skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having written in both Go and Rust, I can see the arguments. Go has a relatively simple, easy to use type system. The problem is that whenever you need to do anything generic, you have to use Go's "any" type, "interface{}", and the reflection system. This results in doing stuff over and over at run time that could have been done once, preferably at compile time. For much web back-end stuff, though, you don't need a really fancy type system with generics. Mostly you're pushing strings around, which Go does quite well.

Rust's type system has most of the bells and whistles of C++, plus some new ones. It's clever, well thought out, sound, and bulky. Rust has very powerful compile-time programming; there's a regular expression compiler that runs at compile time. I'm concerned that Rust is starting out at the cruft level it took C++ 20 years to achieve. I shudder to think of what things will be like once the Boost crowd discovers Rust.

The lack of exception handing in Rust forces program design into a form where many functions return "Result" or "Some", which are generic enumeration/variant record types. These must be instantiated with the actual return type. As a result, a rather high percentage of functions in Rust seem to involve generics. There are some rather tortured functional programming forms used to handle errors, such as ".and_then(lambda)". Doing N things in succession, each of which can generate an error, is either verbose (match statement) or obscure ("and_then()"). You get to pick. Or you can just use ".unwrap()", which extracts the value from a Some form and makes a failure fatal. It's tempting to over-use that.

The lack of exception handling in Go yields too many "goto" statements. There's also a tendency to turn the panic/recover mechanism into an exception system. This has roughly the problems of C's" longjmp".

As a practical matter, Go now has most of the libraries you need for server-side programs. (Not GUI programs, though.) Rust has only very basic libraries, and they're not stable yet. The language hasn't quite settled down. People are writing and porting libraries at a good pace, and this problem will be solved.
An editor’s farewell: The case for liberal optimism
I've been down on "cross platform native apps" because they're always the lowest common denominator of the language and platform, but this looks intriguing.
The Chait article should be required reading.
If you're going to use something with JS's syntax, at least take Typescript or Flow for some compile time checks (optional types, function arity, variable names, &c).
Spacewar on an emulated PDP-1
Online Marketplaces
The easiest explanation of what happened was Microsoft were a software company who had all of their eggs in one basket relying upon third parties to use their operating system and consumers/enterprise to use their products like Microsoft Office. Whereas Apple started out as both a hardware and software company, first computers and then portable music players (iPod), watches (iWatch) and phones (iPhone).

This is where Microsoft went wrong. They focused on providing the software and let vendors like HP, etc use it on their machines. Apple was smart in seeing that there are advantages to controlling both the software and hardware (the iPhone is a perfect example of this). By the time Microsoft realised they should have been producing hardware that used their software, Apple had already overtaken it in the great tech race. Apple had the hardware and were providing the software thus locking out any competitors from their platform. Not to mention, they were focusing on the design aspect of the devices themselves which others were not.

I think Microsoft have started clawing back. HoloLens looks like a seriously great product, I think the amount of time and effort they have been putting into hardware and infrastructure will undoubtedly catapult them back to the top. Not to mention Microsoft have cleverly changed their strategy to favour open source (something nobody would have predicted 7 years ago). The Xbox division also does pretty damn well too.

The question is: can Apple sustain their current success? It seems the iPhone is their meal ticket, if the iPhone eventually fizzles out, where will that leave Apple?
For a while, Microsoft was flat-out giving developers $100 for every app they published:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4124548/microsoft-paying-d...
Guacamole: distributed genomics with Scala and Spark
If they can pull off what they're saying they can, this will be mind blowing. Pretty interested in seeing what the server code for this looks like.
The big one is probably LiveScript. I feel like it removes some of CoffeeScripts rough edges (the big one is the scoping rules; in LiveScript you have to use := to modify a variable in in outer scope).
Sublime Text + GoSublime was my first try but then I kept getting //GsDoc: no docs found. At that time, my solution was using Sublime Text + GoSublime + Godef. I still could not find a good debugging tool though.

