skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't going to jump into this discussion but that isn't very fair. I don't use PHP myself and am not a fan of it but here are some reasons why I think it is popular:

1) It's very easy to get started with, even if you're not a great programmer (or even if you have never programmed before). Just start with pure HTML and then add a few <?php> tags.
2) Lots of PHP hosting available, much of it free.
3) Loads of frameworks and libraries available.

I'm sure a PHP fan could come up with a few more.
One of the developers claims he did file a DMCA notice:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/fvepu/someone_just_...

>I'm the developer of the original Guitar Solo Lite. I noticed the rogue app a bit more than a week ago (I was receiving crash reports sent from the pirated version of the app). I notified Google about this through all the channels I could think of: DMCA notice, malicious app reporting, Android Market Help...they have yet to respond.
There's an implicit "yet" in my sentence that I should probably have put in. As in, the MPEG(-LA) plans for H.265 to be widely supported (by hardware manufacturers, pirates, and everyone else) and plan to charge royalty fees on it. But widespread use of VP8 and a credible threat from VP9 (or 10) could force them to choose between making money and being the defacto standard.
A brilliant and insightful read.

Game developers should embrace and reward players that think outside of the box and subvert the game to add their own rules.
I can recall MissingNo. from the original Pokémon games as a great example of players subverting the game and in essence creating a cult following to this "cheat".
Your refusal to engage in sensible, evidence-backed prejudice is leading you to bizarre conclusions.

You have basically no idea about how business runs
in Africa or what are the countries.

I don't, and neither do the Chinese investors. Like them, if I could make a business work by bringing my own people in now, I'd do it. Much better than running the gauntlet with the known governance problems and the predictable chaos it would cause my business.

Rather, we should get rid of the terminology that
even categorizes countries as a lower kind of world.

Language should reflect the way things are, not a politically correct perspective. Otherwise we could be encouraged towards ridiculous ideas, such as that it's as easy to put a team together in Angola as in Japan or Germany (or South Africa!).
ISIS Toolkit - Came across Werner Vogels on it's old homepage
Make it simple, make it small. And just do it. If you can't persuade several people you know to take part, it probably wouldn't be a goer on a bigger level. Just do a small one, figure out the tech, see what works and what doesn't, and then bring it to us as something to take part in.

It sounds great but it's edgy/new enough for you to need to do a small test run first to refine the idea. And you'll find it hard to sell without having the experience under your belt. It's one of those "meh, sounds weird" ideas that just needs some momentum before people will be won over, IMHO.
Off-topic but I'm not sure where else to ask: Does Overcoming Bias have any organized index of posts remotely similar to LessWrong's sequences[1]? I'll probably just dive in and navigate via tags, but a more directed approach would be preferable.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
Aliens Riding Meteorites: David Dobbs on the Journal of Cosmology
What are you proud of.

I love that question, and now I use it now whenever I interview people. You can tell pretty quickly whether you can relate to someone depending on how they answer it.

A funny question to ask, is if they know what a 418 HTTP error code is.
Ever get the impression that NASA is doing a disservice to the scientific process with these sensational media pushes? Arsenic based life anyone?
The need to code
Tribal Tattoos,Tribal Tattoos Designs
Tribal Tattoos Designs Maori inspired tribal tattoo designs, hand drawn tattoo images by Mark Storm, Dutch graphic tattoo designer.Are you thinking about getting a tattoo
Any official announcement? I feel that Google don't like that their ads are displayed the way most of the Facebook app developers do (with many other ads, driving people to click and very low CPC).
On my iPhone safari, readability killed all the big Os, makes the article very hard to follow.
Would spork or a similar testing tool that loads the framework+gems once and then reuses them for each test run help with this issue do you think?

Hopefully the bytecode would be kept by the VM between each test run. I don't know enough about the ruby interpreter to say, especially not YARV.
My point was that Google is providing the software and hardware support[1], in conjunction with every big name you could mention, with a short list of notable exceptions, therefore overall it is as strong as another hypothetical royalty-free codec which is technically better, but which has less hardware, software or industry support.

In short "better" codec means more than just compression efficiency and asking people to switch out their infrastructure for a quality improvement is as tough as for a cost reduction. It only happens now because the whole industry acts in concert to make it happen. There's no reason why the industry couldn't coalesce around a free codec next time if the "idealogues" and "hippies" have laid sufficient groundwork, either with no business case or one that only works in certain niches. This is how it has worked in many other free software or free content success story.

[1] this doesn't seem to be widely known. If you google for WebM then one of the twitter results is Joe Hewitt asking smugly when Google will announce hardware and Youtube support for WebM, something they'd done about a year previously.
Second that.

