skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I'm not seeing the "steal" part; it sounds like you simply didn't make the cut.

There's something to be said for online jobs being one of the few job sectors where overqualified candidates are popular, which could be tortured into lending a weak "theft" angle, but it's not here.
Inbox Pro - A revolution in email
>It's not a contract to which I've agreed though. If they want me to get content in exchange for something, then they should make sure I do, otherwise, they are putting things on an open server that I can easily read from. What I tell my browser to take from it is up to me,

You are conflating the practical ability to do something with the moral right to do something.

The fact that something cannot be enforced is a practical problem, not a moral one. A rural car-park owner may have no practical method to force people using his car park to leave money in an honesty box [1]. His request for payment may have no legal standing. Neither of these points has any influence on the moral value of not leaving the requested payment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty_box
> It can only run at speed if you interpret it as something that is not JavaScript.

By that argument any JS JIT is "no longer JS".

All JS JITS find cases where JS can be optimized as something simpler. For example CrankShaft and TraceMonkey find areas where variables are simply-typed and heavily optimize those.

This isn't surprising - to make JS be fast, you do need to find where you can make it go faster, by avoiding the "normal" JS dynamism where anything is possible. So the JIT optimizes it as something that is "not JS". Again, nothing new with asm.js there, JS JITs have been doing this since 2008 (and JITs in other languages far earlier).

> You can use NEON directly from NaCL/ARM [..] NaCL can output ARM and x86 binaries directly

Those are not portable, which JS must be. A better comparison might be PNaCl, which is like NaCl but has an intermediary portable format. PNaCl will of course have the same issues asm.js does with not having direct binaries that can just be loaded and run, not allowing use of CPU-specific code, etc.

If you don't care for portability, then the web/JS/asm.js/WebGL/etc etc. are likely not the best thing for you. Instead, a native app could make more sense.
Facebook Acquires Storytelling Site Storylane in Talent Grab
Another likely contender in the blogging game is acquired too early in my opinion. With twitter veterans working on medium, storylane had a nice headstart and a good idea. This is a very risky game to be in but the idea of nice and clean design with enough input area was called for in the blogosphere. Talent acquisition evidently might mean death for inspiring startups.
Like I said, might not be a problem for a simple web app, but have you ever tried writing a game? For even the simplest game I end up using a lot of (fairly simple) math, linear algebra and some physics. If you start doing stuff in 3D, you'll need even more.
Perpetrators of the Spanish Inquisition believed that they were guiding Jews to the "best choice". That didn't make their actions ethical.
It is supposed to provide you more checking by disabling automatic cast from void* to any other pointer. This makes sense in C++ since casting a pointer to a class can trigger some address adjustement if the target class of this instance pointed to is multiple derived (and maybe in other cases?). There is no way such adjustment can happen if the source type is void*, because then you don't know what the source type really is.
By steal I mean steal you away. Definitely didn't make the cut but I'm grateful for the opportunity.
KDE misconceptions on being slow and bloated
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seriously sounds to me like you're arguing, "This is how we've always done it..." If so, two things:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

2. In our history as a species, that same (fallacious) argument could have been, and almost certainly was used to support slavery, human sacrifice, and genocide, among other charming and socially redeeming things.

I really couldn't care less whether a particular tribe-of-monkeys behavior has always been around or not. My ethical compass is pretty firmly tuned to one fundamental principle: the net increase in human freedom — freedom of action, and freedom from harm; freedom of expression, and freedom from exploitation. I care whether a particular tribe-of-monkeys behavior serves to benefit one group of monkeys at the expense of another.

To my mind, this one — the concentration of power in the hands of a few, built on the backs of many, which is then used to enact social norms or policy that are often counter to the interests of those many — does.

(Edited)
Yup. We use it in our Backbone.js app to allow users to open links in new tabs and for changes in those tabs to propagate back too.

For me it is awesome to use PushState and LocalStorage in a client side app and all the while the user thinks they are using a "traditional" server side app.
What do you mean by, "steal you away?"
You just described the main reason to use LibreOffice.
You bring up good points. But I'm still not sure about the 'not a contract to which I've agreed' part. Couldn't it be argued that there exists an open understanding by all parties that the content creation is sustained purely through ads -- and all site visitors are softly agreeing to these general terms upon site access?
Encyclopædia Britannica's President on Killing Off a 244-Year-Old Product
How about:
* Deliberately making terms and conditions so long and verbose that no-one has the will/time to read them and is more likely to simply check the "I have read the terms and conditions" checkbox without actually reading them.
It certainly can be a philosophy. For the past 6 months I've lived in a tiny place away from my apartment, where (the apartment) I only spent 6 nights in during the same time. I am being convinced increasingly I do not need, or even WANT, the extra space. Were I to find a companion who shared this view, I think I could live this way for several years, if not for the remainder of my natural life.
Slow is not always "totally useless". It just degrades gracefully. Furthermore, the fact that it's based on JS makes the integration with the DOM much easier.

