News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

axefrog

Re:The Simplicity of Prolog on Sunday January 26, 2025 @03:15PM (#42833622)
Fun fact: A large portion of TerminusDB's codebase is written in Prolog. https://github.com/terminusdb
Re:SomaFM on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @02:40PM (#31573187)
Di.fm has a modern UI and going as strong as ever.
The Veloren developers seem to have forgotten to provide a page of information _anywhere_ giving a non-negligible overview of what the game is about. The main website has little more than a paragraph listing some other games as inspiration, followed by some Minecraft-like screenshots. It also has a manual which is clearly focused on developers and contributors, as it provides next to no information for a new person who just wants to know a bit more about the game without having to actually download it. How is it similar to Dwarf Fortress? How is it similar to Minecraft? How is it different? What do you do in it? Why is it so much work just to find an overview of the game and what it has to offer?
We have a massive problem with our media being largely owned by Murdoch. The result is that our elections tend to be heavily influenced by lies and propaganda, just as is the case with Fox News in the US.
Re:They're Made Out of Meat (1991) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @08:28AM (#24738498)
I find the whole premise odd. Meat is fundamentally associated with living creatures. How could you have a concept of meat and simultaneously find it weird that creatures would be composed of it?
Genuine curiosity... why have you put an apostrophe in "parent"?
But it's ok for taxes to pay for roads and garbage collection?
Re:Hello wasm-pack on Wednesday April 18, 2018 @03:02PM (#16870030)
Does anyone have a good sense of the current performance impact of crossing the boundary between JS and WASM? I've often thought it'd be great to be able to expose high-performance data structures (and other infrastructure-level stuff) via WASM and then make use of them from JavaScript, but I seem to recall that the interop performance cost is currently too high to make it worth doing, which leaves WASM mainly only useful for long-running tasks, such as game engines, expensive graph layout algorithms and so forth.

Edit: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/04/javascript-to-rust-and-bac...

> "The wasm-bindgen code generation has been designed with the future host bindings proposal in mind from day 1. As soon as that’s a feature available in WebAssembly, we’ll be able to directly invoke imported functions without any of wasm-bindgen‘s JS shims. Furthermore, this will allow JS engines to aggressively optimize WebAssembly manipulating the DOM as invocations are well-typed and no longer need the argument validation checks that calls from JS need. At that point wasm-bindgen will not only make it easy to work with richer types like strings, but it will also provide best-in-class DOM manipulation performance."

Re:The web, on this day 10 years ago on Saturday August 05, 2017 @06:22PM (#14938254)
Don't forget that screen resolutions were lower on average back then, which means that the side-by-side comparison doesn't really account for relative scale.
Re:Hacking DNA: CRISPR, Ken Thompson, and the Gene Drive on Monday April 03, 2017 @05:29PM (#14027345)
I'm curious; what don't you like about Aubrey De Grey? I haven't yet seen an interview or conversation with him where he doesn't seem extremely knowledgeable about his field, or lacks an understanding of anything relevant that he's queried on. He also seems to have a fairly significant number of credible people on his side in the biotech/medical fields.
Re:YC AI on Sunday March 19, 2017 @07:04PM (#13910299)
Thankyou, this looks to be exactly what I need! Starting the course now.
Re:What makes WebAssembly fast? on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @06:38PM (#13759390)
The W3C spec is now finalised and locked in, and Chrome and Firefox will release Web Assembly completely in their next releases, respectively.
Re:Ask HN: How do you overcome fear of failure? on Monday February 13, 2017 @02:17AM (#13633655)
Realise that by not risking failure, you fail automatically.
Re:Why Do DMT Users See Insects from a Parallel Universe? on Saturday February 11, 2017 @12:14PM (#13623499)
Occam's razor is a guideline, not an immutable law.
Re:Visual Studio Code 1.7.1 on Friday November 04, 2016 @04:35AM (#12871105)
Updates are monthly. Would you prefer a six-or-twelve month digest summary?
Re:Victorian Jokes Database on Saturday February 27, 2016 @07:43PM (#11189196)
Just as a point for consideration, look at the television variety shows broadcast back in the 50's. Simple slapstick humour, such as tripping over or crashing through a drywall brought huge amounts of laughter from the audience. If that happened today, the only laughter you'd hear would be from the laugh track.
Re:Ion: Cross-platform OpenGL library from Google on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @08:00PM (#11070081)
Looks pretty good, but would like to see more than just a features list. Some documentation? An issues list? A way to discuss the project with the developers and other users? (e.g. via Gitter or a Google Group)
Re:Starting a tech startup with C++ on Saturday January 02, 2016 @04:34PM (#10828067)
Re:Google Knowledge Graph Search API on Saturday December 19, 2015 @08:34PM (#10765684)
I don't see how it could. If you search Google for apple, or even ask a person to give you information about the term "Apple", how can they give you what you need without further context?
Re:New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @10:16PM (#10343826)
Actually that link doesn't even link properly to the Surface Bookj page now, which means anyone new reading these comments won't get the context, seeing as all they'll find via the link is Surface Pro devices.
Re:Welcome to the Block Party: The internet after ad blocking on Tuesday September 15, 2015 @01:51AM (#10219163)
I was always a defender of a site's right to use advertising in lieu of any better way to pay for its content. As someone who'd had stabs in the past at making content sites with useful content, I understood that it was a case of etiquette. If you want to read my content, do me the courtesy of allowing an unobtrusive text ad to exist off to the side. On that basis, I never blocked ads. Sometimes the ads were even interesting.