Altough

"There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stump."

makes me a little curious. I'm not a biologist, so someone who is, how often do you find organisms/fossils completely different from known organisms?
I submitted the Wired story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2293947

and then realised that was probably not the link you meant, since it was not the blog post. If you are wondering about the validity of the press release, I trust David Dobbs to quote a press release correctly; I'm guessing the journal is making another go of things.
> If you're not updating, it may not work with the latest version of ruby/rails/whatever.

Do Ruby/Rails/whoever often have releases that break backwards compatibility?
This is a bad article. At the risk of picking out particular points...

Minute power savings on power-eating devices are ignored, even if they cost 140 power plants, because apparently consumers' energy bills aren't high enough for them to care. It isn't because they're unsexy. Apparently there are better ways for companies to spend their engineering effort, like making features that save an hour of users' time instead of saving $1 of electricity. So it makes the fallacy of thinking that engineers have free time to worry about X, and that regulation to force them to care about X is a good idea instead of considering the opportunity cost. (On the other hand we could point out that consumers are going to be rationally ignorant of the cost while it would actually be worth a day of an engineer's time to improve such and such, so we should regulate that in the interest of optimizing the behavior of human beings. But then we'd have to worry about the externalities of such regulation, and <imagine a libertarian argument here>.)

> What we have is a bloated network of fiefdoms and cartels, all of whom are hoping that some new technology will enable their continued siphoning of the nation's wealth and income stream.

It's sentences like these that show this is not worth a second skim. The last thing that helps established income streams is new technology.
Doesn't anyone else here see a chicken and egg problem??
Sure. The tileset can be found here:
https://github.com/freecivnet/freeciv-web/tree/master/freeci...

The isometric map is basically rendered using the HTML5 canvas element, by image clipping tiles from the tileset.
How long is their oil supply supposed to last?

Because after that, it's really going to get harsh, it's 80% of the country's income.

This has also happened in Brazil.
it has more to do with corporate affiliations:

hg seems to be strong at Google
github was done in ruby
php ... whatever
Absolutely!

http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
A great story.

That process, the act of programming is something that I need to do.

My feelings exactly. I can't not program. If I'm burned out with some complex work-related problem during the day, I can still catch myself fiddling around some random unrelated little code that does something "cool" (whatever might be cool for me at that moment) in the evening.

I started programming in elementary school (10yo), when I got a C64 computer, which was very popular at the time. BUT, I got it with a disk drive (1541-II drive, which cost more, and had more CPU power than the actual computer), and all my friends had tape drives, so I couldn't exchange games with them..

So I read and re-read the owner's manual, which was in German, and I didn't really know German .. so I would type these BASIC examples and try to figure out what happens. I think one of the first programs I wrote and understood was a variation of "guess the number" game.
Wow. They should get in touch with a lawyer - if they submitted correctly google would appear to be in clear violation of Title II, leaving them liable for the copyright infringement. Google has the responsibility to "upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material". Expeditiously hasn't been directly tested in court, but the general belief is that it's somewhere between 6 and 24 hours.

That liability includes up to $30,000 in damages per infringement (download).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...
In case any of the fabric folks hang out here I'd like to post a suggestion.

local task no longer works with cd. It works well with lcd though. The change log presents lcd as a new feature. It might be worth adding a note under "backward incompatible changes" that existing local tasks running inside a cd context may break (as they did for me).
Credit is given in decreasing author order as customary.

I think customary is quite variable. I would put weight on the first author and maybe last, but beyond that the order is usually meaningless. Some groups where I am will even go with alphabetical order and flip a coin to reverse it.
Hey thanks for he feedback everyone.

Design decisions:
Dont rotate images - this really kills performance.

Try not to scale images - My rough performance tests said: draw 1 scaled image = draw 3 images.

As you guessed, Bullet images sprites were not done for performance reasons. I might try and add them again and see what it looks like.

I'll experiment with bigger enemies / explosion images / collision box changes.

I'll write up an article in the future covering my decisions in more detail. And yes I hate it when HTML5 games kill my CPU I was going to make sure this one didn't do that.

andy
> And so I did. That first copy of byte magazine got read to pieces, I even knew the words of the ads by heart.

