skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I have WotC on the line... Why wasn't the D&D 5th Edition SRD hosted on GitHub during development?

Hell yeah. I'm tempted to contact some of the creators of some of my favorite RPG systems (Jason Bulmahn, Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook), and beg them to agree to make a completely free RPG. Or at least design the core mechanics. I'm thinking maybe some Creative Commons license, which would allow commercial use. Get them to make a bid, as to how much it would cost to have their work-for-hire for however long they estimate it would take to make the Core Rules of this game...

...and then have a Kickstarter, to raise the funds to do it.

And make implementations of the Core Rules in several programming languages, probably JavaScript first (good for the Browser, or for Node.JS), with Reach Goals for other languages...

Let me tell my personal story: I was a DM for D&D 3rd Edition, and I chose to run through Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I had a hard time running it, though, so I made an electronic version of the campaign book. I scanned every single page, I made a wiki on my laptop, one for each NPC. I made a wiki page, with the scanned content for every single monster that showed up. I made wiki pages for every spell (with the scanned content of every spell, right there.) I didn't have to settle for the OGL content, I had the ACTUAL CONTENT FROM THE BOOKS, so my rule-lawyering players couldn't complain that the DM's rules were slightly different from their rules. I made hot-clickable maps, to take me to rooms. I made spreadsheets with every NPC, and their Initiatives, and Hit Points, and any effects on them...

...and now that I've made this thing, for personal use, it would be ILLEGAL for me to share this with anyone.

That sucks.

I've also played around with making computer role playing games, based off of some fantasy role playing game, but most of the "FREE" ones out there, are not available for commercial use, or I'd have to pay a licensing fee.

That sucks.

Ah well, I'm done rambling for now...

One more quick point: I don't begrudge people for making copyrighted, commercial art like games and campaigns. But I think the time for the "Linux" of Fantasy Role Playing Games has come.
Yes, it has similarities to WorkFlowy. We sometimes say "Evernote + Workflowy = Gingko" :)
I am not a native english speaker (indian) even though I moved to the US at the age of 16. I am 32 now. I have a fairly "neutralized" accent according to my native speaker friends. How did I get there ? Over 16 years of practice by listening to music, watching movies and most importantly, how my co-workers/colleagues communicate and express themselves. I still do that today when I can. Just a habit.

I am not interested in commenting whether PG should have said what he said or not but I do think that if you have a thick accent, you need to work on it and not just assume that people understand what you are saying even if your grammar is great.

My advice as a non native speaker.

-Talk slow. Lot of foreign languages are spoken fastly and hence when they switch to english, they go at the same pace. Don't do that. Try and space out the words.

- Ensure that the each word is spoken clearly and not mixed together. Instead of saying "how'r you", start with "How are you" ? Once you get a hang of it, you can switch to the faster version.

- Just working on specific letters can make a lot of difference. For example, the letter 'T'. In Indian languages, people hit that letter really hard. So when they pronounce something like "want", it sounds like "wantttt". The tongue rolling should be minimal here.

- Watch english shows, movies, listen to music, radio whatever. Dont just stick to your own language. Socialize with people who don't speak your native language. Observe them and learn.

- Most importantly, understand that just being able to speak english with perfect grammar is not enough. You need to do more. Nothing wrong with admitting this fact and working on it. Just my 2 cents.
That song, being written in 1611 and in intentional Scottish dialect, is not a good example.
I challenge you to remove the gray ad using Adblock
Web: Try It Now!

Me: Cool, a demo! [click]

Web: But first, you must Sign Up...[trollface]

Me: Nope nope nope...
He was explicitly called out as being prejudiced when deciding which companies to fund. I don't think he's being too defensive here. http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/08/27/quoted-y-combinators-p...
I've tried to switch completely to e-books but when the content get technical, I still find paper books a lot easier to read (probably since you can go back and forth easier than with e-books).
They add them because people most often choose the cheapest flight.

Lets say you have two airlines that both need to offer a flight for $300 in order to make a reasonable profit. If one shifts $15 of that cost to bag fees, then people will choose that one even though the end cost is the same. The other airlines have to follow suit or they will fail to stay competitive.
I have always felt PDF is outdated for research papers. We need some kind of interactive paper format; yet universal, open specs, look the same and usable across platforms.
Cockatrice is the successor to Apprentice, and is still around even after a recent C&D from WotC. The reason the C&Ds come along is because they all tend to use terms and concepts that WotC owns, like tapping cards.

http://cockatrice.woogerworks.com
Never allow them to watch English movies/tv series dubbed, just with subtitles. Once they are a little more competent, switch to English subtitles.

