skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keyboard Manufacturers Are All Slackers...

Keyboards aren't going to fundamentally change but there are manufacturers who aren't slackers, who are trying. (As far as the original article - use ctrl, alt and shift - they're designed as modifiers - for your Metroid III action.) Think of the Anykey on older Gateway keyboards[1], or the Compaq keyboards with the split spacebar where the left half was actually backspace[2], or the new-ish Dell keyboards where the layout of the six keys above the arrow keys has been changed to feature a huge delete key[3]. The Windows key, a long loathed key by many a gamer, forced back to the desktop in the midst of a critical section. Most have only come to accept since it pretends it isn't there as many games disable it. And even then, it only uses up previously unused space which doesn't moving other keys around.

These little 'innovations' annoy me, and I'm sure many others, to no end. Innovations that ended up on the scrap heap of innovation and change-is-bad-ism.

Keyboards /cannot/ fundamentally change because unless you magically replaced all the keyboards in the world at once, installed user-base just has too much inertia.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_AnyKey

[2] http://lowendmac.com/mail/07/art/keyb.jpg - Actually, that left half was actually remappable, which caused unending complaints due to unexpected behavior.

[3] http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2374/2011622454_dfe08bfcda.jp...
I think both are equally difficult to get into. I think that TS does not impose as many ideas from above as YC. The YC companies all seem to have very similar names and designs when they first publicly announce, while the TS companies seem more diverse.

A good technical team with poor marketing and biz skills should go to YC, and good biz people should go to TS.
yeah, i had most of them in my english classes (in a non-english speaking country), so i was a bit disappointed of this list :(
@SirBv here. Thanks.
This is stupid. Filtering the content and hot linking to it while stripping the ads is very different from what google does in its profitable search businesses.
YC definitely does not dictate company / domain / product names "from above."

There is not much mandating or micromanagement at all, or else it would feel more like an incubator.
Not sure if this is what you meant, but an old fashioned free trial based on time (30 day free trial!) doesn't convert as well as a freemium based trial (first 100 subscribers free, after that $10/month) in my experience.

The latter is a good way to let people try it while avoiding the ticking clock. I think the 30 (and 60) day free trials rub people the wrong way since so many were used for borderline scams over the years, hoping people would forget to cancel in time, etc.
Google Shortcuts has been successfully installed.
I'm limited to 5 alpha numeric keys, and I get the Keyboard viewer via System Preferences > Keyboard > "Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar"

There's also a lot to be said about the feel and quality of the keyboard. We press these little buttons thousands of times a day, millions of times in our lifetime. A clunky, overly loud keyboard, or one that requires too much travel is a terrible thing to have to work with.
The summary of the talk given on the 26'th Chaos Communication Congress can be found on the 26c3 wiki, it includes a link to the slides:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3654.en.h...

Video recordings can be found on:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/Streaming#Unofficial

(the ones on 26c3.ipv6only.org are good, but, as the name suggests, accessible via IPv6 only)
How do these compare to the current gen of Mac keyboards, response and feel wise? The current gen Mac keyboard is my all time favorite, all my computers have them.
Agreed about there being more aggressive comments, etc. One possibility would be to move to another site and not lock it down. Moving to another site may be enough of a switching cost and I think there are many like myself who are not YC-funded but enjoy the original spirit of this site...

"It's also counter to the spirit of the net to police too aggressively."
I also agree that it's against the original spirit of the net, but at some point in scale it becomes a requirement. I worked on a community site for a major TV presence which had gone awry. There were millions of community members and, unfortunately, some would be posting death threats about others or about celebs.

I had hoped that there were "self-regulating" solutions but we had to ban the hell out of people. Not that HN is anywhere near that level of ugliness... :)
But if the OP is really concerned about a quality experience playing Metroid III, shouldn't he be using a gamepad?

It's 2009 and I still can't type very well with my flight stick either.
What does a stupid parent trying to adopt a puppy have to do with parking kids in front of a computer screen?

Like the story you linked to said, leaving a dog alone with a three year old is dangerous. There is no real danger in looking at videos with your kid (or letting them watch it themseles).
And that's happily another reason why it's a terrible idea. Norton and McAfee are terrible virus scanners (Norton especially)
Dijkstra was replying to this:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf

AFAIR Backus says that C and Pascal are too low-level to be good at problem solving, but pure functional programs, point-free style and a more math-like notation may make programming less error-prone.
Douglas Lenat, the founder of Cog project, is absolutely fascinating hacker. His earlier work on on AM and EURISKO was amazing, even if proved to be a dead end.

