skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"So far, the vaccine has been tested successfully on alcoholic mice."

How does one raise a mouse to be alcoholic? How would you even diagnose it in mice? Is there a genetic strain, or is it environmental?
If Iceland's parliament were in fact "forcing someone's personal value upon a whole country", then I would also consider it to be morally wrong. However, the democratic process is there to guard against this sort of behaviour. It doesn't always work, but you haven't shown that it is not working in this case.

I believe you are referring to the reference (haha) to the article in /Slate/. I read that article and didn't find it hugely compelling. Some good points were made in the article, but they weren't even close to a complete argument.

Again, I agree that 'it's not a government's job to force their subjective moral values upon people'. Firstly, when it comes to morality, it's pretty much all subjective. (I actually believe that there is an objective morality; it's just really hard to convince anyone else that my morality is it.) It is, however, a government's job to enforce the morality of the people.

Just because bad things happen in countries where pornography is banned doesn't mean they happen because pornography is banned.

I believe you are saying that banning pornography is an indicator of a bad government and the other governments that have made the same decision are a pretty bad lot. This may be true.

But my point remains: it is a government's job to enforce the values of society. It just depends what we see as our most important values (is it free speech or moral decency, in this case?).
> Repeating someone's experiment but changing several of the variables (temperature, overnight stop versus all-in-one-day) does not refute the experiment.

That depends. If the stress on the car's battery is the same, but the driver's behavior with respect to charging is different, then the new experiment may have important things to tell us.

And remember -- in science, there are no failed experiments. A replication effort that doesn't produce the same result as the original experiment is still a useful result.
I understand the benefits of puppet, ansible, etc for provisioning on a massive scale.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, but we wanted to take our own stab at it to see how people might respond to it.
It looks like yellow highlights are external links.
More to the point: As soon as you want to mix audio levels, <audio> alone is completely insufficient. You need mix control in order to fade background music and loops. I consider this a basic need; the Mozilla API allows you to roll something yourself, but Web Audio is more clearly suited to the application.
It works best in magazines or newspaper layouts where the pull-quote exists outside of the normal eye-path when reading the article. Then you avoid the "Hey, I just read that" moment, but still pull people in who are leafing through.

But, web pages are not typically laid out in such a way to allow for that.
I am getting the feeling that marketing asm.js needs to emphasize a few things:

- It is JS.

- It is effectively an IL for every JS backend.

- It is constructed to contain proven equivalences with familiar models in advance.

To me these points alone suffice shut down the standard bytecode idea by either meeting or exceeding it everywhere. Finally:

- Today.

Nothing needed breaking to build it. You've got your eggs and omelet too.

Edit: format.
Well, if I were not sure of the language, I'd be very careful about criticising and accusing those who do speak it well.

That said, given your now seemingly playful use of the language, and my experience of the excellent English the Dutch generally speak, I'm not sure I entirely believe your reply. Although, as I'm not a mind reader I guess I'll have to let that go.

Ironically, my reply to you put my Karma to over 1000...
The Twitter equivalent would be asking Twitter users if they'd use TweetDeck given only mockups of the app.
> I would really, really like to see some benchmarks comparing NaCL vs asm.js, and I won't buy this as a viable compilation target until there's data to back up these (dubious) claims.

The current numbers are that asm.js is around 2x slower than native code. I didn't compare to NaCl (which would be apples-to-oranges since it is non-portable) nor PNaCl (which I am not sure is ready yet for benchmarking? Please correct me if not).

We expect to improve on the 2x later this year, this is just the first iteration. I do think 2x is quite promising already though - it's in the range of Java and C# (on a fast VM for them).

