skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Google also argues that the decision will introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular was becoming a WebKit monoculture.

Ahah so much hypocrisy condensed in this sentence. Yeah it's constraining to share code and have compile time #defines but if every vendor did the same there wouldn't be any common project.
This is already true today.
Ultimately all currency, even gold, is fiat money given value only by use. It therefore seems difficult to decouple different stores of value. I think all the media coverage has indeed caused more people to use bitcoin and increase it's relative value. I have a hard time believing that the growth rate is predictable, there are so many unknown variables and it's so young.
Funny story. I wanted to make video games, until I learned all about the prerequisites to do it.

You might think I balked and bailed. But the reality is I found out that the stuff that goes into making a modern AAA video game is way more interesting than the resulting product.

I now consider wanting to make video games a negative indicator of ever actually doing so professionally, even if the person understands the requirements to do so.

Especially if they understand them in fact.
I sure hope Google is considering heterogeneous computing, too, and better sooner than later.
On the contrary – having them in close proximity might lead you to spend more time watching these puzzling and hauntingly beautiful creatures manifesting the same primordial intelligence out of which we evolved...

I think it's also important not to project our human minds onto jellyfish – it's very possible they are completely enlightened and are supposed to teach us something
Glad to hear I wasn't the only one disappointed by it.
It's not just supply — you have to account for demand, too. Demand is likely to change based on media coverage.

Even if it were just supply, the supply effectively changes all the time because not all bitcoins are on the market all the time. If I forget I have bitcoins, they're not part of the supply (of course, the rising dollar value might make me remember…).
Oh this is fantastic! My father teaches astronomy to kids (he has a mobile planetarium that he takes around schools [1]) and one of the main pain points he has mentioned is communicating a sense of scale to them.

This is elegant because it mixes the concept of "imagine this orange is the earth, mars would be in <nearby town>" within the constraints of a web page.

Kids have difficulty visualising distances in an abstract way - but time is much simpler. And the length of the scroll to Mars really emphasises this.

Great visualisation.

1. http://www.starlincs.co.uk
Something that's been bugging me about Heroku is that the dyno price has stayed the same ever since launch: $0.05 per hour. Compare to services like Digital Ocean and AWS (who lowered prices significantly in the past few years), Heroku is starting to get very expensive.

The 2X dyno at 2x cost doesn't really make me happy, it just invites me to spend more money when it would be more cost-efficient to move.
No. Simply put: the core is likely solidified just like Mars and its magnetic field is very weak, causing the weather to be influenced by only its rotation and solar winds. It would be far more difficult to terraform than Mars really.

Also a Venusian day is something like 5,800 hours and its surface temperature is capable of melting lead.
A congenial 'fuck you' to the authors for crashing my entire OS. Cool idea though.
Yes, we've given credits (or a refund, at the customer's preference) in cases where lack of visibility or inaccurate docs led to over-provisioning of dynos.

There's actually very few cases where people paid more money than they would have otherwise. Heroku is a service with your bill prorated to the second. For the most part, if people don't like the performance (which is measurable externally via benchmarks and browser inspectors), they leave the service. Many people who hit problems with visibility and performance did exactly that.

Naturally, we'll be working hard to try to recapture their business, as well as to remove any reasons that existing customers might leave as they hit performance or visibility problems scaling up in the future.
This might have been funny if hundreds of people didn't spam it every day in hopes of manipulating the price.

One of the worst part of the bitcoin community right now is the number of armchair speculators who have absolutely no idea what they're doing and think it's clever to go into the bitcoin IRC/forum and allcaps that people need to start selling their bitcoins because "ITS GUNNA CRASH" in a baseless hope that it will drive the price down.
Does Apple already maintain a private WebKit fork for iOS?
I'd really like to see a few more markers:

1) 3100 px: Farthest humans have been from Earth (Apollo 13, April '70: 400,171 km)

2) 10 px: Gemini 11, farthest from Earth on non-lunar mission (Sept '66: 1,374.1 km)

3) 3 px: Apogee of ISS (farthest a human has traveled for... a while: 424 km) (I'm probably forgetting something, can't find a good list of spaceflights by distance...)

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Far...

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

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

Taking Earth's diameter as 12,742 km (though it bulges by about 43 km in the center), we're saying that's 100 px. So if my basic algebra is right (no promises) you can convert the above km values to px by dividing by 127.42.
UIWebView means DOM, CSS and JavaScript is brought by mobile safari? All the stuff to show and run a web page?
No, that's circumference - 3.14 * 12742 is approx. 40K.
You are looking at the Earth side-on, so you only see the 2D projection of the half-equator. (EDIT: I think it should be "1D projection")

Another nitpick - presumably our view axis is perpendicular to the solar system plane. The Earth would not look like in the picture, we would see one of the poles but slightly off-centered.
For those wondering why we don't have a Bitcoin ETF, this is one reason. Making a reliable market in decentralised and pseudonymous Bitcoins without an exchange is very difficult. An ETF needs a reliably liquid underlying market to keep a lid on tracking error [def]. We need more competition in U.S. dollar Bitcoin exchanges, preferably a FinCEN-compliant one.