There is a massive disconnect in English ability of the European countries that dub media on tv and the ones that use subtitles.
How To, Literally, Take Over The World
Large scale 3D printer on Kickcstarter for
Made me think of a favorite Mark Twain quote.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Actually, if you look at what PG and YC are trying to achieve, this is a great strategy. What an efficient way to filter out people who focus on soundbites and refuse to think more deeply and clearly about what the author is trying to say.

also related: http://paulgraham.com/say.html
The thing that always amazed me about SCUMM was that they managed to make Moonbase Commander in it, which was a turn-based strategy game with online multiplayer built in.

Granted, it does some weird stuff with the engine (to the point that, to my knowledge, no SCUMM emulator can play the game) but it still amazes me that the engine was that flexible.
Facebook Befriends Contests
I think you're right here, but the qualifier "all things being equal" can't be taken lightly. Rarely if never are "all things equal." I also don't think a shift in the market context is necessary. We already have a market place where people who feel tricked or duped will have a lower opinion of the company doing the duping. dark patterns have a bad edge to them too--very few of them, when noticed by the user, leave the user actually feeling good about how they were duped.

This kinda reminds me of the talk PG gave at 2008 start up school titled "Be Good." (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc) He outlines many ways why it's not merely ethically appropriate to be good, but also a strategically superior approach to running a startup. Ease of use, simplicity, trustworthiness--these are important qualities of a biz's reputation, both internally and in public perception. And Dark patterns tend to harm that reputation.

Edit: Addendum--obviously there are monopolies or monopoly-like situations where reputation isn't important.
Why social impact technology is the only technology.
How does it compare to socket.io or sockjs?
Thanks. That "Dealing with Power Creep" article is a good read.
Named No. 1 ‘dirtiest’ hotel, resort sues TripAdvisor and loses in 6th Circuit
Agreed. And I think we greatly underestimate how much this is holding Science back.
Mailelf Kickstarter - A Simple Encrypted Email App written in Go
Mailelf brings encrypted email to your existing email accounts. An open source project written in http://golang.org/ to stop companies and governments from spying on your messages.
1. I know one thing. I am tired of my picture taken
whenever I walk into a store. In order to buy a bolt
at that mess of a store(the big orange); my picture is taken multiple
times. It pisses off customers like myself, and every
year for as long as I can remember, the majority of
theft is internal. The worst offenders are Management.

I think you will see a rise in people wearing desquises?
Or, maybe an Indian will eventually sue the offending
store on religious grounds? (steal the soul)

Yea, I'm rambling, but I sometimes feel like we lost all
privacy? And yes, this is the only site I comment on
anymore. I don't even trust this site. I bet they are
logging in all IP's, and saving them just in case the government comes a knocking?
A sole person in the country would do as an example, right? And I'll bet with 300 million there's at least one tech-inclined American with English as the first language that has trouble being understood.

Likewise, if foreignness isn't really the issue, disabilities will surely also count? Are there disabled people in tech who have a hard time speaking English? Would Stephen Hawking pass as a Founder for PG?
MLBase: Distributed Machine Learning Made Easy
Typical Org-mode code diffs better than typical Latex code. This is a serious argument in favour of authoring in Org-mode and using its Latex export facility.
I disagree. I think it's good to get away from being constantly connected all the time, but that doesn't inherently exclude ebooks. Ebooks are just a convenience for me, and I can take my entire book collection everywhere with me on my Kindle, with tremendous battery life, and a built in light so I can read at night.
How the Dropbox Datastore API Handles Conflicts – Part Two
Yeah, but that wasn't for Haskell.
To which I'll add: the past helps better understand the present...
If you think you don't have time for coffee you need a therapist, not a spray bottle.
These people will do this either way. Why even include them in your assessments?
This is a pretty big feature for me. I am tired of barely being able to read my screen when I am outside. I would also like a longer battery life but I am able to deal with current battery life and is not the primary concern for me.
That's a few layers up the stack. Sudden Termination is a message to the OS management layer that an app can recover robustly from an unexpected death. That's not a job for the kernel, and presumably Darwin has some handling analagous to the OOM killer for the situation where memory truly is exhausted.

FWIW: Android baked that idea into the framework from the start. All apps are essentially required by the application lifecycle to be robust against sudden failure, and the system is designed to give apps fair warning to save themselves at various times (e.g. on backgrounding). If you think about it, on a battery-powered embedded system that's pretty much a firm requirement anyway.
I'm not an actor, but if you watch The Kevin Pollak Chat Show it might give you lots of info. They talk about the highs and lows of the LA and NY acting scene.

Here's one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Qj_...

And this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UU1Jnt2IJ5HWjaYz-EPzglbg&f...
Phoenix Films New Music Video via Drone
Can I use other extensions? It's dead simple with Remove It Permanantly. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-it-per...
And so suddenly I've just realized, 10 or 20 years from now, it's not just the police who will be flying these things around.

