skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know how having experienced it myself. In my case I was almost stuck in the French Alps using Google Maps on the iPhone. It had taken me off the autoroute onto a national highway that turned into a country road that eventually turned to a dirt road. The rental car's built-in GPS (which I had switched off earlier because it had given me bad directions before) actually came through this time. On the way back I used the directions one of the locals gave me to use the newly opened autoroute instead.

I used to laugh when I heard stories like this in the news. But in my case it's dark, we're all tired, in an unfamiliar location, and I'm busy looking for sign/landmark/anything to get me pointed in the right direction. And, it managed to snow (this was in May). So when you're doubting yourself and not sure what decisions to make guess who doesn't have that problem? The little 4-inch box sitting on your dashboard who is speaking with absolute authority that you need to make a right in 400-meters.

And that is why people get stuck in the places they do sometimes.
While I like the idea of changing the shape of the map during the game I think the point about player created content falls flat.

There's significant modding, mapmaking, AI etc. communities for many games. In fact in this day and age I'd say it's smart to outsource that to the users to a good degree and provide excellent tools+some support.

Then again this seems to be a 2005 article about a 1993 game and I don't even recall what the situation was like in 2005. Probably a lot less modding etc.
Criticizing what someone has made with middlebrow dismissiveness is one thing but pointing out that taking on a legally and commercially entrenched industry will be hard and here are some of the specific challenges is entirely valid.

I think the original question is worth picking apart if the answers are being criticized.

>Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?

> I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started?

The original question is worse (by a long way) than most of the answers. Most of the answers pointed out the major challenges or suggested better ways to achieve the vaguely stated aims although there were some useless dismissals.

The question indicates (possibly wrongly) a massive lack of understanding of the business "Basically, my understanding...[something basically right but oversimplified]". It is badly punctuated "fox" rather than "Fox", 'dont' rather than "don't". The question also fails to really be clear about what he wants to do. Does he really want to run a cable company maintaining wires in the ground and boxes in homes? Or is this mostly about securing more favorable and flexible content deals? Or is there an implicit assumption that he needs to own the cables to get the deals? What scale does he want to start on? A small town/city or national?

I didn't see the original question while it was active but if I did I would have pointed out how hard such a business is to break into especially if top grade content is required due to the maze of exclusivity contracts and the value of them which means massive amounts of money are needed to make the sellers choose non-exclusive options. Even companies like Microsoft and Sony with massive deployed platforms (Xbox and PS3 in particular) need prolonged negotiations to get any content and aren't anywhere near being able to offer full cable replacements and even with their own content Sony can offer only what is not exclusively licensed elsewhere.

However that doesn't mean that the video space can't be attacked as Netflix is showing but it will in my view need to be an indirect attack that builds audience until it can compete head to head for the major deals and content as a viable distribution platform and pricing model. Note that when the competition really starts costs may rise not fall as the platforms will compete for the most important content potentially driving up content prices for all the distribution platforms.
In dynamic languages? Sure they may. The PHP script you thought works crashes, the Lisp routine out of the sudden enters the debugger, things like that.
= 0.1 quantitative easements, and will provide 1000x more boost to the economy.. What are we waiting for?
>People who have made a concious decision to support the producer of the content.

Pirates are those that proportional spends more money to support artists and producers, than those that do not pirate. Many make very conscious decisions in regard to independent labels, so that money gets funneled to those that need them mostly.

As for your comment as a whole, rationalization to explain political motives is as old as politics itself. Worker movement = people who just want more wages and work less. Social reforms = people who want free money. Medical reforms = people who want free medical care. Tax abolition = people want to spend less money on taxes. Green movement = ...

Sorry, the argument of rationalization to explain political motives are a horrible bad argument.
Thanks for the link. Very interesting stuff.
I heard similar stories about Google Maps a few years ago, people getting stuck in US desert/parks because the GPS is incorrect (and also reception wasn't good back then, but that might have improved by now maybe).

At least this story is hitting the HN front page. Because the park rangers were hitting Google's traditionally deaf customer service ears (which must have been super-frustrating because people had already died and/or gotten into life-threatening situations).

I lost the link to that article, sorry. If I happen upon it, I'll post it here.

On the one hand I suppose it's people's own fault for venturing into dangerous terrain unprepared. But on the other hand, what's the use of having GPS Maps when you don't know when it's trustworthy or not? Great effort by OpenStreetMap (read below) of cross-checking their own maps for consistency with competitor maps, is at least a step in the right direction.
I always intended to start a blog properly with a post about this topic (I am the one that he refers to in the article), but I never quite got round to it... and so the full article has been sitting mostly written for about fifteen months and entirely written for about ten months. I don't understand myself. And as for the bug report which I should have filed two years ago when I first discovered the issue...

