skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You guys at Mozilla could just target NaCL/PNaCL, contribute asm.js as the second-tier means of pulling IE and Safari along with you, the whole industry moves past the disaster that is JS/DOM/CSS, and everyone is happier.

Moving past JS/DOM/CSS is just not possible. Backwards compatibility is how Web technologies survive. There have been many attempts to try to redo the Web from the ground up: XHTML 2.0 for example. They did not succeed.

> Developers matter -- but users are why we're all here. It's not as if Apple's users have been hurting because developers have to target multiple variants of ARM and learn a new programming language.

And users do not care about the surface syntax of the bytecode. If there were some user-facing advantage to not using JS as the transport format, then sure, it might be worth not using it. But so far I've simply heard "I don't like JavaScript syntax". It's fine that you have that opinion, but it's not worth sacrificing backwards compatibility for it, since it doesn't matter to users.

Regarding shipping native ARM and x86 code alongside the fallback mechanism, I've already explained why that won't work: developers won't test against the portable version, so it might as well not exist. The Web will be locked into those hardware architectures for all time. That might be a cheap way to compete with native apps in the short term, but in the long term it is bad for hardware innovation. (For example, consider that, as azakai noted, ARM might not have taken off at all if we had done that early on.)

> That's not just surface syntax. As a tool maker, I spend an awful lot of time working on and with things that touch assembly/bytecode as "surface syntax". It matters, a lot, and JavaScript is a TERRIBLE bytecode syntax to have to deal with.

It only matters to a small subset of developers. Besides, if you really don't like it, just write a converter that converts it to the mnemonics of your choice. It's really quite trivial.

By your logic, we shouldn't gzip executables, because
tools have a hard time reading gzipped assembly. But that's a silly argument: you just un-gzip them first. It's the same with asm.js. If your tool has a hard time reading asm.js, convert it to a "real" bytecode first.

Additionally, LLVM bitcode isn't really much better from a simplicity standpoint. As I already pointed out, the verifier and bitcode reader for LLVM is much larger than the asm.js verifier.

> That said, it's also not the same disadvantage, because PNaCL implementations compile to native code; there's no fallback interpretation mechanism that exhibits the unusable performance profile of asm.js's fallback profile.

Yeah. The fallback mechanism is it doesn't run at all. As I already explained, there are applications for which it is much better to actually run, despite reduced performance.

And "unusable" really is a stretch. There are many apps written in Emscripten that run just fine in current browsers. Like I already said, AAA games aren't everything.
Looking at the product as it is now, offering an API for third party app developers that clones the primary timeline browsing experience is a no-no because Twitter gives up control over how they can craft their product experience. For example, look at their official app's Discover tab. They can't offer something like that and iterate quickly easily across all apps.

Serving ads through the API alone also limits ads delivery. For eg., they might want to display full screen video ads like how iAds does it. Or they even want to do something even more fancy (remember the dick bar? Imagine if there was no third party Twitter apps when they launched it). Without complete control, it's hard.

In a way, they are at stage 2 of their evolution, stage 1 was iterating on their core product, now they need to iterate on their business model.

PS: I'm the developer for SimplyTweet. I'm biased, but I can imagine where they might be coming from, even though I'm not happy about it.
Total aside, kind of interesting that Spotify is a peer to peer application.
CARTOON - UFO- Unidentified Flying Objections
New math, but aren't the scumbags shaving off all the profits still the same?
do you really believe those things were created in or by silicon valley?

Even beyond their public pasts, their early private champions like Bell Labs, BBN and IBM weren't from california nor private equity backed.
Using pip the way they recommend is careless. It makes your deployment dependent on: 1. a working network connection and 2. All the remote repositories being up. 3. nobody having messed with the remote repos. The 3. is admittedly less of a concern, but all 3. are beyond your control and re-downloading the dependencies on each install is wasteful.

Fortunately pip has the --find-links option which, combined with having all dependencies downloaded locally makes it possible to have a fully local install.
The two most common methods are "Screen Readers" (audio) [1] and
"Braille Displays" (touch) [2]. Depending on the exact vision impairment,
other alternatives also exist (magnifiers, customized color/brightness,
and so forth).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display

Good Luck with your situation!
NIST statement on Daylight Saving Time (DST) problem
Thats not true. There was no long view government plan to create what we now call the Internet.
Show HN: Interactive lectures and presentations with websockets and node
You should consider moving it to App.net https://alpha.app.net/
Really good post - just a note from myself - I've had to remove my shoes for screening many times while flying out from my native country(Poland) and that wasn't even to the US,but to other EU countries. So this is not something that only TSA does.
Use bootstrap, but customize the design to fit your brand. Bootstrap is a framework for building your own CSS on top of. The less opinionated it becomes, the better, since it'll make it easier to adapt the framework for your design.
Ray Charles.
"Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back."

