skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will take a guess:

One central reason why JavaScript can lag a page is that an infinite loop can occur in any function. Javascript is single-threaded, so this won't just slow down your computer; it can potentially crash your browser. Nothing else is allowed to happen until this function exits; if the function never exits, then the page is stopped and in some cases the whole browser process is stopped.

We could instead schedule these loops. That means that we'll check for browser events first before we go to the next thing in the loop. Here's some code which does this, implementing a simple for-loop structure:

function loop(start, end, fn) {
if (start < end) {
setTimeout(function () {
fn(start);
loop(start + 1, end, fn);
}, 0);
}
}
loop(0, 1000, function (i) {
// do some complicated calculation.
});

Is this what Pot.js does? Well, it implements a deferred "forEach" function, but if that's the goal, then that is not very clear -- especially because the main provided example (getting JSON) is already an asynchronous task in most implementations.

If that is the goal of Pot.js, then the library is an example of premature optimization and probably should not be used in new projects until it's determined that some loop is actually slowing down the page somehow. There are many reasons for this, but the simplest is that scheduling a function tends to kill a stack trace, and stack traces are more useful.

Unfortunately, the real use case probably isn't covered. The real case where I accidentally crash Firefox sometimes comes when I'm developing recursive functions. Consider this implementation of the Fibonacci numbers:

function fibs(n) {
return n <= 1 ? n : fibs(n) + fibs(n - 1);
}

Do you see the bug? It calls fibs(n) when it evaluates fibs(n), and goes into an infinite loop -- instead it should call fibs(n - 2). It's the sort of mistake that can crash Firefox if accidentally coded in Firebug.

Here is how the program would need to be structured if I wanted a magic protect() function to protect myself from Firebug crashes. Notice that everything needs to be made very ugly by wrapping it in callbacks:

var fibs = protect(function (n, callback) {
n <= 1 ? callback(n) : fibs(n - 1, function (u) {
fibs(n, function (v) {
callback(u + v);
});
});
});

Now, this function protect() can schedule the functions and while this will loop to infinity, it won't crash Firefox and I can copy important data to a text document before closing the tab.

Unfortunately, the above is so ugly that I will probably never be willing to write it again. So I also don't see the point here.
Say 100,000 people ordering a book makes $1,000,000 for Amazon.

Say if those 100,000 people came through an affiliate link, they only make $900,000.

If you're Amazon's affiliate manager, indeed your first thought is, "Wow, Pinterest is great! Look at all these sales"

But your second thought is, "Wow, if I just drop Pinterest from my program, I'll make an extra $100,000." In its current state, Pinterest will not do anything to stop these sales from being generated, so the merchants are just throwing away money.

The real problem here is that Pinterest doesn't deserve the commission, Pinterest's users do.
Here's the memo in which Boisjoly warns of a potential "catastrophe of the highest order - loss of human life."

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/result-would-be-catastr...
This argument seems like it follows a fallacy. A chat room is simple. Threads are simple. Therefore combining them must be simple too!
Ronald Reagan was supposed to give a state of the union address a couple days after the launch. He wanted to use the success of the space program as part of that speech. While there was no direct order, it's clear that NASA management felt significant political pressure to push the launch forward or risk reduced funding from congress. It's clear they screwed up, just wanted to add some context to the climate when they made these decisions.
Star Trek as a purely symbolic artifact of past times
Yes, nothing has changed. Lessons were not learned. And this was known before the Columbia disaster, in fact not long after the commission on the Challenger. It bears striking resemblances to the financial crisis.
How To Change Windows XP Home to Windows XP Pro
For a little dollop of recursivity in your morning coffee, here's the bit where the CoffeeScript compiler uses these extended regular expressions to lex, among other things, extended regular expressions...

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/blob/master/src/l...
I just can't read. Oops.
Yes - I believe a loss of life is acceptable and inevitable. The state of the art is currently the bloated NASA system. My hope is that a leaner, private approach will be more effective and safer. I'm not sure I'm willing to make a prediction on whether that will be true or not. For one thing, NASA doesn't have the problem of profit to be concerned about.
Facebook, the Killer
Camera Olympus SP-620UZ and SP-720UZ New Ultrazoom | GadgetMAG
The engineers didn't do the best job of communicating the certainty of the problem, the magnitude of the problem, etc.

That's a recurring theme when management screws up badly.

Intellectual honesty applied to this particular situation:

1. The management should know that the engineers are more profound in the topic than they are.

2. The management should know that lives are at stake.

3. The management should notice that the engineers take their time and argue until late at night, mentioning "death", "explosion"

4. The management should know that communication skills may vary.

But management still did not act upon it, because they did not know their limits. That's their fault, nobody else's.

I'm glad you take your responsibility seriously.
I'm a software engineer at Knewton who worked with Kenny on this project.

