skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what would happen if you offloaded the rendering of a movie like Monsters University to something like Google Compute Engine. Would it cost an arm and a leg? Or would it solve a lot of scaling/cost/time challenges?
In that case, if client A wants to do something with the value x, it should instruct the server to place metadata on it, essentially saying that it's reading it with the intent to update. This could be implemented as "update x with value of get(x)". That way it would be placed into pending with metadata.

Having a heartbeat between the client and the server could also help prevent the write from getting purged from "pending" prematurely.
I'm surprised the acceptance rate is so high.
> Yeah, feels like it's targeting the people who need this service least. Bay area is geek central, or so it's reputation suggests

Just because there are lots of similarly-minded people in the same area as you doesn't mean it's easy to make friends with them. A lot of people relocated to the bay area every month, a service like this would be great for them.

Certainly falls under the category of "solving problems of SV 20 somethings" though :P
On the politics, cargo-culting, and maintainability of JavaScript
Technical conference: Analytics  Web Scale - June 6
This is actually from July 2009. Not that it matters all that much as I'm sure it is still useful but I thought I should point it out.
Meaningful representative democracy, with majority rule, has existed for around 110 years. There wasn't a democracy anywhere in 1700, and no serious thought of starting one.
> Comments are fails

As the article mentions, I agree that it's good to make sure that you're naming conventions and code itself is expressive. Furthermore, if you approach coding with this philosophy you will most likely write much better code the first time around. Still some comments, written in plain (INSERT YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE HERE), which give an executive summary of the class or method can be useful.

> Avoid output arguments / Have No Side Effects

This can be difficult to do in a language like C. It is convention to pass pointers to arrays, structs, etc and allow the method to change it or operate on it. Also it is normal for a method to adjust a pointer's position. With all the grief this caused me though, I do think that this is great advice for a language like Java, Ruby, etc.
Very different. People "money laundering" using virtual currencies are just trying to make private transactions without reporting each one to the government.

Wall Street is getting massive funds directly or indirectly from the government/taxpayer.
Seems to me like you would get customers for this sort of product the old fashioned way, by cold calling businesses and setting up meetings with businesses etc as opposed to internet marketing.
I think by "money laundering" the governments of the world are referring to untaxed income. God forbid the peasants transfer money between countries without being taxed.
I never said the Wii didn't release with an "Oh my god.. " game. I said the Game Cube didn't. We don't disagree.

The N64, SNES and NES all released with "Oh my god.. " games as well.
Ahh yep, think I understand now. Thanks for the screenshots :)

Edit: And now that you've pointed it out the way that chrome does it is really annoying!
Agreed this seems like a project that he will be able to work on for quite some time.

Def. a long play.
Intellectual property in the time of crowdfunding
When did we as a society decide that anonymous transactions ought to be illegal? Because I would like to voice my opinion in the other way.
Unless your performance optimizations specifically avoid method invocation, you can always extract the nasty bits to a well-named method. This is what is meant by comment avoidance: it is better to isolate the dirty stuff and pick good, specific names for what they do than to write an explanatory comment wherever possible.
You should email this directly to the guy. Information like this is priceless for someone in his situation.
3D Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with CSS
My usage of "economic regulation" in the context of this thread is pretty obvious. I'm not attempting to win a war of pedanticism with you over the definition of property rights.

The well accepted meaning of economic regulation is the use of regulation to compensate for market failures or centrally-planning economies (such as controlling money supply, subsidies, tax-breaks, import/export tariffs etc).

This is very different from the enforcement and defence of basic property/contract rights in courts as I was implying.
And Notch just paid 5000$ for the bundle.
this framework should be seen more as a lightweight alternative to jquerymobile. While making hybrid apps with phonegap/cordova, too many people are relying too heavily on large javascript libraries which hurts performance,a small css framework like topcoat or ratchet, and a js library for architecture like angularjs, backbone.js and emberjs is a more ideal approach for hybrid apps than just throwing all of bootstrap, foundation or the sometime buggy jquerymobile

I still think jquerymobile is a good approach for hybrid apps because it is easy to learn and a full-stack framework and works on a large range of devices, one can only hope that webkit renders faster in the future
Every friendship I've ever established has been based on some activity: sharing an office, playing sports, watching a movie, etc. And I don't think I'm unique in this respect.

Meeting a person solely for the person of selecting him or her sounds very specific to dating.

I think your project is interesting and has a lot of potential — I'm just pointing out that, by downplaying activities, you may be expecting a type of socializing that's unnatural to many people, especially if you hope to differentiate yourself from dating sites.
A beachhead is a temporary line created when a military unit reaches a beach by sea and begins to defend the area while other reinforcements help out until a unit large enough to begin advancing has arrived.

