skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slower is far better than not running at all. Backwards compatibility is how Web technologies (and, for that matter, most technologies--x86 for example) survive.

And asm.js' encoding has no impact on the user experience. That's precisely my point. Using a binary bytecode instead of interoperable JS would maybe make the parsing easier, but that doesn't make up for the costs this would burden developers with (not to mention the difficulties with two VMs sharing data and so forth, something which is terribly important but is always glossed over in these conversations).

Finally, regarding threads, we're talking about a new proposed standard here. There will always be work to do, since just taking the NDK and putting it on the Web is not an option. PNaCl isn't shipping yet. So the question is whether asm.js presents a shorter, more straightforward path to success than the alternatives. I believe it does.
Reliability on prod is imho a big win for the less-sexy checked exceptions.
Most good logotypes don't use typefaces as-is; minor tweaks are made to the characters, ligaments are created, etc. To someone with the right skillset, I don't think starting with an iffy open source font would be much of a problem.
I'm basing my comment on the implied definition of history being presented in the article. I think it's trying to move history from the category of study for the sake of study, for "people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved", into that category of things that are essential for everyone to study. I think that's unfair to the other liberal arts and an exaggeration of the universal utility of historical study.

You're taking "based on broad stereotype or outright lies," and "worse than zero." out of context, but I'll defend "pile of anecdotes", because that's what even good primary sources are: a non-representative data point of something that happened in an uncontrolled environment.

I appreciate what you're saying about the study of history being able to open your mind to the complexity of the world, but that's such a different goal for history than the article presents that I think you're defending a different thing entirely, and not the idea I'm attacking.
I'm not pretending that games only have this issue.

It's not even an issue to me. I'm not sure what your point is.

I was just trying to clarify that game purchases are still essentially software licenses, even from the least restrictive providers (GoG).
That's not inconsistent. Unintuitive maybe.
New Design Specs for YouTube Channels
Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st
Ask HN: Scala web devs, describe your stack
How does web programming in Scala look like? Which stack is used? What kind of issues are you experiencing with frameworks like Play?
> What I suggest to friends asking me for advice re:grad school is to go to grad school IF AND ONLY IF they get an assistantship of some sorts (those usually come with a tuition waiver).

I think this is key. Every professor I ever had said "if you have to pay for a grad degree, don't go."

Which I would have, which is why I didn't!
Well gee, if only we had some sort of previous experience with a way to fund long-term research in basic sciences, the results of which profoundly changed our world.

Oh wait, we've spent the last 30 years enjoying the fruits of government funded research from NASA, DARPA, Bell Labs, and others. I know that this may not be popular with some people on Hacker News, but by and large government funded research in the basic sciences has been instrumental in transforming America into the technological powerhouse it currently is.

Peter Thiel is upset we have 140 characters, and not flying cars? I choose to be blown away that we have a world wide planetary communication grid capable of delivering information in near real-time. Step back for a moment and let that blow you away for a while.

I appreciate the enormous advances that industry has layered on top of the many breakthroughs that have come from public labs, and I also understand that industry has been invaluable in making many of these breakthroughs popular and widespread.

But we already have a model for successful R&D that will allow for the sort of paradigm shifts that Thiel is apparently asking for, and it's not going to come from a decade of eating ramen in your garage, hoping that you'll finally get your payoff in the form of an X-Prize. It comes from consistent government funding towards the best and brightest, not beholden to quarterly results or the profit motive, from dedicated researchers each doing their part to move things a step forward.

If you really want breakthroughs that will change the world, then it has to come with the patience to wait years or decades, to keep funding steady and high enough that the best aren't impoverished, and the understanding that the results need to be open and free to all who want them.
> JS JIT is an internal implementation detail

asm.js optimizations are also an internal implementation detail. You don't need to do them, and the code still runs fast. Or you can do them in a variety of ways, not just the one being tested in Firefox. In fact I argued for optimizing in a very different way originally.

The point of asm.js is that it ensures you don't do things like use multiple types in a single variable, avoid undefined values cropping up, etc. That helps JS JITs in general, both existing ones as well as new optimizations made more feasible by the approach.

So asm.js does not expose any implementation details, no more than say CrankShaft and TraceMonkey do in the documents written about "how to write fast JS for modern JS engines" (which often say explicit things about "don't mix types" and so forth).

> Users don't care about whether a particular application uses non-portable optimization strategies

Of course users do. A portable application would be runnable from all the users' devices, that's a huge plus. Just like users want to play their music from their iPod, laptop, TV, etc., they want to run their apps on all their devices as well. Portability makes that possible.

> You can target x86 and ARM specifically (which are likely to be the only architectures that matter for the next 5 years), and fallback to PNaCL for everyone else.