Godef:
https://github.com/buaazp/Godef

Others also have this issue with GoSublime
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21832288/gosublime-go-to-...
This is easy to beat: just go to the source. If there's a howling white man going on about injustice and how he's going to tell you about the struggles of women of color, First Nations and Imperialism.. ignore that person. Go talk to a (well.. several, actually) woman of color, member of a First Nation or a nation ravaged by European and/or American imperialism.

"But what can I do as a white man/white women/generally privileged person?" - Amplify. Your voice unjustly carries more weight than that of other people. If you can be the "Retweeters" of Social Justice, you'll be doing a lot of good. Just be sure to retweet the people with firsthand knowledge.
An article about how and why Apple overtook Microsoft would be interesting but this was not it.
As a math major who went to grad school in CS theory, I find the article's title vexing. It projects a faux dichotomy of computer scientists v. mathematicians when, in reality, it's mathematicians v. mathematicians.

Many areas of computer science, at least the areas in which Leslie Lamport is best known, is a strongly mathematical discipline inspired by models of computing. Dr. Lamport probably considers himself as a "computer scientist", but I bet it is really far from what many laypeople (even the HN crowd) imagine to be computer scientists.

Another issue is, mathematicians have as much to do with mathematical pedagogy in secondary education as computer scientists have to do with science experiments in high school. Again, the title is really misleading in this regard.

Anyway, I am glad that a great mind like Leslie Lamport and David Mumford (definitely a mathematician) are thinking hard about how to make math education better.
The author spends a lot of time decrying Chait, his article, and his views, but seems to end up in a pretty similar place.

Other than the fact that deBoer has scrupulously chosen to only call out white authors, this article seems to "scold" its subjects for their tactics just the same as Chait's did. What's the basis for the great distinction between the two that's the basis for the first and last paragraphs? That Chait is a "centrist Democrat" instead of "more left wing"?
Semicolons are already optional in JS. Automatic semi colon insertion (ASI) has a clear set of rules that are pretty easy to remember.

http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/to-semicolon-or-not
Yeah,

deBoer's post speaks to a culture of not knowing the right language, of general intemperance and how poor and working class actually wind-up more likely to be victims of it because they are less likely to know the game even if the game itself is intended to protect them.
I think in some ways Microsoft lost its dominance by focusing on the wrong competition. Microsoft Bing is a great example of Microsoft trying to become a company it wasn't. (i.e. Google)

In my perspective, Apple dialed in it's focus, avoided the same pitfalls, and came out a dominant player in a market not many were focused to innovate on. (i.e. smartphones).
...Okay. Maybe you could submit that story and post a comment to it, instead of hijacking this story's comments?
Is there anything like flow for Coffeescript?
it solves a lot of the problems that CoffeeScript is trying to solve without drastic syntax changes.

I cannot speak to authorial intent, but for me the majority of the problems CoffeeScript(and moreso LiveScript) solves are syntax ones.
Vivek Wadhwa is taking a lot of heat for exposing the way that one plays: women get a lot of positive attention and small investments, but the ones who get made into players are men. (Their goal, with regard to women, is something more direct than vicarious living.)
I think this is the referenced Chait article: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-t...
Supreme Court Orders Google, Yahoo, Microsoft to block sex determination test ad
Do remember that Microsoft became a breakout success thanks to IBM losing control of the IBM PC, upon which DOS ran.

The origin of Microsoft (rampant clones, many hardware vendors) is literally the opposite of the origin of Apple's recent successes (vertically integrated, does their own hardware).

Microsoft's original strength was its weakness this time around.
I had a P1 133 but no 3D card and GrimFan was one of three popular games til 2001 that didn't run on that hardware (beside Quake 3, Outcast).
<snark>
had to be hundreds of thousands because you didn't come out of the gates with a decent design and you had to wing it for the last 6 years
</snark>

;)
I spent about ten years being an "ally" to feminism, to the LGBT community, to minorities, etc.

