skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. If I spend a week doing more than around 20 hours of work, then I'm usually doing something wrong. The following week, I will spend some time trying to figure out what went wrong. There's usually always a better way.

Programming is the perfect lazy-man's work. If you're really good at changing O(n^2) to O(1), then you can pretty much double the output of other teams while also reducing your work. It's pretty fun.

Also, this applies at scaling. If my business model can't afford to hire more people as the demand for the business grows, then the business model is just a bad idea.
Actually, the most popular browsers of our target audience are Google Chrome (the lion's share), Safari and Firefox. Since supporting IE is such a pain, we decided to go without it, at least for now.
Multi URL tests with non-cycling options
The map is an SVG document. clipPaths (basically masks) have been created for each landmass. The pings being displayed are just circles with gradients, but you only see them through the 'pixelated' landmass mask.

The map starts a static SVG file and the pings are added to the DOM with JS. The animation is a mix of JS and SMIL.
Interesting landing page. The choice of three <h1> feels weird. You usually go from <h1> to <h3> for the sub-headlines. The <h1> being the main hook. I would actually move your second headline ("Do you wish you could learn about business from some of the world's best entrepreneurs?") to the top, and then move the other ones to <h3> tags.Adding a picture of the book cover to the page usually helps sales due to how connects the price to a "tangible" product (even if its not). Make the free sample offer more noticeable. I did not see it the first three times I browsed the page. Tip: use a different color other than blue. The call to action button
also washes away in the theme. Since you are using bootstrap, test using the btn-danger class (which makes it yellow), and change the button font color to black or dark grey. The page background should be a bit lighter to ease readability. Maybe use a light pattern from subtlepatterns.com. Instead of using italics in the second sub-headline ("Then The Found a Business Book is for you.") test changing the font color to a dark red. It tends to improve how much of the page people read.

Still, a very good start. Much better than most startups out there.
Don't ring a bell, activate the money blower when you close a deal.
I think the "art vs. not art" discussion isn't the big thing, though. It's really more about awareness of the mechanism of a game and understanding WHY it's fun/intriguing to humans. That brings up interesting discussions regardless of any "artistic message" - the "funness" itself is a type of artistic expression.

You can see this sort of discourse about games like Ms. Pacman where people breakdown the paths of the ghosts and how it adds just enough randomness to remain endlessly intriguing (unlike regular Pacman)

I think the point is we can really discuss human nature through what games people like and how they impact us. I guess that's the point of discussing art, too.
Yea, no kidding. It helps if you wipe off your screen, make sure the brightness is up, dim the lights, pour yourself a glass of wine, etc.
> Announced: 2013-05-15

How does that work? Is this a planned announcement of a known vulnerability or a typo?
The free version was an obvious fail. I bet it cannibalized sales as well. Should be removed.
Have you researched the history of patents? I'm no expert, but my understanding is that they were established in response to the guild system, in which a lot of technical knowledge was kept secret. Invention may have been occurring, but it didn't benefit the larger society the way it could have.
I agree that people expect discretion from their couriers (electronic or otherwise), but I wasn't talking about technical limitations this time. Privacy is something that encompasses even more than government.

The 4th Amendment is specifically a limitation on government power to compel unreasonable search or seizures. That's why I said having a private courier give up your information (not at the demand of the government) would be at best a civil matter such as breach of contract.

Now does FedEx and UPS routinely give up our parcels to the wrong party? No, but the reason isn't the 4th Amendment. The reason they try to deliver to the right party is because of the incredible market reaction that would occur if they were known to be routinely diverting deliveries or snooping.

But your expectation of privacy in general (as opposed to privacy against government interception) does not have any backing in law AFAIK (sadly), which is what I think rayiner was pointing out. From the perspective of the law, if you're willing to disclose information to some "random" third-party then why wouldn't you be willing to disclose it to anyone else (incl. the government)?

I agree that we should be able to expect privacy even in these cases, as it seems like a fairly large loophole if rayiner is right, especially in a world that is far advanced from the days where long-distance communications of any sort required government services and so privacy really did mostly mean "privacy from government".
Completely agree, and I'd also argue that social media's worth varies quite widely based on a brand's current market penetration. Pepsi and Coke are so ingrained in our consciousness due to other ad buys that their social media outreach may be automatically be resented as "corporation is invading my Facebook".

But for smaller companies, at the very least, social media is a much frictionless way of disseminating updates and news, compared to email signups and expecting people to go to your company blog. And upstart companies may (initially) be seen in a more positive light for their seemingly underground/non-pretentious way of communicating to their fans/followers. I'd say that's hardly "worthless"
Renters rights play a comparatively small role in limiting supply. Last year, the city built something like 400 new units and removed something like 200. IE, the city could only accommodate something like 400 new residents last year. More than that number moved into the city. Quite a few of the new residents are also paid 6 figure salaries.
At the very end, Kaminsky says that large financial actors and nation states have the ability to deploy massive mining farms, and that somehow this is a bad thing.

