skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Compilers like Emscripten and Mandreel, which already generate code similar to asm.js, can be modified (we already have it implemented for Emscripten, it's not a big change) to generate valid asm.js. Then engines that recognize it can optimize the code even further than existing optimizations. Some of the technical benefits:

* ahead-of-time compilation and optimization instead of heuristic JIT compilation

* heap access can be made extremely efficient, close to native pointer accesses on most (all? still experimenting) major platforms

* integers and doubles are represented completely unboxed -- no dynamic type guards

* absolutely no GC interaction or pauses

* no JIT guards, bailouts, deoptimizations, etc. necessary

But the bottom line here is: asm.js can be implemented massively faster than anything existing JS engines can do, and it's closing the gap to native more than ever. Not only that, it's significantly easier to implement in an existing JS engine than from-scratch technologies like NaCl/PNaCl. Luke Wagner has implemented our optimizing asm.js engine entirely by himself in the matter of a few months.

As the site says, the spec is a work in progress but it's nearly done. Our prototype implementation in Firefox is almost done and will hopefully land in the coming few months. Alon Zakai is presenting some of the ideas at http://mloc-js.com tomorrow, including an overview of the ideas and some preliminary benchmarks. We'll post his slides afterwards.
Did anyone else read this title as: 'Scheduling morning meals with Python and Celery'?
Yes and no.

You can also walk away from a student loan; if you go teach English in small Asian villages for the rest of your life, it's not like they'll sent in a SEAL team to extract you.

And you can certainly walk away from regular loans by declaring bankruptcy. Provided you're prepared to have that on your record and on your conscience. And deal with the many years of consequences.

It's the same thing with investor money. Legally, at any point you can just shut down the company, return whatever's left in the bank, and call it a day. But there's more to it than the legality.
Very misleading title. The predictive power of this sounds really impressive, but utterly useless. I don't have alternative routes if there's traffic, and if there is, I already know what my options are, because I drive it every day. (coincidentaly this morning I was followed by one of google's white lexus self driving cars, with its silly spinny thing on top making it look like an attempt at being a TARDIS, although it was self-driving (it said so on the rear bumper), the driver was clearly driving it.)

I feel like Google Now will just take much of the fun out of life. If I want to see a movie, it's not exactly hard to look it up or walk down to the theater. Buying a ticket on Fandango is pointless, my movie theater has people selling tickets and completely unused machines right next to them. I also use the machine because there's never a line. I don't want to go into a restaurant and have google pick what I should order!

The only useful integration technology I have found useful recently was Passbook. I bought a United ticket on my smartphone which issued a Passbook boarding card when I checked in. I walked through SFO in about 15 minutes from curb to sitting on the plane, waving my iPhone at scanners along the way. Even when I changed my return flight the Passbook info changed dynamically with information and my boarding 'card'.

I am happy to pick my own restaurants, I enjoy looking on Yelp and making my own mind up. I don't want to go to the place that has paid google the most for ads, or who has hired the most fake reviewers. I have my own mind and I'm happy to use it.

Maps, Email, Search, all wonderful innovations from google, they have revolutionized these areas, but I still want to think for myself once in a while.
ClojureScript is also quite different from JavaScript - http://himera.herokuapp.com/synonym.html
Sadly, as long as our education system is incredibly test-focused in the push for "teacher accountability", no "soft" curriculum like this will ever be a reality—despite how much better it would be for learning.
Luckily, my phone bill for the last month was quite reasonable, so it looks like I won't have to do Excel in the near future.
This is actually completely useless since these explosions are far closer to the earth -- probably between 100 meters and 1 km altitude [1], vs. 10-30 km estimates for this meteor. Also, it only shows thermal radiation effects, which are insignificant here.

This is an appropriate calculator for meteors [2-3], including the effects of the actual blast (overpressure), not just heat. The documentation says windows are shattered at about 6,900 Pa (1 psi).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions

[2] http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/

[3] http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth (Flash)
Chrome is 32 bits on Windows, by the way. Suppose it's on it's last legs too, uh!

