skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firefox OS is a great idea, and if it was 2010 it would probably stand a good chance at succeeding with the correct launch strategy. But its not 2010.

This weekend I had a chance to play with a Jolla smartphone. Hardware wise it pretty good, and had some really good ideas, but the software was half baked. While in time both Jolla and Firefox OS could become great products, but time ran out a while back.

You now have to come to market with all the pieces (and then some). You can't adopt the "build it and they will come mantra" because unless you can give users a compelling reason to switch without losing functionality they won't come. The hardware wars are long gone. The app wars ended a few years back. We are now in the ecosystem wars and Mozilla (and Jolla) appear to have no answers for this (or have answers "coming soon").

The sad fact is that from here on out it's iOS and Android in a tussle neither can win, and unless the phone market resets itself like it did in 2007 there is very little anybody else can do.
Does this job pay? If so it sounds like a better deal than stacking books in the library or being a barista. If not, I'd pass. For volunteer work it's better to get involved with some department research that might lead to a funded RA-ship someday.
There are 500 pages à 15 tutorials on tutsplus about "design":

http://tutsplus.com/tutorials/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search%5...
Criticisms about online programming contests and algorithms-focused interviews
I've not seen it at all but you're right that there are some strange attitudes with some people and letting their children watch horrific things at a young age. Even on this very topic, some of the comments are "meh violence isn't a problem, I don't see why it would be disturbing to my child" which is clearly a case of desensitisation influencing the stuff they show to their children.

I have same many films that I wish I had never seen as I can't "unremember" things or wipe bits of my brain out. The incessant flow of violence in films only serves to desensitise: something is truly shocking the first time, not so the next time, and repeatedly it isn't shocking anymore.

To see that some people use their own level of how shocking a film is to THEM to decide whether to show it to their children is distressing; "I wasn't shocked, so why would my children be??". Very sad.
فيلم كابتن مصر
problem is, the hard part is not coding, the hard part is transforming requirements and workflows into logical structure a computer can understand.

that's the bottleneck, whatever the language.

the new literacy would be not just to see a lego construction and understand the pieces involved, but to see the final construction and to be able to recover the build instructions by sheer mind gymnastic.
You may mean slimmest.
Seven-figure salaries damage firms reputation
I quite liked the look of it till I spent time in Google Apps admin today! The dropdown control is completely broken, even in Chrome - you cant scroll without it closing on you.
What baffles me when I look at all these futuristic interfaces is that they do not take into consideration the most productive combination: keyboard+mouse+voice+3D depth. It would allow you do many things at once and as a result save time. Limiting users to gestures on flat surface looks nice and easy but isn't the fastest way to interact with stuff on the screen.
IQ84 turned me off Murakami for a long time. Count how many times he recounts the same incident in almost the same words (narrator, mother). Count how many times he mentions breasts and the shapes of them (it's likely the same number of times he mentions any female). I read book one and two and realised at the end of it that I couldn't bear to buy the third book just to discover what happens to the protagonists.
You are right, but this sentence makes sense in the context for which CompCert is intended.

The requirements of the DO-178 standard for aeronautics, for instance, are such that the choice for compiling safety-critical C code that runs within the aircraft is basically between either:

- the equivalent of “gcc -O0”, that is, an off-the-shelf compiler with no optimization so that source-level constructs can be mapped to assembly constructs and vice versa, or

- CompCert with optimizations, because the soundness of the optimizations can be justified to a level of formality such that it matters less to be able to trace assembly to source.

A source without much detail, but the best I can find within 5 minutes of googling: http://projects.laas.fr/IFSE/FMF/J3/slides/P05_Jean_Souyiris...
Everyone defecates too but I don't need to see that :-)
CloudSight: Send an image and receive a description of its contents
No movie ever scared me as much as stories. Because you can always close your eyes. But horrible story gets straight into your brain before you even know it's scary and stay there invoking horrors.
Coaching a Young Team Creating a Startup
> zo1's anecdote shows that at least some kids get lifelong anxiety issues from watching horror/slasher movies at an early age.

