Swift is pretty clearly Lattner's baby. It's not usual for language parents to just stick around indefinitely, Bjarne Stroustrup's helicopter parenting of C++ is the exception not the rule. You won't find Kernighan at WG14 meetings, Eich isn't a key member of TC39, Hoare isn't in Rust's core team. van Rossum was BDFL for over 20 years, but did give it up.
I am reminded of the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel". Children are their own people, they're meant to go into the world and be themselves. A programming language isn't a person but its destiny is distinct from yours, and it deserves the opportunity to be its own thing and develop without you hovering over it constantly.
Mostly I was just snarking at Bjarne. My take is, Bjane wanted 1980s Unix programmers to like his semicolon language because it was kinda-sorta C compatible, but most of them didn't. And so, he's been trying to change their minds for ~40 years. It's not OK to still be here in 2023 trying to make it happen, a lot of them have retired, some of them are dead, it's not going to happen.
He tried leaving many times, and other people convinced him to stay in WG21. Your posts are nonsense and you know nothing of C++ history or semicolons.
There can be no clearer example than iTunes's downgrade into the awful Music and somehow even worse Podcasts. On the plus it has invogorated the 3rd party space.
I was never a fan of iTunes but at least I could usually wrangle it to do what I wanted. Music, on the other hand, is simply horrendous. I have never cursed the Apple ecosystem as much as when I try to put music on my iPhone.
The length/count property was added after people asked for it, but it wasn't originally in the String revamp, and it provides iterators for all of the above. .count also only claims to be O(n) to discourage using it.
Without a source code license somewhere on site (I don't see any after looking around) you had better not copy-paste these into a next project. The default state if there's no explicit permission granted is that it's not usable: https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/
These are tutorial code snippets. I didn’t look through all of them, but the snippets are so generic that I think it’s okay to not worry about a license.
Also he's got to approaching retirement age at this point, and there is no backbench corps of other DTS who do what he does. Maybe another decade we'll have his help, then what?
I'm still not sure how I feel about the actual copyright issue, but this was a bad test case. Thaler is trying to have his cake and eat it too; his position is inconsistent (this similar to a previous comment I've made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783707).
He wants credit for creating the AI, and he wants to that AI to be recognized as autonomous and independent by getting the Copyright Office's imprimatur. But at the same time he wants to treat the art created by the AI as if it were his, or at least to act on behalf of the AI as if it were not autonomous.
I've started using the best AI work I could find in all my works too, without attribution, and it makes me money. I recently added AI music to a website, which I found on youtube and got with a youtube downloading script, really drives engagement
I also don't care if someone does the same to works I generated in Midjourney, which I display in my various presentations. The Executive branch and now Judicial branch are pretty clear about this (so far), so its a free for all
This was one of the promises originally of Stack Overflow: all the content is Creative Commons licensed so that if they "turned evil" (I believe it was Joel that put it this way) the community could, in a way, create a fork. https://web.archive.org/web/20230203170609/https://stackover...
Unfortunately the dumps themselves are not a legal requirement, just a gentleman's agreement, so realistically exercising this ability was still at the whim of the company.
That kind of shit is poison. It's like there's a weakness in community run stuff that allows people to come in and co-opt it for their own agenda. I don't know that this is a corporate issue, it's an issue of people not pushing back because they don't want to get accused of anything and letting special interests walk all over them. It's happening everywhere. But I agree, no point on dealing with people who spend their time on this garbage.
But the community is not running it: all the infrastructure is in the hands of a for-profit corporation. Contrast this with the Freenode/Libera split: because not just moderation but also hosting was done by the community, they could continue operations fairly quickly when Freenode turned evil.
So I guess that's the lesson we should learn from it (again): the community doesn't own shit if it does not run the daily operations.
I always wonder why original founders just sell the company and do something else. Why don't they try to control it more and make sure it stays aligned with needs of society more?
Either they can't because of shareholder/equity owners pressure, or they won't, because they really don't care and just said it for PR
I certainly wonder about the "do something else" in the sense of serial entrepreneurs. If I could cash in once I'd be done. If I had enough money to retire on, I would. Run a cat shelter or something.
But the actual answer here is probably a combo of a few things: One, running a company is probably not as much fun as building a company. Much of my career has been "pioneer" roles where nobody else has done the job before. At a certain point, the foundation is laid and the problems to solve are different and often less interesting -- at least to me. It's the build vs. maintain thing.
Two, they started with good and noble intentions. Money got involved. A lot of money got involved. The noble intentions were replaced with reality.
Three, have you met users? As a site grows you have to deal with more and more people and people can be very demanding and not very appreciative. Coupled with the previous factors, I think original founders get burnt out and decide to take the cash and move on. The allure of building anew is too much, the grind of maintenance is too much, and the cash is too good to pass up.
