skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"PG's advice to Charlie about focusing on an idea they're passionate about, and an idea that they could see themselves working on for the next 5 years is sound."

Except for one thing. Passion about something is not something that you wake up in the morning, think about a bit, and then go pursue it.

You won't find a single story in legacy business history of someone who started a wildly successful business because they woke up one morning and thought "I want to start a business". It happened the other way they were going about their business and noticed a need or had an inspiration or idea and then decided to pursue making it a business. Only exception is now in the current day and age we have so many people doing so many things with ease of entry some people are able to pull this off it seems.

In the case of YC or other incubators we now have people who are attempting to just "come up with an idea and fill a need" and while some are succeeding it's not the way businesses have started ever before. Generally. And the process of finding something takes time as well and there is much serendipity involved (and that doesn't operate according to a schedule either).

Now it is possible to "think up" a business but that process can take years. In the case of my first business I had the inspiration one day while in college, pursued it out of college and then thought of a better idea which is the one I actually did. The process took time and there was no particular deadline. That idea worked and I sold the company (9 years later).

The 2nd business on the other hand took me 4 years or 5 years to come up with an appropriate "inspiration" as I investigated various possibilities (flying around to trade shows). There was no deadline that I was working under ("demo day"). Just whenever I found something I would do it. And I finally did and it worked out as well.

My point is, I don't think you can say to someone "focus on an idea you are passionate about" and they go off and "think" and come back with "yeah we want to do X we are passionate about it".
Yes, how he viewed the society and what he absorbed while he was going through it in all these years, the experiences he had and how it affected his thinking/reasoning - a conversation with him about these would be a rare privilege. :)
I use "FileBox" for some things, but I'm taking the developer's word that it is secure.
True, I actually was thinking about a Cartesian Closed Category (as explained in https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hask )
> She doesn't want to fork gcc.

Yes, I got that. I'm saying that she should if she feels the issue is that important (assuming she has the skills to pull off the fork).

> She's saying that if people wanted to use gcc in this way so badly, they would fork.

Conclusion: they don't.

> But nobody is interested in doing that, because it's easier to work with clang rather than try to fight with gcc.

That's most likely not a majority of the users but if clang serves their need that does not diminish GCC in any way other than that a couple of users moved to a different product. Big deal. GCC does not charge any price of admission, you are free to use it and you're free not to. If you're not driving the car you don't get to shout from the sidelines on what direction to take.

> And the argument is that gcc is worse off for having driven those users away.

GCC (and by extension Stallmann) are not driving anybody away. If you feel 'driven away' because someone does not act as you think they should then you have an entitlement problem.
Feel free to use the asm! macro in rust when you need to. FFI support is also quite good.
Most modern routers do sflow collection in hardware. There's no CPU or memory overhead for having it on.
> The GPL always seemed like fighting fire with fire.

That's exactly what it is. You have to really appreciate the care that went into drafting that, if there ever was a real-world hack the GPL would be it.
Thanks, I could not agree with you more. Last year I released something under the GPL, and when a few potential users complained I wimped out and switched licenses. I think that I made a mistake doing that. I am working on something else interesting and I plan on sticking with the GPL, even though my project is for Pharo Smalltalk and I think GPL use for Smalltalk projects is rare.

I think that in the distant future we will see very old, very well tested software that changes only slowly. I would like to see that software using GPL or AGPL.
Perhaps the drug made him a more prolific plagiarist.
His position doesn't make any sense, though. It only made sense as long as LLVM didn't exist, but now that it does, it only hurts GCC. Anybody who wants to incorporate Clang or LLVM into a proprietary project already can, so absolutely nothing is gained by crippling GCC to make it less useful to those people.

All this is covered in the letter, in fact. If his principles lead him to completely ignore the real world impact of his decisions, his principles are not good ones, and not something to be admired.
Ask HN: Is Excel a dataflow programming tool?
This was really really fun! :D
True for many things. But there are still plenty of things that we still want to do faster or cheaper or that we want to feed more data to, and we also still find plenty of new things to do as computers get more powerful.
But if you put the ball on half-way on the surface, it seems the water waves don't bounce on it. Or is it me ?
Prolog Programming Language (1997)
Do you need hackers for hire? Do you need to keep an eye on your spouse by gaining access to their emails? As a parent do you want to know what your kids do on a daily basis on social networks ( This includes facebook, twitter , instagram, whatsapp, WeChat and others to make sure they're not getting into trouble? Whatever it is, Ranging from Bank Jobs, Flipping cash, Criminal records, DMV, Taxes, Name it, We can get the job done. We're a group of professional hackers with 25 Years+ experience. Contact at hacksville147@gmail.com ..or text +1 (502) 383-3106.. Send an email and Its done. Its that easy, try us out today.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- Hanlon's Razor -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

