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I Ctrl+F'd for "Oblivion" to find this...

There definitely needs to be a series of libraries named after keyblades.

First thing that came to my mind too!

I've had two "Please call me, it's broke" calls just this morning!

So I've heard of dark patterns before, but wouldn't it be a logistic nightmare to try and describe, and therefore regulate, design patterns that dont actively injure users? I'm using injure to mean induction of the addictive behaviors. Design is something I'd consider very subtle, and with lots of moving parts.

Here's an example. What if Google decided that when you pull down for notifications on android, items originating from DoubleClick should be prioritized to the top, regardless of user settings? A lot of people who have apps that generate advert-ifications wouldn't immediately notice the difference but the effect would begin to work in their brains as that consumption impulse is triggered more and more often.

Or what if they decided that same thing for the lock screen notifications? Eventually you're fending off consumption impulses everytime you touch your phone.

These are patterns I trust independent users, like bloggers and columnists, enthusiasts, those sorts, to keep me informed about. I remember hearing about the search engine nuking years ago when it actually was committed. That sort of media is in my eyes, a decent way to inform people that they need to mentally condition themselves to subvert the patterns.

But many never become aware of these things, and of course those are the people usually more vulnerable to the effects of psychological conditioning in the first place.

I'd love to hear some moonshots about how to safely and fairly try and regulate something like design.

I was an alcoholic for over a decade before I found my recovery.

But I couldn't turn around and tell a distilleryman that he has to brew his liquor a certain way.

Maybe the world would be a better place without booze. I would've had an easier childhood, maybe. I don't think addiction is necessarily the fault of production.

There are certain exceptions and scenarios, like cigarette marketing to minors, marketing in lower income neighborhoods on purpose, stuff like that.

Regulation is and always will be a very slippery slope. Even a small step down the slope can eventually compose into cataclysmic effects. It also makes it easier for regulatory bodies to make their case fallaciously once the first steps are taken. "You trust us with your credit card number, why not give us your location info now?"

I'm rambling, but the video game industry could be irrevocably injured by trying to regulate addictive content. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but we should aim for fairness when possible, I think.

Maybe awareness for individuals that are already more vulnerable to addictive behaviors? Like a surgeon general warning or something.

Counterpoint:

What if you could say "Yeah boss, Thermanator is complete and ready to be unleashed." and mean it?

I spent thirty years turning in shit like "PrimitiveSpoofAttackDHCP" and "TCPThreadPoolFlooder" but now I'm realizing I couldve been writing bond villain superweapons all this time.

This looks horrendous on mobile. I can do Request Desktop Site on my mobile browser and it looks better but not perfectly aligned still.

Feds used Rails? That's neat!

If you don't mine telling, were you a contractor or like a permanent dev? I'm very surprised that feds would choose Rails for projects. Maybe for prototypes or in house stuff or whatever.

Anyways, cool!

I've never broken a guideline here.

Uhhhh, juggalos paint their face and it JUST SO HAPPENS that it beats face recognition sometimes.

I assure you there was little to no intellectual effort on their part towards that end.

Fucking magic. All in the motherfucking air.

I didn't flame anybody?

We're literally talking about mormons.

I switched to Bing two years ago and I'm pretty pleased with how well it works.

Insane how people are coming to grips NOW that Google is an advertising company instead of ten years ago.

Because of course it's a good idea to chase off extremely low crime demographics. What a smart move! /ssssss

I'm sure this ain't breaking the hearts of most Mormons anyways. Utah will take them with open arms.

Nice. I browse with gallium on a Chromebook but I have a desktop at home with elementary. A little fancy but tolerable.

Still not quite the Year of the Linux Desktop... Any year now....

It's not the lack of features it's just the difference in what it's meant for. Crystal has a GC, it doesn't have a lot of memory control, etc. She just ain't that type of lady.

Crystal isn't what I thought it was. That's not a bad thing necessarily, it's certainly nobody's fault....

For what I have in mind, rust fits my needs much more closely. I want to write a game and learn all about graphics wizardry and rendering pipelines and all the cool Carmackian arts I've been missing out on. My career is winding down, but I think I will retain my gray matter longer if I keep myself busy.