Also four... there's a peak for any site. You often don't know when or how, but you do now that someday your site's maximum value, interest, participation, and all that is going to peak and then decline. Sticking around to fight the good fight may just mean passing up a payday and being left with a declining property nobody wants anymore.
Probably 10-15 years ago now someone I new built a dev focussed B2B SaaS company that was quite successful. I’m not sure if they ever raised investment, but they were hyper efficient and definitely not following the VC model. Profitable, very small team, and that’s how they liked it. I compared notes with the founder regularly and found it very inspirational. He didn’t want to follow the typical VC model. He wanted to build a long term company that could sustain itself. I just loved everything about what they were doing and how well they were doing it.
And then one day, completely unexpectedly (to me) I read that they’ve been acquired by a private equity firm. I reached out to find out what happened and what changed. His answer was along the lines of “turns out everyone has an exit point after all. Priorities and motivations change and I’ve given this company everything I have to give it. It’s time to explore what’s next”
I think about it a lot. And I’ve witnessed it in various ways numerous time since. People that were hacking on a side project with the idea of “I just want this to be a fun passive income stream” seeing the adoption and love their work gets suddenly thinking “oh my, there’s potential here I didn’t see before! I could build a whole team and company around this… let’s go raise investment!”.
I think we’re just really bad predictors at how achieving the things we want will impact us emotionally. When we reach those milestones we react either more positive or more negatively than we could understand previously.
And yet you get people like Zuckerberg who'll stick around until the end. It's not like he cares about users or connecting people beyond them being a means to grow the company. Yet he saw through the company from its founding to the gigantic megacorp it is now, and it doesn't seem like hell ever want to quit. Why didn't he quit? It's not like his users are any more appreciative and he's far from beloved by anybody.
…or they might have determined that they‘d rather spend their time on something else.
Keeping control is a (mostly time) commitment and liability. You have to stay on top of things and actively decide on issues that inadvertently come up.
> Either they can't because of shareholder/equity owners pressure, or they won't, because they really don't care and just said it for PR
That is assuming the worst in people. Have you ever wanted to move onto something new? If you make something cool, it is not your lifelong obligation to oversee it.
They probably had some nice checks written with their name in the "pay to the order of"... but they weren't the ones doing the selling, negotiating the price, or having any say in it more than any other shareholder (weighted by the shares and voting status) would.
What? How do you justify declaring a person as a whole "super toxic" with only a link to an interview citing a link to a blog post including "Things like… hyper-competition… an over focus on aggressive competition… things like zero sum thinking" when:
* the post is about interviewing which mostly is, for better or worse, a competitive zero-sum process.
* the post is more than a decade old (then, more like two now.)
* the post is written by someone else.
I have no opinion on the guy one way or the other, and he may in fact be toxic, but that's hardly compelling evidence.
Because despite claims to the contrary most of these sites/projects aren't created for altruistic reasons, they were created to make money (at some point). Cashing out is typically part of the long term plan.
In the case of Stack Overflow, I think the reason for the data dumps was two-fold: one of the original founders (who left long ago) came across as at least idealistic and wanting to do the right thing. The other was pragmatic and most likely always thinking about the money angle. However, the other founder likely also saw the value of the data dumps from a PR standpoint which was quite valuable as they were initially trying to replace expertsexchange.com that paywalled most of the content. IIRC, they discussed the data dumps in the early days of their podcast.
Now that there's big money to be made from machine learning (both the models and the data they are trained on), they've likely decided 'screw it' on the PR value of the data dumps and would rather get some of that sweet, sweet machine learning money.
The thing is, I sympathize with them not wanting machine learning companies to make money off the site’s content without any benefit to the contributors, moderators, or the site itself. I worry that gating access won’t really change that and just mean that the site owners also benefit at the expense of the community.
It is a well known situation. The best thing is that I don't think it was intentional, contrary to other well-known "offenders".
Experts Exchange was well known for showing up in search results but not providing the answers without paying. Many people hated it and wanted search engines to implement some sort of deny list to filter it out automatically.
So the idea is that in case leadership wants to 'carve out a kingdom' that is not in line with community wishes, the community could take the data dump and create a clone of sorts? Then now the last snapshot for doing so would be the last data drop from March?
Assuming that the linked post is accurate and that the "approval from senior leadership" to turn the dump back on does not come...then yes, I would say so. Actually there is already Codidact, although if I recall correctly they explicitly ruled out importing SE data when they started up. https://codidact.org
There were a number of issues that lead to the decision not to do a grab and seed of SE into codidact.
There was the "what license is that post actually under? Is it 2.5? 3.0? 4.0?" which made things difficult.
