skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone always gives the Windows Registry guff. But while I think the Windows Registry has a lot of problems, it also is a step forward on the mess if incompatible configuration files found within /etc (and /usr/local/etc) on your average modern UNIX-like OS. And now you're seeing tooling, like Docker, which is specifically designed to isolate the mess around each mess-user (essentially creating a bundle of mess).

The whole filesystem layout is pretty poor, with massive amounts of inconsistencies (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin) between different software and even distributions. So you just wind up with everything scattered all over the place, and package managers exist essentially to corral the mess.

Everyone loves to talk about how UNIX is simple, and how UNIX concepts date back to at least the 1970s, and while that is true in theory, in practice the inconsistent behaviour and lack of much evolution has ultimately meant that UNIX's simplicity doesn't scale very well as the systems become more complex with more moving pieces.

But nobody is willing to touch or even criticise the mess that is modern UNIX because they know they will get massively criticised by the old guard and the die hards (see systemd, which is trying to evolve classic UNIX concepts and getting massively attacked, even death threats as a result).

Windows' file system is also a mess. But at least Microsoft are trying something with Windows RT "Apps," at least they're trying to move forward and progress. The UNIX world is in cryogenic suspension, even Apple has only hidden a lot of the mess and not really fixed much of it.
Ah, OK.

BTW ,this guy[1] is already using/playing with rust for mcu's. maybe he found a way to make it work for ISR's ?

[1]http://spin.atomicobject.com/2015/05/21/generate-embedded-ru...
Interesting, how was the mod team picked? I think it is a good check to have it be separate from the Rust team (assuming it wasn't picked by and answers to the Rust team).
It is more difficult than it looks, but then again support multiple Linux distributions with a simple Apache installer is more difficult than it looks as well.

I suspect that this is a function of overestimating the effort on the Java side and underestimating both the demand and the work on the non-Windows side.

They used to be an extremely Windows-centric company.
I'm back! http://tokn.co/c53b53x5
Yes, I noticed that this story was a parable of what happens when a charismatic leader declares something taboo, because of all the unforeseen problems it always causes, so the acolytes resort to a workaround that has the same problems in a different form but does not violate the religious taboo.

There is inevitably a Law of Conservation of Coding Cost that will get you one way or another. If you won't rewrite your code from scratch (because of all the unrecognized wisdom in the old code), you'll build a compiler from scratch (and discover all the unrecognized wisdom in proven compilers), or you'll switch to some proven cross-platform solution that will cover most of your needs, but the remaining pieces needed to complete the job, when added together, will introduce you to all the unrecognized wisdom embodied in the standard, platform-specific toolchains, or some other approach that will preserve the cost in some other way.

This "never rewrite from scratch" dogma is an example of incomplete wisdom.
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That is troubling, but I don't see how that equates to him "suppressing" anyone, if all he's done is voice his own opinions about those people. I haven't really followed the story, but was Steve part of the group that demanded Curtis be removed from StrageLoop?
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Spolsky has praised Lisp and Scheme and mentioned that it was used as the gatekeeper class at his university (e.g., http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool... ), which makes this comment funnier to me.
Food delivery app idea looking pretty OK about now :)
When did blogs start showing a 'loading' screen, then doing a weird scroll thing at load, and having stuff unfolding near the scrollbar?
Anything in particular there? A lot of that is software that other people have written that he maintains, which is perfectly fine, but that's no more technical than running a one-person online and print media house. Much of the rest is small scripts that he's written and released, which again, is great, but everyone writes small scripts. If our standard for "non-technical" encompasses people like Adria (not Adrianna) and Shanley, I don't see how ESR avoids that. (To be clear, my own opinion is that we should call all of them "technical".)

If you `git log --author='Eric S. Raymond' -p` on gpsd, you'll find that the majority of it is documentation, comments, style, etc. The code, by and large, is from other people.
> The college messaging site YikYak (raised $70m+) had 2 full size buses and a motorized bull to ride.

> There couldn't have been more than a few thousand attendees at this event.

They definitely need more motorized bulls. My on-demand motorized bull company, UberBull, recommends at least 4 motorized bulls for every 500 people.
It's a lot of syntactic sugar and things removed. Even the ?: operator which I use a lot. Typing "a = if b then c else d" is a huge wasted opportunity to just keep the ?: op. Plus there's no way to get the == operator even if you know you want it and understand the nuances.
Having no files in /etc is considerably less discoverable.

It can be handled with good documentation or example files in /usr/share/doc but it's still harder that way.

Of course there are downsides that this article brings up. But is the problem simply the existence of a file in /etc ? Because that doesn't seem to be a problem to me, instead the problem is upgrades that are harder because they have to merge changes.

