skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious how they plan to implement actual medieval / early Renaissance combat tactics with a controller like the one in the video - how would you do half-swording or something like the Mordhau?

For people who aren't medieval geeks - half-sword is when you hold the sword halfway up the blade with your left hand, in order to deliver a more accurate, powerful thrust; perhaps after trapping your opponent's sword between your arm and body. Mordhau ("murder-strike") is when you invert the sword and use it as a mace. These things came about because swinging a sword into an armored opponent isn't actually going to do much to him.

It seems like the kind of combat you could simulate might potentially be fun, but wouldn't actually simulate a real fight from the period - not enough grappling / bashing.
Relying on the way you happen to combine data, instead of using a function that's designed for authentication and has baked-in a safe way to combine the inputs, is a bad idea. "What if $EDGE_CASE_OF_INAPPROPRIATE_CRYPTO_FUNCTION" is never a good question to ask. Just use the right tools in the first place.
What's great is imagining yourself as the guy who has to come on and speak after such a glamorous intro.

I'd love to hear more about the awkward moment that ensued when the rep got on stage and started talking, if he tried to play it off like that whole thing didn't just happen.
He comes pretty often to latin-america and he has friends and the foundation helping him at all times. One is still to get pissed of at the amount of time and work wasted because of this.
really sorry to hear this. if somebody puts together some kind of fundraising thing to help him out, I'll gladly kick in.
Haskell you fiend, stop following me around!
Well, we are at a very nascent stage and Haskell may be bit of an overkill. But, I will give it a second look to quiet my demons.
Dear Christ just kill me already.
I understood what he meant, but it still made me double-take.
I created a few javascript card games, most of them in late 2011, but they really started earning this year. So far have made Spades, Hearts, Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Shithead and a couple of solitaires. Revenue has been steadily rising, and is a nice little side income now. http://www.spades-cardgame.com is one, the rest are linked from there.
am I correctly reading the rewards? it looks as if no reward at all includes the actual new hardware controller he wants to create. doesn't make a whole lot of sense that way.
The unfortunate reality is that with a light, fast weapon, you do not have the time or reaction speed to actually parry. "Parrying" doesn't really happen. Getting the f away with your feet is the only option.*

I don't agree with this. I practice eskrima and we block/parry a lot. It's a lot easier to move a 0.2kg stick than your whole body (50-100kg).

But blocking/parrying is not a substitute for footwork, it's a complement to it. If your footwork is good, your opponent might only be able to attack you from 1-2 directions. Blocking 2 directions is far easier than blocking 12 (8 in competition [1]).

[1] For safety reasons, thrusting and knee strikes are not allowed. Nor are strikes to the back of the head.
Understanding the CSS Transforms Matrix
There aren't any great solutions to this problem on the horizon yet, sadly. FB login isn't a viable option because they or so aggressive about using it to mine data, and let's face it - there are probably plenty of logins and services people don't want co-mingled with their public persona. Google login is another non-starter but for similar reasons, but with the added issue that they have so many services, with so many TOS's that you run a very real risk of losing access to a bunch of third party accounts if you ever run afoul of Googles' policies and they terminate your service. This happened to a lot of people who signed up for G+ but were not above the required age: they lost access to gmail and all the other Google services simply because they didn't read the fine print.

Oddly enough, I think it might be credit card companies who are in the best position to solve this problem. They already have a large infrastructure for detecting fraud, they have the trust of the general public, and they already have a high level of integration with many websites. More importantly, they have a business model that is not predicated on selling your data to make a profit (well, at least not entirely).
Perhaps the question should be why do people who could be billing their time to enterprises for $100+/hr or on 6-figure salaries spend years of their life trying to build a startup that has a very small chance of becoming profitable. Consulting or even full-time employment is debatably a more economically rational choice.

Thankfully, people are not rational economic actors so there's a healthy ecosystem where talented hackers are basically free to work on whatever they like. Here's to the freedom of being able to do what we love, whatever that may be.