No it doesn't.

It shows that at least one person has lifelong anxiety issues that they attribute to having watched horror movies.

I don't have anxiety issues and I watched horror movies at a young age, maybe I would have anxiety issues if I hadn't? Maybe on average it has a positive effect on anxiety? Maybe it's completely unrelated. You can't draw any conclusions from a couple of anecdotes
Hedge funds vs Big data
Los Angeles police shoot, kill man on the ground
Enjoy Explosive Sex with a Large  Size – sexy shop online store
His last project was LightTable, and provided huge value to people. Can I ask if you ever even used it?
> program isomorphism in general is basically the halting problem.

How far does this go? On the face of it, for some system to determine whether program X halts period could be different from finding whether program X halts, given that some program Y halts. The fact that program Y halts I guess would count as an additional axiom in the system, and depending on details of program Y could be more or less helpful in determining that X halts?
Isn't the problem that children have unrestricted access to the Internet and various parts of it that are pretty much cesspools? If you jump in muck, you're going to get dirty.

I was surprised to see how little monitoring / filtering there was available on modern smartphones/tablets! Is there any filtering available on an iPad / iPhone? If so, I couldn't find it.

I certainly wouldn't want to give an iPad to my child and send them away for private browsing. The problem would lie with me in that I wasn't monitoring them; in the older days when you needed a PC, at least the PC could be in a public area of the house and everyone could see what was going on but it isn't so easy now.
Fantastic, recently I've been really wondering why this kind of thing wasn't looked at more - it seemed to me it'd be a lot more consistent than using wind turbines or solar energy.

The idea looks excellent - obviously not 100% on the environmental impact (and I wonder if we really can get a good idea until some years after it's finished) but surely it's much better than coal & nuclear options?
Ask HN: How Do I Improve?
I'm a sophomore university student in computer science, but only seriously started studying the field upon entering college. I've worked hard to apply myself and leverage my resources, but being surrounded by so many smart and experienced people and struggling to find internships for the coming summer has been discouraging lately.

So HN, how do you choose what skills to improve (whether for fulfillment or employability), and how do you go about improving in an efficient and effective manner?
It doesn't get close to “gcc -O2” (the page says within 20% of “gcc -O3”). It is only the most useful optimizations that are implemented in CompCert, at perhaps an implementation cost of one PhD thesis per optimization pass. But that is still better than no optimizations in contexts where none of the optimizations from an off-the-shelf's compiler could be trusted, as discussed in this thread.
I will start improving my communication skills for sure. Thanks for your comment friend.
What a strange expression. Does this mean to truly appreciate how good my car is I must drive it into a tree and wreck it?
Financial contract allowed people to go back in time and invest in the future
What I think it is not about the price. It is mostly about the utility of that thing and coolness factor.
We know that one of the reason Microsoft is not so popular now is that people don't think it as to be cool anymore. And Apple's products will continue to break records as long as it remains in fashion sense and is a status symbol.
Hell no. Crack, crack, knees and back.
Now now, you're confusing him with Milan Kundera
I appreciate your positive spin on this. I can't help but rant.

Perhaps the user experience is mostly there, but I would not describe it as fantastic.

For me the pain starts when you click in the "share what's new box". It's the first, most basic operation and it's bad.

For a start, I click on the left hand side of the screen the whole card jumps to the center of the screen. (at about 15 fps!) Why? Why does it move?

Not only am I forced to shift my attention from where I clicked, but everything on the screen reflows drawing my attention all over the screen.

Not only that, the icons all change size and shape, and a bunch of extra stuff is added. If you wanted a completely different dialog box, how about just a button that says "new post"

Next up lets have a look at "People I may know" box on the right side of the screen. I see a friend, and next to his icon is a button that says "Add". When I try to move my mouse over to click it, it's hidden behind a popup window that "rolls" into place (badly) and I have to check boxes to put them in specific circles.

