skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Nobody writes a AAA game in Python. Nobody tries to build a browser in Python. Nobody writes a performant Apache/Nginx class web-server in Python. Nobody writes a database engine in Python. Etc etc.

Almost nobody does any of those things regularly. I've written perhaps two ISAPI modules (in C++), one Apache module (in C) and in none of those cases the code I wrote replaced the bottleneck. It was just that that was the "right" place to put the code. I've done performance analysis countless times (the first time was, indeed, to demonstrate moving off VB3's p-code and into Turbo Pascal's native code was going to have a negligible effect on the performance of a client-server application) and I've seen, over and over again, the bottleneck being the network and the database.

For the exceedingly rare case it's not, I agree, Python/Ruby/Perl/Smalltalk is not the best choice.
I'd really like to see a fuller analysis of what Pac-Man was doing there. As I understand the algorithm, it should have seen into the future where the dot gets eaten, and not turned back.

But maybe the program failed to discover the bytes which hold the score, and so it didn't think eating dots was a particular notable activity.
> Neither of these things are likely to happen (unless there is a revolution),

There was actually a revolution. When I was a kid, Nelson Mandela was in jail. Did the revolution improve matters?

One thing is very different between .in and .za: .za is one of the most violent countries in the world, while .in is one of the least violent.
As the author says, the point is not the results, but the elegance of his generic approach.
Both the video and paper are well worth going through!

The Abstract is 16 words. The introduction begins with
"The Nintendo Entertainment System is probably the
best video game console, citation not needed." Need we say more?

Also, I wish non-programming fields of media would also adopt pythonic triple-quotation marks.
The aesthetic is the political...
Seems like one of the most inefficient ways to acquire bitcoin.
I don't disagree, but I do find myself having moments of clarity when I look up from work and come check out HN. Often it's just a brief comment just resonates, and clarifies something I'd been chewing on for the past few days/weeks. In that way, I guess it's a precursor to what the author labels as true 'inspiration.'

In any case, I like dropping in on smart people debating stuff.
>Graphical quality matters in everything, everything, everything visual. And it's a reasonably reliable proxy for how much effort has been put into the rest of the game.

You sidestepped the whole "text only adventure games" thing with the "visual" word. We were talking about computer games in general.

As for all the above examples, I don't think they show at all how graphics matter. They show that great addictive gameplay trumps flashy graphics any day of the week.

I mean "properly sized view and clear, effortlessly distinguishable artwork"?

Those goes without saying. Of course graphics should not obscure the game's goals.

That doesn't mean that the graphics are "60% of Tetris" -- in the same way the fact that Tetris would be totally unplayable if the background was all black and the tiles dark gray --doesn't mean that graphics are "100% of Tetris".

As for "MUDs require a quality typeface, proper layout, and appropriate coloring", yet people have played them in bad typefaces --heck, even not typeface at all, just bitmap graphic card fonts-- and black and white. Matter of fact, in the eighties lots of people on DOS PCs played color games in black and white monitors, and enjoyed them too.
Ideologically speaking, there is no incentive.

You do it because you're a good person who cares more about humanity than profit.
I agree with you on the tone of the conversation, but from my -- admittedly biased -- view, submodules are an abomination, and any serious proposal to come up with an alternative should be welcomed with open arms.

Ramkumar may have taken the questions directed at him the wrong way, but IMO the questioner shares equal fault for that. Know (or learn) your audience, and tailor your responses so you you achieve a good outcome. "I'm super frustrated and feel like I've wasted my time so I give up" is not a good outcome, for any of the parties concerned.
Egads! You've definitively proven that Bitcoin will go the way of the Dodo! Congratulations! See the receptionist on your way out to receive your prize. </sarcasm>

On a more serious note, you've really contributed nothing here. The parent post is saying that a crash does not necessarily imply that something is useless and going away, giving examples of where crashes haven't affected whether or not people still value something.

