skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've noticed a lot of people in this topic complaining about graphics/UI. I'll give you that the UI does need an overall badly, but there's a reason for the graphics: the sheer complexity of the game, and the fact that his last game's development stalled because of graphics.

In the "sheer complexity" department, imagine trying to depict any of the following well graphically: randomly generated artifacts made of random materials, the ridiculously intricate damage models, and completely randomly generated titans (which do start with a base creature, but have random materials/bodyparts galore). While you could just do essentially what he does for the ASCII and have one symbol that represents all these, he doesn't seem to want to go this route. Which is insane, but hey, insane seems to be the normal for DF development.

The second part is that his last game died partly from his trying to implement graphics too early. Notice how the full title is "Dwarf Fortress: Slaves to Armok"? Armok was the game before this. Similar in overly ambitious scope, but with an early 3d style graphics. However, for some reason or another, it became to difficult to support its development after graphics, and it collapsed under its own weight. Hence the switch to ASCII: he could continue implementing hundreds of features without as much regard for performance or implementation. It's easy to add in dozens of new creatures, random titans, genetics and randomized traits when you don't have to actually worry about representing it. I highly suggest reading his devblog (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html) just as inspiration for what one crazy ambitious man can do.

As for why he doesn't enlist more help, make it open source, etc, the answer is even simpler: this game is his bread and butter and both he and his brother live off the donations. Yes, part of it is that he wants to maintain control of the project, but if a program was literally the sole means of supporting you and your sibling, I think you'd be wary of giving away its code too. He has said it will likely be open sourced when he dies however.
New to web development
Honestly, I am happy that you took a more pragmatic view of this. Whenever I try to write in literate style it never seemed as good as a naturally written documentation; never as good as Django documentation, for instance. I used to think it is because of my inability to structure my prose in a different order to my code.

Of course, most languages these days are late binding and do not enforce a strict ordering of parts of code. But I still think literate style is best suited for single-file source code documentation.

I truly look forward to reading your blogging engine created in literate style. All the very best!
If your MacBook is properly configured, it should hibernate, so that you can easily resume your work, after you plugged in power supply. So I see no benefit from this app...
Stross on: Roko's Basilisk and theological errors of transhumanism
Python 2 is still widely used, that's why saying it supports "Python" seems legit to me.

Although I have to admit I'm annoyed by this versioning problem myself. I find myself wasting a lot of time sorting out versioning issues of packages/frameworks I'd like to use.
Learning C# to make switching to Javascript easy seems somewhat backwards.

Plus it's not as if it's hard to leap between C-syntax and VB's syntax anyway. They're both imperative languages with much of the same core blocks (albeit often called differently). Switching between such languages shouldn't take more than a quick glance through a "beginners guide" and then some cross-referencing as you go alone (like using an English/French dictionary). It's not like they're different paradigms like functional languages (Lisp et al)
> "documented"

you can open the document linked from the article and scroll to section 10.7. There are the details of the cases. It is a mix of industrial espionage by actual CIA agents and the hacking. Example:

Case:Federal German Ministry of Economic Affairs

Who: CIA

When: 1997

What: Information concerning high-tech products held by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs

How: Use of an agent

Aim: Obtaining information

Consequences: Agent unmasked and expelled from the country

or

Case:López

Who: NSA

When: 1993

What: Videoconference between José Ignacio López and VW boss Ferdinand Piëch

How: Videoconference recorded and forwarded to General Motors (GM)

Aim: Protection of commercial secrets held by GM in America, secrets which López wished to pass on to VW (price lists, secret plans for a new car plant and a new small car)

Consequences: López's cover is blown, in 1998 criminal proceedings are halted in return for payment of fines.

No consequences in respect of NSA

> But it's not.

I agree with your conclusion. If you have anything of value, be paranoid. The Chinese (or anybody else, really) will try to get their hands on it.

