skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software rendering was fast enough for games in the 90s. On machines featuring a few megabytes of RAM and CPU clock speeds measured in tens of, or at most a couple hundred MHz.

Now even the cheapest and lousiest PC hardware is orders of magnitude faster than back then. Why wouldn't software rendering be fast enough now that it is orders of magnitude faster than when it was fast enough?

The benefit is that it is more reliable. If you can shove pixels on to the screen, you can do graphics in software. The graphics stack for hardware accelerated 3D graphics is incredibly complex and buggy. Questions like if I buy this laptop, will my graphics work? are sad sad reality. Problems like libGL error: failed to load driver: i915 are reality. And for those who write graphics code, doing workarounds for specific chipsets or drivers is reality.
HN Admistration stated that they don't allow posting these type of topics from regular accounts as they bring karma disbalance. And they don't see such a value in this topic to make submission created by the "whoishiring" account bot.
1. I'm not sure about adding more JavaScript-based functionality.

The original idea was to create just the static code, but I got a few emails asking for something that could be reused without having to generate new code for each page (for example on a blog). I'll nevertheless save this for a future consideration.

2. This sounds interesting, I'll check this out.

Thanks for the suggestions; if you'd like to keep an eye on updates to the service, there are links to my blog and Twitter to follow on the site.
Nice! Reminds me of The Business Card Raytracer[0].

[0]http://www.cs.utah.edu/~aek/code/card.cpp
To use the age old tradition of out of context quotes:

"Software rendering died a decade ago, and should be left dead."

I don't think entertainment industry CGI folks agree with you, at least not yet :)
I've just watched this with my roommates, and I think we're in consensus that Aaron's beliefs, to make the Public Domain actually public and universally share information so that we may be push forward the progress of humanity, are undoubtedly correct.

What I would like to know at this time is how to make Aaron's beliefs a reality. What can I do? What can my roommates do? What can anyone do?

Ideally, I also don't think that this is a zero sum game. We can all be winners. I'd like to believe that we can all be winners.
"what I dislike ... systemd" -- Without any sort of explanation.
Interesting. I suppose it makes sense, in a way: solar power captures solar energy directly, whereas hydro captures solar energy only indirectly, through the water cycle.

Do you have any ballpark ideas about how the cost of producing the dam (most concrete, I guess) compares to the cost of producing 120 km^2 of solar panels + 'enough' battery capacity, in terms of some kind of ecological footprint?

My intuition is that the ecological capital costs of solar panels greatly exceed the capital costs of the dam, but I have little faith in my intuition....
Yes, but Lake Mead serves an additional valuable function as a water storage facility.

I'm guessing that is it's primary value. The power generation is secondary.
Vlajipno: Full Text Lojban Dictionary
"Your activity looks suspicious to us. Please prove that you're human."
Please don't mention IV like they're an insurance company of some sort - they're scum that is a cancer upon the world.
I would think that everyone expects salespeople, ads, news, and politicians to be acting in their own interest, and therefore takes precautions to counteract that.

Facebook, though, pretends to be a communication service. The general expectation from a communication service is that it transmits information between users, thus users expect that what they see or hear coming out of the communication service is what the person at the other end has said/that the person at the other end will see what they say. A service that doesn't provide that isn't really a communication service at all, by definition - and lacking any other uses, isn't really good for anything. Just imagine a phone company with advanced speech recognition and synthesis software in the line that rewrites your conversations to be happier (or any other quality that the company or its customers prefer).
As someone interested in software rendering.. thank you for posting this. I hadn't heard of this project before.
Here's one option:

http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/operation-a...

http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/

Another is to write to your representatives in Congress demanding accountability for prosecutors and Stephen Heymann in particular. The web forms actually do get tallied by interns and closely monitored by staffers when there's a spike.
The problem with the "canonical" Haskell Quicksort implementation is that it is utter tosh.

The whole point of Quicksort is being a fast and in-place sort. That's its entire reason for being (the name kinda gives it away). An algorithm that's slow and not in place is not Quicksort and not "the essence" of Quicksort either. It's some other sort ("Slowsort"?) loosely inspired by a cursory reading of Qicksort and not understanding what Quicksort is about and why it is "quick".

The whole thing is somewhat typical though: "We have discovered that the essence of <well-known-thing> is <completely-different-thing>". No, you have discovered a mapping function from <well-known-thing> to <completely-different-thing> That's not the same as "the essence".
Just launched an extremely simple tool for categorizing and displaying my favorite free fonts, Pretty Open Type. http://namanyayg.github.io/pretty-open-type/
Yes, buying from Vimeo is probably the best way to support Brian and his colleagues.

