skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The "guns save lives" argument falls apart when you realize that the plural of anecdote is not data.

No, not really. It works for real data, too.

>> Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, we find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths.[1]

Which never impresses anyone so gun advocates go for stories.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=10129
Asteroid Flyby
I disagree with your last statement. The most convincing explanation I've seen of Google's motivations with Android is that Android is a hedge in case Google is locked out of other platforms. They make money from people using Google services, regardless of whether the services are used from an iPhone, iPad, or Android device. Google and Apple certainly compete in many areas, but Google isn't trying to "destroy" Apple's business, nor is that even realistic.
What do you think JavaScript is? It's a standardized, potentially fast† language that other languages can compile to.

† No language is inherently fast. C can be slow (see CINT) and at least a subset of JavaScript can be fast (see the OP).
Will Javascript become Java?
> Ford, at least in the story, has neither "information" nor understanding.

He does have information, he has information that some people around him will respond to his requests for more information if it becomes necessary to have it. The power of delegation at work.
I suppose you could look at it like that, it's certainly powering the types of experiences that Color was hoping to create. It's a much different way of achieving it, though.
You should develop that, for sure.
Looks great, HN wrapped in sex, love it!
The speed limit on the NJ Turnpike is largely 65, but traveling at 70 - 80mph on the turnpike is normal, often the speed to just keep up with traffic, depending on the day/where you are on the road.

Wanting to go 80 on the NJT isn't "taking it to the track", it's "driving from A to B".
I'm sure this will be successful. It's very similar to how sharing of movie and music files across the Internet is prohibited, and now no one gets movies or music without paying for them. Same thing with the War on Drugs - it's been so successful that no one takes any illegal drugs any more.

But seriously, has anyone in Iceland ever heard of a proxy?
This seems very much targeted at emscripten and not to cross-compilers that start with GC'ed languages like GWT, Dart, ClojureScript, et al. If you are cross-compiling Java or C# to asm.js, you don't really want to manage memory manually. I work on GWT, and asm.js as an output target is very interesting to me (I've worked on a number of performance Web games using it, GwtQuake, AngryBirds, etc), but the starting assumption is GC, so I want to leverage non-boxed numerics, and all of the other nice stuff, but don't want to stuff everything into a TypedArray.

It's also unclear to me how this solves the problem of startup time on mobile. A giant glob of Javascript takes a non-trivial amount of time to load even on today's fastest smartphones. The spec seems to argue that Browser VMs could recognize asm.js and if I read between the lines, employ snapshoting the app and caching it for later quick startup?

In all likelihood, the majority of asm.js outputs would be actually be non-human readable output of optimizing cross-compilers, so there isn't much benefit from having a readable syntax that humans could read, so what's the real justification for using JS as an intermediate representation over say, a syntax specifically designed for minimum network overhead and maximum startup speed? Seems like it might be worthwhile for Mozilla to also work on efficient representations of asm.js that minimize this overhead. The usual response is minify + gzip, but it's not a panacea.
Sorry, I did not explain my position accurately. When I said that JS VMs are not standardized, I was not arguing that they should be (that is in fact a terrible idea), I was responding to the poster above who said that since we (a) already have a JS standard and (b) browsers have JS VMs, that we already pretty much have what I was arguing for.

I also agree that standard semantics is what people really want. Asm.js seems like an interesting project but one of the issues that (I like to think) the VM approach would solve is that the semantics could be more low-level. Why do I think that that is a good idea? Well ideally, one would not have to wait for different browsers to implement say websockets, but the websocket functionality could be simply implemented by the website as a library which would use (presumably secure) lower level primitives of the VM to achieve the websocket functionality. (If that sounds vaguely familiar to the microkernel idea, it's not just you :-) ).
Advice for Learning Algorithms for the First Time
It's not moving away from, it's addressing shortcomings.

As you should know, JS only has 1 type of numeric representation in userland, Number, which serves both floats and ints. Not surprisingly, operations with ints are much more efficient than with floats, and if an optimizer can introspect your code and determine that some value will only ever be an int, internally it will represent it as a int. Otherwise, it's forced to use a float representation.

Thus, coercing all values to values that can be internally represented as ints can yield a significant performance boost.
I think this list would certainly fail a lot of good, smart candidates, but it probably didn't pass many idiots. It's not likely that someone would know all of these facts and not be well-educated and intelligent. If he was truly getting hundreds of applicants and he didn't mind skipping some geniuses who didn't know facts, this seems like a good way to weed people out. Plus, it's pretty easy to grade.
I use http://historio.us/ for that. One-click bookmarklet, all my links are indexed so I can full-text search for them later.
And yet Ford was a fantastic innovator and worth $188 billion (adjusted for inflation) when he died! It really hammers in the point that general knowledge and intelligence are very different skillsets.
> 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?

