skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could be a "realignment of priorities", could be lagging sales, who knows? What I do know is that I've actively started avoiding EA games. I'm not a hard-core gamer, so I don't get terribly passionate about the actual and alleged sins of EA. But I think Battlefield 3 is going to be the last EA game I buy. Without going into a long spiel, it just feels like they're not satisfied with my $60 and make it too obvious in their grab for more. They're not the only ones, but they're the first ones I noticed and they continue to be the most blatant.

Add to that the problems that so many of the games have upon release. I know Battlefield 3 had problems, and then there's the well-publicized Sims. Everyone I know that plays Madden complains every year when a new one comes out (yes, I do question why they continue to buy it). Perhaps I'm not the only one considering how badly I want to play a game when I stand a good chance of being frustrated with it at the start. Maybe I'll go outside instead. :-)
For which (TIL) the speed of propogation is limited by the speed of light - except (maybe) gravity: http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp
Nonsense. They wouldn't be bound to anything.

There are people making millions using these APIs now with no support. Why would charging them $25/month suddenly require support?
"Have you thought about getting a job working for better people" is incredibly patronizing, akin to asking a fast food worker why they're not working at a real restaurant or someone at a huge, bulky conglomerate why they're not working for Google. The rep knows that their script isn't designed to help you, just like someone working at McDonald's knows that their burgers aren't the best in town, but they also have to pay rent at the end of the month so they're going to stick to it.

Being nice to customer service reps is the best thing you can do and is the easiest way to get them to go out of their way to help you. Chances are the caller before you was kind of a jerk, and the caller after you will probably be kind of a jerk, so if you approach the call in a nice manner and are polite and patient you'll stick out in a good way and the agent will be more inspired to assist you. It's possible or probable that they'll still be hamstrung by corporate regulations but like they say, you'll catch more flies with honey than vinegar (or however the saying goes).
One disadvantage (with flourescents; I'm sure LEDs wouldn't have this issue) I've noticed is that there is a small delay between when you turn on the light switch and the bulb turns on. Also, it doesn't start at full brightness but has to gradually increase to full brightness. Not a huge issue but worth mentioning.
What do you call someone (like, say Jenny McCarthy), who honestly deludes herself into a position where their lies are both harmful and profitable? Does it matter what they really think?

We are who we pretend to be.
They share a similar core OO based language, but C# went out and got a bunch of flashy add ons. C# got generics before Java did. C# added delegates, lambdas, LINQ, the async keyword... Some people see that as progress and making day to day programming easier. Some might see it as bloat(how many ways are there to do async in C# now?)
I'm not quite sure I understand the point of this post. If you see spamming as an amoral activity, either shut it down yourself, or continue knowing that you are profiting from amoral activity.

If you don't, then please continue spamming. I think that would make you a pretty big a-hole, but it's your life. shrugs
Out of curiosity, how did you encounter this paper ciderpunx? The authors aren't familiar to me from logic/computing, but perhaps they're combinatorialists.

If I find time I'll look at the paper in more detail as it's a question that I pondered but never bothered to answer myself when I studied the λ calculus.
I'm Bengali, so I do have an idea. People on the sub-continent want to develop in their own way, but they generally have a deep respect for Western culture and a desire to adopt elements of it. India has already adopted huge amounts of British culture.
Namecoin is a very interesting project, but I prefer PPC coin's proof-of-stake algorithm to bitcoin's proof-of-work for long-term stability and robustness.
What’s the Matter With Zynga?
I couldn't tell from your comments, strongvigilance, but do you code as well? I'm interested finding who on HN code but also show a deeper understanding of finance beyond just passing interest.
Definitely agree. I wonder if there's a cultural difference too. I'm pretty much a native English speaker and still fell for it.
Those that know don't write books.

If you'd like more of a live view into what is going on in the markets (strategy-wise), check out nuclearphynance.com.

