skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Opera Mini doesn't even support touch events"

Good to know. So we'll always need fallbacks.

"A wide range of the browsers available on Android are supported"

Interesting, but what I'm getting at is: will this work for most Android users? 65% of Android devices have <4, which Chrome can't run on, and many of the remaining 35% don't have Chrome but an older stock browser. I'm genuinely curious whether this slider works on those most common browsers.

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
Let's not forget MRG: the real time kernel support is excellent (and if messaging and grid are of the same quality, i would wholeheartedly recommend them)
Right now there are several companies working on reusable launchers. SpaceX, of course, who already has a proven expendable orbital launcher. But also Blue Origin, Armadillo, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic. None of those companies have an orbital launch vehicle but each is working on building the foundations for reusability in the form of pioneering various control mechanisms (vertical landing being one) as well as engineering various component parts (from engines up to propellant tanks and so forth). Some of them are looking more at the sub-orbital space tourism market to provide early returns and some of them are certainly more dedicated and more well funded than others. Overall it'll be exciting to see what comes of it all.
Affiliate commissions are a small fraction of a purchase price. Around 4%-15% usually, average 7% in my experience. It's hard to build a business model where your revenue is a fraction of that fraction.

We tried this ourselves in one of our projects: http://bvyer.net. We plan to keep that one going, since it doesn't cost us much to run, at least so far... but we certainly learned that it's hard to make any money in this line of work.
"I think C might make more sense if you are more familiar with assembly language."

I've written some assembler in the machine language of at least three different processors. On one machine I was surprised that my assembler code ran, whatever it was, 5-8 times faster than Fortran. Why? Because I made better use of the registers. Of course, that Fortran compiler was not very 'smart', and smarter compilers are quite good at 'optimizing' register usage. I will write some assembler again if I need it, e.g., for

R(n+1) = (A*R(n) + B) mod C

where A = 5^15, B = 1, and C = 2^47. Why that calculation? For random number generation. Why in assembler? Because basically want to take two 64
bit integers, accumulate in two registers the 128
bit product, then divide the contents of the two
registers by a 64 bit integer and keep the 64
bit remainder. Due to the explicit usage of
registers, usually need to do this in assembler.

But at one point I read a comment: For significantly
long pieces of code, the code from a good compiler tends
to be faster than the code from hand coded assembler.
The explanation went: For longer pieces of code, good compilers do good things for
reducing execution time that are mostly too difficult
to program by hand which means that the assembler code
tends to be using some inefficient techniques.
It's some sort of key fingerprint. You know the key you sent to the other party, and the other party can compute the fingerprint of the key they received from "you." If they don't match, someone changed keys in transit.
Can Star Wars Make .5 Past Hyperspace? - TechCircuit.net
It sounds like they're stepping away from being hubpages.com with a product lean to becoming ehow (demand media) with a product lean.

And evidently it'll look kinda like pinterest based on the layout of the front page.

Just might work!
"""
Overall code quality: Who knows

Should I use this to fight my oppressive regime? Yes -- if your fight consists of sending dirty self-portraits to your fellow comrades-at-arms. Otherwise, probably not.
"""

Am I missing something?
We formalised spelling in the 18th c., independently of one another. No particular reason beyond that, afaik.
thanks. watching that is strangely satisfying. it's like the path of the planets has been predestined, yet it still feels somehow random. kind of like life
I'm sad to see the Twitter ecosystem collapsing. There are a couple of projects that I'd like to do involving Twitter, but I've backburnered them because it doesn't seem like a safe place to play.
Exactly what I was thinking, thumbs up
Does this assume that the voice channel can't be doctored? But couldn't a MITM attacker do just that — compute the "correct" fingerprint and speak it to the recipient?
On being a girl in computer science - a confession
Million dollar appeal for Ultima sequel
Tons of fonts? Yes. Tons of great fonts? Nope. (A few, sure.)
> While Cryptocat is written in Javascript (aaggh!)

Is there something inherently insecure about using JavaScript or is this not meant to actually be relevant?
Thanks. I just made a note of that!

So, someone else dug into the details of
how C manages memory and wrote some
code to help people find problems; makes
good sense.
Once again I'm just sad to see the continued erosion from the awesomeness that was Twitter. Twitter are killing off the good and magnifying the bad, all in the pursuit of goals that seem to be forcing a continuous decrease in the quality of end user experiences.