(I am technically one of the "executive producers" but I don't make any money from it.)
Your title is a common quote, I'm not sure if you're misusing it on purpose or not
Ah, self-promotion opportunity! :)

Just finished a little helper app (arrange windows on the screen) for Mac: http://www.zonesformac.com

About to start work on a 3D game engine. Reviewing the required maths now.
What's flash?
Google to prevent OEMs from customizing the UI on Android Wear, Auto and TV
Can we all be good netizens and torrent rather than overload Archive servers? Not enough seeders right now.
Ross Anderson: Safety And Privacy Health Systems In The Age Of Biodata [video]
Web crawler that collects comments on social and media websites and lets users analyse and visualise them. It's not very hard to build and provides a great service to businesses releasing PR articles and seeking feedback on them.
We get a lot of scraping activity from China, Russia, and Europe. You probably have an IP from somewhere we've seen actual suspicious activity from. Sorry!
You "already fund" something, but need to vote for it to be funded?
> Software rendering died a decade ago, and should be left dead. We have great new tech like EGL and GLES growth to standardize on a base set of accelerated 3d functionality you can just assume.

Servers that need to render Web pages offline, for example for automated testing, may benefit from something like this. Or you may be working in an environment where you can't assume the GPU driver even works without crashing (sadly, this scenario describes Web browsers). In these cases, while you don't want to render with software, you need a software fallback because users won't accept not being able to run the browser engine at all.
The thing about fallacies is that you can't claim one just because it's common.

The thing about this case is that network effects of communication services make for very strong path dependence, thus making it extremely hard to get back up the slope a bit if you notice you've been slipping down a bit too much.
Let me see if I can clarify.

Imagine a (rather useless) program that prints a number.

x = 5
x+=2
print x
print x

this prints the number 7 2 times

in the 'context' definition of equality, which we'll denote using let * = ..., each of those assignments generates a context, which I'll show using indentation.

let x = 5
let x = x + 2
print x
print x

These two programs do the same thing. However, using names as mathematical variables instead of 'boxes', there is another program we can create using the same 'sequence' of expression tokens (thus giving us greater expressive power).

let x = 5
let x = x + 2
print x
print x

this program prints 7, and then it prints 5. In other words, we are able to access previous values of our 'variable' x if we want to, whereas this is not the default behavior of a system with mutable variables. This has an added benefit, not really shown in the previous example, of providing zones of protection from interference from the rest of the program. For example, I can always be assured that within the first context, x will always mean 5, and within the nested context, that x will always mean 7. No function or outside line of code can impact the value that x takes on. This really shines when programming in a team - this gives you assurance that to change the output of your section of the code, another teammate will have to directly alter your code. This localizes the source of future bugs in this code to always be in this section of the code, drastically simplifying the debugging process.

To make these contexts space efficient, modern functional programming compilers analyze when a program no longer needs access to previous value (because they will never again be used in the future), and marks it as 'garbage' to be collected later.

To try and rephrase it one more time - A mutable variable is an actual location in memory. Anyone sharing access to this location in memory in effect has a communication channel open to all of the other linking bits of code. This can be a powerfully simplifying abstraction, in some cases, which is why functional languages generally still provide it by many means, including (in Haskell) the State and IO monads. However, as a default model of resource usage, mutable variables are a poor choice. Generally speaking, you don't really want all parts of the code to be talking to one another. As programmers, whether using procedural, object-oriented, or functional programming, minimizing this kind of communication can help minimize the impacts of future changes. This is why object-oriented languages have private methods and variables, and why there is a trend towards object composition over object inheritance to define more complex behaviors, because both decouple the resulting subsets of code and make them more robust to external forces. Mathematical variables simplify our attempts to achieve this by cutting off the default route for breaking these hierarchical assumptions - shared communication.
Experimenting with ways of having automatic memory management without either traditional garbage collection or reference counting, but rather by finding proofs of nonliveness at compile time. Trying to find under what language restrictions such a thing might be possible.
> Its entirely possible that people would be more engaged if they received more negative news

Or the other way around, there have been many articles about social network envy, having to keep up with the FB Joneses in terms of having an exciting life etc.

I wouldn't have been surprised if people felt worse after looking only at positive status updates...
You makes perfect sense, taway. I appreciate your sentiment regarding traveling somewhere will not solve one's problem. I want to travel to Macau or Goa and eat the fusion of traditional Indian or Cantonese-Portuguese cuisine and maybe plays Gaopai at the casino's there but pretty sure that'll only obliterate my anxieties for a few days.

I also appreciate your empathy and stating that you also felt the same once. At least for me, there's more to a person who is willing to make fun of themselves or admit freely to their shortcomings than someone who offers eager advice.

