skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty close actually. The easy part is the hardware and basic software. In 10 or 20 years a long list of technological innovations and cummulative advances will put more than enough processing power on people's desktops, bringing advanced rendering techniques like radiosity and ray tracing into the realm of real-time rendering with commodity resources.

But that's not that the hard, or interesting part. The hard parts will be making content and simulating physics convincingly. It is already hugely expensive to have artists painstakingly recreate textures and models for 3d environments, how much more difficult will it be to do so at higher levels of fidelity? Obviously we need some pretty significant tooling breakthroughs to make this problem even remotely tractable. The physics problem is even harder. It's a lot easier to fake it and just cram things into acepted game mechanics (invisible walls, imovable and indestructable objects, etc.) than to perform robust simulations. Physics may easily require more computing power than rendering.

But a simple immersive photo-realistic virtual 3d world is but a tiny corner of the implications of such technology. Think about augmented reality, for example, integrating smart phone functionality into the world around you convincingly using transparent displays. Or using VR goggles that reproduce images of the real world with overlayed data. Seemlessly integrating infrared or radar data, for example.

Imagine playing a game of cops and robbers except with enhancements that merge it with a video game. Or simply imagine the world being enhanced in a seamless and subtle way with computer data, like a hud but far more sophisticated. Imagine if every single person in the world was not a stranger to you, if you could instantly know their name, their job, their public history, etc. How does that impact society, friendships, business, government, war, etc. The implications are both broad and deep.
Agreed. It also sounds juvenile and a bit detached from reality.
They do fall in the same category, because of the Data Protection Directive. This is not a law, but all EU states interpreted the directive, and enacted it into law, and the law in each country is now basically the same.
oh. Thanks.
Yumemiru app aims to let you control your dreams
Relax. Just relax.
The web browsers are automatically updating themselves for a reason.
I'm going to have to agree that's a usability gaffe. Peripheral animation that isn't in service of a notification or something else that actually requires the user's attention is, quite literally, only a distraction.
Unfortunately, no company really gives a shit about this law (unless it suits them, e.g. when you complain about something, often they hide behind it as an excuse for not telling you something).

Because no-one ever checks up on them.
Vintage terminal
"Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down."

Well there we go. A bunch of sensational journalism hype again.

The problem with Tribler then is that the network becomes stagnent once the tracker goes down. Sure peers receive shared connections from one another to create a web architecture but unless you've dialed into a web that has the host of a scene group the group will stagate on content will it not? Without a central tracker to facilitate the sharing of new peer data to prevent the swarm from becoming stale the content will eventually all reach 100% download and remain so with no nocomers being able to find the network.

My knowledge of the DHT and Peer Exchange protocol extensions to BitTorrent are limited but isn't this what they tried to accomplish? How does Tribler make this any better?

I'm stuck on the fence now. Tribler doesn't appear to be new and fantastic because its still strongly relied upon by central servers for bootstrapping abilities. Sure the network established might be large in size but without fresh peer exhanges the swarm will die off once the tracker is brought down.

Someone to enlighten me perhaps?
Ask HN: How to reach the "IT guy"?
Hi!

I'm about to launch a new website+Android app to help companies to manage their fleet of Android smartphones (it's maybe a little bit ahead of the current needs, but I beleive that the continuous consumerisation of IT will leave companies no choices). I also have others B2B projects that targets IT.

I'm curious if you have any idea on how to market these kind of websites, how to "reach the IT guy".

Twitter, HN, specialized subreddits, AdWords : Check

Any idea ?

Thanks.
It all depends on the purpose of copyright in the first place. In the US, at least, copyright law stems from one section of the Constitution:

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and
useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The stated purpose is clear: to promote progress. It's not difficult to evaluate the current environment in terms of this initial purpose, and I imagine it would be tough to build a case that piracy is stunting artistic progress. (And thus difficult to justify laws that inhibit file-sharing.)

Somewhere along the way, people began to confuse the concept of promoting-artistic-progress with ensuring-people-can-make-millions-of-dollars. These are two unrelated things. The success of some company's (or some artist's) business model has nothing to do with the progress of the arts in general. So I agree with you: the amount of monetary "damage" caused by piracy is entirely irrelevant.

What really matters is the moral argument that piracy equates to theft, or that piracy hinders artistic progress. I don't think it does. But if anyone disagrees, I'd love to hear your argument here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577454
> Get rid of the W3C and let Mozilla and the Webkit project define the web moving forward; they've done a great job so far.

The standardization of required codecs for the `<video>` element is indeed a wonderful accomplishment by the non-W3C HTML5 WHATWG.

Seriously, a third-party neutral organization will always be needed. Who will you appeal to when the main companies start having different ideas about something? Another thing that organizations like W3C or IETF do is to provide some kind of shelter from patents and similar problems.