The dumbest thing about this is that monetizing Twitter is trivial, without changing anything else. Just put occassional and obvious ads in our streams, and charge us to upgrade to see an ad-free steam.
it is the very reason why a lot of really smart people drop of out of the universities. essentially the only thing it really proves is that you're very good at doing what you're told, the way you were told.

yes, there are very smart professors. I have met many. I have met equally if not more really dumb professors. they're not stupid per se, but they can only think in the procedures they have been taught to think.

chomsky made the argument that by the end of your academic career in general you are already chewed, so that you are part of the system, unless you have strong enough peers that keep you from getting assimilated.

gatto in his book the underground history of american education made the argument that the education system is really made to generate a class society.

personally I think it's a system that nurtures mediocracy. the university system wants is based on the most common denominator to get as many "well enough trained" workslaves out as possible. to do that efficiently you essentially have to cut out the top and the bottom, and keep the rest.

i recently sat in a room where they wanted to introduce the new head of development. some random dude, not particularly interesting, but just got a ph.d in computer science, associate professor in a random university. If I was running the show, he wouldn't even have made it past the first interview. but i just sat still nodding and making a note on how I could use a ph.d right now
One thing about CentOS/RHEL is that it is the most common "enterprise" linux and thus if you need to run any commercial software or need drivers for specific hardware you are more likely to find that the vendors favor RHEL. Or to a lesser extent, SLES.

For example some enterprise backup software I dealt with: installing on RHEL was easy: install the vendor's RPMs. On Debian (Ubuntu) systems, there was a lot of extra fiddling around with "alien" and "dpkg" to get the software installed.
Kill Them All...with Kindness.
Array keys shifting downward wouldn't be weird magic; it would be the expected behavior when removing an element from an array. Dismissing it as simply how Lua's tables are designed doesn't make it intuitive or expected.

> Your first example has a point – perhaps undefined variables should error when accessed – but that's got nothing to do with tables.

Well, of course it does. The point is that you can silently end up with array "holes" due to a typo, which you are supposed to avoid in Lua for a number of reasons, such as an the length operator returning an incorrect result. I don't understand why my previous comment is getting voted down for pointing this out.
Having a paywall doesn't prevent developing new readers: even if you charge for access, you always have the option of providing a sampling of your current or older content for free. For example, the NY Times has a paywall but lets people read a certain amount of free content before they have to subscribe.
I applaud this move. It's difficult, emotionally, to pivot this radically, but I think in the long term it will be a more rewarding and meaningful route for the founders.
They're using EC2, so I'm not sure why it takes them so long to add new servers.
I've found that most people don't care about this unless you're delivering an extraordinary native experience (ala Path)
A native app is great if you've got a team who can do it well. If you can't, simple PhoneGap-ish apps will suffice. It's a sunk cost in that if you get traction, you'll eventually need to switch over to native to compete: effectively a re-write.
This blog post came out this week. http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/03/dynamodb-one-yea...

We prototyped some stuff with it at Lytro but didn't release the functionality. There is a bit of a learning curve to it. You really need to understand what you want to use it for before you start creating things with it.
It's a shame that Twitter themselves don't seem to be doing anything to clean up the spam. I use to enjoy following twitter during sporting events but these days every trending topic is immediately swamped by automated spammers.
Porteus 2.0 Review – Portable Computing for the indecisive
Glad to see the Refer.ly circle jerk around here come... full circle.
It should work with the classic Android Browser, but unfortunately we haven't been able to test it fully yet (no such device)... Hopefully we'll have an older phone to test with on monday, and I will update the library or the list of supported browsers accordingly. :-)
Root is not enough either.
Most drivers are closed source (on phones) so you have no idea what the device is actually doing.
Heh, that's exactly what I made with a friend for a physics project in high school. We didn't even consider different methods--we used the Euler method because it's the most intuitive. I didn't even know it had a name!

Good times.
A minor point of curiosity: one of the captions says "Using SilentCircle on a Huawei complete negates the point of using SilentCircle."

I appreciate that it may be somewhat tongue in cheek, but is that a riff on the US accusing Huawei of being a national security threat[0], or do Huawei phones have a track record of known security vulnerabilities?

