skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think an interesting breakdown would be instead of counties, go by language. China is bending the statistic so far that it's the only one above the world wide average. It would be much more useful to know that if I were making a website only in English how many users I could expect to use IE 6.
World's first earbuds you will Never have to take off to listen to someone...
Pirated XP installs: http://micgadget.com/11633/why-the-chinese-still-favour-inte...
Tadpole Web-based SQL Client [Tutorial + Screenshots]
In general, when I see a greyed out comments, I can understand why they were downvoted.

But I occasionally see downvoted comments that seem totally legitimate. If someone feels negatively about a comment (for reasons other than it being nonsense or off-topic), the mature thing to do is to explain their disagreement with the comment.

I agree that asking "why the downvote" is rarely productive. But downvoters should explain their point of view in addition to (or instead of) downvoting.
I was raised Catholic. Without a heavy dose of serious ritual and theology, I can't take something calling itself a "church" very seriously. There has to be something more than a social club.

Freemasonry?
If I had to guess, it's because their internet is so cut off from the rest of the world that modern day pressures to move away from using it don't have as much impact.
Why must HTTP 2.x be backwards compatible with 1.x? Should SSH have not been created because you can't talk to it with a telnet client? If a new protocol offers sufficient benefits, it would be worth having to make minor changes to apps to support both.

Cookies suck, from a technical and regulatory-compliance standpoint. Plus, I'll finally stop having to clear my cookies every month or so just to log in to my PayPal and American Express accounts. Both sites keep creating unique cookies on every login until there are so many that they pass their own web servers' max header length limits.
Agreed. I have used C almost every day for the last 25 years... And not only is the C more maintainable, it is more easily ported to new CPU architectures than assembly (complete rewrites in that case) -- and yes, it is a fast, low overhead language -- especially moreso when using the CPU vendors compilers over GCC since they already know the best way to optimize for their own architecture.
This change will not be dramatic like this. "Retina Display" is a "very high resolution display". It is not magical. It is not a fundamental technological shift. It is only Apple fanboyism that makes it seem that way.

There have been "very high resolution displays" at the front edge of PC tech for decades, and the Internet has scaled slowly but surely to meet our current middle ground (probably approaching 1080p on desktops and something slightly lower on laptops this year). Most of the people here have been using "very high resolution displays" during most of the development of the web, designers in particular. PCs will, of course, reach the resolution of Apple's Retina Display; they'll have to in order to stay competitive. But, it'll happen gradually. Most people don't choose computers based on display resolution. I bought a new laptop a couple months ago, and went to Fry's (after buying online failed three times, and needing to get something quickly)...I bought the only 15" laptop they had with a 1080p display. Literally, it was the display model and they didn't have any others in stock. Consumers buy cheap or buy a brand name. But, educated consumers will keep pushing things forward, slowly but surely.

So, yes, in three years, we'll mostly all be looking at "Retina Displays", but we'll just call them "displays". And we will have evolved the web slowly in that direction, just like we've been doing for decades.

Proof:

http://web.archive.org/web/19970404064352/http://www.apple.c...

Note that on a modern display, these graphics are tiny, and the site itself only takes up about a 5th of the page (if that much). We've "gone Retina" maybe three or four times since 1997, we just didn't have Apple telling us that doubling display resolution was an epochal shift in computing technology and a legion of fans to carry forth the message.

Final point: The shift from CRT to LCD was much more dramatic than this shift, and we all made it through. Scaremongering is pointless.
Ars claims this is "as clear-cut a case of fair use as can be imagined", but courts have established that political use, while an important factor weighing in favor of fair use, is not the only factor, particularly when concerning the wholesale appropriation of the work.

http://www.callawyer.com/cle/cle_story.cfm?eid=898723&ev...

See for instance Long v. Ballantine, where the court ruled against a political campaign for their unauthorized use of a photo in advertising.