That said I remember reading about Cog when I was a freshman (around 1994), and to the day it doesn't seem to deliver the promise, despite many million of DoD money. The idea was that a reasonable featured AI will emerge when Cog ontology reaches critical mass, but it just doesn't seem to be happening yet.

EDIT: disregard this, a case of my confusion among three-letter names.
I struggled with this question as well in the past on UniversityTutor.com. Here are a few common ones from other sites that I looked at. Maybe the right one will jump out.

number of photos, highlighted listing (AutoTrader)

storage space (Evernote)

top listing in search results (Google)

top listing in search results, larger listing/photo, more photos (Haystack.com)

number of projects, ssl, storage (Basecamp)

number of faxes sent (FaxZero.com)

number of subscribers (Aweber.com)

Pro Badge, storage, num photos (Flickr)

receive messages but can't reply (Match.com)

send messages to full inboxes, racy photos, other stuff (OkCupid)

If you don't mind sharing the app we could probably come up with some other ideas too. If you literally just have a laundry list of features, then yeah maybe the best and most useful ones you give away free, and the ones power users will want you can make paid. That is the heart of the freemium model I think: a causal user who might find it useful once a month should be able to use it free, and spread the word for you. A power user who is logging in almost daily, or making money from it (for business), etc should be a paid user.
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Errors in Reasoning
It makes me sad how much the human race is capable of and how much of that capability is unrealized for cost reasons.

"It wouldn't be profitable."

Much better to kill each other over religion instead...
Purely functional programming, that is. Not functional programming per se. With that corrected, I agree with the guy.

However, his critique shouldn't be surprising to anyone but blind believers. Paradigms and features all have comfort zones and none of those is large enough to cover even nearly everything.

Analogously to strong/weak typing and dynamic/static binding, you rarely only want either. You either start with strong and/or static and build yourself dynamic and/or weak behaviour by hand. Or you start dynamically and later enforce certain type constraints deemed appropriate. There are a few holy wars in between but you can raise above that.

Similarly pure functions and impure state management ought to support each other, not fight each other. Pure functions are pure, clean, and functional so that mutations can be sparse and well-controlled. Conversely, the state must be destructively updated in some place by the impure code so that the pure functions are relieved from having to bother with it.

Similarly you can start at either of the pure and impure ends but you're bound to end up somewhere in between for any useful program.

You can start with pure functions and build something with them and worry about saving the state later. The original author is right in that that I often start with the latter and feel somehow guilty when writing the state. I shouldn't! Personally, I've noticed that this approach too often equals gigantic mutations on huge, monolithic states that yield huge, monolithic new states that you have to store somewhere.

Alternatively you can start with impure code and clean out stuff into pure functions as you learn how the program evolves. Each time I do this in, for example, Python I get the sense of how fucking brilliant I am. I should do it more often! Personally, while "erring" on the impure side at first I've noticed that the resulting program is often more beautiful as pieces of pure art rise from a pool of impure goo.
Fung was “fostering a community that encouraged — indeed, celebrated — copyright infringement.”

True. Too bad that's perfectly within his rights. "Free speech", have you heard of it?
The idea was that a reasonable featured AI will emerge when Cog ontology reaches critical mass, but it just doesn't seem to be happening yet.

The same "problem" with AGI. I like AGI, but a very practical implementation seems away.
Before we get to court, why don't you decide what crime this is?
Why? There are plenty if free and often better systems. And even if the gov funded it why would there be an uptake in use.

Then you have the issue of unmaintained systems. Most machines friends give me to fix already have a virus scanner bt are still infected.

No, as already said this is not a funding problem it is an education one.
My body distorts broadcast television and rebroadcasts it. Is any conductive object infringing copyright?

(Arguably, a criminal conviction may require "intent". If you use Bittorrent with the intent to only download, are you liable for your uploading?")
Why do all the names seem so similar, and a lot of the designs follow similar philosophies?
Take a look at mozart-oz, a multi-paradigm/model programming language. it is a rich language able to perform OOP, dataflow, functional, declaritive and
and can hide observable non-determinism. Though it might not be fast enough to handle your particular case of gaming. grab "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" for a read.
I think this community might be a little biased, just a little.
Ontologies don't seem to scale well as you try to describe more stuff.
If you want to avoid too much travel, you should not be using a qwerty layout. E.g. Dvorak optimises for less finger travel.
The problems involved with developing Synaptic Web applications
You're thinking of Cyc, not OpenCog.
> elitekeyboards.com

They look like ordinary bad keyboards. I prefer the Kinesis contoured (http://images.google.com/images?q=kinesis%20contoured).
Eliezer is right, OpenCog it's not a knowledge base. It's (from Wikipedia):

- An API to manipulate an extended hypergraph of terms and relationships, dubbed the "AtomSpace".

