skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As recommended by samstokes, Frozen Synapse is an excellent tactical game :). While it's not released yet, you might also enjoy Xenonauts, which is an indie-XCOM-alike.

In general, this year's (PC/FPS) games I'd pick as being worth a lookin are:

* Deus Ex: HR. This year's GOTY for me. Amazing single-player storyline, and it's truly open-approach as far as levels are concerned. I played the game almost entirely stealthily (ie. finding air conditioning ducts to hide in and making extensive use of augmentations which showed enemy patrols' FoV in order to avoid detection), but you could approach it completely differently and gun down every last dickhead guard. In a year where Portal 2 had clenched my favourite spot, this did incredibly well to claim it.

* Portal 2. Valve, Portal, `nuff said. I didn't think it was as good as the first one (there were a lot less twitch-esque puzzles, due to the PS3/360 not being able to support the rapid mouse movements a PC does), but still an excellent game.

* Battlefield 3. The whole BF3/MW3 thing is the most ridiculously hyped up marketing exercise in existence, but the multiplayer here is still Battlefield, and still solid. Might not be your cup of tea, but definitely fun for a hoon.

* Tribes: Ascend. Still in beta, and still being actively tweaked (thankfully, as the balance is currently nowhere near correct). Still, it's undoubtedly Tribes: fast, airborne, and team-oriented. Woot woot.

* Dead Space 2. My favourite horror/FPS mashup. It's not so much scary as it is shocking; generally, you get less of a fright (unlike Amnesia, which is deeply unsettling), and more of an OH FUCK style surprise. Really, really glad EA kept this franchise going, but I imagine after one more round I'll be over it (sadly).

Also, if you play nothing else from the indie establishment, Bastion is amazing. If I was to recommend only two games from this year, for me, they'd be Deus Ex: HR, and Bastion :).

In terms of other tactical games you might like, I don't typically play that genre so can't be a good recommendation engine unfortunately. Company of Heroes, while an RTS (and long in the tooth now), focusses more on local tactics than it does traditional RTS trappings (ala Starcraft 2). Thanks to the recent failure of CoH: Online, it's had a bunch of balance changes backported and is currently undergoing somewhat of a rejuvenation :). The Dawn of War II series is RTT (tactical; there's no basebuilding) but the online is so hardcore most have been turned off it by now.
Black Friday prices not always lowest for our recommended models
Because of this payroll systems are fraught with implementation problems, particularly in government, where this type of rules exist.

In the past I kept a log of IT project failures as I come across them. There are a few bad payroll system rollouts. http://it-project-failures.blogspot.com/

The Queensland Health Payroll system blew up a political storm because of implementation issues. The cost of the blowout? $219M. http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/health-pay-bun...

In fact there was an inquiry into what went so badly wrong
http://www.insightcp.com/blog/why-sap-hrpayroll-projects-fai...

Payroll systems should never be migrated wholesale. They should be scriptable, for instance pay masters should be able to script the computations to assist them.

Anybody else interested in IT project morbidity could also look at http://delicious.com/search?p=itfailures and http://delicious.com/tag/deathmarch
Ask HN: Who caters your lunches in the Palo Alto?
The prices you show go out to tiny fractions of a cent (>6 decimal places). I don't think that's going to make a difference in someone's decision, and trimming to just showing the cents will make the prices look more consistent.

EDIT: I should mention that this site was useful -- I learned about backup providers that might fit me well that I otherwise wouldn't have known about.
But can you imagine trying to find the charging cable for your Kindle after a year?
Mexico's Largest uni to post online nearly all publications, course materials
Batteries are pretty easy to replace in newer (last few years) macs. ifixit.com has really good guides for digging around inside your mac. This (http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing-MacBook-Pro-13-Inch-U...) guide is for my mac from 2009, as an example.
"Gigs" is the word I was looking forward. Will update copy soon. Thanks.
My solution (for an app in development) is a status indicator that shows users when they're offline, sync'ing, or sync'd.
The amount of Jeopardy! questions that are online in J!-Archive is by now quite large. So large that it has begun to approach the corpus of facts from which knowledge-based non-current-events Jeopardy! questions are drawn.

Although Jeopardy does not repeat questions per se, they often find different ways to clue the same fact or connection.

I would guess that if you took the text of a clue, ran some trivial clustering on the J!-Archive contents, and instantly displayed the top three clues and responses for a human, they could be quite competitive on the show even if they knew nothing on their own.

So if you put the J!-Archive into a Leitner-system flashcard app and put a few hundred hours into it, I imagine it would improve a contestant's chances considerably. It doesn't look like much, but that looks like the major tool here. If I had won my last game (the final regular game of Season 23, followed by a six-week hiatus) I was planning something like this. However, I never thought of using analytic feedback with categorization in this way. That clearly also gave him some valuable feedback on what to study and what categories to be confident about.

