skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dart and NaCL design are not happening behind closed doors, period. NaCL was first published as a research paper. All development since it was published has happened in the open. None of the popular languages today have been the designed the way you suggest. K&R designed C behind closed doors, ANSI C came later. Python, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, the list goes on and on, all designed and prototyped first prior to any kind of standardization. Committee driven languages like C++ have shown to bloated monstrosities in terms of complexity. Creating a focus group and committee to design a language is the surest way to lead to failure or to compete with Duke Nukem Forever for delayed completion.

I have a nagging suspicion that many of these arguments are based around aesthetics and language chauvinism. The people who are super critical of Dart or NaCL are also the people who intersect with people with absolutely love Javascript, and dislike class-based OO and other paradigms. There is no such thing as a unified web community. Everyone has difference preferences and opinions on the way to write web apps. The forest through the trees is that consumers and developers today increasingly don't care and are seeking out native, battery efficient, mobile applications. It's an incredible threat to the Web, and all of this bickering over people's attempts to find more performant ways of shipping apps within the Web model, but not use JS are IMHO, missing the point. While Mozilla and others think the fight is against Dart and NaCL, Android Java and Objective-C are crushing on mobile. I have grave doubts that FirefoxOS + asm.js can rectify any of the core issues. The desktop is going bye bye.

Anyway, Dart was announced in 2011. It still isn't finished and it has been changed radically since then based on community feedback from the needs of developers.

Everyone ships binary blobs to the Web today. Gmail is a binary blob. It's a red herring.

I love the Web with all my heart. I don't think JS is the Web. The Web is HTTP. It is URL. It is transparent content. RESTy semantics. It is indexable, federatable. You can ship JS based apps that I don't think quality as very Webby.

My big fear is, 5-10 years from now, everyone is publishing "sites" that are app store distributed, and all information is siloed behind private repositories. Is asm.js going to stop that? Is it going to make mobile web apps as battery efficient, memory efficient, or performance efficient, with less jank, than iOS? I don't think Dart will either, but we need to figure out a solution.
Snowden: UK GCHQ Paid $150MM by NSA
Please don't worry about whether or not you are going to go to college, or be an entrepreneur; don't waste time trying to optimize your technology chops; you are 16 and you have acres and acres of time. Be 16 -- do dumb stuff, have fun, learn how people work.

What I'd tell myself at 16: Self, when, in 1993 you get to 22, take that job in California.
My feedback to your perspective is that I wasn't convinced to use Dart. In particular, when you said this:

The important bit for the discussion at hand is that Dart is not even _anything_ as a service. It's a set of installed, open source compilers and libraries. They will continue to work in the (unlikely, IMO) event that Google drops support.

... I recognised that you'd missed the original article's point, which is that enterprise customers won't adopt it. If Google wants Dart to be of interest to more than tech startups or hobbyists, then ongoing support, patching, commitment from the vendor is ab-so-lute-ly necessary. This is why Rails succeeded, for example. And poor old godforsaken Java.

It's just the reality of technology component selection for IT in the mundane non-tech-sector.

As for your tone in here:

expectation that Google will drop Dart is based on what exactly? A few SaaS product cancelations? The "never rely on Google" meme is getting so old

that's just plain bitchy, sorry - and not at all convincing. If your intention was to make Google insiders look like disconnected academics in an ivory tower, you succeeded; if your intention was to make Dart look like an attractive prospect for developers to choose to invest their time in learning and developing with, I suggest you should rethink your pitch.
Curious if you could link to the latter comment a year ago as well?
'pay us in advance for developing a product
that hasn't been market tested or validated,'

I'd say that the fundraiser, if it succeeds, is pretty good market validation.
and what planet do you live in? everybody I know has a Google account only because of either Gmail or Youtube.
Enter Free Giveaways from Facebook Pages
Stephen King’s Family Business
Should they succeed, let us hope that the mobile version of the webmail client will function better than the mobile version of your static site. Pretty unusable in MobileSafari.
This is not really relevant to your comment, but just wanted to let you know that Dart together with Julia is very close to my ideal of a general purpose language. Ceylon looks very promising too, but it's not ready yet.

