skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Games are art, not commodities, and this adds a monstrous degree of complexity to economic analysis of the genre, especially around different business practices. You can't compare sales of a game year over year because demand is different, just as you can't always compare sales of games to each other.

Certainly games compete with one another, if on no other basis than dollars out of limited household budgets and hours out of limited leisure time. And certainly some games tend more towards sport than game (MOBAs and online military FPSes come to mind) and choosing between games can be a matter of choosing between different mechanical aspects. However, in the main choosing between games to play tends to be closer to choosing between musicians to listen to or books to read. Competing games may have similarities but there is still only one Katamari Damacy, only one Mass Effect, only one Sim City, and so forth.

Why is this relevant? Because it means that the factors behind the relative success of a given game are as much due to aesthetic factors as to anything else, including DRM. Hypothetically, if a band releases an album in a way that is heavily DRM encumbered and the album doesn't do well is that due to the album itself or consumers reacting to the DRM? The simple answer is that you don't know because the whole thing is subjective. More so, it means that people tend to be more willing to tolerate onerous burdens (including DRM) because there typically aren't commoditized alternatives. This means that it's almost impossible to determine the impact of the use or absence of DRM on the success or failure of any particular game or even on the game industry as a whole, especially since this current period of widespread sophisticated DRM is only around a decade or so old.

We know that in the short term companies can certainly get away with shoving DRM down customers' throats without always incurring hugely negative consequences to their business. However, game publishers are very much in the brand image and brand loyalty business, and persistent long-term trends that are ignorable in the short-term could be quite significant over the course of decades.

I can't predict the future, but anecdotally it certainly appears as though major game companies are squandering a lot of customer good-will, and sometimes DRM is the cause of it. And I suspect that in the long-run such effects will have significant impacts on the industry as a whole.
I've written similar bug reports at 4am.
why is there not a open-source hacker news enhancement suite? I kinda wanted to make one but am so swamped I never get the chance -- someone do it, and make it an extension or something
Thanks, maybe I'll try later.

Note: I have to ask myself why stylish seems to allow modification of firefox's chrome. I have lost touch with the state of things in firefox extensions but I don't remember it being promoted as a skinning extension.
Yet most countries, if not all democracies, do it far more humanely than the US does.

Why?

Why is the self appointed leader of the free world so inhumane?
Eesh, sorry! I'd like to think it's a Medium problem — either that or your browser decided my article wasn't worth reading ;)
We Drank Soylent, The Weird Food of The Future
good overview but lacking a solution
Lets see your long list of pristine, error-free commits then.
Even if MtGox handled 100% of USD-BTC trades, it is still not Bitcoin. Many more transactions are happening on Blockchain that has nothing to do with MtGox or any other currency exchange.
Step 0. Assume free open source project with publicly accessible bug tracking system with non-zero open issues is bug-free.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100201091632.ht...

Science seems to contradict the premise of this project. The research out there seems to suggest anywhere from 5-7 hours can be a healthy amount for an adult human.

This sort of project could cause anxiety about lack of sleep therefore causing a further lack thereof.

TLDR: If you're tired sleep. If you're not.. stay awake.*

* A well balanced diet and exercise regime are recommended in order for this point to be valid.
Clicky: http://ubiome.com/shop/
I actually think that random forests are relatively difficult to tune in comparison to some Boosting methods for example.

The typical parameters are the following:
- Number of trees
- Percentage of data used to train each tree
- Maximal depth of the tree
- Minimum information gain (although this can usually be set to 0 and use only the depth)
- Minimum sample size (same as the minimal information gain)
- Number of thresholds to try for continuous data

Tuning is also difficult because of the non deterministic nature of the algorithm. If you compare to sets of parameters it requires more evaluation in order to be sure if one set is better because of the better choice of the parameters or because the algorithm chose the right data samples. This effect decreases with the number of trees, but the training time is increased in this case.