We can discuss about the efficacy of such shelters and about the ability to mediate between different options, but the web is definitely under a better situation than wireless telephony, a field where company-run consortiums decide standards and "settle" disputes.
Congrats to Joel and Leo! I'm a huge fan of Buffer and I think this is a great addition.

Actually just replaced Sharebar on our site with this plugin instead. This one is much cleaner looking and the functionality seems more solid.
Way to go, dcurtis, ranting about web standards and webkit's greatness while your website doesn't render sanely on my android devices' webkit browsers.
Google pays out $410,000 in one year for vulnerability rewards
Delivering on Hadoop .Next: Benchmarking Performance
This is a very different situation in quite a few ways. For one, IE was not just a big browser, but was almost completely dominant. For another, many of IE's browser-specific features were Windows-only by design, such as ActiveX.

Here, we have an open source rendering engine that clearly delineates browser-specific features (each of which is well-documented). The use of a prefix makes it possible to use the browser-specific features offered by WebKit without sacrificing compatibility with other browsers, something Microsoft actively resisted. For quite a while, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to make sites that looked and felt right both in IE and in other browsers.

Had Microsoft extended standards in a way that played nice with the rest of the community, maybe they would have had someone saying something like this in their defence. Instead, they used browser-specific features as a way of undermining standards.
I ... think it might have been intentional. Notice the xkcd comic.
Same. I would be happy to use this if I could just drop it in to my site in the form of a js plugin or similar... though I suppose it's not too hard to make my own. I guess this is for the bloggers who aren't very techie.
Agree 100%. As someone who's been through the program, I can attest that it's an amazing experience, and people behind it do a remarkable job of upping their game even more from session to session. I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing the companies that come out of it in the years to come.

Seeing as they take no equity and provide a ton of value, it really should be a no-brainer for any team with a founder with a Stanford affiliation to apply.
And the Lean Launchpad class is not cancelled and is coming in 60 days based on a new material.
The DEFINITIVE Guide To Going Viral
To me it sounds like he's trying to say that the vast majority of startups aren't in a position to offer lavish wages to obtain talent; they're still trying to receive funding to get off the ground. He suggests that the companies should be transparent with the state that "they don't have money yet, but we're hoping to soon" as a pitch that'll draw workers?
> I work for FlightAware

Cool! Say, are you guys still running on Apache Rivet, just out of personal curiosity?
CoffeeScript's got you covered. Here's forEach ...

for item, index in list

... here's the same over an object ...

for key, value of object

... here's the map() ...

mapped = for item in list

... here's the filter() ...

filtered = for item in list when item.isActive

... and so on.
Okay, so you now you have edited the source code and compiled a binary, is your recommendation that the binary be downloadable and installable by the user from the website?

Open source is one thing, but if you're not able to convince Google and Apple to ship your changes, you've hit a wall. FF implementing support for the WebKit extensions is what will break the web back into the IE-dominant era.
Original Article: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/09/music-labels-joint-venture-...

Update, 2/10:: ESPN says it will not be pursuing legal action. A spokesperson gave us the following statement:

“We’re disappointed the exhibitor took this route, especially at a festival for an industry whose jobs are most at risk if we are not able to curtail stolen content.”
I think you've hit it with watching the adoption rate. It's not as if Microsoft or Apple or Google can force these features on to people. Web developers have to actually use them.

I fail to see how "monied interests" can affect much unless developers who are very much not part of these interests actually use these features. I think the way things are going (i.e., engines add features, developers use them or don't, the ones that get used get approved by de facto adoption, etc.) is perfect and fits the best with the pace at which things are moving in this industry.

I don't think, as many do, that it will lead to the proliferation of a bunch of confusing, bloated features being shoved into the spec (as loose as that word can be applied here). We haven't seen much of that yet, and I really don't think we will.
Does anyone have any insight as to why the W3C has taken over 10 years to converge on the spec for rounded corners? Any info more than just "bureaucracy"?
> Companies without VC funding also fail.

Companies without VC funding also don't have to deal with investors pushing to get a big return at the expense of every other part of their business. Maybe not all VCs do this - I suspect that's the reason your responses to this string of 37signals posts seem defensive - but a significant portion of them do.

> Instead of simply assuming that one of two equally plausible alternatives is true, it would be useful if David tried looking at the world and trying to figure out which is actually true.

Honestly, I think you're both painting with a wide brush. He's lumping all VCs together as pump-and-dump investors and you're taking his criticism of that business model as "no one should take VC money."

This is a tough topic, which makes the vague language at play here all the more frustrating. I'm not entirely convinced you two are actually talking about the same things.

