skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.

>We have redefined the word fast.

Sometimes I am really surprised by the responses to companies here. It seems like people never had a job or forgot the experience. Companies are not abstract entities that make things happen and only do PR: people work there.

A large portion of HN is likely engineers of some sort or someone very close to them and yet you don't believe EA's engineers are scrambling, maybe pulling all nighters to fix this. All you see is PR being slow to respond. PR are not the ones working fast to fix the issue.

(I don't work at EA and I don't know anyone who does, I don't even play games)
No, the fact that he's not living in reality does.

I never heard about Codd complaining about IBM's first relational implementation. In fact, have you read Codd's papers defining relational databases and normal forms?

To even get to 1NF, you have to eliminate any non-atomic datatypes. How the hell are you going to do that?

Get rid of strings? Any idiot can put
"key1=value1;key2=value2" into a string and violate 1NF.
Any idiot can create two identically typed columns for storing the same attribute, instead of one, in the same table, and violate 1NF. Even frickin' dates are non-atomic.

There is no practical way for a database server to ENFORCE what Pascal calls "relational" on the users.

So actually the whole "SQL's not relational" bullshit boils down to three things: "WAAAH! DISTINCT should be the default!" "WAAAAH! we shouldn't have NULLs!" and "WAAAH! we shouldn't have recursive table definitions or hierarchy types!"

Back in the real world we want those features, because we NEED to represent hierarchies and "Not Applicable" values in our databases.
because it is not transparent and perfect, having 99% of the stuff means the .1% can and do warp our democracy
TopNTree — A merge-sort inspired data structure
Do you really think that between "one person sees my penis" vs. "my penis is on the internet" you wouldn't mind which one?
The glasses do have a light on when recording according to the Verge.
If several countries, distribute across various continents, have managed to put in place three-strikes and six-strikes (not that I think it's good), it means that the one and foremost knee-jerking argument saying "You can't do anything about DDoS because: [X] It's technically not realist" is gone.

Technically now ISPs could throttle the bandwith (or even disallow net access) to zombies boxen used in DDoS attacks in all the countries applying "x-strikes" rules.

So there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

It's not exactly as if DDoS was a fatality and nothing could be done about it.
> There are thousands of problems that Google Glasses could solve.

And they leave it to 3rd party developers to solve them, it's similar to stock Android. Their calculator app is baseline, but the devs branch out more products with different features.
App stores seem like an even bigger 'sharecropper'. Giving 30% for what?

The biggest point is advertisement - or was. Now that the app stores are saturated, you absolutely need to market your app independently. Its as if you have a website that has been given to you by apple/google and they allow you to make money off of it if you pay them annually and cut them in for 30% of revenue.
Honestly I think people should stop saying anyone bought this game at all. They leased it. At some point in the future, EA is going to decide that the cost of running the servers outweighs the benefits of keeping them online, and they're going to shut them off.

Have EA made any promises regarding the expected life of this game?
>People already have eyes and memories.

It's not about seeing, it's about recording and sharing it in the internet. There is a big difference.
The Chinese are pretty minted, can they not buy the Russians a new one?
Same here … maybe just a hiccup.
"It is quite difficult for Python or Ruby to have the level of IDE that Java has. IntelliJ for Java is hard to beat. And Jetbrain (the company that makes IntelliJ) also produces Resharper (R#)..."

Jetbrains also makes IDE's for Ruby and Python; Rubymine and pyCharm.
We should first now the size of the attack and how many zombies are participating.

With all the exploits out there coming out on a nearly daily basis it's not exactly either as if having an army of a few tens of thousands of zombies was expensive...
Like PDAs ten years ago? Except we all have those now, save for the name.

The problem that these solve is that most things you'd want to use your smartphone for aren't worth the time it takes to get it out, do the security numbers or pattern or facial recognition, bring up the app, etc. Reducing the overhead from 45 seconds to 5 seconds is an enormous win, it seems to me, quite apart from the head-mounted camera aspect that gets so much focus.
The 5-point cafe has had a history of publicity attempts - they used to have bikini clad women pay your parking meters if you bought food. They generally latch on to current events and try to leverage them to get people to come in more.
Why would people incorporate in the States/Singapore?
err.... I think you are deeply confused.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_normal_form#Atomicity

The rules of relational databases aren't the rules because some guy named CODD said they are. There are deeper principles of mathematics and logic at work. It's rather hysterical to claim that, because some guy named CODD explained the properties of this system in an ambiguous or confusing way, that the whole system should be disregarded as impractical nonsense.
Protein 'Passports' Fool Immune System To Deliver Medical Nanoparticles
You can make a lot of arguments against Comic Sans but these are either not the right ones, or you're going to need to back them up with some explanations what you really mean (because merely stating typographic jargon doesn't make it factual).

