skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Artistic Heads Carved From Phonebooks
Taking an ordinary phone book, Alex Queral carves a face into this object of so many faceless names. With the book, a very sharp X-ACTO® knife, a little pot of acrylic medium to set detail areas and a great deal of talent, Queral literally peels away the pages like the skin of an onion to reveal the portrait within. Once the carving is complete, he will often apply a black wash to enhance the features and then seal the entire book with acrylic to preserve the work. However, he never loses the line registration; and the book remains quite pliable.
Lots of interesting linked data to consume and use in mashups here.
It really depends on what type of programming you and your friend are talking about, it may be worth clarifying this with him.

Though from personal experience I would say with most jobs (and especially those relating to web development), lack of experience and social skills will play a larger roll in whether or not you're able to secure the position you want rather than lack of a degree.
Incidentally, you've invented space partitioning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_detection#Spatial_par...
Rackspace Surpasses 100,000 Cloud Computing Customers
If one does not allow the comparison of sales figures among new consumer electronic devices, then claims that 7 million iPad's last quarter indicates success are invalid.
I think given enough students, 3 data points over 4 years is a perfectly appropriate dataset from which to measure longitudinal effects.

I'm not saying I don't agree that the test may not have measured anything useful, or that there wasn't some sampling bias, but there's nothing inherently wrong with 3 data points per person over four years.
> Serious chess player here. I'm sure that Rook or Queen odds is a win but it is not a simple matter to force equal trades in chess games. It may be easier to force them with those odds (I never studied odds games much so I don't know a ton about how the dynamics change -- but neither have you), but I don't see why.

Seriously? Tournament chess player here with experience playing a range of levels up to and including grandmasters. You've got to be off your rocker if you think that it isn't easier to force trades with a QUEEN advantage.

White needs but play to the center. Play to open up the board will be inescapable. Black's only recourse (to avoid exchanges) would be to effectively give up the center or attempt some kind of closed defense like the Sicilian Dragon. Even in the case of the latter, he'll be forced into positions that will allow for the equal exchange of material or near equal material.

Assuming black moves only with the intent to avoid exchanges, he'll land himself in a terrible tactical position.

Lastly why are you comparing this kind of game to STANDARD lines that would involve balanced material? This is not a standard game. Did you seriously spend a paragraph talking about the French, King's Indian, and Najdorf? Of these, exchanges are not only highly probable, they are INEVITABLE regardless of, "...some lines for example (I mean lines with e5 by black, not the piece sac lines) but when you do so it's not actually very good for white." Virtually no standard line can be bad for white when he is up a QUEEN.

The point being: even if white is down a pawn or two pawns or even three pawns, he is STILL ahead. White has a considerable advantage in making exchanges because they are implicitly better for him even when he may lose minor material.

To anyone here saying that a queen is just a theoretical advantage: you know nothing about chess if you seriously believe that. I'd challenge you to play against a master, not even a grandmaster, with those odds and I guarantee you'll lose every game. You won't even stand a chance of drawing. Forget that. You will lose, horribly.

It isn't just a heuristic, the queen is an extremely powerful piece, with black down a queen the remainder of play is EXTREMELY unbalanced.

Whether or not you can prove this completely is another matter, but who cares? It's an obvious win in a perfect world. There's little to no mystery there. And it's hardly a reflection of the mechanics of an actual game, given how unbalanced it becomes.
The question is are you trying to build a desktop class application or not. If not jquery/backbone is the obvious solution.

If a tablview is particularly interesting to you Cappuccino (http://cappuccino.org) has simply the best tableview out there.

This is what it was like several months ago, and it has only gotten better.
http://timetableapp.com/TestingEnviro/imdbdemo/

It's fully customizable too, supporting any kind view you want to put in it, and will remain very snappy.

http://githubissues.heroku.com for example shows of some of this flexibility and performance in a real world app.
Analyst Failure on iPad as Indicator of Disruptive Change
On the other hand, the NES games' collision routines were with 99.6% certainly done in hand-written assembly; this article is about a JavaScript-based game engine.
The quote you have shows they are only noticing a correlation, there is no talk about the cause. I also have a sneaking suspicion that if we could find the original article and read it, the researchers would also believe that this is only a correlation at the moment.
> Google doesn’t have as much insight into my personal life as Facebook has.

This is debatable. Off the top of my head, Google has my search history, gmail (my facebook alerts get piped here as well), gtalk, google reader, calendar... and the list goes on.
I completely agree. I've long said that we should separate academic pursuits from technical or vocational training.

Arts and Sciences => Academic

Engineering, Medicine, Law, Pharmacy, Business, and everything else => Vocational

I think we need to recognize that there are two classes of people who go to college:

Academic: those who wish to learn

Vocational: those who wish to qualify for jobs
Tron: An open source legacy
The results are MUCH better now....thanks for the direct attention! I love HN :)
I believe one application of this is truck convoys in battle zones like Iraq.
I think programmers have one common skill set that gets them off to software development - mathematical acumen.