As for technical books, I prefer Maureen O'Hara's structural approach over continuous time finance. Beyond providing more of a "trader's view", she is also a lovely person. I don't much care for continuous time finance.
I disagree with you.

Sit in a call centre with no ability to fix people's problems and you'll realise that people are angry with you and that some are rude to you. Do this for long enough and you'll stop empathising with them back. You will just be going through the motions.
Yes, I know it was a joke. I just had to check that my memory wasn't acting up. (I actually had to use nothing but ed for real work for a few months in 1985 — makes for good training in regular expressions.) Real ed only requires two EOF (or 'q' commands) if the file has changed, so you don't quit by accident, but driving it by script won't hang.
Interesting, but I'm still correct:

Again, if a person A who has been in the
US for a long time and has gotten good
with US 'culture' sees an adult B who
has not been in the US long enough to
qualify for US citizenship, then person
A will detect person B as an immigrant
and non-US citizen easily.

Your point is that this detection can
also be made by some non-US citizens
who have been in the US for a long time.
True but does not conflict with what I
wrote.

You are straining to find something
wrong with what I wrote. Sorry,
I wrote nothing wrong.
Since a government's power is drawn from its populous, I would argue with your conclusion as to who is granting whom control. (A state divided cannot stand.)
Thanks, great explanation. I'm finding Ember Data really nice to use from my experience so far. I look forward to seeing an official release and documentation. For the time being the source code is heavily commented if you want to see what can be extended.
Industry Ventures provides little-known pressure valve for venture LPs
This should not be a front page article. I'm going to start flagging all 37 signals posts since they spam us with low content and brief posts I believe are only designed to feed traffic to their domain.
Why We’re So Obsessed With Causation
I'm three years clean of EA-crap. There's so many wonderful games out there made by simply far better companies.

Sim City was going to be my shameful end to my boycott, but unfortunately EA/Maxis made the decision to avoid my most beloved franchise all too easy.

Condolences to everyone who lost their jobs today, I hope passionate and talented staff will find new homes in better studios, and I can't wait to see what y'all can accomplish without the EA shackles on!
Hypocrisy is not inherently bad. Hypocrisy is the acknowledgement of the importance or relevance of a value without the discipline or will to act according to that value. That does not invalidate the value.
As others have mentioned, the 2880x1800 resolution is unusable with a 1x1 pixel display. You can change this with "xrandr --output DP-2 --scale .5x.5" and that will cut the resolution in half, but everything is very fuzzy.
Beware the Unstoppable Robot Turtle
I wonder if you've actually used one of the newest Cree bulbs? I'm not color blind and I found the color of one of their 2700k bulbs to be better than the CFLs I use in a few places. Come to think of it, they're a fair bit better than the g7power LEDs as well.

This is why I'm wondering if the CRI is really a magical "light goodness" benchmark number or what. Some people certainly seem to be treating it that way.
Nope. Imageine instead of ping-pong balls you had a blue squash ball (TIL: the color is important! [0]). They're squishy, and so when you poke the ball at your end, in reality you're causing it to visibly deform. It then pushes back out to a sphere, moving away from you. In doing so, it pushed into the next ball. This process of deform->reform->...deform->reform takes time, and that time is the propagation delay.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squash_(sport)#Playing_equipmen...
I should expand this statement. They are both two very similar languages with different pros and cons. Your statement is too broad for anyone to answer. If you state specifically what you're trying to do then we would be able to tell you better if there is an advantage of one over the other.
You know, I thought a lot about this. In India, there is a weird phenomena that I noticed: many of the best teachers want to teach, not college students, but high school students preparing for the rigorous engineering entrance examinations. Of course, it helps that they get paid a lot more than university professors, but the ones that taught me, for instance, had a genuine desire to impart knowledge where it would matter the most. They loved it when we would solve a difficult physics/math problem. By contrast, they complained that most college students were too distracted with other things. I found this to be true when I went to college, when, of a class of about ~500 students, only about 50 were actually honestly learning.