Sure, as a developer I can see that this is an optimization of a two step process, but it breaking some basic rules about what a button is. To me its jarring and clunky. Is just weird.

I dont know what would be better, but how about some "circle" icons that I could drag my friends face onto? Too weird? How about a drop down at the top of the card that dictates what circle a new friend goes into.

I could go on and on and if anybody at Google is interested I will!
Sometimes when I've had a module of about 500-2000 lines, I have thought that much of it could be represented pictorially in a way that could also be understood by a machine.
CarGo makes driving easy for wheelchair users
I am sure that Hitler never had a diet of fast food and burgers, yet if he ate them constantly he'd get fat.

The same goes with what you put in your brain; if you watch slime, slime is more acceptable to you and what comes out of you is only a product of what goes in - slime. Just because someone in the past did horrific things doesn't mean we need to expose ourselves to a barrage of horrific things.
1) yeah there are lots of places that like free work, but in my opinion no one with a degree should be doing that unless it's charity. How do you find small companies? Easy. Just go to places where you are likely to meet people working in your field. Seminars, meetups, conferences.

I don't know about the UK, but here I would not even apply for jobs online. That is "front door" job hunting and it is a waste of time. It is so much easier just going to an event and telling everyone I meet "I have a degree and I'm looking for work."
There are a lot more people who can write a web app than a mobile app, by a factor of 10 at least. Give them a platform where it's trivial to make an app (easier than, say, Cordova/PhoneGap), and make it free, and you could easily disrupt the mobile market to a small degree.

If FirefoxOS is a success the next challenge will come from the fact that iOS and Android could easily have HTML5 apps too with a native WebviewUI 'player' app, and if FirefoxOS gets any traction their respective developers will add that functionality quickly. Hopefully, for consumers and developers alike, they'd all have compatible APIs so mobile apps would be truly cross-platform, but that's not very likely.
"No... but it might be the new numeracy."

Especially with all the tools people have to do raw calculations for them (hardware or software calculators, spreadsheet, equation solvers) the coding "benefit for people who won't continue it professionally" is similar to math education.

In both cases, the takeaway involves establishing certain critical-thinking skills, for creating mental models of a real or desired thing, trying to break that model down into solvable chunks, recognizing chunks you already know how to solve, and building upwards again.
Show HN: Ivancerust – 3D voxel renderer using raytracing, written in Rust
Ask HN: Investment Options
Where do you personally invest your money: savings account / fixed deposit / 401k, ESPP, bonds, mutual funds, Betterment / Wealthfront, individual stocks, personal algorithmic trading / Quantopian, real estate / own a house, lending marketplace, angel investor, founded a company with savings, or other.

Looking for HN's opinion around the best place to invest one's savings with recommendations for allocation percentages of net worth across investment options (more than one of these options most likely). If you could also provide an approximate of number of years in the industry that would be helpful (1-4 years, 5-10 years, 10+ years)

Example:
1-5 years in industry
Savings/Fd/401k 50%
ESPP 30%
Betterment / Wealthfront 10%
Individual stocks 10%
Resource deprivation. Competition. For a number of major nations, foreign wars.

For those in any of the member states of the "Coalition of the Willing", the illegal and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq has resulted in as many as 600,000 deaths (Lancet). That's one for every 512 Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Ove...

And that's merely human deaths. If you include animals slaughtered or killed in the name of humans (for food or as a consequence of human activity) it's tremendous.

It's about 35 million cattle.

116 millon pigs.

9 billion chickens.

271 million turkeys.

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/FactoryFarm/U...

And that's for food production.

If you look at wild birds, the numbers are pretty crazy.

100 - 120 million by hunters.

175 million by power transmission lines.

365 million to 1 billion by windows and buildings.