"Airline Security a Waste of Cash," Schneier, 2005:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-096.html

Schneier goes on to claim that everything else is security theater. I'm open to the idea that there's something else out there that's helpful (though I couldn't name it off the top of my head). But we should definitely apply steady pressure towards the demilitarization of the airports so this cruft doesn't stay entrenched forever.
Thanks, I was having difficulty finding it for some reason.
Windows users have always had a choice of browser, since they have always been able to download an alternative to IE.

The deal with the EU didn't add any choices, it just used Windows to promote alternative browsers to Windows users.
Fair enough. Sounds like that fast mode was essentially DDOSing them then, I'd be interested to know whether they have a plan to put it back.
Whether we use a new technology for good or evil reflects our character as individuals and as a society, not the character of the technology. Even something generally considered beneficial like antibiotics causes problems if selfishly misused. To be considered good or evil, volition is required. Technology doesn't have volition. Only people do.
Are people getting so many 2-word "thank you" emails a day to show this article has a valid point? Don't get me wrong, sending merely "thank you" as a reply-all to a 200-person recipient list is one of the biggest email sins. But as a unicast, it serves the purpose of acknowledging receipt. If it was worth sending, it was worth knowing it was received, understood, and appreciated.
You are aware that all the technology you mention was initially produced by government-funded research or research labs in monopolies (Bell), no?
I'm previewing my new flying car. It doesn't fly yet but it drives great on the road.
I dont mean to be pedantic but computer's have been playing chess for years...
The whole point of blue-sky R&D funding is that you can't plan exactly what you're going to get out of it. Today DARPA is a bit more focused on practical application than it used to be, but it's ethos is still: "let's throw $10-30 million at a bunch of smart people and see what happens." The "plan" is to fund fundamental R&D and hope something really useful comes out of it. In that sense, the development of the internet was a fulfillment of that plan.
>Even something generally considered beneficial like antibiotics causes problems if selfishly misused.

What problems do antibiotics cause, besides lessening their own future effectiveness?
First:

Books, video courses, etc. aren't training OR consulting. You write once, and infinite people can buy them. A workshop is training but it's also a product because you only have to make it once, then you could present it yourself or easily have somebody else present your material, or turn it into a series of videos, etc., etc. Just because you are currently doing the work yourself doesn't mean that's the way it has to be.

As for your point about not "blogging about the location of their mine"…

As I have shared in many places, Freckle is grossing over $400k/yr now. Yep, a time tracking app. I "blog" (present, talk, podcast, etc) about this all the time. I give away my "secrets" (such as they are) repeatedly. I show people my revenue, and I teach about how I designed the software and how I market it. Of course the way we market it is plain to see considering the marketing is on the internet and I tweet it, link to it, talk about it, etc.

Surprise, surprise -- nobody has ever copied Freckle. Nor have any of our competitors copied even a single element of our innovative interface. Not even the really obvious stuff their customers need!

The fact is, you can tell people your "secrets" all day long and rest easy. Because the reason those people aren't rich isn't because they lack "secrets," it's because they lack discipline.

Finally, you claim that if people make money with training/workshops/videos/books, then we're just "giving presentations about gold-mining."

But 42% of our gross revenue in 2010 was from JavaScript workshops. Yep, programming workshops. About code. Amazingly, there were no pickaxes or sieves in sight.

I understand that you're angry. Whatever it was you signed up for, in the hopes of striking it rich (or at least highly comfortable), it had to do with shiny software and not boring old ebooks or video classes on how to effectively onboard new customers. What we do isn't sexy. But the fact is, unless you can help people, you're not going to be able to make sales. Help can come in any form, even as software, as long as it works for the customer. If your products (yes, products) don't help people, though, you're sunk… and sexiness won't help you.
Almost all the ones you listed have had a large role of the Government in play (ARPANET, DOD etc.. not to mention indirectly via research grants to universities). To claim that is all free-markets, and entirely done by 'innovative' private companies is at best a myopic view.

Just fyi, I truly believe in free-markets but I am willing to ack. that it rests on strong foundations in a 'common infrastructure', and with few exceptions, innovations entirely from private entities are limited.
The TSA is a discussion proof issue. Their mission is to make all transportation safe -- which is prima facie insane.

