Let progress proceed - gene therapy over-regulated  - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/03/gene-therapists-ask-to-be-released.html?ref=hp

<comment><AUTHOR> What most people don't realize about gene therapy is that it is not a scary technology. Gene therapy essentially happens to us all the time when our bodies are invaded by viruses. In fact, our bodies respond to gene therapies in much the same way it responds to a viral infection. That is to say, our bodies will mount an immune response to any foreign DNA being introduced. So gene therapy is not really that different from catching a viral infection.

Gene therapy is also not as permanent as some people might believe. Gene therapy will not be passed down to someones offspring - not unless it were deliberately targeted to their gamete (sex) cells. Furthermore, a typical gene therapy will wear off in a few years, as the foreign DNA becomes removed/lost in our bodies over time.

In short, Gene therapy is not really as scary as it sounds. It is far less effective then the public at large might believe. Yet, it promises to offer treatments to a myriad of human ailments. It is time for the public to become more accepting of the technology. It is not something to fear. We are not going to be seeing mutant, super humans walking the earth in the next hundred years with our current level of technology.</comment>


IsMyQuestion lets you easily create pages with a question and its answer. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ismyquestion.com

<comment><USER2> This is a very cool idea. Love it.

That being said, isn't the joke that you have a really long domain name like ismycatstillalive.com and then the only content is a simple answer? I feel like ismycatstillalive.IsMyQuestion.com just isn't as funny.

I wonder if they let you point your own domain at them with an alias DNS record...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out! You can definitely point your own DNS to it (via redirect). I'm also considering becoming a registrar affiliate so I can register non-ismyquestion.com domain names for people's questions if they like, but that's a bit further off.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, like I said, very cool idea! I love what you've got right now and I definitely think you're on the right track.</comment></comment></comment>


1600s England Through the Eyes of One of the First Modern Travel Writers (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-1600s-england-through-eyes-one-first-travel-writers-180963536/ <comment><USER2> It's about Celia Fiennes' _Through England on a Side Saddle In the Time of William and Mary_

"She travelled around England on horseback between 1684 and about 1703, "to regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise". At this time the idea of travel for its own sake was still novel, and Fiennes was exceptional as an enthusiastic woman traveller."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celia_Fiennes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celia_Fiennes)

Download her book as pdf, epub etc: [https://archive.org/details/throughenglando00fiengoog](https://archive.org/details/throughenglando00fiengoog)

That 1888 edition is the first complete one.

<comment><USER3> If the name Fiennes brings to mind actor Ralph Fiennes and his cousin explorer Ranulph Fiennes, it's no coincidence: they are related.

Wikipedia has several overview pages:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fiennes_family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fiennes_family)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisleton-Wykeham- Fiennes_fami...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisleton-Wykeham- Fiennes_family)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Drop back a few decades and Pepys' Diary is another fine slice of life of urban England. I'm finishing a public domain production of the 1893 edition[1] for Standard Ebooks[2] at the moment but in the meantime they're all online and cross referenced at [https://www.pepysdiary.com/](https://www.pepysdiary.com/) ; it's fun to dive in and read an entry or two.

[1] [https://github.com/robinwhittleton/samuel-pepys_the-diary- of...](https://github.com/robinwhittleton/samuel-pepys_the-diary-of-samuel- pepys)

[2] [https://standardebooks.org/](https://standardebooks.org/)

<comment><USER5> Peyps also created one of the great treasures of English folk history, a collection of over 1,800 broadside ballads. Broadsides are the closest thing we have to a 17th century newspaper - cheaply printed, sold in the street and fundamentally ephemeral. Browsing his collection gives a remarkable insight into the zeitgeist.

[https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/pepys](https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/pepys)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want an account of these times written in modern English, "The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain" is a lively and entertaining read: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Travellers-Guide- Restoration-B...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Travellers-Guide-Restoration- Britain-ebook/dp/B01I0RU15S/ref=sr_1_1)

</comment><comment><USER7> I note with interest how her travelogue was rediscovered. How will this work a couple hundred years from now when people of our generation put stuff online instead of pen to paper? Will there hopefully be a local copy on their computer, assuming the SSD or HD hasn't died and later generations can read it? Or will it simply perish when the hosting bill isn't paid, or the account is inactive?

A lot of memoirs from this writer's era certainly didn't survive either, but it seems like there was a greater chance back then even considering the cost of pen, ink and paper.

<comment><USER8> I think about that every time I am visiting an archaeological site with stone inscriptions.

Looking 5000 years in the future, no one will be able to read our documents, like we do with those written 5000 years ago.

<comment><USER9> Reading 25 year old documents is hard enough. I mean, none of my current computers even has an optical drive, let alone a 3.5" floppy. To say nothing of the actually-floppy floppies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you've read Neal Stephenson's "system of the world" this book is a voice straight out of that timeline. And for more contemporary references "the favourite"

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting article, but I'm slightly puzzled by the [sic] comments following many of the quotes. The use of English looks correct for the time.

<comment><USER12> Surely the [sic] annotations are to indicate that the quotations are unchanged from the original source text, which contains somewhat archaic language and misspellings of words when compared to modern English.

<comment><USER11> You're right. I'm so used to seeing it used in a snarky way that I was overlooking the original meaning of "sic erat scriptum" (thus was it written).</comment></comment></comment>


If you don't catch an exception, PHP spills your MySQL account info by default - <AUTHOR> http://php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php

<comment><USER2> This is mitigated somewhat by most sane deployments using firewalls or similar mechanisms to prevent access to MySQL from non-trusted hosts. If any box on the Internet can already talk to MySQL, you're... not in an excellent security posture.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Quoted from the above official PHP docs: "If your application does not catch the exception thrown from the PDO constructor, the default action taken by the zend engine is to terminate the script and display a back trace. This back trace will likely reveal the full database connection details, including the username and password. [...]"

</comment><comment><USER3> Why are your errors going to the browser ?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the quickest way to implement user management for my SaaS - <AUTHOR> Implementing user management functionalities such as<p>- user registration - email/phone number verification - user login - forget username or password
- account deletion - etc For SaaS is a common requirement. What are the best ways available today to implement these functionalities quickly without wasting the resources? <comment><USER2> File based access under a Unix with users and groups. Assuming you know or are willing to learn a Unix.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps take a look at auth0 or amazon cognitio.