I think random forests are really good for very large datasets, but in my experience for smaller datasets boosting (for example JointBoost or GentleBoost) can give better results.
He found a bug, and posted to the bug tracker. Would you have preferred he just shared this with his buddies to crash servers, or attempt to sell it?
Help the EFF fight a patent troll who threatens podcasters
In my extensive experience, it can work, but only if you are very disciplined about both the bootstrapping and the freelancing. Decide in advance how long you'll do both, what type of projects you'll take, and the terms you'll freelance under.
Bitcoin is NOT immune to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
A Hacker News but just for Londoners
Nice kanban board - have you tried trello.com ?
Look into HTTP digest AUTH. It works in a manner you suggest but without the vulnerabilities in your suggested implementation (the a reply pointed out).
Fellow Lumia 800 user, also tired of the lack of very much needed updates. I feel your pain.

I'm now waiting for the fall to come to see if any decent iOS or Android phones come along.
Huh. You're right; I totally missed that.

And I didn't call you a liar. The world isn't black and white like that, OK?

Nonetheless, you singled out this easily-missable page 2 speculation and cast it out like a solid gold internationally accepted fact. That's what I, and perhaps others, took issue with. I'm not disagreeing with you just to be an asshole. Nothing drastic is going to happen in 16.0 years.

The funny thing is I basically agree with you, but you should stop hanging your entire arguments on obscure, debatable predictions from page two of articles on some site last year.

> >I hope you learned your lesson
> Indeed.

Learn the right lesson. People are not out to attack you, well not me anyway. Just change the way you construct the argument.
Ah, that explains a lot. It also shows the shadow side of open source software development: if the developers get bored, they can just up and leave. If all the devs do so, the project is dead but there’s no one there to call it. Users aren’t owed any explanation.
When you find a bug which amounts to a security vulnerability, you should inform them privately and then make it public after a reasonable amount of time has passed and preferably after it's been fixed. By making it public right from the get-go, anyone who sees this bug report can now attack any system that uses MongoDB. Do you think that's OK?
Massive price drop in solar power: Alternative energy will no longer alternative
The article recommends to split your SHA256 hash into two pieces. However, one transaction to one address is sufficient.

You just have to create the address in the same way in which Bicoin generates an address for a public key:

Base58(RIPEMD160(SHA256(public key)))

So there's nothing wrong with doing it the same way for your data:

Base58(RIPEMD160(SHA256(data)))

(That's what I'm also using in Bitcoinproof http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/)

Using this hash is not any "less secure" than the plain SHA256 hash, because the RIPEMD160+SHA256 combination is used by the Bitcoin network itself. So if this one is broken, the Bitcoin network itself is broken, and your timestamps would be no longer trustable anyway.
"Banter" is a vile word for a disgusting act.
50+ tabs!!
I think it will be like printers -- a bit of both. Not everyone has or needs a printer, and almost no-one owns an automatic book print/collate/binding machine.

A good, small, cheap 3d printer may become just about compulsory for anyone who, say, does home repairs, does any kind of professional design work, does arts and crafts, and so forth.
A is for Array - ABC Book for Kids
Feel free to fire me any questions about it here. Also, it is based on Telescope by Sacha Greif and Tom Coleman - which is built in MeteorJS.
yeah, suck on that body of work by a bunch of people that I don't know. screw you consumer product...how dare you not be 100% what I want 100% of the time. Luckily, every other cell phone NEVER LETS ME DOWN IN ANY WAY.
WP users have been waiting (and asking) for a global orientation lock since WP7's original release, almost 3 years ago.

They still don't have it.
I'm more productive at night, when girlfriend is sleeping and I am on my studio, with SomaFM radio and just a desk lamp. Ah, and lots of Camparis with Orange and Soda at my side.
How to Write Effective Tweets
India is the US + ~1 billion people. It would be great if great if most of the country could move into the middle class within a generation.
Clickable: http://transittimesapp.com
Trello is indeed awesome. Just add a task, bug or an issue and it can be picked up by someone, anyone for that matter, without the need to assign it to anyone in particular.
Not really relevant to the article, but I've been worrying a while about being 'too general'.