[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/us-panel-calls-huawei-a...
I thought Outliers by Malcom Gladwell was a good book, but maybe it's an exception. It really shed some new light on life in general, so I'm glad I read it as a high school junior. It's ignorant to write off an entire genre of books, even if much of the genre is comprised of convenience store bookshelf "Become a millionaire overnight!" title bait books on the subject; when an author takes a closer look at what success really is, it can actually be a worth-while read.
Awesome post. Thanks for posting. This was my interview question.
> Slower is far better than not running at all.

Why? For the purposes for which asm.js is intended, the code may as well not be running at all, and users will be driven to upgrade their browser.

If you really want to support backwards compatibility, then make it a secondary target, not the primary one that you saddle yourself with for all time.

> So the question is whether asm.js presents a shorter, more straightforward path to success than the alternatives. I believe it does.

I believe NaCL and PNaCL provide a much saner path to an ultimately superior end, and would have a far greater chance of succeeding if Mozilla wasn't playing NIH to assuage their need to support JavaScript.

asm.js is competing with native, and they're starting out with an intentional disadvantage.
Thanks for pointing to your low-latency-switching strategies, was an interesting read!
Although I see how it is great for a high availability strategy as a side-effect, I wonder why you did not want to make use of location information on the phone.
I mean having the user send his coordinates with his first request would be the obvious choice, but privacy considerations could speak against it.
But if your returned list of available servers for a region would include coordinates, the app would not have to establish connections to all the servers, but maybe just the closest X. That could improve the whole process and save a tiny bit of traffic if you had a lot of servers in every region.
And what about having a list of all your available servers cached with their coordinates in an encrypted sqlite database then? Firewalls that filter the single domain that is queried for server information would not be as successful. On the other hand, old or compromised servers would have to get revoked regularily.
Or Have you had more problems with the idea of phone locations and local server lists?
Definitely a great initiative
http://cplus.about.com/b/2013/01/27/what-is-jx9.htm
Sure. Right now our custom tech supports Windows, OS X, Linux, and iOS. I'm most comfortable in windows so that was my personal preference. That plus the Visual Studio debugger kicks the bajeezus out of Xcode for C++.

Some features could only be worked on through OS X. Gamecenter leaderboards, in app purchases, analytics, and some UI bits. Some of those don't even work in the simulator and require an actual device.

The windows build was missing a handful of features but none of them matter for development. No full screen, no settings, hard coded resolution config, incomplete UI, etc.
Aren't we all? :D
This sounds more that your experience with Debian tools is much weaker then with RHEL based ones. The discussion on this is endless, both systems have advantages, I just prefer Debian from majority of reasons.
Just because you're using EC2 (or any other "cloud" platform) doesn't mean you can just simply add new servers to your infrastructure, your application architecture needs to cater for this. With EC2 you have the "ability" to architecture your application in such a way that you can take advantage of this but if you don't then you have to do everything manual. Cloud is not a silver bullet.
The version I know is "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Maybe another way of looking at it: most Americans now get the university experience, something you note used to be reserved for social mixing of wealthy families. In other words: the masses are now experiencing a quality of life only the wealthy once had. Instead of seeing this a problem, I see it as the tip of the iceberg.

What is the college lifestyle? It's essentially the dream: do what you want, don't worry because everything is taken care of for the most part. It's like socialism: the good and the bad. You don't have to work very hard and there's little payoff for being the hardest worker. But at the same time, there's plenty of experimentation, outside the box thinking: everything is questioned.

Many of us suggest that machines do more and more of the heavy lifting, as humans are allowed to be the 'artists' (or whatever you want to call it) that they want to be... We hear this a lot: that we're on this kind of a trend and it'll continue until we need to make major political changes (a la distribution of wealth and ownership of production) to ensure harmonious society is possible. Well: I suggest that we're already part-way here. It's just that most of us experience this for only 4 years...or roughly 8% of our adult lives.

I suggest that this 8% will only grow and our societies will need to change, politically, in order to let this happen.

There are the credential-obsessed individuals on college campuses, but they're actually a small minority. Most are just living the life of freedom for a few years before learning what work is like. Wouldn't you go back and live college over again if you could now? awesome!
It's feeling more and more like the people at the top of Twitter have lost the thread.

At one point I thought there mission was to "Know what everyone in the world is thinking right now".

Obviously useful, obviously valuable.