Google will find you lots of usage examples in your language.</comment>


Economies of Density: A Study of Amazon's Fulfillment Center Network - <AUTHOR> https://www.nber.org/papers/w23361 <comment><USER2> In case you want to read the full paper: [https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2017/preliminary/paper/GR9...](https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2017/preliminary/paper/GR9RTndF)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shipping distance isn't the only factor in shipping costs, and reducing shipping distances can sometimes have the effect of increasing other costs...and thus cannot be compared in isolation of those other costs.

For example, reducing shipping distances increases the number of locations where inventory must be kept, which increases safety stock, which reduces inventory turns. Also, as inventory becomes more fragmented, you can increase split shipments which can have a huge upwards pressure on total shipping costs because of the marginal cost savings of adding an item to a box (ex. a shipment of a small item may cost $3 but you can add a large item to the shipment for only $0.50 more).

And at the end of the day, there are marginal returns to reduced shipping distances, because the majority of shipping costs are borne by the last mile. Much of this is obscured by carrier retail pricing, which commands a premium for distance. But as negotiating power increases, realized carrier pricing much more closely aligns with carrier cost structures. And those costs are driven heavily by the last mile, which isn't going away even with the most feasibly localized inventory you can imagine.</comment>


Andrew Yang Discusses the Automation of Labor and Universal Basic Income at SXSW - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alRgSjWT2RI <comment><USER2> I do believe there will come a point where we have a "replicator" or printer- like machine or robot that will provide for everything we might want. I don't believe Mr. Yang will be alive when that time comes about, which is an issue for his campaign timing.</comment>


Insane HTML5 take on Google's interface - <AUTHOR> http://search.detourlab.com/

<comment><USER2> Oh god it just downloaded 16 .mov files with no reason! What the hell is that...

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes the effect much less impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is actually an annoying interface. Maybe I just don't get it?

</comment><comment><USER4> This made my day, it's giving a personnality to the system i use the most. It is so tired of crawling the web to find me results that it makes typo... it is very human. And the quicktime stuff shows its very lazyness. When computer will make mistakes and have emotions they will be more understood by everybody. I read that somewhere in an old book.

</comment><comment><USER5> Quicktime is so 90s.

</comment><comment><USER6> Without the letter shuffling, that'd be an interesting skin of the Google interface.

</comment><comment><USER7> i know it's supposed to be cute, but the yawning is sort of creeping me out.

</comment><comment><USER8> quicktime. really?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm out in the public and I didn't give it enough time to see that it was yawning, and not moaning. Everyone was looking at me >:| and still are.</comment>


107 Nobel laureates sign letter blasting Greenpeace over GMOs - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/29/more-than-100-nobel-laureates-take-on-greenpeace-over-gmo-stance/?postshare=1941467299721309&tid=ss_tw <comment><USER2> A couple of previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12014542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12014542)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012827)

</comment><comment><USER3> "blasting"... what is this, buzzfeed? or some pokemon cartoon?.</comment>


Free logic book: Introduction to Proof Theory (1998) (PDFs) - <AUTHOR> http://math.ucsd.edu/~sbuss/ResearchWeb/handbookI/

<comment><USER2> It is chapter 1 of a handbook. As you'll see here, chapter two by the same fellow is also available.

[http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~sbuss/ResearchWeb/HandbookProofThe...](http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~sbuss/ResearchWeb/HandbookProofTheory/)</comment>


How to go about getting freelance jobs? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm a student, and I can't take a fulltime job.
I also can't move anywhere.
So, I'm stuck with jobs that are:
1) telecommuting 2) short term contracts, or part time
How would I go about find jobs like these?
I'm a pretty competent programmer and I would rather not spend my time on places like freelancer.com where $10/hr is considered pretty good.
TinyProj fit the bill perfectly for me, but, unfortunately its been shut down.
Where should I go now? <comment><USER2> Don't be deceived. 10$ an hour on freelancer.com may seem like the norm, and you may well take some jobs that end up paying about that, but: 1\. Not all skill areas pay that poorly. Look for an underserved area and exploit it. 2\. Those low paying initial projects can turn into long term good paying clientele. I did exactly that with six iOS projects in 2011. The effective hourly rate on the initial jobs was 20-30, but once I had proved myself to the client, I would quote at 80-90 an hour, with no objections. 3\. You're a student who can't take a fulltime job. In that situation 10$ an hour work from home isn't a bad deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> See, for me, I don't really want to work if its $10/hr, because "just making money" isn't really my goal, and I would rather spend my time working with open source projects.

Thanks for the suggestion, though!

<comment><USER2> OSS is definitely an alternative. For me bidding on and winning iOS jobs was a way to motivate myself to grow my iOS skillset whilst getting paid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Whats your skill set? I run a small design agency, where occasionally I need help with frontend/backend projects. Drop me a line if you want to chat

<comment><AUTHOR> Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP (Symfony, CakePHP), MongoDB, MySQL, jQuery, Javascript, C/C++, algorithms.

I learn new things pretty quickly, too.

How would you like me to contact you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> wait til fabric. ;)</comment>


Decoding an air conditioner control's checksum with differential cryptanalysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2017/12/decoding-air-conditioner-controls.html <comment><USER2> Nice writeup! I'm going to be decoding a variety of air conditioner remotes in the future so this will be a good reference.

If anyone is interested in the process of reverse engineering an infrared remote from "I have a raspberry pi and some electronics" to "I can decode and encode infrared signals to control my stuff", I have an article on that:

[https://blog.bschwind.com/2016/05/29/sending-infrared- comman...](https://blog.bschwind.com/2016/05/29/sending-infrared-commands- from-a-raspberry-pi-without-lirc/)

There are better ways to do what I've described there but it's a good start.

<comment><USER3> > _You can see if an infrared LED is emitting light by looking at it through > your phone camera_

Do you or anyone else happen to know the sensitivities of phone cameras to infrared bleeding into the visible spectrum, esp under interference from the rest of the visible spectrum?

<comment><USER4> Disclosure: not an expert. IR/UV bleeding depends mostly on 3 things: sensor sensitivity, materials of and coatings on lenses, raw sensor data processing. Professional cameras are usually equipped with IR blocking filters and UV filter is "standard practice". Results can vary drastically from seeing under clothes [1] to barely registering IR lighting.

[1]: [http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126782&page=1](http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126782&page=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Coming from a statistics background, this kind of work is totally unfamiliar and very fascinating. This kind of high dimensional, complex data seems like it would admit some very interesting machine learning. And I wonder if the techniques described here could be adapted outside of cryptography for inference or other data processing applications.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a little scary. I'm in the middle of doing this exact same thing. Not sure if it's compatible or if I'll have to do the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice read, it reminds me of CrcRevEng[1], it was really useful several times when I needed to find what CRC algorithm a vendor used. The most fun was when I tried to RE disassembled function named crc_512. Turns out it was a checksum of 4 bytes.

