skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also can't help but note that Gabe only began this public crusade when Microsoft released an app store that competed with Valve's app store.

Well, of course. It's not hard to see the writing on the wall. Valve is looking for a platform where they can't be muscled out before they're muscled out of the one they're on. You can only compete with a vertical integrator for a long as they allow you compete. Doubly so with software platforms. If you look at the trajectory of Microsoft's platform control, there is zero reason Valve shouldn't be shitting their pants right now.
Audio just works if you're not a power user, or use only programs compatible with each other. Try using a JACK application alongside an ALSA one and you'll see it doesn't "just work".

Even then, if you stick to ALSA applications, you'll have a few issues:

1) You're going to be limiting yourself to a lot less possibilities (Skype uses Pulse, IIRC, for example)

2) You can't have simple settings such as per-application volume control.

Sure it "just works", but it does if you use a set of programs which only the people who say "it just works" (a lot of people, I know) restrict themselves to. While it may work for you, different people have different needs.

I'm still waiting for the day Linux audio (and video, but less hopeful because of proprietary drivers) simply works in the same way it does under Windows/Mac.

Footnote: I completely forgot to mention latency issues, which is awful for audio processing.
Linux Leads Self-Driving Car Movement
The developers of Fallout 2 Online released the source code
Thanks! I actually have an RV with solar and LED, so I'm very familiar with the awesomeness of running off the grid. I'm not sure we'll get enough solar to make it cost efficient, but we're still looking into it.

I haven't done enough research into desalination-- I had no idea that shutting it down for a while is a problem. Why is that?

We may also do rainwater recovery + filtration for drinking/cooking, and salt for showering. Worst case we have to bring water over every time and shower in salt.

Planning on doing propane or wood to heat water, propane for refrigeration and cooking.

Thanks for subscribing! We'll be going out in the spring to do some more work and will definitely keep people updated on progress.
Researchers monitor Chinese web controls with fake social network.
Oh god, I'd forgotten about Optimus, it's a whole new level of messed up! I completely agree on that front. Took me days to get my laptop working right over the summer. Thankfully I don't game on my laptop, but if I did, I'd be very annoyed. The only way I actually got everything working was by installing Gnome Shell of all things...
The difference is that the choice of package system is completely in the domain of open source software. Proprietary drivers require support by hardware vendors.

If we had solid, feature-complete open source graphics drivers this wouldn't be an issue.
I disagree. I have 5K rep, I am not quite a newbie myself so I rarely ask. But just this month I have been under a lot of pressure with a site launch so I did put in a few questions. When I've asked a tricky MySQL question someone came in like ten minutes, produced a working answer, soon edited to add a fiddle. The dude is programming almost longer than I am alive! I asked a regexp question -- someone with over 50k answered that. Where else would you find free advice like that? SO is amazing.
Eh, not allowing that subreddit is just Reddit exercising their freedom of the press.
This is such a classic HN comment, sorry. You start off with a totally fair premise, asking genuinely if this is a difficult problem.

But then, you go on to speculate not just that it's probably not technically difficult, just "clever", and then go even further to speculate that it's probably "not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring." Are you asking questions in good faith or are you making claims? What you wrote here seems less a genuine question and more a post to downplay bump's work and their acquisition as worthy.
I can think of one big case: Many NFC tags are used as QR codes. Encrypting this doesn't really get you anything, since it's public information that's being broadcast freely to anyone anyway.

On the flip side, adding the extra hardware to a tag to support encryption has a non-trivial cost. (NFC tags are limited by both storage space and power.) If you're doing mass production of tags, that cost adds up very quickly.
Why did they do that? To make the site less useful unless you'd paid up. i.e. "to encourage you to pay".
No, you can still run games on Win 8 that you can run on Win 7.

Gabe is stating that for Valve and their digital distribution platform Steam, Windows 8 is a 'hostile' environment. They could potentially be blocked/forbidden from deploying steam on Win8 (or future version of windows) as the Windows App store could take it's place as well as any steam updates/game updates would have to go through Microsoft which would cause unnecessary delays/overhead.
I hope so. If anyone buys an island in Nova Scotia, get in touch!

We're leaving all trees around the edge to prevent erosion, and are clearing very minimally. Will definitely be getting some expert advice before making big decisions, though.
With many (likely most) PC gamers having sunk many thousands of dollars into their Steam library, those are the same thing.

Foolish on their part? Probably. However that seems to be the current situation anyway.
To make it more portable and consistent, something you can rely on. To avoid issues with locales (LC_*) and save some CPU in the meantime. To gain control. It would be wrong not to do that for such tiny amount of code.
Tablet games have terrible controls, even when they are implemented as well as possible. There are certain types of games that are well-suited to touch, like Angry Birds, but most games are really awkward to play without a mouse/keyboard or a gamepad.
1) Same argument as ever. OpenGL is cross platform. This means you can reuse your engine for a mobile port of your game.