The `transform` approach is interesting; I never tried to find a workaround for it but just accepted it (again, rather than filing the necessary bug report...).

"If there isn't a bug reported for it, the bug doesn't exist."
I think most of side-projects are meant to enjoy the process of building and try new technology. So I would not want a friend to build "my" side-project using his skills and choice of technology. It's something I need to build. I enjoy the process.
Google's Mr.Maps
Slim (http://www.slimframework.com/) is built around modern features of PHP 5.3/5.4 like closures and is similar to Sinatra/Express.js
"Go ahead and jump! What's the worst that could happen? Ohhhh, I just thought of the worst thing. Ohhhhh, there, I just thought of something worse!"
Justin Bieber had just 70k YT views [1] before he was discovered by Scooter Braun. He didn't make it big until he was signed with Braun and Usher. 70k views in 2008 wasn't nothing, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume he would have grown to his current 3+ bn views, becoming an international A-lister, and a household name without signing with a major label.

YouTube and online help nobodies become somebodies. Labels help somebodies become megastars. The bottom end is rising, and the top end is compressing, but I don't believe we'll ever see them equalize.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2011/02/11/inside-th...
Local police post mugshots on Pinterest, leading to a 57% boost in arrests
Perhaps but that doesn't make piracy good. It might make it an unavoidable side effect of something that's good, but that's a different thing.
According to the "About The Author", it was you. According to me, it's a low-content, highly SEO'd page. Flagged.
Japan pedal power aims for human flight record
These products and others allowing one to save text or code to Github seem to be begging for Github to introduce a staging feature in the API. It would allow saving code Into an intermediate uncommitted state, but could even be implementing as a lightweight stash-like feature. A set of changes could be individually stored or just committed through UI/API.
Have you actually read the thread he was complaining about? Most (but not all) was very reasonable with specific challenges to be overcome (which if he really wants to do this he should want to know about) and in many cases some suggestions and/or alternative approaches to achieving his apparent aim (different subscription pricing model).
>70k views in 2008 wasn't nothing, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume he would have grown to his current 3+ bn views without a major label.

You just proved my point that if the world likes what you're doing (70k+ views), you're bound to get a lot of attention more easily. It's also easier to get an initial presence too. Prior to "web 2.0" the chances of him being discovered would be practically non-existent considering he was just a kid doing covers of his favorite songs. Back to the original point; the middle man isn't as crucial as he used to be.
Does anyone have metrics on how many people actually scan QR codes? I'd count my self as pretty technical and except for a few attempts years ago for novelty value I've never scanned one. I can't imagine non-technical people even knowing what these are but their recent proliferation makes me wonder if maybe I'm wrong.
My life's work to collect what little I have means nothing while things like this are going on. I might go borrow millions of dollars too, because everyone is under the assumption that no one is paying anything back when the whole ship goes down.
> While I agree with the main premise of the article, that game designers need to take a critical, uninfluenced look at the genres they design games for, it feels like the author hasn't attempted to play a game in the last 10 years.

The article was written in 2005 so that seems like a correct assessment.
Intelligence Council Predicts 3D Printed Organs, Megacities, Brain Chips by 2030
or broscience
This reminded me of Richard Branson (the Virgin guy) and a post by James Altucher. I think James' point is that to do something huge, like start a new airline, you always have to find the next step. Pretty basic really, break a big task into smaller pieces. But worth a read nonetheless, it really goes into OP's question.

"Q: How do you know when you’re thinking too big or aiming too high (if that’s even possible)?"

"A: In the mid-90s I had an idea that lasted about the amount of time it takes to drink two beers. I say this because I had the idea at a bar and it was quickly squashed by the two friends I was with

(...)

My real problem was: I didn’t have confidence. And I didn’t know what the next step was. In retrospect, I should’ve written down my idea, written down ten ideas for possible shows to launch with, and started pitching TV companies to get someone to partner with me on it. That would’ve been simple and not taken too much time before there was some payoff."

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/how-do-you-know-when-youre-thin...
If all of your tests are integration tests and something fails, you have no idea which part of your stack the problem is in.

Not necessarily, because if you have a lot of integration tests then probably multiple ones will fail given a bug in a certain module, and the pattern of the failures might be all you need to locate the source of the problem.

