JackdawX

Most renewables are not reliable power sources, the wind blows when it blows. That is why a diverse power strategy is needed, including nuclear.

When you say the amount subsidised, what is your source, and what do you mean by 'more'? Do you mean more in total, or per kwh generated?

Here is the course I was taught by at university:

http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~roger/cpp/

Lots of value came from the lectures with roger. Sadly he has retired, it would have been nice to have them up on youtube.

What you've just calculated there is the cost of giving everyone, including middle class and rich people, a $20k tax break. Obviously this wouldn't work, as the amount of tax in and out of the system needs to be the same. The easiest method or distribution to understand is negative income tax:

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM

Would it work in real life? Dunno. Lets see what the outcome of the various tests are. The key question isn't the maths actually, but whether people will choose to work enough to support the system.

> Really, the permissive licenses allow the code to show up in places that copyleft licenses would not allow it. There are a ton of open source projects used in Microsoft Windows or iOS thanks to their permissive licensing -- and neither Microsoft nor Apple are legally obliged to give anything back.

This whole sentence is backwards isn't it? A libre license does not restrict code from being used by Microsoft or Apple, it is those companies that restrict their developers from using libre licensed code. The license doesn't care who uses it. Apple used the GCC project as their primary compiler for many years, contributing objective-c to it.

Ahh, guess my info is out of date, thanks.

> Yes, we do "have to meet FDA compliance." I can't define "have to meet" and I work here. Of course, I'm just an engineer.

You are not an engineer. This is a protected term in the US and other countries. If you were a professional engineer, you would be bound by a legal and moral framework preventing you from doing work on unsafe medical equipment.

There is a good argument that there should be a software equivalent of protected engineer status for this kind of work. This kind of story should be a wake up call. I personally had no idea that critical medical equipment would be running on MS windows...

Here is a gif of the action from the reddit thread:

https://gyazo.com/945aa97382bd4a2f4e49a662b5ff6399

This is more populated than any live server event since the dark portal opened (the first time).

> Imagine what it is like to be black in a country where just a few generations back you carried at all times in mixed-race race situations the possibility of being assaulted without recourse or lynched, or in present times accused and convicted of a crime you didn't commit or shot on sight for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

> Imagine what it is like to be Jewish and have 85% of your relatives systematically wiped out in living memory.

I think you're taking a devils advocate position here, but this is interesting if true. I'm not sure how the actions of people 60-80 years ago should affect how we view ~20-year-olds today? For example, how is the behaviour of white germans in 1945 related to white americans or british in either 1945 or 2015? I think we were on the opposite side of that war.

As for black lynchings in the american south, again this is a localised issue. But lets say your university is in an area where it happened, how likely is it that someones grandfather was involved in a lynching? Pretty small. But even if they were, should someone today be associated with their grandparents criminal behavior? I don't see how.

Well, that is already tax fraud correct? Someone already has to check for that. The savings come from all the additional checks you would no longer need to do to see if people are really disabled, what their marital situation is, where they live, etc.

> The anti abuse/fraud work alone…

There is no concept of benefit fraud in a BI system. Everyone by default qualifies for the same level of BI. Your government paycheck starts at the max value and can only go down from there, which happens when you are paying back that money in the form of tax. The only type of fraud detection needed would be the tax fraud system that already exists.

I'm not saying everything about BI would work (although I hope it does), but the fact that you could cut benefit overhead is self evident I think.

There is no arguing that basic income, welfare, disability benefit etc. are socialist. That is not deriding them, it is an accurate description. It's strange that this is a bad term in the US, not so here in the EU.

Sometimes, posts like this appear on hacker news that are completely impenetrable. I read the page for RunC and the only thing I could find out about it from that page is that it is a "Container", and these are its specs. A "Container" is something that is used by "Docker". "Docker" is a program that "allows you to compose your application from microservices". A "microservice" is "a software architecture style, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes" (we're down to wikipedia at this point). So a "microservice" is an abstraction of unix design, and finally we're on solid ground. If you were interested you might be able to work backwards through this list of projects, researching what each one does, and then you could find out what RunC actually is.

