skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're already on it. The Unreal 4 engine will use voxel cone tracing:
http://www.unrealengine.com/files/misc/The_Technology_Behind...
http://eviltrout.com/2013/03/23/ember-without-data.html
No. Freedom means not having force initiated against you. That is what it has always meant, and that is the common-sense definition that normal people use.

Sure, politicians and others try to distort freedom to mean something else all the time - like "political self-determination" (i.e., the majority can dispose of you; see India, or even Soviet Russia, for an example). But they need to be called out on it, just like I'm doing now.
Show HN: MedBill.Info, Aggregated Medicare Reimbursement Data
Let me add Godspeed You! Black Emperor and your list is perfect :-)
Can anyone suggest a structured approach[books, tutorials, free online courses] to learn data science?
I think it's awesome how they thought something was too hard, and so they faked it to be "good enough."

I'm going to have to look more critically at Pixar movies now, knowing that the old ones didn't have actual calculated light sources.
Unfortunately pre-rendering and real-time rendering are worlds apart.

Pixar probably didn't need to do a voxel -> triangle transformation to their data set if they were using voxels, but any real-time renderer does.
Self-doubt is the first step in keeping us sane and grounded. It is what brings the best in us, it makes us look over our plans with fine comb and it forces us to look at the bigger picture without losing sight of task at hand. I am in the same boat as you and find different things to worry about but I think it is better to worry when you still have the chance to make a difference rather than saying, “only if” at the end. I’m sure even when you launch your next book, you still will be worried.
> Ok, done ranting. :-)

OK, I'll take it from here ;-). Me, I paused at these words:

"the intent is always to influence"

Well, yes, I suppose so. Except, perhaps, for the non-fools (actually Johnson said blockheads) who wisely spin entertaining stories for money.

But the word "influence" always reminds me of a story that my mother recounted. Many moons ago, there was a bit of social and labor unrest around our parts, and there was a general workers assembly at the factory where she worked.

One of the workers speaking at the meeting said his piece, and finished by remarking: "But this is just my opinion, and anyone who lets himself be influenced is a fool".

That simple remark still gives me pause today, when I contemplate all the "influencers" busily emulating Genghis Khan, trying to insert their ideas into as many brains as possible.
"Let's add voxels!!!111one" is one of the most irritating refrains of gamers.

There are a lot of very nice mathematical properties of triangles, and the trend towards graphical fidelity has really only served to balloon budgets in the gaming space. We don't need voxels, and honestly neither do we need ray tracing.

It's not even new tech--games going back to Outcast, some Build engine games, Novalogic stuff, and so on have used voxels. Ray tracing has been used in a handful of nifty tech demos, but otherwise nobody cares.

Ray tracing and voxel tech is of marginal utility for games, and things have moved on--it'd be like switching the US construction industry over to metric; too late to make a difference and too minor to matter.

EDIT: In spite of all this, voxel cone tracing looks sexy as hell though.
This is pretty basic, but helped me somewhat: http://www.scribd.com/doc/97294264/Nexmo-SMS-Deliverability-...
Never ever, felony is a serious crime. Misdemeanor or some lesser degree charges maybe, but only in exceptional cases.
Annals of the Security State, Gabriel Silverstein Division
New social media platform, Scrapll
We have created a beta page with information about Scrapll. You can check out our features and sign up for our beta. If there are any suggestions, please let us know.

If you sign up for our beta we'll keep you updated with the development progress and you'll be able to use the beta version right away when it's online.

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Prove's HN Easter Egg for Simple Phone Verification
I did. That was my problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779561
A lot of the tools in pixar are wonderfully clunky.

They went through a phase of hiring hip young things fresh out of MIT to write tools. Instead of nice friendly tools that play well together, they got a lot of domain specific languages.
Really sorry to say this, but my eyes hurt from the text contrast. Maybe you should consider changing the font size?
How to Get a Job As a Rails Developer
Judge orders child porn suspect to decrypt hard drives
Sorry, but the comparison is incredibly flawed. Your PHP or Rails code will still generate HTML in the end.
Your Better Life Index
From the title I was expecting to disagree, but this isn't about "not having" the meetings, it's about taking them offline. I think I agree with this. I should have done this at my previous job. The devs had flexible schedules (which I support), and trying to have a fixed schedule for daily stand-ups was unworkable and I eventually gave up. This would have worked much better.
It's really important to note what he only barely says here—he's not disinterested in software engineering because he doesn't think it's valuable today—he's only interested in it because it's an okay model for how powerful tools get built for children.

