skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many many many game developers get sucked into the infinite vortex of trying to "find the fun". A computer is a very large blank canvas and the set of all possible games is infinite. It can be overwhelming trying to decide what game to make.

Often, developers wander off to "make an engine" partially as an excuse to put off making those scary decisions. But an engine isn't a game and if you want to ship something people can play (and not just make games themselves with) you do have to make that choice.

You've made an insane amount of progress, but I wonder if you're struggling with this too. If I can make two suggestions that might help:

1. Realize a negative choice has positive value.

Every idea or feature sounds cool, so the default answer to "Should I add ___?" or "Can the player do ___?" or "Can the engine support ___?" is going to be "yes" because it all sounds fun. But the end result is something that takes infinite time to produce. Your time is finite.

It takes courage, but I find I make better progress when I deliberately allow myself to choose not to do something. Remember, any feature you omit pays you back in the most important currency: time. By saying, for example, "No multiplayer", you're saying "Yes" to a lot of other features you will now have time to implement.

2. Make the game that only your engine can do.

You're in an unusual position in that you already have a very interesting, unique engine. Most developers out there just have half-baked clones of existing engines.

When you're trying to figure out what kind of game to build on top of that engine, focus relentlessly on the kind of gameplay your engine, and only your engine can support. For me, that's rich, detailed, destructible terrain. If it doesn't take advantage of voxels, cut it.

Looking at the videos over the past year, I see lots and lots of basic character animation. Every game engine can do that. It's not interesting to see yours can too, and it takes (took) a ton of your time to do it. Don't spend time catching up to other engines. Spend time building on top of what you already have.

I don't care if a character in the game is a simple billboard—I actually think billboard characters would look nice with the pixely voxel style—I'm coming to your engine for the terrain. Everything else is secondary.

Good luck! It's been inspiring watching you make progress on this.
We've been using Stripe ACH's payments for a couple months now (coming from Balanced), and the whole process, from charge to bank, takes around 7 business days, and the statement shows up on day 1.

I consider this a long time, so long, that I'm actually considering on working directly with a bank myself and plugging into ACH network directly (The way we operate, its faster for some clients to just be paid through PayPal and cashout through PayPal).

As far as fraud goes, ACH charges can be reversed with no questions asked for 60 days if it turns out the charge was unauthorized (with no recourse, except asking the customer). On the other side, if a fraudster has your bank credentials, and can confirm with micro deposits, this is no different than them going to PayPal or Venmo with that same information.
I love Voxatron, but not likely - Voxatron's rendering is quite different. It is one of the few "pure" voxel engines in existence.
"Based on known terrestrial reserves, and growing consumption in both developed and developing countries, key elements needed for modern industry and food production could be exhausted on Earth within 50–60 years.[2] These include phosphorus, antimony, zinc, tin, lead, indium, silver, gold and copper"

Sounds ominous! Why aren't we more worried? Because Capitalism?
Not sure about this. Pricing reads "funding sources" with no reference to the number of bank accounts that you can charge. http://blog.dwolla.com/connect-multiple-funding-sources-dwol...
Tadepalli V. Uber Technologies, Inc
Show HN: ProductMap – A change log as a service
>>Your comment actually made me scroll back to
>>...check this thread was.. about Perl 6, not Perl 5!

Well, the context of the parent, and it's parent, was not Perl 6.
Legit thought experiment and not a troll, because I'm curious about thinking through this.

What happens if legislation is passed that more or less prevents people from owning property that's not their primary residence? Like: if you don't live in it more than 190 days a year, you pay a really high property tax on it.

I've always thought a big part of the landlord - tenant issues around rent control, fair market housing, and a lot of other stuff all stems from the position that people are allowed to own more homes that they can live in, and derive income from landlording.

There's some obvious issues - not everyone wants to live in a home / apartment that they own (liquidity, mortgage, etc). This could be obviated with some workarounds (and market forces might help out a bit too - I'd imagine real estate could change hands a lot more frequently in that situation).

Anyway. Thoughts?
> "And so, today, we’re delighted to launch support for ACH payments for all U.S. Stripe users."

Any ETAs for international? More particularly Canadaland?
Via an email from Uber California Airport Fee Settlement Administrator <Administrators@qgemail.com> opening with:

> Why did I get this notice? This Notice relates to a proposed settlement (“Settlement”) of a class action lawsuit involving claims that Uber Technologies, Inc. (“Uber”) charged users of its mobile application (the “Uber App”) fees that were described as “Airport Fee Tolls” when users arranged for rides to or from certain California airports, and that Uber did not remit those fees to the airport (“Unremitted California Airport Fee Toll”). You are receiving this notice because you may have paid an Unremitted California Airport Fee Toll between June 1, 2010 and November 20, 2015 and may be a “Class Member” in the lawsuit.
Wow, it's like looking into the viewport of the future of video games.
There is no transaction fee for Dwolla whether or not you use the free product or the white label product. There is no limit to the number of bank accounts you can debit or credit via ACH with the white label api - https://www.dwolla.com/white-label
Maybe Roman toilets are overrated, but 2000 years later, countries like India still don't have them.
Reuters photo set:

http://www.reuters.com/news/picture/inside-the-doomsday-seed...
We built ProductMap to have a place to tell users about new features, updates, and product announcements.

