skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Updating the imagery in a head mounted display (HMD) based on a head tracking sensor is a subtly different challenge than most human / computer interactions.

Doesn't the military already have this solved for head mounted displays for attack helicopters and 4++ generation fighter jets? Heck, they have augmented reality displays for that matter.

EDIT: Many of these problems could be solved by putting an entire purpose-built gaming rig in the headset. There are nicely capable chips for mobile devices with lots of power in the GPU. Design such a system from the ground-up for low latency. Accelerometer and head-tracking inputs would be low-level interrupts, for example.

I wonder if this is how the military contractors solved this?
"a set of standard low-level control primitives ... Are there technical challenges preventing this from happening, or is it mainly inertia and lack of need from the current market?"

It's easier to iterate faster without having to deal with a standardization committee. See OpenGL history for some context.
> You know damn well you sometimes deal with people who simply don't respond to your niceties.

People.

> Again, maybe you have a reason, but unless you are leaving critical things out, your attitude is what makes it impossible.

I said as much.

> Why does it have to be his fault?

It doesn't have to be. I said as much.

> Back and forths like are annoying and make this community look pedantic.

Commenting is not the way to handle this then. Downvote, or flag if you think it's not appropriate. Commenting, however, signifies what I said contributed to the discussion. If it didn't, then any reply would be equally worthless.
Unless Spotify has some backdoor API with Facebook, it seems like a major oversight in the Facebook API that an (any?) app can re-register a deactivated account and give itself whatever permissions it wants.

Just because Spotify accidentally (or purposefully) took advantage of that hole doesn't mean it's not Facebook at fault here.
In Canada they have a system where you input a PIN number every time you use a credit card at a POS.

I've heard from my Canadian friend who owns a Shoppers Drug Mart, that it has cut down chargebacks to almost 0.

Why they haven't implemented this in the US I'm not sure. The only problem is that if they figure out your PIN, it makes it very hard to fight chargebacks from the point of the consumer. But we all know that the CC companies don't care.

The one thing to note is that it's very hard for the CC companies to lose money with fraud. Usually the merchant or the consumer is on the hook. Then the issuing bank, etc. They're last in line, so their incentive to make drastic change is nil.
" would you take it upon yourself to leave a project if it reached a point where team expansion was necessary?"

Not every project requires team expansion and teams vary in strength and productivity. But in general, yes I would leave if I were required to stand in front of 9 "team members" every morning and tell them my deeds and troubles. At this point, the challenges have been solved and the single hardest problem in the project is coordinating everyone. I get bored and frustrated at this point causing me to seek a more interesting project.

Software is fundamentally a creative discipline - creativity rarely occurs in a committee.

A 10 man team can certainly do more work then I can (in general). But if I'm unable to work properly in a 10 man team, I SHOULDN'T be on that team. Not all of us are effective in the traditional agile environment - give us a nook somewhere and let us solve problems independently. You'll get far more value out of us that way then adding us as the 11th member of that team.
The main difference is what happens if you chain together multiple operations. Are these executed one by one (each resulting in a roundtrip to the database) or executed all at once (single roundtrip to the db).

As a side note, each programming language has its own idioms. We tried to bring the ReQL query to each language in a way that felt as close as possible to the host PL (as opposed to say SQL which you need to use it as it is; and that led to the hundreds or thousands of wrapper libraries/ORMs. etc).

alex @ rethinkdb
This is good stuff and he covers a lot of important indicators.

One thing I discovered in 2001, and validated from 2002-2007 is that monetary policy is a massive indicator of the direction of countries. Once you understand economics (Economics in one lesson by henry hazlitt is a very readable place to start, but Austrian business cycle theory is the real deal) you can see how things are going to go pretty clearly. Which is why in 2001 when the mises institute was predicting a housing bubble (long before even Krugman advocated creating a housing bubble) ABCT let me know that it would eventually pop. I put this theory into practice with a variety of financial instruments and profited from it.

The thing about real science is it lets you make predictions. Oil is very critical and this guy is onto some really good stuff... but economics in a broader sense and monetary theory in specific, is also hugely relevant.

The biggest tragedy of this kind of knowledge, though, is watching people make bad decisions (like buying houses they couldn't afford) based on nonsense they were told (essentially propaganda). Even someone who knows you a long time and thinks your a genius will believe CNN, politicians and their own desire to buy a house and "get in on the action" over wise counsel.

Which ultimately left me with this conclusion: People get the world they create, and they are complicit in its creation. How many people who hate the PATRIOT ACT and NDAA voted for Obama? How many should have known? How many people who wanted prudent financial management voted for Bush? How many should have known they would get deficit spending? How many were tricked into voting for one of these guys with the idea that the alternative was so much worse...when in retrospect they aren't that bad (Bush, for instance, never cracked down on abortion like we were told to fear in 2000, and he was in office 8 years.)

