skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CLI might be well-defined, but you're going to have to implement this VM from scratch in every browser on top of the existing JS VMs. Alternatively you could ship the same VM code with every browser (unlikely - hasn't happened for JS yet) and now you've got two VMs running in every browser with twice the surface area for bugs and security exploits.

Now that you've got the CLR running in the browser, you've got to figure out a way to map it to the existing JS semantics. Microsoft's existing JScript.NET mapping isn't cleanly compatible with the prototype-based inheritance of the Javascript you're writing.

Re: legacy baggage, see:

- the parts of the basic .NET framework that shipped with 1.x and were effectively deprecated during the switch to 2.0, ie: System.Collections vs. System.Collections.Generic.

- the DLL specification, in which .NET assemblies are wrapped.

If you're not shipping a framework, what do you win by shoehorning an existing bytecode specification into the browser, except not having to write that bytecode specification again?

The web has different requirements than a desktop/server application and needs a runtime built for the web.
Very true and I think that applies in a wide variety of cases too. To me its telling that the recession of 1938 came shortly after FDR came out with a new plan to help "fix" the economy.
Except that Apple owns a monopoly on iPhone application distribution. Just as in the Kodak case where Kodak had a monopoly on parts.

In the Wal-Mart case you can hardly argue that Wal-Mart owns a monopoly on consumer good distribution.

The key thing here is that there is no way to get a legitimate application (and web-apps hardly need apply) onto the iPhone without going through the Apple channel. It looks and smells like a monpoly (at least as defined in previous supreme court rulings) to me.
The pain of developing web apps today. Having faster execution makes a new class of web apps possible. (The other two things you mention are incidental next to having native code speed.) The longer you've been developing on the web, the worse your blinders are when it comes to what we could really do with native-code speeds.
Yeah, readability is good. The pictures mostly bother me because I do most of my browsing on an 11 inch monitor.
I like the JS bytecode idea, but it won't be as powerful as Java or .NET in terms of performance.

Pertinent example: Flash improved its performance enormously from AS2 (ActionScript) to AS3, and one thing they did was add type info. Pertinent because AS is JS.
The TL;dr version: Developer who quit developing for the iPhone platform in 2008 due to issues with the App Store's policies decides to come back because a) he sees nothing better coming along, b) doesn't wish to turn into an angry, bearded open source zealot in 10 years, and c) realizes that his gesture didn't make Apple change its mind. Further, he suggests that Apple's levels of control are a natural evolution of platform development.
The submitter != the author.
I'm confused, Dennis. Was I replying to you? Also, it looks like we're saying the exact opposite thing.
Sketch Processing (web-based IDE using Processing.js and Bespin)
the initial role of big brains was for sexual attractiveness. For a long time, hominid females were selecting for big brains. Big brains served the same purpose as big tails do for peacocks. I think perhaps that those females were determined to someday produce a man with the mental capacity to understand women.

While this abstract is slightly funny, I suddenly realized that I have no idea about why humans evolved big brains.
Why most of the other species do not select for bigger brains, while human evolution seems to suggest that a bigger brain is a much better survival tool compared to sharp claws or protective colour? Certainly, other species would have offspring which have slightly larger/smarter brains. Why is that only a few species (humans, dolphins ...) evolved relatively large brains?
The solution that (mostly) works for me is a combination of multiple virtual desktops (I use 9), and a tiling window manager (dwm). I usually don't exceed 2 or 3 windows per virtual desktop and the number of desktops is fixed. I have it wired into my fingers that Super+<n> takes me to desktop 'n', and then, typically I'm on the window I want. If not, it is a constant number of "Super+n" to get me to the window (because I don't exceed 3 windows per desktop).

This works for me because I can remember the "place" where windows are, and it is usually one or two chords away.
Heh.

They'd hand them a twisted pair Ethernet cable (attached to a jack in the wall) and say "Have fun! Get back to us when you're on our intranet."
Phoenix had its first Pecha Kucha night a few days ago. We've had five Ignite Phoenix events.

