skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like good reasons, to me. They're a company with on-the-edge games and they can't afford to be held back.

I'm actually quite surprised that Valve has -any- say in what they do on their own website, or what they implement in the game. I could understand having to implement certain features (like not crashing with the Steam overlay) but to prevent features, marketing, non-game sales, or anything else that doesn't directly affect Valve?

Inconceivable.
Dental Assistant Training
玫琳凯化妆品价格表
Vi was developed on a system that had Ctrl and Esc where Caps and Tab are now.

One now about using Ctrl-c: that bypasses InsertLeave autocmd's.
No. I worked at a small IVR systems company in 2000 and at Nuance in 2001. I also worked with the tech during my undergraduate years. My opinion on speech recognition is that it's very pie-in-the-sky and not yet ready for general applications. I don't say this because the technology itself isn't ready; it's that humans aren't ready for it.

Having stated my bias: Speech recognition systems are actually not that complex at their core. It's a blending of statistical models. Getting good data is a problem. You need a good acoustic model that's adapted to your users and the environment in which they will be using your application. Everything from the fluency of speakers, to physical environment, to the characteristics of the channel over which the speech is sent needs to be considered.

If you have a good acoustic model, now you have to worry about your language model. Are you going to try to accept all words in a language, or just restrict your users to a particular domain of language? If you have a good language model, then you need to worry about the dialog management. How do you keep context in a conversation? It's not an easy problem.

The primary problem with speech recognition systems is that human beings set their expectations of them too high. It's a psychological factor. When those expectations are not met, the user is frustrated and angry. Consider this. Whenever you call AT&T, your health insurance company, or credit card company, do you enjoy the experience of the IVR system that routes your call? Probably not. You probably don't even talk to it and resort to pressing the buttons instead. Unfortunately that's the experience most people have with speech recognition. I think it's the worst possible application of it.

If you're making a small, toy application whose vocabulary is pretty restricted and whose functionality set is small, then you're probably okay. If you venture into full dialog/anything-goes type applications, the chances are high that your app will be a bomb.

These researchers can swap out all the lower-level statistical models they want, but it won't fundamentally improve the technology. There are systems out there with word error rates very close to that of humans, but the systems higher up in the stack that interpret what is recognized are still very crude.
If you have a dedicated QA group, you can say it will decrease the amount of time QA spends on regression testing.
> However paradoxical, minimalism can be also an be attachment. As Buddhists would say, take the middle road.

One of my favorite lines in philosophical thought is, "Moderation in all things, including moderation."
Don't you understand, if the government doesn't spend huge sums recovering these coins our currency will be devalued.

I mean, devalued more. Because, you know, quantitative easing, and all that.

More seriously: I want to know how the hell you find a jury who will actually support the government stealing heirlooms from an 82-year-old woman's safety deposit box.
BlackBerry Torch 9860
After coming out of disparagement from the users for Blackberry Storm due to its sluggishness RIM had something to celebrate with the announcement of the new BlackBerry OS 7 devices. Blackberry introduced its new range of devices: Bold 9900, BlackBerry Torch 9810 and BlackBerry Torch 9850/9860 powered with OS 7 this august.
We are still brainstorming. Would love to hear some ideas !
Patching High School: Teaching the Classes That Should Exist
Very cool concept. I would love to see it taken a step further and invite/confirm appts.
This already exists, of course. OStatus is based on LRDD, Webfinger and Salmon, which is based on PubSubHubBub, which carries Atom messages.

There are already decentralized networks working fine - you can install a StatusNet hub on your own server and follow and be followed by Laconi.ca users.

The problem is that there's no real demand; they don't really bring anything the users want.
Apple May End Mobile Phone Contract Era
European Binary Events are Plentiful
Ask HN: How can Google Maps built in URL shortener be so short?
It looks like it only uses 4 unique characters. (ex. http://g.co/maps/32xe)
I have used Play! on a few projects (my experience coming from the last 10 years of JSP/EJB, JSPX/EJB3/JPA, Struts, Spring, JSF, attempted suicide, etc.) and really enjoyed it.

It does a lot of magic and doesn't follow normal Java patterns, but you can look under the covers and the different programming style it uses is easy to grok.

If you are a Java dev that is sick of the architect-itus that Java developers typically suffer from, Play will feel great to you.

If you are coming from Spring MVC, JSF, Struts2 and any other large-scale framework with a lot of configuration and complex concepts, you will appreciate Play quite a bit more.

You can tell the creators are Java devs that played in the Rails arena for a while and brought a lot of that back to the Java world.

The mailing list is also quite active and releases are very methodical.

Play also works on Google App Engine, (obviously) AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Zenexity's own Playapps cloud hosting[1] and now Heroku... nice to see innovation!

