skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whoa cool. This will work well. I implemented a similar dynamic lighting solution for sprites back in 1997. I used 3D models though that were rendered and then the pure colors and Z-buffer were captured for dynamic lighting effects. Mentioned here as "Software Prototype: Real-time 2D Sprite Shader":

http://www.exocortex.org/ben/#High_School-Era_and_Earlier_Pr...
I was thinking about the same thing myself. If the lamp can unpack the 3d data from 2d assets in a web browser you could seriously increase the art quality in webapps without hugely increasing download size.
This is really cool.

My first thought was it is probably just a clever little convolution kernel trick but it seems harder after reading about it.
This is awesome and kind of makes me want to get back into game programming. Unfortunately, I have no artistic ability whatsoever, and don't really have the time if I did.
Solution: stop using Ubuntu.

There are lots of other very able distributions out there, many of which not only have better privacy features but also are technologically superior in one way or another.

In no particular order, these are all very capable operating systems for a variety of needs:

* https://fedoraproject.org/

* http://www.centos.org/

* http://www.opensuse.org/

* http://www.mageia.org/

* https://www.archlinux.org/

* http://www.gentoo.org/

* http://www.sabayon.org/

* http://www.debian.org/

* http://www.linuxmint.com/

This list is non exhaustive. They are all free. They all work well in different places. There are others too.

We've all had ample indication that Ubuntu was headed for the pits. It's time to move on.

-- a proud gentoo dev
Does anyone have data on earnings from the pay what you want model that Ubuntu is using?
...or any Java program.
Breaking News: Soon you will GET to play Quake as a program that you download and install, rather than HAVING to play it in the browser because...seriously...who wants to do that?
Not really. Imagine if you had a serious alcohol control problem, alcohol was a huge trigger for you, you had a family alcohol related death, you were arrested for drinking and driving, you grew up with alcoholic parents, you were removed from your parents as a child because they couldn't care for your because of their alcohol problem, etc.
It's a step in the right direction. Comcast already cuts people off who download "too much" too many times. It used to be that "too much" was undefined, then it became 250GB.

The necessary next step is other internet providers competing on speed + cap. People can compare to an expensive LTE plan capped at 5GB, and make an informed decision. When there is FIOS at the same speed with no cap, or a 1Gbps uncapped provider, people have a real choice.
> Please refrain from the "EEs don't know how to program" comments.

No, no. As an EE I can tell you that lots of EE's really suck at software development. They never really took the time to study CS to a reasonable depth. As a result you see code that is just horrid and really naive. I've seen stuff that could blow up boards Hollywood style in a microsecond. Such things as potential timing conflicts turning on two MOSFETs such that you have cross conduction and draw hundreds of amps due to the direct short from +V to GND.

Now, on the other hand, "desktop" programmers are equally --if not more-- dangerous than ignorant EE's. They have no clue and no experience with hostile embedded environments. I mean, the simple startup configuration code of some modern microcontrollers is the kind of thing you'd never see in desktop or web development. Then you have a myriad of other issues: watchdog timers, drooping/unreliable power supplies, static discharge-induced reset, load dump in automotive, similar applications, or noisy signals, sensor and key-panel data, potential single bit flip situations in aerospace/radiation environments, thermal issues, etc. The list is huge.

These are issues that are far better understood by an EE. And so, the best embedded software developer is probably going to be an EE with real solid training of CS principles as well as an solid understanding of defensive or safety-critical electronic and software design principles.

An example that comes to mind was when we designed a high-power motor controller many years ago. This thing could handle thousands of Watts. Testing included full output short circuits, zapping it with static electricity, exposing it to RF via close proximity antennas and coils and other torture tests. We discovered that under very rare conditions the output to go to full power when power was first applied AND the power connection was, I'll say, uniquely noisy. Imagine a corroded connection to a power strip on a marine platform that is moving. When power is applied, if you look at it on an oscilloscope, it looked like the most horrible noise you'd ever seen --except this noise was actually powering the board. We had to build a custom power tester using old motor brushes and an old commutator driven by a small motor in order to simulate ugly power supply scenarios. We later replaced this with a programmable digital system that could do the same. The embedded software and the hardware was then modified to deal with these ugly conditions and much worst cases as well. The thing was nearly bulletproof.