I presented at Ignite Phoenix IV (watch! http://vimeo.com/5351826). Prior to that I did a Pecha Kucha format talk at a Phoenix Ruby User Group in an attempt to get others to do the same (I failed :( ).

Attending the Phoenix Pecha Kucha event I was struck by the differences between the 6:40/20x20 format and Ignite's 5:00/20x15. The shorter slide duration, and overall shorter length of each talk, really seems to matter.

It's hard to say for sure, since a good part of this is the quality of any given talk. These are tough formats to use, and require careful planning and much practice. In real life not enough people seem to put in the needed effort. (To be fair, these are all volunteers and are earnestly doing their best. )

Still, despite what should be minor differences, the Pecha Kucha talks seemed to drag.

Part of the problem may also have been that the talks were punctuated by speaker transitions and intros. Meanwhile, at Ignite Phoenix, it's become a well-old machine: as soon as one speaker is done, the next is out and slides are rolling within , say, 20 seconds. You end up with much higher information density.

Anyone else here give an Ignite or Pecha Kucha talk? Or try some other interesting format?
Electronic. Minimal Techno. House.
just a small suggestion: May be you can put a small video on the website explaining what bitcrumb does and how does it work.
Good list, I just installed Compass and BBC news apps.

"Car Home" remains my favorite app because it can show the area you are in as a composite satellite image and roads, do voice navigation, voice queries to find specific types of businesses near you, etc.
Boris is a good guy (I know him personally from when I lived in Vancouver), so don't go all TechCrunch Commenter on this.. :)
As I understand it, the focus up 'til now has been correctness and compatibility rather than performance / efficiency. It seems a bit early to jump on them for that (though the speed hit you mention is surprising). That said, I'd expect things to pick up speed once the next-generation compiler Laurent mentions in the blog post is ready (and when the RubySpec needle moves closer to 100).

Regardless, the team has made a ton of progress since the last release. Here's looking forward to the next.
This is a classic example of the design tradeoff that directly pits new users against power users. MRU is a simple, solid solution. Like many powerful tools, it takes some learning, and is then dependable. The alternative suggested here is a very complicated solution that power users will hate because it's unpredictable.

You’ve been using alt-tab to bounce back-and-forth
...
tab. What happens? Because of your habit, you expect it
to go to your web browser, but because the last used
application was your Twitter client, that’s where it
switches.

Experienced users will handle this by repopulating the cycle when they switch. In this case alt+tab, release, alt+tab, alt+tab, release, alt+tab.
We recently revamped our website, where you can find out more about the people that make up the growing Google Ventures team

Just for fun, I counted...

Their site lists 11 partners: 11 of them are male, 0 are female.
They list 4 associates: 1 is male, 3 are female.
They list one assistant: 1 is female.

If it weren't for that oddity (a male associate), I could predict gender based on job title. And this is coming from one of the most progressive companies. What does that say about the rest of us?
> [...] or outrun a cheetah [...]

Outrunning a cheetah is actually pretty easy for a human over all but the shortest distances.
And yet a lot of the interviews I've heard about the crisis indicate a lot of the people dealing in them and rating them did not understand them.

Telling people that they should try harder is unlikely to solve the problem in the future I think.
The world cup is almost here. a great opportunity for app developers
I'm working on an app to make window management as easy as possible: http://windowflow.com

It's about to relaunch with a significantly improved UI and more flexible tiling methods, so check back in a week if you don't like what you see now. Any feedback is appreciated.
How much of the web's inflexibility comes from Javascript and cross-platform JS issues, and how much of it comes from things like "Canvas is only reliable in 40% of browsers" and "HTML5 video only works reliably in Chrome and Safari"?

Because, CLI could address the former (it seems sensible to standardize a bytecode runtime rather than an entire language and its associated libraries), but probably not the latter.
Does using vi to edit my program comply with 3.3.1 ?
I could have used some of that with my son about 16 years ago, he would cry for days on end and it would drive us completely bonkers.

