skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did Sony lose the generation's console war? On a global basis it looks[1] like a stalemate between Xbox 360 and PS3. MS clearly won the US and maybe just about the UK but Sony won in many other markets. Sony burnt cash on it as an early loss leader and MS on warranty replacements. I haven't checked whether they both eventually reached profitability.

[1] http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/01/10/report-ps3-surpasses-x...

Of course the Wii was the sneak attack from the previous generation that made Nintendo possibly the real winner although they are looking vulnerable now.
My experience with building an alternative Android Facebook client (which naturally uses almost every part of the API):

1) Just keeping up with documented and undocumented breaking changes is probably a full time job.

2) Expect that some feature of the API breaks every 2 weeks, especially login on their Android SDKs cannot be relied upon.(reliable for me is the industry standard for server uptime usually advertised - 99.99999%) If your application just uses few parts of the API it probably once every 1 or 2 months.

3) Substract 0.5 to 1.0 points from the rating of your app in the Android or iOS app store, depending on how heavy you rely on Facebook, because of the instability of their APIs.

4) Expect to spend at least a day per month writing bug reports. (Or just give up like I did)

5) You will do lots of reverse engineering to work around the bugs which they are constantly creating at a mind blowing rate.

My final conclusion after almost 2 years of working with their APIs (as a good actor) for my app (link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster&h...) is that I will never ever ever build again something that relies that much on Facebook.

If I need a friends list in a future project, I'll just use the users telephone book, like I already did on a VoIP/Messaging app for mobile that I built for the company I work for.

If I need private messaging I'll just set up my own XMPP server.

If I need login, I will sure as hell save myself the headache of using their fucked up (and even when it is working - bad converting) login, and build one myself!
How To Hide Window Hard Disk
I decided to write this for fun as one of those
computer tricks you might love to know. I’ll guide
you through how you can hide your hide disk drive or
any other disk drive icon which is normally located
at the My Computer directory.
Hiding your Hard Disk Drive is usually achieved by
manipulating your registry in order to achieve this,
but in order to avoid messing up your PC if you are
new to the Registry Interface, there is a simple
Freeware that can help you achieve this in just a few
clicks.
Here is a hard disk drive icon in My Computer
This Freeware is called NoDrives Manager . You can
use NoDrives Manager to hide whatever hard disk
drive you wish to on your Personal Computer.
You can Get NoDrives Manager via http://sourceforge.net/projects/nodrvman/ .

Once you’ve downloaded it to your PC, launch it and
select the letters of the Hard Drives you wish to Hide
(for instance, if you wish to hide the C: Drive, select
the letter there and Save).
Once you save, simply restart your Windows PC and
open My Computer, you’ll notice that the particular
Hard Disk Drive that bears that letter would be
invisible.
Hurray!!! That’s a simple tutorial on how you can
hide a hard disk drive on your Windows OS Personal
Computer. If you love this comprehensive tutorial,
why not share it with your friends?

Source: http://naijafolded.tk
But Launchpad accounts only get upload rights when their prior work is reviewed by the developer membership board. And the prior work is identified against that same Launchpad account. So there is a root of trust: it's the developer membership board. It just happens that the trust system isn't implemented using a PGP web of trust directly.
> The closed-source software/hardware model provides a lot of performance gains over the open source model.

Wait, what? If they changed the license right now to an opensource one, the software and hardware wouldn't slow down at all because of that.
I find this page hard to read: http://practicaltypography.com/summary-of-key-rules.html

Perhaps it looks good on a tablet computer. But it feels odd to learn about typography from a page that feels difficult to read.
I agree. However, how do you suggest we judge languages in terms of their productivity, isn't that highly subjective? I have never seen anyone do a proper 'productivity benchmark', but perhaps with some rigor it could be done reliably.
To add another story, about a year ago I came across the 'other' folder which contained a message from an intermediary organisation - apparently my birth mother wanted to get in touch.

