skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You touch on a very interesting and general concept, and that is the correspondence between lossless compression algorithms and probability distributions, and the subsequent correspondence between probability distributions and procedural generation algorithms.

Consider the first correspondence. Suppose you knew a certain class of strings arose from a probability distribution. Then you can talk about the strings that are most likely to occur, or, more useful in general, about the individual characters that are most likely to occur given a history of previous characters. Using this, you can make a compression algorithm that will map (symbol, probability) or (symbol + history, conditional probability) starting from the highest probability, to the numbers 0, 1, 2 ...

This is arithmetic coding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding

The result is optimal in terms of expected compressed string length assuming the strings you use this on really do come from that distribution.

Now consider the other way around. Suppose you have a lossless compression algorithm. Find the (uncompressed symbol, compressed symbol) pair (possibly with context) that achieves the highest compression. Assign that a high probability. Then find the next pair. Assign that a slightly lower probability (This can be done in a more principled manner than I'm alluding here). Then you have yourself a probability distribution.

More on data compression theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression

But what happens once you have a probability distribution over some data type, is that you may cast the problem of automatically generating instance of that data type as sampling from the distribution. Many procedural generation algorithms that give nondeterministic results (and the useful ones do, otherwise the work the modeler has to do is fundamentally the same) can be re-cast as sampling from a probability distribution; look at what the algorithm is generating and learn the distribution.

Note that this is uncomputable in general for the same reason Kolmogorov complexity is. This is known as Solomonoff induction:

http://singinst.org/blog/2007/06/25/solomonoff-induction/

So to answer your original questions:

1. The information (as in information entropy) in the algorithm in the CD is the entropy of the true probability distribution from which your levels originate.

2. And yes, in principle you can use the correspondence between data compression and procedural generation to generate instances of any arbitrary data type, not just 3D game levels. It may be hard to design a probability distribution that will create well-formatted instances though :)
"Most good developers are gainfully employed"

I agree, but I'd say that all good developers who want to be employed are employed.

Companies bring up 10% unemployment because they think "Gosh with all this unemployment there will be lots of 'hungry' developers and we should be able to hire top talent for $80k or some other piddling sum."

The fact is that unemployment among competent developers (and marketers and sales) is 0%, so if a company wants to hire one they've have to pay more than the other guy and offer better working conditions. The incompetently run companies don't comprehend this, they are much too "bargain" oriented on non-commodity products.
Yeah, but only as “safe” as a 4-letter password. Assuming full alphanumerics, that’s only 14 million possible 12-character passwords to try. Given a 1GHz processor, well, you see where I’m going with this.

This is why I freaked out when bluehost.com (AVOID!) required the last four characters of my password to accompany support requests(!).
That doesn't mean Netflix is going to rule - it's much more reasonable in my opinion to assume a cabal of motion picture industry will form and cut out the middle-men.

And it's a pity that you're almost certainly right, since Netflix actually does what it does well.
Such a scenario would imply that there's a higher number of capable programmers willing to receive a given wage within commuting distance of those places than there is in New York. I don't think that's the case.
So no corporations.

That should be interesting.
I'm such a person. If you can live without sports (or only the sports available locally via over-the-air) and you don't need to see the latest/greatest shows, cable TV isn't a great value proposition. I don't mind waiting a year or two to watch something; there are plenty of alternatives in the meantime.

That's the essential problem that the industry has to deal with: there is way more content than most of us have time for.
>> If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to reach people like me?

I can speak fairly knowledgeably as I headed up all of Voxeo's developer community and support in the early part of this decade (and as employee #1 and co-founder Voxeo). In a pre-social media world, marketing involved a lot of face-to-face contact, primarily at conferences for developers: Cold Fusion, PHP, ASP etc. We held app contests, live coding demos making people's phones ring, sponsored meetups and conference after parties. (sound familiar?) We were out there...just apparently not at the same ones you were at (sorry).

>> Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was cheap as Twilio was 2 years ago.

I honestly don't think any exist...not because they were lost, but because we never charged anything back then..nor have we ever charged developers. For production apps, there's no doubt that the cost of transporting data has dropped dramatically in the past 10 years. What we can do for pennies now, cost dimes 10 years ago. Of course, we also had to walk 10 miles to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways ;-)

>> But it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to use as possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have relative to voxeo/tropo.

You are absolutely correct. There are some things about Tropo that are still overly complex. We're working on that. Fortunately it's easier to simplify features than to add new ones.

>> Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are asking for before people jump ship.

I'd tend to agree. By my estimation (based on how long it took them to burn through their first round of financing) That should be right about the same time their latest round of funding runs out. No time for resting on laurels. :-)
> You will know about your research than anyone at your school.

I think theses should also be held to a high standard of grammar.
It would be interesting to calculate the current cost per bitcoin, in terms of electricity used to generate them (and hey, perhaps the quantity of CO2 produced too!).
More accurately, it gives the reading level of all discussions in which you commented.
God yes. I've been a subscriber since about the begining. Tyler has a very no bullshit view on business - real business done well. The first issue had an interview with the CEO of lego, they regularly feature small business and leaders in their video series.

He also has a fantastic eye for style (not surprising), more people should aspire to his level.
Javascript is a really difficult language from a static analysis perspective, and they're still special-casing a lot to get to something useful -- for example, in the Prototype toolkit, they had to change about 5% of the code to get it to analyze well.
This is correct and both have both a small number of developers, pay very well, and have a really hard time at recruitment. Joel has blogged quite a bit on what a hard sell NYC is and all he has to do to sweet talk developers into even considering it. In the past I'd been offered very nice salaries to work in finance there and found there is no salary so high that it would compel me to move to NYC. Yes, many people love it there. Not many developers though. How many developers love the bar and party and media and high finance scene because they are massive extroverts?
There are a ton of corporate networks that could be compromised because of this:

A quick search shows staff email addresses at techcrunch, apple, microsoft, google, goldman sachs, etc.
Ask HN: Any Brisbane Based Hackers?
Hello HNers,

I was just wondering if there are any other Brisbane (Australia) Hackers out there?

I am co-founder of a Brisbane based startup and I am wondering if there is any community presence here as my business partner and I would love to share successes, lament difficulties and learn as much as possible from likeminded people.

Reply to this and let me know!

Thanks,

Carl
I have never read "The Emperor's New Mind". What are its flaws?
Netflix's greatest coup to date has been integration with so many hardware manufacturers - the bulk of net-connected TVs & consoles have Netflix on there as a gimmie.

But Amazon is catching up - found them on my most recent Sony TV purchase, they're on ROKU (originally a Netflix device), etc.

With that option I find myself using Netflix less and less because the streaming content just ain't that great and Amazon's streaming on-demand service, while more expensive today, gives better content.

The recent rumor of Amazon considering bundling a FREE streaming service with Amazon Prime is very compelling and, unlike Blockbuster & the studios, they can compete in online commerce and have the pockets to play with the studios.

ref - http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/12/07/5605985-amaz...
Let's be a little more realistic about this: Austrian and Keynesian theories both exist to this day because they provide good enough rationalizations for the preconceived political agendas of different sets of people.

The idea that economics breaks down into a neat little disagreement between Keynes and Hayek, however, is anachronistic.
if you choose the encoding such that each letter in the alphabet encodes some Shakespearian paragraph, then you can find many lines of Shakespeare on this very discussion.
I'm not one to make fun of someone who puts himself out there like you have. I've been there before.

I think you'll find that engineers are a critical and skeptical bunch. You're right that you should get in front of as many of them as you can. You need to learn as much from them as possible, even the ones who aren't working with you. Listen to them. They will help you in subtle ways that you might not notice at first.

At this point your most important goal must be to gain credibility. I don't think you should learn Python or anything like that. We both agree that's probably not a great use of your time. What you do need to do is understand enough about how web-based products are built and how they work to talk competently about specifics.

That's going to be hard. One way to do it is to try to build something yourself, which we've kind of ruled out. One way to do it is to read a lot. One way to do it is to find someone you know who's an engineer and watch what he/she does while asking questions.

Credibility is everything. And you can't substitute it with passion.

I wish you the best of luck. Keep us updated.
I've noticed that many startups want people that are: a senior developer in new technology X, is good at Photoshop, and can design customer facing webpages. They also want to pay you well below market wages (because you should be happy to work for a fun company that has a fooseball table) and give you company equity in place of sub-market wages (which is a joke, because most startups are out of business within 5 years).
Fraud is certainly beneath me.

I expect I could make some money selling magic "quantum" stickers that enhance the sound of an audio system, making them for pennies and selling for hundreds of dollars. But that would be wrong.
For people who like smalltalk, Redline has a lot of promise and James Ladd is definitely one of the good guys.

