skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kotaku makes it sound like the devs are saying female characters are just somehow more complex technically than male characters, and they literally didn't have the technology before to create them.

What they're really saying is that it would be twice as much work with two different modeling and movement algorithms running instead of a single, streamlined approach. It's not impossible, but considering the amount of work developers already have to do and the graphics the games are running, it was left out in favor of a smoother, finer experience.

What you noted about creating an engine to support custom characters means that those developers took the time to go back, refactor existing code and optimize around different multiple different models running simultaneously while keeping a smooth experience.
At the core, the use of threads for any embedded system required to operate in hard real time is a mistake. Threads and interrupts are the minefields of real-time embedded systems.

Based on study and years of experience I conclude that the ONLY way to build such as system is to use a time-triggered approach as opposed to event-triggered. No threads. Only one interrupt --the timer-- in the entire system if at all possible.

This is where I fall back to the raw simplicity of C. You really have to work hard to do stupid shit like threads in C. By that I mean that you have to go out of your way to bring in the code and a framework that might allow you to do that. I've successfully written and applied at least a couple of RTOS's for use in mission critical applications (definition: you fuck up and someone gets hurt or dies). Again, only one interrupt. No threads. Carefully --and I do mean very carefully-- shared data between tasks only if absolutely necessary.

A corollary to this is that I could not fathom programming an electron microscope (the subject of the SO question) or anything that might lead to millions of dollars in losses with Java. Couldn't pay me enough.

Anyone interested in working with hard real-time embedded systems would be wise to study the following well-known books:

- Patterns for Time-Triggered Embedded Systems, Michael J. Pont
- Embedded Systems Building Blocks, Jean J. Labrosse
- uC/OS-III, Jean J. Labrosse (uC/OS-II by the same author includes
the source to the prior version of the OS)
- Doing Hard Time, Grady Booch
- Operating System Concepts, Silbershatz, Galvin, Gagne

There are other good books on the subject. The above should provide a very solid foundation.

Don't just hack away without the necessary background. The consequences of making mistakes out of sheer ignorance could be dire.
wow, I love that they're growing by piggy backing on existing brands. it'll be interesting to see how far this model can go. I want to see it extend far beyond clothing and accessories.
Your last paragraph seems to say that we don't want accurate estimates because then we might not do the projects.

No, my last paragraph says we don't want ultra-conservative estimates because we would definitely not do the projects.

Meanwhile, if we're now accepting that lowballing is a good idea, as your last paragraph says

My last paragraph doesn't say that.

This gives me some evidence that Musk could deliver more cheaply and on budget than the linked industry observer expects.

Perhaps. But if I were a betting man, I think Must will be in for a rude awakening upon discovering the mess that is the public environmental process, as have many other entrepreneurs before him.
Bellbot - Play a sound when you have new users
It would be great if you or someone on your team did a blog post addressing this issue. I'm generally in favor of GMOs in all their forms, but there aren't many good, non-Monsanto, voices that get heard over the screedy shouters and milquetoast "better safe than sorry" types.

For instance, what is the real worst case scenario? Would it be Kudzu meets glow sticks? Man eating plants? Or just a bunch of $50 sprouts that only glow in the most technical sense of the word?
YC startup Swiftype raises $1.7M seed round from Andreessen; NEA; Kleiner
Ask HN: What are important topics for new programmers?
What are some important topics that you feel new programmers should learn about, but are often skipped over?
Default parameter values, ...rest expressions, and modules were all part of ActionScript 3, which was an early implementation of JavaScript Next (then called ECMAScript 4). As I recall, Microsoft and Yahoo! threw a fit about it, and most of the interesting enhancements were shelved.

Glad to see some of the good bits making their way back in. The number of times I've had to do

function(firstParam, secondParam, thirdParam) {
if (firstParam.hasOwnProperty('firstParam') {
var argumentDict = firstParam;
firstParam = argumentDict['firstParam'];
secondParam = argumentDict['secondParam'];
thirdParam = argumentDict['thirdParam'];
}

firstParam = firstParam || "default value";
...

is sickening.
Update from Facebook on AllThingsD:

(Update 12:15 pm ET: Facebook sent the following statement to AllThingsD after publication on Thursday: “We continue to have a great relationship with PayPal, and this product is simply to test how we can help our app partners provide a simpler commerce experience. This test does not involve moving the payment processing away from an app’s current provider.”)
Hey, nice job! I do a lot of work (both professionally and as a volunteer) coding stuff for genealogical and historical non-profit organizations, and I could totally see an API like this being useful to us. Do you accept donations of name data sets from the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire? :-)

Also, I would love to learn more about how the service actually works on the back-end.
Also, who wouldn't want to play high-stakes poker with someone else's money!
I think the comment is just being misunderstood, but Amazon (at least AWS), doesn't do any try before you buy type stuff. It is usually an hour long initial phone screen, than an all day long 7 hour interview with multiple people over the course of a single day in Seattle.
Introduction to Csound on the BeagleBone, RPi, & other Linux-powered tinyware
I think you would need to include companies with < $500M values to be able to answer the question:

> But is the seed strategy working for startups and VCs?

