skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Platform independence isn't really a big deal. Apple managed this just fine with fat binaries, and you could have an analogous system on Android without problems and a build chain that automatically cross-compiled (easy in golang). Developers wouldn't even have to notice. The size of binaries is often a small part of the total size of the app - resources tend to take up much more room.

The real problem would be porting all the current APIs. If Google actually decided to do this though it would be a good opportunity to clean up the current APIs and provide a new version free from legacy cruft. So it is doable, but a fair amount of work to provide UI bindings etc.

The obstacles are more political and monetary than technical.
Woah, typing code at speed is incredibly difficult. I don't know if it picks languages randomly but it gave me Lisp just now, and... ack!

Unrelated, TypeRacer is amazing. We had a bunch of contests at my last job and they ended up making a trophy because I was the King of Speed. It was pretty fun. So, thank you!
Either I am not understanding something, or perhaps you are not clear about the system side of Android.

AFAIK, ART doesn't "use" Dalvik. It is an ahead-of-time-compiling run-time for Dalvik. IOW, ART wouldn't exist without Dalvik.
This is http://famo.us 's approach. A JS framework built on the idea of positioning everything only using CSS 3D transforms.
And Go was started in 2007! http://golang.org/doc/faq#history

It's got nothing to do with open source. Instead it reflects the different approaches taken by Apple and Google.

Apple designs something new, tries hard to get it right the first time, and commits to it completely. Swift is the way to write for Apple's platforms, period. It's appropriate for a "social media application, all the way up to a high-performance 3D game." There's no doubt that Swift is meant to succeed Objective-C.

Google experiments more, sees what sticks. Go, Dart, Dalvik, v8, NaCl... You sure have lots of choices, but the relationships between these technologies is unclear, and has the character of uncoordinated teams working in isolation.
So what does Airbnb do when a property owner demands Airbnb delist his property from its site? Clearly an owner has more right than his tenant to determine where his property is rented, especially if their lease agreement prohibits short term rentals.

If Airbnb received a legal notice from a property owner demanding it delist his property, it seems like they would have to comply. Otherwise they might face a pretty simple case of negligence for listing an owner's property for rent without his approval. The only evidence the owner needs to supply is a signed copy of the lease and public records of ownership.

So why aren't landlords doing this? I think the issue is either they don't care, or there's no easy way to do it. Perhaps somebody should set up a service that facilitates this process by reducing it to uploading a copy of the lease agreement and ownership records, then sending a request to Airbnb. If enough property owners use a service like that, it could gain some significant attention.
Have you tried https://github.com/zeux/qgrep ???
Fast regular expression grep for source code with incremental index updates
I think it's "riskier" for Google to stick with anything Java related at this point. Even if it takes 5 years to make the switch, I think they should do it. They don't know what Oracle is going to do in the future against them. The recent win for Oracle has already showed them that they made a mistake not starting supporting Go 2-3 years ago when Oracle first sued them. This could end up costing them soon, but it could also get a lot worse. I think they can't afford not moving off Java. Plus, look how much excitement Apple caused with Swift for developers. They could do the same with Go for Android.
I find that propagating the error is what I want to do at least 95% of the time.

Part of the problem with Java exceptions is too many people feel obliged to catch exceptions, when they should be propagated.

Ideally, the only catches would be in the top-level loops (request / response dispatch for server, event loop for GUI, arguments for command-line).
Have to agree, I thoroughly despised Java until I started developing for Android, it suited the Application Framework and made the language fun, developing fully functional apps with ease and speed.
Back in 2009 Blippy came out and I thought it was dumbest thing I'd ever heard of. They got something like 13M in funding and I was flabbergasted. Colbert sort of sarcastically did a piece on them and soon after they were deadpooled.

The 1M for Yo was from some oil magnate/cofounder of Yo. Maybe to oil magnates, 1M is like a nickel to us. But Colbert did a sarcastic piece on Yo so empirically, they should be deadpooled soon.
You mean Google is. Remember when Schneier said no too long ago that "Google is in the surveillance business"? Even I didn't take it so literally back then, but it turns out he was just slightly ahead of time with that characterization.
Apple controls and chooses the hardware targets by itself.

Android is open and the potential number of hardware targets is limitless. It's not just about the size of the binaries; the app and the programmer should ideally be agnostic of the hardware. On an open-platform with closed-source applications, the least awkward way to do this is to push the native translation to the run-time.
What’s Trending with DevOps Tools: A Study Using Google
I don't see any reason there can't be interactive story-driven games. I agree though, games with a pre-defined story, and a path you have to follow, tend to lose a lot of the interactivity one would like in a game.
Great work. Having a download all link would be awesome.
I would not be around mucking with code today if not for this woman's work. May she rest in peace.
If only. But no.