Likewise, McCain settled with Browne over the former's use of his song in a campaign video, after the court rejected the McCain campaign's fair use argument.

http://www.scottandscottllp.com/main/refuse_to_dismiss_music...
Right which is why I am buying it. They have earned their money
Nice to see more folks from Ohio out here!
For decades people have said that compiler's code generation is at par... and it slowly has become more true. I read a lot of disassembly listings and I'm often pleasantly surprised at how clever some of the code is. However, there's also plenty of times where I see plainly wasted instructions as well.

That's not the real reason that assembly is often not worth it, even in situations where it once was. The real culprit is that for a long time CPUs were outpacing memory in speed gains, so a cache miss became more and more expensive relative to the clock speed.

This meant that more and more micro-optimization work has gotten focused on cache behavior. C gives you just as much control over how your data structures are stored as assembly would. Maybe you'll need to define some prefetch() macros depending on your compiler, but that's about it.

There are certainly some remaining cases where you really want to control things at a register-allocation level (encryption, codecs, fancy floating-point things) However, most projects are better off focusing on improving their memory behavior rather than trying to get to that cache miss in 80 instead of 82 cycles.

The other huge shift in performance-oriented computing is, of course, the availability of more and more CPU cores. Again, lots of work to do but assembly doesn't give you any advantage at all.

So even if you're good enough at writing assembly to beat the compiler (and most people aren't) you probably should have been spending your optimization effort on other things.
> See for instance how SSH replaced TELNET, REXEC, RSH, SUPDUP

> Or I might add, how HTTP replaced GOPHER[3].

telnet and gopher were used by a few thousands servers only and were not consumer facing technologies (for the most part), it doesn't make sense to compare that to IPv4 and HTTP that are used by millions (billion?) of servers.
I hope one of the parts deals with people's aversion to C declarations. The declaration syntax allows vastly complicated data definition, and the fact that declaration looks like use simplifies things immensely.

(I also have a personal style quibble -- lots of people seem to think that putting spaces around every lexical element clarifies things; I think it just makes gassy code.)
What did you take a picture of? I remember taking a video of several people sleeping in the back of a Hong Kong (Central) McDonald's and nothing happened. Perhaps no employee saw me?
Oh! You said "I will not put money where my mouth has been" did you mean "now"? :)
Apple TV MC572LL/A (2010) [OLD VERSION]
Complete aside - Comment about posted pictures from Digital Eye Glass

I noticed from his posted pictures (labelled as Possible Witness 2)
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RnoG7dHRDjY/UASnGzPFkSI/AAAAAAAAAD...

There's some nasty spherical lensing effects there. I'm noticing that from the signboard on the right middle side. The menuboard should be flat across, with perhaps a deviation of where the signage isnt exactly flush to each other. Also in other pictures, you can see spherical lensing distortion from the corners of walls and ceiling tiles.

I know of libraries that take low compute overhead that compensate for this. And all you need for calibration is a checkerboard of white and black waved around.
Excellent judge of the protocol. It's interesting that no one is trying to solve the cookie bloat problem with http.
> Arch linux isn't all that hard

Yes. Yes it is.
I think a cross between this and vimgolf would be really good. Basically where you just get things you need to do like changing the paragraph formatting and you just implement them to help you get in a state of flow with your editor.
The incident at Logan airport was big news in Boston in 2007. It involved an MIT undergraduate wearing a piece of art on the front of her shirt that consisted of a circuit board and LED attached to a battery. It freaked out some airport staff, and the Massachusetts State Police came very close to shooting her:

http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html
I think there is so much room for discussion here, being in a company thats decided to stay and plant roots here in Ohio I hope to be able to add to this conversation soon. I just don't have that information yet. Either way, great post.
2 Years Later: The First Instagram Photo
Erica's one of the earliest Square engineers and has helped build their infrastructure from the ground up, so this should be a good one. Please sign up if you're planning on attending, we need to make enough food for all of you :)
I dunno - obviously different projects diverge on required backwards compatibility (Python 2/3?), but SSH isn't called Telnet v2.