I feel like HN is a terrible audience for this message. Not because there aren't people here who will love it—and to them, disregard the rest—but instead because so much of the community is about making value with the technology that exists today. We're trying to be presentists and do good jobs with the problems and tools that we have in front of ourselves. That's why MVPs and marketing for traction make sense. That's why we can argue for oh so long about the javascript framework of the moment or best practices for software design. Because that stuff is important and has really tangible relation to our ability to generate value today.

I respect the hell out of Bret Victor, but also recognize that he's targeting something different. Something that makes him a little more of a mathematician than a programmer. A little more of an artist than a builder. Something that drives him to teach children instead of adults.

I personally struggle with this a lot, a lot. I want to build perfect software, not because I care about that program, or because I think it'll make me more money and thus give me more freedom. I strive for it because whenever I make a step in that direction I realize I'm communing with something unearthly. Something I don't understand.

Personally, I know I want to teach some day, but I couldn't stand academia because the academia I found was chasing after efficiency in achieving a notion I didn't believe in. For that reason, I'm so glad Bret does what he does and tells the world about it. I believe in him, strangely enough.

I think because even though we cannot know at all what he's striving toward, it's a value that I can come to respect much more than the entirety of "tech" today. Truly, I hope a lot of people think that's foolish.
When the output of the tech stack is the product the means that achieve it and the level of accuracy reached matter a great deal.
Media for Thinking the Unthinkable (Bret Victor)
just FYI, that renders like this: http://imgur.com/rFXdS4l (chrome 27)
A more cynical definition would add "... and who is worse at statistics than any statistician and worse at software engineering than any software engineer." ;)
I don't get why this was removed from the front-page?
Nope, that is changing the wording to suit yourself. He started the project and is able to work full time on this.

A Mageia packager contributed some very good patches towards systemd. He's not in the email on debian-devel, while he monitors systemd , works with Lennart and others, etc.

See his other email:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/05/msg01367.html

Our Mageia packager is not included. One of the patches he wrote: During the development of the journal he fixed a really important journal memory bug. Took a lot of effort to figure out, etc.

But the arbitrary '100 patches' is introduced. Seems rebuttal is pretty biased.

PS: Upstart has had 17 contributors. Systemd has 15 people with commit access. Systemd seems way more viable.
If you would like to see GitHub add two-factor auth, drop them a note saying as much.

https://help.github.com/contact
You might want to look into getting a prepaid phone of some kind, even if it's not a smart phone. Having a portable emergency communication device seems like a good idea even if you're opposed (for whatever reason) to cellphone use in general, and a prepaid phone won't give you monthly bills or contracts to worry about.

If that's no good, then how about Google Voice? In addition to its other useful phone-related features, it allows sending and receiving of text messages.
Pretty bad analogy. In the realm of making 'pretty pictures that eerily realistic' the looks 'realistic' part is pretty significant... and usually it is Pixar itself that starts the promotional pieces of what new technology they have whenever they have a big new movie coming out...
That's 1 out of 50+ examples. Facebook is easily the most commonly implemented, so why would they not make that the default example?
Interesting questions. I don't have the answers, but I can say that I can't imagine that Pixar would ever 'go all the way' to an 'unbiased' GI renderer.

Our entire function in the filmmaking business is to tell a story visually, and for that you need complete control and directability of the image. This is the opposite goal of unbiased renderers. Nevertheless more tools in the tool box is always good.
I used Laravel for a small project for the past couple months. Although I started web development in PHP, I am strictly a Ruby/Rails developer right now and I have to say working in Laravel felt very natural and right at home. I'm not saying that being Rails-like is merit in it's own right, but I had that same feeling with Laravel as I did when I first started using Rails. I'd highly recommend trying this framework and hope with more projects we can see some solid documentation grow.
What do i do now? Just mailed my wife may day, may day!

My daughter watches Dora diligently. hopefully i can buy the shows.
Why a chuckle? I like that they at least let you fill out the CLA online. The ASF still requires contributors to fax in a paper form (or they did last time I checked, which was when I did mine, which was, now that I think about it, some time ago, so maybe this long rambling comment is actually pointless after all...)

Anyway, the point is, having an online form to submit a CLA seems like a positive step to me, if you're going to require CLAs at all. And a CLA that simply grants a perpetual, worldwide, irrevockable license to the content, as opposed to asking for a transfer of copyright ownership, doesn't seem to onerous to me. And for an Open Source project with commercial backing it is pretty commonplace.

That said, we are an Open Source startup, and we don't (currently) plan to ask for a CLA from outside contributors, but just something basically saying "I license my contribution under the Apache License v2".
Ruby has OmniAuth[1] which is Rack-based middleware.

[1] https://github.com/intridea/omniauth
That is pretty lacking in detail. Is there something a bit more complete -- something that might actually be useful for even a cursory analysis?

