skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Several things:

As of recently, that trend has finally stopped: Firefox has started gaining (very) small amounts of market share recently. The point where the speed of user attrition slowed down was actually slightly before the Australis launch, but after that, the development sped up considerably.

Thus, it looks like Australis helped substantially with winning back users.

Plus, a few years ago, the competition was essentially IE6/7. Not hard to gain market share against that. Now there are several great browsers to choose from. Which I'd say is a fantastic development, even though I work for Mozilla.

Finally, there are the billions of dollars that e.g. Google pours into advertising for Chrome, which might have something to do how market share developed.
India: Airtel customers to pay extra for VoIP
> I'm always slightly bemused at how quickly people feel the need to rush into the next operating system.

The difference with this release is that it's a pretty big UI overhaul and some developer features such as storyboards for Mac aren't available on older versions. People who develop for the Mac or iOS have little choice but to upgrade.

I've been running Yosemite since DP 1, and haven't had any major problems yet. There are minor annoyances, but on the whole, Yosemite's feels like a step up over Mavericks(after using it for a little while). Although I should mention that I have a pretty beefy computer with 12Gigs of RAM and a decent graphics card.
What the Brain Says about Machine Intelligence
> I am yet to find a single heavily-unionized entity proving to enhance my experience as a consumer.

Unionization has nothing to do with your experience as a consumer.

> seem to always serve the interests of just the union members and in no particular way improve the experience of the consumers.

That's entirely the fucking point of unions - to serve the members.
Oops! Yes. 16 bit. I was thinking of the 8 bit data bus of the 16 bit 8088.

What about Micronix? http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/mnix_micronix.htm... - "As far as I know, Micronix was the only Unix-like multiuser system ever to run on an 8 bit processor."
I hope they unionize and demand higher wages. Higher costs for human drivers will increase the incentive for driver-less cars, right?
They do, it's called Windows Embedded, and OEMs customise it to include only the components they need.
I do it, though I do 30 hours so it's three 10-hour days, and I get 75% of my "normal" salary. I started out full time, and after about a year or so I went to my manager and said "how about I work 30 hours?" and he said "sure".

It's a big company which HN would probably scoff at, and we work with super uncool things like Oracle. But it's just a job, and I get to spend Mondays and Fridays with my young kids.
Yes, but it's not like you're going to spend that time saved doing an interview with someone else. I mean you've got the time scheduled, I just think it's rude of either party to cut it short because you're not 100% in love with every aspect of the job (or candidate). The interview is a process, go through it and collect your thoughts and assumptions at the end.
"The London Taxi racket"[1] were not just arguing about meters. They were also arguing about wheelchair and guide-dog accessibility.

[1] is language like that useful?
Replying to the other reply that exceeds the max depth one can reply directly to, to imply "human life" is somehow a magical infinitely valuable commodity is childishly naive. Human life is just an electrochemical reaction and like everything else in the universe has a quantifiable value.

If you're going to vote me down please explain how I am wrong and how not being able to put a price on life is more than just silly romanticism.
Full support for contributing to Firefox via git is coming: http://glandium.org/blog/?p=3413
How Tools Can Help You Boost Your Productivity?
Remote Working Over the Festive Period
This isn't surprising, actually. If you want to prove data is coming from a human, then you need to involve a proof of work system, like the guided tour puzzle or a Hashcash-like implementation, or both.
The level of detail in this post is insane. I wasn't expecting so much from a blog post.
We often forget to remember that chickens have not an human brain.

The subliminal (and fake) statement in all those articles is that the chicken are a sort of "small little people crying" living very sad lives because they don't live like humans do. This is simply terrible.

Living in a farm, even in the best of farms, at Texas or New Jersey, could be perfectly claimed as a totally artificial and unnatural live for the point of view of a chicken. They are rainforest birds "cruelly" placed at deserts or in states with harsh winters living inside for 6 months a year. There are many reasons because a chicken could not to want to go outside. The claimed "because the farmer is a jerk" is wrong often.

They can do this because they are adaptable, and they just don't care so much as we do. But this is NOT natural for this species. If we really wish that chickens live "happy chicken lives" maybe we should grow them only in countries like Venezuela or Brazil...
And yet..

Advertising works -- at least partially by mechanisms that do not belong in jury trials.
Which they're obviously not now, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Yes but if your house causes a black out to our city, or a fire that destroys a city block who's held responsible? You, the electrician? What if people die?

The problem with Randian Objectivism is it normalizes human death to solve micro economical problems. I'd rather have micro economical problems then human death.
> it's not unheard of to emulate a legacy/antique CPU on a newer one to make use of proven code.

