skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The ethics of Stallman's arguments don't matter in the least, and they never have. He's like a guy in 1905 trying to get people to keep using horses. He's been on the wrong side of history for so long that you can no longer even detect that there was a history to be on the wrong side of: he just floats out there in his own strange little bubble of ideals. You have to respect his dedication to those ideas, but there isn't much relevancy left.
sure -- but we know the reporter wrote down divinity claims, even in the earliest gospels.

Keep in mind the Lord-Liar-Lunatic argument is aimed at those who claim "Jesus is a great moral teacher" based on the things Jesus is quoted as saying. Jesus is quoted as making divinity claims, many of which are obvious if you have good knowledge of Hebrew scriptures and religious practices. The "Legend" option (Jesus didn't really say those things) is still open, but that makes it harder to claim anything about the value of Jesus' moral teachings.
Again, yes, I know. I understand what the model is. I'm saying it's not useful to point out that you can choose contradicting axioms to base your model on. And make no mistake, the two axioms that you are proposing do contradict each other.

So again, the issue is not that you can't compare numbers of arbitrary magnitude in constant time -- I never said that. The issue is that it is a contradiction to say that it takes linear time to inspect all the digits of a number AND that it only takes constant time to compare O(n) digits of two numbers.

You're essentially saying that you can axiomatize your mathematical universe with nonsense axioms, which yes, you could do, but that's not useful to point out.
You entirely miss the point about dev teams usually logging their activity in other places.

If a whole team is expected to respond to the emails this service sends with new updates on a daily basis and do that in addition to whatever activity planning, communication and and tracking tools they're already using, then using this service instead of making a one time effort to get their existing toolset to spit out daily emails is probably a false economy.

And if they're currently not systematically tracking project activity, and relying entirely on verbal communication or email they're - for good reasons or bad - probably not overly likely to pay for to SaaS-based coordination tools either.
Berta Lovejoy
In the early XP days, we spoke about code's equipoise.
Q: Where did Smalltalk go wrong?
A: Excessive cost of development tools at a time when Java was free.

Java was easy for C, C++ and Pacal programmers to migrate to. It had enough incremental benefits to justify the leap. Most importantly, Java surfaced with inbuild support for the Internet, just when the Internet rally was building.

If Smalltalk development tools had been less costly, it would have surpassed Java on every front. And, Smalltalk is such a joy to use.

Smalltalk is a success on the technical front. Current software technologies are still duplicating the innovations originated in Smalltalk. Docker is the latest, saving the state of a software solution.

Developer productivity is where Smalltalk really shines. There are many ways to measure productivity and code quality. Ultimately, total effort per function point is a useful one. On page 46 of http://namcookanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Funct... a table sets out number of months to implement a 1,000 function point program. Here's a few metrics for dynamic and static languagues:

Smalltalk 21 coding months
Ruby 46
C# 51
Python 53
C++ 53
Java 53
PHP 53
JavaScript 71
C 128
Assembly 213

By these measures, Smalltalk projects will be completed in less than half the time as projects using C#, Java or C++. Javascript centric projects will take 3x, but this is not really an apples to apples comparison.

Where Smalltalk really failed, was on the commercial side. It failed to be adopted by a critical mass of developers. Smalltalk was used successfully, due to tool costs, mostly in Fortune 1000 class enterprises. For my small software company, it was a secret weapon enabling me to outperform competitors. I didn't sell Smalltalk, I sold "solutions."
Did you mean weasel?
Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
Is Luvit fit for production use? Which Lua web stack would you say is the most mature in general?
I had this too. Great stuff. I'll have to see if I can get one for my kid. She's digging lego's right now.
SaaS don't have to be "beta". And of course there are many factors to take into account.
> don't give back anything even remotely related to their business model.

Why should they? It would be nice if they did but they'd be directly enabling their competition. That's not what open source is all about as far as I understand it.
I've created closed source software for many years now, and we've happily reduced our costs by incorporating open source software (where the licenses permit). We've also paid for proprietary libraries.

I would be surprised to find anybody doing serious development without relying on open source software somewhere.

And the companies I've worked for have generally been very willing to release code as open source, partly for goodwill and advertising (we've received several job applicants who only learned about us through our contributions to open source projects), and partly to avoid the cost of maintaining an internal fork of, say, Boost or JQuery. Even if you can't open source the whole kaboodle, it's often possible to release something, especially additions to existing open source projects.
Haters gonna hate, but I think it was a cool thing Kim Dotcom did. I think it's time to put my Mega account to use.
Here's Chicken's interface to Python: [1]

It also has bindings for R, C/C++, Lua, Matlab, Objective C, and even Java.[2]

I could have sworn it had a Perl interface too, but maybe that was just my fevered imagination, or an older version of Chicken.

