grumblenum

It's a west-coast tech industry consortium language that is a mashup of subsets of SML, C++ and Cyclone with some very strong opinions about aesthetic differences. "Simple" is not a good description. Lisps are simple. Rust, Java, C++ & friends are not. Also, the core paid promoters of rust are almost all alumni of the Ruby on Rails hype-train. You can judge for yourself if their promotion of rails was grounded in truth.

In 2005 I was in a college dorm that provided the NYT in a common area. I picked up one and the first article I read was a column about Hurricane Katrina. The author interviewed a history professor who bewailed the failings of the president and the United States and how this was "worse than Antitem". In other words the esteemed Grey Lady interviewed an "expert" whose expertise has nothing to do with meteorology or disaster response to get a "Bush sucks, haha!" hot-take. Even as a know-nothing teenager (of strong anti-war sentiment at the time), I recognized that "area man says natural disaster proves Bush sucks" is just pablum. I put the paper down, and I have never picked up an NYT since.

Thanks to the hero who provided an archive link, so that I could skim this. This article appears to be NYT heroically defending a corporate sponsor against the vile slander of other content marketers. Still speaking truth to power, I see.

I don’t think much will change until the incentives change. Right now there is basically no consequence for doing the wrong thing. Software is unique in that defects are generally tolerated. Minimizing time to market can be everything where often winners take all. Thus an incomplete solution today is worth more than a flawless solution in the future.

I’m not saying it’s good, but it is a predictable consequence of the market incentives.

Creating a monetary incentive to judiciously use a scarce resource seems to be exactly the kind of problem a market solves. Or in the case of a command-economy, perhaps the policies of the party running the state for the last decade should been more effective in addressing basic problems like "how do we feed ourselves?"

>"The police are racist murderers" is, first of all, objectively true and facts don't care about your feelings

Um. No? Drawing a hard line on the facts is understandable, but you sound completely out of touch.

>So while you may not like the slogans, they definitely seem to be working.

I take it you don't live near "the hood." De-policing is a luxury ideology for political dilettantes well insulated from the consequences of their juvenile theories.

>And if this results in horrific consequences because we've fundamentally undermined security, who's accountable for that? No one (and everyone)?

It will be quite the moot point then, won't it? May I add for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's record that I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.

>Oracle was clearly on the wrong side of history here.

I agree insofar as that is a euphemism to mean that Oracle is not tightly aligned with the interests of the left. Google is a big donor both in cash and in kind. Oracle is much less so.

> The damage to the industry from allowing APIs to be copyrighted would have been immense.

If I were to copy Google Sheets, offer an online service called "Google Sheets" and the only difference is that I modified a handful of implementation details so the service would run my spyware, and not Google's, then I would lose any copyright claims made by Google, hands down. You could make an identical argument that the web interface is an "API" and copying their code is a necessity of providing equivalent functionality. Google ripped off Sun and got away with it because the US legal process is a farce. Denying the right to copyright ANY code at all would be a morally defensible position, but that's not the ruling.

The most insightful comment is also the most downvoted. What did HN mean by this?

>Tech startups usually thrive from apps, services, or valuable technologies.

I think an unprecedented abundance of cheap leverage and an inability of investors to make reasonable valuations of highly abstract products should be in that list.

Not HN approved, sorry. Plus, I don't think that Yarvin still has his mojo since his wife died. He'll be back, but Urbit is way too convoluted to just coast into success.

Well, to be fair, Google is in a unique position to shape opinions and manufacture outrage over their right to ham-fistedly thumb their nose at Oracle's software licenses. Google has hundreds of patents, and they have some applications for patent which are total nonsense (like the heart hand gesture... seriously). I don't think any party involved has a credible moral objection to intellectual property rights. I think they do have different friends D.C.

Pocket is ad-tech that nobody wanted. FTP is, for some, a useful feature. The negativity is because Mozilla maintains a façade of selflessly serving the little guy but then it removes an existing, working feature that makes it a little easier not to use surveillance-focused file-sharing services like Google Drive. The animosity Mozilla receives from its users has been well earned.

> A modern web browser is probably some of the most complex software humanity has invented yet, besides a full-scale OS.

And whose fault is that, if not WHATWG?

Embrance. Extend. Extinguish.

--------------------- ^ [The web is here]

The article is about intentional error; however, I have found this to be very approachable and entertaining primer on (probably) unintentional error in research:

https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/

Research that has been further filtered onto your favorite infotainment coffee-table-science column further suffers from the 'eigonvalue' problem. I think assuming intentional fraud is excessive for a default position, but complete trust of any document formatted with Latex because "it's science" is probably worse.