It's probably less to do with using proven code and more to do with maintaining perfect bug-for-bug compatibility. You can't even reimplement the bugs you haven't discovered yet. Also, writing an interpreter for most microcode is fairly methodical. Depending on what level of detail you need to emulate (clock timings, interrupts etc) it could be quicker and simpler than digging up an old fossil of a developer who knows enough about the original software to port it for you.
In my mind, there is a difference between a tech scene and a startup scene. To me, where I live near Provo, UT is a tech scene. Almost everyone under 40 works for a tech company, some large ones like Adobe or Novell, and many small companies. Most of the small companies are stable. We are not high growth, we are solid small companies making a few million a year for a small group of employees, and have been around for more than 5 or even 10 years. We are not full of VCs. We are full of smart entrepreneurs who quietly work hard and make good livings. We do have a local university, which routinely graduates new people starting new companies.

To me, that is a tech scene.

I see no way that VCs and rapid growth / rapid failing companies would be better than this for the local community. If people want that scene, SV has it, and seems to enjoy it. Fine, more power to y'all. I just see no reason to try to reproduce it.
PowerPoint is all too often used to commit the fallacy of argument via misleading vividness.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_vividness
There were no chemical weapons in Iraq and no babies were killed. There wasn't any connection with Al Kaida.

The US lied about that and started a war. Why shouldn't they lie about North Korea?
Blog – Android Invitation code
There's been enough studies showing that people having more than 0 weeks of vacation is beneficial, good for productivity, etc. Unions have secured that for people in the US who would otherwise not have access to this.

A lot of social movements granting more vacation time to people in France happened through generalised strikes caused by unions.

The argument goes that since people can be more productive when well rested and not sick, then companies can in theory pass the savings onto customers. Whether this happens in practice is slightly independent of unions getting health care and vacation for the workers.
I agree that the fee is too high, but you're going to have a hard time convincing a middle-man to remove the middle-man.
Many organizations that have the problem this solves are already complex enough to benefit from LDAP. etcd is not appropriate to use outside a controlled server environment because it's not authenticated.
Maybe, but this is rather like using a Cyrillic letter in a Spanish-teaching website. "What language are you teaching anyways?"
Just curious, how would you describe what most people usually mean by "callbacks"?

I've always considered function arguments to functions like qsort() as callbacks, and from my interpretation of Wikipedia it seems to agree. Now I wonder if my interpretation has been overly general or if a more specific interpretation has become more commonplace.
What exactly are the mechanisms that do not belong in jury trials? What in concept is so bad about attorneys using AV presentations to make their points?

If the objection is that the prosecutor is labeling the defendant as guilty, isn't that the job of the prosecutor? And why can't defendants use AV presentations to portray their clients as innocent or point out contradictions by the prosecution?
I think the user was just listing things they are excited for. Not drawing relationships between them.
> Well, that's the difference between having a good public transport option and driving.

Why? He listens to podcasts and audiobooks, something which can be done while driving.
Anyone with a smart phone to use Uber is capable of researching though. If they don't research the onus is on them. I don't just blindly buy products, or hire contractors it's not 1950. I always read reviews first. The people HAVE the power to find competitors in their area. If they donee en try that's not anyone's fault but their own.
And happy belated Hanukkah.
Why do we need journals? Maybe they made sense at one time when it was good to have a (paper) copy in every library.

Now, they are arbitrary cliques creating disciplinary silos. Peer review could be handled with cryptography, including links to revisions, retractions, and updates.
> If we think jurors are dumb enough to be swayed by superimposing the word "GUILTY" over a mugshot

It's not a matter of simply thinking this might be an issue; we know it's an issue. And it's not a matter of being smart or dumb. It's just basic human psychology of the type that you'd likely learn in any introductory course nowadays. There's even a $500bn global industry (advertising) largely built around exploiting these same psychological heuristics.

And yes, you're right, that does raise some questions about the validity of the jury trial system. One could quite readily argue (and many do) that a lot of what we've learned about human psychology over the past few decades raises similarly disturbing questions about a great many other aspects of the way we handle criminal justice.
That is incorrect. Unionizing was strongly opposed throughout the industrial revolution. Look up Pinkerton's efforts, the Haymarket incident, many others.
Mostly because, unlike with Iraq, it's difficult to tell what agenda is being furthered by pinning this on NK.
Exactly. It is journalism what is falling apart, not the world.
Do you think it's also worrying that we all communicate in English? Is the English language a stagnated monoculture?

Pandering to language fanboys isn't a good idea. Javascript is a good enough language, and if you don't like it, write in something else and compile it to javascript.
> seem to always serve the interests of just the union members and in no particular way improve the experience of the consumers.

Serving the interests of the union members - representing them in their negotiations with management, to be precise - is a union's reason for being. They might also hold their members to a standard of professional ethics, depending on the union, and that might or might not benefit you as a consumer, but that's not the immediate goal.