You can actually build Guile-Emacs right now: [3]

"As of the end of GoogleSummerOfCode 2014, the Elisp engine of Emacs
is fully replaced with that of Guile, and most things Just Work™."

Though it's true that it'll probably take some time for Guile to be fully integrated in to mainstream Emacs, and for all the wrinkles to be ironed out. But the future is here.

I do have to give credit to Clojure for exposing more people to a Lispy language, even if the language does not measure up to my ideal of what a Lisp/Scheme should be. And I do grant that there are many more Clojure jobs than Scheme jobs. So if work with a Lispy language is your goal, Clojure is probably your best bet.

However, many people work on open source and personal projects using languages that they are interested in and actually like rather than those they are forced to use at work. There's also much value to learning classic languages very different to what you're used to, which I elaborated on in another post in this thread. For all of those reasons and the ones mentioned above, I'd still much rather use a Scheme than Clojure.

[1] - http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/pyffi

[2] - http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-projects/egg-index-4.html#ca...

[3] - http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs
Someone somewhere is reacting with "We must further prevent them from selling in our state!"

Actually, probably fifty people like that. Or rather organizations.

And they'll work as hard as they can to keep this from consumers.
Don't you love the "free market until it actually creates competition for us" model?
What do you mean by the "wrong" side of history? I only see one or two reasonable arguments that can be made against Stallman -- he might be out of touch, he definitely values personal freedom over convenience... But it's a bit early to cast a value judgement saying he's on the wrong side of history.

I see him as someone who values things differently than I do, but I also could see a future 150 years down the road where people bemoan and wail, "why didn't we listen to Stallman".
Joel Test for Team Quality
I have huge respect for Stallman and I understand his argument, but he's still stuck in a 1980s mentality where everyone on a computer had to have some level of expertise with actually running software.

The fact is that many people today are incapable of even installing an application on a proprietary desktop OS, much less utilizing the freedom of software they control. 10 years ago I was building websites for people at $1000-$5000 a pop, all with open source software. They have all the benefits of free software available to them, but you know what they don't have? Anyone to maintain their software for a reasonable price. I've been directing them to SaaS providers for a long time because frankly it makes no sense to pay me 100 times as much to a software professional in order to realize this freedom.

Obviously Stallman would say that there's no inherent reason that you can't have a reasonably priced service based on free software, just like there's no reason you can't charge for shrinkwrapped free software. However the mechanics and cost savings of SaaS make this much much more difficult to conceive, and frankly I don't see how it will ever make sense for the laymen who make up the vast vast majority of computer users today.

Stallman is a gem of the computing world, and I would never say anything bad about his ideology, but the primary battle that needs to be fought today is about data ownership, not software freedom. The latter still matters, but only for the computing elites (ie. programmers, sysadmins, etc), the former is what is increasingly going to affect everyone going forward.
Because they didn't have as good dentistry as we have now.
So you're saying that The Washington Post shouldn't have reported on Watergate, with Deep Throat? If you can't trust the people providing the news, then citing sources doesn't change that fact. This is why you have collaborating sources, this is why you vet stories, and this is why you build trust with your readers. They could have linked to their source, and still not NAMED the group. Its the name that gets added to google search, not the sources.
I think the problem with that is that Excel has a few 'almost like eval' functions. For example, SumIf takes a string like "> sin(2)". You would have to translate those strings at runtime, and may have to guess at the source language (that string might be input by the user)

Even if that isn't the case, the engine cannot know whether any macro will change formulas. There, you hit the really troublesome area. VBA has a full eval (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff193019%28v=...). Even ignoring that, things can get hairy because Excel localizes numbers (is that comma a decimal point or a thousands separator?) and list separators (does one use commas or semicolons as argument separators?)

I expect there are some edge cases here that makes this problem unsolvable in practice. Some people will have code that checks whether the string representation of a cell's value contains a comma to check whether it is >= 1000 (or <= -1000.00, but relatively, that is a 'minor' bug)
He's been on the right side of history and the rest of us have been on the wrong side. I think the Snowden leaks solidify that view. After Microsoft Windows how could you disagree with him on concerns of proprietary software lock-in? And he's been spot-on as far as privacy goes: worried about the cloud long before anyone else, and concerned about cell-phone surveillance before it was hip. The mere existence of GNU licenses has done enormous good for the world, and Linux is proof. Linux didn't take off because of his ethics, so you're right in that regard, but his ethics are responsible for the things that people like about free software.