While your post was a joy to read, if you focused only on the facts it would be much shorter...
Digital Medicine: Machines for living
@minid, http://www.minid.net. My portfolio is not on behance. There's no need to move northern spain, in Barcelona we have plenty places with cheap prices to setup an startup. I do preffer remote working and go relocation when the first round is setup :).
Looks nice! How did you develop this? Was it in each native language, or through something like Titanium?
I guess the third approach breaks if one of the two numbers is 0
Building for humans is hard
It is not just the ASCII. He could write a more useful GUI. With buttons and better mouse control, it would be much appealing for the crowds.
Money laundering is the whole point of bitcoin.

</joke>
Commenting is still not required, AFAICT.

Are you positing that better formatting encourages worse comments/documentation? I'm of the opinion that their presentation is independent of their quality.
I also do this often, but taking inspiration from "The Dice Man", I assign weights to options (0.3 for one option, 0.6 to another, 0.1 for the third - I assign weight very quickly, without much consideration), launch calculator and press Random button.
If 0.4 comes up, second option wins (over 0.3, less than 0.9).
It can boot linux just fine https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/21/378
Ask HN : How Do Apps Like Sanebox Work
Big enough to host a significant culture or proto-culture leading to a rosy generational memory, small enough that it can rather easily be sunk/destroyed by a disaster with only local impact (as opposed to the completely insane representation of a continent basically covering the current indian ocean in the linked article)
Is it legit to claim to support windows if you only support XP? It's disingenuous. At the least mention the version number in the claim if it's that important.
Thank you for your feedback. I have actually started with Django and I find it awesome. I can get things done in few hours and Python is rock solid.
I think group watching will remain popular, especially among kids, and for that you need a large display. Maybe the trend will be towards screen sharing, where you'd use a tablet or phone to select programming, then switch it to the screen. Maybe 'screen control' would be a more apt name, since I wouldn't want to depend on the tablet/phone for data & rendering. I'm not convinced that enormous standalone tablets are sufficient, because I have to believe that fingerprint smudges on a TV would be seriously distracting.
Lumia 520: hands-on with Nokia's latest budget Windows Phone
Exactly right: the image is from http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4309?viewlocale=en_US&loca.... (Props to Google reverse image search).
HTC One preview
So... here's the thing. "Cyberwarfare" is primarily data theft/information control but can also involve real danger like control of electrical grids, water supplies, and centrifuges for highly radioactive materials, to mention a few. Sure, information warfare has been going on a long time, and, sure, each major country does it.

But, when the world economy is teetering/has teetered and it's not clear how things will pan out, that is when wars start.

Now add to that that introduction of new disruptive technology is soon after used in war, and you have a problem that can't be whitewashed with a post like this.

Think about aviation. When I hear aviation, I think of the Wright Brothers- but what's next? Commercial flight? No, I think of bi-planes, the Red Baron, the use of aviation in the military, and war. The time period between the flight by the Wright Brothers in December 17, 1903 to the start of World War I on July 28, 1914 was 11 years. 11 years! Aviation didn't spawn world war, but you have to know that it contributed its part.

Think about the race for the bomb. And, what did we do when we finally had the technology? We dropped two of them.

It's sad to say, but the use of internet technology by the military is inevitable. The U.S. isn't trying to start a fight by identifying that China has state-sponsored attacks on American businesses. The fact is that even though we still somewhat live in a Cold war era (it never really ended) and to large extent, no one wants to see another bomb go off, the fact is, this shit is real. There is a power struggle on Earth and we've been a part of it since we were born. The internet binds us all together and helps us communicate our thoughts, fears, etc. and I want no part of a world war. But this "new war" has been in-progress for some time now and people have learned its ways and are using them. These little events like publically identifying centrifuges going down or that China is truly state-sponsoring attacks might not be Normandy or Gettysberg, but saying these are non-events is no better than hiding your head under the covers.
Combining Hadoop/Elastic Mapreduce with AWS Redshift Data Warehouse
Freakonomics are doing a study/website on this idea (Minus the option to pull out if you realise what you really want)

https://www.freakonomicsexperiments.com/
Because that action would help no one in power.

