skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I lost money for the first 7 months, almost everything I had. Started taking money out in month 9, on Valentine's Day Feb 14th. We were quite profitable by the 10th month, and we bought a building at the 12th month.
NEW GAME - Immersive Gameplay & Personality Assessment
Theres a stackoverflow discussion regarding that. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progra...
Information wants to be free, but the world isn't ready
I have done quite a fair bit of scraping over the last year, and I have to say that the combo of PhantomJS / CasperJS is really unbeatable. I have had to navigate some fairly awful DOM structures replete with errors, confirm dialogs, IE-only features, horrendous endless iframe trees, and more fun stuff. There's nothing I haven't been able to plow through yet using Phantom/Casper.
> This kind of put into words an odd feeling I was having about the whole "war of the sexes" vibe

What vibe?

> we're making a harmless part of videogame history a political and social justice issue

Who is doing that?

> What I don't understand is how one of the most common storytelling tropes in history (we're talking Shakespeare and then some) has suddenly become uncool to use

What are you trying to say?

I thought I read a story about a dad who wanted to make a game fun for his daughter. I read the article, I read it again, yep, it's a story about a dad making changes to a game for his daughter. What story did you read?
People still write (and play!) interactive fiction. http://inform7.com/ and http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse
I don't know. I have two young daughters and they would want to be the girl character - just because. They're too small to know or care about social injustice. Sometimes, people are just having fun.
a) That was indeed my point,

b) I was gilding the lily a bit, that's fair,

c) I remain skeptical the benefits exceed the costs, (given the viability of sites that don't end in ".com", and the fact no one's raising "lack of context" as a counterpoint to expansion of TLDs), but you make a provocative point. I could see it as an open question.
Cool hack, great dad, etc.

However, I can't help but point out that one of the most popular video games of the moment, Tomb Raider, has a female protagonist, and hordes (brutish, sexist hordes!) of male gamers are playing it without issue.

Maybe it's not such a bad thing to learn to play as a character that is not exactly like you.
Wow, this is pretty cool. Bookmarked, and I will drop a line once our web app launches (within a month or so)
"checkmate in one!" seems fairly clear to me.
Prediction markets don't necessarily have to be real currency and it's a misconception that they are only accurate if you're using real money. We have run a prediction market using fantasy currency for years: http://home.inklingmarkets.com. We also run run private markets for companies...
Calvin and Hobbes on Product-Market Fit
Great read, I didn't know chaos theory had applications to radar; I thought the study of radar originated in probability theory and spectral theory. Very interesting.

My only criticism is that Mary Cartwright would probably balk at the idea of royalty in mathematics.
I was going to ask about the message details but I figured it would make me sound like an asshole, so thanks for that. I've looked for this kind of message specifically and not found it in the spec. Does it specify a note number or do something odd?

FYI, I wasn't worried about synths generating the message but rather receiving it. It's not too hard to tell whether a synth has a concept of per-note aftertouch, but I guess if it's two distinct messages it's okay to be selective about which you support.
I've heard that view on language. It has it's place. It's no good for philosophy, or anything requiring rigorous reasoning. It is precisely this kind of reasoning that is desperately needed in discussions of sexism and racism, so we can try to get past the emotional issues that are clearly, I'm sure we can agree on this, clouding people's judgment. To some degree, we have to understand or at least notice the baggage to neutralize it. But overall richness is not desired as much as precision. If we don't try to be precise, we've already failed at communication. This is the opposite of putting blinders on myself.

If you want to talk about something more complicated than just "discrimination based on race", I think you need to describe that in terms of simpler things we agree on before we can decide whether it's happening and whether it's good or bad. Otherwise we don't know what we're talking about. This conversation is a perfect example. While I'm using the strict definition, you seem to think that "racism" means when the underdog is discriminated against but not the "dominant" culture, I still don't understand it. I think your definition is broken and deceptive (at least it's possible to prove something from a "degenerate" definition), and you think the same of mine. Would have been nice to know that at the start.

On the subject of pure logic, pointing out that someone's argument benefits them is strictly a logical fallacy. I'm tempted to whine that your arguments are self-serving, but tu quoque is a fallacy too. Both are usually counter-productive, except possibly as an explanation after you've explained logically why someone is wrong, which you have still not done.

This is how I try to approach any sort of philosophical or moral question, especially in writing. If you don't agree on this basic approach to finding truth, we really have nothing at all to say to each other.
The upvote question is easy to answer -- this is Hacker News. Of course we upvote programming. And I agree with the point about writing. And I think we shouldn't read "everyone needs programming literacy" from hacking a ROM any more than we should read "everyone needs to know woodworking" from "here's a cool piece of furniture I built for my daughter."