So, yeah, drop any EE in front of a compiler and you'll probably end-up with really dangerous code. An EE with the right training and lots of scars would be the best option. Someone with a bachelors or masters in CS and no EE training and embedded world experience could be scary dangerous.
A PHP library for Server-side Google Analytics by using the Measurement Protocol
As someone who has dealt with telecommunications providers (Sprint, AT&T, Verizon) for the last 10 years on a professional basis, "Unlimited" is ALWAYS a code word for "There is a level that if you go over, bad things will happen to you, from traffic shaping, to outright cancellation of your account."

Honest to goodness conversation with Verizon I had in 2005 (we were purchasing about 100 M2M (Machine to Machine) CDMA circuits) - it was Pythonesque in its tortured logic.

Me: So, I'm wondering how much traffic we can use?
Sales Guy: They are totally unlimited
Me: Great, so how much is "Totally Unlimited?"
Sales Guy: Just what it sounds like - No Limit.
Me: Right, but what is the actual Limit.
Sales Guy: It's unlimited.
Me: So, I can stream 100 kilobits/second continuously for 32 gigabytes/month/circuit:
Sales Guy: No, that would fall under our unapproved usage clause.
Me: Yes. I understand. So, I'm wondering how much traffic we can use?
Google also doesn't: molest me at airports or train stations, drone civilians, assassinate anybody, launch wars that kill tens of thousands, murder your family with a SWAT team, violate your rights with force via parallel construction, threaten you with the espionage act, sell guns to Mexican cartels, sell weapons to anybody much less theocracies and violent 3rd world states. Google also can't null and void the entire US Constitution at will by using force.

Yep, it's absurd to the extreme to compare the NSA and Feds to Google.
With voice commands, what happens during a spouse/sibling fight over channel selection or other uses? If one person is playing a game, can another person that has the biometric ID set up come in and take over? Is there a hierarchy in control or total chaos?
Just for kicks I tried it out on chrome on my Nexus 4. It renders great, but the movements are jerky. There are some conflicts between zoom on the page and zoom on the globe.

I'm impressed it worked at all on mobile.
pg writes about a lot of this in his essay Mind the Gap.
http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
I suppose for animations you'd need to recreate the light profiles for every frame?
Yeah, I feel like we've been here before. The tractor eventually put ~90% of the population out of work. If you were someone without a tractor, you'd be watching your neighbours become more wealthy while you'd be left worrying about completely losing your livelihood.
A Critique of Website Traffic Fingerprinting Attacks
Unless you're in Cyprus.
> People use default Ubuntu with Unity?

Of course, I don't even change the background. "Canical crap" is mostly mythical or takes a single toggle to turn off.
Sure, it only takes one guy to write an OSS backend clone. Does he host it, or does the user host it? If the user hosts it, does it work on Windows, is it a simple install, can an average person figure out how to run their own dedicated server using the software? Does the maintainer respond to bugs? Does the maintainer have time to maintain the app? Does the maintainer work for free?
Local man sues over junk phone calls that urge him to update his Google listing
To each his own. I'm always impressed when I or my wife walk in front of the xbox and it figures out who we are during a kinect game. There's a wonderful sci-fi like feeling the Kinect produces that no other tech of mine does. It really does feel magical sometimes.

This whole "THE NSA HAS OUR MEMES!!" is a bit over the top. Being overly paranoid hurts innovation and limits what we can do. Also, if you think Gabe Newell and his people aren't storing all sorts of stuff about you, I think you have an overly rosey view of non-MS companies. Most of us a carry senor-laden devices that make the Kinect look like a potato in our pocket everyday.

