skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"incompetently believed" - By whom? I doubt the U.S. had many immigrants from India in the 1800s. Genocide is defined as the deliberate killing of a group of people. I'm sure the Europeans and early Americans had microscopes to make sure those blankets were infected before giving them to the Native Americans.

The imagery wasn't stolen. Mexico had cowboys (vaqueros) before us. Did they have a patent on what clothes to wear? Cowboys look like cowboys because of the utility of their clothes, not because of some sense of fashion. Try working on a ranch in a suit and top hat.

Did you ever study history? I recommend that rather than regurgitating other people's delusions. Texas was not stolen. The people who lived in Texas revolted and drove out the Mexican soldiers. Texas then became its own Republic. Texas later joined the United States voluntarily.

Perhaps the game of Cowboys and Indians is culturally insensitive. I don't know anyone who hates Indians because of it, or wants to go hunt them or any other humans in real life. The public school I went to did a pretty good job teach us about the plight of the Native Americans. Also, I would venture to guess that game Cowboys and Indians was introduced by the many western shows and movies that were popular in the mid-1900s. Cops and Robbers was immensely more popular even before Cowboys and Indians [0].

The rest of your post is just ridiculous and I have no idea why you brought those things up. What does a "sexual predator kit" have to do with anything?

[0] http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cowboys+and+ind...
A bigger problem for using your linux machine as a media PC than bluray is the lack of Netflix. You can make it work with wine and some patches, but it's a non-trivial amount of work and/or disruptive to your normal wine install.
> It's simple probability.

No it's not.

It's hype, buyout rumors, etc. The stock price will fall hard.
Palmer Luckey of Oculus fame was funded by Joe Lonsdale, of Palantir. He told me Lonsdale hasn't been involved with Palantir in over 4 years though, so any associations with "spooks" or "nsa" type stuff is silly. Yah right, OK Palmer Luckey, like the NSA, CIA wouldn't love to control hardware and software related to future VR worlds. Like Lonsdale has been able to cut all ties, I thought the old saying was once you get in, you never get out, at least not willingly! LOL! I think Palmer Luckey is a sith lord.
20 minutes at what speed? How long to row if you engine doesn't start?
We saw an unusually high amount of cemeteries on the way to the island... if the zombies rise up, we are totally screwed.
2k8=16000
Well, for me, a consumer, O'Reilly failed in other regards.

1) It started producing mediocre books by the dozens. Gone are the days were the O'Reilly tomes (like the Perl books) were THE definitive books on a language.

2) It started promoting all sorts of half-though marketing/visionary crap (Thomas Friedman means Alvus Toffler style), on Open Source, Web 2.0 etc.

3) The Safari bookstore (which I was on and off subscriber over the years) had BS restrictions and a bad UI. I haven't even bothered to check if they provide a good tablet story nowadays.
One question: weren't you afraid not to have visited the island before you made an offer?
To be fair, steam for linux has been out for about 6 months. Steam for OSX more like 3 years. That's some pretty significant progress in that time.
> These people sound positively mental. Is there a term for when lawyers meltdown like this?

If not ... are they drafting for the DSM-6 already? :)
And most important, no gratuitous incompatibility or user lock-in based on formats. Commercial developers esp ones that raise huge money, tend to try to lock users in. If that's their plan, they can write their own outliner, should that situation ever arise.
For a more in-depth introduction to reinforcement learning, Sutton and Barto's book is available online:

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/ebook/the-book.ht...
hope you all don't mind. little self plug on the subject - I also have an open source outliner

here is the source
http://github.com/hhuuggoo/efficiently

and the demo:
https://eff.iciently.com/docview/r/4ed70c031a7ba32edb000002/

But this one is an app, not a plugin, so it might be less useful to some.
I find so much wrong here.
For one you really don't seem familiar with Wine, which despite being run by a ragtag group of developers already has brought legacy support for most Windows games on Linux.