[1] [http://reveng.sourceforge.net/](http://reveng.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow sounds like whoever engineered that checksum was a missy elliot fan: [https://xkcd.com/153/](https://xkcd.com/153/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if you could use a machine learning algorithm, trained on the samples provided, to correctly predict the outcome of another input

</comment><comment><USER10> Great read! Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: Review my app - peer code review app  - <AUTHOR> https://codereviewapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I needed something to do some code reviews in my day job and threw this little app together in the evenings over the past month or two. I have held back on releasing it, as I am not really satisfied with it yet, especially the 'website' around the app, but everyone keeps saying release often, so here it is. I would like to develop this into a solid code review app, but I am running short of simple features to add, so I definitely need some users to guide me.

Any good and bad feedback is appreciated, especially around the application more than the home/tour pages, which I basically just threw together last night ... thanks.</comment>


Show HN: How I Built HelioHex - <AUTHOR> https://vinaybhaip.com/blog/2020/07/05/heliohex <comment><AUTHOR> Over the past few months, I built a highly-configurable, modular, hexagon- based lighting system. Check out the demo here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TQva79vo88](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TQva79vo88)!</comment>


EU parliament calls for Privacy Shield to be pulled until US complies - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/05/eu-parliament-calls-for-privacy-shield-to-be-pulled-until-us-complies/ <comment><USER2> Max Schrems is great, and the hero we need. But I'll believe it when I see it, that the EU parliament dares to vote against such massive business interest. GDPR was one thing, this is a totally different level.

<comment><USER3> Massive US business interests. Why should the EU parliament care about that?

There's an obvious solution for Facebook et al. Host their primary data centers in the EU and move their US user data there, instead of vice versa.

<comment><USER4> If privacy shield gets scraped, then I might have to switch my European business to use only European third party services. At our company we use a carefully selected number of U.S. services that we believe have the interest of their customers and data at heart, but without privacy shield we might not be allowed to use them.

The massive downside for me as EU business:

1\. Lost time and money having to migrate. 2\. Usually european companies providing the same service are worse, leaving me and my customers worse off.

<comment><USER3> Oh absolutely. In other words, you'll be in exactly the same situation US businesses are in, that rely on Chinese and other suppliers that are now subject to tariffs. Politicians, eh? Hope someone wins this trade war soon so we can get it over with.

<comment><USER5> This is _not_ a trade-war issue. This is a long planned review of the Privacy Shield regulation. Even if all trade conflicts ended, this would continue because it is not about trade but fundamental rights.

<comment><USER6> It is possible that the resolution gained more votes because of the trade war.

In general, Members of the European Parliament have less understanding of business and trade than businesspeople and traders, and in my view[0] tend to follow their emotions more in those areas.

Some also have a streak of anti-Americanism, in varying degrees. As the heat increases, this sort of resolution may occur more frequently.

I'm sceptical of the notion that MEPs all voted according to their devotion to fundamental rights.

None of this means that I believe pursuing the resolution into legislation is a bad or a good idea. I'd have to see (and understand the consequences of) the proposed measure.

[0]This is an impression; I have no empirical data

<comment><USER7> > I'm sceptical of the notion that MEPs all voted according to their devotion > to fundamental rights.

This is what it comes down to, your disbelief that MEPs could have a genuine interest in their constituents' privacy.

<comment><USER8> It's the rational belief to hold.

<comment><USER9> You can't just claim a position is rational just because it is cynical.

<comment><USER10> It seems like a sadly reasonable assumption given past behavior and their own spying and loopholed cooperation.

<comment><USER3> So you don't think passing GDPR and the previous data protection legislation going back decades, and enforcing them counts as evidence? I'm sorry, that is a bit snarky, but the EU has been pushing strongly in this direction for a long time and it's been perfectly apparent it was going to come up hard against the US on this.

<comment><USER11> _So you don't think passing GDPR and the previous data protection legislation going back decades, and enforcing them counts as evidence?_

Sure it does, but so do all the loopholes they wrote into those laws so EU member states could continue their own surveillance programmes and data seizure powers, and for that matter all the then-illegal spying programmes that were retrospectively legalised when Snowden et al brought them to light. Let's not pretend the EU and its members are whiter than white in this area, nor that the EU is above attacking the US tech sector through non-technical means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The parliament is also calling for "evidence and legally binding > commitments" to ensure that data collection under FISA Section 702 is not > "indiscriminate

Ha...this I doubt will ever be provided. And if it is provided, will it be seen by the citizenry? They're either going to have to cave on the "no indiscriminate collection" requirement, accept an invalid definition of "indiscriminate" or "collection", or flat never re-agree to the agreement. Because, sadly, indiscriminate collection of data isn't stopping.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't see how this can possibly end well.

I live in the US; I have many friends in Europe; how exactly is Facebook/Google/etc going to separate our data geographically while still displaying it in our feeds/inboxes/etc?

There really seems to be only one realistic endgame: The end of the multinational corporation. Pick a jurisdiction, keep your servers & employees inside, and tell the rest of the world to get soaked. If Europe really wants to control their citizen's data, they're going to have to start firewalling, China-style.

I'm guessing privacy advocates imagine the world will homogenize on a set of Euro-compatible policies and everyone will live happily ever after? That seems far less likely than a set of mutually-incompatible enforcement regimes, like we already see with China and Russia.

So what does Facebook/Google do? Disallow friending/email/communication across political boundaries?

<comment><USER14> There is another endgame that I will concede is considerably less likely to happen, but I will maintain remains possible: the end of the modern-day nation-state.

My evidence for this claim? Very few nation-states if any are growing as fast (in terms of net worth) as the largest multinationals, but the multinationals are still relatively agile (read as able to mobilize their strength behind a common agenda). Sure at the moment, the largest multinationals have only as much net worth as some of the poorest countries. However, look at how cities and states try to out compete each other in order to have companies like Amazon and Foxconn set up their headquarters. How soon will it be until countries start competing with each other for something similar (building your next regional data center in EMEA? here are the contenders). If the multinationals really wanted to milk it, then they could totally make a game show out of it à la Eurovision.

<comment><USER15> then who would monopolize violence in that scenario? What stopping us from a might is right type world?

<comment><USER14> 1) The multinationals of the future. 2) Time, insufficient money in the present-day, and regulations/political will.