I personally like consulting work as it's very low overhead, get to meet lots of smart/interesting clients, high cashflow, exposure to lots of exciting new projects. I even enjoy the hustling and pitching part of the business. I'd like to build a successful product one day (as most consultants do) but it's hard to find an idea I care about enough to dedicate years of my life to, especially when I have a steady stream of consulting work that pays well and satisfies my need to create.
FB login is a good concept, but I've seen too many situations where "Log in with Facebook" leads to a page asking me to give permission for the app to post to Facebook on my behalf.

There's clearly a need for a standard login, but there's also a need for a much brighter line between identification and permissions. Until that happens, even when it's available, many users will shy away from using a standard login.
"Never use a hash function for message authentication" is such a simplistic view. The author takes a common hash function design (Merkle-Damgard), and somehow extrapolates that hash functions should be simply ruled out for authentication.

First, this may send the wrong message to the less-focused reader: "what, I should use block ciphers instead?". Luckily, HMAC is eventually brought up, which is a fine solution.

HMAC requires 2 calls to H, our favorite hash function. Certain applications may find the overhead to be prohibitively high. With non-broken hash functions (e.g., any of the SHA-3 finalists), we can use the so-called envelope authenticator: A = H(K||M||K), with some padding to separate K from M to keep security proofs happy. This is significantly faster for short messages, and short is the most common size out there.
Please substantiate. An attacker knowing an internal collision of the hash algorithm for m1 and m2 (of the same size...) can construct HMAC(m2,key) from HMAC(m1,key) without knowing the key?
The link: https://developer.v.me/docs/get_credentials
The man who runs Freedom Included, Inc. (the seller of the laptop through Amazon) works at the Free Software Foundation with RMS. I don't think RMS will have trouble getting a new laptop.
Building and army of robots
Robots to test our code and deploy. Robots to open doors. Robots to play our music. Robots to record videos of presenters. Robots to serve us beer.
I recently started http://simplyhire.in/ . I started working on this about month back ( may starting ). Couple of local startup has started using it. This looks good.

But right now unable to push beyond these local startup, lack of networking etc. Let me know if guys can help.
It's important to note that hawala is indeed informal. So informal, that if you get screwed by someone attempting to scam the system, you have no [legal] recourse. It's probably best if you're social network already includes an existing hawala broker.
He's just kind of a publicity hound. I find that his opinions are usually well-reasoned, so this one is kind of an exception. Basically, I think he's a decent judge, but I don't like him much. This time, though, I think he's out of his depth.
That is another discussion since we are talking about fitness, specifically upper body strength and endurance, not rates of illness.
True but such is life. You make up for it by always giving people a chance first. You never fire on the first sign of dipshittiness.
Why can such powerful stances be resolved with a 5-4 ending position? Literally one person makes the difference. You'd think for such a far-reaching situation, a resolution would require at least a 2-person majority to pass.
I would donate to anything Stallman related anytime. But I am not quite sure if this would be in his intention. Are there any public infos about his personal/financial situation?
Parry with a sword was actually really uncommon last resort for the most of history. Viking blades for example dented really bad if they clashed. There is a saga about combatants beating several wooden shields to splinters until the blades clashed and both swords broke.

For samurai, the same is true. For heavily armored knight's, well they tried to poke each other in the eye mostly.

Me and my little brother with boffer-swords? Same story again. I found first hand experience that usually it's lot more usable to dodge the blow while simultaneously trying a counter blow than to parry. And the more you need footwork the more you have opponents.
> They were also described as men. Does that make it sexist?

It notes the sex of the decision-makers and implies the quality of results as part of a generalization, so I guess it is sexist.

> They were also described as privileged. Does that make it class warfare?

Warfare? That has a lot of extra meaning. "Classist" would be more clinical.