> Are there documented cases of industries or even governmental sectors where unionizing - whether in America or abroad, say France - has proved immensely beneficial to the consumers and patrons?

The example that leaps to mind, in part because the comparison is so easy, is the press. In my town the difference in quality of output between journalists who are members of the guild and those who are not is quite noticeable.

Whether you want to credit that to the union, or the fact that better journalists are also better career strategists or something, is up to you. You're focused on the wrong thing vis a vis unions. They are there for the workers, that might or might not play out well for the consumer.
I told my girlfriend about my startup product, here is what happened
IANAL but (in Ireland) liability usually stops with the company unless the directors are shown to have acted outside company law.

Given that Uber's business model seems to be based on "fuck the law, we'll do what we want" - in my view is that the management, morally, can't rely on that same legal system to insulate them from punishment.
Maybe Adobe Flash doesn't work with pure Wayland, but needs X? So with Shumway you wouldn't need an X compositor (at least for Flash)
If this was a different company in HN people would be clamoring that everyone else needs to get with the times and that this is just our favorite buzzword "disruption" at work. It doesn't apply to uber now, I guess just since they've crossed the invisible HN "us vs. them" threshold now that they have a lot of money.
Well when I mean 'work', I mean that in the research sense (since for me that's 'work' :) ), and what I see and hear on conferences and symposiums, so I don't have any easy links. There are some FP7 projects that worked on this (search e.g. the Urbact websites, the FP7 website under transportation and sustainability themes, the Interreg website under the respective themes etc) and there are also many calls in Horizon 2020 that cover these aspects. There were some calls in the past in ICT subjects with open submissions that were won by projects working on crowd-sourcing and serious gaming applications that also covered this subject.

Furthermore (and again without having anything concrete at hand), there are regularly articles that cover aspects of this in the usual journals: European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, Transportation, Transportation Journal, Transportation Science etc.
I just saw this new recaptcha implementation on another site and spent about a full minute playing with it. If you mouse over the checkbox and click it, if you move your mouse while the spinner is "working" it magically confirms that you are a human. If you click it and don't move, it asks you to solve an image captcha, presumably to detect programatic click events. Coupled with the cookie store, I don't see how this is any better. I give it 2 weeks before it's just another hoop for bots and two more hoops for humans to deal with.
Author went for USB oscilloscope. Do not follow his recommendation if you like good quality usable tools. Sainsmart dds120:

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/sainsmart-dds120-usb-o...

"scope is advertised as 50Ms/s while the ADC runs at 40MHz"

40MHz sampling means its usable for signals up to ~10MHz. Its ok'ish for arduino level of tinkering.

If you like this type of old school hardcore hardware hacking check those links:

http://n8vem-sbc.pbworks.com

http://www.s100computers.com

Those guys are actively building 20-30 year old computers from scratch. Most modern (and probably the fastest) is 386DX/486DLC board

http://www.s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/80386%20Boa...

On the other end of the spectrum is virtual hardware hacking. MAME project has a less known offshoot branch called MESS. It emulates old computers on a logic level with single clock cycle precision (not instruction, its clock accurate!). To get you idea of what that means imagine sound card emulation. Sane person would map buffers and pump samples to your host sound API. MESS people on the other hand desolder chips from old Sound Blaster 2.0, DECAPSULATE Intel microcontroller responsible for DMA, read its rom content. Emulated sound card runs this rom dump on virtual Intel 8048. Same with Keyboards - they emulate 8048 with its rom content inside keyboard, and 8051 sitting on the motherboard with its individual rom content! :)

This is pretty crazy and inefficient (C++), but extremely accurate. Emulated hardware ranges from 6502 (and all of its individual sub models like 6510, 6509 etc) to 486/586 processors and 3DFX cards (again emulating low level functions, no opengl mapping there).

http://www.mess.org
"I don't have time for that" should be translated as "That's not a high enough priority for me to make time to do it."

While we live in a world where setting our priorities one way (more money, less time) is facilitated by everything from labour laws to social conventions, we do have a choice to set them differently.

There are two prongs to this: 1) setting our personal priorities differently, and consciously accepting the trade-offs that involves and 2) promoting social and corporate policies that enable our preferred priorities.

Setting personal priorities may involve simply not working through lunch every day and ramping up from there.

Promoting social and corporate policies may involve things that facilitate telecommuting (reflecting the discussions here on the time-cost of commuting) or a move toward more European-style labour policy, which doesn't seem to have harmed European productivity (http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states). That's another way of saying the Anglosphere all-work-all-the-time ethic is really inefficient, and who wants to be inefficient?

