skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A very interesting read, but I'm missing one step:

Game recording is established as a favorable way to make games better, to avoid a crappy beta experience or problems right after launch.

How are you going to get decent recordings in the first place? Playing with a couple developers seems a lousy way to jump start a good selection of games, is it? How is this chicken and egg problem solved? I miss a way to bootstrap the process, load a good set of (varied, representative) replays?
European Space Agency agrees on budget and future of Ariane program
The underground art rebels of Paris
> I'd be surprised if there is a net gain for the US

You must be trolling

> Which country is Sweden exploiting? Which country is Switzerland exploiting?

Essentially trading manufactured goods for raw goods

> Agreed. What's your point?

You cryed "fixed pie fallacy", but it doesn't apply. "Such and such fallacy! Over!" cryes are extremely annoying.

> I'd say about 90% of Shenzhen was born in the country-side. You very seldom meet someone who was actually born in Shenzhen given that the city is ~30 years old.

If the government needs people in a new city, it will make sure that people will move to that city. But if a man born on the countryside wants to move to the city, he will not be allowed to do so, at least not near as easily as in any western country.

See. I am not arguing that China has a better way to run a country. I'm just saying that first world countries are no saints either.
How about a css sprite for bootstrap? A complement to the standard glyphicons would be awesome, and if you goal is to see Batch in many designs as possible, that would probably help (beautiful work btw)
The Ninja HTML & CSS3 Challenge
Huffington Post,IgniteGood Millennial Impact Challenge Reader's Choice Finalists
You need a native English speaking proof-reader:

You can open other islands
by solveing a tasks in alredy
opened.

I'm not ragging on your skills - my natural language skills are limited (to say the least) - but you need some assistance on that one. For example:

You can open other islands
by solving tasks on those
already opened.
Thank you very much for this. The website is amazing, UX is perfect and the content (the icons) is top-notch. I will someday re-pay you for this wonderful favor you've done to the community of designers like us, especially considering the fact that it's difficult to find good stuff without having to attribute the creator.
Always enjoy these articles. I do think that the simulation strategy deserves a bit more discussion, and the pitfalls of replays are glossed over slightly.

Simulating players gives you the benefit of end-to-end testing much more easily (for example, it tests your login flow and disconnect flow, both of which are often written without much care for performance). It also practically demands that you write a scripting console for your game, which is an invaluable resource for error testing, debugging and development both by your engine and content developers. It's true that human players are more unpredictable than bots, but that's not a drawback, because you want to stress-test the hottest part of your game. For these purposes, you can write a small test level (think an arena) and have bots spawn at either end and run towards each other, attacking until they die. This isn't at all representative of how players will play the game but it will very definitely catch performance regressions.

Replays depend on two factors, deterministic playback and unchanging content. Deterministic playback is possible (though extremely difficult) to achieve, but it really has to be a priority from the beginning, and it has to have its own testing suite and fixing regressions has to be a priority. It's impossible to retro-fit it onto an existing game (sometimes by design, as non-determinism occasionally is mistaken for randomness). Unchanging content is, obviously, unlikely to happen during development and is much more likely to be possible during betas, but during those time periods you have much more time to devote programmer and content developer time and attention to ancillary features like expanding bot programming.
Peter Molyneux Kicks Off First Kickstarter With Project GODUS
Call for Bletchley Park codebreakers to crack the D-Day pigeon cipher
Australian Govt pledges action on Google tax evasion
A game the scale of GW will have a dedicated QA department with at least a half-dozen testers, who are constantly playing the game anyway.
You may enjoy this animation of a dramatic reading of a bad review: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/558516
I know edofic and he's a cool guy, but man was I disappointed to find out this essay isn't about taking a laptop and traveling country to country while solving cool engineering problems remotely from random coffee shops and hotel rooms.

To be honest, I am a bit confused. Are there really people out there who don't switch stacks at a whim's notice? Whenever the job might be done better in a different technology?

This is a great time to be an expert generalist.
Can’t Be A Solo Founder. Bullshit
It is finished, in the sense like WebOS is finished.
You might want to look into the "incidence of coincidence", which is the probability that letters from two randomly chosen text's are the same. It can be changed to measure a single message, and gives a distinctive difference for english vs. random texts.
Thanks for the kind words! Attribution is optional, but always appreciated :)
This was the line that really grabbed me:
"I’ve come to believe that a good cry is like a carwash for the soul."
Beautiful!
SHOW HN: PYGA - A Python Google Analytics - Data Collection API
you have yet to give guix or nix a try. been using paludis in past and i can tell you that guix/nix is obvious evolution step :)
Now you can use google analytics from server side.
Possibilities? I guess there are many.
AIUI, the pro argument is that the Internet is international and should be controlled by an international body rather than the US government.
No doubts about the advantages of x86_64, I would insist on it in a new computer for virtualisation and encoding DVDs. But many people don't do much more on their computers than they can do on their highly restricted armv7 gadgets. Desktop software has reached a plateau IMHO, I don't think we can extrapolate from the 16->32 bit change. Gamers and IT professionals are a completely different beast of course.