However, this is to take nothing away from Roger Craig's exceedingly impressive untrained skill at the game, which he was able to train effectively to unreal levels. He plays Jeopardy! like a boss.
Scala: Typesafe Stack Adds Play Framework
Couldn't you just allocate a pool of IDs to each session (open client), and let the client generate real, unique IDs directly using them? This way you wouldn't need collision detection, synchronization, etc. You only need a big enough IDs space, or a way to reuse IDs of the pool that weren't actually used by the client (by including them in new pools).
Tumblr: Protect the Internet (Stop SOPA/PROTECT-IP)
This looks good. Have any devs tested these guys vs Flurry vs Google Analytics?
Perhaps "unpopular" was the wrong way to phrase things.

"You don't hear it very often/emphatically from the mainstream media, nor spoken aloud by anyone in a position to change policy, nor spoken aloud by anyone who has a serious desire to gain the positions that could change policy."
>As the line for the x-ray scanner started to grow, they started letting people just go through the metal detectors. Once the line shrunk back down, they started forcing people to go through the scanner again.

That's not even limited to airports. I've seen it on festivals and concerts as well, and I'm sure it extends to other public events. Most notably I remember the security checks at the entrances of the infield on the Wacken Open Air 2010. When Iron Maiden or other very popular bands played, they just waved everyone through. It was ridiculous, really.

Also, there's a really amazing video[1] from a German talkshow on Youtube where Werner Gruber[2] completely embarrasses one of the most fervent supporters of the body scanners, Wolfgang Bosbach[3] of the CDU party. He easily smuggles enough thermite to blow a decent hole into the wall of a plane through a body scanner, and later demonstrates its destructive capabilities on a frying pan.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrKvweNugnQ - German, I sadly cannot find a subtitled version, though it's quite possible to understand the basic gist by merely watching what Gruber does (he's the slightly chubby guy with the red tie).

[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Gruber - Also German, he has no English wikipedia entry.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Bosbach - Quite uninformative, the German version is much better. He's a supporter of all sorts of completely ridiculous laws and measures, including a ban of "Killer Games" (violent video games) and all sorts of surveillance and anti-privacy laws.
Do you do affiliation with Amazon? No member of my circles will go to anything but Amazon's wish list. Every other list I've tried was a total non-starter.
That article was written in the future!

I'm a pretty high-ranking editor at a large publishing company and I did not go to college, so I am very lucky. However, I feel for those who are in serious debt because of school. I believe that next year, 40% of all student loans will default. That's terrible.
Wallawe: Do you think this on-line petition system is useful? Instead of going through a congressman, one could go through the White House?

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/how-why/terms-partic...
Perhaps. But this bill would breaks DNSSEC for the same reasons that it breaks "infringement-inducing sites". It's going to pose the same difficulty to any other organized security features added to DNS.

The result will be chaos.
The analogy would have worked if you changed roulette by 2 blackjack tables.
Worlds first windows 8 Bootkit to be released at MalCon
It is a tough balancing act. You just hope they grow up and thank you for it around age 25. I'm thanking my parents now recently.

It's really great to have them involved in things even if it's a lot of things. They'll tell you if they really don't like it. Don't confuse laziness or tiredness with disinterest, that's all. You never know if you did right until much later. All you can do is try what you think is best, hold your breath, and let the chips fall where they may.

A lot of times I think it all depends on the kid too. I was signed up for everything from swimming lessons to soccer to boy scouts and more before I even turned 1! That's right, before I was a year old! All things considered I turned out smart and productive.

My younger sister on the other hand wasn't very involved. My mom dragged her to girl scouts for a good 4 years or so and she hated it though it probably did her good. But she's great too! She's a straight A student coming up on graduating from Penn State in about a year.

So it's all just relative.
Supreme Court of Assholedom: The People vs. Steve Jobs
I came here to say the same thing, and you'd already said it.

I too love problems like this. A properly designed system like this one will account for every possible oddball situation you can come up with -- and if it can't support an especially weird solution out-of-the-box, it will be easily extensible such that it can.

Too many people code to the goal and don't try to model the underlying logical concepts.
Well, I don't want to go into deep maths but the chance of creating the same cID is infinitesimal.. so one doesn't have to manage this case graciously. I.e. Just refresh the page or make a soft refresh (clear the models and re-send the data from the db, which isn't huge since that part is already coded for the initial loading). It's not the same as if it had 1/10 chance and you had to be clever to fix it. I mean, even without this problem, it happens from time to time that the best software needs to refresh because of a small bug.
Looking at how this worked was quite interesting. I hadn't really played with the JS console before. Thanks for making a contest that wasn't totally secure. =)
Schools list Australia
Was the Italian protest something voted for by the community?
You mean YouTube has information on all of the photographs I've ever taken and who I've licensed them to? I don't recall making this information public, so I don't see how they could possibly detect copyright infringement of my content.
The fundamentalism is the problem, not the technology.

