skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah... I didn't know that. Hopefully one day it is smart enough to understand emergency like this. I guess it can be done if Google Cars watch enough YouTube videos. Actually, if Google makes enough videos for the Car to watch, it might be "possible" to do an early reaction such as "pull over slowly."
Errr, the numbers on the graph don't match the headline, at all.

This is partially because they compare two very different percentages, and expect them to cancel each other out, but they don't ;)

Let's take https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Nal5V8NG4BaEYnFL2lbcskLtaUE...

In 1970, we have 150 btu/sq ft and let's be generous and say 1500 sq ft.

So we have a home using 225000 BTU.

Now, we have 101.8 btu/sq ft, and 1864 sq ft.
That's 188264 BTU.

17% is not nothing, nor is it "offsetting the gains".

Note, you can't use the 101.8 number for the new housing graph, since it's an average over all homes.

(In fact, you can't really just multiply any of these numbers and have sensible results, but hey, it's a news story!)

You'd have to find an average new housing btu/sq ft, which they don't provide.

Also note: Greater energy efficiency is entirely possible. You can easily halve the heating energy requirement, for example, by using ground source heat pumps in most places (my GSHP was a 46 SEER , 5.3 COP unit).

But this has high monetary cost to retrofit (When done during construction, and factored into the price of a house, it basically costs "not a lot more").

Or you could use per-room mini-splits, or whatever.

It's just that people don't care, and so the only thing that forces higher energy efficiency in most cases is building code changes, not consumer demand.
The comparison with ChromeOS is flawed because you can go into Dev mode[1] on ChromeOS and do whatever the heck you want in a linux userland. There's even a project called Crouton[2] that allows you to install traditional Linux apps side-by-side on your Chromebook. You can also build ChromiumOS[3] the open-source version of ChromeOS and make it do whatever the heck you want.

I don't know about you but I want my sysadmin to work for me so that when I tell it to shut up and get out of my way, it does exactly that.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/poking-around-your-chro...
[2] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
[3] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide
For those who may not have heard of him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
I guess it is really about having "friends" to do that with you, which I don't have any to do snapchat with. But yeah, I probably can relate it back then with tumblr, using mustache in google hangout etc..
Review: Apple iPad Pro
This is an edge case. Most of the time your average user is after the text and not the shitty formatting.

Copy-Paste as WYSIWYG should be default, Copy-Special should be an expert-only option.
Pay up. If it is important enough to you that you want it done, pay above basic minimum wage and someone will do it for you. Must we keep people in wage slavery because you want your roof tarred?

We've heard this sort of argument before, of course. Back before the emancipation, some white landlord would say "If we let these negroes go, who is going to pick the cotton?" --- We ended slavery, and we should end wage slavery.
Amdahl's law is such a powerful idea. I use it to prioritize development items every week if not every day.

Always sad to see a story like this on hacker news. I'll be talking about his ideas for the rest of my career, guaranteed.
I interned at Facebook a few years ago, so I'll speculate with an ounce of information.

There's a lot of openness, including around issues like this, at the company. There's weekly all hands meetings, where a developer could directly ask Mark about his opinion on a feature like this. The user experience, including creepiness, was almost certainly discussed. They may have misjudged in this case, but that's fallibility, not because it was ignored.
O...k? The linked page doesn't mention patents, Wikipedia doesn't identify what patent, and Wikipedia isn't exactly authoritative anyway.

And also, what in the world does "Proprietary, with free download. (with patent claim)" mean??
The purpose of Amdahl's 1967 paper was to dissuade customers that multiprocessors were cost-effective (read: more expensive for him to produce at Amdahl Corp). In a certain sense, he was correct. Ironically, however, that same paper is now the most quoted in the parallel processing literature. Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup.
> I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86.

I've long thought that Apple would have been a way, way worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was.

I'm so glad Android saved us from that.
I think he deserves a HN Back Bar tribute.
I consider desktops different than phones. My phone is an appliance for me. I would be pissed if they tried to do it to OS X.

I wrote that as a counter to the 'Windows / OS X does it without issue' line of argument. There are issues. They may be relatively minor (OS X) or very bad (Windows XP), but there is no free lunch.
Snapdragon 820: Prepare for an immersive dive into mobile experience
You are missing the career bureaucrats in universities. They have won. The vice chancellor at our university get more than AUD 600 000. Not bad for a small university in the middle of nowhere.
I've never encountered a malicious command in the wild, but having the commands I execute saved in a "notes.txt" or a wiki page I keep to document whatever I'm doing at any given time, sure has saved my day more than once. Usually several days after, when I can look back at what I did and replicate, fix or enhance whatever procedure.