<comment><USER16> States partition the surface of the world and each person withing their borders is subject to their law (even foreign people passing by.) They have exclusive access to people.

Multinationals don't have borders and don't have exclusive access to people and they don't (currently) wish to because they sell different products and it would be pointless for them and for people to be able to buy from only one company.

So that endgame would work only if multinationals take over and rule the world together. That happened in Continuum [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_\(TV_series\)) a Canadian dystopian sci-fi TV series.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kind of a tangent (secant?), and this is a rather broad discussion topic, but is anybody else also worried that the EU is going to lose some of its teeth with Brexit and such coming up? I'm wondering how all these regulations will play out in the next few years if members decide the EU isn't serving their interests. Will serious enforcement take place, or not? Because if not, it seems likely to me that companies might try to "wait it out" and avoid full compliance with regulation for a while, to see what happens.

<comment><USER18> No; if anything, they will gain teeth. For many years, the UK has been a strong influence in a variety of directions (pro-swpat, for example, but often anti-regulation), many of which were not well-aligned with their continental cousins.

The EU27 are better aligned without the UK, and will move forwards more quickly in many areas the UK would have held them back. Ongoing integration is very much still the plan.

In the meantime, the UK will have to stay very close to EU rules in order to continue to trade with its largest market. However, it already has little/no say in future rules, and that will stop altogether in March.

<comment><USER17> Thanks! But note that by teeth I meant the ability to enforce, not the ability to legislate. I expect the more countries leave or lose interest, the easier it is to legislate, but the less leverage they have for actual enforcement, so I'm wondering how that balances out.

<comment><USER19> There's no sign of anyone else leaving yet. [https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-support-increases-in- euro...](https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-support-increases-in-europe- continent-but-also-exit-referendum-support/)

If any other country was going to do it, it might have been Greece during the financial crisis, but ultimately the same pressures apply: no country can pull up the drawbridge. Dependency on trade, investment, and migration of skilled staff is the backbone of a modern society. And leaving the EU does not make Europe go away, it just removes that country from the decision-making process.

<comment><USER20> The only thing, I think, that might change this, would be if the UK against all odds manages to make Brexit successful. I personally don't think there's any chance of that, but _if_ that were to happen, anti-EU sentiments elsewhere in Europe might grow. I think the reverse is more likely: That Brexit will serve to firm up EU support even more once the full effects become clear... I live in the UK, so I hope I'm wrong and that things will work out ok...

<comment><USER21> Ever wondered why the other EU countries didn't make much of a fuss over Brexit? It's because the UK had many privileges from the times when it was needed to establish the EU... and then it didn't even join the Euro. The UK has been an entry point for English speaking businesses into the European market, but it kept all the benefits from that behind an exchange barrier, which is not in the interest of the rest of EU countries. Now, many of those businesses will leave the UK and establish operations in the EU-Eurozone proper, directly contributing to strengthening the Euro instead of the GBP, which will become a further incentive for countries to stay in the EU.

As for the UK, there are other ways for it to survive and even thrive, but whether it will be good or not so much for most of its citizens, remains to be seen.

<comment><USER22> IOW Ireland is looking increasingly appealing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Well, this was completely predictable. Privacy Shield seemed extremely flaky considering how suddenly Safe Harbor was shot down. I hope most European companies were smart enough to drop hard dependencies on US companies for privacy relevant data during their GDPR audits.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is, yet again, the EU trying to legislate for the whole world.

<comment><USER24> Well, considering the US is invading and bombing counties all over the world for various reasons, the EU way is a bit less aggressive, don't you think?

I also never understood why Americans think that is bad. The EU is making their market less attractive, so shouldn't Americans be happy about that?

<comment><USER25> I'm not happy when the liberty and quality of life of foreigners is damaged.

<comment><USER26> As a European, I'm quite happy the EU wants to protect my personal data from being arbitrarily raided over without any warrant by your government for the simple crime of not being American, but thank you very much for your concern.

<comment><USER25> I'm not happy with any government surveillance, regardless of origin or target.

<comment><USER27> Then I'm glad you agree that this resolution is a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Place your bets: how many years til EU kicks Fb/Google/Amazon out of Europe?

<comment><USER21> 260, give or take some.

The EU has no interest in kicking anyone out, for as long as they pay taxes in the EU.</comment></comment>


Muse – Your Tool for Thought - <AUTHOR> https://museapp.com/ <comment><USER2> This is exactly what I've been looking for: LucidCharts with better web integration! Will I pay $100 annually for it? Probably not.</comment>


Introduction to Golang - <AUTHOR> http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/08/18/introducing-go/ <comment><USER2> I've just recently started playing with go and I think the most impressive part is how close you can get to a dynamic language development feel without sacrificing the benefits of static compilation, speed, binary distribution, etc.

There is a lot to love about go and it is very quickly starting to look a lot more interesting than other languages like ruby for future projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> And for people who want to "level up" their programming skills and get an excellent language for writing servers in with a great faculty for safely concurrent semantics:

[http://clojure- doc.org/articles/content.html#clojure_tutoria...](http://clojure- doc.org/articles/content.html#clojure_tutorials)

<comment><USER4> How is deployment with clojure? I haven't used either, but deploying golang programs looks incredibly simple, whereas JVM wrangling (which I last did years ago) was never fun for me. Does either one support erlang-style hot code swapping?

<comment><USER3> You might be over-rating the usefulness of code hot-swaps in production with Erlang. Erlang devs I've talked to have looked a little green in the gills when I asked about it.

Coming from Python and Ruby, being able to just deploy a jar is a dream.

<comment><USER5> Python has packages ("eggs", although the term has multiple meanings, I'm unaware of good unambiguous name to things you host on PyPI or alikes). You put your code under a certain conventional directory structure, write simple setup.py file and, well, that's about it.

(Although, as I happen to use mostly Debian-based systems, I prefer not using Python packages directly but build .deb out of them with stdeb and use system package manager to deploy. Just dput the built package to company's private apt repo, and Puppets pull the update.)

<comment><USER3> Eggs are incomplete, broken, don't really solve the entire problem, and don't even solve the problem they were designed to solve.

It's a mess, there are multiple factions and implementations, and until people started consolidating there were 4-5 concurrent popular approaches to packaging Python libraries.

I've lost tangible shards of my sanity to Python packaging and some of my poor coworkers are fighting the terribly useless fight regularly still to this day.

Worse, most Python projects that have any non-trivial dependencies usually entail NumPy, SciPy, or Cython.

