skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had similiar problem in one of my first games (scrolling shooter with asteroid physic, hobby project in TP7 and mode 13h), and I solved it in similiar way (when objects bounced off the obstacle I added constant to response vector length, so that ship always bounced with velocity so big, that even with gravity added, and when player rotated towards the obstacle and engaged engine, it would still move out of the obstacle in next frame).

It looked a little funny, cause when you left the ship to itself, it bounced in a place to half its height and back forever.

To mitigate this I've added 2 kinds of obstacles - most of the terrain was filled with obstacles with spikes, that did damage on each collision, so players won't test my collision response too much :) There were some obstacles without spikes, and you could forever bounce on them, but they were rare, and I marked them as "landing places". I think that added to gameplay.

Then I've added buttons that trigger doors to open/close, and in a few levels I've just placed some ship with no ai attached over the button. Effect - ship bounced forever, so the doors connected to the button opened and closed repeatedly ;) Player could also influence that by pushing the triggering ship away :)

It's funny how constraints of game engine can guide you into gameplay elements that you wouldn't consider without them.

EDIT: the game if anyone is interested: http://ajuc.ninja.umcs.pl/programy/gry/hw/download/hw.tar.gz
it's in Polish, sorry, and coding style is outrageus
'Black swans' and 'perfect storms' become lame excuses for bad risk management
I think it is very important to use code from real-life applications, rather then synthetic examples like that, or like ones presented in the original article.

Otherwise the results of that research would be biased towards comprehension of meaningless chunks of code, rather that of a real thing.
PDF Copy Protection: Copy Protect PDF Files for USB Drive on Windows
I was late to a VC meeting today. Because I am a dumbass and did not plan my travel well.

Should I, or anyone else, be fined for that?

I apologized when I arrived (and e-mailed as I could beforehand) because it's rude to be late for a meeting with people you are in business with, regardless of whatever monetary incentives someone wants to arbitrarily hang on that.

If you need a fine system to make that work, I'd argue you have deeper problems, problems that money isn't going to do much to solve.
Why when I press next does it tell me to hit -> on my keyboard? I'm using a tablet, would probably make more sense in this day to use a swipe as input.
Sitecom adds "Do Not Track" to its home network routers
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to discuss the problem and solution in a way that is both descriptive and productive. I think these are a some of other issues:

1. I think too many people attend college (in the US at least). College is expensive, and the ease with which students can attain loans to attend has made it something that people probably take too lightly. There's still a perception that if you go to college and study "something," when you graduate you'll get a job from the magically place where jobs come from. This perception is being challenged, but it's a barrier.

2. The fields of study that tend to lead to higher paying roles also tend to be more challenging. The difficulty and popularity is somewhat "priced in" in the microeconomic sense. For instance, I think our society romanticized the humanities and arts, despite the harsh reality that these programs leave students with few concrete/marketable skills. And while I'm not saying that we should gut arts and humanities programs, I would argue that right now that skill-set is in low demand. Statistically speaking, the chances of success are low and the roles of distinction are scarce, leading to higher unemployment rate for certain fields of study. Add to that the general scarcity of good jobs, and an increasingly competitive economy as developing countries rise out of poverty and converge to the developed ones.

So what do we do?
1. I think our society should better educate it's citizens on these issues (what are the value propositions of certain fields of study, what can people do to be more successful, etc). I think we could also use some gov't coordination to ensure that the skills being learned match the desired skills of the market. Anecdotally I know of many firms that are hiring, but feel there's a mismatch between the skills available and those desired.

2. I think we should find some way to provide employment for at least some of these un/underemployed youths. The Civilian Conservation Corps from the Depression Era U.S. comes to mind. Basically, citizens were given the option to work on gov't infrastructure projects as an employment option. I like this because it both provides assistance to the unemployed and allows society to recover some of the cost of helping its citizens.

And congratulations, shanelja. The situation among some of my friends has been pretty bleak... It's always nice to hear an uplifting story...
Well, and I never understood what is so great about	Instagram.

If it wasn't for it being mentioned all the time in HN, I would never had heard of it.
A big evolutionary step for a mystifyingly arcane device
The votes seem to be a summation of the tweets/+1s/likes. The numbers are skewed due to the Google +1's -- it's stuck at exactly 1616 for every feature request until page 23. This looks like either a misconfiguration or a Google+ bug to me.
There are entire groups of people for which this isn't necessarily the case. For example a significant portion of mainland Chinese people use a chosen western name when interacting with services that operate in English. Just because a given use case for names is not a use case common to your social strata, does not mean that it may be common within other groups.
when you are looking that far away, you can't see any planets. They are not light source like stars.