How do you know that people hate change? Has anyone ever said "no, I don't want to run a 64-bit program, I've always been a 32-bit person"? People have to endure the crap in my grandparent post and that is what they hate and resist, especially if there is no tangible benefit to it. SSDs have entered the mainstream market much later and I have seen nothing but praise for them. SSDs are change too, often a painful one for a running system, but they solve an obvious problem.
:kids—an :nth-child tester
"You have a plan for human flight? That's so implausible I'm not going to even look at what it is. Chasing that dream looks a lot like gambling away your savings - worse, your lifetime - chasing after that one big win that's never going to come." - lmm's great-grandfather, 1902.
Community Builder Required
SSGS—Super Simple Grid Systems for the Web
DefinitelyTyped: TypeScript definitions for popular JavaScript libraries
Nice looking JQuery with Clojuresript
havent try guix yet, but with nix you can simply do:
nix-env -i vim or vimFull
and it should install it.

look in documentation at http://nixos.org/nix/ on how to install nix and drop on irc.freenode.org#nixos if having problems
This is pretty much exactly how it worked when I was there. I imagine when the team was smaller, they leveraged a combination of developer recordings + recordings from volunteer testers (the game had a group of volunteer testers in the high hundreds by the time I started working on it).

In particular QA recordings got used a lot to reproduce particularly tricky bugs and race conditions, since players usually weren't savvy enough to spot them.

The volunteer tester group was also useful for load testing, since it gave us a way to throw a hundred or so players at one of our development servers and record all of them simultaneously. It gave a reasonable approximation of what the load might look like on a single production server and it meant we could also capture recordings of how the servers (and clients) behaved under load instead of just having 4-8 developers playing on them.
That's the reason I really hope most of the software will be webbrowser-based in the future. I know that right now native apps give you a better overall experience but too often they pull you into the walled garden of hardware vendor.

There are solutions like phonegap etc. that let you write semi-native apps that use embedded browser inside it, but with HTML5 and successors I believe it will be possible to just have everything run in a browser, setting everyone free from any vendor specific solutions.
Is taking advantage of international tax havens "evil"?
Upvoted. Readers at the entrances sounds like a good compromise.
How to Sort Array List in Java
"Secret Intelligence Service - Target Elimination Specialist" wanted
They're right. Inside of themselves they realize, consciously or subconsciously, that death is the great motivator.

Death is, if anything, what forces people to break out of living other peoples' lives and start living their own. Even death can not do it for all people but without death and the sense of our mortality during our limited days alive hardly more than a few people would face things in their lives and go forward. Theoretically, a majority would probably just opt for postponing things "till tomorrow" for hundreds of years.
Q, get on it!

Screenshot in case they do: http://i.imgur.com/0UAcJ.png
The upside for the simulation problem is that many multiplayer games have something approaching bot AI to begin with - enemy AI - so you can use that as a starting point for those sorts of tests. I'm not sure if that was ever done at scale for GW testing, but it would have been possible...

My understanding is that the replays were possible because the game engine was architected from the beginning with the server 100% in control of game events and the clients relying on message-passing to communicate with the server. This means that the recording captured on the server is a definitive recording of what actually happened in the game. Clients could desync, so a replay might not reproduce that, but otherwise they were pretty accurate.

I'm not sure how the unchanging content problem was solved. I think everything was revision-controlled aggressively enough that it would have been possible to set up a local server instance using old content, and it's also possible that most ordinary changes (altering a texture, a map, etc) wouldn't actually change the results of a replay. Definitely a challenge, though.

Replays came in handy later on for other features (like letting players watch others' PvP matches in-game) so they probably ended up carrying their weight in terms of development effort. I do wonder if they felt like a burden initially, though, before their value became clear...
Would be awesome if its vector art based fonts like fontawesome.
Goed gedaan Maarten! Building a product in a weekend is always very cool, but to get on TechCrunch too is even better!!
Thank you. I went back and looked, and you're right, it seems that it didnt submit ALL friend requests, only about a hundrad apperently.

