skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its not about Eich - or, gasp, open source. Neither of those words capture the attention of your 'mainstream' users staring at their mobile phone as they walk down the street. Don't believe me, ask the next 20-something you see.

"Back in the day" (read: when the world relied on internet explorer) tabbed browsing was not a mainstream feature. Nor was pop-up blocking, containerized scripting(active-x anyone?) and browsing not being tied to window managers. Times have changed and now while we have diversity, we also strangely have more of the same. Aside from interface, Safari, Chrome and Firefox all offer very similar experiences. Those game changing features that made Firefox popular are now mainstream.

The stats mentioned above are interesting but should not be surprising to anyone here. Google has heavily promoted Chrome and built it in to the android platform. Apple has done something similar with Safari and iOS. No surprises here. Also, keep in mind that Mozilla walked away from an entire market of mobile users. (Source: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefox+ios )

Wrt moving forward, what about listening to current trends in the market? Security, privacy and speed all seem to be popular buzzwords these days (now, if more than ever). Why not focus here first?

Users have proven time and time again that unless there is a major compelling reason to change they will stick with what they know and what has worked in the past. With the built-in browsers being 'good enough', what reason(s) do they have to change?

Man, it almost seems like we've been here before..
Are you referring to the WaPo comments, or HN's?
Doesn't Apple use Webkit, same as Google? Isn't that functionally the same, except for Google's optimizations?
Reading the original problem, "Write a function that returns the sum of the two largest numbers in an array", I took the liberty of assuming that the input list would always contain at least two items.
Kafka is a message bus (for data in transit), not a store for data at rest. Sure, you could abuse it as an append-only log-structured primary data store, but then again, when you have a hammer, everything looks like your thumb, I guess.

Also, as another poster said, it has no indices, just an offset pointer.
On Saving the World and Other Delusions
In the US, I think the problem is that employers are MUCH more powerful than employees. That probably springs from the demonization of labor unions and weak employee protection laws.
It would take at least a nanosecond for each position. Given that 6x6 already has 62567386502084877, it would take at
least 724 days. To take "practically forever", 7x7 more than suffices:)
You win "Most Hilarious Bug" for the day.
This is a fairly standard 6th grade essay.
This sounds like a job for http://www.aerospike.com/
But everything that came after C hasn't improved on this, at all. In fact, languages now dominate that aren't compiled.

So as it stands, C is still your best bet when you are looking for that optimal translation. Intel has recently made some effort to augment it in ways to fully utilize new CPUs various parallel pipelines and specific functionality:

https://ispc.github.io/
Well, it would be interesting problem in combinatorics if you calculated the result in an interesting fashion.

Something like numberjack, which uses constraint programming for combinatorial optimization, would be useful and an article about how someone did this would be useful but alas the op is just a dull statement of a result and doesn't have much merit imho.
The software industry is broken for older engineers. Look at the typical algo/CS heavy interview today. It favors and selects for these characteristics:

1) Young, fresh graduates who still remember well the CS material. Or those who have a lot of free time and can study for these interviews (for example look at this Quora link http://www.quora.com/How-much-time-did-you-spend-preparing-f... the first reply mentions spending 28.5 hours per week for 5 weeks, which is 142.5 hours total) From a senior software engineers perspective that's a ridiculous commitment for something where an arrogant asshole interviewer can shutdown a whole onsite interview process because they're having a bad day or have some favorite question they think is the One True Question for determining if someone is a software engineer.

2) The software industry tends to overvalue youth. It has a very high salary at start, but also a very quick salary cap. And most companies have no technical ladder, and even those that do it's a joke compared to the manager ladder. All of this is not surprising. Since the industry is so heavily biased towards hiring and rewarding youth, older experienced engineers are not valued.

3) Senior software engineers have heavy pressure to leave the software field. I'm feeling this now. I'm a senior at my current place and my salary is basically capped. There would be little to no benefit going to another company. And even if I wanted to, I have a family now and don't have
the free time to study for software interviews. My options are basically go into management, consulting, or start a business. I have no desire to start a business or go into consulting because I simply don't like doing those business related things. I want to be an engineer not a business person. But if I just stay an engineer, I will probably get laid off someday due to ageism. And if I'm an old engineer who is laid off, job mobility is basically gone due to ageism and the CS heavy interviews that I don't have the time or motivation to study for. So the only safe path is management. A lot of senior engineers face this decision. Which again reduces the number of mentors and experienced engineers to teach the new younger engineers.

4) And doesn't anyone notice just how wrong whole concept of studying for an interview is? There's a whole book publishing industry dedicated to technical interviews such as Cracking the Coding Interview. The technical interview has become like the SAT. Many could just study to pass it, but be horrible engineers.
The memory usage doesn't seem that bad for a modern browser that sandboxes each tab.