Imagine if Tim-Berners Lee was on the receiving end of this in the 90s? "YOU WANT TO STORE COOKIES ON MY COMPUTER? YOU'RE STORING IP ADDRESSES AND USER-AGENTS?!?!?! RUN SCRIPT IN THE BROWSER???"

Yeah, the web wouldn't exist then. We'd have "GNU Privacy Gopher" and no one would use it other than Richard Stallman.

If your government is fascist then fix it. Don't blame the guys trying to make great games.
Enforcement has been suspended in the majority of markets for the last ~18 months or so.
It's not in my knowledge how to quantify unlimited. Any definition of unlimited should come from the provider, Comcast.
> It's a search box that many people will use exclusively to search for _local_ content.

That still doesn't make it a privacy violation, since you know where your searches are going (as does any other user, since it's obvious based on the results).

> Why should Amazon know what programs and files I'm using?

It makes the normal user's life more convenient since he doesn't need to figure out which box to type something in. You think that's ridiculous? Users are well known for typing web addresses into any box available. They cannot tell the difference. Having a single box for everything makes for a better experience,.

Amazon doesn't know what programs and files you're using, since Canonical anonymizes it. If you don't like it, or you don't trust Canonical, and you still want to use the "search everything" search box, then adjust the settings to do what you want.
Yeah, I switched to Debian a while back and it was surprisingly frictionless.
Automobiles have not done wonderful things for minority groups in inner cities. There have always been ghettos and rich areas, of course, but they used to be right next to each other. Now, you have middle class and rich people living in suburban enclaves which they protect by lobbying to keep them inaccessible except by car. The advent of the car has been incredibly damaging and polarizing to the American social fabric.
Most routers in homes have IPv6 support.

The real problem is getting ISPs to provide IPv6 support.
This is pretty neat, but I find it pretty annoying that my eyes have to keep shifting up and down to read the explanation for each command. It would be nice if the explanation text popped up closer to where my eyes are already focused.
Rock, Paper, Scissors Robot Wins Hands Down Every Time
IOS/OS X Build Tools: From Code to Mach-O Executables
Guys this is amazing.
Adobe breach far larger than disclosed
So essentially the market for health insurance is competitive on what companies can afford rather than individuals? So the proposed change would force insurance companies to be more competitive on a smaller scale and in the long run, cheaper. Interesting.
The Ten Ninety Nihilists
Is this common, that an automatic transmission won’t immediately shift to neutral? I thought that automatic transmissions usually let you shift to neutral without pushing the shifter button in to let you shift to neutral without blowing through it at trying to put the engine in reverse. Shifting into neutral while driving shouldn’t break anything, unless maybe if the throttle is fully open and the rev limiter isn’t working, but that’s the most important situation for being able to shift into neutral, isn’t it? I don’t see why an engineer would want to try to prevent this.
Been using lubuntu on my laptop ever since I got it
What you will be going through?
What is the eventual revenue model for this? It seems this is going to take quite a bit of computing to remain a free chrome extension for too long.
Did you read the part explaining what each of the commands does...?
There's a native way to avoid that recursion.

var snap = document.evaluate('//text()', document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null );
for (var i=0;i<snap.snapshotLength;i++){t=snap.snapshotItem(i);t.textContent = replace(t.textContent);}

Also, the regexps would probably be better like /\belection\b/gi, to avoid eg reelection->reeating contest.
I recently recorded a screencast [1], about linux cgroups, and how you can restrict/shape various program resources. For one of the examples, I wrote the following C program to take 50MB of memory, at around the 15:45 mark in the screencast you can see it in action, but this could easy be modified, and add a sleep, to hold the memory for a while. You would most likely need to disable swap if you wanted to use 90% of the free memory, run "free -m; swapoff -a; free -m" as root, then use "swapon -a" to enable it again.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void) {

int i;
char *p;