While you're right that VC funding (and all of the other resources) can be valuable assets, I've had the end-user experiences he cites often enough to get suspicious any time I see someone taking it.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/09/music-labels-joint-venture-...

Update, 2/10:: ESPN says it will not be pursuing legal action. A spokesperson gave us the following statement:

“We’re disappointed the exhibitor took this route, especially at a festival for an industry whose jobs are most at risk if we are not able to curtail stolen content.”
tl;dr - What d'you mean stealing address books is wrong?! Everyone else is doing it!
What I see as a problem is a failure by some projects to manage expectations. I think that a lot of people who are backing projects like this don't realise that they are not pre-ordering anything, they're making a contribution to the project startup costs and hopefully they'll receive one or more of that product when manufacturing begins. I've seen comments on some Kickstarter projects that have slipped on shipping deadlines that don't seem to indicate that the commenter understands the uncertainty of funding a project like this.

I don't think there's much risk backing an experienced person with a ready to be manufactured product, and I've backed several such projects on Kickstarter, but I think that backers need to remember that part of the Kickstarter proposition is that you get discounts on products like this as a reward for putting in fixed upside risk capital.
A Fix for Online Identity?
I don't see how deciding the syntax for a gradient fill might affect one business concern vs another
TomTom GPS watches you drive, sets your insurance rate accordingly
The fact that they're open source doesn't matter. We (humanity) have largely compatible open-source implementations of ActiveX in Wine and ReactOS, and if W3C or ISO or someone had deigned to standardise ActiveX this code would've found its way into Gecko and KHTML.

Plus, NaCl is closer than "something like" to ActiveX. What do you consider to be the salient difference between the two technologies?
A physical, open source time puncher for freelancers
Raphael Abrams shows us his Freelance “Puncher” time tracking device. After trying many different methods for keeping track of his hours, Raph created this little puncher to easily clock in and out of his freelance work.

Check out the code and schematics here: https://github.com/raphaelabrams/freelance-puncher
"If you're havin' cash problems, I feel bad for you son..., I got 99 problems, but my pitch ain't one."
Relevant XKCD:

What normal people hear: OMG! Someone took down a system belonging to the CIA!!!

What computer people hear: Omg. Someone took down a poster put up by the CIA. Yawn.
Awesome! I love how you kept the SICP quote intact; that is essential.
Twitter, HN, specialized subreddits, AdWords : Check

Any idea ?

It's funny you mention everything but the most powerful one, LinkedIn. Research your company, check your network, find links to the IT guy at the company and then use those links to get an audience with the IT guy. If you do not have a network connection, find a common group that they belong to and participate in the group. Make sure you have a common interest in the group or you will come off as an unauthentic sales person, because well you will be an unauthentic sales person. Participate in something that your are authentic about will give you a common ground to build a connection with the person on. Then and only then can you establish a connection. Please not this strategy only works with high ticket value items, if your product is low cost the effort will not pay off.
If var is counter to other C-style languages, that doesn't make it a bug. It just makes it unique. Is there some other reason you're saying it is a bug? How does it break closures? Javascript works with var today and closures are used all the time. Breakage free.

"what do you mean, braces don't actually delimit scope?"
I would answer, they don't. Because this is not <insert your favourite braces-delimit-scope language>. This is javascript. Nobody should have ever told you that braces delimit scope here.

It's not like this is some extremely rare issue that you aren't going to find documentation for. A quick run through a basic tutorial would suffice.

So how is it that 'let' works the way variables should? It works differently, that's all. So now you have to know how let is different from var, why it was introduced, when to use let, when to use var, etc.

Then when you see code using let, you're going to have to determine whether the person used it because they know what they are doing, or because someone just told them "let is the new var" and they use it all the time. Same for var. There is an added level of uncertainty when reading code. And and added level of complexity in explaining the language. You haven't gotten away from explaining how var works. Because you're still going to see tons of code using it.

Wouldn't it be easier to just learn how to use var properly?
That wouldn't be a problem if the non-vendored variants of the CSS attributes didn't take so god damn long to become proper standards.

The problem is not the webkit vendor attributes, the problem is that proper standards aren't able to keep up.

HTML5 is still not a proper W3C standard (or "recommendation"), it's still just a working draft, and was last updated in May of 2011. It's been six years. So far.
How do the projects being open source prevent something like ActiveX from coming to them?
This is a somewhat ungrateful perspective, just after the Eolas patent case was thrown out.

Yes, the W3C process takes about half the lifespan of many HN readers. Yup, it's not ideal.

But it's the only game in town and it's been going on so long because it works. Because it successfully brought Microsoft into the fold and conversation at a time where, had they decided, they could have broken everything.