Have you ever packaged something that's using multiple C and Fortran dependencies for automated deployment? It's horrific.

Meanwhile, back when I'm at home and I use jBlas or any other Clojure, Java, or Scala library here's what I have to do:

Add dependency to project.clj:

        [bulwark "0.0.3"]

Ship the jar.

        lein deploy $maven_repo

Writing Clojure code at home is incomparably more pleasant not just in pure code, but in all the accouterments and tooling as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tried the language recently. Wanted a in-memory data structure that could represent a filesystem-like graph. Ran away when I understood (please correct me if I got that wrong, but I wasted a whole weekend and found nothing) that it's either totally type-unsafe void*^H^W interface{} all the way or I have to write my own separate implementation for every and each type of graph I'll use, without any significant way to reuse code.

<comment><USER6> Without generics you'll need to use an alternative approach. As you said you can use interface{} everywhere. Another option is to create an interface that does what you need. Checkout "sort" for an example: [http://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Interface](http://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Interface).

<comment><USER5> Sure, I can `type Tree struct { Child []*Tree; Node NodeType }`, where `NodeType` is either `interface{}` (makes `Tree` reusable by sacrificing type safety) or some concrete type (sacrifices `Tree`'s reuse) but that's about how far I can progress. Also, I have to manually ensure that only one of Child or Node is set, but not both.

I just can't do anything like `data Tree a = Leaf a | Node [Tree a]` there.

(Edit: okay, my mind swayed a bit, that was trees, not graphs. I had different ideas on data structure to use, and my memories are a bit messy. Sorry about this. The problem should still hold, it applies to both trees and graphs, and I think many other data structures too.)

<comment><USER6> The 'one of Child or Node' isn't really an issue since you probably shouldn't expose the members of the struct (the tree should be accessed via methods). But I agree with your point about containers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://i.lvme.me/4gl8uip.jpg](http://i.lvme.me/4gl8uip.jpg)

The up-to-date Go Users page is at [http://code.google.com/p/go- wiki/wiki/GoUsers](http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/GoUsers)

</comment><comment><USER8> Taken from the article:

> "Strongly typed (with dyamic casting)" > "while Go is statically typed, it > has a strong system for dynamic casting and reflection".

This is not even wrong. The _whole_ point to using types is to make strong _guarantees_ about the meaning of programs without even having to run them. Dynamic casting and reflection _destroy_ the usefulness of these guarantees, by virtue of their semantics depending on information only avaluable at runtime. Strong typing with dynamic casting and reflection is like a safe knife whose handle is a blade!

> "Really good at concurrent stuff, pretty fast"

Give me a break. Concurrency support is all about compartmentalizing the use of resources as much as possible, reducing sharing between the concurrent units of computation (processes, tasks, goroutines, whatever you want to call them) to the bare minimum required for the program as a whole to serve its goal. How does Go's shared memory model help in this regard? This fundamental inadequacy has negative consequences both for correctness (synchronization is a convention, it is not actually enforced) and for performance (Go needs a stop-the-world garbage collector).

===

Go might have been barely interesting ten or fifteen years ago, but in 2013, this kind of design has to be rejected as mediocre.

<comment><USER9> I don't know why you're being down voted. Your points are completely valid. Without Google's name behind it, Go would not have had all this hype around it.

<comment><USER8> Fanbois hate it when someone points at the flaws in their favorite language. I still cannot comprehend why. As much as I like Haskell and Standard ML, if someone pointed out their flaws (Haskell: lame module system, needing arcane hacks to selectively introduce strictness; SML: no open sum types, no applicative functors even when generative ones do not make sense), I would not take issue with that. Realizing our tools are not perfect is the first step to improving them.

I have nothing against Google, but their programming languages (at least, the ones that I know of), Dart and Go, are really mediocre and uninspiring. For all their bad reputation, Microsoft at least has F# and is indirectly involved in the development of Haskell. Even Microsoft's take at an objected-oriented language for the uneducated masses, C#, is much better than the Google- and Apple-endorsed alternatives (Java and Objective-C).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For people who use go in production; what do you use for database abstraction and mapping ? I found several "ORM" but either they throw static typing out the window, or they seem to be way overblown in what they try to do (ending up dictating how some of the data has to look in the database), I look only for a database abstraction (which db/sql doesn't provide), does a good one exists ?

</comment><comment><USER11> Random question - but what happens when you divide by zero in go?

<comment><USER12> [http://play.golang.org/p/TjzkjvDfYa](http://play.golang.org/p/TjzkjvDfYa)

<comment><USER13> For people not familiar with Go Playground, that's a compiler error.

<comment><USER14> Does it only throw a compiler error if you use 0 as a constant? Let's say you have a function that returns an int; does it force you to check if that int is non-zero before using it in division?

<comment><USER15> It can only throw a compiler error if you use a 0 literal (or constant), because it cannot determine the runtime value of a variable denominator at compile-time (obviously).

It does not force you to check, but if you wanted to "catch" the "exception" (really, "recover from the panic"), here's how you would do that. Note that this is admittedly a somewhat unidiomatic use of recover(): [http://play.golang.org/p/dAQ01dus9Y](http://play.golang.org/p/dAQ01dus9Y)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "This isn't a language for use in UIs or game clients, but it is an extremely competent language for making servers, infrastructure or parallel/distributed processing systems."

Golang has a GUI tool kit: the "net/http" and "html/template" packages. While I personally hate EcmaScript with a passion, I have to admit every single GUI tool kit or windowing system I've worked with had serious fundamental design flaws not unlike JavaScript and the DOM. The entire scenario is not unlike the Tcl\Tk days. People will bitch and whine but will do so while using it until something better comes up.

<comment><USER17> > Golang has a GUI tool kit: the "net/http" and "html/template" packages.

The article is written from the point of view of a game developer. He means UIKit or WPF. Most games used to write their own UI controls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There sure has been a ton of Golang hype lately. At the risk of being downvoted, just wanted to add my 2 cents: seems obvious to me that Google's PR team has been in full motion on Go lately. At the very least, there are quite a few Google fans active on HN routinely pushing Go. Which is no problem of course.

I just find this somewhat frustrating given that we also have the massive NSA surveillance scandal unfolding. Because I'd like to think that intelligent, free-thinking hackers would opt for using products & technologies from companies & organizations not so directly, deeply, and intricately involved in said scandal.

