skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The deficit is software. Hardware has gotten crazy fast, but software is struggling to make use of that speed in ways that are valuable to average users (e.g. reducing perceived latency).

At the risk of stating the obvious, a computer feels snappy when it responds to user actions (clicks, keypresses) quickly. That is a holistic problem -- one that concerns all parts of the system -- so it's hard to optimize. Software tends to evolve "within the lines"; it's hard to make changes that cross abstraction boundaries. But that's where performance is.

On the other hand, hardware has gotten faster unevenly. Disk seeks are the slowest thing your computer does besides WAN access, but those haven't sped up much over the last decade. Disk throughput (and size) have increased orders of magnitude faster than seek time.

But we're still using the same software abstractions (and the same software!) for these radically different machines. For example, stat() is still a synchronous call. In the old days it wasn't all that slow relative to CPU operations. Now it can take 30ms, which is 30,000,000 cycles on a 1 Ghz CPU. So arguably the default should be async.

C is another abstraction that had a reasonable performance model when it was invented, but no longer does. It's hard for the average developer to have a decent (portable) model of a CPU these days, especially with regard to concurrency.
As a kid In the early 90s I remember reading Scholastic Magazine at school and reading that flying cars would be available by 1995. I was ecstatic. :-|
Video: Crazy Fast Build Times or When 10 Seconds Starts to Make You Nervous
Works perfectly here, in both "in browser" as well as "totally blowing my mind" mode. Kudos, sir.
Awesome announcement...and though I get what you're doing here, using "Rails" un your headline was a real diversion
Facebook engineers used Pokémon to test new Timeline features
Jeffrey Ullman on Software Patents [2000 Knuth-Prize lecture]
I recently slammed into this as well. I'm am far from being a "real" developer, but I do occasionally write software for work on my own time. I spent a couple of weeks laying out a simple gui and getting all the pieces to work. I then "released" it to the office, and after seeing people clumsily poke through the menus, I decided that they must have been laid out poorly. So I rearranged everything, and redid a lot of the graphics, and swapped the versions without telling anyone. I received a crap storm of negative feedback. Ended up having to write a guide for how to use everything, and then still didn't learn my lesson! I thought X would function way better if combined with Y, etc, etc.. Pushed another version with some new features and some feature removed, and again, a torrent of confused coworkers asking me where things went.

The only good decision I made was to stop messing with it... which is hard. Each time I see people interact with it I feel there is a glaringly obvious change that needs to be made to ultimately benifit the user. But alas, I leave it be.
The "real dream of the flying car" seems to differ from person to person.

Some people essentially want a flying machine that they can land in their driveway and parking lots, that they can take to the air for all but the shortest trips, with little need for "car" abilities. Others want something that's a car the majority of the time, but can fly on those midrange (60-600 miles) city-to-city trips.

VTOL on city streets is unlikely to be popular any time soon, largely due to safety concerns. But there's been a constant push for decades for something that can take off and land at small airstrips, and with only a few minutes' conversion work, can then drive over to grandma's house. Turning a 6 hour drive into a 3 hour flight would be a big deal.
> Once you go down that road it means that those that have have to pay for those that have not.

I'm okay with those who have having to pay for those who have not.
Mail.app on both OS X as well as iOS is pretty fantastic, though not being cross-platform isn't a "keeper-honest-er".

You seem to also forget mutt, which, while substantially less useful, quite clearly does not suck.
I don't see how that's a serious problem. An add-on ecosystem can be explained literally as "we let third parties who aren't as skilled as browser-developers develop (optional) parts of our browser." That has both obvious advantages (there are way more developers passing that lower bar, serving many more needs) and obvious drawbacks (a lot of them... can't code very well.)
I don't find this as absurd as you make it out to be.

Let's do it.
jono_x, yes you are banned. Hellbanned specifically, which is why I can't reply to you.

I don't understand why you are banned. Normally it seems like it happens to users who post junk, or who get downvoted a whole lot when they're new. Neither of these apply to you, however, so I'm really not sure.

If you really want to respond, maybe you could do so on your blog, and someone in the thread will link to it.
What killed Firefox for me wasn't just the plugin breakage on updates, but the unnecessary plugin breakage.

For most of my broken plugins, the immediate solution was, "edit the XML file inside the .xpi, and update the maxVersion to include the latest version of Firefox."

