skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are being down voted, but I think it is a valid point. Games compete for your time as well as your dollars, and the internet is a big and easy distraction. I spend as much time reading about games as playing them. Look how many views game playthroughs are getting now.
If they really have the chops and motivation (wishing for it doesn't make it so), it may be a valuable life experience for them to give it a try. If they "succeed" they've saved years of expensive tuition. If they "fail", then they'll have a lot better idea of what the real world's like ... always valuable when choosing a college major, if they go that way.
Exhaled breath is unique fingerprint
Raven Software releases source code for Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast
The biggest problem with the gaming industry is that they think they should give a shit what vocal gamers say on internet forums. They've hemmed themselves into a weird little violent, misogynistic, anti-kid, anti-family, hyper-competitive corner because the loudmouth bullies that play the popular games are loud about it. Computer gaming is basically a counterculture trying to run itself as if it were Hollywood. You can't keep alienating larger and larger segments of the marketplace and just raising the price of admission. Eventually you have to lower your costs. The news lately is that they're noticing they can't throw Hollywood budgets at high-speed Germanic thrash metal markets and make back the investment. You can, however, throw Metal Blade budgets at them and do quite well. They just need to relearn how to do that, and the indie gaming industry is showing them how.

Look at everything the indie gaming industry is getting right. They're focused on polish, family-friendliness, low stress, low risk, low investment fun. That's the real takeaway from Angry Birds. Angry Birds doesn't need high pressure, extremely realistic death, a complex story, voice acting, a new 3D engine with photorealistic cloud shadowing or any of that other shit. It's a simple, fun game, and it's $1. It cost so much less to make than the big-ticket games it's ridiculous, and it made way more money because everybody could buy it for themselves, for their kids, for their friends' kids, and nobody had to wonder if it would be socially acceptable or get them into trouble. In-app purchases are not the problem. The problem is that over half the marketplace won't go near a modern game, but will happily spend a dollar or two (or ten or a hundred) on non-confrontational, unrealistic distraction. Gaming is fundamentally entertainment, and the whole country gets bored. The problem is emphatically not lack of a market, it's just lack of understanding what the market wants and will bear.
I think he was being not sarcastic, but satirical – he was writing a parody of Java programmers. So he didn’t really mean that nullary wasn’t a word; he was just saying that existing Java programmers might be confused by all the changes and new ideas they will have to learn. But thanks for explaining ‘nullary’ anyway – I couldn’t remember what it meant.

Edit: Looking at jebblue’s comment again, maybe I'm understanding him wrong and he’s serious after all. Poe’s law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law) is in effect. In case “Closure, isn't that a language?” is serious, here’s the answer: no, but Clojure (http://clojure.org/) is. The name “Clojure” is a pun on “closure” (source: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/clojure/4uDxeOS8pwY/UHiYp7p1...).
There's always a new entrant into any bubble, thinking this would be "the" ideal time :)

That said, I love the concept of BTC and could see using it at some point for some thing or other, the "investments" just give me such a sour taste that I don't even want to own any at any minor cost.
This has to be one of the most useless articles i've ever read...
Non-blogspam version: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

Also, I really don't understand why this book gets so many recommendations. I can't figure out who the target audience is or how it adds value to the field. I think all that I can tell is that the target audience is not me.

To be honest, it feels like some of the Schneier books that give you a lot of those "Aha!" moments, but don't actually have a lot of information. Maybe I'm missing something.

Edit: Damn, this guy has been blogspamming HN twice a day for like a year. 5 submissions to his blog in the last 2 days.
Node.js 0.10.3 released
Also Ada, my favourite language.
In the last 12 months I have written Java, Python, C++ and Go for work. I don't switch daily but it's not unusual for the switching be weekly or semi-monthly. That seems pretty polyglot to me. I'm not unusual at work either. Many of us switch among the big 3 of Java, Python, and C++.

It is possible that Google is unique in this though.
This was not unheard of. CD-Extra/Mixed Mode CDs were used for a lot of games[1] because they could use the drive's hardware decoding so there was no performance impact. At that time decoding a MP3 track could take more than 50% CPU.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD#List_of_Mixed_Mod...
Agreed. Doing that on a regular basis for a few years cant really be good for your posture.

Besides, i find the coffee shops in the city are usually very cramped, lots of noise and young parents/babies, mediocre wifi.
I enjoy working from a coworking space and i also enjoy a proper working enviroment with a beefy workstation, 2 external displays, people around that are developers vs young hipster moms, stable fast internet etc. I go to the coffee shop to take a break and well, grab a coffee.
Great stuff, looking forward to the final release, thanks to the Golang developers for all the hard work.
Interesting interactive collection of url
'"Now, you listen to some of these so-called sports-medicine experts today--shit! It's just shtick. It's just something else to sell. Warming up," he scoffed, adjusting a red ascot fitted neatly into his jumpsuit, "warming up is the biggest bunch of horseshit I've ever heard in my life. Fifteen minutes to warm up! Does a lion warm up when he's hungry? 'Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.' No! He just goes out and eats the sucker. You gotta get the blood circulating, but shit, does the lion cool down? No, he eats the sucker and goes to sleep. And that," he concluded, folding his arms into a variation of the pose, "is the truth."'