Words like "racist", "sexist", and "classist" have real definitions and you don't get to apply them only when they support portions of an argument that you happen to agree with.
First, this may send the wrong message to the less-focused reader: "what, I should use block ciphers instead?". Luckily, HMAC is eventually brought up, which is a fine solution.

If the reader can't be bothered to read the article to the end, I hardly think it reflects on the author. Whilst it might indeed be a more concise article if it just said "don't use a hash function for message authentication, use HMAC", it would still miss the important final point about timing attacks, not to mention the journey of explanation about why you shouldn't just use a hash function.
Started a curated ecommerce site for vinyl lovers that's been profitable since day 1: http://vinylloop.com/
Step one: enable dirty buffers.

no step 2. Vim will behave like any other tabbed editor. Be it using tabs or buffers. Done. Why it's not the default? Well i don't care as vim is painful in all sorts of ways without customization anyway :)
I think Gabe's soul purpose in life now is to just troll Half Life fans.
> I need to compile the whole thing if I have to make even a tiny change.

How is "compile if I need to make a tiny change" affecting deployment? Use Play. Or use other hot code reload options for dev.

As for deployment:

> Therefore, deployment becomes an event. Events tend to be planned and managed, hence slower.

Deployments are events, and they tend to be planned and managed.

1. Check all tests are green(deployment tool can auto-check it).

2. Tag source.

3. fab deploy(or whatever)

4. Do some user level smoke testing that everything worked.

In case of Java, compiling a jar isn't that big an addition to the list. And seriously, it's not like you compile manually when you have to deploy. You set up `ant deploy` or equivalent which will run tests, jar it, tag it, push it, restart server if needed. Deployment isn't different from what you do in Ruby or Python.
Really awesome, i couldn't think you can make money with a no-sponsorship model on games. So your revenue comes completely from ads?
I find it really incredible that this companies were so careless. Really. I know that security practices are rare to come by, but come on! LinkedIn, eHarmony and last.fm! These are some of the biggest websites.
Is it Fair for Chefs to Cook Other Cultures’ Foods?
Yes, as a fellow born-EO from another country, this is more or less accurate.

Tiny sects built around EO do exist that are against evolution, etc, but are by no means the prevalent force. Let's say, 5% at most.

Another nice feature of EO, is that it's practitioners could not care less about tons of things that enrage evangelicals and such. EO takes a more pragmatic view, man if flawed, see the error of your ways if you do bad, but even if you don't, peace bro, etc.
Second Pentadactyl. There's also Vimium and Vrome for Chrome/ium. There are Vim plugins for everything these days (even Eclipse and Emacs), so that combined with a launcher like Synapse or Gnome-Do, you almost never have to use your mouse anymore.
Nigeria is an English-speaking country, the other countries you listed are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_speaking#List_of_Englis...
How The linkedin Hacker stole our data
Ask HN: where to get customer opinion for early concept?
In the "Startup Owner's Manual", Steve Blank stresses plenty the need to get out of the building and get customer feedback about anything it is that you're doing.

In the case of my product (we're still in customer discovery phase), it's tentatively aimed at stay at environmentally friendly stay at home dads or moms. The problem is that being in the SV tech bubble, and only ever interacting with tech people and entrepreneurs, we're having a hard time getting an idea if that's a good product/market fit. We're in fact going close to nowhere.

I'm an engineer who's just now starting to figure out how to be a "hustler", and so I'm pretty fresh when it comes to getting random people's opinions. Where should I go? I'm thinking either online forums (again, probably my tech bias showing), or in person at stores (can't imagine this would have worked well for companies like IMVU and Stardoll, chasing 13yo girls down Toys R US aisles for customer validation) or some other meetings of our hypothetical core user. I think the guys from Food on the Table went to some kind of homeowner meetings and tried to pitch their idea there.

Any suggestions?
> I really liked the way it doesn't make the debate as "fiat" vs. non-fiat (as though fiat were a dirty term)

When someone uses the word "fiat" in casual conversation with me (without meaning the make of vehicle) I reply, "oh, a Bitcoin fan, eh?"

