122 karma · joined November 17, 2018
Would you still make this point if you were comparing...
for example, Rust and C++?
... where Rust is the "young" language? Working on such a young language (and, FWIW, Rust is younger than Nim), you might miss the chance of contributing to an ecosystem that's already been in development for quite some time.
Not every language grows up with a silver spoon from Mozilla or Google.
However, Go and other languages have a huge ecosystem and many more libraries. Nim only has a few web servers/frameworks, for example. Even if Nim's web frameworks/servers (like httpbeast) are quite fast[2], they lack the completeness that exist for other languages.
Until then, if you are looking for a systems programming language, you owe it to yourself to investigate Nim[3], alongside Go, Crystal, Julia, D, Rust, Haskell, etc. The tooling is fantastic and the Nim compiler produces clean, cross-platform C code (or JS[4]!) that can be automatically fed into gcc, clang, mingw-w64, etc. It's a language that's undergoing rapid changes, but almost all of the changes are in the libraries and it's exciting to see all of the innovation there -- and as libraries increase and mature, it will become a really compelling application language as well.
The community is extremely active, and issues are promptly dealt with. For HNers, it's an opportunity to still make a huge difference by contributing to a relatively young language, compared to getting drowned out by all the noise in a more mature language community.
0. https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut1.html
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaprogramming
2. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
That's like saying, "why did you introduce entropy?" It's there. It happens, and it's difficult to get rid of in any complex system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
Debian was one of the first large distributions to use a build farm for many different architectures. Maintaining deterministic builds (even as far as just file timestamps) in a distributed environment is very challenging.
"Suppression of ideas" is a grey area? I have no words.
> We is you, me, and society at large.
But that is not who would be passing judgment in this brave new world of customer service reps and AI. Do we just ban everything mildly controversial?
> Expertise matters and the opinions of experts matter much more than a nonexpert’s opinion.
Are you a qualified, cited expert in this area that you are holding forth on?
> If a very large majority of the people who study an area of science agree on a conclusion in that area then it’s more likely they are right than someone who has no expertise in that area.
There is some room for intelligent debate in nearly any 'consensus' opinion. Some percentage of even experts nearly always disagree with the consensus, and consensus has often been proven wrong. If society went along with the expert scientific opinion concerning eugenics, for example, many of us might not even be alive today.
> Non experts deciding for themselves what is right/wrong is a recipe for disaster. Peoples’ intuition is usually wrong without a lot of experience to back it up.
Non-experts deciding for themselves what is right/wrong is exactly how the world has existed for thousands of years. You seem to be saying that the answer is to just shut down this debate if it occurs among the great unwashed.
> It’s why we don’t let just anyone practice medicine or structural engineering. Expertise matters and the opinions of experts matter much more than a nonexpert’s opinion.
And, yet, we do. In most free jurisdictions, you are free to practice medicine on yourself or do design your own structure or home.
But, who is we in this case? And what specifically are some things and how narrowly are they defined?
> The best we can do is go by consensus expert opinion.
Is that really the best we can do? How many times in history has consensus expert opinion been found later to be dangerous and wrong?
Should we assign that task to an AI or a customer service drone of unknown education and experience?
Or, should we assume that any reader of any particular "dangerous and wrong" things might be a better judge of whether those things are, in fact, "dangerous and wrong" as applied to their specific circumstance?
We take a pretty liberal approach to this :) there are a few companies on the platform now who just create a lot of companies and keep them all below 20 servers (that's pretty easy to monitor) but so far we haven't kicked anyone yet, and there's also a legitimate reason to do that (if you're an MSP and have multiple clients). We just send an email to clarify if we think it's an issue.
> I'll send you an email, would like to connect!
Sure thing - it's first.last @ userify! Great to meet you Ch Daniel and thanks for your nice comment!
We give away 20 servers for free -- no invoice, no credit card needed, nothing. Once you exceed 20 servers, we charge (it's about $70/month).
You'd think that 20 servers is way too much to give away, but actually about 76% of our servers are on the paid plan and a huge percentage of our customers come from the invitation referrals when people change companies or consult for multiple companies.
(Our pricing might be too low and our product might be a bit too technical and scare off a lot of people who might not even know what SSH is, but for now that acts as a filter and keeps our support costs low; it's working for us, although we'll probably lighten up a bit on the technical homepage in the near future.) Also, the SaaS product acts as a frictionless testing area for people who actually just want to deploy the on-premise version, which accounts for approximately 40% of our revenue.
Our customers like the product and we have grown with many of them from free to paid. We're growing a startup for the long haul and don't have to demonstrate any particular growth rate to anyone.
The advice in this article works. Build something that provides some useful utility to people, and give as much away as you can. Most people will not abuse it and will return the favor as they grow.
https://github.com/jamiesonbecker/organization-system
Vim is powerful.. if you don't know how to copy/paste blocks, vertical blocks, search backwards/forwards, etc, learn that first.
Sounds awesome.
... it's that Solaris is effectively finished as an OS. It's not even its own upstream anymore for arguably the greatest modern contribution to any OS.
This is tragic, and needless. Oracle effectively shot itself in its own foot with the pointless and deliberate choice of licenses, the on-again, off-again open sourcing of Solaris, and the complete lack of commitment. Solaris had a real shot of remaining a fine alternative UNIX operating system, at least for the server side of things, but now this shot is gone.
They killed Solaris like they killed Java.
The conflation of two totally different categories of products decreases the credibility of the entire article.
With that said, the subject matter is tragic.. almost terrifying. Did we learn nothing from stuxnet?
This will work exactly as it does on Linux (and the shim will continue to be open source): local admin (or user) accounts will be created and keys deployed, and the user will be able to choose PowerShell as their shell of choice.
(FWIW, Userify is both a cloud/SaaS and on-premise/self-hosted SSH key management solution designed for modern clouds like AWS and Azure that creates local accounts, deploys keys, and then keeps everything in sync using just outbound HTTPS connections.)