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The answer is: the author’s idiosyncratic skillset and language familiarity, the state of the web application programming language ecosystem 9 years ago, and a series of extremely unconventional architectural decisions; all of which are nearly guaranteed not to apply to the reader.
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Great summary. Also, given they were a 3 person startup I think they should have immediately reduced the candidate languages to the ones the author was already quite familiar with: Python and Common Lisp. Then out of those you think about how hard it would be to hire another engineer and get them up to speed without losing too much of your own velocity. Then you choose Python.
(And hopefully step back from disliking the GIL and realise it very rarely stopped anyone from running a website in the real world).
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“I think they should have immediately reduced the candidate languages to the ones the author was already quite familiar with: Python and Common Lisp”
That’s exactly what the startup factories tell the founders to do, too. Makes sense given they need to be developing as fast as they can rather than learning a language/toolset and minimizing risks to their iterations.
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A-Za-z0-9
5 days ago
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Small Assets without the Headache – Minification made easy with Elm 0.19
What a curious way to announce this much awaited new Elm release. Does anyone here know more about the ideas behind that? I’d have expected some kind of public beta and a proper release announcement…
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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
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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.
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This topic was addressed by Evan (creator of Elm) in his recent talk at Elm Europe 2018 titled: “What is success?”
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So I watched the video, and this is addressed around the 41 minute mark: “There’s pressure on me to be always be saying everything that’s going on with Elm development, and the trouble is that it’s not always very interesting… it’s like… ‘still working’”.
I think “still working” would have been better, though. I don’t think anyone expected weekly updates. Every 2 months updating the Github readme with “still working” would have been fine. And the fear that saying you’re working on X and then it doesn’t pan out, so better to not say anything at all, seems like the worse option.
I also think the talk is a little dismissive of Javascript, and the community. Sure, the number of packages is by no means the be-all of a good language ecosystem, but it says something about the platform and its viability. If nothing else, it means there are alternatives within the ecosystem. People have limited time, and very limited time to invest in learning brand new things, so they naturally look for some way to compare the opportunities they have. Is looking at numbers the ideal behaviour? Maybe not, but if I want to sell Elm to my boss and she asks me when the last release was and I say “18 months ago” and she asks if I know when the next one will be and I say “no”… that’s how languages don’t get adopted and ecosystems don’t grow.
As a complete outsider, but also as someone who wants Elm to succeed, I think community management is something they need to take really seriously. It seems like Evan really doesn’t want to do it, so fine, have someone else do it. You can dislike that there are persistent questions about the future of your project, but they’re best addressed at the time, not left unanswered.
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Personally, I’m not really convinced by those arguments.
I especially don’t understand why 18 months since last release, and no known date of new release, are arguments against adoption of the language. Take C or C++ — they rarely have new releases. Is this an argument against adoption? I don’t think so; actually, more like for adoption in my opinion! Slow pace of releases can mean that the languages are mature and stable. I’d be really surprised and annoyed by a boss who would think otherwise.
It now occurred to me, that maybe Lua is a good example of a language having a similar development mode as Elm. It’s also evolved behind super tightly closed doors. And new versions are usually dumped on the community out of the blue; though usually with public betas & RCs. But those are published only for fleshing out bugs; language design input is mostly not taken into account. AFAIK, the community is generally OK with this. And the language is totally used and relied upon in numerous niches in the industry (including a large one in game development)!
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Take C or C++ — they rarely have new releases
C and C++ have been mature and in very wide use for decades, where Elm is a very young language - just a few years old. Same with Lua, it’s been in widespread use for, what, 10 years or more? I think that’s the difference. Elm is still much more of an unknown quantity.
Slow pace of releases can mean that the languages are mature and stable
Sure - when the language is mature and stable. I don’t think anyone would consider Elm to be that way: this new release, if I understand correctly, breaks every package out there until they’re upgraded by their maintainer.
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Personally, after some initial usage, I currently actually have a surprising impression of Elm being in fact mature. It kinda feels to me as an island of sanity and stability in the ocean of JS ecosystem… (Again, strictly personal opinion, please forgive me should you find this offensive.) I didn’t realize this sentiment so strongly until writing these words here, so I’m also sincerely curious if this could be a sign of me not knowing Elm well enough to stumble upon some warts? Hmh, and for a somewhat more colourful angle, you know what they say: old doesn’t necessarily mean mature, and converse ;P
And — by the way — notably, new releases of Lua actually do also infamously tend to break more or less every package out there :P Newbies tend to be aggravated by this, veterans AFAIU tend to accept it as a cost that enables major improvements to the language.
That said, I think I’m starting to grasp what you’re trying to tell me. Especially the phrase about “unknown quantity”. Still, I think it’s rare for a language to become “corporate grade non-risky”. But then, as much as, say C++ is a “known quantity”, to me it’s especially “known” for being… finicky…
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The devs are active on https://discourse.elm-lang.org/, which might help people see the project activity.
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$HOME– I released a new version of molten this weekend. The highlight being websocket support; I don’t really need websockets for anything in particular but I realised I’d never read the spec before so my inner yak shaver took over and did what he does best. This week, I’m probably going to give Dramatiq a little love since folks have opened a couple of PRs I haven’t had a chance to look at yet.$WORK– I’m going to be working on coming up with new ways to make it easier for folks to integrate with our product.-
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I would say the core framework is simpler (in the sense of fewer, less coupled components) than flask:
- API-focused,
- no external dependencies other than
typing-extensionsandtyping-inspectwhich are tiny, - no global request context,
- no blueprints,
- no CLI,
- no development server,
- no sessions or templating.