Funny: http://occupyoccupyflash.org/
True: http://occupyhtml.org/
The police still do random bag checks. I've seen them doing them in Union Square within the past month or two.

Anyone who declines the search can simply exit and enter the same station from a different entrance.

They make no sense as anything related to security.
Apple's upfront premium pricing

Uh, not so much anymore.
These machines don't provide any increased security over a pat down. It might be convent for the TSA but harms the passengers.
the more government oppression applied to the Internet - the sooner a government oppressure resistant alternative would emerge. The current Internet is a great thing, yet it is fundamentally flawed by being that vulnerable to any whimse of concentrated political and economical interest.

While it can't be presicely described how the future free Internet would look, it is possble to imagine some modern implementation of something like the old Fido network with a set of satellites and cables/floats in the international space and waters and the next generation WiFi that will have on the scale of couple orders of magnitude greater range.
Apple is already killing these 3rd party services (readability,instapaper etc ..) they have a readability button in their latest safari for ios5 alongside with a reading list. hence the decision the make it free ..

iMessage was another attempt to kill whats app, I won't be surprised if instagram is next.
I think this is no different than the situation with programmers. Are most programmers "overworked" in that they get too much done? No. But many are "overworked" in that they are constantly distracted with little problems and don't protect enough time to think hard about any single issue. As a result, they do lots of short-sighted work and don't get enough done overall, but also feel constantly busy and hard-working.

I think that's pretty close to what normal high school is like today. There are constant distractions for standardized testing, mandatory this-and-that, worry about your SAT scores, etc. And not enough sitting down to understand what this novel is really about. Or what an integral really is.

I think this explains both the subjective feeling that students are "overworked" and the objective truth that they aren't doing or learning nearly as much as was traditionally expected of students.
61 Percent Of Top Brands Have Created Google+ Pages, But No One Is Following
Thanks everyone for the stream of comments. This law has global implications for how the internet works, or does not work.

1: The real question we should be asking is the source of the SOPA text. It was pretty clearly written by lobbyists, for their clients, and its just as clear that the committee has no idea about the contents. We should be attacking/ranting at the sponsoring companies while helping the congress people to understand through measured lobbying and public action.

2: Larry Lessig's latest book covers the process of making USA's laws extraordinarily well. Congress people are trying to do the right thing, but it's hard to believe laws are made in an unbiased manner when we look at the flow of cash supporting their elections.

3: New Zealand had a similar moment when copyright legislation was debated earlier this year, and the tech community suddenly saw how laws were made. It was a rush job, not pretty and the major parties suffered for it as they took stances which often lacked logic. We now have an election on, wand while it is not a big issue, I expect we will see a lot more support for the Green party, who were the only ones crying foul.
Delicious Button v1.1
I don't get the difference. Can someone please explain? Seriously, I'm not kidding.
This. For me, the comparison is never between a $1000 Apple laptop and a $400 Gateway one.

The comparison is between a $1000 Apple laptop and an $800-$1000 Lenovo T-series or X-series Thinkpad (or, as I call them, the "real" Thinkpads).

For something that I use for hours every single day, an overly-heavy and shoddily built piece of junk is not an acceptable option. Apple isn't the only manufacturer that makes quality hardware, but the quality non-Apple machines cost much closer to the Apples than the junky Gateway does.
A road trip plan generator that connects to Foursquare
Emergency Dental Care in Fort Lauderdale
The proof is in the pudding. If they're making more ROI, on average, in investments made in the last 2-3 years then clearly things are fine. If they're not making as much, on average, as they did 10 years ago, then there is inflation/bubble/etc. Sadly, it'll takes a few more years to do such analysis.
this article is talking about UIs, and more specifically user-interaction driven interfaces. it shouldn't be relevant to SEO at all, because it concerns what happens after the page loads, not the initial page load (which is what the search engine sees)
I think something like this will be key. For me, as absurd as it sounds, the delay is the indicator. That indicator needs to be replaced if actions are to become instantaneous.
And the reason for that is the authors make their living through payouts from corporations for help with DNS.

If DNS becomes more "DIY" they will not be able to pay themselves, via tax-exempt 501(c)(3) corporations, the same inflated annual salary. Their DNS consulting businesses will take a hit. And they'll no longer be able to charge thousands of dollars for giving presentations about DNS and its flaws.
From the UX perspective this approach is still wrong. Any sort of operation that may fail needs to provide an intermediate indication of an in-progress activity.