Of course, it should still go with passion and and tenacity to become a good developer. There's a lot of programmers / coders out there who did not have any formal degree or training in the field of software development but have made some great strides. The key thing here is in doing it, execution and making value out of the codes you write.
Christer Ericson's book "Real-time Collision Detection" covers all this and much, much more in a very readable (IMO) fashion. The companion website for the book is at http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/ and the blog on that site can be just as invaluable a source of information as the book itself.
You might want to google for "separating axis test", it is a very simple technique that allows you to detect collisions between any two convex polygons. It can also handle continous collisions detection for translation (your moving grenades) very easily.

In your axis-aligned case, you would project the objects you test on both axes (x and y). If the do not overlap on any one of the axes, they do not collide, otherwise they do. To handle movement you project each objects movement vector on the axes as well and add that to the objects projected interval.

To find out which grid squares that are covered by a polygon amounts to resterization, which you can find many tutorials for with google.

Axis aligned boxes are trivial to rasterize. For more complex shapes you write a rasterizer for triangles and handle arbitrary polygons by breaking them up into triangles (google "ear clipping").
“It's poor form to miss an opportunity to be more specific about data rather than less.”

I don’t agree at all. It’s usually a good idea to summarize data and in the process of doing so being less specific. Most is perfectly understandable in the context. It actually is very surprising and interesting that most iOS devices that were sold in the last quarter are not phones so saying just that is perfectly fine.

There is no strange and arbitrary 5% condition for the usage of most and there never has been. Most is an exact term.
Evolving particle weapons in games
How would one recommend getting that experience?

I imagine in web development, writing stuff and putting it on a portfolio site or github would be pretty good, or patching an existig community website, or writing stuff for charities or small businesses.

But for other types of programming? What would be the best way to get internships, or to develop something that can showcase your abilities?
The goal was not to destroy centrifuges per se; the goal was to delay the enrichment program. More delay is better. By failing to cloak the payload, Stuxnet's creators ensured they'd get less delay.
Let's not get caught in a false dichotomy. Not having a Facebook does not necessarily make you anti-social. But if we take "anti-social" to be a measure of one's social availability, not having Facebook decreases that measure. Communicating only by smoke signal or carrier pigeon would make you extremely unavailable whereas communicating by email and telephone would make you very available. In some demographics, users check their Facebook 3+ times per day, so depending on your social circle, being on Facebook makes you highly available.

For the record, I do not use Facebook, but I accept that it makes me less available. Friends who make Facebook events to organize events can invite nearly everyone they want to invite to their event on Facebook, but have to go out of their way to invite me via different means. This makes me anti-social to some (pretty small) degree.
This article would be correct if Google dropped flash together with H.264. The practical result of playing H.264 to Chrome users via Flash instead of through a native open source implementation (Chromium) is surely a net negative for free standards supporters? After all it's "proprietary, nonstandard software."
Name You Need to Know in 2011: Urban Farming - Michael Noer
The Myth of Female Software Developers
Link?

(I can't find any such thing with Google. That may merely indicate my ineptitude or a shortcoming in Google's indexing or searching. I didn't have the patience to look through every article in Gizmodo's archives for that month.)
Not just the internet, now copy machines being censored in China...
The man is right. Of course, you also have to have a good idea.
Pot kettle black.
Collision detection absolutely affects performance, if you can run with 100 objects naively, but you can run with 10000 objects by being efficient, your performance has been affected. Computational power is never enough!

How are you storing your objects in the grid container, is it actually a container or just an array with an index pointing to the object in some kind of object array?
It's possible to do the grid without actually creating it as a datastructure, you just "hash" the point you are at:

px = (int)(p.x-grid_min.x)*grid_delta.x;
py = (int)(p.y-grid_min.y)*grid_delta.y;
hash = px + py * grid_width
cell_list[hash] += [p.index]

Where p is your object and grid_delta is the cell size. The cell_list could be implemented a couple ways, but if you think of it as a hash table with each entry as a list of objects in the cell, then all you need to do to get potential colliders is calculate the hash of an object and get back all the indices.

This is a technique we are using to speed up neighbor checks in some 3D particle simulation code, it works quite well on the GPU but its simple and you already have a grid in your code.

Another option would be a quadtree, I haven't looked, are there not JS implementations already out there?
I agree, given some representative sample data and a goal ("make rendering this page go fast"), finding speed improvements likely wouldn't be very hard.
>Technically corporations can be convicted of criminal offenses just like regular people can, but the penalties don't make much sense. They end up just getting fines, since it's difficult to send the corporation itself to jail.

Why is that?

