skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Didn't the US experiment with it as well?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare

It wouldn't surprise me if the Russians were looking at the same thing, but it should leave some fairly telling clues behind. At the very least you can see plowshare craters littering Nevada on google maps (in a nice grid pattern in some areas, just search for "Sedan crater" and zoom out a little), I would expect similar to be somewhere in Russia if they were doing the same.

Edit: This is the Russian version of plowshare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nati... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagan_(nuclear_test)
Best of luck... ;-P

Seriously, asm.js already comes pretty close to a standardized VM at a low level. But we intend to grow it to include integration with structured binary data and GC, to the point where it'll provide very similar functionality to VM's like the JVM or CLR.

The big real-world benefits of asm.js over a boil-the-ocean VM are that (a) the content is already 100% compatible and quite highly optimized in existing browsers and engines, and (b) it's far easier for engines to implement on top of their existing technology.

The biggest downside is that the syntax is weird. But that's just not a big deal for compilers. They can generate whatever weird syntax they want. You could even implement your preferred bytecode format as an IR and compile that to asm.js if you wanted, but I'm not sure compiler-writers would even care that much. They'd do just as well to have IR data structures in the internals of their compiler, without needing a special surface syntax for it.
They are developing them in parallel.
Since rust is still an experimental project (the language isn't even finalized) it wouldn't make sense to replace firefox with it _now_.

So there is no "at that point" decision. Firefox+Gecko codebase is here to stay for a few years.
My thoughts on Redbox vs Netflix (go easy, I'm a developer, not a writer)
> Yet they state their action plan to "fix" this issue is to update their DOCUMENTATION and no mention of fixing the DEGRADATION issues itself.

This is flat out untrue. The third bullet point in their action plan is to update their documentation, and the fifth is "Working closely with our customers to develop long-term solutions".

Updating the documentation to accurately reflect what the platform does is obviously critical to allow people to make decisions and manage applications on the platform as it is, so is an important and immediate part of the action plan.

Long-term fixes to the problem are also important, and are explicitly part of the action plan. Its clear that they haven't identified what those solutions are, but its not at all true that they haven't mentioned them as part of the action plan.
Can it still be considered a 'subset' if it adds new traits like 'int' and 'intish'? If it both adds and remove things wouldn't that make it more of a variant like scheme is to lisp?
They raised $4.7M last August:

http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/14/a-4-7-million-injection-in-...

They would have had to pay their 28 employees an average of about $300k a year to burn through all that by now.
And if we're living in a fantasy world, we can all get a pony, too. The fact remains that JavaScript is widely deployed and has multiple viable competing implementations. Any hypothetical bytecode format starts at a huge disadvantage due to this reality. The path of least resistance here is to target JavaScript.
"What is the speed of sound?" is far too vague of a question.

What medium? What temperature? If air, what is the humidity?

Or is this like asking the speed of light and we can all just assume it is in a vacuum?
Asteroid Flyby Webcasts: Watch 2012 DA14 Live
Yes, you could comple JS to asm.js, but then, unless you change the JS semantics, you'll have to implement a GC, and your GC might have pauses.

Note that an interesting possibility would be to be able to generate asm.js at run-time for a domain-specific language. You could easily implement this as a JS library.
But how long does it take to get to that speed?
So, why not "slut loves his cock"? Why "destroy"?
> They use special tricks, like (a+b)|0, to force results to be in the int32 range, and avoid overflow checks.

Why is this not seen as the worst idea ever? Why this great resistance to moving away from javascript?
I think the number I heard for heating the battery was 1.3kW. The model S battery is long and flat and hence has lots of exposed surface to lose heat. Also, it was in the teens when the original reporter left his car outside. So, is plausable.
No, you're confusing expressions with metanotation.

Using infix metanotation to describe Lisp semantics is a convention that goes back to McCarthy.
Some of these might have been more valuable in the days when you couldn't just Google anything in an instant to find the answer.
It sounds like you want Chrome's NaCl.
There really is no more important metric than back-links, but getting quality back-links can be very difficult.
ding ding ding!!! I was just about to chime in about that. Are these stats accounting for spouse and children and adults in school/military at the time? I'd be curious to see how the numbers break down.

Also of note is that when you do calculate in Spouses and children, they still had insurance because it was less common to "only insure yourself" (I have no data to back that statement up).
Measuring the total energy release of a meteor vs a nuclear weapon yield is not an apples to apples comparison. Not when measuring destructive force.
6.1.1 apple ios update
Citation needed.

My understanding is that all existing plans for deflection are wild-and-crazy and completely untested.

