skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I expect most serious developers will stick with engines like Unity

They should stick with engines and frameworks like Unity. Coding raw JS and WebGL is ugly. But there's no reason why Unity cannot compile down to something like asm.js and webGL. In fact, I believe Unity already lets you compile to a swf, which gives you great performance and doesn't require any extra plugins (besides Flash).

>Unity Web Player is easy to install, and it's an increasingly common requirement for a lot of games. It's a barrier, but only a small one.

It's an insurmountable barrier.
> It's not. Asm.js is pretty much just assembly.

No, it's not. Have you even read http://asmjs.org/spec/latest/ ?

It's a rather high-level bytecode, expressed by constraining JavaScript to a specific subset of the language, interpreted according to rules that are considerably more specific than those specified in the JavaScript spec.
Then why have a giveaway when you can simply give them a trial? If it's an ecommerce business, why distract ppl with a giveaway and give them a reason NOT to buy right now?
I'd love to hear what makes R not-fun to develop in. I'm always on the look-out for common pain points.
I don't think that's caused by Spamhaus. Possibly fallout of the attack? I'm having no problems connecting, although the page doesn't want to finish loading.

Spamhaus identifies spammers. They don't take down websites or block connections.
> why shouldn't you compare NaCL to asm.js?

The portability limitations have made Google wait for PNaCl before it flips the switch to authorize NaCl apps on the Web by default.

Note that I believe this choice is wise. I quote them:

> This will… avoid the spread of instruction set architecture dependent apps on the web.
You don't need to do rotation, either -- suppose the first nameserver, when up, is consistently faster than the others. Just setting a timeout of 1 is appropriate, then.
I haven't looked at the Supplementary Multilingual Plane: Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs [1F300...1F5FF] in a while. My favorite characters are 👹 (Japanese Ogre)👺(Japanese Goblin)👻(Ghost) and 👽(Extra Terrestrial).

The symbol 💣 (Bomb, 1F4A3) is useful for reviewing movies using Leonard Maltin's notation.
Doesn't look bad at all. Simple currency symbol.
Keeping money within its own hospitals sounds more or less what you'd expect, surely? That's the whole point of having their own hospitals?
And I expect the executives are paid quite a bit. I'm sure they're not a bunch of angels, but nobody says you have to use them. FWIW, I've used them once in the past, and observed my father doing the same, and we've had no complaints. The premiums seemed reasonable, as well; far from the horror stories one hears from the States.
You've all read BOFH, Now read the BMFH Chronicles.
I don't think any of your examples would have looked impressive just based on the idea. In all of those cases, the wild growth is what made the company a big story.

Tell the world that your startup will deliver burgers, and nobody will care. Then mention 1 million burgers served per day and you'll be a legend.
The "19 yo did this and that" headlines are on the same plane as "single mom discovered one awesome trick" advertising.

It boggles the mind that people keep clicking on either. And yet, here we are.
Well, zlib is fairly trivial and probably not a good example due to overheads.
However, an example such as a torrent server this would make much more sense.
That being said, Erlang is basically a scripting language for building fault-tolerant and parallel applications.

Using C, you might be able to get parallel, but it'll be a lot of work to make it distributed and fault tolerant.

The underlying data structures have little to nothing to do with what's being said in the article.
Quake live without plugin would be awesome.

Quake live in it's current form, and same with Battlefield Heroes, is just silly. OMG a game that runs in your browser!!1 You just have to install this activex-plugin first... Totally misses the point of having browser games. I might as well install a full game.

In the case of quake live installing the plugin was actually MORE hassle than installing a normal program, i counted the steps and with a normal game i usually just select install dir and press next two times, done. For quake live i had to go through tons of hoops, the installer had several steps and in the end i also had to restart my browser twice. Sooo convenient that it runs in the browser....
Google Custom Search's brutal internal inconsistencies
"and they’re rewarded with a yawn."

Let's hope they're rewarded by making a business that creates value and makes them some cash in the process rather than being the tech darling of the next seven days!
What about the distinction between "any transfer" and "cash transactions" is lost on you?
> Right, so by 2040 we can't distribute an application without rebuilding it for 5 or 6 different architectures

5 or 6? 2040? All we've seen over the past 20 years is the gradual reduction of in-use architectures down to a few winning players. We're even seeing it in the SoC/MCU space now, where custom architectures are being replaced with ARM.

I expect to continue to see evolution and simplification, not revolution. If there is a revolution, well, we'll want to take advantage of the power of that fancy new hardware, I suppose.

> one of which is a bitcode format that doesn't even run at native speeds, despite the name.

PNaCL generates native code from the bitcode.

[response to your edit]

> You're basically demonstrating the entire problem with the Native Client camp - you're so myopically focused on the immediate needs and the immediate environment (arm! x86! games! performance this year!) that you have absolutely no appreciation for the trail of destruction being left for future generations.

