Hacker News Reader

devinuson Our Agreement with the Department of War

A corporation, according to US law, is considered a "person" and afforded many of the same rights as an individual citizen (https://www.fincen.gov/who-united-states-person).

Even outside of the US, a corporation is widely considered to be a company of people with their own agency and rights.

A person or group of people should be able to set their own boundaries without being subjected to immoral and unjust retaliation, i.e. corporate murder (https://x.com/i/status/2027515599358730315).

Also, ask any frontier model what Pete Hegseth thinks about democracy.

devinuson We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

What exactly is considered "settled" law when the SCOTUS can unilaterally overturn Roe v. Wade overnight after almost 50 years of precedent?

devinuson How I Switched to Plan 9

This is the kind of content that would be #1 years ago before HN became about regurgitating news about acquisitions in Silicon Valley. Remember that it's Hacker News you're reading. I welcome a return to those days.

devinuson iPhones are hard to use

I recently switched to iOS from Android after years on Android. I'm coming from being a daily macOS user for almost a decade. I would argue that iOS should no longer be considered the more "user friendly" of the two. That might have been the case years ago, but iOS seems to expect prior experience with what I can only guess are iOS paradigms specifically.

Almost every important action I need to take in an iOS app is hidden behind a gesture. In Android apps, gestures are value adds. They make on-screen actions or actions accessable through contextual menus quicker to accomplish for the experienced user. In iOS they're essential to accomplish some tasks.

devinuson Crypto’s $600B Crash Hits a New Low

My reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17722685

devinuson Crypto’s $600B Crash Hits a New Low

I'm late for this reply, but it completely depends on your use case. If you're just a normal user using cryptocurrency daily and you're most interested in the stability of value you could trade everything you receive for a "stablecoin" as it's known within crypto circles. This would effectively "lock in" the value. This is most effective using e.g. Nano since you can perform this immediately without worrying about transaction fees.

If you're unaware of that concept as a user but a fiat "off-ramp" exists (a way to turn your Nano into your local currency) you can immediately "cash out" whenever you receive a transaction.

If you're dealing with micro-transactions or payments in general then we're beginning to wade into the territory of imaging a secondary "off-chain" system of accounting and many strategies likely apply.

devinuson Crypto’s $600B Crash Hits a New Low

That might be a valid criticism against e.g. Bitcoin with a 30 minute confirmation time, but if you send your friend $10 worth of Nano they'll have $10 worth of Nano by the time they receive it, ignoring whatever they decide do with it.

devinuson Crypto’s $600B Crash Hits a New Low

I'm one of the core developers for Nano[1] (formerly called RaiBlocks). It's one of only a handful of cryptocurrencies with an actual working product available today that does everything it claims to do: Instant transactions with zero fees on a green network that could be powered by a single wind turbine.

Despite what I see as it's massive potential for things like micro-transactions, global remittance, arbitrage across exchanges, a development platform for payments and functioning as an actual currency (i.e. a medium of exchange, what you send is exactly what the other person gets) -- the market does not reflect this reality at all right now. There are several projects that are objectively scams with higher market caps than Nano.

To me this reflects that the market is completely irrational right now. I knew as early as January that there was going to be a reckoning, but until some of these coins and tokens that are going nowhere are shaken out projects will just have to stand on their own merits and prove that they're valuable.

[1]: https://nano.org/en

devinuson Zstandard v1.3.4 – faster everything

These are rather large release notes for a patch release.

devinuson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2017)

Hello, at Rebel we are working on making everyone's inbox an interface for immediate action. We allow our users to send their customers emails that work like a normal web experience. Customers are submitting reviews, educating themselves with hotspots, and even shopping with 1-click directly in email. We believe that the inbox of the future is going to be just another surface for people to do what they want, like a bit sized application delivered in a push. We're hiring smart engineers across the stack to help us make that a reality.

Stack: Node.js, Ember.js, MongoDB, Influx, AWS, Docker

devinuson GitHub is apparently in crisis again

I've been on GitHub since the earliest days, and I've definitely noticed that there's something going on -- or the lack of anything going on more like it.

When was the last time a big feature that people are actually clamoring for was added to GitHub (and let's not pretend LFS fits that description)? Meanwhile you have the maintainers of the most popular projects publicly begging for changes they've been waiting years for, startups like ZenHub innovating on TOP of GitHub in the form of browser extensions, and then startups like GitLab poised to eat GitHub's lunch as soon as they figure out how to capture the social aspect.