Anyway, kudos to Dan for his detailed article - I'm sure he could care less about the political alignment of the corporation he is getting his tools from - and really it should be about technology first; so if Golang fits his needs most optimally then by all means that's what he should be using. Just saying, don't forget about the alternatives ;)

<comment><USER19> FUD. What proof are you referring to that Google is "directly, deeply, and intricately involved in said scandal?" Should the industry drop C++ (Microsoft) and Java (Oracle) support or similar (Scala, Python, etc)? AMD and Intel processing? All American companies; completely ludicrous.

<comment><USER18> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Details.j...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Details.jpg)

And there is plenty of other reading material to review regarding Google's history with the NSA (see my other links posted in the nested comment below).

Perhaps I should not have said "directly, deeply, and intricately involved in said scandal" in the tone of 'matter of fact' \- because it is indeed an opinion, but I'm just drawing what I feel are logical conclusions. IMO Google is the NSA's primary Trojan Horse into the free market. I am in no means declaring this as fact, like I said originally - just wanted to drop my '2 cents' if that's OK.

<comment><USER19> It goes deeper than that. You are suggesting that intellectual, free thinking and Google can't coexist, or to work AT or WITH Google is to be not intellectual nor free thinking. It's ludicrous to label Google employees and users. You would suggest that Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and those Google employees that publicly deny your FUD [0] can't be intelligent, free-thinking hackers. Crazy.

[0] [https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13qvvpjivahzpnbo04...](https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13qvvpjivahzpnbo04cghl5dpa2ytui4wg0k) (Yonatan Zunger [Chief Architect, Google+] denies PRISM wholesale)

<comment><USER18> I believe you're taking my comment out of context. I shared 'my 2 cents'; an opinion - and did not label Google users or employees. I apologize if you found my comment rude, but I clearly intended it to be taken with a grain of salt.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Security Monkey: Monitors AWS and GCP accounts for policy changes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Netflix/security_monkey <comment><USER2> Another open source tool in this space that also supports writing your own rules, lambda/event based execution, config rules, guard duty support and wide coverage is [https://github.com/capitalone/cloud- custodian](https://github.com/capitalone/cloud-custodian)

<comment><USER3> See also, [https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/forseti- security](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/forseti-security)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible to add custom rules to security monkey? Is there a Howto for this?

<comment><USER5> You can create custom alerters: [https://github.com/Netflix/security_monkey/blob/develop/docs...](https://github.com/Netflix/security_monkey/blob/develop/docs/misc.md#custom- alerters). This allows you to have custom logic for items in your environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds cool, but can't some combo of Cloudwatch and Cloudtrail do this?

<comment><USER5> Hello there! I work at Netflix and am one of the primary contributors to Security Monkey.

You can absolutely use Cloudwatch and Cloudtrail for this. This is actually our long term plan with [https://github.com/Netflix- Skunkworks/historical](https://github.com/Netflix-Skunkworks/historical). We intend to effectively move all watching logic to Historical so it's all event driven vs. polling.

Hopefully we'll have integration sometime next quarter.</comment></comment>


A woman first wrote the prescient ideas Huxley and Orwell made famous - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/quartzy/1498891/the-pillars-of-science-fiction-are-two-writers-you-dont-know/ <comment><USER2> While I haven't read What Not I have read the other novel mentioned here, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and I have to say 1984 pretty much completely takes the entire plot from it.

Spoilers follow:

Both books follow the journey of a single man as he has a romance with a rebellious woman, get involved with a rebellion but then find out that an older man who they thought they could trust was really part of the secret police. Both novels end with the protagonist getting brainwashed and once again loyal to the state. While I like and respect Orwell immensely as an author, it's clear that he owes a great debt to Zamyatin for his most famous novel.

<comment><USER3> Orwell wrote a review of _We_ in which he claimed that Huxley must have been influenced by it. Orwell is also reported to have said that he was taking it as the model for his next novel i.e. 1984.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the quote the title is based on, and the fact that the title is based on it.

[https://archive.org/details/whatnotprophetic00macauoft/page/...](https://archive.org/details/whatnotprophetic00macauoft/page/n9)</comment>


A student loan collector must halt collections - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/business/dealbook/student-loan-national-collegiate-trusts.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage <comment><USER2> It's mind-boggling how a nation is able to develop a system that forces its young to spend a large part of their life paying for the salaries of bank employees and managers, simply because they want an education. It's even more mind-boggling that these students can then get rid of this dept easiest by joining the system themselves, simply shuffling around money to make more money to pay off their dept.

And then Jamie Dimon calls Bitoin a ponzi scheme... Our entire economy is a ponzi scheme.

All of our money is created as dept, as such banks collect money on all of the money ever created. They create nothing of value for this. Why do we accept this?

<comment><USER3> Why do we accept the out of control increase in cost to get a degree? Why is it possible to get a loan for a degree that will be highly unlikely to lead to a career that will pay off the loan?

The schools seem to have way too much power here. If this was any other industry, there would be more oversight and regulation.

The easy money from lending immunizes the schools from being cost conscious because it shifts the burden to the students, who are told they'll go to heaven if they only get a college degree.

<comment><USER4> > Why do we accept the out of control increase in cost to get a degree?

Because that degree is valued, not for the education the student received, but as a formal gating mechanism: those who do not obtain it (and it better be from a "good" school) are (with a few exceptions) excluded from all possibility of ever having "good" jobs.

In other words, our hiring practices are the root of the problem.

Even in tech (where I know from experience that skill and education are only mildly correlated), education on the resume is still a gatekeeper and my company's recruiting of novices comes primarily from the better college campuses.

<comment><USER5> I don't have a degree and never had an issue finding good work in the tech industry.

I've found there are so many people trying to get into IT that your portfolio counts for more than your qualifications (much like with a photographer).

<comment><USER6> > I've found there are so many people trying to get into IT that your > portfolio counts for more than your qualifications

I'd expect qualifications to matter less if there are few people trying to get into IT, since employers can less afford to miss a good candidate. If they get a hundred applicants for each position, they'll be more inclined to use a weak filter to throw out half of them on a first pass.

<comment><USER5> Maybe there is a glut of average candidates then? Either way I've found no issue getting jobs - even for positions which specifically state an IT degree as a requirement. And I'm always honest about qualifications as well.

Obviously I'm not advocating people skip university. But I think it's important to remember that you can still compete in the job market without a degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> " _Those borrowers had made payments after being sued over loans that were legally uncollectable, either because the statute of limitations had passed or because National Collegiate lacked the documentation needed to collect the debts in court._ "

This sounds a lot like what was happening during the financial crisis a decade ago. Lenders were selling mortgage loans to Wall Street to be bundled into collateralized debt obligations. After those CDOs got sold a few times, people lost track of who actually owned a particular loan. When borrowers defaulted, it was in many cases impossible to prove who was legally entitled to collect on the debt.