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=fiat+currency&ctab=0&...
A friendly fyi: simplyhired.com might make a case that you're infringing on their trademark.
Ha, I realize now I've talked with you (or some other colleague of yours, Florian) for some eventual Django freelance work. Glad to hear it's working well, seems like a crowded market in France at least.
That has to be perhaps the worst site ever. Without javascript enabled, the entire article is covered up by a CSS overlay telling me I need to enable javascript.. all while the actual content I want to read is behind it.
New Mexico does the same thing with liquor licences. The worst part is that the state's biggest liquor distributor now owns the vast majority of the licenses. "You have to buy all your shit from me AND give me a percentage of your profits" - sounds like the mafia but it's every day business in NM.
I have mixed feelings about this.

Firstly, all these pesky class action lawsuits where each participant can get $7 [1] do absolutely nothing but enrich lawyers. I really don't see the point in them. So frankly I don't care if those go away.

But I guess it's some form of accountability.

Also, depending on the jurisdiction these provisions prohibiting or restricting you from suing may be unenforceable anyway.

[1]: A law firm will file a lawsuit on behalf of a number of participants (eg my monitor really isn't 19", it's 17.7" display size). The law firm will seek certification by a court as a class. At that point they'll sign up as many people as they can. These lawsuits nearly end up in settlement so the defendants may settle for, say, $10 million. The law firm keeps $3 million (give or take) as they're paid on a contingency basis. The million people they got to sign up will get $7 each.
Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012
> The other, less common scene appears much more chaotic. Groups of students sit around circular tables discussing how to solve a particular problem, or standing at the whiteboard arguing about the best way to proceed. The teacher moves around the room talking with the different groups in turn, making suggestions as to how to proceed, or pointing out possible errors in a particular line of reasoning the students are following. Occasionally, the teacher will call the entire group to order and ask one group to explain their solution to the rest of the class, or to give a short, mini-lecture about a particular concept or method

I had some classes that did this. In was invariably even less useful than "please memorize this formula", simply because of the social pressures.
I really like your service and have used it a few times. I doubt the UX will be affected that much if you were to include a few passive ads. So I would say, go for it, make some money, you deserve to.
Yeah got to realize that, will be changing the domain name soon.
Show HN: ThudIt - Realtime Image Search For Twitter
Is It O.K. to Be a Mediocre Employee?
Point 1 is about not writing unit tests and instead focusing on acceptance tests since they can replicate the experience of the boss or customers who might ultimately complaint to you. If they can't notice something's wrong, hurrah!

I don't adhere to the philosophy, but there is something to this if you refuse to do TDD or write unit tests. It's better than nothing and it will catch the most blatant issues if you replicate the user stories carefully. It's what I call "minimum viable testing" (MVT!). However, among other problems, it won't help at all with refactoring.. but I suspect a developer who gives up on unit tests isn't one who's doing much refactoring or structural work anyway? (Points 2 and 4 imply this.)

My personal result of doing all of this is productivity and better products. I can't tell if I did it all wrong, and that's why I'm writing better code now, but I truly believe that I'm not alone. In fact I think that most of us regular web developers, tend to do the same "mistakes" as I did.

There's room for argument over the meanings implied here, especially in tossing up productivity vs code quality. Is ad hoc, spontaneously designed, poorly tested code that's doing the job in production "better" than well planned, well tested code that's still sitting around under development? It could be yes or no, depending on your viewpoint, but it's important to appreciate the nuances and the balance involved.

I'll note, however, that more developers than not do develop in this way and mostly do OK at it. While there's also a large group of developers who'll jump up and down about architecture, clean code, TDD, and various other philosophies (me included sometimes!) there's also a whole world out there unfamiliar with such concepts and still putting together passable software. The key is knowing when and why certain things matter or are useful, and I suspect the author of the article has been getting a feel for that and coming to terms with what disciplines his sort of projects really require (i.e. not many).
Yes, I'm kind of amazed at it myself. I rank fairly well for some of the most relevant keywords now, and that's where almost all the traffic comes from.