You can use this jQuery to click all friends who are clickable:

1) jQuery(".fbProfileBrowser .fcb.fwb.text").click()
Adam this is awesome, the fact that you refunded people who had already purchased is even more awesome

http://adamwhitcroft.com/2012/11/on-batch/

Really great work
Well.... yes and no. What happens if Google Docs goes down - or is killed?
If you work on sufficiently large projects or in enterprise there's a high cost in switching stacks even if a particular project could be done better in a different technology. When all your software runs on the same stack, or on a limited number of stacks, there's less friction - it's easier for people to move between stacks, it's easier for different projects to work together, it's easier to use all the libraries which have already been written etc.
> Isn't it compulsory to hash user passwords, as otherwise it would be a severe user data compromise? What should be done in this case?

No. It is not. There is no legal compulsion to hash passwords. I believe Visa and Mastercard do require their vendors to do so however or risk losing their ability to process credit card payments. I also think that there is some US healthcare law that somewhat requires it.

But in general there is no legal requirement to hash passwords. The lack of hashed passwords doesn't mean that there is a "user data compromise" within its own right.

The reason companies hash passwords is so that if they ever get broken into that it means the bad guy has to spend several days or weeks breaking the password database which gives the company time to notify the users and the users time to change their passwords.

Note: A lot of compromises go unnoticed and in those situations hashing offers little additional security (since the bad guy has infinity to crack the passwords).

Note #2: Hashing also makes implementation easier since the length of passwords becomes uniform and you essentially eliminate things like SQL injection (since the raw password is never stored in the database).
Can anyone tell me why one needs to learn Scala but not something else like Go or Node.js? Some other buzz word?
Javascript date library
Why are you learning it? It's a serious question no trolling.
Jeff Bezos the game changer
Nobel Prize winning biochemist says all biofuels are nonsense
Elon Musk - the Future of Energy & Transport
really liked it. just one thing: i'm not a native english speaker, so it takes me a little more time to tweet an answer. would be nice to have the timer to halt when typing...
to bragging to HN (Friday)
Depends on the document and jurisdiction. If I remember correctly, some levels of military classifications here in Finland require you to not read the document and return it to the officials. Of course the one who left the document would also get reprimanded at least.

Using someones password without permission is as illegal whether you shoulder surfed it, cracked it or red it from a post-it note.
That's one misleading name if you ask me - GUI+X
Right -- as improbable as that sounds, it pales in comparison to the likelihood of renovating your chimney and finding a pigeon with a coded message from WWII!
Dont call yourself a programmer (2011)
The real password is "Swordfish".
Friday deals may not be the best
I had a lot of rhetorical questions too. Also, Kevin's solution is not 100% waterproof - just looked through some "negative reviews" for ServInt and they weren't exactly negative. Maybe you could build a bayesian filter of some kind? (I'm not sure how Kevin filtered his reviews exactly?)
Wasn't this posted on HN just a couple of days ago?
I like that using technique, but why is it using and not typedef? I thought using was meant for exposing names from superclasses.
And the weight of the hard drive would clearly be the cause of the pigeon getting pulled down into the chimney and unable to get out.
Wow. I have in my possession some really similar looking crypted pages form an Italian partisan of the WWII (prepared and parachuted by the English forces).

It seems to me that the situations might be analog. How can I contact them? I see that they are asking for help but I don't see contact info.
A more transparent internet where all the sites are abusing their knowledge of the algorithm to improve page ranking.
It would be awesome if someone made a vector font for these like FontAwesome: http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/
Obviously a joke. "This role is particularly appropriate for those who like their martinis shaken and not stirred."

Made me wonder though, how MI5 do advertise. Found this: https://www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/mobile-surveillance.aspx

"A valued member of a diverse team, you’ll follow subjects of national security investigations by foot and by car. Your observation skills, quick thinking and ability to fit into your environment means you’ll be able to make a big contribution."
Baku FC name 21 year-old as manager based on computer game experience
Code Triage
How I brought my bounce rate down from 80% to 12%
I use WebOS in two devices (a pre2 and a touchpad) every day and am pretty happy about it. I think Enyo rocks and is available everywhere and that WebOS is more user friendly than iOS and Android.

Now, how does that compares to GNU Hurd?
Job reference code
007
Or, just maybe, it's not a joke at all? ;)
This would call for a primer in Bayesian inference. Actually, all medical practice would benefit from understanding it.
Great! I'm really fond of the idea of icon fonts and I'd like to use some of those icons on a web project of mine that I'm working on. I shall bookmark the link :)
One man's premature optimisation is another man's common sense...

You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization

You can get metrics for sequences of text here: http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/

Or, more here, if you're (somehow) not bored yet: http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/dissent.html
Your game sounded interesting. But the site does not have a prominent "Click Here To Be Notified When The Game Is Available To Buy" button.