Probably the only thing I don't like is optional typing...
I'm not conflating anything. You can't use 'Dart is open source' as a defense if people are complaining about walled gardens; it's entirely possible to have a walled garden around an open-source product.
A nice introduction to finite state machine
Be careful of those comparisons. I expect a port of Hotspot to ARM would beat the snot out of Dalvik on any synthetic benchmark. It would also use up your battery doing it.

Dalvik was designed for small battery powered devices from the beginning. In early versions of Android the advantage it held over Java VMs is that Dalvik bytecode is (claimed to be) half as big and twice as fast to interpret compared to Java bytecode.

A useful comparison would have to, at least, take into account battery efficiency, if not space efficiency, how much you can get away without using native code, etc.

Then there are issues of how the VM is used. The CLR in Windows Phone is, AFAIK, not used for a middleware layer the way it is in Android. That is, a lot of the Android APIs are implemented in Java and run in a Dalvik VM instance.
Not sure if it mentions it in the Wired article (and not condoning it), but he was using an awful lot of high end tech - night vision, helicopter etc.
i wouldn't call it a proper defense, rather a work around. besides CSRF tokens there are lots of secret strings, and it's not website's problem to avoid wiretapping
I've been mulling over the most common argument predictably
wheeled out by the patent aggressors and their supporters:

"Theft! We don't want them to steal our stuff!!"

Never mind that even if one allows that the whole concept of patents
is a legitimate, and an ethical legal framework, patent infringement
is never theft.

Theft would involve actual trespass of someone's physical property,
that involves removing and/or otherwise exploiting said property without
the owner's permission -- in effect depriving them of it.

So for an obvious example, if Corp A. breaks into Corp B's engineering
offices, and literally steals their code and/or design documents.

That would be theft.

Of course, computer break in is not technically a physical trespass,
but the distinction still stands: an actual trespass must occur.

We already have time-tested criminal laws for this, and justly so.
Patents are completely redundant for this case.

But if you think about, there is actual, honest to goodness
theft that goes on in patent cases... and the thief, it's
the aggressor! Albeit for a "limited time" (that's of course
subject to interpretation, in 20 years many things happen, to
someone who dies, that limitation is permanent), someone is given
the government-sanctioned go-ahead to literally deprive another
of their own discoveries and hard work.

Independently discovered, independently arrived at and hammered out.

No matter.
This comment is irrelevant and has high potential for derailing the discussion off-topic.

Mr. Baez here is a world class mathematician; surely he is more than familiar with formally undecidable propositions.

This post is about the future of mathematics, and what tools might become available. It also showcases the complexity of this discipline and how much material you have to be familiar with and have in the "RAM" of your brain before you have an eureka moment.

What hypothetical complementary tools do you think would meaningfully add to a mathematician's toolkit?
Can't see the original article due to paywall. But I get the gist from the comments.

The "teachers don't make enough", "we don't spend enough on education", etc. debate is on the wrong point. The education system and philosophy in the USA is broken at all levels. Citizens are acting rationally by not volunteering to spend more tax dollars on it.

Those that can afford it bypass it entirely by paying for private education, or if they don't have quite that much money, by moving to a community that is wealthier and has better public education.

Economic forces combined with the digital age's technology will inevitably lead to the creative destruction of the education industry, just as other industries formed under Industrial Age economics have been deconstructed.

Unfortunately this is being fought to the death by the established education community and its monopolistic, union-based government and quasi-governmental constituents.

Try telling a public school teacher any of this, and you'll get not a reasoned response, but scorn, anger, and a slamming door in your face.

