skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "I'm not comparing XP to Ubuntu. A few years ago I experimented with a Pentium 3. XP beat "mid-level" Linux distributions handily. Mid-level distributions would be something like http://www.zenwalk.org/, typically using user friendly but lightweight software (like XFCE). Note how they advertise for speed on the front page."

The problem here is you're just quoting anecdotal evidence - which is pretty much worthless. There's nothing to say what the specs of the systems were, what your usage was, nor any post-install optimisations (eg since you're familiar with Windows I'd wager that you weren't running a vanilla install of XP - instead disabling themes and such like to streamline the OS. But you were probably still running a vanilla build of stripping XP down to it's minimal components while running a vanilla versions of those other Linux distros).

To further prove how useless anecdotal evidence is, I wiped my wife's old laptop and installed Xubuntu and saw some marked speed improvements - despite Xubuntu having desktop compositing and such like enabled (which wasn't enabled in Windows). I've also replaced two offices full of Windows CE thin clients with Linux - same hardware, but instead of WinCE (which is as minimal as Windows gets), it's running ArchLinux with LXDE.

So we can all quote the "upgrades" that we've done, but without offering any real details such stories are worthless (and the results would be mostly down to whichever OS your most familiar with anyway - as you'll know how to tweak it's performance). Which is why the majority of my point was about the age of XP (and the issues that gives in terms of security and support) vs running the latest version of Linux. At lest with that, we can evidence our arguments.

> "typically using user friendly but lightweight software (like XFCE)"

XFCE isn't actually that lightweight. I mean, it's often used as a lightweight alternative to KDE, GNOME and such like, but they're pretty beefy / bloated desktop environments. If you wanted something lightweight then you would have been better off with LXDE, E17 or any of the numerous window managers. But this goes back to my point about it being easier to for you to run a low footprint version of Windows because you're more familiar with that - and thus how worthless anecdotal evidence is because of that bias.

> "I also owned a first-generation netbook, and there XP was better than Puppy, Slax, etc..."

Well that's definitely not true because the 1st generation netbooks were ASUS EeePCs and they were all Linux (Xandros to be precise). XP wouldn't even run on the netbooks originally. Microsoft had to push through changes to XP's code and licences after the netbook market started to take off out of worry that Linux might grab a chunk of Windows's market. And I remember this vividly because not only does my wife have a 1st generation EeePC, but I remember the Linux fanboys proclaiming that netbooks marked the "year of the Linux desktop" (which sadly never happened due to Microsoft subsidising Windows so massively that Linux netbooks actually worked out more expensive in comparison).
There is newer.cases, like a guy that took his family.to vote.for him, and claims he voted.on himself.and still.ended with zero.votes. He sued.TSE but the reply was that he probably typed wrong and confirmed.a.wrong person.

Since there is no per vote paper ballot, it.is.his.word.against the judge word, so guess who win.
Awesomesauce: Turn Chrome Developer Tools into an IDE
I agree that it's a bad tool in many ways, but even if the language (and environments) were beautiful, the problem at hand is often the way that people use it.

In this case, a poor craftsman uses his tools to do the things that the browser already does for you.

I've seen some JS that reinvents lots of what the browser rendering engine should handle (recalculating & reflowing heights of elements every time something was added or subtracted from the DOM, for example). Expand this kind of thinking to an entire project, and you start to find yourself in the kind of mess described in the slides.

If/when Dart replaces JS, some of the enforced structure may help prevent badly organized or buggy code, but it won't fix poor assumptions of what concerns scripting should and should not handle.
Firing a woman for being "too attractive" is legal
The few female focused technology events that I have seen promoted locally give off the vibe of a private members club. They don't say it explicitly, but hint with words like attendees are welcome to take their partners etc. It just seems strange to me because other events have nothing like that style of language.
So the question is: what's the equivalent of an electric starter motor for businesses/startups?
I believe the reason why Portuguese developers are not flooding UK (I don't completely agree, I see them coming more and more but slowly) is that any reasonably good developer in Portugal still can find work in consulting and state related IT firms. They work long hours and earn low, but enough to live comfortably there.
Is this not essentially a job ad disguised as a blog post?
If you are still using GMail (or Yahoo, or arbitrary US-based email company) in August, your right to complain about the NSA spying on you is revoked. If you’re complaining about government spying on the Internet, or in a gathering of programmers, and you won’t take basic steps to do anything about it, then you’re a hypocrite, full-stop.

I don't understand this point of view. Your opinion on how fair or legal or morally right a law is has nothing to do with the steps you've taken to avoid that law.

Why do the "basic steps to do anything about it" stop at protections that the technically-skilled can take, rather than contacting and complaining to your Congressperson or otherwise actual attempts to have the law changed?