Again: hundreds of millions to a billion creatures killed by what is effectively static structures.

200 million to 3.7 billion by domestic cats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...

I'm not condemning this, actually. As I said, it's a fact of life.

But yes, we kill. All the time.
Happened to me with A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was 6. Also didn't learn my lesson, but never again in my life I had a nightmare. Freddie was really scary, all else can said to be a dream if Freddie isn't there. :)
This is probably a Philistine question, but how do we make sure the proof -- that CompCert works as intended -- itself is correct? In mathematics and science, it happens all the time that someone finds a mistake in a proof years later after its first publication.
>>That's what Alan Kay thought personal computers were going to be for.

This prediction did work out in one area that computing has always been significant: music-making. If you consider that your average synthesizer is an analog computer with a process pipeline, modern software has definitely fulfilled the modelling/simulation goals set by the pioneers in the early years. The average electronic musician using a computer to compute sound is well and truly driving a computing process with modelling techniques - though there is a very wide scope of variety between the interface being used to produce this result, it is true -nevertheless in the synthesizer world, these concepts have lived on and matured. Play with puredata (http://puredata.info/) or any one of the thousands of other sound modelling/synthesis applications out there and you'll see this reality.

The challenge then becomes to figure out how to turn your average business process into a synthesis, of sorts, which can be modelled in an analogous fashion ..
The piece argues that "[c]oding, like writing, is a mechanical act". It's certainly not the intent of the learn to code movement to teach typing skills! This statement seems to grossly misrepresent what people mean when they say "learn to code".

To learn to code is to learn to model systems. Programs are built from components -- abstractions -- and good programmers know a wide variety of abstractions and understand how to combine them to achieve the desired effect. A good program is one that accurately models the phenomena of interest, whether that phenomena is something as simple as "display the user's profile" or a complex simulation like a game.

Now I would agree that many of the current curriculums are terrible, and teach no great insight into modelling. But that is the fault of the curriculum designers -- often people who have neither great experience in teaching or in programming. That doesn't mean there isn't good work being done, such as the Program by Design team (http://www.programbydesign.org/).

In short, I think the blog post builds a straw man argument. I agree it absolutely belts crap out of that straw man, but that is beside the point.
It seems this is all based on a finding of "traces of wheat DNA"

Does that really suggest farming or trade? Couldn't it have just been wild wheat?
Climate Oscillations and the Global Warming Faux Pause
> To this day, I struggle being alone at night. I'm jumpy, imagine all sorts of weird and nasties creeping and crawling around the dark recesses of whatever room I'm in.

That is one of the reasons that I got a dog. Having another being in the house is a massive difference from being alone, even if that being can't talk and is a bit of a scaredy cat himself.
Well, maybe you should improve your Google-fu

"Get started with Windows Runtime apps. You can write a Windows Runtime app in a variety of languages, such as C# or C++ with XAML, C++ with DirectX, and JavaScript with HTML/CSS. Now you can easily create apps for Windows devices and Windows Phone from a single project."

Taken from https://dev.windows.com/en-us/getstarted

Free trainings and ebooks:

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/deve...

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2012/10/29/f...
Same in Emacs:

M-x artist-mode

Shift-MouseButton2, select Drawing → Rectangle
I don't communicate in programming languages, I just lack the correct word. I believe that art is more about impression and people's current subconcious and dreams than what is told or shown. Onirism, impressionism, ...

When you look back at old movies, which were lacking technology to materialize the subjects, they still managed to convey the essence. Today it's easy to have precision to appease the senses (CGI, 3D sound, 3D images, etc) but I don't find them an improvement over their predecessors (more often the opposite). Hence my idea that it's more about feeding the imagination than anything else.
JustYoyo - London, UK - Full time / Not remote

http://justyoyo.com/

JustYoyo is a FinTech startup building a marketing platform for modern retailers
powered by mobile payments. We're looking for diligent and enthusiastic
software engineers to join our engineering team and help us with:

- Scaling out our platform as daily transaction volumes grow

- Monitoring and alerting

- Robust fraud detection

- Statistical analysis of transactional data

Our product comprises iOS and Android apps and a set of Python microservices hosted on
AWS. We currently use Puppet, Django, Celery, RabbitMQ and Postgres amongst other
things, but are starting to rebuild components in Go.