And then my views drifted ever so slightly from the tried and true party lines. One day I said I thought it was wrong that Brandon Eich was forced out of Mozilla, I said I thought it was wrong the way he was treated. Immediately the decade spent arguing for gay rights and marriage equality disappeared and I became a bigot, the enemy.

One day I said it seemed clear that there is in fact a biological aspect to gender. The decade spent arguing for feminist politics disappeared, and I became a sexist. Just like that.

I've lost friends, old friends over these things. My politics are still left of center but I've learned not to open my mouth around the social justice set because to them I'm a sexist/bigot/racist/etc. It's amazing just how small a step out of line you have to take before the group tries to collectively shame you into seeing the light. It's amazing that shame has become a central tool for trying to create positive social change.
It's monthly earnings so I doubt it's $914,132 and more likely just a formatting error.
For your anthropological edification:

I have watched in excess of 100 hours of League of Legends, a game I've played for substantially longer than that. It's an easy, no brainer thing that one can do on an iPhone to relax after a hard day in the coding salt mines, and (unlike the game itself) doesn't require your undivided attention for 40 minutes.

As to what I get out of it: I don't know, similar to what people watching other people play basketball get out of that.
Nothing in that thread is anything but opinion.

As for the money not showing up anywhere, its quite clear that the French secret services are involved in covering up the transactions - this is one of their key tasks, after all.
Another one lost to the wrong detail... God I suck at mouth.

>AI will have a lot of limitations like these, so I think that "as efficiently as possible" is not going to be so efficient in the end.

You think. AI won't care what you think. Efficiency equals greater chance for survival. As with bacteria, we can break this down to a binary sequence: try to live/die. The difference between bacteria and AI is that AI has language -- a way to describe what to avoid that jeopardizes survivability. In addition, this advantage is exponential.

I play with code in my day to day. Some might call it "software". Really what it is is a decision tree. Any piece of software you have ever come into contact with -- ever -- is just that: do this? Yes or no. Is it that? Yes or no. To suggest that a machine couldn't decide "yes or no" a million to one faster than we can is insane. So, given our previous hypothesis that more information means more power, how can we possibly win?
If you look at something like a mutual fund, they will say something like X% performance over X years. BUT what they also do is remove poorly performing positions from their portfolio.

As they are not part of the portfolio they can avoid reporting on the performance, so you don't necessarily get to see the full picture of how their decisions affect their investors.
Funny, that's the exact advice I would give to #GamerGate.
Really? I have been under the assumption for many years the the commodities markets are thoroughly rigged. See for example (among many others) the Goldman aluminum warehousing case [0-1].

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-alum...
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/20/investing/goldman-commodity-...
etc...
They had to block native code on WP7.x because they were on the CE kernel, knew they were going to move to the NT kernel in WP8, and native apps wouldn't have ported over.
The problem for Microsoft isn't that they didn't see mobile coming and Apple did like as article suggests. The problem for Microsoft is that their previous strategy of ruthlessly copying Apple's innovations and taking the market for themselves with a highly profitable licensing model was coopted by Google doing the same thing except Google gave it away. If you're looking for the old MS it's alive and well at Google, Samsung and Xiaomi.
Thing is, when you feel bullied, why is that? Is it because people are trying to tackle issues that benefit you? Trying to get you to not be certain way simply for the sake/respect of others that are not like you? Is it because theyre being unnecesarily rude?

I can comprehend how someone being rude leaves a bad taste, but it seems to me like most of the time bully is anyone who doesnt agree with you.
Even for monad transformers it's not necessarily the case that direct composition leads to a monad. For instance, ContT looks like

newtype ContT r m a = ContT ((a -> m r) -> m r)

so ContT M A is not the same as Cont (M A).