I do not think so.

These actors would merely compete between each other, thereby enhancing the security of the Bitcoin network, making it harder for an individual actor to perform majority attacks ("51% attack") and rewrite the block chain. A successful attack, with large actors already participating in the mining industry, would require collusion, which I think is unlikely.

Perhaps Kaminsky simply meant that deploying massive mining farms would help them profit from Bitcoin more efficiently than the average user. This would be false. Contrary to other industries, there is no economy of scale in Bitcoin mining. I witnessed this first hand when expanding my GPU ops from 2 Ghash/s to ~60 Ghash/s in 2011. Indeed, the smaller you are, the more overhead costs become negligible and eventually effectively "free". The student mining in his university dorm, or the individual mining on his mini desktop ASIC or computer at work, have zero mining costs when operating: free electricity, free hosting, free A/C, free network connectivity. However, the ones managing huge farms have to pay for data centers, maintenance technicians, electricity, etc. This is why Bitcoin mining is a long-tail system: most of the mining power comes from a large number of small-time miners.

(I should add that at this moment, in 2013, there is a small window of opportunity for a large actor to dominate mining. ASICs are barely starting to hit the network, so in theory a large actor could deploy many of them and represent more than half of the mining capacity. However this window is rapidly closing. Most people estimate the network hash rate is going to grow by 10-50x in the next 12 months.)
Not to be too self-promotional, but this is literally the problem we're solving at Addepar.

15 years ago the power shifted from banks to hedge funds, and then in 2008 it started shifting to investors. But they still don't have the tools to understand what's going on.

If you're interested in solving problems like this in an engineering-led company, please email me. I'd love to talk.
Pepsi is an interesting case for the ineffectiveness of advertising in general.

I find it hard to believe that television or other advertising for a product like Coke or Pepsi makes a big difference in sales. I'm already aware of the products, I already have my opinions on them, and they aren't going to change them.

If these companies stopped advertising tomorrow I don't think there would be an immediate effect on consumer behavior.

For a while I was a heavy drinker of low carb Monster. One day I saw the can, thought I'd try it, decided I liked it, and then I bought it frequently.

I hadn't seen a single ad (or promo) for Monster until years after I'd gotten sick of it.

What would happen is that the channels they sell through would notice that they weren't being so aggressive about marketing. The channels might think they are less serious and then they wouldn't work so hard to promote those products.

I know somebody who sells newspaper advertisements and when people ask the question "For what a postage stamp sized ad costs in the paper for a year I could rent a storefront or hire an employee so why do I need to spend money on you?" he gives them the answer that people who are used to seeing your ad in the newspaper might think you went out of business if the advertisements stop.

That's how sick the advertising business is in 2013.
"I thought you meant people using Bitcoin to do arbitage between (old school) currencies X and Y"

That's precisely what I suspect (and can only guess at this point) that it is being used for:

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/btc-trader-bitcoin-arbitrage-made...

http://lichtman.ca/is-bitcoin-arbitrage-feasible/

https://github.com/michaelcdillon/BitCoin-Arbitrage

At the same time, MtGox also serves as an entrypoint for non-speculating users and has effectively become the "Bitcoin bank." It's voluntary - people are choosing to use MtGox, but in this regard MtGox's success seems to be a Bitcoiner's weakness: a DDoS against MtGox can cut the value of a BTC (and their lunch money) in half.
Make that a €2000 good electrical bike then, you're still paying €3000+ for the fancy body.
Exact same experience here. QBASIC allowed you to put ASM code in line with BASIC, like so.

y=199
x=319
c=15
def seg = &ha000 + (&h14 * y)
poke x, c

Of course, functions like CIRCLE were already much faster since the entire function was already in ASM, instead of having to go in and out of the interpreter for each pixel. You'd wrap the above code in a SUB routine and replace all your PSETs with it. I even coded my own sprite maker that used the mouse in a similar manner and made a pretty impressive looking Mario clone with the appropriate functions I learned in math class. Pythagorean theorem was very useful when working with grids. I didn't understand why everyone wasn't doing the same thing and why everyone hated math.

Imagine the teachers surprise when on the first day everyone is learning FOR loops and I'm making a RND bump map with directional lighting. This was 1997 so we were still using Yahoo to look up the ASM offset codes, which worked just fine, you'd just have to be good at making your queries or you'd have to dig through a couple of pages of results.
From what I've read the way to approach media queries is to shrink your page width to a point where the page breaks and then add in some code to fix it.

