skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is true in so far as if you run benchmarks on the Nexus 1, the Nexus S, and the Galaxy Nexus, the Sun Spider and V8 benchmarks roughly double between each device. Some of that is improvement in V8, and some of that is faster ARM CPU.

I don't think anyone is claiming JS will reach native performance, or that you're going to write triple-A title games like Battlefield 3 in it. The question becomes, when is it good enough?

At a certain threshold, JS performance will be good enough for a good swath of apps and games on mobile that the deployment benefits and cross-platform nature will outweigh the downsides for many developers.

Just look at JS on the desktop. Performance has gotten good enough that for the vast majority of cases, people do a good chunk of their work within the Web. There's no need to download native apps for reading news paper sites, or social networks, or even light productivity work on your desktop.

In my opinion, too many apps are being written in native code for mobile that don't really deserve to be, it's a temporary transient situation for a few years.

IOS basically is a return the Microsoft era with native apps for everything, and I think, like with Microsoft, the Web will start to turn around in the future and start to steal back marketshare from native apps.
Really? Are you also angry about SIRC's guide to British pubs? http://www.sirc.org/publik/pub.html The abstract of this lolcats paper says The research revealed that the LOLCat audience is comprised of three separate groups that interact with and appreciate LOLCats for different reasons. The study also confirmed that LOLCats are operating as a genre, and that the appropriate execution of that genre is central to their enjoyment. That's not obvious stuff, and it looks like some real research was done.
"Facebook uses it, it can't be all bad!" is a stupid argument. Because the rest of us have to deal with PHP's not-Facebooks, whose flaws are made more frustrating because of shit tooling and the systematic encouragement of shit practices in the writing of code.
In Microsoft there's an internal tool called bugger. I think sizeable number of people are well aware of the multiple meanings.

Actually, it's a rare triple entendre - the anal sex reference, the "computer bug" official reference and the "someone bothersome" reference.
Ask HN: Password management for small groups
What's a secure and convenient way to store several dozen passwords in a way accessible to small distributed team?

We've tried a private Basecamp project, Google Docs, and individually we each use 1Password or LastPass.

We have 40+ clients, each with 5-6 passwords each.

I've see apps like Passpack but was curious how others handle this challenge.
Yes. This is where having a spouse with fantastic benefits comes in handy.
Although it is commonly taught in undergrad classes as "stating that Turing machines and lambda calculus are equivalent" (which to be clear, it does), the premise of the Church-Turing Thesis is that all computable functions can be computed with Turing machines/lambda calculus.

The Church-Turing Thesis is unproven, but these days almost universally beleived to be true. Wikkpedia has a fairly decent coverage of all this stuff, if anyone is new to this topic.
JFTR python also has a function call to import modules http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#__import__
This looks pretty real. Who would write 100 pages as a joke?
Company was doing well and had a good idea. Product worked great, we did our job. The problem is, management didn't.

I left after all the other engineers did.
OWC announces a 960gb SSD in a 2.5" form factor
>How the fuck do people tolerate Phoronix?

I use Adblock Plus, and I never experience any ads or popovers on Phoronix.com.
Ask HN: How do I advertise to Mac users?
My company has a MacOS App Store app coming out (successor to http://qbix.com/calendar), and we would like to be able to buy ads for it.

Naturally, I thought Google adwords would be able target by OS based on the user agent string, but somehow, in 2012, this seems not to be the case. There's even a video of an expert on google befuddled :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4ZSQ7ej-mw

And putting the words "mac" or something similar into a pay-per-click ad will make its clickthrough rate really small and therefore raise its price by 10-50x times (I read about this). So that's not an option.

Can anyone suggest any options for advertising Mac App Store applications in a targeted way?

And also, how come there isn't anything out there to target operating systems (to sell desktop apps) ... I mean it's 2012. Isn't there a need for this?
I feel like that would be counterproductive- circling the (not bad) downtown with miles of undevelop-able land.
Ask HN: Career Survey
I'm studying CS and am doing some research on the industry for one of my classes.