How do you suppose they reduce the memory consumption for each tab without being able to reuse many of the content between tabs?
I appreciate how moderators sometime join in comment threads to explain their approach. HN moderation used to feel like a black box but I find the interaction with the community much better nowadays. Thanks!
If Mozilla didn't care about openness and just focused on making the best browser, what could they have done differently? They could have had H.264 earlier, but that's pretty minor. They haven't been hurting for money.
Then why spend the time and money producing videos about being open and choice. I am a person that is knowledgable about OSS, free software, etc. and even I don't care to watch them. Instead, maybe they should worry about user experience a bit more. For example, can they make the browser look a bit slicker by default? Less buttons, no separate search bar? It's just so 2006. Honestly, most users care far more about a nicer back button than your license. And if they want to stay relevant they have to appeal to the average person, not just the OSS activists.
They were unhappy to lose several hours of the rest of the company’s work.
No Google forked Webkit into Blink[1] about two years ago.

[1] http://www.chromium.org/blink
To add another data point, I'm using Firefox on the Mac with a half dozen plug-ins and I have never experienced pauses remotely like what you describe.

Furthermore, Firefox has been consistently smoother than my near-virgin install of Chrome. It's weird -- while Chrome definitely finishes loading pages a bit faster, it performs incomplete page repaints in the process, causing unpleasant whole-of-screen flashes as I jump from page to page. With Firefox, moving from page to page is butter smooth.
Google has put a lot of time and money into getting Chrome mainstreamed. IE Tab was a big help for enterprise adoption and that made more normal people accept it as a "normal" browser. Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome.

Firefox has responded well to Chrome for the most part, but when Chrome was released, Fx had some long-standing problems that Chrome obviated, and many in the tech community have been Chrome devotees since. Mozilla sometimes gets confused and makes bad choices, like manually reviewing all code that gets published in its addon store and refusing to ship patent-encumbered H.264 codecs, that further hurt adoption and reinforce the reputation that Firefox makes it "harder" than necessary to use the web.

Google made a deal with Adobe to fix up some of the stability and performance issues in Flash and they ship the improved plugin as "Pepper", part of Chrome; Mozilla still doesn't have a good solution for this, though it has a small start in Shumway.

Google built an internal PDF reader so that people didn't have to worry about Adobe Reader popping up as they clicked around. Mozilla eventually copied them, though Mozilla's reader is written in JS, and Chrome's is written in C++.

Google systematically attacked the most annoying things about internet browsing and dispatched of them effectively in Chrome, didn't make excuses about how the bad experience was Adobe's fault. Mozilla is less effective because it's usually too busy with infighting over what technically counts as "open" and what doesn't to get the real work done, or at least to get it done before Google has already shipped the change to their users.

I used Chrome for about 18 months full-time but have been back on Fx since version 4, so I'm not a Chrome apologist, but these are the reasons why Firefox isn't crushing Chrome.
Chrome has just too much momentum. Firefox has to be significantly better at this point to be noticed again, and right now it's somewhere between "just as good" and "marginally better".
Chrome no longer uses Webkit; it uses a fork called Blink. (Technically a fork of WebCore, the core of WebKit.) It's similar, but has diverged since the fork.
Ask HN: Best strategies, analogies and/or scenarios for teaching kids CS skills?
We're currently working on developing a teaching platform based around our BASIC interpreter DiscoRunner, and we would love to hear from HN readers as to what methods they've used in the past to teach kids computer science concepts -- which worked, what didn't, and why.
This will obviously be invaluable to us when it comes to working out the lessons that will be taught in our fight-to-save-the-world-from-evil learning environment, and we would be eternally grateful for any scraps of wisdom you could toss our way. =)

Thank you!
Isn't teleportation an incorrect word to describe what's happening? It seems synchronization would make more sense since it involves two distinct objects that are first entangled.
This is a bit tangential to the article, but the first paragraph stuck out to me.

For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side.

Back in my day, I was playing video games all the time, hacking them with debug cheats and GameShark. This was universally called a waste of my time by every adult I met, I had to go to great lengths to convince people I should be allowed to do it, and it's what on-ramped me to a super lucrative (and I hope useful to society) career in tech.

Yet here we've arrived at a state of affairs where most western children regularly spend inordinate amounts of time on walled-up instant-gratification video game platforms designed to vacuum money out of their parent's wallets, entirely detached from inspiring them to hack at things and go into technology. Somehow this state of affairs is perfectly normal and okay.

Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it.
Do you expect women to wear wires whenever they're sexually harassed?

Since the twitter response is predictable by now, and sexual harassment tends to occur over repeated interactions, it's surprising that woman haven't started to make recordings of sexual harassment before making allegations about it.
> The problem is not one of gender but one of power.