If I were thirty years younger and starting out a career in web development, crystal would excite me. The prospect of all that ruby out there that will eventually need to be crystallized... Man, what an opportunity.

I don't really have a specific idea in my head of what a crystal for systems development would look like so I'm not sure that I could really provide what's missing from crystal.

Rust is made for systems from the start and there appears to be a large number of really smart low-level hackers on the scene already. I'm glad, because I don't know, so at least I can fail amongst a crowd.

:)

I'll still love you even though you're a windows heathen.

Actually, let me ask you something... Are you just targeting windows or are you a windows user also? I can't imagine writing non-dotnet code with windows, but maybe I'm doing it all wrong.

It really ought to say "fast LIKE c" because none of the core devs actually want crystal to be used for systems programming.

All they want is ruby with static types, that runs fast. Those things will satisfy them alone.

Intelligently written C/C++/D/Zig/Rust will always knock Crystal out of the park. :(

I gave up on crystal and realized I should've started with rust in the first place.

Crystal wants very badly to displace ruby, in order to leverage the network of developers and generate more and more attention. It's a smart decision on their part.

As such, crystal doesn't seem to have munch interest in low-level nitty gritty. "we aren't trying to be C" is a common comment amongst contributors.

For game dev, (why I'm bothering with rust) it's too big a turn off to ignore.

For web dev, I suspect crystal will ultimately find some success. Lucky framework has some REALLY cool features that rails hackers are going to discover eventually.

Unless ruby 3 drops a type system bomb and finds a 10x perf speedup, the continuing progress crystal is making will consume the ruby ecosystem.

Congrats on another successful release! Still no exhausting matched, no parallelism, and the spectre of type system changes in the future still looms, but aside from those things, looking good!

And windows support. But I personally don't mind windows support being missing. Fuck 'em. Continuing to settle for windows with alternative implementations and things like Wine only gives windows more power as an antihero. Let them be forced to adopt a Linux kernel, no compromise.

Edits: typos

I guess I meant weird in the moral sense. It's certainly not unusual given their past behavior as a corp.

Sort of depressing, really.

Clearly the parent commenter didn't intend to imply that the industry is not regulated. I think it was more of a tongue-in-cheek jab at Amazon.

I think it's just generally weird that a shipping and commerce company is taking interest in pharma to begin with. I think it SHOULD make users uncomfortable that a single company is potentially exposed to all these different vertices of user information. They know what you buy, soon they'll know what groceries people buy, what they read, what medicine they take which could in turn reveal metadata like sexual habits or genetic patterns.

It's weird.

I mean stability in what they are offering. LTS versions are essentially being done through the concepts of Editions, where every other year or so, a new edition is released and the changes and new features from the previous edition up to that point are summarized.

It's not that rust code is breaking, that's not it. It's that with new things happening every six weeks, if I wanted to write something that 100 developers will work on, how would I do that? Where I would begin? What version should I choose to ensure everybody is on the same page?

Once 2018 edition is polished up, this will be mostly a solved issue, so kudos to rust team.

But yeah. This is an ocaml thread anyways.

I phrased it awkwardly, what I could've written was

"ocaml has a healthy module system and lots of module authors and maintainers and recent developments suggest ocaml the language continues to move towards more safety and more modern, convenient features."

Linear types are HUGE imo. I'll be playing with ocaml a lot when those comes out. I can't wait to see how far ocaml wants to chase other languages into the memory safety/ correctness rabbit hole. It's great.

Are you aware of OPAM? That's what I am primarily referring to there.

That's such an interesting thought. I've played some procedurally generated dungeon games in my time and I've always thought it was interesting to have a new experience but there was always that nagging feeling of aimlessness.

So in order for a machine to be able to craft an interesting narrative for a human, I think it would need to take into consideration the temporal element of how humans consume things and how that impacts the experience.

In a dungeon, that's when you go down ten different dead ends and you are losing interest.

In music that's probably a long drawn-out melody that ends abruptly, like what you're talking about.

How would something beyond that be modelled in a program, though?