But I will try to answer the question about foisting software literacy, since you seem to be questioning the larger trend. The question to ask here is, what do you think the skills economy will look like in 15 years? Looking casually at the trends, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that software is eating the world. My friends in scientific research have either learned to code or are hobbled by their inability to do so. Financial institutions are increasingly just software companies with some domain expertise; I know finance people who can't get jobs because--to simplify a bit--they don't know SQL. Many non-technical office workers I know interact with a computer on some sort of programmatic level (e.g. Excel macros) and almost all of them would benefit enormously from programming literacy to help them in that. And all of that is trending upwards quickly; that's why programmers are in such high demand.

Cooking is great and an important personal skill, but it's only an essential skill for chefs, whereas if you can't code, you might become the equivalent of the guy who can't use email in today's office environment. So to me, it's a question of what the world's going to look like in the future, not a question of what's most practical around the house. Forecasting the future is hard and it's an interesting debate--there are all sorts of reasons software might be less important than we might guess, and of course software people are predisposed to think software will be super valuable. But I think it's the right way to frame the discussion: if software runs the world, you really need to know it. If it doesn't, you don't.

I'm not accusing you of this because I don't know you at all and your comment doesn't suggest it, but I hear a little bit of insider entitlement in a lot of programmers' arguments against increased software literacy. "I don't want all those other people jumping in and pretending they're software engineers too. The future belongs to the select few, which happens to include me. Leave software to the pros!" It's seems absurd to me that programmers don't want more people to understand the ins-and-outs of their profession...unless they feel threatened by such a thing. There's something very fishy about telling people who don't code, "Oh, yeah, don't do what I do. Learn to cook instead." Are you sure we're not just trying to keep all the marbles?
Let's see.. Pretty sure Peach has her own game on which the entire concept is getting the Mario Bros. out of trouble (the name is eluding me right now, it's on the DS).

She's personally helped save the world more than once (Paper Mario 2 comes to mind).

There are other female characters too.. Timpani from Super Paper Mario has a huge dynamic with the primary antagonist of the game.

And if you look outside of that particular franchise, you'd be remiss not to look at Samus Aran (minus one almost universally panned game with an outsourced plot), arguably the poster child for strong female leads in video games.
That covers the privacy concerns, but not the data ownership. It doesn't protect you from the (admittedly remote) possibility that Google will no longer offer sync servers.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but why not just use a Google Spreadsheet?
Regardless of the technical qualities of Lift, its future is pretty uncertain with 1) dpp leaving the project (in pretty bad terms) a few months ago and 2) Typesafe choosing Play over Lift for its stack.

I would definitely not pick Lift today for a new project.
Whois wouldn't help here. The problem is that so many requests are going to twitter.com/[username] that they start sending false 404s (or some other error, not 200) because of rate limiting.
Might want to bump the contrast up a bit. A tad difficult to read any of the text. Best of luck with the project.
I think this might be an over-emphasis on writing and coding for both articulation and problems solving. Doing both won't provide "everyone" better results. There are many ways people approach communication and problem solving. To say writing and coding are the best or only ways to develop these skills is in my opinion very short sighted and limiting.
No signs of border-box in the code.
There is a startup penalty to getting phantomjs executable up (including all of its WebKit internals), but once you're there, I've never had any performance issues. Roll a script using casper.each() and feed it an array of urls. It is typically very fast for me. You can trap on the page loaded event and do some benchmarking, but I would disagree with your premise that using PhantomJS/CasperJS is slow.
True, true. Consider the 'September' phenomenon. Newbies need a place to congregate. Those services catered to new users (termed IIRC 'lusers' at the time). Once 'it all' has become more familiar, then specialization happens, and more creative/sophisticated users start to resent the 'operation of the machine' and branch out into the niches (as teens are doing now with FB). I see no reason to expect that has changed.
Very true for startups where growth is only thing that matters. I work at a startup and we've been wondering whether mediocrity is worse than failure. I think it holds true for startups but not much for other things in life.
I think it's a slippery slope though: exactly who should profit and how much profit is too much? Posing those kinds of questions raises the ire of the "free market/profit motive cures everything" crowd that drives our current brand of capitalism.

Once we give something over to the machine, we introduce the very problem. IMO, we need to completely rethink what should be left to the markets vs. what we produce as a society for the good of humanity.
>What vibe?

Have you read this comment thread?

>Who is doing that?

Have you read this comment thread?

>What are you trying to say?

