skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bought Far Cry 3 the other day, but had some problems playing it. Specifically, there are bugs in the key bindings mechanism, where some vehicles are stuck on the default key maps, even though the keys are configured differently in the preferences.

I looked into the key map preferences file, and it's fairly clear how the key mapping is implemented in the game: the defaults are hard-coded in, and "mapping" is implemented by basically having a search-and-replace filter on the incoming key stream. It's no wonder there are bugs; it seems that not all places that check for input run the input through the filter. What's missing is an indirection between the concepts of a keystroke and a command.

But the particularly revealing thing was when I went onto the Ubisoft forums to discuss the issue. The forum for Far Cry 3 Console has about 15x as many posts as the Far Cry 3 PC forum.

If revenues are similarly lopsided, it would explain why the PC version - the HUD and input system in particular - is such a crappy console port. It's because PC players are an afterthought, a minor bit of loose change to pick up after the bulk of the market has been addressed.

And in turn, the PC experience, from opening the box to getting the game running, is so unpleasant it turns more and more gamers away from the platform. It's not available on Steam in the UK, so I got the package in the mail. Ubisoft didn't even use proper plastic for the DVD box, it's all floppy and squeezable, like the plastic used for tomato ketchup or mayonnaise bottles. Ubisoft did almost everything they could to show their contempt for PC players.

So I am not optimistic for the future of PC games.
Try meditation for 10 days - its working for me
SEEKING WORK
Remote, based in Tel Aviv, Israel

Specialities:
Full stack web dev (LAMP + Node.js + Redis)

about.me/udiudi
twitter.com/udiudi
github.com/udiudi
Live server load statistics with Server-Side Events (EventSource)
Are there people that blog and then not post it?
Comic: This Is Why Your Email Was Hacked
i think it's obvious he'd rather spend countless hours at the workbench than do that :D
It could be as simple as Blow declining to donate his game to MoMA, too.
I am becoming fascinated by finding better ways to document and communicate about code - not just writing good docs as part of checkin but, well lets say we take on a feature.

We should propose how to implement that feature, (spec) get some feedback, go do it, review the implementation against the spec and even then I would want to have a sort of stack overflow Q&A site so people can ask why did you do that ?

Anyone else feel we are missing a whole boatload of tricks?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/swap-your-laptop-ipad-li...

The photo suggests several items to carry and keep track of, and then assemble to work. A small light laptop is one box. Seems easier to me (chuck the one box into the bag and off).
Also have it and did the same upgrade. It seems the only (or one of the few) upgradable Zenbooks. Others have SSD or RAM soldered on the board. Needed some special screw drivers though (torque 5) in order to open it.

Ubuntu is running on it, has some quirks currently, but runs quite well, although I had to remove the splash from the UEFI boot options to have it boot from a USB stick. Without any special power saving options used (like having the dedicated graphics chip turned off) I get between 3 and 4 hours of battery. Once I have time I will try to tweak the Linux a bit to consume less energy, turn a few things off (keyboard backlight, bluetooth, lower screen brightness) , I should be able to get up to 7 hours of battery or so. On text-mode only I might even get more.

The screen is really bright and has nice colors.

Only thing I didn't like was the trackpad, so I'm mostly on keyboard.
I agree with this, but have had trouble getting support for the idea of focusing on documentation among my coworkers. The major concern is that comments can rot as code changes and the comments/documentation are not updated to reflect the changes.

It's my opinion that it should just be part of the developer's discipline to update documentation as they update code, but this seems not to be practical when not everyone shares my idealism for documentation. What ways are there to get buy in from those that need to be convinced about the value of documentation?
I feel you would get less work done running or walking on one of these, and you would also not get much exercise value out of it.