Sometimes, bias is only in language.
I swear I see a variant of this article every week, and the discussion is always the same. TL;DR make sure your standup meetings are incredibly fast.
This was my reflex as well but then I remembered that Clean Code serves mostly as advice to OO programmers. In OO programming you can consider an object's attributes to be implicit parameters to a function.
This is something I can never resist buying. DRM-free cross-platform games where you can decide what portion of what you decide on spending gets sent to who.

Its a brilliant business model and it proves it can be profitable.
I wrote a long post exploring it but then realized your frame-up statement was more interesting. If I wanted to extralegally grind somebody into the dirt, maybe what I would do is deposit an encrypted drive with a shitty password, some personal files of the defendant, and some illegal files. Then I would submit this as court's evidence and use it to compel him to decrypt a drive that was actually under his control that never in a million years could we crack without his help. If he doesn't cooperate, we can hold him for eternity under contempt of court. If this decision stands, it could be used by unscrupulous law enforcement to socially engineer the legal system into routing around self-incrimination prohibition. Obviously this requires fabricating and planting evidence against a defendant, but history has shown this happens. So, I'd say it's a serious risk if this ruling stands.
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/704540-liberty-reserv...

43.a ... The defendants, shall forfeit to the United States, pursuant to Title 18, United States Code, Section 982(a)(1), all property, real and personal, involved in the offenses and all property traceable to such property, including but not limited to: a. A sum of money of at least $6 billion in United States currency;
The non-gamer gamer moment didn't pass. It moved from consoles to smart phones, tablets and Facebook / online gaming (which had a mere 10 million users at the time of the Wii's release).

The non-gamer gamer market is bigger than ever before, and will continue to expand.
Why are overworked young doctors part of the unexotic underclass?
This won’t win me any friends, but I personally think that Clean Code is one of the most dangerous programming books to be released in the last decade.

There’s a lot of good advice in the book, but it is written by and for Java programmers, and it comes with its share of risks if you take its advice. If you’re developing in a dynamically typed OO language like Ruby, it’s almost always bad advice to follow Clean Code. There are performance considerations even with Java to following some of the advice given. With Objective C, the suggestions are just silly. With languages that emphasize some level of functional programming (including Ruby and even C# to a degree), the suggestions are counter-productive and produce code that is unnecessarily obfuscatory.

Yes, it’s good to have short, readable, meaningful methods. Reducing method size too much, though, can result in code that you have to follow through many objects in order to understand the logic. If you follow Martin’s advice enough, you will end up with lots of very short methods on lots of very small objects—and have a hard time understanding just how your program fits together.

If Martin were a better writer, or had expanded his horizons beyond Java when he had written this book, he may have written something profound—still dangerous, but profound. Instead, he wrote Clean Java and either he or his publisher thought it would sell more as Clean Code. My advice is to ignore the book—unless Martin comes out with a second edition that takes what he has learned in the last few years since leaving behind Java and applies it to really make a book that describes clean code.
Not just "sites;" I can see this being great for some API's topology.
The cost would be completely prohibitive. Pixar is at the point where they have to micromanage the electricity cost of their rendering clusters. (At one point they did a multimillion dollar hardware upgrade on the grounds that they would actually save money thanks to new hardware being more power efficient.)
Taiwan proposes China-style block on Internet services that infringe copyright
>So, what's the proper name of the Xbox that came out in 2001?

I'd say Xbox, as no other console is named the Xbox except for the one that came out in 2001.
Here's a nice refresher, "Global Illumination in a Nutshell": http://www.thepolygoners.com/tutorials/GIIntro/GIIntro.htm
Doesn't need to be that much, or even have drugs. $3700 is enough for thieving police:
http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/easy-money-civi...

Police regularly abuse forfeiture. It's a horrible and very un-American thing they have going on. Yet because the money ends up in the police pockets, there's little incentive to fix the law.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/08/10/why-asset-forfeiture-a...
It doesn't matter if they meet Japan's rules as long as they have US customers. Liberty Reserve was not a US company either...
It seems to error out.

select name, count(*)
from queries
having count(*) > 1

Column 'queries.name' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause.
The name "Iron Conversions" sounds like some type of service to boost your user conversion. When seeking advice/services for converting users, I'm not sure I would look to the person who just blogged about failing to convert users. Maybe I'm wrong.
It seems this is a direct step towards putting the brakes on Bitcoin. You can bet the new Bitcoin startup investors are recalculating their risk. And that was the goal with the timing of this takedown- to slow future institutional investment in BTC. The govt knows it cannot take down the protocol itself, much like bit torrent, however it can make local corporations through a straw. On the same token, savvy bitcoin startup investors also realize that bitcoin will be around until Star Trek as a sound mathematical model cannot be destroyed by any govt.
I'm doing everything I can to legitimately pay for the service. If it is "illegal" then it's absurd and just shows you how dumb the laws are regarding digital movies/music.
It’s horrendous advice for Ruby. As I said in a different comment, this book wouldn’t annoy me if it had been called Clean Code.

