skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From garadget's post on their forum:

> At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection.

It seems to me like garadget is perfectly willing to refund the purchaser, once the purchaser returns the item.
Yeah, abusive language it is not. It's more of a tantrum.

Looking at the other reviews, it does seem that the company is happy to help with issues even where there is a negative review.
This is mind blowing. I do a bit of running, some half marathons etc. but nowhere close to Ultras and this just amazes me and also excites me. I would want to push myself to do this at least once...see how my body responds.
Title doesn't do any justice, it's an all-discrete circuit made from diodes, transistors and such. They are soldered not on a PCB but mostly free hanging in air above a copper ground plate. One wrong move and "bazoing" sparkles. The guy didn't draw a schematic beforehand either. He mostly made it up as he went. Amazing.

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/oscilloscope-pong-for-...
How Can Entrepreneurs and Startups Simplify Professional Video Creation
Some games, if multiplayer and a bot is put in, can use paths learned by human players to appear more human.

We did some of this for racing games which really have pretty easy AI when compared with character games or strategy. An example is take ghost runs from real players, essentially splines from real players good and bad, but adjust the runtime play to the current vehicles but try to run that line. That way runs appear more human and probably can't be replicated by AI as well.

For racing there is also the typical rubber banding AI which tunes to the runtime play[1].

Most AI in games really come down to just scripts and action recipes. Zone based events/actions, path passed actions/events, follow/ranged/staged reactions, global actions/events, AI directors that can tune the game to the player or difficulty dynamically etc.

Left for Dead probably has the best AI director out there for tuning some great co-op games[2]. It does med drops, weapons, enemies appearing all based on the current state of the players and skill. Music also changed per player based on their situation and intensity of that situation.

The Director, sometimes referred to as the AI Director, or simply as AID is the artificial intelligence of Left 4 Dead that features a dynamic system for game dramatics, pacing, and difficulty.
Instead of set spawn points for enemies, the Director places enemies in varying positions and numbers based upon each player's current situation, status, skill, and location, creating a new experience for each play-through. The Director also creates mood and tension with emotional cues such as visual effects, dynamic music and character communication. Moreover, the Director is responsible for spawning additional health, ammo, weapons, and Special Infected, like the Witch or the Tank.

It should be noted that there is another Director in the game, which controls the music on a per-player scale, called the Music Director.

[1] http://www.giantbomb.com/rubber-band-ai/3015-35/

[2] http://left4dead.wikia.com/wiki/The_Director
In Defense of Interactive Graphics
This is not a marketing page. It's a legal page from their lawyers stating how the brand name should be used, such that they don't loose control over their trademark. You better believe they're damn proud of the fact that their name is being used as a verb. They just have to show that they're defending the brand so that they don't loose their trademark. Google and Kleenex are in the same boat.
This is awesome! I work in the cash register software development world, and our customers are sometimes quite picky about the latency of our systems as a whole (= the time between a scan of an item happening, indicated by the scanner beeping and lighting an LED, and the output being visible on the display). I found myself measuring this total latency using an iPhone (at that time it was a 4, without the high speed camera, but nevertheless sufficient to see whether we were below the critical limit of - at that time - 200ms), and it worked out very well, although I had to load all the videos into external software to count the frames accurately because the phones' own players weren't sufficient and there were no apps like this.

I will definitely give this tool a try, it could vastly improve future measurements using the same technique :D
Not even the title of the article. A little click-bait-y. Expected a blog post from Adobe or something, not to be redirected to their trademark page.
I don't see this story going anywhere positive for Garadget. Blocking functionality because of a bad review? This will backfire horribly.
Fractal Technologies | Software Engineer | Eindhoven area, The Netherlands | ONSITE, Full-time | http://www.fract-tech.com

Fractal Technologies is a small, fast growing company developing software for chip development and manufacturing companies. Major semiconductor companies world wide are using our software to validate chip design libraries and IP blocks.

For the expansion of our international software development team based in the Netherlands we are searching for a software engineer who can work independently, is passionate about his work, and eager to learn. Our main development languages are C++11 and Python. We are now migrating to C++14, and once GCC stabilizes C++17 we will upgrade to that. Our engineering work is versatile; project examples include the redesign of software components for thread-safety, performance improvements to existing components to handle ever growing design data efficiently, design and implementation of a wide spectrum of validation algorithms, and the visualization and reporting of validation results.

Interested? Please send an e-mail to: info@fract-tech.com
Here is Google's version of Google is not a verb: https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html
While Kleenex is commonly used to refer to any brand of facial tissue, I've never heard of it being used as a verb.
What happened to Mexico seems quite clear. Back in the 80s-90s, South American cocaine and marijuana were mainly smuggled via Central America and the Caribbean. Some Mexican marijuana and heroin was smuggled to the US, but quality was low, and there wasn't much money in it.

