skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Targeting a lower frame rate also allows you to create a world that is mor interactive, a la the quote in the article, by including more game objects and other elements. Graphical quality is still important...hence the lower frame rate.
> Be sure that what you are doing is something you truly love, and not just something you want to love or want to portray that you love for the benefit of others.

Can you expand on this? How do you ever know? Whether I love what I do has been one of my existential questions for the last decade, and why I didn't immediately follow through with my CS degree out of college.

I feel like I can never know whether I'm doing something I "truly" love...but I'd like to be wrong
Economically, there's no real difference between productivity rising for different reasons. However, people "working more" has nothing to do with any of them - productivity measures value produced per time worked, and so rising productivity by definition means that people produce more with the same amount of time working. From this perspective, there's no reason why a productivity rise due to computers in the 2000s should be any different from a productivity rise due to better factory equipment or production processes in the 70s.
I'm curious for someone to explain the choice of charity. It looks like Silicon Valley Community Foundation is an organization that specializes in helping people and companies set up large spendings of charitable donations. Does anyone else do that on this scale?

It seems the alternative is spending a fair amount of mental overhead to set up a charitable foundation or donating to an existing foundation institutionally equipped to spend that much money as a non-profit (the Gates Foundation).
People call "Node.js handles 10k connections" a magic. Erlang easily does 1MM
Moral of the story first: developers, please take a look at Erlang.

I cringed when I read the story. Someone calls Node.js a magic when it handles 10k connections. Erlang handles 1MM connections without sweating.

Why? Because around two years ago I have created an Erlang server which does broadcasts of ~500bytes message to up to 1MM of concurrent users with a end-to-end delivery delay of at most 1.5 seconds, using ONE physical server and ONE application server (i.e. just one Erlang VM instance)!

Proof: https://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/Krakow2011/speakers/GlebPeregud

TL;DR. Node.js is not magic. It's not as scalable nor as robust compared to Erlang.
How many people actually worked on this project ? (just curious)
What happened between 1998 and 1999 that flipped the percentage so dramatically in favor of IE? Was it all the new people joining the internet for the first time who simply clicked the blue e instead of installing netscape or did people abandon netscape in droves?
So, as a Game On 2010 contestant, my entry is now gone from their site? I prefer to participate to js1k which does not erase entries.
Also the reader should be aware that he will be in competition with games in development for years, some run by companies.
(edit: not to mention the sudden urge to send prizes now instead of in due time)
Those may make the game more enjoyable, and 30Hz may be the correct decision for that reason, but if those things come at the expense of fps they come at the expense of playability.

It is undeniably a trade-off, which way you think is worth it is a subjective matter of course.
I would always prefer the wealth coming from inside the system, not being first taken by individuals and then spread at their whim. Such wealth would much rather be a sustainable source. A well functioning society/government would know exactly how to spend it well.

In many cases, to me, the good the rich do does not nearly weigh in for their wrongdoings.
> The black swan is something that is completely unforeseeable and for which there are no previous partial or complete examples, either of the final outcome or the contributing causes.

There is no such thing as something completely, entirely 100% unforeseen or unforeseeable. Someone, somewhere in the world will be seeing it coming... just as some intelligence analysts saw 9-11 coming, some economists saw the financial crisis, etc. etc. What we're considering is what the prevailing and strongly established consensus well outside the fringe areas says.
Ask HN: A 24/7 Instant Phone Concierge
I've been floating this idea around my network, and although it's relatively easy to set up, I'm not sure if there's a market for it. It's something I would probably use since I travel a lot, but I've heard mixed responses.

Basically, it's a 24/7 phone concierge that you can call to do stuff like make reservations, call you a taxi, recommend a restaurant, book you a flight or hotel, etc. Real life agents on the phone that pick up instantly. Like Exec, but over the phone. Like Onstar, but for your life. Like Siri, but human-powered. Agents are highly trained and can do anything for you, as long as it can be done legally over the phone.

Questions:

1) Is it worth trying to focus this service into one vertical, like travel, much like American Express (who provides this service as part of their Platinum Card which is where I got the idea), or are you better off calling it the "Call anytime, do anything" concierge?

2) I'm thinking the ideal consumer for this product would be the same market of Exec and Uber--upwardly mobile professionals with disposable income and no free time.

3) Thoughts on price point?