Seems to me the solution is to use 3 way diffs like how source control system do it, and update configuration files automatically as much as possible.
> Fortune 500 companies spend months and years building software and databases to federate data to garner insights. With the one, two punch of Data Links and Dataclips, you’ll have a fully baked analytics solution in a fraction of the time.

Statements like this tend to irk me. They seem to be suggesting that what they've come up with solves the same problems that Fortune 500 companies are trying to solve with their own federation solutions. I get that it's marketing speak, but it seems rather heavy-handed to me.
Shared libraries still make sense for unix/linux distributions; There's a lot of little binaries, a lot of little processes, and the size of the full libstdc (or even one pruned to the binaries necessities) is high overhead compared to their actual size.
Sounds like you're a beginner. Learning a JS framework has it's advantages, but learning a new language would be extremely useful to your general ability as a developer. Full stack developers are generalists, by trade, so understanding programming at a deeper level would be super useful to you. Rails and Django are both fine options. Which you pick comes down to personal preference. Why not learn the basics of both and see what feels better?
It's fascinating, because writing your own custom language is one of those things that everyone knows is a bad idea.

It's one of those things that people do because it seems like the path of least resistance (and in the short run, is), but it inevitably snowballs into a pit of technical debt. Spolsky knew this quite well (he'd written eloquently on the subject).

...and yet he still did it. His defence was that it was the easiest option in the short term, and he was probably right, but it doesn't matter. People only do stupid stuff that seems smart; saying "this stupid thing seems smart!" is only a defence if you have no idea that it's actually fundamentally stupid. Of all the people in the world, Spolsky is one of the least able to mount this defence.

Contemporaneously with his decision to go all in on Wasabi, he wrote a scathing condemnation of Ruby for being slow, unserious, obscure; he suggested that a serious company shouldn't opt for Ruby because it was risky, and that choosing it would put you at risk of getting fired.

Was he right? In 2006, maybe? I mean, he turned out to be wrong, but I don't think it was entirely obvious that Ruby was a serious choice 15 years ago. Of course, he wasn't writing 15 years ago, but even nine years ago, a very conservative, safe approach to choosing a technical stack very possibly did mitigate against selecting Ruby, for all the reasons he outlined. But those arguments applied twice as hard to Wasabi. You don't get to argue that there "just isn't a lot of experience in the world building big mission critical web systems in Ruby" (and hence you shouldn't use Ruby), and then turn around and use Wasabi for your big mission critical web system.

Of all the people in the world, Spolsky probably had the best understanding of why Wasabi was a stupid, short sighted decision. He did it anyway. And it was stupid and short sighted. Rarely is someone so right and so wrong about the same thing at once.

(And yes, Fogcreek is still around, and so is FogBugz. But I don't buy for a moment that Wasabi was actually a good choice. They survived it, but they didn't benefit from it.)

Edit: Spolsky has written too much about why things like writing something like Wasabi is terrible idea to link it all. Besides, a lot of it has been linked in other comments. But I don't think I can express strongly enough that my anti-Wasabi position is simply repeating the things the guy that signed off on developing it and using in production wrote. ...then he decided to write a new language because apparently Ruby was too slow to possibly use to generate a graph, and there was literally no alternative to using Ruby for graph generating than writing your own compile-to-VBScript/PHP language. Words fail.
some famous hobbyists that went on to form companis around their hobby:

Ford, Edison, etc
Blogger's been doing this for a while.
NY State Senate Passes Bill to Prevent Arrests of Bus and Taxi Drivers Who Kill
Yes. Hello sounds amazing, but it could have been an extension along with hundreds of other amazing extensions for firefox. The point is there are extensions that I use and there are extensions that I do not use. There is no reason to stuff something down my throat however amazing they sound.
>On the other hand, there are a few environments where performance still matters. Languages in use there are rarely dynamically typed, but I'm not interested enough in them to care much.

Well considering Rust I'm guessing Mr K might have different views now.
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The absolute disregard for any thanks for the Chromium team in the announcement is disgusting and a slap in the face to the foundation this editor is based on.
Personally, I really miss the "heyday" of the RSS reader. That was a great way to consume content.
I worked at two places where people had resumegasms over "brand name" schools. Neither of them hired anyone who was ever any better than completely average (and yes, I include myself).