It should. "Marketing" details like that will make as much or more difference in the game's success as the quality of the game itself. Go add this NOW, before the Hacker News effect tails off.
Now imagine everything dries up, and there is nothing to go back to. No possibility of a job to fall back on.
> since all objects in space are visible

The majority of objects in space are not visible to us. They only become visible when near and bright enough. Even known comets such as Halley are not visible to us most of the time.
Wasn't this posted and trending on HN just a couple of days ago.
Sinatra arg - Return a specific argument from the url
Interesting. And similar to what I discovered. I graphed my two most recent experiences being on the front page of HN:
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/whats-the-front-page-of-hack...

While is is fun to see 30K visitors in a day, it's daunting and can play merry hell with your hosting bill if you're not careful.

Still, probably better than languishing in obscurity!
It's a dilemma. For now there is good money to be made in these ecosystems, there are people that are really raking it in (and in an above-board way). At the same time you're setting yourself up with your head on the chopping block, after you've sharpened the blade with your labor.

Personally I would never build something that is not as much as possible stand alone (so without reliance on some third party controlled eco-system, of course everything needs hosting, bandwidth and power but those are commodities). But I have to counter that with the fact that I realize I'm losing out on quite a few opportunities.

Choices, choices. Long term vs short term.
Yes it is obviously a joke ... at least that's they want you think what it is :D
I just added a Slant for this topic so we can collaboratively explain both sides: http://slant.co/topics/is-google-s-freeandopen-internet-camp...
The Jelastic Spotlight: Douglas Ireland and MyTeamsBetter
OTOH, the west would probably support any kind of stable government there. KSA doesn't have seem to have much else other than oil, so they would have to cooperate as well. Foreign support may provide credentials to the ruling family, but in the end it's the citizens (or in their case, subjects) that define their collective fate.
>It's pretty easy to turn up this complex of beliefs and signaling and ideas: just talk to people about greatly extending the healthy human life span. Your average fellow will disavow such an idea, even if it comes with good health all the way. Oh no, they will say, why would anyone want to live for such a time. I'll be glad to go.

I don't think this is so. People cling to life to extreme measures. What they don't like is the actual process of aging, losing relatives and friends, their health, and so on.

That affects what they respond to even if you ask them about "extending the healthy human life span" even if it comes with good health all the way, because the pain of aging is real, whereas the "good health all the way" thing they know to be a pipe-dream.

If you could demonstrably show them the "extension + good health all the way" they would JUMP at it. Especially if it could include their loved ones too (people don't merely want to live, like some primitive organism, they want to live with a certain quality and in certain company).
I know some folks at GCHQ. Email me via my profile here and I will put you in contact.
Windows 8: A soaraway Kinect? Or is it Red Ink Friday for Microsoft?
Post the scans or transcripts please!
While much has been published about the German Enigma system I've not seen much about the British equivalents during WW2.

If this message was produced using a one time pad - which is practical for short messages - then it may be very difficult to decypher.
>I never want to be dead. Ever.

Sure, everybody says that at some point. But when you're too old, sick and aching, and with your friends/family gone, do you really believe you'll think exactly the same?
The Beards of Silicon Valley
I got 5 questions in a row like 'Do you want to meet there at that time?' which were direct twitter messages to specific people. This needs more filtering as others have commented.

It bugs me to see this on TechCrunch and HN when there are great submissions that did not get such opportunity (example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804373).
Haha geeze, the crowd here is brutal. I don't think the writer is saying that he has the objectively worst life, and everyone should feel bad for him. It's just a microcosm of the human experience. This article is showing that, even in our prosperous country, a relatively successful person can feel the same pain of failure and rejection that everyone feels at some point. The rich and poor all struggle to find out who they are and what their place in life is.

This isn't a contest of who suffered the most. Even though dying is common, it doesn't mean a death is trivial. Personal experiences should be able to be shared without marginalization.
For some reason this article doesn't mention the MS soaraway "Kin" mobile phone success ;)

Though I suppose technically speaking that wasn't MS's own hardware, they just bought the company.
It's nice to see more and more C++ articles.

Some additions:

- The least you allocate on the heap, the better. Move semantics really help in that aspect;

- Smart pointers are not magic. Although I really think using unique_ptr whenever possible is a good idea, shared_ptr comes with a performance cost (especially in multithreaded environments), can introduce vicious memory leaks and is often used as an excuse to not think your lifetime cycle through.
Uh, in Central London I count at least 6 operated by the council or Met or Transport for London (unclear actual ownership of the outdoor ones but they're mounted on public poles and accessible by Met for criminal investigations). This is a short commute. Seems rather pervasive that I'm tracked visibly for about 70% of the distance covered on foot.
Clean your Work Station in the Office to Improve
Remaking the Greatest Game in History: What's next for Black Mesa?