- Jack LaLanne on stretching, from Outside Magazine
If something is in Chromium, it will be in Opera. It's as simple as that. And Chromium has tab isolation.
Sure, except that Taibbi's writing is /also/ so predictable that he practically <expletive> <amusing metaphor> Goldman Sachs.

See what I did there? :)
Practically speaking, it can be useful to give up in some cases. But do it for the right reason . . .
Been coding Java since 98 and am baffled at how all of this new co plexity is making my life easier. Closures maybe, but the rest of this article just felt so _theoretically helpful_ and complex, bogged down with cool terms and functional fanciness. I feel old and unhip :(
You're right that Chrome's multiprocess architecture is more mature than the WebKit2 design. I wish we hadn't ended up in a position where we felt we had to make our own. But stay tuned - we have some great stuff coming up.
Additionally, this article only considers /static stretching/, which is far less helpful to me as a runner than /active stretching/: leg swings, kicks, or arm circles.
I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other company with a history of friendly interaction with the community

Sorry but I have say, WTF is this? You are employed by Google https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jmillikin . Can you imagine a current employee saying "I don"t trust my [current employer]" and still expect to show up to work again at 8.30am? How much weight should we give to your "trust"?
I agree with this, although I live in one of the smaller Australian cities and cannot move for various reasons. I am desperately trying to find a reasonable programming job, but having quite a hard time. Pretty much all the jobs around here are IT department style, with long winded garble on job boards, and silly requirements about - just from memory, I've seen things like "must be familiar with at least one of C, C++, Java, XML" (Apparently XML is a general purpose language) or "Knowledge of C++ or Delphi required" (What these two have in common I'll never know). I'm sure such ads exist in other places as well, but there seem to be an unnervingly high proportion around here.

I'm not sure what it's like in Sydney or Melbourne, however. Perhaps it's better there...
I know in this kind of nerdy community of which I am a part, this might be considered to be a hip statement or "logical" or some such nonsense. But I am going to just be honest and say if that is your view, you're a horrible person. That's just such garbage.

EDIT - I had a little time to think about your statement a little. Your statements are basically just ridiculous venom. In any other venue, it would be met with the vitriol it really deserves but I just find this to be essentially inhuman.
Hopefully the V8 guys have more respect for asm.js than they do E4X, which would be really nice to have in NodeJS. Even though V8 is from Google devs and not directly associated with NodeJS, I think they should be at least considerate of features that are useful outside the browser, but need integration into the engine itself.
Holy Crap, Is This Mark Zuckerberg's Embarrassing Childhood Angelfire Website?
> I am justified in staying for as for long as is necessary... I generally purchase a single espresso for $1.50, add milk to attempt to simulate the taste of an actual cappuccino (at one third of the cost), and stay for between three and six hours.

Frankly, I thought this was satire.
Noo! Why can't we have one, nice open source target? At least I hope they all support the standards.
Considering compilation differences between 32/64 bit versions across Linux, Windows and OSX, let alone different versions of NodeJS most native modules require a build system on the platform... As someone who's stuck with windows deployments for NodeJS work, it's been a little painful... I'd take the little performance hit for modules that load/run transparently.
Thanks! That was really well-written.
Indian students invent "anti-rape" underwear
Linus Upson, vice president of engineering for Chrome, did forgot to take the tampon out of his arse before the final shots became decided.
This is a conspiracy theory. PR moves take time, so both Servo and Blink announcement probably baked for many weeks. The best explanation is both PR teams thought today is a good timing, probably because it is right after Easter holidays.
That sounds interesting — what kind of value are the Chinese companies adding?
NodeJS is already gaining traction as a high performance asynchronous platform... Though it's best fit has been in situations that are more IO bound than CPU bound, where it's been a bad fit. This could make it a better fit for CPU tasks, with high IO.

Right now, I have a few workers managed in node, that run compiled code. It works pretty well, but having more of that as modules directly available in Node, with nearly the same performance would be really compelling.