I figure this could be useful for most students and other people interested in the industry so I made the results public.

Also let me know if there are any other questions that you'd like me to add.

Link to the survey: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE5TTjJhcDhqZ1pGYmxsT1pLTkhwT2c6MQ

Results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajq3zr0vAK6jdE5TTjJhcDhqZ1pGYmxsT1pLTkhwT2c#gid=0

Thanks
> Microsoft has mandated(as much as they can mandate to OEMs without violating antitrust!)

And similarly, everyone can install the browser of their choice on Windows. But it was still an antitrust violation, because it was, in effect, leveraging a monopoly in one market (Operating Systems) to produce gains in another (Browsers). This is along the same lines, except it is using a monopoly in the Operating Systems market to farther same monopoly.

> picking on a platform with 0% marketshare compared to a platform which does the same thing with ~80% marketshare and >90% profit share.

There's a huge difference here; Apple makes both the software and the hardware. Microsoft makes software and forces hardware makers to comply. And no one would even care about that requirement, if it weren't for their desktop OS monopoly. Again, leveraging monopoly in one market to farther gains (limit competition) in another.

It's not the 0% marketshare I care about. It's the monopoly abuse.

And I don't think anyone has a reasonable legal complaint against Xbox360 not running Linux even if it were 90% of the console market. Apple sells (Hardware+Software) they make themselves. Xbox360 is (Hardware+Software) Microsoft makes themselves. This is NOT the situation in the PC or non-apple phone or non-apple tablet market.

> OEMs are willing to add signing keys of other players, but no one is interested in starting or running an operation that can sign F/OSS kernels with their key(after checking if that it's not malware).

Microsoft charging $100 for certifying something is not malware is a joke. As was mentioned earlier in this thread, it is much more likely that they are after pirate OEM Win7 activations.

If I was a malware distributor, I would make sure that I submit - directly and indirectly - hundreds of bootloaders and kernels, many of them exploitable through buffer overflows or similar tactics.

I've been burned too many times with hardware that supposedly worked but turned out to only work well under windows (With bad ACPI kernel tables, and other such stuff), to trust the theory that everything will work out well.

The only way to fight this is legally.

> Perhaps your few K$ might be better spent on such a nonprofit organization or division of the Linux foundation instead of throwing it at lawyers? Just my thoughts.

I don't think so. EFF and ACLU, perhaps.

edit: added note about xbox360
Clickable Links

Link to the survey: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE5TTjJ...

Results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajq3zr0vAK6jdE5...
FCC re-evaluation cell phone safety
Things I Love About Go
Steam engines generally have terrible efficiency, at least at small scale. At large scale they do well (lots of power plants are basically steam engines), but smaller scale means higher output temperature, less equipment to capture energy, etc. Wikipedia says that an engine that exhausts the used steam to the atmosphere will be 1-10% efficient, as compared with ~25% for a normal gasoline engine and 40-50% for electrical generation engines.
Apple Photo Booth does something similar (although I don't think with moustaches.) While trying to search for that, I found another iOS app that can do this with 250 facial features including a moustache (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ace-freakyface-cartoon-mask/i...)
This is obviously very troubling for Facebook, considering that Sponsored Stories appear to be their main effort to monetize mobile.

It's especially troubling because this is yet another breach of privacy on their part. People liking pages or apps don't expect to be spokespeople for these companies, so showing my name next to an advertisement is disingenuous. It's made even worse that this is opt-out, and my name is displayed on sites other than Facebook[1].

There is going to be hundreds of millions of people who will never even know that they're recommending products to people, and that's bad.

1. http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/22/3110645/facebook-ads-on-zy...
> Does anyone know if namespace packages actually work?