The data presented here appears to have a selection bias since you've only selected companies that resulted in $500M+ valuations.

So, I don't think you can draw this conclusion from the data presented here:

> But on the whole, investing in seeds seems to pay off handsomely for VCs

I do agree that investing in seed pays off if you have a big winner!

> particularly if the seed investing program lands a big winner

Aside from that potential fallacy, I find the data and other questions here interesting.
This sounds a lot like reinventing the wheel (JVM). JVMs lack the power of a full linux core, but do you really need it? you just wanted hardware access + native threds (JVM has these and more)

Also this sounds good for just 1 App, but what happens when you try to run more VMs than you have physical cores? And/Or memory, this would directly affect the host.
re mutualism, of all the variants of leftist anarchism I am familiar with, this one does indeed appeal to me the most. The problem I have with it is only the idea that as soon as anyone who has invested labor into real estate vacates the property, it is supposed to be perfectly ethical / justifiable to simply appropriate it. This puts all kinds of peculiar incentives in play for owners of real estate to avoid losing their property by maintaining "occupancy" of it, which is in itself kind of a nebulous and strange definition.

If we build a server farm and use it for staging and then push that environment to production and we're not actively using staging for the next month, is it OK to appropriate that? If you spend many years of labour constructing your own home and all associated facilities, is it acceptable that when you go on holiday to some remote location, it should instantly be up for grabs?

If it's just a case of being unable to enforce absentee ownership for any given interval, I think this is both a terrible failure of imagination on the part of mutualists as well as an undeserved tip of the hat to that old "might makes right" chestnut. We can take your property, therefore it is not yours anymore.

I'll admit there are problems with the concept of ancap homesteading also; the mutualist criticism of "rearranging a few twigs on a parcel of land not entitling the arranger to title in perpetuity" is not without basis, natural resources and real property are quite thorny and difficult to disentangle concepts by nature. This is why the original suggestion of a thousand competing political systems flourishing is even more appealing to me then just every space on earth appropriating the ancap model as laid out in "the machinery of freedom".

Through competition and the market, we can see how things play out in the real world and what people end up preferring. I have no problem with any political philosophy insofar as they keep to themselves and do not attempt to enforce their ideas on those that are unable to choose an alternative, which unfortunately as the status quo stands is almost no place on the planet.
Friends don’t let ECMA International add classes
If a company genuinely operates out of Ireland, sure.

The issue that's caused a lot of grief is that a lot of companies set up what pretty much accounts to shell companies in Ireland, with the bare minimal operations they can get away with, and route massive amounts of revenue through it in creative ways that have nothing to do with where the actual operations and revenues of the company are.

Especially the "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich" arrangement has drawn a lot of ire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
I've thought about this before. Facebook, especially on Sunday or Monday morning (read: post weekend) is like a highlight reel of your friends' life. So if you had a particularly boring weekend and see nothing but pictures of people having a great time (in your absence, mind you), of course you'll feel bad.
Heh, if I sound like that it's because I'm disillusioned with my experiences.

You can totally fix internal communications, but the employees have to own it. If the employees don't feel the desire to share the knowledge, it will never get done.

Sufficient management push could get stuff done. But I've got an internal knowledge management tool as well (fully ITIL compliant!), and from the emails there's a bunch of people who will avoid the tool or make low quality knowledge articles.

Why not integrate with Outlook? That would be pretty badass, because as soon as someone wrote a plugin for Outlook with our ticket management system I dropped in like 3x as many tickets as I used to.
iOS 7 & The Motion Frontier
Is the visual interface build from scratch or based upon an existing framework?
Of course doing well and doing good aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Returning to the present situation: Execs who have made more money than they or their heirs will ever need, and who are starting to think about their legacy, have an opportunity here.
source link?
That sounds accurate, but

1. You need large samples of hires because you must know what features actually correspond with good performance

2. You need to have a near perfect understanding of statistics

Once Google and friends collected a large enough sample they concluded their puzzles are not a good indicator. Similarly, people tend to have bias towards certain skills without any statistical evidence that they are correlated with performance. And statistics is all about removing the bias, which has proven time and time again is very hard. Otherwise you would be just gambling on instinct, which at best is just a sanity check.
>1. Disregard unspoken rules, but not the small ones like
>not donating at the museum, think more rules like "you just
>can't enter this industry", "you can't just schedule a
>meeting with that CEO". Those can have an immense ROI,
>while the petty ones may get you a punch to the face.