And how useful is it to run your own encrypted email server if the email message itself isn't encrypted in transit?
No. Tax havens exist because people (and companies) want to hide assets. That's independent of the existence of any tax 'hell'. Unless you're of the opinion that all taxation is bad (an opinion I disagree with).
But won't that opportunity be there after they spend 2-3 fun years in London?
Come on, no serious economist gives credit to Laffer's curve - until taxation goes over something like 70%. And it's incredibly easy to demystify: Just try to check how many times taxes were increased, and fiscal revenues increased. If we were on the descending slope of that curve, increasing taxes would decrease fiscal revenue.
Yep.

This part of what the legal system is up to is clearly what people should be upset about and protesting in the streets.
So I don't know much about anything, but I'm confused on this point. You say "This effectively means it always performs late binding and invoking a message is REALLY slow in Objective-C." But I can't find any evidence of Objective-C performing late binding or in documentation [1][2][3][4].

[1] - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5943949/late-binding-vs-d...
[2] - http://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/resources/ObjCFun.html
[3] - http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/genera...
[4] - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9470824/dynamic-binding-l...
Those sources don't appear to quote any hard numbers, and don't seem to dispute the WHO's methodology, but then again I can't read French :)
Edward Snowden Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize
Cache-aware matrix multiplication – naive isn't that bad
not worth the legal hassle

That's not the Steve Jobs I read about. Like him or not, he was a man of principle.
Reading your internships page (http://www.lokku.com/jobs/intern.html):

> Will you pay for my travel to London?
No.
> Can you help me get a work permit?
No. You need to be able to work in the UK.

The internship sounds really interesting, but maybe if you want more people applying from all over Europe, you should be a little more open about your relocation policy? (I understand that the cost of travel might not be prohibitively expensive intra-europe, but it kind of reads as "Can I apply if I'm not in London? No.")
NodeICO - classy npm badges for Node.js projects
Several years ago I treated Lokku as the coolest place to work in London according to my criterias. It was the only one map-obsessed, small, open-source friendly, no-bullshit startup in a nice location. Unfortunately I was a Java guy and they were looking for Perl people.

I believe you cannot underestimate the impact it makes on London geo scene. Without Lokku, London will be a rather dull place from geospatial perspective.

If I were in the Uni now (I graduated in Hungary), I would definitely apply.
Those bloated GUI libraries are part of the problem, in my opinion.

HTML is a great document definition language in the right hands but like JavaScript, its poor use can create a nightmare. You can fix this by learning to write clear and simple semantic HTML but if you have to work on legacy code that doesn't really help.
Because Amazon doesn't want to confirm it I'm pretty sure they don't use ECC.
To be honest, he sounds just like the other parents trying to justify why their children should spend years learning Latin. (This was a snooty private school, not a parochial school.)
I had a server shut down after it started scanning other servers from other hosters for vulnerabilities. Taking it offline immediately is what I would expect any sane hoster to do.

Not being available for resolution is a different thing.
This correlates to this comment [0] from the recent "Probably not for hackers" post [1] [2].

> [...] I would pay for a site that was only hard-core tech articles.

Well here's the chance.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6043443
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6043318
[2] http://essays.kuntz.co/you-re-probably-not-for-hackers/
Yes, the NSA could still get your metadata, content from your ISP with an NSL, but this would eliminate the possibility of getting your email directly from the g00g
The Hyperweb
Horse, drawn with just css... no, seriously.
No need to be sorry
Dunno, ask the FBI.
If you're from the EU you don't need a work permit.
This is probably just a prototype for the model that will detect terrorism in Wi-Fi networks.
> Objective-C doesn't use methods like Java/C++/C#, it uses messages like Smalltalk. This effectively means it always performs late binding and invoking a message is REALLY slow in Objective-C.

Well, "always" is a little wrong. The first time a message is passed and the bound method is called by the runtime is significantly slower (~4x slower than a virtual method call in C++). But then this message/method pair gets cached and for every subsequent call the cache is used.

Then there's some real neat trickery that is performed in objc_msgSend() ... after the method to "call" has been found the code directly jumps into that method without creating a new stack frame. (All needed arguments have been passed to objc_msgSend() and are already on the stack.) objc_msgSend() in essence is a trampoline.

So when sending a message to an object multiple times you only pay for the cache lookup - which is pretty fast by itself and a cached call is faster than a C++ virtual method call.

Performance Numbers: http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/performance-comparisons-of-com...

More about objc_msgSend(): http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-11-16-lets-buil...

Now I don't know enough about Java but I guess it isn't much more faster than that. So calling Obj-C slow may be a little too bold.
Fortunately, JS is not the only tool we have. JS is a relatively fine compile target, and with asm.js, a pretty fast one.

So pick your favorite among CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Dart, GorillaScript, Elm, ClojureScript, etc, or try compiling your favorite language using LLVM.