2) You take some of the graphic card company engineers and put them into a room with game engine engineers. Valve had some spectacular success with this technique lately [0]. Unfortunately, this is not viable for Indies or Free Software devs, but only AAA games need the high end anyways.

[0] http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
Pretty good point, actually - distinction between the small and large companies.

To date though, I only met two people who are proficient in both, and do it day to day.
Doxxing isn't necessarily protected. You're assuming a correctly identified suspect (truth being an absolute defense to a charge of libel, in the US) but there's abundant evidence that a crowd can get carried away, rationalizing what turns out to be a quite incorrect identification.
> How exactly did the US feds "Seize" 5 million in bitcoin?

Presumably, if they wanted to seize bitcoin, they'd produce a demand to turn the bitcoin over along with stating the legal authority for the demand and the legal consequences of failing to comply with it; lots of actual seizures work that way.

But if you read the article, the $5+ million seized from Mt.Gox by the US government was US dollars (not bitcoins) ($2.9 million from Mt.Gox's account with Dwolla, and $2.1+ million from two Wells Fargo accounts), so "how can you seize bitcoins" is irrelevant.
And how is Steam not a closed system?

It is, but currently relies on an specific level of openness in a platform to operate.

Microsoft and Apple are vertical integrators. They don't.

So when the parent said "it seems that Microsoft is fast headed to a closed platform" they were referring to specific aspect(s) of the openness of the platform (Windows). Not saying that Steam was a free-for-all.
Sweetwater well on a saltwater island this size is a rare thing.
The influence of Kickstarter (largely due to Linux support for the popular game engine Unity) and Humble Bundle on the availability of games on Linux cannot be overstated. But even outside of Linux, it is wonderful to see how the indie gaming scene is blooming at the moment.

There was an editorial (which I can't seem to find now) on Rock Paper Shotgun, about how we're having the golden age of gaming right now, and it's very true - though we'll have to wait for many of these kickstarters (Torment and Wasteland, to name to two most well-known ones) to come to fruition.

It's also neat to see that they don't necessarily go the nostalgia route. The last one I've backed, Sunless Sea [1], is going to be a mix of different concepts (roguelike, exploration, survival, trade) along with a mechanism for madness, and is not a follow-up to anything in particular.

I'll toast the future of gaming, happening right now.

1: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/failbetter/sunless-sea/
I've never seen a good answer either, despite searching for one. I've also seen a lot of smart people that are confused by the GPL despite reading a lot about it. I've seen much less of this confusion with other copyleft licenses, like the EPL in the Clojure community.

The GPL sucks, full stop.
We're a bit faster than libevent in terms of dispatch throughput; some benchmarks in this commit message:
https://github.com/facebook/libphenom/commit/41b6106f04fe62c...

The `tests/bench/iopipes.t` "test" allows you to play with some concurrency parameters to try this for yourself on your hardware.

We haven't compared against libev.

We've added some more APIs (buffers and sockets) since those benchmarks were done and we don't have numbers to share around those yet.

One key difference between libevent, libev and libuv is that libphenom is inherently multithreaded in its IO dispatcher and timeout implementation.

If you're dispatching purely CPU bound jobs, we get very close to linear scaling with the number of cores:
https://github.com/facebook/libphenom/commit/c2753c2154a0cff...
The trickle-down technology of the America's Cup
Pandora plans $231M share offering
A long time ago my very athletic college girlfriend dumped me for a very athletic version of me. In the final weeks of that doomed relationship, I desperately hit the gym to try to stop the inevitable end of that first love. I failed.

But what I succeeded at was vowing to never again get dumped for someone that was pretty much me but in better shape. So the rest of the failed experiments on the way to meeting my wife found new and innovative ways to reject me.

These days, when I'm in a technical interview, and I get asked how I solve problems, I answer with something like "On a treadmill, running at 7-9 mph, until the answer becomes clear to me." About 2/3 of the time, the person asking the question is taken aback and I've just saved myself from working at a company full of couch potatoes half my age and heading twice as fast into effective old age. Really, we won't get along, let's just move along.

And about 1/3 of the time, the person seems to get that I'm using exercise to get away from the information deluge of the workplace to give my brain a chance to do its thing. These are the only jobs to which I give any consideration.

The day you stop moving is the day you start dying IMO.
Yes, for causal gaming and general system usage, the open source drivers are usable. But, I play competitively in a clan and take gaming seriously. None of my clan members or gaming buddies would ever sacrifice 10-50% FPS and put up with the micro-stuttering with the open source drivers. I regularly install the gallium3D drivers to see how they are progressing. The current visual glitches and performance hit is unacceptable to me.
That's a fair point.

The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or WiFi Direct.