For many people, though, leisure time is over-rated. People work long hours because they value their working hours more than their leisure hours, and set their priorities accordingly. There are a lot of reasons why people have those priorities, some of which may be related to how bad we are at judging what is likely to make us happy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...
Isn't this essentially how Wal Mart operates in the US today?
So this is probably a little Marxist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance? In other words, money is more powerful if you can buy a robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs.

On a micro level, I see this as a worker figuring out how to do his 8 hour task in 4. Boss man says great, now you can do this other task for 4 hours also instead of going home at noon.
I can't disagree that any of what you say is possible (see also: orbiting teapots), but what makes your theory, not just possible, but more likely than North Korea's actually being responsible?
Like you, I always have a charged battery, a data connection, and the time to conduct research.

I also have a PhD in chemistry, and I find this knowledge invaluable for assessing the potential for harm of all food additivies and environmental pollutants. I find this nicely complements my medical training, which of course helps me make the best decisions regarding my health, and my PhD in CS which keeps my data safe online. Of course my 15 years of MMA keeps me safe on the street, and my extensive knowledge of finance means I never have to worry about my bank's financial security.

I really don't understand why we need any governmental organisations!
I understand your point but there's a much less stifling middle ground. Unions can be grand things until a line is crossed. Higher wages for drivers? Sure. Safety and insurance? Absolutely. Prolonging the adaptation of a technology that will replace the dangerous alternative (humans operating cars)? Please, no: this job market is now dead for drivers. It's time to move on.

Or should we go back to horse-drawn carriages in consideration of the unemployed buggy drivers?
UX for Wizards
Start Planning for the Sale of Your Business on Day One
I was also wondering how popular LDAP is? If you are thinking of using Hologram, or can benefit from it, would you please comment and mention if you already use LDAP or some other alternative?
>algorithms dynamically find us the optimal code for doing X

Likely will never happen.

For example:

~Counting sort is awesome with low range on inputs.

~Quicksort on user inputs is an attack vector because of O(n^2) worse case run time (CPU consumption attacks).

~Merge Sort is nice on user inputs b/c of its static runtime.

Without understanding the context of when and why sort is called, and what sort will be sorting you can't make an informed decision of what algorithm to use. A lot of this nuance escapes even very senior developers.
Oh, hey you're in the thread. You're really confusing matters by using the term "Public Domain" in a way that really doesn't mean what you are trying to say (though I'm not at all sure what that would be). Please see the post I made elsewhere in this discussion that may clear up matters a little: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792829

(FYI, when I speak of "rights" in this post, I mean "legal rights", which I personally distinguish from the ethical ideas of "right" and "wrong"--I'm just explaining legality, there is no "ought" in what I say here)

> What I was not aware of is that the copyright notice required by BSD is useful only in asserting the right of the copyright owner to swear away virtually all of the protections normally granted by a copyright notice. It is a legally castrated copyright.

Um, what did you think a license would do? That last sentence, it's pretty much exactly the definition of what a copyright license does (if a little strongly worded).

Copyright is automatic. It only affects works (in your case, written code), not ideas (such as algorithms). You start out with all these rights about copying, distributing and broadcasting that particular work. These rights are exclusive, they belong only to you. That is default copyright, when you don't license anything.

Indeed exactly what a license does, is "castrating" (if you will) your copyrights. You can (partially) grant these rights to others, under certain circumstances, thereby diminishing the value of your own exclusive rights. That's what it does, a license defines under what circumstances you give up your right to exercise your copyrights, with respect to other people.

You start out with full exclusive rights, and a license formalizes how much and under what circumstances you are willing to chip away those rights and share.

Yet again, I must stress, copyright only applies to a "work"--a legal term, in this case referring to the written code of your project, and in general specifically not referring to ideas.
Comparing taxi pricing to food safety is crass. Last I checked there weren't degress in taxi fair-ology.
This has advertising and spam written all over it.

How nice just as you pass Benny Giraffe store:

"Today 50% off healthy biscuits for Giraffes."
Innovative Services Are a Huge Boon for Startups
Transfer Data from PC to PC
Empty Node Module Memory Usage
He has built a writing career out of writing books about cognitive science and language, and then more recently diversified into history and writing style.

Exactly one of his books, so far as I can tell, has anything to do with telling anyone "that everything is fine". But it doesn't claim that everything is fine (only that violence is on a long downward trajectory).

I'm guessing that your real objection is to The Blank Slate, which you see as justifying entrenched discrimination. I'm not at all convinced that it does any such thing, but in any case it's a long way from "Pinker wrote one book that some wealthy right-wingers might find comforting" to "Pinker's writing career is built on comforting wealthy right-wingers".
BitTorrent’s Project Maelstrom: Decentralizing the Web Browser