One of the most successful projects I ever worked on, in robustness/quality terms, didn't really have any unit tests at all, but it had a comprehensive suite of end-to-end test cases that could be run automatically. Many of those didn't (and couldn't) have an absolute true/false outcome, either, but looking at the results they generated and applying various heuristics developed from experience, they were remarkably useful for similar reasons to unit tests.
Cloud Logging with Log4j
It's partially an answer to jiggy2011's question from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4898861, but I think it's worth mentioning separately.

There's a very good sentence in SO thread - j_random_hacker's: "Every programmer has a probability distribution of bug locations; the smart approach is to focus your energy on testing regions where you estimate the bug probability to be high."

So Kent Beck is not skipping some tests because he thinks he's awesome (as jiggy2011 said it sounds like); he does that because he can anticipate, from experience, that a particular type of bug is of very low probability for him, because he knows he's unlikely to make it. Like, for example, I tend not to put + instead of ++ in C++, so I can be pretty confident my code is free of these types of errors. Everyone needs to estimate his probability distribution for oneself (factoring for unknown unknowns) and test accordingly. The more experience one has, the better the estimate.
Ah yes, I was watching it on my phone. Just rewatched it in 1080p and see what you mean.
A language able to do multi-paradigm programming while giving the ability to do low level stuff as well as high level programming, while compiling to native code.

I really miss the ability to compile to native code in most implementations for mainstream languages nowadays.

I am looking forward to D and Rust, but it will take ages before any of them really get into mainstream.

C, well I haven't touched it since 2001.
But do you pick the job or can you say "there is no logging story - we mus do one therefore I am working on it"
50,000 subscribers at $75/year for Wine Advocate
Show HN: TravisLight - a monitoring tool that spots failing projects on Travis
Square adds passbook integration
Instagram Turns Evil, And It's All Our Fault
Google Makes Raven Tools Choose: Scraped Data or Adwords API
The problem I tend to have with user created maps in RTS games is they often don't work well with computer AI at all.

The AI in these games often relies on certain "trigger points "on the map for example "try and hold this area", "try and attack this way" , "build a base here" etc rather than having a truly generic AI.

When using user created maps these points are often either not put in or are not used in a way that is not as tested and thought out as those that ship with the game.

This results in AI that either sits there and does nothing or will just play very badly on a particular map.

Of course most advanced players are not interested in playing against AI, but it is a good way to learn a new game or to try a particular technique etc.
> Professional firms that do this can charge upwards of $100,000 per processor for this kind of work.

> ... [Dr. Decapitator] was willing to do it just for the cost of the donor cartridges and supplies. This worked out to $250 per coprocessor.

Sounds like there's some room for improvement in that market. Either that or Dr. Decapitator is one extremely generous dude.
"That's a nice noble reframing of humanities innate desire to have access to Game of Thrones season 2 without paying for cable."

But doesn't that speak to the exact issue you're responding to? I'd more than happily pay for Game of Thrones season 2 if it were available for me to pay for on its own or with other things I want. The problem is that in order to get it I have to subscribe to cable, which is a hefty tax to pay for a single show.

I'm not begrudging HBO for deciding that's the best way for them to make money. But I gladly reward artists and companies that are thinking outside the box and doing direct-to-consumer or generally breaking away from the middle man.
This article seems to provide Red Star donwload links (untested) http://www.openingupnorthkorea.com/archives/325
It's indeed very motivating to read/hear such things. Still, there is always this underlying fear of failure that stays present, and this fear is somehow difficult to overcome. After all, of all the dreams people have, of all the people working their way toward their dreams, how many are actually succeeding? We can't really deny that for some case, regardless of the effort put together, it can/will still fail.

From this fear, the rest kind of snowball; you are afraid to fail, therefore you do all you can to not fail, you stay realistic about the situation, you even expect failures [1]. I do find all this very inspirational, but also difficult to apply altogether when in a realistic or even negative state of mind. The first smallest failure will be a reason to give up, to lose motivation.

The points mentioned by Will Smith in the video the author linked could be applied one at the time to eventually reach a point where these fears can be put aside, almost forgotten, and all the rest could follow, slowly built by placing one brick at the time.

Maybe the thoughts are mixed up, or I don't understand it the way the author meant to explain it, but I see that those two HN threads are linked, but almost opposite. Will Smith states that having a Plan B distracts us from Plan A. Expecting failure ahead is preparing those Plan B.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4897467
Actually a pragmatic will see step 3 as unnecessary - you get to step 4 faster if you skip it, and assigning blame doesn't help solve the problem. After the problem is solved you have all the time in the world to think about the meta-things like assigning blames and congratulations.
C'mon now, this is just a pool of ideas, no need to draw lessons here and put down all the ideas. I think it's a cool initiative regardless of their quality.
Author here. This app is a sibling to my previous firewall, Radio Silence (http://radiosilenceapp.com). Quite a few customers have asked for a whitelist-based firewall instead of the blacklist-based one, so I decided to give it a try.