In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that stuff will improve with time.
In fact, if I remember correctly they are literally not profitable -- the fund has lost money every year since its inception. In some ways they're the ideal investor.

EDIT: decent article on In-Q-Tel from NPR last year that explains that they originally intended to make money, but as of last year they hadn't (and weren't on track to do so)http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839...
You should do a little research into how this whole energy/technology/computing/internet stuff came to being.

Steve Blank gives a good talk about the "Secret History of Silicon Valley" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

You'll note that at the end he kind of says "but everything got better and we're all driven solely by the capital markets and they know best - don't worry be happy! Pay no attention to the g-men behind the cur.."
With the Global Warming upon the Human Race, it will be stupid to buy the Islands which might not last forever... All the Islands that are available look like they might submerge within another 5 years.. paying those exuberant rates for islands is stupidity..

Look for Islands with a Hillview, that might work out..
I think I'll have time to look at this tomorrow. Maybe.
Yup. I'd be happy if we all as an industry took a year or two to evaluate all our current technology and fixed as much as possible to make everything resistant to eavesdropping by intelligence agencies all over the world. Until I have confidence that I can trust the device in my pocket, I don't really want to be granting it even more privacy invading features ripe for abuse.
I'm all for games on Linux, but the reason why he's saying "Linux is the future" is because the MS Store is threatening Steam's business model if it stays on Windows.
Haha, I had a double-take when I clicked the link.

I didn't mean to misrepresent core.async. I just heard about it one day and got compelled enough by a walkthrough[1] to convince myself I could figure enough of it out to make something happen in my nrepl buffer. Which happens to also describe my approach to life now that I think about it. Except, you know, in my life buffer.

[1]: https://github.com/clojure/core.async/blob/master/examples/w...
It's an LLC. We have a lawyer as a member of the group, so he drafted our purchase and sale agreement and our operating agreement. We had to hire a local lawyer, too, to draft an affidavit and to register the deed.
The problem with moon hoax theories is that, in the modern day, we're accustomed to extremely realistic CGI. What we don't realize is that in 1969, it would have been harder to FAKE the moon landings than to actually land on the moon.

This video explains why: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU
I saw the == and it looked so suspicious but I didn't know what it was from. That'll be burned in my brain from now on, though.
How Rich and Poor Spend Their Money
What's coming in WebGL 2.0
Ooh. Maybe they can patch POE::XS to use this as a backend. The existing POE::XS code is 9 years old, and I can only assume probably doesn't work after that long without updates.
Ada Developers Academy Launched
They are doing what's right IMHO. Doxxing people that have nothing to do with the situation because some internet sleuth found a picture with them in it, even though they have nothing to do with it, is wrong.
Thank you! Some of my ancestry is from there, but it's the first time I've visited. I was really struck by how friendly everyone is, and how beautiful the area is. Halifax was a cool city, too.
It's not about absolute time. I mean a GC worse than another 15 year older GC, does not necesarilly needs 15 years to catch up to it.

It might never catch up, or it might catch up in just a few years years, if people and funds are concetrated on that goal.

For example from the legacy of the usual dog slow JS implementations, we got V8 feature complete in less than 2 years and could run rings around them. Same for the JIT-ed js engines of Mozilla and Apple.

And while Google and Apple have tons of funds, Mozilla scale development is not that far from the reach of a typical open source project with industry bakers.
I made this site: www.rocketships.ca/fixmybug due to that very frustration. It doesn't in anyway replace SO, it's intended to help us help each other solve minor syntax errors and misunderstandings... the sort of thing that gets you banned from Stack Overflow. It's pretty quiet now though as I never got around to drumming up users.
You're going to be running cutting edge games on a Surface? I don't think so. Perhaps in 5 years you could stuff enough electronics in a box the size of a tablet to run current games of today at max settings on something like an Occulus Rift. But then what about the new games 5 years from now? PC Gaming is an arms race which has always required expensive and significant hardware to enjoy at the top level. I don't see tablets replacing that anytime soon.
I'm not hot for reimplementing printf, but I did need an interface that made it easy to print diagnostics for various objects; rendering them to the stack and then passing them to the underlying printf implementation makes for a lot of boilerplate code.

In addition to reducing boilerplate and aiding portability, having our own printf implementation aids in consistent behavior across platforms, and allows for a deeper integration with our streams and buffers so that we don't need to make a series of clunky calls to measure how much storage is needed before passing the formatted data into the lower layers.
But how can you go from "no personal information about leads unless you are really sure" to NOTHING?

Is it correct to sacrifice catching the bad guy to protect the small chance that someone is wrongly accused?