Makes as much sense as saying the problem of drunk driving is not one of alcohol consumption, but cars crashing into other objects.

Your gender has an incredibly strong causative influence on how much power you have.

So no, unfortunately we don't get to just eliminate gender from the discussion. It would make things easier, but no.

> I am sure every powerless black man, just before he gets
> shot on the street like a dog, can take solace in your
> assertion that his gender has a incredibly strong
> causative influence on the amount of power he has in society.

Wow. Not sure where to even go with that one. Surely you can understand that some events are... influenced by multiple factors?
Not really anymore. Google forked part of WebKit to create Blink[1], and both Safari and Chrome have their own optimizations.

I'm not sure how close to each other these rendering engines are. I imagine they're still very very similar, but now that the fork has occurred, time will tell how divergent (or not) they become.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(layout_engine)
Ask HN: Consumer privacy as a service?
Are there any tools or services for controlling the amount of public information about you?

Minimally, this could be a company that tries to remove you from consumer databases, or even just explains the modern vectors by which your identity and activities are captured and stored?
> Not all apps have taken this route. “The Hunger Games” lets you choose between being a girl or boy for free.

The Hunger Games app? As in, an app based on a book with a female protagonist? That's kind of like saying "Oh, hey, the Pride and Prejudice game lets you play as a girl!" It's a telling detail that could slip past if you're unfamiliar with the story.
Is there a process in place to handle such people? Do they get asked to leave (shortly after being hired), or are they moved to a role which doesn't require programming?
Why I won’t mourn Mozilla
This also has a lot to do with content summarization, for example, take a look at the "fifty shades text generator" and http://genopharmix.com/TuataraSum/
They actually forked WebKit and use Blink now, but they obviously still share a lot of the same code as the fork is relatively recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28layout_engine%29
Who knew that continually ignoring your userbase and changing things in ways they don't like for roughly a decade could have negative consequences?

The list is getting too long for me to even remember, but I'll try: they moved tabs to the top (can't even toggle it via about:config anymore), they killed regular download dialogs, they killed the regular status bar, they removed the ability to keep browser history but not keep download history, they radically changed their address bar search function (Awesomebar) and appearance and provided no option to use the old method people were used to, they made accepting a self-signed certificate more difficult than filing your taxes, they fought Debian over petty license branding issues (that other software had no issue with) giving many of us "iceweasel", they radically altered their interface to be a poor Chrome clone and killed all customization (can't put refresh button on the left, can't unmerge back/next buttons, etc), they started putting adware onto their new tab page, they made it so that extensions must be signed by Mozilla to be installed with no ability to override, they turned HTTP/2 into an agenda by making TLS mandatory in spite of the IETF's decision on that. They continue to blow off per-tab process support, and 64-bit Windows builds are still not mainstream. And that's off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more. Eich doesn't even have to factor into this, no matter which side of that you're on.

You can like or hate any one of those, and yes if you want 20 extensions you can mostly make it look and act like it used to. (Plus, they talk about removing all that stuff to simplify and unbloat the UI, and then they add useless crap like Firefox Hello in its place.) But each time they changed things and completely ignored their user's feedback, they lost a few more users to Chrome. I don't really like Chrome all that much either, but at least it's not a constantly changing target, where you never know what feature you're going to lose because of an auto-update.

Firefox's decline wasn't any one great catastrophe: it's been death by a thousand papercuts.

It's really simple: if you offer a feature at one point, and you want to keep your users happy, then you don't completely remove that feature from them in the future. You can default to something else, fine, but you make an effort for people who liked the old way. Microsoft understood this up until Windows 8. And it looks like they're relearning that lesson again a bit with Windows 10's changes.
A system administrator is going to most likely be using some sort of push tool or have Firefox in the default image - if they care enough to use it at all. In all my years of doing Network/Sysadmin (1999 - 2010), Microsoft always told us their browser was the best and easiest to configure with system policies... so the higher ups just bought it, hook, line and sinker. Never mind that Microsoft had never PROVEN that claim.
If your engineering org is 50-weeks-a-year structured around delivering stories and fire-fast and doesn't build in time for ramp-up, it has a good chance of spitting out ineffective hires. But most organizations --- and we worked with lots of them as a high-end engineering consultancy --- aren't structured like this. More importantly: it's disproportionately the larger organizations with bigger brand equity that tend not to be run entirely out of Pivotal Tracker, which feeds the resume effect.
Mozilla certainly seems to be far more effective at delivering UI features (especially inadvisable ones) than engine features, but it's important to keep in mind how Firefox extensions can pick up the slack better than for other browsers. NoScript is the leading example of this.
How could there be a purer application of Greater Internet F-wad Theory[1]? Both the founders and the funders[2] should be ashamed.