Not needing to compile certain NodeJS modules is what I'd find really compelling.
ahh, thanks for clearing that up and explaining the difference between the terminologies!
Nope. This is the announcement that Go 1.1 has reached beta status.
Having to pay more taxes because you can afford it is the same thing as getting sexually assaulted. This is a very reasonable comparison.
A Fast Typing Game
It would be interesting to go back in a time machine and see what a coffee shop looked like before free wifi, laptops and cell phones. I can't even remember... did people have conversations? Read books?
Maybe if you sprayed onto a badly-insulated keyboard, you could create a short circuit through your fingers, and be both metaphorically and literally shocked, as well as having literally spewed.
Thoughts on Blink
It wouldn't be due to simple muscular tiredness. Studies on weight training show that local muscular fatigue can largely dissipate within minutes.

I'd place my money on a CNS phenomenon.
C++ is the only realistic option for some things, but it's not without serious problems. Intelligent criticism of a formal system, such as a programming language, is what allows us to make better ones in the future.

If you honestly think there's no point in trying to make better programming languages, you're welcome to continue programming in FORTRAN IV. But don't expect other people to take your opinion seriously about what "serves no purpose".
Off topic, How do you clone a project like that big? Git is still trying to receive the objects %1 of 2,200,337
This article is the perfect length.
The 168 hour work week
The basic point made is that pre-exercise stretching decreases power and may decrease stability. Sports scientists have been finding this in a number of studies for some time.

Post-exercise stretching, or regular therapeutic stretching, is not what they're talking about.
Mars is fucking far.
I would agree except that most people come in for coffee and then leave.
Since "shocked" is a synonym of "surprised" / "startled", I think literally is fair in this case. I'd believe that he was literally surprised by the news!
Just like this post tries to claim "The Hustle™ is bullshit" so is this post.

It's not work hard vs work smart. It's both.

For me, if I sleep less than 8 hours I'm brain dead => 0 productivity.
I am more productive at night than during the day.
I need to change regularly the project I work on, so I am always working on several things at once.
For instance, I am less productive 50hrs a week on the same project than 100hrs a week on several one.
And the list goes on and on..

It's up to each and everyone to see where you start loosing productivity and what makes you a better worker.

As a CEO, this ability of self improvement is something I am always looking for in my employees. (but it's rare)
The last thing I am looking forward to do, is checking the clock. When you pay someone the big bucks, it's not to be changing diapers.

The only thing that is for sure is that in term of productivity, there is no black and white truth or rule.
Hardly. Having a site that has buggy coding which has been tweaked to look good in IE's buggy rendering is a far cry from "our site uses cutting edge web-standard features that your browser does not support, please use a more up to date browser for a better experience". Night and day different.
> There is hardly any duplication.

There will be a clone of JavaScript parser. IR building is already duplicated as well.

I am aware that middle-end/back-end are shared, though there are some IR instructions are that specific for asm.js.

But I agree: duplication might be the wrong word here.
Disney Shuts Down LucasArts Development
In Tribute To Lucasarts, Raven Releases The Source Code For Jedi Knight II
I use music for that. Jazz24 is a good stream.
The changes concerning function returning[0] are really welcome. The merits of implicit vs. explicit else blocks were debated, but I think everyone should be glad to get rid of forced panic("unreachable").

[0] http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.1#return
Also Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.

Code for Jedi Outcast: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jedioutcast/

Jedi Academy: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jediacademy/
Suck on this, as they say.

And by they, I mean Thomas Friedman, when it comes to justifying wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
That's a really good question. Heroku is offering to handle the hosting, devops and scaling issues for us so that we can focus our energy on building a killer product. When considering the costs of hiring a devops team and someone to wear a pager 24/7 when servers go down, paying the premium for using Heroku becomes a lot more attractive.

'why not get a dedicated professional to handle devops on your team'

It sure is easy to write that, but the reality isn't as rosy. I've gone through the process at two companies to try to do that, interviewing ~50-80 people and it has been a nightmare. It is really really difficult to find quality devops people. Again, this makes PaaS like AWS, Heroku and AppEngine a lot more attractive. They are betting their entire business on being able to hire good devops people, so they tend to attract better talent.
> There is exactly zero evidence that a brain/mind is functional without it's body.

My understanding is that head transplants actually have been done in mammals with retention of consciousness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant

So no, I wouldn't say "exactly zero evidence".

> Ok, I'll give you that there is a non-zero chance. Other's have touched upon that in this thread, and I would contend that giving 200k to some family/friend is more useful than throwing it away, but it's your money. If you are happy with a negligible-but-non-zero chance, go for it.

I basically agree that there's a minimal standard of evidence for cryonics working that is required for it to be worth more to an individual than giving the $200k to family and friends. However, it is not clear whether cryonics-as-it-exists exceeds that mark or not. I would think it does. Estimate $5M per life, and chances in the 1-10% range are reasonable for the cost.

>> Nobody will be thawing brains using 21st century technology.

> Bit of a cop-out, no?

