skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Definitely agree, though I have more a machine learning background. Simple serial port connections are so foreign to me it is bothersome.
The console market is already becoming a niche.

They're for social games (like WiiSports) that you play with friends and family or story-driven games (RPGs, etc) that you don't need a PC to play.

Honestly, I don't know how anyone plays FPS games on consoles. I play Halo 3 with my son now and the controls are infuriating.
You've made me so very, very happy.
>Some of the suggestions make PostgreSQL seem less mature than InnoDB, still

I like the way you throw "still" on the end, as if innodb has ever been more mature than postgresql. That's very amusing. The suggestions you reference are not postgresql specific, they are general suggestions to not do really dumb stuff with your database, and apply to every database.

>My forum gets almost a million page views daily

Of course you can do dumb stuff, especially if you have a tiny site like that where even the crappiest server you can buy is going to be way overkill. In a case like that, go right ahead and store sessions in the DB if you want, it won't matter at all. The suggestion is for people who expect to end up with a busy site, where updating your database constantly with every page request is going to hurt your scalability and gains you nothing.

>We don't have to worry about running VACUUM periodically either.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that running a 10 year old version of postgresql is a good idea.

>I feel PostgreSQL may be a wee bit overhyped

I wonder if that has anything to do with your obvious ignorance of the subject.
I don't know what level of evidence would satisfy you, as you seem to have a pre-existing bias against the farmers' claims.

Monsanto attempted to sue, then dropped its case against the Runyons. Given Monsanto's otherwise litigious history, and the damage that would be done to the company if they were to lose a case like this in court, the evidence points in favor of the farmer.

Statements like "I believe (any case) does not exist" and "this is just someone who has been in a bunch of movies" show bias, and tell me that you're unlikely to accept anything short of a full and frank confession from Monsanto that they have aggressively sued innocent farmers.

What do you call a company that pursues cases like the one cited in the CBS News article about Mo Parr?

74-year-old Mo Parr is a seed cleaner; he is hired by farmers to separate debris from the seed to be replanted. Monsanto sued him claiming he was "aiding and abetting" farmers, helping them to violate the patent.

"There's no way that I could be held responsible," Parr said. "There's no way that I could look at a soy bean and tell you if it's Round-up Ready."

The company subpoenaed Parr's bank records, without his knowledge, and found his customers. After receiving calls from Monsanto, some of them stopped talking to him.

"It really broke my heart," Parr said. "You know, I could hardly hold a cup of coffee that morning,"

I won't make any further arguments about this, because I'm not trying to change your mind if its already made up.
The console market is fine and most of what Ars claims has been said at the cusp of every new console generation.

The original Playstation came out in 1994 and wasn't discontinued until 2009. The PS2 is still being manufactured. PS3 still has a while to go by that metric. If you want to talk time between models, PS1-to-PS2 was 6 years, and PS2-PS3 was 6 years, leaving PS4 to be only slightly behind the curve if it comes out next year.

Consoles have always been subpar in some way or another compared to top-of-the-line PCs at release; that article's claim is silly. My PC at the release of the PS3 had four times the PS3's RAM, and it wasn't even top-of-the-line. One of the biggest benefits of targeting a console is that it's a stable, homogeneous platform.

Tablets and phones aren't the new consoles, they're the new GameBoys. In that way, I agree with you that they could hurt Nintendo the most, mainly by virtue of the DS having been the leader in that market.
Which has an interesting balance: you're then using things developed in isolation, which can give you better parts but it definitely means you have to provide interconnect conventions and that new developers have to get used to your particular combination of parts.