They used to work somewhat. I had flaskext.* registered as a namespace package but unfortunately it conflicts with pip which is why new Flask extensions name their package `flask_bar` instead of `flaskext.bar`. The exact problem is that setuptools uses pth magic to put libraries into a namespace package which conflicts with pip's idea of installing packages flat into site-packages.
Join the Pirate Party...I did today. Seriously.
Show HN: Same-origin policy? What same-origin policy?
Holy guacamole, there's a connection of this monster to Coors beer.
it has some rough edges, sometimes when I try to build the docs for one it has a hard time importing both packages until I kick it a few times, but they work. I'm doing it for these two modules:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dogpile.core/
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dogpile.cache/

edit: also they work fine with pip so not sure what armin's issue here is.
2) I only have a year worth of safety net at best and I'm completely paranoid about being able to find a job if the start-up wouldn't pan out.

6) Again, I only have a year's worth of safety net. If I start putting that into capital, we're probably down to six months.

8) Fiancée needs ten of thousands of dollars in medical work. There's no way I'd get insurance that would cover all of it.

-1) I don't have too many ideas. I have the opposite problem. I have too few ideas and the ideas I do have are either bad or have already been implemented better by someone else.
Is it not worth studying such a pervasive aspect of our culture, especially if it says something novel about ourselves?

I'm also quite interested in the rise of Rage Comics as a new medium and what it might evolve into. Certainly people love telling and listening to short stories, but today's tools are quite crude, yet still addictive (much like very early video games). I'd love to see the successor to Rage Comics 10 years from now.
Good luck! I really liked post from you from last year: http://ope.nu/p/40
The transcript for the focus meetings is hilarious...

MODERATOR: So the Lolspeak made sense to you?

JT: The Lolspeak made sense to me, and I found um, the Lolspeak translator, and I started sending all
my emails in Lolspeak—

RK: That exists? I’m learning so much now!

MODERATOR: Well AB, the Cheez Town Cryer is almost all in Lolspeak, and—

AB: Uh, the Cween speaks perfect Lolspeak

RK: Hee heee!

Also, make sure to look at the focus group content full of Lolcats.
A tiny redesign of Basecamp's homepage from 37signals with Bootstrap Design
I really wish Blizzard offered up the same sort of analysis of WoW and eventually Diablo. WoW must be a treasure trove of data for an economist and Blizzard has had to work very hard to control things like inflation.
related - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4146876 - links to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9348662/Faceb...
Something every sales manager should be aware of: Forecast Creep
I don't see exactly how this is a violation of privacy, since the same friends that see your advertisements can go to your About page and get that same information from your list of likes.
No. Solve puzzles. When you run it, it checks each number to see if it matches the expected result shown in the top-right.
Great, stressful read.
I hate articles like these for the sole reason that they go into a laundry list of things to do or avoid. A few examples of blogs doing things the right way would go a long way in educating us, instead of preaching.
While I think that the rise of internet subculture is very interesting from a sociological point of view, I doubt the phenomena is researched enough to warrant a study as narrow and specific as this.
When is the right time to raise: on dreams or with data?
So instead of creating a vector format that can be safely used and manipulated from a containing environment (like any other "dumb" image format), they wanted to go make a whole new rich document system? Sigh.
We're currently running most of our stuff from a Mac Mini we own (about US$1500) that's co-located with macminicolo.com in Las Vegas (about US$30/mo). It's mostly a static sight right now, though we'll be setting up an online store to do direct e-book sales in a few weeks. We will also get a second Mac Mini sometime soon to use as a staging/emergency replacement server.

We're selling e-books to a niche market (check out www.photoshopdimensions.com) so we're not worried about runaway traffic growth, though of course we'd love to have that problem.

This has worked out well for us so far. Setting aside our questionable server OS choice, the downside of owning your server is the higher up-front cost and responsibility for the hardware. You can reduce this by leasing a physical server from a hosting company.

