skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
when I was younger, Flash was <the thing> in interactive web development and UI awesomeness. you couldn't get anywhere close with HTML and Javascript and Java applets were just about to die. 10 years ago we still had the Flash Festival in Paris, where I saw some of the coolest interaction concepts til now. those things weren't just websites, it was poetry! (and don't get me wrong here, I'm not stuck in the Flash age, but it really was poetry and really amazing UI)

that's about the time I started writing ActionScript and learning how to use (Macromedia) Flash to do some basic animations. I got as far as teaching myself the Flex Framework, almost had a paying customer for a Flex project, but it actually never went beyond the hobby phase. the Flash picture portfolio I wrote for myself is still out there and I love it. it's ActionScript 8.0 but I never had any compatibility issues with any browser or Flash version. I looks the same everywhere. and I bet the compiled swf file, which is still online, dates back to 2003 or something.
nowadays thefwa.com has been rebranded to "the Favourite Website Award" - it used to stand for "the Flash Website Award". that's where I discovered group94.com a Belgium-based advertising agency who were writing some crazy ActionScript back then. nowadays their website has gone HTML. it looks boring. and basic. it looks just like all the other agency portfolio websites out there. it used to be funny and clever and poetic. it used to be well... flashy. take a look at the Flash scene 10 years ago and take a look at how web interaction has evolved: nowadays you want something cool, you get it parallaxed... millions of websites all taking on the same design element. the Flash websites I saw were all different in many ways. the Flash world was a place of inspiration.

I don't really remember when I stopped reading thefwa.com (which I used to do on a daily basis). I didn't really notice when Flash got replaced almost everywhere by HTML(5). I just did now. and I feel sorry for it, because Flash used to be (and still is) a great tool and a great concept.

EDIT: I'm not talking here about the mediocre Flash world. there's plenty of bad Flash websites out there. I'm talking about the glamorous one. and in my opinion the glamorous Flash world from 5-10 years ago is still more artsy than the glamorous HTML5 world nowadays.
Basics of Three.js
I've written more than a few syntax highlighters (as well as semantic highlighters and entire IDEs based on incremental parsing and type checking). This is one of those features where eclipse is quite ahead of visual studio, but its quite a minor feature it makes sense that isn't a high priority.
Its my belief that most women, and men, throughout human history HAVE been entrepreneurs. What is a farmer, after all? Or a hunter? Or a gatherer?

After all, what do people naturally do? What do animals naturally do? Well, they don't sit and wait to be told what to do. No, they seek out opportunities.

The current economic arrangements, however productive they are, are the anomaly.

I don't think they are going away, but the work we do will become more more entrepreneurial as labor is automated. And as education evolves away from "sit still and listen to the lecture" towards something more compatible with how people actually thrive.
You didn't read your own citation.

"But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model?... As graduates... they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be... The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. 'Non-intellective' factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more... [Harvard] wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough."
Bridging the Analytics Gap in Sports
Or rather, you're being willfully obtuse.

Citation, please?
Interest in a community for sharing problems? (as opposed to ideas)
Inspired by my post from yesterday [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7326188
Harm doesn't have to be inevitable for something to be morally bad. E.g. drunk driving, unprotected sex, and so on.
Are you also looking to hire interns? I love Heyday, and I'd love to be able to work with you guys to make it better.

I'm mostly interested in HCI, UI/UX and Front-end Development.

Thanks!
This is one of the rare emails that got its own website. It is also one of the rare websites where changing the color on reload is okay.

http://bikeshed.org/
SEEKING WORK — Remote or Luxembourg

I am a freelance web developer & generalist. Happy to work with Ruby/Rails/JavaScript/Python. I would also enjoy pairing on projects if you are a freelancer yourself.

Get in touch for a quick chat: matthieutc.com
I have the same question. :)
You should ask Ben then! He's a really smart and accomplished guy and I'm sure would be very happy to share that with you.
Well, cui bono? Facebook, who wants to replace email with Facebook.
And this is why Dawkins was right about debating with young earth creationists
Game characters are better when they gossip and lie
Bitcoin Is Not Real Money
The SAS vs. R Debate
If the problem is that hereditary wealth leads to hereditary elections, and I tend to agree, then we have a sufficient condition for plutocracy.

Elections could work better, but not much better. Your 2000 member national legislature will still be mostly made up of professional politicians. A given politician will still be way closer to another politician (even from an opposing party), than the people. A bit like 2 NBA players are closer to each other than they are to their respective fans.