:-3

I grew up in a later era and one time in the late 80's my mom brought a portable computer home. When you turned it on the screen would shimmer and my mom let me type in the word processor. It was disappointing, since I expected computers to be so much more Amazing than a word processor. Then, later, we got a home computer, and we had it for seven years, and internet access for two, without the idea clicking that yes, I could probably write programs on it somehow. (I couldn't, actually, because QBASIC was not installed.) Finally I got my start writing "programs" when in eighth grade they taught us how to do word processing and make spreadsheets, and using MS Works Spreadsheet '99 (on a new PC) I made a spreadsheet for managing a basketball pool. I was still unaware of the idea of having a programming environment on a computer. A year later, though, we had to get TI-83 calculators for math class, and that's how the hobby of programming kicked in for a lot of people of my generation. Programming on calculators sure as hell beat devising ways to sort a deck of cards.
My need to code comes almost exclusively fromy my need to understand. If I can understand a problem space well enough to explain it to a computer, I probably understand it.
The very conservative estimates put the readily recoverable amount at around 380 billion barrels. World oil consumption is 90 million barrels a day, or 32.85 billion barrels a year. That means that if Venezuela was the only place left for oil, we'd be looking at around 11 years until it runs out.

In the real world, that means 234 years at current rates. Obviously, as oil runs dry, that means market forces push up the costs, and Venezuela becomes wealthier.

I think that Venezuela nationalizing the oil fields was a good decision, and I support the principles of the Bolivarian revolution in theory, although I think Chavez has been incompetent at implementing them, although there have been important positives, especially when dealing with issues of severe poverty. I especially support the push for direct democracy, but of course, I think it should be further decoupled from the government.

Most in the US are familiar with Chavez through his foreign policy, which is god damn awful. It's embarrassing at best, and in the case of his support for Gaddafi, unconscionable in the worst of times. It's unfortunate that this is the most outside Venezuela know about its politics.

At the top economic level, there are other models to learn from, Rwanda's universal health care and internet investment, and China's infrastructure investment for instance, but I think a mix of a Lula-style approach and a Norwegian style social investment of oil money would be the best approach.

Oh, to answer your question: Not for a very long time.
AMD blasts Apple's Thunderbolt technology
Finding a hacker for a low budget.
I got trouble finding a programmer for a small startup. At first i only need someone at a fixed price basis but somewhat later i want to hire someone fulltime. Remote work only.

I searched for 2 month on freelancing sites like odesk, vworker etc. but didnt find someone who seems to be suitable for the job.
At the other hand if i look at sites like here everyone seems to only work for $100/hr+.

Does anyone maybe know some sites where i can find some students who are eager to work for a reasonable price?
ASLR is mostly enabled, especially in 64-bit binaries. W^X protection is always enabled on 64-bit binaries. Service hardening and privilege separation are enabled by default always.
Sorry for my broken English, thanks for the elaboration.
How to cycle the hills of Italy & attend an afternoon board meeting from Beijing
The Norwegian fund where they stash their oil revenues is staggering - it's worth $512 billion and owns 1% of equities globally, for a country with a population under 5 million!
I do business in Africa, I work with chinese companies doing business in Africa, I do business in Germany, in China also. I've spent many years in those countries. You don't, you just have this prejudice without any justification. It's not evidence. I have experience, you have a bunch of articles you read on the net.

People like YOU are the greatest problem Africa faces. I'm glad the chinese are not like you, but go where money can be made.
if they were sure bout that, they would post it on nasa.gov i guess
It's half way there. Or both ways sans saving to device.
Home Sharing on iOS 4.3 allows to get your music from your computer and play it. AirPlay allows you to upstream media from your device.
I am pretty sure OTA sync is implemented and working somewhere on Infinite Loop.
Sadly it now seems clear that the iPad 2 will be locked to specific providers (at least in some regions) - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/06/apple_forced_to_make...
What it captures to Write a Medical Thesis
Writing a medical thesis is not an easy task. However, students doing MD degrees will have to submit a well written one. Therefore, it is important that students know the elements required to write a medical thesis which will get them a degree.
Really? I actually think sandwich making will be dead easy within 10 years. You just need a robot arm that can recognize and manipulate ingredients that costs less than maybe $300k.
It's mainly C# and .NET stuff on there.
These kinds of topics crop up pretty often here, maybe you can start by looking at the ideas there. Eg. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2293542
Sounds cool, but the page times out.
IPad 2 will be networked locked
Second that, the so called "astrobiology" is one of those fields which we don't know if the study is at all scientific or meaningful until we meet the alien in person. I remember watching a video of the 80's featuring a Professor of "Supernatural Studies".

These are, as one may call the study of "unknown unknowns"
Also try longreads via Lexpaper.com
@longreads http://lexpaper.com/paper/daily/share/longreads
#longreads http://lexpaper.com/paper/daily/tag/longreads

Download as e-book and read it offline.
erase and rewind

aka push -f and yell at them.
The rants session at the GDC conference had an element of gaming in it so it seems silly of the panelists to arbitrarily change the rules because it was not what they had imagined. But then again the author of the article could be seen as having to broken an implicit social rule don't lie, don't cheat - that permeates most societies. No wonder they labeled him as a cheater.

