skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a distinction between positions here:

"Being genetically modified always makes the foods inherently unsafe"

vs

"Being genetically modified cannot make the foods inherently unsafe"

Both are wholly incorrect positions to take, and the question is often posed as a false dichotomy between these two options. Attention to mechanism and importantly, to incentive, is going to be essential in any future detente we arrive at... and we will arrive at one, because genetic engineering is only going to get more useful.

Categorical prohibition of 'The Monsanto Roundup Ready Gene' and a temporary moratorium on growing GMOs until a resilient process for tradeoff consideration is created would be a much more reasonable process. Personally, I'm in favor of the state establishing high-value labelling requirements, and allowing alternatives. "Made with FDA Certified Pasturized Milk" vs "Made with Uncertified Raw Milk" is one we would appreciate in the US, where the highly nationalized agribusiness sector does not approve of giving us such choices.

"Certified Safe Local-Grown GMO" vs "Certified Safe Import-Only GMO" vs "Uncertified GMO" vs no label for natural organisms seems a perfectly fine way of doing things to me.
Looks like somebody wants to drink the kool-aid. Boy, HN has some seriously angry, condescending a-holes.

Also, bikeshedding? Assange is causing problems that is not helping the Wikileaks cause. He's becoming an ineffective leader: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/28/edward-snowden-e...
The beginner's guide to coming up with billion dollar ideas
It's not a question of browser support, it's a question of user choice. Do I want to allow any and all websites to run random scripts on my computer?

For some people and some sites, the answer is an obvious yes. Especially when the script is an integral part of the app or site you're visiting, such as a game or a highly interactive tool.

Sometimes though, the content should be enough. There are plenty of sites out there, like blogs, that shouldn't need js to provide their primary function. For example, I don't feel that I should need to enable client side scripting to view a 140 character tweet on the twitter site.

For some people, tracking via js is the primary concern, and in their case it makes sense to disable js whenever possible, and use offline tools for everything that needs to be interactive.

In any case, this move has a solid precedent, and as others have noted there are plenty of plugins that allow granular control over js execution.
Firefox

2002-2013
... in exchange for a system without even the pretension of accountability
Looks like the reason behind the move is that preferences UI has become incomprehensible ... which actually doesn't have anything to do with javascript.
Perhaps a move towards Eclipse-like preferences would be a wiser choice?
It's even more relevant now with all the front end JavaScript frameworks that so many web apps rely on these days. In an age where web sites are now web apps that rely almost totally on JavaScript to function removing this option except for those who really have a good reason is acceptable and probably preferable. I feel like educating users is becoming harder and harder due to how hard we've all pushed for "it just works" type experiences so rather than fight the tide Mozilla is going with it.

Plus, apart from security concerns which can be dealt with other ways, JavaScript engines are now capable of running multiple web apps in many tabs simultaneously without being noticed. Wasn't performance one of the primary reasons for having this option back in the day? Now its not an issue. Going forward we might not see a disable js button and think it just as normal as not seeing an option to disable CSS or even html. It's kind of a non-optional piece of the web now.
I supppose too many people accidentally disabled Javascript in recent months while trying to disable Java. As long as there's an about:config option that does the same thing, I don't think it's a bad move to remove that option from view.

I will, however, miss the "Advanced" button next to the "Enable JavaScript" checkbox (if that button is going to go away, too, which the article isn't clear about). I use those Advanced options all the time to prevent websites from messing with my neatly tiled windows and trying to prevent me from using the right mouse button. Here in South Korea, the majority of blogs and forums have right-click protection enabled (and refuse to display any content if you disable Javascript altogether) due to ridiculous defaults in popular platforms, and every other website feels like they have the right to go full-screen. Firefox is the only thing that makes this stupid trend bearable. I guess I'll have to go and check whether NoScript has a similar option.
There was a talk (or podcast?) that discussed how cluttered with vestigial options Firefox and other browsers are. One of the examples was JS - if you turn it off entirely it makes the entire web seemingly broken. As long as the option is there for power users, this is the kind of thing that removing will probably cause less headaches for people in the long term.
I've never raised money-- I wasn't born into the connections, and that's what being "fundable" is actually about-- but I've worked in VC-funded companies and I hate what they have done to this industry.

The slow decision-making is about three things:

(1) It reaffirms the rank of the VCs. (Status waiting.)

(2) It's a test of the petitioner's social status. (If desperate or low-status, the petitioner will continually seek feedback.) The whole point of the time-wasting deliberation is to weed out the desperate, and more importantly to see if you come from the right social class (and can therefore summon enough resources to make their slow response tolerable) to be funded.

(3) It gives risk-averse VCs, who are driven more by their individual career goals (of being "in on" career-making deals that occur once every few years and require social access) than portfolio optimization, plenty of time to collude, trade favors, and peddle influence.