We're not using Neo4j because of other unrelated constraints that have led us to write our own graph data store. Kenny's work implemented the "rule paralleling queries" approach you mention.

I'm not sure about Prolog, but Java's Antlr library was really easy to use. Writing the parser+lexer infrastructure only took a few days. It wasn't quite as clean as using Antlr in a language like SML, but for implementing a parser in Java it was pretty great.
> You can have too much pizza...

But you can't have the best pizza in the world without potentially spending thousands of dollars to get yourself to Naples.

That's an extreme example, but I assume those economists mean that almost any category of good can reach arbitrary levels of consumption. If I had several billion dollars, my pizza acquisition budget might literally be 1000x what it is now.
What are we to gather from this? That assholes on the Internet are also assholes in real life?

"Confronting" people like this does little to change their behavior. At best, it publicizes their identities, and causes some minor level of disgrace, but why would that matter to them?
Hmm, this is actually an entertaining idea.

I'd like to see a Chris Hansen style confrontation, where they track down trolls, confront them with what they've written, and then see how they justify or apologize their way out of the situation.
Google's personalized search returns overly personal results
Yeah, you're right. Apple isn't only killing Flash because it is good for the society. They're doing it because the user experience would suffer. That isn't the case with video codecs unfortunately, but it would have been great if Apple did embrace WebM, but I don't see that happening in a near future.
And how would the company have performed if they hired a less expensive CEO?

Fantanomics.
When you free() a memory region, it's not returned to the OS. It's only made available for later mallocs.

When malloc returns memory previously freed by the process, it effectively returns uninitialized memory, without leaking any information that's not already known to the calling process.
i don't know how you could possibly say Steve Ballmer is underpaid for his performance.
President Obama shoots marshmallow at White House Science Fair
I think it is a good book. I agree it is really bad written, but also provides a different perspective over a few important areas, like owning(second) houses being liabilities instead of assets for most people, and them not realizing that.
Can definitely get behind those page-speed comments at the end. Was on a shopping website the other day (large, national site too) and was increasingly frustrated by the 5 second page load. It sounds picky but when you're browsing around, opening up tonnes of tabs, trying to compare products, etc - it really makes you consider going elsewhere. In the end, I probably didn't buy as much as I would have it had been a much faster site.
Not only that but there's this subtext that's screaming out "Startups are cool, right? Startups are cool, right? This is worth it, right? I'm cool because I'm part of a startup, right? If I speak condescendingly in blog posts itll seem like I'm successful and awesome, right?". I don't know this guy so I shouldn't pass judgement. I'm just saying that's how it comes off. I'm sure he's a nice guy otherwise.
I think that it really only applies in the games space. The basic features of most utility apps is pretty easily defined by the problem they're attempting to solve. The basic functionality of all Twitter apps, for example, are pretty much only what the Twitter API allows. They can do more than that(historical caching, thread aggregation, etc), but the basic functionality is to read your stream and post tweets.
I find it really dumb, considering these are tech companies. Yes the bandwidth is higher in person but it's a professional arrangement, not a marriage. It's just 19th century thinking honestly.

I think sooner than later companies who learn to accept distributed teams will have an edge over those which don't.

You just need to trust your employees more and have an internet connection.
A better "industry best practice" for comparing address books
Lesson From Norway: More Years in School = Higher IQ
How Invite Media’s Founder is Making Sure Success “Wasn’t a Fluke”
Here is a cool trick to learn it:

1) learn the key's by heard for each row from left to right and vice versa until u make no more mistakes.

2) buy an old keyboard and cover the keys with color pads, for each finger_to_key match a different color

3) color your fingernails accordingly.

4) do your typing but now only with fingers of matching colors.

5) Enjoy the fun game

6) Get faster and faster

P.S.: I won the competition of being the winner learning touch typing fastest when I was a kid.
The price was .......a new typewriter :-)
Megaupload was taken down and people are leaving DDL serves in droves. Usenet is a relatively safe, very fast, and a service thats been around for years.
What you're not seeing is that pretty much everything you work on has some risk of failure, and much of it could be catastrophic. Sorting through all of that is not easy. Yes, in this case, there were systemic and human failures.

It just goes to show you that even when everyone is paying attention, things still go wrong. Some people heard him and made the call that it was still safe. They were wrong. That, unfortunately, is the state of the art today (or it was back in the 80's). The alternative is to stay on the ground.

But yes, shit does happen, and nobody climbing abord the orbiter is under any illusion that it is a safe thing to do.
I've never hired an employee, but I'd imagine that they're looking for someone to be a member of the team so to speak.