Uber for numpy, perhaps. The best case scenario would be like Oracle and JavaSE. I lack the imagination to speculate on the worst case, so I am quite surprised that anyone expects to make more than $24M in profit from yet another programming language. Particularly one which caters to the narrow intersection of one-off scripts/rapid iteration, efficient machine code generation, but without limitations on memory usage.

There are also other lightweight alternatives. The Gopher protocol has a small, but disturbed following : http://gopher.muffinlabs.com/gopher.floodgap.com (you can actually use netcat as your gopher client). Gemini is a more modern gopher-inspired protocol https://gemini.circumlunar.space/. Personally, I'd be pleased to see a text-first approach gain adoption. I don't think anyone looks at the thick-client model browsers have evolved into and sees an optimal solution.

I think evangelistic energy should probably be directed at complaining to organizations that share content through JS-framework monstrosities. Getting rank-and-file web-devs excited about lean websites doesn't hurt, but clients and CTOs have real decision making power.

In the Bush years he was cool. In the Obama years he wasn't cool. Around 2016 he became a pariah. The press is most often aligned with the interests of the party and is a fair-weather-friend at best.

Please read The Captive Mind for the version based on true events.

Spoiler: the Poles discovered that a political movement with methods and motivations which should sound very familiar didn't turn out to be the good guys after all.

Those WMDs are surely out there somewhere...

Maybe they will compensate you with discounts on some of their upcoming offerings like Google Re-Education Camp or Google Kulak Liquidator. Kids, are your parents tainted with dangerous Bourgeois sentiments? Get a free $10 Amazon Gift Card for every tip you make on Google Informant.

Egyptian scribes, the Oracles of Delphi, the Medieval Catholic Church and journalists and of today all seem to be treated kindly enough. The "intelligentsia" exists to serve the prevailing regime (they cannot exist without patrons). Sometimes those regimes last centuries. I would tend to agree, however, that hysteria among the intelligentsia is an indicator of the feelings of insecurity among their patrons. Hysteria probably sums up the last 5 years to my recollection.

>We don't let MasterCard and Visa print up their own hundred dollar bills, after all.

Some financial institutions may engage in fractional reserve lending, and if an entity can "securitize" or otherwise creatively determine the value of any assets or liabilities, then effectively they are allowed to create their own money.

That sounds insane because you made it up. You don’t get a bill for every core that Amazon owns because you hosted an enterprise edition of GraalVM on one. Even if that were the case, use the CE or collocate or self host.

Yes, and that's trivial for useful business cases. Let's look at a service beyond reproach:

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/

Wow! An M5 costs $2300 a month, which is almost three times as much as Graal licensing would cost, assuming you paid for all 48 cores ($864). Frankly, if a minimum wage job is a larger revenue stream than your "app", then you should probably do the minimum wage job instead. There's also a community edition. It's free. I think the moral outrage about anything Oracle-related is a hollow fashion statement, like a Che Guevara t-shirt.

If your "enterprise" software doesn't generate $18/month, then you probably don't have a viable business model and should use the community edition. I don't take the Oracle hate seriously when it's all the latest fashion to pay much, much more for your CPU because it's hosted by Amazon. The alternative of "free" services in the Google-sense (ie data-mining users to sell to third parties or develop other products) seems worse, personally.

Remember how when people wax nostalgic about programming language wars there is the obligatory quip about the relentless and obnoxious media blitz of yesteryear to promote Java?

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." -Solomon (he/him)

Has this actually changed since 2017?

I think it’s pretty funny that you can farm up votes by just mentioning a project in rust, with knows substantive information provided about its value or quality. I wouldn’t consider either of these things more than a toy.

Just FYI, I didn’t read any of that wall, but it did make me laugh that you wrote it. You should go tell your rest friends to check the slack and down vote.

I think Compcert isn’t widely used because of its license. GNAT is also GPL. Everyone lost their mind over Oracle charging a nominal sum for their compiler. I don’t think rust would have its corporate backing if it had similar licensing.

Also, there is only undefined behavior in rust. The compilers behavior can change at any time for any reason any time somebody with commit rights thinks that it should. You cannot begin to assert provenance about some thing that can change at any time.

>I imagine it's pretty similar to how you verify or audit the output of a compiler with a specification.

I must be missing the humor here. You can test against a specification to verify implementation. Testing an implementation against itself is meaningless. I would think that this is obvious. Also I don't typically use the word "empirical" to indicate purely qualitative assessments or intuition. You also provided a dead link.