For something as fundamental as HTTP the author argues changes need to be radical to drive adoption, but at the same time there's not necessarily wide-spread impetus to do so if the burden is too high. This is engineering on a 15 year time-scale, which I feel a little young (at 24) to well comprehend!

It's not just apps in the web-app sense, but user agents (all the way down to embedded systems) that would need changing to take advantage of the 'sufficient benefits'. That's a pretty massive undertaking.
Haha, glad you put it together, I had one confused look on my face reading up and down that thread repeatedly.
Newly released UFO files from the UK government
Google of the past was built on A/B. The new UIs are designed by a small, closed-eared team of graphic artists.
So if we swap around a few of the particulars -- say, make the guy with the camera black, relocate the scene to the deep South, and then make the three perpetrators good old boys -- a fairly plausible hypothesis would rush to mind, even if it is outside the experience of the typical white American at the typical McDonalds. Mafia fronts certainly exist in the world, but they are probably greatly outnumbered by petty people who, given authority over someone they dislike (+), would abuse it if it were consequence-free.

+ It isn't even necessary to assume that the language barrier or anti-Americanism had anything to do with it. I mean, even in the deep South, a good old boy might try to rip a prosthesis off a black guy's head just because he doesn't like "weird Treky shit."
I don't think NYC (or any location) offers real advantage towards thinking bigger. May I humbly, and with good humor, present Michael's own endeavor--Grouper: "a social club that arranges drinks between two groups of friends who don't know each other."

I do like that the tech community worldwide seems to have a new concern with tackling larger and more important issues. I'm excited to see what emerges.
There is a difference between filming in public and private spaces.

In most common-law jurisdictions filming in public is completely legal, even filming an event put on by a private entity (ie a sports game - there is no property in a spectacle). Note also the proliferation of CCTV in public spaces in many countries.

On private property you have the right to set rules and effectively dictate who is welcome and who is trespassing. Hence you can't take a video camera into a theatre etc.

There is a grey area when your public filming infringes on the reasonable expectation of privacy of another person. I doubt anyone here would take too kindly to a stranger following them 24/7 with a video camera.
I live in DC where these things are abundant because of the very strict building codes in downtown. Almost without exception they have at least two people working inside and the lunch rush only lasts for about 2 hours, tops, so that's really the extent of their work day. Which, by the way, this article conveniently leaves out- the major disadvantage of the food truck business- limited hours of service and limited maximum capacity.
Yahoo! and AOL are a classic examples of The Innovator's Dilemma. They can't separate themselves from the immediate needs of their customers to look at the patterns of what's next. They'll never take the leap of faith to do something completely new because they're not in a place where their culture and SOP allow it. The products that made them initially successful can't possibly carry them into the future. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
Chrome: What Are Packaged Apps?
Thanks, Ray! We should get a group of Ohio people together sometime soon. From what I understand there aren't too many of us yet...
I like the phrase "PC Plus." It's exactly my experience. I use my desktop and laptop for most things, but for consuming content when a small form factor works my tablet is great.
I left Cycorp in 2006. At that time various DARPA AI projects featured a number of different languages - mostly Java. Constraint Programming, NLP, Neural Nets. Machine vision is C, e.g. OpenCV. Speech Recognition & translation is C, e.g. Sphinx - Darpa Communicator.
> I wonder if even Thunderbolt could drive that.