My hypothesis is that many college grads don't make the most of their easy access to learning, but have an incredible sense of self-entitlement. Those in high school are still at a very impressionable age; curious about the way the world works and hungry to find out more.
It's cool to see this research, but it really needs to become more accessible and widely applied. I'll start digging in, thanks for the pointer.
Could you point me to quant analyst job salary listing on glassdoor. I couldn't find what the job title typically is.
Embracing the Kobayashi Maru – Why You Should Teach Your Students to Cheat [pdf]
Without getting into the minutiae of lumens and efficiency metrics for different lighting technologies...

It never occurred to you just to buy a second lamp?
I travel with cheap, worn, ugly luggage. Nobody else wants it!

Nobody bothers my car, either, for the same reason.
This is detestable. I hope everyone can translate this blog post accordingly. If not, here it is:

"I publicly acknowledge I'm wrong. I'm letting Twitter know they should shut me down, but I'm just going to keep riding while the money is hot. Everyone will think I'm a great guy because of this post and my reputation will be salvaged after I'm shut down."

Spammers are the lowest. If the OP has any shred of dignity left he would shut down before Twitter can do that for him.
The period is necessary in human languages because we write sentences next to each other and we need some way to separate them. Programming languages are line-based and are more akin to recipes or poetry. So that's a bad analogy. Unless you consistently write all your statements on a single line, of course.

Furthermore, you present a false dichotomy here. A semicolon-free language can easily have semicolons as an optional measure if you do want to cram several statements together on the same line. You mention one-liners; a semicolon-free language can support semicolons. Here's a Ruby one-liner:

>> b = Box.find(3); t = Thing.new; b.add_thing(t)

A class of errors: Well, anecdotally, I have personally never had a single issue with semicolons in JavaScript in all my years developing with it, simply because I always use semicolons. The reason is that JavaScript has a bunch of "semicolon insertion" rules that are not well understood, so dropping the semicolons is a bad idea, as the recent "fiasco" showed, and I just decided very early on not to go that route.

As I understand it, JS is a semicolon-enforced language that allows you to drop them at your convenience, whereas Ruby, for example, is a semicolon-free language that allows you to include them at your convenience. I'm not a parser expert, and I won't swear there is a significant difference except in which rules are defined. But I do know that semicolons are categorically not an issue in Ruby. So I would say that this argument is invalid, too, because it presents a flawed language as the ideal. The Rust guys should not need to base their design on JavaScript.
I've been working on getting API documentation added to ember.js.com, fwiw: https://github.com/emberjs/website/pull/457
I almost made that same mistake. I was thinking "are there even 20 racial groups"?

Acceptance rate at Harvard is 5.9% for instance. So you get almost 20x applicants than you can accept.
This reminds me of a slightly, although not entirely, related paper that I read a while ago titled "Embracing the Kobayashi Maru – Why You Should Teach Your Students to Cheat". I've linked to it in this item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5609346 because I think it is different enough to warrant a separate discussion.
Then I guess brain surgery isn't exactly brain surgery, if you know what I mean.
This would have been more interesting to me as a study in game theory, if some of the 'mob' had given false or incomplete answers to the rest of the group on a minority of the questions, saving the 'fully-correct' answers for themselves. That way, if there was a curve they would benefit totally from the 'mob' and still come out ahead of it.
This is why I love HN. Thanks to you too cle!
To an extent - I'm a trader first, programmer second - learnt the latter to help with the former.
that actually looks barely edible.
In that case, please say specifically what you mean by "the same undesirable consequences".
"EA's most high-profile projects on the horizon are this fall's DICE-developed Battlefield 4 and the BioWare-developed Dragon Age III."

EA continues to go to the well of existing properties all the while dangling a slightly new feature in one hand while choking us with DLC/IAP in the other. Their CDN is a joke compared to Steam and they earned their rating in pop culture with their routine disdain for their customer base.