I'll be putting up some slides with more specific numbers tomorrow after I finish giving a talk on it.
I found the test very interesting. You have to keep in mind that Edison was a prolific inventor, who at the time was in the business of disrupting as many industries as he could. From that perspective, he was looking for people who knew a lot about the current state of technology and business, and also able to bring to bear knowledge from apparently unrelated areas.. Many of the questions are trivia related to the technology of the time ("who invented photography?", "where is platinum found", etc.). I think the expectation was that someone who was actively interested in technology would have picked up a lot of that sort of trivia along the way. Some of the less technological questions ("what's the capital of Alabama?") are probably just trying to evaluate how aware the candidate is of the world around them.

A similar list today, say for a candidate to help run a high-tech incubator, might consist of questions like "who founded Google? which is preferable to a seller, a 2nd price auction or a standard auction? where was the web invented? what's the geopolitical and technological significance of tantalum? are lithium batteries riskier than other battery technologies, why or why not? what's a typical price for web advertising (per click, or per impression)? what's a zero-sum game? what's a derivative?" (Those are just off the top of my head, I could probably come up with a better list if I thought about it for 15 minutes). In other words, not things that you must know in order to do the job, but things that anyone capable of doing the job would likely have picked up along the way.
We don't assume anything. New employees here at GitHub can choose whichever platform they prefer—it just so happens that most people here go for Macs of their own accord :)
This means that one slip-up won't become the slippery slope. That's a big deal.
This is something better asked on serverfault.com
Great writeup and thanks for the intro to Zawinski's law!
Analyze your Twitter archive
When Heroku's apology for misleading its customer is ITSELF misleading.. that's bad

> Especially the one line about the date of the report, that's just pedantic.

What they claim to have known and when is very relevant to how much you can trust them! Here's the timeline from my perspective:

1) In 2011 Tim Watson points out the problem: http://tiwatson.com/blog/2011-2-17-heroku-no-longer-using-a-...

2) Heroku responds but does nothing (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/heroku/8eO...)

3) On 2/8/2013 I send Heroku full details about the problem including simulations, etc

4) On 2/11/2013 Heroku responds and says the best path forward is for me to optimize Rap Genius and that Adam's done talking about it with me.

5) The Heroku's Ugly Secret article goes up on 2/13/2013

6) Heroku releases BIG apology on 2/14/2013 saying they only learned about the problem on day ago.

Heroku knew about the problem at the LATEST on 2/11, and before we made a big public stink, their response was to say "just make Rap Genius faster"
Five men at atomic ground zero (video)
I think the explanation for the change is a bit simpler than that. Someone can correct me if I've misunderstood, but AFAIK it isn't that "Intelligent Routing" was too expensive, but that it depended on simplifying assumptions that stopped being true.

Originally, Heroku was only for Ruby, and it depended on the assumption that a server could only handle one request at a time. All the talk of Intelligent Routing seems to date from this time, so it appears that Intelligent Routing just meant they never routed more than one request at a time to a server. But then Heroku wanted to add support for things like Java and Node.js, which can support multiple requests per server. This meant the simplifying assumption of "1 dyno = 1 request" baked into the old routing algorithm was no longer valid, so they had to switch to something else or they'd be crippling pretty much everything but Ruby.
I think having events and query is overkill and is no longer an array. You are essentially making a database at this point but trying to pass it off as a basic array to replace the lightweight builtin Array. I would even shy away from calling it array since it really does very opinionated things.
Are there certain geographies or areas that are more prone to these incidents than others? Countries in northern hemispheres for example?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhote-Alin_meteorite

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patomskiy_crater (Debatable meteorite origins)
That is exactly what asm.js aims to be: a fast target to compile to. As a bonus, it is fully backwards compatible and portable too.
Gravatar is down
Wasn't corrupt before the collapse? :)
-:) (Not to knock twice ?)
Russia Today also describes the Tungaska meteor as "one of the most mysterious events in history" and suggests it was caused by space aliens [1].

[1] http://rt.com/news/meteorite-crash-urals-chelyabinsk-283/

(today's http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5224616)
Now Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla will all have to ensure that tricks like (a+b)|0 are executed optimally though.
A lot depends on the angle too.
I'm currently using both Knockout observable arrays [1] and Underscore array helpers [2] in a project, and the Array.js library looks like it mashes both of these concepts together quite nicely.