Let a compiler take care of all the numerous rough edges raw JS has.
> Morals is basically "values + priorites". This is like saying "these people don't do X, instead we see physical laws acting on matter and energy".

Just because morality involves values and priorities doesn't mean that every disagreement about values and priorities is a moral issue.
Yes, I did see your "data". Comparing the average income of all men to the average income of all women does not establish a pay gap. The average of all women works fewer hours than the average of all men, work less demanding jobs, and has less experience. Comparisons of men and women with the same amount of experience, working the same hours, in the same job show there is no difference in pay.

I have no idea why you have such a hard time with the FBI rape stats, googling "forced envolpment" would get you what you want: http://www.good.is/posts/the-fbi-expands-its-definition-of-r...
I had a very similar experience in undergrad. I skipped all sorts of classes and got great grades. I didn't care. I put off studying weeks of material until days before the exam. I'd even have a beer or 2 before exams. It wasn't stimulating. For me, part of that was because I was doing the wrong thing the whole time. I was studying biochem when I should have been learning to code. When I went back for my masters in CS, I actually tried and cared. I think I missed 3 classes the whole time and only because I was too sick to go. Passion for becoming the best programmer I could be drove me to try harder and harder. While I know that school doesn't teach you everything you need to know about software development, I refused to let anything that I could learn slip by.
It is not clear that's what it is being said.
not really hn front page material yet...

quizlet is brilliant in this space
Richard Stallman: Snowden leak a chance for privacy [video]
I spoke at SpainJS. It was a small conference, and unsurprisingly, most of the audience were from Spain.

I obviously was not reaching "everyone," but so what? I reached 300 people, and the politics of why a conference was put together to appeal to Spaniards (is that a word?) is of no consequence to me.

If I were a politician I'd attend Church pancake breakfasts and lunch with the Greek Business Chamber. Humans clump and cluster for all sorts of reasons. I support some, am indifferent to others, and frown at a few more.

But in the end, if the people in attendance are people I want to reach, I'll go. If their politics don't appeal to me, I'll avoid discussing the subject.

JM2C, I can't tell anyone else what to do.
They should put a public list of names and whom they voted for... Crystal clear and no doubts...
In every situation that you allow your engineers to develop for the technology instead of for their customers, this is going to occur.

Does the customer care that the latest MVVM JS tool is being used? Not unless your customers are only other developers. The customer cares about getting whatever widget you are selling them quickly and with as little thought as possible on their side to consume it.
I wondered the same thing. With secret courts and secret hearings, who knows who is fighting or not for our rights?
How to avoid MySQL replication errors
>He did compare it to a "control article". A few in fact.

Were any of those he compared to ones where he was deliberately being dumb and wrong about something?

>And his article in question wasn't "dumb" - it was just satire which a bunch of kids misinterpreted as being "dumb".

Shrug. Poe's law. Or, as 4chan puts it, "ironic shitposting is still shitposting".
The more you look, the more you will find.
Plato's Cave is amazing eye opener to everything we do daily.
Number 1 reason to uninstall applications on Play Store, executable size, Google IO 2013.

Plus Mono does not save you from writing multiple UI code anyway.
The original article seemed to have a mistake there, it now says dynamic binding. This is indeed much slower than regular invocation as the first article you linked to states.
Anonymous Browser Fingerprinting in Practice
Unity Technologies Blog » New Collaboration with Engine Room Games
And perfect for manipulation and black-mailing.
OAuth 2.0 - The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Too bad this does not mention two-factor authentication. I've grown so accustomed to it that I feel naked without it.
If the record is public, then it actually provides a lot less leverage for blackmail than a history of secret use of LSD.
That canary thing is an interesting trick, previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702247. (Four years ago!)
I will combat your anecdotal evidence with some of my own - I've put Linux Mint XFCE on some friends and my girlfriend's laptops, and they tell me constantly how much faster and nicer it is.
IMHO, it's a bit irresponsible, to call something XXX-proof, when we don't even known the full range of capabilities of XXX.
To say it in the words of @fat: hi haters https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A_G3NghCIAEAGbM.jpg:large
The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all'
Doesn't being an EU citizen give you free right of work? (This is spoken as someone who's non-EU and is going to have all kinds of fun sorting out visas once I finish studying in the UK).
Today is "National Dork Day"
Out of your list only Opel really qualifies as an "autmotive entrepreneur". It may have been left off the list because it has been owned by General Motors since the 20's.

Companies like Peugeot, Renault, and Fiat produce a very wide array of non-automotive products. MAN Group was founded in the 1700s and while "truck building activities" commenced in 1903 it was hardly the lion's share of their business.
Show HN: please.js - a PostMessage based communication library
I think it's the EEA - which is the EU plus Iceland, Norway and Lichtenstein:

http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/eucitizens/
I think that says more about you than them.
It's as though you're being bullied by two people, and when you try to deal with one of them, you're accused of being unfair because you can't deal with both!