You're anecdote doesn't even work. Like tulips there was a market bubble for Beanie Babies which burst, but Ty still sells them.
PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2013
There are some in depth documentaries and reports on it. I think the main issue is windmill hating people live in extremely quiet places and when you add any noise to them it's more distracting than already living in a louder area. Plus they occasionally make loud noises.

That said, the question of why those people are living in the middle of nowhere doesn't come up at all. I think that's the more important issue. If you want to reduce the environmental footprint, reducing the size of sprawl and suburban/rural population size would save a lot of energy.
This is the 5th or 6th time I've seen this posted, including by myself, and every time the topic has sank like a stone. I'm perplexed as to why HN doesn't consider this project worthy of discussion, given the path-breaking nature of the proposal.
> In several foreign countries, the primary means of exchange is USD, yet taxes are still paid in the local currency.

I feel so sorry for those countries' governments - imagine being paid in currency which is completely worthless because it has no intrinsic value, not even that set by taxation! One wonders why they bother collecting taxes if the proceeds cannot buy so much as a coffee; wouldn't it save everyone a lot of time and hassle if they just dropped the pretense of taxation entirely?
> It's easy to think everyone has their acts together like facebook or google

Well... For those companies, obviously, dynamic languages are not an option. ;-)
The "percent" of X that makes up a game is purely in the eye of the beholder. For some people graphics has a huge part in their like or dislike of a game. Conversely there are plenty of games that go out of their way to have retro graphics specifically to evoke a certain nostalgia or just to shift the focus to the story and the gameplay.
Because whether you can use that mobile phone or not is determined by who controls the money.

Whether we're talking cartels, the Fed, Congress, oligarchs, big corporations, or good 'ol fashioned free market billionaires. They dictate ultimately whether your phone 'works,' whether you can get on a plane, whether you can use Google or the Internet, or drive a car, or draw power when you plug into an outlet (at least for 99.9% of the population).

None of that has changed one bit, and none of it is going to. You can swap one power broker for another, but what you can never do is remove them. You can start by asking who has the military weapons, who has the control over money standards, who controls taxing authorities - and then you can follow the chart of money / power on down.
I'm not arguing that it is fine to drop stuff in the oceans, but that first one doesn't sound that dangerous:

"Die britischen Fässer enthalten nach Angaben der IAEA 58 Billionen Becquerel, die belgischen 2,4 Billionen Becquerel Alpha-, Beta und Gammastrahlung. Der EU-Grenzwert für Trinkwasser liegt bei 10 Becquerel pro Liter."

So, there's about 6 * 10^10 Becquerel radiation there, while the EU allows 10 per liter. If so, mixing this with 6 * 10^9 liters of water would dilute it enough to be within EU limits. That's 6 * 10^6 cubic meter. If the stuff got dropped over an area of a square kilometer in a depth of 6 meter, you would already get there.

So, I expect at worst, localized contamination of sea water.

Also, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs291/en/: "The WHO guidelines for drinking water quality recommend repeated measurements to be implemented if radon in public drinking water supplies exceeds 100 Bq/l.". That puts that 10 Bq/l EU norm into perspective.
That’s all gameplay and has nothing to do with graphics.

Anti-aliasing and all that tech, better (professionally) drawn textures, etc. – all that could be done without affecting gameplay.

I agree with you that the 1×1×1 meter block is of central importance to the game’s success. It creates a game that strikes a perfect balance between giving you power to manipulate the world and giving you simple enough tools to manipulate the world. 3D editors exist but only very few people find playing around and creating worlds with them to be fun. Minecraft is much less powerful than a 3D editor (since it restricts you to those 1×1×1 meter blocks), but by reducing that power it is able to give you accessible tools. (There is obviously also a technical reason. Making the basic unit smaller than those blocks makes the worlds more computationally intensive.)

Yeah, having 1×1×1 meter blocks restricts the graphics, but that’s a consequence of a gameplay decision. That’s the causal link there.