I'm 6 months into my first full time job, but did work with the same company for the equivalent of 6 months while I was still at uni. During this time, I've done backend development under 4 different platforms, fixed database issues, designed UIs (thanks bootstrap!), solved some basic server issues.

I enjoy my work and I'm learning a lot of new things every single day, but am I spreading myself out too thin? I don't feel like I know any one thing very well. Will I get to a point where I have 4 years of experience, but I won't be able to get any jobs because I'd only have 1 year worth of Rails, 1 year of Django, 1 year of Java and another year of Javascript?
Fax machines are the big one. They were obsolete ten years ago and still cheerfully screwing up documents and wasting paper today.

I'd argue that the printer and books pretty much qualify.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_india seeded hatred and distrust among people in India for the past 3000 years.

http://www.firstpost.com/world/painting-india-red-why-the-gl...

You either collude/bribe to get things done in India.

http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-...
Is it the height of professionalism? No.

However, I've written similarly irate messages at 4 or 5am, particularly after spending months working on a product. And this level of coding quality is unacceptable in any product which wants to be large-scale deployed on the internet.
GCC 4.8.1 released
On Mac OS X you can use `pbcopy` and `pbpaste` to copy and paste from/to the Terminal.
Election Closing - Reform the W3C Process
Then 'eat that' iOS too. The iPhone's system-wide rotation lock is pathetic. It can only lock to portrait mode — and yes, that requires forcing the fullscreen landscape mode in Safari back to portrait.
Amazon Route 53 Adds Elastic Load Balancer Integration for DNS Failover
It would get really interesting if someone modified LuaJIT to emit asm.js code.

In this case, the Lua code could be even faster than the equivalent JS code on some applications where LuaJIT generates better code than V8/IonMonkey (even considering the 2x slowdown of asm.js wrt native).

The relevant yo dawg joke would be "I heard you like JITs so we put LuaJIT on your OdinMonkey so you can JIT while you JIT"
I can't tell if this article is supposed to be mocking these technologies or justifying their use.

I don't see why landlines are dying, mobile phones are way too expensive for general use. Hell, I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have a landline.
No your article is very good, reading it on pocket at the moment.

I think in terms of development I think its good to have a good idea what's going on end to end, I would consider that normal. However, its good to have a specialism too, that is be a master of one or two things.
Its not much to ask someone to be proficient in a programming language or 3 and a database of some description, I don't think.
List of bugs fixed, 91 in total: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&...
Sorry but I don't buy it.

You're telling me these links don't look paid to you (and this is an example of just the first page):

http://www.webhostingsearch.com/web-tools.php - Spammy footer link

http://jack-fx.com/ - Spammy blog roll links

http://www.helpdesk2000.org/ - More spammy blog links

http://www.chat-software.org/ - Spammy footer links

http://www.cloudcomputing-providers.com/ - Spam network links in blog posts

Guessing you guys will need to whip out the disavow tool to get out of this one. These are exactly the types of links that Penguin is going after - anchor text rich & not editorial.
Blink, PNaCl, And Standards
In my experience I would like to move in the other direction specialization. As a generalist by circumstance (First engineering hire and then I became the only developer at my startup when my CTO left) it gets grating after a while. Particularly when the newer hires automatically assume if there is something unpleasant or even slightly outside their defined work, it's your job. What i also observed that as a generalist there is a cap on what you can learn in a specific field. This works for a while, I learnt a lot at my startup particularly since I was coming from a non web background, but my learning hit a cap a year after I joined and I was constantly juggling production bugs, sys admin tasks and database optimization sometimes all at once, which hardly left much time to become an expert in anything.
Ask HN: What gets you out of bed?
If half the work is showing up, half of showing up is getting out of bed. :)

What do HN readers do to get motivated and start the day awesomely when working on a startup?