Well hopefully we wouldn't make the same mistake again by going with a language and we would just implement a VM on which JS is implemented. It would be much easier to validate the correctness of a VM anyway, achieve better speed than was possible before, and not tie people down to a (painful) language. On a personal note I would actually start to view the web browser as a platform instead of a bunch of tangled strings, cans, and tape.

EDIT: I didn't answer your question. But, as a developer, I will only move to the web for my default programming language when I have bytecode or assembly to look at, not some convoluted scripting language. Hopefully, Asm.js is a minor, minor bump on the way towards the browser as a usable platform for arbitrary development.
1. What's a good tutorial to learn JAXB and JAX-RS?

2. Maven is a nightmare too. Every time I've used it (usually because I'm compiling someone else's code and they wrote the build in maven), it downloads hundreds of megabytes of who-knows-what from random Internet sites. I want to pin versions of dependencies (and dependencies-of-dependencies) so my builds are repeatable, and I want to be sure everyone who's forked my git repo can still build the code if the Maven URL's for the deps have gone out of business. I recall trying to read the Maven manual, but both the manual and the concepts were incomprehensible -- there's so much automagic, when things break, it's difficult to even come up with a hypothesis of what might be going wrong. (And anyone who has any experience with any build system knows that the build always breaks.)

I usually just use Ant. It's a bit of a pain shuttling jar's around (symlinks help), but at least I can understand the build.

3. Part of the problem is that I don't want this alphabet soup of technologies. If I'm running in Python, and I'm developing a prototype or a one-off hack, I just write a file called whatever.py. (I can "import json" in whatever.py if I don't want to use hacks like eval()/repr() or copy-and-paste for parsing/serializing.)

I want to be able to build a quick one-file prototype to process my XML, without enabling the "Java EE 6 web profile" (whatever that is) and writing a Maven build file. I want using XML to be this simple:

sudo apt-get install default-jdk
javac Whatever.java && java Whatever

And Java's XML handling just isn't that simple, whereas Python's JSON handling is.
Today is not 1921, mind you.
That, or protect against insurance fraud.
This would probably help the Dart effort a lot by providing a sane compilation target.
He doesn't make it clear whether this is a from-scratch port, or whether it's based off of the same port he reviewed in his article.
Because backwards compatibility is really important. x86, the Windows API, TCP, IPv4, and Unix (compared to Plan 9) are all examples of things that are full of cruft, but they persist because they have the right survival characteristics.

Besides, all it really comes down to is that the bytecode format has a weird encoding when sent over the wire. That's OK. You can view it as isomorphic to a format with a more natural encoding if you'd like; such a "disassembler" would be trivial to write.
Yes, Bumblebee is really cool.

My main problem with the Optimus configuration on Linux was overheating: as the discrete card (nVidia) was always on, even if the system wasn't using it, the computer was hotter. Without workload, the normal temperature on Linux was around 53ºC, while on Windows was 42ºC. It felt warmer on the keyboard too.

I had some problems trying to get Bumblebee to work on Fedora (at least the bbswitch worked, so the discrete nVidia card could be turned off, and then the computer wouldn't overheat on Linux). On Ubuntu though, the setup was really smooth [1]: just adding a PPA and then installing a package and everything was working :D

However, while Bumblebee is really cool, it still can't do what the official nVidia and Intel drivers do on Windows. You can run programs in the discrete card with Bumblebee, but you have to use a special command for that (optirun), the cards won't be switched on-the-fly depending on how much processing power is needed, which is the case with the official drivers on Windows. There supposedly is some progress in that regard though [2], in a project called Prime (awesome pun indeed)

[1]: This answer helped a lot too: http://askubuntu.com/questions/36930/how-well-do-laptops-wit...
[2]: Blueprints: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-r-hybr...
Looks like a great project.
This guy reviews them on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Techmoan

I think all the brands are "random Chinese company of the week."
ASmallWorld
Hey everyone,
I was wondering how many people here are also on the aSmallWorld network.

Haven't used in a while but figured it might be interesting to cross-reference.

talk soon,
G
http://giacomoballi.com
Thanks guys. Let me know if there are any other features or such that you would?!
There are good and bad things about PNaCl. But overall, the resistance to PNaCl goes beyond Mozilla -- it's a really hard standardization/synchronization problem. Our goal with asm.js was to produce something that could work today (because it's 100% compatible with existing JS semantics) and work even better tomorrow as engines optimize it even better.

Edit: Re: predictable performance, that's exactly what asm.js is about. The performance model is much closer to that of C or PNaCl/LLVM.
> This isn't moving away from JavaScript.