Worth watching.
No one in my zip code is getting one. Hope the DB is wrong ;)
as akalsey said, Tropo is built on PRISM.

http://www.voxeo.com/prism

PRISM is a highly scalable, reliable, and extensible communications application server. It's a very proven platform and is used by several of the largest consumer and commercial VoIP providers. It's also used in Microsoft's Tellme service and is the foundation of all of Voxeo's products and services.

Asterisk can be painful, but they have a new ground-up project in very-early (pre-beta) stage called Asterisk SCF that is designed to achieve PRISM-like capabilities.
Speaking for myself I know what NYC is like and it's a basically a shithole filled with narcissists, psychopaths and useless welfare recipients. There are also some rich artist media types, but it's not like developers get invited to their parties.

What is there for developers? Almost nothing, plus high costs.

The Bay area has way better restaurants, culture, diversity and intellectuals plus nearby beaches, mountains, wineries, skiing, it goes on and on.
One thing I'll say for Amazon is the explicitness of the cost for storage and bandwidth, coupled with the simple fact that my (and your) startup are very unlikely to get anywhere close to something they haven't seen, make AWS extremely attractive for any real deployment.

We had a Dreamhost account (have!), and briefly entertained using them for our rollout, but some simple number crunching and common sense made us see that Amazon was set up for the possibility that we would really have to scale, whereas Dreamhost was pretty much set up for casual work-at-home developers who were looking for absolute rock-bottom costs.

Seems like the simpleCDN guys made the opposite decision, and went with a company that markets XYZ rather than really looking under the hood. It's incumbent on any business to vette their vendors and understand the risks, rather than just point a finger and say "they promised!"
Funny, I was just figuring out the last details of my own setup over here.
Looks like a good guide.

Thanks
What about emailing everyone in the DB?
Good article. But, if the article says right away that Gnosis has nothing to do with Anonymous, what is the Anonymous logo doing there? Why not the Gnosis ASCII-banner logo?

Are journalist really that lame?
Java -> Javascript -> (v8) -> assembly = JVM
Go to gawker.com > "login" > "forgot password". Put your email. If it says it sent a new password, then they had it. "Username was not in our records" -> it wasn't.
whenever I'm alone in a room I always think I'm the smartest guy in the room.
The thing is that 1 service with 5x content >> 5 services with x content each. Being able to find everything in one place is a very large benefit from a consumer perspective.
Singularity University - Maybe There is Hope for Silicon Valley
I agree why bcrypt is much, much better. No doubt about that. My question was whether there was something I could do to improve security (even if marginally) on platforms that can't/don't support bcrypt.

> bcrypt gets you a future-hardened algorithm that can be adjusted in responses to gains in computing power.

How would I be able to change the cost factor overtime? I don't store my user's passwords. Should I just re-bcrypt the bcrypted password using a higher cost and in my login_verify code, take that into account? Or is there something else you can do overtime to raise the cost factor?
See: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ClassesPrototypesComparison

In my experience, prototype-based OOP is less prone to the typical OOP over-analysis - if you just need one object that does something, you just assemble it, that's it, problem solved. Since the default stance isn't designing a generic class for all possible subtypes that exhibit related behavior and blah blah blah, there's less push toward overthinking things.

Prototype-based OOP is also well-suited to runtime modification, since the underlying implementation is usually simpler, but that's a distant second to the above benefit. And while prototypes are sometimes assumed to be less efficient than classes, look at the research from Self* - While some popular languages have poor implementations, it's not inherently less efficient.

Also, I suspect prototypes integrate more smoothly with non-OOP code than classes, based on experience with Lua (which isn't strictly OOP, but typically uses prototypes). To some extent, this blurs with dynamic typing, though - there's only one statically typed + prototype-based OOP language I know of, Günther Blaschek's Omega (described in _Object-Oriented Programming With Prototypes_).

* http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html
Some of the people involved later worked on the "JVM". Perhaps you've heard of it?
Best digital cameras for every budget
For people who can't remember if they ever signed up:

Go to gawker.com and use the 'forgot my password' utility. It's under login > forgot my password. Enter your email address in the field provided. It will tell you straight away "That email address is not in our records. Please try again."

I can't think of any reason this would be incorrect based on the recent events. Of course, this doesn't tell you whether your password is vulnerable, just whether you have an account.
Factories are nothing like software development: factories are repetitive assembly lines and software development is a creative process.