Firefox 10 changed this behavior, making plugins assume to be compatible by default, unless set to a strict mode by the plugin author. But Firefox 10 released in January of this year, by which point I had long since moved to Chromium.
How Not to Venn Diagram
If you want to contribute to Thunderbird in order to improve its UX, then the "parity with Postbox" meta-bug would be a good place to start.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=737347
That needs to be explained somewhere obvious. On the market page it only tells me the app is incompatible with my device, giving me no clue what to get that would run it (except for the OS versions, which my device satisfied).
I don't get it, why do you want it to be native then? What's the advantage?
Normally when a headline asks a question, the answer is no; in this case I could paste several pages of nothing but the word "yes", forming some sort of ASCII art of the word "yes", and not even scratch the surface.
Unfortunately copy of the skin of Gmail would not get you the gigantic honking datacenters that make Gmail so much faster than Mail.app. Would you pay for a client that looked like Gmail and performed like Mail.app?
It's confusing because it's a temporary stay of a temporary injunction, but other news reports suggest that Google will be selling again next week.

(See Update 3 below)

http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/3/3136336/galaxy-nexus-no-lon...
I use Fastmail.fm for my email hosting (using my own domain), and recommend them. They don't have two-factor authentication, but do have others, such as one-time passwords. They have a lot of features over and above GMail too (such as aliases and personalities), and much prefer them to GMail.
This is precisely the kind of thing that Apple excels at. It's what makes John Q. and Jane B. Public think Apple products are "magical." It's the kind of thing Normals don't think about. If they buy solely on price ("this robot thing is a smart phone, too, and it's cheaper") they tend to get a subpar experience.

If the more open ecosystems can agree on some kind of continuity, user experiences will improve. But by being more open, they necessarily allow developers to impart their own ideas completely out of step with others in the community or even apart from the platform.
You can use fastmail.fm with your own domains.
Fake Portfolio of person who sent that stuff: http://www.chroma9.com/

Comment from Friend of the person who requested for work: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/w57og/a_web_designers_r...

Full email: http://i.imgur.com/UsrMh.jpg
Seems unlikely; Scott MacGregor left Mozilla to launch Postbox.
> the most popular PHP code contribution site I think?

Popular in that everyone knows its name and knows not to ever use it. It's an absolutely awful site that's been awful for an entire decade. Most of the code being uploaded there these days is from indian and brazilian developers.

All the good PHP libraries are on github and shared socially.
Perhaps it's okay as long as that's where the online store servers are located; but I don't see anything about shipping in the article.
I still don't understand why there is almost no push towards restartless extensions on the AMO site apart from one "restartless" badge for addons. The front page[0] has literally no mention of them. For a while, they didn't have too many restartless add-ons. Recently, they've been getting more popular; Adblock Plus added restartless support a while back, after much work, and there are quite a few others [1]. It would be a decent time to start featuring these much more prominently, if not exclusively.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/restartless [the only way, as far as I can tell, to get this list is to manually search for this tag]
Project: Image Indexing
I don't understand this logic. Maybe it's cultural. But still, freedom of speech is something like a human right, right? Then does it mean the government need to give newspapers for free to those who won't buy them?

Freedom to access internet is to same level, it means human people shouldn't be arbitrarily blocked from accessing internet, that's all, that's enough, and that's already a lot, actually.
> What if I can't pay for it? Do I have the right to force somebody else to pay for it? Am I going to be forced to pay for the Internet of somebody else?

That's roughly what taxes are for, yes.

> Why is the Internet a human right but electricity, which is kind of critical to running the Internet, is not?

There are a number of arguments for electricity being a human right. I'm perfectly okay with saying it is one.

That said, the interesting point is that you're imagining electricity here to be an implicit right of Internet access. That's fine, but it implies that, if Internet access did not require electricity (and who knows, maybe it won't someday), the claim is that Internet access remains a human right without a need to imply a right to electricity.
go ahead and point them out.
This is more like a driving helicopter than a flying car. Although I think the gear required to safely operate isn't much worse than any fully dressed motorcyclist would wear.
The options dialog changed to a page at some point, and the page has now been redesigned. I would class both of those as pretty big, though most users probably don't use it.
According to http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/141/the-price-of-approva... the average cost of phase I-III trials is in the neighborhood of $150 million.

So no, not really in the range of crowdfunding.

And if you did get it approved, and managed to sell the treatment to everyone in the USA who has Crohn's disease, you'd need to make a profit of several hundred dollars/person just to pay for the cost of FDA approval. Realistically you'd want to charge more to recover up front risks, the cost of marketing, and uncertainty about what fraction of the target population you'd successfully sell to.
The classic idiom (at least in America) is "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zechariah_Chafee
You did confirm it. He said the economy has been growing since 2002 and that's true even if the growth rate has slowed down. Going from 7% to 3% annual growth rate is still a growing economy.
I love gyrocopters and it was a slick website, so easy upvote from me.