Down the road we'll be adding things like voting, user feedback, and automatically posting to social media.

Happy to hear feedback!
I don't see any listing for Ohm/mm2 which is where a lot of the conductive inks tend to fall over.

Sounds interesting but I'd be very curious what the resistance and how consistently it can be applied(in order to limit variation for impedance matched traces).
Lots of people have produced decoders for vp9 including both hardware and software vendors. Including companies like ittiam, Intel, samsung and qualcomm.

Lack of a non NDA public spec may have made things more difficult for some but it certainly didn't stop everyone.
From a technical point of view it's amazing.

Artistically, the voxels are too big to look impressive to anyone used to polygon graphics, and too small to give off the "pixel-art" aesthetic of Minecraft or Terarria.

I want to play the game evoked by the banner at the top of the page, but not the one I see in the video.
Unfortunately, that will only stop people who run around taking photos of other people's checks.

Does Plaid provide information about the location the checking account was initially opened or the general location of the account owner's residence? The biggest problem with Stripe is they provide ZERO checks on IP location + billing/shipping zip code, checking the email against known fraudulent email addresses, or shipping location against known drop locations.
I blogged about my collection of tools here - http://ashishb.net/tech/mac-os-x-primer-part-3-window-manage...
It looks like a lot of fun. I've been following the development for some time and really enjoy your posts and updates (especially the ray-cast renderer, so cool).

You're amazing.
20 minutes of aimless muttering does not a good video presentation make. Impressive progress though.
Maybe an elevator but I very much doubt a Wonkavator!
That makes sense, but certainly quite a few things I'd like to print at home would be for 'amusement' or to 'satisfy idle curiosity' (that would describe quite a lot of my adult life, not to mention my childhood). Not to belittle 'strictly philosophical inquiry' either, (though how much inquiry you could wring out of a Lego minifig, RPi case, etc. remains to be seen).
As for your Tor links:

1. Not even about Tor, rather about Tor Browser, which is a modified Firefox and is optional to use (and 100% unrelated to Tor as a protocol or daemon). Complaints about this can be directed to Mozilla.

2. Pando loves to fear-monger about Tor and draw 'conclusions' without actually supporting them. Notice how they represent a blog post stating "incapacitated" (ie. affecting availability) as "exposed" (ie. affecting confidentiality)? Notice how Pando nowhere actually describes how a lot of 'fake' nodes could supposedly compromise users?

That's because they are not making a technical argument, and they don't understand the internals of Tor. They are just publishing a hit piece that sounds vaguely to the untrained ear like it might have some technical merit, without ever actually proving the assertion they're making. And their implied argument is wrong.

3. Ah, an actual issue with Tor. But look at the operative phrase: "The problem boils down to this – around 90% of Tor users are still using older software which can be hacked." It's an issue that has long been resolved, and was an implementation error rather than a fundamental issue with Tor.

--

You're really not the first to try and claim that Tor is "broken" by pointing at a bunch of articles like this. The reality is that none of it actually means that Tor is broken, and the one attack on Tor that does exist (and that is very expensive to pull off) isn't even clearly described in any of these articles.

If you're going to argue about the technical merit and security of different proxying techniques (because that's what they all effectively are), then at least inform yourself to a point where you actually understand how they work internally. Right now, you just look ignorant.

I think icebrained nicely covered the other few points, aside from "installing a software program" and "cloud services" - in which case, I'd recommend you look into package/executable signing, how it provides some guarantee of consistency, and how you can use it to avoid dodgy software builds. This kind of thing is also exactly why many people avoid proprietary software and 'cloud services', by the way.
Ansible would be much better if they just used Python for the playbook API instead of YAML. Ansible would be a clear win over over-engineered competitors like Chef if they fixed this, but as-is I don't want to use it.
Yes. But the list to be filtered varies with the query I make.
Not available in the desktop client it seems.
Because every voxel needs processing, and you've only got 16.7ms to process every voxel every frame.
I just received an email about this. It looks like if you used Uber since November 1, 2014, your reimbursement (if it happens) will be in the form of credit to your Uber account. If you haven't used it since then, Uber will issue a credit to the payment account associated with your Uber account. Kind of interesting.