It does, however, have everything you would need to build and API w/o bringing in other dependencies. The
molten.contribpackage then lays more functionality (sessions, templates, ORM, etc.) on top of that (and more dependencies!).I would probably place it somewhere between flask and pyramid.
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Cool, sounds interesting. I think not having a development server might raise the barrier to entry, though. Every time I’ve started something with flask or pyramid it’s been with the development server. Sometimes that’s even enough for small internal projects or throwaways.
Blueprints have been one of the most confusing things in flask for me (though it’s been a few years since I tried to use them, maybe they’re better now).
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I’m writing a little website in Python to track my weight. I’ve used various apps and have never been entirely happy with them, and my needs are simple (three line charts with different time ranges), so I’m just going to roll my own.
Right now I’m trying to figure out which charting library to use. There’s matplotlib (workhorse, but a bit confusing) and some more recent alternatives.
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isthatforreal
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6 days ago
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Mozilla files arguments against the FCC – latest step in fight to save net neutrality
As a European, I don’t quite get it: Americans seem to be concerned with net neutrality, meanwhile not protesting huge monopolistic corporations(the gatekeepers) removing some controversial users on their own judgement and with no way to appeal. Are individuals excluded from the net neutrality?
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I’m not very familiar with the legal details, but I assume the distinction is general access to the internet being considered a utility, while access to platforms being considered something like a privilege. E.g. roads shouldn’t discriminate based on destination, but that doesn’t mean the destination has to let you in.
edit: As to why Americans don’t seem as concerned with it (which is realize I didn’t address): I think most people see it as a place, like a restaurant. You can be kicked out if you are violating policies or otherwise disrupting their business, which can include making other patrons uncomfortable. Of course there are limits which is why we have anti-discrimination laws.
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Well, they’re also private, for-profit companies that legally own and sell the lines. So, there’s another political angle where people might vote against the regulations under theory that government shouldn’t dictate how you run your business or use your property, esp if it cost you money. Under theory of benefiting owners and shareholders, these companies are legal entities specifically created to generate as much profit from those lines as possible. If you don’t like it, build and sell your own lines. That’s what they’d say.
They don’t realize how hard it is to deploy an ISP on a shoe-string budget to areas where existing players already paid off the expensive part of the investment, can undercut you into bankruptcy, and (per people claiming to be ISP founders on Hacker News) will even cut competitors’ lines “accidentally” so their own customers leave them. In the last case, it’s hard to file and win a lawsuit if you just lost all your revenue and opponent has over a billion in the bank. They all just quit.
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Which ones?
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One of them described a situation with a contracted, construction crew with guy doing the digging not speaking English well. They were supposedly digging for incumbent but dug through his line. He aaid he pointed that it was clearly marked with paint or something. The operator claimed he thought that meant there wasnt a line there.
That’s a crew that does stuff in that area for a living not knowing what a line mark means. So, he figured they did it on purpose. He folded since he couldnt afford to sue them. Another mentioned them unplugging their lines in exchanges or something that made their service appear unreliable. Like the rest, they’d have to spend money they didnt have on lawyers who’d have to prove (a) it happened snd/or (b) it was intentional.
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The landmark case in the United States is throttling of Netflix by Comcast. Essentially, Comcast held Netflix customers hostage until Netflix paid (which they did).
It’s important to understand that many providers (Comcast, AT&T), also own the channels (NBC, CNN, respectively). They have an interest in charging less for their and their partners content, and more for their competitors content, while colluding to raise prices across the board (which they have done in the past with television and telephone service).
Collectively, they all have an interest in preventing new entrants to the market. The fear is that big players (Google, Amazon) will be able to negotiate deals (though they’d probably prefer not to), and new or free technologies (like PeerTube) will get choked out.
Net neutrality is somewhere where the American attitude towards corporations being able to do whatever to their customers conflicts with the American attitude that new companies and services must be able to compete in the marketplace.
You’re right to observe that individuals don’t really enter into it, except that lots of companies are pushing media campaigns to sway public opinion towards their own interests. You’re seeing those media campaigns leaking out.
Switching to the individual perspective.
I just don’t want to pay more for the same service. In living memory Americans have seen their gigantic monopolistic telecommunications company get broken up, and seen prices for services drop 100 fold; more or less as a direct consequence of that action.
As other posts have noted, the ISP situation in the US is already pretty dire unless you’re a business. Internet providers charge whatever they can get away with and have done an efficient job of ensuring customers don’t have alternatives. Telephone service got regulated, but internet service did not.
Re-reading your post after diving on this one… We’re not really concerned about the same gatekeepers. I don’t think any American would be overly upset to see players like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix go away and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of those guys implode as long as they don’t get access to too much of the infrastructure.
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Right-leaning US Citizen here. I’ll attempt to answer this as best as I can.
Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit). But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs. I do remember this article was moderately interesting, saying that the majority of root DNS servers are run by US companies. But, that doesn’t really faze me. As soon as people start censoring, that get backlash whether the media covers it or not
Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship. I bet you didn’t know that InfoWars was the #1 news app with 5 stars on the Apple app store within a couple of weeks of them getting banned from Facebook, etc. I don’t really have any opinion about Alex Jones (lots of people on the right don’t agree with him), but you can bet I downloaded his app when I found out he got banned.