We use Sprintly to manage our Kanban development process, with mandatory peer
review and test coverage for all work.

Our current vacancies:
http://yoyo.workable.com/
Show HN: Callitab- New tab extension -Manage todo list, news and weather updates
I would believe that if Web OS, Windows Phone HTML apps, Tizen, Blackberry, ChromeOS didn't already prove users and developers alike don't care.
In science it may happen because everything is based on a lot of assumptions, themselves based on our physical perception of the world, which may be proved wrong later in time.

Are mathematics subject to this kind of flaws ? There is a very restricted set of axioms, and almost everything else is based on formal proofs.
Don't even get me started on the crap cartoons show these days. Violence everywhere.
Tradiio turns recommending new music into a game that offers real-world rewards
Enabling unified is fine. Enforcing it, as Google did, against users' express wishes, isn't.

When my G+ and YouTube accounts were merged I ended up with (or as) the three top stories on HN (I've got a screenshot on Imgur somewhere, linked from my subreddit).

In December Google created a new "myaccounts.google.com" site where it's possible to manage Google accounts, including adding or removing services. While I can remove my YouTube account (there's nothing on it but history), it won't stay removed, thoughct that's in the cards. IOW: Google seem to be taking steps to disaggregate their offerings.

Several of the bigger blunders of G+ have revolved around both identity and bundling / tying. #nymwars, forced calendar integration (look up Robert Scoble's rant), the YouTube Anschluss. This is what Microsoft tried in the 1990s. Eventually people rebelled.

You cannot force someone to like you.

People want convenience, yes. But it doesn't mean it's got to be the same website for all of us -- I'd really like to see federated services solved.
There is value in communicating status of work via a central SCM repository. For binary files and locking this is particularly so.

The approach of Perforce where file status is tracked on the server provides this. There can be costs associated so it's not just a panacea for all SCM ills, but it's certainly worth considering.

One reason Perforce is so widely used in game development - it scales easily to Terabyte sized repositories straight forwardly.
The presentation tips you don’t know – City A.M
zo1's anecdote shows he has lifelong anxiety issues. Not sure how you diagnosed the cause to be horror/movies and not something else.
Genuine question: why do they do this? Is it to protect their customers from reverse engineers?
FWIW my post was awkwardly written, it might have been better to say I help a lot of people who are not all that tech literate and are also middle aged and elderly. I don't mean that people over a certain age are inherently in that category, just that there is a significant market there.
While formal proof is not perfect, humanity is not yet aware of methods to achieve higher assurance. It is basically better than anything else we have tried.
I cannot find what is the link with the city of Toulouse. As I'm currently living there, could you provide more details?
Surely the implementation of the mathematics may be subject to errors, just like any implementation of anything? There is nothing that is so perfect that humans cannot err while applying it.
Is there perhaps a market for Firefox OS among the few who care about privacy more than app availability? Or are they all happy using Cyanogen?

(Obviously it would be great if OSs were properly decoupled from hardware like in the old PC days before UEFI, but I can't see any way of getting back there other than a very long political slog. Title II gives a small amount of hope for that.)
Ask HN: So why does IPV6 appear to be irrelevant? Will this change?
As a user, developer or sysadmin, I appear to be able to completely ignore IPV6.

Is this likely to change any time soon? When will it start to be something that I must pay attention to?
Google's AI is now smart enough to play ATARI like the pros
Google Now is of course sending your voice clips to strangers: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/strangers-on-the-internet-a...