[1] http://www.playapps.net/
Just a warning, a lot of these SSDs "cheat" by using compression. I bought the best drive that I could find for my macbook pro - OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, and was rather disappointed to find out that the posted speeds are based on benchmarks with compressible data. The reason this is an issue is because if you use disk encryption like you should be doing, encrypted data is not compressible. As a result, my speeds are 1/3rd to 1/2 of that which is advertised, and it was not worth the extra money.
http://gav.brokentrain.net/projects/vimtips/vimtips.pdf

This PDF file has a lot of tips/command lines about Vim

It is also produced really well, with landscape pages and bookmarks, so that it can be displayed on your monitor very efficiently.
C++ 11 Concurrency Tutorial Series
So now you could create a system with a "Go, Spot, Go" architecture. (depending on what Spot actually does). (http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US7/NAMES/dickjane.html).

(I hope this message isn't inappropriate for Hacker News, at least right now when I think it is still a (pun not intended) novel joke. Yes, I realize the article alludes to See Spot Run, but I couldn't find anybody linking Go and Spot together in such a way.)
Then why are they bringing Minecraft to the XBOX 360 which is a much more locked down platform than steam?
Why not? They're continuing to create really great products that scratch their own itches and are allowing the company to grow.

Seems like they have the resources for it and the drive and ambition.
I really admire how much Notch seems to understand opposing viewpoints that most people would simply make inflammatory posts about. His diplomacy here, as well as with Bethesda, has been stellar: Not "Steam is a DRM-ridden mess that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, bwa ha ha!", but instead, "I understand why they'd want to control their platform." Not "Bethesda are an Orwellian corporate giant trying to crush the little guy, bwa ha ha!", but instead, "This is probably just lawyers being lawyers." Never a bridge burned. What respect and maturity! Hats off to you, Notch. I'm proud to be a part of the same community of developers as you.
I think that's an important point.

Was replacing his book collection with a Kindle an example of "less stuff" or "more stuff"? I don't think it's either. It's an alternative, and in this case, it felt like "less stuff" to him. That was in line with his goal and it worked.
That's not what I was responding to. The original suggestion about the X220 was responded to by saying that the X220 isn't 'elegant' and has a design that harkens back to 2001 (which is implied to be a bad thing).

The elegance of the design alone is not enough to place it in a different category. If the argument had been that it can't be classified in the same category as the MacBook Air (with a list of reasons other than "I think that it looks ugly"), then this thread would look a lot different.
The Birth Of A Word
This is how the battle for openness is won. Not by endless online argument, but by building stuff. Stuff that, by virtue of its openness and flexibility, is too awesome to be needlessly and arbitrarily constrained.

Beats the shit out of dogma.

Good on ya, Notch.
You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Apple and XBLA have similar restrictions about interaction outside of their walled gardens. There are good reasons for this: Preventing fraud (they trust their credit card processing much more than some random app developer), filtering objectionable content for those under 18, ensuring a certain minimum standard of quality, etc.

Also sorry, I accidentally downvoted you when I meant to upvote you. (Can someone please move those arrows farther apart?)
SciPy for .NET & IronPython
Reddit hosts largest online atheist community
W3C: HTML predefined icon-like symbols (1996)
The goal is that emails CCed to Inbox Assistant send the recipients an accept/reject email and an .ics attachment.

Still waiting on more usage patterns and feedback to emerge so I can figure out if it's something people want.
What would be the best way to copy text and paste it replacing some other text?
I have tried Pencil, Balsamiq, MockingBird and Google Docs. Google Drawings works best for me.
The WebObjects sites I've encountered in the wild all seem to have completely garbage URLs - is that a requirement of WebObjects, part of the culture surrounding it or just an unfortunate coincidence?
Play is great. Simple, fast, and easily scalable.

Play and Akka are my new favorite toys when I do Java.
I note with mild amusement that B&N's Nook Color hasn't exactly destroyed Android. (Even though half an hour on the web is enough to find the tools with which to root it and turn it into an Android 2.2 device -- Honeycomb is still a bit alpha-ish. And I can testify from first-hand experience that the Nook Color makes a really nice Kindle.)

What the Amazon tablet may do is to trigger a shake-out among the Android tablet vendors, because if it's as well-integrated as the Kindle e-ink experience it's going to show up a lot of crappy also-rans for what they are. And it'll likely punch well above its price point because Amazon will be selling the handle at (or below) cost in order to guarantee ongoing sales of razor blades.
One suggestion I'd make (that I haven't seen implemented, so it's only an idea) is a regular cull. Every few months or a year, depending on your preference / tolerance, just sit them down and ask them to choose what they're willing to throw away or give away. You could explain it in terms of your philosophy, or frame it as giving their lovely things to other kids who would also like to play with wonderful toys, or so on.