P.S. I assumed that InfoWars was what you were referring to when you said “removing some controversial users” P.P.S. I just checked the app store again, and it’s down to #20 in news, but still has 5 stars.
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But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.
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I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.
It’s interesting to contrast this to New Zealand, where I live in a town of 50,000 people and have at least 5 ISPs I can choose from. I currently pay $100 NZ a month for an unlimited gigabit fibre connection, and can hit ~600 mbit from my laptop on a speed test. The NZ government has intervened heavily in the market, effectively forcing the former monopolist (Telecom) to split into separate infrastructure (Chorus) and services (Telecom) companies, and spending a lot of taxpayer money to roll out a nationwide fibre network. The ISPs compete on the infrastructure owned by Chorus. There isn’t drastic competition on prices: most plans are within $10-15 of each other, on a per month basis, but since fibre rolled out plans seem to have come down from around $135 per month to now around $100.
I was lucky to have decent internet through a local ISP when I lived in one of Oakland’s handful of apartment buildings, but most people wouldn’t have had that option. I think the ISP picture is a lot better in NZ. Also, net neutrality is a non-issue, as far as I know. We have it, no-one seems to be trying to take it away.
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I’m always irritated that there are policies decried in the United States as “impossible” when there are demonstrable implementations of it elsewhere.
I can see it being argued that the United States’s way is better or something, but there are these hyperbolic attacks on universal health care, net neutrality, workers’ rights, secure elections, etc that imply that they are simply impossible to implement when there are literally dozens of counterexamples…
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At the risk of getting far too far off topic.
One of the members of the board at AT&T was the CEO of an insurance company, someone sits on the boards of both Comcast/NBC and American Beverages. The head of the FCC was high up at Verizon.
These are some obvious, verifiable, connections based in personal interest. Not implying that it’s wrong or any of those individuals are doing anything which is wrong, you’ve just gotta take these ‘hyperbolic attacks’ with a grain of salt.
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Oh yeah it’s infuriating. It helps to hit them with examples. Tell them the media doesn’t talk about them since they’re all pushing something. We all know that broad statement is true. Then, briefly tell them the problems that we’re trying to solve with some goals we’re balancing. Make sure it’s their problems and goals. Then, mention the solution that worked else where which might work here. If it might not fit everyone, point out that we can deploy it in such a way where its specifics are tailored more to each group. Even if it can’t work totally, maybe point out that it has more cost-benefit than the current situation. Emphasize that it gets us closer to the goal until someone can figure out how to close the remaining gap. Add that it might even take totally different solutions to address other issues like solving big city vs rural Internet. If it worked and has better-cost benefit, then we should totally vote for it to do better than we’re doing. Depending on audience, you can add that we can’t have (country here) doing better than us since “This is America!” to foster some competitive, patriotic spirit.
That’s what I’ve been doing as part of my research talking to people and bouncing messages off them. I’m not any good at mass marketing, outreach or anything. I’ve just found that method works really well. You can even be honest since the other side is more full of shit than us on a lot of these issues. I mean, them saying it can’t exist vs working implementations should be an advantage for us. Should. ;)
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Beautifully said.
My family’s been in this country since the Mayflower. I love it dearly.
Loving something means making it better and fixing its flaws, not ignoring them.
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Thanks and yes. I did think about leaving for a place maybe more like my views. That last thing you said is why I’m still here. If we fix it, America won’t be “great again:” it would be fucking awesome. If not for us, then for the young people we’re wanting to be able to experience that. That’s why I’m still here.
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arguably the tech hub of the midwest.
Only if you can’t find Austin on a map… ;)
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Native Texan/Austinite here. Texas is the South, Southwest, or just Texas. All the rest of y’all are just Yankees. ;)
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But if their ISP starts doing anything shady, they’ll surely get some backlash, even if they can’t switch they can complain.
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They’ve been complaining for decades. Nothing happens most of the time. The ISP’s have many lobbyists and lawyers to insulate them from that. The big ones are all doing the same abusive practices, too. So, you can’t switch to get away from it.
Busting up AT&T’s monopoly got results in lower costs, better service, better speeds, etc. Net neutrality got more results. I support more regulation of these companies and/or socialized investment to replace them like the gigabit for $350/mo in Chattanooga, TN. It’s 10Gbps now I think but I don’t know what price.
Actually, I go further due to their constant abuses and bribing politicians: Im for having a court seizetheir assets, converting them to nonprofits, and putting new management in charge. If at all possible. It would send a message to other companies that think they can do damage to consumers and mislead regulators with immunity to consequences.
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The problem is that corporate fines are generally a small percentage of profits.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-radcliffe/should-companies-obey-the-law_b_1650037.html
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Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal
Nobody says this. It’s being pushed because it prevents large corporations from locking out smaller players. The Internet is a great economic equalizer: I can start a business and put a website up and I’m just as visible and accessible as Microsoft.
We don’t want Microsoft to be able to pay AT&T to slow traffic to my website but not theirs. It breaks the free market by allowing collusion that can’t be easily overcome. It’s like the telephone network; I can’t go run wires to everyone’s house, but I want my customers to be able to call me. I don’t want my competitors to pay AT&T to make it harder to call me than to call them.
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t. Internet service has a massively high barrier to entry, similar to a public utility. Most markets in the United States have at most two providers (both major corporations opposed to net neutrality). Very, very rarely is there a third.