The upside is you have the full server CPUs/memory/disk at your disposal; a modern server can support a pretty sizable load if you don't have to share it. I believe StackOverflow got pretty far in their early days on a single app server and a single DB server.
Show HN: Get an interesting fact on every page [Chrome Plugin]
I don't think it is fair to compare health insurance with salary, they're completely different animals.

#1: You cannot plan for the unexpected

When you quit your job to start a business, you're planning to lose your existing salary. If you've planned well, your living expenses (food, rent, utilities, etc) are known, so you can plan for them.

You don't plan to get sick or hurt, and even if you did, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to accurately estimate how much it will cost you to get better. You pay for health insurance to help you pay for the unexpected, so its value is inherently volatile.

#2: You cannot "go back" if the unexpected bites you

If you're looking to start a business, chances are you are highly skilled, personable, and/or ambitious. These are all traits that lend themselves to being abnormally hirable, so if things didn't work out the way you had hoped, you can likely get back into the workforce with a similar salary from when you left. And if that doesn't work out, you still have a better shot than most at a myriad of other job opportunities that at least pay you something worth working for.

If you get sick and you have insufficient health insurance, there are very few ways to get around it. If you were diagnosed with cancer a day after you quit your job, and your current individual provider was unwilling to provide all of the necessary treatment, you're out of luck. That's the ball game. You can't just back out of your startup venture and go back to work to fix the problem.

#3: You can die

Your salary can affect your quality of life, but with personal and societal safety nets, you're not going to die just because you're poor.

The U.S. has no safety net that ensures you will be provided with all of the care you need to not die even from curable or treatable conditions. Medicaid is about the closest thing to such a net, but it doesn't cover every person nor every thing. No personal safety net will help you here either (unless you know a few billionaires that have enough of an interest in you being alive).
Perhaps you could detect when they start to preform science. Put them one a rock, then a few hundred thousand kilometers away place another rock, this time sterile, and seperate them with a vacuum. If living goop gets to the sterile rock, chances are you would be justified in calling it intelligent.

(Yes, I did just recently watch 2001. Sue me ;p)
I think Harvest is the one I've seen used most by consultants, though it only has a narrow lead over others.

Freshbooks integrates with Expensify via API sharing, though the last time I looked at it, this solution was more expensive than Harvest.
Yup Facebook and Yahoo are PHP. Google/Amazon/eBay/Walmart.com are all primarily a combination of Java and C++.
>EDIT: Just found this:

Ahh, I went to the trouble of finding that and had it in my clipboard :)

Took me a few mins and was really hard to find on Google and was buried amongst all the noise generated by these FUD stories and discussions about UEFI secure boot. It's almost as if it was Google-Bombed.
If anything, prices went up.

Asus MyPal (a relatively high-end PDA) was around $400 when I bought it. That is cheaper than modern high-end phones and roughly equal to the prices of mid-level phones.

The laptop I'm writing this from costs around $400 dollars as well. This is the price of the cheapest iPad.
Code Club - The Interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Chad Hurley
IMO it is a browser bug to let SVG JS interact with anything outside the image canvas sandbox, without explicit user opt in.
I believ "Not all designers are created equal". For instance, I have a very deep understanding of SEO, some dont. Some may code much better than I do, some are better at illustrations, some are better at web and some are better at iOS designing.

Simply check their portfolio and see if you "match" his or her style. If you are into minimalism you dont want to work with a designer that really likes to put tons of fancy effects on their design.
A giant national park that is likely filled with asbestos, lead, and god knows what other toxic substances they used to use in buildings back in the day. Tearing all these buildings down carries serious environmental risk.
One of the seemingly common threads I am seeing is that having vim available across platforms is an advantage to some. That certainly has value.

I can't really comment on the rest of your excellent post until I try some of these things out. I intend to spend some time with vim this weekend, try out some of the ideas presented in this thread and see what I can learn.