Referendums are not elections. Citizens will do better on laws than they do on people, if the laws affect them directly. And it's not only laws. Some things are way more important than laws: budget policies, whether to build a hospital there, destroy a school here… More generally, if you need >110 IQ to understand a law, then there is a problem with the law itself. Like computer code, laws should be readable.

Some roles do need individuals in charge. How to select them? By random trial of course. Also make sure they are double and triple checked before, during, and after their mandate. The Athenians had such mechanisms that we can emulate. Here is an example: if the sheriff, randomly selected for a year, is mean to people, someone he has been mean to may well be sheriff later. That's a rather weak control mechanism, but you get the idea.

-----

Anyway, my central point isn't about elections. My central point is that people who are used to rule wrote the constitution themselves. People of power wrote the rules of power. Such a conflict of interest is unacceptable and can only lead to a broken system. The constitution therefore needs a complete rewrite, which probably means gathering a constituent assembly.

But.

Who do you think should be in this assembly? Certainly not people of power, or we will have the conflict of interest all over again. I'm not against elections as a mechanism, but do you see a way to have elections which does not select people who are used to rule?
Films are sort of a natural monopoly. The winners will have huge budgets thus "better" films.

Instead, indies compete for a niche. Niche customers (at least, the ones you want) aren't bargain hunters, but people who pay for their idea of quality.
Next Launcher 3D Shell v3.0.7
Indeed. According to wikipedia (source was written in ukrainian, so can't checĸ), Putin said in 2008 that Russia would attempt to annex Crimea and East Ukraine if they were to join NATO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations#...
I'm quickly setting this up, send me an email if you'd like to test it cjbarber@stanford.edu
PHP to Node.js to PHP
so basically a lot of people may end up with a lot of worthless stock instead of a poor cash return on what they're owed?
I'm confused as to the point you are trying to make.

You cited an explicitly anti-semitic policy as a model of what investors should be doing, while implying that anyone who disagreed was somehow trying to keep women disadvantaged. Huh?

You then cite a study showing that drive and determination matter in addition to academics. No one disputes this. That's why a woman founder demonstrating a lack of determination (i.e., choosing to divide her focus) was a disappointment to the investor, who was stupidly honest for a moment before deciding to hide his real feelings.

Certain specific seemingly non-academic factors also promote life success. That doesn't mean that any random hobby does. An investor isn't an asshole simply because he doesn't think that pregnancy is on the list of non-academic factors that do promote investment success.
> > cons-cell is a terrible abstraction on modern hardware

> Could you expand on this?

Sure, that one is pretty easy. cons cells are effectively 2 pointers. Consequently, they are not guaranteed nor expected to be near one another in memory.

Now, that's not a big deal with respect to the first pointer. That contains the thing, so we always have to chase that down.

In a Lisp/Scheme cons-cell list, the second pointer needs to be referenced to get to the next cons cell. So, we have to chase a second pointer just to move to the next element.

Every time you chase a non-contiguous pointer like this, the processor may have to bring in a cache line and that's a big penalty.

Contrast this to say, an array/vector. To get to the next element you just add some small amount to the current index. It's likely already in the same cache line as the previous element.

Arrays/vectors have a big win over pointer-based lists in terms of locality of reference on a modern microprocessor.

There is a second problem with cons cells in that their abstraction in terms of the language also has problems:

"Programing Language: Why Lisp Do Not Have a Generic Copy-List Function"
http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_equal_copy_lis...
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/EQUAL.html
this is creepy, while stopping at a gas station I have noticed a camera scanning customers and their cars in a very robotic way - possibility being scanning faces and car plates.

Where does it end, when and how? Is it a felony to destroy devices that spy on me for which I didn't authorize the gathering of intelligence on me?

I am sorry but all this is really gets under my skin.
my 2c.
It is not as if Lithium is a abundant reserve that is available whenever you need.

Yes there are enough Lithium reserve even for the next 100s years even if EV were suddenly replacing all cars today. And it is much like oil, there are still HUGE amount of reserve.

But the problem is extraction. Or more precisely the cost of extraction. If some of these reserve cost 10x more to extract then no one will invest into extracting it. Example would be if US didn't perfected Fracking Natural Gas wouldn't be so much cheaper today.

Then there is the technology side of Battery. Telsa are NO expert in Battery Chemistry and Technology. They have currently zero expertise and experience with it. Compared to Panasonic or Other who have been perfecting the battery tech for decades.

The problem with today's battery isn't production capacity. Heck China could ramp up production of battery faster then you could even imagine and have a world of over supply issues within a year. The problem is with battery tech itself which requires innovation or even a leap forward.
You would have to have a starter with quite a lot of torque for this to work.