There was the "what are the actual attribution requirements that SE has for sites that use its content?" This is a bit of an issue because it's never really clear what those requirements are and what you need to do. It can also hurt SEO because it's duplicated content. Furthermore, codidact leadership had already and enough dealings with SE lawyers and likely wanted to avoid any other.
Lastly, there was the desire to make a philosophical break with SE. The codidact founders didn't want to have anything to do with SE.
Some sites are doing ok. Others stood up but didn't have sufficient involvement to keep them going.
Having an imported site that is mostly inactive with activity on that same content is even more disappointing than having a mostly empty site. And active mirroring is a time-consuming process that runs into rate limit issues with an API.
I haven't used codidact (sorry, name needs replacing), ok just poked around
* too slow
* needs type ahead find search
* needs a GIST experience
The site looks good, presentation is really clean. Lots to like about it. But the think that replaces SO is going to have to be a step function in capabilities. That said, just fixing the weird descend into performative rule following and language-lawyering on SO might be that step function.
* "Tipping" or actually giving money to a question answerer would be cool
* Having a question asker being able to put a bounty on question would be cool
On the face of it, I am not getting scalability (in many senses) vibes from codidact.
Personally when the fork happened, I was interested in it... but I'm mostly "meh" about it since its another Q&A style format that maintains all the advantages and disadvantages of the format that SO provides.
I really hoped that they would have gone for something much more radical in terms of trying to create a way to share knowledge.
It's Stack(Exchange|Overflow) with better governance and a different development cycle time and focus - and I appreciate that... but its still that same Stack in terms of underlying format.
I would have been more interested if they went to something like how Discourse is different from forums. It's still a forum, but it took the structure of a forum in a new way that solves some of the traditional forum issues.
But getting that community there, and stable, and growing is a very hard problem. It's one of the things that Reddit and SO are fairly successful at doing because of the network effects and the corresponding exoduses from other services when they were growing.
There was a compelling story to tell of "why do you ant to switch." There's a story now, but mastodon, Lemmy, codidact and similar haven't really stood out. It feels like "we're the same but better... if you ignore the performance of the site."
"Yea, I could switch from reading reddit to reading Lemmy... but it doesn't have a feed of 200 cat pictures I need each day for my daily dose of eye bleach."
The shtshow is the reason to switch, but there also needs to be new capabilities on the other side. As soon as they break old.reddit.com, I am out.
I feel like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub is 10x more complex than it needs to be. The SO replacement should be an application on-top of an existing protocol.
We outlined some of our broad goals (intended differentiators) here: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/276296, in case that helps. Codidact is a work in progress. The biggest non-technical difference from SO is how we treat communities and their members: communities have a lot more autonomy, and we treat people decently. No stockholders are driving anti-community business decisions.
On the technical level, while Q&A is central, we also have other post types and other models. That post I linked to is an article in a blog that's part of our Meta community. The Electrical Engineering community has papers, so people can present information outside of the Q&A structure. Code Golf has a sandbox where people can get feedback on draft challenges before posting them. Software Development has a Code Review category. Some of our communities have added their own customizations to the code, like Code Golf's leaderboard for challenge answers. We want to work together with our communities to build what best serves their needs.
We've done some things that look small but might have larger effects. For example, the asker of a question can't mark one answer as "accepted" like on SO, but anybody can mark an answer as "works for me" -- or "outdated", or other annotations that communities can define. Scoring takes controversy into account, because +10/-5 and +5/-0 are very different even if they're both "net 5". With threaded comments, it doesn't matter so much if two people have an extended conversation; it's not in the way. Abilities are granted based on activity and reputation is just a number -- or can be turned off entirely if that's what a community wants. We're trying to make as much stuff configurable as we can, because we can't possibly know what's going to be best for every single community and don't have the hubris to claim we do.
We have the usual bootstrapping problem of a new thing. Our communities are small and trying to grow. Because they're small, visitors don't see thousands of questions and high activity, so they don't participate either and wander away, making it harder to build activity. We would love to find people who want to work with us to build communities. We recognize that helping to build a community with us is going to be harder and slower than just asking your question on SO, but if everyone were happy with SO this thread wouldn't be here, so maybe we're an option to a few people reading this?
(I haven't posted much on Hacker News, so I hope I've read the room correctly and that this kind of comment is ok. If not, I apologize and would appreciate correction so I don't repeat mistakes. Thank you.)
A citation is needed for the number of iOS projects that have more than a minuscule amount of code at the application level that risks memory unsafety.¹ The value proposition becomes stronger for the system frameworks that the app consumes, of course. (Although even the stdlib dips more than once into memory-unsafe Swift for performance.) But this brings us to another of the points from the article: is it really best to use one language for both use cases?
¹And additionally for whether those project would eliminate such code if rewritten in Swift.