It's worth exercising a little perspective. Can you think of any endeavor that has so successfully united vendors to create something as broad and interoperable as the web, over such a relatively small period of history? The W3C has been fundamental to this.

- What has the W3C ever done for us?

-- Well, HTML.

- Oh yeah, they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.

-- And CSS you could view source and copy.

--- Yeah, you remember how scared we all were of Microsoft Blackbird?

- All right, I'll grant you that HTML and CSS are two things the W3C have done...

(you get the idea.)
To Catch A Hypocrite (the VEVO business)
Who will you appeal to when the main companies start having different ideas about something?

No one. If the browsers refuse to agree on something (codecs being a good example), there's nothing that anyone can do about it. Just say "no standard is possible in this area" and move on.

OTOH, if two or more major browsers agree on the syntax and semantics of a feature, let's issue it as a standard (and de-prefix it) ASAP.
My flights between Taiwan and California in the last ~18 months were usually around 40,000 feet give or take a bit in 747s and 777s.
Ok, let's say the author's methodology is flawed. Does that make her larger point invalid? Should we not, as parents, be mindful of our children's manners?

My daughter is starting to develop her vocabulary now, and this article was a good reminder to me that we need to start pushing "please" and "thank you".
How Not to Pitch an Angel Investor
Yes, but that risk has flavors. Funding the Moon Landing was exceptionally high risk [1] because NASA did not yet have a minimum viable product. VC's that I've met don't usually take that level risk, they wait until there is at least some expectation that the team can deliver something (hence the MVP requirement in many series A rounds).

[1] In "Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception", Charles Seife claims that NASA asked GE to calculate the chances of success in the Moon Landing and came out with 5%.
http://www.amazon.com/Proofiness-Dark-Arts-Mathematical-Dece...
Why do you want to reach the IT Guy? He doesn't make any buying decisions.

You're looking for the CTO, or even better the CFO if you can show a cost savings. Efficiency combined with cost savings are the best way to sell a product in B2B.

For smaller companies, you still don't want the IT guy, you want the president.

As to your question - since you are selling a technical product to a non-technical crowd, you're looking at business journals, specific industry websites, etc. You'll need to do your homework here to make it effective.
To put it in a concise (and possibly politically incorrect) way:

Yes, Silicon Valley is desperate for engineers.
However, Silicon Valley is desperate for engineers who are in the 0.1% of the engineer population in terms of intellect, motivation, adaptability, etc.

These are hard to find, first of all because it's 0.1% of the population (so it just boils down to a numbers game), and second of all because often these individuals will rather work on their own thing rather then work under someone else's orders.

If you have the potential of a John Resig, Ben Kamens, or Craig Silverstein, you won't have any trouble finding a job, and you'll have every startup at your feet. If you're "just" an OK engineer, then SV is not going to move mountains for you, unlike what some have said.
For the record, a large portion of big box office films leaded as camera recordings are recorded in foreign theaters. CAM or TELESYNC releases tend to originate in Russia, China, or other eastern european nations and have their English/Dutch dubbing added from an audio recording made stateside.
Magnet Link Archive Viewer [Python]
the developers of WebKit added the prefix -webkit to the experimental stylesheet declarations. This ensured they worked only in WebKit.

No. This ensured that they didn't pollute the global namespace with experimental, partially-implemented ideas. If Mozilla, Opera, and Webkit each make e.g. "rounded-rect" declaration, and one browser takes the width as the first argument while another takes the radius first, then we're screwed. At least having "-moz-rounded-rect" and "-o-rouded-rect" means developers know how their pages will behave in each browser. I agree that the W3C is unacceptably slow, but that doesn't mean prefixes are a terrible idea.
> meaning if a native English speaker says it, then it's okay

I'm not sure what you mean here. Descriptivism is a paradigm of linguistics in which language is analyzed as it is used within a given population and point in time, rather than analyzing it according to a strict and timeless set of rules (a.k.a. prescriptivism). Rather than defining a given usage as right or wrong, it seeks to classify the usage according to what populations and registers it's used in.

That's not to say descriptivism has nothing to say on what language one ought or ought not use, just that the recommendations will be dependent on who your audience is and what setting. Like: using "y'all" in Texas wouldn't raise any eyebrows, but in Wales it certainly would. And using "hoosflaw" to mean "pickles" wouldn't work anywhere.

In the U.S., I'd wager that adverbial 'good' is used quite a bit informal contexts like conversation, texts, or Facebook posts. So it's up the author (native or not) what sort of feeling they want to evoke while delivering their message. Homey and conversational? Authoritative and experienced? Silly and offbeat?

That said, if you're not confident in your command of the language you're using, formal is probably best, since A) it's probably mostly what you've been taught, and B) it'll be comprehensible and acceptable to everyone.