while I agree with you in this case, I don’t particularly like the “I speak for everyone” stance you seem to be taking here.

Do you think an additional CVE tag would make sense? Given there’s upvotes some people seem to be interested.

Yeah, I’d rather not have them at all. Maybe a detailed, tech write-up of discovery, implementation, and mitigation of new classes of vulnerability with wide impact. Meltdown/Spectre or Return-oriented Programming are examples. Then, we see only the deep stuff with vulnerability-listing sites having the regular stuff for people using that stuff.

seems like a CVE especially arbitrary code execution is worth posting. my 2 cents

Yeah, it’s a bit…different, but it looks like picking and highlighting one feature is what was done for previous releases as well: http://elm-lang.org/blog

Especially given the “is Elm dead?” questions that have been popping up in the past few months. I guess it’s better to be head-down working on the next release, but I think just a little more communication or visibility into the project might have helped alleviate some of the concerns.

since they recently disallowed using javascript in elm packages, it only makes sense that they’d lead with what that had won them, i.e. function level dead code elimination.

Yeah, I’d be fine with a post when notable, interesting things have been added/removed/changed. Pony is an interesting language! But yeah, posting this one seems like it is wasting a bit of goodwill.

as I write this, this story is hidden by 8, +10, -5 spam, which indicates to me that might be better to refrain unless there is a major milestone, or an interesting new feature that might spur some discussion.

Adding some additional commentary about why the breaking type change is interesting or useful might help; there are enough language implementation nerds who read lobsters regularly that it could generate some discussion, especially since the capability types are one of pony’s most compelling and novel features.

We’ve normalized the daily commute to the extent that a lot of people don’t even question it, but when you sit down and look at the numbers they’re frankly somewhat horrifying; we consider it normal to sacrifice a quarter of your life just for this anachronistic practice.

No doubt a lot of people are in that situation, but working in the office doesn’t automatically mean a miserable commute. I have a ~15 minute bike ride into work, and it’s awesome. Some days the commute into the office is the best part of my work day.

On the flip side, I pay a bit higher rent to live in the city (Boulder) instead of further away in the suburbs. It’s totally worth it for me, but I understand why it’s not for everybody.

I get this sentiment, but it only really covers car commuters. a longish bike commute can be nice, and sometimes subway or train commute time is all the time a person has to themselves.

that said, I work from home and have no desire to go back, even though I never commuted by car.

interestingly, though, gen_statem, the replacement for gen_fsm, is a lot more like gen_server than what it replaces. there’s a lot to be said for familiarity.

it’s a compiler IL. several other beam languages use it as a target, and a lot of tooling (most notably the dialyzer) works directly on it. in the context of the series, iirc it’s the form that the compiler runs a lot of transformations on for optimization.

I could be mistaken, but I believe I read in some white paper at some point, that the dialyzer project needed an intermediate format (one that would make their lives easier) in order to proceed. So Core Erlang sprung out those efforts during dialyzer’s infancy at Uppsala University. Feel free to correct me where I’ve mis-remembered.

If my understanding is correct, it’s basically an intermediate compilation target between normal Erlang code and what runs on the BEAM.

Who is being excluded? How is Outreachy preventing someone from contributing to llvm?

I remember those days too. “No one” cared because “everyone” assumed you were white, male, and college educated. “There are no women on the Internet” dates back, at least, to the early ’90s.

As a black male dropout, that was fine for me— I could get involved. No one questioned my capabilities. And as long as I kept up a good impression of being fluent in upper-middle to upper-class white culture, I could build my skills and social capital.

I also got beat up on the street in front of my grandmother for “showing off” how I could “talk white” at school.

I also remember, when Pentiums were out, using a pawn shop purchased Apple IIc with a gifted modem. I also remember hacking into dial-up pools to get telnet— haha, as if my machine could talk SLIP or PPP. I remember begging friends from MOOs and IRC for a shell account. I remember having no concept of the disparity between myself and the people with whom I played games, chatted, wrote code, and made friends. They simply had things, and I didn’t.

I don’t see a problem with choosing to give their time and their money to mentor people who otherwise might not be able to participate. There certainly hasn’t been a problem with people choosing to give their time and their money to people who look like them, sound like them, grew up with them, attend the same church as them, went to the same school as them, are friends with them, enjoy the same movies as them, play the same sports as them, and just happen to be a well-off straight white male. Just. Like. Them.

There is no whitemend.

