skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Why should they? They don't have any reason to allow mature games [...]"

Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Microsoft publishes games that are designated with the M (Mature) rating. For example, see the Gears of War franchise, published by Microsoft Studios (formerly known as Microsoft Game Studios).

"Microsoft and Epic Games today announced that the Xbox 360 exclusive sold more than three million copies in its first week since release, cementing "Gears 3" as the biggest game of 2011 and catapulting the franchise beyond one billion dollars in lifetime sales." [1]

[1] http://epicgames.com/news/gears-of-war-3-soars-past-three-mi...

Edit: w1ntermute & freehunter: Thanks for the clarification!
No, it's pretty vague. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal#Characteristics Also, the Hausdorff dimension of a Hilbert curve is 2.
HELLO, my name is: Just In Mind
They have every reason to allow mature rated games. Mature rated games are among the most popular games out there on console and PC, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty , Elder Scrolls to name but a few.

PC Gamers who like R rated games have been a fair chunk of MSs user base for years now, thinking all the way back to 1991 and Wolfenstein 3D. Games are a big reason a lot of people are sticking with Windows as opposed to getting a Mac or trying Ubuntu.

Another factor to consider here might be that not all R rated content is considered equal, for example it appears that in America strong violence is less taboo than sex or swearing. So maybe Blood'n'Guts 3 gets an exception but Karma Sutra: The Game doesn't?

I also think it'll be quite some time before we have AAA game engines running nicely under WebGL.
Pre-Orders Launched for Microsoft Surface
I'm sure this project is going to get a lot of use; As a supported of free software, I would have been much happier if this was GPLd or at least LGPLd. Alas, it's BSD license, which means that it's going to help the Win8RT echosystem tremendously :(

https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/

ANGLE: Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine. The goal of ANGLE is to allow Windows users to seamlessly run WebGL and other OpenGL ES 2.0 content by translating OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9 API calls.
I'll be the grouchy contrarian and observe that I frequently don't like the more highly voted submissions.

Seems the high point submissions are frequently pop science or culture articles (e.g., "Amateur astronomers discover a planet with four suns" or "A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space"), while the lower point submissions are articles I actually learn from (e.g. "Exploring the Virtual Database Engine inside SQLite" or "How to do a great product promo video for less than $200").

I get enough of the former on Reddit; I come to Hacker News for the latter.
One more nitpick. During installation, I noticed the use of two app names, "ParentControl" for the app itself, and "Parental Control" otherwise. Could become a problem from SEO standpoint.

And one last nitpick/question. It looks like the app requires a connection? Was it simply easier to develop, or did you want to simplify the sign up process by tying users' settings to their email? It would obviously be much better if this worked in Airplane mode. However, it's not a dealbreaker, and the unusually low friction of getting set up may be worth it (in fact, if that were the goal, I think it's kinda genius).
With AppFog [1], you can get WordPress with the tantan-s3 plugin pre-installed for uploads so you can share nothing (but the database) and scale with a click. You also get Varnish caching with no additional work.

Full disclosure: I am an engineer at AppFog.

[1] https://appfog.com/
Microsoft Surface RT priced at $499 or $599 with Touch Cover keyboard
You can't base decisions on a slippery slope. All we have are the facts currently available today.

This kind of thinking is essential for a court system. That's why we say that justice is blind. But if you are not in the middle of a lawsuit, you should not use this type of thinking.

Thinking about trends and creating testable theories is essential for polity planing. You can't prepare for the future if you don't make projections about it.
Cool! What about supporting some sort of visual indicator for invalid fields?
The negligence in this case is stunning. His 'hack' was to write a Perl script which scanned a range of IPs, looking for remote access accounts that did not have a password. So, the compromised machines were:

- connected to the public internet, with a publicly routable address

- not firewalled

- running remote access software without a password

I strongly believe the strength of feeling shown by the US authorities here is primarily one of embarrassment. It is more comforting to believe you are facing a genius superhacker than it is to believe the people responsible for your network security are literally incompetent.