If you think you can do this better than the Django community, this can work out well but I'd say more often than not when I've heard about it people weren't actually able to spend enough time on this as they'd hoped and keep falling further and further behind Django and other frameworks.
How many services do that? I can't think of any.
Background: http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2011/04/graydon-201104
The video-game idea, to me, is gone anyway. There's a unknown factor that has disappeared. 80s and 90s machines were all surfing the edge of what could be possible to render on a screen. And we, as consumers, had almost no idea. You'd be blown away by 2.5D, transparency, polygons etc etc. The 'shaders' era put an end to that race, even though the handheld constraints gives new room to compete. Somehow it's good, it means games will be more about games and not about making awesome HD-wallpapers-replay-demos; but at the same time I can't shake the feeling that developpers needed the hardware limitations to fuel their creativity. And also do people want more realism ? I'm more drawn to impressionism these days...
Sending a hash is no different than sending a plain text password. Because the attacker has complete control at their end and can just hack a client that sends that same hash even if they don't know the original password.
“How Full of Sh*t Are They?” and Other Questions Writers Ask
PayPal’s founding team was six people.
...
Four of them built bombs when they were
in high school.

Surprised no one picked up on this (not that I could see anyway).

When we hear about a kid who got caught building a bomb these days we never think Wow - they'll make a great entrepreneur some day!

Maybe we should learn not to judge children too harshly?
6.5 Million LinkedIn Passwords Reportedly Leaked
The argument people keep making that mobile devices are only for "casual" gamers does not hold water. While largely true today, there is no reason this will continue to be the case. Look at the console market and you'll see that all early games were what anyone would describe as "casual" today.

Let the mobile gaming market mature, and you'll find it filling niches you hadn't thought possible.
> I think YC supports the companies that shoot for the moon, but people aren't willing to take the risk and say no to acquisitions of $20-$100m because that is the short term business model of today and people just want to take their $5m and show off.

A more charitable take: A founder with a few grand in the bank is doing a high wire act without a safety net. A respected repeat founder who's already banked a few million can let go of most concerns for safety and family and focus on changing the world or self-actualization or whatever you want to call it.
Apple Tries to Stop US Sales of Samsung’s Galaxy S III
You should mention why you are interested in joining a startup that is going to Chile. Are you in Chile yourself? Or is there some other reason for this.

I am not going to Startup Chile, but the question popped on my head as i read your website.
Facebook Glitch: Compensation For Investors
"Ferociously independent" might be a more accurate characterization than "control freak." And you're right, I don't see Jobs submitting himself to being led around by mentors.

On the other hand, he didn't have to deal with the much more complicated legal environment that we have now, which includes patent suits left and right whenever there's big stakes involved. But on the other other hand, perhaps there's no good way to navigate these new problems anyway.
"This app will have access to your entire Dropbox."

Uh, no. Why do you need access to my entire Dropbox? That's bad. You should request access only to /Apps/Gimmebar.

(I'd submit this as feedback, but your bottom right 'feedback' thing is broken - on submit, you get a blank page.)
> Streaming non-interactive video requires advances in bandwidth.

Of course, and also throughput and latency. There is money to be made solving these problems, though, independent of the gaming industry. Compare the state of streaming video now to the state it was 5 years ago and 10 years ago.
There are per-subreddit (and sometimes general) sponsored stories on the top of each page, separated by the rest of the actual page by a big box.

Example:
http://i.imgur.com/LvkN5.png
Where in San Francisco is this streaming live from - can you attend in person?
PHK is not concerned with preventing precomputed (rainbow table) attacks. A salt is fine for that. He wants to make it harder to create special-purpose hardware for brute-forcing. Combining many different types of hashes is only intended to eat up die space.
sigh

I understand that "why django sucks" is a better, more provocative title that will get read more than "why django isn't perfect in every way and i prefer using flask for this", so i don't fault the author for choosing that subtext.

However, the general "tradition" (yes, its a tradition now) of justifying a tech/infrastructure decision with "Ah! language/framework/db made popular by others is a horribly broken mistake! you are doing it wrong!" is 1. getting old, 2. counterproductive for engineers.

They are tools. There are different tasks with different requirements. They have different pros and cons and different learning curves. Some tools are better suited for some tasks. Some tools are even better suited for most tasks. Sometimes it even makes reasonable sense to use a product that isn't the best of the best of the best if you are really certain you don't care about the dimension in which your tool is not the most amazing.