It would be better to take breaks often, and every other day take a 1 hour break to do a proper set of exercises in a gym, playing a sport or just running or biking outside.
The problem is that C wipes the floor with C++ in high-performance apps, while any scripting engine wipes the floor with C++ in terms of abstraction. C++ is simply losing the war to the combination of C with scripting.
Haha, true. I do not actually use it at the moment either, I just figured it could be fun.
Because the fact that a game contains art doesn't necessarily imply that it is art. I can also take a gymnasium, commission art for the walls and music to be played as people exercise and so forth. I doubt that people would consequently consider the gymnasium to be itself art, despite the fact that art no doubt went into its creation.

A film could also feature excellent writing and beautiful visual art, but the art of film comes not from those individual elements being present, but the artistry present in their use together. The thing that makes film an art is the combined whole of those individual elements, which is why you can have a film that is not good as a film despite having, say, spectacular acting or sharp cinematography or a beautiful score.

So the question is, can the artistic elements of games be combined in such a way that the whole result, not just the individual elements, is artistic?
Why should we ? Google+ does it, Apple does it, Dropbox does it. I've disabled this feature on all of them, but this is hardly new.
It's obvious now that social networks have moved past micro-blogging & articles. Pictures are the new focal point of sharing. They're all angling to make their apps more sticky by lowering the friction of photo sharing.

As long as they provide commonsensical & easy to understand privacy controls & a way to download all your data, I'm fine with it. I can even accept the argument that it's a nice convenience to have, phones get stolen, devices are starved for local storage, sensors are getting bigger & so is the data they generate.

The problem is, & it's a HUGE one, is an account is a password away from being hijacked. People better educate themselves about security (two step auth) & be careful what they upload.
Nobody Is Crying For You When You Are Worth Billions
>The choice to specialize the term in a highly-gendered manner is unnecessary, particularly when it reinforces common stereotypes and using it adds nothing to the actual point being made.

It does: it presents the point in a well understood idiom, something people can easily relate to, not to mention being statistically correct. It also avoids him self-censoring his speech because of what some vocal over-tight prudes might think. The republican right does enough censorship --there's no need for a progressive censorship to pile up on it.

>As for your “cultural imperialism“, “provincialism”, those terms have specific meanings which aren't relevant - they are not simply free passes for you not to have to think about topics which make you uncomfortable.

No, they are perfectly relevant here. You come here thinking that your little PC diatribe applies the world over. It is not.

There are cultures in perfectly modern western societies that view those PC notions with ridicule (of which "So he said mom to imply non-tech-savvy-person? Big f'n deal" is the more polite version), if not frown upon them. Not everyone shares the very protestant hypocrisy of covering their past crimes (e.g racism, sexism) with current guilt.

To project that PC ideology (and to ask to enforce it) to the international HN audience is the very core of provincialism, in the sesse of the George Bernard Shaw quote: "[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature".
Assuming Unity interface, most software would assume mouse level pointing accuracy or keyboard short-cuts. I imagine an older iPad model would be cheap enough to buy second hand and try it...
TechXploration PayPal
Follow the money - were there any campaign contributions?

Check the lobbyist sign in sheets.

This was one of broken promises from the first campaign, lobbyists are still alive and well in the whitehouse.
Thanks for the great comment... I couldn't have said it better myself... The tutorials are written to follow, play and then create your own variations of what you just learned.
The retina display is nice to look at when coding :)

My current workflow is to just put one Emacs buffer in it, and I also use one of the two 30" displays for a whole bunch of Emacs buffers, and the other 30" display has browsers and other stuff. But I'm still evolving it. I have a coworker who just leaves his laptop shut and uses the two 30" displays in this setup.
Actually, the "single-most simplest animation or interactivity" (plus things far more advanced that that) can be achieved with like 1-2 lines of javascript, and sometimes not even one line, using declarative css transitions and such.
and there is resistance to using the free software alternatives, thus leading to a cycle where the free software alternatives don't get feedback/criticism.