$300K is way too steep, though. For that price why not buy a new Cessna and just drive a clunker to the airport?

And, for that matter, $300K is way too steep for a Cessna. The amount of money added to planes to cover lawsuits is insane. You end up buying an amount of gear that might sell retail for 30-50K for 10 times that much.

I'd love to fly this, but hell, I don't see why I'd paid that much. Even if I were a gyrocopter fanatic, I'd just buy a kit and have it built. It's just way too much money for way too little capability.
partly it's payment details: a lot of patent extenders roll out right when the generic goes to over-the-counter status--insurance pays for the new prescription drug, but won't cover the old one at all anymore.

the one relevant to me on a daily basis is zyrtec/xyzal -- xyzal is just zyrtec filtered for the correct chiral form, but the prescription is cheaper than the OTC for me thanks to my insurances' rules.
I tend to schedule more time than I think I'll need to complete a task, rather than less. Any time left over goes to tasks that I didn't complete earlier in the day and, if none exist, I browse.
Self-flying air vehicles like this are probably easier to implement than cars. For simple reasons, such as there being no obstacles like roads, street lights, pedestrians, and because you have a 3rd dimension there is significantly more space so the vehicles can be more spread out. The trip itinerary is a lot easier because you're essentially going from point A to point B in a straight line. Also, starting from day one, you could mandate that no human is allowed to pilot these types of vehicles, so you wouldn't have a mix of human and computer pilots that you have with cars.
I'll keep it in mind! Thanks!
I suspect that they plan to remove the infringing features indefinitely, so they can sell while the appeal goes on no matter what the courts may decide. They can then re-add the features later, if the GNex is found to have not been infringing.
I generally agree, but would present a specific software-architecture cause for most responsiveness issues: the simplest way to perform a UI update is "toss and rebuild" - remove all the elements and replace them with new ones containing changes. This method is straightforward and much more maintainable than the performant alternative: hold everything in place and manipulate the minimum needed to update.

It's a particularly important trade-off as you start considering, for example, more complex layouts where the size and positioning of one element may affect any number of others, elements get added or removed, etc. There's a spectrum of variations between these two extremes that let you choose between maintainable and fast, but neither end really has an ideal combination of both. Language and coding style changes can help, too, but a truly complete solution still seems absent.

The initial load is the second major source of peril for responsiveness. Even if a custom cache for the load is used, the user's first-run impression is still going to be of an uncached experience. Here the disk seek, as you mention, is of huge importance. But I find that I'm personally less irritated by load times than I am by software with intermittent spikes of high CPU usage, which will slow down the whole system at unexpected moments.
Quite the opposite. This isn't about the userland, it's about the kernel. The linux kernel is where the high-performance cluster computing advances have been. The GNU userland is just a clone of the BSD userland, nothing special there. Moreover, FreeBSD and OpenBSD's packages are diverse, well-maintained, and current. But neither OS's userland nor any of their packaging systems have anything to do with high-performance cluster computing.
Yes, many kinds of amoebas are visible to the naked eye. Some grow to several millimeters long.
So what do you guys use for managing multiple email accounts well? I love gmail.com but it still doesn't have an easy way to add multiple accounts to the same interface so I'm stuck with the problem of constantly switching between 3 google accounts just to read my email.

I used thunderbird for a while but it doesn't show or work with conversation threads as well as gmail and it's search functionality is terrible (I always had to open up gmail to find old email)
I can't stop thinking why? Why do we want to go and live in Mars? Developing the capabilities to go there is one thing. But living there?

I mean we could use it as a prison. Ship prisoners off to space ;)
They're called negative rights.
Nice. I like how they design it to fit in a regular garage. Wonder what's the range and what kind of fuel it uses. Regular unlead 87?

A proximity warning radar to warn things nearby would be nice.
note that both "car" and "computer" were patented at the concept level (both causing huge messes, incidentally). of course, those patents expired long before the relevance of the concepts....
Doubtful. Seeing as they maintain their own Linux distribution, they would probably be maintaining their own BSD flavor instead.
Reminds me a bit of the plasticene game, Creachi. Same musical feel too.

http://dougburnett.com/game/creachi/
Every single time I've tried to use outlook I've found it so painfully slow its almost unusable. But I do have a lot of email.
i want to sell htmlc.com - send me an email if you want to buy it :) have owned it for years and years - never used it - was going to be part of my htmlcenter.com site but never got around to it.
Office Furniture Gold Coast
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I just want something that works as smoothly as gmail with threaded conversations and a usable search and can manage multiple email accounts easily, is that too much to ask?
I met Grady Booch at the kickoff meeting for the Society of Software Architects (or some such). OOPSLA 1998 in Vancouver.

