I'm not going to lie if something is badly presented or mediocre. I don't think that helps the team that made it or the quality of HN.
I don't want people to be sad or hurt either.
Sometimes it looks like something is opportunistic or scammy. In that case you flag it. If something seems clueless and doesn't seem to have a lot of work or thought behind it I hope people want to help when they level harsh criticism. In these cases people need direction and it's a case where guidance or mentorship might help. It's so important to do this with care.
How long did you spend trying to learn Nix? I am trying to learn Nix as well because when I see it working it looks very clear and organized.
NixOS seems like it is from the future in my opinion. I agree the docs are outdated a bit. I had to go on IRC to #nixos to find out nix-shell is now nix shell. I submitted a pull request to the Nix Pills for that.
Taskwarrior. I really wish I could use it on all my mobile devices easily. I especially wish that I could control it using my voice and use it with all my wearables. I think a taskwarrior service with easy setup and UI through modern channels is my dream of how people change the way they get things done. Taskwarrior isn't there yet but I feel like I've got super powers when I plan with it. Unfortunately when I'm doing my plans I don't want to always have a terminal window open.
"4.1: Why is the Singularity Institute interested in Flare?
"AI has always been one of the traditional drivers of programming language advances, although usually for the wrong reasons. We don't think AI is so simplistic that the thought processes have anything to do with the idioms of the underlying programming language, but we also think that current programming tools are simply inadequate. It would be really hard to code an AI in a non-object-oriented language and it probably won't be easy to build AI in a non-annotative language either. Flare, an extensible language easily modifiable by Flare programs, will let us write more powerful tools, and will let the AI introspect and tinker with its own source code, without our needing to become compiler and interpreter specialists."
"If there's no production-quality Flare language by the time the Singularity Institute begins writing code on the AI project, as seems likely, then we'll probably be forced to write pseudo-Flare programs in Python, at least for the prototype. But we won't have to like it, and we'll still want to switch to Flare as soon as possible."
The Singularity Institute has embarked on a long-term quest to develop real AI. They don't want to stop there, either; they want to develop recursively self-improving AI, Friendly AI, and transhuman AI. The Singularity - the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence - is a quest of such mind-boggling importance and earthshaking impact that our words cannot even begin to describe it. (You should go read their website.) Even if you've never heard of the Singularity Institute and you're getting involved in Flare solely because you love annotative programming, we still hope that you get a warm fuzzy feeling from helping to bring about a swifter and safer Singularity. "
Saw this part and got curious: "Programmers note that a system like this can’t build larger projects out of small snippets of code which, to be fair, sounds like whistling past the graveyard."
So I clicked on the original link and saw this:
"At the moment, DeepCoder is only capable of solving programming challenges that involve around five lines of code. But in the right coding language, a few lines are all that’s needed for fairly complicated programs."
A far cry at this point from
"OUT of the way, human, I’ve got this covered. A machine learning system has gained the ability to write its own code."
Still it's been amazing how much has been done with deep learning in such a short period of time.
I wonder when this will change from seeming like an advanced code snippet finder/synthesizer to an actual skilled coder.