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jflatowon [dead]

What are you doing about it besides complaining? If the answer is nothing, that might be a good place to start. Trying to fix the problem usually either results in a) fixing the problem b) a deeper understanding of the problem.

jflatowon Python: Generators, Coroutines, Native Coroutines and Async/Await

This is called Continuation Passing Style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style

jflatowon [dead]

Filesystems are not inherently bad, of course the answer is 'it depends what you're trying to do'. Sounds like you might be interested in Plan 9: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/net/net.html

FWIW, these ideas are not dead. For example, Erlang on Xen uses a modified 9P2000 for much of what it does: http://erlangonxen.org/more/9p2000e

jflatowon The Power of Power Cycling

And I wager everyone commenting otherwise knows that.

Not really. If it happens once, it can / will happen again. In my opinion a bug is a bug and should be fixed. But I do agree this attitude does seem prevalent.

jflatowon Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision

Runit is / was awesome but how is this news?

jflatowon Guido on Python

You also take a performance hit, which however subtle, can be hard to justify when making a relatively big 'upgrade'.

jflatowon RESTful considered harmful

Not really, browsers still provide native JSON parsing ability - which is faster (and easier to implement) than most other parsing you would write inside JavaScript.

jflatowon RESTful considered harmful

I stopped drinking the REST cool aid years ago, for pretty much the same reasons.

It's not that HTTP APIs aren't useful - of course they are - it's the religious adherence to REST doctrine that is harmful. I take the author's point to basically be, "do the simplest thing that makes sense for your use case, don't worry about how RESTful it is", which I totally agree with.

jflatowon NASA announces discovery of Earth-like planet with earth similarity index 0.98

Briefing materials:

http://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936612)

jflatowon A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boolean Satisfiability

Isn't it actually only showing that BQP contains NP, not P = NP?

jflatowon Monads in JavaScript

Not crazy, I wish people would take monads off the pedestal.

jflatowon Ask HN: What equivalents of Erlang/OTP exist for other languages?

For those unaware, Elixir is a language that runs on the Erlang VM, so its amazing concurrency is the same as Erlang's.

jflatowon The Really Big One

But the article says you could spend many lifetimes.

jflatowon Ask HN: Why don't transistors in microchips fail?

As far as I understand, chips are designed with many redundant pathways for exactly this reason. I think its a rather important part of the design process, but someone who knows better should probably say.

jflatowon Cola.js – Constraint-Based Layout in the Browser

I thought it would be too, but this is just as awesome.

jflatowon Mailpile Chooses AGPL v3

This is the first time I've read about it, but I too was impressed by the leadership. I also must say that I'm pleased with the outcome of this election.

jflatowon Ark – A modern systems programming language

Not to be confused with Arc: http://arclanguage.org/

jflatowon Atom 1.0

Yes. I keep trying to like Atom because I want to have native WebView buffers while I'm editing. Every time I try it, I end up wondering how anyone can be comfortable using it. I'm not sure how much of that is due to instability that will be fixed over time, and how much is because I'm coming from Emacs.

Have any experienced Emacs users found that Atom makes them more productive in any dimension? I want to like it but I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

jflatowon Adding JIT-compilation to a toy interpreter

Would you still object if the tables had the heading 'ANSI C Equivalent', for example, instead of 'C Equivalent'? They are clearly defined relative to C, so is your problem with the lack of explicit version? Or do you object to C as an IR?

Personally, I actually quite like the idea of C as an IR.

jflatowon Adding JIT-compilation to a toy interpreter

Where does it claim to be a language reference? I only see it referred to as an API. It seems like you are evaluating it in terms of how LLVM does things, which is maybe the wrong way to look at it. It's a library, not an IR.

jflatowon Erlang/OTP 18.0 has been released

I love Erlang releases and am very happy about the improvements to maps. I have to admit the OTP motto of "move slow and never break anything" always leaves me wanting more (though).

jflatowon Columbia becomes the first US university to divest from private prison companies

I don't think so - in Google Finance compare both graphs are actually on the same scale. Since the scales here are independent, it depends on the chosen scale where they will cross. The graphs do not start in 2010, they start in 2000.

jflatowon Columbia becomes the first US university to divest from private prison companies

Right, good point - when you choose arbitrary scales you can make them cross whenever you want.

jflatowon Columbia becomes the first US university to divest from private prison companies

Interesting article, but the first graph is one of the most blatantly misleading charts I have seen in a long time. Showing two graphs overlapping on completely different scales is a really nasty trick.

jflatowon Creating a language using only assembly language

This is wonderful and impressive.

For others curious how long it took: judging from the first commit on GitHub (https://github.com/nineties/amber/commit/bdb49d27968d6bc4588...), which references a first commit from 2009, it seems at least 6 years.

jflatowon 8^8 – Find another you

Yeah, I can't seem to pass the spam test either.

jflatowon Clean Up Your Mess – A Guide to Visual Design for Everyone (2011)

Your left or my left? Seriously, I assumed he was describing the one on the left for most of the discussion until showing the posters again, when I realized he didn't do his job.

The question was "which one looks cleaner?", not "which one makes it easier to find information?", and to my eye the one on the right has more noise (the balance of spacing, border around the image, more varied fonts). I guess there are arguments for both or neither, but it's clearly not cut and dry.

jflatowon C Questions and Answers

Glad I'm not the only one who didn't find anything here that would make me think I didn't know C.

jflatowon President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

There's a lot of confusion about net neutrality and regulation of the internet at large.

I'd love to see a poll of the HN community to see the distribution of support, amongst what should be a relatively knowledgable group of people. Unfortunately I don't have enough karma to create it myself.

jflatowon Stuff Goes Bad: Erlang in Anger

Wow, Fred has been providing a massive service to the community. It's great to see someone continually producing high quality, open source, technical prose (for Erlang).