But then the US clamped down on the Caribbean route. And now cocaine was moving through Mexico. Now most illegal marijuana comes from Canada. So Mexican gangs are mainly moving cocaine (and heroin).

So yes, it's the US drug problem, and the War on Drugs, that's fucked over Mexico.
Well fine, i'll just say, "this image was fireworked!" Oh wait...
I can only hope you are creating an Ultima 7.5. True world building seems to have been left in the 90's.
That's not being professional
Columbia Journalism Review used to have full-page advertisements from Xerox that read, "You can't Xerox a Xerox on a Xerox. But you can make a copy on a Xerox-brand copier."

It was effective, in that I remember the ad many years later. But it didn't do much to change the way people use language.
Great mission, but hard skip this tire fire. Trust me.
The number is correct, it's an Australian number [0]. Specifically a FreeCall number following the format: 1800 xxx xxx. Not to be confused with the United State's 1-800-xxx-xxxx format. An easy mistake to make if you didn't notice the /au/ in the URL.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_Australia
Who here hasn't thrown a tantrum on Yelp?
I think it should be illegal. Frame it in terms of a burger. If McDonald's says "since you say our food is bad we're messing with your burger after you bought it and we'll give you your money back if you return it" that would be illegal and probably, not sure though, a form of discrimination.
Not "for negative Amazon review", but for being an asshole.

This guy forgot that there are people behind every product and the abstraction is as thin as it gets when it is in fact a smaller company or a startup. There are negative reviews and there are nasty reviews. He was nasty to them and they no longer wanted him as a client. No reason why a company should swallow shit that a person wouldn't. They certainly _can_ do that (no questions asked refunds, customer is always right, etc), but it's an option, not a requirement.

[Edit]

We had paying customers like that - sent pissy emails, no Hello, no signature, just spit and complaints about minutae with personal attacks ("only an idiot would do it that way") and a shitload of entitlement because they paid us money. In all cases they recieved an immediate refund and a goodbye. If they can't make a basic effort to keep things civil, we have no interest in working with them.

The only issue with the case at hand is that they explicitly mention bad an Amazon review, while they actually dropped him because of his general toxic attitude.
https://youtu.be/e0WqAmuSXEQ

I played through HL2 again recently and it was fun but I found it to be over designed. HL2 (and Portal!) try way too hard to make the player feel clever. You'll find some nook or cranny or hidden path that always turns out to be only way to go.

I used to rag on the guns in the game too; they are not fun to use, but looking back I think that was a deliberate strategy to encourage the player to use the gravity gun more.

HL1 certainly had a much more organic feel to it. Like the abstract bases and hell of DOOM vs the uncanny valley cities of Duke Nukem 3D, the missile base of the original HL, which has no basis in reality in terms of its design, feels more authentic and believable than City 17.

Most of the battles in HL2 are either forgettable or boring (SHOOT A ROCKET AT THE THING!), but I must say I really enjoyed the one near the end of the game where you fight against soldiers on multiple levels as you climb your way up some kind of warehouse: https://youtu.be/91uWeqArrok?t=3h38m19s
The verb now has negative connotations, in that anything refereed to as photoshopped means it is obviously badly edited and/or fake looking.
Be careful what you wish for, my middle tier Motorola phone got an update a couple of weeks ago and has been crashing several times daily ever since. I'm not convinced their patching schedule is enough to make a real difference anyway.
$29 per month for the student subscription which includes access to ALL creative cloud products? That isn't expensive at all especially in the context of higher education where a single textbook can cost over $100.
Ah, okay. After reading the author's Medium post, I wasn't as convinced the rest of HN that he's actually being scammed. Put another way, he has not convinced me that the issue doesn't lie in something unique to his situation or his credit report. Most of the "red flags" mentioned, as others have pointed out here, are not abnormal in (legitimate) apartment rental application processes, my own included.
Agreed. This is why single player game AI can be made fun with simple FSMs and logic models.
The host in question introduced himself to his co-hosts by telling them all about his pre-tournament porn search and jerkoff session, on live camera, and then continued in much the same vein.

He was an ass, and the only thing Valve did wrong was letting him host in the first place. He's always been like that, and they should have known what would happen.
His service account was also banned: rdmart7
Robert Martin This user is suspended until Dec 27, 2019 7:37 pm.
Reason: attitude

after writing:
iPhone App will not stay open - just flashes when trying to launch
Device Setup
Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iphone app, powered phone off/on - wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here...
And you can lose a lot of money while still being right. Always remember, Wall Street's cemetery is full of people who were right too early.
Read the review here [0]; it's not abusive. It's probably the review of some guy who has been burned by half-assed Amazon shovel ware before.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2XHHHGM6BEUG6/re...
USA is a saturated market, where renewables are given incentives by the government (unfortunately it won't be so any longer).