It's so hard to have a child that is obviously in pain and that you can not communicate with other than holding him and trying to somehow comfort him.

It let up after about 4 months and the relief was immense.

He's heavily asthmatic so using medication pretty much all the time there is still a chance he'll grow out of it but that's lessening year by year. He's in the middle of a growth spurt at them moment, in spite of a serious lack of superstition I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Yeah, the difference in representations could be a problem. I think a lot of it could be dealt with (with much difficulty) by the compiler -- for instance, you might be able to use the mantissa bits as a two's-complement int and synthesize proper arithmetic and comparison behavior out of unholy combinations of floating-point operations -- but in general, if someone depends on the bit pattern explicitly (as in compressed data, bloom filter, bit flags, ...), you're going to have a hell of a time getting correctness, much less performance.
Ugh. "buy anything".
Indeed. You're correct. But this does show NP-completeness.

A rather incredible theorem is the Cook-Levin theorem which states that any problem that can be verified in polynomial time can reduced to an instance of sat SAT (in polynomial time).

The practical upshot of this is that to show NP-completeness, you only need to provide a polynomial certificate and reduction to SAT, or some other know NP complete problem.
ECMAscript 4 was supposed to bring these features to Javascript, but it ended up dead due to standards-committee politics:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/ecmascript-edition-4-brendan-spe...

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/10/open...

http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-future-of-ecmascript-3-is-4
It saddens me to see Aza proud of dropping out of "3/4 of the schools he attended" as his title bar proclaims. It's one thing to note that a lot of people drop out of schools to seek their passions, but I never think of the dropping out as being the moment of pride.
OK, how exactly? Web apps now, and presumably in the future, are essentially engines focused on manipulating a DOM structure, which is then rendered (with any luck, correctly) by the browser, right? So unless you're talking about effectively ignoring the DOM and rendering applications solely via use of Canvas or SVG, what is the magic sauce that flavors this <i>new</i> class of web apps?
With summer coming up soon (for those of us in the northern temperate zone), I'm especially looking forward to trying the iPad out as a 'vacation computer'.
I do that too, it's pretty great. I'm on Windows so I use Dexpot, which is pretty okay.
Sorry I didn't read the thread correctly and mistook the placement of your reply.

However yes my statement was very much the same, however questionable comparisons to the console market may be.
Hah, the only positive piece I heard about Bootup Labs (who recently kicked out a bunch of their startups) was that this Boris guy was working with them. I guess they don't even have that now... I feel sorry for them...
I'm still waiting for the MacRuby/GCD Rack-compatible webserver they mentioned awhile ago, supposedly called "ControlTower".
Clustrix: Yet another scalable SQL database (YC 2006)
I think that [a well designed bytecode + VM modification (current JS VMs aren't really designed to run from bytecode) + implementing global cache] is more work than [creating a mapping / compiler from JS to CIL + creating a stripped down profile]. The second option does not require big redesigns, room for incompatibilities, etc. JScript.NET might have some compatibility problems, because it started before the proper DLR - a new, clean mapping would be better. Also a new mapping independent from MS would be preferable.

I don't see the problem with legacy baggage though - you don't have to ship all classes. Stripped profiles such as Compact Framework for handhelds have been already created - there's nothing stopping people from creating a new one for the web. The DLL point is a bit moot - it's just a wrapper, it works. If it's too much overhead, you can start sharing the CIL itself instead (the content is standardised afair).