[1] http://knockoutjs.com/documentation/observableArrays.html

[2] http://underscorejs.org/#arrays
Interesting idea. I would guess that this idea, like many good things at startups, will be have to change when you get to 20 or 30 people. Correct?
I'm the same way: I look at the list of stories, open all the ones that look interesting in new tabs, and do the same with the comments for them as well. Then, I have a nice queue of six to twelve tabs to peruse.
@dherman The document says, "extraordinarily optimizable". Do you have any numbers on that?

I'd love to see benchmarks from running asm.js-compatible JavaScript on e.g. SpiderMonkey versus an asm.js-optimizing SpiderMonkey.

Are we talking about incremental differences of 5%, 25%, even 50%, or orders-of-magnitude improvement?
For enterprise Mac management I've found the Casper Suite to be awesome: http://www.jamfsoftware.com/ (no affiliation)

It can easily create thin images for setting up new machines (make a small base install and then give the computer applications X Y and Z), package software and remotely deploy it to computers, create rules to push out new versions of software to computers, etc. You can set up self service so that users can browse a general store of applications but you can also assign applications to specific computers. They handle iOS devices now too, and their community is great. It also has SCCM and Altiris plugins, but I haven't used either of those features.
The FinTech Hackathon
It's Too Bad Epic Games Considers Female Protagonists Tough To Justify
We had most of december and january below -15C sometimes down to -30C and diesel cars had no problems. Most problems were caused by guess what: batteries not giving enough juice to start. Diesel cars, having bigger batteries, were actually more reliable.
Oh interesting, hope it succeeds then!
Excellent, I shall refrain from contacting the uk Ubuntu mailing list regulars in that case
The appeal of JSON isn't that it is shorter, but that it is easier. Easy to read, easy to type, easy to parse. XML may be easy "enough", but I'll choose JSON anytime I don't need the extra things that xml offers. The verbosity of XML may sometimes be necessary, but it just isn't very much fun to work with.
Out of curiosity, how many developers do you have who primarily use a Windows machine?
Two things. First, the article doesn't "challenge" Zach's views in any comprehensible way. It simply spews vitriol as if the author (who is also the publisher) was paid by the ad hominem.

Second, the views Zach espouses have more weight than simply Zach's endorsement. It isn't as if he's the only one who feels this way.

Putting those two things together, I don't think it's fair to use words that imply that Zach is rejecting the author solely because the author's views undermine Zach's personal and unique viewpoint, introducing cognitive dissonance.

You or I may disagree with him, but I think Zach's argument is more akin to putting up a sign that defines "nicely" the same way Hacker News defines its guidelines, namely a set of heuristics for discourse that have been found through experience to lead to productive discussion.
Storing it and transferring it on the server is one thing; serializing it locally in the browser itself might be a more reasonable goal? That is, it wouldn't be expected to be portable to anything but that very same browser, but it would allow you to cache the compiled result. (I would expect the serialized string to be signed by the browser itself, to prove that it was created by the browser – and for the deserialization to fail on some browser upgrades).
It's going to be exciting to see how these escrow-like services develop over the next few years. Specifically because, as you mentioned, you don't have to deal with a lot of regulation that comes a traditional product.

I wonder if companies like Strip/PayPal/Visa will try and lead the way or if they'll wait and be the acquirers.
They don't see themselves in that market...yet, and the trends don't look good in that direction either. As we all know, Apple has continued to shy away from actual computing in recent years. Now if you could do something like this for Linux, businesses that don't yet have an MS infrastructure could find this very compelling, especially if the rumors of Linux MS Office come true. I work in IT in a large nationwide law firm and we spend so much time of our days dealing with viruses and general Windows headaches when what people do is mostly either 1) through Citrix, where we manage the Windows instances or 2) on the web. If MS Office for Linux dropped, I think businesses like ours would find this a very compelling option.
Bit Torrent's SoShare up to 1TB gratis
Apple Remote Desktop does almost everything you're describing.
It would be very hard to compile regular JS to asm.js: It would be exactly as hard as compiling regular JS to C, in fact. The problem is you don't know the types of everything.