[def] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trackingerror.asp
Can you then please provide specific, step-by-step steps, for turning online BTC (in say, Coinbase or MtGox) into an offline, printed, "paper wallet"?

Thanks.
Congrats! You're in for some of the most amazing moments of your life (if your experience is anything like mine thus far with our 2.5 year old).
Yeah, it was wonderful! The alternate browsers just accepted the standards dictated by the dominant browser, and that didn't cause any problems at all!

/s
If you want to really put a tinfoil cap on, you could say that by Google contributing to WebKit they are giving Apple a lot of free code, allowing them to devote fewer resources to their browser. Once Blink diverges father from WebKit it won't be practical for WebKit to merge in changes from there.

One has to wonder if Google will be recruiting other WebKit contributors (RIM, Intel, Nokia, etc) to move over to Blink. This would put Apple in a tough spot.
I wrote to DH around 2000 after a discussion I had with a friend about Wittgenstein and GEB. It was a pretty callow email, but he was kind enough to send a thoughtful reply.

He said he didn't know much about Wittg., but didn't like his vagueness, which I found interesting from someone who was into Zen.
That actually makes more sense as a default.
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“Currently, the majority of WebKit reviewers are from Google (95), with Apple coming in second (59)... Google is also currently responsible for the vast majority of commits to the WebKit repository...”

Doubtful.
The difference between cable and having 5 Netflix competitors is that you don't have one company with a local monopoly setting your pricing.
The Android and iOS versions have always been different. Apple does not approve any browser apps that do not use the default UIWebView.

It was this reason that Adobe could never launch a flash enabled browser on iOS.
nugget at the end: "there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes; like Mozilla, all new experimental features will require developers to enable them in the browser's options page"
Brilliant. I never actually reached mars - just the gut wrenching distance to the moon made me realise how amazing the Apollo program was - whatever gets us to Mars ...
Theoretically, we could build floating cities on Venus:

Landis has proposed aerostat habitats followed by floating cities, based on the concept that breathable air (21:79 Oxygen-Nitrogen mixture) is a lifting gas in the dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, with over 60% of the lifting power that helium has on Earth. In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 km above Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the solar system – a pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0°C–50°C range.

Because there is not a significant pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the breathable-air balloon, any rips or tears would cause gases to diffuse at normal atmospheric mixing rates rather than an explosive decompression, giving time to repair any such damages. In addition, humans would not require pressurized suits when outside, merely air to breathe, protection from the acidic rain and on some occasions low level protection against heat. Alternatively, two-part domes could contain a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium (extractable from the atmosphere) to allow a higher mass density.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_city_(science_fiction)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_...
If only some of these startup founders could hear themselves
After hearing dozens of startup conversations this is what I started hearing.
I'd love to see the Sun included on the opposite side of the scale. Its diameter is 109 times that of earth, making it 10900 pixels. Would be just as impressive a demonstration.
Godwin's Rule Corollary violation:
o Mentioning Google Reader in a discussion unrelated to RSS or Blogging causes automatic loss of debate/argument/credibility.
Does anybody have a link to their source tree?
Microsoft will pay you $100 to publish an app in their app store
Yes. It's (finally) slowly being upstreamed, however. iBooks uses a separate fork of WebKit, too.
MtGox just tweeted 5 minutes ago that they're being hit by a DDoS. Their site is essentially non-functional beyond the public cacheable static pages.

https://twitter.com/MtGox/status/319563995759652864
Do you have a way to get in touch? (I'm also a python guy and I just started learning how to create pdfs in LaTeX too. This project is totally do-able.) I'm: pconerly at gmail
Kind of a silly thing to say though. If Mars had a "better" atmosphere too it'd be that much more superior as a colonization target.
MtGox is supposed to be replaced by CoinLab (which will still be called MtGox but will apparently be a completely different backend) any day now.
While I understand, this still makes me sad.
We're a bit worried about compatibility, certainly. One important thing to note is that WebKit has _tens of thousands_ of layout tests; all of those tests exist right now in the Blink repository, and we're certainly going to continue working with browser vendors in general and the W3C to ensure that we can agree on exactly what standards mean, and how they should be rendered.