Teenagers especially are really influenced by brands. I keep suggesting that 'industry standard' = 'same as all the others' and that being a bit different might be a good idea. No dice.
It is a nice idea, but I am still skeptical on how somebody can improve his speaking skills just based on virtual "stuff". It is almost like learning to code just by writing out code by hand on a paper. This needs a lot of video integration in order to work.

I think you'll be surprised.

A hurdle many speakers have to get over is to be able to listen to what you're actually saying rather than what you think you're saying. Video is a great trick for that.

I very nice hack I learned from @johannakoll was to do my sessions to Silverback (http://silverbackapp.com/) or some other screen + webcam recording device. Being able to watch yourself speak with your slides is a hugely useful tool to spot problems and improve. It allows you to see yourself as your audience sees you.
Concept art vs. character models: A visual comparison (gallery)
I like both ideas of email and notification. I was asking if there is a mobile app for that because I am travelling with my phone and without my laptop.
"Year of the"... pfft. I invoke Yodwin! (The unknown distant relative of Godwin)
With any interpreter or vm you have to factor in the LOC of that technology, so I think your measure is not accurate for calculating the statistical likelihood of defects. Also there is the significant added complexity in things like a JIT and bugs by side-effect, (e.g. the runtime hit by garbage collection sweeps).

Admittedly for Lua the increase in size is not so big, what is the compiled interpreted now, like 200kb? In any case, it is certainly longer than the comparable C++ program.

I agree with you completely that a more significant factor to correctness is in the "legibility" of the code to the author/maintainer. If you can read Lua better than you can read C++, one should by all means use Lua whenever possible because you will produce fewer defects.

I think your point about why the industry focuses on java/c# when it requires the same overhead in code to c++ is exactly why there is a recent "resurgence" in c++ . The whole back to native is a recognition that java (especially j2me) and c#/.NET has failed to deliver on most of its marketing promises. It isn't to say they don't have compelling visions, but in the end they don't offer any more than C++ and you get alot more portability and predictability.

Just my $0.02.
I can feel your pain.. Maybe you can convince them to update atleast the docstrings and use some documentation generation tool? That's mostly only API docs but still... it's near the code that is touched and should be just on the screen while changing code :)
Trust. (Why simple concepts make hard problems)
I'd add:

* Learn Factor instead of Forth - it's similar, but modern :)

* Try logic and declarative paradigms (Prolog, Mozart...)
Crooks inject malicious Java applet into FOREX trading website
The whole concept of "sending party network pays" is just an elaborate wordplay. Relay-switched telecommunications networks are inherently symmetric. The concept of a "sending" party is meaningless; the originating party pays. This makes a lot of sense, since the originating party is the one in a position to decide whether to place the call and therefore should bear the cost.

By renaming the originating party to the "sending" party, they can redefine YouTube/NetFlix/whoever as the "sending" party even though the user is the originating party. Thus they attempt to justify denying the user the service which they already have paid for unless they receive the appropriate kickbacks^W "fees" from whoever is serving the data.
Most people don't consider soap operas or game shows to be art, but they undergo all the same stuff movies do. (And some people regard them as different kinds of art and other people as simply "bad art".)

Differently, it bothers me that people hear "game" and think "on a computer". Is football art? Or is Remember the Titans art? Or is National Football League 2012 art?
This is a lovely idea. If nothing else it gives conference organisers a place to point folk to who are nervous/new to speaking - which is a common question I get. Well done.
Ask HN: Any cool accessories or special use cases for iPad Mini?
I live in Brazil and I'm about to get the iPad Mini from a friend who's bringing it down. I've never had an iPod, iPhone, nor iPad so I'm curious to know what kinds of cool things I can do with it or attach to the Mini once I get it. An official Apple store will be opened here in Rio and Amazon is apparently going to open a virtual store (plus warehouse) here, so I'm hoping accessories will become easy to buy.