So, I'm just going to call you out on a few things. I might not know all about typography, but I do know quite a bit. I would say more than the average person, so if I don't get what you mean really, it's probably a good idea to expand on it, if you stand behind those statements. And if I got the wrong ideas from your short critique, please do educate us, I'm always willing to learn.

Hinting. Can you give me an example of how it's poorly hinted? From what I've always seen, Comic Sans is actually hinted rather well, and in my opinion actually gets better at smaller point sizes (mainly because with less pixels the shapes and kerning become more regular).

Contrast. Now about the zero contrast, I suppose what you really meant is that the lines are all equal thickness, which is something different than "contrast" because you're going to have appearance of heavier weight at the connections of the lines, which is why Helvetica and Arial actually have varying stroke widths, to give the appearance of uniform weight. You can argue this gives Comic Sans bad or uneven contrast, and I'd be inclined to agree. But zero contrast doesn't make sense to me when referring to Comic Sans.

Additionally, how does this automatically disqualify a font from print or display? Especially really large display, I've seen it in large rainbow coloured logos at children's daycare centres, and it works just fine there.

Harmony. I did some Googling to make sure, but the only typographical meaning of the term "harmony" that I've been able to find is the one that I already knew, and it's not something you can attribute to a font. It's to do with the rhythm and contrasts of spacing and weights (and more) on a page or part of a page. You can say it's hard to make a harmonious design with Comic Sans, but you cannot say Comic Sans does not "have" harmony.

I do agree it's not particularly suitable for body text (unless you happen to have dyslexia, but there's prettier fonts that help there, unfortunately they're not free).

(Sans) serif. Not a true sans-serif, how is this bad? The author explains his choice and I think that particular choice was a great one. In today's digital world, differences between Il|1 can be crucial, and can't always be inferred from context, most typographical conventions followed out of a need for medium-specific legibility, and I'm afraid you're going to have to deal with the fact that mixing serif and sans-serif is now a valid design choice.

I still don't particularly like Comic Sans myself either, but for different reasons (that I explained elsewhere in this thread).
Why does the IIT grad something more than any other human?
Python TableFu - A tool for manipulating spreadsheet-like tables in Python
Three that immediately jump to mind:

* Putting a "minimap" in your field of vision as you walk down the street.

* Letting you read a book--or consume an ordinary chatroom/news feed/other auto-updating thing--while standing in a packed subway car, or while laying in bed (no more weird-sideways-phone-holding-time), and never having to "put it down" when something needs your attention; you just look away, and then look back.

* Giving you to-do lists that you'll finally always check, because they can actually get "in your face." For that matter, spaced-repetition flash cards that come up exactly when you need them to optimally memorize things.

Also, a few more that involve sensory data input, but only to process it into something else (these could be high-level APIs that can safely be accessed whether or not "real recording" is enabled):

* Identify your contacts with visual recognition [can be just stored on your device--not some Panopticon database], and automatically pull up their contact cards/Facebook profiles. Everyone you've met gets a nametag hovering over them like in an MMO.

* Finally make QR codes useful: look at one and immediately see the thing it links to overlaid--and then bookmark it with a glance. This extends to other kinds of barcodes--for example, being able to see the lowest price for an item in a store by just looking at the UPC.

* Identify images, songs, movies, TV shows, etc., through passive submission to something like Tineye, Shazam, etc., or just by a "backing track" laced into the audio/video, that the HMD can detect. Never "lose" something you liked just because you didn't get to find out its name.

* Pair the HMD to a TV, then pause the stream whenever you look away from it. Pair the HMD to a computer, then lock it whenever you aren't interacting with it.
Distinguishing important from urgent with drawings
Using baye's nets to set priorities (for beginners)
If your nickname here can somehow be linked to the company you're working for (e.g. by checking previous messages you posted to HN or on another board) I think it's not very smart to write what you just wrote.

Now the bad guys knows that they should just have tried a bit longer.

Now maybe that because you were DROP'ing / blacklisting IPs maybe they just ran out of zombies but still...

If I was the attacker and read your message and wanted to be bad, I'd just hammer you a bit more to put you in trouble.

Besides that there are some ISPs who do care about both keeping you online and fighting the low-life scums: the ISP XS4ALL from the Netherlands is (was at least) notoriously famous for that.
The technology is everywhere. The act is not.

You don't see people walking around with their phone held high constantly recording everything as they walk around. If you did then most people would be suspicious or concerned about what they were doing. And more than likely at some point they would be asked to stop.

People record video using smartphones of people they know. Not random strangers.
>solving a problem people don't have, won't have, and don't want to have.

I can see this being used in some situations where you don't want to hold a video camera - like recording your pov when you're skydiving, scuba diving, mountain biking etc

But then again, there are already helmet/bike mounted cameras..
" the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis" [0]

[0] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/10/12/53802/private-sector-l...
Explain it? You take offense by the "don't need so much money" or the "supplemental earners" thing? The latter is presumably simply a current statistical fact? Don't need so much money - well I explained it. And as I said, any women who feels she needs more money is free to earn it, even today, and even in IT.