That's a big compromise. If we had done that before the rise of ARM, for example, ARM might never have achieved its current success.

But anyhow, of course there are different compromises to be made. The web and JS focus on true portability, with its downsides. If you personally are willing to compromise more to get better performance, then sure, another option might be better for you.
What gives you the impression that a site has the right to force you to view ads?

Also, what bizarro universe are we living in where viewing ads is seen to have some sort of value or merit on its own? If I were to watch broadcast tv, for example, and in one instance watch all of the advertisements dutifully and in the next skip all the ads with a dvr but in both cases on no account be influenced in any way to buy the products advertised, is there a difference (morally or commercially) between either behavior?

I would suggest that I have no more obligation to watch advertisements than I do to buy anything being advertised.
The age of bugs (2008)
Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
If x86 and ARM become the favored platforms for full speed on the Web, as you've essentially locked the Web into those architectures for all time. Web developers will realistically not optimize the PNaCl solution.

I disagree that this is worth the cost. This is not about "a slavish devotion to JavaScript"; your solution is fundamentally opposed to portability.
As Mr. Green points out, the key issue today is more about key disruption. And, in my opinion, that's an area closed source solutions are even more scary. (Without any form of transparency, why would we believe our keys aren't being archived to China?)
My favourite story about Napoleon is the start of Napoleon's Hundred Days, following his escape from his initial exile:

> The 5th Regiment was sent to intercept him and made contact just south of Grenoble on 7 March 1815. Napoleon approached the regiment alone, dismounted his horse and, when he was within gunshot range, shouted, "Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish."[131]
The soldiers responded with, "Vive L'Empereur!" and marched with Napoleon to Paris; Louis XVIII fled.

As the name of the period suggests, this state of affairs only lasted for 100 days before he was defeated at Waterloo and surrendered. Still pretty badass though.
But then these people look at history, and see this giant pile of anecdotes, and all the sudden it's the Middle Ages again and we can hermenutic our way to wisdom by staring at it really hard

My whole life is a pile of anecdotes! And yet I've used my experiences to build a functional mental model of the world. I can use history in the same way.

You argue that anecdotal data should be flatly ignored when making decisions. If that were true then newborn children would be the best reasoners on the planet. Your argument cannot hold in general.
Eh, for every use case where it's more convenient that arrays start at zero, there's one where it's more convenient that arrays start at one, and vice versa.

For example, to get a prefix of length 'n', you need characters 0 through n-1 with zero-based indexing and 1 through n with one-based indexing. (That Python hides the -1 when using a [0:n] range is a convenience; the subtraction still happens internally.)

Similarly, to get the last element of a one-based array with a[length(a)] and the last element of a zero-based array with a[length(a)-1].

What it comes down to is that sometimes you have to write +1 or -1 for zero-based indexing where you can avoid it for one-based indexing and vice versa. What is not the case is that it only universally happens for one of those schemes.
For happiness, I agree, although often a significant lack of money will hinder happiness and render unhappy.
You don't consider it an inconsistency for (1) and (not 0) to evaluate to different results?
Those are some awesome orbits. There don't seem to be any solutions where all three bodies are in the ecliptic? If so does that mean we would only see these in the wild in a planet/star "capture" situation?
> We are nothing without good process, and self-help books or the actions they describe are hugely useful with that...

His FIRST criticism is that the books and articles about success are vague (i.e. lacking in specific actions) and ineffective (not actually useful).

> This piece is a deeply anachronistic

You are aware this is an essay from around 1908?
Only if you wrongly assume that poor people don't work.
The first two examples already work in lua if you just put something at 0.
Thanks, it is fixed now.
Nice work, and good luck!
Is there an IMDB of beers for apps like this to use? And wine for that matter?
Why You Should Drop Everything And Buy a Nokia Lumia
Zero to Google in 18 Months: The BufferBox Story
Garry's Mod made $22 million, Facepunch working on new PC game
venture backed startup buying low quality content to drive affiliate purchases?
As my history teacher would say, "to learn from our own (we as a society) past"
2) T-shirts are a great business model, there's a reason why so many web comics do it. They provide a healthy profit margin at comparatively low overhead. For a reasonably popular site t-shirt revenue can be as much or more than advertising revenue. I'll point to Topatoco as an example here, it's a company that provides fulfillment for t-shirts and similar merch for 3rd party content creators, and is successful enough that it services several dozen such creators. Given that they manage to employ something like a dozen staff (including part-time employees) and they operate on a lower commission than many other similar services I think that's a good indicator of how successful that business model can be for the creators.

3) See #2. As for why anyone would buy a book, because a book is compiled and easier to read. Whether or not you think it's reasonable the market certainly does. 37 Signals book "Rework" is a bestseller and one of the top selling books in the entrepreneurship category. Look at the popularity of the Joel on Software books as well.

