possibilistic

I have never used Yahoo pipes, but I found IFTTT to be quite limited when I tried it earlier this year. There are no booleans, pipeline control, arguments, scheduling, reuse, etc. I know this tool wasn't written for me, but these are things that I would derive real value from.

I want visual tools at a level just above a scripting language, hosted on a managed platform I can largely ignore. An API for webhooks and oauth, 3rd party API support, triggers that can run custom javascript or python... I'd pay all the money for that.

I find this style wholly garish. Thank you for giving me the vocabulary to describe it.

Mid-century modernism is whimsical, busy, distracting. More than anything, it belongs to our grandparent's generation; it's an admission that we didn't reach the sought after future of robots and space travel.

I would take sleek lines and monochromatic shades over this any day. This is just my personal opinion, of course. I'm very cognizant of the fact that many people appreciate this style and find my own to be bland and drab.

I wasn't born in that era, yet I am immediately conscious of the style being described. I think this is owed to both the cultural preservation afforded by film and photography as well as the nostalgia of the previous generation (there are undoubtably a disproportionate number of films set during this period).

No. I described at a high level just one of the mechanisms of adaptive immunity--one of the most incredible biological systems in my opinion. (Runtime metaheuristics search!) These are complex pathways that involve many genes.

If the system isn't working you probably won't live very long. And while there may be certain functional alleles that may increase odds of an initial false positive stimulation, by in large the entire class of failure known as "allergic reactions" is simply a result of how the system itself works. You don't really need to invoke genetic differences to see how it fails. This is why the hygiene hypothesis is so strong.

There are actually four major categories of hypersensitivity that involve different cell populations and signalling pathways (eg. why poison ivy allergy is different from pine allergy).

If you're interested, the Wikipedia articles aren't a bad read. I also recommend Janeway's Immunobiology as a great intro to the entire subject.

This is not how Type I hypersensitivity works. Epitope recognition is powered by a biological RNG (somatic hypermutation) and evolves at runtime via the process of somatic / V(D)J chain recombination. Your body learns to be allergic, perhaps due to a bad ashy vent (you got sick that one spring), under-stimulation (play outside!), or just plain bad luck. Unfortunately for all of us, the immune system has no concept of the innocuous nature of harmless antigens. It will continue to pick up bad habits until the day we die. But thankfully it also keeps the trillions of cells, leaky programming, our own broken and errant self, and other uninvited guests that would just as soon eat us at bay (bacteria, viruses, cancer, fungi, nematodes, ...).

Wow, so many memories you've just unearthed. I haven't played a nomic-based game since I was a teenager.

My online friends and I had a series of mostly text-based nomic instances where we would creatively write and world build, but there was this one crazy performance art piece where we hacked a phpBB instance to grant every user admin privileges. The experiment was in relative harmony for a few days before the first rounds of deletes and IP bans. After one or two attempts to regain equilibrium, there were rampant impersonations, terrible javascript popup spam and redirect loops, and disappearing server files (the joys of using PHP prior to formal CS education and any form of engineering discipline...). Finally we acknowledged that the experiment had been a great success when all HTTP requests returned 500s--testament, at least in our minds, of the ultimate fate of mankind if ever given absolute and unlimited power.

Then there was that time we piped say yes to each other's terminals, somehow creating a pospositive feedback loop. Or those dotfiles that brought down the whole server... none of that stuff was very nomic related, but ah... teenage years.

The hosting company certainly loved us. :') I hope every one of them got a raise for having to deal with our endless support tickets as a result of our own foolish and stupid games.

Anyhow, very astute parallel to draw.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

I appreciate the memories / feels.

A little bit far, but at least I can say I know of another HN user in Georgia. :)

Send me an email if you're ever out this way, and I'll do likewise.

Given the recent judicial president set for revenge porn cases, I feel we need a similarly harsh ruling for those found guilty of swatting. This is a crime that could easily result in the deaths of innocent victims, and the punishment needs to reflect that.

Doxing for the purposes of shaming wouldn't be bad to punish either. I don't want us to become a vengeful police state, but this kind of cowardly behavior makes me angry.

Aside from training the police, FBI, et al., how do we go about stopping this from happening more frequently?

I find it interesting how much analysis has been given to the tone of cperciva's comment. There is an awful lot of this going around lately.

What is the goal commenters in such threads are pursuing? To correct a wrong or misunderstanding? To show someone as biased or bigoted (or to advocate the other way)? Who are we training, and what is it we are teaching? Could it be done a better way?

Is the error cperciva may have made large or small? Does it have an impact? If insignificant, why does so much effort need to be expended? Otherwise, why are there not articles to reference on the issue? (Or are there?)

To be completely blunt, this all seems incredibly passive aggressive to me. I'm not talking about sexism--again, I'm simply referring to all of the meta analysis on communication and tone.

I am honestly curious, and my questions are not for dramatic effect. Could this all be short-circuited by a "I doubt the OP meant to trivialize XYZ, [...]" and be done with it?