Also, while he was logged in to these machines he had notepad.exe-based conversations with other hackers - he was definitely not the only person who accessed these systems.
In all honesty, the requirements aren't that bad, especially for game designers that aren't just attempting to make a quick buck. There's really nothing in there that should force good developers to really have to stretch to follow them.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh69408...

And their user agreement is friendlier to FOSS projects than Apple's.

c. Third Party Rights. Your app, including any app that contains FOSS, must not infringe or misappropriate any intellectual property or personal right of any third party. You will obtain and maintain all necessary rights, clearances and consents, and pay all performance, licensing and reuse fees, including any consideration associated with providing music or video related content in and through your app. If your app includes FOSS, you must comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms, including any source availability requirements.

d. FOSS Software. If your app includes FOSS, it must not cause any non-FOSS Microsoft software to become subject to the terms of any FOSS license.
Startup Offers $1 Million to ‘Failed’ Entrepreneurs
A lot of child bullying isn't really for any particular reason. The reason is just an excuse.

Had you been Scottish I think you'd have either been bullied for some other differentiating factor or the bullies would have bullied someone else.
Investors seek billion-dollar payday as Vringo v. Google trial begins
The Magazine Issues in New Era of Writing
My point was that it's comparable to Surface: similar HW specs, no Retina display. iPad 3 offers more hence it's pricier. I simply don't see why anyone except Microsoft Office users (in 2013;-) would prefer Surface to iPad 3.
Iron sulfate doesn't reproduce.
15000 Wordpress blogs hacked for making money from Survey
Defend your first argument.
Stripe NYC Meetup
I've seen that, and other similar vague wordings, but I haven't seen anything trustworthy that said why.
The Office apps that come with the Surface are the real deal. It's the Home and Student version according to the web site.
> Is there an authoritative definition of a fractal?

Sort of. I believe Mandelbrot's original definition required only that the Hausdorff dimension exceeds the topological dimension. And that kinda-sorta includes Hilbert curves, if you count them as topologically 1-dimensional.

But I've seen other definitions, including a rather hazy one that was not a definition in the formal sense, but just talked about properties that certain interesting sets tend to have: self-similarity, etc.

In any case, I have yet to find a situation in which the formal definition of "fractal" actually mattered significantly. (If someone knows of one, I'd be interested.)
I've been looking at possibly picking up an iPhone next month, and iTunes is really the sticking point. I know iTunes isn't strictly required, but it does enhance the experience or so I'm told. But iTunes as it exists right now is awful IMO.
Electric Car Battery Maker A123 Systems Files Bankruptcy
> Was Lucas trying to say something about the inevitable result of the military industrial complex?

You're giving Lucas far too much credit.

Exhibit A: "Nooooooooooooooo"

Edit: Agreed, TIE Fighter was a stupendously great game. It captured the feel perfectly.
You should get upvotes because you made a counter argument with specifics. (And that TV ad is the one I was referring to.)

The funny thing is, and this is totally in the realm of personal opinion-- I think all of the advantages you mention are actually detractions. Mouse input on a tablet? Seems like a big mistake (but I know, MSFT chose to go with a "windows mode" rather than port their office apps to touch) MicroSD slot? I'd rather that space went to more battery capacity or something more useful. "Full" USB port? If I could plug a mouse into the iPad I still wouldn't.

The snap out stand is something that I forgot about, but might use if the iPad had it. Finding a good case that supports all the different usage modes for the iPad is a pain. But still when I saw the stand shown off, it felt like a gimmick that makes the Surface feel cheap. That might be a marketing misfire, since this is actually a feature I might wish the iPad had, maybe if presented better.

Anyway, all just our opinions based on our preferences. If you buy a surface, I hope you love it!
Microsoft acquires cloud-storage appliance vendor StorSimple
Is there anyone available to help a wannabe Python programmer?
The lack of historical discrimination doesn't preclude discrimination happening now, and the existence of it doesn't preclude the possibility that banter can just be banter and be taken as such on both sides.