Full disclosure: I'm asking because we want to make our startup's alarm clock app better. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chaoscollective.warmly
Oh, for sure. The massive profitability of the Big 4 has its blessings, and it lets the RBA set quite high reserve ratios by global standards.

But our market is too small to attract truly serious competition. A serious foreign entrant would need to buy a Big 4 and that would be expensive and messy.
Get past the comedy, listen to the facts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPZed8af9RI

The facts stated have never been refuted.

Be ashamed. Either Americans are the most criminal in the world, or the US justice system has a real problem.

I mean, worse than Iran? Worse than China? South Africa? Are Americans really that bad?

Perhaps now we know a certain hacker preferred death. I know I would. As a British citizen, I would genuinely rather kill my self than end up in the US justice system. Do not doubt that. And I know my government will not protect me from American "justice" either.

Im sorry, but this makes me very, very angry. If a country cant get justice right and fair, then Im sorry, I believe it has no right being a country, let alone being a country that thinks it has the right to interfere on the world state, and have the sheer arrogance to pontificate on others.
Alright, I have a solution. The last time I worked with a team of generalists we would get into sticky situations of division of work. We came up with the idea of appointing "First Speaker"[1] for each project. Though the Wikipedia article doesn't say much, in the Foundation book, first speaker is someone who spoke first and it does not indicate hierarchy. The first speaker is someone who first initiates or formulates a (reasonable)plan of execution. The rest of the team would follow with inputs on the same plan making it better(instead of creating new plans). It was more than shouting "dibs".

One of the reasons I think it worked out was because the team members were all of the same work and skill experience(i.e equally bad or equally good). We also had equal stakes in the project. I don't see an all generalist team working out at all if they are not of equal mileage.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Speaker
Nice article. Unfortunately we see that in big projects there may be too strong of a reliance on specialists performing certain tasks. This isn't only because of the potential specialist nature of the task, but also for an important part because workers have an incentive to become a specialist. Generalists are expendable, while specialists are not. This implies that a specialist in a given domain has greater job security within the project, and thus has an incentive to protect his specific domain.
People often ask the hypothetical of what sorts of behavior we consider normal today that people in the far future will regard as barbaric or bizarre. Our prison system is probably near the top of that list, for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is the sheer size of the prison population these days due to the war on drugs.

Even more significant is the widespread societal belief that prison experience should be brutal punishment and torture, with no concern for justice, fairness, or humaneness. Prison rape is a punch-line, it's not even on the radar as a political issue.

The public acknowledges, accepts, and approves of prison experiences as not merely pragmatic methods of keeping some folks separate from public society, and especially not as rehabilitory, but as retributive, vengeful, and arbitrary. These are the basest and most despicable sentiments when it comes to issues of criminal justice, but they rule the day in the 21st century as much as they ever did in the middle ages or even in the stone age.

This is easily one of the most significant issues of our time, as significant and important as the Cold War in the 20th century or the struggle over the abolition of slavery in the 19th.
Yup - that was actually an old job, but at @MakeshiftHQ we have a streamlined real-world version for each project we work on.

We're a small team (4 designy-devs + 3 others at the moment) and we're almost always in the same room so it's quite nice to have the liberty of having a real, physical, 'can pick up the card and put it next to my monitor' board, but we also keep our Trello up to date in case we're working from home.
Serious?

Where I live (across the pond) cellphones are the cheaper alternative.

Landlines are all swapped for ip "landlines" or mobile phones not only for convenience but also for price.
I assume the JS code generated here is using heavily the asm.js subset, so it can be run faster on asm.js-capable browsers.

Therefore V8 is not the ideal platform for benchmarking this implementation. You could try with a nightly Firefox.