What happens when FAB technology stagnates, everything locks in place and micro-processor advancement halts? Nope, it takes years for the state of the art FAB technology to trickle down everywhere. All the while getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. That state of the art smartphone in your pocket, it uses processors fabbed using 28nm technology. Even switching to 14nm technology would quadruple the transistor count and allow a corresponding increase in performance. Also, as FAB costs come down it would be more and more cost effective to increase chip sizes up to the maximum feasible die size, further increasing performance. Meanwhile, as former state of the art processor manufacturing becomes cheaper and cheaper it becomes more and more ubiquitous. So now not only your CPU but also your flash storage is made using 14nm technology, and maybe they decide to cram a shit-ton of micro-controlling processing power in there (they already do) and a bunch of static ram for caching or whatever, and performance keeps improving. Meanwhile, the processors and controllers in the radio system, on the cell towers, in the switches and routers, and in desktop and server devices keep getting faster and cheaper too. So now you have a butt-load of resources "in the cloud" or "the fog" or whatever idiom you want to ascribe to the phenomenon, all available for making sloppy code run faster and better.

Ah, but wait, there's more. This is all the boring stuff, but there's crazy stuff out there too. Memristors are almost certainly the future of computing in more ways than one, and so far it looks like they'll be as feasible to manufacture and as practical as we've theorized. With durable storage that has access times faster than modern ram the performance bottlenecks of the past (which have rarely been in CPU and have more often been in I/O or RAM) will fall by the wayside. Pocket sized computers will have terabytes of non-volatile super RAM. You can write 3D renderers in javascript and they'll run at 4k resolution / 60 fps with detail beyond what state of the art GPUs are capable of pushing today.

So no, the hardware train isn't coming to a stop, in many ways it hasn't even started yet.

That doesn't mean that caring about quality and writing highly efficient code isn't worthwhile, but it does mean that there probably won't be a big mean performance bottleneck forcing everyone to get their shit together in the near future.
> negative externalities like pollution, over-harvesting, misinformation, or antibiotics misuse.

Not disagreeing, because the point is true. However solutions for most of these have been found

a) over-harvesting : only a problem in a non-fully-privatized situation (in other words, the more government involvement, the more you have this problem). This one is actually an argument FOR capitalism.

b) pollution is also a tragedy of the commons thing, and could be solved by privatisation. Of course, in the real world that presents some challenges.

c) misinformation : this is not a problem of capitalism at all. Or rather, it's a problem that solves itself under capitalism (though not necessarily to people's liking). For example, insurance can fix this. Under central planning systems, every one I've ever seen, the problem is not so much misinformation, but the total lack of relevant information at all (e.g. employing the mayor's daughter in your management structure gets you the contract for city IT, good luck finding that info. Oh and if you're an idealist : good luck preventing that from happening).

d) antibiotics misuse : well, on one hand this is happening partly due to misuse. However, where do you have any data whatsoever that it wouldn't happen without misuse ? As far as I can tell antibiotics resistance happened even before WWII, when we were definitely not wasting antibiotics. At any rate, the ship has sailed and it's a sunk cost at this point. We should not waste money and resources fighting it, as even massive effort can only slightly reduce the rate here, it can't fix it.

(one theory I found is that what's happening is simply that we are effectively raising the price of new and therefore working antibiotics, dampening their use, until a balance with nature is found. Sadly, it is blatantly obvious that in order for this to actually happen, the vast majority of the sick would need to go untreated, so there simply isn't a good solution, capitalist or government)
For instance I use following config (nginx.json) for nginx:

{
"user": ["_env", "${USER}"],
"cwd": "/var/www",
"standardEnv": true,
"numFiles": 1024,
"binary": "/usr/sbin/nginx"
}

And php-fpm.json:

{
"user": ["_env", "${USER}"],
"cwd": "/usr/sbin",
"standardEnv": true,
"numFiles": 1024,
"binary": "php-fpm",
"args": [
"-F"
]
}

Hope that helps
I'm not sure if I'm impressed.... Sonic 2 (from Sega Genesis) had a "debug" mode, where you enter a cheat code on the controller and could then edit the levels. I remember playing that about 20 years ago. What's the big deal about this...?
Buyback Bitcoin After Checkout
Once upon a time, administration was 20% of college budgets. It's now 50% (guess who does budgeting?). You need look no further than that to find your answer.
great backstory:

I had been looking for a lightweight fiber strong
and stiff enough to use in reinforcement. At just
about this time—it was 1964—there was talk of a
gasoline shortage, and we thought we could use a
reinforcing fiber lighter than steel for radial
tires. A lighter-weight vehicle would require
less gasoline. We were not very successful with
the tire industry. It was using cheaper steel
wire for reinforcement, and the change to fiber
would have meant changing machinery at the tire
plants. So we expanded our research for new
end-use applications, and we now have more than
200 end-use applications for Kevlar.

http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americ...
Actually a common thread through much of the discussion about transparency/publicity/safety is that someone engaging on social media should be aware of their platform's effect on the people they talk to. I think that's a pretty good point really. In the case of many of the activists mentioned, it means the amplification of the threats to their safety. In a different situation, it might mean the ability to easily get someone fired.