The only way to figure out whether star has any planets around is to measure and interpret periodical gravitational vibrations.
Do you mean "anything bad happen" to you personally, and that things that only happen to "other people" don't count?

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/technology/1012/gallery....
French psychiatrist sentenced after patient commits murder
"Think of the kittens, think of the breakfast plates, think of the converse shoes. Free the photos."

Best quote ever and pretty much encompasses everything about Instagram in one sentence. I don't see what the big deal is, Instagram issued a clarification statement about the TOS changes. And in all honesty it's not like the photo quality of an iPhone image is that great, especially not for advertisement purposes let alone the subject quality of the images themselves.

As an aside: you can't argue Flickr's $25 per year pro account is extremely good value for money. Especially if you're uploading a lot of photos. I've seen photo shoots that resulted in thousands of images before from just the one shoot. Instagram isn't a site for pro photographers, it's more teenagers at parties and hipster eateries.
Actually legal names are a problem even within the US. I recently had problems with getting a California driver's license because my second middle name was abbreviated on my green card, but spelled out fully on my North Carolina driver's license, which I was transferring to California.
Before and after pics / other evidence of effectiveness?
What Happened To Art? (or why I love tech)
From alestic.com

>> Both EBS boot and instance-store AMI ids are listed, but I recommend you start with EBS boot AMIs.

Why two opposite recommendations from alestic.com [authority on AWS] and practitioners?

Not a flame - I am planning my AWS deploy strategy and need to make a decision between these two approaches.
It is not our intention. As if that mattered when signing a contract.
Absolutely true. I was talking about the 8051, which is the context of the code I posted.
Web Technologies Overview
There is nothing I would love to see more than for jQuery 2.0 to be modularized so people can pick and choose the modules they want/need.

It would also be nice for them to adopt semantic versioning with 2.0. i.e. move to 2.0.0
The great thing about jekyll is that it runs of github ... thats the main reason I'm currently building a site in Jekyll.
How much does AWS save in terms of admin vs a standard VPS?

I assume it runs a standard linux distro, therefor patches , firewalls, dependencies etc are still an issue surely?
If it were that easy why isn't everyone a business owner?
I see you, Marissa . . .
I agree, but isn’t this the curse of most experimental research in programming techniques?

Ideally, we’d compare like-against-like using industrial scale applications, implemented by professional practitioners, controlling for everything except what we’re trying to investigate. Finding opportunities to do that in practice is rather harder, because obviously most real software development projects don’t get implemented twice by identical teams making exactly one significant change in their approach.

What I thought was interesting here was that even though it is only a toy program, there were still some patterns to how the reader explored it that might suggest more general trends. As long as we understand the limitations of the experiment and don’t overgeneralise any conclusions, isn’t some data still better than random conjecture?
Apptrace – An app discovery tool with added perks
Haha, definitely agree. It was mostly a fun exercise for us to build for the community so people can send a copy of their Instagram photos over to Flickr. We love data portability and we also understand both Instagram and Flickr are businesses and they want to make money. This gives users the freedom to move, don't move, use both, etc.
Study Finds One in 6 Follows No Religion
For an experiment like this it's important to have small, self contained code fragments. It wouldn't be fair to expect someone to decipher the whole Linux kernel source in a short amount of time, for example. Given a sufficiently small chunk of code, almost everything looks synthetic. I imagine many real life application have sections that take two arrays, find the numbers within a certain range and then take the intersection like this program does.
To add, perhaps iPhone users are more engaged with Flicker to the point where iPhone interactions outnumber Flicker interactions.

Taking this a step further, perhaps Flicker is trying to align more with the iPhone/Apple brand than the Google (Picassa/+) brand.
>>Which period of India would you consider communist? The 'late 80s' period you reference later? I don't know nearly enough about India's history, and understand that geographic regions are very important.

India never explicitly stated its a communist country. But most of its policies were communist based for a large part of its post independent history. State controlled industries, tightly regimented license system for anything private, unions etc.
Shoplocket – Sell easily by embedding your product anywhere on the web
The idea we live in a simulation isn't science fiction
9 Months Later, Is The "Google Play" Brand Switch Actually Working For Android?
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/ForeignAffairs.pdf [pdf warning]

Is a really good geopolitical paper I recently read about black swan stuff. The general gist, to my understanding, is that artificially supporting a regime makes it weaker.
Really interested to learn about how you use Chef to bring up and configure your ephemeral instances.