Outreachy isn’t out to make a monster out of you. It’s trying to correct for GSoC. You don’t like Outreachy’s policies, a much smaller, less well-funded org than Google, then go through GSoC and Google. You have lots of other options other than Outreachy.

The code of conduct doesn’t say anything about how white men are bad. Reading the CoC, if you object that strongly to it that you must leave, then please do! That’s the CoC working as intended. You are deciding to exclude yourself by deciding that what the CoC forbids (i.e. being an asshole) is something that you must be and defend.

Also, one more thing.

I wish I could explain to people who are privileged one way or another, that it doesn’t mean your entire life is handed to you in a silver platter. Being a white male doesn’t mean you can’t be poor or can’t be gay (thus discriminated) or that you can’t have a slew of other problems.

It just means you don’t have those problems in addition to also being discriminated for being a woman, for being black, for being anything else.

demonization of political groups (and to some extent, white men)

I’m a white man in tech and I can count the number of times I’ve been demonized on zero fingers.

demonization of political groups

The dominant political party in this country has in black and white in its party platform a desire to make same-sex marriage illegal (while simultaneously claiming “government overreach” is a bad thing). If hearing that we shouldn’t punish gay people just for being gay makes you uncomfortable, well…it’s supposed to.

(That same party has in its platform a denial of anthropogenic climate change, an existential threat to our civilization; the denial of which has zero scientific backing….but no, we can’t tell them that they’re wrong.)

More importantly, the stuff I’m talking about above is also banned. You can’t go to a conference and talk about how “Republicans are stupid”. You’d be asked to leave or at least tone it down.

The problem is that a lot of people hear “don’t be an asshole” and they think “man when I tell transgender folks they’re stupid and make jokes about gay people I get called an asshole (totally unjustifiably!) and I might get in trouble. Ugh, SJW’s!”

Remember when no one on the internet cared what you looked like, believed, or who you loved? I want to go back to that :/

I’ve been on the Internet since around 1992. That’s only three years after the very first consumer ISP served its first customer.

Was there a large contingent of people who really did believe that? Absolutely, I mean, I was one of them. Were there plenty of racists, sexists, homophobes, and bigots of all stripes? Absolutely. Go look at old Usenet archives from the 80’s and 90’s. Racism, sexism, homophobia abound. There was a long diatribe against same-sex marriage on a Perl newsgroup for some damn reason around 1996; there were plenty of people who chimed in and agreed. Various big names in the early hacker community were famously bigoted (often hiding behind “libertarianism” while simultaneously claiming women and black folks are just inherently inferior and it’s “just science”).

The “good old days” are very often viewed through rose-colored glasses. People were people back then too, for all the good and the bad.

Remember when no one on the internet cared what you looked like, believed, or who you loved? I want to go back to that :/

This was never true. People on the internet have always cared about who you are in ways that factor these things in. The fact that the (largely white) nerd culture contingent who had a lot of influence on the early internet has decided to tell this utopian story does not make it any more true than stories your grandpa tells about respectful children and walking both ways uphill in the snow.

Remember when no one on the internet cared what you looked like, believed, or who you loved?

And look where it got us. Toxic subcultures, huge gender inequality in the workplace, software products that simply don’t work for many groups people… The field was biased towards white male hackers from the very beginning, and “not caring” only increased this bias. No, I don’t want to go back to that, I want to fix it.

Updated:

Also, “no one one the Internet cared what you looked like” simply because they technically couldn’t: nicknames and plain text don’t divulge much. As soon as we got real names and YouTube it became obvious that the majority of people care very much about how you look like. So a young girl making a guitar cover or an Ubuntu installation walk-through mostly gets “you’re hot” and “nice boobs” comments.

People with privilege have been getting more and more outraged that the world is discriminating against them. They see it as unfair. Yes, it’s discrimination and that sucks. But it’s infuriating when they paint it as unfair, because that implies they’re somehow being disproportionately discriminated against, that the discrimination is unfairly balanced against them. And of course that’s nonsense. These privileged people, intentionally or not, feel they’re entitled to live free from any and all discrimination at the expense of those less privileged.

Remove yourself from the politics and think about a simple model instead of race, sex, gender, or orientation. Just group A and group B.

• members of group A receive 120 points a day
• members of group B receive 80 points a day

Members of group A develop a belief system that they are entitled to their 120 points. When some members of group B try to increase their points to 85, and that lowers the group A points to 119, the members of group A become angry. They say the members of group B are being unfair.