You win a common execution environment. You proposed a common bytecode, but there are only so many ways in which you can implement the runtime environment in that case - each opcode has to be precisely defined. Even if each browser implemented their own, it would most likely be a complete engine redesign with very limited current code reuse. They'd have to either create everything from scratch, or reuse (for example) the DLR and CLI and implement the JS -> DLR compiler on top of them. So that's exactly what you win - not doing everything from scratch.
Gates: U.S. Has Best System for Entrepreneurs
I think what he is saying is that your views are very black and white, and it's just not that simple. Maybe my definition of fat is different than yours, after working at a tech company for 5 years, but when I think fat I think 300lbs+, not 200lbs with a beer gut that can be jogged off in a few weeks. Some of these people have trouble walking to their cars without some kind of assistance, what is your solution for them? But hey, way to generalize a whole lot of people. Fat is fat, right?
I guess I'd consider myself an "experienced alt-tab user", and I have this frustration on a regular basis. Yes, as you say, I can manually reorder the apps, but it annoys me to have to do so.
Imagine if WalMart required vegetable growers to use WalMart brand fertilizer if they wanted their vegetables sold at WalMart. That seems a bit more like the current situation with Apple. It's not at all apparent that there was a quality issue with apps not programmed in Objective-C, and it's certainly not obvious to me (as an ex-Apple employee, Objective-C-coding, iPhone and iPad developer) that Apple would be able to prove in court that the license agreement is about quality rather than competitive interests.
I'm going to publish a Ruby shootout on Mac very soon.
I agree: very stress reducing. My wife and I have 21 sq ft of containers on the deck right outside of our kitchen and close to where I work at home. Getting up frequently to "tend" our mini-garden is great. Also, we eat a bit of our own fresh produce almost every day. I like to grow Thai basil, regular basil, lots of onions of all types, hot peppers, brocoli, brussel sprouts, lettuce, and tomatoes. It is important to plant different types of produce at the correct time of year.

I like earth boxes: water goes in the bottom, roots get watered, minimizes evaporation so they are very water efficient.
"Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
...
We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?"

I'm a little confused here. Is he saying they're blameless, but they're going to fuck us anyway? Or is he saying they're not blameless and the fucking will continue uninterrupted?
i don't know, but if your web publishing software is so braindead it can't let you type "<FILE>" and "i < 10", it's time to switch to something else.
I do the same, only instead of dwm, I use musca. And I have 11 virtual desktops assigned to Super+<1 through 0, and the key left of 1>. I also always use the same virtual desktops for certain tasks, so finding windows is easy: firefox? its in the web browsing desktops: 7 and 8! Pidgin? Thats desktop 9, etc etc.

Finally, switching between windows within a single desktop is a simple matter of changing focus in a direction by using Super+<cursor keys> (I can resize and swap by using Super+Shift+<cursor keys> and Super+Alt+<cursor keys>).

I can also cycle through windows in one frame (Super+c), but its not often I have more than one window in a frame (since I normally have either one fullscreen window in a desktop or i have two to four windows tiled), but when I do, its normally only one, so cycling is more of a "toggle between windows" for me.

Super, being the "windows key", is a great key to use for window management. Windows key is for windows management is easy to explain to people ;-)
Or, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and Facebook users will finally realize that their use of Facebook comes at a cost. Namely, sketchy ads that follow you around the internet.

There's going to be an upper bound on how much Facebook can push the envelope on privacy. Eventually, they're going to hit the point where the users, the publishers, or even the government will not allow them to go any further.

Facebook's big gamble is that this upper bound is high enough to allow them to make money off of exposing personal information to third parties. It remains to be seen if this is true, and if it is, if it's sustainable.

All it takes is one rogue app developer to harvest some personal information and use it to harm someone to scare people. If the mindset of the public shifts such that people start to back away from posting or publishing personal information, Facebook loses.

It's a precarious situation for Facebook, really. Their success hinges upon people being comfortable with losing their privacy. Google has a much better revenue model since it is not tied to there being a conflict of interest between them and their users.
You might be thinking of Boris Wertz, who joined Bootup's board around when their the cohort downsizing story hit last month. Boris Mann's presence was definitely a positive for Bootup, but not the only one.
The comparisons seem especially apt.

Microsoft: Nobody can develop first-class applications for the platform without licensing the (extremely expensive) X360 XDK, which includes an approved compiler toolchain.