The bluray argument is largely moot.
Valve and the game industry at large could care less about it, with consoles as the exception.
Gabe and his team only have to present a console with an advantage over existing consoles (modular build is a huge deal) with a distro that is stable. With the impressive bases already in existence, and OpenGL being a fullfledged match for Direct X it's a no-brainer that Valve has what it takes to pull this off.

Lastly I'd like to point out the Linux community is not uniformly against closed source. What makes our veins pop is stuff like hardware OEMs not releasing driver sources, making development and innovation a pain.
Who cares if a game is closed source?
Show HN: Complete Linux Mint (Ubuntu) Setup for Node.js Developers
The problem is that it might matter for HTPC consumers now, which could hinder the potential later of consumer Linux HTPCs.
Money likes to flow. It feels "good" to let money flow. Using discipline is at odds with almost every natural instinct that most people have. When a windfall heads your way it is easy to think it is endless. Treating them with respect is probably the best business lesson an entrepreneur can learn.
The RICO case was filed before the US District Court of the Southern District of NY.
Awesome idea, thanks!
I agree. MathJax renders this both pointless and outdated. All my recent articles use MathJax and I wouldn't dream of going back to graphics for equation rendering.
I think the plan my friend was using was Rogers iPad plan... data only, but it was really reasonable.
It seems more likely to me that they just run the PRNG before the spinning block animation begins, no? Or maybe time isn't a factor in their seed, just game state?
Maybe they save the PRNG seed specifically to prevent this particular form of "cheating" (loading a saved game continuously trying to get a difference result?) It's better than the "you can only restore from the beginning of the level" alternative, anyway.
That's kind of like the story about the group of blind men and the elephant.

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

You were so conditioned to what you'd find that everything you saw fed the template in your mind. Here's a counter story from an outsider:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2013/09/16/venture-for...

Detroit is the perfect entrepreneurs city. Tremendous opportunities along with tremendous risks. I've waited my entire life to see progress in Detroit's long downward slide. Sadly now that it is here few can see it.
Not necessarily. If it simply sets the random seed once as the program starts, then saving the state of the game, and reloading it repeatedly will give the same result from rand(), because the seed hasn't changed and you are rewinding/repeating time.

If I flip a coin in a deterministic universe, it's still "random" (air flow, force exerted, etc), but if I "rewind time" and play it back, I'd get the same result.
Older game compatibility might not be so much of an issue in itself.
You have the same thing with Windows to a degree, plenty of DOS / Win95 era titles are not directly compatible with newer versions.
Same with older consoles.

What tends to happen is either there is a re-release to cash in on a previously successful game or compatibility tools (WINE/DOSBOX) become good enough over time.

The biggest hurdle is the lack of a killer reason to run a Linux gaming system over a Windows system or a console. AFAIK there is no big title in the works that will be in any way a Linux exclusive.

Here the open nature of Linux actually works against it to a degree, since the underlying stack is open source, dependencies can be (and are) ported to other platforms with less technical and legal issues then proprietary systems like DirectX.
Just for kicks, I timed how long it took to hash a 1Mb password on an EC2 small instance:

>>> timeit.timeit('make_password(a, "asdfasdfasd")', setup="a = 'a' * 1024 * 1024; from django.contrib.auth.hashers import make_password;", number=1)
206.77019500732422
You Can Hack Your Growth, but Don't Hack Your Marketing
John, it's great that you want to learn more about those topics. But, don't misunderstand. Earning a PhD is like 10% learning about the topic, and 90% learning the process of research and the business of research. Based on your blog post, it's going to take a while until that other 90% really hits you. Reading papers is easy compared to writing them.

Also, PhD studies and the academic life at a research institution are emotionally stressful and extremely time consuming. You have to consider the negative impact of that on your family, regardless of how supportive they are.
indexes and chunks of data that are used often remain cached in each application instance, and new changes are streamed to the application cache.

It means that reads from a hot cache do not touch network. Reads are very fast and scale "out". You can write code that does a lot of reads without caring much about performance. (SQL reads only scale "up" and you care very much about their performance.)