Contract work is when you need a certain task or objective done. But being a team member may involve driving new ideas, working with others, etc. That sort of stuff requires a lot of communication that can't be done by Skype or email.
I watched this last night. On the whole it was a pretty stupid programme with equally stupid people not knowing how to report and block people. Why not just ignore sites like littlegossip, and why have a formspring account.

"I love that the whole thing is narrated like they're tracking down an animal in nature. I loved the end "So, there you go, an internet troll. That's what they look like." Yep, that's what they look like." - this did make me giggle though.
Why scammy? It's pretty common sense that these books do not offer any recipes for wealth creation, but they do offer something very important: the correct mindset for wealth creation. That is something that many many people lack and need.

Finally, if you find it useless, why do you assume that everybody else does so as well?
Too late:
http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-becom...
XAMthone plus
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I would guess less "CDs" and more "consuming web content" :-) But other than that I agree. Moreover, partially-autonomous cars will be a stepping stone to adapt people's culture to accept fully autonomous cars easier. Just as we have "park assist" today, that will evolve into more driving assistance before autonomy.
I just read "The Challenger Launch Decision" (after someone here recommended it) and it has a more nuanced view of what went wrong. While there was a long history of concern about the O-rings, there was also a history of getting conflicting data, of implementing "fixes" that appeared to work, only to come back later. Even the engineers themselves, while expressing concern like the memo mentioned in the article, they did not, until the launch decision conference the night before, voice anything as strong as "stop the launch".

During reading the book, I was struck by two things: one was the "slippery slope" introduced by first seeing something and arguing it was not a launch risk. With the decision making system in place, that meant it was very difficult to then, when another datum came in, to say that the two data together implied something was wrong, because they had already argued that the first datum was not a risk. This is of course a well-known phenomenon, but it didn't seem like the system was well-equipped to deal with sparse and sometimes contradictory data.

The second was the feeling that what was happening was that the engineers were observing a random process and post-rationalizing cause and effect. (I had just read "Fooled by Randomness", which may have contributed to this.) Every piece of information was made to fit into some model, but it seemed like no one was considering that maybe what they were seeing was just inherent randomness. With that view, the progressively bad outcomes that happened before indicated that what was observed was a poorly-characterized random process with a fat tail. At some point, one rationalization was that they had a "safety factor of 4 left", but if you have indications of a fat-tailed process, that's not much to bank on.
For growth: it's choices that matter, not sales
Facebook, the killer
Has facebook experimented with converting links into aff links when possible? How much would that be worth...
What do you think of the Phantom Protocol? It's very focused on the anonymity part, but also aims to be "indestructible":

http://code.google.com/p/phantom/
An indian nigger programmer doesn't believe one man can write a compiler. An indian nigger reinvents Unix. An indian nigger thinks like an ape--immitate.

They are arrogant and stupid and I've had to put up with their stupid heathen shit.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\QUIX.TXT

fear, not knowing what she was saying, exclaimed, "Do
not kill me, senor, for I can tell you things more important than any you
can imagine."

"Tell me then at once or thou diest," said Anselmo.

"It would be impossible for me now," said Leonela, "I am so agitated:
leave me till to-morrow, and then you shall hear from me what will fill
you with astonishment; but rest assured that he who leaped through the
window is a young man of this city, who has given me his promise to
become my husband."
Interesting stuff but light on details. Anyone work in this field who can provide insight as to how the data is initially encoded in the DNA?
I had a similar problem. I know you said that this isn't an AJAX issue, but have you tried using data-ajax="false" in your <a> tags? jQuery mobile uses AJAX for page loads, even on local pages, in order to implement transition effects.

http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0.1/docs/pages/page-links.ht...
Not enough to claim poor usability (which is btw, have nothing to do with)
I suppose we have different definitions of "scammy". RDPD and the 4-hour series both package up common-sense recommendations in a way that resonates with a lot of people. There might not be a whole lot of substance there, but I don't think that's the point. The people who buy (and enjoy) those books, are the ones who just want to find someone else saying what they're thinking. It's a bit of extra motivation towards their goal.

There's not a whole lot of value there beyond confirmation of common-sense ideas, but I don't think that's a scam.
Great innovation from @seatwavelabs again.
Need to Grow Your Business? Enter the Fab.com Economy
In Piracy Debate, Trying to Decide if Sky is Falling
But even there, no one actually reads those permissions lists, and apps routinely ask for far more than they need.

Lots of people do read those permission lists, and they are one of the most commonly referenced complaints in app reviews. A firestorm arose when an Angry Birds update inexplicably added the ability to send SMS'.

