skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the HN thread accompanying the release of Google Inbox, a (supposed) engineer working on Inbox was saying that the reason for the exclusion of Firefox was a performance issue with accessing sparse arrays with huge indexes.

Link to the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498

Link to the bugzilla entry: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963
Except that with a few quick changes the application ran, so intentionally blocking seems like a valid description.
I don't think it's a product of inequalities. I think it's a matter of preferences. People value luxuries. Food may not be efficient in the resources/calories sense, but it is nonetheless the food people are eating and a big part of its cost is its energy cost.

In industrialized countries, less/more expensive energy will lead to an increase in inequality as the basic items that everyone (including the poor) consume a lot of are very energy dependent. Transport, heating & home electricity are easy enough examples. Richer people might use slightly more energy for these (bigger houses, cars, etc.) but not much, energy consumption of this kind does not track income.

Steel, concrete and other building materials are very energy intensive. Being heavy means there is a tradeoff between manufacture near high energy sources and high cost transport.

Lets leave aside the carbon effects and/or other externalities. It seems to be bad for the quality of the debate to mix the discussion about the cost of reducing energy consumption and the necessity of doing so. I don't personally have very strong opinions about the carbon-climate debate. I do think the "reduce energy consumption" side of the debate underestimate the cost of drastic cuts especially on below median economic strata.
Wow. I never thought I was speaking with someone with a superficial understanding. That was immediately clear to me.
But now, well, I'm awed by one of the best conversations I've ever had with a stranger on the Internet.
Thanks. I think I need some time to process the whole thing.
I doubt he will use SDL, the author mentions in another video that he is interested in implementing his own render. Also, he claims he won't use DirectX or OpenGL.
For a given exposure duration.
On the other hand, it's the customer's decision to put Cloudflare in the stack. They have decided to put Cloudflare on the path, just as they would have decided to use nginx. There really is no one to blame (because the end here is not the customer's server, it's the cloudflare server) and if you really want to, you should blame the customer.

EDIT: just read your answer below, my comment is off-topic. Sorry.
>The official said discussion of such matters would allow criminal suspects or foreign powers to determine U.S. surveillance capabilities.

Not to mention U.S. citizens!

I mean, if they want to use that argument, then they should actually limit their surveillance to "criminal suspects" and "foreign powers".

>This is the go-to defense for surveillance secrecy.

Indeed. And note how it used to be terrorism that provided the tidy justification for sweeping up large numbers of random U.S. citizens in these operations. Now, just plain ol' criminal suspects and foreign powers provide enough justification for domestic spying.

The goalposts are moving. We will all be accustomed to the surveillance state soon enough. Nothing to see here.
Animations are not important enough to justify. Not wanting to serve all your content from a single domain is not enough to justify. These are excuses, not technical reasons.
You have right, but this triggers me to the other side of a programmer perspective. Thinking from a test driven development, and creating parts that are easy to mock and test, couldn't be the outsource-process mindset be a one more reason to better write code handling the dependency of the other parts of the system? This way, i think that some critical parts can be easily mocked up in the outsourced code, so the complexity gets easier to manage. What do you think?
Greg Wilson (from the 'Making Software' book) has been claiming the cost of building software is rather constant, regardless the programming language. The formula seems to be
"one can build and maintain 10 lines of code per hour".

If this holds for J, K, APL we should all be doing that.
The Sigma DP3M has a foveon sensor instead of a regular sensor with bayer filter array. It's based on different wavelengths of light penetrating silicon to different depths, which means that all 3 colours are stacked on top of each other, so you don't have to throw away 3/4 of your photons just because they happen to be a different colour than the dot they fall on.

At low ISO the image quality is amazing, at high ISO it's very noisy. Also, the red channel is much noisier than the blue one.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Absorptio...
Google is not the same it wanted to be back in 2009 [1]:

Today, we base our developer products on open standards because interoperability is a critical element of user choice.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html
Well so far extracting money from dumb customers is still an excellent business to be in. eg charging $47m for a spreadsheet with a $100m error [1] or helping Libya invest its money in trades that soon became worthless[2]. It is hard to make money like that from trading alone with such low risk.