The bytecode format is not as big of a deal as you claim. 1,000 lines of code for the verifier.

There's nothing intrinsic to JS that forbids having SIMD support. In fact, it's under active discussion...

Having two back ends for PNaCl seems suboptimal. Why force all Web developers to generate two bytecode formats because we don't like the way asm.js looks?

AOT compilation isn't a panacea. You still have to verify it. So it's not like the NDK could just be adopted to the Web as is. Besides, caching can mitigate the startup costs a lot.

Finally, JS has threading, and it could grow shared state threading in the future. This doesn't strike me as that big of an obstacle.
CentOS Linux 6.4 Released
It's the same engine as our much larger game, Planetary Annihilation. http://www.uberent.com/pa/ PA needs it's own engine as no off the shelf option is sufficient for it's needs.

Outland Games is a much simpler game, but the PA engine is modular enough that we could scale down to mobile. The upside is that a lot of the work for Outland Games will carry forward with the engine and help future projects (including PA).
I just want to say that while I don't personally block ads, I have used Flashblock, and I might consider blocking ads. The reason for this is not that they are "annoying" or get in the way of reading. For me, it's because I know that advertisements wear on you over time. They are whispers of culture and what you need to do to be happy and gain status. Because of how I feel about ads, I would consider paying for content. However, I think the real pain point here is that we have a hard time knowing whether the content we get is worth paying for, or whether we would have an easier time getting comparable content elsewhere for less. And, of course, how big is the market for people that say "I don't want to see ads because I want to save money on stuff I don't need... but I do want to spend money on certain content"?

So the author is trying very hard to please his audience, but he's also trying very hard to appeal to them and make money. Well, no kidding, we do need to make money to do what we're doing. But you have to make it clear that you are focused on making things better for your audience. You're demonstrably providing clear value of some sort to them. In this case, somehow reviewing games in a way that you enable your audience to make better decisions about where to spend their hard-earned dollars. (I can't speak to the magic that makes one game review site better than another.)

So ask your readers - have they used your content to make decisions? Have they saved money by not plopping down $59.99 on a game that they, individually, would not like? Do they agree with your reviews regularly? And is that because they try the same games that you review, and come to the same conclusions, or because they base all their conclusions on the reviews? If they are saving time and money and getting to do that which they value most (or a lot, at least, more than other things, in this case, playing particularly good video games), then you have clearly enriched their lives. They should let you know, and try to enrich your life, too. But I don't think that viewing ads enriches their lives or yours, or rather, it's a pretty indirect, watered down way to enrich your life.
My personal experience in the field?

There is a line between blatant manipulation and offering information to those who are interested in the products and services. Most of the marketers I know have lines they won't cross over. Just because some have zero limits doesn't mean we all do.
Red Hat Reinforces Java Commitment and Assumes Leadership of OpenJDK 6 Community
"Why does anything in government take FIFTY years to change?"

It was designed that way because change comes in two forms, good change and bad change. No one at the time of the creation of the US form of government could come up with a way that would enable good change to happen faster than bad change, and they recognized that bad change could could be fatal, they had to create a system where change was slow enough that bad changes could be reversed as it slowly became obvious how bad they were.

They also made the assumption that the people being governed would proactively participate in the institutions of government in order to effect change. What we've seen as that things can get bad enough to motivate participation, and in doing so force more change. The 'tea party' movement is a good example of that sort of force in action. There were more new 'tea party' congressional representatives in 2010 than any new movement had produced in a while proving once again that a block of people, motivated by the same sorts of issues can effect change by participating in their government.
> Slow is not always "totally useless". It just degrades gracefully.

Slow isn't graceful, especially when your competitors aren't slow. I look forward to Mozilla advertising Firefox as "only 10x slow as Chrome!".

In this case, it's even worse, because if asm.js is successful, then the fallback mechanism will simply become an awkward vestigial limb that's no longer required by any modern browser. Treat a vestigial limb as your first-order target is silly.

> Having two back ends for PNaCl seems suboptimal. Why force all Web developers to generate two bytecode formats because we don't like the way asm.js looks?

Because it's about users, not about developers. Generating optimized binaries means that users have a better user experience.

> Finally, JS has threading, and it could grow shared state threading in the future. This doesn't strike me as that big of an obstacle.

