skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But that's the thing! Caring about usability isn't enough. Are you a domain expert? Have you read your Jakob Nielsen and such?

Because Nielsen, for instance, probably wouldn't slam this design as hard as you have: For a work in progress, it's pretty danged good. The homepage is obvious, it presents the most important things in a way that nobody could miss. I'll grant that the "binaries" link is a bit obscure, but that's copy. There's some wasted space on the homepage but that's not a huge deal because the website's simplicity puts most things only a click or two away. The "packages" page is great! The tutorial could use a monospace font, but otherwise is great too.

I really hope that your advice doesn't result in iolanguage.org becoming a clone of Rust's website or otherwise an impersonator. The authors here are trying something new and unique and what they've pulled off is already looking sharp and easy-to-use.

So yea, I think you're just trying to sound like an expert. Trust me, you're not the only person here who knows about usability (if you do, that is -- you come off as more of a frontend developer than a real UX person, because your suggestions are lacking in depth and experience, and the HTML/CSS bit in your reply makes you sound especially green).
Oh man, I entirely disagree.

Sure, there are two forms of profanity, and I consider profanity as a part of speech on par with other parts too:

One form is lazy, and it's there for shock value. It can be parsed by subtracting it to see what value it really added to the expression.

The other form adds value.

Lazy profanity is largely useless. Value added profanity is quite useful, and is a valid part of speech. There are good cases against that, but I really won't validate them here.

The language is quite accurately described by brain fuck, and when "fuck" is removed, it's not just shock value. In fact, it's a struggle to embody my feelings about the language and reach the brevity and fidelity inherent in the current name.

This isn't a disagreement worth a serious debate over, I suppose. It was worth a brief counter point. By and large, profanity is OK. It's not gonna hurt anyone, and this world does, in fact, contain ugly things, people, ideas, etc... It only follows that we have ugly words for those things, and it's really easy to purify some of what brings life, society, and the world overall it's texture and richness, away.

Besides, one can drop an asterisk or two and get along with the current name just fine.
This is actually a solved problem already on most underlying operating systems, it just hasn't filtered down into the Javascript-world. On Windows you want a GUID and on UNIX-like OSs you want a UUID.

GUIDs and UUIDs are guaranteed to be unique not simply because of their length, but also how they're constructed (MAC address, timestamp, and a random element).

So even if the random number generator does loop back around, it still won't ever generate the same GUID/UUID even on the same hardware, and on other hardware it is more unlikely yet still (due to MAC address).

So the question is: Why isn't GUID/UUID generation not available to Javascript? It works extremely well and is used for exactly this type of scenario.
I see your comment as "13 hours ago".

The page it points to is "5 hours ago".

If I didn't know it was Arc forward-dating posts as part of its 2nd-chance system I'd be REALLY confused.

:P
> GPU-based OS, anyone?

This makes me... uneasy.

Incredible work, though. I had no idea GPU shaders were run as Von Neumann programs. I always thought they were really tiny sets of math operations with minimal branching, because it had to scale to a bunch of little cores. But that's not true entirely, somehow!
I stopped at the picture.

I just learned that Google's first ever servers had USB. USB 1.1, but USB.

(Along with serial, joystick/MIDI and parallel.)

Somehow that resonates in a weird kind of way.
Maybe we don't need as many "roundup ready" crops? Before the blanket use of herbicides there was cultivation. Some farmers are rediscovering it.
How to Get Your MCommerce App Ready for the Holidays [Infographic]
on an interesting note: i can't wait to hear the answer to this question (if he already hasn't answered it)

"would you let your kid use internet.org to access the Internt"
Bikeshedding - if they can't make a website, how are they supposed to make a good programming language?
> In other words, don't speak like there is only one true way to do things

You're absolutely right. I made some assumptions and let my own values come through. My assumptions are 1) that this developer wants his/her language to succeed, 2) that a language succeeds because it's usable/accessible, and 3) that this design is not usable/accessible.

#2 and #3 are totally debatable, which is why I told OP not to take my word for it and to observe users instead. I'm just one user, and not an expert or designer.
This is true for UUID version 4, which is completely random. There are variant that use host-specific information in the process (in fact version 4 is the only one not doing it). [1]

This said, I see that often only v4 is implemented, so maybe there are issue with the other variants.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier
If you equate Stalin with "the USSR", you're wilfully excluding about 40 years of additional history--history that was very, very different after 1953, and certainly is not captured in gulag literature.