Re: Western society criticism; as someone who grew up partially in Eastern society (China), I believe that traditional Buddhist practice is in practice and effect more similar to the Catholic Church than different. And people in China and South Korea see the same alternative appeal in Christianity as people in the West seek Yoga or Zen Buddhism. So perhaps it's not the religion/philosophy content but the person doing the seeking.
How about a trailer?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140331/11334226752/anima...
Trio of supermassive black holes shake space-time
You can always stop funding something.
I am currently working on an app that let's you send messages which can only be read in certain a moonlight - similar to the moon letters in The Hobbit. Trying to tie digital messages to the real world. MoonLetter http://moonletter.com
Well, where is it when not where you are purposely changing those sort and filter defaults with the explicit goal of changing people's perception of the world in a way intentionally not in line with their interest?
I wrote a specific SoundCloud downloader that's very easy to use:

pip install soundscrape
soundscrape black-moth-super-rainbow

https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape
I'm working with an awesome team to revolutionize how companies enable their employees to access apps. We want to make the workplace a better place. It's more of a nested set of projects, but hopefully it counts.

Join us! We are growing fast and have tons of openings. https://www.okta.com/company/careers.html
Not quite yet, I want to bring it a little further along to a somewhat MVP stage.
How fossilized ideas live on in even the most sophisticated science
I would say old at this point (seems like the Backbone todo app has been around for a while). Personally, when I teach people programming I go for NodeCellar (https://github.com/ccoenraets/nodecellar).
Mustache/handlebars like templating engine with data-binding hooks built in
No problem, I guess if you're gonna eventually give into vices, I guess there's no point to hold back and just go all in one go and go from there, ; )

I believe you're also right that you're not alone. For me personally, I've found that it isn't that adults who are older than me have eventually gotten their act together but more so that people retreat to their families and smaller intimate social clique and not reveal their inner lives as much, compared to when they were melodramatic teenagers or college kids on Facebook or YouTube vlogs.
Is there a link to access without subscribing?

EDIT: Private Browsing on Chrome seems to work.
Possibly, but only in the short run, as skewed perception of reality tends to have long-term negative consequences. Which is precisely one of the reasons why this kind of stuff is evil.
Nice design! Looks very useful, bookmarked.
Tried to take it for a spin, and it worked fine until I received the call. But I only heard "thanks for trying phonecard" and the call disconnected.

This is something I'd actually pay for, if it works as well as advertised! Cheers!
Agreed. I was more commenting on the more recent trend of "risk averse VC investment". As the OP states at $1.5 ARR, they would be profitable. It feels like VC investment in B2B space has become highly risk averse, only funding expansions of proven business models (we'll give you money if you can prove that you don't need it). This is a fine investment model but not sure it qualifies as "venture" investment. Can you really expect 10x returns if you're also looking for essentially proven, almost profitable businesses?
People are supposed to tell computers what to do, but in practice it's been the other way round quite a long time.

As an example from the extreme end, I recall an incident that happened to my mother's coworker. (This would be more than 15 years ago now.)

One day, her bank card stopped working. Payment terminals wouldn't authorize anything. ATM's wouldn't allow to even get a cash balance. So, over the lunch she went to the local bank branch to find if there was something wrong. Went to the till, presented the card and ID and explained that all of a sudden her card wouldn't work anymore. The clerk checked from the computer, looked up and responded in a calm manner: "You are dead."

Eventually the reason was discovered too. A full namesake had died and the paperwork for terminating the accounts had gone through. The person doing the closing had done an account search based on the full name only and closed everything.

It took a few weeks to get the mess reversed, much of it spent combating the bank to even accept the existence of a clerical error. As far as I know, they never accepted the responsibility of the cock-up.

As amusing as that anecdote may be, the real problem is this: for the bank clerk, the output from the computer screen overrode the reality that was, literally, standing in front of her. Ever since then, our reliance on computers telling us what to do has only increased.

Drivers, blindly taking instructions from their satnav, will easily ignore the reality around them. We've conditioned our users to believe the computer over their own senses.
Good to see more games coming to Linux, even though I game only rarely. They forgot to mention also Carmageddon:Reincarnation, funded by Kickstarter, now already available on Steam in preview for Windows, and should be coming to Linux later as well! One of the few games that I'm really looking forward to :)
> Well actually Erlang is not single-threaded it is multi-scheduler and multi-process.

I think the parent and you are talking about separate things.

Erlang the language is single threaded. Erlang the language has no concept of threads. That's what I think the parent was referring to, since he writes "concurrency model".

The BEAM Erlang VM, on the other hand, uses multiple schedulers and multiple threads, pretty much as you describe. Most people regard that as a characteristic of the VM _implementation_, not the concurrency _model_.
sounds like
http://www.jajah.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jajah
Ask HN: Who is iamdevloper on Twitter?
Fun question. Someone like me doesn't know who is @iamdevloper who very popular on twitter.
I currently work on an automatic Piano agent (software only) that randomly creates and plays well sounding melodies in the spirit of Chopin.
I appreciate your suggestion, but I feel like there's more to do, and I'd like to do more.
We're working on http://jokund.com, a very easy to use blog platform: you type your article in an email and just send it to my.blog.name@jokund.com, it creates your blog. No signup form, no password.
You can customize 'my.blog.name' to whatever you want, and in your email you can use font sizes, bold, attach pictures...