"I'll pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today" is getting old.
It wasn't up to the author! He's just relaying a historical point.
good articles
LibrePlanet software freedom conference announces line-up
"I would not say that my life is worth living right now"

One day it will be, that is sure. Keep fighting.
It's sad but the reality is that you need adblockers to use many websites, Google and other search engines being among the worst offenders.

The world's biggest advertiser has made the use of adblockers necessary, if you want to use their engine http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/1... or http://www.seobook.com/images/google-serp-layout.gif and not see just ads. Once activated for a site that has abused ads, others are hurt almost by default.
Bitfields have some crazy fun dark corners, though. For instance, which values can this bitfield hold:

int b:1;

Signed two's-complement n-bit integers can hold values from 2^(n-1)-1 to -2^(n-1), so in theory it can hold 0 and -1, but many compilers get that one wrong. Always declare one-bit bitfields as unsigned. (The Sparse static analyzer will warn you about that one.)
You hit the nail on the head. If it is per impression, then yes, there is some information they would like me to have and there is some profit that this site is receiving from those impressions. It is fair game then to have me see those ads if that is what the model is as long as this model isn't abused.

If the pay-per-click is supposed to piggy back on free impressions then I have zero conscience of denying them free advertising.
angular is amazing. way less code needed.
He framed the Mars problem quite powerfully. Seems his primary reasoning is quite practical, compelling and admirable at that: hey, humanity has the ability to travel off-world to other planets. Let's do it now while we still can...

we obtained this ability and can equally and quite potentially lose it just as easily. Our sun is not getting any younger.
For anyone hoping for some deeper fundamental connection, you should read about natural units[1] to understand why that couldn't happen.

Given a dimensional constant, it can only be related to some more fundamental mathematical constant in a particular set of units. So the connection will be entirely due to how the units are defined, as is the case here.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
By inclination I like languages that have seriously clever type systems, but I hardly ever write code in anything that is not javascript these days, and the reason for that is that javascript can be run easily almost anywhere.

I know that if I write some useful code in javascript, I will not have to rewrite it. You can't really say the same thing about any other language.
>most/all merchant agreements.

Typically only in states that had their own law enforcing that restriction on merchant agreements.
On "Green" Incentives
If you're serious about learning history, there's no substitute for reading primary sources:

http://books.google.com/

Remember that the cliché is right: the winners write the history books. The antidote is primary documents (and humility). This doesn't mean you should ignore secondary sources. Just keep them honest by going to the originals from time to time.
I went through grad school once (PhD, dropped out, left with a MSc), am now doing the startup thing, and intend to go back for a PhD because I do love some things in research and academia (and I have some R&D-type ideas I'd like to work full-time on which require me to be in an university setting).

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).

When I applied to grad schools, I didn't get in my top 2 programs of choice; I did get in decent programs, but which wouldn't pay me (or not enough to cover my various expenses). I ended up choosing a lesser program, but one that gave me full tuition waiver + a teaching (and later, research) assistantship.

Grad school is a great experience, and I believe most people will get something from it. But it's not worth getting in debt for it (even if it's your top choice- you wouldn't pay Google/Apple/[insert your favorite company here] to go work for them).

Now of course, this advice is easier to follow for the scientific fields; but I have friends who got into liberal arts programs with full tuition waiver + a decent assistantship. The bar is just much higher for these (as it should be).
Don't think the K&R book is the standard. The standard now exists and is detailed enough, for what C aims at being. As for doing maths in C or wanting managed allocation, it is well there are better languages for that (and it was even better wide know twenty years ago for the math part...)

You seems to have found some that works well for your needs so everything is good.
CrazyEgg has a great form.
You can read about the optimization process here: http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/crazy-egg-case-study/ (after the "Optimizing the checkout gave 116% more sign-ups
" headline)
What you're referring to is a self-XSS. They were a lot more common back when you could run JavaScript from the address bar.

These days if you try and paste JavaScript to your address bar (try it with: javascript:alert(1);) then the browsers try and stop you. Firefox just won't execute any JavaScript, even if you've manually typed it. IE and Chrome strip the "javascript:" prefix (but Chrome is vunerable if you type "j" and paste the remainder).

More info here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=956977232793
That was my first thought too. Setting up a Bitcoin client currently requires the download of around 7GB of historical data, as I recall.

The four-minute proof of work also worries me: do I have to toast my laptop for four minutes every time I want to send a message? That's going to be bad for battery life.
The biggest problem with many of the "alternatives" is that they don't really work. They only really work for lone cowboys who only have themselves to feed.

