skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Dear Esther Linux build on your download page was made by CodeWeavers, which means that it is based on a custom-tailored version of Wine ... [we] commission[ed] Ryan Gordon to create a fully-native version of Dear Esther, as well. ... [which] is not quite ready yet. ... The native port is planned to come soon to Humble Indie Bundle 8 customers"[1]

So download the crossover version from their site now, or wait for the native port to appear on steam when it's ready.

It's not like they're hiding this, there's a link to that page right underneath the words "Dear Esther" on the landing page.

[1] http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/116...
For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means.

First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object at that point. You also take into account the position, intensity, color, etc. of any light sources in the scene. Optionally, you may also take into account any shadow casting. That's it.

What's missing from that list? It's a big one: You're not taking into account the way other objects in the scene affect that little point. In the real world, light bounces all around. Each little point is affected by pretty much each other little point. All the points are interdependent.

But with local illumination, you ignore the way other surfaces contribute to the point's illumination. You're just looking at that one point and the light sources. That's why it's called local.

Global illumination, by contrast, does take into account the interplay between different points in the scene. Its main purpose is to simulate light bouncing between polygons.

As you can imagine, managing the complexity of all those interactions is a tall order. We have quite a few algorithms for this; all are approximations. It's worth noting that some of these approximations can converge towards a provably physically correct result if you let them run long enough.

In any case, running global illumination often causes a major increase in rendering time. So it's understandable that Pixar, which has to render a huge number of frames at huge resolutions, did not traditionally use it much.
> … is a climate change denialist

It would be nice if Hacker News could avoid the worst abuses of language that happens in public debate.

1) Climate has always and will always be 'changing'. It is a dynamic, not static, system.

2) No one denies that climate changes so 'climate change denialists' is the empty set.

3) To dispute the theory of 'catastrophic anthropogenic global warming' is not the same as denying 'warming', 'global warming' or even 'anthropogenic global warming'. It is only when you add in the 'catastrophic' part (which comes from the magnitude of the predicted positive feedbacks in global climate models) that you enter into the realm of serious disputes.

4) There is considerable evidence that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 20 years (anthropogenic or not) and even more evidence that the magnitude of the positive feedback included in the 'catastrophic anthropogenic global warming' models is much smaller than previously assumed.

5) If the climate models only match actual temperatures by lowering the postive feedbacks in the models then they are probably no longer predicting catastrophic warming.
I used to work as a process engineer at a semiconductor manufacturing plant. The plant ran 24/7, so we had (almost) round-the-clock engineering coverage. "Stand-up" meetings weren't viable because many of the engineers on the same team would work at different hours, so at the end of the day each engineer was required to send a "passdown" via e-mail.

A passdown included the experiments that ran on your reactor for the day, the experiments that were planned for the next day, and potential research directions based on the results. With a trail of passdowns, any engineer could easily pick up on the thread of logic from the previous engineer and continue working in their stead (if they are on their weekend, vacation, sick, etc.).

The nature of the job necessitated leaving behind a trail for someone else to follow, but I think it's a great process to be adapted to other work environments.
Ok, I'll take the bait.

I need to make a web page about standups and just start posting links to it. It's the same question time after time, and I keep thinking I'm going to forget part of the answer.

Standups are not meetings, at least not like I know them. Some teams have "standups" while doing a morning walk. Some meet at the coffee shop. Some have stopwatches and pigs and chickens and all sorts of other things. So what? Meetings usually involve sitting around, an agenda, a leader, a desired set of outcomes, and so forth. Standups really don't have any of that in the traditional sense. The output from a standup is just an informal agenda for the day. People meet, they discuss what's up, they break up and informally get together to do stuff. Standups are designed to prevent meetings, not be another one.

"Because it’s the information that’s great: the meetings are time-sinks."

No, it's about non-verbal communication and social interaction around common team problems. We've found that listing the 3 things helps do that. You might get the same effect with having each person act out an improv based on their feelings. I don't know. Give it a shot. But it's not about information. No. No. No, no no. Technology teams are made of people, not robots, and the work of everybody getting on the same page and keeping up is a human job full of social nuance, not the exchange of status information.

Later on we get here:

"...the only benefit to having a meeting is the face-to-face discussion that it allows for. Or, to put it another way: if you’re structuring your meeting around trying to eliminate anything that isn’t a two-minute “this is what I did/am doing/am having trouble with” update, why are you having a meeting at all?"

"Discussion" a much better word, but you're once again assuming that it's all some kind of information flow happening. The hardest part of working in technology teams is the social factor, not the bandwidth of information flow. Standups are about physically looking each other in the eye, figuring out where everybody is, and figuring out if you can help. It's not information, and it's really not discussion.