What it does mean is that you can't just assume that the same words or behaviour means the same thing when directed at different groups.

The specific example I was responding to said try saying some of the things a Scot might say to and Englishman to a black person and see how far you get. My response to that is you can say the same words in the same tone of voice but it doesn't mean the same thing as everything that came before and goes along with those words is different.

I'm not saying that Scots can't be genuinely prejudiced against English (in a small number of cases they are - there are arseholes in every society), I'm saying what is acceptable or unacceptable between Scots and English is not the same as what's acceptable between white people and black people.

To turn it the other way around, I'm sure it wouldn't take much to find something I could say to a Scot about their history which would be horribly insulting but wouldn't be remotely offensive to, say, an Asian.

Does the fact that the Asian man didn't find it insulting make it OK to say to the Scot?
I sincerely hope the iPad mini's new screen specs don't require us (iOS app designers and developers) to add yet another batch of device-specific assets to apps to maintain universality.
That's the 16 GB model. The surface has 32 GB. The version of the iPad with 32GB and 3G is $729.
iTunes on OSX isn't a bad experience like Windows.
Peeking inside LuaJIT
I don't think your conclusion follows. An analogous proposition would be "Steve Jobs was a careless slob with no sense of style because he wore jeans to his presentations". It's possible that Einstein chose to look exactly the way he did. Or he just didn't care. Not knowing more about Einstein, I couldn't say.
> This is a fairly common chemical compound with many biological uses.

Your point? Eutrophication can be pretty nasty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication
Betties in Nebraska do it, too: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/28/us/a-club-where-everyone-i...
MS prices Surface tablet at $500, but is it cheap enough to beat the iPad?
Show HN: LOST/LONDON
Communicating without memory in a quantum system
Battery:
iPad 42.5-watt-hour clearly mentioning browsing time (its called confidence on your quality)
Surface RT 31.5-watt-hour Pro 42-watt-hour

WiFi+Cellular:
iPad Yep
Surface WiFi only

Weight:
iPad 1.44lbs to 1.46lbs
Surface RT 1.5lbs and Pro 2.0lbs

Applications:
iPad Rock solid platform unified
Surface Choose between RT and Pro messed up ARM and x86

For me I think Microsoft has done same mistake again, introduce "complexity" and if you look closely they are actually selling you a "not a gorgeous quality stuff" for same price as iPad. I don't see Microsoft dominating the market! Just getting a market douche on stage that makes you hear sound of click with no quality in product pisses me off!
Top mistakes of startups rising from Nokia's ashes
A blog post series reflecting common mistakes by startups created by ex-Nokia people. Advices that are work for other startups too and especially for ex-corporate people jumping the bandwagon of startups.
This is useful how? This is no better than a read-only image, with right click 'disabled'. It does look pretty.

I'll just head to thingiverse or clones. Those sites let you <gasp> download the models.
I think screen size flexibility is coming to iOS, so we can't rely on two static screen sizes any more.
SQLite predates both; the first official release is from August 2000.

Also, one of the goals of SQLite is to be available everywhere. It's available as super-standard-super-clean C code in one .c file, that works on just about every architecture. Had they used C# or LuaJIT, that could not be achieved.

I'm not sure if you are aware, but SQLite is what powers almost every app on Android or iPhone that needs tabular storage, including the built in ones like Contacts.
This brings up a question that isn't new at all: How do you secure your designs and data from "walking away"?

In the really old days a significant piece of work may have required a sizable external hard drive to steal. Then came writable DVD's and you could move ~5GB per disk with ease. With USB drives one could move 64GB for about $40 on a keychain.

Then there are services such as Dropbox. And, of course, anyone could setup a server for a few bucks and FTP gobs of files if allowed.

Other than reactively (lawsuit once discovered, etc.), how are companies protecting from having digital work product stolen by less-than-honest employees?

