teh

We had a look at first commits from various projects a while ago [1] - I like how the first commits get cleaner the newer the projects are, presumably because version control became more ubiquitous.

[1] https://blog.wearewizards.io/first-commits

Apologies for misrepresenting - my Guix knowledge is clearly out of date!

OTOH disagree with many of your choices and the assumptions you based them on. But I also think that this would easier to discuss in a civilized face-to-face than over the lossy, easy-to-misinterpret medium of text on the Internet!

Guix comes up on every Nix thread on HN and it's a bit frustrating. Guix runs on Nix technology with a new config language for packages & a different philosophy about what can go into its core package set (it's a GNU project).

My personal take is that the difference isn't large enough to warrant a new distribution and if you want to choose you should go with the momentum and that's with core Nix (10-30x contributors, 10-100x packages, depending on how you count).

People also think scheme is better than Nix as a language, but if you reason backwards from the requirements that's not at all clear to me. I think Nix-the-language would be better off with types, but the lazy, functional & pure parts are necessary for the concept.

> Symlinks have all sorts of weird semantics on different Unix machines.

Is there any other implementation than posix in the wild these days?

I know it's meant to be a joke but Red Hat have done an amazing amount of good for desktop Linux. I really appreciate their work.

Both good points. In practice a) hasn't been an issue but for b) we had to apply a fair amount of patches ourselves.

Luckily b is almost fixed, and if combined with e.g. grsecurity I think nix has a good story.

No high level overview, just a fairly specific (and sadly slightly out of date) one here: https://blog.wearewizards.io/how-to-use-nixops-in-a-team

It's still Linux but a lot of common problems go away. E.g. if you remove a user from your config then it's removed on the server (as opposed to Ansible).

Or: Because you have a dependency DAG all services that need restarting after a change are known (no more Chef notifies :restart).

Or: No more apt-get dist-upgrade. You can have a single package depend on an entirely new version of your OS and keep the old OS in place (except for the kernel version of course).

We run a fleet. Happy to answer questions here or shoot us a mail at team@wearewizards.io if it's sensitive.

This is a great resource, thank you!

I'm the 2nd part of this. We're not making any rash decisions and staying is one option.

It's not just brexit: We have an end-to-end encryption product and we're really super unclear on what the new IP bill means. It looks invasive and we're not keen on waiting to find out.

It's quite easy to get to that number of lines once you have code for integrations with other products, monitoring, devops, patched versions of broken or unmaintained libraries, a growing number of tests etc. We run a relatively small product and we already have 30k lines with just two people.

E.g. "in practice, if the EU doesn't strike a deal with the UK (which it won't) then I think it will suffer more exits."

That is quite a bold statement that needs a lot of statements from people who can make these decisions to back it up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

I've read many of your comments here and I'm not convinced you have a good understanding of how the EU works. [1] is a committee meeting that tries to establish how we could disentangle ourselves from the EU. It's very long but it's full of great info how the exit could work, and as a side-effect full of info how the EU itself works.

Making a case from an uninformed POV is not convincing me. If you back up your statements with data and pointers I'll pay more attention!

[1] http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/cb083c53-3998-4f3a-...

It seems human nature complicates things. Perception of fairness trumps reason frequently [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game

There's some evidence that high inequality precedes instability (Piketty good starting point, follow his references & data).

The mechanisms are somewhat nebulous and likely complex and diffuse.

So no single WHY other than stability (I live in the UK and an unpredictable future is really bad for my business as we just found out).

My rational brain agrees with you but I feel this decision was based on who shouted the most.

I participated in some political online discussions (something I rarely do) in good faith and the responses I got were often uninformed (no idea what subsidiarity means, what the EU institutions are, the objectives of the Maastricht treaty, ..) and more often hostile ("fuck off you want us to give Germany another pounding?", "why aren't you grateful", "we have the most powerful army and sit on the UN Security Council", ...)

After reading that for hours I came to the conclusion that these people are 1) stupid, and 2) arguing in bad faith. It was totally unlike a well paced engineering discussion.

What's your plan for engaging in this kind of discourse?

(I can link you to plenty of comments on HN right now that argue with words like "these people", "sickening", or say "The EU has no relevance to peace or war.")

Judging by today's discussion with friends one issue is that the UK looks very unwelcoming for immigrants like me now.

We won't make any rash decisions but I think my partner and me are going to leave medium term despite us having great and interesting jobs.

That's not a decision based on economics but on "soft" feelings.

Does it really "sicken" you?

This is the first objective of the Maastricht treaty:

"strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the institutions;"

That sounds like championing democracy to me?

As an immigrant living in London the "bad" ideas are in the eye of the beholder surely? Can you enumerate a few ideas that are bad?

Also, to me an institution keeping the peace also trying to contain the "contagion" of instability makes perfect sense. It's what I want and I contacted all my representatives to that end.

I'd like to see some evidence for your statement. Subsidiarity is a general principle taken into account for all EU decisions. It's the opposite of "seeing difference as a disease" IMO.

I read this and I agree with everything that he says - but I also think it makes Haskell look worse than it is to some passer-by.

My impression is that the Haskell community is very self-critical (which is great), but someone just peeking in from the outside might think that Haskell is still in the random hobby project stage, and that it still hasn't figured out strings.

That's totally not the case though! Strings are solved, just a bit annoying to use sometimes. We're running Haskell in production and it's amazingly stable and hard to break.

I wish the community was bigger though, that's why I'm posting this to encourage everyone to try it.

   University of Tübingen has a pending patent application for the Neural Art technology.

I wonder what that is (can't find on Google)?

We're a UK company running a project that uses user-facing encryption and one of the issues for us is that it's totally unclear what this bill means.

I read the relevant sections 10 times over but until this is tested in court we don't know. I don't want our company to be the test balloon though, so I'm hoping a larger company steps up and challenges some of the provisions.

Of course the "internet connection record" retention is really sad. Right now the use cases are very specific but I'm sure new use cases will be found soon with the usual reasoning (terrorists, etc)

Some brief googling shows this: https://joi.ito.com/coi.html

So at minimum he's a great networker who can help his students get good placements.

He's also been involved heavily in creative commons and helped secure funding to keep it going.

He might rub you the wrong way but I'd give the probably not-stupid MIT people the benefit of the doubt that they chose him because they think he adds value to the institution, not because of some fluffy feely thing.

It costs her money not work while at court.

I worked as a contractor for MacMillan (they publish nature) and it's hard to believe how much money they spend for no results. The project I was on had been running for a year when I joined. I noped out after three months and I heard it was shut down a few months after I left with nothing to show.

That was 4-6 people full time and my entire floor of 80 people was full of projects like that - projects you never heard of.

The weird thing is that everyone I worked with directly was very smart, and went on to do cool stuff.

Summary: If I had to guess the remaining profit is wasted on silly projects and high manager salaries.

I'm not sure it's that simple. In London we have no limit and it's now one of the most expensive places on this planet and despite that it's increasingly impossible to find an apartment.

Maybe there is some other cause (e.g. everyone wants to live in a city now)?

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html is a bit cheaper but you'll still pay $50 / terabyte. Using DO just for data might work but then you can't run fast computations on your data.

Do you have benchmarks on that? Not my experience for network speeds and CPU of individual machines but it's been 6 months since I checked.

I think Temit is a fuzzer or Quickcheck / Hypothesis [1] :)

[1] https://hypothesis.readthedocs.org/en/latest/