I think the graphics played some role in Minecraft’s success, but only insofar as they were serviceable and not completely terrible.
They did a good enough job on picking a new name and changing everything to use it that I no longer feel it's a weakness. http://rove.io/
Eww, why would you want triple quotation marks being adopted anywhere?

What overlying function in print would they serve exactly?
textual article link instead of pdf image

http://steveblank.com/2013/04/10/china-the-sleeper-awakens/
>Graphics in relation to games not so much. You can make a great game with very simple graphics

Absolutist claims about how important graphics are can never be true because different genres utilize graphics differently. The immersive games crytek makes weren't really possible before computer graphics technology was capable, so I would argue that no: making crytek's games with very simple graphics would not even be possible.
This article really made me think. How often do we forget to actually DO something with what we have learned or witnessed.
In the general case, it has the low startup cost of a document db combined with a clear path to scalability with a future relational model.

In the specific case, it removes the data transformation code required to convert the clojure data structures I have to sql, json, or xml that postgresql understands.
Bitcoin is a means of control, just like any currency. The incentive is intrinsic.
For what it's worth, the protocol is/was not 'bulletproof' [1].

As far as I understand the basic architecture of the protocol, none of the crypto parts used are to be considered 'novel' (public/private keys+signature schemes & hashes) - it was the overall combination of various parts, esp. the combination of proof-of-work + p2p to (also) verify transactions, and the hash-chained blockchain to avoid double-spending etc. that proved to be truly powerful.

[1]: "On 6 August, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was found. Transactions weren't properly verified before they were included in the transaction log or "blockchain" which allowed for users to bypass bitcoin's economic restrictions and create an indefinite number of bitcoins." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#2010; direct link to CVE: https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-51...)
"I live next to a major city exit road. Before that, I lived in a house that had a freight railway station across the street. I've never noticed any problems."

For you, no problems. For others, there might be.
And if you do have a problem for example falling asleep when there is sound, the sound from the turbines is nasty as with such low sound you can't block it with earplugs.
I'm not saying you should care, just a fyi that some people do have to care about this for their own sanity.
I'm totally down with attributing the worst things about America to America as a whole, even if they show up in other countries. We could use a little deflation.
I immediately thought of this blog post when I read your comment - http://joethepeacock.blogspot.com/2012/04/thats-why-you-dont... I've experienced your situation and have always found this uplifting.
I can confirm it was well worth my 16 mins.

This really makes me want to go back to my game and play some more with AI. Although, at the same time I realize that's the mistake I made - making the game/platform for creating AI. It really takes a toll. This guy uses existing NES games, which allows him to focus on the AI and even generic game learning. Brilliant.

You can clearly see the advantages of AI in the short-term play (think in the order of milliseconds, exact frame-by-frame button presses) over anything a human could ever achieve.

Imagine combining the short-term button-mashing of said AI with the long-term planning of human players...
Great Developers Are Librarians
I thought Minecraft's inspiration was Infiniminer?
You can just check the slides here:
http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.slide

I read them a couple of weeks ago when I decided to take a look at Go,

and they were really helpful and eye opening to the problems it is trying to solve.
I've noticed that ever since I've started reading HN (which I think is fairly intellectually stimulating for me), the rate at which I independently think up new ideas for projects has greatly reduced. I don't know if they are actually correlated. Maybe reading a site like this and reading about other people achieving and inventing things lubricates that part of my brain that gives me satisfaction for making things myself.

Or that I now have so many ideas from others whirring around in my head, that it is difficult to separate my own personal desires from the experiences and projects I read about in blogs and discussions, so I emerge without really knowing any of my own dreams and dispositions.
Meritocracy is generally not about "natural talent", it is about accomplishment. It may be the case that $REFERENCE_CLASS_1 performs poorly because they parent their children badly.This doesn't mean that the final process doesn't measure merit, it just means that because of bad parenting or whatever, $REFERENCE_CLASS_1 has less merit than $REFERENCE_CLASS_2.

