skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a fairly naive argument. My local bank discourages potential robbers with armed guards, alarms, and a locked vault. Just because they've never charged anyone with bank robbery doesn't mean those measures didn't prevent potential robbers from deciding to become actual robbers.

It's really not any better than the argument that of course the TSA keeps away terrorists and tigers because there haven't been any hijackings or tiger maulings on airplanes since they took over.
I assume that if Blizz kept 90% of its employees it likely kept most or all of the employees that would otherwise do kickass startups. If it didn't, then there is something very wrong with its layoff process!
Brain mimicking machine learning
>Furthermore, society would benefit if the book were in the public domain. It would be available from more sources than just the one state-granted monopoly that's selling them now.

No it wouldn't. It wouldn't be available from any source, because it would never get written at all. There's only so much time people are willing to put into an unpaid hobby.
How Google —and 104 Other Companies— Are Tracking Me on the Web
The House Y Combinator Should Have Built
Banksy on Advertising
I don't know if $13 is conservative. $9/mo is the most expensive plan available to me. Presumably in places like China people pay by the hour and therefore way less than that.
This kept backscatters from being deployed for the most part; have you ever seen one?

I don't fly very frequently, but my understanding is that nearly all airports in the US now have them. Is this incorrect?

Nobody likes waiting in line or taking off their shoes. But I'd much rather do that than let people get onto my plane with explosives. Forget patriotism, it's a matter of your own personal safety.

The problem with the TSA's procedures has little to do with the minor inconvenience of taking off your shoes. It's about the bigger picture: the extreme reaction to an infinitesimal threat. Even daily activities like driving involve a far greater risk to your well-being than the threat of airline terrorism. If we're not suffering from crippling fear of the mundane but far more significant threats we face in our everyday lives, why do we allow this one far-fetched threat to literally terrorize us into giving up our basic rights and sacrificing billions of public dollars for the "privilege" of participating in air transit? The spectacular violence of a single event 11 years in the past has sent us into a downward spiral in which fear is increasingly winning out over logic and rationality.

There have been no successful terrorist attacks on US flights in the decade since 9/11. And none of the failed attempts were foiled by the TSA; they were foiled by the foolish incompetence of the attackers and the permanently heightened vigilance of the public. For every carry-on item that the TSA can prohibit, "the terrorists" can come up with 100 more that aren't even checked for in the screening process. It's a hopeless losing battle. Like the author says, the holes in the screening process simply cannot be closed unless everyone is required to fly naked and handcuffed.

In short, your personal safety when on board an airplane is not significantly improved by the ridiculous security theater that surrounds the boarding process. So why bother with it at all? Why inconvenience millions of innocent travelers, trample on their rights, and throw piles of money down the toilet just so that people can feel that "something is being done"?
I have played with a Windows 8 tablet at that had a fully functional desktop interface, looked just like Win 7 desktop.

...and I'm pretty sure it was an ARM
Ordered two from Newark (I'm in the US); the order confirmation email has an Expected Ship Date of 5/10/12.

I've got a BeagleBoard C2 and a BeagleBone to play with until then...
Why do you assume he wouldn't get paid for it?
> How easy would it be to board in, say, Mexico or Canada, and hijack the flight to the US?

Arguably harder than it would have been before 9/11, as the U.S. has insisted on security standards for flights destined for American airports. That's why you frequently have to go through an additional gate security check at a European airport when flying to the U.S.
This graphical representation of code structure seems reminiscent of http://scratch.mit.edu/
I am not at all happy with this trend and will not use a site that requires it!
برنامج تحويل الصور وتعديلها بكميات كبيرة ReaConverter
Breach of China's Firewall on Google Plus - Obama's Page Flooded with Comments
Inside Visual Studio 11 Beta: A Guided Tour
I was under the impression that the law prohibited viable seeds but due to a loophole (you can't be certain a seed is viable or not) they couldn't stop people with any seed. I might be remembering this all wrong.
Emacs is already indistinguishable from magic :).

Seriously though, I actually prefer working with text, even here.

Also, I think this could be improved by making "meta" symbols like defun into different shapes rather than just including them as words. So a definition would look like a different box than a normal statement. Probably the same for &optional. Of course, this wouldn't work for user-defined macros or functions, but it would be nice if just for the standard ones.
Well, in the normal case, you wouldn't do it. These variable length structures need to be created on the heap to be able to be used in a variable length way, for the most part, so you'd just put a pointer to them into an array.