More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States. Five. It doesn’t matter how many local ISPs there are; without Net Neutrality, five corporations effectively control what can and can’t be transmitted. If those five decide something should be slowed down or forbidden, there is nothing I can do. Changing to a different provider won’t do a thing.
(And of those five, all of them donate significantly more to one major political party than the other, and the former Associate General Counsel of one of them is currently chairman of the FCC…)
I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.
Net neutrality says nothing about how much it costs. It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content. It would be like television stations charging more money to Republican candidates to run ads than to Democratic candidates. They’re free to charge whatever they want; they’re not free to charge different people different amounts based on the content of the message.
Democracy requires communication. It does no good to say “freedom!” if the major corporations can effectively silence whoever they want. “At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.
And there’s a difference between a newspaper and a television/radio station/internet service. I can buy a printing press and make a newspaper and refuse to carry whatever I want. There are no practical limits to the number of printing presses in the country.
There is a limited electromagnetic spectrum. Not just anyone can broadcast a TV signal. There is a limit to how many cables can be run on utility polls or buried underground. Therefore, discourse carried over those media are required to operate more in the public trust than others. As they become more essential to a healthy democracy, that only becomes more important. It’s silly to say “you still have freedom of speech” if you’re blocked from television, radio, the Internet, and so on. Those are the public forums of our day. That a corporation is doing the blocking doesn’t make it any better than if the government were to do it.
Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship.
There’s a big difference between Twitter not wanting to carry Alex Jones and net neutrality. Jones is still free to go start up a website that carries his message; with Net Neutrality not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.
There is no alternative with Net Neutrality. You can’t build your own Internet. Without mandating equal treatment of traffic, we hand the Internet over solely to the big players. Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power. It’s not censorship, it’s the exact opposite.
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That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t.
This was also brought up by @hwayne, @caleb and @friendlysock, and is not something that occurred to me. I appreciate all who are mentioning this.
More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States.
Wow, I did not know that. I can see that as a legitimate reason to want net neutrality. But, I also think that they’ll piss off a lot of people if they can stream CNN but not InfoWars.
It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content.
I understood it to also mean that you also couldn’t charge customers differently because of who they are. Also, don’t things like Tor mitigate things like that?
“At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.
I completely agree. But in the US we have a free market (at least, we used to) and that means that the government is supposed to stay out of it as much as possible.
Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power.
I also agree. But these corporations (the tier-1 ISPs) haven’t done anything noticeable to me to limit my enjoyment of conservative content, and I’m pretty sure that they would’ve by now if they wanted to.
The reason I oppose net neutrality is more because I don’t think that the government should control it than any more than I think AT&T and others should.
not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.
But they haven’t.
edit: how -> who
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Even though I’m favoring net neutrality, I appreciate you braving the conservative position on this here on Lobsters. I did listen to a lot of them. What I found is most had reasonable arguments but had no idea about what ISP’s did, are doing, are themselves paying Tier 1’s, etc. Their media sources’ bias (all have bias) favoring ISP’s for some reason didn’t tell them any of it. So, even if they’d have agreed with us (maybe, maybe not), they’d have never reached those conclusions since they were missing crucial information to reflect on when choosing to regulate or not regulate.
An example is one telling me companies like Netflix should pay more to Comcast per GB or whatever since they used more. The guy didn’t know Comcast refuses to do that when paying Tier 1’s negotiating transit agreements instead that worked entirely different. He didn’t know AT&T refused to give telephones or data lines to rural areas even if they were willing to pay what others did. He didn’t know they could roll out gigabit today for same prices but intentionally kept his service slow to increase profit knowing he couldn’t switch for speed. He wasn’t aware of most of the abuses they were doing. He still stayed with his position since that guy in particular went heavily with his favorite, media folks. However, he didn’t like any of that stuff which his outlets never even told him about. Even if he disagrees, I think he should disagree based on an informed decision if possible since there’s plenty smart conservatives out there who might even favor net neutrality if no better alternative. I gave him a chance to do that.
So, I’m going to give you this comment by @lorddimwit quickly showing how they ignored the demand to maximize profit, this comment by @dotmacro showing some abuses they do with their market control, and this article that gives nice history of what free market did with each communications medium with the damage that resulted. Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age. It also democratized more goods than about anything other than maybe transportation. Probably should stick with the principles that made that happen to keep innovation rolling. Net neutrality was one of them that was practiced informally at first then put into law as the private sector got too much power and was abusing it. We should keep doing what worked instead of the practices ISP’s want that didn’t work but will increase their profits at our expense for nothing in return. That is what they want: give us less or as little improvement in every way over time while charging us more. It’s what they’re already doing.
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I read the comments, and I read most of the freecodecamp article.
I like the ideal of the internet being a public utility, but I don’t really want the government to have that much control.
I think the real problem I have with government control of the internet, is that I don’t want the US to end up like china with large swaths of the internet completely blocked.
I don’t really know how to solve our current problems. But, like @jfb said elsewhere in this thread, I don’t think that net neutrality is the best possible solution.
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Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age.
I might recognize a name, but I probably wasn’t even around yet.
So, I’m going to give you…
Thanks for the info, I’ll read it and possibly form a new opinion.
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But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
What obvious reasons? Because customers will switch providers if they don’t treat all traffic equally? That would require (a) users are able to tell if a provider prioritizes certain traffic, and (b) that there is a viable alternative to switch to. I have no confidence in either.