But if I understand correctly (I've never used mirage) mirage is a unikernel for ocaml applications. It compiles down to xen system calls, for monitoring and administration. Mirage isn't actually an implementation of an OS in the traditional sense.

Ocaml is of course already fast. INRIA has been using ocaml for compiler hacking for several decades. The speed comes as no surprise, but eventually rust will have inline assembly support, it's already nurturing some basic SIMD features, it is already being turned for lower level dominance.

I think ocaml could compete, but not the way it is now.

With linear types in the future, perhaps ocaml could follow rust's lead and implement a memory model around move semantics.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I do perceive a nontrivial gap here. Ocaml is not built for writing system drivers. And a good system driver is written in something that was designed to be used for doing so, imo.

If you can afford to exclude windows and linux, Swift.

If you like windows but also want cross platform, C#/F# and Xamarin.Forms or UI or whatever its called. I've heard very positive things about dotnet gui work these days.

I'm spending time with rust to try my hand at game development. As an older developer, it's all a bit foreign to me so I don't really know what's good and what's not.

That having been said, desktop development is something the rust community at large is dedicated to ant interested in. There's already a fee libraries, like Conrod for Piston, gtk.rs, etc but I don't know how these options stack up against industry standards.

C# 7 is a lot more functional and pleasant than the C# 4/5 everybody dismissed years ago.

F# can compile to wherever you need it and you can write functional first and just include it in your nuget built just like you normally would.

If you're adamant about functional, consider dotnet. Of course C# is still very much OOP, that's just what it is. But I find the primary benefits to FP in my own code to be more related to correctness, testability (and therefore more correct) and a convenience in modelling data structures quicker than subclassing. Even with generics, having unions and record types makes it just that much more satisfying.

F# actually has a little micro-discipline called domain-driven programming. Search for that term and you can see how different researchers have used F#'s incredibly flexible type modelling to adapt to their domain and make their code easier for people in that domain easier to understand.

Hope this helps!

These companies sometimes make deals at the app level, in order to get location data from phones that share it with their app(s).

So not necessarily. But I like how you think.

The next two years or so will be really exciting.

Rust is beginning to understand that they need more stability and LTS versions, and libraries are blossoming nicely.

Ocaml already has a very mature module ecosystem and is now becoming safe and modern.

I think rust will still have an edge in adoption due to its portrayal as C++ unfucked, but ocaml is definitely the easier tool to work with, imo. And maybe that will change.

I don't think even linear types and multicore would be enough for ocaml to make any significant dent in the systems programming world. Rist and C/C++/D/Zig all do memory management too conveniently, and it opens doors too close to the bottom for ocaml to keep up.

Any ocaml hackers: would you want to write system drivers in ocaml? Why/ why not?

I think there are times when the graph model shines.

https://theburningmonk.com/2015/04/modelling-game-economy-wi...

I read this article I found on HN a few years ago, and for some reason it came to my mind just now.

The neat thing about the graph model of course is being more immediately expressive to the query-er, and that takes cognitive load away from that person.

I'll never say a bad thing about SQL or the relational model. I completely agree that it's superior in terms of flexibility, performance (almost always), modelling (usually), etc but I guess there are times where you have a weird project and it's just I guess the convenience and ease of using Neo4j and a few cypher queries and then it's over.

In the case of the article I linked, there is also the benefit of having a convenient way to see how changes echo throughout the graph, something that is more involved to do with tables and joins and all that. I'm not a DBA, I've really only ever dabbled, but if I got dropped into that situation and DIDN'T have a graph model, I'd have no clue where to even start. Maybe I'd start trying to walk tables and build graphs out from each item type to each other item type. That'd be gross.

Of course, that's probably not a problem scenario that comes up very often. Most of the times I've interacted with databases in general I've been just dealing with sanitizing params, getting HTTPS configurations configurated, just boring infosec stuff. That problem is probably very rare in the realm of "problems that graph seems to have an advantage"

Anyways, yeah. Relational, awesome. Graphs, sometimes convenient.

I had kefir for the first time the other day and I'm pissed that I've wasted 50 years of my life not drinking it.

It's delicious!

What self-respecting literature enthusiast hasn't heard of Tolstoy?