I wonder if this could be a future foundation for a non-apple mobile ecosystem that has an emphasis on native (i.e. non-VM) apps. Samsung is also a collaborator with Mozilla on the Rust programming language and Servo brower engine. Rewritting the entire mobile ecosystem in a safer, faster language on a platform they have more influence over may be their long game. Our entire mobile ecosystem was written during a phase of rapid expansion where releasing first and going viral took top priority. IMHO everything ever written for a smartphone is more or less a prototype, and any ideas worth keeping will probably be reimplemented over the course of the next decade or so.

Right now unless you use an "unsafe" block, all array accesses are bounds checked at runtime in rust. This isn't as big an overhead as you'd think thanks to branch prediction, etc... but it is still there. Also, it would be nice to be able to write a dot product function that is generic on the length of the vectors, but the lengths are strictly checked at compile time. So not a huge deal, but it would be nice to have someday soon.

The "guide" and the "guides", recently merged into "the book", actually are professionally maintained by a Mozilla employee, who is doing a great job but is of course outnumbered by the rest of the devs making language changes. Among other things, "alpha" is a chance for him, not to mention writers of external libraries, to get fully caught up with the development branch before beta and eventually 1.0.

I have been using rust during development and eagerly awaited this release. Please be warned, however, that rust has a steeper learning curve than most languages, and be especially warned that the language has been changing faster than the documentation can keep up during the push towards alpha. Last I checked, even things as core as the names of the integer types differ between the documentation and the implementation. I want people to get excited about the language, but I don't want anyone to get an unnecessarily bad initial impression!

3 N-m on the output of the reducer.

I personally love that Buzzfeed exists; anytime someone one my Facebook feed posts a Buzzfeed like, I unfriend them or at least take them out of my news feed. I hope Buzzfeed achieves a 100% monopoly on links to time wasting internet garbage so I can filter it ~all out.

If enough people start using tools like this and trusting game theorists, perhaps we will ultimately be able to get non-academics on board to fix our broken voting system. The American voting system was designed by people who thought slavery was fair, and was ultimately a compromise between people who thought land ownership should grant rights, and people who thought every white male should have equal rights.

It's still very common for men to wear a watch in Europe. I wear one, and have found that women often ask me for the time when I'm out because it's easier than getting out their cell phones. My girlfriend makes fun of my watch but then ends up grabbing my arm to read the time. I personally expect a watch to not need manual winding, charging, or battery replacement, and to have a perpetual calendar so that the date will remain accurate over the entire lifetime of the watch. A watch that good is hard to find, but the japanese make a few.

Well, nature is really great for walking around and looking at and smelling while you are on vacation... and there are all the neat tricks in materials science and chemical engineering that we are "stealing" from other organisms. Even if you don't think biodiversity has intrinsic value, species are going extinct far faster than we can study and learn their tricks. As for "ancient thought patterns", I doubt many of value are going extinct, though perhaps linguists would disagree; they're having trouble keeping up with the extinction rate of human languages!

To be clear, this Mozilla Labs thing does not seem to be related to their big products and research projects, i.e. firefox, firefox os, rust, servo. Mozilla labs is some sort of project incubator for people to work on webby applications.

What is the advantage of this over using, say, one of the realtime ARM kernels floating around on the net, with a ubuntu userspace? In our application we have had pretty good experiences treating our beaglebone blacks like any other linux machine, with only the installation (via sd card instead of usb key) and the device overlay tree stuff being hardware specific. We regularly ssh in, run vim to edit files, recompile... Is the idea that it is capable of scaling down even smaller than debian can, for boards that are less powerful than a beaglebone? I tried out the "smart" package manager they use on my ubuntu laptop, and it seemed slow, and seemed like it did not import the existing package selections; "smart upgrade" offered to delete practically everything on my system including stuff like vim.

It is extremely neat. I do think they need a better spokesperson for the technology, though; Van Jacobson's talks are so crammed with partisan political references they turn me off, despite agreeing with him politically.

It's the same guy (Van Jacobson) in both the google video and one of the NDN videos. And the catch-22 is that "make sure this talk is well mirrored and universally known" is a big part of what NDN is for.

I think you're underestimating the amount of content that normal people produce, and especially the amount of content they would share if sharing it was a more robust experience. There are a LOT of old geezers out there dying every day with domain specific knowledge in their heads that has not been transferred to the internet, mainly because they are not the type of person who is willing to learn a bunch of web technologies and set up a server and use what's left of their money to pay someone to maintain it after they're dead. Sure, people can use centralized services for that, but if data is not profitable to the large corporations hosting it, sooner or later it will be garbage collected too. When YouTube goes down, and someday it WILL, vast swaths of our global culture will evaporate with it because it was all tied to a central service, unlike the sort of system the NDN guys are trying to build. Remember, big media ~already has fancy caching and persistence (for them) mechanisms set up for content delivery that they are heavily invested in. My understanding is that NDN is trying to democratize this, so that content you produce, or that you have an interest in, remains cached on your devices in a way you control, while still being shareable with others.

If you copy and paste in "while(*p++ != '\0')" without figuring out exactly what is going on, that's a pretty big red flag that you're not ready to work in C. I absolutely agree RE the difficulty of not knowing how to precisely convey how much experience you have in a given language on a CV though...