Datomic is like Git (distributed reads, central writes); Postgres is like CVS/SVN (centralized reads and writes). This is made possible by immutable history.
> The internal politics is actually easy to understand. It moves very slowly, and it's based entirely on getting a critical mass of influential people in the department to be on your side. It requires a lot of closed door chats to get things done.

Definitely. I'm entering my fourth year now, and in retrospect, it's completely unsurprising. But when I entered graduate school, I almost immediately realized that I had idealized the notion of academia. Probably because I was a newborn pup as far as academia was concerned and really wanted to believe bullshit didn't get in the way of quality publications. (And I don't even have any sour anonymous review experiences myself.)

But academia is just like everything else: most people seem motivated to publish to advance their career. Only a few good ones are out to publish something to help others. I really thought it'd be the other way around when I entered. Naive, I know.
Demographics. Detroit is 82% African and 31% minors. Pittsburgh is 26% African and 20% minors.

And Pittsburgh has not had an insurrection in living memory.
Ten years from now: /.*/ has been acquired by Google.
I'm curious about how you and your employer would report your income for tax purposes. As far as I know, an employer can't write "50 bitcoins" on your W-2 or 1099 form.
Office Pet Peeve Cartoon
Totally do-able. Example: "Society for the Protection of SPS"
Most games shape their random events because true random is actually really frustrating to play.. but what it appears to me here is that there's a PRNG here that was seeded before he save-stated.. and since he didn't do anything that called the PRNG before that head-butt, the number didn't changed.

This sort of behavior is famous in Fire Emblem.. but there's also a trick due to how some of the games do pathfinding. Some of the games, if the game can't decide which path to take, calls the PRNG to decide. Since you've induced a call to the PRNG, you can redo a specific battle with a different random number generation.
If you were playing on a console, the fact that the number is chosen ahead of time wouldn't make a difference. The only way you can be disappointed by this predetermination is if you are trying to game the system with an emulator. This doesn't seem like some cardinal sin to me considering you'd never know if you played the game the way the game was meant to be played.
As long as the dice roll is a) statistically fair with equal odds for each possible outcome and b) cannot be determined by the player in advance, it doesn't matter when the dice value is computed. That way, the value can be computed in the background, and there isn't any lag when the player hits the die.

Admittingly, since it is Mario Party, the dice definitely aren't fair.

Coincidently, for many Nintendo games, there's usually a way to control randomness by deliberately seeding the RNG in a certain way. (Pokemon in particular has many RNG/memory manipulation tricks).

One my favorite RPGs, Golden Sun, has an RNG flaw that if you perform an exact sequence of attacks in a certain order, you will ALWAYS get a rare item drop.

http://minimaxir.com/2013/05/guaranteed-to-be-random/
For me, as a perpetual employee that would love to run his own business one day (and is working towards that), this is quite an insight, but I'll bet it's hard to do it another way:

-------------------------------------------------------------

The only raises we had were merit raises, as you improved your skills and impact. You were expected to manage your own time, with no set hours, and the only responsibility around vacation time was to make sure that no balls got dropped.

Eventually, I hired an employment lawyer to review my draft, and he said, “That’s the most inspiring employee manual I’ve ever read, but I can’t let you use it.”

I complained, but I eventually gave in. As we grew, it was harder and harder to maintain our informal processes. (I remember a real inflection point at about 50-60 employees, and another at about 100.) We gradually gave up our homegrown way of doing things, and accepted normal HR practices — vacation and sick days, regular reviews, annual salary adjustments — and bit by bit, I let the “HR professionals” take over the job of framing and managing the internal culture. That was a mistake.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Also, MIR is using CLA, which sucks.
Well, I mean, yeah. If you don't enjoy it or end up in a position where you no longer enjoy it, then doing it for fun is no longer a good reason. :-)

I certainly didn't mean to imply that everyone's experience should be rosy...
I don't see how you can separate the two. The current system used to work because the population was growing and people didn't live as long. Either change would be enough to result in lower benefits.
This page has prices on islands near Halifax.

http://www.privateislandsonline.com/areas/novascotia/islands...