But Goldman can see the writing on the wall, and now has 25% of its staff in tech, because the markets are changing fast. Stupid people will still make up much of the revenue stream for a long time though, and large companies that like to pay large sums.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/10/16/spreadsheet-mistak...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/06/goldman-sach...
I get the impression that people who prefer Mercurial to Git only ever talk about interfaces and not about the underlying model. It seems to me that especially for a tool as important as version control, the underlying model is significantly more important: you can wrap a mediocre interface in a nice one, but if the model isn't very good you're pretty much stuck. That isn't to say that Mercurial's model is bad per se, but it certainly strikes me as significantly less elegant than Git's. (I'd be happy to find out I'm wrong about this - I know Git's model pretty intimately but am only moderately familiar with Mercurial's.)

This problem seems to generalize quite a bit. Emphasis on surface-level characteristics rather than core differences seems to be prevalent in comparisons of databases, programming languages, web frameworks, etc. This seems quite bad, but I have no idea how to fix it.
What I know, given the right vendor prefixes, transitions works mostly the same way on both platforms. I don't think it makes sense to only have transitions for one browser when it's trivial to support other browsers as well. The CSP issue I honestly don't know why that's so but I'm fairly sure they should be able to follow CSP on their own domains, just like the rest of the applications on the web have to do.

To me, it feels like Google has an unfair advantage on doing web applications when they can do stuff on their own domains that no one else can, unless they also develop their own browser with unique features.
Twitter have recieved a lot of flack lately for their poor handling of abuse complaints. Particularly in relation to #gamergate. I've no idea whether that makes a difference, but it's worth considering: abuse, like spam, is going to be a big problem for any communications service.
We've only looked at reducing the depth of field as the narrow aperture on smartphone cameras leads to an extended depth of field (meaning that everything is usually in focus within the frame).
> ... good old days where you could link two Nintendo Gameboys and play tetris against each other

well, i got pretty close, where i once hooked up a local chat client with emacs-doctor-mode, and for one of the folks had it take over ;)
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Thanks a lot for that information! Will include it in the post when I get a chance.

The performance is kind of bad in Firefox but I'm not sure it justifies blocking the entire browser because of that. For a comparison, Google Photos is slow as hell in Firefox, but you could still use it if you want to.
Because they don't want a slow webapp under their logo. And this one would be particularly handicapped by that.

Everyone praises Apple for user experience, right? There you go. They're giving you want you want. And at least Chrome works on multiple platforms, even Linux.

What seems like a more arbitrary limitation is that Inbox doesn't work with Google Apps. Thought it, too, probably has some technical reason deep in the belly of the beast.
Microsoft fixes severe 19-year-old Windows bug found in everything since Win 95
Hi Go team,

if you want an alternative for Gerrit code review, you can also use http://review.ninja. It's also open source, so you are welcome to contribute.

Cheers,
Mitch
Twitter solves a "real problem". Relatively convenient 1:N communication, where N is the number of twitter users and at the same time a method to selectively subscribe to some of those messages by certain criteria (hashtags, selection of users). There is a reason why Television channels love Twitter, it has essentially the same characteristics as traditional broadcast television, plus some form of interactive feedback. That the system is centralised and has few message types is purely coincidental.
I disagree.

They're short cuts you might take to get a product out and get early feedback, the same sort of shortcuts most of us have taken when pushed to release something sooner. This is a product in Beta, not the finish article.

Even if everything work in theory just dropping multi-browser testing would save time. If their aim is a beta product for early user testing, I really don't think what they've done is unreasonable.
That's not the claim. On the press conference they showed those images to give two individual examples to the public. They hold that the strongest evidence is classified.
"var webview = document.createElement("webview");"

Turns out, it's pretty easy to code a web browser in ANYTHING if one of the primitives you can instantiate is A WEB BROWSER...
Changes that included disabling a browser security policy - not something it's reasonable for Inbox to request its users to do.
Yes, it is indeed functional in Firefox, with some adjustments to their animations, it would be "running properly". And yes, they are going out of their way to make it run only in Chrome since all the rest of the browsers are blocked.
Gerrit is a Rietveld fork, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_(software).
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I wonder how much pronunciation affects the results. Given their questions:

Which brand of laptop seems bigger, Detal or Dutal?
Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi?
Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen?

In British English I only chose the 'u' for the second question (the first by association - Detal = metal). How would US Americans pronounce these?
But serving all content from a single domain is a reasonable thing for Google to do.
I'm not sure how to interpret statements like this, at least not without acquiring a good business understanding of these energy businesses. A lot of funding has gone into green energy in various forms over the last 10 years, in lot of countries. None if it seems to have the kind of cascading effect that I would expect from the kind of runaway success I often hear claimed.