Maybe a controversial use of Facebook messaging, however wouldn't fault fb for filtering it out of my inbox.
Cryptocat's lead dev talks about the latest vulnerability
The BEAST Attack or is SSL/TLS Really Broken?
Ask: Do VCs provide 100% funding?
Do VCs provide 100% funding or I have to put in a part of the funds too?
On the US keyboard it probably is. On Finnish keyboard it's where < is on the US one, i.e. Shift-comma.
That's nice, but my money is on Elon Musk :)
I've been reading the "How to pay for this book" page [1] and noticed that there the author said:

> I pro­grammed a new web-pub­lish­ing sys­tem.

I seem can't find any other reference to that, and still not sure about emailing the author directly yet. My google-fu failed me on this one. Anyone know if the author's system has been published or sold?

Thanks before.

[1}: http://practicaltypography.com/how-to-pay-for-this-book.html
Also see the Q&A from later that day: http://media.ccc.de/browse/conferences/sigint13/vortrag_mp6_...

Both videos also downloadable from http://ftp.ccc.de/events/sigint13/mp4-h264/
The cost of the ownership is the dealbreaker here. Otherwise I'd buy a whole block and turn it into the best paintball/airsoft arena ever.
Variant Types in Golang
Digital as a noun
Here is the mail that all the users got -

Hello,

You are receiving this message because you have an account registered with this address on ubuntuforums.org.

The Ubuntu forums software was compromised by an external attacker. As a result, the attacker has gained access to read your username, email address and an encrypted copy of your password from the forum database.

If you have used this password and email address to authenticate at any other website, you are urged to reset the password on those accounts immediately as the attacker may be able to use the compromised personal information to access these other accounts. It is important to have a distinct password for different accounts.

The ubuntuforums.org website is currently offline and we are working to restore this service. Please take the time to change your ubuntuforums.org account password when service is restored.

We apologize for any inconvenience to the Ubuntu community, thank you for your understanding.

The Canonical Sysadmins.
MsPaint only receives that kind of response from people because it was near universally available for a lot of people.

Deluxe Paint is still my favourite, but there's a long list of much better paint programs for the Amiga too, but the vast majority of people who have used MS Paint have never seen any of them.
shameless plug, but check out Cyprus. there are a lot of Brits here during the summer and for good reason. protaras/ayia Napa have the best beaches but limassol may provide you with better WiFi and perhaps better prices. it's a small island and if you rent a car you can get to a beach within 30 minutes wherever you are. larnaca is also nice and you may find a cheaper place to stay there.

let me know if you're interested
Is it just me, or is he spreading himself awfully thin these days? I mean, I don't know him personally so it's entirely possible this is all within his capability, but "Loop transport", "LEO Spaceship", Tesla and now Mars too?
Plivo is looking to hire a Infrastructure Engineer (YC S12)
I don't know. All methods I can think of are expensive and wasteful. So perhaps it's a good proxy.
As pointed out in the other comments on this thread, this benchmark benchmarks mostly standard RNG performance, not quality of the code generated by each compiler. Here you've got much more computationally intensive benchmark, showing that D is "as fast as C" like it could be said about Java: http://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/performance-...

It is close, but Java is just as close, too. Not a tremendous performance advantage that someone would choose one over another for and not something I'd expect from a language marketed as "performance oriented".
A very interesting read.

I've always been interested in fonts, but I have a question regarding their price. Why are they so expensive? I don't know how long it takes to design a good font, but is it longer than writing a good smartphone app? Font pricing feels outdated. It feels from an era when publishing was done by large companies.

If I could buy an excellent font for $10-$20 I would literally buy dozens. But font designers are making their work a serious expense, making me ask myself "is it worth it?" In most cases, the answer is no.
> Berkeley sucks after rewriting its site and removing bunch of old courses, including classic Scheme based CS 61A and courses on Buddhism studies.