[Edit: for example, it is not clear how the timestamp is computed/validated by the network. Do all nodes have to have synchronized clocks?)
Reveal effect with CSS only
> systemd can boot quite a bit faster than just 5 seconds.

So can other operating systems, no monolithic kitchen sink of systemd required [1].

[1] I realize that having 69 totally interdependent and non-portable daemons is considered "non-monolithic" in systemd-land, but I live in the real universe.
> Just got four times better...

How?
1981: First Version of Online Newspapers [video]
Whether it's better or not in some aspects, in practice patent encumbrance makes such decoders non redistributable, therefore open source browsers can never normally adapt such codecs, and it makes sense for W3C/IETF to choose mandatory codecs only from explicitly open (i.e. free and non patent encumbered). The best course of action is not to bow to codec cartels like MPEG-LA, but to fight against current closed codecs domination and to advance open ones by improving and creating new better codecs.

There is a greater risk of people popping up with claims against VP8 or VP9 as they are newer and less prominent. The MPEG-LA's call for a pool of patents has helped draw out those patent owners and many have joined the pool and reached terms with Google (although Nokia and maybe others haven't.

This is common FUD. Whatever was in that "pool" - the end result no one attempted to attack VP8 with patent claims, except for Nokia. The strange counterexample to the claim that "prominence" guarantees safety is Google, who used H.264 against Microsoft themselves. Nothing is protected against sudden patent attacks. But if there are no known patents - then paranoia won't help anything.
Engineering the New LinkedIn Profile
I was wondering if the author realized this. Using Microsoft SQL Server, the answer would be to use a window function like row_number or dense_rank and then select where row = 1.
> No. Freedom means not having force initiated against you. That is what it has always meant, and that is the common-sense definition that normal people use.

No, that's not what it means (in the political context, anyway), it's not the definition that normal people use, and importantly, it is not how the term has been used for hundreds of years in western political literature and philosophy. You can't just go around appropriating words and giving them your own idiosyncratic meanings.
> Does the tech stack in the background matter

I think it does, because the tech stack in the background allows for things that might not be possible for other tech stacks.

You can duplicate somebody else's webapp in your backend of choice, but you can't have true GI if your rendering engine doesn't support it, and while you can fake some of the effects, they ultimately won't look as good as the real thing (unless you're aiming for a different 'good').
A new podcast on Laravel:
http://laravel.io/
I think its some sort of pun to the fact that it's Laravel "4"
what's so revolutionizing about it?
Already bought Little Inferno based on the rave reviews. It's so much fun playing with fire.
Not according to Milton Friedman:

> In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Friedman developed the argument that economic freedom, while itself an extremely important component of total freedom, is also a necessary condition for political freedom. He commented that centralized control of economic activities was always accompanied with political repression.

> He argues that, with the means for production under the auspices of the government, it is nearly impossible for real dissent and exchange of ideas to exist. Additionally, economic freedom is important, since any "bi-laterally voluntary and informed" transaction must benefit both parties to the transaction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Freedom

So for example, if something like free speech is limited, economic transactions are no longer free if either side has limited information. Or if you are investing money and the government has manipulated public perception about the market or the economy itself, there is a hazard.
Better tech could theoretically allow you to develop more movies at once by reducing the amount of specialization required, or simply develop movies faster or on a cheaper budget for the same results. If you are getting results that match your competitor but have to spend 10x as much time rendering it because you are doing it "the old way" then you are at a disadvantage even if your movies both do well.
This is the standard in most disciplines. I wish the authors of this article had done the same test with journals that do blind reviewing. I'd bet they still got a lot of rejections of previously accepted articles for bizarre reasons, since in general acceptance depends a lot on the particular reviewers you draw.
I can see someone disagreeing, but those two graphs look pretty flat for 2000-2010. Certainly no overall "up" or "down" trend. (Or, if there's one, then it keeps on swapping turns with the other.)

The explanation was having to do with local cycles, I believe. I didn't grok it well enough to understand it or else I would have presented it; it was, however, decent enough to pass my "this is BS" filter. A lot of things don't.
Cato: "The evidence indicates that, on balance, the oil industry is not a net beneficiary of government subsidies... The contention that oil consumers do not pay their fair share of the environmental and national defense costs they impose on society is dubious. There is little evidence to suggest that the environmental externalities imposed by oil consumption exceed the taxes and regulatory costs paid by consumers."

That's about as close as anyone has ever come to fully-backing oil subsidies. They're not terribly popular in normal political discourse. The piece unveils a dubious argument that evades the fact that taxes on oil are used to finance the cost of roads and highways. They do not serve to mitigate national defense costs, environmental damages, or health costs caused by burning fossil fuels, extracting them, or refining them. These costs are borne mostly as hidden externalities paid by government and consumers.
Major Victory as Jury Rules in Favor of Private Food Rights
> As the company sold 5,000 cars in the quarter, though, $13,600 per car was paid by other manufacturers, who are going to pass at least some of that cost on to buyers of their products.