Having a large audience / lots of followers is a powerful thing. Maybe it isn't vicious in the sense that it isn't violent, but I think it can definitely be a way to bully.
Yes and no.

An adjunct typically has a PhD or a masters degree combined with real-world experience.

Public school only require a bachelor's degree, but technically, teaching public school in most states also requires a teaching credential (especially with the No Child Left Behind law's "highly qualified standard), which is not part of most content (that is, non-teaching) programs. However, many districts are purportedly willing to hire a masters/PhD candidate and then back-fill coursework necessary for a credential (e.g., curriculum design, classroom management) as well as guide toward content certifications. These additional courses and certification exams are paid by the teach out-of-pocket, of course.

So, as with many things, YMMV.
The Little Book of Modern Front-end Tooling
No, we don't. The content is accessed dynamically so the private content wouldn't be accessible once it is set to private.

Also, on Nabaroo you can choose to keep your collections private w/ an option to invite select users only.
Just because you are getting less out of the deal than they are does not mean you are getting less out of the deal than not having any deal at all.

The deal "provide me a decent meal and I'll stay at work another hour or so" is, evaluated rationally, completely 100% fine by me. I'd rather stay at work for an hour than take an hour out of my day to cook & clean, or spend the equivalent of an hour's wage on feeding myself.
Google takes down anti-Filipino blog
EFF promotes Open WiFi initiative
I don't know about that, single core computers weren't known to be used in a multitasking kinda way. You usually had one main program open at any given time. It's not like my computer with a Packer box running on the left, a code editor in the middle, and Hacker New + 10 tabs on the right.

It was Word.

Or it was 3D Pinball.

The issue was Word and 3D Pinball didn't use multi-cores well and some people didn't see anything to gain. They thought "well it isn't going to make lag in Word disappear, or Pinball more fun." They completely missed that they could run both at the same time now.
Norse – Watch cyber attacks from across the world
For what it's worth, I used type racer to learn to touchtype. Took me from about 25 wpm to about 65 wpm. I seem to have plateaued there though - I actually type at around 90, but with mistakes. The game doesn't seem like a good tool for shaking out the mistakes.

Another problem is that it doesn't teach you all the weird punctuation we use as programmers - I still look at my keyboard when typing code, which I don't have to do fit normal text...
Forgot to tell you that nginx shouldn't be daemonized:

echo "daemon off;" >> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
> imagine if someone had the intelligence to code a universal installer that works every time and installed every piece of needed software all at once with zero user interaction

What's stopping you?
Remittance flows from one country to another in one infographic
Theo's opinion about BoringSSL and LibreSSL portability: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.tech/37174
Men in China avoid the most successful women when choosing who to marry
Nice concept! Free-agent nation, but with a Marxist twist, heh! I like it! Any place that has successfully implemented this in the US?
While I'm with you on the definition point (it is interpreted) I fail to see the relevance of that last paragraph??
148! ;)
India is an uncivilized nation for your girl child.
http://www.firstpost.com/living/india-a-civilisation-of-rapi...
Like most people I read the first book years ago. Nothing in that contradicts the impression that his current argument is a chauvinistic appeal to authority.
Rust is almost/ready for Android and iOS, granted that the language itself is still in a state of flux:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Doc-building-for-andr...

More recently:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2014-June/010323...

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Doc-building-for-ios
Can you please explain how markets address overharvesting and pollution, and examples of that happening? If your point is that states can overharvest and pollute too, sure - of course they can. They probably will if they're corrupt. My point was that only states can stop it: see the legislation on whaling, fishing, poaching, emissions regulations and taxation, ...

On misinformation, you made the (unrelated) point that states are corruptible. Yes, they are; so are markets (e.g. LIBOR) and companies (i.e. employees acting contrary to the company's interest).

Corruption occurs when the people involved are undesirable, and the reward outweighs the risk of being caught. In states where the electorate cares and is informed, undesirables are less likely to be elected, and there's a higher risk of being caught. Ideally, the bureaucrats involved in choosing who to give the contract to (the bureaucrats being directly affected by the decision, because the government is smaller) would tip off the local broadcaster that the decision was rigged, and they would investigate.

I think it's more likely for corruption to be unveiled in states than there is in markets or companies. The larger the company, the smaller the chance - and free markets tend towards multinational monopolies anyway ("efficiency" and all that).