The shooting of Benno Ohnesorg helped an existing power which had a long tradition of successful CI.
> PG - any chance you can post this to the front page?

Are you kidding me? You want the fast lane to the front page because you're upset that people's projects only have Python 2 support when you expect Python 3? Is this some kind of joke?

Could you at least tell us what specifically set you off there?
I think the last paragraph is key:

> We also need to revisit the approach of compiling a high-level language to VHDL/Verilog and then using vendor-specific synthesis tools to generate bitstreams. If FPGA vendors open up FPGA architecture details, third parties could develop new tools that compile a high-level description directly to a bitstream without going through the intermediate step of generating VHDL/Verilog. This is attractive because current synthesis times are too long to be acceptable in the mainstream.

This is both an ideological as well as a practical matter. Until the whole process INCLUDING bitstream generation is open, I don't see FPGAs as a viable alternative to general purpose processors.
"Solutions are in the sidenotes."

Where are the sidenotes?
Yep, an example: I edit OpenStreetMap. The opening_hours property allows one to represent a wide range of opening hours. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:opening_hours

A lot of public parks in London are open at different times during summer and winter.

Here's an example I added personally, the churchyard of St Anne's Church in Soho. http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/40879988

"week 1-13 Mo-Su 10:00-16:00; week 14-43 10:00-18:00; week 44-52 10:00-16:00"
I'm guessing RethinkDB but it's hard to say..
http://python.org/download/

"The current production versions are Python 2.7.3 and Python 3.3.0."

"Python" is widely considered to be python2, not python3 (yet). Deal with it.
I would love to see a bunch of hard hitting engineers focus on optimizing DF with multithreading and GPGPU stuff. It would probably require a full rewrite. Having some experience with AI and pyopencl physics simulations I have no doubt that DF could be many orders of magnitude faster and capable of sooooo much more. That's really where my angst stems from.
See madradavid . com contact me @ madradavid @ gmail . com
Baltimore homicides map
I'm very sorry that I posted an entry on my personal blog.
IDC Cloud Leadership Forum in Europe | CloudVane
What got me was this line.

> What is surprising is the unfaltering belief that since attacks come from IP addresses in the same geographic region as a PLA unit, ipso facto, the attacks are state sponsored and need some sort of government response.

Mandiant and the US government aren't using IP address details to determine this is the Chinese. In fact, they're explicitly not depending on IP addresses to link these attacks to Unit 61398. Mandiant specifically refers to 'indicators' which can range can be IP addresses but can also be source code comments, coding styles, reused usernames, reused passwords, reused encryption certificates, reused domain names, etc. In short, the evidence linking Unit 61398 to these activities is the same kind of patterned evidence that is used to pin multiple crimes on serial killers. It paints a compelling modus operandi that cannot be easily dismissed as multiple independent actors. It is one group doing this and that group is most likely Unit 61398.
I think speed reading is most useful when you are reading some text where only parts are relevant or new to you. By quickly reading those, you can focus on the important pieces and spend more time to think about them.

Interestingly, the faster I read, the less I'm able to "filter" the information I read about, it seems almost as if my brain absorbs it directly. That means that I'd never speed read content that might contain bad memes or false information: political propaganda, religious texts, etc.

Does anyone know a good test for reading speed (including comprehension)?
At least anyone who has Python 3 installed is likely to also have Python 2.
Yes, people for sure will still want to watch stuff on good quality displays. But I think dump TVs: large displays that you can easily connect to a standard computer or a mobile device and stream content to are much more compelling than 'smart' platforms.
Another reason to toss a coin is when facing an arbitrary choice. Rather than making an informed or uninformed decision on something that doesn't even matter (and thus wasting your allotment of daily decisions before reaching decision fatigue), just toss a coin.

