kirillkh

Dear Mozilla developers! I've been using Firefox since v1.0. And I want you to know that by ditching the old plugin architecture you are alienating your faithful users, myself included.

I'm sorry, but I decided to stick with Firefox 55 for now, possibly switching to Palemoon later. I need my old extensions to work: Status4Evar, EdgeWise and Classic Theme Restorer. I can't stand the current FF UI and I will not give up on this.

It's true: "The base layer source code is usually proprietary, and thus is generally not available for public access".

https://sailfishos.org/wiki/SailfishOS_Source

Then you were right, I should've checked before answering.

It's been a while since I played with OCaml, but I'm pretty sure that modules are stateless. A quick googling shows that you can use global state, but it's not the same as one instance of state per one instance of struct as in Rust.

Google should really get a grip on itself.

Advocating the freedom of expression is one thing https://www.google.com/intl/en/takeaction/free-expression/

... but actually allowing a random guy freely express his little crappy opinion that goes against the corporate culture is another. Can't believe Google bought its own bullshit.

Oh well, at least they acted fast and gave him the appropriate amount of Fire and Fury.

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." -- Noam Chomsky

A key difference from OCaml's modules (besides the lack of type parameterization) is Liskov's data types have associated data. So it's more like Rust's structs. Also, like in Rust, there is no support for multiple implementations of a single signature.

Seeing how gradient descent is such a pinnacle of deep learning, I can't help wondering: is this how our brain learns? If not, then what prevents us from implementing deep learning the same way?

You're right, that's the difficult part about Rust. Every novice has to go through these hoops to acquire the intuition. I'm midway through and feel comfortable working with Rusty libraries, but interfacing with C libraries that widely employ shared state is a major pain. Fortunately, more and more libraries get rewritten in Rust or acquire sane Rust wrappers.

You can fix those problems by writing a post that would contain said interactions, resolution and update.

Let me tell you a story about a particular generation of terrorists. Namely the ones born in the 1950's. First and foremost, Osama bin Laden (1957). We all know what he did. Second, Khaled Mashal, the current Hamas leader (1956). Finally, Abbas al Moussawi, one of the founding fathers of Hezbollah (1952).

Many of us know what terrorists born in the 1950's did, but somehow we all miss the fact that they all belong to the same generation. Weird, eh?

A lot of people think they know who Vladimir Putin (1952) is, but how many of them are aware that twenty years ago Putin was involved in the Chechnya war?

> I can recall several excellent children books that were published in Russian that were my inspiration when I was young

This made me curious - am I understanding correctly that you read those books in Russian? How did you pick up enough Russian to reach that level?

To be fair, I don't recall any propaganda in the first 5 of books in the Wizard of Oz series (which, admittedly, could be explained by its subtlety), and the later ones were much less popular than the first. Personally, I didn't read the 6th (and the last) one.

Soviet literature of the period was definitely encouraged and even required to have ideological subtext, there's no arguing with that. However, that doesn't tell us much about how successful that policy was. The article is evidently trying to make a point that it was successful by presenting an example of a person who could recite "Barmalei" from memory, without mentioning that "Barmalei" was actually innocent and unrelated to the propaganda-infested books mentioned previously. That is either an error on the article author's part, or a purposeful omission.

Please don't read this as a claim that the policy was not actually successful (which I don't know whether is true or not).

I take it Rust is not supported on ESP8266 yet?

Then why do you think will the current technology still be useful, given an order of magnitude higher price?

The article mentions the angles (120 horizontal, 35 vertical), but not the distance covered. This might explain why the interviewee does not believe the solid-state lidar will replace the current tech.

The thing is we never know whether approving X is a type 1 error or not approving it is a type 2 error. So right now we cautiously make, say, 99.9% of type 2 errors and only 0.1% of type 1 errors. We need to relax the requirements a bit, so that the split is, say, 95%/5%, where the 5% type 1 errors are minor (as in, won't cause a huge catastrophe).

This makes me wish some of my colleagues were issued an airplane ticket to the US. Possibly one-way.

You might be correct, my figures were a guess.

I emigrated from Kiev at the age of 16, back in 1997. I jumped at the first opportunity to get out of there, even though I knew it would be tough for some years to come at the new place. As you can imagine, I hated everything about that country.

I felt completely unprotected - there was no effective law, everyone was either scared shitless and fighting for survival -- or a thug. It felt like the thugs had complete power over "normal citizens" like myself. I was used seeing them on my way home from school on the street corners waiting for a chance to jump at a passerby and rob them. Often they would approach you and start a conversation, probing your fear. Then you can only get away without being humiliated/beaten/robbed by walking to a crowded place, maybe.

