skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, they don't have to make them Oculus exclusive to support VR devs and fund the development of more titles.

VR headsets on the PC are just another device like your keyboard, mouse and monitor. I haven't heard of an LG-monitor-exclusive game before, so why should it exist for VR?

It's different on consoles.

Firs there was DRM and now the insistence on exclusivity. For some reason Oculus seems to have forgotten their promise of an open ecosystem, and I hope it's not some Facebook influence Palmer is unable to fight against, and if that's case, I hope Carmack isn't getting pissed. Remember, John is the driving force behind GPL'ing all the engines/games at id software. It's reasonable to doubt any future GPL id software release since John left.

Between the Vive providing an arguably better experience (at a hefty price) and Oculus alienating PC gamers left and right, I have no idea what's going on in their management department. It looks like the wrong people got control.
The title of this post is facile and ridiculous. Obviously the DAO was a disastrous failure and very nearly resulted in catastrophe for its investors.
You don't. There are two conflicting and irreconcilable centres of gravity in law - justice/fairness, and the exploitation of power asymmetries for profit.

Which is why it's literally not possible to reduce a contract to code, and it never will be.

Even if you could produce perfect bug-free code at reasonable cost - a fantasy in itself - you still have to contend with the irreconcilable motivations of the parties to the contract, and the fact that contracts are used to hide motivations as often as they are to reveal them.

It's perfectly possible - common, even - that the motivations are conflicting, irreconcilable, and ambiguous, to the extent that the true practical meaning of a contract can only be defined by an external higher legal and political authority.

Or by one party rolling over. Because making that more likely is what many lawyers get paid for. (And what some of them live for.)
Apple's Differential Privacy
> Have you been propaganda-ed much?

Mate, propaganda is not a verb. If you want to talk to me have manners.
Opponents of IEX, including the other stock exchanges, have argued that the structure of the new exchange will add unnecessary new complexities into an already complex stock market, and potentially end up hurting small investors.

Yeah they are really looking out for the small investors. How very considerate.
> Feeling any sympathy yet? :)

No, because if you skimmed it and then decided to say it was confusable with the prior art of communications satellites, you've just shifted from being lazy to plain disingenuous.

> NDA's almost always say things like this (from an NDA we've signed):

And you've read their NDA? I don't know how much more I have to couch things with allege and supposedly. I have no idea if they're blowing smoke up Google's ass or if they have a real claim. But you sure as hell don't have any evidence to write them off as confidently as you have been.
While the cryptocurrency conversation online is dominated by right-libertarians, I think you'll find that a lot of hard/radical leftwing direct-action types are very much obsessed with cryptocurrency and structures like the DAO. I personally don't look at the cryptocurrency scene/DAO with anything more than bemusement, but I think that community is often presented in a very unpleasant light (look at the weird nerds!).

A more charitable stereotype might be that cryptocurrencies and automated contracts appeal to anyone who thinks that they can design (through their technical expertise) a better world than the current political elites. I'm not saying that they're right or that their line of thought hasn't been historically responsible for atrocities, but I don't think it's fair to paint them as sociopaths.
A Roadmap Towards Machine Intelligence – FB AI Research [pdf]
Not Einstein but Feinstein:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Misattributed
There are a lot of people who like communicating through image memes & other short soundbites - I am not one of them.

I value text. I like reading deeper insights from people much more than cheap flyby memes or time consuming videos. If communication regresses like that, I'll probably withdraw from using those features. It's simply what I don't want in a social network.
people consider vatican not to be equivalent to ISIS and even much worse
Scorex: modular blockchain framework in Scala
Autonomous cars will already line up together to get the slipstream efficiency; take it an extra step further and you could have a battery tanker-truck up front giving everyone in the convoy a charge and also making their travel more efficient.
> In a study by the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Arlington, VA, it was shared that immigrants founded 51 percent (44 out of 87) of U.S. billion-dollar startups and are key members in more than 70 percent (62 out of 87) of these companies.

I do so dislike that study. Three months ago, when we discussed it here on HN, I gave some criticism at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11310031 .

In short, the numbers don't give you enough information to be meaningful. For example, if there are 20 founders and key members per company, then if each company had 1 immigrant founder who was also a key member, then 100% of the companies would have immigrant founders/key members, even if they only made up 5% of the population, which is under what you would expect given the amount of immigration in the US.

Many companies have multiple founders, and all have multiple key members, so the statistics they give have a built-in bias that emphasizes immigrant contributions.

In the comment I tried to figure out the population statistics, rather than the "at least one in the company" statistics. That data wasn't available in their report, and I couldn't reproduce the numbers in the report, so I made a rough estimate myself.