I would say that you're demonstrating why the web camp continues to fail so horribly to move past simple applications: you're so myopically focused on the ideology of tomorrow over providing a great user experience today.

In fact, I day say you're leaving a far worse trail of destruction, because web applications are the ultimate expression of always-on DRM. When the servers for your "apps" disappear in a few years time, the applications will disappear right along with them -- forever.

How is the Internet Archive going to archive your webapp?

> You have Pepper which is a huge bastardized, specialized clone of all WebGL/HTML 5 audio/media APIs

That's an overstatement of Pepper. It's quite simple -- far more so than the massive browser stack that WebGL+HTML5 brings with it.

In fact, Pepper is simple and constrained enough that someone other than an existing browser vendor or major corporation could actually implement and support a standalone implementation of it. By contrast, producing a compatible browser is such an enormous undertaking that even companies like Opera are giving up and tracking WebKit.
In the same way that your spam filtering is censorship or your ad blocker is censorship.

Spamhaus isn't preventing anyone from putting anything anywhere, they provide a service that others can use so they don't have to see it.

This post in no way is a comment on any of Spanhaus' practices which has garnered some criticism.
"OpenStack is like you think about the linux kernel. Most people want a distro, not raw source to setup their environments"

Since he was comparing the relationship between a hypervisor and Openstack to that between the Linux kernel and the userspace tools, and I was just commenting on that comparison. That is, which I know people that use hypervisors without Openstack (or other virtualization management applications like Cloudstack or vCenter), I don't know anyone that uses the kernel on its own. Sorry, I thought that was clear but I guess it was not.
Something like PostRank needs to exist again. Hopefully in this second blooming of RSS post-reader, we'll get some attractive offerings in that area.
GNOME 3.8 Released
Here's the opening sentence from Anthony Ha's top list for TC. How much more positive can you get?

Y Combinator was tougher to get into than ever this season, and the quality showed on stage.
Yes, it was a fairly weak hypothesis.
OTOH we got on several RBLs a number of times and managed to get taken off them.
Once I added an SPF record it hasn't been a problem since.

Didn't use SPF to begin with because there was a large number of hosts legitimately sending mail for the domain and it was a pain to get all of the IP numbers for various crazy reasons.
I don't really believe the story but its an entertaining read.
The blessings of technical debt and the impact on SDN | Real User Monitoring
R has a million related built-in functions like sapply(), tapply(), lapply(), and vapply()

Exactly that. I've always found R a horribly confusing mess, compared to general programming languages (I'm proficient in Ruby, JS, Obj-C).

On the other hand, compared to some of the other commercial stats packages, it's beautiful and logical and reasonable. I regularly use Stata, where you're only allowed one data table in memory at once, and almost everything relies on side effects and Byzantine macros. E.g want to calculate a mean? First, 'summarise' the variable, then assign 'r(mean)' to a var name, then quote that the right way to be substituted into an expression where it's needed.
Thank you for saying this.. Perhaps both? :) Then it's easy win.
IPhones most 'vulnerable' among smartphones, says ZDNet
From the manpage: "[rotate] causes round robin selection of nameservers from among those listed". This means in your configuration, the broken nameserver will be hit once every 3 times, resulting in a 1second timeout before trying the other 2. So in every 9 requests your setup results in 3 seconds delay for as long as the nameserver is down.

In case of Amazon, you actually prefer their nameserver as it resolves names to LAN IPs where possible.
With your strategy, ~66% of my instance hostnames would be resolved to the less efficient WAN IPs, that's with all 3 nameservers being reachable.

As for data, there's papertrail and Premium Support tickets with Amazon admitting to their downtimes. In most cases (e.g. the one on Jan 14, 2013
11:27 PM PST) "there was a problem with the underlying host".

Remember it doesn't even need to be the service itself going down, there's weaker links in this chain like misconfiguration of the virtual host. Cables can get tripped over. Anycast is not possible here.

I'm not blaming them. This article was about mitigating suckyness in case of outages, not proving that such a thing even exists : )
"by selectively targeting the sperm that carry it."
So only sperm can carry "BRCA mutation"?
Also, I can just smell feminists (at firs rad-feminists, since they already say that all male infants should be aborted right away) going to try ant and kill all sperm that carries Y chromosome using this research.
Modern game engines also leverage SIMD and multi-core SMP. Javascript is inherently single threaded. While there is hope in retrofitting SIMD in (Rivertrail ParallelArrays or Dart's recent work with new SIMD TypedArrays), I don't see any path for supporting multithreading. JS is inherently async and singlethreaded in its memory model.