The article compares pollution credits to bribery and a shakedown, but I don't quite get the case. Tesla doesn't get them for free, it actually has to produce low emission vehicles. And no one is forcing Honda to buy them from Tesla specifically (or technically at all). Honda isn't prepared to produce low emission cars, so the carbon credits market means they don't have to, so long as they're willing to bear the external costs in some other way.

Pollution credits are a relatively lassiez faire mechanism for converting a specific type of external costs to internal ones, and they seem to function pretty well. Not a leading question, but I'm honestly curious. What is the conservative or libertarian argument against them, and what approach would conservatives or libertarians prefer we took to the problem of large externalities?
> Encrypting cookies. You should store as little as possible in cookies--ideally just a single identifier. But even so, it's very important to make cookies tamper-resistant. You can't, e.g. just have a plaintext cookie that says "userid=42."

Note that you possibly don't want to _encrypt_ the cookie (particularly if it's transmitted over SSL); you certainly want to _authenticate_ it.

I may not care if the user knows that he is user ID 42; I very much care if he's able to tell me that he is user ID 43 instead.
You might be right, but the site being displayed seems to be primarily for more introverted people, which are already likely to be shy/cautious. I've never offered facebook exclusively on a site because of the fear that a smaller percentage of people will signup.

After building facebook, mobile, and web apps for a long time, I'm extremely cautious about the internet. I recommend to friends and family "don't add or download any apps, don't use IE7, and don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want in your biography."

Until you've built a facebook app you'd never think that your friends added apps have extended permissions to your profile.
Hi, I'm currently a heavy codeigniter user, looking for a switch. Can you please give me some of these examples you speak of that blow you away? Thank you.
You speak kind of to the upside to having FB auth. It makes it easy to try services like this without committing to a password. If I'm on my phone or playing around with Show HN apps like this I'm probably not going to bother giving an app a unique and new password and I certainly don't want to give it my go-to lazy password. Because of that I feel like things go a bit smoother if they have FB auth. The benefits became clear to me when LivingSocial got hacked - I didn't have to worry since I use FB auth on LivingSocial and they never had my password in the first place.
This has it's own set of problems, namely, it is more difficult to do this over email than it is to just talk face-to-face; that is, it is slower.

Yes, what the author offers here is asynchronous and most developers love that idea. However, in practice I've seen this method fail more often than it succeeds. Why?

Face-to-face synchronous communication matters. Problems are addressed quickly, brainstorms happen. Personal relationships develop; mentors and mentee relationships evolve. Perhaps another developer had your problem with some pesky JS library last week and gives you just the clue you needed, and so on. I actually think standup meetings are not only not the worst thing ever, but the best thing ever for a growing developer as they allow them to quickly see what others are doing, and quickly get feedback on their own work.
> Why can't we have a reasonable non-syslog text format for logs?

I think the real question is: why is systemd defining a logging format at all?
"Sort-of. If the copies came with a license agreement forbidding you giving a copy to the press, then you might be liable if you did."

Except that you do not need a license unless you are making copies. The only reason you see licenses with software is that the process of installing software is making a copy of that software. Books do not come with licenses, because you do not copy a book in order to read it.

"Furthermore if members of the press got a copy, they might be forbidden from publishing the test in full."

I am pretty sure that even a full reproduction in a newspaper could be fair use, since it is for purely journalistic purposes and the publishing of the questionnaire would not impact the market in any way (the scrutiny by the press might, but criticism is also covered by fair use).
you're right, apologies for that
Ease of use. The downloads from Humble Bundle come with all kinds of random installers that work in different ways, and by default install your games into different places. Additionally there's no notification of updates being available, let alone downloading + installing the updates automatically or with a single click.

It's like the difference between distro packages and stuff you've compiled from release tarballs.
Actually light sources have always been the only thing 'traced'. We used to use them to trick ray tracing in the early days of RenderMan (put an image in the lightsource so you can 'reflect' it). It's surface to surface and other GI effects that where late to the party.

Nevertheless we often faked that with massive light counts. For the opening shot of Armageddon with the astroid hitting earth I used 20,000 point lights to represent secondary debris reentering the atmosphere. In 1998 or when ever that was it still only took RenderMan a few minutes to render each frame.
You worked at Google for five months. How did that possibly destroy your career?
1- China is not prosperous.

2- Singapore is a small and unique example.

3- The middle east is wealthy because of natural resources, and here lack of freedom really helps.
Working could include raising children, or gardening or a lot of activities that one doesn't get paid for, but it is universal that a sense of fulfillment comes from laboring for something.