skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that's for "normal" quantum computers. D-wave is a different kind of quantum computer.
Enterprise software is about long-term maintainability, compatibility, and comprehensive support for all included components. Pulling packages from npm and the like unfortunately will not satisfy those prerequisites.
These ports belong to one of the worst money-grabs in history. Look at the reviews: Numerous bugs, no updates for recent iphone/ipads and worst of all, the controls just suck for everyone who played the real games or is serious about completing them. [obviously a problem of most touch ports].

I gladly keep a mint SFC with FF3 and Mario Kart packed away than spending a cent on pseudo reminiscent experiences.
Integer factorization is currently not known to be NP complete, and is expected to not be so. Therefore, even such a breakthrough as posited in the article would have no immediate bearing on the question of P vs NP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization#Difficult...
This is not going to happen as long as Nintendo is still making its own hardware. They are going to keep focusing on their own platform.

One could argue Nintendo should make games for the Xbox One / PlayStation 4 if these consoles outsell the Wii U as badly as it looks like they will. But they're not going to.

The reason Nintendo is flailing right now is that the 3DS released with poor battery life and too expensive. The Wii U released with no "must play" games even on the horizon, let alone available at launch. (Still only one side scrolling Mario game, no Zelda or 3D Mario even announced, and Mario Kart is a ways off.)

Marco is right that Nintendo did this to themselves, but both Marco and Gruber know nothing about Nintendo if they think there is any chance of them releasing any iOS games.
More grep vs rejit benchmarks
Remember that it is version 1.0 right now, and MS has a good (not perfect) track record of follow-thru.
While I normally dislike Adam Curtis's work, I totally agree with you about the ending on that article. That's certainly the sentiment I sense, as an Arab currently in the UK.
Nothing against your general point but...

even among English-as-a-first-language speakers...

kind of English accent used by some recent immigrants from India

Those two statements don't work together. Almost nobody in India speaks English as a first language.

Well, I'll refine that statement a bit. There are, in fact, families in India who speak a lot of English in day-to-day situations. This works both as a status symbol as well as a tremendous advantage in the professional world. But I'll bet these are not the people whose accents you'd have trouble understanding. Kids from such backgrounds usually grow up watching a lot of American/British TV/movies and are usually able to operate fluently in an international (not just American) English speaking environment.
Key phrase:

"But I was always thinking of making iOS games and making their own hardware as mutually exclusive."

For Nintendo, it is. As far as I recall, Nintendo never released one its games on another platform. And Satoru Iwata (Nintendo's CEO) explained it lately [1]. Relevant quote:

"By integrating hardware and software, we can be unique. And because we have hardware and software developers in the same building, they stimulate each other."

Have you ever bought a Nintendo system just for its Nintendo games? I know I did. Several times. The N64 for Mario Kart and Mario 64, the GameCube for Mario Sunshine, the Wii for Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart again...

Maybe Nintendo looks like an idealist in a corporate-driven business, but consumers are somewhat sensible to Nintendo's commitment and that's why they're still successful.

It can backfire someday. Currently, the Wii U is sold at a loss [2]. I don't know how it will sort iself out. A bit too early to tell.

Anyway, Nintendo games on iOS would be hugely successful, but it's neither in their DNA nor in their long-term business strategy, no matter what gaming platform you're talking about (because yes, iOS has become a gaming platform).

[1] http://www.gamespot.com/news/iwata-explains-why-nintendo-won...

[2] http://www.gamespot.com/news/nintendo-continues-to-sell-wii-...
One excellent tool for accent reduction used by linguists but often neglected in language education is IPA (international phonetic alphabet).

You can learn the portion of IPA relevant to the language you're working on, as well has how each symbol translates to mouth movements.

Then you can use the IPA transcriptions available in some dictionaries to not only hear how the word sounds when pronounced by a native speaker, but also know what they are doing mechanically to produce those sounds.

This is especially helpful, because it can train you to identify and produce the different phonemes that your brain isn't attuned to for in your native language (one classic example is japanese speakers' difficulty with r and l, which happens because different languages make different decisions about what constitutes a unique sound).
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Legality and reasonableness is seldom correlated
I disagree and believe there is more upside to this than downside. You certainly can't say that the fact that different browsers and devices handle favicons differently is a standards issue. If you were to try to standardize this then we'd end up with either a very large and complex standard (close to what we unofficially have now) or a lack of innovation. Innovation isn't the exact right word I'm searching for but what I'm getting at is that forcing vendors to use set sizes and naming conventions would detract from some of the small but important UI and even hardware differences in devices and browsers.

iOS had the retina display with mobile safari first, then came Microsoft's metro interface which brought tiles and going forward we're probably going to see many more devices and browsers that handle some aspects of web resources differently and for good reason. We can't expect the web standards committees to be able to account for all of these advances as fast as they come about and I'd argue that's exciting and good.