Not really. There are things we can justifiably think are possible but too technically difficult to accomplish in the very near term. Comprehensively curing cancer for example. It's going to happen, but it will take a while. Likewise, machine-phase nanotech that can operate at very low temperatures to perform subtle manipulations on vitreous biological materials which improve its ability to support itself during rewarming.

The thing is, when you rewarm cells in the lab after freezing them, they incur damage during rewarming. For example, if the vitrification point is below the freezing point, that means ice will try to form if it has a chance to during rewarming. In situations where extracellular ice exists, it will melt during rewarming and thus cause osmotic shock to the dehydrated cell.

In the concentrated solute version of vitrification like we see in cryonics, the concern is more that the concentrated solutes will interact with proteins when they get warm enough to do so. That can denature them and trigger autolysis. So prior to rewarming, picture a machine-phase manipulation that digs in and gently pulls out chunks of toxic cryoprotectant, and replaces them with something more benign for the thawing process. It could also add drugs that haven't been invented yet, e.g. a comprehensive autolysis blocker, or improved ice blocker that lets you replace some of the vitrificant with water and still take your time rewarming.

That's not getting into nano-repair, which is complex enough that I would concede it could be implausible (though I don't exactly think it needs to be ruled out at this point).
Innovative benchmarking reveals a dark side of current gaming graphics cards
The hubbub of big city coffeehouses is indeed not conducive to hacking. If you have the luxury of being able to move around, it's worth checking out coffeehouses in small towns. My current favorite in Northern California is the Curly Wolf in Nevada City. Exquisite interior decoration, great people, quiet atmosphere, open til midnight Sun through Thu, til 2am Friday and Saturday. And if you're willing to travel farther, you can even still find hacker's paradise, like the Shot in the Dark in Tucson, AZ: open 24/7. Trust me, it's quiet in there at 3am.
The original point was that a "netflix" provides better content than cable to start with.

The argument against it was that the company providing the content would be exclusively providing that content.

The rebuttal is that it would be better to pay 5 companies that all produce exclusive content than to pay for cable, which "provides" mostly stuff you don't want to see (and frequently don't have the option to not watch, if you're viewing any of their content, ie: commercials).
40-70 hours a week is healthy? This makes me laugh.. why not just select an even bigger range.. people who work 30-120 hours a week? Sounds great.
The Euro was a mistake on paper. It held out pretty well in the first few years compared to that.
No one would be writing JavaScript without technically minded people who write the interpreter. Sure, these languages are great and are more approachable to novices, but the systems guys aren't going anywhere. Anyone writing high level glue code does so on the backs of people who make it possible to do so.
You generally don't get taxed for holding personal goods, except real estate, at least in the US. I'm not a tax specialist, but it seems likely you would only get taxed on bitcoin transactions, ie: if you sell bitcoins for U.S. $ you would get taxed on the profit, much like a stock.

If you mean use bitcoins to avoid any taxation at all, well, I guess you better have a bunch of lawyers lined up.
I notice that there's quite a few things Amazon still doesn't let you buy if you're in Australia. Many physical products, it seems.

I can only guess this is because of distribution rights for certain products in this country. For example, my partner tries to buy nail polish but often she can't. It wouldn't surprise me if a certain distributor has that product stitched up via a distribution contract for all of Australia, therefore allowing them to monopolise price.

Really, if you're not in the US it's often a completely different world for all kinds of e-commerce - anything from physical goods e.g.: off Amazon not being available for arbitrary reasons (even when others are), to media such as Pandora which has only relatively very recently become available here again after being withdrawn for literally years.
The comments in this thread baffle me. I find it amazing that some Java programmers are so rigid in their thinking that they can't deal with the introduction of high order function types that practically every other programming language has.

One of the reasons why it's taken so long for Java to get these features was early arguments by members of the JCP that, quite literally, Java programmers were too scared off by the "complexity" of closures. Which is ironic because I see forum postings from Java programmers looking down on Javascript/Ruby and other scripting languages as for less-rigorous/serious engineers.

Soft bigotry of low expectations? How can Javascript programmers do fine with the complexity of closures (without types!), but Java programmers are a kind of special protected class of wimps that have to be shielded from functional programming of any sort? :)

Lambdas, Streams, and other high order constructs produce vastly more readable code and encourage additional re usability through more abstraction. If you think the introduction of "for-each" in Java5 was a good thing, why be opposed to collection.forEach((x) -> expr), if you can understand for(T x : collection) expr; ? Ditto for listener patterns, filters, comparators, runnables, futures, concurrency primitives, parallel streams, all are easier to use and understand with lambdas.

If takes only a few hours and one or two samples to get used to the new lambda syntax, especially if you are familiar with HOF in JS/Ruby/Python/Perl/C#/every-other-freakin-language.