skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The big problem is that the existing polygon-based rendering system is a moving target. I don't see anything being done with voxels that's doing stuff that the existing food chain can't already do (a) better or (b) well enough.

The one seductive component of the Euclideon presentation is that their system would free up artists to not waste time building optimized models or materials, but I strongly suspect that this would not be the case, it would just change the process of optimizing content. And given that everyone will still need to target platforms which can't handle voxel rendering for some time...

I'd have to say that the Euclideon presentation would have been a lot more impressive if the landscape weren't built out of cubes. You don't need to be a great artist to, say, randomly arrange simple objects to give a more organic look to the landscape -- they're able to zero in on particles of soil but they couldn't do nice terrain contours? That definitely supports Notch's points.

If I were going to show off an island, I'd make sure the land-water interface kicked ass. Unity's terrain demo (which is polygon based and several years out of date) kicks this thing's ass.

http://unity3d.com/support/resources/example-projects/island...
On the topic of government 'spin' in social media, I highly recommend the book The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov.

He goes into detail on how different government organizations censor or spin different types of media, and how the viewpoint that 'everything should be completely open' is rather naive.
"that's just a self delusion caused by an emotional reaction not a valid argument"

It really is not, believe me.
I did the exact same thing a while back. The company I worked with used 4 fully-loaded servers driving Java spiders while I used 2 y/o laptop and 100 lines of Erlang.

Showed the code to my manager, he left the room saying I should do some "real" sysadmin work and stop playing around.

Just for a test, I started spidering big local news sites with I think 10000 threads and left it running for about 15 minutes.

Two things happened:
1. I consumed all bandwidth, rendering Internet unusable for the whole company, and
2. got about 10% of data other 4 Java servers could gather in a day

This stunt didn't get me fired, but my manager insisted I delete the program I wrote. Nobody was interested in results I got so nothing happened.

But it was fun watching bandwidth usage RRD graphs go through the roof :)
Well, maybe he is trying to create a hoax... Hahaha, Not sure really. If he is being serious this uncertainty will be his main problem...

But the concept and so the site are just funny. Hahaha.
The Ruby documentation is at ruby-doc.org rather than ruby-lang.org.
Typefaces for Dyslexia
Startup Social Media Challenges
Go is about 2 years old. Python just turned 30.

Penetration will come.
We need to do something big to get rid of old browsers so we can all move forward and start using this stuff. We need real progress.

If there were a law that mandated upgrading browsers that were out of date (by whatever definition you think works) what would that law look like? How would it work?

I ask, because if anyone comes up with something that could work, then we can all start pestering our politicians to put it into action.

It might be a complete non starter of an idea, but I'm so tired of seeing all these awesome time saving HTML5 tricks I cant use, it's got to be worth a shot.
It's transparent but definitely not user friendly. When you opt out it uses a cookie so if your cookies get deleted you need to opt out again. Also, since opting out uses a cookie you must opt out on every browser on every machine you use. Definitely not convenient.
So you have a legacy system that is being used by other systems, you're the new super genius and can't understand the system, so you rewrite? Discounting the potential release iterations and bug fixes that are in the legacy system? Your "improved" version can't include that knowledge since you didn't understand the legacy system. Also discounting the company wide knowledge of the legacy system, warts and all that exists? Also having two identical systems isn't fantastic. Rewriting a system because someone can't understand it is rarely the correct solution. It most likely means the rewriter doesn't understand the problems that are being solved by the legacy system either.
Nag Panchami Hindu Festival 2011 Wallpapers
Nag Panchami is a Hindu festival celebrated by Hindus in most parts of India. It is celebrated on Panchami in Shravan month. Nag Panchami will be celebrated on 4th August 2011 throughout India. Nag Panchami is the day on which snakes are worshipped. Snake temples and Shiva temples are flooded with people during this festival. The Indian mythology is full of stories, relating, snakes, humans, gods and demons with each other. Snakes have been associated with eternal gods like Lord Vishnu, Lord Shiva and also Lord Vishnu's incarnation Lord Krishna.
NYT Crossword editor: "I was willing to endure a life of poverty to do this."
Apple, Google, Samsung Eying InterDigital Patents
Finally, the Omnibox gets some love with partial URL/title matching. I switched from Firefox to Chrome for a while, and the Omnibox was my number one gripe: the URL matching was frustratingly poor, and it seemed to have no concept of sorting by recency or most visited. By comparison, the sort order in Firefox's AwesomeBar is so well-thought out that most of the time I can find the site I want in only a couple of keystrokes - yesterday, I needed to pull up a URL I'd used the day before, but all that came to mind was that it contained a '|' character... when I typed in '|', it appeared.