I have actually tried this before, in a 1972 J-4000 with a 258. The starter on that truck would make most other starters look like wind-up toys, but the truck would lurch, but not roll.
>Unless you have some magical way of forcing everyone to suddenly drop their prejudices, then there is a need for social activism.

Predicated on what? What's your proof that such prejudices exist, or that they're applied more so to women than men? Furthermore, what's your proof that discrimination is the form of social activism required to fix this unproved prejudice?

In any debate around this issue there seems to be a lot of working backwards from the evidence to whatever theory the commenter personally supports. People who want to believe that prejudice and sexism 'keep women down' cite the fact that men are predominant in tech. People who want to believe that men are more predisposed to enter tech than women cite the exact same evidence. This isn't how logic works. Unfortunately for the latter group, it's not possible to prove a negative (i.e. the absence of sexism), so the former group will actually have to present evidence showing that prejudice is the best explanation for the gender gap in tech.

>Who are these women being given more than a fair chance?

Ignoring the facile pretense that every tech event is somehow exclusive to men simply because more men choose to attend, I'd start off by saying that this event -- this event which is enforced as exclusively women-only -- is evidence of women being given gender-based advantages. It requires Orwellian levels of double-think to look at a female-only event and pretend such a thing isn't sexist, while at the same time decrying the sexism in tech from the mere unexplained fact that tech contains more men than women. But this event is too hot an issue for both sides for either party to concede that it's proof or disproof of a female advantage in tech.

Instead, I'd ask what you think constitutes fair, and what constitutes equality? It seems that the answer to this question is what really divides the two sides in this debate. I -- and I assume most who think events like this are destructive -- would answer that fairness and equality relate to negative freedom: the freedom from someone restraining you from pursuing your goals i.e. we would all be more equal if the only thing which stood between us and our goals were our own skill (or lack thereof). If you disagree with this goal, could explain why? And if you do not disagree with this goal, could you explain how you justify discriminatory events? (And if you could do so without sarcasm, that'd be fantastic, thanks.)
Pocketbook (https://getpocketbook.com) - Sydney, Australia

Hi all,

We're a 5 person startup here in Sydney, Australia. We are changing the way people manage their money.

We are funded and have a small 5 person team working from Surry Hills. We are growing fast but need some help - we need more developers. Our server stack is a typical java stack and we have strong focus on mobile - both iOS and Android. If you're a top-notch Java guy who wants more - I'ld love to get in touch with you.

Send me a quick note at alvin@getpocketbook.com and I'll be in touch.

- Alvin (Founder)
Watch out Kinect, AllSee does gesture control without a camera [good vid]
It is read once and written once, and the value that was read is the value of the expression.

Note that this "elaborated" version,

while(*src) {
char c = *src;
src++;
*dst = c;
dst++;
}

if the pointers were volatile, would actually read the source value twice.
50 essential freebies for web designers, March 2014
New projects are being released all the time that make us excited, curious, inspired and sometimes a little bit jealous. Today we continue our monthly series of the very best free resources for web designers with a collection that includes cool scripts, awesome fonts, great ideas, and must-see experiments.
This is how myths get started. He said it and then I 'passed it on', because if it came from him so I assumed it to be true, 'cause he's a pretty swell guy, rinse and repeat.
You're the one wasting time with ridiculous semantic arguments, but this time I don't even know what semantic argument you're trying to make. Women absolutely do regularly and customarily (two words which are synonymous) get pregnant and raise children. I never said anything about women making bad investments, and I have no idea where you're getting that idea.

I am speaking very clearly. Pregnancies are common and normal, plain and simple. Use whatever word you like. Regular, normal, usual, routine, etc.
IE9 is probably going to stick around for quite a while, it's the last version that Vista users have access to. IE8 should start dropping off at a faster rate after April, but will still be with us due to home owners who don't wish to upgrade past XP. What will be interesting to see is whether home users gravitate towards new PCs or tablets.
For me "easy to use video on the Internet" always was a direct link to a file that I can download just like any file, and play in my media player of choice just like any other video file. Flash never worked so well; it only ever caused grief for its crashes, slowness, security problems, nonportability, compatibility issues, etc. So far HTML5 hasn't worked much better.

I don't see how flash moved the web forward, it certainly didn't do so for me as a user. Maybe it did for the guys upstream who would rather have control over all my access to their data, instead of letting me just download it and do what I want with it.
I didn't down vote anything, so I'm unsure what you're referring to there.