As for your final point, I disagree. Online journalism is still following the, now obsolete, model of traditional journalism. One concentrated on access, aggregation, and conduits rather than original content. Most journalism is, frankly, trash. It's regurgitation. Find one article on a news story and I can point you to hundreds of copies of the same material with no significant value added, splattered across so many "news" sites. Aggregation of that sort is no longer significantly valuable in the internet age. And sites that don't offer significant added original value are going to die. The internet is very, very good at disintermediating valueless intermediaries.
Shutterstock Founder Took 100,000 Photos To Get His Company Off The Ground
BTW, do you have permission to use the Python and Java logos?
I'm a bit late in commenting here, but would love Firefox to do one thing with script debugging. A lot of scripts are written unindented, without spaces, and may be obfuscated to save size and for other obvious reasons. But that makes script debugging very difficult in the browser. A feature to properly indent them, and possibly unobfuscate them 'live'
in the debugger will be great ! Not sure how difficult would that be ...
Testing for -0 in JavaScript
It's an interesting pivot. Not sure about the domain now, though.

I had signed up for and was excited about them potentially disrupting the affiliate marketing industry.
You'd think it was obvious, but there's immense cultural pressure to take on debt for an immaterial promise which may or may not actually be of any benefit to you in the future.

Student debt has eclipsed credit card debt in the US, and Americans aren't exactly known for being stingy with credit.
I don't think you can have security on a device you don't have root access. And since most of the phones are locked and untrusted does it matter how much exactly?

And almost all really nasty regimes have already somewhat liberal view of using thermorectal cryptoanalysis anyway. Tor style obfuscation and retransmission with very low SNR masked as a torrent client could be a better way to go. If your government know that you said something to someone they can just "ask" you to find exactly what. The trick is not to be found.
Almost everyone makes money. The trick isn't to make more, it's to spend less.

Some of the best advice I was ever given was that if you want to be rich, live like you're poor. Most people, left unchecked, will live to the extent of their means, which is a tremendous contributor to debt, because a) when you want something above what you already tend to buy, you do it on credit, and b) credit is carefully constructed to take forever to pay off if you are only paying what you have to.

So, the advice could better be stated "spend less, put what you don't spend towards eliminating your debt".
Brian Fargo’s New Game Explodes on Kickstarter
cringe ... a<0?sth:sthelse; phew...
Ask HN: Tools for Android NDK development?
Looking at porting a desktop C++ and OpenGL app to Android. Wondering what tools do you use for debugging and profiling apps on Android? Am interested in profiling both CPU code, as well as OpenGL shaders.
Same. A Twilio-like aggregator for affiliate marketing could have been a special idea. Content/review sites could just sign up and have any product they reference from their content linked to the appropriate affiliate program.

They went in a more consumer-focused direction though. I wish them luck.
Thanks for the feedback, now I put a contact button. Please feel free to send me your ideas.
I guess the best point about these is that they are actually (or hopefully?) somewhat standardised - XMPP with OTR works perfectly fine on the desktop, albeit only for IM. Inventing a new protocol to provide essentially the same features appears a little unnecessary - at least the IM part could have reused OTR with voice calls using some other encryption (possibly based on the keys negotiated via OTR).
Ask HN: Dedicated Server Suggestions
Hey Hacker News!
I'm kinda in a bind right now. I have a site that I've been working on for some time. The url is artjutsu.com/beta. The concept of the site is pretty simple: Teach the world art.

So a while back, I decided to work on a little platform to help other artists (and enthusiast) organize their work. The idea of artJutsu ended up escalating to do more than that. The product on the beta site is what I like to call "LinkKit". Its a tagging system I've created to help organize links, articles, and references for artists. It uses AJAX to parse the back end for data to be returned as html. Its a really simple concept and I use those techniques at work all of the time flawlessly.

I'm having a problem though. I've just released a trimmed down version of the LinkKit system and it runs fine.... for 30 seconds. After that the server just chokes and the product is rendered useless. I'm ashamed to say, but I didn't think that using AJAX would have that affect on a shared server. Boy, was I wrong. (try clicking on the draw tab, and moving up and down the tree)

So, I need some help Hacker News. The question here is, how does one find servers to run their applications successfully without spending a lot of money? The platform is fine but its quite expensive (the project started out as a way to "learn" asp.net). I really want to see this product come through. There are a lot of things I want to build (and have built) upon this platform. I also have some good ideas for building this product into a business. I just need a good server to start out with (a good horse).

Any suggestions will be very helpful. Thanks for reading my post. I know its a bit long.