It is not that his doing didn't turn out to be intelligent, but his intent almost certainly wasn't.
> diverse, eclectic, and elite

Ugh.
So the surface of the water is a real time displacement map?
We changed how we handle incoming mail (some of it was unwittingly ending up in a bit bucket) could you try again? I intend that everyone get a response. Sorry!
I should have added, "By the standard of SV-focused tech sites."
without the zealots the pograms of distributed piss taking will find you
Hmm... I liked The Martian a lot, but hated The Europa Report. They don't really seem comparable: The Europa Report has silly martians and little hard science... it's more like "Blair Witch Project in Space" IMHO.
Yes, you're right, that's the other one but as long as home connections are consumption centric that will likely remain. It's been that way since time immemorial, 300/75 was my first modem, the only time that I had symmetrical up/down was in the ISDN period.
Library of commonly used snippets for Jekyll sites
Objective-c, despite having compilers on other platforms, 99% of the time is used for programs running on an apple platform. It just hasn't made it into other universes, despite itself having many nice qualities (especially over c++ imho). Swift is Apple upgrading their own environment, which as an iOS dev is welcome.

I'm not sure the cross-platform framework problem is one that helps them or makes much money compared to what is status quo. But at least their proprietary world got better for those of us who write for it.
My work [1] addresses glitches head on (hence the system is called "Glitch") by tolerating glitches and at least making the extra work functionally benign (via logging and rollback, like a transaction). Glitch is not based on data flow, however, but somewhere in between even if still very reactive.

I've built a few data flow systems in the past (my dissertation work [2] was based on one), but I decided to tolerate rather than avoid glitches early on because I found that way to be more resilient. Flapjax [3] avoids glitching via a topological sort, which I rather see as an optimization (to reduce unnecessary work) rather than as a correctness issue.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2265...

[2] http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/179366/mcdirmid06superglu...

[3] http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mgbcgb...
RMS is unwavering.

He is an ethical fixed point combinator if you will, the fixed point combinator of FOSS. Like a lighthouse on a rocky shore he'll perpetually shine his light to keep you away from the rocks of proprietary software.

I'm not even sure how much of this is tongue in cheek.
I presume you've seen https://zinc.rs/?

"Zinc is an experimental attempt to write an ARM stack that would be similar to CMSIS or mbed in capabilities but would show rust’s best safety features applied to embedded development."
It's true that most people seek family and stability. However, there is more to human existence than that. There are people who lead very eccentric life styles that express passions for other pursuits. For some reason scientists do seem more prone to eccentricities than most. Examples abound in biographies of great scientists and engineers like Galois, Tesla, Whitehead, Heaviside, Erdős...
Here is an older thread about the story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095
What's the point in making 1.0 if it's not forwards compatible? There were some very serious issues with the language, that if not addressed, would require rewriting code when they were fixed. Adding them in 2.0 would probably doom it.

It's not like 1.0 represents all the features they want though, there are many language and library features that are planned for the future.
What happens when a brogrammer writes a self-improvement blog. I like the style.
Copyleft is a collectivist ideology, it only ever cares about users as an anonymous mass, but not about individuals with individual needs and constraints.
If the GPL is at a close it is because enough critical infrastructure is, for historical reasons, based on BSD.

I think GPL is more important today than it ever has been. Core infra software should all be GPLv3.

GPL is one of the most clearly logical apolitical instruments of change that has ever existed.
Everything humans do is "playing with nature". Technology only gives us new ways to "play".
Windows and OSX support, although it seems that if you don't compile the Windows version yourself, you're limited to 2000 packets[1] or to pay[2].

[1] http://www.ntop.org/get-started/download/
[2] http://www.nmon.net/shop/cart.php
egcs was big enough of a threat that it became the official gcc codebase.
>out of fear of a closed-source boogyman which doesn't exist any more, thanks to clang (if it ever did).

Eh, what ? Apple is already shipping their proprietary fork of Clang which supports their proprietary language Swift, this is exactly what Free Software which Stallman advocates is working against.

The whole idea of Free Software is that the end user will have the full rights to examine, modify, copy, run said software, proprietary plugins in GCC flies right in the face of that, so obviously Stallman is opposed to them.
Io has a special place in my heart. I've used it in my final project to get my bachelor's degree.

I made a web framework inspired in Rails (hey don't judge, it was 2009 and i was young). The framework itself barely worked and had some nasty memory leaks, but that doesn't matter because the real important thing was that now I understand how most web frameworks work, I'm not intimidated to use a new one and when there is some problem/bug i kind of have a sixth sense of what is really happening.

