Ironically, the maker of the win95-in-electron hack works at… slack. https://github.com/felixrieseberg

That would be quite a hack. I doubt Electron could even be made to run on Windows 95. Once Windows 98 came out, Win95 was all but forgotten by 99% of the computing world in short order. I would guess that most programs of the pre-Win7 era that are still actually useful have roughly this level of support:

• Windows XP: probably? maybe?
• Windows 98: not likely
• Windows 95: lololol

No, the text they write definitely shows that they are in for the money.

AGPL

The previous license for the 3 modules in question was previously AGPL.

It absolutely is. Read the FAQ section on the AGPL, it’s very unclear. ‘Many features of the AGPL…’ kind of language. What features? It’s not the Linux kernel, it’s a license, it’s pretty small, just say what these supposed features are.

Of course the reason they don’t is that it’s a smokescreen: the AGPL is of course fine, but their goal isn’t to make the software free, it’s to profiteer off it.

There’s a lot of implementations that load the widget once the user want to use them. They are pretty common in Germany and pretty much work by having the button “primed” with one click, which loads and activates the JS and the widget.

I have such buttons that work without Javascript. Just normal links.

You might consider using these or similar social sharing buttons without javascript or tracking.

Well, so one of my Berlin Rust Hack & Learn regulars is porting rustc to Gnu Hurd. I can switch soon, year of the desktop is 2109.

If I remember correctly Haiku also has microkernel.

QNX, Minix 3, or Genode get you more mileage. At least two have desktop environments, too. I’m not sure about Minix 3 but did find this picture.

Don’t MacOS and iOS both use variants of the Mach microkernel?

I’ll try to debug the contributors thing, this seems to be a problem for some (but not all) repos.

Color coding: agreed, it’s pretty dumb now. Basically, open=yellow, closed=green, regardless of the numbers. I’ll fix this asap.

Thanks!

I was under the impression a panic in Rust was unrecoverable. Does it matter if the data structure is left in an inconsistent state if drop panics? I thought that not having to reason about exception safety was considered a selling point of not having exceptions.

Panics in Rust are unrecoverable within a task. You can catch them (for example, before unwinding into a piece of C-code, which is undefined) using catch_panic. Still, there’s guarantees around panic, and that being that all owned values affected are properly _drop_ped and especially, memory safety is not violated in the process. Now, imagine the panicing code has the data structure borrowed and triggers the panic. The original value continues to exist and must be in a consistent state.

Mutexes are a good example of a structure that has to deal with that problem. As Mutexes cannot reason about the operations on the data they contain, they become poisoned in such a situation.

Safe Rust allows you not having to reason about exception safety, unsafe on the other hand… is unsafe Rust ;).

Panics in drops are rare (and generally recommended against), but they may happen…

Another observation: in this case, they may lead to a memory leak, but leaking is safe in Rust. Dropping twice is illegal.

While you’re right about Rust community being friendly (even by force at times), the actix discussion wasn’t all happiness. The unsafety was first sort of ignored by the devs, which made some people claim that the developers of actix are completely untrustworthy, and shouldn’t be trusted in any future project either. That understandably made the actix devs a bit unhappy, probably on the verge of just dropping everything and walking away, but fortunately they decided to fix things instead.

So it was pretty good in the end, but the road there was a bit worse than you described, IMHO.

Their headcount has always been kinda small I think? You need to hit a certain size before carving out a specific position.

Because reddit is not hosting financial data or (for the most part) deeply personal data that is not already out in the open, I would assume that they are not that interesting a target for hackers looking for financial gain, but more interesting for people script kiddies who are looking to DOX or harass other users.

This reminds me of all the hoopla around the JVM as it was coming out: one language to rule them all! Distributing bytecode instead of compiled binaries! Write once, run anywhere! I see how WebAssembly improves on some of this story, but it still has a sameness to it, except it’s dubbed ‘open.’ As a user, why do I care? As a developer, why do I care? HTML 5 displacing Flash has meant that ads are more invasive and harder to block, honestly.

There’s a big difference between Java and WebAssembly. While you could totally imagine a bare JVM that just runs JVM bytecode, it always came with its standard lib, the TLS implementation and everything around it. And even then, the JVM needs to come with a garbage collector, which wants to take control of all memory. The teasing thing about WASM is that it only talks about portable code, but not about a portable API. It’s quite different from the JVM in the aspect that it isn’t a platform in itself.

I live in Emacs, so https://github.com/vermiculus/magithub, https://github.com/sigma/magit-gh-pulls and https://magit.vc/ itself are my primary tools. They are the most powerful git tools I had the pleasure to work with.

I just haven’t yet used tools that hook into it. What are some of your favorite tools?

I can highly recommend githubs own hub: https://github.com/github/hub, https://hub.github.com/hub.1.html

I tried to collect the pros and cons in this article: https://begriffs.com/posts/2018-06-05-mailing-list-vs-github.html

I also spoke about this at length in a previous article:

https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html

While my general experience with git email is bad (it’s annoying to set up, especially in older versions and I don’t like it’s interface too much), my experience of interaction with projects that do this was generally good. You send a patch, you get review, you send a new, self-contained patch, attached to the same thread… etc, in parallel to the rest of the project discussion. It’s a different flavour, but with a project that is used to the flow, it can really be quite pleasing.