It can't.

http://www.marco.org/2012/06/22/predicting-mac-desktops

"" - If a 27” Retina Display is a “2X” version of the current panel, that’s a 5120x2880 panel — running that at 60 Hz requires more bandwidth (over 21 Gbps for 24-bit color) than Thunderbolt offers today (up to two 10 Gbps channels).""
Yes, compiled C or C++ is almost always better. This is a major reason why the Microsoft compilers no longer support inline assembly code on the 64-bit architectures. (you can still link in assembled binaries of course)

This brings to mind another reason why the statement "Wrong: use Assembler Language" is so goofy. You're never going to use assembly language. You're going to use 99.9% C or C++ and a bit of assembly language. "Use C if you want something to go as fast as possible" is still basically correct.
I'd love to hear your thoughts in six months, Josh. I also have to recommend you come out here and spend a couple weeks getting to know people, too =)
I bash it not because I don't know how to use it but because I see if being used so often for jobs that would be better done using other techniques.
Thanks for your support, Ahmed. We do not intend to look back.
Though I like the idea, I think this is a bit of over engineering.

How will the earphone decide what the outside sounds to adjust too? Does it need a microphone? Why not just design the earplug so that it allows outside noise in when appropriate (ignoring the fact that we don't know how to tell which of those noises is appropriate).

If you're going to pursue this, and have figured out how to define which noises to let in and which not to, might I suggest that you use the microphone for noise cancelling? Then you ignore the noise cancelling when you want to let in outside sounds and turn off the playing sound.

Part of the problem as I see it is that we play our music so loud because we are trying to block out outside sounds. This is the beauty of noise cancelling, everything sounds louder because you aren't trying to overpower the outside sounds.
I have read the cited paper, and seen no mention of what you described to be there:

>As to the relation of the visual field to the observer, the feeling that the field was upside down remained in general throughout the experiment.

>On removing the glasses on the third day, there was no peculiar experience. Normal vision was restored instantaneously and without any disturbance in the natural appearance or position of objects.
I don't think that it's a cop-out that any founder could use -- imeem and picplz were not successful companies, but the issues they tackled were successful issues, in that Spotify and Instagram are (currently!) thriving companies that found the "magic sauce" to succeed in that space.
I took this picture in a Paris McDonalds about 2 weeks ago (near the Hotel de Ville, not the Champs Elysees location): http://cl.ly/image/1g1b3Q0j152V

Notice that the employee is covering her face. She yelled at me after I took the pic - "you can't take pictures here!". Why was she upset? Well in my case the girl covering her face in the pic was very pretty, I took it that she might be a fashion model or aspiring actress. When I ordered her co-worker was very pretty as well and was wearing what was obviously a wig.

Just a hunch, but the Paris McDonalds might offer their employees protection against cameras from tourists to protect the identity of their employees.

Edit: also found this article, this case does not seem to correlate with my hunch - motivated by menus / prices: http://www.pixiq.com/article/woman-claims-she-was-assaulted-...
> Why must HTTP 2.x be backwards compatible with 1.x?

Because the only benefit of removing cookies is a tiny bit of simplicity which could theoretically allow removing (a small amount of) code browsers will already have to keep around for probably at least a decade to support existing websites. If cookies are mostly unused by the time HTTP/3.x rolls around, we can talk...

> Cookies suck, from a technical

Agreed, but...

> and regulatory-compliance standpoint.

I don't understand this point. Surely the need for regulation of user tracking by websites doesn't depend on whether cookies or an equivalent mechanism are being used? If people start using Not Cookies(tm), they will be unregulated at first, but the law will be changed if the effect is the same.

Edit: Similarly, any protocol that gives a website a persistent identity token without its explicitly requesting one is a bad idea - cookies do provide a modicum of visibility to the user regarding who's tracking them. Not sure exactly what Kamp is proposing.

> Plus, I'll finally stop having to clear my cookies every month or so just to log in to my PayPal and American Express accounts. Both sites keep creating unique cookies on every login until there are so many that they pass their own web servers' max header length limits.