If solar and/or wind is so great, why aren't high energy activities moving near those places or developing their own renewable power source? Where are the solar desalination plants or mineral processing facilities?
What's being shown here...?
Sorta. The eggs you're placing into github's basket are different from the eggs you've decentralized. I'd argue those eggs (merge requests, issue tracking, discussions) have never really been successfully decentralized.
Why? I don't intended to copy my code from my employer's machines to personal servers just before I leave, do you?
What do you mean by "thick American accent"?
"The GP appears to believe no one ever has bad luck and everyone is as fortunate as he."

Do you honestly believe that that was the point I was trying to convey? My point was that there are ways for individuals to mitigate the risk and impact of those "bad luck" situations, without the need for government spending.
There are couple of problems with the open source clients, one is the front end the other is anti-spam. Many of them are hideous and look like 10 years old. Some of them are functional and look nice, but you still have to deal with bad anti-spam filters.
> those usages are semantically different, and consistently so

They're very close to the same syntax, and the fact that they're significantly different just shows again that the CLI is a mess. If they're so different, they should have significantly different syntax. "space versus slash" is not significantly different. I'm sure I'm not the first person to create a new branch called "upstream/master" :P

The problem with git branch versus git checkout -b is that 99% of the time, what people want to do is create a branch and switch to it. The "create a branch and don't switch to it" could just be a flag on git branch. It DEFINITELY should not be two completely different commands.

> it's pretty obvious if you've taken half an hour to understand the underlying data model of Git

This is the biggest red flag about git's CLI. I shouldn't need to know the implementation to use the UI.
Getting a product out in the web development world includes getting it out for other browsers than the browser you develop in house. Otherwise, you won't get the early feedback you wanted. Especially when your application is working, with some minor glitches.

It's not like the application is completely broken in Firefox with the fixes mentioned. Bypassing CSP for your own domains feels like a hack that you shouldn't be able to do.
You have to admit it seems a little shady when it comes from the browser vendor. It would be fine if the message said, "we haven't tested this, it might not work, YMMV". Instead, the message says, "click here to download our product", the implication being they'd like you to convert to only ever using their product.
There are a smattering of media reports saying that they can attack LTE (the new system or upgrade is called "Hailstorm").

They are pretty thin though:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/cities-scramble-t...
People may indeed limit themselves to having only two, one, or even no children at all, but that will only lead to extinction of such self-limiting groups. Besides these, there also are people that see nothing more important (but not necessarily better) than leaving behind their own kind as offspring. Unless some effect kicks in, like a social drive that instill in the masses the idea of breeding less as it's in western culture, or a government-enforced program to artificially control the demographic dynamic as in China, these kind of people will prevail in the long run. And that's a good thing, I think.
I understand. So based on your experience, don't you think that writing down the specs and the expected return, combined with finding a smart programmer available to write code, could be a winning decision? I mean, there is nothing in this process that can be done to improve your efficiency and still be a win-win deal?
Thanks, good info there! After some digging, I realize calling it an alternative to OpenCL is wrong.
From their FAQ:

HSA is an optimized platform that will be leveraged to enhance the OpenCL runtime. HSA is not an alternative to OpenCL. HSA benefits OpenCL by removing memory copies, bringing low latency dispatch, and improving memory model and pointers shared between the CPU and GPU.
I saw this a BT in the UK the building services prt of teh comany got ideas above its staion and tried to move peopel out of central london.

All the new buildings had poor transport links - they even tried to move the head office to "a shead at heathrow" which was stoped when the ex engineer CEO used "engineering" language to F off
A colleague of mine has often said, "Regardless of whether you choose to use a framework or not, eventually you'll be regretting your decision."
As an outsider, the uncited studies sound suspiciously like the sort of thing that is guaranteed to generate statistically significant values with enough iterations...
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"The main cost is fuel and other chemical inputs, and the mortgage on the land itself."

Don't forget the capital investment for the actual machines, and the R&D spending required to even make them available. The big reason we do have a lot of our farming automated is because it was profitable to spend upfront capital on automation instead of manual labor which became inefficient/obsolete in that regard.
Google have produced a product which offers a great experience on one browser. They are happy with the performance of the application on that browser. They have no doubt tested it on other browsers and found the performance to be sub par. That application is clearly still in 'beta' mode (The app is still invitation only). I am sure that they will 'un-block' the browsers that Inbox doesn't perform well on once they've resolved the performance issues - I'm sure it's also not a slight against Firefox or any other browser. The alternative of course is that instead of this discussion thread we'd have a thread about how poorly Inbox performs on firefox which would damage the products overall reputation.
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I think it being a time machine trumps its being powered by plutonium: go to future for cure to cancer, come back, and just like that, the plutonium is irrelevant.
Thank you for posting this!