I'll put in a plug for anybody that's interested: I've created a no-frills "Agile Team Tune-up" email course. No selling, just a weekly concept explained with ways to apply in your team. If you're interested, here's the sign-up: http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl
Why do people assume that voxels and polygons don't play well together?

There are voxel engines now that store world data using voxels while what the player actually sees is polygons based on that voxel data.

I'm reminded of one guy's side project[1] that accomplishes exactly that.

[1]http://procworld.blogspot.com/2012/12/videos-of-caves-and-bu...
Check out: https://www.centup.org/

Likes that cause donations to go to your favorite charity!

(I am an acquaintance of one of the founders, but not related in any other way.)
Top 20 Wordpress Plugin I Just can’t Do without | Onenaija Blog
I think this is unique to programmers because they are in the unique position where they completely understand the ramifications of giving a 3rd party access to their Facebook account.

Outside of our world, signup with Facebook would probably convert a lot more and even improve engagement. It's a worthy tradeoff IMO. Atleast to a business owner.
Taxono-mess
You may want to read the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In particular:

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I see you're new to Hacker News.

I can understand that you don't agree with the developer's choice to use Facebook connect. But this sort of response isn't productive to the conversation.

Is it really that black & white? I'd imagine there are tradeoffs between product usefulness and the imposing nature of Facebook connect. Shouldn't we talk about how to prioritize these tradeoffs?

> Please, f* off.

Please support productive discourse on HN and avoid comments like this in the future.
My kids have just started watching Diego (as in last night), so it seems the licensing deal is still active in the Canadian Netflix library?

Unblock-us.com is the way to go, costs $5/month and means you can access all of the Netflix libraries (US, Canada, UK and others).
1) http://renderman.pixar.com/view/raytracing-fundamentals
2) Unbiased renderers like Maxwell and arnold very different beasts. Unbiased renderes have only become practical with moore's law. Renderman is so prevalent because its both fast and flexible. Maxwell specifically has a very distinct look.
3) its renderman. They eat their own dog food.
4) CPU, with GPU bits for specialist stuff
5) AAAAAAGGGEESS 24hours a frame in some cases. even more if there is lots of fur/water
> ray tracing is a relatively advanced CG lighting technique

Not really correct. Ray tracing is more like the most simple GC lightning technique you could imagine, but so incredibly computationally expensive people have been mostly waiting for the hardware to be good enough for the last 50 years.

And in the meantime, they've been using an incredible pile of hack and tricks to try and approach levels of visual quality and complexity trivial on a raytracer, except said pile of hack could actually be computed before the heat death of the universe.
Defusing OP's point. There are plenty of other examples of deathtraps in the photos, anyways...
Hmm. What kind of statistician these days can't pull data from a MySQL table? Even the almost-retired people I know have to interact with data sources in some SQL product or another.
To your last point, it depends on what role you currently serve to your company. If you're among statisticians, you make yourself valuable by knowing more about computer science and programming than the rest of the group. If you're amongst engineers (probably more common than the former--at least on HN), knowing probability and statistics gives you that edge.
How in the world is that a "full-throated endorsement of oil subsidies"?

Also, claiming that "That's about as close as anyone has ever come to fully-backing oil subsidies" is quite laughable.
> Another layer of abstraction just results in more complicated code, more bugs, more difficulty testing the different code paths.

No. A proper approach to abstraction:

- Reduces complexity by reducing interdependency between subsystems.

- Facilitates testing by reducing interdependency between subsystems, and reduces bugs by facilitating testing.

- Allows for iterating components of the code base independently, and more easily adapting to changes to underlying components and subsystems, whether in the software themselves, or part of the system(s) the software relies on.

> Might be fine for a lot of projects, but this is just something to boot up your system.

Actually, this isn't just something to boot up your system (and if it was, it would be even easier to keep portable).

Instead, systemd a kitchen-sink-replace-everything-daemon that introduces massive cross-system/cross-module dependencies.
what's the point of incorporating it in engines if the hardware is not made for it ? By the way, I remember carmack talking about accelerated ray casting. That would be a killer feature...

Also don't forget voxels take an order of magnitude more memory. Voxels are hyped because of minecraft, and in terms of acceleration they're really not trivial at all.

I remember some nifty demo with voxels though. But honestly wait for the real-time graphics API mess to smooth up a little before going voxels. You can still do a big lot with triangles.
PyPi package download counts removed
I wonder if anonymized ride data will ever be available for consumption. It would be interesting to see an animation of bike movement throughout the day.
Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain (2006)
Show HN: Goodbye Old Editor – Reinventing coding with the cloud
That's it!