1.) Recommendations don't work at scale. You are not going to find a single company to fund gaming journalism company in order to do tighter recommendations, and you aren't going to have enough man power to manage recommendations for multiple companies. Amazingly enough, there is a company called Google that provides a similar service to this, and I doubt destructoid can compete with them.

2.) Selling T-shirts is a terrible business model for a company that doesn't produce t-shirts. Again this works for the lone-cowboy, but for an actual company expecting to recuperate costs with t-shirts it would be simpler to just open a clothing line. Producing t-shirts isn't free and you once you have a sizable market its no longer easy. Now instead of hiring writers, you find yourself hiring sweatshops.

3.) Selling physical books only works for the lone cowboys (smbc, oatmeal). If you have to do it at scale, it would be smarter to just open a bookstore. And again, why should anyone buy an ebook when they could just use Readability for free?

4.) Charing for your service. This makes the most sense, NYT does it and is really successful. Problem is, it might only work for NYT. Its hard to convince gamers who in a large part don't buy their games, to pay for your service. Out of all the sites you ad-block, how many of them would you actually pay for? If Kotaku required a subscription for their service, would you actually pay for it?

Its easy to be an armchair MBA and claim ads are the problem and anything else would work without having tried it yourself, or list companies who are doing so successfully. Its just completely unfair to assume that the guys actually busting their butts trying to make it work are lazy because they use ads. If you really think these alternate models really work, you should start your company with them. With no competitors you are certain to eat the market.

Until then, please understand that online journalism, and print media in general, is really hurting to find a business model that actually works and they aren't using ads out of laziness. They are using ads to pay the bills.
Saying that it's not new wasn't meant as a criticism for your discovery of this happening on github. Quite the opposite.

It's more of an observation on how even well-known security vulnerabilities can go overlooked. Even by companies with as big exposure and as many resources as github.
As long as ads are in the markup, they can be blocked. It might take a hand-crafted CSS selector, but that's nothing impossible.
Very amusing book.
You are a thoughtful hacker, but most people don't look much outside their own arena, which they tend to think it better than the rest, for fairly obvious psychological reasons. HN probably contains a much more open minded sample than the average science/hacker community! I'm an applied sociologist, a human hacker with emphasis on method, inter alia. The number of brilliant bio / physics and maths-oriented friends I have who believe that statistics is the only meaningful measure of truth is not insignificant. Sad, but true, a narrow methodological ideology assuming the primacy of cardinal measurements and deduction over anything else. Good point, and I shall use social network analysis as another example for such people.
There are numerous examples of this blindness in popular geek culture, such as xkcd positing an outdated reductionism to physics or maths, which as a numberloving teenager I also subscribed to, because it was neat and easy.

Thank you for the pushback, but you are part of an enlightened segment. It's about time I constructed a survey to ascertain the actual values and beliefs in this space among the HN community. I wonder if they let you do surveys here.
They stopped doing that. It's fully native now.
Put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.
The entire thesis of my post had nothing to do with a benign willingness to block or unblock ads. I block ads simply because I am sick of all the things I mentioned in my OP. The point is that they stepped over lines that I feel should not be crossed and I blocked them because they disrespected me. I would posit that many people are sick of it and any non-tech person could easily open google and ask "How do I stop all these irritating ads on websites?" and they will be taken to adblock.

Obviously, advertising is a service, but if sites learned to tone it down instead of money-grabbing and causing a miserable experience for their readership, they should actually be thankful for adblocks. Without adblocks, many people would simply click the back-button, cause their bounce rate to go through the roof, they drop off the front page of google, and they would have no views to brag about to advertisers.
> Is the hardware just too difficult to work with? Too much variety?

I'm sure this makes it more difficult. Most mobile devices are locked and require some significant hacks to makes them boot an alternative OS. On top of that, each one requires a completely different kernel. There's currently no mainline support for most ARM SoC's, although I know that is being worked on.

> Is there no interest in the community?

I think this might be it. Most hackers are happy with Android. It's 'open-source' and they can run community-driven custom ROMs. Most Linux desktop environments suck on a touch screen anyway so there's not much incentive to install a linux distro.

Also, take a look at Arch Linux ARM if you haven't heard of it. It runs on a lot of ARM boards very similar to what's inside smartphones and tablets. It really should be only a minor effort to get that on phones and tablets but few are bothering to do it.
> Couldn't it be argued that there exists an open understanding by all parties that the content creation is sustained purely through ads -- and all site visitors are softly agreeing to these general terms upon site access?

No. Absolutely not.

What about an older browser that can't properly display javascript? What about someone using a screenreader? What about when I use Lynx from a terminal window?

There is no implied relationship. There is no contract. A website hands me a block of text and I can choose which text to render.