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I don’t personally care if the prioritize certain websites, but I sure as hell care if the block something.
As far as I’m concerned, they can slow down Youtube by 10% for conservative channels and I wouldn’t give a damn even though I watch and enjoy some. What really bothers me is when they “erase” somebody or block people from getting to them.
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well you did say they have an incentive to provide “equal service” so i guess you meant something else. net neutrality supporters like me aren’t satisfied with “nobody gets blocked,” because throttling certain addresses gives big corporations more tools to control media consumption, and throttling have similar effects to blocking in the long term. i’m quite surprised that you’d be fine with your ISP slowing down content you like by 10%… that would adversely affect their popularity compared to the competitors that your ISP deems acceptable, and certain channels would go from struggling to broke and be forced to close down.
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Well, I have pretty fast internet, so 10% wouldn’t be terrible for me. However, I can see how some people would take issue with such a slowdown.
I was using a bit an extreme example to illustrate my point. What I was trying to say was that they can’t really stop people from watching the content that they want to watch.
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I recall, but didn’t review, a study saying half of web site users wanted the page loaded in 2 seconds. Specific numbers aside, I’ve been reading that kind of claim from many people for a long time that a new site taking too long to load, being sluggish, etc makes them miss lots of revenue. Many will even close down. So, the provider of your favorite content being throttled for even two seconds might kill half their sales since Internet users expect everything to work instantly. Can they operate with a 50% cut in revenue? Or maybe they’re bootstrapping up a business with a few hundred or a few grand but can’t afford to pay for no artificial delays. Can they even become the content provider your liked if having to pay hundreds or thousands extra on just extra profit? I say extra profit since ISP’s already paid for networks capable of carrying it out of your monthly fee.
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yeah, the shaping of public media consumption would happen in cases where people don’t know what they want to watch or don’t find out about something that they would want to watch
anti-democratic institutions already shape media consumption and discourse to a large extent, but giving them more tools will hurt the situation. maybe it won’t affect you or me directly, but sadly we live in a society so it will come around to us in the form of changes in the world
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But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP. Especially in apartment complexes, you see cases where, say, Comcast has the lockdown on an entire population and there really isn’t a reasonable alternative.
In a truly free market, maybe I’d agree with you, but the regulatory environment and natural monopolistic characteristics of telecomm just don’t support the case.
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Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP.
That’s a witty way of putting it.
But yeah, @lorddimwit mentioned the small number of tier-1 ISPs. I didn’t realize there were so few, but I still think that net neutrality is overreaching, even if its less than I originally thought.
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But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
Awkward political jabs aside, most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect. Whatever arguments you want to make against net neutrality, there is one indisputable fact that you cannot just ignore or paper over:
ISPs do not operate in a free market.
In the vast majority of the US, cable and telephone companies are granted local monopolies in the areas they operate. That is why they must be regulated. As the Mozilla blog said, they have both the incentive and means to abuse their customers and they’ve already been caught doing it on multiple occasions.
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most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect
I think you’re a bit late to the party, I’ve conceded that fact already.
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All of that is gibberish. Net Neutrality is being pushed because it creates a more competitive marketplace. None of it has anything to do with professional liar Alex Jones.
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
That’ s not how markets work. And it’s not how the technology or permit process for ISPs work. There is very little competition among ISPs in the US market.
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Hey, here’s a great example from HN of the crap they pull without net neutrality. They advertised “unlimited,” throttled it secretly, admitted it, and forced them to pay extra to get actual unlimited.
@lorddimwit add this to your collection. Throttling and fake unlimited been going on long time but they couldve got people killed doing it to first responders. Id have not seen that coming just for PR reasons or avoiding local, govt regulation if nothing else.
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I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.
It’s not about how much internet costs, it’s about protecting freedom of access to information, and blocking things like zero-rated traffic that encourage monopolies and discourage competition. If I pay for a certain amount of traffic, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to turn to Google and say “want me to prioritize YouTube traffic over Netflix traffic? Pay me!”
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Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit).
Where on earth did you hear that? I sure hope you’re not making it up—you’ll find this site doesn’t take too kindly to that.
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I might’ve been conflating two different political issues, but I have heard “fascist” and “nazi” used to describe the entire right wing.
A quick google search for “net neutrality fascism” turned this up https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbye4z/heres-why-net-neutrality-is-essential-in-trumps-america
“With the rise of Trump and other neo-fascist regimes around the world, net neutrality will be the cornerstone that activists use to strengthen social movements and build organized resistance,” Wong told Motherboard in a phone interview. “Knowledge is power.”
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You assume that net neutrality is a left-wing issue, which it’s not. It actually has bipartisan support. The politicians who oppose it have very little in common, aside from receiving a large sum of donations from telecom corporations.
As far as terms like “fascist” or “Nazi” are concerned—I think they have been introduced into this debate solely to ratchet up the passions. It’s not surprising that adding these terms to a search yields results that conflate the issues.
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Ill add on your first point that conservatives who are pro-market are almost always pro-competition. They expect the market will involve competition driving whats offered up, its cost down, and so on. Both the broadband mandate and net neutrality achieved that with an explosion of businesses and FOSS offering about anything one can think of.
The situation still involves 1-3 companies available for most consumers that, like a cartel, work together to not compete on lowering prices, increasing service, and so on. Net neutrality reduced some predatory behavior the cartel market was doing. They still made about $25 billion in profit between just a few companies due to anti-competitive behavior. Repealing net neutrality for anti-competitive market will have no positives for consumer but will benefit roughly 3 or so companies by letting them charge more for same or less service.
