Hacker News Reader

GravityWellon NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations

Thank goodness! Looking forward to the Pluto close-ups, which will hopefully include the dark spots.

GravityWellon The Universe Might Be Expanding a Lot Slower Than We Thought

Care to share some examples of dark energy evidence? If the evidence is a measurement of expansion, then it doesn't necessarily support the existence of dark energy.

GravityWellon Author of “Unix in Rust” Abandons Rust in Favour of Nim

> The number of compiler bugs is a bit scary.

I see similar lists for GCC when a branch is underway. I'm actually impressed with the number of active contributors, and I find the design very compelling. I'll be keeping an eye on this project.

GravityWellon Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

This is extraordinarily useful and unique. My compliments to Backblaze for making this available. This is the type of empirical data I would love to have for as many things as possible: SSDs, monitors, TVs, kitchen appliances, tablets, cars, etc.

GravityWellon Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

I just fired up a NodejsConsoleApp project in VS 2013, created a few simple functions, set a breakpoint, and started stepping through. To be fair, I assumed Edit and Continue would work like it works for other .Net or Native projects, or like the old VB or even VBA.

1) "Set Next Statement" doesn't work, which is a pretty big part of E&C

2) I could change code and literals without stopping and restarting the debugging session. Each change causes the current statement to jump to the top of the current function, or to the first line if modifying code outside of any function. Local variables are reset, but globals retain their state.

3) Interestingly, I could change code in a function that does not have the focus, and nothing is reset, then step into that function.

I remember seeing something similar when V8 was being demoed and showed a "live edit" capability, so I guess NTVS has similar functionality.

It short, it sort of works, but it's not the same as E&C for .Net (C# or VB), C/C++ native code, or Office VBA.

GravityWellon Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

Note for those visiting the thread, I found one of the big things with this release is the support for Edit & Continue:

http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/releases/view/104141

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4

It was in the original title, but has been edited out.

GravityWellon Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

I'm hardly an MS fanboy, and I'm not sure what announcements you're referring to, but it's hard for me to see a downside to this.

GravityWellon Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

I had to see it to believe it, but here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4

GravityWellon Valve Is Making All Their Games Free To Debian Developers

Interesting move by Valve, and another positive step in support of Linux.

GravityWellon Valve Confirms Official AMD-Powered Steam Machines For 2014

The fact that #1 and #2 are Chromebooks is worth mentioning. I found that surprising.

GravityWellon Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB

One of the mysteries of HN and how stories do and don't make it to the top. It seems to me there is more attention to tabloid type stories lately.

GravityWellon Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB

From the article:

"..It turns out that far from being a minor initiative to keep MariaDB alive, Google is actively patching and upgrading MariaDB 10.0 to be fit enough so that Google can migrate all of its thousand-plus MySQL instances onto the technology."

GravityWellon First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

It doesn't. In this context, "...that I believe all living things", the words "I believe" can be directly converted to "I have faith without any evidence".

GravityWellon Sigil

Aptly named or not, a google search for sigil shows the epub editor as the first result. The project has been around a long time: https://code.google.com/p/sigil/

GravityWellon 95.4 Million self driving cars sold per year by 2035

"Navigant Research forecasts that autonomous vehicles will gradually gain traction in the market over the coming two decades and by 2035, sales of autonomous vehicles will reach 95.4 million annually, representing 75% of all light-duty vehicle sales."

GravityWellon Lossy PNG

Not sure what the objective is, but using the "before" example 475kb lena pic, a subsequent jpg at 61k looks very close to the original, and much better than the 61k blurred png.

There is a reason why jpg has survived the test of time. It delivers a good balance of quality, performance, and is well supported. Challengers like JPEG 2000 have not gained much traction because jpg gets the job done. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000

GravityWellon Google supports MariaDB

I'm not sure why MySQL seems to have received more attention over the years. PostgreSQL might be more robust.