Another important life experience lesson was learning the pros and cons of "dynamic typed languages", so when I see yet another war of "dynamic vs static" I just walk way as fast as I can, time is limited and it always ends in some kind of intellectual masturbation.

Obviously it doesn't have many libraries, the implementation is wonky (try instantiate a file with 80+GB), it's "slow" and that's another life lesson: developing, maintaining and growing a language and platform to a level where anyone can use it to solve whatever problem that have costs A LOT of money/time/resources.

Anyway, the language is not perfect but its brilliant, so thank you Steve Dekorte.
Angular drives me nuts on a regular basis but I feel like I learned a great deal about developing Javascript applications from it and its community.

I remember someone complaining in AngularJS forums that the documentation reads a lot like a CS dissertation paper. Not sure how many others feel this way but I appreciate the extra context. Or maybe I'm just a masochist.
Which? Computing – Magazines – Which? Publications
That twisted lock picture can only be done if the bike is improperly locked or the thief was willing to destroy part of the bike while stealing it. (Or it was an unusually talented thief.)

If you have your frame, at least one wheel and a secure post (preferably 3" thick) going through your lock leverage attacks become very difficult.
Can't wait to see some more crazy stuff done in WebGL! Working fine on my MBA 2014, but I think it's the first time I heard the fan spinning :)!
I think he meant 'violations' not violence
Agreed completely and having met the man, can confirm that every cause needs an extremist and he is better at it than any one i can imagine. At some point in your life you have to decide to refuse compromise.

I was sat beside the venerable and lovely Bruce Perens at a conference at which RMS was talking and we had this chat. Bruce is too pragmatic to hold people to account.

People who know politics will tell you the same for being dragged to the middle by opposing parties.
I'm not sure you know the whole history of this piece.

This is ecologically a case of Stallmann driving people away. Over the last 10 years I have seen numerous patch sets to make GCC dump out usegiul ASTs, and they have been rejected by stallman for purely political reasons.

Stallman is perfectly within his rights to tell people he doesn't want this (in my opinion) very useful functionality in the FSF GCC, and to purposefully make it hard for people to maintain forks where they do as this functionality (which he has admitted to on multiple occasions), but he is certainly driving users and developers away.
The part about staring into someone's eyes is pretty well known. I remember hearing about it in the context of something that cults do to try to build a false sense of intimacy. IIRC, there's something about staring into someone's eyes, particularly at a distance of a foot or less, that we subconsciously associate with those closest to us which causes us to suspend our defense mechanisms.
Interesting. Do you know of any work that computes a data flow graph as the program runs (i.e. data flow is implicit in the source code), which performs then reactively?
> I think it's a shame it's not under the GPL.

If Clang is under a permissive non-copyleft license, can't you just fork/relicense it under the GPL? And then build improvements on the GPL version? It's not very nice or sporting, but counterintuitively, it would help demonstrate why copyleft is important.
I don't see any change in the licensing landscape at all, permissive licensing remains king for libraries, frameworks, while copyleft remains king for 'full end product' style projects.

Some people seem to take the upswing of web oriented frameworks as a sign of permissive licensing being favored across the entire OSS ecosystem, but it's simply in an area where permissive licensing was already entrenched (again frameworks, libraries) that has seen a lot of recent developer activity.
If you do it in the middle, you get some really nice patterns
Doing this in a browser is a neat trick, but the actual state-of-the-art in realtime GPU fluids is slightly more impressive. nVidias FleX middleware is a good example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o0Nuq71gI4
The other reply says as much, but it bears repeating as what you said is so extremely incorrect. The GPL is and always has been a license that limits the rights of programmers in order to ensure the rights of users.

This is one of those, frankly, pretty rare cases where the users actually feel a limitation of the GPL (mostly because people that use Emacs has a significant overlap with programmers where the line between developer and end user is very blurry).
I've always enjoyed Moxie's blog posts. This one is probably my favorite.

AEAD, EtM, or bust.
Maybe I'm dense but I don't get the 'driving away' bit. Not doing something is the right of any creator. Stallman is the guy that first of all wrote the software and made it possible to fork. So if the functionality is really that much in demand get it over with and fork it so you can correct all these perceived slights and the world will be a better place for it.

But don't try to pressure the man into doing something he clearly does not want, whatever his reasons, that's akin to complaining the gift you got wasn't quite what you wanted.
Not really related. FRP has as much in common with dataflow programming as generic functional programming does. Related incidentally in that both refuse side effects, but one is based on function application while the other is based on data flow connections.

I'm not really familiar with how flow-based programming differs from data flow programming, however.
Brewie: the Internet of things comes to beer brewing
Modafinil has actually been shown to have negative effects in high performers. It is a wakefulness agent that promotes alertness and not necessary memory formation. For the ladies out there regarding modafinil, provigil, and adrafinil (an upstream analogue that requires no prescription in the us) watch out as it can interfere with birth control.