I also work on http://mailin.io, a node.js smtp server that listens for emails, parses them and posts them as json to the url of your choice.
Ask HN: Weekend project stories
What is the shortest duration you've worked on a project? This means a complete project, from ideation to deployment (bonus if it got many users and press coverage)

There are the likes of Facebook etc, which started out as weekend on-the-spur hacks and led to huge companies. Has anybody in the HN community had such an experience?

Please mention how long it took you, what stack you used, link to the project would be appreciated, and some metrics to give us an idea how successful the project was.
As someone who uses Angular.js every single day on some very large front-end apps, yeah, Angular seems simpler to understand, until your app gets large; Those small examples don't really show the benefit of the Flux architecture, as when it's that small something like Angular or other MVC frameworks with their magic and libraries really shine.

Heck, Angular is still excellent for large apps as well, as long as there is discipline in your development technique. The issue arises when you have a large team with varying skill levels, all working on the same front-end, with things stuck in the $scope when they shouldn't be, over-use and abuse of $watch, and a stack of other gotchas that make debugging an absolute nightmare, as tracing the execution flow is nigh on impossible.

That's where Flux is trying to do things differently. By having one way of passing data between the various components (and plugged directly into React, which also is built around a "componentized" architecture) you know exactly where to look when things go wrong, you give up a bit of dynamism and magic for explicitness, which in my experience is not a bad thing. That's my two cents anyway!
Essentially? That's really not what Quora is essentially. That's just how you've spun it.

Say what you will of the product, but the people originally behind Quora (and the people currently running Quora) did really great work at Facebook and had a reputation in SV for their brilliance. And they got their wealth because of the things they achieved at Facebook. So it's not surprising they were able to raise lots of money. VCs love investing in people who have track records of doing great things.
Also, Apple has one notably used as a fallback to display Core Animation stuff on a VESA driver (for safe mode, VMs, multiseat remote sessions via VNC). It goes up to OpenGL 4.1 and is fast enough to have the OS X UI be quite usable.

You gan try a quick demo on either your GPU or their software renderer with OpenGL Extension Viewer[0].

[0]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/opengl-extensions-viewer/id4...
OK, I didn't know that. It's a shame.
At a startup interview years ago, the hiring manager told me a story,

"Once, there was a fisherman with his single fishing boat toiling and netting and gutting his daily haul at sea; then one day, a Silicon Valley VC came on his boat and made a business proposition, 'I can make you a rich man; I can give you a funding to scale your operation so you can hire 40 people with 40 fishing boats to catch more fishes and make more money!' The fisherman laughed, the VC trying to push him with the startup enthusiasm immediately said, "think of all of the money you can make and you can then retire, and think of what you'd be able to do afterwards with that freedom!

The fisherman said 'Well, I'd retire to some place close to the coast, buy a fishing boat there and go out to the sea and go fishing.'"
You may already be aware of it, but sounds something along the lines of lifetimes in Rust:

http://rustbyexample.com/lifetime.html
Right now in Istanbul on a six week vacation from my a long term consulting gig (in Sweden). Using the entire vacation to improve and get some traction for Analytics portfolio, a multisite web analytics dashboard.

https://analyticsportfolio.com/
We are working on solving e-commerce logistics issues within Africa.

Effectively an outsourced warehouse and logistics engine which enables e-commerce sites to be able to sell items throughout africa.

http://www.parcelninja.co.za
> Facebook altering it's block-box proprietary algorithm for what to show is something it does every day. That can't be unethical by itself.

Why not?
Well, at least it's intellectually honest then.
How to get to the top
It compared badly also to cities smaller than it: compare SF (metro population: 4.5m) to Vancouver (2.5m), Vienna (2.4m), Zurich (1.8m) or Prague (1.2m).
Have you ever tried to integrate to N different 3rd party ID providers? It's a jungle, and I'd happily see a competent national replacement.
All of which are topics that most people, even reasonably intelligent people, are interested in. They may be beneath your tastes, but that does not invalidate them.
I think Aaron would have advocated--as the movie aptly points out--a re-thinking of one's approach to life in a way that involves more political activism than we're typically used to, versus a one-time reaction. There's a wide range of political issues for people to make their voices heard on.

Directly related to Aaron's interests, I'm suing the Courts over PACER and other related issues. See http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northe... , where document 23, the First Amended Complaint, is the main one to read. If anyone wants to file an amicus brief/write a letter to the judge in the case and/or the Administrative Office of the Courts, this would be a good time to do it.