4) Anyone doing this out there? I wasn't able to find anything exactly like this other than the AmEx service (which leads me to believe that a company search engine might be a good product to build as well)

Thanks for your feedback!
Definitely a great idea. I'm sure there are some out there not a part of the majority who take Instagram seriously and would love to move their photos to Flickr.
If he was doing this studying in a community college, he was likely not paying through the nose - Community Colleges are a type of two-year institution in the States that are supported by local government, usually charge per course rather than per semester, and rarely cost more than $1000 a year.
i have been in web development sind 1998, and the worst time was 2004 to 2006. whereby 2002 and even 2003 IE 6 was seen as fresh air in the internet (oh, the things you could do), in 2004 the cracks and horrible limitations began to show, and no new version, no better browser, no better internet in sight (mozilla firebird still sucked at that time), 2006 was my personal year of browser depression, and i decided i don't want to code for a living anymore (quit my job, started my first business).

browser share wise, yes, 2012 really is/was the greatest year ever.
windows 98 happened
Actually linux kernel is very readable. And there is nothing synthetic about it. Just try opening some random page of linux kernel source code, and you'll see. Say: http://www.linux.fm/source/crypto/xor.c/

Hey, you can even listen to it ;)
On one hand you're right: when block devices fail, they're pretty much gone--if you've ever tried to read from a bad sector you'll know this exactly, or worse still on SSDs, where the disk will fail to show up to the bus.

That said, I'm not sure I agree with the idea that we got away with a lack of error handling because disks had consistent performance. Magnetic disks have always had incredibly inconsistent random IO performance, and even inconsistent performance between different parts of the platter(s). And in the spirit of co-evolution, we engineered around it: OS disk caches are critical to decent performance on HDDs.

I think it's not that we found disks to be consistent, as much as our solution to their suboptimal behaviors was caching, rather than error reporting/timeouts. I believe this is because caching was the most transparent approach; a good cache makes a variable-speed disk look just like an ideal disk, so an application can be written assuming the disk is perfect.

Interestingly, as distributed systems have evolved, we've ended up having to engineer the error-handling constructs that might have been used for block devices; we see them in network filesystems (as mentioned) as well as most other network services. Applications have been designed to deal with errors. We just haven't propagated those constructs down to the disk devices in the recent past.
Microsoft included it for free with their (at that time monopoly market share) operating system. Entire Divisions of Netscape were terminated when that happened.

It may be hard for people to imagine now, but back in 1996/1997, selling browser software was like selling spreadsheet or word processing software. People paid $50+/copy for their browser. It was a threat to Microsoft (potential alternative application platform) - so they eliminated it (Cut off Netscape's Air supply) - by giving the browser away for free with their operating system - and, because everyone (for most reasonable definitions of everyone) was running Microsoft's operating system on their desktop, there was no longer any need to buy it from Netscape.

It probably didn't help that, by 1998, the Netscape client had a pretty significant technical debt, was no longer a nimble browser, and, if I recall correctly, had been rebranded as "Netscape Communicator" and had all this crufty email/calendar/editing software slapped onto it. If all you wanted was a browser, Netscape was not necessarily the goto product anymore. Even simple things like rendering large tables could freeze up the browser. And it crashed. A lot.

This was before people realized how valuable controlling the search engine/first hop to the Internet would be.

Netscape (Mike Homer?) finally realized that, with it's dying breath, the most valuable asset it had wasn't all the Enterprise Software (Directory Servers, Certificate Servers, Enterprise Web Server, Application Servers, Business Servers) - but, Ironically, "www.netscape.com" - sold to AOL for $4Billion (much of the software being split between AOL and Sun in the ill fated iPlanet experiment) - and, on the last day of trading, was worth $10 Billion (mostly due to to a rise in the stock value of AOL - the deal's value was heavily related to the AOL stock price)
The market looks healthy at the moment.
Wow. Actual documentation and working examples. That jumps this one to the top of the pile for sure. Thanks for the link!
Choosing the Right Cleaning Firm for Your Needs | Zanisa
This is one thing to me which seems to me to be a genuine failing of an efficient market. Over the medium term, ignoring the low-frequency, high-risk event gives you a margin over your competition. Hence you succeed at their expense and they fail/get bought out by you etc.

As a simple example (the general argument applies to all sectors and all forms of risk), consider a bank ("safe bank") keeping $X in reserve to handle unforeseen events. Another bank ("risky bank") which keeps only $X/2 in reserve.

Risky bank will have a advantage over safe bank at all times except when an event requiring between $X/2 and $X occurs. Should such a rare event occur, risky bank would fail and safe bank survive.

Once the frequencies of such events drop to low enough levels (once ever 5? 10? 20? 40? years), there is no market pressure on the riskier bank to plan for the problem (and in fact the opposite, the market will destroy safe bank).