There’s a Ruby shop in Toronto that I interviewed with a couple of years back. As soon as I learned that they considered Clean Code a good book to be learned from, I knew that I didn’t want anything to do with their software development process (and I write very good, clean, and readable software, thank you very much).
Presumably this is a PR originated piece, because it surely reads like one. In any case, having a headline this ridiculously hyperbolic is actually a negative, IMO. The Sphero is certainly cool, but if I click through to read about something that "May Change Everything" and then realize they are talking about a remote control ball, it actually hurts my perception of the product more than it helps.

You delight people with the delta between reality and expectation. If you blow the expectation up too much, even a reality that would otherwise be delightful seems kind of lame and stupid.
Ask HN: Recommendations to Learn C from a Ruby Programmer
Hey all - I am going to be needing to program a lot in C in the near future, and am looking for some good recommendations to get me started from the basics of the language to how to program advanced topics in C. I've never really worked with a low-level language like C, mostly working with Ruby to develop scripts and web applications. I am now needing (and wanting) to learn C.

What are some good tutorials to start learning C? I would prefer ones freely available online right now to begin with so I can start programming in C right away. But, any book recommendations are also highly valuable. How did you (if you have) learn C to begin with? Are there any standard tutorials for C?

Any help would be incredible. Thanks!
I appreciate that! It wasn't clear to me how public my own level was.

My bad reaction is actually from a conversation I had with a couple clients I had sent to the site -- they saw their own "level", I guess, and were rather put off by the whole thing. Not that I blame them; I find it pretty tacky, too. Hence I've been avoiding bringing new clients to the site.
There's an awesome library that goes by the name of Polyvox that does exactly this. It's worth a look if you're interested in voxel-y things.
This is a key idea behind the "ladder of fall" (of man) presented in the Bhagavad Gita Ch2, verses 62 & 63, which I will quote here for your convenience:

62. A man musing on objects develops attachment for them, from attachment arises desire, from desire arises anger.[1]

63. From anger arises delusion, from delusion confusion of memory, from confusion of memory loss of intellect, from loss of intellect he perishes.[1]

There is a simple but powerful metaphysical system underlying these verses and I apologise to the uninitiated reader, but would be happy to briefly outline this system should anyone wish it so.

While I will avoid vague (undefined between myself and the reader) terms such as 'natural' or 'intuitive' thinking, readers who accept that the intellect is that which conceives solutions will also be able to entertain the possibility that by improving/strengthening the intellect we improve our ability to solve the problems that face us.

This improving of the intellect is the meta-solution to all problems, and (caution: opinion) it should be a requirement for all human beings that they develop this faculty (as the only known living beings with access to higher reasoning faculties). Failing such, you are not living up to the name 'human'. Perhaps this is a hardline stance.

Education (formal) fails us here. We are provided with material to think with and about, but scarcely are we conducted through the arenas of thought by those who have made it further than we. Instead, education seems to be a way to simply 'make a living' by learning a skill and applying it in exchange for money.[2] A noteworthy read on this is the Cardinal JH Newman's thoughts on how British universities in the early 1900's were moving away from pure 'intellectual' development and became more utilitarian. A brilliant intellect allowing us access to his thoughts.[3] Suffice to say, things have worsened much since then.

[1] From "The Bhagavad Gita" by A Parthasarathy. As an aside, I cannot recommend his book "The Fall of the Human Intellect" enough.

[2] I'm making a generalisation here. If you happened to have someone teach you who opened up your mind, you're one of the lucky few in the world.

[3] http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/
Yes, this is what I meant; it's not that the market disappeared, it's that they moved on from the couch+TV setup.
This was a fun read but we've already reached the meta-discussion of the meaningfulness of entrepreneurs so it's probably time to move on.

The reality is that entrepreneurs cannot solve the Big Problems or big problems - the investment and time horizon of these problems means that traditional structures, e.g. large companies, research organizations and governments have to step in. Disruption is for the easy stuff, hard stuff still has to be solved the slow way, with decades of hard work.
that's a fantastic write up, thanks!
Ssh and shared connections
You don't know what you're talking about. What were you doing in Africa for 30 years...drinking on beaches in Cape Town??

