jvickers

I wonder if they would be open to fabbing AMD Zen chips.

Things can indeed be both cheap and expensive. It takes two different perspectives, both being correct in their own right, and not directly contradicting each other.

There can be different ways of looking at the cost of an item: 1) The cost of the parts and manufacture. 2) The retail price.

An item could be cheap from perspective 1 and expensive from perspective 2.

In my experience, the quality variance with teachers is much higher than with iPads. iPads have never had the attitude problems that some teachers have had (except some Siri edge cases perhaps).

> If you Google very carefully today you’ll eventually find RencourtBlitzenMcPhail

I did perform a Google search for 'RencourtBlitzenMcPhail' and all I got was that one article! Perhaps other users of the Google search service will get this comment too, but the real 'RencourtBlitzenMcPhail' will probably remain elusive for a while. Maybe I can't 'Google very carefully', I'm not really sure what that means in the context of searching for RencourtBlitzenMcPhail.

It's useful having some code in JavaScript. Even if its not fast enough for some things, having a nicely organised and documented library can be very useful.

Optimizations, using Typed Arrays, could make the code considerably faster. C++ addon code could make it faster still. Intrinsics within that addon code could use SIMD. While this library certainly is a lot slower than the equivalent C or Fortran, it's got potential, and it's not something that I'd dismiss as being pointless because it's a particular thing that's written in JavaScript.

Also, in the browser, language choices are very limited. Another reason why having JavaScript code that does a variety of things (including vector maths) is useful.

Then if I did release something identical to Firefox, I'd be releasing Firefox. I doubt it would be controversial at all, if anyone noticed.

I went to an interview once, for a company that makes online games (gambling). We spoke about my education and lack of a degree. They seemed to be saying how it important it is for them that the team is good at maths. I said I had a decent mathematical grounding, and understanding, and while I'd not be able to instantly answer maths questions I'd be able to think about how to answer it, and research the problem.

I was posed a question... how would you simulate the appearance of a fruit machine wheel (3D rendering). I explained that I did not have the answer with all the details already, but probably would not need to know them all either and could use what's already been done to a large extent. This was put to me as the kind of thing that an employee there would be expected to know. I asked my two interviewers what the answer was, how they would solve such a problem. There was a lot of umming and arring for a few (uncomfortable for them) minutes. I found it very funny.

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.

Ideally you'll be able to fix bugs and handle the growth as it comes.

Is your app free?

In a home, size and weight is a bit of a factor.

Is the building strong enough to support the weight? Space also has a cost.

It would also cost more to manufacture, transport and install big and heavy equipment, because it is big and heavy equipment.

My impression of Java UI components was that they looked boring and old-fashioned. It's a subjective judgement, but I guess others would have thought that way too. If Java Swing or other parts of the Java UI toolkit looked better than many native GUIs then there would have been more interest.

Does anyone know if or when the GPGPU acceleration will be available in the normal Postgres install?

Is / will this acceleration be switched on by default?

In order to go to Mars, and come back quickly and safely, it would make sense to send supplies of various sorts on a robotic mission (or a number of them). This way there would be plenty of fuel on Mars.

Another possibility would be having a launchpad in Earth orbit, so that many different modules would be assembled (a lot like the ISS), but in a configuration that's designed to travel to Mars. Launching it all at once from Earth does not seem like the safest or most efficient answer to getting a very large mission payload into space, given current technology. This way, there would be allowances for failed launches, while the human crew is brought into orbit using more tried and tested methods (with sufficient rescue mission planning), on a much smaller budget than the whole mission cost.

Some kind of Exploratory Space Station seems like the way to do it.

Thanks for that reply. It's not made it that much clearer in my mind though, because C and C++ can be used to write fast web servers.

Do you have an opinion on how Rust compares to Go?

With both libraries MIT licensed, there could easily be movement of code from io.js to node.js once the team at Joyent were satisfied that the code has been done correctly.

I fail to see how there can be controversy over forking MIT licensed software.