Reddit now simply holds their public image higher than justice. I would wager investors and senior management who have a financial interest made this decision.
Reddit has free speech too. It works both ways.
FYI (only tangentially related to the presentation), here are the latest hardware survey results for Steam users.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

You'll notice Windows 7 is still #1 (not surprising) but Windows 8 and 8.1 are the fastest growing, with almost 15% of Steam users running Win8 64bit.
Can you vote someone off the island?
Grind: A Workspace for Free Range Humans
I live in Hamilton, ON - basically Pittsburgh of Canada. Well, Pittsburgh with a time-machine back to that confused period when Steel City was on the pivotal moment where it could decay into Detroit or become what it is today.

Local activists and even the CBC point to Pittsburgh as basically Hamilton's to-do list, and former mayor Tom Murphy in particular.

Basically, his approach was this: cut spending brutally, raise taxes (especially parking tax, which improves revenue, cuts traffic, and gets more people into bikes and buses), call in favors from philanthropists, bulldoze the steel mills into profitable waterfront land.

Too late for Detroit to make those changes, though.
> still needs manufacturer supplied toolchain for the rest of the steps

This still kills the desired properties of the system. You need open source tools end-to-end, all the way down to the place-and-route system. A backdoor can be inserted at any point otherwise.

Stepping away from the current state of things, competition in the FPGA space still relies heavily on patents and trade secrets. Until that changes, the proposed approach isn't viable.

I wonder if Xilinx or Altera will ever consider this market space interesting enough to pursue. Unfortunately, my gut says no.
10gen- Is it safe to use mongo?
Correct; In-Q-Tel is not trying to make a profit.

The purpose of In-Q-Tel is to subsidize technologies that could be useful for the intelligence community (CIA, NSA, etc.) -- with the implication that entrepreneurs might have less incentive to develop such technologies if there weren't someone willing to fund them. A lot of these technologies are R&D-intensive, aren't massively scalable, don't have a huge consumer TAM, and wouldn't meet the criteria traditional VCs would demand from an ROI standpoint. So the presence of an investor without a profit motive makes a lot of sense.

In many respects this is similar to DARPA, and I don't see anyone up in arms about DARPA.

I know the NSA is a hot-button topic right now, as well it should be. But let's not bust out the torches and pitchforks over anything and everything with some connection to the intelligence community. We're placing some pretty heavy burdens of guilt by association on the startups in this list, whether fairly or unfairly.
I'm actually really into learning about forest management. I've been reading a lot about it, and it's fascinating stuff. Based on our usage, it seems that we should be fine, especially since few people will be coming in winter. My bigger concern right now is bringing back birch trees! We have some dead ones, but very few live ones. The whole island is balsamic fir right now, so it smells like Christmas trees.
It's almost like the admins, the contributors to vigilante subreddits, contributors to SRS/SRD, and in fact everyone on reddit are different people or something.
Question is, if Windows becomes a closed ecosystem or flops altogether, would PC gamers elect to move to Linux? Even if they do, there's going to be a significant loss of numbers along the way, and it's already a smaller market than consoles. I can see a future where most game companies (barring maybe Valve, Blizzard, and a few others) cut their losses and decide to focus solely on consoles and iOS/Android. That would be a sad future indeed.
A distribution is not based on patches - its based on picking software packages which to bundled together into a working operative system.

But okay, lets go with the distributions desire to chose what license to use. Who cares about the license? The whole point of pragmatism winning over idealism is to achieve a set of practical effects, regardless lofty concept such as "freedom of choosing license".

A distribution is most effective when it can use the best software as much as it can. This mean that a pragmatic distribution should use any software, be that proprietary, GPL, permissive, anything, so long it is superior. A pragmatic approach to license issues would be to have built in tools to slim down the distribution to reach specific practical effects depending on the need of each individual users.

Surely, giving people working graphic drivers is more pragmatic than giving people nothing and say "the software that give your practical use from your hardware is under the wrong license".
> Reddit has free speech too.

Actually, Reddit doesn't have free speech. Reddit moderators are famous for enforcing their personal views by banning, or threatening to ban, people who express dissenting views. The level of censorship is so high that one wonders whether those doing the censoring even understand what free speech refers to.

Example: http://arachnoid.com/psychology/reddit_psychology.html
> But for a few years starting in 1969 we routinely soft landed a rocket on an unmapped alien surface

Er, no, we didn't. Before we started landing people on the moon, we sent a series of unmanned mapping missions to the moon so that we wouldn't be trying to land on an unmapped alien surface. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_program
You have no protected speech on reddit; they aren't the USG and by no means have to comply with the first amendment. So get off of your high horse, they're allowed to enforce their policies how they feel fit.

Edit: Also, you're going to have a hard time getting a favorable interpretation of True Threat Doctrine from a court -- which is really the only reason why it would be removed.
NSA Head Modeled His Office After The Bridge Of The Starship Enterprise
I hope to some day have it visitable in the winter, but not expecting it to be ready for that any time soon. The idea is to start with a cool private camp site, and eventually build it into a year-round sustainable retreat.