We'll be coming at the same problems from different angles, find and fix different bugs, and have the opportunity to peek at how other browsers have done things. I'm quite hopeful that will mean that we'll all end up with better implementations.
http://bitcoinity.org/markets?exchange=mtgox
Considering I just picked up my first iPhone and started playing with node.js this week, does that make me weird?
Hy, Lisp in Python
I think the value of this is in its focus and simplicity. There have been other websites using zooms and/or scrolling to visualize scale differences (e.g. http://scaleofuniverse.com/), but this is an elegant statement about just one fact, and I think that's more likely to get the ball rolling in someone's brain and amaze them than inundating them with trivia all at once (but thanks for the trivia just the same :).
Where'd you get the idea that Venus has a solid core?
Right, I wasn't saying this in a negative way :). That is quite interesting!
> Is this code for "They wouldn't take our changes so we said, 'Fork it!' and made our own." ?

I think its probably more exactly what it says -- a way of eliminating the overhead of dealing with the complexity of the WebKit ecosystem. As noted in the article, "Google says, for example, that it will be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files comprising more than 4.5 million lines right off the bat."

That's a whole lot of complexity that isn't relevant to what Google is doing with Chrome that is worth not having to deal with.
This isn't "perfect" in my mind, but it's close: https://blockchain.info/wallet/paper-tutorial

I like BlockChain. There's still an amount of trust and I can think of ways it could be compromised, but they do a pretty good job architecturally of preventing your loss in the case they're compromised (well, depends on how they're compromised)

Anyway, those instructions will give you a secure paper wallet and an account that will enable you to still check your balance through blockchain.info.

(Note, this method keeps your private keys on the paper wallet, and the public key with Blockchain which enables balance checking but prevents compromise via blockchain.info)
I use coinbase. How long until they are hacked? Who can I trust! This is the one con to bitcoin.
"The traditional response to these kind of language imperfections is "better tests, better practices". Otherwise as, Unit Tests solve all problems."

The security vulnerabilities found in all browser engines stemming from things like use-after-free suggest otherwise.

"For C++, someone would say to use some set of abstractions or static analysis tools that confers additional safety that isn't available in the out-of-the-box language."

It's really, really hard. The language works against you at all levels. Type systems are much easier ways to achieve the same result.
Tried it, liked it, donated. Thanks! (also emailed him to tell him about a few broken links to his album downloads)
I'd be concerned about the legal angle of running an exchange. Can you just create one or are they regulated? I know it would be different for each region, but at what point does it change from being a web app to something of significant interest a country's financial regulators?

As has been said, a wallet is easy and could be run with minimal effort as a side project. I think you'd need a lot more than technical knowledge to be able to manage an exchange.
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Better use a proton instead.

Electrons are point-like particles, ignoring their wave characteristics, so don't have a "size" per se.
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Blink remains very much open source: the repository should be visible in a minute or three.

We're going to be even more transparent than we currently are, actually, about how things get added to the platform http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features. I'm pretty excited about how that's going to play out with regard to sharing ideas and implementations.
And don't forget in the shower!

If I hadn't taken a break during which it occurred to me that I was doing it all wrong, there are problems I'd still be working on!
I'd say that's a huge performance hit (return, check, call instead of jump). Plus, your JIT might not like it.
Somewhere in this comment, and in the first principles vs. analogy dichotomy, is the dichotomy showcased in the book/film "Moneyball".

Something has always bothered me about it. Something like ... is it better for a human to make a wrong decision than it is for a machine to make a right one ? Perhaps "it depends" ? If so, what is the threshold ? How wrong does a human decision have to be to be inferior to a machine decision ?

The same thing is showing up in Talebs _Antifragile_ ... he argues quite clearly for analogy, and skewers decision making from first principles.

It troubles me somehow...
Very Cool!!
There already are speed differences in iOS alone. The native Safari has a faster JavaScript engine than the sandboxed Safari instances that iOS apps use.

Or something like that. Something about security concerns.
Yeah. It would be the same problem that WebSQL had:
http://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/

As much as I was sad to see it go, I sympathize with their problem. If you just have a single C/C++ implementation with no spec, it's a lot harder to know, as a user/web developer, what the correct behavior is and what you can rely on.
Sleeping an extra hour is 4% of your day. If a 4% decreese in your time makes you 8% more productive then it is a good deal.
What I learned in a year with WisePricer
This assumes that Stack Overflow is the only way to continue learning as a developer.
This is just a personal opinion, but for a browser I'd always support and use a not-for-profit one. No matter how fast, or perceptibly fast, an offering from a business entity is.

Here is why: 1. Tomorrow you, the billion dollar enterprise, will force real identity even more vehemently. 2. I certainly don't want to see a constant hum of ads. 3. I don't want to turn my computer into a wide-mouth bucket for chrome apps, for example, which have higher than normal access and rights on my disk.

