skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> TCO interacts badly with many Lisp language features: dynamic binding, unwind-protect, ...

I've never understood this claim. I mean, I understand the technical point: that use of dynamic binding or UNWIND-PROTECT creates a barrier in the stack across which TCO cannot be done. But in practice it seems to me a non-issue. I can't recall ever, in 35 years of Lisp hacking, wanting to write a tail-recursive routine that used one of them on each iteration, in such a way as to cause unbounded stack growth. It just doesn't happen, at least not to me.

Maybe that's partly because I try to keep my usage of dynamic binding to a bare minimum. I think some people overuse it.
I'm not convinced about car ownership. There are a lot of benefits in owning a car that you can keep "stuff" in. But just as Zipcars have presumably eliminated some car ownership use cases at the margins, fully autonomous cars would have a significant effect.
I've written Firefox extensions, and I gave up on the official Mozilla extension store. It is far easier to host the extension xpi yourself and provide the update configuration in your extension manifest for your own webserver. This lets you auto-update your extension yourself. The only downside is you have to learn how to sign the extension with either the command line or an eccentric GUI program on windows.

All of the problems detailed in this blog are true. But I feel like the author missed one thing that bugs me. Whenever you install a Firefox addon, you might notice that little text saying "author not verified". Why is that? Because the verification process for authorship is above and beyond the normal extension process and insane.

Author signing process: https://www.mozdevgroup.com/docs/pete/Signing-an-XPI.html

Automatic Firefox extension updates (without Moz store): http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/automatic-firefox-extension-...
Reddit and 4chan Begin to Button Up
They're in libbsd, which is a dependency of Samba and therefore installed on most desktop distros. They just trade off one bug for another anyway.
Inside a TTL Logic IC
Btw, we debug a lot of JS code and although Chrome has better developer tools they do crash... a lot and are unresponsive too. Chrome/Webkit should have native tools not the one written in JavaScript because this is a mess. They are still better than Firefox's dev tools.
The repo is at https://github.com/erming/shout

Looks pretty neat - even setup to work decently on mobile devices.
The problem I see is a false sense of security: Users will just see a lock in their address bar and think they're safe -- even if they're on a phishing site with a self-signed certificate.

It appears that users have been conditioned to look out for at least that little lock symbol, so devaluing it now would throw a lot of user training down the drain and give phishers fresh wind.
Taming the Asynchronous Beast with CSP in JavaScript
How Facebook (and Candy Crush) robbed us of a secure, passwordless world
You say that as though we can't do both.

In theory we can, but in reality we can't. That is not how, historically we allocate resources.

And who's to say it has to be a government that does this?

Actually I don't say that at all and intend fully to be on the train for one of these breakthroughs in the private sector.

Companies like SpaceX are stepping up and picking up NASA's slack at a rapid pace.

NASA "invested" 500M into SpaceX long ago. The USG also picked up most of the bill for the Falcon 9 if I remember correctly. I think SpaceX is doing great stuff but lets not get too excited about market demand for space exploration. The bulk of these programs look at earth, which I think are valuable and useful. I think Musk is going to find that he has trouble finding a robust market for manned exploration - the ROI (in every way) just isn't there.
Interesting point - depending on how this is implemented, all iOS Twitter clients could already be violating the App Store guidelines!
Swagger 2.0 is released
No I did not.

A great part of an IDE worflow is the visual experience. Having some kind of service, while forcing each client application to create their own UIs, kind of beats the purpose.

This is why on UNIX world the developer experience feels half-baked to those of us that could step a bit into the world as imagined by Xerox PARC.
Hmm. Yeah, that would be a problem, wouldn't it. There are failures that cannot be proven to not occur at compile time, namely, as you mention, hardware errors. ECC will prevent some of these, but not all. So perhaps it should still be layered at the hardware level.

(Reminds me of the JVM exploit that relied on waiting for random bitflips in RAM.)

(Of course, this is a problem for traditional OSs as well, although the vulnerable area of memory (ring0 data structures / stack / etc) is smaller.)

I wonder. It might be possible to express some of that in the proof requirements - "this program must not write to memory owned by another process even if a single bitflip occurs anywhere" - although that would probably balloon the complexity of the proof.
What about the equivalent of an 'early decision' application like in US colleges?
>> If any one could have pulled an Android Phone w/o Google Play it was Amazon

I don't agree with this assertion. Amazon doesn't have a stellar UX track record.
It's occurred to me that competing for business by making the process better for the founders, rather than worse, would be the way to go, or at least one business model that other incubators should explore.
The salaries of the average H1B worker compared to the average American worker are probably relatively close.

But when I say H1B workers are "cheap labor" I'm claiming this on aggregate. If we take a charitable view that an H1B worker is paid $5K less than a non-H1B worker per year - and that's very charitable based on the numbers I've heard thrown around - a company like Tata or Accenture is looking at tens of millions of dollars in savings.