What does it add to just using git by itself?

I think the selling point is precisely that it doesn’t add anything else. Creating a PR involves more steps and context changes than git-format-patch git-send-mail.

I have little experience using the mailing list flow, but when I had to do so (because the project required it) I found it very easy to use and better for code reviews.

How can an average user be expected to choose from a basically random list of nodes?

How did they choose their email provider? Not be carefully weighing the technical options, surely. They chose whatever their friends or parents used, because with working federation it doesn’t matter.

what are the odds that I, or whoever is maintaining the node, basically gets bored of it one day and kills the whole thing?

Same as what happened with many early email providers: when they died, people switched to different ones and told their friends their new addresses.

Really, all this argument of “what if federation isn’t a holy grail” is pointless because we all already use a federated system — email — and we know for a fact that it works for humans, despite all its flaws.

These ‘which instance to join’ sites are completely useless, I wish they wouldn’t exist at all.

Second, if I do that I’m now in charge of security for my data. As terrible as Twitter and Facebook are, they’re probably still a lot better at securing my data than I am

Setting a price tag on your datas doesn’t secure them. There are enough scams and hoaxes on Facebook to share your information with other companies that I have to disagree with you. And since those social networks are collecing more data than necessary, it is easier to lose data.

a language called rockstar could be touring-complete.

Nothing? But it’s made by an organization called “Django Girls”.

About and contributing

This tutorial is maintained by DjangoGirls.

Following the link gets us this (emphasis mine):

Django Girls is a non-profit organization and a community that empowers and helps women to organize free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources and support. We are a volunteer run organization with hundreds of people contributing to bring more amazing women into the world of technology. We are making technology more approachable by creating resources designed with empathy.

To me, it looks like they created high quality approachable documentation as material for their workshops, to further their goal of bringing women into tech. “Designed with empathy” probably means it avoids using exclusive language, anecdotes, analogies, and so on. So less “designed for female programmers” and more “doesn’t assume programmers are typically male.”

Otherwise, nothing. I don’t reckon a bunch of women were about to write the “Django Bros Tutorial.”

As others have said, the tutorial name just comes from the organisation.

It’s notable in that it is tutorial meant for people with 0 knowledge and possible contact issues with computers.

Also, FWIW, the “Girls” name for those organisations (coming from “Rails Girls” is widely regarded a mistake now. The chapter I help out with (Rails Girls Berlin) has recently renamed into “Code Curious”. Turns out that grown women don’t feel spoken to by “Girls”.

I think that there should be tools for converting from a dsl to the unsugared powerful syntax. As much as I love regexes, not everyone knows them and there are lots of subleties, complexities, and variations (is that perl, vim, shell?).

The problem with regular expressions isn’t so much that they are overly succinct but that the sub-expressions typically go unnamed. E.g. we might have a regular expression for IPv4 addresses (from https://stackoverflow.com/a/5284410):

re = /\b((25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)(\.|$)){4}\b/

but this would be much easier to read if we wrote:

octet = /25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?/
re = /\b(#{octet}).(#{octet}).(#{octet})\.(#{octet})\b/

and as a side benefit it does stricter validation and correctly captures all 4 octets.

The most important facility any language can provide IMO is the ability to give names to constructs we create.

Hollywood movie franchise games are almost always of extremely poor quality in all aspects, not only code, but gameplay, assets and art style too.

While I agree with that in general, the Alien franchise is an exception, having multiple high-quality games like Alien Trilogy, Aliens vs. Predator (not related to the film, with all races playable and an incredibly great Alien movement system), AvP 2 and Alien: Isolation (with its extremely faithful level design modelled after the first movie).

Colonial Marines was an extreme let-down, especially with such an experienced shooter studio as Gearbox behind it.

This is exactly the attitude that leads to maintainers’ burn outs.

Do realize this:

• Adding syntax variations is not done at the expense of performance, different volunteers are working on what’s more interesting to them.
• Python is not a product, and you’re not a paying customer, you don’t get to say “do this instead of that” because none of the volunteer maintainers owes you to produce a language for you. Just walking by and telling people what to do with their project is at the very least impolite.
• If you want something to happen in an open source project, volunteer to do it.

(None of this is aimed at you personally, I don’t know who you are. I’m dissecting an attitude that you’ve voiced, it’s just all too common.)

please stop adding these tiny edge case syntax variations and do something about performance.

There’s a better forum, and approach, to raise this point.

Have you tried Pypy? Have you tried running your code through Cython?

Have you read any of the zillion and one articles on improving your Python’s performance?

If the answer to any of these is “no” then IMO you lose the right to kvetch about Python’s performance.

And if Python really isn’t performant enough for you, why not use a language that’s closer to the metal like Rust or Go or C/C++?