skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lazy answer is that >95% of users have images and JavaScript enabled, and of that 95%, those who have a slow connection are getting the same experience across a number of websites, so they probably won't be turned off by a slow site.

The better answer is that unless you think about it from the start, providing a no-JS fallback can be hard to do well and may require a fair bit of re-architecturing of your website or web app - something that you probably won't bother doing to do for a single digit percentage of your visitors (text-only support probably has a lower priority than supporting <IE9 and Opera Mini). Finding out that images won't work is also pretty hard - they're no way that I know of finding out if images are enabled or not without using JavaScript, which is probably disabled as well.

I've actually been creating a reasonably complex web-based application recently, and for fun every few weeks I test it using Lynx[0]. Technically, using forms and very basic CSS results in a fairly usable service. I managed to get a working CSS3-only (no JS) fallback for tabs, some toggle buttons and some other UI goodies. The only problem is that I end up duplicating a lot of stuff on the backend of the app (because I have to deal with both form submissions AND ajax), and there are a lot of things that you can only really do with JavaScript and images (e.g. games, most interactive stuff without reloads, anything to do with images obviously).

EDIT: regarding advertising, rarely do (effective) advertisers online want the largest audience specifically, they want the most engaged audience. Is this no-JS and no-images user interested in downloading an app or a pop album? Probably not, so it's not worth putting in the effort to make them see your ads.

[0] http://lynx.isc.org/
You don't need to use RC4 to support windows xp with IE8 - you can even get away with using TLS1.0 and above. If you need to support IE6 though, then yeah, you're stuck :/

The cipher list below (for apache) should work just fine with XP/IE8 and later, but still net you an A+ in ssl labs, with a bit of other work.

SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA128:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA128:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA128:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA128:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA128:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA384:AES128-GCM-SHA128:AES128-SHA128:AES128-SHA128:AES128-SHA:AES128-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:HIGH:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!MD5:!PSK:!RC4
SSLProtocol All -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLHonorCipherOrder On
The loss of NPAPI is what's going to drive me away. If they stick to their guns and drop NPAPI in 42 including the flags, then I'll finish my transition to making Firefox my new main browser. I've heard the arguments for why it shouldn't be present, I've heard Google's argument for a more pure web experience, but quite frankly I don't care.

I don't like Google's "our way is the only way" vision for the internet, where Chrome has morphed into an operating-system like amalgamation of resource heavy proprietary features, while simultaneously shutting down flags, features and settings that power users rely on to wrestle back any control at all of our own personal browsing experience.

Chrome was a great step forward and I will remember it fondly, but it really is post-peak on the technology adoption curve. Google is focused only on that giant laggy late adopter side of the curve and simply could not care less about early adopters and bleeding edge users anymore. If you feel like Chrome and Google actively design against our use cases -- you're right, because the laggard phase of adoption is in full swing and we're, once again, pointless nothings and easily ignored voices, drowned out by Google's Master Vision.

Oh well, Firefox has really solidified into a nice product these past few years, even if they are following Google down the stupid proprietary forced-bundled of useless features (here's looking at you, "Hello", which I ironically am not allowed to say "Goodbye" to).
So, this is the so-called "intelligent design"?

I think not.
YouTube to mp3 – Django souce code
I haven't been able to check it out fully yet, but all this hour of code stuff looks amazing!

Being able to launch a little tutorial project right in the browser with videos and all, for free...great job Microsoft!

I'm not a teacher but I can already see the amazing educational potential here. I love helping people who are learning to code, and then watching them complete their first small project on their own, very satisfying; this is a great tool.

Edit: The more I keep looking at this the more excited I get...really great job Microsoft Research!
needs to improve before i'll be asking it to automatically order my dessert ...

https://www.imageidentify.com/result/0fmiowetw4u07
Men need to open up about depression, not man up and keep quiet
The blind spot is not huge. It's easily compensated for, and it appears the mammalian eye has other attributes that make it work well. We just don't have enough data to understand whether mammalian eyes embedded a major problem that had to be compensated for, or if this design has attributes that make it desirable.
Repeat of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544311
Yeah. "It could follow me whilst I mow the lawn!"
I actually just found this single mention of Google engineers specifically addressing this in the next major build of Chrome. Maybe there is hope after all:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453303#c...
I switched off of Chrome on all my personal PCs for Firefox about a month ago and I'm happy I did.
Still am but with a different nick.

MichaelCrawford got banninated because Rusty was worried about getting sued for defamation when I satirized a formal client.

I'll explain in detail later but just now I need to sleep.