Group A believes that group B should not take any action that decreases their daily points. Group A compares their loss of 1 point to group B’s initial 40 point deficit, drawing a false equivalency. Some subset of A, group A’ deliberately take points from group B members around them to restore their original 120 points. Group A’ claims this is fair.

Group A’ bands together to institutionalize the 40 point difference. Some extreme members of group A’ even try to widen the 40 point difference. Group A’ comes to believe at an institutional level that the 40 point deficit either doesn’t exist, or is somehow natural and fair. Group A’ believes they hold the moral superiority by defending their 120 points.

Members of group B continue to try to elevate themselves, but A’ demands that all work done by group B must benefit group A’ equally. A’ considers this fair. Groups A and B focus on elevating group B rather than bickering with group A’ about whether 1 equals 40. Some members of both groups A and B institutionalize polite exclusion of group A’ just to simplify the whole thing, because they’re tired of bickering.

A vocal minority demonizes group A’ for their actions. Some members of group A find this demonization troubling. A larger and less vocal group of A and B think group A’ is a bunch of fucking douchebags, and start to actively exclude A’ rather than deal with their asinine bullshit. A surprising amount of group A wonders if this exclusion is fair or reasonable. Group B, and an increasing amount of group A, respond “are you fucking joking my ass what the actual fuck?”

If you’re a member of group A, please try to empathize with group B. Next time you feel discriminated against for your group A membership, take a step back and reflect on how you’re feeling in that moment. Try to imagine what it’s like to feel that way every single day of your life, at work, on the street, or in your own home through the media.

I’m glad to see this trend of standing up against poltiical [sic] exclusion in Open Source.

Me too, I just wish more people would up and leave, instead of stick around and yell about “reverse discrimination” and such. I’m definitely coming at it from a selfish angle (and concern for my friends,) I’m just really tired of people who “disagree” with us existing, at best, and actively harass us at worst. The only way I can participate in open source is anonymously, which means it’s mostly uncredited work. It’s just not worth the toll it takes on my mental health. Of course, whenever possible, I contribute to projects/communities who show that they are aware of these issues, and are actively doing something about it.

Looking forward to the Incorrect, Off-topic, and Troll downvotes.

I like this essay, and it makes me think about a couple things.

…the length and detail of a name should be proportional to its scope: A variable that is referenced across multiple files ..

It’s funny, because I like to write CoffeeScript, and you can’t really do that: variables are file-scoped by default. It’s a preference thing. (Some people like to shadow lexical bindings? not I)

Another issue with picking long names vs short names is that often (depending on language), naming is itself a leaky abstraction, because you just know it’s gonna allocate an entire word if you want “int cc_exp = credit_card_expiration; ..cc_exp..”. I don’t think all languages give you aliases for free. We also contort to make things fit 80 characters. Variables can’t have spaces (except Common LISP?), most can’t have dashes, I really want subscripts!—it feels like those password prompts: “5-8 characters, alphanumeric only”. At least we don’t have 8.3 FILENA~1. We learned to name files! (except the pain with spaces, again..) The tools often give naming a hard/constrained time, since it’s somehow never a priority.

I wish a lot of code were just a little more wasteful/redundant to be a lot more readable.

It’s not at that stage yet. They’re presenting a paper on it so far and that’s about it. They might open it up after the research phase is over, fingers crossed.

It sounds almost too good to be true. I find it weird when researchers claim things that no one can reproduce. So much for transparency.

This response confuses me. There’s an appeal that they exist in a kind of useless corner of PACELC (“sometimes we’re consistent and slow, and sometimes we’re inconsistent,”) a diagram that I feel wants to bamboozle me but just makes me cringe, some Java Jargon about data grids, and a bit of backing off on availability for future versions of particular object types.

“Before going into that[,] lets[sic] go into how common network partitions are.”

This sentence, or something like it, is a pretty sure sign that what you’re going to read in a few seconds contains some (or is entirely) bullshit.

The best I can interpret from this is that the author seems to believe that a PA system requires losing writes. The blog seems to be saying “Yes, we are PA/EC, so of course these are the results you’d expect”. Which is clearly not true.

It looks like freebsd’s mbuf API allows you to customize it quite a bit, so in that sense, if I’m understanding the post correctly, they didn’t have to modify the TCP stack to get the flexibility they needed to accomplish this.

The ThinkPad line has a long history of being known for build quality and reliability, particularly in the era when they were built by IBM, before being sold to Lenovo. This was epitomized by a ThinkPad that survived a fire. Additionally, in the older era of Linux driver compatibility, where buying a laptop was fraught with peril, ThinkPads had a reputation of being a safe bet. They would reliably work, or could be made to work with minimal tweaking. There is even an entire Wiki dedicated to this.