The actual time period is I think determined by how long it takes risky bank to out-compete safe bank and so drive it from the market as a significant force.
Interesting post, but isn't this information only supposed to be viewed by accredited investors approved by FundersClub? From their TOS:

to the extent you receive information from FundersClub, Issuers or other Investors with respect to any Investment activity on the Site, you may not further disclose or otherwise provide such information to another party
Print your Instagram photos on canvas
Thirty frames per second is depressing. I don't know how some people can stand it. I get annoyed when I notice the frames drop below forty five.
as someone who went to more than one browser war i have to say: as long as there is still some blue in that chart, it's not over. and yes, i'm strongly biased. i would be years younger if ms would give me back the time i wasted with IE bugs/features/rendering/special-needs or whatever they call it.
Yep. My thinking exactly. Easiest thing to read is a table. Always :)
I'm in the same boat. 2 yr degree and 3 yrs experience (one employer).
Reading through your comment I imagine that many people are in this boat. The part that is most frustrating around HN is it seems like everyone has ideas and is a rock star and many successes and jobs are falling from the sky.

It can be discouraging when you have none of that. Most discouraging is when people say things like "Just move here and you'll have jobs flung at you daily!" Relocating isn't something I can do on a whim.

I know that given the chance I can excel but no employers want to give it. It seems almost like a fix when the same positions are left open week after week but you've already been turned down (with and/or without an interview).

For me ideas are hard to come by so what I've been doing is finding things that annoy me as I do them. Can I do anything about that? Most of the time I can't but recently I've stumbled onto a couple ideas that I can.

So this post is slightly relevant: I believe many people, including some of the ones that seem to have it all figured out, are just like us. Continuing to learn and having to research to get things to work; not machines.

Edit: nobody here has said this but many times it's the tone I read it in.
6 Things Every Founder Should Hear (but doesn’t want to)
This is where we start to wander into problems with classical set logic.

No, I'm not joking. Fuzzy sets are pretty much required for any meaningful discussion of "failed", "foreseeable" etc, if they are to be at all useful concepts: http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/

Reduce foreseeability and failure to a binary toggle and you destroy enormous amounts of information with high utility so that some syllogisms still work. Wasteful.

Taleb is a very intelligent man, but AFAICT he does often reinvent existing concepts with much cooler names. "Antifragile" sounds awesome. "Robust" sounds boring.

Take "black swan", for example. Given the technology of the day, black swans simply didn't exist. Iain Banks called these "Outside Context Problems", one might also call them "paradigm-busters".

Anyhow. I should have padded out my original definition with the usual legalese about "reasonably foreseeable".
I agree with the first half, but regarding Mozilla… IIRC I switched to version 0.6 (then called Phoenix, iirc) as my default browser in 2003, and I don't remember it sucking.
I remember still coding for IE5 compatibility in 2006, but it was not a problem. For me IE7 was more annoying, strangely enough.
A) Some of the space in these new buildings is being used to "ease overcrowding in Yale’s existing facilities", so it is disingenuous to look solely at the increased number of undergraduates they will house.

B) While dorm rooms are usually small, there is often a lot of shared space in the building: it is thereby also disingenuous to compare the cost per square foot in a dorm to that of an entire apartment.

As an example of this, the "residential colleges" that Yale has also include dining halls (as demonstrated in the architect's renderings of the plans for this particular construction plan).

C) When planning new buildings for what are pretty much best described as small cities, you also have to think about the surrounding infrastructure; apparently part of these projects is about revamping the nearby streets to handle the increased pedestrian and bicycle traffic that will result.

D) This kind of expansion isn't just about new places for people to live and eat: if you look at what the money is being used for, it includes a dance studio, a fitness center, two cafes, three art studios, four computer labs, a theatre... and this isn't even a third of the list.

--

Now, one can certainly argue about whether they really need to do all of this and whether they are getting the most value from the things they have decided to do, but you really can't just say that all they are doing is providing a place for 1,000 undergraduates to live and then start doing the math: those people need things to do, activities to be a part of, food to eat, specialized equipment and rooms for whatever their specialities are.

(Also, I take issue with the idea that, even if it made sense, they could just "buy a three-bedroom home in New Haven for every new student it is bringing in", as the article examines, or could get the average rate on square footage as you do: there probably aren't even 1,000 houses on the market, so in addition to drastically alternating the demand market for housing in the area, which will itself alter the price, they are going to need to do new construction, which has massively different ramifications than just buying existing housing.)
So one of perl's nicest features is it just plain, flat gets out of your way. If you want to write something some way, go ahead, perl will allow you.

This is great - you can cook something up in 5 lines that would take 15+ in Python and 50+ in C++. It also means that it's really tempting for some to abuse this ability, even for code which will be long lived.
Just to push a point about the effect of luck:

> But then I also could make my savings work to avoid becoming homeless when not earning much money.

You've taken reasonable steps to avoid homelessness.

What happens if someone pushes a software bug out to your bank?

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...)

(http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northe...)