(A line in a spreadsheet that says John Doe owes you $500K is not very convincing evidence to a judge - you need to be able to provide a document with John Doe's signature on it.)

<comment><USER8> My son got a letter insisting he owed money on his college loan. He never had a loan. I paid for his education without any loans. He asked for documentation and they stalled. I finally had my lawyer write a letter on his behalf and, sure enough, they had made an error and were deeply sorry for our inconvenience.

Notably, they didn't offer to cover my time, his time, and the expense of the lawyer. I value my time more than I value money. I consider these things theft of my time.

<comment><USER9> Did you consider taking them to small claims court to recover your costs?

<comment><USER8> Not really. The thought crossed my mind but I figured it'd just be more of my time being spent. I can make more money. My time is a finite commodity. I'd rather waste it on fun things.

<comment><USER10> Didnt you think for a minute of your precious time that you had perfect opportunity to teach them a lesson and burn some of their money in the process? These scumbags dont exist because we dont have laws strictly prohibiting what they doing - they exist because only very tiny fraction of people they tried defraud will do something about it.

<comment><USER8> Nope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Student loans are becoming insane.

My own loan was initially government issued with a reasonable interest rate, but a year after finishing uni, it was sold off to a private fund that decided to jack up the interest rate to nearly 7%! In the UK, education used to be free. Now kids are leaving 3rd grade universities with 50k GBP debt, a ridiculously high interest rate and no quality job prospects. That's a lot of pressure on young shoulders (my sibling is going through this currently, and I can see how distressing it is).

And they wonder why young people can't get on the property ladder! The ignorance on behalf of the government is astounding! I'm not sure I'd want my kids to go through that, even if it means missing out on the social experiences of university.

<comment><USER12> The UK system has the weird and politically contingent "forgiveness at retirement" element, which means that theoretically it has a lifetime cap and behaves a bit like an income tax on graduates.

The catch is it's something like a 9% income tax!

The worst thing is that the three big national parties(+) all have their fingers on this, so I'm not sure who you could rely on to fix it. And whether it might have to come with rationing to a certain fraction of the population being able to get free university.

Not to mention that education is a vital export industry which the Home Office keeps trying to destroy.

(+) The third largest party by MPs is the SNP who only stand in Scotland, where they have ruled out tuition fees

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "A random sample of nearly 400 National Collegiate loans found not a single one had assignment paperwork documenting the chain of ownership, according to a report they had prepared." [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/business/dealbook/stud...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/business/dealbook/student- loan-debt-collection.html)

Why aren't judges fining them /their lawyers? Can I sue John Doe and demand that he pay me the money he took for his mortgage? Before filing a lawsuit, the "I bought your loan so pay me" chain should be settled in an acceptable way. Otherwise it's fraud.

<comment><USER14> Sanctioning a lawyer isn't as easy as people think it is. It took years to take down the Prenda lawyers

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm obviously very old compared to the target audience. I was accepted to Columbia and Texas A&M and chose Texas A&M because I had various scholarships that paid for my tuition and room/board. I had some scholarships to go to Columbia but was facing debt of ~20k/year so I choose to go to A&M instead. My life is fine but I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who take out huge loans. (I had to work after my freshman year and I didn't go out a lot etc.) Not seeking sympathy for me, just saying I don't have any desire to "forgive" the loans for anyone.

I don't know the solution but having the govt secure all loans and think about forgiving them is not going to help the next generation. Where is the incentive for univ to bring their costs down? Also, where is the incentive for people to either shop for a college they can afford, or even forgo college in favor of some other training or on the job experience?</comment>


Mars Rover Spots Metallic "Arm" - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/02/07/mars-rover-spots-metallic-arm_n_2637990.html

<comment><USER2> Here's NASA's hi-res original:

[http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw- images/msss/00173/mcam/0173...](http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw- images/msss/00173/mcam/0173MR0926020000E1_DXXX.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> A better source:

[http://www.universetoday.com/99750/another-weird-shiny- thing...](http://www.universetoday.com/99750/another-weird-shiny-thing-on- mars-2/)

</comment><comment><USER4> we don't know for sure it is metal, but it looks terribly similar to a number of metal ore veins I've seen here on earth.

</comment><comment><USER5> Man, that HuffPo Google Hangout video thing was the most asinine things I've seen online in a while.

</comment><comment><USER6> Huffington Post? Come on now..

</comment><comment><USER7> 1/2 a centimeter in height, natural feature.

</comment><comment><USER8> Huffington Post Sports "Deceptive" Title

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't see the comments in the article.</comment>


From English Major to Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacksonbreyer.com/words/from-english-major-to-software-engineer <comment><USER2> I'm on a similar path.

I was wondering, hope this isn't too personal to ask, when you were searching for that first internship, I am in that stage right now, what did your resume look like? What sort of projects did you include and did not include?

Besides my curious questions, I enjoyed reading about your experiences and I hope to read more on your blog.

Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good luck with your switch! I tried to highlight that it's a difficult but highly rewarding path, if you stick with it.

The first time I (unsuccessfully) applied for internships, I listed my paralegal work experience and a few programs I'd written. The chatbot I mentioned in the post was the highlight, even though it was not very impressive.

When I applied to internships successfully, I was in grad school. So I listed most of the courses I'd taken. I had more projects to my name at that point too. The most exciting was a Python script that used machine learning to figure out who wrote a passage of text. I'd done that for one of my Computational Linguistics classes and was really jazzed about it.

Hope that helps!

<comment><USER2> That little bit of advice helps a great deal. Many thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Digg vs. Reddit infographic - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2010/07/27/digg-vs-reddit-infographic/

<comment><USER2> The pie chart should have used matching colors for domains that appeared on both pies.</comment>


7 lessons I learned while being banned in Google for 12 hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/7-lessons-i-learned-while-being-banned-in-google-for-12-hours

<comment><USER2> WTF did I just read?

<comment><USER3> Something inspired by an IV-drip of Red Bull with an espresso chaser. Possibly also PCP. Or, more simply SEO people are crazy about optimization.

I couldn't make heads or tails of it either.</comment></comment>


SML and OCaml: Why was OCaml faster? - <AUTHOR> http://thebreakfastpost.com/2015/05/10/sml-and-ocaml-so-why-was-the-ocaml-faster/ <comment><USER2> This is why we don't microbenchmark languages. Usually if you dig a little deeper, you find that actually the difference between the languages is mostly just that one of them does one thing badly.