What if everybody actually demanded their government was honest, prudent, and abided by the constitution?

So, yes, use everything you can to understand geopolitics, because we're in a time of great upheaval- or close to it. The future for the USA is dimmer than the past, unfortunately, no matter which major party wins the next several elections.
Spotify started requiring a Facebook login from all new users on 22nd September 2011. On 6th December 2012 they put the non-FB signup option back. You signed up before they required FB so you never saw the requirement.
That depends (somewhat) on the usefulness of a stolen Glass device. They require a network to be useful, contain a GPS chip and so are easy to track down, and can likely be remotely disabled by Google.
The view update part was the most confusing, but I tried to understand it this way:

Imagine you had a magical game engine that rendered the entire world perfectly accurately for every point in space and direction a viewer could possibly be looking at. All you had to do was say:

RenderGameFrameForEveryPossiblePoint();

... // Who knows how much time

viewerPosition = QuicklyGetViewerPosition();

TellTheGPUToShowWorldAccordingTo(viewerPosition);

Well then, you could postpone calling those last two functions until the absolute last minute. This way you have very little or no movement of the viewer's head between when you read their position and when you show the view for that position.

But naturally, RenderGameFrameForEveryPossiblePoint() is slightly out of bounds of current technology. A lot of what Carmack was discussing, as I understood it, was simulating this effect as closely as possible. The way to do that, it seems, is:

StartRenderingGameFrameAccordingTo(lastViewerPosition);

... // Stuff

viewerPosition = QuicklyGetViewerPosition();

viewMatrix = ComputeViewMatrixDelta(lastViewerPosition, viewerPosition);

FinalizeGPUFrameRenderWithNewViewMatrix(viewMatrix);

That final bit is just a perspective transformation of a bunch of rendering that was already computed and given to the GPU. But if the viewer moves too quickly, you can easily move somewhere in the world that wasn't actually rendered, or your perspective could shift such that and object that was once occluded is now visible, or vice versa. It seems a lot of the complexity is there.

The last thing he talked about, time warping, seems to be a similar thing only it's scanline by scanline. So in effect you're saying "hey, video card and display, I know you're going to force me to draw a whole frame at once, so I'm going to give you a frame where each scanline gets rendered a little bit into the future according to where the player is moving."

The effect on a monitor would probably look like a forward shear, but on an HMD (if done correctly), it would correct for the natural shear caused by having to "freeze frame" the viewer's perspective for one entire frame instead of just a scanline.

Some of this may be woefully incorrect, but it was how I explained it to myself. Please correct anything that's wrong or overly simplified.
Java on the Mac is malware
A lot of people have criticized the petition and asked for a letter writing campaign to congress representatives. The site is bare at the moment, but more to come soon.
Awesome to hear that your using backstitch! (I'm one of the Co-Founders). If you get a chance I would love to talk with you about how your using it and what you would like to see from the service. Please feel free to ping me at jordan [AT] backstit.ch
Laziness typically implies something isn't evaluated until you need the data (e.g. you coerce it to a native language data structure, or you need to print it, or write it to a file or network). So saying list(query) lazily evaluates the query, while saying query.run() is a more strict (explicit) evaluation model.

I actually think strict is better here, but that's a different discussion altogether :)
"A minority of your applicants are going to perform badly in that situation because the adrenal glands will effectively reduce the output prefrontal cortex below an acceptable level"

I have an off topic question. I don't see what the problem being discussed has to do with how glands reduce activity in certain parts of the brain. Sounds to me like a fancy way of saying 'people don't perform well under stress'.

You could of course ask - "what mechanisms control human behaviour, and how does stress specifically affect body systems?" Then, great, let's hear all about adrenal glands and prefrontal cortexes. When that's clearly not what the question was though, I find it a form of poor communication.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?
EMV only seems to secure offline transactions at merchants and ATMs. How does it protect information for online and phone payments?
It's awful. For ages, we've worried about The Government mounting cameras everywhere until the only private space was one's own home, and away from windows at that. 1984 famously envisioned a world where this surveillance extended to the domicile, but even then it was stationary and had blind spots.

Seems that in the near future, there will be little need for any of this, and there will be no coercion; rather, most of us will vie for the most powerful, feature-loaded head-mounted camera.

That's not to say that such an invention can or will only be used for evil. But there's no denying that this is huge progress for anybody dreaming of global surveillance or something like it.
You've just described ARQC EMV card payments.
Once again you are mixing in logical arguments with emotional ones, and using emotion to override logical arguments and ultimately support an unjust status quo.