Oh and that http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/lates...
Simple really. The rock that landed in Russia was the one our alien protectors used to deflect DA14 from hitting the earth.
Interesting. From the picture, and the path length of 320 km we can estimate that the meteoroid impacted at a very shallow angle. Assuming that clouds only form below 50 km, then we get an upper limit on this angle of ~10 degrees.

asin(50./320.)

I wonder if some of the videos is complete enough as to calculate the speed.
I agree with you regarding Elon's motivation, but I think Elon's reason for talking about the circling 0.6 miles wasn't to claim that it was a meaningful distance/fuel issue, but rather that it was evidence of Broder's true motivation.
Is it important in this context to know exactly what the speed of sound is in feet per second without looking it up, or is it more important to be generally aware that sound travels through air via compressed air waves and that it is quite a bit slower than light, the details of which can be looked up when necessary? Are these executives going to be tasked with making lightning-quick product decisions involving physics calculations on a daily basis?
English. High school students now learn English by texting and tweeting, and they don't read anyways. #getoffmylawn
thanks damon. looks like we're switching to mailgun :D
I'm pretty sure we don't get anywhere near a billion dollars from Google. I haven't paid attention to our financials in a while, but the most recent public financial documents from 2011 say "Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2011 was $163M (US), up approximately 33 percent from $123M in 2010."

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2011/fa...
> by 2008, Facebook had pretty much everybody, including grandparents, as a user.

Not in my circles... Facebook didn't even begin to pop up on my radar until 2009. Social media adoption is extremely dependent on where you live and what type of people you know. Generalizations based on personal observation are invariably going to be wrong.

To add some actual data to this: in February 2009, Facebook had recently surpassed 175 million users[1]. It's now got a billion. So 2008 is definitely too early to place your "pretty much everybody" statement.

[1] http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/14/facebook-surpasses-...
Seems like a necessity in Russia but a useful thing to have elsewhere. I know I've been in situations in the USA where I've wished I'd had one.

Can anyone here recommend a brand/model?
I reread your post. It was the same as the first time I read it. It said "Always love how people throw out "gun violence" (as if there is such a thing) is so distinguishable that it should be focused on above "violence"."

Based on the bit I emphasized, you are implying "gun violence" is not a real concept, or doesn't exist, or something along those lines. Gun violence is real.

Further, OP is clearly not commenting on the prevalence of gun violence vs other violence. OP is commenting on things more likely to cause damage than a meteor strike.
TANRI TEYİDİ : DÜNYA PEYGAMBERİM VE KUTSAL GECELER, GÜNLER KUTLU OLSUN
Haha, its so funny! especially considering the fact that http://www.cucumbertown.com is a recipe site :)
Sure, that's a rational way to look at things, but human emotion is also part of the equation.

It may be easy to walk away from professional fund managers, but friends and family and small angel investors who believed in you?

Knowing that a social debt can never be repaid, sadly for some people, may be too heavy a burden to carry.
Thanks for the tip. Didn't know that. Tesla was very likely an alien or time-traveler anyway.
I think the code base is too hard to embed, stopping the support kinda made sense, since they want to stay relevant with finite resources.
I completely agree with this, especially for us living now, since we have access to virtually any information on the internet.
However, I can see why Edison would ask seemingly pointless questions. First, while that information is readily available in books, going to a library to find the book with the information needed was much more time consuming than pulling up Google, so there is the convenience factor of memorizing random tidbits of information. Second, and perhaps more important, is the fact that Edison was an inventor, hiring people to help invent things. As an inventor, one needs to have a vast array of knowledge in many fields, and then to be able to make connections between seemingly unrelated items/topics. In our case (hacker news readers), we seek to combine separate entities in ways that no one has done before, creating a new product (read: app/website). Making connections no one else sees is at the heart of entrepreneurship, and invention as well, so having that wide array of knowledge could be see as invaluable.
Most big titles are multi platform nowadays.