Bad for conservative’s goals of market competition and benefiting conservative voters.
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MUMPS is still in active usage, I think? A few years ago I interviewed someone out of the midwest (Minneapolis or Michigan, I think) who worked for a large health software vendor. They’ve been around for a long time, and they’re in a lot of hospitals across the US. I’m pretty sure their whole system is built in MUMPS.
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Epic is the vendor iirc. It is also all up in the VA Vista system.
It is part of the fractal of sadness of healthcare.
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I don’t really know enough about the MUMPS ecosystem to answer, but maybe? It seems to fit the COBOL criteria:
- “Outdated”[0] language people don’t really want to work in,
- Relied upon in core parts of large, “boring”, slow-moving companies who have a lot of code and,
- Who are very unlikely to be disrupted out of their space any time soon
I got the impression that this particular company was one of the few/only software games in town, wherever they were, and that they kinda hoovered-up a lot of the engineering talent from the surrounding region. That said, the person I spoke to was very aware that MUMPS is incredibly niche and was looking to build transferable skills in a more mainstream software environment, and was looking in the Bay Area. So, I could guess they might have a retention problem, at least amongst people who are also willing to relocate for work. That’s speculation, though.
Caveat: This is all from memory of an interview a few years ago
[0] I used air-quotes because not everyone has these perceptions
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“Outdated” is a loaded term, sure, but I think we can explore it a bit.
Things can be outdated because more work has been done in the space to create technology which is better in every technical respect, but that doesn’t mean the existing technology is going to be changed, because social and political aspects factor in as well. Of course, in both software and buildings, something becomes outdated once flaws are no longer repaired when found, but fixing bugs becomes a political and social football as well.
(Then, of course, there are the sad cases who need to be contrarian to the point they’ll argue that technology which has been superseded and abandoned is in no way outdated. They’re the ones who throw out the most heat, and obscure the most light, when someone’s trying to understand the field.)
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Second, we address a major usability flaw in Typed Clojure: users must manually write annotations. To remedy this, I will present a tool that automatically generates Typed Clojure annotations based on observed program behavior, including a formal model of the tool, consisting of its runtime instrumentation phase that collects samples from a running program, and type reconstruction phase that creates useful annotations from these samples.
I’ve wondered about this approach for a while. If it works for Clojure it might also be a boon for Typescript/Flow, or for getting more type hints into Python (which, IMO, is less useful given the official stance against type checking)
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Timely. I have Nim in Action here after skimming the tutorial (as much to support the book author as anything), and my reactions to most of the language have been “Oh, that’s convenient”. I’m drawn to the easy C/C++ FFI but overall my fiddling with the language has been pleasant.
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Nim in Action looks interesting. I like it that it directly dives into building things (at least it looks like that from Chapters 3 through 7). Most other books lose me at “here are 10 ways how to declare an integer”.
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This is precisely what I was going for when writing Nim in Action. Super glad to see it being appreciated :)
I strongly believe that learning by implementing (sometimes large) practical examples is the best way to learn a programming language. Learning every single detail of the language presented through small unrealistic examples gets boring quickly.
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Reasonably up to date for a dead-tree edition, it’s from 2017. I haven’t compared to the complementary ebook but those are “live” and get updates. I’ve noticed a couple changes/errata (compiler invocation option, deprecation of Aporia editor, a change to the
..<operator) but nothing significant.-
Indeed, it’s barely a year old.
I’ve actually added all the projects in the book to the Nim compiler’s test suite so the book should remain compatible with new versions. I’ve also asked our BDFL to not break these, so far so good :)
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Great idea on that!
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Thanks for posting this! I am just starting with Nim, coming from about 10 years of Python and JS. I’ve found it mixed going. It starts off feeling quite Pythonic and familiar, but rapidly becomes unfamiliar when looking at source code for existing libraries (which I’ve had to do a bit, as documentation or even comments tend towards zero).
I particularly agree with you about the Uniform Function Call Syntax (thanks, I have a name for this now). It makes other peoples code harder to understand, because it seems less organised, and my own code harder to write. For example, in the nimcrypto library a bunch of
encryptfunctions exist with very similar signatures. Trying to use one likeobject.encryptand getting the parameters wrong results in a wall of compiler errors like “did you mean thisencrypt[huge type signature]?, or this one?, or this one?, or this one?, or this one?”. But there’s only one that is valid. I’ve found it pretty confusing. I’m happy to hear it might be addressed.
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I am also learning Nim right now and I can relate so much with the post, especially the part about the module imports. I just dislike so much that everything gets suddenly imported into the regular namespace that I only use “
import X as X” and “from X import y” so that I can keep the mentality I have built from Python-
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Clojure used to work this way; before version 1.4 or so there was the
:usesection of thensclause which brought everything in, but its use has since been strongly discouraged in favor of:require [x :as y]which is much clearer. Maybe Nim could take the same approach.
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If you feel paralyzed when an interviewer asks you how you see yourself in five years, remember she doesn’t want you to read the future, she wants to learn about your motivation and goals.