Gaming is still in its infancy as an art form. The faster the EA/Activision oligopoly is broken up, the more power we as consumers will have in the future.
That actually made me laugh out loud, but I assume they meant their colleagues who are also their friends. Something like the logician's definition of 'and', I suppose.
It's also trying to solve a problem CC created -- the proliferation of mutually-incompatibly licensed works whose license terms are so overly complex (and so poorly presented) that most people using them don't really understand what they do. Unfortunately, the "copyheart" thing takes it too far in the other direction, resulting in some potentially very legally problematic situations for reuse.
I mean the economy for which we must all bend ourselves into pretzel shapes.
It is basically just a mummy-burger. Drying foods to preserve them is a technique almost as old as humans themselves. Notice how every time you see someone talking about this experiment, they used a burger with no condiments? The condiments are too moist, they would provide a foothold for decay.

Mist that burger down every day with a spray bottle and I'd put a great deal of money on it decaying just as fast as you would normally expect food to decay.
New Twinkie Maker Shuns Union Labor; Relaunch This Summer
It should be fair to note that experiments like this can only work in small groups. In much larger class sizes chaos will ensue.

It will also be an interesting experiment to take a large group of students, split them into groups, and then give out exams to each group. By adding a factor of competitiveness test scores might even go higher. Competition is everywhere in nature.
Here, here on having sympathy for those out of work today. I look forward to many of you becoming fed up with the corporate policies you have had to survive under, and look to strike out on your own.

I'll be on Kickstarter and Steam, waiting to see (and fund) what new directions you take us all in.
Here is a more interesting look at this:
http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-r...
It will most likely break your teeth.
Any properly cooked hamburger will have the same result.
Teaching homeless people how to use Kickstarter
Inspirational Quotes for Startups
half of these companies don't do anything other than conglomerate information and present it nicely. How are they supposed to make money?
"Quantitative Researcher"

As for salary, it varies a lot. For a large hedge fund, you might look at $200K base, for smaller shops maybe $150K. Of course, most people are more interested in the bonus. Also, it varies a lot based on experience.
I am constantly surprised that we have a 'moral' aversion to cheating. IMO school teaches two strategies for success. 1.) work hard within the rules and 2.) cheat but don't get caught. Each is equally valid in society, even without a 'moral' component.
If you enjoy this kind of thinking, you'll love Dan Ariely's Behavioral Economics class when it next comes to Coursera.
Chaotic flow art
Another endorsement of the Harris Book here. The technology is all out of date (hello SuperDot), but otherwise it's a great introduction to modern financial markets.
Side note regarding the page as a whole: the link on the main page in the footer is broken ("older posts"). It points to [1] and displays a CSS file instead of the page because of the query string.

[1] http://apiux.com/page/2/?custom-css=1&csblog=1&cscac...
This is an awesome post. I really admire Natalie and everything she's done with She Takes On The World.
American Airlines earned an enemy
The thing no one mentions is that this is an inevitable side-effect of scale. It's hard enough to do good customer service in small brick and mortar stores where your ratio of employees to customers is high. When you scale up a business to the size of an airline, good customer service is a glaring cost and an easy thing to ditch in competition.

Economies of scale give us better prices but it happens are the expense of customer service. We learn to lower our expectations.
The fact that it would cost any money at all is completely ludicrous, any judge with any basic concept of logic can see that it's an obvious development of technology and therefore can't be patented. You shouldn't have to hire a lawyer to prove that.
Amazon is an interesting case, partly because they really are doing on-line commerce and product distribution infrastructure on a scale that basically no-one else does.

I'm wondering how their next chapters are going to play out when (a) people get fed up with the automatic pricing mechanisms that keep dramatically changing the prices with no logical basis from a customer's point of view, and (b) too many bricks and mortar stores start to go under, and people can't browse there before sneakily shopping on-line afterwards any more.