As for how much: "The total amount of Unremitted California Airport Fee Tolls that were charged to Class Members and that Uber will reimburse is approximately $1,785,912.85. The amount that Class Members will receive will vary depending on the Unremitted California Airport Fee Tolls they were charged. The settlement payments to Class Members will not be reduced or used to pay the settlement administration costs, a Plaintiff’s service award as approved by the Court, or attorneys’ fees as approved by the Court. Uber will pay these expenses separately and in addition to reimbursement of the Unremitted California Airport Fee Tolls it will pay to Class Members."
Hopefully they'll get there. We're a UK based company with 90% of our revenue from US based enterprises, so moving to this would be awesome :)
Ok, thanks, sounds cool. Interesting use of P2P technology, good luck!
AnthemScore – Automatically create sheet music from audio
Pretty sure from the context the OP was saying on board the chip.
On to the next 2,271 days… (Fred Benenson leaves Kickstarter)
The existence of the issue in the first place.
User Stories Acceptance Definition and Criteria in Agile Methodologies
You have to create an account, then remove the password from it. You can't create a new account[1] without a password.

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/disable-remove-...
google analytics with automated filtering of referral spam
Since we are in pedant's corner, note that I very carefully used past tense. Yes it originally was a design goal.

Source: The Design and Evolution of C++, by Bjarne Stroustrup. (I don't know which printing I have.) Page 120, Section 4.5 "No gratuitous incompatibilities with C". It explains my original claim, and also why it couldn't be 100% compatible due to some other C++ desirables (eg better type safety). Partial quote:

"C++ doesn't aim at 100% compatibility with C because that would have compromised the aims of type safety and support for design. However, where these aims are not interfered with incompatibilities are avoided - even at the cost of inelegance. In most cases, C incompatibilities have been accepted only when a C rule left a gaping hole in the type system."
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10857624 (245 points, 5 days ago, 70 comments)
Rust's ownership system makes shared memory much more safe than you'd expect. And you can also use shared-nothing approaches if you prefer those.
NASA's New Office Is Our Defense Against Death from the Skies
Using python as the playbook API sounds dangerous. I think the idea is to restrict playbooks so they can be sanitized.

To me, it still seems like a win compared to over-engineered solutions like chef.
I think I read once that when elevators still had operators, larger buildings would have one or more dispatch agents in the lobby that would line people up at the appropriate elevator for the range of floors they intended to visit.
Please don't post uncivil comments to Hacker News, even when the other comment is a bad one.
I'm not sure about Oakland's geology, but the part of SF where I live (outer sunset) is more or less just houses on top of sand dunes. I'm no geologist, but I've always wondered how well one could build tall buildings on that kind of ground.
The largest is currently Dropbox, who re-wrote the way they store the bytes on disk in Rust. It was deployed in late December, they have promised a report after it's been in production longer than a few weeks.
This company wants to change the way we build gadgets by making them modular
Thanks Bob! Totally agree with you - it really is a battle of fighting against my "engineering instinct" which just wants to build stuff all day, no matter how useless it is. I have deliberated over this internally with myself and others for a long time. In fact, half way into the character animation I was kicking myself for even beginning working on it. I tend to justify things (whether rational or not) as a content problem ("Oh I can just build this system and it will make making this type of content so much easier!"). I now really need to hone down on gameplay (and stop just telling myself to do so). :)
Good challenge. I've thought myself many times what would be elevator logic, and it's not trivial.
Someone should really scrape that site into an API and re-surface it to make it as well-designed as it deserves to be. Would be a fun UX/design side-project...

EDIT: The first site you linked, that is :)
In my opinion, that's what has been missing with Starbound, which has been one of the punchingbags for crowdfunding/pre-order games. The engine looks great and it has a lot of unique content - but its just an engine right now, with no real content for people to play through while they task and tinker with changes (they are on, what, the 4th full combat overhaul?). In contrast, during development of Terraria or Minecraft you could get enjoy playing it.
You should add the http:// to make the parser show the address as a link.
See https://sel4.systems
FreeCodeCamp.com is showing that there's a hunger for learning JavaScript for people in their 20s and older, but what about teaching people (in the same age range?) other skills?

I also mention FCC because they've made it so you can add your content instead of their JS content, and poof, you have a learning platform!
I came to say the exact same thing.

There is also no sub-Saharan civilization that had figured out basic sanitation/sewers, even into the 21st century for some places.
In college I worked part-time for a music social network startup that sold songs and paid artists a commission, kind of like iTunes. I had to write a cron job that would issue the artist payouts every night by writing ACH files in plaintext and SFTPing them to SVB.