Furthermore I'd say web standards already do take care of this in the most elegant way I can think of. The <link> tag is totally standard and future proof when it comes to favicons. I don't see anything wrong with adding a link tag with standard attributes to support multiple devices here. The purpose of a favicon is to associate a small image with a website or URL in general. Not all sites need the apple-touch icon or windows tile but some do. What we're seeing here is an attempt to target specific browsers on specific devices for very specific cases. By and large the standard desktop browser favicon has never changed. When you take all that into consideration I think its actually quite reasonable for these different methods of specifying favicons to exist.

I'll grant you that adding all that in your markup is ugly and having to think about which devices you want to target is a pain especially once you've decided on it and then have to start thinking about which markup to use and in what order.

Still, this isn't a case where vendors are using proprietary markup to capture more of the market or doing anything "evil". It's more a case of using an existing standard to take advantage of a specific device capability. Standardizing the way web/markup languages are handled is good but trying to standardize favicons in this context seems like an awkward way of trying to standardize how a device and/or browser and/or OS handles its UI and is not good.

Edit: I can't think of a good way we can standardize this but I am curious if there's anyone out there that has a decent idea for how we can standardize how we specify favicons for the plethora of devices we have now and will continue to see going forward.
Creating a language to make a statement is probably a bad idea, but there are plenty of other valid reasons to create something new:

• You want to learn how languages work.

• You have a problem which is difficult to solve in other languages but easy in yours.

• You want to combine features that have never been combined before, to see if their interaction creates something of value.
Those of us who like to bookmark sites on our bookmarks toolbar without any text will find your suggestion very annoying.
The argument is that the pie is already unevenly distributed. In the future, it will be even more unevenly distributed, and the skewing of the distribution will outpace the growth of the pie.
An ambition of mine is a programming language where the program structure is decoupled from its visual/textual appearance (model-view separation). One nice result of this scheme is, for example, you could work on a program in English and another person could collaborate on the exact same source in French.

Although I suspect that if this did get written and translated around a lot, many non-English speakers would still pick the English surface syntax due to network effects...

(Edited for clarity)
How to Infer Topology
Well of course we can expect that a scripting language designed for manipulating text-document markup into pretending to be a full GUI application in a nonstandard browser-specific way will be an excellent language for general-purpose backend computing.
>Part of the problem there is that the law profession built walls up that technology is tearing down. The development industry has no walls.

Exactly law school was such a golden ticket because the lawyer's guild set it up that way. The ABA convinced the state governments that that they should be the gatekeepers of the legal profession. They manufactured scarcity that drove up prices.

New lawyers can still make a decent income, even now. The problem is that they need to make way more than a decent income to pay the inflated tuition rates charged by most law schools.
Historically, the web standards process was theorized to work like:

1) vendor introduces new feature, tagged with vendor name to not pollute the namespace (e.g. -webkit-foo, or msapplication-TileColor from the OP)

2) once feature becomes popular enough to warrant its permanence, vendors agree on some new standard name for the agreed-upon behavior

3) ???

4) everyone uses the new standard name

The problem with this idea is that step 3 is missing. Browsers can't drop their -webkit CSS support because old pages rely on it, and new pages still use -webkit to work on old browsers. The original name is effectively permanent so there's little incentive to even take step 2, because all that produces is two names for the same thing (e.g. you use an attribute with "apple" in the name to choose the Android icon).

In recognition of the failure of this process, Blink (and other browsers) is using a different approach, where new features are not namespaced; instead, they'll require users to individually opt-in to nonstandard features, under the idea that it's hard for an idea to become permanent if it requires each user to individually configure their browser:

http://www.chromium.org/blink#vendor-prefixes

I am a little skeptical that this will only result in going too far the other way -- new features will wither because you can't experiment with them enough to get enough mass behind them to standardize them -- but at least it's not retreading the known broken path.
Wouldn't they start moving important web sites off of SSL then? Surely they couldn't be the only ones able to exploit if they found it. Or at least, if they found it, others could theoretically as well.
Cormac McCarthy on Application Configuration
They already exist. But the only way to keep a site small is to not invite many people to it.
A quick look at wikipedia[1] shows that these trains often have regenerative braking which means you can have both the wheels and the maglev system stopping the train. So at the same speeds these should be able to brake faster than traditional trains.