However, some regular JS might be easy to compile to asm.js. For example a matrix multiplication library.
See evilpie's comment below.
I agree with you. Even (not chauvinistacally) under control of the USA, EU, China, Japan, India or Australia.
That must be why there are so many homicides with other weapons in Western Europe and most of Asia.
This is the level of modern public discourse. "Romney lied" or "Obama lied" was what you probably heard most in headlines last year, even though in most cases the discrepancy was more along the lines of Broder lowering the temperature twenty minutes after he thought he did.
Twitter: We've engaged our Legal team to help ThePSF
A VM with standardized input and output is exactly what I meant. Nevertheless, the underlying implementation of said VMs can still differ but they would all implement the same bytecode standard (similarly as both HotSpot and Dalvik both implement the JVM bytecode standard).
Yahoo Mobile Revenue Just $125M
evilpie posted some numbers below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227841 and I'll reproduce the salient points here:

odin (now) odin (next) sm v8
skinning 2.80 2.46 12.90 59.35
zlib 2.02 1.61 5.15 5.95
bullet 2.16 1.79 12.31 9.30

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=840282
PopClip: The App Your Mac Needs
Interest in the story will tail off over time, but Musk made himself look whiny and childish. That won't change even if his claims are fully substantiated.
I'm sorry he got (1.) wrong. Let's be really generous and say that he means databases that aren't relational (which is totally different from XML database), even by that definition I'd argue that there aren't more people (developers) using Non relational over relational. How about end users, yes probably more users, but even in 2004 more people were using non-relation databases than relational (file systems, LDAP, Lotus Domino, VSAM, IMS, AD). So perhaps you could interpret surpass to mean 'better than', well that's just vague.
If you were developing technical products in 1921, the process of tanning leather was probably very relevant, as were questions about the density of different kinds of wood, the sources and production of various metals, etc.

Just as a programmer should know the orders of magnitude of latencies, an industrial engineer in Edison's time should have a sense of the characteristics of materials he might be choosing between. For example, should the handle of a new tool you're inventing be made of leather-wrapped steel, or hickory (traditionally used for ax handles)?
Teach your kids to be fans
Totally agree, and also I think that we might be embarrassed to look too paranoid in case the event wasn't that alarming.
This is also similar to the Backbone.js Collections type which inherits functional-programming methods from Underscore.

The main difference seems to be that Backbone expects objects as members of the collection.
AWS RedShift First Impressions
What the hell are you guys talking about? The people on the ground thought a nuclear war was beginning. People in their cars probably thought a plane was crashing--no need for the driver to react.
I think GC interaction should be the highest priority. As a way to run C/C++ in the browser at native speed, asm.js is awesome, but as a way to run Python, Java, Go, etc in the browser at native speed, asm.js would be world-changing.
Genuine question: with such ammunition, is there a even a tiny chance it will go through a plasterboard wall and kill my flatmate?

Would a taser be a safer-yet-effective option when living in such an apartment?
Have you guys thought about memory management in the ArrayBuffer "heap"? One can decommit pages from a real heap, which can be a pretty important optimization.
> I’m convinced that the best path forward is for one of your developers to work closely with [redacted] to modernize and optimize your web stack. If you invest this time I think it’s very likely you’ll end up with an app that performs the way you want it to at a price within your budget

So... Heroku's CTO acknowledged there was a problem with their stack, and offered to help RapGenius modernize and optimize it. And RapGenius quibbles on the word "yesterday"?