EDIT: Indeed, 8 MFLOPS on FF Aurora, 1.2 MFLOPS in Chrome Canary.
There's also an App named "Satoshi Proof" which performs that kind of notary service for you:

https://github.com/ligi/SatoshiProof#readme
It is beyond unprofessional, it's down right dangerous.
Obviously the guy is not a security researcher so he's probably not aware of proper disclosure protocol but seeing as he's fully aware this bug is exploitable ("Step 8. REALIZE I CAN CRASH 99% OF ALL WEB 3.9 SHIT-TASTIC WEBSCALE MONGO-DEPLOYING SERVICES WITH 16 BYTE POST") doing it this way is really not excusable, no matter how pissed you are.
Great idea, but it turns out to be not that much was to be had by the amount of grief and shame I've accumulated: just $66.66 so far.

I seriously need to write down a list of "unwritten rules that get you spanked". :P
But then, fax machines are still the fastest and most usable way to transmit paper documents.

It's way easier to fax something, than to scan and send it, then having the others print it. I think that we haven't found a good replacement for the fax machine.
My secret to getting out of bed: I sleep with socks on!

I find it's also much easier to get out of bed when you know what you need to accomplish and what's on your agenda for the day. A sense of urgency is a great motivator.
That's an absolutely brilliant idea - thanks; will definitely try it out :)
I guess Microsoft has been spending months writing KLOC trying to accomplish the same feat. Those silly people in Redmond!

Or, perhaps, their designers have decided that an orientation lock doesn't create the experience they are looking for. Just because you can have a feature doesn't mean you should have a feature.
Clearly doesn't work then does it?

One of the highest prison populations in the world. If it were a deterrent, people wouldn't commit crimes that get them in prison, would they?

Either its no deterrent, or Americans are the most criminal in the world.
Hasn't the 1 year in Java made you a better Javascript programmer? I assume you haven't just been learning language syntax, but have been developing patterns that are deployable across languages. Of course, you would have been a better Java programmer if you'd spent 4 years with Java, but don't underestimate the value of the generalist approach you've taken.
I've worried about that every day for the past few years.

But then I consider the alternatives — either designing flats in Photoshop/Sketch, or coding someone else's work?

I might be spreading myself thin but I'm enjoying it and delivering the most value I can be.
I agree with the "No one knows how to work with generalists" statement, and I have found myself scrambling to answer the "What exactly do you do?" question a few times. It feels like a small few appreciate the idea that I just like to build things and don't mind moving around to address issues in different "areas." Others expect to put me in a seat with a label on it and focus on whatever tasks require the person in that chair. I invariably get called something I'm brought on to the team and then switch gears unexpectedly. ("I didn't know you code.")

Your idea for pairing generalists is awesome, and I wonder if it's viable to do independently and "sell" two generalists as a team to recruiters/companies. Just like the art director and copywriter combo, two generalists sell themselves as a duo able to address any challenge from the server to sales.
It should work smoothly as long as no one is as stubborn as a "mule" ;)
The US vigorously refuses to be part of any of that. Now you know why.
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It's not optimal, but it's certainly allowed/ok, and it's far better than NOT posting that in the bugreport forum.

Proper disclosure takes effort. The product owner can offer bounties to motivate others to make that effort for them. But if you can't/won't spend that effort, then it's still better to publish the bug than not publish it.
Work doesn't happen at work. But collaboration does.
Shall we keep the economic kooks & Elon Musk in separate bins?
That's only a feeling.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...
Google Advocates 7-Day Deadline to Publicize Critical Vulnerabilities
Only to a torturer seeking self justification. Which makes them guilty because to seek self justification one must know one is doing some thing wrong.
Lua in JavaScript: Running a VM in a VM
Computer scientists oppose Oracle's bid to copyright Java APIs
I agree proper disclosure take effort but even if he was to send them the very same text privately instead of posting it to the bug tracker it would have been better.
I'd take a CRT television or computer monitor over any widescreen flat display. The one I have next to my some-what old LCD looks much better when playing video. It can render 640x480 games correctly without some horrible scaling artefacts.

I also wish there were still more pay phones in my local area.