skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been monitoring Elixir on HN for a while now, looks like an interesting direction to take.

I wanted to know which direction Elixir is going to take? Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir?

Is there a plan to change Rails enough to run on Elixir?

How does the community feel about Elixir? I'm certainly interested in the concurrency aspects of Elixir (ie. no GIL) and everything else that Erlang has to offer.

The developers of Elixir were core Rails developers so please forgive me if I'm getting the wrong impression here.
First mistake I noticed was requiring that the person already have experience in relatively new and uncommon software tools.
A system whereby apps/sites post metadata about the items awaiting a user rather than specific notifications is an interesting idea. But I wouldn't want to be the one to formalise that system and try to encompass every interaction users have with their data online.
Not sure about that... HAproxy is a proven technology (very reliable and a joy to use at that) in this field while Nginx is a newcomer and needs to establish its credibility first. I personally wouldn't use such technology for load balancer until it is properly battle-tested. Also, I can't see much of an advantage over (proven) HAproxy - am I missing something?

As for supporting a single product, I don't see the point of that. Using Nginx for load balancing will probably be much different than using Nginx as a web server, so the learning curve is similar.

Not that I don't welcome competition, I just don't see a real need in this space.

EDIT: btw, the Lua thing was an April Fool's joke...

EDIT 2: no it wasn't, my mistake. I was surprised by this so I checked the page and jumped a gun when I saw "April 1st" on http://www.haproxy.org/news.html. Sorry about that...
I never understood PPAs. Ever since /etc/apt/sources.list was split up into /etc/apt/sources.d, we've been able to manage repositories using files. Since we already manage the rest of our system files with packages, why not do the same for repos? Dump a sources.d entry, and possibly a GPG key, into a .deb package and give that to users, rather than instructions on how to enter non-standard URLs into a vendor-specific GUI.

In fact, I wrote tools to do this many years ago:

https://gitorious.org/debian-repo-packager creates packages for a bunch of repos, including PPAs

http://chriswarbo.net/git/service-packs.git provides a GUI for creating "service packs": packages containing a repository, generated from a list of packages and their dependencies.
Criminal charges, like everything else in this world, is a tool. A tool that police have.

The tool can either be used correctly or incorrectly. I think as long as those officers weren't going to go through with the charges (which it seems to be the case), their use was correct.
It's a business decision to limit forward progress to support browsers 3-4 major versions behind. One that multi-billion dollar companies like Google have decided isn't worth it.

"A lot of people" = 4% on IE 8 & 9 (http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php)
Agreed, they could have written the entire piece without naming the person. As well it could have had the same outcome, we hired poorly, we learned X and Y, and they would have looked better. Now they might end up black listed, who wants to work for a company that will publicly stab you if things go poorly?
So... some sort of reverse-Whitewater situation, except with some Democrats targeting Scott Walker rather than some Republicans targeting Bill Clinton?
> Why the disparity between wages, if each worker operates the same presses for similar hours? It's down to individual productivity, Pelc says. The more records they press in each shift, the more money they take home at the end of the month.

I find this interesting. I've had my share of jobs where it seems that there's no point in doing beyond the minimum required because there's no reward and often not even recognition for the extra productivity. The only thing that really comes close is sales jobs where commission can stack up, but that's not necessarily comparable.
Would somebody knowledgeable care to comment on how tools like Bluespec SystemVerilog play into this discussion if at all? Disclaimer: I know little enough about EE that this question might be nonsensical.
Per-second metrics and a (claimed by netflix) pluggable system for custom metrics that's likely easier than pushing custom cloudmetrics data.