You agree that changes need to happen. So why not lobby for the changes that you want to see? Why lobby for the status quo or the expansion of the current broken program?

From your comment, why not lobby for these:

1. Employers should NOT have the right to send people back within 30 days if they eliminate a position. Instead, the person should have the right to look for another job as long as the visa period has not expired.

2. Employers should not be involved in the green card application process -- people should apply for a green car on their own, after X years of stay.

Why not have a real change agenda instead of sniping at non-existing arguments (they'll ban H1B!) or adding support to the idea that being exploited by BigCos is the only way things can be?
I was thinking that this will revolutionize cycling. Instead of looking down at your mounted cycling computer, you could simply have this built into your glasses (cyclists are almost always sporting sunglasses as it is). Speed, heart rate, cadence, wattage...all of this can be put in front of you, without the need to ever look down, which could increase safety.
I used to go on camping trips regularly. I always found that I woke up exceptionally well-rested in a tent. I attribute that to a combination of the fresh air, the possibility of a gentle breeze, and the difference of outdoor sounds vs. a 60Hz hum in the house. And it's not about sleep length, either; I would always wake up earlier in a tent than in my bed.

I think the phenomenon is worthy of more in-depth scientific experimentation, but I wouldn't ignore my own experience; even with no control group and a sample size of one.
SXSW Housing: Wanted
Hi everybody! I got started on my SXSW plans a little late and as a result, there are no hotels with space left. What a surprise!

Is anyone renting a home with space for one more or know someone who is? Goes without saying but more than happy to pay my fair share.

Please let me know!
Exactly. This is precisely the problem. It's not that any particular question is a "bad" choice, per se, it's that interviewers can fail to realize what they are actually testing for.
Regarding your last point: it's getting better. Modern TVs have "game mode", where latency is minimized. The latest LCD panels use embedded Display Port, eDP. The latest eDP standard introduces a frame buffer on the LCD itself, where you can just write deltas and tell it to "swap". I think this is quite similar to what you're proposing, in concept.
Yes! LMK if you'd like to join.
Yes, they have with very powerful hardware thats not very consumer wallet friendly.
Wow, this is just really really great. I am biased because I do this too, read all sorts of stuff, put articles together, make silly predictions to myself about how that will affect the world and then watch to see if I was close.

When you do this for a while it becomes habituated. And then you start seeing not the data points, but the connections. Stories that seem to cluster around certain events, or predict them. Some really obvious ones like in California when ever there is a call to 'cut spending' in the legislature, just like clockwork there will be 6 to 12 stories appearing about how important it is to keep teachers well paid and how they have already sacrificed so much. These sorts of 'dots' become predictive of future events, and knowing the future can tell you other things (like other people who are doing the same thing you are)

I explained it to a guy on the train once, if you ride a train from point A to point B, it is full of strangers. If you ride it every day for 6 months from point A to point B (and you are at all observant) you notice "That person works in Palo Alto and lives in Mtn View, that person only sits facing opposite the rest of the car, those two people are in a relationship but trying not to be obvious about it, that guy hates his job or wants a new job" etc. Because each day you right gives you a 'dot' and after a while some of those dots coalesce into meaning.
I do, but that's because I am not a developer so a lot of the information on HN is novel and outside my usual knowledge base. That, and the designer digests available on the web are so dumbed down it's hard to stomach.
Like watching repeats of MythBusters, the designer news outlets are ostensibly for designers but it's more about disseminating easily digestible content.
We can do round 2.0 next Friday :)
Congratulations to 37signals for adopting a hiring practice that most companies have been using for more than a decade.
I remember once when I was automatically logged in to my roommate's Spotify account on my computer just because we were on the same WiFi network (?). She had never used my computer, let alone logged in to her Spotify account on it.

I'm still not sure how or why it happened.
Carmack has also mentioned in the past we could solve other buffer problem with non-isochronous displays, essentially a display that doesn't run on a fixed hz cycle but rather outputs lines to the screen as it comes down the pipeline at whatever framerate the host system can handle
I think there's a ton of this kind of communication going on that we don't realize. I have been a practitioner of QiGong for about 9 months and it has opened me up to a whole different dimension of information that is passed between living things. I think much more study is needed on these methods of energy transferrence between living organisms.

These kinds of subtle communications make up a dimension of the human experience that can only be consciously experience by being actively cultivated and the main stream scientific community has bound itself to a set of ideological assumptions (IMHO inhereted from the Christian church) that deny the existence of these dimensions of human experience and so do not respect their cultivation or deem them worthy of study.