I assume these have the potential of going significantly faster than normal trains making braking harder. In this test though they didn't reach even the peak speed of normal trains. Apparently the french TGV has the record for normal trains at 575km/h[2] (vs 500km/h in this test) even though normal operation is "only" 320km/h.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Power_and_energy_usage

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
The best article I've ever read that explained Nintendo's product strategy was written in 2005 by Daniel Cook of lostgarden.com (founder of Spry Fox, creators of Triple Town amongst other games) on the eve of the launch of the Wii, and discusses how Nintendo fundamentally needs a creative environment based around product innovation and new input types that it has control over:

http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation...
Actually, listening to the accent of young children is a good way to get the same exaggerated sounds.
It did not work for Skype[1]. This conversation has been about security through obscurity. You're describing their competitive advantage because competitors couldn't build external interfaces to the protocol; that's not security a security win, it's a business win, as you said.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security#Flaws_and_potent...
Wouldn't "return 410" (potentially) be better?
Can't imagine the NSA or any agency puts anything too important on the Web in the first place.
The topic of this discussion "if a peasant's life was so sweet why did they run to factories?". You proposed they were forced to do so at gun point. I presented a contradictory fact - peasants were forced to stay peasants at gun point. You go off topic. I concede, there is no way we could persuade each other so you win as you can downvote my posts.
That is what TypeScript is for.
>Must everything be quite so serious. all. the. time. ?

Yes. Yes it must. It's what makes HN unique and wonderful. There are thousands of other discussion boards that aren't as serious.
It is a very fancy knife.
Not bad, it's not completely clear from the article but checking wikipedia L0 should be a "production" maglev, similar to Shanghai's Transrapid (except Transrapid's maximum operating speed is 410km/h. It did reach 501km/h in early test runs but doesn't reach that on scheduled traffic).

It's good to see that tech finally get in production (Japan's maglev demonstrators first breached 500km/h in 1979).

FWIW, if all goes well the L0 should be used in the (planned) Chuo-Shinkansen line going straight from Tokyo to Osaka through Nagoya in 67mn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuo_Shinkansen (the fastest runs on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen currently take 2h25)
What if everyone worked remotely?
Cheers. I may integrate the changes in the cheatsheet one day if i ever get round to updating my old side projects. :)
But if you fail to technically execute, as Microsoft's competitors did except for Word Perfect, customers won't even get a chance to evaluate your product.

If you're late and your product is impossibly buggy, like Word Perfect, even your most loyal customers will defect.

I'm assuming people who watch gaming will be able to apply the above sort of analysis ... but that of course depends on just how awful these failing products were, something I don't know.
This article is so true, software dev job market will implode in long run.
> Then programmers who relied on such odd results wind up writing horrific code like your second example

What's horrific about that? Would it be better if we had:

#define to_bool(_X) !!(_X)
...
bool a = to_bool(someInt & 0x02);
The axe: Chop trees, skin branches, kill food, skin food, kill enemies, break open shells, etc., etc., etc.

If you were marooned on a desert island, it would be one of the first things you'd make (a spear likely being the other).

Props also to the aqueduct, storage tank, settling tank, and water pipes. Those are pretty important.

Props to all of the above used for waste removal.

And vaccines. Vaccines are pretty cool.

Not the wheel: We had to pretty much have flattened paths (flattened by walking) or flat areas (which we eventually moved into) before wheels became useful. (There was a great article in Discover years ago about why there were no wheeled insects (if wheels are so great, why don't bugs have 'em?) - not enough flat even surfaces.)

Not fire, because we didn't invent it, we mastered it. So we'd have to nominate the match or the crucible or the firebrick or something.
Save your Bandwidth- Start downloading files directly in your Dropbox
If that 400% performance improvement was achieved by sacrificing code readability, on a project that has deliberately chosen to prioritize readability over performance, then yes they should be mocked. Or at least told not to do it.
I thought it was a deliberate non sequitur.

It comes off as pretty funny that way, and helps make the point.

"He could shoot himself in the foot with a knife."
I declare 2013 as the year of Favicon Wars.
I don't get it. He was a head chef in Wales where the national languages are English and Welsh, and he was able to speak one of those two languages fluently. I don't know the full story, but it sounds like he was also being discriminatory and out to make a political / nationalist point by refusing to communicate whatsoever in English.

If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).
There are very few technologies that are as bad as working with JSP, even considering your Java experience.