Look at developing countries, only a fraction of new energy sources for India are solar, even though our coal is inferior quality.

I'm pretty sure that coal is still cheaper than solar
They face the same legal challenge though. Also, you don't Kleenex your face? :)
What I learned from the video game "Pandemic 2" is that the longer your disease remains undetected, the more widely it can spread; if you're asymptomatic and apparently harmless, you may be able to infect every human before you activate the bad side effects. (Which is the goal of that game.)
> they don't HAVE to provide a service to someone

I'd say they gave up that option once they sold the device. They could have refused to sell it initially, but after the transaction is completed, arbitrarily cutting of the service should not be permitted.
If I'm not mistaken, this is exactly what barzahlen.de is doing in Germany. I'm not really clear on the reasons for such a thing existing in Germany, but if you want to buy online for cash, you can.
According to the Amazon.com page for the item, it ships from and is sold by the manufacturer. So it's not a proper Amazon item, it's an Amazon Marketplace item.

In this case, I don't think Amazon even is the retailer, they're just the platform, in the same sense as eBay/PayPal.

Also, the guy (presumably guy) has said to return the product for a refund, so things will pretty much be zeroed out, unless the customer doesn't go through with it.
Indeed.
So in GOAP, actions have pre-conditions and post-conditions (effects.)

pickup-item was defined as:

PRECONDITIONS: HANDS_EMPTY==1, NEAR_ITEM==1, HAVE_ITEM==0

POSTCONDITIONS: HAVE_ITEM:=1 HANDS_EMPTY:=0

Which makes it so that agents carry one thing at a time, indeed.
A small shop in Guadalajara was making AR-15 lower receivers, using a Hardinge VMC 600 ii CNC mill.[1] This wasn't the usual operation starting from "80% lower receivers"; they were machining the whole part from plain aluminum billets. The machining job lacks a finish pass, but probably works.

There are some surprisingly primitive yet successful gun factories in the third world.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-cartel-gunsmi...
Helpful article thanks. My concern with Go is that it particularly suited to problems in the space of computing, and computer and data science. Like C, suited to systems programming. What I am unconvinced about yet, is how suited it is to problems that require the modeling of concepts and their interactions, an area well suited to object domain models outside of that sweet spot. I'm aware that the alternative to an object domain model, is a database model driven by use case based procedural code, which Go could be argued to be well suited towards.

Is the "package" as the unit of encapsulation a limitation that makes Go unsuitable to the large scale modeling of concepts in problem domains outside of the "computer"?
But how do they get the light out? Mode density in air is only about half of what it is in organics.
Yes. The ISP-consumer relationship falls under contract law (civil).
Bingo I did the same :)
Why Uber Culture
There are many countries in the world where it would be illegal to fire an employee with such a condition, and his sick leave pay would be compensated by the government so it's not up to the employer's benevolence. Just saying that you don't have to work for Valve...

(A common argument is that "Companies wouldn't thrive in such a socialist environment". But you can look at Supercell, King and Mojang: all are Nordic game companies with multi-billion dollar valuations and more profits than Valve.)
I thought acting like this against a bad review was pretty much verboten on Amazon?
Mine was never secure it just broadcasts an ID there is no key signing or anything.

My friend had hers removed after closer to five years. GP used a scalpel to make a small cut and pulled it out. The process seems to be the same for women who get Implanon.
You need to give 0ad a try:
https://play0ad.com
It's very much alive and well, and the AI gets better with every release.
I'll be able to beat it on the hardest difficulty, and then the next release comes out and I have to come up with new strategies...
you can work remote as long as it's from the bay area...
This customer may have been an asshole in this situation but that isn't really a good reason to state he's an asshole. For all we know he might spend the rest for his time reading bedtime stories to sick kittens. Judging someone's character based on a single incident isn't a great thing to do.
Are you sure about the REMOTE? When I applied I was told there was no remote option.
Show HN: A ncurses CRM system (and accounting)
I've been building a CRM/accounting system for my personal small company. It's still in an early stage and is lacking a few features. But it is finally usable.

https://asciinema.org/a/0g9f8c00mrkm018p10r8p8km3

Please share your thoughts
Here's Google's terms [1]. I just remembered Bing was trying desperately to turn bing into a verb! Bing it, they said.

[1] https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html
The guy has three reviews on Amazon, two of which are one-star.

I think the abusiveness is primarily in the guys forum post, plus posting the negative Amazon review without waiting for response from the developer.

But that's just my sensitivity level.
Ahh, a controlled demo on a test track with impeccably clear road lines and signs. Something they could have tested a hundred times with, potentially overfitting a route. Even then the Tesla was over-cautius, stopping metres before in front of a stop sign.