My mention of misinformation was referring to things like: the media reporting on celebrities rather than legislation, or misleading advertising, or the media being paid to report a certain way or avoid a certain story. These actions have negative externalities, and the markets won't stop them. What the market wants (more celebrity stories, or fewer oil spill stories) isn't always what the market should get.

It should be illegal to use antibiotics in agriculture, yet the markets love them. That was my point.
You could always try the Xamarin way. Basically the same APIs, but with nicer languages (C# or F# instead of Java).
> For arrays of whatever, it may be internally transformed into the same contiguous representation you see in C.

This is a bit tricky because Java and C semantics are not the same, and an optimizer is obliged to prove that the difference does not matter before allowing the transformation. (It could also be given license by some kind of annotation.)

Sharing of mutated fields and Java's == are the major obstacles to doing this transparently, as far as I know. They turn out not to matter if there are no other references to the objects which you want to embed in the array, but proving that (in all the cases in which you would want it to apply) is a bit tough.
In NYC, at least, it's also a legal problem. Short-term rentals (even of property that you own) are illegal under city law. The law would consider the hosts to be:

- Running illegal hotels in buildings that are not zoned for commercial use.

- Running a business without a valid business permit.

- Failing to pay the hotel tax and other business taxes.

- Violating fire regulations that govern hotels and other commercial property.
A Biologist Debunks the "Bee Saves Its Friend From a Spider" Video
Public API for Screenshots on iOS is needed NOW
> > To use the example from the article, any design must be described with a sequence of words. You can't patent a sequence of words, so all patents should be invalid.

> This appears to be the source of the nonsense. You aren't distinguishing between the words (or algorithms) that describe a thing and the thing itself.

That's exactly my point. By saying that software isn't patentable because it is simply a collection of mathematical algorithms, you aren't distinguishing between the algorithms that describe the thing and the thing itself. Software is literally a collection of data and algorithms, yes, just like a digital photograph. (Although you could stretch further and define data as simply a single-purpose algorithm.) And legally a "collection of algorithms" cannot be patented. But in reality, much like the photograph, there is a great deal more to software than that; there is thought and creativity involved in "collecting" those algorithms. Saying software is a collection of algorithms is akin to saying a book is a collection of words. Literally true, but missing the bigger picture.

And yes, I understand the difference between patent and copyright. I was simply giving an example of something else - a digital photo - that is exactly like software: a collection of data and algorithms. Does that mean that exactly the same laws should apply to software as to digital photographs (and everything else that is simply a collection of data and math)? Of course not, because these things are fundamentally different, and are each more than the sum of their parts.
Why thorium reactors are important
Economy is a fuzzy topic. You can't quite model it right, you can't experiment by eliminating all the variables but the ones you test and so on.

It's not an exact science.

So people who thrive in such fields are people who can slap a convincing narrative to a set of selected events, and call it a theory.

Now, Christensen's narrative about Disruptive Innovation has many true elements to it. It's a useful tool in the box to have, as a model, when you analyze your business, your competition and the market you're in.

But it becomes counterproductive when Christensen seemingly is ready to explain everything as the after-effect of disruption. Take his excuse about the iPhone not failing. He's saying "no, I was right, but I failed to spot that the iPhone is disrupting laptops and not phones."

So he got it right, except he got it wrong. Plus, it's hardly that simple. The iPhone is not disrupting just laptops, it's obviously disrupting phones, and desktops, and even wristwatches. He, better than anyone, should know that the thing being disrupted is not a product, but a way of doing a given task, something he calls "what we hire to get the job done".

And so... what good is a model, what good is a theory, if it's so malleable, and so subjective, that you can explains all possible outcomes for a company by tweaking what you see as the disruptor and the disrupted? What value is a model that can't make a proper prediction?

The father of Disruptive Innovation has failed to be any more accurate than a coin toss so far. We're by now convinced Christensen can fit any happenstance to his narrative after the fact, but just as Lepore has noticed, he has yet to make a prediction that turns out as he expected.

He's just guessing, like all of us. But he has authority, because his book is enjoying popularity, so he has that air of authority when he speaks.

I respect Christensen, but unfortunately he's fallible like all of us. He wants his theory to matter, he wants his theory to be shown "right" in every single case, but his theory of disruptive innovation is but a small element in a very big picture. He himself acknowledges that in his response, but fails to grasp the implications of it in the economic outcomes for the players he's analyzing.
vaporwave /r/Vaporwave
I was trawling through r/personalfinance and it doesn't take long before the above starts to ring true.
Here's a somewhat related question,
Why is Google forcing a broken cipher (RC4) in Youtube?
IE11 disables RC4 completely.

Specifically, the server that actually serves the video only accepts RC4 connections over TLS. You can also connect to the same server over plain HTTP. See
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/990082
r19---sn-ab5l6nel.googlevideo.com
Drone video of the day: Illegally flying over Beijing