I am in fact still crying of joy by the release of Brutal Legend in Steam.

That was one of the two reasons for me to have planned to buy a PS3 this year. Now I don't have to, PS3 purchase is canceled. The other reason is GT5, but iRacing is more than good enough.
Seriously? You linked to slashdot.org/recent ?

Luckily it was still recent: http://slashdot.org/submission/2498125/how-does-modularity-e...
The mistake here is the "everyone." I agree that infix is easier for some math, but otherwise I genuinely prefer prefix, and I'm not the only one.

So the question now is, are those of us who have no problem with prefix notation merely a random minority of the population, like people who are left-handed, or are we a minority like say the minority who are good at math, or the minority who used the Internet in 1995?

I'm not saying for sure we are. Even after all these years, I still can't say for sure whether ordinary programmers will ever be able to deal with prefix notation. But I also don't feel it's safe to dismiss the possibility.
Sounds like a wonderful Kickstarter project. Seriously though, the cost/benefit ratio isn't worth it for detecting stuff this small. "Worst in 100 years" and there was virtually no damage.
There was a company in the '90s that was working on a byte code representation of programs which was designed to be “optimally” small by encoding more at the AST level than the ASM level. There were papers, but they were acquired by Microsoft (I think) and vanished. Does anyone remember them? The papers would be interesting in light of this, and conveniently near the end of patent lifetimes if patented and solid prior art if not.

Edit: Maybe I'm thinking of Michael Franz and Thomas Kistler's work on “Slim Binaries”. It matches the content if not the ambiance that I remember. It's been a while. My brain tapes could have print-through.

“A Tree-Based Alternative to Jave Byte-Codes” http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/C05.pdf

“Adaptive Compression of Syntax Trees and Iterative Dynamic Code Optimization: Two Basic Technologies for Mobile-Object Systems” http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC01.pdf
Don't think I haven't explicitly referenced you in my talks already! :D

http://vimeo.com/43380479
Couldn't agree more with what you said.

I just find it amazing that Steve Jobs, who could have retired multiple times over, was still spending 10-12 hour days at the office, on a consistent basis. This was at the expense of spending time with his family.

I understand passion but balance is important in life.
More than anything, this makes it sound like Edison only knew how to get useful work out of somebody whose brain worked like his.
EDIT: Just saw Bill Nye explain this on the DA14 webcast from planetary.org. When the meteor hits the atmosphere at such a high velocity, it's like hitting a brick wall and it explodes on impact. Then the shock wave propagates to the ground as the fragments fall and oxidize.
We don't call out 'knife violence' or 'fist violence' or 'cricket-bat violence'. All are real too.
I'm afraid I can't say much more beyond what I have without talking out of my rear. But you can read about X/P's XLE project here: http://www2.parc.com/isl/groups/nltt/xle/
Uh, have you heard of Servo? https://github.com/mozilla/servo It's that, as a research project.
What were we thinking? Harlem Shake Office Style
A coworker uses a gopro. Seems like overkill to me, but they're small...
> But Windows Phone is entering a dangerous time, one in which its competitors are starting to catch up and even surpass the innovations of Microsoft’s mobile platform.

What alternate universe was this article written in? I've wanted to give Windows Phone a chance since they released the newer version, but it literally has nothing to offer other than a slightly more minimalistic default UI. Does no one remember the "Get Smoked by a Windows Phone" contest that Microsoft stacked in their favor only to get beaten by Android anyway? [1]

News flash: You can configure any Android phone to have the same interface and functionality of WP7, and you've been able to for years.

[1] http://skattertech.com/2012/03/i-won-the-windows-phone-chall...
May just be me, but I'd prefer to be gunned down than killed with a hammer.

