skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Syntax does not matter much; Erlang's focus is not to be a good general-purpose language. It is good for distributed computing because it lacks many useful and pleasant features.

Erlang has built-in immutability done right (more so than in Scala, OCaml, Clojure(?)) - if it's not built in the language from the start, there's nothing you can do about it.

Erlang has built-in binary serialization/deserialization that makes messages across network easy and natural. Please show me a language that can serialize a closure and send it over network. A rich type system and general-purpose language features are obstacles here, types of values have to be dumb to serialize seamlessly.

Other than that, it has a lot of convenient and coherent features like good pattern-matching (useful for parsing and routing messages), proper tail-call optimization (just look at Scala, again), the built-in actor model, lightweight processes, process monitoring, the large library of battle-tested distributed practices, OTP, – these things can be recreated in another language/VM, but it will probably take huge resources and efforts and self-limitation of the platform, not features.
Is this the new iteration of ilikerabbits.com, aka Magic for programming tasks? The design is really similar.
Very much this.

If you're not familiar with Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, The Century of the Self, on Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud (whom Bernays effectively made), and Anna Freud, as well as the influence of advertising, "public relations" (a term coined by Bernays), and propaganda (the term he coined PR to avoid) on the public, corporations, and govenrment.

Also Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which is an ad-man's perspective on what is fatally flawed with his own industry. See also his later book, The Capitalism Papers.

And of course, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly.

There've been a number of recent HN posts on how bloated websites are becoming, and how content is being watered down on the Web. Pretty much all of this can be traced to the current funding mechanism: advertising. Which is increasingly becoming the problem, not the solution. E.g., TJ VanToll's "The Web's Cruft Problem".

Thomas Wells hits on what I see as the two most likely alternative funding mechanisms: a content tax, and philanthropy or patronage. Combining these with some form of decentralised content syndication compensation system seems like a possible path forward. The total value of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, of which publishing is $152 billion. If 20% of that is online content, it amounts to roughly $100 per person per year.

Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK's broadband tax proposal is an earlier and similar concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Mander

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly

"A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication"
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...

http://developer.telerik.com/featured/the-webs-cruft-problem...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9897306
Cool. For the curious, this sounds like the background hum of a starship, or perhaps a server room with the volume turned down. Not particularly relaxing to me (I prefer the birds outside!) but each to their own.
A rough ride is the least of your problems. In a powered vehicle, the primary purpose of suspension is to keep you in contact with the road. If you're not in contact with the road, you're not in control; braking, steering and acceleration don't do anything if they can't react against the surface.
What Is the Truck Factor of Popular GitHub Applications? A First Assessment [pdf]
Imagine piracy was really capable of bankrupting these companies [that profit from manipulating children]. Wouldn't you torrent all day and all night?
Molinillo – A generic dependency-resolution implementation
Doesn't all communication count as manipulation of agency? Like, in reading this I feel swayed... but you didn't cite any facts or research.
> the situation we're in right now with advertising is like medieval warfare with the advent of the crossbow -- a great imbalance in favor of the attacker that disrupted the nature of combat for centuries.

(totally off topic, but)

hm. I thought that the crossbow was a little like the early fireams, in that it wasn't particularly better than what came before, mostly due to it's terribly slow rate of fire; it was just easier to use.

My understanding was that someone skilled with a longbow was a more effective fighter, especially in terms of rate of fire, but also in terms of armor penetration and range than someone with a crossbow or a early firearm. (my understanding was that early firearms were massively effective at dealing with armor at very close ranges, but that effectiveness dropped off very quickly. Crossbows suffered from similar issues, in a less dramatic sort of way.)

However, becoming really good with a longbow was a serious undertaking, one that took up a significant portion of your time over a lifetime.

The crossbow and the early firearms, from what I read, were superior in that you could give them to a bunch of shopkeepers or construction workers or what have you, have them drill every third Saturday, and have someone who was a semi-effective warrior when it came time for battle.

back on-topic, I... think there's a hole in our schooling; one the greeks had down. Rhetoric. Most students don't study it. And most of that manipulation of other people (at least if you use words) falls under rhetoric.

Incidentally, I am given to understand that rhetoric and logic were often taught together. Formal logic gets more academic time than rhetoric, I think, but I think that explicitly teaching logic with rhetoric says important things about logic and how it ought to be applied to argument. This idea that we need to apply logic to our arguments before applying rhetoric is a cultural value that we don't have, that the greeks did. I mean, I'm the first to call the greeks assholes, and to remind everyone that they had slaves, that they were not good people and that we should not follow them in all things. But we have chosen to model our education systems after theirs, and this is one of the things they did that I think we should do, too.