This is going to become more of an issue the closer our technological interfaces interact with our senses. These assumptions about what we are, how we communicate, and how we interact with the physical/spiritual world form the base assumptions underlying the future course of our evolution and progress. What happens if by augmenting/modifying one sense we cut ourselves off from another that informs us subconsciously?
CitiBank - Virtual Account Numbers
It is, or at least was, possible to delete your facebook account. Not just deactivate it.

http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?_fb_noscript=1

That's in Swedish for me but I assume it's localized. It says that there are two options, one is deactivation, and if you don't believe you'll need your account again, the other is deletion.
I pay, effectively, a recurring fee for PyCharm. The personal license is €89 and comes with 1 year of upgrades. As they've been able to release upgrades after that year expired that looked interesting, I paid another €50 for it the next year support.

Personally I'm not keen on a recurring payment unless there's a clear benefit. For an editor, that'd be having a team committed to making it better. The JetBrain guys have shown good progress.
So happy that I use 1password to generate random passwords for every single service I use. This wouldn't be possible if everyone was more aware of security - still, I find the way facebook treats its users increasingly disturbing and seriously consider to leave it.
There are many use cases when pulling money is more convenient for the consumer. This is how most people pay their bills for example - they let providers deduct a different sum every month based on usage. There's a lot of value in being able to simply "set it and forget it"
"Doesn't the military already have this solved for head mounted displays for attack helicopters and 4++ generation fighter jets? "

Far from it. There was a recall a few years ago over glitches in a fighter jet HMD. It's still an active area of research and no less than 5 different systems employed by the US military divisions
If you don't want someone to mess with your Facebook account, then perhaps you shouldn't give them your Facebook login and password...
This is really good advice!
Dealing with asteroid strikes
I disagree that it's clear. A placeholder in a field is no substitute for an actual label. It should be an enhancement, not a replacement. With the number of places using e-mail addresses as usernames, it's a natural mistake.
Learn in Freedom
Regular expression: ( a * )*

String: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaab

This kills the browser.

ADDENDUM:

A good read on executing regular expressions in linear (and thus predictable) time is http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

Many other algorithms have exponential edge cases. This can open yourself to DoS'ing if you accept regular expressions from the user (e.g. a search feature.)
Do you have any evidence or other basis for this belief? Or is it just a hunch that you share as if it was fact?
That has its peeves/perks, people don't want to say they work for apple anymore just to avoid the attention; a company of one.
> or even unhealthy drafts.

I'm pretty sure there is no such thing. (unfortunately, most people I know not only believe in it, but are also afraid of such drafts; the result is that, for example, I find it uncomfortable to work in any office because of stale air most of them accumulate throughout the day).
+1 for mentioning Gambit-C. I don't use Gambit-C anymore, but I used to use it a fair amount for writing small utility programs. Gambit-C can be used to build very small and efficient executables. Gambit-C doesn't have the huge library that Racket or Chicken have but it is great for building small command line utilities, etc.
Google voice recognition can be done offline on phones now.
Really?

Of the three job interviews I've traveled for in the last year, all were paid by the company 100%.
For retail POS transactions, EMV (chip+pin) cards and terminal are an attempt to shift this balance. Unfortunately, the rollout isn't due for another couple of years yet in the USA, and there has been significant resistance to the change already (as demonstrated by the 10 year lag when compared to the EU rollout).
There'd be some need for regulation but less than with fission. The only nuclear waste is activated reactor components, not transuranics and fission products. The reactor turns off like a light switch, with nothing to produce decay heat, and it has no potential for a runaway reaction. (It's hard enough to get the reaction going in the first place.) The only potential radiation release is small amounts of tritium, and there's no concern about fissiles getting diverted for weapons. Tritium has some weapons use if you're ready to progress to thermonuclear bombs, but in that case you hardly need fusion reactors to make it.

If we manage boron fusion, we'll be producing less radiation than burning equivalent coal, and won't have tritium. It's hard to see how anyone would justify regulating that for anything other than electrical safety, just like any other power plant, and for radiation standards on par with medical equipment.

People bring up that joke in the comments section of every fusion article ever published. The fact is, fusion has progressed exponentially since about 1970, about as fast as Moore's Law, despite a level of funding far below what those early optimistic advocates said we needed.
In many ways it would be easier to build a long term habitat on on Mars than the Moon. Mars might have a mostly Carbon dioxide / Nitrogen atmosphere at vary low pressure but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing. There is even enough H2O (220ppm) that it's probably viable to extract enough of it from the atmosphere to make up for recycling losses. (As in you could build a machine that produces more H20 over time from extraction than you would spending that mass shipping H20 directly.)
This story and the interview had so much potential but Ortiz just hides behind legal sequester and refuses to answer the majority of the host's soft questioning.