats (there exist none as suitable for the job).

You can call me clueless or dishonest, I don't care. I can only share my experience with the topic. You don't have to believe me.
Sounds like the author lends credibility to the proposal through past accomplishments, suggesting that the project is well planned and executed and thus worth checking out.
> Imagine LISP, but in the hands of Sauron or Palpatine.

Common Lisp?
Lead Android Dev at Streak (YC S11)
Does folly "just build" on current Ubuntu / Debian boxes now? When it first came out I had enormously trouble getting it to build at all.
Using compiled XSLT-translets in Java (XSLTC) has a huge impact on performance, with transformations taking 0.5s the problem seems to be in the way your XSLT is written and pushing or pulling the data, not XSLT itself:
http://xalan.apache.org/old/xalan-j/xsltc_usage.html
> I believe the fundamental pain of xslt was... that it was an FP language. When teaching XSLT, the difference between those who said "its elegant" vs. those who said "its pain" - is whether the individual could grok FP.

I've heard this before, but I don't find it to be true for me anyway. XSLT has never really clicked for me, while I really like Clojure and OCaml. Maybe the FP is part of the problem, but I also think XSLT is just a particularly obtuse functional language. XSLT makes it hard to figure out how to express even moderately complex algorithms (e.g. a map-reduce function is literally just that in Scheme, while I'm not sure I could write one correctly without several tries in XSLT) — and once you do express them, they're buried under an impenetrable mound of XML boilerplate that makes them hard to maintain or understand later.
This is the guy behind Tiny C Compiler, jslinux.org (running Linux in JavaScript in the browser) and Qemu. (And several other interesting projects). This alone makes me have great faith in BPG.
OSv – an operating system designed for the cloud
It is getting much closer to falling under the Chinese sphere of influence as American military dominance in the Pacific wanes and China's increases. I expect it to be gradually swallowed up Hong Kong style in the next couple of decades.

America's 'promise' to protect it will likely be quietly withdrawn.

Either that or we will go to war.
WOW Having read the history of that company I'm somewhat flabbergasted at the prospect that a company that made child porn would be protected intellectually over the Chaos Computer Club, which we can safely say has nothing in common with this Color Climax Corporation. More so for the UK at least, given such practices in such times were not legal then. Though I suspect this would be some EU ruling and the moral and ethics of this are moot in the black and white production line of the legal world in some fields sadly. Processed guilty by default and you have to prove innocents by exception, which seems to be how anything copyrighted on the internet is handled.