While I do appreciate RapGenius raising the issue publicly to bring better accountability to Heroku. Their response to Heroku's response ought to have been along the lines of: "Hurray! Everyone's boat is rising with the tide." Not this.
Towards a better Erlang: Elixir isn't Hipster
If there's enough interest in a different time, I'd think about doing it again on a weekday evening.
Quite reminiscing to last time when a guy put the vagina-hacking link on HN...every time when something about porn posted here, the website would be DoS'ed in hours, almost without exception...perhaps next time we should at least have the courtesy to notify the author to mirror the site before we link it on HN...
FDA Approves First Retinal Implant
GitHub Open Sources “Boxen,” A One-Command Tool To Install GitHub.com on Macs
> the economic section is putting forward a strongly Keynesian point of view... not a consensus.

I think part of the reason for the confusion is that many people (including me) do not know enough about economics to know what it means to be Keynesian (vs Austrian or other schools, I believe?), in much the same way that most non-programmers have no idea what we mean when we are talking about object-oriented vs functional.

It doesn't help that most economic schools seem to be like religions: All the other guys are wrong, and ours is the only one that's right. Sure, you can look that up on Wikipedia, but if you don't know enough about the domain it's easy to not realize that there are alternatives (or what they are).
Kind of old, but in it's time PlentyOfFish.com was 1-man startup. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish

I would love to get a list of 1-man-startup/companies and their experiences, but chances are that these guys are way too too busy to blog about it.
As does OS X Server, but it doesn't "just work" out of the box the same way Macs do in general, or even iCloud for individuals.

For a 5-25 person SMB, there's not a full-time IT guy who could set it up. At best, there's a desktop support/printer/office manager type. At a tech company, you might get lucky (or unlucky) and one of your devs or site-sysadmins spends much of his time setting stuff like this up.

ARD is pretty weak compared to MS SCCM, and super-weak compared to something like AirWatch or Zenprise (MDMs).
Why we're building a native, in-app helpdesk & knowledgebase for your iPhone app
At my company, small cms company bought a few years ago by older larger media company, recruiting in Stockholm, we're offering new employees a Mac or Linux laptop, but there is a lot of hinting that "you'd probably be best off picking a Mac", and a few new hires have opted for the latter because of reasons that to me sound like they think it's the "company DNA" or something.

I'm not religious about platform choice, but I'd hate to see a future where developers are pidgeonholed with regards to their tools

Edit: currently 13 of 15 of our devs use Mac
> Are there certain geographies or areas that are more prone to these incidents than others?

No. An incoming meteor or asteroid is perfectly ecumenical with respect to location, therefore the vast majority of meteors fall into the oceans.

On a related note, the best time to see meteors is between midnight and dawn in whatever location you find yourself. The reason? At dawn, if you look straight up, you're looking in the direction Earth is moving in its orbit at thirty kilometers per second. By contrast, if you look straight up at sunset, you're looking at where Earth has just been and is receding from at thirty kilometers per second. Earth's velocity is added to that of the wandering space rocks near dawn, but is subtracted at sunset.

The Russian meteor even happened at dawn.
Well, the Cloud Server is basically a VM that you have full root access to, so yeah install apache and mysql, varnish whatever and off you go. But performance seemed better than the equivalent AWS instances that I tried, and I've had no outages in the 3 or 4 years or so I've been using it. Which compares well with AWS.

Cloud Sites are a totally different product. My first complaint was no ssh access so you can't deploy with version control. FTP like it's 1999.

Second issue, was we would see random null responses that did not come from our application (medium sized Drupal site). It was a while ago, but here's a more recent post recounting the same problems. [1]

And another post on Reddit from a couple of days ago with a couple of other people. [2]

Drupal is possibly similar enough to Wordpress that you'd see similar issues.

For a SAAS I'd be looking at the most reliable hosting I could get if I were you. Outages are going to cost you both your time and customer trust.

[1] http://mavergames.org/content/drupal-rackspace-clouds-cloud-...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/18bcbb/is_it_time_fo...
Impressive! How deep was it?
Silent Circle and inexperienced protocol parsing