I don't really care where anyone went to school. It doesn't mean anything. Really, going to school at all doesn't mean much. I need to see what you've done outside of that to make any meaningful evaluation. It doesn't matter if it's a huge project. You can give me a couple 10-line things that do something useful and I'll still get to see how you name things, format code, use built-in libraries, etc. Then we can chit chat about project management and how much you love or hate it.
For one example:

float a = 1.0; // compilation error in java, no problem in C++

For another:

int a[5] = { 0, -1, 2, 3, 4 };
(1+a) = 1; // :)

Also:

assert( !(1/2) );

Also:

enum Foo {A, B};
enum Bar {C, D};

Foo e1 = A;
Bar e2 = C;
int i = 0;

assert(e1 == e2); // warning
assert(e1 == i); //no problem whatsoever
You can't criticise "modern UNIX" in general based on the ugliness of the filesystem hierarchy of one system.

Edit: or most systems, the point is that the ugliness is not intrinsic to unix-likes
Important changes:

- Reader mode is confirmed not leaking data. No need to disable it.

- There is a way to stop leaking the browser history to Google while keeping Safe Browsing.

* both tested using Fiddler
Silicon Valley housing crisis epitomized in this listing for a $899/month tent
There's a secondary market that is surprisingly lacking in interest. I have a site that brokers large blocks of IPv4 to interested parties, and the most interest I've seen is for a /21. We have a /8 and can not come anywhere close to drumming up interest for it.

http://ipv4hub.com
UCSF to Use Apple’s ResearchKit for LGBTQ Health Study
If you can create multiple accounts for this competition I'd do that and run different strategies through all of them
Inverting a Binary Tree with Scala
See, right here you can see HN always picks the wrong things to be outraged about.
That's fair. Which modern UNIX variant has a nice filesystem layout and has modernised etc?
> see systemd, which is trying to evolve classic UNIX concepts and getting massively attacked, even death threats as a result

Anyone who actually threatens someone over a Linux process should be mocked openly and probably forever.
The death threats are a ridiculous disaster for the community. Things should never come to that and it's unacceptable.

However, there is an important lesson about change management here. People don't like change. And people need to believe their concerns have been taken into account in order to change. And the proposed solution needs to be genuinely better for everyone's use cases.
> Apple's iCloud name change policy is totally sexist

> Women have to change their names with marriage and divorce.

Good to know.
Whereas, complex systems built on popular OO frameworks never have issues with maintainability.

/me deactivates snark mode

I see the issue exactly the other way around.

If you can build a domain specific language that lets you express concepts in a clear way free of boilerplate or conceptual hackery (ORMs, for example) you will wind up with a much lighter maintenance load than the equivalent functionality built on an off the shelf framework.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from using the two as appropriate. Simple CRUD app? Rails. Need to express a very complex domain in a readable, easily maintained form? Custom language time.
You don't have to use syscalls directly. If you statically link a library that makes system calls, then a syscall interface change will break your app. But if you wrap all system calls in a dylib, then that dylib insulates you against syscall interface changes.
https://github.com/cloudflare/jgc-talks/blob/master/dotScale...

I like that github extracts the slides for me, but what would be better is if it could extract just the plain text.
Thank you Mr. Astroturfer! But instead of complaining about /etc - make a package manager for the "holy" windows!
A while back in at Nice airport I was trying to get a cab into town. The licensed taxis with taxi signs on them were quoting us about twice the metered fare to get in. I actually wandered over to tourist info and asked if the cabs were not supposed to work at the official fares and they just kind of shrugged as if to say what can we do. You can see why consumers would not be too keen on the situation.
I honestly find I use the ? operator in coffeescript far, far more often than I want to use a ternary conditional.

Fair enough on the == operator, but it's another that I have honestly never needed or wanted.
thereby destroying yet another pristine wilderness in the name of progress.
What happens to the private sector end nodes? Do routers perform NAT from IPV4 to IPV6?
With the following Atom community packages, I basically have a Rust IDE: linter, linter-rust, build, language-rust, racer
Define "modern" and "nice".

(This sounds flippant, but is actually important as these are completely subjective. The answer may turn out to be OSX..)
We've been working on Atom for a long time. I think that CS was a great choice when it was made some years ago, and I can say that the core team quite likes ES6 (which directly addresses a lot of the same JS warts that CS was designed to avoid). That said even if we decided to move to ES6 today, it's a big ship and it takes a long time to turn :)
Worse even.

https://archive.is/BtDaA
As I like to put it: unit tests don't affirm the correctness of code with respect to a specification, they merely affirm that certain implications of the specification hold with the code under test. In that sense, the general tendency to assume correctness in the face of passing test suite is basically an instance affirming the consequent on a huge scale.
There's just no way you can run a facility of that size with three people, sorry. In addition to DC techs you need building engineers, HVAC people, electricians, and probably a lot more that I'm not thinking of.
Mobile should have been IPv6 from the beginning. In China, it mostly is. If we could get all the handsets on IPv6, that would free up much address space. T-Mobile has been pushing IPv6, but they had problems with Skype and WhatsApp, which apparently don't talk IPv6 properly.
But while I think the Windows Registry has a lot of problems, it also is a step forward on the mess if incompatible configuration files found within /etc (and /usr/local/etc) on your average modern UNIX-like OS.