I estimated that 28% of founders are immigrants, which is rather less than the "51%" and "70%" numbers from the report.
HtmlUnit: Release 2.22 – May 27, 2016
Adium is the pidgin for Mac.
> Third, they're a fairly small organization

Yeah, I'm playing the world's smallest violin for Facebook, of all companies. THEY ARE TOO SMALL!
There is already a computer NL hold'em tournament out there, which can be found here, http://www.computerpokercompetition.org
That may be even worse. This would basically be a "majority robs minority" attack. Not necessarily a great thing...
The investor added an unnecessary qualification to her title, and now we have a discussion about the place of women in the industry, designated days, and a campaign about changing job titles.

If you do not find that charged, then we have to make do with the significant degree to which our definitions of that word differ.
> What would be the use case for "letter of the law" agreements

Consider a service where you take money from a user, and then use that money to run a service on their behalf, in a fully automated fashion. You get $x, you spend $y on a server and bandwidth, and you pocket x-y as profit. But if the user pays for your service on a credit card, they could dispute the $x, and leave you on the hook for $y, which could be arbitrarily large; you can immediately cancel their service, but that doesn't get you the $y you've already spent back. It'd be nice to have an enforceable agreement that "you can cancel at any time and stop paying us, at which point the service goes away, but under no circumstances will we owe you anything".

(This is also one reason why companies often don't offer discounts for paying up-front for a year or more, and credit card processors consider those high-risk: too many people dispute the transaction after a short time and get all their money back, including what they've already paid.)

I can imagine many more scenarios that rely on "once you have the money it can't go away", that don't work nearly as well with reversible transactions.

> how do you avoid massive problems due to buggy contracts as we're seeing?

In cases where you want human judgment as a safety precaution, write it in at the top level of the contract. "Notwithstanding anything else, all transactions are reversible for up to X days based on the judgment of Y, to be supplied via Z mechanism; if such judgment is not supplied, the transaction becomes immutable after those X days have passed." (Or, if you want, "all transactions can be disputed for up to X days, which will then hold them for judgment by Y for up to Z days".) The equivalent of "don't run untrusted software in ring 0"; the "pure letter of the law" space is ring 0, and many things could be built on one or more layers of indirection above that.

In cases where you don't want human judgment, then you avoid buggy contacts the same way you avoid buggy software: get a lot of people looking at it, and limit how much you trust things that haven't been heavily hammered on for years. Anyone investing millions into a "smart contract" today is taking an absurd risk.

You could also purchase insurance of some kind. If the price of that insurance is absurd, that should tell you something. But not every transaction should have to price in built-in insurance (and actuaries to properly price it).
EC Country specific recommendations
> "Constructor" already got used by C++ for something different.

Constructor was used (long) before C++! For instance, the "cons" function in Lisp stands for "construct", and speaking of which, ANSI Lisp even has "boa constructors" (by order of arguments). We are used to having terms like "constructor", "array" or "variable" have different shades in different languages. If I reach for Awk to munge some text fields, I'm not suddenly confused because its "arrays" are not like C arrays or Fortran arrays.

The same terms being used is actually helpful, because the terms form the pivots in conceptual mappings between languages, and comparisons. Even if two languages have different notions of what is a "variable", they are used in similar ways. It's easier to hang different shades of meaning on the same word than to memorize some made up new word. Even something quite different, like placeholders in pattern matching or predicate logic, can still be called "variable" without causing confusion.

Think about parameters/arguments. They can be by value, by name, by reference, or normal order (lazy). Using a different word instead of "parameter" for all these would be counterproductive, and make it harder to speak comparatively.

Bottom line, people aren't complete idiots.

"The Flunk language has flurbles, which are like C++ variables, but not exactly, so we use a different word. Unlike variables denote locations which do not have a type and can store any value." (Gee, that's just like "variables" in some existing languages that are not C++.)
A meritoracy can reward qualities other than intelligence - integrity, talent, dedication, diligence, courage (both physical and moral), kindness, generosity, willingness to help others...
This is anecdotal, but I've still never watched one of those auto-play videos you see at the top of news articles. It's just so much more efficient to just skim the text below and find the relevant information you were after.
What horrible thing can't you say that about?
Two thoughts on this:

1. I'm still not sold on that VR is the future of gaming. I do agree that exclusivity will hurt more than it can help. Similar to the way Telsa opened their patents because the adoption of electric cars by the populace is better for their business than protecting their IP.

2. It makes sense that Valve is investing so much in this because it's just another excuse to not make video games anymore. RIP HL3. ;)

EDIT: oh, the down votes. Heaven forbid there be any sarcasm on HN.
I'm not sure where you got this from. There's nothing inherent in WSGI that prevents you from spawning multiple threads and processes. I'm unaware of WSGI implementation that does not do this. uWSGI even shows how to do this even in their quickstart [1].