I mostly do this when I don't know what I want to eat in a restaurant. Find two things that look remotely okay, toss a coin.
In fact /usr/bin/python is recommended to point to Python 2 while Python 3 is /usr/bin/python3.
Falcon's eye, I miss you...
Despite the "fad" it's a very important area where almost everyone falls down.

The results Mint, airbnb and path got from "facebook integration and sharing buttons" is spectacular and should not be overlooked.
I have a possible correction. Might dbl-all not be better named sqr-all? Thanks for the article by the way.
Hey guys, love the idea! I just noticed you had a preferred voice option to listen to the streams. Certainly lends a bit more variety than vanilla podcasts!

What was the design choices of having the particular voices out of the many you could have chosen? Does your data show a particular preference by region?

You guys should do an Ask HN on what people would like to see as the default instead of random. Could lead to some interesting discussion!

Tip: It'd be great to see a 'preview' button to hear what they're like especially the premium
Try diffing the compiled source for 1.4 and 1.5.
Some Samsung galaxy tablets have 'S Pen' that also use Wacom digitiser system (pressure sensitivity and similar). See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Note#Stylus
and
http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/mobile-devices/galaxy-not...
I'm actually working with other data-folk trying to document ISO 8601 compliance across a wide range of date-time libraries and document it publicly, probably on the microformats.org wiki or W3C wiki.
I did a speed reading course when I started uni and yes it does work. A lot of stuff is bad habits - some others have mentioned, sub vocalisation, keeping your eye in the middle of the page and read with your peripheral vision, obvious stuff - don't slide your finger along the page, don't use a ruler (some do) and so on. I improved my reading and comprehension quite a lot, but find I turn it off when reading for pleasure versus reading to extract facts. It's well worth doing - even if it only increases your reading speed 10 or 20%.
[edit: How to skim read was another useful tool]
> ['&&' is used] in almost all programming languages [including] c, c++, JavaScript and...

You mean all C-syntax languages. ;)

There's a hell of a lot of Turing complete languages that don't follow C's syntax (Python, Pascal, Lisp, Haskall, Scala, Erlang, Scheme, PL/SQL, JCL, COBOL, Logo, ALGOL, Fortran, Ada...and countless others which I've I've forgotten about or have never even heard of.

But sadly it seems many developers aren't even aware of the popular paradigms outside of imperative programming, let alone the numerous other imperative languages that were popular before C's syntax became the de facto standard template.
Around the point in the article describing the eye movements required for reading, I experienced a weird anxiety as I attempted to both perceive my own eye movements and consume more of the text. After a few sentences it actually became uncomfortable. Gave me the impression that implementing speed reading strategies would be dubious for me, personally.
I remember getting quite interested in literate programming back in the early nineties, but I've barely heard anything about it since then.

Has anyone (apart from Knuth) used LP for any real work of significant size? What was the justification of doing the, presumably substantial, work to add literate programming to coffescript?
I totally agree about the Lightweight IDE thing. IMO Sublime is close to being great, but some missing features must be preventing people from writing great plugins like those in Emacs world.
What a cute su.c file!

You should see this beast in Solaris!

http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/sr...
Electronic warfare, signal jamming, hacking, phreaking, and crypto are not new to anyone in the military, and most certainly not the intelligence community. The Allies won WWII on the strength of their signals intelligence.

There's the potential for the "bad guys" to do more here, using automated agents provocateur, but that's really nothing new - We had Japanese internment camps because of fears of that, and we certainly don't want that again. Imagine what would happen if we booted every windows machine off the internet for a day... Maybe we should relive those internment camps, after all :)
The idea of a company the size of Foxconn fleeing China isn't believable. Government regulations, tax structure and cost considerations determine business decision making. And, that's exactly why China's thriving right now. A decade from another low cost center will spring itself up and without doubt businesses will throng that destination.