[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak
You bring up a good, valid point, but one that is mostly orthogonal to the issue at hand. To the victim, it doesn't really matter if the friction faced is caused by malice or bureaucratic ineptitude...whether it's the detective who personally doesn't give a shit, or whether it's a detective with a heart-of-gold-who-normally-would-givea-a-shit-but-doesn't-want-to-be-the-squeaky-wheel-tonight...the result is the same to the victim.

Also, in defense of the NYPD detectives, I do not think it was "corruption" that caused the issue...again, things are rarely so black-and-white, good-and-evil. The next day, I was assigned a more enthusiastic detective, and a week later, the suspect was caught by an alert detective who was made aware of the suspect's description. The better explanation is that my story fit the pattern/biases of the initial detective who feels he's seen this shit before, etc. etc., and in his years of work, feels he's entitled to some skepticism.

But again, whether it's the result of actual "corruption" or just "normalcy"...who can really tell the difference?
"(and wouldn't consent when sober)"

What you would have done sober is completely irrelevant (for both parties). Most states define alcohol related rape as "too drunk to consent." That is all we need to be concerned about.
A sentry turret robot using a Rpi2 to detect, track and fire at some object
As George Mallory said when asked "Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?"

"Because it's there."

The number of legal Go positions is a simply defined number that is easily approximated but an enormous computational challenge to compute exactly. I've made it my Mount Everest:-)

I also want to see if the number, written as 19x19 trits in ternary, corresponds to a legal position, which would be totally awesome (but at 1.2% the odds are against it).
Thank you. I asked because the expression "MPL with GPL exception" wasn't clear to me.

You may want to know that in the past few years, MPL 2.0 was released, which embeds a so-called "GPL compatibility" by default. In fact, it's a relicensing allowed by MPL 2.0 licensor.

MPL 2.0 still keeps an option for the licensor's software to never be relicensed, but they have to specifically use an "incompatibility" clause.
> Mozilla sometimes gets confused and makes bad choices, like manually reviewing all code that gets published in its addon store

To be fair, extension malware runs rampant in Google Chrome, so it wasn't necessarily a bad idea per se. Just perhaps not a great execution.
>If you report an incident to the police and if they find evidence of sexual assault, what company or coworker is going to apologize for them or criticize you? Especially if they get convicted.

I want to believe this, but this is a society where a bunch of pepople on a football team got convicted for rape, and we had op-eds lamenting that these people's promising futures were "ruined" by the conviction.
"The article wasn't talking about the browser's development but it's marketshare. To me it doesn't look like they have too much to worry about there. They are still ahead of Safari on the desktop and are still way ahead of Opera."

What's the leading browser on mini-computers and mainframes? Mozilla is not a significant player in mobile and that does not look to be changing and that's where we are headed.
Funny, the list you provide are all the changes I really like. I wish they made these sooner and more of these types of changes. Awesomebar, tabs on top, all that just makes good sense to me.
Whistleblowing is providing concrete facts that would hold up to scrutiny, outside the system that they should be reported.
If Firefox is to ape Chrome so much, it should just give up.

(Not a fan of Chrome.)
Insightful points, thanks! I guess from all of that, the optimist in me only sees "Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome." as an on-going threat.

On every other front FF is either at parity, will be shortly or already better. Plus Mozilla has the privacy card, which at least for me, means something. So... I'm calling it! This is the bottom and FF's fight back starts now :)
The one with the ST:TOS Enterprise crew and the balding guy reading 'Understanding BASIC' [1] (Future Past / cover of BYTE Dec 1977) is just...classic.

[1] http://www.gamesetwatch.com/silly/10.jpg
In my small amount of experience, reasoned application of Fitt's Law goes a very long way for ui design.
Unfortunately I don't think that Beacon is doing all that well. They recently had some layoffs.
Kids can impress you when you least expect it.

My daughter wrote this http://fingswotidun.com/cruft/MelissaStory.txt While she was on a trip. When she got back she promptly forgot all about it which drives me mad, I really wanted to find out where it was going. She was 10 at the time.

On the other hand I once gave her a mechanical typewriter and later found http://fingswotidun.com/cruft/TypingByMelissa.jpg
What's your plan to monetise this? Do you somehow get a cut for each one sold?
or deploy a package with some 3rd party... but it still takes effort, what are the reasons for spending it?
There's definitely a profit motivation for a company to not pay $80k a year while not getting anything for it. Something must be going on.
The idiotic Washington Post website actually makes the thumbnail image smaller when you click it. Fortunately, the URL of the image is hackable to get a full-size version:

http://img.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp-content/uplo...