skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting that his concept for inline search looks almost exactly like a current google results page. It would be very cool to have something like that available without necessarily relying on google for it.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that a composite view like that, which queries multiple services, can be created quickly without aggregating the data before the search is performed. That's problematic if you want to avoid relying on a single search provider.
Returning Swift Errors: Enum Or Tuple?
I really like the popup from the url bar. Safari 8.0 on Yosemite already has it, but the one they show in the presentation is more interesting and useful. I already use Spotlight as the only way of accessing applications on OSX (habit most emacs users get from using smex), so I +1 a universal "Search interface"; it's much more useful/productive then moving your mouse and pointing to icons or open an application and look for stuff.
How a Site That Streams People Playing Games Became a Billion Dollar Business
Thanks! that is very helpful. I am in a similar situation. Need to save a bit more and then probably it'd be the right time.
I wonder if this could be made into a modification of Firefox, such that a user could choose the "simple" version when installing for the first time. If you wanted to switch between browser modes, just visit "about:config" and flip the switch to have the full experience of Firefox. Not to say that Lightspeed would be bad as a standalone browser, but the install base and the code base already exist for Firefox.
The choices aren't only "true" or "hoax." gwern pointed out that it could be due to wishful thinking, or lack of knowledge about certain natural events.

Those last two accept that people are "being as truthful and/or as accurate as they can", but also recognize that people are imperfect observers and imperfect interpreters. As your charitable assumption doesn't allow for something that we know happens frequently, I think it's fair to say it's a non-realistic assumption.

For example, astronomers from Schiaparelli to Lowell said there were canals on the surface of Mars. Some made quite detailed maps. There was no hoax, only a combination of wishful thinking and optical illusions.

At some point we have to stop being charitable in the way you mean. But we can still be charitable by saying that people are imperfect. This path, which gwern took, also leads to learning new things, though about human psychology and not putative pirate treasure.
Yes, that is absolutely true and valid. Indeed the rental push is national and a great point. That said, to compare the rental increase in Oakland, or the Bay in general, is a far stretch from the national average. And the reason for that is obvious to most who have lived in both situations.
MeteorPad
I think it is a gross simplification to say "bad schools are filled exclusively with kids whose parents are indifferent to education"
> This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted at: "things I can't talk about"

The author is Robert O'Callahan, who is a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla and a 15-year veteran of browser development. He's not just some random blogger spouting off.
Viva la resistance!
China to exclude Apple products over security concerns
Disappointed that there isn't any innovation wrt tabs; they aren't mentioned at all.

I understand Lightspeed aims to be minimalistic, but many of these defaults are just illogical. Default click-to-play at the moment already ruins many audio sites where the flash applet is hidden, and turns others into a game of Where's Waldo.

Completely dropping extensions is antithetical to the central idea as well. Ideally, the browser would be barebones and fast (what Firefox once was) and any features would be an addon. Otherwise, you get sucked into the mentality of "if only there was this one feature".

All in all, there seem to be several inconsistencies in the central idea, but it could definitely turn out to be an interesting idea.
A Maryland school district wants to snoop on students to keep them safe
Is anyone else having issues getting it to compile in OSX?
I agree. that's mostly the point of my comment. :-)
Google has very deep pockets, and is successfully executing an astonishingly vast integration play. Google can potentially own:

- Your communications (Gmail, Hangouts, Voice)

- Your working data (Drive, Docs)

- Your footprint on the Web (Google Analytics, Ads)

- Your footprint on the Internet (Fiber, Loon)

- Your browser (Chrome)

- Your operating system (ChromeOS, Android, GlassOS)

- Your device (Chromebooks, Glass, Wear, Android phones and tablets)

- Your movements and travel (Maps, Ingress, ITA)

- Your robotic overlords (Boston Dynamics)

Not to mention the upcoming plays for home integration (Nest, Thread), your means of transportation (Android Auto, self-driving cars), and your activity and health data (Fit).

Each vertical success reinforces the Google Platform, and lends momentum to Google's efforts in other verticals. It presents one hell of a barrier for start-ups (unless you fancy share-cropping), decreases consumer choice, and ultimately, that amount of consolidated power just doesn't seem healthy for a functioning market or society.

Edit: All of that, and I somehow forgot YouTube. And G+. But we all forgot G+, right?
Maybe "LightFx" would be a more fitting name for this experiment.
Tabs are accessed through the URL popup overlay. I agree that it's difficult to imagine browsing without them, but I manage well enough on phones without them.
While I haven't seen anyone actually use this pronunciation I'd consider 'p', short for predicate, a fairly logical way of pronouncing '?'.

If nothing else, it's LISPy in origin at least. Without actually being inherent to LISP. For example, with a ternary operator:

var adult = (age > 18) ? true : false;

Pronounced: 'adult' equals (age greater than 18) p true else false.
What research group composes papers in Word?