My current nick is "Repeatible Hairstyle".
Feedback wanted for new shopping app
Hello there, we are launching Social Reviews, its a social network that makes shopping fun as its like having your best friends shopping with you. We would love to have feedback. Up for the test? Thanks
I view 'entertainment' as a recall to primitive satisfaction brain response in our first months of life. That's why we kiss who we 'love' (eating him symbolically), etc, etc
Rachel Whetstone leaves Google communication role to join Uber
But if they call it a quantum computer enough times it's almost like it is one, right?

Troyer's group has done some great work looking for any quantum speedup from one of these annealers, for example: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6195/420
Very nice. But why not have full keyboard support for the PC ?

I'm working on a very similar experimental editor for Clojure/lisp and my intention is to make it vi-like - navigate and perform the edits with the keyboard.

Some other ideas I'm experimenting with:

Customisable icons or even specific shapes for functions.

For example the function "show loading screen" can be represented as the actual visual screenshot of the loading screen.

The idea is to get rid of most of the syntax and leave only the user-defined names.

In 'interactive' mode, each form (block) can be executed and arguments can be entered right inside it.

Each function block could have a 'back side', where all the meta data about the function resides, like documentation and unit tests.

So visual programming is a new hot topic and there's a lot of stuff to explore in this area.
It's really not. People used to pass the bar without ever going to a law school.

The entire profession has been captured by educational institutions. It's a posterchild for what tech should not allow itself to become.
Furthermore, I thought Medium was supposed to be a place for quality story-telling. Guess it's jumped the shark, too.
James Simons (full length interview) – Numberphile
For those who don't know who he is:

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

The interview is incredibly fascinating.
Wow, that's a pretty big share of websites to ignore by not supporting SNI.
Better than being wrong about stuff you’re not interested in, I guess.
Desert Island HN Discs
The BBC has a programme called "Desert Island Discs" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Island_Discs) where a well known person is asked to choose 8 pieces of music, a book and a 'luxury item' that they'd select if they were marooned on a desert island.

If I were such a person I'd take Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics (I won't bore you with the musical choices).

What would you take? And what would you want to listen to?
>From my perspective "communicating mastery" is exactly what you describe. I am limited to the context and expectations of a classroom. So students being able to pass tests is at the root of "Communicating Mastery" whereas mastery itself would be the ability to do the job in "real life"

Even in my own personal life, I often reach a point where I'm internally better at a subject than I can express it even in a natural setting. So I do think there is still a concept of internal mastery and that it does have use for self reflection.

Most often this is when debugging some complex application and getting an intuition as to where the application is broken. It still takes more time before I can express my mastery of the issue in the form of a fix and in some cases even more time before I can give a sufficient justification for why the fix works.

Recently I fixed on issue by applying a sort to a list being traversed by a function calculating something off of it. It was weeks later before I figured out why the sort was actually needed (when working on a related issue), there was just an intuition that the list needed to be sorted.

>The real problem at this point is not how a specific test is run, but rather that our education systems has trained students to think inside a very small box when taking tests, and students become often paralyzed with indecision when asked to act outside that box. Most of my students have never experienced socratic method, and are honestly scared of it.

Yep. Helping little siblings with homework, I'll sometimes ramble off topic and they will try to steer me back to helping them get the right answer. So I then tell them "Yes, the teacher just wants the right answer, but the ramblings are going to be what actually helps you later in life." I found that professors who ramble off topic and bring it back on topic are some of the best because they show how all the sterilized knowledge actually matters.
It saddens me that one who seems to have technical talent in science can fail so miserably at social interaction, with probably fatal consequences for his scientific career.

At the same time the behaviour of the professors gives me hope. Several kindly and patiently tried to help him despite him being rude, offending and egocentric.

Finding his behaviour positively entertaining is sadistic, and I'd find it contemptible and disgusting.

I agree that what crackpots are missing is not scientific method or technical talent but social integration and interaction. An early, informal and honest "this idea is non-sense" can help a lot.
I'm an accidental convert. Since upgrading to Fedora 22, I've found myself using Firefox almost exclusively for both normal browsing and webdev. Previously I was 100% Chrome, and I've somehow transitioned without really thinking about it nor meaning to!