The oldest CS61A I found on http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science is spring 2008. It's taught by Brian Harvey and is Scheme-based: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,PL...
Virtual Machine Management System in Nodejs
> didn't see it up on concrete blocks

Take a look at the annotation on http://www.flickr.com/photos/travisgoodspeed/8581912859/in/p...
"Every" 8-bit home computer had similar applications, and much earlier than GEOS too, though GEOS is a good counter-example because its windowed and so much more directly comparable.
System Provisioning System in Nodejs
The concept is different. VC buy shares/equity of a company.
The company may be owned by a group of individuals (they may or may not have invested money, but they are typically founders of the company)... When a VC invest in Equity of a company, they get some percentage of ownership in the company...
Cameron ‘Porn’ Advisor’s website ‘hacked’ – Threatens/Libels Blogger
Here's the compare view for an overview of the changes dbaupp applied to the original code: https://github.com/huonw/levgen-benchmarks/compare/logicchai...

edit: wrong addition left thereafter for posterity, ignore it (apparently Go uses ISAAC so the change to XorShiftRng might be unfair to Go (though it's trailing anyway). I expect C uses the standard libc generator?)
Oh man, he's hating all over Times New Roman.

http://practicaltypography.com/times-new-roman.html

Times is great! I would say that any hate for Times is a repressed memory from the days when it was the default font in Microsoft Word. I mean, wow, remember this?

http://i.imgur.com/6QV6Qvr.png
Absolutely, for this type of work Deluxe paint would make him more productive because of much better zoom tools and palette management.
Being able to talk about memory allocation in a safe way is one of the key objectives of Rust. Rust is the only modern language (i.e. not C or C++) I know of that allows one to mix GC'ed and manually allocated memory, and heap and stack allocated memory.

Reasoning about mutability is necessary for safe (and fast!) concurrency.
I would love to a Kindle edition or a pdf. It would be great read on the move.
The Slippery Slope - Dark Patterns in UI design
So lets say I want to start a company and require $50K. Would the VCs invest $50K and get some ownership in the company?
This is a fantastic resource; it's unfortunate that the site is so slow (HN effect maybe?)
The "face" part of FaceTime seems quite directly descriptive of what FaceTime does to me. I know that descriptive names cannot be trademarked. Perhaps that has some bearing on this?
Ok you live in a world where Java is "as fast as C". Let's terminate this discussion.
Not RFC2821/RFC2822 email, but it is a form of email as far as the public are concerned. The term "email" doesn't necessarily have to mean Internet email that is compatible with other Internet email systems, even if you might wish it to.
Of course, you can't teach 6 year olds the same way you teach 12 year olds, their brains aren't even fully formed yet. That was already a given ;)
How to put a human on Mars
I completely agree, his excessive use of "Small Caps" is incredibly annoying since it just looks out of place with the rest of the text. I'm also not a fan of his font choice, rather than picking it to promote readability it looks like he just picked it so he could be snobby about using "professional looking fonts". I wouldn't be so up in arms about this if he hadn't labeled the entire site "practical typography" since I have more trouble reading this site than I do almost every other site I visit.
Then it would be testing how GCC compiles C code and not Nimrod, right?
Writers, please put exactly one space between sentences
Siri in a Teddy
There is a list on the EmacsWiki
Sourcefire's flagship product is Snort which is an excellent Open Source Intrusion Detection System. Their business model is to offer management tools, rules and support on Snort for enterprises.

Their 2012 earnings were $223.1m which was a 35% increase over 2011. With cash and near-cash of around $200m, this is a purchase price of around 10x annual revenue.
Hire me - a blog post
Almost half-way through it and I'm learning quite a lot of new things. Btw, for those who deal with web typography, you should look at Typeplate[1]. That's an awesome typography starter kit for your project.

http://typeplate.com/
I guess value depends on how many time you're going to use a given font. You'll pay once but could use the same few fonts across many projects.
List of 25 Ups And Downs To Expect From Running Your Own Online Business
Interestingly there is something about that page (or my eyes are tired, in the wrong light etc) that makes that page hard to read for me.