Maybe it's time for me to give Chrome another go, but it's got a high bar to beat.
Wall Street Journal desperately defends Murdoch
we're in the same boat. we have disabled the search mechanism on the site. if we are not interested in licensing the search, what other steps need to be taken at this point? it seems like the only options given by them are to license or they will litigate. hopefully people can keep us updated on what actions they are taking.

also, they provided an incorrect value of our estimated annual revenues, almost double over our actual amount. would this have any relevance? i am wondering where they obtained this information from, probably those questionnaires you have to fill out to get a free magazine.
I currently have 203 tabs open, and firefox has been running for 13 days. It's using 2.1gb of memory. I churn through tabs a lot. Firefox used to have memory problems, but it hasn't been a problem for me in at least a year. 10mb per tab is pretty good, IMO.
In its early days, Apple embedded a couple of no-op string variables, including the name of one of its programmers, in the code in the Apple II's ROM. Franklin Computing produced a clone. Apple didn't have to look hard to find its programmer's name in the cloned code. Apple successfully sued for copyright infringement. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankli....
Wait wait I've seen this guy before... Is he Borat? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borat Hahahahaha.
The Tree Style Tab extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...)
The Japanese (actually, this applies to Asians in general) are very good at making standalone devices, which is why they owned the console industry prior to the 6th generation. Creating integrated platforms where software plays a significant role isn't something that the Japanese are very good at. That's why when Microsoft came in with Xbox Live they were able to steal a huge chunk of the market share.

This is also why none of the Korean or Taiwanese cell phone makers that had huge market shares were able to beat Apple to the iPhone (and even now, all they do is provide hardware for Android, which is American as well), or even beat RIM to making an email-friendly cell phone.
". Today we have Netflix available on 10 devices in our home. My wife can be watching a World War II documentary on her iPhone, while I watch a DVD. And at the same the kids watch Toy Story 3 on the computer, all for no incremental charge. "

I'll have to test this.

You can't watch a movie on two pc's with the same account at the same time.

Does this not apply to phones and pc's or other devices?
It's buried at the bottom of the page, but they link to the "Keep My Opt-Outs plugin".

Just curious: are you opting out? Why?
It seems that articles on the Guardian[1] have got an "Article history" which list when the article was changed. Saddly they don't tell you how the article was changed.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk
I'm not the only one... sweet. :P
I'm an intern on the Mid-Market Product Marketing team. I reached out to Matthew to see if I can give him any help/advice now that he's already got the referral in.
大腿吸脂多少钱
Building a Niche Lead Generation Empire
We are talking statistics here. When you see a hypothesis like "past performance does not correlate with future performance" you look around for evidence for or against it. All the examples I cited clearly speak against this hypothesis. Insofar, the fact that people use past behavior as a predictor for future behavior clearly speaks against the hypothesis.

I could go on with examples. Why is it for example, that people want to get to know each other better before they hop into some kind of mutual arrangement or contract? Could it be, because we all try to predict future behavior from past behavior?

Of course we could all be wrong - in general or in certain circumstances. Maybe a pedophile will never molest a child again in the future. Or maybe the girl you dated who was very obnoxious will change for the better. Yet, this is unlikely (remember: this is still a statistical argument). So the burden of proof is with the guy who came up with this hypothesis.