EDIT: Oh, you mean research groups that don't do math.
And yet, now we hear people complaining that everybody should just run WebKit, while at the same time whining about needing to hack around IE6.
Yes, it does. Does this invalidate Robert's comments? If anything, I'd say it strengthens them.

"Employee of company A praises company B (from which company A gets most of their revenue)" is not a noteworthy story. But change "praises" to "criticizes" and it's entirely different.
It's in the CTA at the end of his post.
I've yet to hear an argument for why the needs of professional linguists should take priority. If you don't standardize the language, then it evolves to become unpredictable, inconsistent and impossible for non-natives to learn without years of immersion.

The language you prefer is also exclusionary. Imagine if Ivy League universities used a complex idiosyncratic dialect that was opaque to anyone who didn't grow up in an upper-middle class New England suburb. It would create a barrier for outsiders to gain access to those colleges, and a lot of other elite institutions. Standardizing and simplifying rules eliminates that barrier, allows the language to be taught to people who would be otherwise marked as outsiders.
At first I thought "oh no, another distraction for Mozilla", but then I sat through the presentation and thought there was some really cool ideas (amazebar!). In fact, I think it can be simplified and paired down even more. Even better, some of the assumptions here even make the software portable (as in doesn't really need to be installed and could just run off a usb drive/out of my dropbox).

Automatically being in a private/secure mode makes lots of sense to me as well.

Some ideas I don't like:

- get rid of loved sites/bookmarks altogether. Frequent usage should just percolate autocomplete suggestions to the top. This design doesn't really need them, and tbh I've barely used bookmarks in any browser in a long time.

- too much going on in the amazebar, drop all the suggestion (which will quickly get stale, tabs, email search, etc. Just focus on most frequent sites and autocomplete, it feels like the presentation is just burying lots of the clutter that used to take up GUI space in the amazebar.

- please don't default to a "downloads" folder. I've never liked it and before I bother to change it, my downloads folder quickly turns into a "random junk I've downloaded" folder. Forcing me to put it someplace actually is simplifying my workflow. It's almost the first option I change as soon as I install a new browser.

- keep tabs more present, don't bury them in the amazebar
He does mention tabs @ 4:18.

The click to play behavior doesn't have to be on the actual applet, it could be a popup just under the top bar or something. Use some imagination.

Dropping extensions is not antiethical. The people this browser is targeted for don't care about extensions.

I don't see any of the "inconsistencies to the central idea" you are talking about.
I had a flashback to the days of web portals. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I like that they're trying something because complacency is never a good thing. You have to try things to see if they work.

I think the biggest allure of this is that there are people with simple needs that want their technology to "just work" as they said. I also agree with owlish's comment in that there are some quirks that need rapid alleviation that aren't being addressed like click-to-play and dropping extensions doesn't seem like a good way to approach this.

I applaud the experimentation so long as the end results are choices we can make for ourselves.
Nvm, looks like it's an open issue https://github.com/azul3d/issues/issues/5
Plenty of tech workers left everything behind and moved thousands of km across borders and oceans to work in SF in precarious visa situations and make a decent living. If they lose their jobs they don't get to go to OKC, they're deported back to India or China in 10 days.

It's harder to empathize with US citizens who've managed to squander their enormous advantages and have to suffer the relatively mild indignity of moving to a different US city.
It's not locative but part of a phrase verb "catch up with".
thanks for the feedback, maxwin. I added some screenshots to the Features page. Thoughts? https://sproutmark.com/features
Having worked in audio and video editing on Pentium-era machines, I don't think modern machines are slow at all.
In 1997 or so, I was running Apache under NetBSD on an SE/30. Ran quite well and was very stable.
"I eat candy because it tastes better than vegetables".

It's an analogy, and hence imperfect, but might still be useful.
Because news already traveled like wildfire. Its just didn't make it out to the people who weren't actually involved as often as it does now.
The closest thing I've ever seen to the "holy grail" for Rails front-end support is https://github.com/ssorallen/turbo-react/ . Theoretically, any user interaction would render an entire page declaratively in the Rails style we've come to know and love, and the frontend would grab the full HTML response over AJAX, parse it, diff it with a Shadow DOM that it maintains, and update individual components. So, for the small sacrifice of maybe a few extra SQL queries you'd have cached anyways, you'd never have to worry about things like creating and maintaining a JSON API just for the sake of having better frontend interactivity. Right now, this implementation is just a regex-hacked-together proof of concept, but I could see things like being able to demarcate components that modify their own children (like maps and rich editors), and allowing components to reconcile themselves in customizable ways (like animations of disappearing div's). Now, if only startup life gave me time to build this out correctly...
If you develop in a *nix environment, fill out my survey for science
More precisely:

-- Left reduce
type Reducer a r = r -> a -> r

-- Here's where then rank-2 type is needed
type Transducer a b = forall r . Reducer a r -> Reducer b r
Browser share is only part of the puzzle. Microsoft didn't also own several of the most popular sites on the web. See callahad's comment for more detail (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151400).
I have just one comment: Go mozilla, you rock.
12,000 years ago there was an impressive (for its time) dynamics demonstrator named "xspringies", (which is still listed on the rutgers site: http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html ) it would let one build mobile or anchored objects with selected internal spring constants which would respond to various parameterized imposed forces. by now someone must've written something that would far transcend xspringies. i'll assume that this falling ball demo is more sophisticated and responsive in various ways along those lines.
You can use the internet at Starbucks in Shanghai without providing ID.