I use an ad blocker now. Too many abuses of my willingness to let the publishers show me ads and I eventually just got sick of it. Where the line was crossed for me included:

- Videos (or audio) autoplaying over the top of my own music; especially when they're in some other tab, halfway down the page, forcing me to go hunting to figure out where the sound was coming from

- Links commandeered by popup launchers; especially when they cancel the original click, or load my link in a new tab and override the current tab with the ad popup, which often resulted in me accidentally leaving the ad tab open while I closed the tab I actually wanted.

- Hover ads that activate because I was careless enough to not pay precise attention to the location of my mouse pointer

- Page content scroll positions jerking up and down as ads appear or disappear (usually just the former)

- Overlay ads appearing on top of content I'm trying to read, and in particular those which make the close button either hard to see, unresponsive when clicked, or which respond as though I've clicked the ad itself

- Content that just won't display because it's blocked by ad resources that have stalled while loading

And so forth. I'll stand up for publisher's rights, but only to a point. Eventually the noise and bad behaviour just becomes too much.

Re:CefSharp – Embedded Chromium for .NET on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @10:12PM (#10089689)
Fair enough. If I could say one thing; make it a company policy to have every team member spend an hour on your answers forum every morning answering all the unanswered questions. Make it a point of pride that you do this. An unhappy user of your product should be a lot more painful to you than the 15 minutes of your 12 hour day that you lose keeping that customer happy. Bad customer relations is poison that will hurt your company in the long run, and probably already has for many people.

Also, be frank and honest about issues that you are aware of but don't have time to fix right now. If you don't have an answer because there's no time for it right now, tell people. They will appreciate the honesty, even if it doesn't solve their problem right now.

Re:CefSharp – Embedded Chromium for .NET on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @07:11PM (#10089153)
Awesomium is good but development is excruciatingly slow and the team seems to place no importance whatsoever on developer relations. Questions on their forum are very frequently ignored, and I've heard that the situation with email replies is similar. If you have an issue that maybe they haven't dealt with yet, they just ignore you, because perhaps it's easier to cover your ears and eyes then to address a problem that folks are having.

Awesomium team, if you're reading; guys! Get your customer relations sorted out! Answer every damn forum post! Make people love you! Many developers are using the free version of your product, but these are the same developers who will recommend that their employer buy your product. Your failures in these departments have stopped me from coming back or recommending your product to others. I can't speak for others, but I wouldn't be surprised if others feels the same way.

Disclaimer: I say all this with no knowledge of how overworked or understaffed you are, what technical problems you're currently facing, how much time you would need to spend answering questions or why the time between updates to your product is so huge.

Re:Alive Beta – Live Coding in Visual Studio on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @06:21PM (#9932766)
Agreed... though I imagine if you wait until full release they'll probably release a trial version.
Take a moment and watch this. Disbelief in evolution usually only happens when one doesn't really understand the field and would prefer to try and explain everything with religion, in which case you may as well try and explain thunder as the sound the gods' bellies make when rumbling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIEoO5KdPvg
Re:Node.js Tools for Visual Studio on Thursday March 26, 2015 @02:52AM (#9268149)
If you use git, open a git bash window and do it from there. If you don't use git, install cygwin and do it from a cygwin bash window. Both are *nix-simulated shells and are not subject to the MAX_PATH limit. I do most of my command line work using Power Shell, but I always have a git bash terminal ready for npm, jspm and other similar path-length-affected tools.
Re:Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @04:34PM (#9030063)
Visual Studio + ReSharper. Hardly unfair.

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