Exactly, that's the point.
This one was 7,000 tonnes (mass).
New technology could change health care system
The scrollbar is used for saturation, click the question mark on the bottom left to see the instructions.
A New Vaccine For Drinking Could Keep Alcoholics Sober
Looks great. I'd be happy to pay $2-$3 for it. Pocket/Instapaper integration would be great i.e. one click and it's saved to read later
It's possibly a good indicator of how well they absorb information and/or how much they read or pay attention to the news, or wherever they are learning these random facts from. I'm not saying that means a lot though, and I definitely would have failed this test.
Do they have the video upload to an offsite server in realtime?

What are some of the feature people looking for in a dash-cam and/or a dash-cam service?
Maybe I'm missing something but don't most email clients ignore/delete Javascript in email messages[1]? If so, how does this technique work?

[1] For instance, http://superuser.com/questions/430562/does-gmail-or-any-othe...
I have not heard of that. Looks interesting, thanks!
This is lower-level. It is JavaScript, but really it is a subset that implements low-level operations. In fact lower than PNaCl, this is past the LLVM IR level.
Hi, I'm the developer of Pinner[1]. This is my first iOS app, just updated to version 1.03. If you use pinboard I hope that you'll give it a try. I'm updating it often with new features - 1.1 is coming soon, with background updates and more. Here's a CodeHookup[2] link for 5 promo codes - any feedback is much appreciated.

[1] http://pinnerapp.net

[2] http://codehookup.com/60f6785c
It wasn't about what you know it was about what he knows. The problem in judging people the way you do is that you assume that everybody else lives like you do and spends their time like you do. Some people digest facts for a living, some people digest facts for a hobby. Some consider learning a life long vocation, facts, skills the lot. So don't be surprised if someone has an encyclopaedic knowledge about seemingly (to you, at least) useless facts.

Apropos useless facts, did you know shellac was made from insects?
RCS ftw!
Despite the space station being at an altitude of 370km, I'm sure sound travels through its air at about the same speed as it would in the open at sea level. So it's not altitude but density.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

What my country (Spain) labor legislation does, and I suspect many of the european ones, is not at all what you think it is, don't worry.

The law just allows workers, if they consider their rights to have been breached, to file a demand. It's somewhat complicated, because your employer, in principle, is still free to fire you when they want. In practice, employment here is and has always been, believe it or not, at will. What dismissal is not is "free as in beer": without a good cause (wrongful dismissal), they will have to pay you some quantity of money. With a good cause, it's disciplinary dismissal, which is free. That's true in all but a few cases, which protect you from wrongful dismissal. Say, you're the union's representative, or your son has cancer.

So you can demand to have your dismissal count as wrongful. You're still fired, but at least you get some extra money, including all extra hours, which have to be paid when demanded. If your employer threatens you with dismissal if you don't work 50 hours/week, then dismisses you, the judge could make it void and file a civil suit for threats, so there's still that protection.

But the catch is, no one can force you to enforce your rights. No one can demand your extra hours (any over the standard 40) be paid to you. Workers are still free to kill themselves on insane hours, if they want. In fact, because of ignorance of labor laws and fear of being fired, it's actually pretty common to do so.
Astroid Mining to Aid in the Deflection of Hazardous Objects Near Earth
If you do, please make it configurable to be a normal app as well as a menu bar app. I don't like menu bar apps that do not actually need to display some sort of persistent notification or control, and there may be others who feel the same way.

Also, we generally shy from "yes" and "love it" type replies here; you can probably assume that 1 upvote = 1 yes.
"Share economy" is getting a lot of buzz these days.

What percentage of people are actually willing to share? and what percent is needed for these business to be viable?

Using airbnb as an example, what percent of the population is actually willing to rent a room in their house?
webbynode

http://webbynode.com
Basically, it seems Edison wanted his executives to have his intense intellectual curiosity (he was a notable autodidact). If he knew the kind of people he felt he could lead effectively, and this was his perhaps-crazy way to identify them, this seems like a good test for those circumstances.

One of the most damaging things is when you have what Gabe Newell calls "rent-seeking inside the corporation," which is a neat economic way of describing bureaucratic political power struggles. And this is totally normal, expected behavior unless you find someone who is pre-aligned with the mission, goals and values of the organization. This becomes totally crucial at huge corporations like Edison's.

So this, in a sense, is a cultural test more than a knowledge quiz. Thomas Edison didn't want people who could win at 1920s Jeopardy!, he wanted people who were driven by the same non-monetary pursuits he had, possibly because it was his best chance to avoid BS artists, pleasant-but-ineffective workers and political strivers. I also have to think that it was because he was a pretty narcissistic dude, but that's another story.
Windows, IIS, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Visual Basic .NET, .NET, SQL Server, own session state store. Not live yet, but nearly all the code is ready to go live, and the code written seems to run well. Haven't written any JavaScript although ASP.NET writes some for me.

I type the code into my favorite text editor, KEdit, and use a lot of KEdit macros I wrote. I don't use an IDE.