It will never change or go away. Nor do I think we will see an end to this insane bipolarism in which a company is either overfunded or forced to operate on a shoestring.

VC is just unhealthy for software; it works (because it's the only option) for biotechnology startups that require $50m+ just to get started, but for software it's just kingmaking (work with us, or we fund your competition) that doesn't really add anything.
> break the laws of thermodynamics as we know it

Not a giant leap to imagine for a species that's been able to construct a Dyson Sphere in the first place ;)
How to move away from GMail (2011)
This is my preferred use of js, providing additional functionality and usability improvements on top of things that already work perfectly well with js disabled.

Users with js still get the "fuller" experience, but users who choose to disable js still have full access to the site.
And the 'people that know what they are doing' are the ones that know what about:config is, and how to Google for extensions to disable JavaScript. It's also arguable that an extension that provides an easy 'toggle JavaScript on/off' button is a much better interface than needing to dive into the preferences pane to disable JavaScript (and possibly re-enable it sometimes).
You link off to some blog posts as being 20% of your inspiration for writing the posts, but they're behind bit.ly redirects. Now I can't tell if I've read those before without actually clicking on the link, which is rather annoying. What's the reason for this?
But only the habits of people who "like" the page, not the habits of every facebook user who merely /visits/ the page
The Google CDN serves its scripts from a cookie-less domain and with an aggressive far-future expires header. Best case, a given user may only need to make one request to Google per year for a given script, and even when they do there aren't any tracking cookies to make that request worth much at all in terms of tracking. You're right that Analytics isn't great for privacy, but their AJAX Libraries CDN is configured in a diametrically opposite way.
You seem to be conflating PRISM with NSA's entire SIGINT operation, I see a lot of people doing that. PRISM is one out of 504 programs that collectively obtain vast amounts of information (approximately 350 billion telephone and internet records globally in the month of March 2013). That is 4 trillion records per year, after filtering the data.

PRISM is an inconsequential piece of the puzzle, and truthfully one of the most innocuous. Nobody is really disputing that it collects information on only a small number of people. However, other NSA programs very clearly do not - they collect everything on everyone, then look at the interesting parts.

As of right now, the NSA has a blank check to collect any data they want and can retroactively obtain warrants for accessing that data. You can argue about the merits of what they are doing, but I see very little basis in arguing that they aren't actually collecting vast amounts of communications.

Personally, I think there is absolutely no way to stuff this genie back in the bottle.
The worlds first "Balsamic Subscription"
You should benchmark, but you are probably wrong. The whole talk was about how hardware (i.e. memory accesses) matters. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to suggests this.

"Earlier authors had estimated that Strassen's algorithm is faster for matrices with widths from 32 to 128 for optimized implementations. However, it has been observed that this crossover point has been increasing in recent years, and a 2010 study found that even a single step of Strassen's algorithm is often not beneficial on current architectures, compared to a highly optimized traditional multiplication, until matrix sizes exceed 1000 or more, and even for matrix sizes of several thousand the benefit is typically marginal at best (around 10% or less)."
Which is two things to me:
1. not a tragedy that can never be fixed, but usually a minor inconvenience
2. one of those random opportunities to learn something, like in this case what Javascript is.

Taking away options from users because they don't know well enough can be kind of a self-full-filling prophecy, too. You cater to newbies, you get more and better newbies, entitled ones.

Stuff should be nice to use, of course, and shouldn't have friendly green buttons that makes it shoot knives at you etc. but it also shouldn't be less complex than it needs to be. If you have nothing left to take away you have perfection; if you still keep taking away stuff, you don't have even more perfection, you're just breaking things.

I never heard anyone complain that this option is there, or that it caused any trouble.. so what is this based on? Where are the petitions to remove this option that causes so much grief?

And why stop there? Imagine all the bad stuff you can do with the printer settings. Why are there options that allow people to waste ink, paper, or even maybe damage their printer? How many people threw away their printer, damaging the environment, because they thought it was broken... when all that happened was their cat walking over the keyboard and misconfiguring it? There might be actual kids choking on toxic fumes from those printers right now, nevermind the environment; and we worry about a website not working.

The Firefox options dialog is still kind of messy, and would be even if half of the options were removed. Take some leads from Opera :) Just taking away things doesn't automatically help, logically ordering them while also putting them in tiers of expertise does.