My dad, a scientist working at an institute (in the Soviet and post-Soviet system the science was done in specialized "institutes", not in universities), could barely make ends meet. That was in part because of hyperinflation (at the lowest point he was making $100-$200 per month, IIRC) and in part because of accumulating delays in salary payouts. I remember some periods of time when all we had was bread, spaghetti and potatoes. We could not even afford transport expenses for me to go to school - thankfully, the transport system was in such shambles that there were barely any inspectors in the Metros and buses, and certainly they didn't care enough to seriously try to punish me for using it for free. Lots of people did that during the worst years in the 90's.

Many were left in the cold, with no means to survive. A generation of pensioners basically died from hunger after years of struggle and humiliation. Old people begging for money in the streets were a common sight.

Everything was dirty, malfunctioning, disintegrating. Police, courts, doctors, the army - all corrupt. Army service was an absolute hell - underfunded, unoccupied, with disintegrating facilities and corrupt officers, the soldiers were at the mercy of inevitable bullies and thugs of their unit. Let me just say that the abuse was commonplace and leave it at that.

Finally, it felt like everyone hated each other. Racism and xenophobia of every kind. People just waiting to exploit your weakness.

Before leaving, I thought there would be periods of home-sickness I would have to fight. Nothing like that ever happened. I left my parents and family behind, but was reluctant to even come for a visit; only visited them once, in 1998. I often hear claims that it's all different now. But I think that's wishful thinking - the same thugs who made it hell back in 1997 are still alive and kicking. And, more importantly, so is the culture that nurtured them.

Like I said, Kotlin is chasing after a moving target. The issues might be kinda-solvable (even if it requires significantly diverging from Java's APIs), but things inevitably get messier both for the language internals and for users.

The ecosystem is great, but it has its own limitations. For example, to my knowledge Scala has not been able to implement tail recursion optimization, citing JVM limitations.

Kotlin has an extensive Collections library, which started largely as an extension of Java's, but now it offers much more. In any case, I was referering to Kotlin's APIs, not Collections per se, and it certainly has its own APIs.

> The new Collections API wasn't incompatible with kotlin

There definitely is a problem, as can be seen e.g. here: https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/jdk-8-compatibility-of-kotl...

Quoting: "Sometime ago we introduced kotlin.Stream<T> type, with the simples possible interface – iterator() function – with the idea that we can make it compatible with Java8 Stream<T> type. Currently we seem to come to a conclusion it was a mistake as we cannot fine a way to represent Stream<T> as kotlin type in Java 6 & 7, and then use to Java8's Stream<T> when targeting JDK8. If you have any idea about how to make it work – please share!"

Basically, while Kotlin is more or less a straightforward extension of the Java 6'th Collections APIs, by Java 8's release the two have diverged. When programming in Kotlin, you would normally use its own functional APIs, not Java Streams API. While technically nothing prevents you from using Streams, they don't fully integrate with Kotlin's native Collections, so you're forced to choose one or another.

Kotlin is one fine piece of engineering. It's only too unfortunate that the same Achilles' heel is holding it back as Scala: there is only so much you can do while remaining compatible with JVM and the Java standard library. Actually, it's even worse: Kotlin swore a seamless compatibility with Java. Maintaining compatibility against a moving target has the potential to make things quite messy. An early example of that presented itself just after Kotlin 1.0 release, when Java 8 came out with with new and shiny functional Collections API - incompatible to Kotlin's.

I never said X GUI apps could not be used, just that the more Windows tools you use, the more you gain more from WSL.

Depends on your use case/tools/habits. WSL gives you the advantage of being able to access the same files with native Windows tools and from the GNU[1] command line. If you plan on using the X GUI tools, it will be much less useful to you.

[1] I can't bring myself to use the term 'Linux' here, because, ironically, Linux is the primary missing part in this Ubuntu distribution. It should really be called WSG or WSU.

Too bad the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is not open source. It is already an impressive piece of software, but many features are still lacking (e.g., neither Valgrind nor gperftools work right now), and it could benefit greatly from community involvement.

Fittingly, issue #1 in the WSL bug tracker is requesting it to be open-sourced: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/1

What makes you think bombing in that video was indiscriminate? On the opposite, I see single buildings being destroyed, while the neighbouring buildings stay intact. That's a very precise strike by any standard. Furthermore, there is nothing to convince me these buildings were not occupied by Hamas terrorists (which are known to hide behind civilian population).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Oqo_wmuGo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0wJXf2nt4Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcrWy3PT6zc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPU4UN03t7E

And yes, I agree with you that knocking on the roof is a very considerate "last warning". Which other country goes to such lengths to minimize civilian loss of life? There are early warnings, too, though: by phone, text and leaflets. That's why you don't see any people running out of that house: it is already empty.

In other news: git just announced a cheap generic alternative to ObamaCare.