I don't know what it is, but feels like my eye sight is only able to comprehend the point focus of what I'm looking at.
In terms of company culture, Cisco and RedHat don't seem very aligned. Cisco is all proprietary and RedHat mostly doing free software.
IMO it causes bugs, as accidentally failing to initialize a variable yields a garbage value at runtime. There's no reason that 0 is any more likely to be a valid integer value than 1, or 42, or 0xdeadbeef, and the compiler shouldn't try to guess.

When a language default is to zero-initialize, it creates a strong cultural impetus within that language's user community to define data structures such that zero initialization is a valid state.

But if the language is taking a hard line against null (rather than e.g. being able to annotate locations as null-accepting as required, or vice versa), zero initialization may not be the right choice. However the combination of a requirement for definite assignment and non-nullability tends to make algorithms involving dynamically allocated arrays awkward to implement.
If they believe in your company and founders: Yes
Turbo Pascal for me.

Until then I'd only programmed in BASIC and while I didn't why I knew there was something "off" about how unwieldy it felt, TP made me realise why.
Side question,

In the introduction the author mentions that if you don't care about privacy, you can solve the x ∈ S problem easily by sending the whole bloom filter to the client. Wouldn't it be simpler for the client to send x to the server instead, and then let the server send the answer back to the client? As I understood bloom filters can get quite large...
I found out about this book because the author's tweet (saying he wrote it in Racket) was retweeted by @racketlang https://twitter.com/mbutterick/status/359768757733826560
nice clean site,

whenever i see talk of typography i always run to the thoughts on monospace fonts,

perhaps lawyers lack the same needs from monospace fonts as programmers...

both of his suggestions for courier alternatives:

FB Alix... his own,

Courier 10

; lack even basic needs such as easily distinguishable 0 and O and 1 and l...

of course i type this comment into a textarea using courier... that then prints Verdana... on a site arguably for people interested in programming and its tangential influence,

so perhaps i am the only audience
Pt-query-digest for MongoDB profiler logs
Has the CCC conference started already? Or is this a one-off speech?
If you used 4.5.x I encourage you to try the latest stable server (5.0.9) and client (1.3.0) again: http://owncloud.org/sync-clients/

Especially the duplicate issues are fixed with the 1.3.0 release.
i think people are being too harsh on this presentation, and focused too much on the form factor and number of slides , instead of the actual content and message

i like the human factor in it, like how random and incidental stuff like being able to complete ruby-mode.el had such a high impact on ruby's syntax

and how learning a text editor inside out, eventually led to ruby, which let to RoR , most people would consider learning so much about emacs as a waste of time, for matz it helped him made ruby

this presentation is more about our human nature , this is i believe a great exmaple of when doing what you love is more important that doing whats important or what you think is right, i like it
I feel like I'm missing the joke. The section "hating on" Times New Roman is displayed in the font-family Times New Roman. Is the author just having some fun?
I wrote "Vim", then edited my comment to make it generic: vi, Vim, elvis, nvi, etc.
very confusing title
Deluxe Paint single handedly got me into the animation industry! So great. I was 11 years old, pre-internet, never used a mouse before, and still could find my way around it easily. Animbrushes FTW!
I can see what you are trying to say. But it would still be testing the speed of Nimrod, whether the Nimrod compiler compiles Nimrod code to C or to Assembly is irrelevant. The fact is that Nimrod is not C, and we are interested in the speed that Nimrod can achieve.
Does it? Maybe it shows intent to see what kind of fancy 403 page payroll.example.com is employing?

I think one of the reasons people (including me) have problems with penalizing GET parameter change is that they are obviously visible and trivial to change. They are a part of URL and pretty much designed to be modified by hand. Growing up on the Internet we learned that if we want to see e.g. the next page of the gallery or board, we don't have to look for "next" button. We just change /0/ to /1/, or ?start=100 to ?start=150 in the address bar and press ENTER. It's easier. It's quicker. It's more natural. I can't feel that there's anything wrong with changing a GET parameter. It doesn't register on an emotional level.