Apple: Anyone running OSX can develop first-class applications for the platform using Xcode for a (very cheap) developer fee.

XNA is a red herring. It's (to use MSFT's term) a hobbyist platform.
Open Graph protocol
what kind of macbook do you have? and what kind of distro do you run on it?
Obviously the solution is to not get into that state in the first place. But granted, easier said than done for some people.

I'm talking about fat - able to exercise if you try. Not talking about morbidly obese.
I'm suggesting that the explanation "you don't see fat joggers because fat people don't jog" is as or more likely than the explanation "you don't see fat joggers because anyone who takes up jogging becomes thin so quickly that nobody sees them during the time when they are fat and jogging".

If fat people took up jogging and became thin, you would see fat joggers.
I didn't say otherwise, and did explain why reducing 3-SAT to this proved NP-completeness.
So the files there contain everything I need to make a working WebOS build?
if the content of your presentation is boring, get new content.
Sounds like a return to the AOL model of accessing the internet through a portal.

Some part of me likes the idea of a portal by which I access information, but when I stop and think about it, in my mind that portal is the browswer and the data is the raw web. I don't like the idea of a site with personal information directing my use. But I'm atypical: I don't do social stuff, and I tend to use mail clients to download my mail through imap rather than webmail.
No, because you would manually shuffle common pairs of applications to be next to each other.
Canada once again deemed root of all IP evil
I haven't see this before: "Web 2.0" business for sale on a online auction
How To Communicate with your Investors
I hadn't heard of Dexpot - thanks for mentioning it. I've been looking for some decent tools for Windows and have been unsatisfied with others so far. I'll try Despot for a while and see how I like it.

First impressions are good, though (at least out of the box) the fullscreen preview doesn't play nicely with multiple monitors :-(
The plan I believe for Netbook edition is to incorporate these icons into the global menu.
Will do so soon, after we buy our first tuxedos. btw - I am the other half of BitCrumb.
Agreed, great work embed.ly; it's a pity there's no way of even knowing they have a blog if you navigate to http://embed.ly/ though. Hence, this detailed blog post is basically undiscoverable unless you already knew it existed.
I'll second that. He's community-minded and a good open source citizen.
Then LLVM is as viable an option as JVM and CLI. Even better, it's open-source and not committee or corporation-driven. And from the political point of view, once LLVM finds its way into Safari (very good chance) then Firefox and/or Chrome, consider the problem solved. I think this idea is brewing somewhere right now, it's too obvious.
Excellent, thank you very much.
Knowledge of, but as a statistics geek, I see a lot of people (like this guy) throw around the term "hidden Markov model" when they don't know what "hidden" means in context. In this context, an ordinary Markov model would be more appropriate.

A hidden Markov model denotes the existence of some dynamic parameter that the computer cannot directly observe, such as the user's current mood. Such a model would take into account transitions between "happy" and "angry" in addition to transitions between "Firefox" and "TextMate". These additional hidden variables are very useful in a wide variety of circumstances, but in this situation I suspect it would cause a combinatorial explosion of state space with little measurable benefit to the user.
Thank you, Qz. I really regret that final line. It was too blunt, absolute and negatively emotive. I'd have edited it later had it not been extensively quoted by the time I woke up next day. Your expansion here gets to the heart of what I was hoping to say, and is fantastic.
Perl 6 written in Perl
The Opera Mobile emulator
I agree. Maybe what journalists really mean is that they can't understand them after spending the five minutes they allocate to understanding every topic.

These instruments were created to shift risk to those most naive about the housing bubble collapse.

Those who saw it coming knew there was great profit in getting others to take on that risk. Just pay them enough and they'll take it on.

Congress can't acknowledge its own role in creating the bubble so they're trying to regulate how people took advantage of it.

But its not the market's exploitation of our government's stupid actions that need to be fixed. They will always find a way. Our government needs to stop being stupid.
BlackBerry Tablet Is Real
or Legend of the Red Dragon :)