Jay
What you're saying is just that in Lua, 0 is truthy. Ruby is the same way, not a big deal.
Scala's Option is a monad, so it's very easy to chain several actions and safely decide if they all succeeded or failed. It doesn't compare with checked exceptions at all.
Wait, so every time someone posted a referly link to HN that seemed spammy, it's because it was spammy? That is, they were artificially constructed and there was money riding on that post getting upvoted?
And if you drink a whole lotta lattes, you will start to feel stronger gravitational attraction to nearby masses such as the earth.
Decide For Yourself: Full Translations of Assange's Swedish Police Interviews
Your second example is not "clumsy", but a consequence of how Lua's tables are simple and cleanly designed. It would be weird magic for the elements to suddenly shift downward. One can do that oneself if need be.

Your first example has a point – perhaps undefined variables should error when accessed – but that's got nothing to do with tables.
Dozeo hands out free online meetings while sxsw
There's a tradeoff here though. On one hand you have friction, on the other hand you have revenue assurance, and often these are direct tradeoffs. Some types of content benefits from high revenue assurance and comparatively high friction, some content is really only useful if it's widely accessible with low friction though. And often the boost in total readership volume that comes from low friction can result in higher and faster growing revenues (web comics fall into this category, for example). However, in general I think content creators have become a bit lazy about considering the value they are offering to their readership.

Just because you put in a lot of effort into making something doesn't mean that what you make is worth anything. And just because it's possible to make money doing something doesn't mean that what you're doing is worthwhile either.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Django Co-Creator, Talks Ecosystems at Heroku's Waza
Xkcd with a little more, I thought these features would be useful.
Wow, this is some amazing theater. I wonder if they are going to argue with the police about a federal bench warrant. Won't be possible to fly by air anymore that's for sure.
> You get the night air, the country views and peace and quiet. That goes a long ways for some people. That is something you don't get in a urban setting.

Country views, not so much, but I live in a city on Massachusetts's South Shore and I get fantastic night air and the place is quiet as a grave after about 9PM.
You can grab a PDF version of the entire book that has this essay, for free, here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Rvk-AAAAYAAJ&dq=%22the%...
A lot of people find coroutines easier to work with than callbacks, so there's room for a Lua alternative to Node.js.

The way things are going, it looks like that alternative will also take advantage of Lua's embeddability to allow interop between web apps and web servers in a way that hasn't been widely practiced before.
I think he maybe meant that the competition is the incumbent apps that don't have encryption as their selling point.
What matters is not what has happened in the past, but the way in which our interpretation of the past shapes our present actions. Describing Thomas Jefferson as a pedaeophile or arguing that he should be judged by the standards of his time and place say nothing about the past and much about our present time.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." Faulkner.
How is one supposed to innovate when they're scared of what that persistent cough means, but can barely afford to feed their family let alone pay a doctor. And if it is something malignant, they cannot even begin to think of how they'd pay for ongoing treatment? How is one supposed to innovate when they're homeless and surviving literally meal to meal?

Contrary to what you (somehow) believe, innovation can only really flourish (as opposed to the sporadic jumps made otherwise) when you are safe, warm and well fed.
For us on mobile devices: http://artjutsu.com/beta
A hungry homeless person is everyone's problem and a huge risk. No matter how you slice it, you end up paying the price: the value of your house goes down, the crime rate goes up, etc. It is a myth that you can escape poverty. Sure, you can move to an expensive gated community with a white gloved guard shooing away the "undesirables", but why do you think it's so expensive?

Moreover, a hungry homeless person is a security risk. How many iPhones, GPS's, laptops, etc. are stolen in a smash-and-grab incidents? How many people get hurt? No, not by your friendly neighborhood homeless lady, but by a person who feels they have no other choice but to steal or a person who is hooked on an addictive substance and can't stop?

Poverty also does not take a lot of people. A few percent here and there will cause enough headaches to become noticeable.

And poverty is chronic in society. It's not like if you took all the homeless, poor, and hungry and shipped them off to some unknown land you'd rid of the problem. No, instead more people would be pushed into the margins, becoming poor. You have to treat the cause.

Therefore, if poverty is inherent in certain societal setups, if it is everyone's problem (i.e.: everyone pays the cost) and it takes only a small percentage of people being poor to become a big problem, it is in the interest of everyone to change the societal setup so that poverty is minimized. Your original point was that it's not the government's job to do this. I argue that it is. The government (by the people and for the people) would not be doing it's job if it wasn't taking care of me or the person next to me.

As an aside, some might argue that private charities work much more efficiently than governments when it comes to homelessness/poverty/hunger. Personally, I believe a balanced approach works best. Big slow moving government projects with lots of oversight and restrictions coupled with flexible and quick-acting private charities are much more effective than either of the two.
Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore
The fall of X-Window