> I do all my grades and such in Google Docs

You upload all your students grade information to an external private company? Which university do you work for where this is allowed?

Sorry, but this post is 100% baseless supposition. If you haven't studied the causes of PTSD or the results of sexual assault you're not really in a position to comment on it. I see this kind of post all the time on tech websites, where people think that the causes of human (or animal) behaviour is simple, because they haven't exposed themselves to enough information to know any better.

I think you should probably delete this post, I can see it doing more harm than anything.

Good call. In what situation is it going to be acceptable to put your hands down someones pants in public? It's difficult to imagine any situation in which this isn't crossing a line. I don't see how that behaviour can be condoned.

If you're living and working in London that's the kind of salary you'd be looking at, simply because the rental prices around here are so high. Outside London I can see it being that much lower. £26,500 is about average wage in the UK, and salaries are not keeping up with inflation and cost of living increases over the last 10 years in all professions.

I did not know this until someone explained it to me. It was before this post, but long after my teens were over. Peoples general attitude to sex and relationships can only come from their life experiences, right? My parents were in a loveless marriage and divorced early in my life, so my guide to healthy relationships was tv, movies and porn.

A better example for duck typing would be something like:

var my_func(var int_or_string, var int_or_obj) { ... return int_or_string_result; }

Simplifies certain operations, complicates debugging. Great for small scripts though.

This is a post responding to the following article that was posted on HN yesterday-ish: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...

The point of that article was to specifically call out lazy surface-level discussions of HTML5/js apps by throwing out some benchmarks, and trying to have a practical fact-based discussion. I found the article very convincing actually, and what I wanted to see was both browser-app proponents and detractors testing out the limits of what the browser is capable of, so we can determine what is and is not viable to program in the browser stack.

This piece is simply not an answer to that article in any way. It does not attempt to answer the question posed in the title, nor does it address any of the points of it's parent article. I think we need to step up the level of discussion here if we want browser tech to be more viable for general use.

Look up 'Monday Night Combat'. Devs like to experiment by mixing and matching genres, so in my experience things like this often exist somewhere. It was a pretty average game, but the idea is sound.

Sorry, I think I worded that confusingly. By 'what does the app do?' I meant more along the lines of 'how much would a front-end client tax the technical limitations of a smart phone?', so that is the hypothetical question I was answering. I'm not insinuating that linkedin is a simple service in terms of what info people might want to store on a database about each other.

> When he says "... we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory ..." what he means here is that memory allocation to the browser on iPad (for example) is too little to handle the volume of user interest.

He's probably saying that the entire app is a single html page, and all the content is loaded using ajax and created programatically. This process naturally leaks memory unless you're very, very careful. Many ordinary websites have problems with leaks, but nobody notices until you're on a phone with limited RAM. Basically, this is the wrong way to write a mobile app or mobile website (or any website).

> This is certainly not the fault of HTML5/web developers, or lovers of open web, but only of the vendors who have not provided sufficient resources

I don't think theres any walled-garden conspiracy going on here - I honestly think this is the fault of the linkedin devs (or more likely project managers). What does a linkedin app need to do? Mostly they just need to do is display profile text and a few images inline. A mobile browser can display text and images perfectly fine - thats its bread and butter functionality. If you're having problems there, you done fucked up.

I bet the app had a bunch of unnecessary css animations, js widgets replacing html components, custom layouts done in javascript, etc. Was the old app ever released? Did anyone have a chance to use it?

As you say in your post, people are buying the game irrespectively. Why bother making changes? Here are the current sales figures in the UK:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/mar/11/t...

Debuted at #2 in the charts. Development time costs money, and the game doesn't need 'fixing' to sell any copies. Despite the negative press in the tech community, most gamers don't actuall care about the always online requirement. I don't see the big deal myself either - most PC games from big publishers actually install malware and rootkits onto your machine! That seems infinitely worse than always-online, but no-one cares about that either.

> Still, you are comparing this to flash, which has only one complete implementation at all which is only available on a subset of platforms and not open source. This number of platforms is decreasing, not increasing (ie, Android dropped).

Indeed, there are problems with both implementations. I'm not saying that flash is the way forward at all, just that I'm starting to doubt that html5 technologies can actually achieve on a technical level what flash has acheived in a reasonable time frame.