However, I can think of a couple of methods, such as packing into an array, and using a second one to index it, like so:

a = [aaaa,bb,ccc,dd]
idx = [0,4,6,9]

To get to the i'th element of a, accesses would go through idx like so: a[idx[i]]. In general, of course, there's no way to allow O(1) access and updates without occasional repacking.
Is Windows Azure Down? (Tumblr)
I know it's naive, but it wasn't until I read this article that I started to think of the WoW programmers as human beings, as opposed to some universal geometric constant about the WoW universe.

I would like to see a documentary filmed inside of the WoW studio, if it's at all possible. Like, it could be really Serious Business, which would be hilarious, or it could be a more relaxed-artists type of story, which could be a fun romp. And maybe we get to see a sysadmin saying, "those are the Legacy Systems, they're from the Early Days, basically the entire World of Warcraft is held together with duct tape and a prayer." It would be great, man.
But the constitution gives Congress a wide latitude in the implementation, which is why the Supreme Court is unwilling to curtail the perpetual extensions that got us where we are today.
Ubuntu For Android
It's coming. You don't have to take my word for it, the official word says exactly that:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/11/29/html5-for-appl...
Who would pay?
DMV: Node.js powered, WebRTC Delivered video chat
More secure extensions, by default
Microsoft Azure outage leaves customers in the dark for more than 12 hours
There was a time where a company I worked for was having to downsize for a second time. They were planning to keep me on, but cancel the software project I'd been leading.

I talked them into letting me the severance package and I went looking around elsewhere. I relocated for a better salary in a bigger city and the company I left was able to retain a couple of other staff (including a single mom!)

I don't want to make it sound like I was more noble than I really was -- it was the right move for me at the time.
Could fixing healthcare be as simple as a checklist?
Come hack TV on a boat - in Cannes  MIPCUBE
The spin in the article was that this was just a routine culling of the employee base.

And to be fair, an ideally managed company would actually have this happen every once in a while. A company like Blizz that has no problems hiring really should drop the bottom 10% of employees periodically and find replacements if needed. I doubt that's the real motivator here, but cutting 10% of employees isn't a bad thing at all as long as the people were picked properly.
This is real neat, but expecting programmers to make such a large jump so quickly is a bit unrealistic.

My best suggestion is to integrate this well with programers existing editors, open a socket from an Emacs instance and use this as visualization. You will get much better traction that way.
There's another word for cold emailing, it's spam.
Thanks Justin. You're probably already tired with comparisons to Zaarly and Taskrabbit, but it looks to me like you are focusing on building a really high quality version of the same idea. Talk about focus!
Sweeping some problems under the rug, this seems like an incentive to only patent something when you're ready for production... Sounds like a win for anyone who wants to use a new threshing design.
And we may have to wait even longer for the super long periodicity planets - for example, Neptune just finished its first orbit since discovery - in 2010.
Not down, but something strange is going on with that parameter. All of these work, but state=ny brings me nothing either

http://api.seatgeek.com/2/venues?state=new&nbspyork

http://api.seatgeek.com/2/venues?state=california

http://api.seatgeek.com/2/venues?state=ca
On the topic of using subdomains, I was thinking of using subdomains as a way of cache busting when I release new versions. Rather than the typical build number in the URL folder name. I didn't build my application to have a "version" number variable. but did have a CDN URL. (Foolish mistake). So I'm left with the annoyance, of having to change a lot of code to include this.
Back To School
Show HN: Soundready.fm, a friend's startup
Anyone who thinks it's worth the money, anyone who wants to thank him for writing a book, anyone who wants to encourage him to make more books, anyone who makes an impulse buy, anyone who wants a physical copy... you know, all the same exact people who pay for it now.
excuse me... ? :)
In the future, even coffee shops will be online
"... Columbia/NYU joint program that puts graduate students (mostly law school and business school students) into pro bono consulting gigs with startups ..."

Now that sounds like an interesting idea.
Yes, not having that feature is a bit perplexing, I already have emacs do something similar with font-lock. Among others, lambda gets replaced with λ.
For Wanted
For Wanted is a new service that reverses the traditional roles of buyers and sellers. Instead of listing the items you want to sell, you list the items you want to buy. As a buyer you can restrict your sellers to eBay and/or Amazon sellers. You also have a 100% complete buyer protection.
> prevent idleness, which in turn keeps things like crime down

This, this right here is exactly the kind of puritan thinking I find infuriating.

Seriously, leisure as a terminal negative term in your utility function?! Never mind the people who are going to use the time to learn, to create art and share it, to spend time with their families -- if we don't shackle people to their counters and desks, they'll be rioting in the streets!

How much theft/violence do you think is driven by need, by looking for a way to get by? If anything, I would expect violence and theft to go down.
Yup - its a general economics type of theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
It's spam if it's unsolicited and irrelevant.

It's opportunity if it's unsolicited and relevant.
I think this will become an increasingly false dichotemy.