These days physical products are designed entirely digitally. All of the CAD, CAM, EDA and code are files that are easily moved. This can be a huge problem. How far does trust go? And how dangerous is the seemingly innocent "taking work home" event once and if an employee leaves the company?
World's Biggest Geoengineering Project Breaks UN Rules
Surface pricing: $499 for 32 GB, preordering starts today at 9am PT
In what way is the Surface RT more comparable to the iPad 2 and not the iPad 3.

The new iPad has a Retina display but beyond that ? (I'm talking about hardware)

You can't even buy an iPad 2 with more than 16GB anymore.
Show HN: Templated Webhooks
I'm building WebGun. It's SendGrid for Webhooks.

A key part of our service is support of a new approach to webhooks we have developed that is essentially "template-driven transformations for web hooks". The purpose of them is to enable your app's end-users to customise your webhooks via templates, and integrate them with other services in new and unexpected ways.

More detail here:

http://webgun.io/articles/templated-webhooks

We're pretty excited about the potential of templated webhooks, and the feedback so far has been very positive.

Very keen to get feedback from the HN community.
I'm a chemist and a software engineer. With all due respect there are a lot of similarities. People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property, whether its patents, copyrights, and or reasonable license fees, etc...
In addition to this, companies are required to pay the prevailing wage for that profession and location to foreign workers, so that they can not undercut Americans (or at least that was what was intended).

I have no idea how prevalent it is, but the mechanism I've heard for getting around these rules is to hire someone at a lower title than what they're qualified for, and then pay them the prevailing wage for that position, with the informal expectation that they'll do higher-level work in actuality (if for no other reason than to avoid boredom). For example, you hire someone at a game company into a QA position, but they're actually a graphics programmer, and once they're hired they sort of start doing more graphics programming even though it's not in their job description.
Why would I choose to use this over APF + BFD? http://www.rfxn.com/projects/advanced-policy-firewall/
Not to mention they are trying to sit between netbooks, laptops and tablets and they ship a USB 2.0 in 2012! DUH Microsoft!
Sure, and if there aren't hundreds of millions to be made in some area, the rules for that area might not change.

The point is that we should be very unexcited about the walled garden approach because it will exclude a lot of cool and fun and useful software. Even if they make an exception for high-grossing software, the whole idea is still a bad one.
Because it has a tablet form factor and UI but can also run desktop apps?
But this same line of thinking can be extrapolated on any system. OSX has a software store! Sure they let you install third party software now, but who knows what other restrictions they'll put on it later? Linux systems have software repositories! Sure they let you install software outside of these repos, but who knows what kind of restrictions they'll put on it later? The new version of my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive! Sure there's a DVD drive and USB, but who knows what other ports they're going to remove?

It's been a year since Microsoft announced Windows 8's restrictions. That's a pretty darn good run-up time, industry-wide. If/when they do put in some new restrictions, it's not going to be sprung on anyone overnight. All these articles are doing is spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about something that may or may not come to pass.
I don’t think it’s so bad. I quite like iTunes and there isn’t really any alternative out there (easy to sort through music library). That only applies to me, however, and may not necessarily apply to you.

The new one, however, seems like a pretty big improvement, very much unlike the iPad version, both aesthetically and functionally. What I want to know is whether the goddamn preferences dialog is still modal.
Uber closes down taxi service in NYC
That would be awesome of course, thanks!
64 GB with Black Touch Cover - $699.00

32 GB with Black Touch Cover - $599.00

32 GB without Black Touch Cover - $499.00
Introducing the New Romo, the Smartphone Robot
The Education Revolution: Coursera's co-founder speaks
"articles I actually learn from"

I think part of the thing that was great about a physical printed paper (I still receive the printed WSJ and NYT) is that you are exposed to things that you wouldn't normally think you would be interested in (you gave two examples of things that I wouldn't normally be interested in). Because these items are pushed to you and you browse past them.