In fact, I've been looking for a modern academic-ish rhetoric text; all I've found so far are a bunch of pop psychology style books, while I strongly prefer a more academic presentation.

But yeah; I think in this case, understanding what other people are doing to manipulate you is how you disarm them.
AFR buddy, AFR. AFR is the annual failure rate, its typically 2 - 5% of the population per year. 4 drives you don't have a large enough set to see this in action, just every day you're in danger of losing a drive by a small statistical amount.

In the Blekko cluster we have just under 10,000 drives. We have a two 20 drive 'boxes' (40 drives) from Western Digital, as drives fail we pull replacements from the 'new/refurbished' box, and we put the dead one in the outgoing box. When we get up to 20 we RMA them in bulk, 20 go out, 20 more come in. That becomes the new 'new/refurbished' box.

It really isn't SAN vs non-SAN it is all statistics.

That said, if you're running your ReadyNAS with raid 10 (mirrored drives in a RAID 0 config) you may find some unpleasantness when a drive does fail. Statistically you have a 1/10 chance of not being able to re-silver the mirror for a 5900 RPM desktop SATA drive. That gets a bit painful.
Unfortunately, I think you're serious. And you're probably one of many who think this way. Which shows that people really don't understand what it means to do concurrency (as go does support it, really.)
Our descends, if we have any after a few hundred years, will consider most aspect of our lifestyles dangerous to the continued survival of our species.
Fair enough, but personally I'd rather take the extra cash and manage my investments myself (and avoid the whole golden handcuffs business that I keep hearing about).
Effectively.

It's one of the reasons why I wish more languages had a generalized switch statement (i.e. one that accepted arbitrary code as conditions, not just constants compared to a single value), preferably with a way to (explicitly, preferably) code a fall-through.

It means that you cannot necessarily translate it into a jump table, true. But it means that you can write code much more concisely, on the flip side. And it remains slightly readable.
My point is that nearly the entire consumer internet is funded by adverts, the first bit was simply humerous. Further, advertising is pervasive and annoying (even with blocking tools) but it is mostly found in private places. I don't think it is immoral to sell ads on your own website, radio station or media channel. If you dont consume free content you would see way less adverts.
Indeed X11. what I meant by my X11 server/client waffling is I think you /run/ an X11 client and servers connect to it--this is backwards to every other usage of client/server.
Services like these seem to only be able to handle small standalone scripts, rather than work in integrated codebases, which require time and dedication to the projects. How is there a market for this, when most developers capable of understanding what programs can do are also capable of writing prototype implementations of them?
Currently looking in to groovy for android dev precisely based on this observation - it has optional static typing (and it gets compiled to equivalent Java bytecode if you provide it not striped out like Dart) but it's dynamically typed and seems to be expressive enough to make the glue code succint. I figured since we need to learn it for the build system why not see if we can reuse it - looks promising so far.

I feel like whenever you have complex data hierarchies static typing just makes the whole thing manageable (recently wrote 2k loc python exporter for blender and prototype to consume it in C# - the C# is much more managable for this kind of thing, c++ is still kind of tedious because of shitty tools, build/module system and it's fairly verbose due to low level nature)
You're still going to need n+1 sysadmins to maintain the rest of your infrastructure. Maintaining a storage system like this really isn't much different for the day-to-day operations. So, yes, it's one more system, but you're already going to need those admins anyways.
A retail CEO worth $840M lives in a Las Vegas trailer park
Inb4 congress tries to pass a law prohibiting them because they can be used by villains to defeat LEO's spike strips.
Bitcoin couldn't have prevented the OPM attack, but these types of attacks will continue to highlight the flawed way that institutions store data online.

I suggest reading this post: http://blog.onename.com/americans-hacked-opm/

TLDR; The blockchain offers a more secure database that allows institutions to stop storing massive amounts of user data on centralized servers.
What do you think is a fair market rate? Are there sites that offer higher rates than this for the contractors for short term gigs? It kind of interests me there if there are opportunities for doing short half day scope projects.
"Entrenched protocols" like slavery got disrupted precisely because a moral dimension was brought into play.

Everybody has weaknesses and exploiting them to sell ads is no more an art - it's a science - that is working at a speed and scale that we have never witnessed before. Advertising is more than just selling body spray. It's about selling anything to us - from our leaders to wars to taxes. I wont be surprised if ISIS is buying FB ads - target muslim youths in low income downtown areas - ad tech can do that for you today.