Imagine if a few hundred years ago we were having this conversation, we might be saying, "Is literacy really necessary for all members of a business?"

Technical literacy will soon become a requirement to successfully operate a new business, especially a tech-focused company. There are plenty of people who can do both, and they will eat the lunches of those that can't.

Saying, "I'm a business guy!" is great, but not when someone is standing next to you saying, "I'm a business guy and I understand everything you talk about engineering-wise."
Something I'd be curious to hear from the pretty lisp designers: what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block?

By way of context, I was a test subject for a perhaps related project called Code Bubbles http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp a while ago. Since it was for Java, a language which is comparatively verbose and I often have difficulty getting decent code density with, this new IDE interaction was truly novel and I found often useful.

I test drove the Pretty Lisp Demo and felt myself wanting for code density in a language where I don't typically have those issues. It was just too hard to fit a useful quantity of code in a screen.
Check Out The Consumer Windows 8 Preview
Looking sweet. The future is in structural editors. The client-server separation is a nice bonus.

Unfortunately this is running up against the UI problem. How do you make this intuitive and powerful? A lot of hard work on usability is needed to get up to par with text editors. Very glad to see it being tackled.
Well just hijack a regional Canadian/Mexican/Whatever flight then.
Looks interesting. On first glance it does appear similar to Trine though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trine_(video_game)
Which I wasn't a big fan of... anyone know if that's the case?
It's interesting to see how startups are able to get media coverage without previous connections to tech media outlets.

The OP's approach reminds me of a blog post posted on HN awhile back with some tips for getting press: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/how-i-pitched-te...
Because Emacs (and Vim, but when talking LISP, especially Emacs) is already magic. The visualization proposed is nifty, but it's hard to beat Emacs for any code editing, let alone for LISP.

Also, check this out: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el
(you can see a screenie in http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png)
Interesting. I thought it would be a company that is still in business releasing all their current games as open source. However, I am disappointed.
If you want a language that compiles to JS and has more compile-time checking, I'd encourage you to check out Dart. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if you don't mind semicolons and curly braces, it gives you a pretty decent amount of compile time checking while still generating nice JS.
Remember, John Staats (designer for WoW, lead designer for their next gen MMO code named titan) was let go in November.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/11/07/rumor-senior-titan-d...

There was rumor that it was more than just 1 lead designer was being cut, but nothing substantial.

I don't think those 60 developer staff were just "QA people" etc.. I bet they killed or scoped down the whole project.
I only hold one tech-related stock directly. It's a semiconductor company where a good friend works, so I have a decent understanding of the business and its prospects. I've made about 400% on it in five years.
I don't know how to do this without ripping you apart, but here it is. You are not depressed. Do not hijack this word. At this point, in 2012, depression is the debilitating clinical illness with potentially life-threatening implications. Sadness, dissatisfaction, melancholia, and such are all excellent terms that help describe the range of feeling you enjoy so much, and much has been written about how positive these experiences can be. But words are important, and when you say you "LOVE being depressed," it confounds the understanding of what actual depression is, a state of being that by its very definition, is intolerable and harmful to the person experiencing it.

Also, unhappiness is not fundamental to getting an accurate understanding of things, which is yet again unrelated to that "feeling of reality" you're talking about. Just as you function best under melancholia, others function best under happiness. You even betray this fact yourself when you say "some of the most famous artists, poets, singers, songwriters, inventors, did their best work during their darkest days." "Some," indeed.

There is no dichotomy between true and happiness. Understanding one's own mental states is certainly a powerful tool to getting the most out of life, but to glorify your own experience to the point where you claim that people who do not share your experience are "dreamers in their sleep" is itself the lie that shows a profound lack of understanding.

Edit: added harmfulness to the definition of depression. In fact this seems to be the key: mental illness (and in turn depression) is something that is only such if it causes harm to yourself and/or others. You are describing an experience that is beneficial to yourself and/or others.
Nice. Gotta admit that I was slightly disappointed that the client-side JS didn't appear to be ClojureScript or some lispy-script generated...

The application seems like a very good place to do Lisp-everywhere. In particular and because of the ability to modify the interpreter, it would be awesome to be able to use pretty-lisp client to edit the server-side code and see immediate changes.
> what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block?

This already exists: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el

(you can see a screenie in http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png)
Like NameCoin? (http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page)
Yammer Raises $85 Million In New Funding
In a game that is so progression based, knowing that all the power you accumulate will go to no useful end can be a real motivation killer. The point of Diablo games has always been to get nice stuff so you can murder progressively more difficult enemies. When there isn't going to be a progressively more difficult enemy, why get nice stuff?