The session state store is just a console application communicating with TCP/IP sockets and using two collection classes, one for the key/value pairs of the session ID and session data and the other for a fast way to apply time out. Timings indicate that on a dedicated, single core computer with a 3.0 GHz clock the session state store should be able to serve over 1000 Web pages a second, that is, (A) read the session state, (B) use and update the session state, and (C) write the session state. The code for the Web pages that use the session state store send/receive just byte arrays; a GUID is used for the key, and the values are from de/serialization of an instance of a class for session state.

Visual Basic has been nice, both for console applications and on IIS for the the Web pages. The compiler is astoundingly fast; the resulting EXEs are astoundingly small; the EXEs load quickly; the compiler error messages are from good up to quite nice; and I may have encountered no bugs at all.
Interesting timing with the release of "A Good Day to Die Hard" yesterday.
Thanks for the input. I'll definitely consider that. Shouldn't be too hard.
Because it was the better API? Game devs all over the net have praised the Web Audio API

The Mozilla proposal required audio processing in JavaScript which in some ideal world is a great idea but in the real world where you want audio running on Intel ATOM and mobile processors and still have time to run other code is the not such a good idea.
> This whole situation sounds more humorous than anything.

Once, it's funny. When this shit happens to you on a regular basis, it's tragic.
Actually, @uvdiv's reply to my comment reveals we're able to detect things of this size regardless of human observers being present.
same for me on Chrome Version 23.0.1271.95 on Windows 7.
Debunking of the sorry attempt at debunking.

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response
Is Iceland in some contest to become the saddest place on Earth?
"Ahh, I see, Clojure SHOULD HAVE been compiled to Java, not the JVM" said no one ever. This is a blatantly horrible idea. Horrible ideas are great for hacks, but it actually looks like Mozilla is serious about this (which scares me).

I want my bytecode to look like this: `iadd`, NOT `(a+b)|0`. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but running bytecode through a text interpreter, which is then compiled again to machine code (possibly via another bytecode) seems like a horrific hack.

I would be much happier with a standardized VM which Mozilla could then implement via javascript or whatever if they wanted.
What you're asking for is drastically harder to achieve from a security perspective. If we didn't care about security, we could just standard the Linux syscalls or something and call it a day. :) But what we're doing here is providing the low-level computational model but still only providing attenuated access to system facilities like the network through standardized web API's.
same FF nightly
This might seem like a useless comment but trust me, you will not understand this right now no matter how much we try and explain to you. You are 19. When you are 10 years older, you will get some idea. All I will say is that settling down is not necessarily a bad thing and it does not just mean that you settled for less. It is just about priority in life but like I said, at 19 it is very difficult to understand this. I cannot even tell you what I used to think like at 19 about life and settling down
Good insights.. he was right on a lot of stuff.
Most people don't have a strong aptitude for trig, but you still learn it.
There's no source cited in the linked article other than The Daily Mail. For the unfamiliar, they're a British 'news outlet' who are notorious for writing articles that grossly misinterpret source data, to forward their own agenda.
I've set home and work yeah. And I also toned down how often weather shows up.

Haven't tried navigating though. I'll give that a shot.
Just what citizens need: a the government watching everything you do! Regardless of how you feel about pornography or other "obscene" content, this kind of power will be abused. Even if Iceland, arbiters of good taste, manage to use it entirely within the given bounds, that kind of information could be pilfered and used by more malicious people. Even big tech focused companies are not immune to data theft, so why would Iceland do any better?

As the saying goes: let's collect data on how everyone in Iceland browses the web; what could possible go wrong?
So what? It's not like a research paper or anything, just an article that has been scanned.
>Err... speaking as someone who has two Firefox OS Developer Devices in front of him right now, I can tell you that it is indeed very innovative

How is a me-too ChromevOS clone innovative?
cool concept, but not as useful as https://kuler.adobe.com/ (unfortunately needs flash)
Game devs all over the net have praised the Web Audio API. Abusing the audio tag was never the correct solution for games. The audio tag was designed for streaming long files, never for sound effects. Just because people were able to abuse it into game use doesn't suggest that was a good solution.
> "If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they'll get there, and they'll take a picture of your dead body. But they can't get there in time to save your life. The first line of defense is you."

Of course, the flip side of this is "If you're horribly depressed in your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone."

Same thing for "If your teenage son's irresponsible friends are in your house..."
JQuery Learning Center
I don't know but I do really hope that the one that hit Russia wasn't part of a smaller but faster one that did actually hit 2014-DA and change its course.

Otherwise the northern emisphere is in trouble.

I find that coincidence very, very weird too.

And you gotta love all the people saying: "Nothing to see here, move along", as if they had themselves ran all the computation and knew for sure there was no relation between the two events.