It for sure makes a great negotiating tactic to extract maximum leniency from the Chinese Govt. Besides, Foxconn is one of the poster boys for Chinese manufacturing might and the Govt. won't let them shut shop over night. It's just bad PR!
If it's an accessibility feature only — and might break apps — then it shouldn't be the default setting on the Surface Pro.

In a well designed operating system the application should not have to explicitly handle arbitrary DPI settings for correct touch/pointer input.

An unsupported application should simply look blurry if it does not provide correct raster assets for the specified DPI. That's it.
This book did in fact double my reading speed in 1 hour and there are 2 nice tests in the back which can help calculate you reading speed and also comprehension

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Speed-Reading-Double-Triple-ebook/dp...
The Cardinal Sin
Affluenza alle urne in calo. E’ il “voto di rassegnazione”
I've always been of the opinion that a TV is just a display. A computer/the web/netflix just gives you access to more content for that display; it's still a TV. Analog broadcast channels, digital cable w/ box and guide features, the full web and netflix, what's the real difference here other than quantity of content? We'll still be watching shows and movies on large format displays for the foreseeable future.

tl,dr: A TV is just a display, we're not going to stop watching content, why say TV is bound to die?
Sure, Crete itself hosted a very significant culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization
which disappeared (probably) due to a natural catastrophe (Thera eruption, 600 times bigger than Eyjafjallajökull)
Court of Appeal bans Bayesian probability
You can plug computers into the HDMI port of any new TV already, right? Whats the difference between a TV and a large display, for the purposes of the average consumer?
> Can you tell me more about how my article spurs a feeling of vagueness?

Not just you, approx. 90% of the software industry suffers from it (big IMHO here of course).
I think too much emphasis is placed on paradigms and magic approaches, instead of talking about things are.

Something like this:

"Is C++ a big pile of mess?
Yes.

Is Haskell a much better designed language, even if its implementations are slower because the higher level of abstraction clashes with the underlying hardware currently in use?
Yep."

Also, what you are trying to describe with all those top-bottom-left-right and similar analogies is the fact that in FP languages you mostly work with expressions, while the building blocks of imperative languages are statements.

I don't really have the time to continue here maybe I will write a blog post myself too :).
Thanks for all the great comments/responses. It really comes down to one thing: After so much time and some decent competition, why can't MS do a better job of UI? Windows 8 was their chance, and it really feels like a fancy skin on Win 7.
Wikipedia over SMS: Getting Wikipedia to the people who need it most
I think speed reading, as skimming, would be good in cases where you are trying to skip through data rather than process it. I do something very similar with lectures on topics which I'm already familiar with -- I speed them up to 2x or 3x speed in VLC, then slow them down when I reach a topic which requires extra thinking and comprehension.

There is also a tremendous value to watching an important lecture twice: the first time on fast-forward so that you understand the structure of the talk and the gist of the subject, and the second time on normal speed so that you can really get into the details. A lot of writing tries to give you an "overview" or "table of contents" to accomplish the same task, but when it's not there, skimming can be extremely useful.
Why do you use 'λ' instead of '\'? Is this normal in haskell projects?
These apps should be drawing to a framebuffer managed by the operating system. Which should then be composited at the correct scale by the OS.

One specific problem that arises on a Surface Pro is that the touch input on Civ 5 is off unless you set the DPI back to 100%. An app should not have to switch its touch/pointer handling just because the DPI changed.

It seems like the low level input handling should have been wrapped by Windows 8 to handle these cases.
Google's Customer Contempt Conundrum
The creators of DF could partner with some game studio to create a nice GUI for playing, or create an API that could allow for beter interfaces to evolve, the tilesets are great, but custom tutorials would be awesome.
I tried playing DF once but was overwhelmed with the information and didn't try again, and i used to play nethack and adom.

I also recommend ADOM for those who like nethack and redrogue that is a roguelike meets platformer, very nice !