When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against. Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like. Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries. And so on. [Insert long discussion here about whether such metrics are useful or just BS, but the point is that there are numbers, sorta]

With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history. If we spend 100 Billion over the next ten years and there are no attacks, was that money well spent? Who knows? Maybe we should spend twice that, or half that.

I'm not even going to go into the civil liberties problem. From a funding discussion alone, there's simply no way to know if we have "not enough", "just right", or "too much"

And so we end up with this kabuki theater, where we pay untrained people to go through the motions of looking like they might be doing something useful.

Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers" -- anybody know people in favor of drunk drivers? Or people in favor of "clean water" -- is there a political group actively lobbying for dirty water? We create these edge cases where the way the issues are framed, reasonable discussion becomes impossible. This is the case with the TSA.

The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately.
In modern web pages, much of the content is delivered through AJAX and isn't in the actual HTML of the page, adjusting fonts often breaks layouts, and for people who can't figure out how to use AdBlock (or are on a mobile device), ads are big, obtrusive, hover over the page content affairs.
> ads were tiny and unobtrusive

Huh? I remember loads and loads of pop ups
Can you elaborate why that is ironic? Most of the basic science is funded by governments (throughout the world, not just the US). Isn't that supposed to be the role of government (funding research that has no immediate financial prospects)?
They know that anyway. The longer and more severe an attack is, the more damage it's likely to do. A host may be able to sustain 30Gbps for a minute or two, but not for 5 minutes. If 5 out of 10 servers are being attacked, you can probably handle traffic at 50% capacity for a while, but not forever.
My mother realized this long ago. Now we communicate mostly through Twitter.

My first impression was that this is just sad but I guess that different people (and cultures) have different expectations when it comes to communication.

With that said, the author is living inside a bubble created by his environment and his expectations. Saying that everyone should conform to his way of communicating is rude. Saying "thank you" to someone (through whatever communication channel you find most appropriate) is generally not rude.
But there were government plans to create telecom networks that ultimately led to the internet.
IANAL, but according to Wikipedia, it comes down to 'market definition' [1]. The computer market as a whole was recognized to be a 'relevant market', in which Microsoft was found to have a dominant position [2].

It's up to lawyers and economists to decide whether the current tablet offerings make up a market in that sense, separate from the cell phone market or the computer market.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_definition

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law#...
A maid is not a product, she is a person. Her hourly rate is a service, because she is physically in your home cleaning for the time you pay her for. That is the definition of a service.

Unless you only buy books where the author comes to your house and delivers a dramatic reading…

… books are products. And so are videos.
Your recurring "rebuttal" to somebody posting a reply to your argument is to say that your point is right, that he is 'deeply confused', that he is arguing from authority, ignoring mathematical principles, that he is hysterical, that he doesn't read his own links, that he is making a fool of himself by not understanding what he has linked to himself. Up to this point, you don't use a single word to actually provide any substance at all to your argument. Then, finally, you actually do address one of his points in the most dismissive and condescending way I have seen all day.

Kudos, I guess. No substance and all hot air. Somewhere halfway through your silly dance, irony ate its own hat.
Nope, I'm definitely writing C99, but it just so happens that MSVC is happy enough pretending it's C++.

Definitely writing C99 in that I compile the exact same source files with -std=c99 -Wall -pedantic when using a real C compiler.
It's a dropshadow on the text which makes the button text look embossed when there is a gradient on the buttons.

There will be gradients on the buttons.

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/pull/6342#issuecomment-...
And it's not limited to the US government.
Maybe this is why the people I interview almost never send us thank you notes. Here I thought it was just a general decline in etiquette, but they're really just being respectful of our time!

Seriously though, I'm curious how many people send thank you emails (or even cards) after an interview. I was always taught that it was extremely rude not to do this, but I'd say as a conservative estimate, we get thank you e-mails after less than 1 of every 10 interviews.
Still not working, trying to load the page of a private repo, keeps loading and loading.
That's what bootstrap themes are for, if you are not good in CSS yourself, you can easily install a custom theme on top of it.
Yes very aware, and applaud the role of government in fostering innovation. IMHO we need more govt investment and industrial policy not less.
This is down to poor typographic styling. It can be removed with two lines of CSS:

-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
font-weight: bold;
Apologies, but I'm shocked by the self-centered, entitled crap I see here; most if not all of those annecdotes speak to the self-important, self-absorbed nature of modern society.