What do you know about crime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years? (A whopping 29 years combined.)
I think the whole idea of generating random ids is flawed. Why take a chance when there is no need? Just take some machine id (seq. number, MAC), timestamp and a big enough per-machine counter and there can be no collision, guaranteed. No need to use random.voodoo().
I'm in that boat unfortunately but it goes back to the 80's for me - heard right wing conspiracy stuff from old people who were getting it from the radio and everyone called them crazy... then the 90's, to 2000's aaaand now its real.

That whole paragraph creeps me out i try to avoid this whole discussion now because I don't like observing anymore - I'd like to completely check out of it. The mass murder stuff is horrifying and I hate that its a part of my reality, and worse yet my kid has to see that shit on the news, and other kids have to live it. People need to let ideologies go and work towards space travel peace.
If all the other bad stuff has become a reality, I just hope the star trek future we were promised can come true ;)

edit: by part of my reality i mean via the news as well - it hasn't directly affected me thankfully.
You might like this, then: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearly/iooicodkii...
"It's nothing new" is not an excuse to continue a bad trend.
I agree that language design isn't related to website design.

However, how widely-used a language is matters a lot to me. I'd wager that it matters a lot to most people. And a language's user base is definitely affected by its website design. How much is it affected? I really don't know.
Dunno if you've ever taken PFL, but I have twice. It's not all roses. Your first 1-2 weeks (depending on company policy) is unpaid, ie you have to take PTO/vacation. Then PFL pays 55% of your weekly salary, to a maximum of $1,104 -- essentially $52k. They dump it on some ghetto Bank of America debit card that you have to hook up to your bank account thru their 90s-fabulous website somehow...

Except for the 40 hours part, OP's was exactly my experience. BigCo contracts out to some awful 3rd party that can't get their paperwork straight.

I actually got notice that my leave was "approved" (as if they could disapprove?) AFTER I returned to work, that's how bad their process sucks.

Don't even get me started about straightening out the bill for health insurance -- yeah, you have to pay your employer's share while you're on leave! Surprise! (I guess this might vary from company to company).

Better than nothing I guess, but I think I'd rather have lower taxes and just take straight PTO.
You can't use monotonically increasing numbers from multiple threads (or servers) without either synchronizing (which is terrible for scalability) or using separate prefixes for different threads or servers (in which case you have problems related to sizing and allocating the prefixes). Right?

The UTC time + random number idea is interesting, but I'm not sure it's any better than totally random. Say you want a 64-bit unique id. It would take about 42 bits to store a millisecond Unix timestamp, leaving 22 bits for randomness. If you consider the probability that a given id will collide with a previously-generated one: with this scheme, you only need to consider ids generated in the same millisecond, but you only have 22 bits of randomness that can be used to avoid a collision. If you use 64 random bits, you can theoretically collide with ids generated across all of time, but the odds of collision are many orders of magnitude lower. By constraining the first 42 bits to store a millisecond timestamp, every millisecond that goes by removes 2^22 values from the possible id space (regardless of whether they're used). (Besides that, this scheme removes from the space of possible ids all of the millisecond values from before the system was created, which seems like about 2/3 of them, assuming about a 68-year span of values for Unix times, which started 45 years ago.)

That's kind of handwavy, so let's do the math. With 22 bits of randomness, the odds of any randomly selected pair of ids generated in the same millisecond colliding is 1/4194304. Assuming independently generated ids, the expected number of collisions after 4194304 milliseconds is 1. So if you have just two threads generating ids once per millisecond, you'd expect a collision in just 70 minutes. That's not great.

It's late, though. Maybe my math is wrong?
> Smart TVs don't cost more.

Yes, they do. My non-smart Panasonic was a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than the equivalent smart ones.
If you have original PS2 discs, can you play PS2 games on your PS4?
I told OP that I'm not an expert or designer and that the best advice comes from observing users.
Suggested solution: round up all grades above 95% to 100%. Re-practicing the same material 100 times because you only score perfectly on the practice tests 9 times out of 10 (meaning, 1 time out of 10 you get 98%) is an incredibly inefficient use of time. Let people get 95% in each of their classes and if they still want to overachieve, let them take an additional class. That's still HARD but at least it's not so wasteful.

Similarly, what about university admissions "capping" the number of extracurriculars etc. they consider? Okay, you've already got your 4.0, you're already in a sport, you already play violin. It's great that you also have three other activities, but we're just going to add until we get you to 100% and stop counting. Enough with the wars between 140% and 150% overachievement.

You get what you measure. If it requires a perfect SAT score to get into Harvard, then people are going to take hundreds of hours from their young life that could be better spent learning something else or having a slightly balanced life and instead spend it studying and re-studying the SAT. It also unreasonably biases entrance against students who needed to work a little bit rather than study 24/7.