The cheapest is 29K for 54 acres 2 hours drive from Halifax.
Try netflix-desktop. It's a package available for Ubuntu and Arch (probably more, but those I know of). One click install of everything you need for Netflix, without messing with your current Wine install. Worked for me!
How so? Then I can buy any kind of land and claim it as my own :)
This would mainly be used for posting to sites that allow images but not custom javascript. If you run your own site and can use MathJax, then you are fine but for others that cannot include the javascript (comments systems, social sites, etc.) this would be a nice alternative.
See also tinyduino: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kenburns/tinyduino-the-t...
smaller, but less accessible hardware interface.
Hello, all. Many people seem to have gotten the impression from my letter that because we ran out of funds paying for the conversion of FLP Volume I from LaTeX to HTML we need additional funds to complete the conversion. However, that is not the case because some chapters of Vols. II & III were also converted for us (though imperfectly), and after comparing the Vol. I HTML to the original LaTeX, I found I could do the conversion myself quite easily using parametrized regular expression search and replace operations and a minimum of hand-editing. I am able to convert one chapter of FLP from the LaTeX to HTML in about 2 hours. I have been working on completing the remaining Vols. II & III chapters in my spare time, and they are very nearly done. Only a few chapters remain to be converted, and a few others only need some HTML tables. We are planning to make a second release when our two PDF editions (formatted for the desktop and for tablets) are available for sale online. In fact, the PDF editions have been ready for a long time, but the publisher is having some difficulties getting them into their retailers' sales queues. Today we have the first evidence of the publisher's success in resolving the difficulties:

https://www.cafescribe.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product...

So, hopefully it will not be long before we add the completed Vols. II and III chapters to the published HTML edition, with the few remaining chapters to follow shortly.

Michael A. Gottlieb
Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
www.feynmanlectures.info
I currently backup to (encrypted volumes on) external USB drives at home. I just recently moved and now have much more upstream bandwidth (FTTH, yay!) so I wanted to do off-site backups as well. After careful consideration, I decided to occasionally make an "encrypted full backup" and then permanently archive those to Amazon's Glacier service.

Edit: Just read your comment further down where you also mention using Glacier. Have you restored any data from it to test it out yet? If so, are you happy with it? Thanks.
Yah I agree, this list doesn't build all the bridges that are really there, like Joe Lonsdale (of Palantir) now funding OculusVR. We need a list that connects all the relevant people and boards with everyone else, then we will have a more accurate picture. Can anyone provide it?
In theory I agree, but I very rarely run into people who actually do so on their own. Even fewer who do something recognizable as contributions to a research field, in the sense of writing up something of peer-reviewed paper quality, which indicates the author is familiar with existing research, appropriately explains how the new contribution relates to concepts and techniques that already exist, and presents the results in a convincing format (whether that's statistical analysis or a good case study or whatever). It doesn't even have to actually be published; I'm fine browsing papers on arXiv too, or things circulated as whitepapers or tech reports.

They exist, but they're uncommon, and many of the people doing that kind of work are in sort of para-academic jobs, like long-time librarian at a big research library, or senior staff member at a (government or corporate) research lab. Even in an environment like Google, the majority of the papers and paper-like writeups seem to come from either people with PhDs, or people with long track records in a quasi-academic environment, like Google's sizable stable of ex-Bell-Labs researchers.

I don't really say that out of any particular love for institutionally tied research, but more out of the opposite, a frustration that it's so rare to find DIY research that really contributes to a research field. Some of that, I assume, is just incentives: if what you earn money on involves getting something to work, all that really matters is that you come up with a technique that works. Understanding how your technique relates to existing techniques, explaining whether it's completely novel or a variant of an established one, and doing the detailed analysis to figure out why precisely it outperforms existing techniques (e.g. is there one particular tweak that's critical, and if so, why is it critical?), is not always something incentivized in that context, but is important to advancing the state of knowledge in a field.
That's why the first sentence of my post was:

>I see RT as likely to accelerate the adoption of platform agnostic web apps in enterprise.