Also, my I-paid-cash SIM card came with a data plan.
And search!
Pretty interesting video. A few things of note:

-Tabs are important to almost all web users these days. Maybe you could hide them and display them on hover but I don't think you should ever move them an extra click away.

-Not a huge fan of the click-to-play feature. Maybe it would work if you could whitelist plugins rather than websites, I guess you lose most of your security benefits by doing this though.

I think he actually raises a good point at the end though, he wouldn't use this for work but may use it elsewhere. That's great, but typical web users only want to use one browser, they get familiar with the interface and stick to that everywhere they go. If people use a certain browser at work chances are they use the same one at home, and I don't think this is powerful for many people to use at work.
Thanks for the tip! I went through my entire cookie list (accessible from the Firefox options dialog) and went from hundreds of domains to ~10 whitelisted ones. I was baffled to see how many cookies I had stored that I didn't even know about.
The Wyvern Programming Language
Perhaps you could use a continuous loop of tape and just wait for the page you want to come around. A bit like how teletext broadcasts work.
The shortage of IPv4 addresses and the horribly slow adoption of IPv6 is a big issue.

SNI works fine, but when it doesn't it fails horribly. Apache defaults to the first vhost on an IP which can result in non-SNI clients being redirected to the wrong site.

As for XP/IE7 usage, I have a client in an aerospace related industry with most of their customers still on XP/IE7.
Yeah, and then Firefox came along.
There are several ideas in play that skirt this idea, however none have widespread adoption as far as I'm aware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network

Frequency hopping, spread-spectrum technologies have been around for quite a while now and a few have seen adoption in the open market, but again, these are fewer and far in-between most other accepted technologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect...
The no setting part is not really an option. No matter how simple you want to the browser to be, if you want this to be the one browser for the personal use, you need some settings.

* setting search engine - this should be dead simple to implement and totally should be customized. I don't mind using Google but some people just don't like that.

Actually I don't get why Firefox search engine customization is the way it is. If you want to SE that is not part of Firefox's bundle choices, you have to install add-on. To me, this should be simple to implement. A user click on "manage search engine preference", press "Add", gives a URL of the search engine (e.g. https://google.com) and then OK. Firefox should just take whatever user types into the search bar / address bar (this case needs to know whether the "keyword" is url or not) and just redirect user to http://mysearch-engine.com/?q= / ?query=.

I can even imagine this useful when I want firefox to do code search. Imagine instead of me going to dxr.mozilla.org to find the code I want, now I just need to set the search engine to http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?= yay!

I can even write an addon that does that right now in probably 30-50 lines of JS right now.

* home page. I think many older Internet users still set a home page.

* Download folders - you still want to expose where to set it because some people prefer to set it somewhere else.

* Bookmarks - if there is no concept of bookmark, how exactly do I find the things I want quickly? Imagine I <3 a bunch of stuff today and tomorrow I want to find that one awesome blog post I want to re-read. If I can't recall the blog title or the domain, how do I do search?

What really helps users, including me, when I just want a browser.

* security, private, clear cookies - awesome, lightspeed would be super awesome on shared computers

* Big buttons. When I first install Lightspeed I should just be prompted a couple pages with big buttons and bars to set homepage / search engine preference

* When I <3 a bookmark, fade in search bar or show me a page with big list of bookmark categories.

And personally, a little cuteness like the wireframe in the demo is always welcome.

See these scratch drawing 1 and 2. I am not a designer, so pardon me. I am also trying to do a mobile experience here. In the bookmark case, you can type, you can mouse over / click and expand to see the top 5 in that category.

[1]: http://imgur.com/Bvtrnhi&WjAoic8

[2]: http://imgur.com/Bvtrnhi&WjAoic8#1

And yes, as a developer, Lightspeed is awesome to me.
The widening gap between memory and core speeds suggests to me that traditional RISC philosophy is not the way forward for performance and efficiency; fixed-length instructions, load-store restrictions, and delay slots may make implementation easier and faster at a time when memory could keep up with the CPU and instruction decoding was the bottleneck, but now that memory is often the bottleneck, it makes sense to have more complex, dense instruction encoding and the other features that are usually left out of RISCs, but improve code density.