Some data from Netflix employees here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9339698
It's hard to tell if I flew too close to Poe's law, failed at sarcasm, have an minority opinion, or just wasn't contributing to the conversation. Probably a combination.
Vmware – virtualization is legacy – Docker, Mesos and CoreOS are the future?
It seems to me that the main take aways from todays vmware announcements https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/tag/lightwave/ are:
1. vmware admits VM is the way of the past and Docker / App containers is where the market is going
2. vmware points to mesosphere DCOS / Apache Mesos as the way to manage data centers rather than vmware
3. vmware has a "me too" fat linux os for containers but still says CoreOS is better. between CoreOS, RedHat atomic and Rancher OS who needs a VMware OS and why would we pay for a hypervisor to run it on?
4. and I'm not sure I got that one right, but it seems that the light wave project is vmware going after microsoft active directory and red hat PKI
IMHO just goes to show how much companies like vmware who charge thousands of dollars per server for legacy slow software don't understand the open source community...
Top 5 Things To Do at RSA [conjur edition]
Ask HN: Technical marketing
Interested in feedback for a career path in technical marketing for data center products for a person with 15 yrs experience as software developer and system engineer with some technical leadership experience.
I am assuming we are talking about base pay here.

~110k software engineering, SV, <1 year out of school.
I stopped short of raving about the actual mattress, because I didn't want to come off as a shill... but yes, the mattress is phenomenal. My wife finds it just too stiff for her comfort, so we got a topper for it, but it is otherwise just as good (if not better) than any hotel I've ever stayed in.

The only oddity I've noticed (not a complaint, but different) compared to traditional mattresses is that there's no bolstering on the sides, but understanding how it's made, that's expected. It is different tho, as pushing on the edge of the mattress, historically, has always yielded resistance, while my Tuft & Needle mattress is just as soft there as everywhere else.
> But if you are using PPAs to create different lists of released software

Isn't that pretty much the whole point of package repos in the first place?
I don't mean to imply that its a bad thing. There are even some instances where a military government was behaving better in some areas than a democratically elected one.
I would like this answer as well. Both boast on their ability to handle concurrency. The main differences I see is that:

1. elixir is less strongly typed than go

2. elixir is more purely functional

3. elixir has a smaller community and is less backed
Tesla is a 12 year old company that has burned hundreds of millions of dollars and shipped tens of thousands of cars. How is it remotely a startup? If you can't get staffing and other admin stuff right at age 12, then that says a lot about how poor management is. If you have engineers making sales calls or giving tours, then you're paying engineering salaries for non-engineering work.
Me too, that's why I submitted it. I guess one issue is how many desalination plants could $30 billion buy? Perhaps that's a better solution?
> I wanted to know which direction Elixir is going to take? Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir?

Elixir is not even approximately compatible with Ruby, nor is it intended to be. It just has syntax that is very loosely reminiscent of Ruby. Someone might one day write a Rails-like framework for Elixir, but it will never be the same Rails that runs on Ruby.

OTOH, if you want something no GIL that can run Rails, there is always JRuby.
Good luck! I think this is a great time to start a new Elixir framework, and competition (or perhaps, "coopetition") is good.
It sounds like brothers Clyde and Dayne are ineffective managers who neglected to supervise Artem (i.e. provide guidance on what he should be working on, then reviewing it to make sure it meets expectations). This blog post, replete with pictures of Artem from his various social media profiles, strikes me as incredibly immature and unbecoming of a professional company.
A staticly-typed solution:

https://oleksandrmanzyuk.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/from-objec...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8904182
As a long time Gephi user (~4 years) this is awesome. Congrats.
I don't currently have a project that could benefit from this platform, and the price point is a bit out of a reach for a college student, but I am really looking forward to see how this pans out.
"Now, Twitter said, the direct messages will operate for anyone who chooses to opt-in to the feature."
Some of the Xilinx and Altera tools come with and install Cygwin (and tcl). Watching WINE install Cygwin is good for a chuckle.
MongoDB works as designed
Who Not to Seek Employment From: The Likely Right but Certainly Rash Founders at Karma
The article cited in this post is actually quite interesting for being 25 years old.

https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obl...
> Erlang's module system means that a chunk of the raison d'etre behind language-specific package managers is already alleviated.