On the contrary. In a year or two, it might not be just the police. In 10 or 20 years, I expect they will be regulated, a licence will be required to operate one, and they will be required to transmit identifying information at all times. Apply any argument you like that relates to driving on public roads, any argument you like that relates to handling potentially sensitive personal information, or any argument you like to do with navigating crowded airspace.
I exclusively read ebooks now, but I still like some paper books as well. So now I just collect ones in print that I really like.
> I also don't think a shift in the market context is necessary.

If the dark patterns empirically work, then a market context shift is necessary.

> We already have a market place where people who feel tricked or duped will have a lower opinion of the company doing the duping. dark patterns have a bad edge to them too--very few of them, when noticed by the user, leave the user actually feeling good about how they were duped.

If they had enough of a "bad edge" that they didn't actually work to increase the returns realized by a business--then they wouldn't be an issue, as there'd be no incentive to use them.
New Bitcoin casinos have driven online gambling growth
I'm witnessing this tax first hand right, but the tax is in a more literal sense. Some background: Right now my commute is about 35 minutes through Southern California (I live in Riverside and drive south to the Inland Empire). On Tuesday, my car was totaled. I was in the middle lane on a 3 lane highway when I saw someone coming up behind me a couple of miles before my exit, so I got over to the slow lane. Right as the car behind me was passing me in the middle lane, their tire exploded, spinning them into me, and spinning me across the freeway into the center divider.

This crash is an example of just how much money not having money costs. It wasn't an issue of the driver's unsafe driving, but of the driver's unsafe vehicle due to poor maintenance. Well, that driver doesn't even have insurance, let alone money to fix their balding tires. For now I'd agree with anyone that says it's their fault for driving it, because that's my insurance's stance and that's the stance that gets me reimbursed for my vehicle, but I can't help but see how if they wanted to fix the initial problem of poor maintenance and no insurance, then they'd need money, so they'd need to drive to work...

But it gets worse. My car handled the crash like a new car should. I was safe. I got a little whiplash but I felt fine and was back to work that day. Her car, much older than mine, flipped (exploding tires are about as bad as a car accident can get - keep up on your treads and watch the air pressure in the summer folks!) and she left the scene unconscious in an ambulance. Now I don't know what the statistics are, but my bet is if you don't have car insurance, you're note likely to have medical either. So this woman, who started too broke to replace her tires, now has whatever legal trouble one gets for not having insurance, has no drivable vehicle, huge medical bills, and whatever suit my insurance files against her.

Me, I'm fine, but I'm without a car (and I opted out of the rental car coverage, and she has no insurance to reimburse me for one), so in the name of frugality I start taking the bus. I go against traffic on my daily drive, so there aren't many routes, but there is one. It makes 93 stops between Downtown Riverside and my place of work. It takes about 2 hours 15 minutes with walking time. That's over an hour and a half longer than my commute driving. I'm on the bus with a few other people who make the same trip. Right now my life consists of waking up, walking to the bus, sitting on the bus, going to work, walking back to the bus, taking it home, walking home, eating a small meal, and going to bed to repeat the process tomorrow. Not to mention last night the bus was 2 hours late because of flash floods in Riverside. I got home after my bed time. Everyone this morning was taxed by pretty much all definitions of the word. Night class? Studying for that certificate to get a promotion? Reading a fucking novel? Ain't nobody got time for that.
Yes, this is the operative point. There may always be some who wilfully and loudly misinterpret you for their own reasons, but the majority will be reading along silently, trying to decide who's most credible. Those are the people you're really speaking to.
YACKR - Yet another code keyboard review.

I think it's a bit overpriced (20-30$) but beyond that, different people value different things in their keyboards. This should not be a revelation to anyone whose been in an office pissing match over the subject.
I recently tried to book a Ryanair flight. I cancelled in disgust when I got an "error" message that read something like, "Error: You didn't select a bus sightseeing tour option".

Instead I chose to fly with a competitor, operating out of a less convenient airport, but with a less scummy online purchase process.

However Ryanair had a 2012 net income of €374 million. That implies their scummy model is successful. This makes me sad.
Dear authors, my screen has hundreds of pixels vertically, I would like to be able to read more than 15 lines at once. The font size is insanely huge. It made me close the tab.
What you didn't know about CFML - common myths debunked
The problem is that I like to read a lot. Usually a book per week, so I keep almost everything in eBook form.

As a consequence, my personal approach is to only keep up to 5 physical books at any given time. Basically I buy the book in eBook form and if I like it a lot - like really, really love it, I can order a physical copy. At that point, I should have already made the decision of which one of my 5 physical books is going to get donated to make space for this one.

I hate clutter and my best work is done in focused and clean environments, so that's why I do this.
What's wrong with using affiliate links? I'd use affiliate links for everything, good or bad. Free money?
Perhaps deactivate Pressy if the phone is locked? Does that kill all useful actions?
Good point. What I mean to say is that the question of "who's smarter, rich or poor?" is not relevant to the study in question, and can't explain the results.
Sorry, but I could not get it.