To take two extreme reference classes, children deprived of oxygen at birth have less merit than children given sufficient oxygen. The result of oxygen deprivation is unfair and sad, but that doesn't mean the brain-damaged child strangled by his umbilical cord is more meritorious than the normal child.

Let me be clear about "holistic" admissions. This is usually just a code word that means "we'd love to just use quotas to let in enough non-asian minorities and keep out those jerky asians, but we can't, so we'll do holistic admissions instead." This is what I'm referring to when I use the term.
So... what do you think about it? Or, do you have questions? I'm not very familiar with Pin, but am somewhat familiar with DynamoRIO, which is a competing project.
Cool - Thanks for the replies!
Do you know what they complained about? The view.

You love technology. But not everybody does. Some people like to live in the city, some people like to live in the country. Some people like to keep technology from enveloping their entire lives.

Is one viewpoint inherently more right than the other?
My rule of thumb is inspiration declines exponentially. And as someone famous once said - inspiration doesn't do anything - irritation has more to do with it.

e.g. at the conference/lecture/business meeting/serendipitous coffee, your excitement level is 110%

To truly do something, you must continue working when you are not inspired.

a day later, 70%

a week later, 20%

Three birds sat on a railing. One decided to fly off. How many birds are there now?
There is a difference between seeking inspiration and simply reading or watching something intellectually stimulating for entertainment (nor are they mutually exclusive).

Reading Hacker News, for example, can be done for entertainment.

And there is nothing wrong with that.
The fact that you have to watch that shitty stretched out video before using it every time is hilariously idiotic. Nobody will ever use this.
When you quote $200 to $300K revenue per head, you are quoting averages, whereas the firms I quoted (and also say, Qualcomm) earn have greater revenues per head and Facebook is about $1 million per employee.

Google has a 3 million square foot building in Manhattan which they purchased for $2 billion. I'm sorry but I don't see Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Amazon, or any other tech firm making anywhere near that commitment.

Of course, not everyone wants to live in Manhattan and I never said that, but as Google has demonstrated, it should be the second place after SV that you want to have a major presence. There are a lot of extremely intelligent high value employees and networks there. It is also a best place for employees to be that want to improve their careers esp if it overlaps with media, finance, health care delivery, pharma, ...

BTW, I don't make my money as a software or hardware engineer but once worked in both fields. I do believe, with the exception of Google, that Goldman and other top tier finance firms have been brighter than many of the SV firms that have only made a small presence in NYC.
Then you missed his earlier emails that explicitly acknowledge that the code he wrote is not at all intended to be mergeable and is just a proof-of-concept.

He also, in the thread, explicitly acknowledges that he's not sure about the best design and asks for help.
I specifically said "robust" kernels for this reason. While I wouldn't call Minix a toy kernel, it definitely was not as robust as Linux after a while into Linux's infancy. I'm guessing it was considered something a single person could probably manage due to its size.

I think this actually furthers my point as well. Minix was created by a world-renowned computer scientist. Linux was created by a college student. Did it really require an elite genius computer scientist to make Linux? No, it just required a kid who was interested in programming (as it happens, he was also very smart). Couldn't the same be true of bitcoin?
It is very expensive, as are most things in Denmark. My relatives there tell me that at night they sit in a small room with a candle to avoid running the lights and heat.
Windmills make tons and tons of waste - there are entire mountains made from mine tailings and slag (obviously not all from windmills, but don't think windmills are free of waste).

Nuclear power has much less waste.
You cannot be that stupid. There is absolutely no way. You have to be a troll.

I think it is more likely that you simply misunderstood the point he was trying to make, which is that the growth curve[1] matters.

We're discussing electric energy, remember?

You're right to point out the demand for automobiles in China, but that has a great deal to do with rapid urbanization and economic growth, which has had a similar effect on electricity consumption.