Note also my characterization was not on the quality of the work produced by H1B workers: I've seen some good and some bad, just like everyone else really. But having artificially cheap labor is inherently bad, both for the laborers that can't negotiate something better & workers in the rest of the industry whose wages are deflated to match.

Indeed, cheap labor is really only good for one group: the one that's constantly pushing to increase the H1B cap.
Simple chemical method for seprating graphene sheets
> its developer tools are terrible compared to chrome. If you have the network console open while a large page loads, good luck interacting with the chrome until it's finished.

The only annoyance I have with the developer console is something they only recently added: you now need to right click in the console and tick "Log request and response bodies" every single time. No about:config option. But aside from that, I never noticed much difference. There are some things I like in Firefox that I missed in Chrome but that's probably because I'm used to Firefox. When I went the other way around, going from Chrome to Firefox after a few months of Chrome usage, Firefox had actually caught up and I didn't need Firebug anymore at all. Never noticed anything missing.
In general, if someone wants me to agree to something "big" immediately, I figure that they don't want me to have time to consider it carefully.

If you don't want me to think about something, I figure you know I would probably decide against your offer (if I did think about it).
Show HN: Slidr.io a slide sharing tool that does not suck
Looks nice, you cannot close a channel in firefox though.
Amazon cuts Fire Phone price to 99 cents just two months after launch
That's a fine attitude to have for your development team, but if your source releases to the general public use -Werror then you're doing it wrong. You're practically guaranteeing that the code you ship won't build on your end user's systems unless they happen to have whatever particular flavor of compiler that you tested with. And in 6 months there will be due to new compiler warnings or new libraries and your stable release will break unnecessarily.

-Werror is much too fragile for production releases, stop foisting it on unsuspecting users.
https://github.com/mozilla/jpm
Swift, Objective C, PHP

- Most of my time is spent on Objective C, Swift and PHP for side projects.

- Sometimes I use Objective C in Swift, PHP in Objective C, not super annoying as the IDE marks these as errors

- Productivity is not awesome but its a cost that I have to pay to work on more than one language.
The one plus is $349 for a 64gb model, similar specs. Bit of hassle to get hold of but the best price for the specs right now.
Any issues with the alkaline dust causing issues with the electronics?
We turned down an exploding offer from another incubator in order to have time to interview at YC. We ended up getting into YC, so in hindsight it was absolutely the right decision, but scary at the time.
> although Chrome has better developer tools they do crash... a lot and are unresponsive too.

I don't know what's better about them, but yeah I too noticed the crashes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues

I don't think it's mentioned on the wiki but I think there might be a DMCA Anti-Circumvention case too if the site you're scraping has technical measures to prevent data from being copied.
[Documentary] Project Code Rush – The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla
cool art project but this isn't systematic enough to trust if the area is 'really' clear
Even without going full-Stallman, a package following GNU FSDG (their guidelines about making recommendations and things) has value to someone who just cares about free software, but still uses some nonfree software.

It's nice to know that while you can deliberately install nonfree software, doing a simple package or plugin search will only show free software. On the recommended plugins screen, no worrying "looks kinda neat, but I need to check if it's free"; just make the assumption that it is. No "oh, I hit the 'just make it work' button, and it picked the non-free option. The system picks between Gnash and Lightspark. If your thing doesn't work in those, and you actually do need Adobe, then you can consciously install it.
Security is an interesting aspect as well. What's to stop someone from planting a location tracker on a shared car, then learning the locations of subsequent users? Or a bomb?
> These guys dont just want YC's cast-offs, after all.

That is thoughtfully provocative. I have literally zero evidence to go from, but I suspect that Y Combinator is like Harvard or Yale: they could get rid of the group that they actually admit and go for the next tier, then achieve similar outcomes. (In other words: there are so many strong applicants that they can't take them all.)

This is just to say that even taking YC's cast-offs could be perfectly acceptable. YC is dominant for now, but it's not hard to imagine a world in which there are a few accelerators which are true YC peers (just like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are variously preferred by different people with real differences in preference).
Five years ago or so, you could debug extensions with Chromebug, based on Firebug. It is what we used to debug Firebug itself. But when Mozilla decided to go and split out its own DevTools about three years ago, the writing was on the wall, and the lead developer John left. Unfortunately, he was the only one that really understood Chromebug, and Mozilla kept changing things that broke it with each new version of Firefox.

If you think debugging your extension is hard, imagine debugging Firebug. We built our own tracing/logging extension a long time ago to help, and I think it predates Chromebug. But it is not the same.

Fact is, Mozilla extensions are going to have some issues when e10s ships in final form. It can give then the opportunity to redo things. I'm not a fan of JetPack, btw, as I think python is a requirement. And not the version I have on my machine. Talk about a non-starter.