We'd be okay if we had 30 years of warning, because that's long enough to try multiple insane strategies, each of which takes half a decade to get working.
Nobody is going to agree to standardize the internals of their JS implementation. Competition for JS performance remains high, engines change their implementations all the time. Engine implementors do not want to, and should not, expose their implementation internals.

Instead, what people really want is a standard semantics they can target that isn't tied to any one vendor's implementation details. That's the crux of a VM, and that's what asm.js is providing.
This view is even more correct now that "what is the speed of sound" is only a google search away.

Maybe Edison only asked these questions because of how long it can take to look something up in a book.

For example, would you hire a programmer who couldn't answer:

- name one or two html elements and what they are for

- what is a for loop, and when would you use one?

These can of course also be looked up in books, but already knowing the answer to those questions (and many more advanced questions) in a lot of what you're paying for when you hire a programmer.
Not mine - just thought it was kinda fun so shared...
FlightCar (YC W13) offers wheels at SFO
JS is not a VM, it's a language and a poor replacement for a VM. V8 is a VM, LLVM is a VM, but JS is just an extremely lucky language.
Hearst’s Venture Arm invests $30 Million in Science Startup studio
I thought we had made a standardized VM language called Javascript so we could forget this whole activeX thing ever happened..?

Not that I disagree that a VM would be very awesome, but it should take as many clues from the collected knowledge of Javascript security as possible, obviously just hooking your 'sandboxed' VM to the browser doesn't cut it. As demonstrated by SUN's Java applet :)
"Russia's deputy prime minister said Russia does not have the capability to shoot down meteors."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/15/russia-m...
wow... does everything today have to be "an Aaron reference"? Seriously... it's like Aaron was the first person in the history of our legal system to be made an example.
Code, Mistakes, Time
Totally reminded me of Sad Shark: http://bit.ly/14WZrIN
I'd really much prefer something lower level, so anything can be easily implemented on top with predictable performance (including JavaScript).

I don't understand the resistance to PNaCl, it's plugins done right.
If you took investment from friends and family under the auspices that it would probably get paid back, you lied to them. This is one reason you probably shouldn't ask for investments from friends & family.

Professional investors know the score. Even the very most promising startups bear an unacceptable risk of failure in isolation. They make sense as investments only as a group. Even then, many (most?) VC funds lose money. They exist because foundations and pension funds want to put money into VC as an asset class, not because anybody is counting on returns.
Care to explain further? Is it a time thing, placement? What?
The Ford story has a superficial similarity to the Einstein one, but in reality they're diametrically opposed. Einstein _understood_ how the physical world worked so he didn't need to carry around unnecessary "information". Ford, at least in the story, has neither "information" nor understanding.

The distinction is similar to the distinction made in philosophy between "knowledge" and mere "true belief".
The other ones are things that are obvious and immediate responses to the problem on description that don't take any deep analysis of alternatives.

Long-term fixes actually do require deep analysis of alternatives (and even what the appropriate parameters are for a solution that will deal with customers problems while maintaining Heroku's scalability), and aren't something you can do much more than make vague references to off the cuff.

The key question on that point will be follow-through.
Yes, the observable semantics is 100% identical to running the same code in an existing JS engine. That's the genius behind Emscripten (i.e., the genius of Alon Zakai) -- he figured out that you can effectively simulate the semantics of machine integer operations by exploiting the various parts of the JS semantics that internally does ToInt32/ToUint32 on its arguments.

What asm.js is simply formalize those tricks in order to guarantee that you're only using those parts of the JS semantics, so that it's sound for an optimizing engine to directly implement them with machine arithmetic and unboxed integers. But the behavior is absolutely identical to a standard JS interpreter/JIT/etc.
JS has 'real integers', they're not being simulated. If you put the appropriate hints in your JS the JITted output will never use a float anywhere. Your complaint is more that all the operators (with the exception of the bitwise ones) operate on floats, and yes, that is kind of a problem.

64 bit integer support is being worked on for JS elsewhere; asm.js probably doesn't offer it yet since you can't use 64 bit ints in any browser yet.
> Why this great resistance to moving away from javascript?

To what? What scenario do you envision where Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla are all willing to implement a single new language for the web?
Why Mozilla Matters And Won’t Switch To WebKit
You're describing PNaCl.
Part of me wonders if Edison wasn't concerned so much with the actual answers to the questions as how an applicant went about answering the questions, and how the applicant reacted in the face of the test. Or perhaps he cared about some questions, and threw in a bunch of random ones to see what the applicant would do.
Forcing everybody to use the a ubiquitous, homogeneous VM implementation is probably not going to work. Browser makers like being able to improve their implementations on their own at a brisk clip. Also, while standardization is a good thing, competing implementations are also a good thing.
> 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.