When talent concentrates like it does in SF and NY, it creates a culture that becomes more valuable than the sum of it's parts. You've got people who are constantly meeting and exchanging ideas, often by coincidence or near accident. This doesn't happen when in areas without enough talent density to create a concentration. The same pattern is repeated in many forms of art and business.
Check if your email is amongst those compromised in Gawker break-in
Well, it's the type itself that's a monad. So the question would be, are Python lists monads thanks to list comprehensions? And the answer is: Kind of. The idea of a monad in functional programming is that it's a generic type that can have a lot of different implementations.

The two operations that must be defined for a monad are:

• Return: You pass any value and it returns a monad encapsulating that value

• Bind: You pass a function taking an argument of the type wrapped by the monad and returning another value wrapped in the monad, and it returns a value of the monad

With these two operations, you can accomplish a surprising range of tasks. Python borrowed list comprehensions from Haskell, where they are based on monads — but in Python, they're kind of orphaned from their monadic roots.
You're being massively dishonest if you're going to conflate "technological progress resulting in greater societal wealth and lower prices" with "monetary deflation". In fact, looking at some historical inflation data (http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical...), monetary inflation tends to correlate with technological process and economic growth, while monetary deflation tends to correlate with recessions and depressions.

A growing economy paired with a fixed monetary base, incidentally, will end up resulting in monetary deflation, which will more likely than not put an end to the growing economy. That was the author's point, and it's borne out by historical data as well as nearly all contemporary economic theories (including, perhaps to the author's surprise, the theories of Milton Friedman himself).
Not if you think that a lot of crap gets voted up and truly good stories are few and far between.
Yeah I was just using the 12 as an example, but someone with say 36 chars past the 8 recovered from gawker should be a little more at ease.

I don't think I've logged into any of their sites, I use different passwords at different sites and they are generally > 20 chars, so I'm not worried. Yet, at the same time, even knowing all of that, I did a bit of a double take and had a brief "Oh shi-" moment of paranoia when I read the headline.

In fact, if I were say a young starlet that used a similar password for my private email or something as my Gawker account, I'd be really freaked!
Thanks for the info. Looks like I should re-evaluate things as at the time Tropo seemed to be a coming-soon/developer-only service that didn't have details around production pricing nailed down. The Prophecy IVR info scared me into thinking that Tropo might have similar limitations.
Scientists create computer-programmable bacteria
check it here http://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?dsrcid=350662
We could go one step farther than line number mapping and just define and implement a standard for full-on support for original source pointers. Then we could implement any number of langs using minified Javascript as an intermediate language.
Duh, You are right; if someone wants to hire lots of cheap Indian labour for $10 an hour, you will get bad programmers. I think, at that rate you will get bad programmers anywhere in the world.

I am building (http://solaro.com) and we just launched our application out of beta. Development happens from India and surely there are kinks and warts, but at the end of day it works.

I think there are lot of things people get wrong when doing outsourcing:

1. Going cheap. Good programmers are costly. In India you will have to fight with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and likes for the talent, you can't pay cheap and expect good programmers.So, please do not come to India, if goal is to stay cheap.

2. Not involving the team. You will have to bring down your walls and involve everyone intellectually. This is real, if people aren't involved with the product, you are going to get crappy result. I am saying nothing new, but what already Jim McCarthy said in Dynamics of software development. But this is more true for projects, where your team is spread across different geographical locations.

3. Iterate. Short iterations, deliver, continuous integration and continuous deployment. Do not sleep on the project.

4. Small teams, do not build a large team just because it is cheap. I know I am saying the obvious here, but I have seen people getting it wrong too often.

5. If the client (or product owner) is located in different geographical location, he/she has to work harder than everyone else.
I do too, unfortunately. I got bored of their streamable selection a little while back.

If they updated it or got more of the main library in there, I'd be all about it again though.
> The maginot line failed because they ... didn't continue it along the border with their friend (belgium) - so the enemy simply drove around it.

Wikipedia says this is a myth:

> It is a myth however that the Maginot Line ended at the Belgian border and was easy to circumvent.[2] The fortifications were connected to the Belgian fortification system, of which the strongest point was Fort Eben-Emael.

[2] Mosier, J. The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of World War II, HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 2, 38.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line
Prior to its reinvention of itself, my primary exposure to the Atlantic was as the original publisher of Vannevar Bush's prophetic article As We May Think:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-ma...

(NB: the timestamp says 1969, presumably because there's some code somewhere which isn't expecting a timestamp from prior to 1970-01-01)

It seems fitting that the publisher of an article that so accurately predicted so much future technology should be keen to embrace it.
Arr. China be pirating the Nobel Peace Prize.