It's going to be brutal for them when it comes.
Window Maker Live: a back-to-basics Debian Linux distro
Of course the whole concept of the diagnosis makes no sense; that one person has a disease that makes them take more time to solve problems, while another person is healthy but supposedly stupider. The test should simply be untimed. (Which I thought it was, with the switch to computer-based real-time adaptive tests?)
Are you allowed to you say what big projects?
Architects: Chickens or Pigs in an Agile Development Process?
And here's the GP's other example:

(putStrLn{9} . show{8} . sum{7} . map{5} read{6} . filter{4} (not{3} . null{2}) . split '+'{1}) "28+32+++32++39"

and here's ak217's Python version:

expr{1} = '28+32+++32++39'
print{8} sum{7}(int(i){6} for i in expr.split('+'){2} if{5} i is not ''{4})

Actually, I prefer your Factor example even more than the Haskell (even though I've never heard of the language) because the order of operations is more natural to me, but really I don't think the proposition "Haskell's syntax [is] a bad example in language syntax" has been demonstrated. Comprehensions in Python and in Haskell are an impediment to composability as I mentioned in another post on this story.
What a bizarre and nihilistic reaction.

People will look at the app for themselves, decide whether it's a good value proposition for them or not. Nobody needs your bitching and moaning; if you don't like it, don't pay anything.

You're just demoralizing people for the sake of it. I'm disgusted that yours is the top ranked comment.
I am puzzled by low-quality, hyperbolic, panicky articles like this. And I'm even more surprised by the reaction they cause on HN.

http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/retiring-chrome-frame.html seems like a pretty good reasoning w.r.t stopping updating Chrome Frame and lists alternatives. What's all this noise about? And what the hell does this have to do with Dart?
Children also aren't very good at driving. Really this couldn't be any less childish.
> The ability to sue for millions of dollars is the one "advantage"

That isn't necessarily true, as some states have caps on tort damages, and more corperations are lobying for similar caps/limits on civil restitution via state law: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/us/even-with-counsel-texas...
Just wanted to say that I like the color scheme. Where can I find the color definitions?
Something like that is actually a great idea. My thought was more along the lines of economics of same day delivery. It's incredibly expensive at the moment for a number of factors one of them being employee costs but also inefficiencies in volume and demand for the service. Self driving cars I figure solve some of these issues.
The Power of Snapchat
I think zanny meant "static" rather than "global".
> The Dart and Chrome teams firmly believe that the adoption of Dart will entirely depend on it's success as a compile-to-JS language.

Interesting. I've held off creating anything serious in Dart because I'm waiting for it to be built into Chrome directly. I know compiling to JS is important, but I feel like other browsers will add Dart support shortly after Chrome, and in the meantime I'd use the Dart2js as a stopgap.
Even assuming that it was possible to figure out how much someone "deserves"....

Don't forget that teachers don't get a bathroom break except before/after the day and lunch, and they are constantly "on" performing in front of a potentially hostile audience of people who are aren't paid to be there and forbidden from leaving, and who sometimes turn violent, they are salary-exempt not hourly (they have to grade papers and such at home), and they generally require a specialized undergrad or masters degree, and continuing education.
Direct link to the list: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8_USrDOQxfdX18xbHpGbzJtNzA/...
And to drop out of the metaphor, and explain why it's broken:

I thought one of the big points of open-source was that if something exists, and it does what I want it to, I don't actually have to contribute (pay) anything further than what I want to. I still will, if it benefits me or if I'm interested, though.

As it turns out, there's a number of freely available distros maintained by others who see personal benefit in maintaining said distros, and some of those do have well-defined security and bugfix support infrastructure and teams. Therefore, those fill my needs, therefore, there is no logical reason for me to expend more effort than is necessary.
>How do you discover new music?

Not him but personally, I still discover music the same way I have for the past 17 years. Music sites, conversation with fans of bands I like, magazines, bandcamp (myspace in the old days), spontaneous purchases of 2nd hand CDs in stores...