What was originally meant to be almost a single changed line of code evolved into a full UI remake. The use cases are quite different, and it was interesting to see all the things that had to be rethought.

All critique is welcome, as always.
My favorite part was the way you put the cartridge in, turned on the power, and the game was playing.

No OS bootup, no OS navigation menu, no game booting delays, no game level loading delays. All games, instantly.

Nowadays, even my television (Westinghouse 40") needs ten seconds from power-on to showing me a picture :(
eye of the beholder.

These actually seem pretty good to me. Obviously none of them contains enough information to tell if its a good idea because not enough of the idea is expressed in this format. But in the context of the format, it seems like a good list.

eg "Basecamp for travel planning" sounds plausible, but it doesn't tell you a huge amount about the service. If this was being taken on by people who know UI and have a interesting take on how travel planning could be simplified, I would not dismiss it.
Actual link rather than to Slashdot discussion:

http://www.jonobacon.org/2012/12/07/on-richard-stallman-and-...

The problem for me is that isn't addressed by this is the decision to make it default on in Ubuntu. That failure of judgement* means that I can't trust them not to change something else that I have to notice and find out how to easily disable. Easy to turn off is not good enough for such a feature.

Edit to add: Basically I think RMS is right about this one (as he often is) although in many cases I make compromises that he would find wholly unacceptable.

* It might be ethics but I would give Canonical the benefit of the doubt on that one.
Sounds like you have a portfolio of work. If it's quality work you can use it to get a good job. Follow these steps - Find the right companies to target, locate the hiring manager (not HR) and develop your personal marketing campaign. People get hired to solve problems. Use your marketing campaign to show that you know the problems the hiring manager is facing and offer solutions. Done well, it leads to that all important interview, - As a veteran CEO, I developed this process to help people in your position get a job.

Stay the course!

www.mycareeraccelerator.com

Bob Prosen
CEO -The Prosen Center
I'm interested in the idea that those who pirate tend also to be those who spend the most.

Right now we know that's true and I'd surmise it's because those who pirate are those who are most interested in the medium therefore consume it most in all it's forms.

But most people now are those who've grown up with some understanding that music or movies or games are things you might / should pay for.

My question is will it continue to be the case that the largest consumers of media continue to be those who actually pay most once you have a generation who've been bought up with torrenting as their primary method of consumption?

Essentially are we in an interim space where it sort of works because the core consumer group have an expectation and a behaviour pattern which is a hangover from a previous time but which won't be replicated in the future?
No, it removes console.log statements; really not at all obvious without reading the code. The metonymy of referring to console.log as the log when it's the thing that creates the log doesn't help at all.
Equity gives shareholders legal rights and creates an opportunity for mischief. A well funded competitor could tie your company up in court for a few dollars via something as simple as alleging a fraudulent practice.

Unlike professional investors, lay persons tend to have wildly unrealistic expectations about the return from a small equity stake in a business.

To me, the burden of managing small unsophisticated shareholders - and lots of them - is likely to take more energy than it is worth.
Codemirror v3 released
Do you use EDG or another frontend? I can only assume that parsing C++ is quite problematic especially with all those compiler extensions and the current transition to C++11.
Don't make big decisions, make big decisions irrelevant
Could they have been faking it, to impress foreigners?

This article [1] tells the story of an entire department store that was faked to impress tourists. But that was 20 years ago, so maybe this time it isn't fake.

[1] http://blog.skepticaldoctor.com/2010/01/15/classic-dalrymple...
Oh, hey, look at that. Thanks for uncovering that. And the games I talked about came out after 2006, so maybe they were inspired by the article :)
I've heard of this happening before. I remember reading something by Bill Bryson, probably from the 90s, where he returned to the US to retrace some of his childhood journeys. After being used to British maps and their fantastic detail he laments the state of US maps as they miss whole towns and so forth.
The Incredible 23: Only 23 Founder CEO’s are Fortune 500 CEOs
I mean I hate camelCase as an enforced standard. I use it when it feels useful. I use underscores as well when I think they are fit.
I just don't like being one standard of absolute truth for a company
I remember playing that in the mid - late 90s as shareware. That page says 1999 but I'm sure it was released waaay before that.

It was the most "arcade like" space shooter that I could find for the PC.

Good to know it is still available as abandonware.

Edit: Tyrian came out earlier, but Tyrian 2000 came out in 1999 which seems to be basically the same game with some extra content.
Is the file of resources available anywhere? The link in the article is broken.

edit: fixed now