This by the way is MLton's _worst case_ scenario. MLton is designed to perform full-program optimisation (unlike almost any other compiler I've seen); the gap is supposed to grow as the code gets larger (read: more realistic).

Sadly due to its design tradeoffs (it's a compiler) it's totally unsuitable for the big ML projects (interactive theorem provers).

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate on why being a compiler makes MLton unsuitable for theorem provers? Is it because they are usually written on top of the interpreter's REPL, and need its reflection capabilities?

<comment><USER2> It's because they use metaprogramming so extensively. As an example, HOL4 (I can only speak for that) accepts a script written by the user (as though in a REPL), compiles and runs it, and produces an sml theory file which represents their defined theory [0]. The user when they start their next theory are supposed to use this computer generated code.

You would have to write your own repl, write your own way of loading, writing theories etc and by that time you've lost performance (HOL even after 20 years of progress and tweaks now has only mostly ok performance).

So it would at least require some rearchitecting, which is my point; it's not a drop in replacement.

[0] - This is AES, before and after building! [https://gist.github.com/j-baker/244ef3e59f19d74c352b](https://gist.github.com/j-baker/244ef3e59f19d74c352b)

<comment><USER3> That makes sense. It's pretty cool to think that ML was designed as a metalanguage for theorem provers, and the innovations required for that turned out to be the next step (or next several steps) in the evolution of general- purpose languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another issue, comparing the MLton FFI and the Ocaml FFI, is that the FFI in MLton is somewhat slower. When I converted an Ocaml program to SML, I discovered that a small portion written in C ran much faster when I rewrote it in SML. In Ocaml, writing portions in C is almost always a performance win, just because the Ocaml compiler doesn't optimize very well. In MLton there's a bit of overhead just for the FFI (possibly because the code generator allocates registers very differently from how it's done in C). That overhead goes away if you use the C code generator instead, but usually the native code generator performs better anyway.

If I remember correctly, it has been proposed to rewrite the MLton floating point conversion in pure SML for precisely this reason.

</comment><comment><USER5> So basically Ocaml was faster because it was FFI?

<comment><USER6> Both did FFI. Ocaml was faster because there was less data munging around the FFI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Still surprising how much time is devoted to formatting (ocaml or any language).

<comment><USER6> Input and output of floating point involves a decent amount of bigint math to do correctly. It's not surprising to me that it is slow -- doing it quickly is still an active area of research.

Writing a bit about that is still on my todo list.

<comment><USER8> I remember reading, years ago, a paper which provided an algorithm for converting an IEEE 754 into a string using only a fixed number machine word length scalars—but I certainly can't find it now.

<comment><USER9> I think you are looking for "Printing floating-point numbers quickly and accurately with integers (2010)".

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1806623](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1806623)

The title is play on "Printing floating-point numbers quickly and accurately (1996)", which in turn is play on "How to print floating-point numbers accurately (1990)".

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=231397](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=231397) [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=93559](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=93559)

<comment><USER10> I wonder if any C standard libraries have implemented this.

<comment><USER11> I understand that v8 is using this algorithm, and Julia also now uses it thanks to work by Jacob Quinn [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/tree/master/base/grisu](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/tree/master/base/grisu)

<comment><USER9> Rust also now uses this algorithm, thanks to Kang Seonghoon: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/tree/master/src/libcore/nu...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/tree/master/src/libcore/num/flt2dec)

Rust implementation is heavily commented with beautiful ASCII diagrams.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any advantages to ternary computing? - <AUTHOR> Reading on Wikipedia the other day, I came across some pages about three-value logic and ternary computing. One of the articles claimed that ternary computers "had notable advantages over the binary computers which eventually replaced it". What could these advantages have been? Also, since there are no ternary computers nowadays, I am curious as to what engineering challenges might have tipped the scales in favour of the binary computer. <comment><USER2> The advantages of using ternary logic vs binary logic to do our computing would be that we can hold the same amount of information in less memory, and we can process more information at once.

To implement the hardware based on ternary logic is much more complex and that is why binary won. It is much easier to process and store 2 representational states in each bit then 3. It is easier to tell if there is a charge or not vs determining the difference between a high charge, a medium charge, or no charge. It is easier to store and read information with 2 polarities vs 3 polarities.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the best Wikipedia page on the topic: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer)

Basically, a balanced-ternary system would be smaller and more efficient than a binary system that can match it. I'd like to see an open architecture chip designed and built with balanced ternary logic. It would probably need to be made from memristors once that is feasible. We will need a computing reboot at that time anyway in order to take full advantage of memristors.

</comment><comment><USER4> Memristors (if HP and others can bring to production) can support ternary logic.

<comment><USER5> Can you provide a source on this? I'm not doubting you just haven't heard it yet myself (and was following HP Memristor tech closely).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Somewhat ironic (and self-answering) asking that question as a boolean..</comment>


LastPass raises prices 50% - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lastpass.com/2019/02/change-lastpass-premium.html/ <comment><AUTHOR> Short history:

      - Oct 2015: LogMeIn buys LastPass for $125mil
      - Aug 2017: LastPass raises prices 100% ($12/yr -> $24/yr)
      - Feb 2019: LastPass raises prices 50% ($24/yr -> $36/yr)

1Password also charges $36/yr, and no new features were announced with the price hike, so the reason appears to be "because we can"</comment>


Miniflux: A minimalist and opinionated feed reader - <AUTHOR> https://miniflux.app/ <comment><USER2> > _Miniflux is compiled statically without external dependencies, drop the > binary on your server and you are done._

> _Works only with Postgresql_

There's a serious need for a pure-go, static compile relational DB. If you're thinking you can use SQLite you'll be mistaken, because it can't be statically compiled.

<comment><USER3> That's plain wrong. I've statically linked SQLite 7 times before.

Edit: and yes, with Go

<comment><USER2> With CGO_ENABLED=0? If that's the case then I'm really interested. Last I checked it's not supported[1]

[https://github.com/mattn/go- sqlite3/issues/384#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/mattn/go- sqlite3/issues/384#issuecomment-283831645)

<comment><USER3> Why would you use `CGO_ENABLED=0`

<comment><USER2> for A fully static binary that can run on a system without glibc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Monetate releases browser data from a quarter-billion online shopping sessions - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.monetate.com/2012/05/17/ie-and-firefox-lose-mobile-safari-wins-among-weekend-shoppers/?challenge=javascript

<comment><USER2> That's not a release of data.</comment>