It's easy to think "I would cope if I had no access to my bank accounts for three weeks" but until you've faced it it's hard to understand how tough it can be.

And for some people the consequences were a few extra days in jail:

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18589280)
Taleb's definition is subjective. From wikipedia:

1. The event is a surprise (to the observer).
2. The event has a major effect.
3. After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected; that is, the relevant data were available but unaccounted for in risk mitigation programs. The same is true for the personal perception by individuals.

Thanksgiving is a black swan for the turkey but not for the butcher. Taleb is trying to solve the problem of how not to be a turkey, and prediction is insufficient for that problem, because errors of prediction will let the worst events through anyway. Rather one should evaluate how much worse things will be as an event grows. If problems grow faster than linearly, trouble will strike eventually.
> distressed at the experience

I think this is interesting. Like yourself, and the author of the article, I applaud Peter Jackson for having the courage to try, and reserve judgement until I have the chance to see it myself next week. That said, I still think it's very much an open question whether people's responses to this are due to the intrinsic nature of 48fps or just due to how alien it feels.

Personally, I can't see how anything that replicates reality better can be intrinsically bad. When I was a very young child and watching films for the first time I remember being distracted by its artifice: the depth of field, the way camera perspectives changed, and the motion blur, though I couldn't have put a name to these back then.

I think the bad reaction to 48 fps is largely for three reasons: legacy associations, with home video and the like, a lack of experience making films at 48 fps (could Peter Jackson have made a better 48 fps film had the industry had more experience doing it? probably), and sheer alienation (if every single film you've ever seen is 24 fps, and you've acquired a suspension of disbelief for 24 fps, then you're going to lose that at 48 fps). I think this last point is worth emphasising: I don't think we innately are capable of a suspension of disbelief for film. I think it's something we learn over time, like I did as a child, and it's something we haven't yet done for 48 fps.

So I'm optimistic. And sad too, because perhaps next week I won't enjoy The Hobbit as much as I should. I think back to Technicolor films and how crappy they looked at the time compared to how beautiful black and white films looked (and continue to look) at the same time. Yet here we are now, and we'd never go back these days.

But who knows. Maybe I'm wrong and there's something intrinsically bad about too-fast a frame rate. Perhaps, as the author alludes, filmmaking is as much a decision of what information to lose as it is what to keep. But I can't help but ask the question: the author says that certain scenes looked like a video game to him, but I ask what would it look like if you'd never played games in your life? If you lacked that association...? Maybe it'd be something a little bit magical.
Moral of the story first: developers, please take a look at Erlang.

I cringed when I read the story. Someone calls Node.js a magic when it handles 10k connections. Erlang handles 1MM connections without sweating.

Why? Because around two years ago I have created an Erlang server which does broadcasts of ~500bytes message to up to 1MM of concurrent users with a end-to-end delivery delay of at most 1.5 seconds, using ONE physical server and ONE application server (i.e. just one Erlang VM instance)!

Proof: https://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/Krakow2011/speaker...

TL;DR. Node.js is not magic. It's not as scalable nor as robust compared to Erlang.
Insomniac Games (the developers of Ratchet and Clank, and the Resistance series) wrote a blog post some time ago about their decision to focus on using a lower framerate (all their previous games were 60 fps).

http://www.insomniacgames.com/how-much-does-framerate-matter...

The summary is that prettier games get better reviews and sell off more copies.
From http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/138586 :

... that modern languages, such as Scala, offer advantages as human communication mediums. I describe an experiment, using an eye-tracking device, that measures the performance of code comprehension.
Brings us to a question in near term. What will Microsoft attempt to do next (other than developing IE10/IE11) to retain their browser market-share?

This?
http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-Mozillas-...

[Update & disclaimer: The page links to a question on Quora which is behind a sign-up overlay for non-users by Quora. I do not work for Quora.]
Actual link: http://www.learnstreet.com/icc/
Put chubby models on a diet with concerns - Rails
This stock/bond chart blew my mind. The bigger question is how long high bond rates will last?

http://www.businessinsider.com/t-rowe-price-us-equity-outloo...
> The black swan is something that is completely unforeseeable and for which there are no previous
> partial or complete examples, either of the final outcome or the contributing causes.

Not according to Taleb, who should know as he developed and named the concept. According to him a black swan only has to be unpredictable to the observer.

But the point is that ignoring the possibility of unpredictable (to you) events is a fallacy. So a black swan event is any event an observer assumes is impossible, or so unlikely as to be ignorable, but then actually happens. Whether an event is a black swan, being an observational fallacy, is subjective.

So taking the 9/11 attacks, for some professionals in the intelligence agencies these were not black swan events because they knew they could happen, but for the population at large and to politicians in particular, they very much were black swan events.