Not that I disagree with your point - it's far easier to avoid being killed with a hammer.
What’s wrong with the Java Servlet API (2011)
I assume there would have also been a detectable gamma burst that Western satellites would've picked up if they're trained on the region.
Jetstrap Beta 2.0 - Projects, Screen Linking, New UI, and 2.3.0
I really can't tell what you're advocating here. It seems as though you're against JS in general, but I think you'll have a tough time arguing that JS isn't: 1) standardized, 2) a VM, 3) in the browser, or 4) a target for other languages.
I don't think meteors are common enough to make their early detection and destruction a valuable military asset.
"In the earlier days of Java, a common refrain was that the JVM could get better-than-native performance because it could make runtime decisions about JIT optimization. In reality, the complexity of performing this task generally outweighs the benefits compared to native code, and the JVM hasn't really succeeded outside of specific micro-optimizations. As a whole, the JVM is still slower than most native code."

The JVM is a much higher-level bytecode than asm.js; asm.js is essentially just a JS encoding of LLVM. To name just one example, the JVM's memory model is composed of garbage-collected objects, while asm.js' memory model is a heap and stack as a linear array of bytes. There's a world of difference between the JVM intermediate language and the LLVM/asm.js intermediate language.

The idea that the LLVM intermediate language cannot be compiled into something as efficient as native code is trivially disproven by the fact that this is how clang works: it compiles to LLVM IR and then to native code.

"You are aware that Mono AOT compiles C#, correct? As does RubyMotion. JIT is not strictly necessary here."

Polymorphic inline caching, essential for performance of dynamic languages, requires self-modifying code.
Bit of a bait-y title. Not about 1-person startups, but how the team members at AngelList all have high levels of autonomy and how the culture at AL facilitates that.
We're using the events internally for reconciling transactions so we have definitely eaten our own dog food on this development.

A big shout out to the author's of Celery which is what we built the messaging framework on top of. That's a quality bit of software right there :)
The Fall TV Lineup May Include Apple Dominating Gaming
Well, I suppose it depends on the relative frequency of the crimes. British newspapers are always on about 'knife crime'.
It's not the same. Startups go south, the founders split, things get wound down, and everyone tries again, or gets other jobs. This happens all the time. Nobody involved gets exiled to a small asian village. Matt Maroon said it better elsewhere in this thread. Bitcartel also made a good point about letting down early friends & family investors, which seems like it would cause more emotional stress than letting down professional investors.

That said, since it seems like half of hacker news imagines that VCs are something akin to loan sharks. Maybe the new breed of angel investors really are putting an emotional squeeze on founders these days? When I worked at startups, the investors were very hands off unless the founders were really mishandling things. However, I've been out of the scene for a few years, and there seem to be a whole lot more VCs, angels and incubators. Perhaps things have changed for the worse.
Are You Using Your Online WYSIWYG Editor Correctly?
I like your idea. I would be against this as a mandatory initiative just because I think it prevents the kind of diversification of minds that tends to foster innovation, but as an alternative for kids who have no interest in foreign language or even lower level math I think it would be an excellent.
Its interesting coincidence i suppose that there is going to be a close flyby of a near earth asteroid on Feb 15th. Even google changed their doodle to remind that (but the doodle is gone now!)

Edit: Ah, its also in the news
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/02/asteroid-2012...
That's mostly what I was talking about, programming in a more restrictive language, probably strictly imperative, without closures etc.
I think that as long as we're talking about sub-extinction levels, I disagree with you.

WP estimates roughly one million car accident deaths per year (worldwide est for 2007). Heart disease numbers are more like 30M/year, although lots of those people were very old, so it's hard to estimate what's preventable. Compare that with a hypothetical meteor that kills one hundred million people, in a confined geographic area (that's 1/7 of Europe, or 1/5 of N America, or just half a dozen large Asia cities). What're the odds of that meteor? Even the once-per-millenium Tunguska event wasn't large enough to do that much damage. But suppose once-per-millenium meteors WERE deadly enough to kill 100M people, that's still 1/10 the deaths per year. If it's more spending-efficient to prevent the deaths from heart disease, do that. If it's more spending-efficient to prevent the deaths from meteor impact, do that.