Does StatusPage do anything that this software doesn't? Just curious, because I was thinking about setting up some form of simple monitoring, but I haven't as of yet investigated any of the solutions in this space. (Forgive me for not checking their homepage; I'd honestly prefer some anecdotal opinion.)

If the two are on par feature-wise, I suppose it comes down to the cost savings of maintaining your own versus the time savings of outsourcing the problem to someone else. It might be nice just to forget about monitoring maintenance.

Speaking of Georgia, does anyone here live in the Atlanta area? I would love to get to know other HNers living nearby.

Sadly, I do not think your willing participation would a requirement. This seems like the sort of thing that would be imposed upon you by the sheer force of adoption.

Could the rights holders of Marvin Gaye's work be sued for copyright infringement of an older, yet still quixotically copyrighted, work? Not only would such a move highlight everything wrong with the verdict, but it would also be quite poetic.

It appears that they have developed a novel neural network architecture such that it is possible to understand what each of the layers encode. (Classically, the result of training might not be intelligible--the learned function is encoded in weights and parameters, and aren't meant for human readability or consumption.)

Another interesting property is the "pipeline" and how they seemed to have developed the math to make back propagation work around it. Each step in the pipeline performs some convolution or transformation function.

I haven't read the paper, but I'd be curious to see if they can reuse components of this pipeline in conjunction with one another. Perhaps it wouldn't be immediately possible (I imagine the parameters would have to be adjusted in some shape or form), but a plug-and-play system of pre-trained functions would be nothing sort of amazing.

(I may be incorrect in my analysis. I'm drawing on the ML and image processing I took in undergrad.)

Absolutely not!! This would be a blatant act of censorship--and to what end? You'll see the same junk science on Reddit anyway.

The feedback from the HN community on science articles is some of the best on the web. It honestly comprises about a third of the reason I visit. I wouldn't know where else to get that.

Granted, I may have a different perspective given that I did a biochem undergrad and can read primary literature. Some of my experience and frustration with the popular media coverage and editorial behavior has given me a lens with which to evaluate coverage of other disciplines. But shouldn't we expect everyone here to have or develop a similar critical thinking patten? Why do we need to treat our community with baby gloves?

It can be a challenge for sizable codebases, especially ones with many contributors and that undergoes steady refactoring.

That feeling you get when you see code with lots of type checking... A lot of engineering effort could be recovered with static typing.

This is the most amazing startup I've ever seen on HN. There's no app, there's nothing to install.

I need Magic in my life. I hate ordering, filling out forms, etc. Pease scale this thing hard and fast. This is Uber-level fantastic. Better than that, even.

Normally I find jokes on HN to be a bit distasteful due to the manner in which discussions are typically conducted here, but this brought me a smile. :)

That cartoon feels like it was from so long ago... Does getting this reference make any of you that also happened to watch during its original airing feel old?

Nim should look very attractive to Python developers. It's a good looking language that has positioned itself in a good market: static typing, looks and feels like scripting (not verbose), and almost systems level (has GC).

I haven't got any experience with Go development, but from those I know that use it, I hear nothing but promising things about Nim. "Modern" is a word that gets used.

Between Rust and Nim, we're starting to see some really clever new languages that fix common pain points. Both of these are so neat it makes me feel as though we're in a programming language boom right now.

Terrorist can be a loaded word in a political context. We have terms like "freedom fighter", " revolutionary", and "rebel", but these don't quite have neural connotations either.

"Insurgent" is used by the media quite frequently, but pundits have twisted this word into little more than an alias for "terrorist". My brain subconsciously makes this mapping despite my knowledge of a contrary meaning; I think maybe language is too pliable in politics.

Maybe we need yet new language to escape the difficulty of communicating without biases inherent in the vocabulary (our minds already do enough to short-circuit logic already without the English language making the matter worse). "Terrorism" and "unrest" are at such a forefront in the global consciousness that the whole subject is deserving of the few extra mental bytes that would be needed to disambiguate the mess.

If I were in charge of such a task, I would try to borrow words associated with certain well-known historical anecdotes in a hope that the pundits wouldn't simply redefine the words from under us. Hopefully such vocabulary would have enough of a semantic anchor in our generation to dispel such attempts, conscious or not.

To press on the issue further, it seems like it would be wise to engineer our language in a way that leads to better thinking. I suppose that would be too artificial to ever be accepted though.

I know it's not feasible at present, but I'd like to imagine a smartphone that I could consider a high end professional tool. A device like that needs no software or UI changes outside of an occasional patch; hardware fast enough that I couldn't imagine a need for replacing it. A Thinkpad or Nikon, and just as much an extension of my person. Like vim, using the device would feel a bit like playing the piano--something I bend and mold, that also bends and molds me.