Instead....well, I don't really know where they're going, and I don't think they do either.
> vi is vim rather than nvi

Debian has used tiny-vim as the default vi for a while now.
Not sure why you're so insistent this is a non-problem (to the point of implying that I or my housemates have personality issues, much less) - it's not like we haven't tried cash. It sucked, so my housemate made an app, and it's awesome.

> Do they go grocery shopping?

Not really - in college most people relied on the meal plan. At the house, we make heavy use of Amazon and Instacart. Those who do shop still don't enjoy having to remember to get cash and make change.

> Sounds like a personality issue

People forget, or just forget to grab cash, because it's not something they normally do, and no one enjoys playing debt collector. WePay can hold balances, too, so the app is basically just a more convenient version of the whiteboard, but with the extra feature of saving a trip to the ATM.

If obtaining cash was somehow related to a personality issue, but that person was otherwise a good housemate, it'd be worth it to throw some technology at the problem and make it a non-issue.

> checks

People are more likely to have a computer, so there's no need to add paper and OCR into the mix when there are better options.

> and then pays 4%

Only if the retailer is passing the transaction fee onto the customer, in which case they can pay with some other method.

People paying debts can link a bank account, so their transaction fee is maybe 50 cents.
Yes, because it's not just a C paradigm. Additionally, even though 1 is true, comparing 1 and true returns false!
That doesn't sound trivial to me. Many would just use a client/extension that doesn't render said obvious ads.

On the other hand, that is the status quo of the web (cf. AdBlock) and it mostly works.
>Those citizens were in a framework where it was possible to subject them to process. They could be arrested, extradited and tried.

Necessity is the mother of all invention. However, what framework in the cold war era made it any easier to arrest, extradite and try citizens then, than it would be now? It is my understanding it has been pretty easy to "extradite" both citizens and foreign nationals into Guantanamo, so what about the "framework" makes it more difficult extend due process of the law? Suspending the rule of law, especially as a matter of convenience justified by armed conflict is a slippery slope that has generally been frowned upon by subsequent generations, such as the US rounding up Japanese-Americans and confining them to "US internment camps" during World War II - Was it constitutional? Maybe, but was it a degradation of civil liberties? Without question.

>That's not the power the President is claiming. It's much narrower than that.

To the best of my knowledge the President has not claimed any power as it relates to killing US citizens. Like any politician who wants an issue to go away he has ignored it and made the official policy not to acknowledge the targeted killing programs.

As far as the power being narrower, it might be, but no one knows because the criteria to get on the Kill List is unknown. I rather doubt it is narrow with any strict standards, based on military/CIA intelligence if it is recommended to Obama to add a name, I bet he adds a name - of course these are the same intelligence communities who knew Iraq had WMD's and knew exactly where they were.

Based on your posts I can tell you are very intelligent and have at least a minimal knowledge of these issues coming before SCOTUS. I believe extrajudicial killings is a degradation of civil liberties, you do not,and no amount of SCOTUS rulings will change either of our minds, nor should we expect it to when the Court itself is split on most issues, generally 5-4 at that.
His answer to "should I use this to fight my impressive regime" was the same for all the tools, just with different wording.
> asm.js optimizations are also an internal implementation detail.

Come on, really? If you require a full spec to define a very specific format, type annotations, and special designators to actually take advantage of it in any meaningful way, it's not an "implementation detail", because as the user, I have to care about it.

> 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).

That's exposing implementation details, too, and demonstrates a failing of JS.

> 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.

Users want apps to run, and run well. They don't care how. Figuring out how is our job. Making user's lives suck more because we have lofty ideas is not doing our job.

Apple gets it. Google gets it. Even Ubuntu gets it.

Mozilla doesn't get it.

> 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.

Not really. Apple and NeXT navigated these waters successfully for multiple decades via Mach-O and CFM fat binaries, and toolchains built around easily and efficiently supporting multiple architectures.

> 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.

The web is competing with native applications. Now you're trying to compete with native operating systems, yet you're not willing to take the steps necessary to actually compete.

Ultimately, you're creating a two tier systems where platform vendors like yourself get decent performance and runtime environments in which you can produce things like Firefox, and 3rd party developers get crappy performance and runtimes environments where we can produce webapps.

I'd love to see you write and deploy Firefox in asm.js, and then try to compete with Chrome.
The problem with javascript encryption is the environment in which it runs being impossible to control... and also some features of the language. There's no strong random number generator, for instance.

http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/