Not sure if this is a good example. I've unsuccessfully proposed meetings with someone above me from a different department. Maybe I should've created Outlook invitations? ;)
Ask HN: What is the best way to do visit based A/B Tests?
I am currently involved with A/B testing for a big website and am running into some problems. I'd love to hear whether you guys here on HN have run into this type of problem?

While I am familiar with testing typical page-to-page conversion, at this project we are looking at differences in users' behavior in a total visit. For example we are looking whether a change in 'people also bought'-algorithm which is shown at multiple places on the site is changing total conversions on a per visit level. So we look op total visits for a segment, then total conversions and then look at differences between A and B in conversions/visit.

To get data for the two versions we create segments in Google Analytics. The problem I currently have tough comes partly from sampling issues.
- Since we have millions of pageviews per day, even on a daily level I still get a sample rate showing only 15% of visits
- Because the conversion is relatively small per visit (~0.1 per visit) the data sampling issue seems to get even worse
- Regardless of the data sampling issues, I think we should have per visit based data in order to be able to calculate the variance of the particular conversion of interest occurring with which we can than compare the means and test whether it's significant.

To show the problem I did some experimenting with using our methodology and splitting our control group in two and then test as if the one half of the control group was a B version. Using our current, flawed, methodology I get 'significantly' different results for both groups.

So I have a couple of questions:
- How do you guys handle visits based AB tests? (and is this even a thing?)
- Are there any tools that capture per visit data like described above?
- Do you know any good resources on AB testing that go further than simple page-to-page tests but really get into testing at a visit level?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!
Depending on the type of work you do your code would not go on github. If you write code for drivers for IR cameras in C or fix bugs in FORTRAN you won't be putting your stuff on Github or contributing to stackoverflow. Github/stackoverflow is, in my opinion, more catered towards the mobile/web/C# community. Military, medical equipment and aerospace software developers prob don't use it either one very much.
I've been searching for a book like this for .NET and the CLR to no avail. Can anyone recommend one?

Or is this book applicable beyond Java?
Can you explain what makes it so terrible? At first glance it seems as if it is thread safe, and avoiding synchronization locks can provide a nice speed up.

The notion that currentPos could be set to the new Point before the Point(int x, int y) constructor completed was completely surprising to me.

Is that something that was obvious to you, or do you have other reasons to dislike it?
Exactly. Don't compare your insides to other people's outsides.
I'm currently in-between girlfriends, and even though it is silly, I admit that I feel a pang of jealousy when my friends post pictures on Facebook showing how happy they are with their significant others. So even though this article talks about a shaky self-reported study with a low sample size, I think they are absolutely on to something. I can relate to the findings almost perfectly.

Facebook is one big game of "keeping up with the Jonases." Everyone's Facebook-facing life is fantastic. They buy houses, they have kids, they go on trips, they have fun adventures with their girlfriends, and so on.

What you don't see is the cockroach infestation at the new house they bought, or the sickness their kid is going through, or the fact that they had to max out their credit card for their trip, or that they got in a huge fight with their s/o right after posting pictures of hugs and kisses.

What this means is that browsing through Facebook is a great way to make yourself feel awful, because at any point in time you are not going to have one of the things you see on your news feed. At least I feel that way. The only reason I'm still on there is because my mom (who lives back home, in Turkey) freaks out when she doesn't see regular updates from me. She thinks something must have happened.
To say "will still use only one core at a time" is a common misconception. It depends. CPython's GIL is not held during many file or network operations and may be released by C code. It's true that multiprocessing is generally a better solution for distributing CPU-bound tasks across cores, but let's not oversimplify.

And as some people may not know, some implementations like Jython do not have a GIL.
Omg. This is exactly what I need for my dad's company..
Elites keep ruining America
No, it doesn't. Not really. The REST server is 'just' another Datomic peer.

Part of the value proposition of Datomic is that what is normally thought of as "the database server" is split into separate processes; the transactor and any number of peers. Peers are safe to put in user-facing applications since if one peer goes down the rest are entirely unaffected.
This is also why automatic weapons with fully autonomous control is probably a very bad idea.

The good news is that if Skynet ever happens, it will probably crash before it can take over the world.
Indeed. I meant for 10 to look large, not small. So, yes, kickstarter has its own reasons for banning various things; and just throw another one onto the heap. They don't bother explaining why these are banned, so why the double standard with GMOs?