I didn't have any problem with the pacing, somewhat agree on the problem of corridor level design, and again I had no problem with the art style. But some of that is a taste issue where our priorities just don't align.
I'm not seeing that - I just randomly picked a searchable word of the current front page ("raspberry") and it shows as recent as "4 hours ago".
I eagerly await all the Sharia law trials of anyone who's posted a bit.ly link to a pornographic picture, then.

And they're not being tried in those courts. Their domain has simply been seized because that's easier than winning in court.
Who killed the Chat Bot?
Oh sure, the new MMO will definitely be their biggest current project, and D3 is a little bigger than HotS, but probably not by as much as you think.

In fact, when you've got a game as big as WoW, making sure that everything you add plays well with all the existing pieces is a mammoth undertaking - it would probably be easier if it was a new game! As you pointed out, these aren't simple 'Here's 4 new areas with some new enemy models expansions, these are major reworkings of large game features.

Although I've never worked on an expansion, from all the games I have worked on those kinds of things are definitely not simple.
Thanks tcmneal! It's been a wild, wild, ride.
In that case, do you need your idea? rather than developing something that's just a cool thing to do or has been developed by others 1000 times over.

If you find it useful, odds are others will.
And I will be happy to help contributors in this task!
It sounds like you already know everything there is. How great it must be to have enlightenment such as your own.

This was a very well structured and thought out article. It is actually identical to an article I have been wanting to write for a while. Few things I might have added as an addition, being that while the spec notes 2 open connections per host, most browser these days allow considerably more.

> Chrome allows 6 connections per hostname
> FF allows 6 connections per hostname
Even the iPhone allows 4 connections per hostname.

Good job on the article. Exactly as you say, even if one person doesn't find it useful, doesn't mean other people share the same sentiments!
I'd like to see a list of Facebook free sites, and what they can substitute.
Oh, that's a nice idea. I have to admit that the boxes don't do much for me, but symbols would make it easier to see what's where.
Holy crap, it's even more confusing than I thought:

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/win...

"You will get the traditional desktop with Windows 8 on ARM - but you won't be able to put third-party apps on it.

That's because all the third-party apps developed for ARM-based Windows 8 devices will be for the new Metro interface."
Mailchimp login is down
It might be fruitful to decompose individual copyrights and lengths. Consider a CC BY-NC-ND license that decays in stages to CC BY after X years...
At least it should now be clear to anyone purchasing a .com domain that they have to comply with all US laws and regulations or risk suffering forfeiture of their property.

If you want to work under the laws of the UK, acquire a co.uk site.
I'm talking about quick jobs. Can you hire someone to help you with some Clojure or Ruby code just for an hour? It looks like it takes an hour just to post a job on elance.
RTP based iContact acquired for $169 million.
> Does he really think potential terrorists or criminals are going to hijack a plane using toothbrushes or popsicle sticks?

Yes. Actually there's an interesting connection with a recent HN article about how space missions are being severely hampered by an irrational aversion to the risk of loss of human life. In the same way, someone with a sharpened stick holding it at the throat of an innocent woman could very well lead to the hijacking of a plane because the people in the situation may very well consider doing "anything" to save that one life. Hollywood, and all that.

> Nobody likes waiting in line or taking off their shoes.

This is one reason why you may deserve some downvoting - this is a classic straw-man argument, and minimizes the true root of the problem: we have a vast, faceless beauracracy that seriously messes with millions of Americans (and foreigners!) for no good purpose. This is a serious problem, and minimizing it like this won't earn you any influence.

P.S. I disagree with the parent comment, and yet I upvoted it because it is cogently argued, if wrong.
Uhm...anyone want to help me out with the timeline?

> Insurgent Games was founded in 2009

> For a couple of years they happily made iPhone and Android games

So that brings us to 2011.

> Now, several years later

Several is at least 3, so that brings us to 2014.

edit: interesting...this went from +3 to -1. This doesn't seem like the kind of question that would provoke that much revulsion in anyone.
Maybe we should mix Windows in: http://ewams.net/?view=Linus_Should_Use_Windows_7
Rack::SpellCheck - Any Rubyist want to build it into a Gem with me?
They are nothing alike. I've only played Diablo slightly, but Torchlight is much closer to Diablo (hell, Trine is a platformer).

I enjoyed both games, but if you like Diablo, you'll love Torchlight. Torchlight 2 is coming soon too, I believe.
Linus Should Use Windows 7
Awesome job guys. I'm going to try to implement this on a largish music blog - it's gong to make it easy to display nearby concerts by artists featured in a given post.
> The future is in structural editors.

I liked CodeBubbles, but do you have any other examples of structural editors for generic programming? Obviously, UI-centric editors and LabView are structural editors, but for very specific domains.
Where do airplanes dump their waste?
Reopen it anyone? ^_^