The same BMW in Europe is marketing car clubs and car pooling to save the planet, while in China and India the message is total opposite about aspiration and horsepower.

Morality has to be talked about.
My Dog’s Activity Tracker Is Letting Me Watch Her Die
Who would then make the content?
>Opponents would argue that space research (specifically exploring other planets) is a very expensive way to do basic research

I'd agree with that. Generally, it would seem that the most efficient way to research something is to research it, not to pursue some other scientific endeavor and hope that it throws off some ancillary benefit.

So, I actually think that argument for space exploration is sometimes a bit of a short-sighted ruse to sell space exploration. It should instead be sold on its merits and a broader vision.
> But weev could. We don't apply laws as if the defendant is some mythical "reasonable" person.

What weev could or could not do is 100% irrelevant. What matters with regard to the law is what a reasonable person would do. That's literally a thing.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/reasonable

AT&T's customers had a REASONABLE expectation of privacy in general, and quite likely AT&T had a privacy policy which spelled this out.

AT&T failed to take the proper steps to protect their customers privacy.

AT&T is at fault here, not weev.

Even if weev did know or not know something, AT&T is at fault for the situation where his knowing or not knowing makes a lick of difference.
But you just did.
ive got a solution. end corporate rule, evolve beyond capitalism. in short: anarchy.
The authorities will never crack your cipher
Assuming the workers are employed full-time, $25/h is about $4000/month. That's a pretty good salary for an average programmer in Portugal (Europe!), even before taxes.
I'm sure we would. I'll buy the first drink. :D
Adobe Source Code Pro (free fixed-width font) 2.x released, with now with
Why would an unlimited ESPP be a bad thing, especially to the point of being a "toxic policy"? Does it really matter if someone else takes more advantage of that than you?

I'd love that as a perk, even if it made someone else even more money. I care about me and my family, not how much someone else gets...
Hyke – A new way to go hiking
For white noise: `play -n synth whitenoise`
That's a joke article...
Designing a fast
Thank you for your responses, I appreciate it!
Just out of curiosity, has anyone done any research into determining whether a drive which fails after X days/years has some properties in the first Y days that could be a signal for future failure?
That was a great article and I now have a good deal more respect for Travis CI. Thanks for posting. Seems like a very healthy way to look at things.
I'd argue that coal and steam power had far more to do with the end of slavery than moral arguments. Though those also held some sway.

When you can provide the work of tens, hundreds, or hundreds of thousands of people through fuel and capital, you can dispense with a great deal of uncompensated labour.

Of course, then there's the decline of that abundant fuel to consider....
Thank you! May I ask why you decided to eventually leave? And do you regret leaving?
Except that precious little funding is actually aimed at this problem.
This article's a good counterpoint: https://pando.com/2015/07/03/holacracy-dunces/
The Value of Water on the West Coast
Firefox has the bad habit of jumping off into space and not coming back for a while, which makes it a non-starter for me.
GH Hardy famously predicted that elementary number theory would have no practical applications. Lo and behold, today it is an indispensable part of web cryptography used by hundreds of millions every day. Waiting on the order of decades for a ROI on fundamental research is simply part of the game. I suspect the point where we experience diminishing returns from this is much to far in the future to even consider the question.
you could have a system of morality that has the axiom

But that's a strawman. It's not the argument being made here. Or by the numerous other critics of advertising: Adam Curtis, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, etc.

The remainder of your arguments follow a similar train.
The programmers might just want to save time to work on more important stuff. There are also technically-able people who can't program but might need a script to perform some mundane task (like their dog image example).
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9892724
Technology is run by the wrong people
The fact that the time horizon is spread over 3-4 years makes the analysis misleading.

Case in point, Bitcoin was a nonfactor in 2012 (hence the high "growth"), but VC for Bitcoin firms has dried up in 2015, with most Bitcoin startups either dying or pivoting to more generic financial instruments/blockchain tech.
What adds to the problem seems to be that Intel was overly optimistic with respect to the ability of their Core M processors to run fanless.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel-core-m-pe...

In summary, yes they can run fanless when idle, but under load, they will be heavily throttled due to thermal constraints.

Maybe next generation we can finally have truly fanless ultrabook-level performance.
I agree with you on the importance of rhetoric -- in the sense of really breaking down what people are saying. Though, I remember being taught some of that in school and I don't know if it stuck for most students. It's probably a disconnect between a subject learned for school and tests, and a subject that's really internalized. A lot of analyzing dusty old essays and historical arguments, not enough forceful application to one's own modern-day surroundings.