Actually - all of these things have in common that they're regulated and I think kickstarter doesn't want to run afoul of penalties from regulatory breach or incur regulatory costs or burdens. To a certain degree (region dependent, use-dependent, etc) GMOs are the same way. Arabidopsis is a weed, but you can eat it. Anecdotally, it's quite tasty.
I'm not sure, once they go into monitization they might end up just like yelp.. not showing the good stuff because the businesses did not pay the ever increasing fees.

[quote]
“Small businesses don’t want to pay for an ad from Yelp or deals on Foursquare or Groupon,” says Seirafi-Pour. “They have deals already. What they want is a better way to distribute them."
[/quote]

I do not see this statement as a 'we will not extort the businesses once our system is rolling'

Full disclosure: I dislike yelp, and feel it's an extortion service. Once the delivery end is kicking, i foresee a class action lawsuit for slander.
Something with at least hardware documentation. Pi is a bunch of binary blobs so might as well just make Android webservers, at least it will be a pocket sized bunch of sealed patents
Big History Project: Take your students on a 13.7 billion year journey
What does this have to do with the internet? This is more about what people do with it, than how the internet actually works...

Frankly .onion sites are a bit more impressive than someone cobbling together a NAS and some random software.
This is actually simple yet well executed - great work.

Glad to see the 'Made with Love in Toronto' footer too. Would love to connect about a project perhaps? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218412

Cheers
As a designer comfortable with my choice, I always saw design as the tool used to capture and manifest the dreams of others. This creativity is then placed in the view of the world to meet with brutal success, failure or mediocrity.
By definition, a designer must be public. They also must imagine themselves in everyone else shoes and use their creativity for others.
Artists, for me, are narcissistic. Trying to create only for themselves. And ideally, they should not care about the opinion of others.
I strongly believe that good design is harder, more professional and more demanding than art.
Having said that , and having started four businesses. I agree that start-ups are much more difficult.
This is stupid because you don't even know why the engagement was lost. It wasn't because the f-35 was outmatched but because they ran out of missiles in the fight which meant they could not defend their tankers and so they ran out of fuel. Numbers matter, you can't expect to send up an f-35 with a limited amount of missiles against a force much larger than yours because thats exactly what is going to happen. You will eventually run out of missiles.

On the other hand, you can buy cheaper fighters and more of them, but are your cheaper fighters better than the other teams cheaper fighters. I don't know, one thing I do know is Australia is not going to ever have an air force comparable to China in the future.
How I quitted Google Mail, Calendar and iCloud
Dropbox Alternative Lima Works With Chromecast, Breaks Into Kickstarter Top 10
I might be off base here but because the processing of data happens on client side is it possible that this could be used to increase privacy through zero knowledge apps?
I don't for a second believe you are not paying 10p per transaction total.

Not even debit cards are that cheap to process. What you are missing at the very least are the fees to the card associations.

You need to compare Strip to SagePay's full merchant services, not fees for just using their software or whatever it is you're getting for 10p. E.g:

http://www.sagepay.com/great-value-merchant-services-sage-pa...

But even then, a large differentiator in merchant services cost is your risk profile and sales volume, as well as type of product.
Whether hungry for money or hungry for success, you're then missing hiring candidates who aren't "hungry" because they have a proven track record at having done very well financially from a series of successes.

At this point, they don't need money or validation, they just figure they can help you solve things and are talking to you because they enjoy solving new things.

Hungry is overrated when what you need is focus on solving the business' problems. This is one reason VC like to see founders take "shelter money" off the table early.
Thanks, I've looked around and have the necessary parts, but not the necessary knowledge. Time is also a rather limited commodity. Looking forward to any responses!
That's a great idea. This should work with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. You'd have to come up with a good idea first and manage the quality well some how.
We have one of those "quotes of the day" at the company intranet, so I see a lot of interesting ones.

Some good ones are

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it" attributed to Thomas Jefferson

One that resonates with me is this one by Cato:

"I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right."

(I used not to know when to shut up or stop defying authority, and my career paid for it)
How I'm working towards building a better self
I just deleted my Kickstarter account and let them know that I will not be backing projects unless they change this policy.

I urge others who care about science, the environment, and the human condition in general to do the same.
Boot to Qt on Embedded Android and Linux – Technology Preview 2 Released
> economic superpower

Not that his point is valid, but he did say economic superpower and the USSR was certainly not.
There are many industries (investment banking?) where empathy can hurt. For most of us, empathy helps. If you have customers, you need empathy. If you have counterparties, it can hurt. If you have employees you need empathy. If you outsource your work on fixed contract, empathy can hurt.