Ignoring ideological issues for the moment (which are important too, but we could be here all day) the major benefeit of html5 right now is that your games can run well on gnu/linux machines, on which flash performs terribly. Techinically you can also target smartphones/tablets, but the performance here is really quite bad on almost all devices. So there is this promise of true cross platform coverage that isn't really being acheived. The major downside is this browser incompatibility stuff we've already discussed that is really hampering the platform, and the performance issues, which also varies wildly with browsers.

> Agreed, no one solved the problem of cross-platform application development (both desktop and mobile) yet. And flash doesn't succeed much, if any, better than HTML5 in this regard. But looking forward HTML5 looks more promising too me.

We're in agreement here, except for that last part. Will html5 (or 6 or 10) actually ever live up to what has been promised? Or should we be betting on a 3rd player at this point?

> And why bother? If you have the choice, why not go with HTML5 which already has some good and very fast free implementations available?

Well, I think this demo kind of proves why not: it doesn't work the same way on everyones browser. We've been talking for years now about html5 games obsoleting flash, but it doesn't seem to be coming together does it? My opinion on why not? We've got some serious problems with the spec and the people producing the spec. Even with the infinite resources of google, the chrome browser is not actually 100% compliant! Is that even fixable at this late stage of the game?

> Or as you're implementing your own environment anyway, go completely native?

That doesn't really help you distribute your games safely over the web to multiple people. Also, cross platform development is actually quite time consuming and hard, and the performance benefeits vs a VM are not really worth it for the average 2D flash-type game.

I think that's an optimistic prediction for a game of professional quality, done by a single person. I reckon most of the work is edge cases, art & sound, tweaking, bug fixing, not working on the generic engine.

You could save time by doing this though, as you say. I'm leaning more towards the idea of reusing code and trusting other peoples engines at this point. But we've all made our own engines and, as other posters have said, this is the guys hobby, and most likely a labour of love.

There are 3 common fallacies in this post that people continually bring up about modern languages. Thought i'd come on here and write some corrections:

"There is innate overhead when using an interpreted language, no matter how advanced the interpreter."

I think a lot of people think this is true, because they have an antequated idea of an interpreter which reads each line as a string, parses the string, then executes the code. Modern js (and jvm bytecode, similar-but-different scenario) 'interpreters' compile to native bytecode and the code runs directly on your hardware.

The speed overhead from modern language has a lot less to do with the 'interpreted' nature of the language, and a lot more to do with (a) code structure (overhead of objects, closures, namespace resolution, all that junk), and (b) the maturity of gcc vs other compilers.

Theoretically a language with a JIT compiler should actually be faster than a precompiled language in any scanario where you are intensely going round and round a loop which has a lot of logic inside it. The more the loop runs, the better the JIT compiler can optimise it based on the current runtime conditions.

"JavaScript is also garbage collected, while C is not, adding an additional level of overhead."

The overhead of the garbage collector is only really to do with memory and startup speed, not runtime speed. It does barely anything when not collecting. Every time you alloc in c, you must free, and those actions have to happen in proximity to each other. Free takes time. GC allows all those free operations to happen when the program is idle, instead of holding up your program.

The more stuff you create and delete, the faster a GC language should be compared to an equivalent program in a non-GC language.

Your post adds nothing useful to the discussion. There is no point arguing about indenting style in a 7 line program, it's needless pedantry! This is almost exactly the same thing as grammar nazi-ism, and seems to have a similarly negative impact coding related websites.

I think we need to coin a new term - indent-nazi, style-nazi, or something similar - for the purpose of dismissing this kind of post and keeping people on topic.

Obviously this depends on your phone. Using an html5 app on a 4s vs. a 3gs is a totally different experience, that probably explains the discrepancies between your experiences.

It's strange how often comments like these crop up on various topics, because they're difficult to understand. The core of your argument is "I don't have this problem, so therefore no-one does". I mean, you are aware at at some base level that people are different right? They have different thoughts, weaknesses and so on.

If tools like this can help, then that can be nothing but a good thing, I don't think there is any need to be derisive about it.