And this being hacker news, you have to admire the great hack that is the GPL.
I've heard speeches by Stallman where he mentions he has enough money that he no longer has to work, but as others have already said (1) he started working full time on GNU before he received that money (and supported himself by selling free software and prioritizing requests by people who sent him money), and (2) he doesn't live an incredibly opulent life, even factoring in the free travel.
If Tesla continues to follow this route it will have lasting implications for the automotive industry. Instead of replacing" your car every 5-10 years you can "Upgrade" keeping existing chassis but replacing enough to make it "Like New" (Refurb vs Replace) Automakers sell a completely new car just to make a few thousand dollars every 5-10 years and that's only if the customer stays loyal (Also why some car companies have loyalty incentives) in this case Tesla can still make that income and the customer is locked in as a bonus this will help to keep resale values high since there will be less cars on the market because owners upgrade instead of selling.

Now more then ever I wish I bought Tesla stock before it went through the roof.
Show HN: Do Not Merge WIP for GitHub, a Chrome Extension
I don't know that I would call it conceptually similar to Go. At least, not if we're looking at the Big Pictures concepts, where Go has concurrency as one of its major departures from C. I don't see any mention of concurrency primitives in Cello (maybe they're there and I didn't notice, but I would think the author would have put that on the front page, if it were a thing Cello tried to solve).

Go does provide collections and iterators and such, so Cello is similar on that front. But, every modern language provide those things, and Cello collections don't seem any more Go-like than they seem Python or ObjC like.

Well written C is consistently faster than well-written Go. There are some dynamic runtime elements to Cello that could potentially hurt performance but I doubt it's a major factor.

I think Rust is probably the better modern language to compare Cello to, and I suspect they'll have similar performance. ObjC would also be a reasonable thing to compare.

But, for most things, they're all Fast Enough. Performance is probably not a useful metric. The reason I could see for using this would be modernizing an existing C codebase (though I'd be cautious about relying on something like this until it has a healthy uptake among developers), or when working in environments where only C compilers and libraries are available. If I were starting a new systems project, I would start with Rust or Go (or maybe ObjC if I ever had to work on Mac/iOS).

Mostly though, I think it's just a cool experiment, and educational.
Great Quotes
This is what happens when people who haven't taken a statistics course try to do statistics.

Any competent UX researcher should know about the multiple comparisons problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem
Ah yes, I was thinking |N x N| = |N|. So is there a pairing function f: NxN -> N which can be used as compression?
> mostly restricted to pen and paper

This is almost certainly correct. Paper and fax-based processes form the backbone of government agencies, compliance-wise. They've been trying to fix this for a long time but the quality of the big, default government software contractors leaves much to be desired. Imagine the healthcare.gov debacle, except by definition outside of the public's eye and much smaller in scope.
That or they can pay foreign programmers a lot less and drive the average rate down for everyone.
Late reply, but they definitely shipped it, and it works really well: http://i.imgur.com/WsuBttk.jpg
I really, really don't like Stallman's zealotry, but you are dead wrong.
Indeed. The "Open Source" aspects of those companies are more to do with trying to diminish the value of their competitors.

It's a case of "Everything I do is valuable, but everything you do should be free."
And I can't drive places without fuel in my car. What's your point? You made a conscious decision to cripple your browsing experience, what did you expect?
Finasteride? Probably too late anyhow.
High quality wigs tend to look better than real hair. So that's an option too.
Lack of margin actually helps readability on older mobile devices. Not sure why they'd go with those colors, though.
I'm guessing they're just going to attempt a DoS of the Tor network, considering their past exploits.
> Or could close their "beta" you were depending on without notice, could lose your data, could leak it, could give unexplainable corrupt results and leave you looking like a fraud, etc.

I don't have to use SaaS to have these results. I've seen in-house efforts with the same risks. The difference, in my mind, is that with SaaS, the provider has some significant incentives to do a good job. The software is their specialty, and the developer will lose money if you stop using it because their software ends up costing you money. There's much less risk of internal company politics saddling you with a useless or dangerous system. On the contrary, I've seen "self-hosted" company projects promised in response to proposals to use SaaS, and they were usually promised to achieve some political goal rather than being a serious attempt to compete. Because it's an internal project which doesn't generate revenue, it's very easy for the company to promise something and then not deliver, as there's no money tied to it.