So if it also protects me against this, I say doubleplusgood.
I imagine you're right that that's how it would have gone. But at least someone would have been trying. The EU is still pretty pissed over Snowden.
When I worked at Bigcommerce that's about the size and space we had too, so subconsciously Mitch has probably just picked a stock image that meshes with his idea of what works.
It's very much a security thing, there've been lots of exploits that work by dropping a payload into a W&X marked area in browsers (usually dropped in by buffer overflows).

Apple also doesn't like unsigned code, and JIT (or self modifying code, or whatever falls into that category) is inherently unsigned code.
Probably, but then you have to manage 10x the JVMs which is no picnic. Pick your poison. Better to re-write to not use zillions of threads.
I love how you're talking about the process from a user point of view. This is truly a difficult time for Mozilla. The rise of iOS means that independent renderers have not as much of a voice as they could have. It is scary because a user will maybe rely on features that exist on Firefox on another os might not work on Firefox on iOS.

The renderer is still very critical for developers. We don't really have a browser without a renderer after all.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28682686
At the time, Jobs was showing off how developers could create app-like experiences using HTML - with the ability for people to "install" your app using the add-to-home-screen feature. That was the intended solution for us plebs. Native apps were most likely going to be only for partner companies.

Ironically when people starting creating actual apps using HTML via PhoneGap and the like, Apple was resistant to that too!
> That's some claim. Care to back it up?

Ah, humans have deforested vast swaths of the earth, hunted hundreds of species of animals to extinction, severely over fished the oceans, polluted a huge amount of fresh water, just to name a few.

Is it even a discussion that humans need to use less resources? I thought this was all widely accepted basic stuff.
Wow. How did I miss this?

I still keep Facebook around 10% for looking people's contact information and 90% because everyone has migrated to using Facebook's messenger. Cutting it just down to the messenger is a godsend.
Nepal's Lesson for All Constitutional Governments View
> I don't know about you but I want my sysadmin to work for me so that when I tell it to shut up and get out of my way, it does exactly that.

I do actually disagree there! And this is perhaps the fundamental disagreement we have. I want my sysadmin to be a capital-E Engineer and choose their ethics over my desires. Don't let me (the capitalist) tweak the bridge I'm paying for into one that falls down; and similarly, don't let me tweak the computer I'm paying for into one that gets malware, joins a botnet and DDoSes people.

You pay your Engineers, basically, to provide you the service of "knowing what's best for you"; to be your domain-specific nanny, making sure you don't do something you'll regret out of ignorance.
(edit: see my reply to your other comment. I think that one's a bit better-structured to address the points you mention)

I don't think it's out of the question. Here are some good reasons why Facebook might want to structure their pipeline like this.

- Cellular Bandwidth is still expensive. They don't want the reputation of raising your data bill by uploading all your photos. Maybe the GPU cycles really are cheaper. After all, Facebook already uses a lot of battery anyway; what does a few million more cycles per image matter?

- Messenger on iOS gets a new release every week. It's not very difficult to make code changes. Not quite as easy as a webapp, but updating recognition models is a pain anyways, so it won't happen too often.

- Uploading photos without the user's consent is going to make Facebook look very bad, especially in certain countries like Germany or other parts of the EU. They already don't have a lot of social "privacy trust capital" as it is; they might not want to waste even more "trust capital" on such a silly application.

Compare this to Apple, for example, who loudly claims that even they can't read your encrypted iMessages. They do this to win privacy karma points. Sure, this claim may not be true, but Facebook can't even consider this kind of marketing if photos are indeed being uploaded. On the other hand, if all the recognition happens on the device, Facebook could win some much-needed privacy karma points back by loudly saying so! Why wouldn't Facebook want to be able to say this? It's within their grasp, too!

I agree; I don't think they're doing this. But my argument is much weaker: I only claim that it's possible, or perhaps even reasonable and desirable, to build their service like this.
> you're browsing through a catalogue of amazing experiences while you sit at home feeling a little fat.

No, I think it's more than that. I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that spending excessive time on the internet will make you feel more isolated (and therefore worse overall), regardless of whether you spend that time on social sites or not. It's the withdrawal from genuine face-to-face contact that is important, not the particular mechanics of such-and-such an app or website.

I think we're still missing something important about human interaction in the way we embody it in computers. Even video does not solve it completely. Telepresence is and will continue to be a major open problem for the forseeable future.
"Mess up" sounds like a pretty loaded term to me. It sounds like "change" would be a more appropriate word, but the headline wouldn't be able to be skimmed over and then passed along to friends quite so easily.
What a sad, pathetic day that you have to consider loading your own code a on a general computing device a risk and privilege.
Well, we're resting at least a trillion-USD economy on that "much less clear"; probably more. Given that, bad actors are properly incentivized to work on factoring, and we can take comfort that we haven't yet heard any evidence yet of a (quasi-) polynomial solution. That is assuming someone couldn't keep something like that a secret.
1. You are factually wrong in saying that Stallman demonizes software released under permissive free licenses, and factually wrong in saying that Stallman proselytizes against their use.