Monads also compose under products as two parallel monadic computations

data (f * g) a = Pair (f a) (g a)

p1 :: (f * g) a -> f a
p1 (Pair fa _) = fa

p2 :: (f * g) a -> g a
p2 (Pair _ ga) = ga

instance (Monad f, Monad g) => Monad (f * g) where
return a = Pair (return a) (return a)
Pair fa ga >>= k = Pair (fa >>= p1 . k) (ga >>= p2 . k)

You can also talk about composition under sums

data (f + g) a = Inl (f a) | Inr (g a)

and you'll get compositions of applicatives here so long as you have a notion of natural transformation

class Natural f g where
phi :: f a -> g a

instance (Applicative f, Applicative g, Natural f g) => Applicative (f + g) where
pure a = Inl (pure a)
Inl ff <*> Inl fa = Inl ( ff <*> fa)
Inr gf <*> Inr ga = Inr ( gf <*> ga)
Inl ff <*> Inr ga = Inr (phi ff <*> ga)
Inr gf <*> Inl fa = Inr ( gf <*> phi fa)

but there's no way to get a similar monad. It turns out that you have to "know what branch to go down before you start" in exactly the kind of way applicatives allow and monad preclude.
So, is there an argument for monogamy that doesn't boil down to property rights?
Photoshop like tools or alternatives
The author needs to be seen to hate Chait in order to be taken seriously by the intended audience.
Correct. It just comes with upscaled background pictures and remastered video files.

The steering on PC with no mouse support is as bad as ever. All adventure games used the mouse as input method, GrimFan tried to change that and failed - dumb decision for a otherwise very good game. The 2D backgrounds are in 4:3 as in the original (only the figures are in 3D).

One can play the original GrimFan on Win7 64bit with no issues.
Do you have any point worth making? You support the worldwide surveillance state. Everyone gets it.
I don't think it's an accident that all three of his examples involve college students. I saw plenty of examples of this type of aggressive ideological policing in various political groups I was involved in when I was college. I have seen exactly zero in nearly twenty years of being involved with and working in left-wing politics after graduation.

(Which isn't to say it never happens, I'm sure it does, just that it's not the epidemic it would appear to be if you look solely at politics as she is practiced on campus.)

There's an old saying to the effect that campus politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. When you get out in the real world and realize politics requires more than making statements -- that it requires building movements, and you need lots of people in order to build movements that make a difference -- you learn fast to either live with people who are mostly on your side, even if they disagree with you here and there, or you content yourself with writing blog manifestos.
I think you're not giving MS enough credit. The pieces of the story that are missing are IBM and Intel. IBM was the only firm in the world at the time that were able to integrate a working computer. To do so at a price that was appropriate for the home, IBM had to outsource large pieces of the project, both the CPU and OS.

MS and Intel were brilliant to allow substitutes for the early IBM computers to rise to market by working with multiple customers. The first firm to fully copy IBMs system (allowing software purposed for the IBM computers to run on other machines) was Compaq. Henceforth, MS and Intel were able to commoditize the PC and extract tons of value from their portions of the value chain.

MS, Intel, and Compaq were key in effectively capturing about 1/3rd of IBMs value in a short time span. The factors that led to their success can probably then be assessed in the context of Apple et al.
The Rent Board's report notes that evictions for non-payment aren't required to be reported to them. So that's a floor, not a cap, on the actual number of non-payment evictions.

You can't sweep all 607 "breach of agreement" evictions away as "pretexts" – those can involve serious issues too, and it's a large category even in years like 2002-2004 when rents were declining. (That suggests it's not just a catch-all for wanting-richer-tenants.) There's also 349 "committing a nuisance" and 42 "illegal use" evictions. Some tenants are truly problematic!
Like it does for a lot of things, I think feminism has its own lingo for this very problem, and it's called the lack of "101 spaces" -- as in spaces where you're learning "Feminism 101", or "Anti-racism 101", or whatever, spaces where the sort of basic questions that would be inappropriate in a graduate-level class are welcome and expected.