3 years later it's great to see Stripe providing this, but I will always have an oddly fond memory of working on that. It felt so obscure and unnecessarily difficult.
For interested people, it ended up with https://github.com/letsauth/letsauth.github.io/wiki/Roadmap
Nascent Objects: An Ambitious Plan to Stop Us from Wasting Our Gadgets
Are there actual licensed engineering professionals (ie electrical, mechanical) who resort to some made up ranks to separate themselves from the herd and use puzzles to judge the skillset of a potential employee? How does this work in industries other than software? Just genuinely curious here.
Power supplies for Bitcoin mining. http://gigampz.com
Yes. Patents don't care if you knew about them or not.
thank you; I'll put a note on my calendar to check in a couple weeks

edit:
Once you google for dropbox rust, you find some really interesting stuff; here's an overview

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724849
It might be even easier than that, since RDP remotes the screen at the GDI level, so if you're looking at the protocol, you'll see a regular pattern of DrawText calls.
Oh no. My work day has been seriously threatened.
Copyrights no (that's what cleanroom gets you), patents yes.
I see your viewpoint, but I personally feel that YAML is a much better solution. I don't want to run arbitrary code in my playbooks! I just want to be able to trigger ansible modules.

Besides, it's really easy to write your own Ansible module (in Python), which seems to solve the issue for any use case I can think of?
The standard answers are:

1) Known reserves likely represent a fraction of what is available because we have not had reason to search for new reserves.

2) We do not really consume any of those resources in the same way that we consume fossil fuels, so as a worst case scenario, we can simply mine them from our landfills. This arguably falls under new, more expensive, reserves.
Python 2 going away in 2020? Yeah right. Python 3 is a dead end. If they rebooted Python 4 to run Python 2, maybe Python 4 would be relevant. As it stands, Python 3 is a total disaster and will never replace 2. Trying to improve unicode handling? Check. Replacing the print statement syntax just because? Ohmygodstupid.
Does anyone know if the wordlist for the new "words" password generation recipe is the standard diceware list?

It would be really cool if there were an option to show the entropy of a generated password.
Have you ever bought a house? I have. I do not want to go through that process every time I move. Plus, while I have purchased a house before, it ended up being foreclosed on and I certainly couldn't get a mortgage now (and I shouldn't... I can't afford a mortgage). I would be pretty SOL if owning a house was a prerequisite for not being homeless.

How is commercial property treated?

What prevents a company building a huge apartment building, "selling" it to an apartment manager (in the form of a very expensive mortgage) and then having the apartment manager rent out "rooms" in his very large "house" to cover his mortgage?

In short, the longer I think about the idea, the less practical it becomes.
The major difference is that Starbound made heaps of money (not to mention that Terraria sold 7 million + units!) I'm still looking for change under the couch. :)
India was the birthplace of plumbing, though the Romans perfected it.

Standardized earthen plumbing pipes with broad flanges making use of asphalt for preventing leakages appeared in the urban settlements of the Indus Valley Civilization by 2700 B.C.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumbing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sa...
""yes, we do not allow these ports" or whatever... does that mean it is "secure"?"

No, it means you don't allow those ports. That's all it means. Saying precisely what you're doing or what attributes your aiming for are what the formal work is all about. Whether your security policy is enough and your design embodies it are different things altogether.

"what does "encrypted" mean? Is it just a word that you use in your specification language? if so, does it mean what you think it means? etc etc etc..."

That's actually one of the easiest things you could ever check in formal systems. It's helpful to think of it like programming. Actually, done side-by-side. You implement a formal spec for a requirement and/or high-level function that takes plaintext as input and outputs ciphertext. This typically uses Red/Black separation model. You also produce and vet an implementation for the encryption module. Now, how to know if something was encrypted in the system before going on the wire? Wait for it... wait for it... answer: it went through the encryption module first while it was initialized and in a state saying it's encrypting. Just like that. Labels and checking at interfaces were used for identifying what went with what and making policy enforcement easier.

Note: Guttman has a security kernel in cryptlib that does this at the interface level for every function in the system. In CompSci literature, it's called Assured Pipelines if you want to look it up. Easier to support now with Design-by-Contract and advanced typing systems. Past systems were kludgy when they happened at OS level except with capability systems.

Anyway, such components and functions are composed with the interactions and compositions analyzed. Each component and composition usually has a small number of execution traces it can perform so one can brute force the analysis if necessary. Finite state machines, both success and fail states, were common in high assurance development because they can be analyzed in full in all sorts of ways.

Note: It was Dijkstra that invented the method for this in the THE multiprogramming system. I think PSOS did it for security first. VAX Security Kernel Retrospective has nice sections where they show layering and assurance activities plus effect they had on analysis and defect hunting. Google any of those to understand the method better.
Totally agree. The sad thing is I'm not even entrepreneurial in the "aggressive unicorn chase" sense; I'm just a lucky guy with a rewarding and enjoyable large tech company job with good pay and work/life balance. It feels like getting anywhere near what I have now, just in Canada, would be so much harder.