Not really. You have certain apps using the file system and others that use the highly limited key-value quasi-file system that is the Registry. There is no single point of truth at all.

see systemd, which is trying to evolve classic UNIX concepts and getting massively attacked, even death threats as a result

Yeah, that flame war's pretty visceral, but there's plenty of reasons systemd gets criticized (chief of which is the perception that it in fact devolves classic concepts).

Windows' file system is also a mess.

Windows' file system hierarchy is an enormous mess far surpassing the FHS in Unix. /etc/hosts vs C:\windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Enough said. The FHS at least has some semantic meaning that is more-or-less consistent or can be easily deduced, but Windows is just a hodgepodge.

The UNIX world is in cryogenic suspension

No, there's many people who are trying new approaches. The problem really isn't the use of a hierarchical file system, it's the lack of semantic categorization of configuration locations.
This issue, configuration, seem too fuzzy for anyone. Unix was simple in the days because it was tiny on limited hardware with a core set of developpers. Linux grew out of this in another context. Some distributions tried to get back to simplicity (slack, arch), but in the of arch, it's back to complexity imposed by current components. As someone reminded me on some web site, polkit is configured in javascript. Every system has it's own way, from the time he was designed (early 2Ks had xml, then it was js,...). The lack of core design is cause the lack of elegance. It's been said that languages suffer this too when they're not the fruit of a single mind (~BDFL).

Windows registry was binary and too ad-hoc, things were unorganized and hacked too. It doesn't address the social issues of compatibility.

I'd love to have a peek at VPRI 100KLoC system to see how their system was described in source.
IPv6 adoption is surprisingly slow. Shouldn't it happen faster?
Sure, but success stories only make the people who worked on them look smart, whereas post mortems give everyone a chance.
Anti-Uber French Taxi Drivers Are Burning Tires and Overturning Cars
You seriously think that if it were driven by DRM mania, they wouldn't have stuffed a DOM parser into a system server?

Again, I'm not saying it isn't crazy, just that it's possible, and that equivalent insanity is already afoot.
When people tell me they "don't worry about performance", I ask them how long their smartphone battery lasts.
I'm a bit in the same boat.

Firefox is better than before for me : it crashes less, less memory leak with better cleaning.

BUT I still have to restart it regularly. At some point during the day it becomes less responsive, closing a tab freeze the browser (during which Windows task manager indicates that FF uses 25% of the cpu for xx seconds, may be related to my quad core), etc.

I don't even have that much tabs (like 2/3 windows, ~20/30 tabs).

The worst offenders are GMail, Google Images (or even Imgur, lots of images seem to kill FF) and a forum page full of Youtube videos.

Removing Adblock helped a bit but other than that I haven't find an extension I could blame (Classic Theme Restorer was a problem though, it's fixed now).
When they got bloated down by designers trying to reinvent HTML 1.1 in Javascript.

This page won't show with Javascript disabled, and that's a shame. There's nothing on that page that can't exist as flat HTML. There's nothing on that page that requires Javascript, but the page won't function without it for some reason.

Do we still downvote/flag comments that aren't directly related to the content of the linked material?
Every time I read about BSDs I wanna try. The core team appear to make a coherent cohesive tractable system. Unlike the bazaar model used by Linux (intractable but working).
Did you intend to run it in a potato? Even a raspberry pi would have no difficulty with that file size.

It's also packing a full browser, don't forget that. And likely all sorts of assets.

I particularly don't care. I'm more interested in how it performs during use.

By the way, task manager indicates it's using less then half that of RAM, with a few tabs open.
for uncle sam to get a warrant is just dandy but thats not going to protect us from organized crime or the intelligence services of other nations.

We need security that my mother can understand. dad had a top secret clearance so mom understands why she needs to shred paper documents.

ive had no such luck explaining to her how to maintain her privacy with her imac.
Archlinux has it a bit simpler than most; with /bin /sbin /usr/sbin all symlinked to /usr/bin.
GoboLinux has something completely different from the FHS.
So ridiculous, google's play store rules have become harder to understand than apple's app store.
Most things that have lots of reverse-dependencies require a significant amount of maintenance. Compilers are not much different from "common" libraries, or special-purpose frameworks, in that respect. Also, writing a direct-to-assembly compiler is probably not a wise idea.
T-Mobile’s big PR blitz is backfiring in Washington
(HN readers, note that alexcrichton is the one spearheading the MSVC effort.)