I think what most healthy individuals looking into substances like this actually want, are nootropics. I want to draw a line here between cognitive enhancers and nootropics though. All nootropics are cognitive enhancers, but not all cognitive enhancers are nootropics. Nootropics have to enhance learning and memory, while being extremely safe and actually neuroprotective (from the disruption of memory formation from chemical and physical damage). Nootropics are generally safe and beneficial for everyday use and with the racetams, Rhett actually have a better effect overtime.
egcs was free software working exactly as it should, you don't like the current direction, fork it, and thanks to it being copyleft the fork is entirely open and can later be merged back or as in this case, become the new official project.
I wonder how many shipments of dosimeter badges arrived 'like new'.

(I kid)
There's been a long-running effort by the copyright lobby to muzzle Chilling Effects. Participants in that effort include Sony, Disney, NBCUniversal, Viacom, BSA, Universal Music, the Entertainment Software Association, and two of my previous employers (before I left to found http://recent.io/), CBS and TimeWarner. They're all members of the Copyright Alliance, which has previously had this to say about Chilling Effects:

The activities of chillingeffects.org are repugnant to the purposes of Section 512. Data collected by high-volume recipients of DMCA notices such as Google, and senders of DMCA notices such as trade associations representing the film and music industries demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of DMCA notices sent are legitimate, yet the site unfairly maligns artists and creators using the legal process created by Section 512 as proponents of censorship. Moreover, by publishing the personal contact information of the creators sending notices (a practice which Chilling Effects only recently discontinued), it subjects creators to harassment and personal attacks for seeking to exercise their legal rights. Finally, because the site does not redact information about the infringing URLs identified in the notices, it has effectively become the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet. (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140317/11355726599/copyr...)

It would be interesting to know how much influence the copyright lobby has had on Chilling Effects' decision to self-censor.

For now, though, if Chilling Effects has chosen to remove itself from search engines, then presumably some enterprising soul might want to mirror the takedown notices posted on that site. That would continue to shed light on abuses of copyright, such as the demands recently made to get Github pages yanked from search engines.

Note it's often copyright lobby lawyers sending these takedown nastygrams, and those lawyers could claim their letters are copyrighted (and, I suppose, even try to get search engines to de-index the mirror site). While they have been unwilling to sue Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford law schools, they may be more likely to sue an individual running a mirror site, even if that lawsuit were spurious.

So if such a mirror site were to be created, it might make sense for it to be hosted overseas where the local law permits and operated by someone living overseas. The domain chilledeffects.org is available...
Ya, that is exactly how Glitch works, except I just call the data flow graph as a dependency graph :).

Computing the dependency graph dynamically obviously leads to a lot more flexibility. I'm not really sure what you mean by "reactively" here: if you mean does it reactively update computations as state (and even code, if you want to get Bret Victor about it) changes, then ya.

Data flow by itself isn't necessarily reactive; actually the way it was originally defined to work very lazy push things through. Continuous interpretations where changes were propagated non-lazily didn't come until much later.
Oxytocin: Two New Reasons for Skepticism
Hackers: DO write crypto code, DON'T use it in production
> Last year I released something under the GPL, and when a few potential users complained I wimped out and switched licenses. I think that I made a mistake doing that.

If it's your own code, you can change licenses back (say, for the next version) if you want to.
> IIRC GNU was originally developed on Sun boxes

Actually it was an unused small Vax (730?) running BSD. It was unused because it was in the AI lab, where we all used lispms or the PDP-10s upstairs (don't get me wrong -- some of the non-AI folks in computer science used unix).

I don't even remember why that machine was there in the first place -- it seemed so peculiar to have a machine like that in the first place. 8-bit bytes and the small, 32-bit word didn't feel like the future at the time (hah!). It was stuck in a small machine room.
> Especially on mobile devices where the layout must change to fit the device and a fixed 800px is totally unacceptable.

Why? Why should "the layout ... fit the device" --
I'm not trying to fill the user's screen;
I don't want to fill the user's screen.

The smallest iPhone screen size I see
is 320 × 480 pixels. With the horizontal
scroll bars, the 320 pixels would be usable,
and if the Web browser would permit using
the 480 pixels for the 800 pixel width of my pages,
then that would be even better. Some of the
other iPhone resolutions are 750 × 1334,
1242 × 2208, and 1080 × 1920 pixels, and there my
pages 800 pixels wide should look nearly perfect.

What's the problem? I'm not seeing a problem?

I'm trying to learn. Where am I going wrong?
What am I not seeing?
Save your software, plant a tree