If Apple is at 34%, with Google/Android 89%, Windows Phone 4%, and Blackberry 3%, it would be a total of 130%, but 130% of what?
Some dialects are more understandable than others. I miss the Canadian accent that I grew up with. That one is very easy for people all over the world to understand.

As for the song, even if you heard it recited, you'd have trouble understanding it. It is in a strong Scots dialect.
To clarify: RT.com was banned by the moderators of a single subreddit (/r/news, which is a large one). This was not an action taken by the reddit administrators but by reddit users who manage the /r/news community. It's within the rights of moderators to, well, moderate their subreddits.

I do think the moderators in question handled the situation very poorly (I had to chuckle at the Zombocom link though). Unfortunately there is no dearth of reddit moderators with sneering dictatorial inclinations and power complexes, or of reddit users who sleep with pitchforks at the ready to persecute anyone they judge negatively.

Perhaps the moderators responsible will be ousted, and maybe the domain name will be re-allowed in /r/news. However, since multiple moderators seem to be involved, I would be surprised if we see a successful coup. Indeed, I expect we will discover that the moderators' concerns are legitimate and they just handled the reaction badly.
Yes, it exists, and I use it every day. In fact, I have a partnership with the DOD/NSA subcontractors who created it, and I have applied the technology to the automated creation of 3D Avatars given a single photo of a person's face. My version of the tech is available at www.3D-Avatar-Store.com. The system works as follows: a person's head is laser scanned, at the same time dozens of single photos are taken of that person from different angles, different lighting conditions, and different quality cameras. Then a neural net is trained to associate each photo with the laser scan data. After a few thousand trainings, anyone's single photo would generate a reasonable likeness of them in 3D. Today, after over a decade of training and 10's of thousands of scans added to the training database, we get remarkably good quality 3D reconstructions given a single photo of anyone, any age, any ethnicity. There are limitations, such as the face needs to be visible, and it needs to be within +/-30 degrees of facing the camera for the 3D reconstruction to be suitable for facial recognition. And that is the point of the original application of this technology: a facial recognition pre-processor. It corrects the face angle and removes any facial expression, creating a likeness of the face in a passport style photo perfect for facial recognition. But, of course, I'm not using it for that. I use it to auto-magically create 3D avatars for video game studios.

Oh, it's really, really fast. My current system is based upon two generations back of neural nets, and they reconstruct from one photo in 0.9 seconds. The latest generation does 144 reconstructions simultaneously given HD video feeds.
cheap php servers and java knowledge,
can u tell me the other options?
If your business model is so fragile that merely discussing it threatens is a threat then you haven't got a business model at all.

Great businesspeople talk about their business. They tell everyone: Friends, strangers, potential customers. All kinds of people can provide useful feedback and the more you discuss your business the better an idea you're likely to have of how to build a good product.

Besides -- the only people who ever ask me to sign an NDA are the people who haven't got anything worth guarding to begin with.
I've made little headway into ebooks, for a number of reasons: a lot of the books I want to read are not available in electronic form; a lot of the books I want to read I already own paper copies of, and I feel little incentive to buy them again; I find that I usually prefer reading in paper form rather than electronic form, especially for anything longer than a couple of pages or so.

That said, I have recently read several novels on my phone, and found that to be a surprisingly pleasant and effective way to read fiction.

Alas, the recent disclosures have fanned the flames of personal privacy and free software idealism in my thinking, reducing what little fondness I had grown for ebooks.
It's not nearly as big as the pictures make it seem, although there's plenty of volume to them.
$($("img")[0]).attr("style","position: absolute; left: -10000px;")
The cold truth about learning another language is that you will not learn much when you are not living in a community(country) that speaks that language.

This is verifiably true, by an experimental test of Chinese-language proficiency, of the foreigners who learned Chinese in my generation. Harvard and some other elite universities wanted to develop a test of Chinese as a second language to find out which Americans were learning Chinese the best. During the norming study for the test, someone thought to include foreigners at the Mandarin Training Center of the National Taiwan Normal University ( 國立台灣師範大學國語教學中心 ) in the norming sample. My fellow students and I who were there at the time "wrecked the curve" for all the graduates of Chinese language programs at United States elite universities who had not spent significant time overseas. Further development of the proposed test was scrapped after that was discovered.

That said, English is more learnable in-country than most languages because of its extensive use as an interlanguage. I lost count early of the number of different native language pairings I would see among foreign students in Taiwan--mostly in Taiwan to learn Chinese--who would converse with one another in English, because English was their strongest language in common. English-language movies, books, and other authentic examples of use by native speakers are also pervasively available around the world in a degree unmatched by materials in any other language.