Kids can be a lot more reasonable than people give them credit for.
This is absolutely the Windows way of accomplishing it. With Libraries, you don't just "map" your Music folder to something, you can have as many folders as you want included in your music library.

How to Include a Network Drive or Folder in a Library in Windows 7: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4617-libraries-include-...
Ah, I missed the "there is very little rental available." Sorry.
"Search Committee of the Board of Directors has been created, consisting of Marc L. Andreessen, Lawrence T. Babbio, Jr., John H. Hammergren, and Joel Z. Hyatt, which will oversee the process for the identification and selection of a new CEO and Board Chair."

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/hp-ceo-mark-hurd-resigns/
I would like to share my experience with Scala and Android. Maybe someone can tell me what I am doing wrong.

Speed and start up time does not appear to be a problem, even if you are using a good part of the library. The problem with scala is it takes so darn long to build your simple app. Size of generated output is not a big deal, though it will be larger than Java for simpler stuff. But unless your app is trivial the media elements will make a much larger contribution to your final size than the code. Also the growth is non linear. Here is what I mean.

If you hello world and proguard your app will be the same size as a java app. But once you bring in some scala stuff - collections or language features which need the library it grows by an order of magnitude. So a 20k Java app vs 100k Scala for the same app. After that initial bump the additional baggage is gradual so that eventually the java app of similar complexity will generate similar sized output. Speed is not meaningfully impacted in my experience. If you are making a game it would be worth considering preallocating arrays and doing basic memory management to avoid stalls.

You will have to avoid some idiomatic scala because functional programming is too easy going in terms of allocation. So manually iterating java hashtables and arrays instead folding over maps and lists. I will note that for my simple app I fold over lists with little impact for now. Scala has the basic advantage of being a java with less boilerplate. The little things add up. But if you are not using it as a functional language is it worth it? I think so. Instead of using it as just a functional language you can use it as something else. more? By leveraging caseclasses, Extractors and pattern matching you gain in expressivity while retaining declarative elegance. your mileage may vary.

So the problems are: You can't easily debug. But Mostly, building takes Forever. It takes 4-5 minutes to build the simple hello world activity. I humbly suggest the scala team look at their android support.

Getting F# on WP7 was a piece of cake in comparison. Building is normal, debugging is there and getting it to work was a matter of referencing a targeted dll.
"As if one should be doing something that betters the world, and if you're not then whatever you're doing is a waste."

Well, yeah, sorta. I don't think there's any need to bring a moral component into it--we all do what we feel we gotta do to get by, but is it really disputable that we'd have a better world if all the energy that went into selling people crap that is at best useless and at worst blatantly harmful to them instead went into directly improving people's lives? To me that seems like the very definition of waste, though I also think it would be extremely foolish to think you could somehow direct people into behaving any differently. Judging the 'wasted' efforts of others is at least as much a waste as those efforts themselves. It's up to each of us to decide individually whether we can be content selling sugar water or whether we can do better... but I think honesty requires admitting that we can indeed do better, whether or not we choose to do so.
Education Software Company Blackboard's Competitive Position is Weakening
Ask HN: With the new startup visa changes...
Does that open more chances and opportunities for European startups who plan on starting their company in the USA rather than Europe?

What do you guys think will happen?
I wonder if anybody in the startup world is thinking of solving the domain problem. Eventually founders are going to get sick of dot com domain hacks but without ICANN cooperation I just don't see how this can change. There are only a limited number of quality domains that are variations of English words.
It might be incrementally generating codes. So it's only at 4 unique characters because only those many URLs have been generated so far; once all the 4-character codes have been exhausted, it would start using 5-character codes.
Steam is merely a new distribution system for a platform Notch has already shipped on while the XBOX 360 is a totally new platform with its own required distribution system.
Even if he hires other people to do it, he is ultimately responsible for it and must know what he's doing, if only to hire the right people and fire them if they don't do the job. It's not something you can truly delegate and wash your hands off from.. Just like how the CEO is ultimately the real 'chief risk officer' in a company and can't delegate managing risk to someone else.
The Future of Gaming: a Portrait of the New Gamers
And, when it does happen, you thanks yourself for the times you thought it was unnecessary tests, but still wrote them to be safe.
Nice introduction to data prefetching. I don't fully agree with this statement, though:

Second, programmers have very little control over instruction placement in memory.