I'm not sure what GitHub is spending the money on, but it sure as hell isn't on the core platform itself or keeping it's most active users happy.

devinuson Metabase: Why we picked Clojure

> Wide variety of mature database drivers

That requirement was probably not met when they started.

devinuson Google Fiber Is Coming to San Antonio

This would be exciting if it was even rolled out in Austin yet.

devinuson Make a Lisp

This is interesting. Since it's hard to read, I've extracted the language statistics and I'll leave them here:

C# - 7.9% C - 7.2% Rust - 7.1% Visual - Basic - 6.6% Makefile - 6.5% Java - 5.8% Forth - 5.0% Go - 4.5% PostScript - 4.2% Haskell - 4.0% Shell - 3.8% Perl - 3.5% JavaScript - 3.4% Matlab - 3.2% Scala - 3.1% PHP - 3.1% OCaml - 3.0% Lua - 2.8% R - 2.7% Python - 2.7% CoffeeScript - 1.9% Ruby - 1.9% Clojure - 1.9% Scheme - 1.7% CSS - 1.4% Other - 1.1%

It seems you could extrapolate interesting theories regarding productivity using these numbers.

There's a jump between Ruby/CoffeeScript and Python, and I wonder why.

devinuson Elixir v1.0.0 released

Several web services in production right now.

devinuson Stuff Goes Bad: Erlang in Anger

Three things that make the experience of developing in Elixir completely different from Erlang: Tooling, libraries, and actual language features (that aren't just skip deep).

Spend 5 minutes developing an app in Elixir and you'll realize why it's not just "only syntactically different" from Erlang.

devinuson Elixir 0.12 released, support for continuable enumerators inspired by iteratees

The release can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v0.12.0

devinuson Elixir is for programmers

if is a macro.

devinuson Rapid read protection in Cassandra 2.0.2

Does Cassandra follow semver[1]?

[1]: http://semver.org/

devinuson CoreOS Vagrant Images

That would have been a problem with every new distribution, including RHEL and Debian when they were brand new. In reality, your SAN should be able to accommodate a generic Linux kernel with any userland you can containerize.

devinuson CoreOS Vagrant Images

I've just begun looking into and playing with CoreOS. Basically, it's a minimal Linux image with Docker, service discovery using the `etcd` daemon they've written in Go, and several interesting properties. The most interesting is their use of the ChromiumOS build tools, allowing them to one day update servers the same way e.g. ChromeOS is updated--using the Omaha protocol to push raw binary diffs of the new root FS.

devinuson CoreOS Vagrant Images

Simple answer: you don't. Longer answer: It depends. Do you want to use yum or apt-get to install programs? If you like CentOS, create a CentOS container with Docker and begin installing programs using yum! Ubuntu? Spool up an Ubuntu container and apt-get away! CoreOS is just the cradle upon which you can run the userland of any distribution you please.

devinuson CoreOS Vagrant Images

You just described the actual draw of CoreOS. CoreOS is just Linux. Instead of going the Xen route you just described, it can capitalize on being just Linux by supporting everything Linux already supports. At this point, you can view CoreOS, which is just Linux, as the "hypervisor." Containers don't have to replicate key subsystems in every paravirtualized instance, as containers share all the same subsystems like e.g. the TCP/IP stack. You're also not throwing away any distribution experience. Want CentOS? Create a CentOS container with Docker. Want Ubuntu? Create an Ubuntu container with Docker. These are incredibly powerful ideas I'm just now being exposed to.

devinuson A Week with Elixir

Finished that blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5864434

devinuson A Week with Elixir

Yes, the Getting Started guide is great. There is also Dave's book[1] and many talks done by José and Yurii[2].

[1]: http://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m32CGvzixrQ

devinuson A Week with Elixir

1) Do you also think of e.g. Scala as the CoffeeScript of Java? Scala : Java :: Elixir : Erlang

2) Yes, interoperability is there and, just like you can use Scala libraries from Java, you just need the Elixir runtime in your path.

3) My favorite is from the String.Unicode module:

    defmodule String.Unicode do
      # ...

      def upcase(""), do: ""

      lc { codepoint, upper, _lower, _title } inlist codes, upper && upper != codepoint do
        def upcase(unquote(codepoint) <> rest) do
          unquote(upper) <> upcase(rest)
        end
      end

      def upcase(<< char, rest :: binary >>) do
        << char >> <> upcase(rest)
      end

      # ...
    end

devinuson A Week with Elixir

I'll begin writing it this weekend and publish it to my blog next week: http://devintorr.es/ (Atom feed: http://devintorr.es/atom.xml)

devinuson A Week with Elixir

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/elixir-la...

This was José Valim's rationale on the mailing list. Once you understand what's involved, f.() begins to look like a pretty good compromise.

devinuson A Week with Elixir

As a professional Erlang developer who now develops with Elixir, I need to stop this right here. This is NOT just about syntax. Elixir simply is not just a pretty face for Erlang, but enables metaprogramming that is simply NOT possible in Erlang without writing 10x more code. Elixir comes with it's own standard library, HashDict, Reducers, and more and more. I'll have to write another blog post, because this misconception that Elixir is just a prettier syntax is somehow still around.

devinuson Zero.rs: runtime-less Rust programs

Could this allow for developing a toy kernel in Rust as long as you define those few libc functions (maybe even with e.g. musl[1])?

[1]: http://www.musl-libc.org/