Having said that, this is actually irrelevant when trying to scale out. There's nothing that prevents you from starting your application multiple times each copy on a different machine. As long as your application is stateless (which is a requirement no matter which language you use). I don't think there's any programing language which prevents you from doing that.

[1] http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/WSGIquickstart.ht...
What does the mining situation look like for Eth? Is it like Bitcoin where it's less than a dozen guys in China? Or is it more spread out.
Liquidity in instruments other than equities (options/futures/futures options) is getting worse, not better. Wider spreads and less liquid markets actually do disproportionately affect smaller investors who are doing anything other than straight equity buying and selling. HFT isn't hurting liquidity and isn't nearly the problem it once was, and this doesn't do anything to address the actual problems in dark pools or auctions or the non-transparent part of the market.
Chip card transactions do take a very long time in the US. If I had to guess as to the reason it would not be network or back end processing (seems way way too long, and too consistent to be due to those factors), but probably the time it takes the card to run crypto. Perhaps they use cheap cards with slow cpu but also big keys for fear of attack?
This is covered in the BBS Documentary[1]. A comparison of Phil Katz work showed he just renamed variables and moved things around. Phil rallied the BBS community to character assassinate Thom. The documentary is shot years later and Thom still breaks down and cries when talking about what happened. It is very sad.

[1] http://bbsdocumentary.com/
Thanks for this, I try to tell my fiance what I do at my job but she hasn't understood until now!
This will force media companies to do something which they should have done a long time ago.

Think of all the videos you ignore on Forbes, WSJ, Bloomberg, etc. because you can't view them muted. Think of all the videos from Buzzfeed and others which aren't of such high caliber but are so easy to consume that you do.

This will force those with real content to publish that content in an accessible way. I'm fine with videos, especially muted ones, because if the current trends stay I think they'll be more useful to me and everyone else.

Text IS great. But somethings like a presidential speech or a short interview need the visual element. Some things don't need the visual part, but a media company can make it better than without it. The key will be to keeping it short because as others mention in the comments it's very difficult to skip around in videos for what you care about. Most of the videos I mentioned are already pretty short though, so I'm guessing that won't be much of an issue for them to adapt.
Certainly didn't mean to imply that you have to be a sociopath to like cryptocurrency! That would be unfair and ridiculous. I think it's more like an allergy to what one considers politics.

The benefits of cryptocurrency i've seen argued for in left libertarian circles don't propose some narrative where it supplants the current structures of government. I think a lot of leftists would reason (certainly, I reason this way) that cryptocurrency's much touted benefits are in conflict with capitalism and could not support capitalism at all. This is at odds with the right libertarian ambitions for the technology: right libertarians love capitalism and the crypto enthusiasts on that side of the spectrum think it would be great for capitalism! It's a fundamental disagreement. I've heard about bitcoin being used to great effect by left wing insurgencies like Rojava. It is useful in its current form as a subversive means of transmitting resources.

I'm not familiar with the left wing arguments for cryptocurrency as a transformative tool for structuring new societies. It sounds like technocracy and vanguardism and, well, we know how that's played out.
In a world that is increasingly data, the ability to process and react to that data becomes worth.

Marking worth is just more data processing, a declaration of subjective value in the scheme of your choice. Nothing special.

The nature of your interactions with those of lesser worth, and your views of them, however...well, there is a defining thing for a human being.
I really enjoyed the gates in Central Park [0]. Christo and Jean-Claude were both huge inspirations to me when I was in high school (I fancied myself an artist at the time). If you're unfamiliar with their work check out the wrapped coast, the umbrellas (Japan), and my favorite: the wrapped Reichstag.

Thanks for sharing this.
Isn't Barclay/BarclayCard (arguably) not a US bank though?
Sorry, I think your point is completely invalid after reading "I don’t view TheDAO as a failure. I view it as an experiment that has reached its conclusion.". If you go to a doctor and he/she tries to cure from cancer giving orange juice he/she can't argue it was an experiment because this is malpractice.

The DAO was not scrutinized enough comparing to the funds it contained.
A lot of what's said is very similar in the education space as well so I can somewhat understand. Great writeup!
Video ads are slightly harder to block. Particularly on mobile.
> AFAIR if you have a single excited particle, you still get this polynomial decay.