I just did some research and found out that the primary researcher on DRACO is Todd Rider from MIT. Now, when I saw that name, I said to myself, "Is that the same Todd Rider from MIT that did the thesis on non-equilibrium fusion reactors?". Apparently it is:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/todd-rider-has-a-kill-s...

I really need to meet this guy.
To me, it feels like Google has an unfair advantage on doing web applications when they can do stuff on their own domains that no one else can, unless they also develop their own browser with unique features.

And legally dangerous, too. It's as if they forgot entirely about the half a billion Euros Microsoft shelled out for doing precisely the same thing.
Whilst they may not be able to identify the nation responsible there's pretty good odds it was a Russian SSK. Everyone else operating in those waters isn't going to risk entering Swedish waters as they have an announced policy of using force against unidentified submerged contacts.
Entering foreign territorial waters submerged, especially of a nation with counter-detection capability and a military that may fire on you, is the sort of decision that goes right to the top.
What is a "blockbuster" drug? One that makes a lot of money for the various stakeholders or one that has a large impact on human health? I'm not sure I care too much about the former and it's not at all obvious how "level of confidence" would affect the latter. Yes, as a result of past medical progress it is more difficult to improve upon the current state of the art.

But new therapies have to compete with existing therapies in the market anyway. If a new therapy can't outperform existing ones, what actual value does it have? Perhaps drug companies should think about solving problems that aren't already solved rather than bemoaning their inability to reap massive profits while reinventing the wheel or pushing minor formulation tweaks to renew their patents.
Here are my unsolicited 2 cents on why not to work on Wall Street:

Solve real problems.

Don't be a second class citizen (e.g. if the firm is financial, software engineers aren't going to be CEO and that says something).

Make sure you have upside. Don't work in a job where your function is to maintain some legacy system and if it breaks its as if you lost the firm millions but if its running smoothly no one cares.
Out of curiosity how many people have pressure suits saved?
A more recent article addressing this essay from the same author:

https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/08/22/hacking-academia/

The tl;dr summary from this second article referencing the first:

a quick summary is this: scientific research in many
disciplines is becoming more and more dependent on the
careful analysis of large datasets. This analysis requires
a skill-set as broad as it is deep: scientists must be
experts not only in their own domain, but in statistics,
computing, algorithm building, and software design as
well. Many researchers are working hard to attain these
skills; the problem is that academia's reward structure is
not well-poised to reward the value of this type of work.
In short, time spent developing high-quality reusable
software tools translates to less time writing and
publishing, which under the current system translates to
little hope for academic career advancement.

I think the HN title is somewhat misleading, the central thesis from the original article is stated as:

the skills required to be a successful scientific
researcher are increasingly indistinguishable from the
skills required to be successful in industry

This is probably a stunningly awesome outcome - it means that industry has a place for advanced degree holders who will not find a classic academic position. In the linked essay above, from the same author:

the number of PhDs granted each year far exceeds the
number of academic positions available, so it is simply
impossible for every graduate to remain in academia.

I wish people would not use 'big data' as a label in these discussions. I think the essential truth is that being able to apply a scientific, quantitative thought process to problems combined with the ability to write software to provide others with solutions to those problems is valuable across academia and industry. That doesn't really have much to do with the 'big data' meme flaming across the skies these days.
Any thoughts on Aquion saltwater batteries? They've raised funding from Gates, DoE, etc... and seem to be market ready.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquion_Energy
This is timely, I have one today.
Or, you know, a third option. They could always do what every other web developer must and make their software progressively enhance so it works at the very least on a few major browsers.
Nope, but if I did, I would expect my employer to use civil means to deal with it. Not launch a multi-year, multi-jurisdiction criminal vendetta against me.

The incident certainly gives me pause about working for them...
FWIW, Safari (webkit) is mostly working. IE is, unsurprisingly, a train wreck.
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The two stats from this article that scream "avoid a tech career at Goldman" to me:

- total tech employees: 25% (8k/32k)

- total software engineers among new partner class: 7.7% (6/78)
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They also produced a product that leaks user data (mostly to them).

In their book, 'How Google works' they claim to settle with more what's best the user than their customer. That's such a bold claim when you are a monopoly.
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In case you haven't seen it, you might consider Fastmail [0]. They have a great webmail client, they just released native mobile apps (for both iOS and Android at the same time, wow!), and they are very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail.

[0] https://fastmail.com