/* intro message */
printf("Starting ...\n");

/* loop 50 times, try and consume 50 MB of memory */
for (i = 0; i < 50; ++i) {

/* failure to allocate memory? */
if ((p = malloc(1<<20)) == NULL) {
printf("Malloc failed at %d MB\n", i);
return 0;
}

/* take memory and tell user where we are at */
memset(p, 0, (1<<20));
printf("Allocated %d to %d MB\n", i, i+1);

}

/* exit message and return */
printf("Done!\n");
return 0;

}

[1] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/14-introduction-to-linux-c...
It's open source. Since it sounds like you won't trust Canonical's claim on this anyway, why don't you take a look, or ask somebody who can, instead of creating fear about it?

If it turns out that searches leak out despite the setting, I'm sure you'll hit the front page of HN. Since this hasn't happened, and Canonical have been under considerable scrutiny about it, I think it's safe to say that your conspiracy theory doesn't hold up.
Broadband prices across the world:
(45 Mbps or more)

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70717000/gif/_70717869...

This research echoes the findings of another report earlier in the summer by the OECD, which compared countries in terms of their broadband-only prices. Across all 10 download speeds and capacities, it consistently ranked the US near the bottom.

For instance, at high speeds of 45 Mbps and over, the OECD report has the US ranked 30th out of 33 countries, with an average price of $90 a month. With phone and TV thrown in, plus some premium channels, these packages often cost $200.

"Americans pay so much because they don't have a choice," says Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama on science, technology and innovation policy.

Although there are several national companies, local markets tend to be dominated by just one or two main providers.

"We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight."

Two-thirds get their broadband via their television cables, she says, because the DSL (digital subscriber line) service provided by phone companies over copper lines can't compete with cable speeds, while wireless and satellite services are subject to low usage caps.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383
It's not, it's one of a number of ways they monetize their product.
Regarding that "disclaimer" in the corner, here's why it was added:

https://micahflee.com/2013/11/canonical-shouldnt-abuse-trade...
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book!

I followed my intuition and bought this book a few days ago when Christian Grobmeier first released it. I had no knowledge of his history, but there was "something" about how he presented it that influenced me to buy it immediately.

This book has a lot of great little stories to think about. The author weaves the concepts of Zen and Buddhism into practical thoughts for those who lead a life that involves professional computer programming -- work that is very mind-driven and which can consume your life if you're not careful and balanced.

The very last section of the last non-summary chapter ("Zenify Your Project") in particular made me smile. I won't spoil the surprise for anyone here though. :)
Netflix should be fine, they've already implemented Canada mode, where they stream super-low bandwidth versions. Because while 300GB may seem small for you, in Canada we have to deal with bullshit like 80GB caps on 35Mbps internet for $70/month.

It's worse than the third world for internet here in Canada. I'd say that you should be grateful for 300GB caps, but honestly, I think all caps should be abolished.
Wow. I had already started the (first, tiny) steps in creating something like this for my game. This is amazing. Take my money! :)
I did an experiment once where I took a sharpie and colored in "random" (to me) squares of a QR code. I managed to fill in quite a few before it stopped scanning (maybe 10-20).
Gotta agree. If a company is private then this info isn't public and can't be audited like a publicly traded company. You're relying on non public data from Hush hush, secret sources or sites which allow you to trade shares in private. You gotta wonder though, how accurate is this data?
Estonia Plans Startup Fund to Build Another Skype
Unlike what a consumer might pay on AWS for traffic, large ISPs almost always typically pay for the size of circuits at the 95th percentile. They do NOT pay for traffic per GB you use for circuits that fall below that peak circuit size - there is zero cost to any ISP for actual usage - it's peak usage.

And, even then, peering makes pricing even more opaque, in which Tier-one providers negotiate mechanisms in which they agree to exchange traffic at zero cost, and just set up connections in meet-me rooms.