Personally, I find automatic recommendation services lacking both in recommendation quality and diversity of things to recommend from.
I appreciate your detail here and I think I agree with some of your points. What is the source of your PoV on Canvas, though? From my history of using it and the other end users I've interacted with who use Canvas, I just don't understand how someone could call it 'extremely well thought through' as an API.

Canvas literally prioritized narrow support for things like drop shadows over support for basic, established rendering essentials like blending operations, well-specified clipping/sampling semantics, control over scaling, and basic image data filtering/transformation. Many of the obvious features Canvas is missing have been in SVG for years now, and have been in applications like Photoshop and in most game-oriented rendering libraries for decades. This is fine in an early vendor-driven prototype but the fact remains that even now many of those things I described are still not possible with Canvas, and Apple has no excuse: They needed only look at things real software did in rendering.

Canvas also remains an incredibly slow API by specification, not just due to poor luck of aligning badly with the GPU: The bread and butter drawImage operation is itself specified in a way that makes it considerably more expensive to implement (for general cases) than it needs to be, and I can only blame this on Apple's PoV on rendering at the time infecting the design of the spec. There are other design decisions that unnecessarily cripple its use for image rendering and image processing; the need to render an image to a canvas and read it back just to get at pixel data is a big problem that is only now being addressed thanks to the valiant efforts of the WhatWG. Canvas's incredibly poor performance also undermines any attempt to claim that Apple might have left key features out 'to make it fast'. I will note that most browser vendors have gone to valiant efforts here to make Canvas fast, and they've done a good job - but it still performs terribly.

The Canvas API also has severe underspecification/poor specification problems when it comes to image quality concerns; its treatment of sampling/filtering (in particular when dealing with subrectangles) and its handling of color profiles/gamma are both hopelessly underspecified to the point that it is no longer possible to fix either of them without breaking applications that have accidentally relied on the arbitrary behavior of existing implementations.

HTML5 Canvas is unfit for: Realtime rendering scenarios, offline rendering scenarios, and 'real' image processing/editing scenarios, among others.
It's a non starter because it's generally poorly implemented and not linked it an increased budget.

Issue 1: A kids past performance and out of school issues dramaticly impact learning independent of the teacher. So teachers in schools in poor areas are often at a huge disadvantage under most of these systems.

Issue 2: Without an increased budget paying meaningfully more money to great teachers can significantly reduce the income for new and or average teachers.

Issue 3: It fails to attract talent because it does not increase the all important starting salary.

PS: Teacher direct compensation is a significant portion of US educational costs but bumping the minimum starting salary to say 50k is not nearly as expencive as you might think. Paying new teachers more, reducing seniority perks which reduces pension obligations and adding incentive based bonuses is IMO a far better use of funds than the administrative overhead that keeps increasing over time.
Why? You can just run the server on your own machine. That's how the git annex assistant works, for example - start a local webserver, then launch the browser pointing to it.
Ask HN: What laptop to buy?
What does everyone use as their primary development laptop?

I'm in the market looking for a new laptop that would be smaller than 15" and is geared towards development above anything else. Lightweight and fast is the key.

My IDE of choice right now is Visual Studio 2012 and I don't plan on doing any gaming on it. Anywhere <= $1000 is ideal with SSD/1920x1080 (at least). No DVD drive.

Any suggestions?
If Chrome gets 90% marketshare, even if they don't ship DartVM, and even if they only implement approved specs, there will be differences in implementation and bugs that drive developers to make sites that don't work on other browsers. We saw this with IE bugs when IE was dominant.

The only defense against this is to preserve competition. My continual criticism in these HN threads is that people's vision is too narrow, too focused on irrelevant battles, focusing energies in the wrong place.

These are two battles going on right now. WebKit derived vs Mozilla, and Web vs native Mobile. The latter is a serious threat and no one is really offering anything to attack the problem. And no, FirefoxOS and asm.js doesn't.