I can comment on this: "And given the number of studies that show that a single interruption to a coder can result in a half-hour delay whilst he rebuilds his mental stack, that makes Vim a tool that can save you hours of productive time every single week."

I've been programming since I was ten years old. I have well over twenty years of experience in the field, across multiple platforms, tools and languages. I started out with machine language. Not assembler, actually typing in hex instruction codes into a keypad. Back then, I used that approach a number of times to bootstrap a Forth system onto a newly built computer board (something like a 6502 board). One of the first things you do after that is write an editor (in Forth) so you can start moving faster.

I have to say that in all of this time I have never had an editor get in the way of the programming task to such an extent that it can be considered an interruption. Interruptions that disrupt the mental stack you refer to are very real and they suck, but, in my experience, the text editor is never the issue.

Again, thanks for your valuable input. I'll spend some time absorbing it over the weekend. I need to get a project out first. Damn priorities!
Should also be mentioned this was a class action lawsuit.

I've observed that class action lawsuits usually benefit the defendant greatly in that the nature of class action suits is that they deprive any persons with standing from all future legal actions on a matter. Sometimes they get nothing as part of a settlement, other parts they receive some token coupon that usually has restrictions to make it useless. In no case is the opinion of the members of the class taken into consideration, nor do they have any right to object to settlements, nor are they normally informed of the settlement until after it has taken place.

In effect, it's a similar protection scheme to how Congress passed a law banning the filing of lawsuits against BP in return for them paying a fine for oil spillage that is vastly below the cost of fixing the damage.

Many actions that are labelled as "settlements" or "fines" are actually bribes paid to the legal system in return for total immunity from future lawsuits.
How FilterMania 2 was downloaded 1 million times in 6 days
So what would you say to those who can't see themselves doing anything else (i.e. running a startup)?

Edit: I suppose your comment is about those still on the fence about making the leap.
Just got this book, and i'm loving it.
I don't think he's talking about an interest-only loan. A $900,000 30-year mortgage with a 3.5% interest rate will cost $4,041 per month.
Sorry about that, recoiledsnake. Thanks for the followup. Do you not consider Secure Boot and the prohibition against disabling it on ARM devices a slippery slope?
Chile edging Pan-LatAm Startups
Does anyone have suggestions for a "guide book" to learn Python? Specifically - best practices, design patterns, rationale for implementations, preferred data structures, even the history of the platform.
This City of Detroit is too big, geographically
I think you guys are getting a little serious.

Also, this paper is about 20,000 object categories, not just 1 (faces). And the neural network is not the standard type but of the deep learning variety which has only existed since 2005 (invented by geoff hinton, who was also big in neural net circles in the 80s so he's not some newcomer who hasn't done his literature search). One of the couthors of the paper is andrew ng, head of the stanford ai lab, so he's pretty legit.
>Suppose Wikileaks developed installable software that embarrassed the U.S. government. Would their key have been revoked, making it impossible for anyone to run their software? Yes.

Perhaps you posted this in the wrong story?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikileaks_app_yanked_fr...
No, it would be an additional option. ZeroMQ will always be supported - we use it enormously at dotCloud. Another transport we plan on supporting is websocket.

Each transport has its advantages. Zmq is incredibly efficient, very flexible and leaves you in full control of your network topology, but it requires a firewalled trusted network, and doesn't provide ready-to-use broker or naming facilities.

Redis can be used as a very efficient broker and discovery component, and can be more easily included in your web stack, but it limits your flexibility and becomes a potential spof.

The good news is, once zerorpc supports multiple transports you can stary with one and swap it out for another without changing your code.
Action.IO could be a game changer
I hate package dependencies on windows.
FUCKU AGAIN,JAPANS DISASTEROUS LEGACY
Koji Suzuki's 'Ring' series - the novels on which the horror movies were based - has a very interesting slant on this idea; well worth reading. (Don't be misled by the movies: the second and third books in the trilogy are excellent speculative fiction!)