Earning more money usually comes at a price. I don't understand why you find it offensive to assume that some people have different priorities?

Women in IT: why do you think the recent "geekettes Hackathon" in Berlin felt it necessary to offer Yoga classes alongside the Hackathon? Is it a bad thing?
Python Script to Watch and Sync Directory
Start small and compose: a strategy for using FactoryGirl
It should be trivial to make a patch with an offline mode, if they've followed good network programming practice.

[edit]
"It should be relatively easy" might be more accurate.
It would not be good engineering to create a single-player mode that doesn't degrade gracefully when the network connection is absent.
>There are thousands of problems that Google Glasses could solve.

Can you give some examples?
This is probably the first comment that made me wish I could downvote. Pure trolling
Smartphones were the beginning of the end of that difference. This is the obvious next step.

What about when this kind of tech is so small that it's embedded in contacts? Even if you think that's twenty years off, still, surely it's obvious that it's coming? It's possible not to notice that someone is video recording you at the moment, but soon it will be essentially impossible to know if they are.
Relational databases have a sound mathematical model. You may not think of it this way, but a table can be seen as a predicate in logical terms. You can frame most logical queries as a chaining of predicates and functions, and you can create arbitrary (finite) predicates using tables. That's powerful.

NoSQL came into style with the web, in which you have large data sets but don't need most of the relational features. You might have a trillion Wuphfs, but you'll never need ad-hoc queries because you're doing mostly CRUD on the Wuphfs. Sharded SQL is a painful way to deal with that problem space. NoSQL systems are often better adapted to it. NoSQL is almost always less powerful abstractly but easier to scale.

The major problem that I've seen with NoSQL systems is that they tend not to handle the edge cases very well. Remember the old joke about the man who goes to the doctor and says, "It hurts when I do this", so the doctor says "Don't do that". Sometimes, you have to "do that". Many NoSQL products are also quite low-level, requiring that more traditional database functionality be written in client code. That gets nasty-- slow, flimsy, hard to coordinate. You don't want, for example, clients to be responsible for generating sequential unique IDs because the clients all have to agree on what the rules are, in addition to generating a lot of communication overhead each time a new block of IDs is requested.

Furthermore, if you're using NoSQL to build something that will be marketed as a database product (e.g. within your company) and are exposed to requirement accretion, you'll find that the requirements are often inspired by expectations derived from relational models: ACID transactions being the big one.

I am not saying that SQL is the best for all problems, but it is a damn good technology. Personally, I think that a lot of SQL hate comes from the limitations of MySQL. If that's the source of your headaches, look into Postgres. Postgres is surprising in how modern and powerful it is.
> wonder if these attacks are related to the Chinese hacking attacks that have been publicised lately?

Might be just me, but I don't like this trend. I'm seeing "the chinese" & "hacking" used too much together without proof more often than not. Almost as if they are being made into the next boogeyman to be afraid of.
Gaming business is similar to narcobusiness in some regards. No matter the experience customers NEED to have their dose.
I personally know some people who make a new Steam account for each game they own and then they just sell the account on Ebay(and thus the game with it). It's against the terms of licence,but it works.
Why not write server code for Windows? I fail to see a major reason that would stop one from doing that. Actually, its a pretty good, well supported and documented and stable platform.
Compare 0:36 and 1:30.
Yes, but the people whose decisions lead to IT people pulling all nighters are not themselves pulling all nighters or even bothering to tell the PR people what to say for 48 hours.

They want to minimise their losses to piracy before China and India become really big markets. They are willing to destroy the companies for this opportunity.
But the language support is not as good as Java and C#, which are static typed and IDE can make use of static analysis.
Which is harder?
Hey guys just want to have your opinion in which is harder getting in shape or learning to program?

I'm a self taught programmer and learning was hard. Now I'm trying to get physically in shape and I feel like this is harder mentally ad physical wise...
It would support the idea that their servers are only used occasionally, probably for saving.
That was a hyperbole.
> It should be trivial

This is another statement that always surprises me when said by an engineer instead of an exec.
Get a smaller host, that way they can't afford to cut you of.
It's like a publicity stunt, only that no one knows about it.
That's a good idea. Just the other day I turned off Ad-Block on the Let's Play Archive (http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/) because they had a little banner message that asked me nicely if I would consider it.
20+ years ago I worked at a food store frequented by urban poor including some homeless and as a starving student at that time I fit right in.