[1] http://www.eia.gov/countries/img/charts_png/CH_elecon_img.pn...
Stephen should consider eating his own dog food before sitting down and typing something like this out.
Printing Paper DJ Controllers
Linus makes a rather unconvincing argument against the system, saying the current system allows for submodules be different for local sites. As if the proposed system would not support that, and as if the current 'dirty submodule' system is a better solution.

Yes! And in the next breath, Linus flat-out admits he doesn't know if anyone uses/keeps a dirty local .gitmodules file. A great example of being out of touch with your users and still thinking you know best. Arguing to keep a (IMO minor & weird) feature around without knowing if anyone even uses it is folly.

I think he's better off just not asking Juno or Linus for advice and just keep on hacking on his fork. I know I would use it.

If only it were that easy. His changes would create a git implementation incompatible with everyone else's.
Yes, as everyone knows, money launderers are gentlemen, who will stick to their word in a gentlemen agreement.

And this valuable process will be generously provided for free, by another gentleman, thus making the whole money laundering a costless operation.

Basically, this whole complex service will fully guaranteed by the trust each money launderer have on their good fellows also engaged in this benevolent operation.

Even without any government action or the tracking of tainted/untainted accounts, I just don't believe it may ever work that way - not with human beings at least :-)
As it happens I wrote something that addresses this type of statement, just today.

http://spacecreeps.com/essays/when_a_game_means_something/in...
Hi yawaramin, there's nothing less modern or idiomatic about list versus generator comprehensions in python. You would use a generator if you want to limit maximum memory usage, and/or if you know that the iterable only needs to be consumed once.
I would assume the blades can be "feathered" so as to catch very little wind and not impart a rotational force, as on a prop-drive aircraft when one of the engines needs to be shut off. There has to be some way to take them out of services for e.g. maintenance.
Greenbacks are doing great, comparatively speaking - the US government continues to demand tax payments exclusively in dollars and jails those who don't pay. Only in another branch of the multiverse would the govt. ever allow tax payments in beanie babies or bitcoin.
Nope. I see no negetive effects.

Functional programmers can write better OO code imho.
The user guide gives a good flavour of the kind of things you can do with this ( http://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/pintool/docs/584... ).
yes, but the point is also that the program doesn't really know the goal, it just tries to increase bytes that look like counters. that's the fun thing.

you should compare it with a game whose rules you don't know, being able only to understand your score. like trying to play spider solitaire on windows without knowing how the game works (it allows you to undo your moves).
Yea, and in addition to that, it can also be read to keep up with news-worthy events.
They are not paying for someone to take the power - that's poor journalism.

It works like this: Every energy producer bids a price for their power, the lower your price the higher you are on the order book.

Then energy consumers will meet the demand by buying from the producers in the order of their price.

Once they have filled their power demand they pay everyone the price of the last price they needed to fill their needs.

So by setting a negative price they ensure they are always on top of the order book - but they don't actually have to pay for their power since other power sources have positive prices, and that's the price that is actually paid.
http://www.amazon.com/Wages-Destruction-Making-Breaking-Econ...
Java is not exactly popular here, especially when compared to Lisp. It has an affinity for downvotes.
First, it's Sunday night.

Second, PIN gives you very low-level access, sure, but it also requires quite a bit of work to get that data. You can get a lot of the same data (as seen in the examples) with libpfm4 (http://perfmon2.sourceforge.net/). CPU Performance counters can give you a lot of this data with much lower run-time overhead, and a lot less work.

Also, PIN's a little hairy. If you just want to generate code for run-time execution, LLVM's your best bet. If you want to diddle with a running executable, you can always use libelf(3) and ptrace(2) to read and diddle with the running process. It may be useful for specific sorts of analyses you want to run on an executable, but it's messy. If you're doing performance instrumentation, dynamically modifying the code is going to alter your results that can be hard to compensate for.