And that is still level3 or level4. Level5 is inarguably far far away.
A Boy from Gilgit, Baltistan Invites Foreign Tourists to His Home
Their domain still leads to an indigogo page.

People should avoid startups those use crowdfunding websites as risk free capital gainer preorder pages.

They don't get proper investment for a reason.
> it will jump me to the latest episode that I started rather than the one I was watching when I quit.

When is the last episode you started different than the one you were watching when you quit? Do they auto-play when finishing so if you started episode 2 and watched until episode 6 it would start from episode 2 again?
For those with a modest automated planning background, F.E.A.R. is inspirational because it shows even the most ambitious and inefficient planners, i.e. STRIPS, which is the grand-daddy of automated planning that searches across flat goals based on a known global state... even that, which is known to be an NP-complete problem in many domains, can be made practical in specific domains with tweaks.

Much of the automated planning literature is about finding ways to find the balance between computational tractability and expressivity of the domain & goals. Many attempts to fuse logic and imperative programming with an aspect of history: hierarchical task networks for example, which are like a high level procedural language with non-deterministic method dispatch. Games like Killzone 2 for the PS3 also had an interesting followup use of automated planning via hierarchical task networks, to do squad tactics; http://aigamedev.com/open/coverage/htn-planning-discussion/

Another thread is Golog as a variant of Prolog that uses Reiter's Situation Calculus to formulate complex goals and domain constraints in a relatively consistent syntax and applied towards "Cognitive Robotics": http://www.cs.toronto.edu/cogrobo/main/systems/ .. it's unfortunate a lot of that work seems stalled since Reiter passed away.

With all the recent hype around connectionist, deep learning AI, etc., there still is a lot of important work going on in the symbolic logic side of AI, particularly in this space of working in dynamical domains. Fusing the two will be really interesting.
HN?: are you interested in seeing documentation for an ELK-like system?
I love examples like these but where lack of real world or common sense knowledge gives funny results.

I tried writing a text adventure game generator once that would combine puzzle templates you gave it like "object X you need is in a tree and you need a climbable thing Y to get it" and "object X is in a vending machine and you need a coin to get it" to create basic chains of puzzles. Without more constraints it would do silly things like create a vending machine containing ladders, vending machines in trees, vending machines containing other vending machines and trees, and vending machines that gave you a coin for a coin.
> If any company were to quiz me on algorithmic basics, it had better explain to me beforehand why it is among the x% of all hiring companies that actually need to roll their own new solutions in the face of so many well-established libraries.

Please suggest a reasonable alternative then. I need to interview people and see if they are going to be capable of digging through complicated code, of coding things reasonably quickly, or writing scalable, robust code, of potentially digging into things enough to optimize their performance, etc. as reasonably well as I can in an hour. And I need enough concrete evidence that everyone else in the debrief believes me. I would love to change the way I do things, but I am held accountable for the interview, so I can't just show up to the debriefs saying crap like, "He says he can use a library for anything that comes up." And I need to evaluate some other soft skills type stuff, like caring about the customer, communicating well, delivering more if you see something extra that you think should be done, etc.

But the obvious answer to your question would be, "because if everything we do could be solved just by using a library, we'd have interns or offshore people do it for a fraction of the pay."
Having been in the same boat, I totally agree with you, parent.

I'm VERY quick to refund and work as hard as I possibly can to help people who want my help, and some people just don't want my help -- for what it's worth, I have many more five-star reviews than one-star reviews on the wares that I peddle, but there are some one-star reviews that are just genuinely inflammatory from people unwilling to work with me to help resolve their issue. It happens.
PicoCTF – A free computer security game for middle and high school students
T&C usually restrict using gift cards to purchase other gift cards (inter alia for the reason you mentioned) [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... (see under 2. Limitations.)
> I can sympathize with being frustrated with customers. It takes a lot of self-control to remain professional at times.

That's why you shell out customer service to disillusioned minimum wage drones: they hate you as much as the customer, which creates a subconscious empathic link.
How to Make a Flower Basket – DIY Crafts Easy Tutorial
I remember reading on Kelloggs box: If it doesn't say Kelloggs on the box, it's not Kelloggs in the box.

Where I live many people call Kelloggs any cereal boxes. I though they should have been proud that their every such product is called by their name.

Pampers also comes to my mind - almost no one calls them diapers - just pampers be it from any manufacturer.
But startups has to be a tiny tiny fraction of software devs. Even in an area of new offices popping up I can't imagine startups being a large fraction of the companies.
I don't think it's terribly expensive if you're a creative professional when you consider the Creative Cloud subscription model. The main reason it has become the standard is because it's so great.

I'm not sure what you mean by "apparently we can't negotiate." There are bulk licensing deals and student discounts. If you're a student, you can get Photoshop and Lightroom for $10/mo. If someone needs it for one course, that's seems pretty affordable.