At that level "cooking" is buy a bun (or two) from the bakery for 50 cents (or less if day old), a dollars worth of sliced meat from the deli, a slice or two of deli cheese for a quarter, grab a handful of condiment packets from the deli, and "cook" that into a sandwich lunch for about two bucks while laughing at the $7 premade subs from the deli or the fast food joint. And frankly the ingredients are probably higher quality than the fast food restaurant.
In Word 2013, Calibri Light is used for header instead of Cambria.
Google called the MPEG-LA's bluff, and won
Or create a real sandbox, with interpreter support, like the PyPy one.
Given that javascript is the language that can be embedded in any webpage ... yes it is.
What precisely am I confused about?

You are linking to the 1NF wikipedia page section on atomicity.

Are you alleging that I am confused about atomicity?

Because I said strings and dates are not atomic. Here is your link:

"A character string would seem not to be atomic, as the RDBMS typically provides operators to decompose it into substrings."

By the way, dates can also be decomposed, into years, months, days, hours, minutes etc

Oopsie, it appears that you're the one who's confused.
Chess CAPTCHA
bummer. what a typo, i'll leave it as it is for everyone to enjoy (actually lazy).
I would care. There's no excuse for your site affecting my server in any way. If it's a site that gets enough traffic the number of connections being made to my web server for a single resource could be enough to adversely affect my site. Besides why are you going to take the chance that the image stays online and in its current location. Just rehost it, it takes such a minuscule amount of effort.
Mono is actually finding its way to new platforms all the time.

I was surprised to find out that the recently released Playstation Mobile SDK is based entirely on Mono, so Playstation Vita runs it.

And I am pretty sure there's an implementation available on Android. As for iOS there's Xamarin. MonoDevelop on MacOS is also quite good.
Are you suggesting it has to do with the technical implications of always-on DRM or the ethical considerations?
It's a Monty Python sort of joke?

Interviewer: (sings) Good night, ring-ding-dingy. (shouts) Five, four, three, two, one!

Candidate: (cackles like a chicken)

Interviewer: (writing) Good! Very good, indeed!
Mirror:
http://web.archive.org/web/20121112213332/http://www.pitt.ed...
> fontsquirrel, dafont, urbanfont

while these sites are fine if you're looking for a cool display font for a poster or something, it's quite hard to find fonts there suitable for heavy use because many of them are really (really) badly kerned and miss many glyphs you need in most texts.

there's probably a few to be found there (especially on FontSquirrel), but it's real hard to tell before downloading and trying them on a full paragraph, as the sites are very specifically designed to answer the question "does my short title / logo look good in this font?" instead of "is it a good font to use in Word?".
EA Labels president Frank Gibeau has bassically stated that they won't make games that aren't in some way multiplayer[1]. This doesn't strictly mean that they won't make a game without a single-player part that doesn't require a connection, but it's pretty close.

[1]
Petition for the right to return games broken by DRM
I don't understand why everyone on HN hates Windows server so much. From an administration standpoint they are much easier to setup and use thanks to their GUIs. Windows is very standardized and has very good management tools and interfaces.

C#, ASP MVC, and Visual Studio are extremely good tools. I've programmed in C# for 10 years and never had a project I could not do quickly with it. It has very good support of 3rd party controls like Telerik, and there are lots of open source projects on codeplex, github, etc.

The most expensive part of software development is paying developers. Spending a few dollars on good dev tools or 3rd party controls is a very good investment and can save a lot of time.
If it's open, I can scrape it.
Yes, but what are the orbits of the debris and how quickly do they fall into the atmosphere or deep space?
>Hey, relax!

You are trying to oppress me. I will not relax.
There's an interesting comment [1] by a fella called kodemunkee at TechCrunch. Is there any truth to this?

> This is definitely an "unmitigated disaster". What nobody's seemed to realize about EA's offer to give away a free Origin game is this: EA can write off the games they give away in dealing with this debacle as a tax write-off at full "market" value (on the Origin market, anyhow) even though they cost only pennies to deliver to you. In addition, the $20 coupon for another Origin game that was given to those who bought the game through Origin will also be used as a write-off against the $50+ the game went against. If we assume that the value of the games that they will offer for their "apology" will be around $35-40, then they will have effectively written off the entire purchase price of SimCity in "promotional" and "apology" give-aways, thus turning the aforementioned "unmitigated disaster" into EA's most profitable quarter ever. This is not just consumer fraud, it's tax evasion.

[1]: http://fyre.it/QUB0pP.4
It's never quite too late, but you might want to really rage about it, to make up for all the lost time.
It has already been changed. Pianos don't have mod wheels, for example. I could list a hundred or so other changes but the good ones are mostly beneath the surface. But these things aren't really pianos, they just use a piano keyboard.

I agree with the poster who said "this isn't for you." Then again, it's not for many people. Electronic instruments have only changed the basic design slightly because they are tied down by a short-sighted standard. It's why mod wheels have been around forever but these things haven't. See the post at the top about the MIDI spec and such.
Who would have the motivation to hack GitHub?