Hammers are bad for cooking eggs. Spatulas are bad for nailing nails. I made eggs this morning. Keep an eye out for my upcoming blog post: "Why hammers suck!!"
I usually parse it as common-off-the-shelf
You can, but that doesn't mean you should. It's brittle. If your app or library breaks because a minor update to a dependency changed those internals completely, you can't say you weren't warned.
Instead of doing the "guy*" thing where you point out that you're just as excited to work with women as men, I would remove the gender-specific language altogether. Then it's a non-issue. If you don't exclude female co-founders right off the bat, they will most likely assume you're just as excited to work with them.
> I should not have to manually initiate the dropbox backup

I'm pretty sure you only have to start it once. After that, anything you Gimme gets put into your Dropbox folder right away. At least, that's how my Gimme Bar works.

I originally thought you had to had to go to Gimme Bar's website each time you wanted to back up, like you said, but recently (maybe a month ago?) files started being automatically put into my Dropbox folder as soon as I Gimme'd them. I'm not sure what happened, but I'm glad about the change.

So, tl;dr: Dropbox backup definitely works the way it should.

As for future-proofing, I think this Gimme Bar does a pretty good job. If Gimme Bar ceased to exist, you'd still have your library in your Dropbox folder. If Dropbox ceased to exist, your Dropbox folder would still be a folder on your computer, and your Gimme Bar library would still be there.

So, for you to completely lose your entire Gimme Bar library, all three of the following things would have to happen:

1. Dropbox would have to shut down,
2. Gimme Bar would have to shut down, and
3. The hard drive on every computer you had Dropbox installed on would have to fail, as would every back-up of every one of those drives.

If you wanted to go to Siracusian lengths, I guess you could install Dropbox's server client on a VPS. That way, you'd have your Dropbox stuff in your own cloud as well as in Dropbox's, so even if all three of the above things happen, you'd still have access to your stuff.
After Apple, Jobs didn't sit on his hands, but went on to found two companies - Pixar and NEXT. Pixar alone would have made him famous, again. And, NEXT assured his return to Apple, because of Apple's failure to innovate in early 90s and the need of something, anything to restart its OS line. NEXT and Jobs were their best bets.

Even without Apple Jobs would have accomplished many things. That's just the kind of person he was. So, luck has nothing to do with this.
A Facebook profile walks into a bar...Shaker launches virtual venues in U.S.
Surely you don't think that frivolous claims are never won?
'replete' with a few Reddit-style comics, of which exactly one could be argued is a Rage comic (though it actually isn't).
The problem with making video games is that it is long not hard.

Designing your game is about 3-5% of the time spent making it. The rest is in tweaking animations, inverting arrays for better performance, refactoring, adjusting physics, fixing weird bugs, creating metaformats, and wishing desperately that floating point numbers did a bit less floating.
There is no per se answer to that question. Cryptanalysis is hard, you can't assume things like commutativity and orthogonality.

This whole line of thought is at best a waste of time, and at worst dangerous.

PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-256 is a vetted NIST approved standard with an adjustable work factor. It has been subject to professional attention for many years.

BCrypt, while not subject to nearly as much analysis nor approved by NIST, was designed by very competent cryptographers, has an adjustable work factor and is based on blowfish -- which has been subject to substantial professional attention.

Use one of the above with the highest work factor you have the processing power for and call it a day. Don't try to roll your solution.
It's more like someone selling a case of bullets while knowing that the buyer will use it to kill someone. I can't say if it's legal or not, but it's certainly not very ethical.
We have an open and pretty well documented API (https://gimmebar.com/api/v1), which is basically what we use to build the Dropbox export in addition to the Instagram, Pinboard, etc. backups. We chose Dropbox because the intersection of our users and Dropbox users is quite high, and it was simple enough to execute.