Here is why it is COMPLETELY stupid to put wifi blimps in Africa. LOL

http://www.heritage.org/multimedia/infographic/2012/10/manpa...
This is the gentlest introduction to d3 out there.

Run through the book and you will have a solid foundation to start playing around on your own for basic visualizations and charts.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026938.do

This was also posted on HN a while back:

http://code.hazzens.com/d3tut/lesson_0.html

d3 is not dependant on jquery and covers a lot of the same basic DOM manipulation. You also need to learn some super basic css to theme things.
As someone who is just diving into Ruby, I'm curious what specifically you think is bad advice for Ruby?
TCP/IP stack for Intel Data Plane Development Kit
The End Of The World Isn't As Likely As Humans Fighting Back
How typing on keyboards is changing the meanings of words
Keep in mind there's a wireless glitch with the simple touch, it may not like your router. Had to set up a separate 801.11b router to talk to the simple touch as it didn't like connecting to our 802.11n mixed mode one.

I think this is specific to the simple touch model. It's my wife's eBook so I cant comment on the technical books part. Though I would research PDF usability if that is a factor for you... Might be limited on book file size.
"The system allegedly was designed to give criminals a way to move money earned from credit-card fraud, online Ponzi schemes, child pornography and other crimes without being detected by law enforcement."

This is like saying Henry Ford designed the modern automobile to be used in bank robberies, drunk driving murders, hit-and-run maimings, and kidnapping.

Yes, virtual currency is attractive to criminals. It's also attractive to law-abiding citizens, many of whom do not like to be lumped into one big morass with "organized crime" stuck on top as a label. We're stepping dangerously close to "If criminals like doing it, it must be bad" reasoning.

ADD: I also note this section: "...On Tuesday, in the first use of the 2001 Patriot Act against a virtual currency, the Treasury Department invoked a section of the law to choke off Liberty Reserve from the U.S. financial system..."

Well, there's your terrorism act, used to control crime via virtual currency. We get scared of one thing, pass a law, and then see it used in a completely different context. The current American kerfuffle involving investigating reporters is tied to a WWI-era law that's almost never used. Amazing the tools American prosecutors have available to them. One could say overbearing, even.

ADD2: Nobody is saying they are innocent. The point here is that these guys are being shut down (and they probably need to be shut down) by procedures that have broad application to all kinds of legitimate use as well. These are very broad and powerful tools we've given the state. We should take some time and think about if they need to be more narrowly-focused. The initial Patriot Act had an expiration date. For a reason.
How long can Sony bleed money from their electronics division?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/global/sonys-brea...
In the "pros" column, you're just violating netflix TOS so in the worst case they figure out you are lying about your country and delete your account. Sounds like a pretty safe (but expensive) way to pirate movies to me.
I don't agree with you.

This should be a simple A/B test in my opinion.

Inspect every single monetary transaction. Measure the results.

Do not inspect every monetary transaction. Measure the results.

Has money laundering and crime increase or decreased? If it has increased, inspect every monetary transaction, assuming all other variables stay constant.
I would also pay for such a service. I have several old band shirts that belonged to my dad that just can't safely be worn anymore. I'd love to be able to pay someone to recreate those. T-shirts would be the simple case though. I have other clothes that I'd like to clone as well.

This could be a copyright nightmare though.
I listed four features and suggested that only two were available from each of the current codecs.

You are also free to use open source AVC implementations and ignore that MPEG-LA license too. Depending on who you are and what you are doing with AVC the probability of action by a patent holder could be very low.

I meant the patents under the MPEG-LA from the eleven companies (some of whom I would take seriously) and including at least two of the biggest Android manufacturers rather than Google's enemies:

CIF Licensing LLC

France Telecom

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V.

Fujitsu Limited

Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.

LG Electronics Inc.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

MPEG LA, LLC

NTT DOCOMO, INC.

Panasonic Corporation

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Siemens Corporation

You are right that the patent list does not seem to be published which is unfortunate. If the patents in the AVC pool owned by these companies were checked against VP8 by someone credible and preferably independent it would give quite a good degree of assurance about them.

Do note though that Google claimed to have bought On2's patents and they too only seem to be offered under the same non-FOSS compatible licence as the MPEG-KA ones.

As for the Nokia patents I don't think that they would have been brought to courts if Nokia didn't think victory was a realistic outcome. However the drop out rate for claims is very high in all the patent disputes although it seems very hard to predict at the start what will stand up and what will fall so it is entirely possible that they will fail. From my perspective this seems a bad sign for the consistency and predictability of patent law which needs major reform rather than proof that Nokia is claiming rights that IT doesn't believe it has.