At least the built in tools are finally getting to a useable state. They are made for e10s. They have some nice features. I haven't noticed them breaking sites that you debug by being them being turned on (my fault for waiting so long to file a bug). They have some great UI choices (yet some bad ones). Overall, they are shaping up.

BTW, the debugging of extensions only works for some extensions. Sadly not mine. :/
We are going to do the following:

1. Reissue our SHA-1 based certs to meet the deadlines specified by Chrome so that no customer sees a warning in Chrome.

2. In the future, we will also have an automatic fallback system so that for poor clients (that only support SHA-1) we are able to dynamically provide 'old' certificates. For up to date clients we will not use SHA-1 at all.
Nice to see RIT's name on HN :)
I guess the writer hasn't managed to get to the point of being frustrated by that yet :-)
Looks fancy and very simple usage. Looking forward to make a testing deployment.
Are there any examples to read high detente count encoders?
This is awful. What has happened to choosing your language appropriate for the task at hand? If you are targeting embedded platforms, you should not be writing in an interpreted language.

Edit: I was having a bad day, and this comment was over the top. I don't like the current trend of everything should be implemented in JavaScript, but respect what Espruino are trying to do.
Say hello to your new dashboard
So about $600.99 then? What a bargain. The $449 price is cheaper than that. (Assuming you are on AT&Ts more recent plans where they charge you $25 more for having a subsidized, on-contract phone.)
When I use the sha tool against google.com, it shows them using SHA-1.
You had everyone until "use cryptocurrencies".
So this is a fire sale then.
Exactly. The value for amazon is future purchases of all kinds via the device, not profits on devices or music.

This is a successful extension of the lessons learned with Kindle, not merely an iPhone competitor.
CloudPlay is a similar app for Mac. It has pretty good shortcut integration.

http://cloudplay.fm/
I'm a buy & hold stock market investor in companies which have good management, care about the shareholders and of course, good balances.

I use the simple strategy of (1 - my_age)% in the stock market and the rest in fixed income funds(or less risky investments, including some hedge in gold and dolar due the fact that I live in the third world and currency fluctuations happen frequently).

It's funny because even though I work with software development, I don't have much interest about internet companies(read FB, TW and so on). The other sectors in the industry are less of a gamble and I like that.
Twitter Officially Begins Testing 'Buy' Button
Please let this put an end to the hipchat/slack madness.
I'm surprised no one here is talking about flow down terms. We have never made any partner or contractor or employee sign NDAs for disclosing 100% internal material, but it only takes one partnership with a fortune 500 (and we have a bunch) before you are knee deep in NDAs with clauses such as "any contractor or employee must be bound by terms at least as restrictive as those herein."

Now if anyone on the team wants the register map for the next-gen SoC we are using in our product (so that they can, you know, write some damn code) we have to start pulling NDAs out...
I Need Brain Surgery
I enjoy wearing my glasses, as it allows me to see :)

Regardless I think smart glasses are much more useful than a smart watch mainly because of how it can overlay things into your field of vision. Word Lens is a really cool example of this feature(realtime ocr/translation/overlay in your language of choosing).
Fuse Colors
This is what keeps me from taking them up on this offer. I would absolutely extend my T-mobile contract for 2 years to try this phone, but AT&T is a huge dealbreaker.

Edit: spelling
If the user chose IceCat over Firefox, then it seems likely that the user would rather not view the content than have the software automatically download software that contradicts their ethical stance.

Therefore it is doing what the user wants. Just not what you want. But that's okay since you will likely never be forced to use IceCat.
Yeah... I've seen all the other posts equating CL with US Worst. You are missing the thread on this.

Rackspace offers its' own revenue stream that makes an acquisition worthwhile and it has sever traffic that nearly perfectly balances CL's residential traffic. This should make it easier to negotiate peering agreements with tier 1's.

So this deal is revenue neutral and offers the possibility of reducing costs through economies of scale and peering... looks like a win-win for CL. In fact, on reflection, it looks alot like the GC Frontier merger in the 90's... Datacenters and iLEC mergers are somewhat old hat... the success of these pairings is varied ;)
> That was me trying to have a small particle making an 8-shaped path around two bigger ones that would be sufficiently far apart to not interact too strongly with each other.

This kind of path is called a free return trajectory and was used in the Apollo program lunar missions. The trajectory is not periodic, ie. it doesn't repeat more than once. The trajectory around the earth takes less time than lunar period ("month") so when the craft goes back up, the moon has moved on. You might be able to construct a planet-moon system with an m:n resonance in the orbital periods of the moon and the craft so that the tracjetory is periodic.