Sure, modules provide a way to "package" functions, but that is 5% of what a package manager does. Being able to distribute, fetch and do dependency resolution is certainly the bulk of it.

I definitely prefer my deployments to rely on packages than fetching git repositories from Github and Bitbucket. There are recent discussions in Erlang mailing list regarding packages and the OTP team (the team behind Erlang) is looking into package managers too.

> The rest - dependency management and building, is handled quite well by tools like Rebar.

Sorry, Rebar does not handle dependencies well. Rebar does not even guarantee repeatable builds. Once I fetch dependencies on my machine, my co-worker can end-up with versions different than mine and that is dependency management 101.

Rebar 3 seems to improve in this area but is still alpha. erlang.mk idea of package manager is a file on github in tsv format (and still no repeatable builds).

> Unicode handling? I think this might be a knock on Erlang's string handling.

Erlang needs better unicode support, regardless of using lists or binaries. Strings support only latin1 in literal format. If I want to write my name as a binary, it needs to be written as <<"paweł"/utf8>>. This is nowhere close to acceptable to anyone that has to write strings in formats other than latin1.

Things are getting better in Erlang 18 but there won't be any conveniences for handling unicode. There is no function to calculate the grapheme length (essential if you want to support languages like japanese or korean and do a size validation on an input), to convert to lowercase/uppercase and so on. Be it if the underlying representation is a list or a binary.
Yup, their MQB platform is pretty cool: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group_MQB_platform
Personally I can't think of anything I want less than push notifications from websites.
ELI5 does this essentially mean I can use the Mongo API to work with Postgres?
“Operation Jade Helm 15″: The Floodgate Towards Martial Law and World War III?
those emails aren't properly sanitised, you can read the 'censored' bits that have just a very small blur.

unless you meant to share those email addresses with the world?
> Given some were touting Go as the next big language what - 12-18 months ago - can anyone enlighten me why Elixir would be different to Go.

Its a completely different language, with a completely different set of people thinking it is the way to go going forward. They have very little in common.

> Or where Go didn't live up to its promises?

As there are in the present, there will probably be more than one significant web application language in the future. Its not impossible that Go and Elixir could both be among them. Its not really an XOR type of situation.
While I agree completely with your conclusion about the French participation in the revolution, it had nothing to do with the Seven Years war. I think you're thinking of the French and Indian War which was the American theator of the Seven Years War of 1756 - 1763 which was 12 years before the Revolutionary war began.

However, the aftermath of the Seven Years War - 1) the conquest of French Canada and 2) the determination to tax the Colonies to help pay for the war - lead directly to the grievances that ignited the Revolution.
1.5 Million Missing Black Men
previously discussed here last year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133808
Yeah, its weird. Queen mattresses start at $450 at Costco [1]. For an all-foam mattress, Casper seems expensive.

[1] http://www.costco.com/queen-mattresses.html
Absolutely true, for corn ethanol in the Midwest, today. Sugar cane ethanol coming out of Brazil has something to the effect of a 10x return on energy spent to produce it (better than oil). I'm from the Midwest, have an ag background, and have been very skeptical of the idea of corn ethanol as an alternative fuel source ever since it became big in 2006/2007 (for the reason you mention, ROE).

What I hadn't thought about before though, is the fact that 100 years of compounding subsidies in oil and gas have allowed for massive technology investment which has improved the ROE for petroleum based energy sources over that timeframe. The question then becomes, if we could subsidize ethanol production for the next 100 years to spur R&D in the area, what kind of ROE would we be getting 100 years from now? Or, alternatively, what kind of ROE did gas get when it was first discovered as a new energy source?
When I wrote "not as easy" I did not mean simply difficult. It just takes a bit more work with Erlang.