That I don't understand some of the discussions (their purpose or mindset) the story is generating. I have no issue whatsoever with the story itself.
The same word often has multiple meanings, and multiple usages.
I'm going to break out of hacker mind and say that this guy should get the Nerd Dad of the year award.
Yeah, cool idea and I get the whole 'night' vibe, but I stopped reading a sentence or two in because reading it was such a pita.
His grandson is the CEO in this story
OT: I use Streak. Love it. Would pay for it. Any plans to bring Streak to Outlook.com?
Also note: this is a brand new talk.
You can get a pretty good feel for the practical level of sympathy by popping down to your local math library and looking at the checkout histories of the works of Brouwer [1] and Bishop [2].

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brouwer

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errett_Bishop

'Sparse' would be an understatement & poor old Errett got such wonderfully backhanded reviews as:

> "Even those who are not willing to accept Bishop's basic philosophy must be impressed with the great analytical power displayed in his work."

and

> Bishop's historical commentary is "more vigorous than accurate".
Tesla EV Safety Training
How to Resurrect Lost Species
That's a shame... I can't say it happens for me, perhaps I've subconsciously learnt not to scroll in the vertical band where the usernames live! I'm using a hoverIntent plugin so you do need to hover for a few hundred milliseconds before it's triggered too.
Actually Go's use of := is almost anti-pascal: it means something rather different, but similar enough to be confusing, and so is likely to confuse anybody who's used to the vastly more common meaning of := in Algol-family languages (Pascal, Ada, etc).

... and then there's Go's screwed up version of Pascal-style declaration syntax...

[a link to my earlier rant on this subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4520104 (TL;DR: Go: "var foo, bar int"; Pascal: "var foo, bar : int"; the colon vastly improves readability, and has no real drawback)]
Yes, That is one of the main functions of government.
Does anyone know what tool you use to do such thing?
I'm the one complaining about nepotism. They were just complaining that he is an inexperienced tool that underpays them. That said, I'm sure they did count on his family connections creating an unending runway when they signed on.
Neat. A very thoughtful gift.
10% of 100 users is also different to 10% of 100k users. Just saying...

Absolute figures without context hardly ever tell an interesting story.
Sorry to interrupt the bitching about the UI of the website, but...

I would nominate a working familiarity with:

Non-trivial graph algorithms

Serious distributed systems design (ie. building something where anything and everything can fail at any time, possibly in nasty or even byzantine fashion)

Formal methods

Optimization methods (ILP and so on)

Binary decision diagrams

as some other "ninja arts" if we're going to have to use the term "ninja".
Seattle bar pre-emptively bans Google Glasses
Virtual Reality Visionary Jaron Lanier
We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter

Yep. Because any idiot can do that. Your point?
>I use keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, and occasionally dream of an Awesome Bar that works like bash.

This reminded me to check up on Ubiquity[1]. Mozilla doesn't even host a page for it anymore, but apparently someone adopted it[2]. I'm going to have to play around with this tomorrow; I'll be happy if it's half as useful as I remember.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_%28Firefox%29
[2]: https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/overview
nice, glad you could tweak to your liking!
Real life version of the ban hammer. What are they called? Power tripping moderators or something like that.
I think i may do the same. (also within a month, hopefully of course)
Noted. I have been thinking about that a lot, actually. Just wanted to get something out there quick to get some feedback and start soliciting people for interviews. I have a few ideas for the actual launch (which should be in a few weeks) that will probably include a lighter theme to make reading a lot better. Thanks for the input!
The quickest way I've found is to do a DNS lookup, and if that fails, hit the WHOIS.
I think physics is going in that direction too. The paper explains how math went from experimental to formal proofs. Now, for better or worse, science wants to extrapolate to universes from quantum particles.

Schrodinger's cat was originally proposed by Schrodinger to ridicule the many word's extrapolation of quantum mechanics. Now it is often used to support it. Scientists create multiple dimensions, universes, etc. based on very little real world data.
Personally I have no horse in the coding-skills race; I really enjoy problem solving and architecting systems more than writing the code itself. If there were lots of commodity coders, I could direct and manage them and enjoy myself plenty ;)

From the 'software is eating the world' perspective, I see increased use of software, but not increased production in unconventional areas. If you look at the progression of home computers, we've gone from booting directly into BASIC, to an iPad, where you really can't do any development. The slow march to 'appification', and the trend of taking away customization and development tools from consumer-grade products makes me think that while software is becoming more important, average people need (and want) to code less and less.

It's definitely a programmer's perspective to say that any knowledge industry (like finance) is just software + domain knowledge. Someone in that industry would approach it from the other end, and say that they can write a req and get some commodity software to solve their problem from some developer half-way around the world. This is where I think the industry is going: not universal programming literacy, but a more stratified culture where 'commodity' development is it's own discipline.

Consider the ease with which any consultant can knock together a CRUD Rails app with some business logic the client specifies. We've removed a ton of overhead and boilerplate, and lowered the barrier to entry tremendously. As time goes on, and development technology advances, I see software development/engineering and computer science diverging more and more. At some point, development might be an apprenticeship or more 'hands-on' education, to learn the existing patterns and practices.