For example, if an item is updated and the backend balks, but in 10 minutes, there is no clear and concise way to indicate this error to the user unless the item was marked as "in-progress". If the backend is normally snappy, then it might make sense to delay showing the in-progress indicator (so that the majority of users won't ever see it), but discarding it altogether is not a way to go.

Another example, say there is a list of items keyed by a name. I delete A, then rename B into A, and then the deletion of A fails. Ain't that a pretty mess to shovel yourselves out of?

That's not to say that there aren't certain UIs that could be made to work in "instant" fashion, but realistically there's just not very many of them there.
Of course, not working is a much quicker way to increase most people's quality of life.
Well the website is mostly static; that'd be overkill. Maybe the author wanted to use another library to create the documentation automatically. But, you've got a point saying that if it's not your first choice for simple static pages, it's a bit scary to use it for huge production website. I.e. Django might be overkill for a simple static page, but it's still trivial to use it for that.
I've never worked as a staffer but from what I've heard, if there was unusual volume on something it usually got escalated. If it's bumps in the noise, yeah, no big deal.
I still don't understand why people think this will do anything for electric cars. The bottleneck is how long it takes to charge your car. If you have a 60KW/hr pack, you can only charge it so fast with a 110v/20amp jack (for the sake of pie in the sky projections assume 50% charging efficiency between charger and battery). Period the end. you could always do 220v/30amps, or 208v/30amps/3phase. or 440v/1000amps. the tradeoff is in how many idiots electrocute themselves. It never ceases to amaze me how people don't get this simple simple fact. It's like saying that you can fill up a swimming pool faster because you've made a sturdier garden hose.
Google, Craigslist, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube and Netflix are just a few example which don't use Oracle or MS SQL Server either.

It's not about being big, banks and insurance companies simply have different requirements on how to access and store their data compared to most websites/services.
Why your startup needs to use Buffer today.
Flash is fine.  Dont be a Fundamentalist.
Honestly, you never know about these things.

It may be that everybody in that room knows the thing is not going to pass but is going through the motions of proposing to satisfy their corporate donors. It may also be that someone is proposing a batshit crazy idea like this in order to see it get shot down. Sometimes Congress seems to even pass laws with provisions that they know will be struck down in the Supreme Court.

It's just plain weird.
Here's a screenshot: https://skitch.com/mceachen/gjr84/http-forrst.com-posts-back...
Why Companies Should Invest in Google+ Brand Pages
Finally, someone made sense of this stuff. So important to know.
cpt1138 we do not do an affiliation with Amazon. List on our site are made using a Google product search but you can put items from Amazon to a wishlist.
I just watched an enjoyable BBC documentary "Chemistry: A Volatile History". The last episode concludes with a visit to the Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt and talks a bit about these elements.
There's no way for Youtube to know whether I have a license for the content. There are cases where hosting companies have taken down the artist's own websites after the labels' automated systems complained about finding "copyrighted" material there. And I've yet to see a supercomputer that can determine fair use.
Turkey – The Blue Mosque by Encounters Travel
I developed this exact same tech earlier this year. It was a pain trying to analyze all the MANY different ways people can screw up html, but the success rate is pretty high across the net. I've been thinking of making it opensource since I no longer use it.
Designing Less Email
Just because somebody doesn't do what you're doing doesn't mean they can't be right. Good advice is good advice, whoever says it.
Well, the UIs have the links (like the "show" link in the example) and search engines follow links, so I'd say it's relevant ...
This demo needs to listen to hash-change events so that it goes back when I hit back in my browser. It's otherwise a good example.
> Maybe it would be better to have people who don't mind it opt-in rather than expecting people to opt-out of something they might not even know they're in.

No, because it will render this service useless, as almost no one will know or care about it. Sad truth, but you can't have 'opt-in' for everything if you actually want to accomplish something.
I'd add that the Ruby community has been using the "it's (good|fast) enough" argument for so long with, particularly where Rails is concerned, that any performance benefits are mostly useless as selling point.
> My biggest problem with the 10x productivity claims is that it ignores the most relevant difference. The best programmers don't do the same things faster, they do completely different things.

I thought the 10x productivity claim was originally from a study of comp sci students working on some algorithm (maybe compression algorithm) homework. In which case the "I think I've seen this before" example from the article probably factors in most.
Encuentra en Sevilla
"Priority Inbox and one-click starring of messages. Other possibilities include some of the stuff Google is about to roll out for Gmail proper: like contact icons, better threading, and deep searching functionality. Maybe there will even be some Google+ integration, which Google is also hard at work on for Gmail." -- MG Sigler
They rap for funding (startup hustle)
My Candle Making with Pinecones Results