Just pretend that the corporation is legally in jail, and apply all restrictions that that includes. No internet, phone, rights to profit, etc.

It would hurt them just as much as a person if it were actually carried out.
Looks neat. I tried it on a couple of servers, just get a "No such file or directory" whenever I try to run it, even with no args.

Not sure if there is a dependency or something in there that is looking for a file where its not.
A few points:

> We applaud Google for this change; it's a positive step for free software

Except that it further entrenches Flash in the short to medium term, possibly longer.

> Most of it is delivered with Flash, which is proprietary, nonstandard software.

Exactly. H.264 isn't going away anytime soon so having a Web browser without Flash gets that much harder. With no native support for H.264 in Firefox or (soon) Chrome, bizarrely the most Flash-unencumbered browsers are Safari and Internet Explorer.

Consider that for a moment: Internet Explorer.

> Free software alternatives like GNU Gnash are available, but the user experience isn't always as seamless as it ought to be.

This is a key point but not in the way the author intended and it's worth parsing this statement. The FSF is driven by philosophy here but most users aren't. If you want to attract a plurality of users a necessary precondition is to have the experience be as good if not better than what you're contesting.

There is a cost to switching: finding new tools, learning a new process and so on. Users need a reason to switch and ephemeral arguments about "openness" of video on the Web just don't cut it for the majority, at least not while such a choice comes with a subpar experience.

> In order to make sure the Web stays free for everyone, we need a free codec to prevail as the de facto standard with HTML5.

Like most future specters I believe this one is overblown too. Everyone points to the GIF fiasco. The net result? PNG was born. If the screws are ever put to us on H.264, you'll see exactly the same thing, only quicker. Computing power being what it is today, the effort of re-encoding every video that exists on the Web is actually not that hard of a problem, and is certainly in the realm of what Google can do today, let alone 5-10 years from now.

> WebM can be that codec: Google provides a patent license with the standard that is compatible with free software licenses

But it should be noted, there is no indemnity against H.264 patent infringement. I'm not saying WebM violates H.264 patents. The reverse may even be true (or both). But the point is that it is a risk.

> We can only be free if we reject data formats that are restricted by patents.

The elephant in the room here is that the fundamental problem is software patents. They need to be completely abolished.

> But the issue's not settled yet.

No but it's a bit like iPad vs the rest of the tablets. The issue isn't settled yet, but the iPad has a whopping lead and the smart money is on it for some time to come. H.264, like it or not, is more mature and has more hardware and software support than WebM, which is far less mature.
> The usage of “most” was completely correct...

This is simply wrong.

When dealing with numbers, esp financial data, it is poor form to not make specific analysis in the descriptions of the data.

Saying 'Most iOS sales are not iPhones' is actually very misleading even if generalized sales numbers are included in the same context.

Ugh, this quarter you will receive 'most' of your bonus. Oops, I hope you didn't assume that 'most' meant 95% or even 75% because it actually meant 51%.

> Context matters and it is prudent to assume that HN readers possess basic reading skills.

There is absolutely no reason to not be more specific. You're just defending poor form at this point and it wasn't even your comment.

Lastly, it's always bad to assume. Why should we assume that this won't be quoted out of context? Assumptions lead to bad things in my experience. It's never prudent to assume.
Why Mentos makes Diet Coke erupt
LivingSocial Sells nearly 100,000 Amazon Gift Cards in 5 hours
I found it interesting that in Germany you are expected to make 25% less than in the U.S., but you have 25% more free time! :)
>It's what there is no particular person to whom blame can obviously be assigned where the problem we're discussing comes to pass.

Actually, it's rather easy. The CEO collects the biggest paycheck, nail the responsibility to them. Greatest profits should come with the greatest risk.
At least there are sites like http://www.thefunded.com/
that lets you rate VCs.
Original: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/coo-ti...

>"Well, you know, that’s all part of the magic of Apple. And I don’t want to let anybody know our magic, because I don’t want anybody copying it."

That's the difference between Jobs running Apple and Cook running Apple in a nutshell. The perception has been that other companies cannot copy Apple because Jobs' skill set is unique. But under Cook the possibility of being copied seems more likely.

And the article bears it out. Cook is a logistics guy and the interview is full of facts and numbers and accomplishments. It's Wall Street speak. There's nothing visionary in it. There's nothing about design or aesthetics. Nothing about revolution. When it talks about the future, it's only in terms of increasing market share in commodity markets.
Sproutcore is like a full UI widget toolkit -- analogous to extJS or GWT or java swing in the java desktop world. I am sure you could accomplish a lot very fast with Sproutcore.

However, I chose jQuery +backbone.js because I am comfortable with the MVC paradigm and I have a lot of experience with Struts.