I asked Grady Booch "What is software architecture?"

He answered "Software architecture is what software architects 'do'."

At that point I stopped caring.

Until I found the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. http://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/0...

It is the sole source I've ever encountered that had anything useful, actionable, insightful, informative, rigorous, etc.

Alas, I've never been able to synthesis Design Rules' methodology into any of my efforts.

Because what I do is software craftsmanship. I've designed some awesome stuff (and a lot of crap). But nothing rigorous, repeatable, explainable.

For a few years, I bought every software design book I could find. Some of them actually good. But the ones claiming to be about "software architecture" are really describing software craftsmanship. Describe as in descriptive, vs prescriptive.

From memory, Design Rules states that architecture is the set of visible design choices in a product. The entire thesis of the book, backed by oodles of case studies and data, is that deciding where the lines between subsystems, the interfaces, and the allowable parameters for those interfaces, is architecture.

PS- Just read the OP. Nothing actionable. Move along.
First, a rights violation does not indicate the non-existence of a right.

Second, "freedom" is not a right and never has been. It is not a useful term on its own. You can be free to do something, or free from something, but you can't just be generically free.
Dotcom said he was in the process of creating a website to publish all the information, so the public could see for themselves.

Looking forward to that. His big mouth strategy should make that quite an entertaining journey.
Yeah the word to use is 'entitlement' which is very different from a 'right'
"isn't MDMA a 'molecular entity'?"

Yeah but it's not patentable. There are many drugs that have the potential to cure all sorts of diseases that never make it to market for this reason.

"I'm just not sure why you would not take the next step and isolate the active ingredients and synthesize them so that people can benefit from something with predicable dosages and a price affected by economies of scale."

Because often they work less well and have more dangerous side effects. There literally is no isolated molecule that on average will produce better results than the whole plant, even though what you're getting from the plant is a little different each time.

The first rule of recreational drug use is rotate your receptors. E.g. if you keep hammering the exact same receptor with the exact same molecule each time, bad things are going to happen. The same thing often applies to medicinal drugs, in which case standardization tends to be worse on average than taking a random cocktail of chemicals, even if you don't know what it is your taking. Again, c.f. the research on marijuana vs pure THC for a good example of this.

"What I still don't understand is why you think that some beneficial compound that's adulterated and present in unpredictable amounts in plant form is better than the alternative?"

Because that's what the evidence says is often the case. It doesn't really make any logical sense, it's just what happens to be true. A good example of this is the TED video Eating To Starve Cancer, where they talk about how mixing a bunch of different types of tea together is more anti-angiogenic than any individual tea:

http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/17/can_we_eat_to_s/

Even if you were to standardize some mixture, there is no reason to believe that taking the same mixture day after day would be more effective than taking a different mixture each time.

Also, you can actually standardize plant medicine now. Plants are cloneable, and you can grow them in highly controlled conditions and then blend them together the same way they blend tea or champagne. (Which is why champagne from a good house tastes almost exactly the same despite the wildly different growing conditions each year. Same for things like Lipton english breakfast tea or whatever.)

"I sympathize with your bias towards the naturalistic fallacy"

The naturalistic fallacy is assuming that if something comes from nature it must be better. That's not at all what I'm saying here.
Not being tied to Google, or any other specific provider.

No ads (and no need to try to avoid them). Nobody systematically reading all my mail to custom-tailer said ads.

Easier integration with client-side encryption tools to facilitate end-to-end encryption.

Better support for plugins and other modifications.

I'm sure others have variations on this theme.
If he doesn't know the lyrics to Lady Gaga's "Poker Face", can we lynch him?

Psst. That's sarcasm.
Malcolm Gladwell has said in an interview that he writes to try out ideas.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html

"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?

"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."
http://tomdoc.org/ makes comments the perfect bridge between "documentation" and "code"
Be wary; the posix interface here is completely advisory. That is, the specification doesn't require the implementing OS to actually account for the advice provided via this interface. As a result, use of this interface may not result in any actual change in system behaviour.
Should I be concerned about the additional memory my way of doing things takes? It seems more convenient, allows for private methods and a limited drawback in my view (memory is rarely a bottleneck)