My first DIY 'accessory', being that I live where I live, will be a book with the pages cut out. No one will want to steal a book. In any regard, what I'll be wanting to do is to use it for work, if possible, but for that I'll need a good keyboard. Can you recommend one? My 2010 MBA's battery has run its course and the computer heats up and gets a bit slow after an hour's use, thus having an iPad+keyboard to work from (mostly just using Google Docs/Drive and Gmail) would be great.

Btw, by 'special use cases', I mean just that (not, for ex., leather cases for the iPad).
"...they just want to be able to play with Photoshop because that's The Thing."

This is the problem. Marketing is really effective to teenagers as they have not worked out the reality behind the branding yet. So free software gets less feedback and a smaller user base and so it goes...

"commercial software is the standard"

I'm just hoping that using 'the standard' gets a bit old and being different becomes a bit more popular.
There was a study I remember seeing referenced a while ago (I think it was in an article about the Mayo clinic guy Levine) where the big point was that if you spent essentially most of your workday sitting, then an hour at the gym doesn't undo that. With this approach I can walk 3 - 6 miles while working. I'm not trying to get my heart rate up to cardio levels obviously; I'm just walking. And I'm not saying I'm a role model for perfect health, etc...
Hacker Selling Java Zero-Day Vulnerability Online
The CL spec is about 1000 pages printed, C++11 around 1300, but the CL spec is written in a more verbose style AFAIK. The R5RS Scheme specification is 50 pages.
There was a lengthy article I read a number of years ago - the source escapes me (maybe Technology Review) - that described their process at length. To call what they do "research" or "inventing" is to twist those words beyond all meaning. They contract with a number of domain experts in various fields, fly them into Seattle as consultants, and hold multi-hour brainstorming sessions where they basically throw a bunch of loose concepts at a whiteboard and see what sticks.

Like all patent trolls, they basically identify where a valuable invention is likely to occur sometime in the future, have lawyers draw up a sufficiently vague patent application, and spray and pray - and then prey.

There is zero follow up - no prototyping, no CAD files, no R&D, no clinical trials, no betas, no execution - it goes from nebulous "idea" straight to the legal department. If Myhrvold is an inventor, then Arthur C. Clarke's estate should get royalties on every satellite in orbit, and Gene Roddenberry's should get a piece of every iPhone sold.

Wait, I take that back - Myhrvold is an inventor after all. He's the Henry Ford of patent trolling - a pioneer in its mass production.
What's sad is the conformist turn this thread has taken. What happened to the rebelious spirit of the internet generation? People shouldn't make judgments based on somebody's clothing. We are supposed to be beyond the point where one needs to be "pleasurable to everyone" in order to be respected. Also, if anything, shirt-and-tie clothing is quite impractical, how about putting some brains to work to come up with self-cleaning/self-healing clothes?

Another thing: by creating a strong impression of seriousness, jacket-and-tie creates a false , narcissistic sense of self-worth that can limit the true drive to succeed and that's a sad, sad thing when it happens. It's just an appearance after all.

Taleb may have been referring to certain "conference-whores" [1] who dress up like geeks to fit into the crowd. Hopefully, in science and technology, actions matter more than words and dress up, and that's one of the reasons we like it.

[1]http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/13/be-careful-not...
I would bet it's a lot simpler than that:

I bet they couldn't find enough evidence to make a case about anything.

Antitrust cases are expensive, long, and require a lot of evidence of very specific types of injuries.
CSS Frameworks for Responsive Web Design
There's a relationship between these two themes of "multitasking iz 4 n00bz" and "dropping friends who are not makers/builders/hackers/achievers/doers" but who ruminate and cannot fix their problems.
I'm calling this 'the oatmeal argument' and it has considerable force.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

Is Windows 8 not available for download in Bolivia? If so is that some silly regional trade reason? Or are network speeds too low?
I don't know about other coders but as one myself, I find the visual metaphors, wording and control selection parts much less daunting than the other stuff. They're just as important (maybe more so) but I find them easier to tackle because the choices feel less subjective and easier to reason about.