I'm very shortsighted (about -8). When I squint, my eyelashes act as a rudimentary lens and make the image clearer. The image is distorted differently when I squint, but less blurred. I suggest that those with better eyesight may also squint in order to see details on a retina display, and the squinter sees a higher res image (albeit a distorted one).

It's occurred to me that competing for business by making the process better for the founders, rather than worse, would be the way to go, or at least one business model that other incubators should explore.

I'm not yet excited about these getters and setters and new features in the latest JavaScript. I've put a lot of time and effort into developing ECMAScript (JavaScript) 3 patterns that overcome various limitations, and have got accustomed to the idea of deploying ECMAScript 3. In terms of providing an API, getters and setters will be very useful. It will be good to have out-of-the-box JavaScript functionality that does not require extra code to use, like various methods I use to overcome the ECMAScript 3 limitations.

Does anyone have an estimate for when ECMAScript 6 will be widely deployed across browsers, almost ubiquitous? I would say now it's safe to use SVG in many situations on the web that would not have been OK a few years ago, I'm curious about when the tipping point will be with ECMAScript 6.

Anecdotally, recently my customers have been a lot less interested in supporting older versions of IE, and I have used SVG in a couple of situations, and that would not have been OK a few years back. I have not been closely following the developments of ECMAScript 6, it has seemed like it will be a while until it's widely deployed. The only things I have found practical use for are typed arrays, and I have been using them in node specific code rather than in code that I expect to run across browsers.

Though I am interested in the latest developments in JavaScript, my focus will still be on what can be done with the JavaScript available in almost every browser. I am also interested in making use of getters and setters in my code but being able to compile it to ECMAScript 3, I may be able to do some relatively simple text replacement rather than having to parse and compile an abstract syntax tree.

Alternatives to getType and setType functions (while still not using getters and setters):

Have a single polymorphic function called type: type() gets the type, type(value) sets the type.

Have .get and .set functions, called like: get('type'), set('type', value).

You could show some relatively small (such as 600x250) images of parts of live sites that you have worked on, with those images showing some parts that you feel more responsible for having done, without having done the whole site. Those images would also link to the sites themselves. They would have a small caption saying what you actually did for that website.

Thank you for your support in this difficult time.

Generally I want to look at properties from the prototype chain too.

In my programming, I have not built it in a way to prevent a malicious developer from changing object prototypes.

If there is actually an attack vector that gets closed by checking hasOwnProperty I'm interested.

If I were to run the code

    Object.prototype.d = 4;

I'd be asking for trouble.

Why do you need to use .hasOwnProperty anyway?

    var map = {
        a: 1,
        b: 2,
        c: 3
    }

    for (var key in map) {
        console.log(map[key]);
    }

outputs

    1
    2
    3

in the console, like I expect.

Any chance of Mozilla releasing a node.js plugin that wraps the library?

I'd also be really interested in an ASM compiled version that's easy to use from node (and possibly the browser).

If I did write a code sample and replied here, would you get to see it?

I don't think there is a way to send messages on Hacker News, and I don't yet know if you'll get alerted to replies to old posts.

I've done some drag and drop programming, but not using the HTML5 API. I may have read that article quite a few years ago, but another problem was that HTML5 was not considered ready for use all those years ago. Recently (well, within the past year or so) I have found clients' requirements have been far less strict in terms of supporting older browsers, so I have been making use of more HTML5 features. I still have not used HTML5 drag-and-drop.

The basics of drag-and-drop only take a few lines to implement, but it's important to do extensive testing to find the edge cases. I found (one year ago) there were problems with jQuery UI that stopped me from making full use of it. I wound up using it for the basic dragging - it would reliably tell me mouse move events, clicks, buttons, and the mouse position, but because the droppables system would miss some events I implemented the logic surrounding detecting where the item was being dragged. Basically, whenever the item got moved, a whole bunch of calculations would run to see what object it's positioned over or near, and it's position within whatever object it's over.

If you want to do drag-and-drop programming in the browser, I recommend you write some code that allows you to pick up a DIV and drop it elsewhere on the screen. It's not trivial to do the first time, but once you understand the patterns it becomes so much easier. The techniques are useful for other similar things, like creating resize handles.