EDIT: Regarding the "the fact that Google does it doesn't proof anything" argument. Would you say that Google should just throw a coin to decide which applicant to take or simply take the first k applicants (say, in alphabetical order) and Google would not be worse off than they are with the current interview process?
hmm it does not work for me: http://i.imgur.com/SDvIl.png

And my browser's cookies are not disabled.
> If it were true that stupid people prefer X, then yes: your preference for X would suggest that you were stupid.

This is not correct. Stupid people prefer eating over starving, but a preference for eating does not suggest that you are stupid.
Android Malware on the Rise
Thank you. It's not just me - all the credit goes to the entire team, especially Van Lindberg for the past two year.

Also, we're discussing bringing startup row back en-force this year, if anyone is interested.
On my original look at this, Google had one of my interests as hockey. I've never shown any interest in the sport, nor have any of my friends, so I was confused. Upon reloading the page, "Hockey" was gone, although I had taken a screenshot before, and noticed a number of other preference had been removed, leaving a much better fit of my activities.

Prior to my refresh I had video streamining, photo sharing, and online video as my "interests" despite the fact I don't tend to use my computer for these kinds of things. These are obviously things I might be interested in (25-34 male demograph), but am not particularly. I wonder why they would appear and disappear like this? How often are the preferences updated (hourly? daily? monthly?)
Well, I also heard the report on NPR yesterday during the news highlights. This was big news for more than just the PPC crowd.

Sadly, I don't think the retraction will be more than a blip.
TripAdvisor Enters New Market
羡慕鹊桥仙情人节短信祝福
NHS National Programme for IT to be scrapped
I get that dark blue "Aw, Snap" page quite a bit since upgrading to Lion.
Not a problem if your employees actually enjoy what they do.
The Xbox Story, Part 2: Gunning for Greenlight
yes - we get a lot of scientists, especially big data scientists at the conference, and we encourage talks and tutorials around scientific computing+python - check out http://python.mirocommunity.org/ for past talks for a tasting!
Peroni, RyanB -

Thanks - would be interesting to know how many people have gotten jobs through Quora. This experience has been great!

-g
Ask HN: Why can't Wolfram Alpha answer which is the largest river in Africa?
It can answer this:
"largest river in mexico"

But, can't answer this:
"largest river in africa"
Are you on Gingerbread? The keyboards before 2.3 are awful.
I work from home all the time and I agree heartily with what you've said regarding burnout. It's that "work feels empty and I don't want to touch a computer" feeling and I can always tell when it starts to come on, usually following an intense week-two week push. When it does, I make sure not to touch the computer or atleast touch it minimally until I start to feel excitement to work on something again (usually takes 3 to 4 days).

I also have to take issue with his routine - diurnal drift has always been a problem for me (hard for me to get up early, easy to stay up late == bad sleeping habits and a sloppy daily routine); I find I cannot maintain a structured and meaningful routine if I start slipping outside of my established "get up early (early here is 7AM or 6AM), shower, work, exercise, read, sleep" cycle (excluding other creature habits like meals &c...).

I'm a rare one in that I don't actually socialize with any developer community at all - but I do have a vibrant and active social life outside of computers - most of my friends aren't anywhere near the programmer/developer culture. I would say exercise (I hit a CrossFit gym three times per week) and an active social life, whatever that means to you, and a structured daily routine are the keys to working remotely and on your own.
Spoiler: At no point in the story does the author download Xcode.
As a consumer I'm with you. If google is going to be showing me Ad's anyway... I'd rather they target them for me. It's not like opting out means they don't have giant warehouses of data on me or that they won't show me any ads. I guess I don't see what the potential up-sides are to opting out.
Matthew Epstein: Cultural Learnings of America for getting the job you dreamed.
Do you have AdBlock installed?
Chicago Radio Is Dead: And It is Technology's Fault?
Getting good survey data requires that the subjects agree to take a survey before you tell them what will be surveyed. This still biases respondents, obviously, but it puts all surveys on an equal playing field.
On average, I have about about 20 tabs open. I use the Tab Mix Plus plugin installed that gives me multi-row tabs. After 10 tabs are open, it adds another row of tabs and it gives me 3 rows before I need to scroll the tabs. So having 30 tabs open is pretty manageable.