- An implementation of a probabilistic reasoning engine based on probabalistic logic networks (PLN).

- A probabilistic genetic program evolver called Meta-Optimizing Semantic Evolutionary Search, or MOSES, originally developed by Moshe Looks.

- An attention allocation system based on economic theory.

- An embodiment system for interaction and learning within virtual worlds.

- A natural language input system consisting of Link Grammar and RelEx, both of which employ AtomSpace-like representations for semantic and syntactic relations.

- A natural language generation system called SegSim, with implementations NLGen and NLGen2.
Excellent point.

Why are people discussing 250$ for a game-able keyboard when you can buy a decent gamepad for less than 50$?
Right, I was going mostly for 'major importance' or 'intellectual heft', really.
Secret history of Silicon Valley: Steve blank's classic video
Search dude..
The copyright owner "expressed permission" for a limited degree of copying by making the content available on a publicly accessible website in a form intended for distribution and not utilizing any means to restrict the copying in the first place.

Good luck finding any judge that'd agree with you that Google's business is "99.9% infringing".
New and Creative Leniency for Overdue Library Books
Google Multivac
It's not just IPs; visible wifi base stations with known locations are also used, if that info is shared by the client (as I believe both the Google Maps app and Firefox 3.5+ offer). So any difference in the devices' signal reception could result in different location guesstimates.
OLPC's XO evolves into tablet
at the beginning, the author states publishers would upload the videos directly to the website with one direct button; however existing content publishers wanted the YouTube audience, hence the move to YouTube API.
they should have uploaded the videos to vimeo/dailymotion and other video websites at the same time
It's worth examining if a TechCrunch article is more likely to be indicative of success or failure. A lot of the products and services they write about can be somewhat braindead from a consumer or client perspective, but I'm sure that the hype and buzz as a result of being featured could lead a company further astray from solving any actual problems or filling any real needs.
God, yes. Shows that it's too early here..

I'll keep the comment anyway, to not decapitate the discussion now :)
It's not cultural deterioration at all. It just happened that the first guy to put real production money into a skin magazine had serious intellectual pretensions. We're all better off for the nice interviews, but there's a reason they had to be bookended with lots and lots of porn for the project to be sustainable.

Now that Playboy is a relic instead of the only game in town, they can no longer indulge such expensive tastes. It says nothing about the wider culture except that we've become more accepting of pornography.
The data is public, so anybody could have double checked it and found that error. Somebody now did. This is how it should work - it is the only way it can work. Errors can always happen, but scientists are supposed to double check.

If the error was deliberate, it would have made no sense to publish the data in such a way that the error could be caught easily.
Comments like this deserves a downvote
Nope it's not. The key is the only thing that prevents anyone on the street to decipher the frequency hop pattern of the network. Once that's deciphered then all you need is cheap equipment (as low as $1500) for the necessary hardware and GSM processing software to do the eavesdropping. It really is BIG news.
That example actually appears fairly regularly in Erlang code.

A1 = ...
A2 = ...

And it leaves a bad taste in one's mouth.

I see putting stuff in a variable as a way to 'take a breather' in the middle of code:

A = some(hairy(function(that() + does() * lots()));
B = back(into(A) + the(A) fray());

I guess that's not the best example because A is used twice and you could just pop the 'A' calculation out into its own function, but sometimes it's nice to make code easier to read by breaking stuff into discrete steps that are easy to read later, rather than one huge line that does everything and then returns it.
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I met Ken while I was a student at Brown. Not only is he talented (the Wired article only mentioned him as the 17 year old programmer from Rhode Island), but he is also an extremely nice fellow. Not at all cocky.
>In FP, you would probably pass those variables around.

The point is that you might have to rewrite every part of the program in order to "pass around" those variables, where as in an impure language with global variables, this sort of major rearchitecting is not going to be necessary.
Oh my, haven't we been debating this endlessly wrt TV? I don't know that anything substantial has come out of it other than that parents who want to "park" their toddlers will find a way to do so.

Other parents will use YouTube or TV or anything else as a source of inspiration, engagement and communication in addition to many other things they do with their kids.

And where parents are not interested in their kids and just park them in front of a screen, I'm comforted by the fact that computer screens, as opposed to the TV screens, provide access to a lot more than passive entertainment.
But TotLol is circumventing the usual scheme -- they're using their own flash player instead of embedding youtube's, which means they never show Google's lower-third banners or intersitial videos.
>By recasting the logic where A and B are called

Which in the worst case will involve lifting the type of pretty much every function in the program into a monad. Which is not going to be necessary in C.
Perhaps "mandating" is too strong a word. Simply subsidizing or allowing security software to be obtained free would achieve the same effect. I meant "to make into law" when I said "mandate."