We've detected such a series of objects and have willingly not tried to prevent them from dramatically altering our ecosystem, but are encouraging and quickening the damage they do. Detecting and predicting is not nearly enough. Action is required and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that humans will take that action. I strongly disagree that a species such as humans 'can and will react and adapt'. So far we have shown that we are the exact opposite: we are the ones causing global environmental catastrophe.
Same for our 2011 TDI. Never had to worry about fuel or engine issues, even in quite cold weather (not arctic, but we live in RI, so there are some cold winter nights to contend with).
How People Learn
How Boundary Passively Monitors Network Round-Trip Times
4 payments trends that will shape the future of game development
I wasn't referring to the meteors themselves... but rather the technology that can track/intercept them. I imagine it could be used for other things also.
Take into account that commuting has a strong negative effect on happiness: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...
It's still a bit surprising that types were never (and still haven't been) added to javascript, as proposed for javascript 2.0 back in 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/20000817085058/http://www.mozilla...

Now we have Google's Dart & Closure compilers, Microsoft's TypeScript, and Mozilla's asm, all of which essentially add types back to javascript, not to mention about two dozen other statically typed javascript compilers: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

If types were approved 13 years ago, javascript apps could have been made to run much faster (fast enough for games even), perhaps negating a need for 'native' mobile apps that we have today, and either hastening the demise or spurring the optimization of competitors like Flash and Java and .NET/Silverlight.

(I'm already aware of arguments against static typing, and against having a VM in the browser or treating javascript like one.)
There are not lots of funding deals with venture capitalists that are structured as loans in the sense that you & I think of them. Probably none.

You do not owe your investors a return. Anybody who thinks they do doesn't understand how startup investments works, or has taken investment on false pretenses. No early startup founder is in a position to promise a return to anyone.
I was skeptical about this idea (as I was about Airbnb) till I saw how YC alumni reacted to it. They all seem to want to use it.
The cool thing is that those of us who have small performance-critical javascript routines e.g. game engines have a whole new cheatsheet of 'optimal' javascript. I can't wait for box2d, octrees and matrix libraries to adopt it; a whole new generation of hand-optimised assembler!
> An expanded report of this article that covers the methodologies and full results of the analysis will be available for free very soon. If you’re a journalist or blogger and would like early access to the PDF, or if you’d like to go on the list of people who will receive it by email, please contact me via this form.

For this and the sidebar, I'd guess he's an analyst for hire - sharing the raw data would let people scoop him. If you want the data, you can always scrape the IAFD yourself...
You should just add the word "bad" to that list.

We can't work on anything until we eradicate bad! $foo is so much less important than bad!

/s
They really want the performance of asm.js code to be predictable, and as a compiler writer, I believe this is entirely possible. The subset of JS they use is made to have good performance. The people here don't seem to like some of the implementation details of NaCl. I think they also might just not want to let Google impose something. Also, the inventor of JavaScript is the Mozilla CTO (shhh!).

I'm partial to PNaCl too. I think it's probably better, in the long term, to have a standard bytecode format to compile to... But, asm.js might win this war, just because the road to asm.js support is much shorter. You basically already can compile C programs to asm.js and have them run cross-browser. Worse is better?
One and a half hours if you actually charge to 100% rather than 90% - which CNN presumably did since their charging stops lasted that long. (And that's with top-of-the-range Superchargers; standard 240V dedicated car chargers are basically useless for long trips unless you're planning to stop and leave the car charging overnight.)
A 10kt yield at altitude wouldn't leave a crater, either...

Unless it was used to blow up a large chunk of rock which then proceeded to fall to the ground. In that case, you'd get a crater, but you'd also get the radioactive material.
Australian Court Says Genes Are Patentable
It's pretty universal to use syntax that's outside the domain of the language being described to describe a language in it's specification, otherwise your head would explode trying to distinguish the example from the rule.

The C++ standard uses tables for the equivalent purpose, not C++ declarations, like at §23.2.1 in C++11. Does this mean that C++ should move from header files to an RDBMS?
Top Startup Lessons Learned from Growing and Failing
Yup. And it's winter in Russia these days too!
FWIW, you xmonad technique is easily emulated in Firefox. Try C-l mdn, etc. The awesome bar really is awesome. Not only does it search open tabs, but it also searches your history and titles and it learns.
Epiphany onE Puck
I thought of Reddit. People don't really "hang out" on facebook, and it's more about friends and family, not communities.
Russia sounds like a pretty scary place, to be honest. Is it really as bad as this makes it sound? How does a whole country get to be so sociopathic?
It's not even about aptitude or utility. It's about teaching people to think differently. Programming teaches people to think in a way that's helpful to every day life. It teaches people how to solve problems logically. That is a big deal.
They are going in nearly opposite directions and are roughly a million miles apart from each other. Once you get a real idea of how empty space is (all of the not-to-scale diagrams you get in high school are no help here) it's harder to see how they could be related than not related.