There is an insane aftermarket for still-working, 2010-era ThinkPads, especially those that can run without Intel’s Management Engine. People have gone to great lengths to upgrade these with newer CPUs (that they were never designed for), higher resolution screens, and all sorts of other interesting and inspiring upgrades.

A lot of devotees (ala Apple fans) look back fondly on the earlier era of ThinkPad hardware, and in doing so focus (rightly or wrongly) on some of the aesthetic aspects of the laptops of that era:

• No focus on thinness at the cost of processing power and battery life.
• A 4:3 screen aspect ratio.
• The logo itself (again, this is part emotional aesthetic, part rational).
• The particular texturing of the trackpoint (“keyboard nub mouse”).
• The particulars of the keyboard layout, and the keyboard feel being of high quality.

So on and so forth. You get the idea.

Two-ish years ago a half-joking product designer (engineer?) at Lenovo wrote a blog post asking what people might want in a “Retro” ThinkPad. The post went viral, so they did a followup of 4 surveys asking people for opinions on the specifics of what it would mean for a ThinkPad to be “retro” to them. Sort of saying “Okay, we went viral, that’s cool, but it was just a poorly-thought-out brainstormed idea. What do you people really want?”

I’m looking for these supposed leaks right now, but based on this post its safe to say the idea is that they are actually following through on a production model based on those surveys.

On a personal note: I am a ThinkPad fan, but not quite the devotee that many others are. During eras when the hardware was not to my liking, I have purchased elsewhere. I do enjoy my X1 Carbon 3rd Gen (from 2015) but the last time I used one before that was 2008. Oh, and this is definitely one of the coolest laptops keyboards I have ever seen.

I could see an argument, however, for this not meeting Lobsters’ bar for a quality topic of discussion. It’s not even a proper release of any sort. More of a psuedo-product announcement via acknowledgement of a leak.

My main machine I use regularly is a 2009 Thinkpad X301 which I use to SSH into a newer Thinkpad which has a much faster processor and more RAM, but a terrible 16:9 screen and a dramatically worse keyboard. Being able to have the equivalent chassis of an X301 but with a non-glossy screen that’s bright enough to use outdoors would basically be the best of both worlds.

The first blog post and the subsequent ones give a good insight as to why ThinkPad fans are ecstatic over this. Have a look at the comment section as well, there’s loads of good comments on why a retro ThinkPad would be awesome.

Can’t believe that it’s already been 2 years since that first blog post. Got a T460s (and have had X200, X230 and T430 and serviced quite a number of other models) and while it’s a nice laptop it doesn’t quite live up to my expectations.

I would argue that scaling is a subset of performance, topic-wise. it’s also a word that seems narrowly associated with the operation of large websites, which is nifty but unlikely to be impactful to the average programmer, whereas basic performance knowledge and skills can benefit almost everyone, sooner or later.

Because refining the inner loop of a JSON parser, or fiddling with the output of a C++ compiler to fit an FPS into 96K, or about vectorizing math code isn’t necessarily the same as putting a cache in front of a web server, indexing a database, or sharding data. Some times code that scales (or is thought to scale) in a distributed or web services sense has been de-optimised in a strictly local sense (microservices are a good example of this).

They’re separate, though related, concerns. Some times you can scale by increasing the performance of a program, some times you scale by throwing more hardware at the load and putting said iron behind a load balancer. I would not consider upgrading RAM on a computer a software optimization.

Third-party browsers are not banned on iOS (I make one that is in the App Store), third-party browser engines are banned, because of Apple’s broader ban on apps executing downloaded code. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox on iOS just have to wrap around WKWebView.

Considering Windows 10 S is actually meant as a direct competitor to ChromeOS, I don’t think this choice is all that surprising.

Hugely disappointing (much like chromeos is to me), but not surprising.

Umm. What? You mean like the Firefox I use all the time on all my IOS devices?

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the paper assumes some knowledge that I’ve found it impossible to google.

You should consider asking here for references if that can help. I guess that most questions would have answers either in textbook introductions to type systems (for example Benjamin Pierce’s Types and Programming Languages, or Didier Rémy’s lecture notes), or in previous work on the topic (for example François Pottier’s thesis). That said, looking at Stephen Dolan’s thesis is indeed a good idea as wel, as theses, being liberated from page number restrictions, are often more accessible than condensed papers.