It sounds very much as though it was the bullies who decided what was "fair" in this instance.
Why would you need a two-factor authentication if the server is yours ? You can always reset everything, you are your own Google.
What if Trayvon Martin was wearing Google Glasses?
I can see two sides to this.

On one hand, the CEO of Qwest was convicted of insider trading, and he claims it was retaliation by the NSA because Qwest would not participate in warrantless wiretapping.

On the other hand, the federal government had a perfect excuse to prosecute Steve Jobs in 2006 with the options backdating scandal, but chose not to. Those would not have been baseless charges--Apple really did backdate those options. The government just concluded that Jobs was not personally culpable.
The HubSpot Spider Web - Ten Alums Building / Leading Companies
The language shouldn't matter for a good developer. From their web page: "Many of our past interns have been new to Perl."
Looks neat. Kinda reminds me of Rando.
brilliant idea and perfect execution. Consider putting "Made by Yarrly" text under Yars( I would like to call pictures as Yars) and there could be a paid option to remove it.
I did not know that, thanks.
Please please don't use greylisting. It's not cool. There are too many broken mail servers around and you'll loose emails. I was unfortunate enough that I had to use mail server with greylisting enabled. As a result I regularly lost booking confirmations.

Spammers know greylisting. Workaround is cheap for them. That's why you are receiving some spams twice.
The takeaway I got from this:

DOM reflows are the major unsolvable source of perceived slowness.

Cool.

So, in an app where you avoid reflows, is mobile web fast? Why or why not? How avoidable are reflows?

Can anyone point me to any articles that talk about this specifically, or benchmarks that make this concrete? (I vaguely recall benchmarks that covered reflow, but it's a vague memory).
Patch management and zero-day protection are pretty important, but unfortunately not covered in this. It is also hard to maintain over the long term.

This is why I stopped hosting my own email.
If it's unconstitutional, we don't need new laws to fix it. The existing laws (the constitution) need to be enforced. It's a failure of the judiciary, not the legislative branch.
"Late binding" is a generalized term for associating a symbol with a value/code at run time, instead of compile/link time. (even if the term is not literally used in the obj-C docs)
My local Barnes and Noble has this book next to Felleisen et al's "Realm of Racket". These will be hours and cups of coffee well spent!

http://realmofracket.com/
You are 100% wrong. C allows you to shoot yourself in the foot much more easily and much worse than JavaScript. JS is a far more "safe" language to code in.

No pointers, no memory allocation. Yeah JS isn't typed but the problems that you get into with that are nothing by comparison.

And again, I'm not saying JS doesn't have problems, it does. But the problems this presentation is complaining about are not results of flaws in JS they are results of incompetent developers.

So he's complaining about the wrong thing by complaining about JS.

It should be titled "I wish incompetent people wouldn't try to do things." And we'd all agree but then consultants like him would be out of a job.
Really nice execution.

Are you able to give a bit more detail on your backend stack and the reasons for your choice or technologies?

Will this stay Android only or are you planning on porting it?
I don't think any large company has any choice in the matter. And this article targeting Microsoft. Apple is doing the same exact thing, who cares if they signed on afterwards? All the major tech companies are, and no one is going to stop using any of them. Get real.
That would be me! I'm hacking an off-the-shelf quadcopter to be flown using an arduino and some python scripts.
Maybe this Objective-C optimization isn't implemented in iOS:
http://www.shannah.ca/blog/?p=226
We downloaded 240,000 posts from Reddit and here is what we did with it.
"They can also reallocate elements into the stack frame rather than heap when they detect specific allocation usage."

I've always been interested in whether this is done in various managed languages. Since I never know the answer, one pattern I've taken to is to allocate memory in static const/final fields that I would normally put on the stack in C, instead of doing a heap allocation to a variable whose scope is completely within one function. You have to watch out for some gotchas like recursing into the same function, but overall it's a pretty painless and clear pattern for me. Multiple functions can all share the same static memory too.

Not that I'm religious about this design pattern, but it's something I try to do in performance-critical code.
As mentioned in the article Fuse is a good tool for building something like this but it is only supported on Unix/Linux and OSX. There is however a Windows project that does something very similar called Dokan (http://dokan-dev.net/).

I recently discoverd a python libarary called pyfilesystem (https://code.google.com/p/pyfilesystem/) that provides a unified API for both Fuse and Doken so that you can write the fs once and run it everywhere.

What's also quite nice is that you actually create your fs as a python API first and then mount it. This results in you creating a good API that could be used inside a phone/tablet/web app, if you stick with python...

The problem the OP is trying to solve is very similar to one I was experimenting with a few weeks ago but abandoned in order to concentrate on my main project that is beginning to really take off.

If anyone is interested in starting a OS project around this sort of idea I would love to get involved.