(Side note: this isn't just my opinion - there's a decent amount of research on the growth of narcissism in modern scotiety. Look at the work of Dr. Jean Twenge, for example)

A small example:

>My father learned this lesson last year after leaving me a dozen voice mail messages, none of which I listened to.

If you enable voicemail and allow people to leave you messages, it's on you to listen to them. Social interactions are no different than product or software design - don't include an affordance for a feature that you don't want the user to use or, worse, will result in guaranteed failure to accomplish the desired task. The fault isn't the caller's.
What would you guess we pay per screening? Guess again - higher.

TSA Budget in 2011: $8.1 Billion [1] US air travelers in 2011: 730 million [2]

Cost per screening $11.09

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Adminis

[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/number-air-passengers-increase...
This is off topic, but Salon.com is a mess. The page loads, and I get halfway through reading the first paragraph, the scroll point jumps around four times, a big overlay advert opens up, the page jumps down to where I was reading, now hidden behind the adverts background. Scroll up to the top, close the advert, a popup window opens for netflix. Close that, scroll back down, start reading the article but realize I've lost my attention.

I'm not against advertisements, just wish these big sites would devote some front end development to having them load smoothly.
Starcraft II Heart of the Swarm arrives in 2 days
This article is a result of what happens when you have no idea what to write about but you need to get something out quickly + when you want to sound sophisticated and socially progressive.
> why would they stand to lose their patent license for WebM?

From http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/ and http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/

> If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of VP8 or any code incorporated within this implementation of VP8 constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Attention CTOs: Culture Matters
Innocent question: what are the use cases?
See above comment by @pashields. These are Steve Albini’s conclusions that Courtney is merely riding on—and continuing to get credit for it seems. I think Albini’s original-original was actually printed in The Baffler before it was printed in Maximum Rock 'N Roll.
Then implement a check for checkmates and brute force it on your computer before relaying the HTTP response. The real AI part is somewhat uneccesairy.
> True. You can also make good programs in PHP* if you "do it right". it's not exactly promoted or encouraged, or even anywhere on the radar though, and doing so involves a fair bit of that relational logic being implemented and enforced in the client.

It seems while you see that you're making a concession, you fail to understand that that actually disproves your own point. I repeat: Your argument is invalid.

> The point is, it's possible to have a "relational database management system" which enforces the relational axioms for you.

People aren't saying that it's impossible - they're saying it's a question of practicality, with the most true to the abstract concept being the least practical in real world applications.

> SQL is fundamentally incompatible with this concept, and forces the programmer to keep the databases relational.

What?

* By the way: Classic case of "doubting, supported by not looking". Even for PHP, there are plenty of resources like http://www.phptherightway.com/ and they are widely known and shared amongst people who know their stuff.
Indian education system is designed to create employees, not employers.
They're conflating "CEO of a legacy company" with "startup founder".
I'm one of the earlier backers (userid: 886) and paid for the developer tier. Haven't done any work on it yet. Once bitten, twice shy.
How Facebook could get you arrested
It's OK for the first iterations, but if you really care about your product, you should hire a HTML/CSS hacker.
Hooray for a trillion dollars spent getting thousands of people to do busywork 8 hours a day for years and years. :/
It may be time for GitHub to build out multiple availability data centers and use BGP as an anycast tool. We do this. I have public facing IPv4 space that is announced from multiple facilities. Having an IP address hosted from multiple facilities is a powerful tool. This allows providers to hit our datacenter through the least amount of ASN routes. We original did this to minimize latency and create faster regional transaction processing. As an added benefit - DDoS traffic also gets routed to the nearest facility "load balancing" a DDoS so that it only affects a single facility or it splits up the 10gbps of traffic among many facilities if it is coming from many sources. O'Reilly's BGP book has a great chapter on "Anycast."

From the sounds of it their architecture may not support this. If they had a SAN solution capable of replication to multiple data centers like HP LeftHand's product or a multiple master DRBD configuration they may be able to host github from multiple active datacenters and announce the block equally so that providers route traffic to them because their ASN is closest.

Who knows, maybe they do all of this?
You Can Only Do So Much
You don't have to write XML by hand. You can mostly use tools designed for working with HTML. The translation into final output is relatively simple. If you are handed HTML it is trivial to put in placeholders or slice it up rather than having to build it up from scratch in some alternate language.
I think you're missing the point. Sending a thank-you note to a 200-person list is a waste of time and rude to those who don't send such notes at every occasion. If you need acknowledgement than what's better than knowing that other person has read your email? (the default behavior of Facebook messages by the way). It is however another matter if the person who read your email decide to not reply back.

I think this article makes a lot of sense.