Also, do you backup your databases anywhere other than on other ephemeral instances?
The fact that online advertisements are actually code that runs on my computer removes the moral qualms, for me. We live in a safe world now, but reading about how intelligence agencies, communist international, and the like operated between the end of WW1 and the cold war really drove home the fact that you do NOT want human beings building a dossier on you, and that fighting for privacy is not a matter of paranoia.
Valid request.

After 2 weeks, I have dropped about 10 pounds from nutrition improvements combined with exercise.

I have gone from a slight pudge to a more flattened midriff.

I'm expecting in a few weeks to have a quite visible six pack.

http://imgur.com/a/9jxkK#0

and http://imgur.com/a/9jxkK#1
The "verification" method seems to verify by checking two deposits. This means anyone with read-only access to your account can now verify ownership via Dwolla. I believe PayPal is the same way.

This kind of verification makes things like the Bank of America lame phone access system turn into a real escalation of privilege.

Although, I'm not sure there's much easier ways to prove ownership of an account.
Unless the planets happen to orbit very stable stars in the plane that sometimes puts them between earth and their star. With Kepler and some earth-bound telescopes you can discern the brightness dips from these and sometimes glean minimal spectroscopic information on the planet. Direct imaging is possible with interferometric methods and some more innovative approaches [1] but require funding.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Worlds_Mission
If anyone stumbles on this, I actually ended up looking this up, thought I'd add it to the record ; ).
Turns out it's considered third line forcing, and is illegal here, prohibited by the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, previously covered by the Trade Practices Act, here's the relevant section (hacked apart for clarity) [1]:

(a) supplies, or offers to supply, goods or services; (b) supplies, or offers to supply, goods or services at a particular price; or (c) gives or allows, or offers to give or allow, a discount, allowance, rebate or credit in relation to the supply or proposed supply of goods or services by the corporation; [...] on the condition that the person to whom the corporation supplies or offers or proposes to supply the goods or services [...] will acquire goods or services of a particular kind or description directly or indirectly from another person not being a body corporate related to the corporation.

Note that this only prevents Apple from selling a locked/contract device, carrier locked devices and contracts are fine, as long as they're part of a deal made explicitly between the customer and the third party.
Back in 2008 they were making exclusive deals with single carriers in several countries, which would have pretty clearly violated this, so seems like Apple Australia were restricted to outright & unlocked devices, or only selling via carriers.

Now, though, Apple give a choice of carrier and an option to buy outright in the US (And other countries, I assume), which, IANAL, is probably still prohibited by section (b) or (c), ie, 'you can still buy it if you refuse the contract, but you get a cheaper price if you take the contract' sounds like it would still be covered by the 'at a particular price' clause.

[1] 47(6): http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2012C00877/Html/Volume_1#_...
4 reasons why your Facebook page sucks
I think there are 3 things that should be applied to anyone serving images.

1. Expires Header (for static)
2. Cache-Control Headers (for less static)
3. KeepAliveTimeout (might be a double edged sword)

and you can set the first 2 on Amazon S3
Who are you to define the "right" attitude? And how do you know that AVTizzle isn't a generous person who doesn't help the less fortunate?

_“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ― Aristotle_

Considering your place in the world, why you are more/less fortunate then others and your purpose in life is as natural as breathing for people. To be able to see validity in both sides of the coin signals to me that AVTizzle is likely an individual who is very generous in life. I don't know him/her personally but your assertions sound completely misplaced and simply projections of what you think someone is like onto AVTizzle.
How to Optimize Chrome Extension? 
Some cool tips to optimize chrome Extensions.
Mark Zuckerberg donates $500 million
I think you've forgotten a leading zero ;)
She obviously fails to grasp what Taleb calls a Black Swan, or ignores his definition for some cheap publicity:
"The attacks of 9/11 were not black swans, she said. The FBI knew that questionable people were taking ﬂying lessons on large aircraft."

They are the perfect example of a Black Swan. Quote Taleb (Black Swan, p.xxii): "... in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable", which is exectly what she is doing.
And, one page later on 9/11: "had the risk been easily conceivable on September 10, it would not have happened".