Element queries would be nice, but aren't we essentially doing that if we take the idea of the previous approach and apply to more high level elements?

If we create media queries on a per element basis we are essentially achieving the same thing. In that sense media queries are a superset of your proposed solution. It would make for a nice short hand though.
Since the app discovery process in the Apple's own App Store (or on an iDevice) is far away from acceptable user experience, it is not a big surprise that companies like AppGratis are trying to fill this niche.

Apple's ban does not help in improving users' [that's us] experience. A better response from Apple would be fixing core of the matter.

I recall that couple of years ago Apple purchased app search&discovery start-up for circa $50M. Looks like reverse integration took place... unfortunately.

I discovered more high quality apps on HN than in App Store.
Mulberry [1] used to be my gold standard of IMAP clients. It has one of the most complete IMAP implementations I've ever seen. Unfortunately the company that made it went out of business in 2005, but a little while later it came back and then was open sourced.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of activity on the open source project and I eventually switched to Thunderbird (which only gets better, it seems). But I do miss many parts of Mulberry. It was stable, fast, and detailed.

[1] http://www.mulberrymail.com/
If you use emacs, notmuch and offlineimap are great. Very strong gpg integration.

http://notmuchmail.org/
People never worry about machine-level micro-optimizations in exactly the same that people never worry about MVC web app frameworks, which is to say "most people almost never" for some appropriate metric for "most" and "almost". It's a niche. My point was just that some people are happy in just one, while others (the poster I was replying to, and myself among them) aren't.
> the financial sector has disproportionate lobbying power.

I'm not sure that's true. If Wall Street really had some super lobbying power Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley wouldn't have passed in their current forms. Regulating Wall Street is a pretty easy position to take if you're a politician.
As far as mainstream gaming goes, the main focus has been in distraction and addiction, using very powerful psychological triggers. (Skinner boxes, variable ratio reinforcement, social pressure, etc.)

If fact, these triggers have been deeply embedded in our social media too, turning both video games and social media into tools for manipulating our emotional selves into cycles of distraction and addiction.

There's billion dollar industries being created and supported on manipulating the emotional parts of people's brains into using their products for distraction.

So how the hell do we get back our ability to focus from these incredibly sophisticated distraction machines?

I've been working the past year on measuring meditation using physical sensors. My research has resulted in releasing an app to measure and track the depth of mindfulness meditation using a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor.

(http://www.buddhamindapp.com)

I see games incorporating physical sensors to see what's happening within us emotionally. With 9.5% of all kids between the ages of 4-17 diagnosed with ADD, we really need some new tools to fight back against the technology's creep into our minds.

With the latest update pushed into the app store, we can now measure the depth of your mindfulness meditation in real time. (By using an algorithm to measure heart rate variability).

Incorporated with this is a meditation quality score. We're working towards building a video game that teaches kids the ability to focus, and fights back against ADD.

So what does this have to do with the quality of games?

I think as the amount of information in our lives continues to explode, the two main problems for us will be keeping the noise and crap out, and filtering what we let in.

So those shooters will enter our dreams, we'll dream in their worlds. But what are they doing for us?

The next breakthrough in gaming is going to be in helping us manage and explore our minds, to live more optimal lives. It won't be enslaving us emotionally with achievements and unlocks. At least, I hope not.
http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_...

This TedTalks takes an interesting approach to Autism in the professional world. Enjoy.
Who thought it was a good idea to color-code Asians with yellow?
The worst possible thing SF could do would be to completely change density and building heights in a boom period. The money is here now, so are the people. But are the entrepreneurs in soma going to stick around if the VC money dries up? Are the hip kids in mission going to stick around once their six figure tech salaries leave the area?

SF is a unique city on the west coast. It would be a travesty to let a bunch of out-of-towners come here for a few years, complain loudly enough to get their changes passed, then leave a barren and soulless modern wasteland once the boom dies down. Dont do radical expansion during a boom! The south and south-east bay will look like Detroit in a few decades, dont let it happen to SF.

Of course the politicians wont help. Brown and Newsom were so greedy/ambitious respectively, they would probably have loved to work with the tech crowd. Lee achieved what he set out to do the day he was elected; he will now most likely look to consolidate his financial situation and his power. I dont think theres been a mayoral candidate since Jello Biafra who has actually cared about the city itself.

Some of the problems SF would have if density increased significantly:
-public transportation is made a for a much lower density than other big american cities. That wont be fixed until bart turns into a comprehensive subway system, which isnt happening while the state is broke.
-highways and their off-ramps in the city are made for a much lower density city.
-The zoning laws for big-box stores and (i think) grocery stores is pretty restrictive. That will need to change. Which is pretty significant. Maybe we dont want SF turned into SJ/LA?