A lot of activists are trying to effect some actual social change. That requires not staying on the basics forever, just as if you're writing papers on operating system design, you won't be spending much time explaining what pointers are. Even in a classroom, a graduate-level class on operating systems isn't a place where you'll be taken seriously if you complain that pointers are needlessly confusing. But it would be a mistake to conclude that coherently explaining pointers isn't important, just because nobody working on OS design seems to do it, or that the student wasn't earnest in finding pointers needlessly confusing. In fact it is absolutely fundamental that pointers are taught well and students be taken seriously when they express confusion -- but it is precisely because it is fundamental that it needs to be in a separate place.

I have seen two good forms of "101 spaces", though. One is quietly listening in upperclassman spaces, the Internet's venerable rule to "lurk moar". You won't understand everything at once; you certainly won't pick up the lingo, and you probably won't understand several of the conclusions. But in an era with internet search, you can slowly work on figuring out what people have found out, just as it's possible to catch up to the state of research by just reading papers and trying to figure out what they mean.

The other is friends, people who have been through the 101 class but also personally know you're acting in good faith. If you say something that's innocently wrong to them, they'll know it's innocently wrong, and not malicious, badgering a tired point, concern trolling, etc. In turn, of course, listen to what they have to say.

But besides those, there's certainly a lack, and for various reasons, a lot of people may not find internet-lurking their style of learning, or may not have sufficiently knowledgeable friends to go bother. It would be a good thing for the world to see more. But unfortunately, the responsibility to create them cannot be on the shoulders of the activists. If you think teaching at a research university is ever half-hearted, imagine what it would be like if the researchers weren't paid to teach, weren't expected to teach at all, and were, often, trying to fit in research in their spare time after another full-time job.
Well MS lost mobile because quite frankly they didn't control the hardware, and for a time it seemed OK to simply provide software for them, but they couldn't push a specific idea out the door until it was too late. They were happy to provide an OS that did phone calls, text messages, emails and a few other small things.

They didn't quite see the big picture, it's not that they didn't see it coming (they were already in it), they just didn't think you could do so many things so well and that people would want to do it.
I think the short of it is that deBoer believes he has a valid point, but believes that there's is a likelihood that his intended audience will just ignore him. He's trying to insulate himself from that outcome by several tactics: The elaborate denunciation of Chait, the careful choosing of targets, the stressing of his credentials and history.

If deBoer could be honest, he'd probably say "WTF is wrong with you? Chait was correct, and excommunicating him for saying correct-but-uncomfortable things is fundamentally unhelpful and illiberal". But he can't say that, because the same process will excommunicate him too, so we get this instead. Not that it'll help; for some of the more extreme types, it's probably enough that Chait quoted deBoer approvingly in his article.

(You'll notice that while he mouths the pro forma denunciations of Chait, he never really specifies where he thinks Chait got it wrong.)
The TLA+ tools can do exhaustive model checking, as well as mechanically checked proofs. The proofs typically use an SMT solver to verify them. Of the two I've only used model checking in a serious way, but you can find Lamport's proofs of things like paxos and have it turn all the theorems green.
It’s absurd to claim that white men can’t ever under any circumstances have anything to say about the struggles of other people, but there are certainly people who make such a claim.

As one example, my father, an anthropologist/historian in his 60s who spent his whole career and life befriending, interviewing, translating, and writing about indigenous rural peasants in southern Mexico, and probably knows as much or more about their history and circumstances as anyone alive (in an intellectual sense, if not precisely as lived personal experience, since he was never himself a destitute peasant) was told by a 30-year-old recent Ph.D from a well-off family (who had literally never worked a job outside academia, and spent her entire life living in rich US suburbs) that he had no right to comment on the circumstances of indigenous rural peasants, “the subaltern” to use her term, because he he was a privileged member of the hegemonic class, whereas she could, as a Latina.