He is not advocating abandoning risk management, he is in favour of risk management that doesn't need us to predict the future, as it is harder to reliably estimate the likeliness of very unlikely events.

Concerning the second example of earthquake risk and nuclear power plants: That, again, is a post-hoc rationalization. Everybody knew that earthquakes were a risk factor for NPP and was planning accordingly. They were just not planning for a Tsunami this size, as it was very, very unlikely. So including higher error margins for earthquakes next time is nice but not enough. Taleb on this: http://www.valuewalk.com/2011/03/nassim-taleb-black-swans/

Consider the aviation industry: After an accident, they find the root cause and eliminate it. It is now something expected, and can be directly dealt with. But also try to improve the system (e.g. via training) to be more robust towards all the root causes the didn't anticipate.
Detachable Skirt Wedding Dresses
There's more ways of doing it. I might be sitting across the street from you right now, doing 35 hour work weeks for a fortune 500 company, riding the SV income bubble and pulling in $150K a year as a sysadmin that keeps your oh so trendy cloud up in the air (Up, up in the air! Light as a bubble in the wind!), while living a $50K lifestyle.

Couple more years and I'll be down south, daydreaming about those good old days full of taking risks (I took the stairs last week!) and how I miss the company gym and free massages, while I'm sipping from my non-alcoholic beverage on a beach somewhere, and considering finally getting my college degree.
MS IE Bubbles performance test shows results based on User-Agent
I tested on my machine, and I get 15 FPS in Chrome, when I change the user agent to IE9, I get 22 FPS.
How to hold Samsung GS3 correctly to receive calls (like iPhone4)?
That's pretty awesome. There are games and everything. I wonder if this was built by google employees with their "20 percent time".
"shares worth $500 million" They are it worth today. Who knows what they are worth in a year :-)
I think it should be hard to fix with mere words when trust is broken either intentionally or by carelessness.
Picasa Terms of Service are much more limited.

They ask for a license to store, display and publish your content, but this is explicitly limited to the use of operating the service. They need that license so that some user does not sue them for copyright infringement after uploading their own pictures and clicking "share".

Instagram/Facebook take a much broader license, which includes sub-licensing rights to third parties, including for profit and unrelated to the operation of Instagram itself.
I am afraid Python fans have a history of trolling Perl. Pick up any Perl thread and you will see enough examples of Python people trying to forcing their principles down your throat, even if there is absolutely no context to mention it.
I get 15 FPS in Chrome on my machine, when I change the User-Agent to IE9, I get 22 FPS.
Bingo!
In Tuesday's blog post, Mr. Systrom sought to quell the mounting unrest and reassure users that the company would not be peddling photographs of children playing on the beach or friends partying in nightclubs to the highest bidder.

"To be clear, it is not our intention to sell your photos," he said.

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/facebook-responds-to-anger...
Web browser market share of all times visualized
>Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them.

Note, getting angry? that is what changes this sort of thing.

Seriously, setting up a ToS is a pain in the ass. If someone that understands the business and the customer isn't involved, if you throw it over the fence to the lawyers, and you don't read it like a user would, this is what it ends up looking like. Hammering out a good ToS is really hard, and it requires effort of someone that cares about the reputation of the company, /and/ hasn't drank so much company kool-aide that they understand that users don't always assume good faith.

These people are harder to find than lawyers. So yeah, setting up a good ToS is hard.

If customers just 'click through' and don't care what the ToS says? guess what businesses are going to do? we are going to throw it over the fence to the lawyers, who are going to write something like this, if they think the VC is their client.

Getting angry is really important, because it's the only way to convince companies to put the effort in to writing a good ToS.
Does anyone else find it shocking that Yale will spend $600 million on a dorm to increase capacity by 1,000 students. That's a whopping $600,000 per student dorm room divided by the number of students per dorm. One source put the average dorm room at 12' x 19' feet split between two people. That's 114 square foot per person, or $5263 per square foot. Trulia puts the average cost per square foot of housing in New Haven, Connecticut (Yale's hometown) at a mere $102 per square foot. This means they are spending a 51x premium. San Francisco prices, as high as they are $626. These two dorms are 8x more than the San Francisco price. How can this even be justified?

Ref:
http://downtownnewhaven.blogspot.com/2008/09/ramsa-selected-...

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/New_Haven-Connecticut/mark...
Thanks!

10 pounds in 2 weeks seems like a lot.
Maybe not. I'm sure quite a few other people tried $0just to see if they got called "Huge Asshole".