WebWorkers are not really a multithread model. Game engines could be written to leverage message passing based isolates, but in some cases, but doing it in an optimal form isn't exactly developer friendly, it's one of pains of developing the PS3 SPEs is that they didn't share system memory and you had to DMA stuff around.
I know of a lot of "boring" businesses that make buckets of cash. That's what I'm interested in. The tech press isn't, because interesting reporting on them involves lots of research and diving into the real story. They want an easy headline filled with buzzwords to drive clicks.
I don't assume anything. I don't assume Yahoo is run by incompetents. I don't even think that incompetence is the best explanation for this.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree with that.

But to me, personal "maintenance" has more to do with introspecting on things are stopping you from moving forward as a person.

Intelligence and success, I think these aren't part of that maintenance. For example, I can think of many people that aren't profoundly intelligent and/or successful, but have a great impact on others, even society, and thus are very happy, positive people.
PyCharm 3.0 Roadmap
Works on Opera too.
I'd say that R is awesome, and that R is a fairly annoying language, all at the same time. (I'll go back to writing some R code now.)
A timeout of 1 can result in false positives. 3 seconds is recommended according to the manpage.
Should the occasional false positive be none of your concern, then you still add at least a second to every request. If you make many, that's many seconds.
Stamplay – Instant Web Development
Income At Home, Herbalife, and the $8 billion pyramid
Killing Time: 11 Ways to Ruin Your Productivity
> The road to automatic parallelisation of sequential programs is littered with corpses. It can’t be done. (not quite true, in some specific circumstances it can, but this is by no means easy).

vs three paragraphs later

> Alexander’s talk gave us a glimpse of the future. His company concurix is showing us where the future leads. They have tools to automate the detection of sequential bottlenecks in Erlang code.

why is that not a contradiction? because an erlang program isn't "sequential" to start with?
>I really don't think that asm.js is necessary to bring 3d gaming to the web.

It helps ... a lot. WebGL gives you GPU access which will largely drive your graphics engine, but there's still tons of places where CPU performance matters (e.g. physics and AI). Asm.js and WebGL are complementary.

>I'm on the web to take advantage of things like JavaScript and CoffeeScript.

And asm.js prevents this how? If you're coding in CoffeeScript, you already have a necessary compile step to do. Are you telling me you wouldn't want the CoffeeScript compiler to give you extra performance by including asm.js heuristics?
it's horrible, can't get it to work right.
On Functional Programming in Java – It’s Coming…
Todd McKinnon: A Startup Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
Tom Dale's Video: Building an App with Ember.js
How is what Thalmic is doing in any way considered boring? Insanity.
Thank you. My mistake was adria got autocompleted to adrian.
I own that mistake :)
I guess we are going to face the problem of having to produce in the coming decades an exponentially growing number of new software applications for all the needs of society… The solution? « write programs that generate programs (that generate programs) that solve problems». We're aiming to solve this problem in communication and marketing, do you think is valuable?
40 Year Old Self Sustaining Ecosystem in a Jar
Stillio - Track sites with daily screenshots
Google Sent Out 8,000 Invites Today for Google Glass
I don't really see the point of NaCL when something like asm.js gives us our cake and let's us eat it too.
This. I had a bad experience with a startup once in which I was the newest developer at a company and was working on a project that used a technology I was more experienced with than anyone else at the company. The whole situation did not do great things for my motivation.
I've looked at Erlang before, and I would certainly agree that it's far simpler to write a concurrent application in Erlang than it would be in C.

I'm just taking issue with the bit at the end, where they're bragging about removing a serial bottleneck by rewriting zlib in Erlang in order to remove a lock. Rewriting it in Erlang really doesn't have anything at all to do with switching to a lock-free data structure.
You certainly can give a trial, but say you wanted to give away one of your larger packages (i.e 1 year or 6 months of free service) then you could use a giveaway.
Tonightish - Creating Trusted Networks of Babysitters
What was your first website?
That's great to hear. Big respect to you guys for solving that problem before it was a problem!
While not being exactly about type theory like Pierce books (you can't waste your money on those), I really like the part about types in "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" by Peyton Jones (the chapters about type system are written by Peter Hancock). It's seen mostly from a technical point of view. The book notably contains a fully explained implementation of a type checker.

You can check it online while waiting for the Pierson ones:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
... The logo you linked to does not look nice. I'm sorry.
All told, you can only seem so impressive on a stage. Nothing impresses me more than when a non technical/startupy friend or relative casually mentions a new product.
"In Wikipedia, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable"

That's why I stopped sending them money.
That and deletionism.
I agree that it's wise to default to a portable implementation. I also think it's wise to also have the option of serving up binaries that are optimized for the devices your users actually have, today.
I think you missed the "automatic" part. Completely rewriting a program in a new language is certainly not automatic.
They're different statements. Taking a sequential program and automatically parallelizing it is a very hard problem. What this tool does, as I read it, is simply find sequential parts of code, and it's up to the devs to figure out how to parallelize said code.
I understand the issues with DNS reflection, but why are open resolvers the issue? Isn't the point of DNS to respond to requests with correct information?