And yet, she doesn’t ask you “what’s your motivation and what are some goals?”. Also, she’s looking out for red-flags like “well, my mother-in-law is getting old and we might have to move back across the country next year to look after her, so I’m just looking for something in the interim”. Which is a totally, 100% legit (and compassionate, and honest) thing to tell the interviewer. But, let’s be honest: don’t tell the interviewer that, they all want to hear that you’re looking to make a long term impact working on whatever BS run-of-the-mill project/team/company they’re interviewing you for. Tell them the mother-in-law story and you won’t be making it to the next round.
Edit: Very little of this, to me, is “how to pretend you have social skills”. It covers some specific interactions with some people you might encounter in a software job, in situations that are highly-specific to software jobs and in particular (I think, from the article) junior developers.
Edit edit: I feel I have been a bit snarky. I don’t want to knock the post too hard: clearly effort and thought went into it. But I’m not sure what the takeaways are. Some of it’s “don’t be nervous in interviews”, some of it’s “I (the author) am a good interviewer”, some of it’s “understand the dynamics of working with the angry senior tech lead” (which is good advice). But… coulda been bullet points?
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I’ve always hated the 5 year plan question. In interviews I’ll usually say, “Well I expect to not be answering canned interview questions,” if it’s a job I’m not really interested in. If it’s a job I want, I tend to say, “There’s no way to know what will happen in 5 years. Scientifically, we don’t even understand why we can only move forward in time. In space you can move in any six directions, but with time, we all move forward at a constant rate (unless you’re very rich and have a very fast space ship, and even then you can only slow down your time travel relative to everyone else).
“So it’s not useful to think about regrets or what you would have done. Our decisions only affect our present and our future.”
I’ve gotten job offers answering that question both ways.
In general I agree with you on this. I hate this idea that most engineers don’t have social skills. We certainly do. I’ve had to deal with clients in many different industries. Articles like this are more about teaching people to be less truthful and tell people what they want to hear to get your goals.
You don’t get great jobs that way. It’s good advice if you just need a job. Once you have a job, it’s bad advice when you’re trying to switch to a job you actually want.
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Without comment in regards to how you approach answering this question, one of the reasons people ask it is that they want to know if you have a future. And further they want to know if they can be a part of it. The thinking goes that if you don’t have a future or your future won’t include them then there is no opportunity for a relationship to develop that will work for everyone. I suppose that can be said, as in the article, as “learn about your motivation and goals.” I certainly consider that framing of the question to be weak and, as you allude to, potentially disingenuous.
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I like to think of scrum as agile training wheels. Calling what this article suggests “post agile” is avoiding the concepts behind why agile exists and what it actually is. Agile is not scrum, but scrum is agile. In the case that this seems confusing, let me clarify.
Yes, scrum is great sometimes - but it should never be the ideal solution. With teams that don’t often change, scrum tends to require a lot of bottle-necking on progress, large in-group meetings, and extraneous communication. This is because scrum introduces a large amount of process which essentially only exists to help everyone communicate.
When people get to a point where they are able to communicate effectively with the right people without needing daily stand-ups, for instance, standups become a bottle-neck. The reason for this is that there are tendencies in many developers to avoid talking to people until next standup out of fear of bothering the other person or even sometimes laziness. This often can block people for half a day if you do daily standups.
This is made even worse with teams that do standups in the morning, because often times developers are doing their standups before they even have a full handle on and remember what they were working on and running into the day before. Standups should be mid-afternoon, post-lunch, etc at a good breaking point where the majority of the team is going to be taken away from producing anyway.
That’s a long example, but it demonstrates how just one of the practices common in scrum can block people.
I believe that we should always be working toward a lean agile model, and scrum should be used as a way to help people gel when it isn’t happening. Once people are communicating effectively, get rid of it.
A lean agile model never precludes or punishes asynchronous work, and it is completely compatible with everything suggested in this article. With all that background out of the way, I suggest to consider that the bigger problem is simply that people think scrum means agile - when agile is a higher level methodology.
Agile is about being able to change direction easily and quickly with minimal velocity impact. It’s not about sitting in a room talking about how great last week went or standing in a group reiterating what you’re doing even though everyone already knows. That’s just a scrum thing, and if everyone already knows you shouldn’t be doing it.
Let us not invent a new name for something that already exists. Instead, let’s embrace what agile is and try to understand where our practices and methodologies have caused us to conflate different ideas and processes.
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This is made even worse with teams that do standups in the morning, because often times developers are doing their standups before they even have a full handle on and remember what they were working on and running into the day before
Sounds like every stand-up I’ve ever been in. I saw an interesting comment about the trajectory of stand-ups, where people eventually end up spending half their time talking up how busy they were yesterday. Seems like moving stand-ups to after-lunch would discourage that, too.
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I would like to request that people don’t post “we” as a hyperlink, without saying who “we” is. It’s much easier to read through the various posts that way. Please put the name of the company as the name of the link, or at least right next to it.
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Picking up Nim.
I worked through the official tutorial this weekend and so far, I (mostly) like what I see. There are some weird quirks here and there, but I think I would publish a blog post in a day or two about first impressions.
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If you write that blog post could you post it here (and maybe in reply to this comment, too, so that I see it?). I’m just starting out with nim, coming from years of Python and JS. I’m finding it more complex than I expected, especially as I’m not used to fighting a compiler. I came into it expecting something like “Python with static types” but it’s only kinda that.
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I just published it. Here’s a link - https://sgoel.org/posts/nim-first-impressions/ .