My personal feelings are that on the Internet you're supposed to use HTTP codes like 403 or 404 to mark places user is denied to access. IMO the space of legally accessible addresses for given user should be defined by a superspace of all URLs that return 200 Ok when that user tries to access them. If you screw up and serve sensitive data without proper access check, it should be your (legal) responsibility, not the person's who (accidentally or not) discovers this.
> Rust is the only modern language (i.e. not C or C++) I know of that allows one to mix [...] heap and stack allocated memory.

Technically I believe (to verify) Go does that as well, but the mix is implicit and the system (not the developer) will decide on its own whether a value should be stack- or heap-allocated.

C# will also allocate value types local variables on the stack (technically all local variables are stack-allocated, but for reference types it obviously stack-allocates a reference to the heap, the end-result is that under the usual understanding of "stack allocation" only value type local variables and parameters are stack-allocated)
When they introduced the option to play local music, it was a pretty big launch and you were notified. And it has always been easy to select where to grab local files from, or disable it. I think your point here is invalid.

The fact that they remove songs is not unethical, so not really relevant.
Hire HN: UK freelancers wanted
I'm looking for PHP and Adobe AIR/AS (yep) coders in the UK for a couple of projects. North of England based, ideal for students, part-time, work-from-home etc. Get in touch with frlncers@gmail.com
One thing is that traditionally users don't buy fonts. In the past, the only people you expected to get any money from were people who got paid to set the type. You might spend months to years working on a single typeface and in that time a considerable amount of work had to be done to market it (done usually by the foundry you were working with), because after that much time a real flop might mean the end. Over the last few decades the barriers for creating and distributing type have definitely shrunk significantly, but there's still an issue over how type should be licensed and exactly what it needs to compensate for. Many typefaces are created by people who are otherwise employed as graphic designers or illustrators, while the individuals who are solely type designers have to contend for their living with type only in what is now a sea of free or corporate subsidized fonts (i.e. what came on your system).

---

If what I just typed makes no sense at all, I blame either my insomnia or the ambien which I refuse to take for it.
Thanks! Much appriciated!
my bad,

i was looking at his site typographyforlawyers.com page,

on the page linked he has a few other suggestions:

Pitch,

Kettler,

Nitti

; and Nitti seems to satisfy those simple needs,

i think i will take a look
"Even Intel barely got to support OpenGL 4.0 in its PC architecture, Haswell, and they're probably years away from implementing the latest OpenGL 4.4."

As memory serves, the Mesa folks usually have pretty great turnaround time on new GL feature support--and as a side effect, Intel does too.
Learn programming in 12 Weeks from my couch? Legit?
Assuming this [1] is what Go is using, it is not ISAAC. It looks like a lagged Fibonacci generator.

[1] http://golang.org/src/pkg/math/rand/rng.go
By my understanding any situation where you need the computing power with the requirement for very low energy input and waste energy output.

I can't think of any specific examples (perhaps an embedded system that needs to perform a pile of cryptographic operations?) but its ability to do a significant amount of processing on the 2W power footprint it is in a different class to current desktop CPUs and GPUs. Even if this $99 unit only does 1/8 of what a $99 GPU can do (caveat: I pulled that "1/8" figure from my arse) it'll be doing it on 1/60 of the power (based on GPU reviews where people have tried to compare power draw with GPU idle to power draw with GPU at 100% but everything else as idle as possible, which indicate modern GPUs pull between 120 and 150W (http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/radeon_hd_6850_6870_rev... is the first such analysis Google found)). That potential computation-per-watt (or computation-per-energy-$ if the cost is more important than the energy supply+dissipation problem) of units like this could be very useful. Of course where power input and heat dissipation are not massive concerns, current GPUs still win on computation-per-device and computation-per-hardware-$.
JVM HotSpot does this, too, implicitly, by means of EscapeAnalysis.
I (jthomp@sun.com, aka "net.god") was in tears. Those were good times.
Someone told me this is called "Takahashi method"[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method