That said it would be nice to be able to identify (ala netflix) articles that you would be interested in. Or at least articles that seem to be of interest to others that pop up all the time in the articles that you read. I've noticed that many of the HN top 20 commenters I never seem comments from presumably because they are posting comments on article that I don't read (or maybe they don't post anymore perhaps).

The other thing that is missing from HN is speed. The site is entirely to slow.
The site generates a .mobileconfig file, which is an Apple plist file in XML format. The API is public, and easily reverse-engineered from other .mobileconfig files.

The "app" that gets installed is actually a webclip, not a native iOS application. They embedded the icon as a base64 string inside the .mobileconfig.

The webclip opens mobile Safari in fullscreen, with a link in the format of "http://mocava.de/ios/parental-control/profiles/UNIQUE_ID/par..., where UNIQUE_ID ties back to the choices you made on the setup screen of their website. This will allow Mocava to track usage stats, which seems like a fair trade-off for a free service.

You could roll your own version of this using Apple's Configurator application, however Mocava has done a decent job of streamlining the setup and installation.
"Are the employees entitled to the 'artificial' supply limitation created by national boundaries?"

That's a very complex question. If you're talking about importing people then there is one set of answers, and if you're talking about outsourcing there's another.

Personally I think we should be more worried about the outsourcing. At least the people who come to the country in question and live there have similar costs, similar employment law and become part of the local economy. Where outsourcing happens there's no chance of competition at all because there's no such thing as health and safety in a lot of places.
I have only been coding for a couple of years and know the feeling. There are so many things you could know that thinking about it is intimidating. A few of things I think you should do...

1. There are a lot of free CS courses being put online. Start with the courses at Udacity.com they are the most "friendly" to start with. Then move up to the university level courses at coursera & edx.

2. Find a local user group. Connecting with other programmers in your area gives you a support network to ask questions to.

3. Study algorithms.

4. Write lots of little command line apps. Don't worry about them being useful just focus on making the code good.

5. If you are not already doing it take all the math classes you can.

You are 14 and that is a good thing. If you stick with it and keep learning you will be a badass when you are 18.
I was rather hoping the keyboard would be included with the package. I think Microsoft can ill afford to charge so much for an accessory that is pretty much a USP for their tablets.
Really like these music selects. Thanks for posting them.
Well there goes my morning. I love to read this high quality stuff, I wish all comments/submissions were this great!
3 tips on reaching out to create partnerships:
1) Keep the communication short and to the point
2) Provide an idea on how the partnership is of value to the person you are reaching out to
3) Make sure you have your elevator pitch on how your company can deliver on that idea

Here's the actual outreach email:

*
Hi,

At Sincerely, we create apps that allow people to take the photos from their phone and turn them into postcards (sincerely.com).

We have an app called Sincerely Ink (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sincerely-ink-cards-create/id...) where we would like to feature cards by Shepard for users to send around Election time.

Usually it costs 1.99 to send a card but in this case, we would let users send these for free to encourage people to get out and vote.

Let us know what you think.

Best,
Hua
It's worth reading JGC's blog post about Ada Lovelace [1]. He argues that she shouldn't be famous for being "the first computer programmer" (in fact it's not clear that she ever really understood the difference engine/analytical engine at all).

Instead, he says that she should be remembered for being the first person to realize that calculating machines weren't limited just to problems of arithmetic - that they might eventually be applied to music, art and other areas. Very prophetic!

[1] http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/lovelaces-leap.html
rada got it right, that's exactly how it works. It installs a configuration profile with restrictions on when you want to lock the device and a configuration profile without restrictions (an empty restrictions set) when you want to unlock the device.
Darpa Robotics Challenge Update, New Video of Petman/Atlas Humanoid in Action
Thanks for the explanation. I'd forgotten about mobileconfig.
Either it's sarcasm or he's thinking about AO (Adults Only) and saying Mature by mistake. AO is uncommon because no major console maker will let AO games on their system and no major store will stock them. Mature games are the most popular category of console games.