If I'm doing heavy research I can easily end up with over 100 tabs open. I just open every single page I'm going to look at in a new tab over time and just lose count.
Thanks for an awesome answer. I agree that your approach with format strings is right, but it was great to hear reasoning against the other options.

I agree that macros are dangerous for an embedded language. In our iOS C++ framework, they have their uses, mainly if we want to reduce boilerplate code, when

- bridging ObjC/C++ worlds

- creating e.g. record data types with JSON parsing & other common functionality for records

- creating handle objects for refcounted objects

but for more complex "embedded languages" we have resorted to C++ templates. Properly used, the give us very nice APIs, but build times are quite bad.

Sidenote: I'd love to get an email notification (opt-in per my comment) from HN if someone answers/comments on my comment. Your answer went unnoticed by me for 2 weeks.
Very strange. Do you share your computer with others?

The change is probably due to caching. If your computer isn't shared, I'd blame Google's classification which isn't always very accurate. Best example: a page of photos of pole dancers was classified as "winter sports" because the secondary navigation linked to relevant content...
You're right. My workflow sucks and there is no way it could be the most efficient way for me to work. All those tabs are useless. Re-navigating to a document multiple times a day is easier than leaving it open scrolled to where I need it.

I guess I just suck at my job.
Maybe they have per-country data, and since Africa is not a country but a continent...
Because it doesn't have the data?
Mexico is a country, Africa is a continent.

Same as how you can ask largest river in USA but not largest river in North America
Customers only notice the flaws or omissions in the remaining 10%
I agree with you, but he did include titles, so someone considering hiring him could easily verify these quotes.
Mozilla Chairman Hints To New Range Of Products
PDF MEtadata Acquisition Tool (aka pdftobibtex/pdf2bibtex)
the "waah I didn't get to play all my cards" thing is weird. he wanted a google interview, he got a google interview, holster your guns matthew, the fight's over
Probably the FCC would regulate browsers. In addition to wasting developers' time filing reports and talking to government employees, the regulating body would add more restrictions on browsers, possibly even mandating they be used to report undesirable activity. I think it's worse than a non-starter of an idea -- it would slow browser development and turn browsers into weapons against free use of the Internet.
Here's a metaphor about a special case where invention is justified.

Suppose you have no cell phone and you need to get to your mad science lab before your apprentice does so that you can lock up the monster you created the night before — otherwise it will eat him. You spot him ten cars ahead of you on the two-lane highway, but he doesn't notice you.

It is 100% guaranteed that he will arrive at the lab before you if you stay behind him on the highway. Then the monster will eat him.

There's a shortcut to the mad science lab through the back roads. Usually the highway is faster, but every once in a while the highway has a traffic jam and the back roads don't. If you take the back roads, you have a 30% chance of reaching the lab before your apprentice.

30% is better than 0%, so that's what you should do. Even though the back roads are probably slower, they're your only possible way to win the race.

In a business context, you may find yourself competing against an incumbent strictly on the basis of their core competency. If you have no way out of that situation, one possible strategy is to pursue an angle of development that is simply different from theirs — even if your best knowledge suggests that their angle is probably the best one. Your only hope is that they run into an unexpected traffic jam on the road they're taking, and that you're on a different road.

My reading is that this is basically the story of AMD64. As I understand it, mainstream opinion in the late 90s and early 2000s was that we were going to have to import some version of VLIW's explicit ILP into CPU design in order to keep getting single-threaded performance improvements, so that was what Intel went with for their 64-bit CPU architecture. AMD announced their alternative path, hobbling themselves with backward compatibility, in 1999.