My personal suggestion would be to impose a severe, severe congestion charge within city limits. This would help to separate the wheat from the chaff, but also to keep services in line with population. The problem is that city leaders are making so much money from tourism and the boom (and potentially development) that they have no interest in helping the city.

The hippies moved to haight because it was cheap and that was all they could afford. The techies moved to SF because it is a first world playground that hadnt been used up yet. Well congratulations, youll get there.
Sure some people buy Oracle for risk reduction after having done a sophisticated analysis, but plenty of people buy it because that's what the nice sales person tells them they need and the sales person obviously understand this techy stuff far more than they do.

The dev team says they can just use this "postgres" but the sales person said he'd seen this situation a lot of times before and that dev team was too inexperienced with "serious software" to know they needed to use a proper database rather than a toy one that people use when learning because it's free.

(not to pick on Oracle for any particular reason; this is common in enterprise sales at all levels)
I am a freelancer and I looked at the video. Not trying to be mean but there is nothing specific in the video about how you are helping freelancers. Just saying that freelancing is hard, project management, payment on time etc. are very generic. Of course, every freelancer goes through all that. There is nothing specific in the video at least for me to give you my email.
The article is written very much against social media sales people, who are basically just like sales people in any other field. The truth is that an awful lot of companies have hopped on the social wagon and push for it themselves, without needing to be sold on it.

Social media is just a small part of my company, we offer it as a service but only to companies who specifically request it, and then we ask that they provide expected KPIs up front which we can hit, and that KPIs should be related to the platform (e.g. likes, reach on Facebook), not related to sales - this way it is up to them to decide whether the spend is worth it or not, all we do is ensure that we deliver what they want from us. We've never pushed anyone to increase spend on social media (from a company point of view, we'd far rather they spend marketing budget with us away from social media...)

Despite this, despite the fact that we don't push it at all, our biggest social account spends $500k/year on Facebook with us, purely on community building. So sure, maybe some companies are being sold on it by salesmen, but plenty are making their own choices here.
I tried hacking MtGox, but it was down.
> The new hire has to deal with these LOC regardless of who typed them (you or a wizard), so they're significant.

That's true. Maybe a two numbers, one with and one without boilerplate? That way someone could get an idea of what they are looking at. (I know, I'm just stacking more and more work up...)
> Isn't the idea of a central exchange (which "Magic the Gathering online exchange" is), where most of the trading occurs, a little antithetical to notion of a distributed currency?

No, its a demonstration of network effects and natural monopoly in an unregulated market.
I know there are transaction fees. I meant friction as--once you have BTC in a wallet, you are absolutely free to spend them as you wish. There is no way for anyone to prevent a transaction.

Bitcoin addresses are public but anonymous. But yes, you can analyze the public ledger to tie known data (publicly-posted donation addresses, etc) to try to de-anonymize someone. There are coin tumblers/mixers in place in some markets, although it's hard to tell how effective they are.
What are your plans to deal with this?
On the other hand, on a motorcycle your head hits that car/wall first. On a velomobile, your feet do.

Also, the protection may be flimsy relative to that of a car, but it probably is a lot better than that of a motorcycle, for instance if you flip over and slide over the Tarmac for a few meters.

Your concerns are valid, though. The best way to cater for them probably is through a culture change. Having separate bike paths _and_ car drivers who are always on the lookout for cyclists because they always are there (example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlQYP4WN-5w) will help a lot.

And no, fast bikes need not go on the highway; they just need a fairly wide and straight flat surface (example: http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/f35-high-speed-...)
And to go further, I see games which are already doing this in a positive way.

Take a look at Rocksmith, which gamifies the process of learning to play guitar, or Dance Central, which can help teach people how to dance.
As a productive adult I spend most of my time seriously. What little recreation time I have, I choose to enjoy how I please, serious or not. You can be a completionist in a RPG and finish quests while admiring the graphics and music or you can spending a evening slaying giants, goats, and elk with ice spears.
>"We like the idea of letting everyone transact freely, but we are uncomfortable with the "winner take all" implication of that policy."

I don't agree with this fully. Your statement implies that "Freely" means "with complete abandon to any sort of soundly regulated and protected system designed to prevent fraud, corruption, exploitation... " -- Also, acquiescing to the "well the system is fucked by design, why are we upset that they exploit the structure of the system" is a cop-out to the fact that their actions are wrong and need to be fixed.

To quote the magnanimous G. Costanza: "WE ARE LIVING IN A SOCIETY, HERE!!!"
Interesting. I've been using Thunderbird for years and years and have never had it lose any data... What IMAP server are you using?