[By the way, all those keyboard shortcuts? They have to go, "hacker news readers" can get them back by editing an .ini setting -- the risk is just too great that someone might open the dev tools and then complain about weird rectangles on their screen, or to fail to convert because the website isn't as pretty as it could be]
You're probably thinking of "Checkboxes That Kill": http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ - and I believe it's what inspired Firefox to remove the option.
I spend a lot of time browsing the web each day. I spend very little time using "web apps," and the few that I do use can easily be whitelisted, since I rarely try new ones. Everything else is basically a blog, article, some other completely static source of information, or an entirely HTML forms-based interface.

I don't block and selectively whitelist javascript, but I think I'd barely notice if I did. Maybe I'll give it a shot some time.
The End of Car Culture
A few months ago, I switched to using w3m inside emacs as my primary browser.

w3m is not capable of handling Javascript at all. And you know what, for 90% of the websites I visit, it doesn't matter. They function fine and look fine without Javascript. And if w3m could manage to make most websites look fine without Javascript, so could Firefox -- if its developers cared.

As for non-technical users -- they're probably not going to be opening Firefox's Preferences dialog in the first place. And if they do, they probably aren't going to start randomly checking and unchecking stuff to see what it does. That's something an adventurous geek might try, but certainly not your typical non-technical user.

If Firefox developers wanted to additionally protect the average user from this dangerous button, they could have simply stuck it in the Advanced tab of the Preferences dialog, or added a scary warning about being doubly sure that the user knows what he's doing (like they do with about:config).

That said, I'm happy to use NoScript for this functionality anyway, as it's far more flexible than a blanket "turn off Javascript everywhere with no exceptions" button.
We do a lot of repeat business, so when I came across Recurhub.com... I immediately realized we needed to create a subscription balsamic option!

Note: just pushed this live about 5 minutes ago. Would appreciate any flaws or breaks that are found. Thank you HN!
disabling javascript is the most effective method against XSS, so it's really bad choice to not be able to do it simply.
not that firefox would be that security-minded in other areas regarding to javascript (XSS + form autofill without SecureLogin addon = fun & profit for hackers)
People will still do it without understanding and then complain that Firefox broke. There is no legitimate reason your average user should have access to this checkbox. Especially when if you actually want to disable Javascript it's still very easy.
>People "believe in" government not because they love it or think it is perfect, they do it because they believe the alternative is something like the Hobbsian state of nature.

Utter BS.

People "believe" in governments largely because they are indoctrinated into the belief system prepared for them based on what country they are born into. Then, based on the actions of that government, their upbringing and life experience their worldview may-or-may-not be shifted.

There are plenty of brilliant free thinking people in the world, they just unfortunately live in a world mostly populated by those who do not have the chance to have a similar perspective, due to an infinite (yet very channeled) set of life-circumstance.

The human mind is the most amazing creation we know of. Yet, the "powers that be" want you to believe that you're worthless, un-guided and incapable. Yet - just looking at the amazing world around you - created wholly by the efforts of the minds of Man - would serve to prove that you and your mind is, actually, sublime.

There has been a centuries long war on the mind...
People will still do it without understanding and then complain that Firefox broke.

If that is true, then point me to all those complaints.

There is no legitimate reason your average user should have access to this checkbox.

That's called kicking away the ladder, and fuck that with a rusty chainsaw. How are people supposed to even get curious about what Javascript is, when they never hear of it?
The bug you referenced is from over a year ago and in fact the feature is no longer deprecated. The documentation page [1] used to highlight the deprecated status but has recently been updated and any mentions of deprecation have been removed.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/share...
Oh yes that monsanto case that gets trotted out every freaking time this comes up.

The poor farmer didn't know he was using roundup ready seeds...and yet somehow also decided to use roundup on his crops anyway!

Except he did know that he was using roundup ready seeds, and thought he was exploiting a loophole.

Turns out he was wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.#Backgrou...

This is absolutely not a case of big evilco going against the little guy.
My opinion is that we need more big seed funds (lets say ~$50M fund size). We can't rely on Series A funds to do smaller deals. Revolution comes from below. Besides, those Series A funds have probably sold an investment strategy to their LP investors and they can't change (or don't want to look silly changing) strategies in the middle of their fund.
You did not respond to the central point of my comment. I will respond anyway.

Firms sell goods to buyers. If buyers stop buying said goods from a particular firm, that firm is going to be in trouble unless they get the buyers to start buying again.

Seems like at least a "pretension of accountability".

Accountability exists in forms other than democracy.
Have you ever actually met any normal users? They have work they need to do, and the software is just a means to an end.

They don't want to be 'empowered' by developers, and they definitely don't want to have to deal with arranging a bunch of poorly documented modules that make no sense if you are not familiar with the underlying architecture.
> I simply don't understand why you would want to browse the web without JS enabled

It's faster. Much faster. Every time I disable noscript to use some website (90% of the time it's video that doesn't work) I'm always astonished how much GARBAGE most website have. Totally useless stuff.