Variable-length instructions are especially beneficial to code density, since often-used instructions can be encoded in fewer bytes, leaving rarer ones to longer sequences. It also allows for easy extension. Relaxing the restriction on only load/store instructions being able to access memory can reduce code size by eliminating many instructions whose sole purpose is to move data between memory and registers; this also leads to requiring fewer explicitly named registers (since instructions reading memory will implicitly name an internal temporary register(s) the CPU can use), reducing the number of bits needed to specify registers.

Other considerations like number of operands and how many of them can be memory references also contribute to code density - 0- and 1-operand ISAs require far more instructions for data movement, while 3-operand ISAs may waste encoding space if much of the time, one source operand does not need to be preserved. 2 operands is a natural compromise, and this is what e.g. ARM Thumb does.

This is why I find the description of "compressed RISC-V" linked in the article ( http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~waterman/papers/ms-thesis.pdf ) interesting - benchmark analysis shows that 8 registers are used 60% of the time, and 2-operand instructions are encountered 36/31% statically/dynamically. These characteristics are not so far from those of an ISA that has remained one of the most performant for over 2 decades: x86. It's a denser ISA than regular RISCs, and requires more complex decoding, but not as complex as e.g. VAX. I think the decision to have 8 architectural registers and a 2-operand/1-memory format put x86 in an interesting middle-ground where it wasn't too CISC to implement efficiently, but also wasn't RISC enough to suffer its drawbacks. I'd certainly like to see how an open-source x86 implementation could perform in comparison.
It did. But Microsoft disbanded the IE team after they won that marketshare, which gave other browsers years to catch up.

Things may have looked very different had they continued the heavy development pace after releasing IE6. IE had a fast and modern engine compared to contemporaries when IE6 was first released, but then it went five years without any major updates.

I'm undecided about Google's growing browser control, but in any case I don't see Google making the same mistakes as Microsoft.
I don't think leaker has mild negative connotations, and if it once did, it doesn't anymore because of the popularity of organizations like WikiLeaks. Leaking is in the name, after all.
It sounds like you don't know much about the publishing industry. Writers do have agents. Generally the agents then work with the publishers, who happen to also provide quite a bit of value.
use another browser where you aren't logged in. It does work, I do it.
You seem to be assuming that the Bay Area has experienced the greatest increase in rents. Looking at the actual numbers is more useful.

Recently, Seattle has experienced the greatest percentage increase in rents[1]. San Francisco and San Jose were up there, but the recent percentage increases in the Bay Area have, for instance, been on par with the increases seen in 2012-2013 in cities like Houston, Miami, San Diego and Boston[2].

It's a tough market out there for lots of people and while it's convenient to think that the Bay Area is always special because of the tech industry, this simply isn't the case.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230488710...

[2] http://realestate.msn.com/massive-rent-increases-to-continue
Check out www.nearcircles.com and tell me what you think
"Squander"... many US citizens see the actions of Silicon Valley and the entire tech VC culture as grossly immoral and unethical. Maybe you have yet to realize that all your actions in the US will only make rich families richer and hurt and damage the lives of those beneath you, but many Americans decide to do work that helps individuals directly as opposed to help investors become even richer.

It's fun to think poor Americans are lazy, but when you realize that helping people in America is one of the lowest paid(often volunteer) positions, how warped the reality of the US dollar is.

To many "dignity" as you described it, is not working like a slave to enrich the evil that is destroying our country. And if you are moving here to contribute to that you are not much more than a paid mercenary.

EDIT: Look, I get it that you are possibly coming from a fucked situation wherever you might come from. And I can't blame you for it. But realize that few people in the US actually will benefit from it, and it will actually make their lives worse. It's what you have to do, but it really isn't something that many Americans would think is good. We already learned about imperialism in High School and prefer not to repeat it.
They should remove all the crap that is non-essential. For example, social and other things. Firefox size has nearly doubled in size between version 15 and 31. Also, I don't think that security would be good. I run noscript and similar. Notice how around slide 33 they said 3rd party cookies would be cleared? 3rd parties should not be allowed. Also, what if my trusted sites does not match their trusted list? Also, what if I don't want certain plugins to be enabled. Sounds less secure to me.
IE and Safari are always (for some reasonable definition of always) going to exist. Firefox is the browser whose entire revenue stream is based around hoping Google DOESN'T want a browser monoculture to develop. If Mr. O'Callahan wants to use Firefox as a way to stop Google from taking over the web, there's two things he as a Mozilla coder he could do that would be far more effective than histrionic blog posts that say "other bad things are happening that I can't even talk about" and expect me to be able to fill in the blanks:

1) Build a better browser than Chrome, and
2) Come up with a way to generate revenue that doesn't depend on Google's benevolence towards Firefox.