Further it focuses a spotlight when an app does request a permission that seems out of place. Ideally when Google evaluates app for their "staff's picks" (the "optional curation") they consider threat surface area.
Nokia 803 revealed: 4-inch AMOLED, Symbian Belle, biggest camera sensor ever
"what you can't afford your business can"

Any more details on what this one means?
Or it could be the rise of augmented reality car games where you run over virtual pedestrians while driving.
It seems like goroutines in Go don't do as much asynchronous stuff as Haskell's I/O manager and green threads do. Looking at Go sources, there is some async stuff w/epoll in the net library with sockets, but file.Read is indeed just a plain syscall.

It makes me wonder, what happens to a goroutine when a system call blocks. Go is supposed to mux many goroutines to a smaller number of OS threads, but what happens when one of those threads has been blocked in a system call?

There are plenty of vague descriptions on how goroutines work but none of the ones I found quickly explained what happens on a blocking system call that allows another goroutine to run, apart from hand-waving about "another goroutine running".
If i understood this correctly, then perhaps Convore does this exactly?
https://convore.com/

But it's now pretty much defunct, due to scaling issues, and the founders concentrating on Grove.io it seems.
The Rise of the Sharing Economy
Very cool article. I have to admit I'm a little frightened of the bulk and complexity of the RPython translation pipeline. I'm not happy about the prospect of waiting an hour to learn my code runs afoul of poorly documented type inference logic. Perhaps when PyPy stabilizes the team can trim back some of the abandoned paths and speed up translate.py?
I learned in high school on electric typewriters in '90 or '91. It was an elective then, but I certainly hope it would be a requirement today Still the only skill from high school that use every single day.

I was someone who had already done a lot of fiddling on the computer at that point so even as a high-school student I had a lot of self-trained semi-fast typing skills that I had to unlearn. I found the first month of the class really frustrating as a result, but eventually the new skills kicked in and I found myself typing much faster than I did before.

Touch-typing is a skill that involves muscle memory, and as such there's no real short cut to it and you'll find the process annoying and not engaging to your higher intellect. But stick with it. It's incredibly useful, I promise.
The decision makers have a very, very strong incentive to keep things going. And the PR circus surrounding the teachers made it worse in the Challenger case. Meanwhile, everyone else has a strong incentive to shut the hell up.

Besides, saying the engineers didn't "try hard enough" is essentially claiming the engineers were in charge. They were not. Managers are paid to manage their department, not just please the higher ups. When a claim is made that failure to address a problem will result in catastrophe and loss of life... really what more needs to be said, or drawn, to make the point? If you're not going to trust your own experts, why have them at all?
Can anyone help review our redesign? thoughts?
voike.com
we have changed our design in order to get better conversion rates...
thanks
jj
The engineering team had approximately 3 hours notice prior to a teleconference to make a presentation. The telecon occurred the evening before launch, with a midnight deadline for the go / nogo decision to be made.

Due to the short timescale to build their presentation, they re-used info from existing presentations. Unfortunately, the same info had previously been used to demonstrate why their o-rings were safe. The NASA people basically said, 'last time you showed me this graph it meant things were safe, this time it means things are dangerous. What gives?'

The decision makers were looking for excuses to move forward, and that gave them an excuse to ignore the warnings.
The guy/gal was pretty clearly doing the best he/she could

Awww... The little guy was doing his best. Oh, wait. You're not talking about a puppy? but the customer-facing front of a company?
The Arizona Wave
I doubt "we" are meant to learn anything form it. But "they" could probably learn a lot.
I hadn't thought of that. Good idea!

Would you say that the following is an improvement?

http://frostchat.com/images/contact.png
Thanks for your perspective.

> The system failed. People failed. But we knew this would happen, and we did it anyway because it's the price of exploring the frontiers. ... you might say the bloated organization and government involvement makes this sort of thing inevitable. But I bet the small privateers exploring manned space flight will run into their own challenges.

I bet they will do better, and go farther. They will know a disaster like that will likely ruin their company, so they will make damn sure that the communication process between managers and engineers doesn't break down, and that the process complexity is kept in check.

You're describing (and excusing) a bloated and dysfunctional system that sprang up around the need to manage the complexity of the space shuttle. People tried to fix the organization after Challenger, but the fact that Linda Ham stopped the request for imagery as described by CAIB shows that they failed or it reverted. And as your attitude shows, there is a bit of a fatalist perspective ("bloated organization and government involvement"). In the long term, it has to be fixed, or stuff will keep blowing up.
If companies could get shamed into doing anything, the world would be a different place. But to a company there is no such thing as shame, there is only the fear that public reaction will negatively impact their bottom line.
If that's the case then I am happy about it. There's been a big push lately about editors and it swayed me to finally use VIM... and I love it! I am a lot more productive since the change. I appreciate all the content people are putting out there for VIM. I learn something new every day.
I can't imagine a 13 year old defending his racist rants behind a veil of tears being particularly entertaining. The fact that this particular guy happened to be an adult is probably a bit of an enigma within the world of trolls.