On the other hand, choosing colours, typography and designing the general "chrome" for a site is a nightmare. It's so subjective and non-intuitive (to me at least), yet has a huge effect on making or breaking the overall design. It's maddening!
I know for the stage I ran at Agile 2012 we looked for things like:

* videos of speaking

* links to existing decks

* feedback on talks from twitter, speakerrate, etc.

If we couldn't get any of that I sometimes asked for a few minutes of video of them just pitching their talk idea. I know other stages at Agile 2012 did that to. The "video snippet" idea is one I've seen a few places. The folk who organise IxDA's Interaction conference have done it the last few years for example.
Fly in Newly Added Content to a Page
Download Introduction to Magnetic Materials e-book
Microsoft Is Stupid to Attack Google
I don't think the unicorn designer myth is true. We exist, there's just lack of people willing to pay for it. I design and develop and still find it difficult to find work. As you mentioned, it's a cost issue.

As an aside, I hate the idea of a visual designer that doesn't know markup, and someone else being responsible for building it - this does not make sense.
Show HN: Office World
I saw it as a nice counterpoint to frontend people who won't look at server code because they're designers or something.., or backend people who won't care about Javascript because its dynamic...

in that sense I identify with full-stack.
..wow! This is impressive.
IPhone killer is around the corner
> customers paying for a guaranteed percentage of high-QoS
> bandwidth during peak network load

This and all similar ideas are very dangerous.

Compare pure commercial networks (mobile SMSes, ISDN) with Internet which has academic background.

What is the right direction for Internet? Why we talk about paid QoS packets ideas and not about Google Fiber?
Macports installs everything from source. That is, it is not a binary package manager.
FTC should proceed with case against Google
Windows 8 isn't available for sale, for some reason. I don't know why. I can download a Windows 7 pirated version easily in 7 hours, I doubt network speeds are the culprit here.
Even if that was a real effect I'd imagine it would be hard to spot. The alternative, that they're seeing what they expect to see seems just as likely, if not more.
Well what would you offer instead?
Microsoft Disses IE Haters
The server room scene could of been silent if the hardware was using fan-less chip-sets.

There are some silent data-centers that use no fans. The only noise would be high-frequency electrical hum. So, for a "future" concept, it works.

As far as the Fancy Graphics, its exactly where hacking is going. Metasploit Framework has an interested graphical interface program called Armitage which reproduces the command-line format into graphical imagery. Considering where the "future" is heading, most of the command-line will be shifted towards a hybrid approach of scripts run via graphical interfaces with CLI tucked in neatly.

The movie failed hard but, did have "proof of concept" pseudo-foreshadowing.
Love the cookbook idea, thanks :)
Scientists develop 'bionic eye' which could restore sight to the blind
Love the dirty tricks idea, thanks :)
Monsanto is a evil company. No other word comes to mind.
It would be for me too, but that's mostly personal preference. I like the biggest damn screen I can get so I can fit more code on it (my home laptop is an 18.4" 1920x1080). But you can code just fine on a generic 13" screen, too, you'll just scroll more. (and my home laptop never travels, so it doesn't matter that it's a billion pounds).
And Manhattan is an island. Yet, somehow, Manhattan has found a way to hold far more people than San Francisco. I
Tasks and oranges
>Building up harms quality of life.

Proof? There is no shortage of demand for housing in Manhattan, despite massive "building up" there.
GitHub hit with major service outage after three minor outages..
Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?
For me:

Life: deciding that I wanted to take care of my body.

Programming: deciding that I wanted to master 1 new tool and a language every year. Last year was Python/Emacs and this year it is Rust/DTrace.
Opensource online support chat shows there interface
Is This a Netflix Killer?
Perhaps whoever down-voted me can tell me where I was wrong so I can learn?
why are you fighting the reality?
where is .NET, Java ...