As for Erlang string handling: [175,95,40,12484,41,95,47,175] ;)

The good thing is that Erlang and Elixir can benefit from each other. For instance https://hex.pm which is made in Elixir, but can also be used for Erlang projects.
It's quite fascinating how they didn't have terraces until now. It really is an ancient technique, its around 7,000 years old. That's older than the plow.
Robot Gets Stranded Inside Fukushima Nuclear Reactor, Sends Back Critical Data
cause none of those types of problems EVER happen on other clouds/networks... right?
Some of this is opinion, but I looked at Go and didn't like its exception model (or total lack thereof). Checking for errors after every possible bit of code that could go wrong seemed like an ugliness to me (disclaimer: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I'm certain a Go guy will chirp up here in its defense... which is fine!).

Elixir/Erlang almost couldn't be more different in this regard, which basically embrace runtime failures (things fail, so... "Let it fail quickly"). An uncaught runtime error in Elixir/Erlang causes the node to shut down after logging the error and, if it has a supervisor node (which is quite likely), the node is restarted in a fraction of a microsecond. The developer is expected to monitor the logs and watch for common faults and fix those. This is in fact where the "nine nines" reliability comes from- restarting nodes extremely quickly after runtime errors.

The Erlang philosophy is basically, "these systems exist in the real world, which is sometimes unpredictable and flaky... accept it and allow the code to move on quickly." This happens to be a good strategy for website code- Remember that Erlang was built to run cell networks... How often are cell networks down these days?

I was also a "disenfranchised" Ruby guy, tired of working on classes of bugs that would never even see the light of day in a functional language, which is why Elixir's syntax was appealing (I had already looked at Erlang, but I didn't like its syntax). Again, there's taste and opinion here, of course. Coding has become awfully fashion-driven, of late.

There's a class of programmers who don't care about syntax or don't see the point of it. Ruby/Rails folks are not typically that type of programmer, and that's the first group who will likely migrate to Elixir.

Finally, what really raised my eyebrows about Elixir was its macro facility http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/meta/macros.html Prior to Elixir, full-fledged macros were only a feature of homoiconic languages (the Lispy ones where the syntax is also a data structure). Elixir came up with a clever way to do macros, while retaining syntax.
"Atlanta" in-town is pretty cleanly segregated with black and white. I'm not sure I agree that it is doing "the opposite of gentrifying".

in-town white neighborhoods (most north of I-20) have seen massive increases in property values in the last three years or so, probably causing "gentrification" as more whites move into border neighborhoods like grant park, old 4th ward, and reanoldstown

suburban atlanta (the vast majority of "atlanta") has also seen steady property value increases, at least in the northers suburbs. (roswell/alpharetta)
What's really interesting to me is that their service, Karma, appears to be a service for naming people and reviewing them personally.
We don't have the technology to say "X will commit Y at place Z at time T". We have the technology to say "Person X is somewhat likely to be a terrorist based on known data". That's an important distinction - they only let traditional police do their jobs in a smarter way, not end their job as we know it.
> I wonder why more people don't use hosting like macstadium? [...]
> while I realize some of the benefits of cloud vs physical it still seems like
> a huge premium to pay for cloud and not necessary for a lot of projects.

Digital Ocean starts at $5/month. Mac Stadium starts at $59/month. When you're discussing huge premiums not necessary for a lot of projects you may want to rethink your argument.
So Google is a relatively "Flatt" organization.
It would be a significant step towards "reaching and re-engaging users" if Google would make it possible to actually build a functional Chromium browser for Android. Since they've completely abandoned the default AOSP browser in favor of Chrome, there is no longer an up to date browser in AOSP.
Designed by Yves Behar, Edyn (YC W14) Gives Plant Recommendations and Tips
> they are still using the same CPUs they did a few years ago

Not true; at the writing of the article, the Pixhawk board was using the LPC2148, and today it uses the STM32F427... who knows what else has been changed over the years as well?
You can probably tell someone's age by what their first encounter in fiction with some futuristic technology was. For this, it was Exosquad for me.
> Painting the "history of Brickell" as some sort of strategy to avoid gentrification is comically false

I didn't get that impression from the story. It said that Brickell helped avoid gentrification, not that it was intended as such. Rather, I understood the story to imply that if cities allow new building fairly freely, then gentrification is less likely to happen; SF doesn't allow it, while Miami does. Miami in fact sounds like the "default" from the article's perspective, so Brickell isn't a clever strategy, it's almost "doing nothing."
I don't disagree with all of his conclusions. But I think that his piece was so glib as to be meaningless.

