News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

effn

Re:Kotlin M7 on Thursday March 20, 2014 @01:30PM (#7437139)
Kotlin would preserve Google's investment in Java in a way Dart wouldn't.
Re:Kotlin M7 on Thursday March 20, 2014 @12:03PM (#7436378)
The funny thing about your comment is that you could have made the exact comment in 1995 to dismiss Java. Sometimes it just takes very long for ideas to reach mainstream, but they can nevertheless become extremely successful.

The most important innovation in the Hindley-Milner type system was parametric polymorphism, since that is the thing that enables you to build more powerful abstractions. Since the release of Java 1.5 and C# 2.0 that is now fully mainstream, but it took more than 25 years.

Re:Kotlin M7 on Thursday March 20, 2014 @11:33AM (#7436149)
The bar for what counts as "innovation" in mainstream languages is strikingly low.
Re:Show HN: 2048 in 2048 bytes on Saturday March 15, 2014 @06:27PM (#7406782)
I found it way harder. I'm struggling to reach even a score of 1000 when I rarely score under 10000 in the original.
Re:Xorg can now run without privilege on OpenBSD on Sunday February 23, 2014 @07:01PM (#7288322)
Hating somebody for writing free software is not anywhere near reasonable. He never forced you to use it.
Re:How Bad Can 1 GB Pages Be? on Sunday February 23, 2014 @01:35PM (#7286906)
This article is not about web pages.
Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google on Sunday December 29, 2013 @02:18PM (#6980822)
So you get other sites to publish your articles, but when other sites want to do the same to you, you call that spam?
Re:Europe's Ryanair vs. America's Southwest on Monday December 02, 2013 @07:52PM (#6837762)
Boarding card reissue fee? It's been a few years since I've been on a Ryanair flight, but all the other airlines I've used recently have QR scanners now, you no longer need a boarding card to board a plane.
Re:Linux-ng on Sunday December 01, 2013 @07:57AM (#6827102)
Or a github security vulnerability.
Re:PostgreSQL: Don't use CHAR or VARCHAR on Thursday November 21, 2013 @03:03AM (#6773579)
There is nothing evil in preventing people from migrating to MySQL.
Re:PostgreSQL: Don't use CHAR or VARCHAR on Thursday November 21, 2013 @03:02AM (#6773575)
It has a index clustering operation but this is a one-time operation that will not affect further inserts/updates.

But it shouldn't matter, the implicit constraint on a VARCHAR(n) does not affect indexing.

> The critique is 'Haskell takes FP to an extreme and I show this is true because someone tried to implement miniKanren and needed Oleg to do it'.

>That is not really a strong argument.

It's worse than that. The linked paper is about implementing minikanren as a monad transformer, which is a lot trickier than just porting it over, regardless of language. It's probably a lot easier in Haskell than in Scheme though.

Furthermore, if pure FP is useless, then monad transformers are useless too. But then the argument becomes "this useless thing is really tricky to implement in Haskell, therefore Haskell is useless". The only reason you would want Oleg's minikanren to be easy to implement is if you actually want pure FP. So the argument kind of negates itself.

Re:Hstore development for 9.4 release on Thursday November 07, 2013 @12:26PM (#6690729)
You can also tune the fsync option to get mongo-like performance and reliability.
Re:'W' Considered Harmful on Friday November 01, 2013 @02:37AM (#6652168)
We do this in Sweden too. WWW is pronounced VVV and the car manufacturer is pronounced BMV.
Re:Hoon's Moronic Type System on Thursday October 03, 2013 @03:29PM (#6491319)
> It's this "the customer is just wrong" attitude that makes some of us sense an area ripe for disruption. Pride goeth before a fall.

Doesn't this apply to syntax as well?

If something seems scary/spectacular/surprising it's usually a good idea to do some fact checking. In this case it's very easy, since the authoritative source (Forbes) is available online.

GE is 4th, not 44th. It seems to be a typo.

http://www.forbes.com/global2000/

Re:Edward C++Hands on Friday September 20, 2013 @02:41AM (#6416282)
So, any programming language incapable of beating a heavily tuned C/ASm h.264 encoder is bullshit?
Re:Larry Summers Withdraws from Fed Consideration [pdf] on Sunday September 15, 2013 @06:38PM (#6390600)
The vast majority of OTC derivatives was far less disruptive to the banking sector than your average vanilla home mortgage loan during the crisis.

An overwhelming majority of all the banks that failed during the crisis had zero OTC derivatives on their books, but plenty of average vanilla home mortgage loans.

Internal documents from the banks that did deal in more sophisticated financial products show that they had a good understanding of how these products exposed them to risks in the home mortgage market, they just didn't think that housing prices would fall that much.

Despite all this, people like to blame OTC derivatives for the crisis rather than overconfidence in the housing market.

Why is this?

Re:Bitcoin now 'unit of account' in Germany on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @07:33AM (#6242977)
VAT is never charged on assets (which Bitcoin is), only goods and services.
Re:Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy on Thursday August 01, 2013 @04:24PM (#6143229)
> I don't know but I assume that part of the reason that Swedes are able to deal effectively with the trash is that they sort it properly at the source, so that they more easily can process it.

Nope, you can burn unsorted garbage. The reason for sorting is so you can recycle materials instead of putting it in a incinerator.

Re:Leaked Samsung exFat driver relicensed as GPL on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @11:39AM (#6090694)
Yes, of course.
Re:Leaked Samsung exFat driver relicensed as GPL on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @07:18AM (#6089299)
No. The authors of GPL-licensed code has no say in how other people license their code they don't own the copyright on.

Derivatives of GPL-licensed code is either: 1. GPL-licensed 2. Illegal

If it's not explicitly 1 by the license on the derived work, it becomes 2. It is not automatically "forced" into category 1.

Re:Ubuntu Edge on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @03:53AM (#6088733)
No, short term bonds get lower yield because they carry much less interest rate risk. There's no free lunch.
Re:Ubuntu Edge on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @03:48AM (#6088715)
30-year bonds do, but they are not risk-free unless you hold them to maturity.
A friend of mine with a record deal is getting more from a single album sale than he gets from 50K listens on spotify.
Re:Reasons to Choose Opera over Chrome on Sunday July 14, 2013 @03:05PM (#6041805)
My experience is the opposite. I find Chrome horribly, horribly slow to use. Safari is ultrafast and FF somewhere in between.

I still use it because I've become so accustomed to its UI but I switch to Safari on some sites to avoid spinning up the fan.

Re:Monads Made Difficult on Sunday July 14, 2013 @02:49PM (#6041742)
I think this is for people that already know how to use monads effectively in Haskell and wants to learn more about the mathematical background.
> You can do that in most Nordic countries, and it has many more benefits than disadvantages. For example, you can walk safely everywhere because everyone has sufficient social security. Street robberies and whatnot are practically non-existent.

To me that sounds like an argument against BI. You're basically saying that we can have the social safety benefits of BI for only 10% of the cost by using means-tested programs . Since that's what the Nordic countries are doing, and according to you it works really well.

Possible in theory. But then you have to explain to people why they are paying the same amount of tax as people one year older than them, but will still receive a lot less when they retire.
> The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately.

This idea does not stand up to any scrutiny at all. The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program.

> Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates of the 1990s be "crazy"? Would closing corporate loopholes be "crazy"? Would investigating why trillions of dollars in tax havens have somehow escaped oversight be "crazy"?

None of those suggestions would come anywhere near the amount of money needed for a BI program.

Older »