At some point when you're measuring the top 1% the margin of error becomes greater than the precision of the measurement. The real problem, as has been discussed elsewhere, is that the brand name schools haven't grown to accommodate as large of a population (by percentage) as they did in the past, to the point that they reject thousands and thousands of students who would have been accepted eagerly 50 years ago. In school and in life there seem to be fewer and fewer positions near the top, that provide lifestyles that seemed attainable not that long ago, given hard work.
Fair enough, I should have said: Smart TVs don't necessarily cost more.
Why no mention of window.crypto.getRandomValues?
Exploring the Android Ecosystem in China
Also Numb3rs s6e10 has a plot related to D. B Cooper.
I was actually talking about the physical "on a stick" format, not actual tuners.

I'm a proud owner of an HDHR and am eagerly looking forward to Silicondust's software DVR. My CableCard experience has been remarkably trouble-free for years, but I've also been using it with Windows Media Center.

I couldn't ever get the HDHR working with MythTV. It has a long way to go as a product for end users, and hope it finds more success one day. I've worked (professionally) with the devs behind MythWeb and Schedules Direct, and I know they have some good talent available to them.

Windows Media Center remains the best software or hardware DVR experience I've ever had, and it makes me very sad that Microsoft decided to discontinue it.
> If I were in his shoes, I'd sell my shares in that website

Probably why you're not.
In Second Life, there are furniture stores.[1]

Heavy Rain has meaningful interiors with realistic furnishings.[2] They're in scale, they have detail, and they look lived-in.

Most games tend to look under-furnished. Especially ones with big rooms. Worse, in some the furniture is out of scale with the room or character sizes.

[1] http://secondlife.com/destinations/home/furnishings
[2] http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-22/hr-ethan-house-kids-...
Most large companies in Silicon Valley give men between four and eight weeks of paternity leave, which you can take any time you want (not just right after the baby is born).
This is motion graphics for the web, not motion graphics for Chrome.
The parent claims that we need the bottom quartile of earners to have children otherwise we would lose out on socially valuable humans (list of examples provided). This is a variation on the argument raised by anti-abortionists that goes along the lines of "how do you know you're not killing the next Mozart?" or "what if your parents aborted you?" It's drek for two reasons:

1) You can't know what the world would like if person XYZ hadn't been born. It's pure science fiction. Somebody else would probably have invented the iPhone, or figured out relativity, etc. Or they wouldn't have. There's no reasonable argument to be made here. The world would be different in ways that cannot be predicted.

2) It implies that you are withholding from your fellow man by failing to reproduce more more more, because each could be the next potential Jobs, Rowling, etc.

I also think it's a little bit ugly to point at the conclusions of difficult lives and say "hey, what a good thing that was!" Maya Angelou wrote beautiful poetry, does that mean we should congratulate slavery and racism? I'd happily live in a world without Jay Z's music if it means kids don't have to grow up in housing projects with single mothers abandoned by their fathers and 12 year olds aren't shooting their brothers over stolen jewelry.
So long as it can be turned off, I don't really care. My decent-quality TV was cheap and I'm sure that it would have cost more if Vizio didn't supplement their revenue with this program.
Well, no. I think what Matt is talking about here is Canonical slapping Ubuntu's trademark policies all over something that is largely derived from other people's software.

Hence the fine line of having some pretense of complying with free software license terms but still violating their intent in practice.

Have you ever had to resort to these extreme redistribution terms for any other commercial distro?
Upenn seems like a really wonderful place for people who are into software that works. Lot of good stuff coming out of there.
CSPRNGs are a type of pseudo random number generator, which are defined to be deterministic. I have no problem with calling /dev/urandom a CSPRNG for practical purposes, but very strictly speaking, it's not.
According to http://www.onedollarbill.org/decoding.html , serial numbers are not globally-unique identifiers:

"The letter which precedes the numbers must be the same number that you saw identifying the Federal Reserve Bank. The last letter of the serial number or suffix letter identifies the number of times that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing used the sequence of serial numbers: A is the first time, B is the second time, C is the third time and so on. With one run for each letter of the alphabet (26) and 32 bill per run, there are a total of 832 bills per serial number."
The bug report that prompted V8 to fix their Math.random was someone doing A/B testing on their site by checking Math.random()>0.5, and the V8 PRNG was so bad that it would give a consistent 2-3% error, which would make any results useless.