Depending on your platform and type of application you may have full control over instruction placement and it might be extremely important to know how to sequence instructions to get maximum performance.
You own a Pre 3? Ack, so jealous.
Office 2007 and 2010 have had the ability to export your settings with the Export-ui extension. I would guess that you can do the same with Windows Explorer too
Has it been confirmed yet that Lodsys is a trolling front for Intellectual Ventures?
If you're paid per hour and your client want you to take the less possible time. It's stupid; I agree. You can try argue with him/her about the importance of it, but in the end, it's their money so it's their choice.
They have an alternative to using Steam on PCs - they can release their own binaries, or source. They don't really have such an alternative on the XBox.
Symbolic links can be used, but many apps that I use don't respect them. Hard links have the advantage of being indistinguishable from a real directory unless an app actually goes out of its way to inspect it.
Panama set to lead economic growth in Latin America
is that opencart extension available somewhere? would be great to release it.
I used to work with someone who insisted on Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows because he could never find anything in Excel. Lotus for Windows was better because it still supported the / menus he'd been using in Lotus for DOS.

Help/Search does seem like a great feature, though.
Show HN: A weekend project to help improve your startup's communication
Great article! Chris Rohlf and myself gave a talk on attacking JIT engines at BlackHat earlier this year[1]. We covered JIT sprays and mitigating against them fairly thoroughly (not this thoroughly, but our goals were a bit different :)).

Check it out if you're into this.

[1] http://www.matasano.com/research/jit/
Cmd+Up goes to the parent folder. There's probably a way to emulate that in ActionScript and set it as a custom toolbar button.
Not an either-or. Both are alluring.
I think it's a credit to the CS community that computer scientists actually ask this question.

I'm an electrical engineer and I left a career in oil/gas to do something "good" with my skills. A few of my former colleagues used to ruminate about whether they could be doing something more meaningful in their professional lives. Of course, there were also those who had no qualms whatsoever about the oil/gas industry, that it was a noble goal to provide the world with energy (and FWIW, this is a perspective that I respect even though I don't share it).

But the overwhelming majority of my colleagues hadn't even thought about it, nor did they really care. The job afforded them a very comfortable living, enough for them to fulfil most of their material aspirations. And frankly, that's enough for most people.

Of course, existential crises probably happen to these people once in a while, but only to be forgotten the next day. My suspicion is that in the main, most people just aren't very introspective. So I applaud the CS community for actually bringing this issue up and discussing it openly.
On modern systems, there are two kinds of addresses. "Virtual" addresses and physical addresses. Virtual addresses are tracked by the operating system, and they can span the entirety of the addressable address space. So, on a 32-bit system that isn't playing any high-memory tricks, that's 0 - 2^32, or 0 - 4 GB.

But your system may not have 4 GB. So the operating system has a data structure called a page table that has the virtual to physical mapping for each process. The processor accesses this table (it caches it in something called a TLB) so that it can convert the virtual address to the physical address.

An example using small numbers. Your program has a pointer to data. That pointer may have value 800. Let's assume that the amount of memory on your system is only between 0 - 400. So the processor has to convert the value 800 to a value between 0 - 400. It's the operating system's job to maintain that valid mapping.

Why does this matter, and why is it so tied up with paging to and from disk? Let's say the OS pages out the page containing that data. Then, later, it's paged back in, but in a different physical location in memory. Your program still has the pointer value 800, but your program still works correctly because the operating system keeps track of where in physical memory 800, for your process, maps to.

People in the Windows world often say "virtual memory" when they mean "swap space" because Windows would call the amount of swap space "virtual memory size." But virtual memory is the technique described above. Read the Wikipedia entry from above, or read an operating systems textbook for a full discussion of it.
Justin.tv owns some of it. What they're probably doing is having Socialcam issue some stock to investors, and to grant lots options to the founding team. Imagine that SocialCam has 100 shares now. They might have the company sell 50 shares to outside investors for funding (so Justin.tv owns ~67%, but that is 67% post-money, and the total value of the stake will be the same). Then the company could allocate 50 shares to an option pool for their founders. That dilutes Justin.tv's stake down to 50%. Nobody has to give anything up--the investors are putting in money, and the options are a form of employee compensation.
But they aren't eliminating the context menu, no? Right clicking is intuitive for me, but it is not for many people. I speak from my own experiences doing tech support professionally and for family and friends.
I am not your search engine optimization bitch.
they would have to send the image back to us also encoded. if they misinterpret the instructions, why would we notice when they use the same encoding scheme to send us back a picture?
Reverie on music streaming and YouTube
Will ModoPayments Finally Monetize Check-In?
To your point about letting the data do the designing for them, I believe they actually ignored an important aspect of their data or they were so biased towards the ribbon that they interpreted the data towards supporting it's implementation.

For example, the "Command Entrypoint Usage" graph, shows the Context Menu as the most prominent means to perform tasks and the "Menu Bar" as the least. Whereas they read this as "We need to make the menu bar easier to use", I would interpret that as a strong indicator that the context menu needs more attention.
http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp

> I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL
I am not so big on unit tests because I feel I mostly write glue code in rails were the problems are really not very hard.

What I really like is Selenium test that work like manual testing and I thus feel they just automate something I would need to do in any case.
The battle for openness is won by building proprietary software?