Here's an obvious example from just this past week. Back at Christmas I bought the first season of a show, and after enjoying the first few episodes, I put season 2 on my Amazon wish list, which I basically use as a convenient bookmarking tool. At the time, both box sets were about the same price, and it was roughly the going rate for such things. A few weeks later, I'd finished the first season and went to order the second, credit card literally in hand, and found that they had basically doubled the price since I bookmarked it. There was no obvious justification, so I assume it was their automated pricing doing something funny. In any case, I immediately removed it from my wish list; I enjoyed the show, but not that much. Last week, I went back to take another look in case the price had come down again, but no, season 2 is still way more than season 1 and other comparable products. The following day, I learned that a TV channel I get is showing both seasons back to back, so if I just wait a few days I can have the whole thing for free. Score: Me 1, Amazon 0.

It's not as if this is the first time I've seen their pricing do silly (from a customer's point of view) things, or the first time they've annoyed me for that reason, but it's the first time it was so silly that I just walked away from a purchase without hesitation, and in this case clearly I'll never go back now. I've heard similar anecdotes from enough friends now to realise that I'm hardly alone, either.

This leads me to wonder whether all of this computerising and optimising that they are doing will backfire at some point, and a lot of the advantages they seemed to have in better pricing compared to bricks and mortar stores were actually temporary or illusory.
I could imagine a lot of things. I'm just trying to point out that you can't just absolve individuals from being responsible for the outcomes of their decisions. And that's not the same thing as saying "The victim was dumb, they got what they had coming to them".
World's Top Most Expensive Phones
And we haven't even talked about dimming. I have dimmers everywhere. CFLs don't dim at all (unless they're special, and I bet they suck). They have other wonderful quirks like blinking when off, if connected to an illuminated switch.
It's not as bad as it used to be, actually. It used to be a deal breaker for me, but now even though I still don't like it, I don't mind it either.
I still couldn't truthfully answer most of the "improved" questions with anything other than "it depends" or "none of the above", because they still make too many assumptions about people's behavior and choices that simply don't match the diversity of reality.

Pay for a streaming video services? Depends, 99% of current services I wouldn't pay for. How often do I get a new mobile phone? Depends, sometimes two in a year, but the current one is already 3 years old. Fuck if I know the "average". How often do I check my mail per hour. Depends on where I am and what the fuck I'm doing, of course.

Etcetera, etcetera.
The people, acting through government, grants specific people, monopolies over particular property. That's all that property rights are--my community, acting through government, agreeing to come to my aid if I'm dispossessed of my property outside the framework of rules we have collectively established. That agreement is what distinguishes property rights from mere posession.
At where I work, we call it chance_2_buy_lunch.scss

Every Friday, we pick 3 random lines from chance_2_buy_lunch.scss (and another 3 from chance_2_buy_lunch.coffee) and the writers of those lines have to buy lunch for the rest of the team.
Nginx ngx_http_close_connection function integer overflow
He knows he will be shut down with or without this blog post. Twitter already knows about him.

The purpose of this blog post is to save what little of his reputation is left by making it seem like he's redeeming himself. He isn't. He's waiting for Twitter to shut him down while he keeps making money as a spammer.
Overall I like it. Some possible changes:

Above the fold page looks a little bland...everything looks like a background image, the birds and the text. My eyes weren't sure where to go.

Also Amir's bio:

"Engineer turned product guy. I find people smarter than me and help them kick ass."

Starts out as first person, then the second paragraph continues in third person. Personally I'd just nix the the part quoted above. It sounds cliche anyway.
Academy of Motion Pictures report on LED lighting in film
Being Really, Really, Ridiculously Good Looking
Two years ago, this was a 12 year old hamburger, and the mechanics at play were pretty thoroughly described here:

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-r...

Spoiler: the author makes a completely homemade burger and has it dry out in the same way as the McDonald's burger, thus debunking the theory that the longevity of the burger is evidence of foul play.