In short, development will become a commodity, but via an emerging class of commodity developers who can handle 95% of client requests. There will still be people who do hard things, and hack in their spare time, and they'll make things better for everyone. But they'll stay in the minority, and development will stay out of reach for people who aren't explicitly 'developers'.
Imagine a world where 100% Beef Hamburgers are made from 25% diseased horse meat.
Interestingly, I think the key challenge is knowing when you've removed that question mark. The post attempts to provide guidelines around that, but mileage certainly varies and there are gray areas.

I think a tougher question (for me anyway) is when you have moderate, sustainable success, but not the stratospheric rise that you envisioned at the outset. At that point, the decision becomes tougher because walking away means that you are giving up something of significant value. I have also found personally that I like building businesses, but running them? Not so much.

So, the business becomes an anchor, keeping you from a greater vision/mission. At some point, you finally realize that it has to be sacrificed in order for you to get back on track, but precious years can be wasted under the illusion of success before you get there.
Sounds like a cheap glorification. I bet the bulk of the design work was done after the project was approved. Why do people need to make up such stories that simplifies and undermines the long and iterative process it takes to produce large projects?
Game Engine + Computer Vision
Predictive Analytics: Overview and Data visualization
Please bookmark! If you are working on some cool stuff, shoot me an email, now or when you launch.
Idea is awesome. I like how the usernames are generated in the first place. It doesn't work, however. I've been looking for simple things that I can hack up to help me learn ruby, so I made a little Ruby version using this idea. "UNameGen"

https://github.com/scrapcode/ruby-unamegen
Good stuff but are the March active user projections taking into account all of the traffic you got yesterday for announcing the pivot?
I just submitted my project cuz I love this idea!
Many of the same advantages hold for any other language's frameworks, with the added benefit of using any other language.
Did you ever check the documentation for the C compiler you were using? Every C compiler I've used have always come with extensive documentation, which included documentation about the standard C calls, like malloc() and free().

Even today, the GNU C compiler (which is what I mostly use) has non-standard extensions to malloc()/free() that allow you to obtain information that is otherwise not mentioned in the C Standard (GNU defines mtrace() and malloc_hook, for instance, which trace each allocation, and allow you to peek into malloc).

From your descriptions, it sounds like you wrote C back in the 70s or 80s. It's changed a bit since then.
Not what I assumed:

>This particular defamation case was not related to Moore's revenge porn activities

I'm more curious how the cases involving his revenge porn sites will go.
Seems incomplete. "Financial / Commodities" only has a few entries.
Killer apps for software platforms
Linux Trisquel 5.5 installation demo
Yeah, definitely change the grey on grey text.

I'm really diggin the cyan and purple/overall aesthetic though.
Interesting idea. I like. Have subscribed and submitted my project as well. Oh and please please please change the website colours... I couldn't read anything without selecting all the text.
Yes, the (few) sponsored ads seem no different than any other tweet you wouldn't care about anyway. I for one am quite accustomed to sifting through things this way, the ads don't seem like much of an extra burden, at least to me.
Are you only interested in projects with a single contributor, or are you open to something made by 3 people but as a side project?
How to open a microchip and what's inside
If we get the same stories posted every month in paraphrase, we deserve the same comments as well.
I don't really see the point here. Poor JavaScript code and a meme to support the conclusion?

I've successfully used programming languages for configuration (incidentally mostly JavaScript). They are more expressive and powerful, yet simple if given some thought.
A few common uses: only on for stimulation and rarely meet up, hookups, new to town and want to meet friends/going out buddies, looking for a relationship and don't know where else to meet guys, just on it to try it out, visiting and looking for the hot places to go, bored and wasting time.

Dating is less formal nowadays, even with women. The distinction between a date and a hookup is getting blurry, since a lot of first dates nowadays end up at least making out.

I'd say that even hookup-oriented guys are looking for a relationship with "the right person," so it isn't always clear saying that someone uses a service just for hookups. Plus, hookups often evolve into friendships or dates (and vice versa).
That's my point: there isn't much going on.

You can try academia, but things are pretty bleak right now. There's so much competition chasing so little money that it's hard to see a path to a career for all but the luckiest few PhD graduates. And forget it if you don't have a PhD from a top school.

People put so much mental energy into pondering the lack of innovation, but we've been systematically under-funding science for more than a decade. There's not much of a puzzle here.
I'm in the same camp as nicksergeant. I also don't like having to click outside the tooltip to dismiss it.

Nice work regardless, thanks for building it.
Really? The whole world drastically changed its security policy in the same way after one event in the US?