One point about PostgreSQL that bothered me was the apparent lack of case insensitive collation. Where SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL default to case insensitive, PostgreSQL defaults to case sensitive, and there was no built in way to change this, so you have to do things like "WHERE LOWER(namecol) = 'jdoe'" to work around it. At least that was the situation last time I checked.

GravityWellon Google supports MariaDB

Hopefully MariaDB can incorporate SQL window functions:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/tutorial-window.ht...

These have been part of PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, etc for quite a while and still absent from MariaDB/MySQL.

GravityWellon Google Chrome security flaw offers unrestricted password access

Correct, and this is the point that is being missed by so many, despite their hyperbole. Chrome could prevent the display of the password as a design choice, but the password must be reversible otherwise how could you send it on to the authenticating server? Only the authenticating server stores non-reversible hashes.

GravityWellon Amazon launches Amazon Art marketplace

Back button seems to work as expected for me in Chrome. And I'm grateful the site doesn't use an annoying carrousel. I find those things garish.

GravityWellon Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

Crossbar believes it can write data to its chip at 140 megabytes per second, compared to 7 megabytes a second for flash. Read performance is 17 megabytes per second, with a random read latency of 30 nanoseconds.

The write performance sounds good, but the read performance seems very low. Also I don't know where they get 7 megs per second for flash. Sounds like the picked the worst performer to compare to.

I'd be more impressed if they had something on the market.

GravityWellon LinuxMint 15 delivers smooth alternative to Ubuntu

The fact you can "install" it is simplistic. Manually adding a desktop environment on top of Unity is not the same as one carefully groomed to work seamlessly, which is what Mint delivers.

GravityWellon Now set timer on Google.com

Nice, timers are always handy. Some things I noticed:

* Shortcuts: hr min sec

* Supports countdown or clock: timer 10 sec, timer 14:00

* Clock mode supports am/pm and 24hr format: timer 2pm

* Set a bookmark for a 10 second timer: https://www.google.com/search?q=timer+10+sec

* Timer stops beeping after about 30 seconds

* If you try to close or navigate away from the page while a timer is active, you will be warned that timer will be stopped

GravityWellon Full Stack Web Development

Your link also describes my understanding of a full-stack developer. I think the OP is giving his summary of some web development history, and his opinions on some of the many options available. But it does not have anything to do with full-stack that I can see.

GravityWellon Volvo Gave Away the Most Important Design They Ever Patented

Apple has patented virtual page turning, rubber banding, pinch to zoom, and probably other more frivolous things that I'm not aware of. I think Apple would quickly patent the 3 point seatbelt if they could.

GravityWellon Belkin Gadget Will Reveal How Much Energy Your Devices Use

A point I found most interesting is identifying running devices via "electromagnetic interference signatures". If it really is possible to measure the power use of things like the microwave, water heater, stove, etc., without attaching inline devices to each one, then I want one.

GravityWellon Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality

Sounds to me like they want to offer a Business level tier. The wording "should not host any type of server" was probably groomed by the legal team. My guess is rather than define what a server is, which is almost impossible, they are covered by that vague terminology.

The important question is to what degree do they enforce it? 0.01%? If so, then no big deal to me. I'm paying a lot more for a lot less with my current ISP. I'd be glad to endure Google's draconion rules.

GravityWellon Clay – A language designed for generic programming

I was just thinking there hasn't been a new programming language announced in the last week or so. With so few existing languages to choose from that have extensive supporting toolsets and APIs, this will surely stand out.

GravityWellon Chromecast: Exploiting the Newest Device By Google

Right, "holding down the single button" certainly means the user has physical access, so this sounds like it is by design. There is context to security.

GravityWellon NetBeans 7.4 – New and Noteworthy

Not sure what you mean by "much" faster. Most of the benchmarks have fractional differences. I think comparing an Apple only, commercial program, to a free and open source multi-platform program, VirtualBox would "win" for a lot of people, because it's not just about benchmarks.