You could very easily build a simple application to back up all of your data to whatever service (S3, personal server, Some Other Cloud™).
You're right that adding AJAX was a small, straightforward change, but it caused a disproportionate improvement in usability. I personally went from using MapQuest exclusively to GMaps exclusively after a single use.
If they want to keep their own mainstream market, consoles will need to keep innovating, rather than just offer pretty much what a PC/laptop/tablet is offering, with varying degrees of visual graphics.
What's the deal with On{x}?
14 Reasons Spain Is Turning Into A Disaster - Business Insider
Teach your iOS device to draw w/ RubyMotion
I've been using Unity at work for almost 6 months now, and I can highly recommend it. Coming from a game development background it's incredible the amount of pain removed and productivity boosted by using it. If you know C# or JavaScript (or Python I guess, as Boo is some Python dialect I think) then you're halfway to learning how to use it already. Give it a try!
Bachelorville’s Big Fish
MIT students' invention turns bananas into keyboard
How can you separate the two? Mechanized agriculture requires large amounts of energy, does it not? So if your energy source is unsustainable, your farming method is unsustainable. Seems logical.
How to Manage Through Chaos: We can't predict the future, but we can create it
Megaupload Seeks Lawsuit Dismissal
I was wondering about this myself when I bought my humble bundle. I think that saying linux users pay more on average is somewhat misleading without some sort of analysis on the actual data. For example, if linux counts for only $100,000 of sales, and the average is $10 dollars a buy. Then you would assume 10000 buyers. However, one person putting in 10k (such as notch) would skew the results dramatically. Then you really have only 9001 buyers and the average price is $11.1 per a user, but that really isn't a good predictor of average price. Same thing with some windows users being really cheap. I think if you removed all people paying more than $100 for the bundle and all people paying less than $2 for the bundle you would find the average price to be much closer. Just my thoughts.
"YC would not be around if Apple wasn't started when it was"

How did you draw that conclusion?
People don't bear Apple animosity for what they have done to RIM, or Google for what they have done to Nokia for the same reasons nobody hated Sun for what they did to DEC.
Really hoping that this will be like the old PayPal, where you could just setup an account (or multiple!) and just go and start collecting credit card payments.

Can't do this anymore as they only allow you to link your bank account to a single PayPal account. Also there are a lot more ID requirements nowadays, so you can't just setup a virtual business like you used to - a separate account for each new website.

I can understand why, but surely a suitably long holding period (account probation period) would solve the fraud and chargeback issues caused by the scammers who ruin it for the rest of us!
Ask HN: Ruby on Rails or Image Processing?
Hi

I need to decide between two job offers. The problem is that they have nothing in common. The first is a Ruby on Rails developer and the second is a research position working on image processing algorithms. Both might get me a Job in USA or Europe within a year which is my ultimate goal. However the former is boring and easy, and the latter is exciting and difficult. I'd really appreciate your comments.
Please consider me a +1 for 3GS. Looks like a beautiful application.
Hi, I'm a founder from a past-round Start-Up Chile selected team. I don't see the reason for the mystery. As a founder I would have been suspicious about your offer. If I would have been looking for a co-founder after being accepted , I would have been looking for someone that cares about my project, and not someone who wants to be in Start-Up Chile just for the sake of it (I'm not saying this is your case, it's just hard to know why are you doing it).

It would help if you tell more about why you want to do it, and explain your skills a little bit more (which Startups have you made a career on, language that you use, OSS projects that you have contributed).

Start-Up Chile is a great experience, hope you can find what you are looking for. good luck!
Again, if you really need to use a secret algorithm, instead use a secret key with the known proven algorithm (see for example https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAppSec/Secure_Coding_Guidelines#...)

That the security of a cipher system should depend on the key and not the algorithm has become a truism in the computer era, and this one is the best-remembered of Kerckhoffs's dicta. ... Unlike a key, an algorithm can be studied and analyzed by experts to determine if it is likely to be secure. An algorithm that you have invented yourself and kept secret has not had the opportunity for such review.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle#Implic...