When I say "opt out", I simply mean that the security software is freely available, but not forced onto your computer. I'm not proposing some sort of communistic action plan. I'm simply suggesting that if the the government provided security software for free, more people would have access to it, and the effect of viruses on businesses can be curtailed.

> Of course you will disagree, because in your head security software is perfect and you can't perceive the massive problems that would result from your suggestion, since you're working with mental ideation primitives that don't correspond to anything that exists in the real world.

You're absolutely right. My suggestion is predicated upon the idealization of antivirus software. Which is exactly why I started out my suggestion with a question about whether or not virus scans can detect this stuff that cause botnets. And then I followed with an if this is true ... then take my suggestion seriously. I never meant to imply that I know much about the efficacy of a virus scanner. In fact, I use a mac, so my exposure to them has been limited.

I don't know how you got a look inside my head, but you clearly need glasses.

Second of all I think you, and a lot of other people who down-modded me may have jumped to conclusions when I used the words "mandate" and suggested the government do something for the greater good. I'm not suggesting something akin to the communist green dam software. My suggestion is probably less controversial than the healthcare plan, since it would be cheaper to implement. It's more like the government digital converter box subsidy program if anything.

So assuming if everyone had virus scan, would it help? If it doesn't, then why did I waste money on Norton antivirus on my PC? Surely virus scan must be able to do something. Definitions can be easily updated across the installed base to counter the latest zombie virus. If you have evidence that this would all be futile, then I retract all my statements about giving this supposedly useless product out to everyone. You probably know more about virus scanners than I do, and I'm not here to argue with you about their efficacy. So unlike what you thought I wiould do, I am not going to disagree with you about their efficacy.
>I'd say you achieve this by passing whatever bit of state data you need to drive the behavior in the various calls to functions A and B.

Obviously you can do that. The author mentions this possibility. But his point is that passing the state around may involve adding extra parameters to a very large number of functions, which is much more difficult than just using a global variable.

It seems odd to me to say that faking global variables by clumsy manual state threading is cleaner than just using global variables. It is more error-prone, more verbose, and less indicative of program structure and programmer intent.
Using global variables is far easier in this case and may entail changing a whopping three lines of code: one for the declaration of the variable and one each in the two functions using the new variable. The argument passing variant on the other hand requires changing almost every single function call in the whole program. In this sense, imperative programming is strictly more expressive than purely functional programming (in the sense of the word that IIRCgoes back to Felleisen: a paradigm is more expressive if expressing a construct that is localized in this paradigm requires a global program transform in another paradigm).

Of course this doesn't mean that a program will be easier to read after going the easier to write way too many times...
In fact, I currently experience the very unintuitive thing that I can create extremely detailed commit messages using git without investing much more time (at the moment, I need to spend around 5-10 additional minutes after an hour or two of development while getting a precise log of added functionality and/or refactorings performed).

The thing I am currently investigating is to commit extremely often during development and then use rebase to squash all of these extremely tiny changes into the actual change. Don't come with the "atomic single changes"-stick after me for squashing local commits, because when I said extremely tiny, I meant extremely tiny. Currently, I commit pretty much whenever a new test is red or the last red test is green, or after a single refactoring step. Given that, I end up with a very detailed sequence of steps and changes I made. Once you are done then, you can just add a summary line, a quick paragraph explaining the reason for those changes and reformat the previous commit messages into a (hieraichally structured) list of detailed changes.

I can just repeat this: Doing this is almost no noticeable overhead (it's just a git commit -a -m "Move method: Foo.bar -> Bar" after a successful build and some rebasing eventually, which takes 5 - 10 minutes after an hour or two of development) and massively improved my commit messages.
I've been reading http://buildingreputation.com/ a lot - partly because I want to build in some reputation concepts into a site I'm working on. It has great ideas about how to run points systems - what causes what behaviour. Very powerful.
V Will Rock You
This is the same results I arrived at. By now, I am pretty convinced that routine and focus is much more important than being able to sleep 4 hours less, whereas routine easens focusing hard and thus being more productive.

Right now, my very own producivity experiment is pretty amazing. I am currently training to get up at 6, eat till 7 and work till 12 from there on and after about a week or two of doing this, things just go amazingly well. I get up, and while my head is still kind of sleepy, my hands prepare coffee, breakfast and whatever else needs to be done, but once it is 7 o'clock, I almost instantly slip into the zone and stay there for a few hours (it works well enough such that I am running out of projects to solve for university, which I consider a good thing ;) )
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