Popup boxes, annoying underlining with mouse overs, certificate verifiers, bookmarks, social network promoters, chat boxes, and helpers galore.

I suppose that stuff pays the bills? Maybe. But pages are so much faster without it.
We originally built FTL to help formalize and automatically parallelize CSS. (Results of that work are going into Mozilla's Servo browser.) That includes constructs for both declarative layout and declarative parallelization. Our PPOPP 2013 paper is the best place to look right now, and a video of my talk at SFJS last week should be posted soon.

We already have JS as a target language ;-) You can try an old version here: http://jsfiddle.net/lmeyerov/Awubf/ . It's similar to the current lang version except without macros. I'm hoping to have a full release with tutorials and a fast non-WebCL version by September, but we'll see :)
Misinformation on NSA programs includes statements by senior U.S. officials
RTC Roulette doesn't ask for a twitter login.
I don't understand why any civilization would ever build a Dyson sphere.

The sphere would be dynamically unstable in the gravity field of the star and station-keeping would be expensive and hard to coordinate over the lightspeed delay.

And stars are terrible energy sources--they're huge, diffuse, inefficient, and not portable. It would be much more useful to build fusion generators to order.
Lazy way of tracking clicks, I guess?
If this becomes an issue of picking your evil, I'd prefer the devil that allows me to play extremely immersive games for hours while maintaining a high quality fitness level.
Ahhh babelfish. So many poorly translated high school spanish papers.
I exclusively surf with javascript disabled by default. I only turn javascript on on websites that i trust or the site has to give a good reason to do so. i wont turn on javascript to display your crappy jquery menu or slideshow.

So many pages are totally broken without javascript. You dont need javascript to have a good layout, a complexe menu or display images. Yet some "professional" sites dont even work without javascript on, All you see is a blank page.

And by the way, there is a tag called noscript , but it seems webdesigners that only think about demonstrating their "html5" talents dont know their basics.

Javascript is the new flash. Stupid cheesy animations , heavy pages , memory leaks that kill your browser, javascript intros that you cant skip ,broken parallax scrolling , slow scrollbars so it feels like you are on ipad , it will be worse than flash when designers start abusing Adobe Edge on all their websites.

So long firefox...
It's very hard to say this without sounding like i'm not respecting the effort you put into writing this or the knowledge and experience you have accumulated as to date (which i honestly believe is significant), so please don't take it the wrong way.

Sometimes you don't know what you don't know. Experience often teaches you a lot more than the best design pattern to use, there is a lot of gut feeling involved, especially when it comes to making a decision today about how you might need to modify a feature in the future - you get better at predicting the future with time.

I have been doing this for around a decade now, and while I've done a lot in that time, realizing you have gaps and that you need to do your time to gain experience is very key if for no other reason than not coming across as a know it all in the workplace.

I still have a lot to learn too.
> I can't remember the last time I wrote an application...there is no reason to assume it is not there as a developer.

I'm starting to feel old, since no one seems to remember HTML webpages instead of apps or those people that would say they can "program" html.
I couldn't watch him use his finger; my whole body is wound up right now.
Probably: our relatives ate them all! There's basically no corner of our planet, from the hottest volcanic ocean vent to the coldest ice at the poles, to the highest clouds in the air, where our relatives don't live.

Of course, it has taken us about 1/4 the lifetime of the entire universe to get this far, so YMMV. :D
Untrue. If wearing a vest, taking a corner involves side-stepping, and in any urban combat situation you'll spend a very high proportion of your time doing that.

Source: Urban combat training, FDF.
Most algorithms complexity is accounting only over ALU ops in assumption that memory load/stores are free. Strassen seems to be using more memory bandwidth than the naive multiplication so it's likely to be even slower.
Somehow the dark corner of a preferences pane doesn't seem like the place anyone would choose for an introduction to Javascript.
Well it sure as shit trashed my knees and I'm sub-sub-sub-elite. Osteoarthritis is not the only potential problem.
I'm a big believer in finding the candidate you're not supposed to find. Meaning, if you find the person you're supposed to find, then everyone else will as well. Plus, they probably already have the job you're offering. So, you compete on salary.

If you can find and take a chance on the right student from the "wrong" school, you can get some great employees.

Large companies in particular love butt-in-seat time as a predictor of value. Sure 6 months experience is probably better than 3. But 6 years doesn't buy you much more than 3 years.

The other thing big companies love is prior experience in the industry. I have never understood that tendency. You already have 10 people with 10 years experience... Why is adding more of the same important? Years in industry isn't anywhere on my framework for hiring.
I think that would be easy to fix using only HTML, if the refresh used an anchor tag to your comment.
Try an extension? Power users aren't the target market for this decision, and that's why add-ons exist.