(And I think you're probably correct about the crossbow bit. The influence it had was in the manner of making arms more accessible -- hand a peasant a crossbow and all that. I suppose a different analogy would be World War 1 -- outdated charging tactics coming up against machine guns, though that's a case where defense had the upper hand over offense.)
Wow, that's fascinating. Would you happen to have a website somewhere that documents your experiences? I'm really curious.
Well I appreciate all the swag and whiteboard markers that come over the wall. :)
And yet cable has exactly as many ads as free TV.
I almost feel like you are saying that forcibly exfiltrating someone from their land, packing them into a ship where ~15-30% die before even getting the "privilege" of being sold onto bondage[0] and serve the rest of their lives as property is remotely comparable to a person using gmail for free but retaining any right for such a company to profit from that data(which you freely give them)?

> Morality has to be talked about.

Logic has to be talked about. Your privacy and attention are your own imperative and outsourcing that is a fatal mistake. You will see adverts on a few trashcans but that is the price you pay for living in society. The choice is yours whether you want to sell your information to companies, you provide it, you have agency, stop.

[0]http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&p...
Better sooner than later... :)
Relativity is not a good example since we could still discover the correction empirically and program it into GPS receivers without having a theory of relativity. (i.e. the corrections are just "these weird numbers that you add to make the results come out right").
Yep, when I see "flat management" I really hesitate to apply. Especially as a minority in tech, I would rather find a hierarchical place with good managers who value good arguments than trust the herd.

Unless you have a team of unusually conscientious engineers, "democratic" or "flat" decision-making often translates to who shouts the loudest.

Not to mention engineers often want to complete the project in the most technically exciting way possible, rather than the way that will most benefit the product. Flat structure + too many engineers like that and you end up with this http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2597, written in Haskell.
I think he means other engineers, in a different branch of the tree, whom are even more distant than someone is higher up but in the same branch.
As another poster already said, Ada fulfills all of the requirements, and you can trivially write reusable code in it.
But if everyone grew "organic" food, then it would be moot point. A full organic system is a better than a full non-organic system. So while current organic food might be contaminated through side channels, making more of our food production 'organic' would be be beneficial - not because organic food is great nutritionally in and of itself, but because having more of it benefits the food system.

That said, I don't eat much organic food. However, this article has made me want to eat more organic food.
Disclaimer: I work in advertising.

> But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job".

I don't understand this. If anything advertising is more transparent today than ever before.

Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked.

With the advent of TV, products would be place throughout the show.

Today we have much stricter laws about making it clear a publisher is promoting a product because they are paid.

> ... the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its competitors. Here is the price. Here is the total cost of ownership as compared to the competitor. Here is how this product can satisfy your needs in this specific case"

Only a very, very small percentage of things are purchased this way.

Why does your friend pay extra for those Louis Vuitton sunglasses? Hint: It's not because of quality. All sunglasses are basically made by one company.

Why does your friend drink Coke over Pepsi? Hint: It's not because of health reasons & pretty unlikely it's because of taste.

Why does your friend buy Frosted Flakes instead of the store brand? And so on...

A lot of it boils down to "brand equity" -- what you'll pay for a specific brand over something else. Why do people do that? It's because of the association, image, and feeling a brand generates. You don't sell diapers by saying "We sell good diapers." You sell diapers by showing a cute baby with soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. Maybe the jab at node etc. but this is quite similar to what the op alludes to. The engagement; the need to solve the problem can have quite intense experiencial results--along the lines of chemical intradiction in other circumstances.
Certainly, it's one experience among many. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
+1, Hapi to be happy!
Your description sounds like intent, but it's important to keep in mind there is a selection force here.

Ten earnest mathematicians try. 9 fail. The tenth structures the problem in such a way that the solution is meaningless but not obviously so-- his work gets published. But he doesn't know and certantly never intended to produce a meaningless proof.

When useful proofs are harder to construct than difficult to detect as not useful trivial proofs, we should expect lots of the latter, even just by chance.
It reminds me SELinux.
For another example of a similarly beautiful interface that echoes "difficult solution made stupidly simple to use", checkpointing under DragonFly BSD: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sys_checkpo...

On an unrelated note, I've always had respect for how Theo de Raadt is both the project leader of a complete BSD system, yet also an active hacker. Contrast to Linus Torvalds, who's mostly a manager nowadays.