Simply put, consumers find it easier to find and buy content on native platforms, and developers find it easier to use tools on native platforms. The Web has a huge looming consumer and developer problem. A lot of people who sit around in VIM/Sublime all day hacking MVC or jQuery websites don't seem to realize the looming problems.

Web Development needs to be made radically more productive. Web Performance needs to be radically upped. The current tap dancing around ES6 improvements or ION/ODINEngine are nice, but simply too underwhelming.

Web Components are a step in the right direction. But honestly, if I wasn't working for Google right now, I wouldn't be writing a web app these days, I've be writing an iOS or Android app.

Both Google and Mozilla have huge problems to solve IMHO, and this bickering over Dart, NaCL, Asm.js, et al is a big distraction. These organizations need to work together to make the web delightful on mobile and for developers as the whole industry transitions.
Are you just boring? It's obviously not something that should be done everyday but that doesn't detract from how awesome it is. Were you never young? Did you not try to go for glory on something that had risk?
I am perfectly fine on a non-retina. There is a difference for sure. When I go to my iPad 4 I surely appreciate the retina quality. For me it was more important the expandability than the screen.
Alienware laptops were also rebranded Clevos until they got bought by Dell. Now they're rebranded Dells. Twice the weight, twice the price, big flashy alien skull, and that's about it. Build quality is perfectly fine for Sagers, and if the "defective keyboards" bother you, you can just swap with a better one. Not to mention the keyboard on an AW I used a while back so uneven it felt like rubbing a camel's back.
I'm worried less about the malice of a dozen psychopaths than the hungry and unwashed billions, the consumerist millions, and the power-hungry tens of thousands.

Any system of government which must listen to its citizens is uniquely unsuited to becoming a spacefaring nation.
Clever idea, someone should turn this trick into a library.
I have thought about that! I just can't find a good "bang for the buck". They are either really small in size and cheap or really expensive but larger in size. I dont see a middle road.
"Compare Canvas with WebGL, if you like: WebGL was developed in the open, based on an established, proven API that had been used to solve problems for decades"

WebGL is, as you alluded to, based on OpenGL, which at one time came from the "single player" of SGI.

If traced back far enough, virtually every useful technology was at one point the product of a single person or single team trying to solve a problem. I can't think of a single situation in which a committee of companies came together and said "We must solve this problem", and then successfully jointly produced a technology which solves real world needs that wasn't based on something a single player had initially produced. Useful technology always has a range of being the product of one team, becoming some level of de facto standard, and then eventually (if the industry benefits from doing so) becoming a more committee-based standard.

The Mozilla folks, with all due respect, tend to suggest that any new technology they adopt must be created by large committees initially whenever they are getting on Google's case for things like Dart and PNaCL, while conveniently ignoring that nothing ever works that way, even the technology that they do decide to support.
I wonder why Netflix even needs to stream through a web-browser anymore. It's easy to install apps on all major mobile and desktop platforms.
> I'm tired of people abusing crowdfunding as some sort of money grab (Spike Lee's recent Kickstarter as an example) and because I'm involved in the industry, I have a vested interest in seeing crowdfunding, as an industry, prosper.

I'm curious, what does "abusing crowdfunding" mean, in precise terms? What is wrong with what Spike Lee's request for money? I understand crowdfunding to be simply a kind of transaction. A banker's job is to facilitate transactions between people, not to discriminate in favor of the ones he likes.
That's a very old feature wish. With <video/> it's possible to implement, but most people are still using the flash player, where, with the current NSAPI it is not very easy to implement it.
I don't know about "walk free". If I were Contra Piracy, I would simply go back to Hannibal Pictures' lawyers and get them to file the suit. Clearly as the actual copyright owners, they have standing to file. Thus Contra Piracy would become a subcontractor to Hannibal Pictures, and probably clear fewer bucks, but at least it wouldn't be a complete loss.
Ok how long till Murdoch will start using his papers to paint youtube as a den of vice and porn