Have you considered other options that run on top of Java?
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Leaking the intelligence budget was probably the most justified leak. Even if you want a geopolitically strong American government, the intelligence budget tells the public how much effort the USG puts into covert programs. So without it you can not have a meaningful debate about the size of the intelligence agencies. But on the other hand, I do not believe that other agencies can infer much from it, since everybody already knows that there is a quite big budget. So even in a real politics interpretation, the budget tells other intelligence agencies, how nice the chess board is, not what strategy is played.
That barrier is dropping. Years ago becoming a developer meant going back to school for another 4-year degree. Expensive, time-consuming, and necessary for most employers to take you seriously.

You could self-train, but having seen the insides of recruitment processes at most companies... that's a laughable thought. For all the wankery that comes out of our mouths about meritocracies, the vast majority of software companies are still extremely enamored with credentialing, especially from prestige schools.

But now we have hacker schools - hacker schools where there are actual employers with actual money who are willing to employ the results. I know two people who are going through it right now, and the interest in hiring them from local startups is much, much higher than I ever expected.

The level of sacrifice required is dropping, and it's dropping like a rock. We will see more and more conversions, and there will soon be a flood in supply.
When I write code, it's code. I don't read it like a human readable text. Because of that, I don't really care what it reads when I try to read it as a human readable text.

For example I don't even think about what it would mean in English if I write

while(true){ i++; if(i>100) break; }

I'm curious if native English speakers look at code as real English text sometimes? It should be funny, because when I translate my code to my native language(word-by-word) it's just meaningless and funny.
>Even if everyone were working in JavaScript, seems unlikely that you'd be able to be both an awesome client-side and server-side developer.

Why does that seem unlikely? Sure, they're largely non-overlapping skill sets, but plenty of people are very good at more than one thing.
It's telling that RSA is not practical to deploy at 256-bit security today.
5) wait another 7 years for IE to implement it, with their own "twist".

6) wait another 5 years for IE to properly implement it.
I wonder exactly what "it" is here.

Quantum mechanics with the "many worlds" interpretation explains lots of things: it explains all the same things as quantum mechanics with some other interpretation. But QM (many worlds) has all the same observable consequences as, say, QM (Copenhagen), so "many worlds" as opposed to Copenhagen doesn't explain anything[1].

But how does that mean that intelligent people shouldn't take the "many worlds" interpretation seriously?

Consider two "interpretations" of Newtonian mechanics. One says that the world mechanically obeys Newton's laws. Another says that the world is controlled by incorporeal angels who are very fond of Newton's laws and always freely choose to push the universe around in such a way that those laws are obeyed. These two interpretations have the same observable consequences (namely, a universe in which Newton's laws always hold), but that doesn't make it surprising if intelligent people take the "mechanical" version of it seriously.

Nor, actually, does it make it surprising if intelligent people take the "angels" version seriously. What (at least for me) makes that option hard to take seriously is its gratuitous complexity: it has the same observable consequences as the "mechanical" system but, at least in my view, is vastly more complicated -- if you wanted to describe such a universe completely you'd need to do all the same work as for the "mechanical" version and then go on to set down everything about the angels' nature, personalities, etc.

In much the same way, you might choose to prefer "many worlds" or Copenhagen or some other specific interpretation of QM on the grounds of simplicity. "Many worlds is simplest because it avoids notions of 'measurement' and 'collapse' that do no real work, and just says that everything obeys Schroedinger's equation all the time." Or: "Many worlds is horribly complex because it involves all those extra worlds we never observe."

So if you mean: "The many-worlds interpretation of QM explains nothing more than any other interpretation of QM does, and therefore it's surprising that intelligent people take the many-worlds interpretation seriously", I think that's wrong. But perhaps what you're surprised that people take seriously is some other thing like, e.g., some particular application of the anthropic principle that appeals to "many worlds"?

[1] Actually, that's maybe slightly debatable; it depends on fine details of what you understand by "explain". For instance: any theorem in pure mathematics is logically necessary[2] and therefore has no observable consequences that you couldn't derive without it -- but it still seems reasonable to say, e.g., that a proof that even-length palindromes have to be multiples of 11 "explains" why I've never seen a palindromic prime number with 4, 6, 8, ... digits. So the fact that QM (many worlds) has no extra observable consequences beyond "uninterpreted" QM might not be enough to guarantee that it doesn't explain anything.

[2] Given whatever axioms you start with.
I can confirm that there were a big dot com death and hangover the first years of the millennium. Specifically, for Sweden.

The rest of the Swedish economy was quite OK.

The takeaway lesson you should get kids, is that there is a boom/bust cycle for programmers/developers -- but it isn't necessarily in phase with the general economy. (Some corollaries about how to handle this were listed in the article.)
Always one of my favorite storied to share with people.
It always helps people open their mind and perspective on things.