He essentially promises that, by lifting building restrictions, you can preserve ethnic neighborhoods from gentrification (for what that's worth), because development will be channeled elsewhere, e.g. into high-rises that the professional class (in his reading) favors.

Just writing it down exposes how facile this is.

And that doesn't even get into other problems, like the unguarded analogies between San Francisco and Miami ("warm-weather cities").

Here's an article that I enjoyed, which also reached a pro-development conclusion, but with a lot more nuance: http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/living-in-a-fools-para.... This appeared in a special issue devoted to the SF housing situation.
Funny

When (my company) hired a remote team, that remote team would stop working as soon as payment was late (by 1 day, not our fault, unfortunately)

This article shows a lot of inexperience in managing people and dealing with cases such as this.

Also the red flags and warnings have been big, since the beginning.

This person should have been dropped 1 or 2 weeks into the story. 6 weeks without showing any work product?

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me (but we need an equivalent phrase for continuous events)
I wonder what it is for Methane Hydrate...Wikipedia says 10X for natural gas, but drilling on the ocean floor has to cost more.
I don't think 'fake' charges should be a tool.

They contribute to the problem with plea deals, too.
Writing the article that way would defeat its apparent purpose; to name and shame. They even bought a domain name of the guys full name and pointed it at this blog. I assume they're probably promoting on social media (why else buy the domain name if not to promote it).

I get why they would go to such lengths; they're angry and want to get revenge. Too bad no one reminded them of that old saying about the best revenge is moving on and living a good life.
Because while people might be OK having the same $1000 iPhone 6 as everyone else, they're not OK having the same exact $80,000 car. They want an extra feature ere or there that the next guy with a BMW m5 doesn't have. They might want some extra carbon bits here or there. Cars are as much fashion as watches, and car customization is a huge industry / widespread interest. If dealers / mfgs can capture even a bit of the aftermarket industry (think simple stuff like chrome exhaust tips / different wheels), it's probably a win.
Power usage is very important for low-end devices, especially smartphones which will be talking to lots of HTTPS resources. This is the complaint on the other side of the pond, away from the people who need ASIC accelerators for whatever reason to keep up with bandwidth/latency/cpu concerns.

Just as an example of the difference - I wrote a naive implementation of ChaCha20 in C with zero optimization effort and it does 5cpb out of the gate (Sandy Bridge). Just using vector-types and letting GCC/Clang vectorize brings that down to ~3cpb on Sandy Bridge - no effort. The Krovetz implementation of ChaCha20 is closer to 1.2cpb on my machine, with AES-256 doing 1.0cpb using AESNI (again, my own naive implementation). All software.

Even the most hand optimized, secure AES software implementations are still in the realm of ~15-20cpb (IIRC), three-to-four times worse than the unoptimized competitor. As linked elsewhere in this thread by me, non-scientific tests show it 3x faster in software on some mobile phones. That's a lot of extra cycles-per-byte for your battery to chew through using AES-256, and I'd guess I easily churn through a low number of gigs of HTTPS data every month..
On Time-Lapse Rocket Ride to Trade Center’s Top, Glimpse of Doomed Tower
I'd love to see more genetic engineering talent put toward greening deserts.
That wouldn't change even if there was a specialized syntax, because of MVCC. So the only problem is that syntactic sugar is lacking, not that the performance isn't as good as it could be.
Microcorruption seems great! I'll definitely give it a shot.