The book is okay, I was kinda surprised at how good he was at keeping the tech believable... still he mostly failed as authors who know little about tech do
Constraint propagation + depth first search.
Social, Events, BPM... Oh My. But What About Knowledge & Context?
U.S. accuses cyber exchange of laundering $6 billion
Plans for Australia spy HQ hacked by Chinese
How to Sink a Submarine, Apple, or the Tech Giant of Your Choice
> BSD doesn't support a bunch of stuff. How would you deal with that concretely. How would you ensure that all those different code paths are tested?

You could start by explaining "a bunch of stuff" -- and why it's necessary -- concretely.
My problem with your question is the evergrowing lack of critical thinking on HN. I think even PG has eluded to it.

What's the difference from Bootstrap? Why don't you view its source? Read through the framework's documentation? For one the default styling is significantly different than Bootstrap.

The one thing I fondly miss about Slashdot is people would liberally tell you to RTFM when you asked something obvious that could have been answered by reading the article posted.
A truly exquisite app: gorgeous, useful and a pleasure to use:
Of the Three Pillars of Standup (what you did yesterday[1], what you are doing today[2], what are you stuck on[3]) I really only find [3] to be of much value.

Git log/Kanban board can tell you [1]/[2] if you actually need to know these things (hint: you probably don't unless you are manager/team lead/product owner).

Kanban blocker stickies can do [3] but I think a designated "safe haven" to get help is useful, at least for teams of varying skill level and comfort with one another.

My favorite standups have been the ones that "devolved" (in the formal capital-A Agile sense) to "Anyone blocked?" crickets "Okay. Good standup."
If you have been in politics as long as I have, you would know that an argument which is designed entirely to downplay the risks and costs of a policy is an endorsement of the same policy.
Well, they don't tend to prosecute that harshly. There are examples of people committing murder and telling the strangest most egregious lies you could imagine and getting nothing at all done to me. See Casey Anthony. Sure, the only thing that happened to her was like a little probation for her lies but those amounted to lies bigger than I could imagine a reasonable person telling the police with a straight face.
1) Size of data : Most econometrician work on small data set (mostly in MBs ) which they can they keep in RAM and use R and excel to analyze the data. but modern day data scientist have to deal with GBs (sometimes TBs or even PBs) of data..for such a large data you need multiple machine or even hundreds of machine..So you need to be good at distributed computing and frameworks like hadoop, hive etc

2) Visualization : such large dataset can not always be expressed in bar charts or pie charts...so standard charting tools like excel and R dont work..you need to have good knowledge of charting libraries like d3 or openGl (for 3d visualization) to analyze and express their findings

4) Type of data: Econometricians are never comfortable with unstructured data set consisting of twitter feeds and apache logs..good knowledge of machine learning and graph algorithms are becoming very essential...Apache mahout a machine learning framework build over hadoop is looking extremely promising
Awesome links, bookmarked thx!

I found out about Kyle Gabler as the score to the final animation composition (50:00) in Bret Victors fantastic "Stop Drawing Dead Fish" talk: https://vimeo.com/64895205
I almost never use my facebook account, so I'm interested to see what the site thinks my "interests" are. Probably toilet paper and towels since my wife uses my account for couponing.
Pid 1 does a lot.

You lost me right there.

Beyond that, the fact that the basic fundamental underpinnings of a Linux system are large monsters that try to do everything, and depend on dbus and libthis and libthat, is deeply offensive. So is the fact that despite there being many daemons in "systemd", they all depend on each other so that to get the benefits of one you have to take them all. It's the GNOME style of programming. I've hated GNOME since 1999 when it first came out, but I didn't worry too much about it since I never used it. But if this crap becomes the norm at a basic system level, it obviates the reason I got into Linux in the first place: to have a clean and useful Unix system that does the minimum it needs to do and otherwise stays the hell out of my way.
Between various sorts of capital controls, the huge amount of state owned business, and endemic corruptions I don't see any way you could talk about China being more economically free than the us, unless it's maybe in that many regulations are only sometimes enforced. I disagree with some of Heritage's methodology in their rankings, but they're consistent and there's no measure by which China is ahead of the US in the categories they look at.
http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
I encourage you to peruse the Github page of the R celebrity Hadley Wickham. While trained as a statistician and employed as a professor of statistics at Rice, he writes quite a few R packages that deal with more traditional development roles (unit testing and debugging, not to mention Plyr and GGplot):
https://github.com/hadley?tab=repositories

Also, Duncan Temple Lang, another professor of statistics, has done some really amazing work with R compilers and CUDA interfaces.
https://github.com/duncantl?tab=repositories
http://www.omegahat.org/
I'll be uploading the Linux/Mac versions of Capsized to Steam before the end of the week. There isn't really a reason for the delay - this is the initial launch of Capsized for Mac/Linux though
This is a free version of the book "Mining Massive Datasets".