I will not link you to any of the numerous examples of Stallman doing so, because you must find your own truth, and you must make your own DuckDuckGo searches.

If you have any honor, you will do this. If you do not, you have blinded yourself and chosen, willfully, ignorance over knowledge. Nothing can forgive this.

2. The point of the parable of the SLF is to pose an actual radical group in the software freedom space similar to the actually radical groups in other political spheres such as animal liberation (ALF), environmentalism (ELF), feminism (Wimmen's Fire Brigade), socialism (RAF), anti-racism (Black Panther Party), or queer liberation (Bash Back!). The outlook of a radical is fundamentally different from the outlook of a liberal. A radical does not negotiate. A radical does not not make strategic compromises. This is rarely a strategic or tactical choice and more often an ideological one, and it seems mostly orthogonal to the effectiveness of the radical group (history is rife with radicals who have made enormous gains, often being entirely transformative on the societies they set out to change). Stallman does not demonstrate any of the qualities of a radical other than that his views are very different from most others. But this alone does not a radical make.

3. Arguing from a definition is a weak stance indeed. It is an appeal to the most meaningless of authority. Stallman disagrees that freedom lies in allowing your work to be modified without restrictions; he rather posits that freedom lies in the ability of a user to have total self-determination over the code that they execute. Neither of these definitions is in a dictionary, and a dictionary cannot offer any source of philosophical, ethical, or moral truth, nor should it. This is a deeper matter than that.
Here's another example: writing blog posts like this one.
React has been ported a few times, React Native is the most well known. Since React is basically describing components as functions of props and state, what's returned doesn't have to be DOM.
War didn't enable them to rebuild, except that the US decided for geostrategic reasons to pour vast fortunes into rebuilding those countries, both allies and former enemies. That is a fairly atypical end-of-war condition.
> This is actually very, very debatable.

I agree. I just think it's just as debateable for pretty much any other mode of employment.

I too worked in quant finance for several years. Believe me I understand. I quit finance because of the wanton greed and dysfunctional politics. But what I found when moving on to bright-eyed start-ups and education technology companies was that there was just as much wanton greed and dysfunction there (in some cases, even more).

I'm familiar with the literature on mutual funds and active managers. I worked for a team that focused exclusively on the low volatility anomaly in equity pricing, and our team's pitchbook was all about how most active managers lose (and yet, we were an active manager, heh).

The problem is that asset managers don't add value by growing or protecting the value of the assets they manage. That is not what their clients want from them nor what they pay them for, and failure to do those things is also not why they get fired.

What really happens is that someone who sits on the board of directors for a pension fund or some other large retirement fund, like say the association for retired firefighters in some state, is tasked with managing some huge-to-them pile of money from which everyone's retirement money is paid. But that task is daunting to a non-specialist board member, and they need someone to act like a management consultant. If the management consultant is wrong, the board member has plausible deniability (e.g. "How could we have known ... the fancy asset manager seemed great ... we all voted to use them.")

Using asset management companies is just a career cover-you-ass tactic for people embedded within the pension and retirement boards themselves. It's truly, truly not about actually growing the endowment or the plan value.

But who is to say this is bad? The "value" that someone is seeking (the "value" of having a cover-your-ass asset manager you can fire and save face in front of the other board members if things go bad, or milk for kudos if the market turns up) is provided by the asset manager.

You and me both probably don't think that sort of "value" matters, but it does matter to somebody, and they're OK paying a lot for it, and most everyday people don't seem to care enough to do something like boycott their company's 401(k) in order to invest directly in low fee index funds themselves. So by what standard do we judge this somewhat scammy thing as certainly worse than all the other kinds of scammy things in all sorts of industries that go on all the time?

I'm not trying to be cheeky when I ask. I'm really asking. What's the "ethics metric" we're supposed to use. When I just think about this stuff from a sort of common sense "be good to people, try to add value, don't be wasteful" perspective, finance looks a little worse than other fields, but not that much worse. Maybe defense and government spying and torture looks significantly worse than all the other things, but beyond that the rest of it all just looks like one big pile of more or less equivalent scamminess.
Finally I get to dispense this random piece of information I researched when I wondered why there were so many water fountains in US buildings but not in european buildings!

The law requires at least 1 fountain per 1000 capacity (usually 1-100), with no more than 50% substituted by bottled water. I wonder how UCF got around this for their stadium.