Having seen this multiple times, I'm much more inclined to use SaaS. Tail risks don't cost nearly as much money over the mid term as the risk of company politics derailing an otherwise laudable goal.
In my experience, the garbage reports are almost never GPGed.
The Internet Showered This Homeless Man with Over $100K
Not sure if you will see my message, but we ended up using chart.js via Qtwebkit bridge. We got rid of bunch of fluff like labels etc though (and reduced how often charts are refreshed). Even though chart.js is canvas based, its performance is not optimal if you let it run for > 40 mins or so.
We shouldn't restrict expansions to digital talent.
I am surprised by this. It would be so much more efficient to concentrate on building technology that makes working with people around the world as seamless as working with them in the same office.
I wonder if this is an argument spawned of fear (that what he says is true, that it is 100% accurate and it is that bad), or is there really something that lets you believe that he's wrong.

Maybe we didn't see enough bullshit put into proprietary programs? Not enough backdoors? Not enough DRM maybe?

This may be an unpopular opinion but it certainly is a valid one. I tend to side with it.
> ... we can achieve a predicted 40-50% improvement on range between the original Roadster and Roadster 3.0. There is a set of speeds and driving conditions where we can confidently drive the Roadster 3.0 over 400 miles.

That has been the range where I'll even begin to consider a car of that sort. I'm seriously rooting for Tesla.
If you are plugging in the colloquial meaning of the word lust, the sayings don't make a lot of sense because in the US in 2015, there are few public limits on lustful gazing.

It takes a classical understanding of lust for the classical interdiction to make sense:

https://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&ei=9aidVJHyC8O...
That's what I figured.

For an organization dedicated almost entirely to computer systems, though, you'd think it would make sense to track system misusage incidents with... a computer system. At least if you want to be efficient.
It everything to do with their business model. Joel Spolsky called it commoditizing your complement (google it).
More good ideas in this direction: Hashlife http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife
Plopr – Code on your local machine, mirror changes on all dev hosts
There exists no practical, reliable method to identify the "great" programmers from the rest (other than by employing them or working with them over a significant amount of time). Many of them interview poorly. If you could actually identify these people, you'd have a billion dollar idea.

So that implies that in order to grant entry to the "great" programmers, the door needs to be wide open to everyone. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it doesn't appear to be addressed by PG.
"American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US."

Clarification: can't find enough American programmers willing to work for low foreign wages.
> The only explanation is that they're telling the truth: there are just not enough great programmers to go around.

Hardly the only explanation.

First, the "career fakers" are unlikely to be seeking international relocation, which means that imperfect interviewing/hiring systems don't exhibit their latent flaws as much.

Second, "post-purchase rationalization" becomes a factor: "I went through this effort in the past, it must have been worth bit."

Third, how much more time is spent vetting a single international hire, versus the same attention to a local candidate? If the outcome is better, how much of that is due to a deeper engagement by the company?
All the technology in the world won't prevent the person on the other side of the world from being asleep when I need to talk to them.
Curious - Is calling a building toy a "game" a regional dialect thing, like soda vs pop? I have never heard of Legos, K'nex, Tinkertoys, etc. referred to as "games" before.
Wow, what a lot of hate for RMS in this thread. All I know for sure is that I wouldn't be writing this on the machine I'm using here without him, and a ton of hardware in this house would spontaneously stop working if every line of code he had an (indirect) hand in or influence on disappeared. I'm pretty grateful for that.

Of course you could say the same about Edison or Maxwell, but that's roughly the right magnitude. Hating on Stallman as a person is not very elegant, hating him for the wrong reasons (at a glance, I spot: jealousy, misunderstanding, claims of irrelevancy and so on) is not productive either.

If you're going to criticize criticize the particulars of the linked article rather than the man. Thanks.

On topic: In case you didn't get it: the article (rightly) identifies software-as-a-service as a threat to open source, it allows companies that in the past would have shipped binaries and would have been compelled by the GPL to release their sources to do an end-run around all this so they can charge you for their software without ever having to release anything. That's a valid point and plenty of examples exist in the world today.

How serious this is is not for me to say but I do note an ever increasing trend towards lock-in and a more asymmetric internet which seems to draw a line between the 'haves' (the owners of infrastructure and services) and the 'have nots' (the users, smaller businesses). Ever larger chunks of a business operation are running on hardware and software even the business owners have no control over, stuff they couldn't keep alive even if their business depended on it. This sort of inter-dependency is exactly what we should be trying to avoid because it means that you are simply no longer in control, either because you don't have access to all the code that powers your business or because your code is only a minor extension to a bunch of black box code that you can not review or inspect on a machine that might be running all kinds of nefarious stuff besides what you think it is doing and that might come back to bite you one day.
It would, if it would work. 90% of the technology is already there, in the form of email, videoconferencing, shared docs, DVCS, etc. The problem is that the remaining 10% will probably mean the difference between the success or failure of your organization, and so until somebody can make brilliant chance creative ideas happen between people on different continents as easily as they happen over dinner, people will still have to colocate.