Free return trajectories are used in manned space flight to guarantee that the craft and crew return to earth if a failure prevents from entering lunar orbit.
The Trans-Everything CEO
Is the CNET article correct in naming YC involvement, or are they just keying up on the fact that some investors are affiliated with YC / YC partners? I ask because of the recent comments about YC not doing Series A due to signaling - so I imagine it would also not do Series C or D or whichever round this would conceivably be for Reddit.
It's a little different for a lot of other accelerators. YC takes batches of, what? like 40 companies or so in a batch? Most other accelerators are smaller with class sizes around 10. If YC is shooting for 40, and gets 37, it's maybe not a huge deal (8% under target). You could even make 42 or 44 offers and plan for a certain acceptance rate, end up with 44 probably isn't the end of the world (110% capacity).

If another is shooting for 10 and gets 7, that's a 30% drop which is probably enough to mess with the economics of the accelerator. Similarly, if they make 12 offers planning for a certain acceptance rate and end up with all 12, they're at 120% capacity, which also might be enough to mess with the economics.

I still think exploding offers suck, but YC is in a much stronger position to be relaxed about them than others.
Ask HN: Should I be bothered by this recruiter's tactics?
I just received this email from a recruiter and found it unsettling:

Hi <nsxwolf>,

I was just cruising around GitHub and took a look at some of the repositories you're interested in. I also checked out the Meetups you've been going to as well, and based on your interests, I wanted to reach out to you and see if you'd like to hear more about a job I'm looking to fill.

I expect to get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn, but this seems very intrusive and unwelcome.

I didn't know I was sharing any information on GitHub. I just looked at the "public activity" tab on my GitHub profile and it says I have no public events to show.

I also didn't know how public my Meetup info was, but I don't manage to attend anything anyway, so I guess I'll just take those down.

Should I reply and complain to this person? Or am I overreacting? There's no secret blacklist amongst tech recruiters, is there?
Nice price (compared to Tessel). Tessel does have a whole bunch of pre-designed modules though.
Two thoughts:

1) You're absolutely right that writing extensions for Firefox is harder than writing extensions for Chrome. But that's in no small part because Firefox has been around for something like twice as long as Chrome has; and really, Firefox's add-on infrastructure goes back even further, all the way back to the original Mozilla suite. Which means Firefox is carting around something like 15+ years' worth of legacy infrastructure with it. There are lots of bits of technology that Made Sense At The Time™ (XUL and RDF manifests, for instance) that just seem needlessly baroque today.

It's possible to imagine them ripping all that out and starting from a clean sheet of paper, but that wouldn't necessarily be an unalloyed good for developers. After all, backwards compatibility is a Good Thing for developers too; just for developers who have already gotten into the platform, rather than those seeking to get in now.

Rather than have a Great Break and throw out all those years' worth of extension developers' work, Mozilla has instead been making incremental improvements to extension development -- creating things like bootstrapped extensions (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Bootstrapped_ext...) and reducing the dependency on things like RDF that nobody wants to work with anymore. This is a pragmatic approach, but it will require a very long time for it to get Firefox to a place where it can compete directly with Chrome on this front.

Which leads me to point 2...

2) Imagine that Firefox didn't have to worry about all that legacy support, and really could start from a clean sheet of paper.

Would it be worth it?

My personal sense is that browser extensions in general are a technology that's on the far side of the adoption bell curve. As the Web itself becomes a more capable platform, many scenarios that used to require an extension can now be handled quite well by sites on their own. And anecdotally, I see a lot less interest in extensions among the "normal users" I interact with these days than I did, say, 10 years ago.

So, if you're Mozilla, maybe you could make extension development cleaner, but it's just not worth the effort to do so. Why plow developer time into improving something that few people care about today and fewer will care about tomorrow? Maybe it's best to just remove the most obnoxious problems by tweaking around the edges, and let time take care of the rest.

Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like what they are already doing...
Consider the perspective of someone who has never heard of a new piece of software before. They just want to know a bunch of things about it, so they can form a concept of it in their mind. This is one such question.

I don't disagree with what the author's focus should be, but I don't think that this question distracts from that.
I had a friend of mine who had emigrated from Iran to England, (obtaining English citizenship). After 6 years in England, he came to the US and eventually got citizenship here. I asked him the same question, "Why would someone move to the US from a first world country?" I found his response interesting: "Because in Europe, you stay where they put you."
This is because they produce so few of them a year.

If someone wanted to sit around and just produce lidar units, i'm sure it could be done for 100x less.
This is true for ALL exploding offers. Not just accelerators or investment term sheets, but for employment as well.
That's valid, but why do individuals have to live long enough? Are our current lifetimes not enough to work on this? Is dying at 90 the thing that's holding us back from creating those things?

I want to live forever as much as anyone else who makes this claim, but if an asteroid hits in 20 years, the difference between humanity being completely wiped out and being able to eventually re-start is whether we've got canned apes somewhere off the vulnerable surface.
Ummm according to the article that title is NOT what's being proposed
Are you an engineer? Then don't be shy about it