If you ever wonder why water fountains aren't in bathrooms, I found this gem:

410.2 Prohibited location.
Drinking fountains, water coolers
and bottled water dispensers shall not be installed in
public
restrooms.
> With funding from Fujitsu, he formed the Amdahl Corporation, setting up offices in Sunnyvale, Calif.

I didn't realize that the tradition of "avoid SV VC and get funding for cheap from an overseas operating company" went so far back.
Browsing Facebook, or for that matter any other similar network (including HN :)), is like anti-meditation. They rattle your mind with so much information in such quick succession that it becomes almost impossible to think through or about any one particular thing. Like alcohol, it is simultaneously addictive – the mind craves information – and depressing – numbs the mind preventing it from engaging in deep rational thought.

I think we can have the best of both worlds – enjoy our whiskey and discuss philosophy too :) I think there is a future for a social network that can slow things down a little, maybe also summarize, organize and filter an apparently disparate group of things, allowing the user enough time to digest and process the information before moving ahead in leisure.
github version of iflux looks ok for me too:

$ cd f.lux-master/
$ shasum -a 256 iflux | grep 10428983a681b07f687511e150f46e39b6f9da506316a8041742a78bc0ce9ef6
10428983a681b07f687511e150f46e39b6f9da506316a8041742a78bc0ce9ef6 iflux
It was alluded to that this change was coming back in May 2014 https://www.mail-archive.com/ozdotnet%40ozdotnet.com/msg1072... and then on Nov 2014 it landed -> https://www.mail-archive.com/ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com/msg11187....

Additionally check out the recent presentation from last week done by the "Open Source Engineering Team, Microsoft" which is based in Silicon Valley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ARzbQSWoIM
Here's the trello board which is tracking the code replacement - https://trello.com/b/vRPTMfdz/net-framework-integration-into...
Recent USCIS immigration changes related to entrepreneurship/founders
It's not just runtime code generation. If it were just that, you could have a browser without a JIT.

But they also forbid execution of code that doesn't ship with the app itself. So you can't have a JIT-less browser that runs any JS at all.

But for Servo none of that would matter anyway, because it's written in Rust. And Apple's policies only allow binaries whose source code is C, C++, Objective-C or Swift, last I checked. So Servo, and any other program written in Rust, is not allowed in the app store period, no matter whether it's a web browser or not and what it does with JS.
Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up?

I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools.

I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.
https://www.mail-archive.com/ozdotnet%40ozdotnet.com/msg1072... (pay attention to the date) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431689 (which is the current status)
Amen. As a person whose experience as an engineer and admin came almost entirely from Free Software, the fact that so many people who should know better defend Apple's model is pretty pathetic.
> I've seen ~4000ms in country areas via 3G

Hell, my municipal (bargain-basement) phone provider here in Canada gives me ~4000ms latency at the best of times. On the other hand, my city is saturated in "free for users of my ISP" wi-fi hotspots that my phone can automatically jump onto.

It seems like the latter are going to be the true solution to low-latency mobile connectivity for most of the more "spread out" countries that can't afford to saturate the country in cell towers.
Meh, Apple wants to control everything because they want a seamless, dead-simple device for non-techies. Because that's the majority of customers - not the power users who want to get down to the bare metal of their machine. They are tyrannical about protecting that experience and basically not allowing you to screw up your device no matter how hard you try.

Of course they're making a ton of money on the App Store as well, but I still think it's more about protecting the device. Otherwise they'd just approve every app and collect their commissions.
#MillionDollarShack: Story of a Middle Class Family Priced Out of the Bay Area
Atwood captured this well in the past: http://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the-...
Russia's S-400 Missile Defense System Has No Equal Globally
There is already a native Direct3D 9 implementation on Linux, called Gallium Nine. It works with any driver exposing the Gallium interface, such as the open source radeon driver.
How many words does a professional translator translate per day
This view is shared by many people at Mozilla (but not all, I expect; it's hard to find anything 1000+ people will agree on) and I believe shared by Mozilla overall. I mean, we're not just continuing to develop the rendering engine we already have (Gecko), we're creating another one as well (Servo)...
Problem is that it is pointless, because the f.lux is released as a binary.. it is not like we can just look at the source code to change the 1900K to whatever temperature we wanted
As a tangent, I've found that phone + email are the truly general options across what is anecdotally to me the Balkan social networks. I've also come to realize that everyone views their social network as obvious, and everyone also loathes to download anyone else's social network app.

But email + phone is international, nobody feels like you burdened them by asking them to get a Google account, and nowadays email and phone is all managed through a synced solution on your phone / devices. As a "workflow", contacting someone via phone or email can feel as fluid as any other app.
When Disney Got Adult and Trippy