Regardless, The parent is right - cost is not a function of data sent, but a function of peak circuit size for the ISP - so, if there is a period in which there is little usage of their network, the ISP can serve traffic at close to zero cost to themselves.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/static/terrible_small_logo.png

yes
Some day, when the AI systems take over, and the world no longer needs so many people that enjoy reading programming manuals and studying Fourier transformations, the great bulk of programmers will be lined up and shot, in retribution for their years of pampered arrogance.

And it won't be the people we put out of work, it will be the people who paid us, who will have long since had enough of it.
Rotating maxed out my cpu in both chrome and firefox but only chrome didn't stutter.
Linux Mint? Isn't that essentially the same thing as Ubuntu or am I missing something? That is, is it the lens search that is the problem or are there other privacy concerns about Ubuntu?
Yeah, it would be nice if someone could change the title
Yep! I've moved to using Debian for production machines and gentoo for personal/development machines. I've been quite happy with the move.

SuSE has a big focus on the enterprise level - I didn't realize that until earlier this year when I talked with a SuSE dev. So enterprises have options other than Ubuntu for standardized & supported Linux.
Thank you!

We developed the "Open Licence" in consultation with citizens, the Open Government Data community in France (Wikimedia Foundation, Regards Citoyens, etc.), and governments worldwide (the Transparency Team at the Cabinet office in London) during a series of more than 50 workshops and meetings in 2011.

Glad you like it. Feel free to send feedback and/or <3 to my team mate Alexandre Quintard (@AlexandreQK) of Etalab (data.gouv.fr).
I got mine on Tuesday. If anyone has any questions about the device, I'm happy to answer them.
That's a good point. But at the same time, people have figured out ways to disable the way they try to monetize off free users, and on top of that the sentiment is that this is a good thing. "Hey ubuntu ius evil and selling our shit! Protect yourself!" is the general sentiment I'm getting from this thread. I feel like if it was a "here's how to avoid paying ubuntu, just disable the PAY_US_FOR_OUR_HARD_WORK flag it is all free", it would be somewhat of a different sentiment.

There's no way to make software un-stealable really, the best you can do is offer an easy, inexpensive, and convenient way to pay for it and make stealing it difficult and make you feel guilty for it. I feel like spotify/rdio took over music piracy in this fashion.
I think the reason is two-part:

1. (From the original link):

"Over the past few years, browser support for plugins such as QUAKE LIVE have dropped off significantly, causing problems for plugins to operate in a consistent and working manner. With the recent announcement of Google Chrome's roadmap [1] to turning off plugin support and the upcoming changes in Firefox [2], it seems that now is the time to make the transition."

2. (From John Carmack's comments at QuakeCon 2012 [3]):

"Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just seems to be the reality."

[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-f...

[2] http://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/09/24/plugin-act...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

--

Based on John's comments regarding Linux, they just are not seeing the return to make it a priority. He mentions that Mac does better than Linux, but perhaps not enough, again, to be a priority.
Xbox One won’t play games out of the box, requires day one patch
If you are severely disabled it's really not a case of "just live opposite the grocery store and work there". Many disabilities will mean that a person simply can't perform economically productive work at all. If you have a degree of means testing you can afford to provide for these people because they are a relatively small % of the population.

In the UK for example we have disabled people who receive more in total government assistance than many able people would when working a full time job. For example they might need full time carers. Relying on charity will favor those who can best play that game, which will by definition make things harder for people with certain disabilities, particularly mental disabilities of less "popular" ones.

> So how is that different with a basic income than it is today?

If you give people different amounts of housing based on the relative costs of housing in different areas then they will not have to move to a different area and can stay where they are more likely to find work.
A completely free fast-paced FPS for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Randall himself states that all upper case is an okay alternative, whereas "Xkcd" is frowned upon http://xkcd.com/about/