True random distributions just work that way. If something that's supposed to happen once in a hundred years is spaced out at roughly 100-year intervals, that's not random.
The article briefly mentions a scam where a driver intentionally causes an accident to extort money. It's strangely satisfying to see this unfold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWvG4KAYJfY
Heh. I would've loved to see the article: 'Google Trolls Injured Russians with Doodle'
The idea is interesting and can work when employee count is small. but when it grows to hundreds or thousands, someone will have to take roles of managing those 1-startups or form groups.
Yes, its the same scale, but explosions in atmosphere distribute their energy over the surface of a sphere. Surface goes up with the square of the radius (hence the inverse square law in so many things). Here being far enough away helps, the over-pressure broke non-tempered glass of the buildings closest but not the tempered glass of the vehicles.

I've watched three shuttle re-entries (benefit of being in California when they were landing in Florida) when the shuttle entered a dense enough atmosphere to create a contrail it looked very similar to this one (although it had a glowing purple leading edge which I never did get a satisfactory explanation for).

I've tried to imagine what this sort of event would look like to someone driving, now I know. Personally I would be expecting the shock wave so I would try to find some place to pull off an avoid being directly impacted by it. I did some experiments with hydrogen and oxygen in a misspent youth (its a pretty powerful explosive at the correct mixture) and the shock wave can take your breath away.
This is the "cleaned up" version of the Duke3D source code by Fabien Sanglard (the guy who wrote the excellent Q3 code review [1], Doom3 code review [2] , and just today the Duke3D code review [3]).

He found the source code so hard to read through that he cleaned it up and created this project to help others learn from it.

(summarizing what he said in his Duke3D review)

[1] http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php
[2] http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/index.php
[3] http://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/index.php
I doubt Edison had a full understanding of the theory of operation for the phonograph he invented. I can't see how knowing the speed of sound in air could matter at all in relation to synchronizing audio with video, or Edison's motion picture camera. He could not broadcast sound from a speaker far enough for the sound to become unsynchronized with any video that was played.
Actually he is, quite explicitly, saying that they will do a short-term description of the current behavior and its impact, provide tools to assist customers in understanding and managing the effect on their specific apps, and work on long-term fixes.
You can use the COPY command to do bulk imports from S3. We also support importing from DynamoDB.
Interview with Kiip CEO Brian Wong
You feel indebted to the professional investors who picked you along with 5-10 other companies to place bets on with the clear expectation that most of those bets would lose? Why?

This is like the guy a few years ago who felt social pressure to pay back corporate debts for his C corporation because nobody was telling him that the debts applied to his company and not to him personally. But the risk of the company vanishing was priced into all those contracts! The same is true for investments. Anybody who invests professionally in startups has a valuation function of some sort that captures the fact that you --- even if you're Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk --- are more likely than not to fail before your company becomes liquid.

(I am also a founder; this time of a bootstrapped company, but I was one of three founders of a VC-capitalized company a few years prior to starting this one, and the two other startups I worked at were both VC companies.)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004....
AKA RPython for Javascript
This is the same concept.
So why did the W3C choose Google's audio proposal? Was there some kind of political wrangling going on there or were there purely technical reasons? I've wondered about that for a while.
Does every car in Russia have a dashcam?
It's a lot harder to add types to a general purpose programming language. Your types have to match actual programming idioms, and if you care about them being safe (which, to be fair, recent languages like Dart and TypeScript don't), you have to consider every possible loophole that could lead to a dynamic error -- and the legacy language fights you, because all of its dynamism was designed back when nobody was thinking about respecting some not-yet-existent type system.

The type system for asm.js is a far more restricted problem, which is why we were able to come up with a solution so quickly (we only started this project in late 2012). The type hierarchy is extremely spartan, and it's just designed to map a low-level language (intended for compilers to be writing in) to the low-level machine model of modern computers.
The presence of pharma in our water supplies is a huge problem. None of the U.S. clean water rules address this. We don't even really know the extent of the problem, because there is no testing regime. Here on the upper Potomac my town dumps all sorts of pharma and endocrine disruptors into the water that communities downstream drink from. Our town considered improving our wastewater treatment but because of the cost, won't stop until the law requires it.
It's interesting how this will develop. I think the article is unnecessary pessimistic. I think BigData mining can also allow Netflix to detect and fund more adventurous ideas and categories, which traditional TV studios would think are too risky from the financial perspective.
Was he serious with these questions, or were they sideways questions designed to suss out how the tested person thinks?
Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?