What I think I'm doing right:

* Simple to start. As soon as you enter the page you see the table, you just need to press Deal and you've started. No "enter your name", no choosing options before starting, no nag ads.

* Single page sites. The rules for the games are on the landing page, which means it has more content and is likely to be ranked higher by Google.

* Keep it simple. As a programmer I had the urge to create high scores, multiplayer, logins, track results etc, but at the end of the day most people just want to spend 10 minutes playing, and leaving out those things also means it's maintenance free, and frictionless to get started.
From your first example:

"This project is dead due to a lack of interest from users."

Do they really mean "lack of interest from other developers"?

They shouldn't be doing it for users, they should be doing it for themselves, and to their credit, I think that's often why they do what they do. They have more common sense than the usual. That's why their work is so good. (It's also because they have more of a cathedral-like structure, and not just with respect to the kernel.)

Who are these "users" we need interest from? How do we measure interest? Among OS's NetBSD's user base (non-corporate) is very small.

This developer chose the Linux kernel not to please users by making the "popular choice" or because it is necessarily the easiest to work with. As the blurb says, it's a matter of driver support.

Yes, Godspeed.
Stephenson is no doubt an extremely successful writer, but that doesn't confer the type of resources that being an extremely successful entrepreneur does. And game development doesn't come cheap either, especially not innovative game development.
The video linked at the end suggests using NFC-equipped smartphones to transmit blinded credentials containing just enough information to gain entry (e.g. I am over 18, I have authority to enter this pub, etc). What do you think about that solution?
Unintended Consequences: Jon Stewart - Edward Conard - video, plus 3 extended
On the contrary, it's an axiomatization, and thus only describes the relation between them. If by "what one means by them" you mean a definition, then you'll need a construction for that. Of course, for the most part, the relation between them is what we mean by them; but Hilbert's formalism doesn't seem to be a good way to address such statements as the one that started this, "a point is a line segment of zero length".
I have never worked with Play before, but it seems like it would emulate Python/Ruby deployment cycle. Thanks.
Over the last couple of weeks I created http://hipdial.com with a friend. You can buy your own, dedicated, PIN-free phone conference line from us.

We've opened doors to the public teo weeks ago and are already paying for the servers. Press launch following next week. It's all very exciting :) Once things relax a bit we'll definitely share our experience on some kind of blog.

Would love some feedback if you have a minute, too.

Edit: typo in URL, oops
FYI, Human species are probably gonna be extinct in a fraction of 10,000 years.
Thanks for your reply, I agree with, and am interested in, what you say. Just want comment:

"Doctors pay little attention to nutrition for people like me, though it makes a big difference in outcomes. Lung transplants grab more headlines and glory than trying to help people keep their own lungs functional and healthy.".

While I realise you might have had bad experiences, I know lots of medical researchers who are dedicating their lives to trying to cure disease, in any way possible. Many doctors would be very interested in proving how diet can help disease, and doing so.
The iPhone imo app should see a surge in downloads.
> You don't need armor and life, if you kill in one hit!

This is why the approach is working for you: you're doing simple stuff.
I find this line pretty interest:
"Because Murstein's company owns a bank, it’s able to take advantage of the Fed’s low interest rates to borrow money for 0.35 percent and loan it out to striving young cabbies who want to own a medallion. The cabbie borrows at around 5.5 percent, with 25 percent down.

“If a borrower doesn’t pay, we send out somebody,” Murstein said. “Literally, they can pop the medallion off the hood of the car and bring it back to our office and, bingo, the guy is out of work.” "

He basically has no risk on his end. Looks like he found a pot of gold!
Attention readers: For some reason I cannot comprehend people use the internet in 2012 with javascript and cookies disabled and then whine when some things don't work.