On the other hand, extinction events are worth treating with extra care. Which in fact is exactly what meteor watches do, which is why they only look for entry diameters over 100m. Seems reasonable! Extinction events have happened 5 times in the last 540 million years. They're pretty rare. Maybe we should just roll the dice.

Off-topic: That's not what "shrift" means. Maybe you'd like "short order" or just the clearly "in a short time".
True. There are programs actively looking for larger objects though, that you can donate to if you're interested. This is the one that found 2012 DA14 which will be passing us shortly:

http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/neo-grants/
I thought it was $300million something a year, for three years. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-paying-mozilla-300-mill...

Personally I was not happy since it makes it harder for any competing search engine and we sure do need competition.
Mandatory reset of PyPi Passwords
You've moved the goal posts from random Jeopardy-esque trivia to facts like what country borders your own, skipping the entire argument.
Can you guys list your one-man startup here?
Well, not directly; any single impact certainly didn't hit and kill life forms all over the globe. They induced environmental changes that gradually caused species to fail to survive. "Sudden" in geologic terms means at least hundreds or up to tens of thousands of years. An intelligent species like humans can and will react and adapt in that kind of time frame. We're already on that path; we can already at least detect and predict any object big enough to significantly disrupt the planetary ecosystem.
It's basically a way to ship native code on the Web that's compatible with existing browsers, with the same performance as native code in engines with full support for it. (Getting to complete parity with native code will take time, but the language has been carefully designed to allow that — and we're close already.)
Microkernels in the browser to the rescue :-). But yeah, I had something like that in mind. I do realize that getting security right would be tricky, but I'm not sure if it would be that much trickier than say the security of any given JS engine. Since the semantics of said VM would be probably simpler, I would make the argument that getting the security right would be easier to do than the security of said JS engine.
Megaupload “Planted Evidence” Claim is an Unfounded Conspiracy Theory, U.S. Says
I like the idea of this, but it bugs me that it still uses doubles and only simulates integers via optimizations in the JavaScript compiler. Why has no JavaScript extension arisen to supply real integers?

One notable side effect of this: asm.js only seems to support 32-bit integers, not 64-bit or larger integers.
They've shown a few of these videos on Tosh.0. Guys pulling over hopping out of their vehicles, each sizing up the others weapons, and then backing down[1]. Amusing, but frightening at the same time.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s0XH5YA2mo
Well, part of what I was suggesting is that it would only be a part of the overall curriculum. So a student might elect my 'project academy' as two of their courses for a half year.

In a high school program that has 4 * 2 * 7 scheduling, 2 semester hours isn't such a big chunk of time.
Why on earth would you draw the conclusion that I came up with that because I search for that kind of porn? Let me put it this way: if you go to a store looking for chocolate and there's a lot of products with hazelnuts and you remark on that, would you expect anyone to jump at you and say "That's because you were looking for chocolate with hazelnuts"?
Benchmarking JSON Parsing: Emscripten vs. Native
JS is standardized. JS VM's are not. Also I'm not against JS per se, I've grown to appreciate the language for what it is, it's more the JS monopoly that I kind of dislike.
Any thoughts on whether there could be a JS -> Asm.JS compiler? Might be a handy way to get rid of GC pauses - and maybe even improve performance - for existing JS code.

Or even a JS -> Asm.JS compiler written in JS... so you can feature-detect and enable on demand :)
If you are locked in the trunk with any cloud solution , then you are a bad programmer/syst admin/whatever taking bad decisions, period.

You should be able to move your project infrastructure quickly from a service to another ,if you cant to that, well too bad when your infrastructure fails...
Thanks for the kind comment! We really do believe it's all about the customer in this industry plagued with terrible stories of HR gone wrong. :)
Nice idea, but the back button does not work correctly. It adds columns to the display. I am using Firefox 18.0.1 on Ubuntu 12.10.