I haven't touched Android development for a few months so I might be out of date. In particular I very much disliked their scroll view and list view implementations. I found Android to be a mess in general, API wise. Things seemed much more ad-hoc and less thought out than on iOS. And I have some very specific disagreements with their API design choices (or lack of them). As I mentioned in my original post, Android seems to lack the built-in high-level rendering, audio, typography, language and other frameworks of iOS.

I've never found the screen density stuff to be an issue on iOS — I always design and render my UI elements directly as vector graphics (PDF). This is almost impossible to do efficiently on Android (no native PDF rendering API).

I really have no idea what you're talking about when you mention my "fear." I am more than happy to develop on any platform. I just find Android much worse than iOS at the moment. If it gets better I'll happily switch.
So it is.

I couldn't find a specific law from Australia, but many lending institutions offer a 6 month deferral of payments for parental leave. I would also assume that if the second parent plans to return to work, then the second income would be included to calculate serviceability.
PouchDB 2.0.0 is out
I haven't had any form of Flash installed for a long time. For sites that show me a message saying Flash is "required" to view something, it's amazing how often that "requirement" instantly evaporates when User Agent is switched to spoof an iPad. We can see that Flash is not only correlated with bad taste, but lying too! ;)
You mean the problem doesn't exist for YOU !

If everybody thinks like you, than an iPhone was never invented ;-)
Not as good as for example for C#, but not as bad as for example Ruby.

I have a plugin for Sublime that complains when something is broken, or a dependency is missing. The typesystem is so strong that usually when it compiles, it works.

So my process for refactoring is basically changing typesystems, and having the compiler check my changes until it works again.

Note that this thinks of Ruby as bad only in IDE aspect. Refactoring Ruby is actually quite enjoyable as Ruby is so friendly to unit testing. You just move your code and run your tests again.
> "Consent of the governed" refers to consent of the polity (by some form of majoritarian process), not to individual consent.

That's precisely my point. It's a linguistic trick to make it sound like an exchange is justified despite there not actually being consent. The analogy would be Apple forcefully taking x hundred dollars from you, giving you an iPhone, then saying the exchange is justified because 50.1% of the smartphone market consensually buys iPhones. (I made up that number, obviously.)
That reminds me of these quotes from the SWF format spec (from v9, but still there probably in the latest version):

"Simplicity - The format is simple so that Flash Player is small and easily ported. Also, Flash Player depends upon a limited set of operating system features only."

"Scalability - The files work well on limited hardware, and can take advantage of better hardware when it is available."

Looking at the rest of the format spec, you would get the same impression, that a fully functional player could be written much better than Adobe's. Almost makes you wonder, did Adobe kill Flash?
What is so much better between Squirrel and Javascript? To my eye, they look pretty much the same.

And Javascript has an enormous ecosystem. While Squirrel has a very small niche of the not terribly large Lua ecosystem.

This isn't to knock Squirrel as a language, but I view this in the same light and Python vs. Ruby. The languages don't have enough better/different from one another for me to tell someone to switch if they already know one or the other.
I don't actually think women are unsuited for CS, but I must say that I don't find the argument that 'in the past more women were in CS' very compelling, because it makes the pretense that all variables have remained constant over the past 40 years.

The fact is that CS -- or what people on HN call CS -- has changed massively in 40 years. For instance, startups barely even existed 40 years ago, and they certainly weren't as hyped as they are now. Furthermore, gender roles have changed in the past 40 years, as has female college admission.

There's something ironically conservative in democrat-styled liberals' [0] harking back to the CS of yesteryear where gender equality was the norm. Societies change, as do fields of work. If I had to take a pundit's guess at the reason, I'd probably say that we have similar raw numbers of women in the field now as then, but more men have flocked to the field as it's proved itself as an excellent means of generating wealth, thus upsetting the ratio.

In all honesty, if I were to guess at the reason there aren't many women in CS, I'd say it's because women don't tend to care as much as men do about generating wealth. Warren Farrell's 'Why Men Earn More' came to similar conclusions: that men are more disposed to taking nastier, more stressful jobs if the pay will be higher. If this is indeed the case, then it would seem that the easiest way to attract women to tech would be to get everyone -- irrespective of gender -- involved in CS at a young age, and allow them to see how fun it can be. If women genuinely do choose to work in careers that they find fulfilling, then this would achieve the goal of increasing the numbers of women in tech without having to discriminate in any way, simply by getting more women to self-select into tech.

[0] I must say, from the point of view of a UK liberal, there doesn't seem to be much liberalism in the US definition of the term. It seems closer to socialism from where I'm standing, with its heaps of top-down reforms and regulations. Yes, this is irrelevant, and no I'm not willing to defend this statement, since -- as a UK citizen -- I have no dog in this race.