(IMHO Chrome's developer/debugging tools are more pleasant to use, but Firefox is getting there...)
The badge-scanning is a good indicator that they're wasting their time... As is evident by your reaction. If they would just spend 1-2 minutes chatting with you, they'd be able to send you much more relevant information or even immediately schedule a demo or whatever their high-touch sales process entails.
A nice picture of laryngeal nerve 'hack' pushed to 11: http://blog.eternalvigilance.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/g...
Been beta-testing this, and it's really really great! Excellent for small diagrams in code comments.
Aren't there multiple rings for the South Pole solution? There's the solution where you head south, circle the pole once, and head back north; then there's also the one (starting slightly further south) where you head south, circle the pole twice and go back... and so on.
I am really excited about this. I'm curious if I can write a novel in this thing (or copypasta into something else), while mixing in visual cues (shapes, drawings), so I can scan a huge text file (hundreds of thousands of words) very quickly and always know exactly where I am.
Love it. I starred it, as a reminder to create/contribute new icons, in the future. :)
Why 'Release' Is a Four Letter Word
I'm not aware of any non-Google sites that are optimized for Chrome, but Google's Search and literally every single one of their products was optimized for Chrome using the SPDY protocol. This was the major one.

https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/
Also, IIRC, sinus covered in soft draining muscles that oscillate or contract at a slow frequency. That's why you often have one side occluded while the other is not, and after a while the opposite. It's just the way the machine ticks, no need to fight it, only patience.
thenextweb.com has just lost Javascript privileges in my browser for using a dirty trick to push ads. As a matter of fact, after disabling Javascript, I didn't read the article and I won't be talking about the article or sending other users to the site by linking to it.

I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, but instead I'm talking about this horrible advertising technique and that should be OK with anyone who supports Internet advertising because that seems to be what you want. Let's start off talking about something else and then maybe we'll get to the article you came here for.
This mode is a lot better and less frantic. Although when the next line falls it does break your heart :)
Little buggy on desktop chrome, but may that is not the intended browser?

http://i.imgur.com/QVzTlqD.png
Instagram's version is more traditional image stabilization. It uses gyroscopic data captured alongside the video to help calculate stabilization. This is all done on the device.

Microsoft's version uses post processing on their servers to generate a 3D model of the scene. They then synthesize a new video based on this data.

Microsoft's approach is more time intensive and can lead to strange artifacts in the video. But lets them generate a smooth video if, for example, the person wearing the camera glances around quickly mid shot.
I would love for Chrome to spend an entire version's development focused on reducing memory. I haven't heard of any focused effort in this area from the development team, has anyone else? I know computers are coming out with increasingly large memory, but I don't want that taken up by a sluggish browser.

For all my complaints with Chrome, there's not an alternative that's attractive enough to entice me to switch (yet).
Anything that has an energy can be turned into a temperature by dividing by the Boltzman constant k_b (units: Joules/Kelvin).

The meaning of that temperature can be hard to interpret, though. Temperatures make the most sense when you are thinking about thermodynamics, not when you consider a single isolated particle.
She's too far from the phone office for DSL, and she is completely convinced that were she to get comcast cable, no one would ever be able to email her, ever again.

Oddly she is completely cool with using webmail from cybercafes - she travels quite a lot.

Mom isn't stupid, she only acts that way.
"Difference between Microsoft's and Instagram's Hyperlapse" http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/hype...
How many people actually browse from server editions of Windows? I remember that I skipped XP because I could not stand the Play-Doh interface, so I went from 2000 to 2003.
After reading this, it made me wonder... what was the first use of a real button?
Hi Yev, just want to say that I love these posts that Backblaze does regarding drive reliability. Thanks.
I'm glad you bring that up, because these are the kinds of things you should cite to refute someone claiming that biological life bears the signs of an intelligent designer, supernatural or otherwise. What distinguishes intelligent from naive optimization is the ability to refactor instead of just making local improvements.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward refuting IDers by claiming that the very prospect of discerning intelligent from unintelligent signals is "unscientific", which is so wrong that it can only survive by groupthink. E.g. How do you even know it's a voice on the other end of the phone rather than static? How do you know the marks on paper are words rather than accidents?
Curious- what tasks do you do that are reliant on NPAPI? Job related or personal?
The muco-ciliary escalator usually takes care of that.
The Instagram app, I believe, relies on gyro data from the phone to sync and align footage seamlessly. However, this would not work from, say, a GoPro camera or video from a DSLR.

The Microsoft product is not limited in this way from what I recall of their research. It is much more robust.
Hi there, Monodraw developer here.

I think it should be entirely possible. Different parts of your novel can just be different shapes and you can arrange them on the infinite canvas as you wish.

In addition, Monodraw now supports embedding of pictures on the canvas, so you should be able to have additional visual cues.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any specific use cases in mind - always happy to hear more from our users.