Moreover, you made the security of your system "key"-dependent: what if I generate such "key" that will only use 5 iterations of MD5 and 1 iteration of SHA-1? This would be a major failure. Imagine if the security of AES was not 2^128, but varied between 2^10 to 2^128 depending on what key you supplied -- would you use it?
No, but it does it lazily.

pmap mentioned above probably has too much overhead for what you are thinking as it is intended for more coarse distribution of workload.
I can't remember the last time I actually went to the control panel to open something up. I'm too content using the start menu search to bring up control panel menus.
I use a private wiki that I use for storing lots of my personal information. I make a new page per idea and link to it from a bigger page. a good friend of mine keeps a giant google document of ideas and uses text to tag ideas.
Ouch - A really harsh review of Coda 2
I know that stealing content happens, but as a developer that wants to stay on the up-and-up (read:not steal the hard work of others), I don't wan't to rely on a resource that has this sort of attitude on stealing others content. From the 2D Art section[1]:

"If you really don’t want to make your own art, steal it! There are a ton of sites with sprite rips of classic 2D games. You can’t make a career on stolen game sprites but no one is going to be sending you legal threats for you making your first few simple games that way."

[1]:http://youcanmakevideogames.com/resources/2dart
I second that. I'm going from Germany every August to Romania and it feels like going to Internet Worderland.
Cabletv + 100mbs unlimited for 8 euros, prepaid 3G cards with 5000mins+internet a 5euros, lots of free wireless. Not to mention the cool operator Zapp ( based on EVDO ), had 2Mbps in on a isolated mountain summit!

Meanwhile in Germany pretty much is a hindrance, beginning with DSL ( i hate the uplink ). Not to mention that Vodafone Germany is billing 3g internet like is made of gold.

EDIT: formatting
> Google accepted hashes in two formats only... MD5 or SHA1.

It's not surprising that they don't support importing custom formats. They support two formats to bulk-import and then surely convert to their standard from there.
Maybe I'm thick, but I don't see what Dow has to do with Monsanto or this story?
IPhone 5 to Get Infinite Battery Life?
Why do everyone keep on insisting that people who hate Monsanto must have watched some movie? Monsanto has bugged the hell out of me for years and I've never even heard of that movie.
So what are they supposed to do? Sort through the seeds one-by-one? The problem isn't that Monsanto is necessarily asking for anything that is obviously crazy, it's the implementation that causes problems.

It's a lot like software patents in some sense. You can't actually insulate yourself from infringement.
Indeed, also a very good point.
Are 95% and 99% difficult to parse?

Plus, does "I've seen it in Perl" nullify the "an idiom you haven't seen" for the rest of millions of programmers that don't use Perl, or J, or ...?
Okay. I think I've figured out how to integrate clojure-style lazy streams with an array-oriented language, but it's a work in progress, and currently shelved until I get my Strage Loop presentation done.
Being a Developer Evangelist - Business of exciting people
There is also this huge list on PixelProspector: http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/ and this article is good start for beginners (like me): http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2011/09/atomic/. The first question to answer is this: do you want to make games (go indie) or work on games (work for a big studio)?
They are placeholders, not final art. I've been working on a game, and I rip sprites from wherever I find them. Not because I am a callous thief, but because the art is temporary until I can get a prototype, and convince an artist to join.
I played many FPS on PCs, and was equally frustrated with my xbox when I first got it. But once I got used to it, I can really say that playing FPSs with a controller is better than with a mouse&keyboard.
guns aren't made or sold with specific intent to kill people.

So handguns and machine guns are manufactured for deer hunters?
AUP? What can I (not) sell via your service?
New Jersey Attorney General files suit against App developer
Hi.

You're right. That is bad. We added Dropbox support before Dropbox allowed per-directory sandboxing. We're on it (but we also have a huge number of things to do). This does have a fairly high priority.

Thanks for pointing it our (and understanding).

S
Ask HN: Late application S12
Anyone knows if all late applications for S12 have been considered ?