I'm not at all satisfied with this stuff yet--not to the level I described. Currently these phones are indespensible (much like trips to the dentist), but what I really want is for them to feel like an extension of my soul (like a fine car). Things are too buggy, too consumer, and moving much too fast. I imagine we'll eventually hit a plateau, because I want that phone.

Your post made me cringe because I mentally extrapolated the trend for cheap goods you set up onto everything else. Honestly I don't know if it would be for better or worse without living in such a world, but I cannot fathom disposable computers, high end electronics, or tools.

This also makes me worry about the concept of ownership. If we have no attachment to anything because the price is driven to zero, will that erode our values (craftmanship, upkeep, environmental stewardship, ...)? Sounds like a future full of walled gardens, shovelware, and products headed for the landfill.

RPC is much better suited for a microservice architecture. Leave HTTP for the leaves. (I wrote a comment about it elsewhere in this discussion).

Example: consider an application including the following microservices: "newsletter service" and "email gateway service".

The newsletter service doesn't need to load email libraries, handle the protocol, failures, bounces, retries. It doesn't need to maintain state on this. Nor does it necessarily need to know if an email address is opted out. It can concern itself with building newsletter templates, A/B testing, feedback/analytics, scheduling, triggers, etc.

Consider how different teams may accumulate specialized knowledge. Now the boundaries of this knowledge are finely delineated. Service responsibilities are clear.

As the company and app grows, you can pull stuff out of the newsletter app. You may want analytics and A/B testing as a service.

Consider all of the possible service boundaries. If you can group 4-10 tables in a relational database into a cluster, that might constitute a valid service boundary. Does it model a particular business function / flow that can be wrapped up and exposed as a service? Will that grow with company and with changing needs?

I don't know how this really helps with RAM. If you're worried about that, you probably shouldn't be considering a microservice. There are operational costs that trump hardware costs.

HTTP is pretty terrible at cancellation, retry, cluster load balancing, in-channel health checks, etc. Some form of RPC is better suited for non-web facing APIs.

And yeah, I agree that it's absolutely harder to test. (Integration test especially.) But you gain a lot for the trouble: independent deployability, scalability, dynamic traffic shifting, easy sevice boundaries and ownership (data stores, state, downstream deps, etc.). For a large company, this makes a lot of sense.

Edit: microservices are not the easy path.

(My company loves microservices, so I'll weigh in at a really high level.)

The author speaks of the complexity in managing and coordinating processes in a distributed system. By designing a microservice, you trade simplicity of software design for increased operational complexities. There's a shift in terms of problem solving too--it migrates from the cross functional engineers to the DevOps and distributed systems engineers.

Don't get me wrong--I think microservices are brilliant and make reasoning about application design easier. But be prepared to bring in some heavy engineering talent to coordinate all the things. Until there are open source frameworks for handling the difficult bits, it might be unwise for a start-up to go the microservice route. Microservices are purposed for scale (since reasoning about traffic is easier with a simpler service and there predictable traffic patterns from a microservice's clients).

Edit :

In terms of the examples you mention, I you may have the wrong idea. Think about fulfilling a specific goal or class of functionality, and make that a microservice: email gateway microservice, user/session microservice(s), SMS gateway microservice, etc. Each is a component that responds to various request types (you really should use RPC instead of REST for deadlines, retries, cancellation, pooling, etc.), but they all sit within a single domain of purpose. The service could be stateless or not, but you try to make the requests idempotent to aid client reasoning.

To again cite your example, several services may use regex, but there might be only one authority on "normalized input" (eg. addresses, etc.). Or maybe there is a client lib for that.

This brings up another point. Services at the periphery (dependency graph-wise) are coordinated by interior services. That can get complicated...

I have to agree. Why waste space on the front page with paywalled content? I have no inclination to ever subscribe to this. I appreciate that others may have different sentiment, but this feels wasted on the majority of us.

I remember when you first announced this project some years back. You've done such an incredible job! :)

Since you mention distribution of pre-trained models by participants in ImageNet 2014, I have to wonder if there would be a market for distributing specialized classifiers like open source software. Eg, an npm-like website you might be able to find a "dog breed classifier", "car make/model classifier", etc. If so, what would it take to make it happen?

Rust is a statically-typed systems programming language. A language where deal with pointers and manage memory. In the way of purpose and design, Rust has next to nothing in common with Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. I don't understand these comparisons, but then again I don't get the comparisons between Rust and Go either.

We should be comparing Rust to modern C++, Nim, etc.

I do feel comfortable with your Go / Python comparison, though. Not insofar as intent, but rather in the people that are adopting it and in the places it is being deployed. Golang seems to be carving out an interesting little niche between managed and dynamic languages.

Rust, on the other hand, looks like it can (will?) steal C++1x's thunder. Games, browsers, applications, operating systems... I really want to write new stuff in Rust.

He didn't criticize just anyone. He criticized antirez. Google him. :)

Good work on this, btw. I'd be super ashamed to release the one I wrote (I was in university at the time, though that's no excuse).