Hah, no you won't. I strongly suspect legacy codebases will remain on HTTP/1.1 approximately forever, at least if 2.0 is backwards incompatible.
Seems unlikely to me. The Motorola acquisition took forever to get through the EU, and that's a different industry. The legal burden of acquiring a major direct competitor like yahoo would be more than the company was worth.
HTTP 1.x will not disappear just because 2.x is available. Millions of people still run wifi networks on 802.11b; all those routers still keep on workin' even though 802.11a/g/n had 'sufficient benefits' that we build those into new hardware. There was no massive undertaking to replace all the routers in the world.

Nobody would have to change their old apps or hardware. Like SPDY, the availability of a new protocol supported by web browsers just means new stuff can optionally do things old stuff can't.
Also - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
Not all Technologists and Entrepreneurs are CEOs
I dont' think the average Micky D's makes enough dough for that.
Save jobs by filling out a web form and emailing Target CEO
Anyone can get that rate if they're doing adjustable rate mortgages. But ARMs are what contributed to the housing crisis -- they're not a smart loan if one is dependent on a paycheck.

*by anyone I mean those with qualifying credit..
I'll admit, i'm biased. >.<

But having installed Linux back in 1997 and dealing with X11Rwhatever it was back then and minicom and all that jazz, kinda makes my view of hard a bit off of what most people view as hard.
Stunning Pictures of New York City from Space
Customize your Blog Header with a Rotating Image
You're confusing evidence with authority and shrouding it in Latin in an attempt to appear erudite.
I would argue that #3 would be one I'd like to have blocked. I've never had a situation where those "Hey! Wanna chat with a salesperson!?" boxes isn't annoying.
Having used Mountain Lion, I'd argue its more bringing mobile innovations and things that are successful there to the desktop. To be honest the desktop hasn't fundamentally changed much for a long time so its nice to see something new and being tried. That said, I'm not the biggest of fans.
Running Arch Linux on a Raspberry Pi, it's pretty awesome as a next step distro beyond Ubuntu, but yeah... as an accessible platform for gamers of all kinds, ah no :)
Does anyone else get irritated by product blogs that don't have a link back to the product anywhere?
Let me know! I'd be interested in hearing from fellow Ohioans.
He said he did go to the police and they did in fact ignore him.

I feel empathy for him because I find it very hard to believe that he said or did anything that would warrant physical assault. Indeed, there is nothing that justifies physical assault outside of self defence or temporary insanity.

Do you really think that a quirky famous academic out for a meal with his daughter attacked these employees? Seriously? Because that's the only way you can reasonably side with the McDonalds employees here.

Speaking about common sense, I think it's pretty clear that you don't go ripping up formal documentation and hiding your identity badge if you really think you are acting in the right. That's some common sense that transcends most cultural boundaries.
Maybe, maybe not (I'm not a doctor and don't want to speculate) but they would absolutely write a letter to document/certify a visual disability and describe potential accommodations that might be used.
All-in-one PDF converter Pro for Mac New Version Released
France's McDonald's operates like an entirely different restaurant [1].

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/01/24/145698222/why-mc...
This is why I think they just miscalculated. They still dont know the religious wars of Fedora vs Ubuntu, or rpm vs deb.

I was seriously hoping for a Valve distro, which would be perfectly tuned for all things media (they hired the SDL guy). Maybe have Steam as the package manager for everything.

Instead, they just joined a camp - this is not good.

The other way they could have approached it was to support Android - not as a playing system, but rather as a console device connected to peripherals - and sponsored some project to run Android apk on Linux with access to the sound and graphics layer (SDL?? )
It doesn't seem like the proposals are "fully" compatible with HTTP. Some of them are entirely different encodings. And I doubt people are thinking of carrying over comments in headers and line folding...

What actually is the proposal to eliminate cookies? Just provide some fixed "identifier" type field?
The link in the submitted article, referring to an earlier incident in which a cell phone camera caused a physical confrontation with a McDonald's customer in France,

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-49140976/mcdonalds-me...

is probably important context here. It appears that there is some systematic misunderstanding among the company managers about how to train their employees to avoid overreacting to cameras in the store.