Surely if random people can't connect to DNS resolvers and get information, they can't surf the net either? Someone has to resolve DNS for people for the internet to function, don't they?
This isn't just any bunker. It is a 5 story cold war bunker, with blast doors designed to take a hit from a freaking 20 megaton bomb at 5 km.

The US may have a bunker buster that can open that thing, but it would kill everybody inside, and possibly around it. I am not quite sure that the US bunker busters of that size are non-nuclear either.

Would the US FBI really drop a nuke to serve a warrent? That seems, excessive and counter productive (as you would destroy whatever it was you wanted).
Just because people are already doing confusing things with currency symbols doesn't mean we have to continue to do confusing things with currency symbols in the future.
Forecast is a new, gorgeous weather service from team that made Dark Sky
Who cares? Are you in this for the flash-in-the-pan press? Or are you in it to make money and/or change the world?

Every day, I'm focused on growing matchist (http://matchist.com/talent) so it can make more money and become a better business. If that produces yawns, so be it.
They're boring businesses. When has the press ever been interested in reporting on boring things?
Yes, I've seen it, but "physics" in this case means ragdoll physics, it's not like Havok/PhsyX or anything that modern game engines uses. These things are impressive for Web demos, but the question you need to be asking is, what would someone who visited GDC or E3 to see console or desktop games say about it? Would they pay $39 for it, or would they think it looks like a toy compared to what the other vendors are showing?

End users don't care what something is implemented it, how open it is, all the stuff that hackers care about. All they see is a game, and they will compare it to other games that are implemented with different technologies. You won't get bonus points because you managed to implement it in a difficult environment.
Frequentist here. This paper makes me hate Bayesians a little less. The reason is because a general thrust of the paper (since I have only had time to give it a once-over) seems to be that just because you are a Bayesian it doesn't mean that you have to get rid of model adequacy checks. Not having model adequacy checks is why I think Bayesians run around with a magic wand saying, "poof! there's an optimal model." After proving a theoretical optimality they never check to see if the real world data supports their arguments. So I'm glad to see a prominent Bayesian saying that you don't have to throw model checking out the window.

On a secondary note, I have to lament the use of philosopy in a math paper. I realize that many prominent mathematicians are/were also philosophers and that the two subjects are somehow linked at some level. But really I think that putting philosophy in a math paper is an excuse to use more big words and sound smart. Most of us would like to have a set of formulas to apply and not worry about-- forgive me if I for what I'm about to say-- fuzzy non-science like philosophy and the implications that it might have on our cold hard numbers.

Can each 31 page paper that combines math with philosophy come with a 5 page companion paper that leaves out the philosopy and just has the applicable math stuff?
Ian from Segment.io here and +1, we've also just started using HelpScout to handle having lots of messages going to all four of us. It was the nicest solution we found for keeping the personal touch still, since they don't add weird support crap to your emails.

Also the graphs for response time as fun to monitor. Accidentally let one request go over night the other day and really messed up my average ;p
Here here. Don't tie yourself to press--one write-up in TechCrunch won't make a measurable difference in the long rung.
American's don't know the intense surveillance that they are already under because these laws are slowly expanded over time with little democratic debate. You are telling the frog in the boiling pot that it is being hyperbolic for complaining that the temperature just went up another degree because the water was already hot.
The Leap Motion Controller Now Supports Linux
I did a search on the /24 block my DSL connection is part of, on openresolve.

There were 14 open resolvers. Prodding a bit around at them , many of them are just linux machines people in my area put on the internet, and have just installed a DNS server on it, likely for caching purposes, but it isn't set up properly.

Ofcourse these are DSL connections, so the upload rate is likely just 512kbit, but all you need is enough of them.
Related to this:

https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/bullet...

A weapon system comparable to this would enable a drone to reliably target one and only one person. That would be instrumental in taking out both hackers and drone pilots under this new doctrine.
It looks like it was designed in 1977, which is disappointing because a currency symbol should have a timeless design. Use of color is nearly always doomed to failure because others will not be diligent about reproducing the colours faithfully.

The existing Bitcoin symbol is far superior, and that it is identical to the Thai Baht is of no great significance - currency symbols are hardly unique. The horizontal bar looks awkward - it lends a poor balance to the design, and looks more like a rendering glitch in smaller sizes.
Emacs.

Tried it years ago and absolutely hated it, then last year I saw a screenshot of someone's org-mode setup and thought I'd give it another go. Since then it's become my main editor for coding, project organization, diet tracking and more.
Mobile Gmail Navigation: Replacing Buttons With Gestures
By "can't waste your money" do you mean that buying them is not a waste of money or that I shouldn't waste my money on them?

Also, thanks for the link to the article.