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I’ll try to get started with nim. The official tutorial seems super complete, so that should be enough to get my hands dirty
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I’m just starting with nim, too. I’ve found it pretty nice so far, coming from Python and JS. I find the LearnXInYMinutes page to be quite a handy reference.
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It’s clear that there’s a lot of work that could be done to improve the security of the Homebrew project. If you use Homebrew at your place of work, consider asking them to donate to the project. As an industry, we need to invest in the well being of core OSS software that we all use and depend on.
Totally agree. We need internal pressure from employees to get companies who are free-riding on software like Homebrew to step up and contribute to its development. I imagine that an ongoing donation would be well within the expense budget of a lot of managers or department heads - it’s not like you should need the CEO to sign off on it. A security scare seems like a good way to justify this, if one is needed, though really it should already be enough to say “We rely on Homebrew/npm/pip/etc… to setup engineer laptops. If it goes away for lack of funding we will lose x days / weeks replacing it. So we’re donating a few hundred dollars a month to help keep it alive. And look, they gave us a badge.”
Now I almost wonder if we should setup a wall-of-shame type website for major companies who use tools like Homebrew and don’t contribute funding (though I would be worried both about the inherent negativity of such a site, and also its accuracy).
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I’m really dubious about this survey and its conclusions.
Firstly, the title is inaccurate - it’s Linux and BSD contributors specifically (to be fair, that’s in the subtitle).
Secondly, there are questions where the possible answers don’t fit the question at all eg “less effort”, “much effort” etc for “do you think it would be a good idea to move the distribution away from Github”
Lastly, they repeatedly conclude that “no opinion or neutral in the question … means participants hesitate to answer this question” but that seems like a really big stretch to me. Not having an opinion or not caring about something is not the same as not wanting to answer the question.
FWIW, my current employer is a happy (AFAIK) paid user of Github. No-one cares about the Microsoft acquisition.
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I would like to try this out, but I can’t auth the shopping list demo to Github because it wants access to both private and public repos, and those of my employer. I understand this might be a limit on Github’s side (maybe the permissions options aren’t granular enough) but unfortunately that makes it a hard pass for me.
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There’s a scope to authorize the app only for public repos. But that in turn would make it impossible to use on private repos. It’s starts to look like GitHub API, as it doesn’t support granting per-repo access, is not designed to support this kind of scenario (application running in brower, impersonating the user).
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I got sucked into a ReactJS rabbithole.
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As someone who is a total stranger to Elm, its dev and its community, but was interested for a long time in learning this language, I wonder if this opinion reflects the feeling of the “great number” or not.
I have to say that I personally can very much see where he’s coming from. GitHub contributions are dealt with in a very frustrating way (IMO they’d do better not allowing issues and PRs at all). There’s a bit of a religious vibe to the community; the inner circle knows what’s good for you.
That said, they may very well be successful with their approach by a number of metrics. Does it hurt to loose a few technically minded independent thinkers if the language becomes more accessible to beginners?
Where I see the largest dissonance is in how Elm is marketed: If the language is sold as competitive to established frameworks, you’re asking people to invest in this technology. Then turning around and saying your native modules are gone and you shouldn’t complain because no one said the language was ready feels a bit wrong.
Yeah when I look at the home page, it does seem like it is over-marketed: http://elm-lang.org/
At the very least, the FAQ should probably contain a disclaimer about breaking changes: http://faq.elm-community.org/
Ctrl-F “compatibility” doesn’t find anything.
It’s perhaps true that pre-1.0 software is free to break, but it seems like there is a huge misunderstanding in the community about compatibility. The version number doesn’t really mean much in my book – it’s more a matter of how many people actually rely on the software for production use, and how difficult their upgrade path is. (Python 3 flauted this, but it got by.)
I think a lot of the conflict could be solved by making fewer promises and providing some straightforward, factual documentation with disclaimers.
I watched the “What is Success?” talk a couple nights ago and it seemed like there is a lot of unnecessary conflict and pain in this project. It sounds like there is a lot to learn from Elm though – I have done some stuff with MUV and I like it a lot. (Although, while the types and purity probably help, but you can do this in any language.)
I watched the talk also, after another… Lobster(?)… Posted it in another thread. My biggest takeaway was that Evan really doesn’t want to deal with an online community. People at IRL meetups, yes. Students in college, yes. People/companies online trying to use the language? No. His leading example of online criticism he doesn’t want to deal with was literally “Elm is wrong” (he quoted without any context, which isn’t that helpful. But maybe that was all of it.)
That’s fine. He’s the inventor of the language, and the lead engineer. He probably does have better things to do. But as an outsider it seems to me that someone has to engage more productively with the wider community. Our, just come out and say you don’t care what they think, you’ll get what you’re given, and you can use it if you choose. But either way communicate more clearly what’s going on, and what to expect.
I’ve shipped multiple production applications in Elm and attempted to engage with the community and I can say that their characterization perfectly matches mine.
Native modules being removed in particular has caused me to no longer use Elm in the future. I was always ok with dealing with any breakage a native module might cause every release, and I’m even ok with not allowing them to be published for external consumption, but to disallow them completely is unreasonable. I’m sure a number of people feel the same way as I do, but it feels impossible to provide meaningful feedback.
I work for a company that began using Elm for all new projects about a year and a half ago. That stopped recently. There are several reasons that people stopped using Elm. Some simply don’t like the language. And others, like the author of this post, want to like the language but are put off by the culture. That includes me. This article closely resembles several conversations I’ve had at work in the past year.