Basically statistical methods that work with big datasets, which is the core of data science.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html
That is the most clear description I've ever seen of local vs global illumination. Thank you.
That does not apply here. If Cato backs oil companies, then they would obviously have a strong cause to oppose government policy supporting oil alternatives.

The issue here is not mere inconsistency.
I wonder what the punishment will be for not providing the passwords or decrypting the drives.
You know, you have an excellent point. If you wanted to tweak standups, how about just doing #3? Everybody say where you're blocked and how we can help. Boom. Standup over.

It'd be fun to try.
Summer of Design: free "Design for Hackers" online course
There are other costs to daily meetings - namely when should you have them? If you have them in the middle of the day, you interrupt the schedule. At the end of the day, then the energy you're looking to develop in the meeting goes the wrong direction (plus it inevitably interrupts someone who was in flow and just wanted to keep working). Therefore you want it at the beginning of the day.

But what if people want to start their days at different times? Now they can't!

I feel this a lot right now. Due to unexpected personal circumstances I have wound up needing to go from "provide child support" to "provide financial support". So I just began a job search. But one past employer who would be otherwise reasonable to apply to went onto my list of places to avoid applying to for a while. Why? Because most of their teams have daily standups at around 9:30-10 AM, and there is still rush hour traffic around Los Angeles at that time. I'd like to spend the morning with my kids, get ready, arrive at 11 AM and totally miss rush hour. (Then leave late and miss it on the other end as well!) But they can't accommodate that.

If you have daily meetings, have you discouraged someone from working for you? Quite possibly so. But if my experience is a guide, you probably won't even hear about it.
a) large instance
b) express/node

the core problem was redistogo, not primarily ec2, though someone else takes up a lot of CPU on my shared instance
Well, but the fact is you are never compelled to incriminate yourself. So I think your distinction is without a difference here. The teacher informed the children, who are not lawyers by the way, they do not have to incriminate themselves. I think your distinction is true in a pedantic sense but I think this was a correct interpretation of what you are not compelled to do.
You said that freedom means "political self-determination." But what you apparently mean by "self-determination," is "majority-determination."

You should read "1984." It covers doublespeak. Apparently, in the sources you read, doublespeak about "freedom" has been going on for about 300-400 years.
"What China shows"

We certainly haven't seen the endgame of China's development. Confidently claiming that China has 'prosperity without political freedom' is simply playing fast and loose with terminology. The stronger and more educated the middle class gets, the more freedoms they demand.

Taiwan and South Korea were dictatorships but get freer every year. Still it took decades of small steps to get where they are today (legitimate elections, opposition parties winning) and clearly China has a long road to even get to where those neighbors are today.

"some kind of political freedom"

While 2013 China is no poster boy for freedom hasn't the situation improved every decade for 40 years? Isn't China today far more permissive and free than in the past? Obviously in terms of elections maybe not so much but looking only at elections might be ignoring real gains made in rule of law, property rights, speech and social freedoms.
Kinda lame... Not sure why either.
This is wrong actually - they've been using ray tracing for ages (all ambient occlusion in PRMan is done with raytracing, by sending out occlusion rays in a hemisphere around the shading point).

What's new with MU is they're using both physically-plausible shading (where the shading is based off physically-based BRDF lighting algorithms, which gives much more realistic results), and global illumination path-tracing for the entire light transfer equation.
Moving a Live MySQL Database to a New Server
Latest builds of Chrome and FF play webm/vp8 fine on my Ubuntu machines.

Given that previously Linux users had to manually enable flash, asking them to update to recent browsers is a reasonable request (also good security). Saying you need Ogg/Theora for legacy Linux support is a bit silly -- that's a vanishingly small segment of the target audience, and they tend to be tech savvy anyway.
Because hover effects benefit the other half that have pointing devices. As long as the hover effects aren't compromising the experience for touch users, why not benefit the pointing device users?
The "self" in "self-determination" refers to the people, not individuals.
We have these kind of daily meetings and I would never replace them with an email thread. Answering the three questions in writing would not only be more burdensome but you would also lose out on the valuable instant feedback.
I should really keep these links handy, but real-world user testing generally shows a pretty strong aversion to Facebook Connect. Here's at least one paper that studied informed consent with Facebook auth: http://www.guanotronic.com/~serge/papers/chi13a.pdf
Yep - a team near my desk routinely has sub-30 second standups following that format. I am probably a bit sour on standups in general since my last project had 10+ person, 15+ minute meetings (sometimes with the client present...) that added very little value for their cost ($1XX x 0.25 x 12).