They got lucky: Intel's "Itanium" turned out to be an Itanic; it hit a performance iceberg and sank, and since 1999, AMD64 has become the mainstream CPU architecture, displacing not only i386, but also PowerPC, SPARC, Alpha, MIPS (except in the very low-end), PA-RISC, POWER, System 360, AS/400, and half a dozen vector supercomputer architectures. (Alpha, PA-RISC, and the AS/400 aren't even on the market any more. SPARC, POWER, System 360, and vector supercomputers are still available, but most of their uses have been replaced with AMD64, running Linux.)
How do you get into the developer scene in Edinburgh, Where do you hangout?
Ask HN: How to get out from under U.S. Patent Law?
Is it enough to simply found a company in another country and refuse to distribute within U.S. territories, or are there additional measures that need to be taken to disqualify oneself from U.S. patent enforcement?
"I stopped writing tests. Reduced the LOC by half. And with no tests, we actually find fewer bugs!"

This can be true to an extent. Tests are a tradeoff that can potentially give you better stability, yes, but at the cost of more development time, longer builds, costlier maintenance, and more surface area for bugs.

Like types, tests are appropriate in some cases, overkill in others. Imo, a lot of web functionality, especially for prototypes, isn't sufficiently complicated or critical (i.e. life or death or responsible for millions) to warrant tests, and the threshold for types is higher. Also depends a lot on the size of your team and skill of developers. If you're producing code with few bugs to begin with, tests have less value.

It's really all a matter of judgment and right-tool-for-the-job. Generalisms just aren't useful.
SEEKING WORK

Rails/Sinatra development and AdWords management> http://ninthyard.com
Protobuf-dt: An Eclipse editor for Protocol Buffers
This can already be done by using a script or img tag load an arbitrary URL.
Tell HN: IActionable Makes the Top 16 for AppQuest 2011
Our startup has been thrown into the spotlight by making it into the Top 16 of Salesforce.com's App Quest contest. It's obviously an exciting and nerve-racking time for us. We've come a long way since we original posted the concept here on HN over a year ago and made the plunge to work full-time on our platform.

I'm very interested in getting some new feedback on our platform, Salesforce application and general direction. We've made a huge pivot to concentrate on employee engagement and I think we've made a good choice.
Bloomberg also offers a comprehensive market data product that isn't just a firehose from the exchange. Lots of work went into normalizing the data stream so that consumers of the stream wouldn't have to learn the oddities of hundreds of different market feeds. The latency is actively monitored (in microseconds) and they offer direct co-lo as well.

http://www.bloomberg.com/enterprise/data_solutions/market_da...

I agree though, even if you have the best algo around, it could fall flat on its face unless you have the pockets to be side-by-side with the big shops.

These places are especially paranoid when it comes to co-lo. I've heard that exchanges guarantee that all the boxes are given the same exact length of network cable to remove any chance that shorter length favors one shop or another.
250k 3 years out of college? Jesus... I have plenty of Ivy league friends in IB & PE making no where near that.. He landed a serious gig. Definitely tough to leave something so cushy so young. Sometimes it really is all about the game.
This frightens me.
I have never yet read advice that suggested doing things the wrong way and felt the person was actually better for it.

Did he have a good experience and a tale to tell in the end? Sure, but he has to temper it with how stupid he was being the whole time. You can have awesome experiences without failing! Without being stupid! Without endangering yourself on purpose!

Likewise, with code, it's the same way. How much better it would be to look back on your code and think, 'Man, that's still awesome!'? And let's not forget the people who come after you. Would you rather have them tell you how awesome you code is, or treat you with disdain for the pile of crap you dropped in their lap? And I know what kind of code your employer prefers.
Clickable: http://iactionable.com

If you're interested in learning more about our Salesforce contest entry you can check our our latest blog article:
http://iactionable.com/engage-by-iactionable-makes-the-top-1...
All true, but nonetheless good news for bitcoin, because the government is less likely to shut it down if their Lords and Masters are making money with it.
The author of the blog post has a creepy picture at the top of the post. I would change that to something less scary...
How else could it be done?