I'm not seeing that in the linked papers. I'm seeing descriptions of exponential decay under certain conditions, and deviations from that under other conditions.
I cant stand videos for most information. By the time the video loads and the probably slow speaking individual goes over just the introduction of the information, I could have already read a more informative article/post.
Maybe that's the point. If you implement, say, arrays very badly, and call them arrays, then everyone can easily criticize you in very direct terms: "Flunk has arrays, but they are broken compared to Python arrays, or even C arrays and Fortran arrays". The left-most "arrays" in that sentence can be a straightforward, blue-underlined link directly to the Flunk documentation which describes arrays. But if you call then batteries, then such a comparison gets confounded with distracting explanations. It's harder to argue that Flunk has broken arrays, when it has something called batteries that hold cells which have polarity and whatnot. First you have to argue that they really are just arrays under a different name, then you have to argue why they are bad compared to arrays, and why that still matters in the context where they are batteries. By the time you're done, you look stupider than Flunk, and more negative than the (-) end of a Flunk battery.
"The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along"*

* also being male, White, straight, Christian

...As though the 50's were the bastion of fair hiring practices.
WebVR works, only needs a compatible web browser. Chrome and Firefox.
> and it's pretty easy to get management to sign off on purchasing something

Whooa, where is this mythical land of milk and honey, and can I but tickets to get there?
>> hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

Because this would be a much better world?
This has been marked a dupe.. Where is the duplicate?
Oculus is backed by Facebook. You cannot in any way frame them to be small, or at any existential risk.
Why the DAO attack may ultimately benefit Ethereum
Yes I have Airbnb median prices listed https://nomadlist.com/airbnb-vs-hotel

It's not my main focus atm though!
>Asbestos is another good example. We thought the stuff was just the best thing ever. Turns out, in the very long run, it's pretty bad news.

Asbestos isn't manmade, its a naturally occurring set of minerals [1]. It was obviously put into various man-made objects, but the fiber itself is naturally occurring.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos
Thanks! 300,075$ now haha
People always bring up defense against the evil gov't. I'd be interested to see how effective some guns are going to be against tanks, nukes, drones, etc. Just seems like more alarmist bullshit to justify owning guns. However, I'm not against gun ownership — I'm only against lack of regulations so any crazy nut can buy a gun at their whim and go massacre people.
I'm not sure what this. Is it some utility that eats plain data and spits out encrypted files?
The original plan for IEX sounds like a wonderful extortion racket. By law, you cannot buy or sell stock on someone else's behalf unless you check with all major US stock exchanges first to verify that you are getting your client the best price. IEX intentionally, massively delays answering back unless you pay them buckets of money. Thus, unless you pay IEX buckets of money, you are at a huge disadvantage on every stock market, not just IEX. Quite a racket.

Has anything changed with either the laws or IEX's plan since then?

Update: IEX did indeed change their proposal to remove the favored order routing. Which still affects trades in other exchanges, and still affects negatively effects traders on all markets, but at least its "fair" now.
It would still be interesting if they only did it in the short term, say 2-3 years.
80% of North Americans Can't See the Milky Way Anymore Due to Light Pollution
"Charged" to me implies that there was some disproportionate response.

What do you think the response would have been if he had directed a question to "the black CTO"?
Thanks brudgers, I appreciate your input.

I think there is some truth in what you've said.

However in my case it wasn't a conscious choice, in fact my conscious choice at many points along the way was to improve quality, stability, reduce bugs that make to production etc. And I haven't done it. So I cannot claim quick and dirty was as strategy. I would have been ok with that for the first 6 months but we are past that.

I want to face up to the fact that I need to change.

Also I have a suspicion that doing things well becomes faster and more efficient than quick and dirty quite quickly.

Thanks for your words on encouragement.
You out-buzzfeeded buzzfeed's own hyperbolic headline.
This armchair legal theory is rather pleasantly eviscerated by Matt Levine today on Bloomberg.[1] In short, you do not get immunity from real world contract law with a one paragraph disclaimer.

[1] "Blockchain Company's Smart Contracts Were Dumb" http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchain...
Thanks! I think this sums up well what I need to do.
Those first two links should ideally have been included in the project's README. From a maintainer's perspective, "Google it" should never be acceptable.
Alternatively, American society values a human's worth by economic output and the economy has shifted to value humans who can successfully navigate the new more intelligence-based economy.
After all human history where jocks ruled the earth, they're now upset that nerds are becoming important?
Meet Tanmay Bakshi, the world’s youngest Watson programmer
If only this were true in elections.
How would this work? If you discovered an attack, what would be the incentive to not just sit on it until it was released to the real world?
Since I started playing all YouTube videos at 2x speed[0] I enjoy watching/listening to videos much more. Watching videos at 1x is just unbearable to me now. I wish FB added 2x playback too.

[0] using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube-youtu...
Thanks devnonymous.

I will make getting a test suite for core functionality my number #1 priority and then investigate static analysis tools and CI.

Do you have any links that explain what a 2 ack process is in this context ?
Behold, the most Hacker News post on Hacker News.
You might be surprised by the intelligence of the ruling class from a few thousand years ago..