I am specifically not advocating platform-specific applications.

Microsoft has essentially thrown away the reasons for enterprise developers to tie themselves down to the Microsoft platform. If that's the case, there's relatively little reason to tie themselves down to any single platform.
I wonder why it isn't showing up? Do you know the case number?
You are correct of course. Now I feel sad that I didn't do the math correctly in my head (in my world apparently kilometers are like 100M or something :-()
It's a bit of a stretch to believe that the Nintendo 64 developers on boxed cartridge software foresaw a day when someone would try to "cheat" using an emulator and specifically coded against it. You can't use save states like this to play a live game on the original system.

If there was a way to skillfully roll the dice, it would give a massive advantage to dice-practicers (in this particular game).

The OP really objects to the illusion of agency. If his random number were generated seeded by the number of microseconds since the dice roll animation began, he would have no complaints. Even though the dice roll is just as random one way or the other.
Solar Panel Is Next Granite Countertop for Homebuilders
That's not exactly true. In Canada government-backed Interac Flash [1] made many merchants accept NFC-enabled cards (debit and credit). I personally use it quite often (e.g. when buying groceries at Metro stores) and not only is it convenient for customers, but also I'm sure it has strong business case and good ROI for the merchants since it allows serving customers faster with shorter lines and fewer cachiers.

[1] http://www.interac.ca/en/interac-flash/interac-flash-for-con...
Speaking of "scalable code", there is another interesting obfuscated piece of code that can scale itself. akari.c[1] is an obfuscated ASCII art downsampler.

The neat thing is that the program itself is ASCII art, and downscaling the program source code will generate valid programs for 3 iterations![2]

[1] http://www.ioccc.org/2011/akari/akari.c
[2] http://www.ioccc.org/2011/akari/hint.html
Malala, Snowden nominated for EU human rights award
It's a shame that it comes to this - someone fighting with their personal wealth. The patent trolls are very well funded.
Really cool, we just spent quite a bit of time playing with it! Who knew South Dakota had hydropower, much less water...

When you get around to refactoring, were you considering ditching Rails? I think this would be really well suited (even if you expand it) to a static site generator like Middleman with Ember or Angular.
I don't mean to nitpick, but that is one thing I don't find to be true.
Comparing W7 install to Linux Mint, Mint won by landslide on my laptop.
Disregarding the horrorshow of a partition layout from the manufacturer that I had to fix, the mint install was much, much faster and easier, with full support from the get-go.
The drivers thing really is an important point, and even when my Windows install was fully completed, the fact I had to cope with the horrible ASUS shell to use keyboard functions has caused me to not even boot W7 for months.

I use arch on my other machines, and naturally that is a whole other story I wouldn't even dare tell a less tech-savvy person.
How to Get to Real Time with A Data Warehouse
Sorry... did I give it away? My bad.
If you all aren't familiar with Mario Party, here's what they're talking about: for a number of applications like turn order and movement distance, a Mario-style block that looks like a rolling die appears over your character's head. When you jump and hit the block, it settles on a single number. Apparently, you get the same number regardless of how long you wait to jump. The issue here isn't that the PRNG is reseeded or anything, it's that the appearance of player autonomy is an illusion.
Apologies, I spent too much time around loggers. I'd hate to be under a tree that sheds politicians and bankers :)
I was rather confused since I know more about finance than logging.

In finance, "Widowmaker" means one thing: Shorting Japanese Government Bonds (JGB) and inevitably losing money.
Because of Japan’s gigantic national debt, and because the Japanese bond rally has gone on so long, investors have called the top in the Japanese bond market for years, only to get impaled.

thanks for clearing it up.
HTML5 image editor wants to replace Photoshop and Gimp