For my current project, I am using java Wicket framework for pages crawlable by search engine while using jQuery +backbone.js for pages that require authentication and have a rich user interface.Even though GWT or SprountCore come with a lot of ready made widgets , the JQuery ecosystem is simply unmatched in terms of widgets available -- with the caveat that you would need to spend some time to get to learn them.

What I miss most in Jquery + backbone.js combo is unit tests and test runners integrated into my build system. If anyone knows how to integrate unit testing of backbone.js based mvc code into ant or maven or any other build system, please post here.
Oh wow, I hadn't heard of that. Thanks a lot.
another "Steve Jobs is God" articles, yay!!! I wonder if he ever gets tired of hearing how much the world loves him, and how his poo must smell like flowers...
Clicky lets you track your individual visitors in realtime also using a feature they named Spy. Spy shows you what page the visitor is on, where they are on the map and what they have downloaded and clicked. (Using your IP address to identify you on the dashboard.)

Oh my God, that's a horrible breach of my privacy.
Basically the article just sells Clicky (and every link in the article is an affiliate one to Clicky), but Clicky isn't going to work for a lot of people because their daily max page views is 500,000.

I'll concede that's a fair few, but I'm already above it and Google Analytics is still free for me and doing most of what I want. The only bits I feel are missing from GA I've hacked into my software (detailed trackback reports).
I don't understand this position. Dropping H.264 is aligned with the FSF's goals, so of course they should support it.

To me, Google's move is an indication that Google will eventually drop and/or downgrade Flash support.

You encourage institutions to do the right thing by applauding when they do the right thing. Not by saying "you suck because you didn't take it far enough". You say "Good move doing X. And when you do Y you'll be doubly awesome."
www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/IN

Says there is 18.22% less of a class divide in India - but IMO, India has a way higher class divide than in the US.
I dont buy a lot of these stats.
Great. I'll check out the separating axis test, too - thanks. Incidentally, I believe The Render Engine, the framework I used, has just introduced support for this technique.
> This article would be correct if Google dropped flash together with H.264

It's Adobe Flash, not Google Flash. It was Google implementing H.264 in the browser. You can still add a plugin to support H.264 in Chrome if you wish, just like you can remove the Flash plugin from Chrome. Essentially, the Google/H.264/Flash argument isn't logical. Essentially, it's like complaining that Apple doesn't ship Flash on iOS devices. It's a bad argument. Just because some ordinarily smart people are making the argument doesn't make it a good one. I cannot stress how bad of an argument it is.

> The practical result of playing H.264 to Chrome users via Flash instead of through a native open source implementation (Chromium) is surely a net negative for free standards supporters?

It's the status quo, but with a brighter outlook then before.
"beanstalk is built using a number of existing AWS services, not from magic beans."
AJAX Broke The Web
You can get reply notifications (email or mobile) using Notifo (YC W10)[1]. I think it's only for replies to your comments, not for all activity in a thread.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720763
The HTML5 History API
Why are you inventing arbitrary rules for the usage of “most” that have never before existed? I don’t understand that at all. “Most” denotes a relative majority and always has. It’s correct to use “most” that way.

Why are you assuming that “most” must be at least a 75% or so majority? If we are talking about wrong and bad assumptions then that is the one.

You might argue that it’s not exact enough (I don’t agree at all because the comment includes specific numbers) but to say that using most in that context is wrong is just mind boggling to me.
I agree wholeheartedly, however some of the re-use headaches of using a framework with non-semantic class names can be mitigated if you're using some sort of include/templating layer (see my other post in this thread.) Done well, on a site with a fairly standardized design from page to page, you'd hopefully only have to edit the markup and/or class names in a few included files, and then the external CSS. This of course isn't going to help you if you inherit a mess, and you'd be better off just using "content descriptive class names" in the first place, but it can be an option.
If you're not actively collecting statistics from your users, then you're missing out on a huge amount of information.

The biggest gains for me have been:

1. when I could discontinue previous OS version (3.x) support because most of my users had transitioned to 4.x

2. It lets me know which features my users are actually using so that I can focus on enhancing and refining them.

3. It lets me know how many installs vs. sales that I have. And yes, this includes any pirated copies.
Very related post/discussion I made (no link karma for it, as if reddit karma were worth anything): http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/f1l79/instead_of...

tl;dr: For fuck's sake, nail the responsibility to the CEO. If they don't like it, they can steer the company into the moral high road. Secondly, Yes, the CEO. They take credit for when the company does well, so let them take credit for when it does reprehensible things.
Women Hairstyles
From soft and flowing curls to short, edgy or chic, get advice for achieving your ideal hair style from About Guide to Women's Hair Styles...
Vox.io - skype in the cloud
If you split the brain, you will get two consciousness?
Dustin Rosen contacted me last year to develop an app for him. He seemed enthusiastic and had a ton of ideas. While I didn't end up building an app, (probably because of location differences) I assumed whatever he did was going to be a hit.

Good Luck to the Pose Team!