Seems like V8's Math.random was only fine for extremely trivial cases (Google doodle Pacman I guess). Meanwhile Webkit has been using a CSPRNG and nobody seems to be complaining.
What kind of UUID? Standard UUIDs of versions 1, 2, and 3 are not really unique enough[1]. Version 4 is basically a random number, so it doesn't help to say "just use that".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier
Steve, is the new website an indication that you're resuming work on Io?
Because they leak details about the user's machine?
I call it the "impact wrench" theory of engineer motivation. Impact wenches are wrenches that turn when you hit them with a hammer - apply pressure and they spin. Hitting harder makes them spin a bit faster. The same with engineers, and 100+ hour founder work weeks are a great example.
Great point / good question. Here's why we didn't just use UUIDs:

* UUID generation still requires a good (CS)PRNG and should be vetted the same way you'd vet a (CS)PRNG.

* UUIDs are one-size-fits-all 36 character base-16 encoded strings. If you want a short random identifier that you can use in a URL (that people might need to type on a phone or something) they're not ideal. Re-encoding them and/or truncating them is as hard and error prone as just generating the randoms yourself.

* Researching a good UUID library and maintaining a dependency is harder than vetting the 10 lines of code required to do it yourself. Without a trusted standard library solution it's unclear which library to use (maybe not as true today as it was a couple years ago when this happened)

If UUIDs were available in the Javascript standard library we probably would have used them in some of the places that we currently use our own identifiers. We do use UUID4s in our Java services, for instance.

I'm guessing that UUIDs aren't standardized because the standards process is browser-centric and it's low priority in that context... but that's just a guess.

Edit: formatting.
They can read and write memory (to access textures), do math (to calculate output colors), and can jump (necessary for bounds checks, etc). That's pretty much the definition of a Von Neumann program:

program variables ↔ computer storage cells
control statements ↔ computer test-and-jump instructions
assignment statements ↔ fetching, storing instructions
expressions ↔ memory reference and arithmetic instructions.

Maps pretty much exactly to what you need.
This piece explains PRNGs really well. I walked away from it picking up more than I expected.

It's certainly something I'll keep in mind as well when writing software that relies on random numbers.
I have a smart TV only because there are no alternatives. TVs in larger sizes that are just TVs are hard to come by, and were even two years ago when I bought it. If you find me a TV with 4k resolution and more than four HDMI ports and no 'smart' features (except CEC, because having my Chromecast and amazon fire stick turn on the TV is magical), I'll switch in a heartbeat.
Prison Break tied a storyline into the D. B. Cooper story as well. A pretty popular story it seems :)
True of UUID1s, unless you bastardize them and use something other than MAC address. You could do UUID4s without leaking info.
SpaceX is significantly disrupting the entire launch industry right now.
Yes this is normal. I work at Twitter and new fathers taking multi-month paternity is very common. Lots of friends at Google and believe it's the same there.
Such a great comment!

"And it's an atrocity that staggeringly gifted young people can grow up thinking they're poorly endowed weirdos because, instead of memorizing their way through school, they struggle to actually understand things since their minds refuse to take “that's just how it works” for an answer, and they bother to "waste time" wondering, "What if...?"

This is exactly how I felt through school and did poorly because of it. I see these issues with my son too but he is excelling because I heavily encourage his curiosity and he has been lucky enough to have some great teachers that appreciate his obsessive need to have to know "why" or dig in deeper. I do worry though that he won't be so lucky as he moves into high school.

"It's really a sad thing that some kids with plenty of potential are misguided into thinking that a GPA is more important than knowledge, experience, curiosity, and comprehension."

This is so true. Something that recently really stood out to me was the lack of critical thinking or troubleshooting skills in kids. I discovered the lack of this in a summer workshop I was part of. Only about 10% of the kids (ages 8 to 12) had decent critical thinking or troubleshooting skills. The rest just wanted to be told what to do and how to do it. Why? Is it because we are so focused on getting kids to reach certain milestones that we are not teaching them or even encouraging critical thinking?
One solution I see (though not optimal), is to install only those extensions you really can't do without, and then have them disabled by default. When you need to use its function though, enable it (only for that short session), and then disable it later.

Otherwise, I have inspected many seemingly innocent extensions like JaSON and REST Console (both meant to run in own tabs, without need to read/modify data on sites I visit, but which nevertheless request for these permissions!). I quickly noted that many other extensions did request for these perms as well... So, for now, for the ones I can't uninstall, I'll just disable them, and only opt-in (maybe in incognito), when I need to use them.
Only real time will remain, sure. But will the DOM remain? Will browsers as we know them remain? Will http remain?

To me, those are the more interesting questions.
I bent (flexed?) the HN rules a little when I submitted this story. The actual headline in the NY Times is "File Says N.S.A. Found Way to Replace Email Program" but like you I didn't know what to make of it - I guessed someone learned the NSA was putting fake Gmail or Outlook on their targets' devices. So I changed it to "File Says N.S.A. Found Way to Replace Email Surveillance Program".