Your browser could potentially take me back into an era of 'download-yet-another-snoopy-app' into your machine yeah! Put it all behind a curated garden and keep me happy within. Where web on tablets and smartphones is today. Nope, not for me.
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I'll say from personal experience on two recent projects: if you're only testing in one webkit browser and not hitting the others there's a good chance that you're missing a couple of bugs. There are a ton of different ways to build webkit, Chrome and Safari were never identical enough to ignore. Fortunately, after developing in Chrome it took about as much effort to support Firefox as it did to support Safari, which is to say about half an hour.
It bothers me a little that they show the motion against a starfield like that -- the stars are so far away that they won't shift perceptibly even on a journey to mars.

I mean, I don't have any better ideas, but given that the whole point is to give an idea of scale I wish they'd come up with something else. :)
Why What You’re Reading About Blink Is Probably Wrong
I feel a bit silly writing essentially the same comment twice in a week, but...

Holy cow. Bitcoin was at $145? I wrote a comment 6 days ago expressing shock that it was at $100, since the last time I checked it had been at $60.

If a 45% rise in one week coming on the heels of a 300% rise in one month doesn't raise your eyebrows, I don't know what will.

I continue to watch this unfold, fascinated, popcorn at the ready.
> If the redesign was using C/C++, they'd likely get the same benefits, just with uglier code.

Not with memory safety. Adding memory safety to C++ is incredibly difficult without sacrificing performance—think iterator invalidation.
it says it is traveling at 1/10 th of light speed. it takes less than minute to get to Mars in pixels, but from other sources I know it takes 13 minutes for radio signal to get to mars. Something does not play here.
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Bitcoin is highly volatile and it's a bubble, but these seem to be unrelated problems. The volatility hurts people who are trying to sell alpaca socks and the bubble may hurt speculators.
very cool - thank you.
household income less than $100k/yr

I work, wife works, own a (very) small business, rent two houses = 40+ PAGE 1040

Tax code = INSANE
Why work does happen at work
Every time I navigated within the site I got a popup telling me to sign in with facebook or google. Incredibly frustrating and I don't even know why I would care to sign into that site.
One thing that's always gotten to me about this distance is what it means for communication latency. Mars is 20 light-minutes away. If we sent colonists, communication would be a 40-minute round trip. No phone calls home, no way to have a chat with friends or loved ones; at best they could send a message, and wait 40 minutes for a reply. That's far away.
please also mark the Lagrange Points
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point

plus Sun, that would be really cool!!
It's the Infinite Jest of the Cognitive Science / Mathematics world
The few pixels to the low Earth orbit and ISS is gently depressing. When's the last time a human went further than that? 1972?
Value is the intersection of supply and demand. Supply may be fixed, but demand is highly volatile.
MtGox confirm they're under DDoS
Your son has a 'disorder' described to you by your high priests. However, maybe he just needs a better way of life, a healthier diet, more interaction, more outside time, less participation in a caustic, chemical society. You wouldn't know that, unless you tried to exceed the imposition of cultural 'normality' imposed on you by your society, by, frankly, leaving it behind.

You have absolutely no idea of how much of an asshole you are being right now. You have your opinion, absolutely no facts about my personal situation, are making a ton of assumptions, and yet think that YOU have the right to lecture ME on this subject.

For the record, my son gets a much healthier diet than is standard in our society. He gets several hours outside every day. We have never had a working TV in his life. As he has grown we have allowed him movies - typically under 4 hours per week. He goes for regular hikes. Yes, we use medicine, but only the minimum necessary to affect his ability to pay attention in school hours.

When he is not on medication, the following sequence is common. I can address him by name, he looks at me, and I tell him to put his socks and shoes on. This repeats 3x at 2 minute intervals. His socks and shoes remain not on, and when I ask him to tell me what I've been asking him to do he honestly doesn't know that I want him to put on socks and shoes. Not because he's malicious, but because he simply was lost in his thoughts.

Yes, that is a culture-specific requirement. But if he was being raised in a "natural hunting/gathering society" he'd be the kid who gets eaten by a tiger because he was too busy looking at a spider to watch out.

Now you may think that there isn't a problem here. But I'm the parent here, you're the stranger, you know nothing about my situation, and it is my job to decide what measures are required to make sure that he grows up to be able to survive in society to my satisfaction. So, in all honesty, it is time for you to fuck off.
Sounds pretty fair to me. I'm not using an order of magnitude more government services, so why should I pay an order of magnitude more taxes?

Yes, yes, I get that a graduated income tax might be necessary to pay for the things our society has decided to pay for, but calling the current situation fair is Orwellian.
The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means.

Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...
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