"We like to brag about how the games industry brings in more money than the film industry, but as soon as someone like Zynga makes enough money to trigger our envy, we invent interpretations of the game rules to say it’s not okay."

I seriously doubt that the criticism against Zynga were due to game developers being envious of Zynga. Frankly, this is a straw man and avoids the valid concerns people have about games and their addictiveness. It's not about rules that have been broken, but what responsibilities game developers have.

"Meanwhile, we are breaking the very same rules: the addictive qualities of Facebook social games can be found throughout all our games."

Maybe it's not a question about if games should have addictive qualities but rather how much and where you draw the line? Games can have a profound effect on a individual and affect their behavior and if the gaming industry doesn't routinely discuss the various ethical and psychological effects of gaming, they risk being seen as irresponsible or oblivious towards the well-being of gamers.

"Jane McGonigal bent the rules to bring her buddies up to share her rant time, but her shenanigans were sanctioned by the industry guard."

McGonigal was "sanctioned" because conferences, like most other IRL interactions, need order to function. Maybe the conference panelists were unnecessary strict and actually caused a loss by stopping McGonigal from talking, but many interactions would become difficult to participate in simply because people gamed them to their benefit.
Let me introduce HOOPL to you: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

"Hoopl: A Modular, Reusable Library for Dataflow Analysis and Transformation"

They use invariants like those in article for practical API that happens to be in the greatest need of high dependability.
I was planning on getting a GSM model on an upcoming trip to the US (so that I could pop a SIM into it if need be, and also to get GPS), but if it's locked to AT&T then that seals my decision to get a WiFi model (and tether to my iPhone or use my MiFi).

Apple, you just lost an upgrade sale. I'm sure I won't be the only one.
> 30% tax is more or less aimed directly at removing
> Amazon ebooks from the platform

Lots of books apps were available before iBooks. Apple has no interest of driving any content provider off iOS: anything that helps sell hardware is good for them.

And Kindle App is still available on iOS.
For now. Amazon and the rest have until June 30th to give up their margins on iOS or leave.
Thanks but these kind of topics are mostly about some designer looking for a hacker as a cofounder.
Thats not the case here. We want to pay for a hacker but we cant afford to pay someone 100$/h, but we dont wanna hire someone from a freelancer site who cant even speak english either.
Maybe customers should decide for themselves what they want.
Lost me at "It was exactly like this, except that i had pants on. …. and i have a much bigger cock. "
Play to win.
I am a postdoc and I think I just realized I have been screwed for years
I hope you've let your boss and former boss know how their investment/faith in you has paid off (for society, not necessarily them personally)...
If Amazon were serious about leaving, they would have left by now, to try and force Apple to not make the change on June 30.

Once June 30 goes past, Apple isn't going to reverse their policy again; if Amazon is there on the 30th, they're not leaving.
So, in a few centuries we will have finally opponents and maybe then we will stop to kill ourselves.
Warren Elles on The Setup
I think you're missing the point.

As far as I read it - he wasn't so much critiquing or defending the gaming industry for their social games. He was offering a parody of their inability to apply the standards to themselves that they apply to others.

To play a "social" game of any sort is to play a game that is automatically rigged against you - since the perception of success will change depending on the status of the person playing (whether they are the creators of the social game, or in league with them).

What's wonderful about the story is that he demonstrates neatly how to win such games. Create your own. As he says - the time he had spent online social games could have been spent building one. If, however, you are stuck in a context where you can't get outside their game (like a conference) - your only move is to perform the action which is most like creating your own game...

cheat...
When I was first programming I didn't have a computer and so I'd write programs in little notebooks. When I finally did get a computer it had a very slow tape recorder for saving programs. I would frequently write programs and simply switch the computer off without saving. Saving was a hassle and I knew that the programs worked once I'd executed them.
This is only one side of the virus. There's another one: the need to create things. I feel a great need to implement my _own_ ideas both in software and in hardware, i.e. first to understand the problem domain, then to create something that relys on this new knowledge and that does not yet exist. And it's a great great pleasure to observe the thing I created works. Maybe not as I initially imagined, but works! And I feel so miserable when it does not, usuaully because of some nasty bug (or a bad concept) and I cannot help stop debugging and debugging till I get it working! :-)
Some gems don't function correctly with Ruby 1.9.1, and a lot have minor issues with Rails 3.

Although sometimes it's more an issue with the documentation as opposed to code issues.
Excellent! Thanks, Alex, it's on its way to you.
Journal of Cosmology is open access on the internet. Given the field though, I doubt anyone that could really add to these findings is going to be held back by a subscription, I assume it's very hard to get access to these rocks and without the evidence to experiment on your just taking the authors word really.

Very different from say an algorithms paper where anyone can implement and run the code and possibly find improvements.