Thanks!
Pretty cool. Just sent this to my daughter to look at as well. She liked code.org's visual building, till it got in her way. This looks like you can dive into actual code if you want to. I think she'll like that.
TLFormView: The Form of the Future Is Here
Would be more useful on the server. I don't know how it is impplemented, I guess it uses canvas, fortunately there a few serverside canvas implementations available.
Write an article on medium.com and ask!
Twitter is a crowded bar
Hackers Gaining Access to Starbucks Accounts
Marketing Startup Percolate Raises $40M More
If there is a way of saving the result and posting it to the server (caveat: I have no idea if there currently is, there almost certainly isn't in a "95 of web users will have a compatible client" sort of way) then you could use this to remove some CPU load when accepting images that you want to watermark before presenting to other users. If it is your image being watermarked you are unlikely to circumvent the process.
Worldwide Warning
Hello,

We invite you to read a book titled "Worldwide Warning", which includes a part of our investigation for 15 years.
We have attached the book in PDF format to this message.
http://www.oriaslevel.hu/files/get/U628l_rhDy/worldwide-warning.pdf

Yours faithfully,
ConspiracyLabs team
I moved back in with Mom because the old friend I was living with was having a spat with his landlady. They are business partners, she blamed me for him slacking off on his work.

He and I blame her for being a control freak. I didn't want to come right out and say so to her face.

I figured it would make peace between my friend and his business partner were I to move out of her house.

I read lots of articles - that's why i hang at hacker news.

I write them too.
i dont have any issues with chrome. love my chromebook and my browser it is synced to all my devices.
A First Big Step Toward Mapping the Human Brain
Microsoft's method allows to use any previously recorded footage and stabilize video by doing frame by frame comparison. Whereas Instagram uses motion sensors which are recorded along with the video.
So Instagram's method won't work for any videos not recorded with their app.
That caniuse link refers to mobile safari. WebRTC in iOS is supported for native apps
the Simpsons died years ago
Do you have any data supporting that? I genuinely was under the impression that the number of sites actively using SNI was quite low.
I'm not a big fan of wordpress but it is undoubtedly a great tool to have in your toolbox, specially when your customers need user-friendly blogging tools or a quick CMS. I've installed for some of my clients Django blogs (with Django-CMS), rails-based blogs, and even a couple of Ghost installs. Nothing has beaten wordpress so far, clients love its versatility...

What I do to fly under the radar of many of the bots and automated scripts targeting wordpress sites is using a modern wp framework: roots bedrock[0]. This gives you a convenient time windows to update wp when you have the time (although with bedrock it is really easy with a couple of commands)

[0] https://roots.io/bedrock/
Are you ready to pack your app with a cool geolocation feature?
New domains revitalize phishing campaigns
Behind Zendesk: CTO Morten Primdahl on the Challenges of Going Global
> It's funny how there's still a considered-harmful goto buried in the language, even though they don't call it that.

Not quite. GOTO allowed you to jump anywhere in the code, for any reason, at any time. Java's Label only really allows you to break out of a loop and jump to a label that was previously defined before that loop.

It's mainly used for breaking out of a set of nested loops on some condition.
Well I would hope that nobody would refer to Palo Alto as "utopia" unironically, but unfortunately that is basically the attitude that the Bay Area and California as a whole do seem to hold about themselves. It oozes from the place in a way that's more than a little offensive to visiting outsiders.
What's the dirty trick? I doubt the author is aware of it, or had anything to do with implementing it. Can you elaborate on what TNW is doing?
Ambitious teenagers are flooding into San Francisco
It's also funny to sometimes see the same people who say goto is bad, use break and continue heavily in their loops. Which are only tad better than goto and often just as hard to read.
I was seeing some of the problems discussed in the article. Chrome had slowed over time, and tabs were frequently hanging or crashing. I usually have around 30-35 tabs open across several virtual desktops on my linux machine, and the whole browser would hang for around 5 minutes whenever they were restored on a browser restart.

Deleting my Chrome data (I mean deleting .config/google-chrome, not just deleting the profile through the browser settings) and purging then reinstalling Chrome fixed everything, even with the same extensions and settings restored and all the same tabs open. Data syncing meant this process was very quick.

Everything is working great on my linux desktop now, and my Toshiba Chromebook 2 gets 8-9 hours on a charge and has never had any problems. Maybe the OSX version is particularly poor?

Maybe some problems are plugin-related? I set 'Let me choose when to run plugin content', rather than having plugins automatically run.
Yale University Releases “Map of Life” App for Android and iOS
It would be interesting to see the browser usage stats for HN...
What's sad is that it seems FF is losing market share :(

https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpc...

I'm really not sure how mozilla will survive without that.
Recent discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9138039, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8445087
I know. When this: http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg is what you get when you load a page, I ain't sticking around for long.