skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't specifically about this implementation, but I've noticed perhaps almost ten similar projects (virtual, programmed PCROBOTS descendants) on HN over the past year. There seems to be a real interest in this area (I made one myself on a hack day a few years ago ;-)) but a lot of reinventing the wheel.

Are there are any particularly popular open source projects of this sort that people interested in this area could perhaps collaborate around?
/r/SRS is hardly a hotbed of radfem activism either. It's a circlejerk where people post posts from other parts of reddit and laugh depressingly at how awful they are
It makes sense to have a single sign-on system (although this also raises questions of privacy over what actions are tracked and recorded by Google - I'm guessing evrything possible is tracked and recorded).

Why doesn't Google provide a dashboard for all their services accessible from every Google service when you're signed in? The Dashboard presents all of Google's services with the ability to opt-in to additional services.

So, for example, if I sign up for a GMail account, my dashboard only shows I've activated the GMail service, but also lists all the other Google services such as Google+, Docs, Drive etc. You can use the dashboard to promote your services rather than cluttering the GMail interface with promos for Google+, Google Chat, Hangouts etc. It's a bit ironic that one of the stated goals of Gmail is to minimise distractions and yet the GMail interface is stuffed with promos for other Google services.
Testing vs. Checking
Delete Cookies, change IP, probably even switch browsers, block Analytics and G+ buttons. At least makes it a little harder for them.
Reminds me of the C++Robots "King of the Hill" competition:

http://www.gamerz.net/c++robots/

I've still got two robots in the top ten there, and another just outside.
Well, there's also the consent decree. I don't think anyone wants one of those...
C++Robots: seek out and destroy any other robots in the arena
Actually, that's false. Most of the money Google makes from ads are not behaviorally targeted ads, but keyword targeted. If you subtract out YouTube 'behavior target' which seems more targeted based on what you watched, the portion of money Google actually makes from using 3rd party website tracking is quite small.
Maybe you're already familiar with it, but I really want to see learn a decent chunk of OSGi in one day.
I wondered this until we did it and then all of the suitable solutions used Windows (we are mostly a Linux house). We didn't want to build our own solution so just used that. We actually just use http://www.cool-screensavers.com/onlinews.html - I'd much prefer a HTML5 or even a flash solution, but I've never found a suitable one.

We've been running the same system for 6 ish years, sometimes people ask us to put powerpoint or videos on the displays, which would be more difficult if it was a Linux system.

The main problem with the displays is not viruses, but rather pop-ups telling you need to do some update or other (like the one shown in the article).
The C++Robots combat engine is available for download:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6748373

http://www.gamerz.net/c++robots/

http://www.gamerz.net/c++robots/c++robots.tar.gz
I define friend as someone I'd invite over to my house. Those are the people I interact with on social networking sites and send YouTube links to.

Discussion forums are, socially, a very different thing than hanging out with friends, even though they both involve people and saying things. That's what I think HN collectively misses when talking about Google+ or Facebook; they think those are Internet Discussion Forums when they are actually something for closer friends.

You have to understand that very few people are willing to write this much on the Internet for public consumption by total strangers -- we are very unusual people, and most online services aren't designed for us. That's why we're typing hundreds of words into a Web 1.0 GUI written in a custom programming language, rather than using Facebook or G+ or Snapchat or whatever.
Reddit has gotten better recently, as long as you stay off the popular subreddits. Pick your 10 favorite hobbies or interests, and subscribe to those subreddits. It's got to be specific: not programming, but programming in Java; not electronics, but amateur radio; etc. (I will admit I enjoy r/AskReddit, which is where people write short stories in response to a prompt in the form of a loaded question. Ask Metafilter is much less creative, in comparison.)

A lot of people are recommending r/programming. r/programming is why I quit Reddit a few years ago. It's all "computer-related cult wars" rather than actual discussion about programming. Everyone goes through that stage in their programming career, but it's not interesting to read about, and most people eventually grow out of it. Not r/programming.
I agree because there are two people in one of those photos!

Look carefully!!!
They forgot the billion *.js posts - with seemingly arbitrary nouns selected as names.

Or the ridiculous intentional mispellings in names...somehow skipping all the vowels & resemble some vaguely phonetic spelling. Twitter > twtr etc.
The search results of Bing seemed very similar to DDG. It seemed to do a mediocre job if figuring out the context of my search. Google seemed to figure out the question behind my query. With Bing the results seemed to feel more like a regular text search where it matched the words I was searching for to semi-random websites. Perhaps google has so much search traffic and they check which links people click on for different searches, so they are able to adapt to put more useful results closer to the top for a given query over time.
5 tips to read before you build a team for your startup
That was a good comment indeed! Thanks thursdayb, cheald!
Not like I think it will have any impact what so ever, but in theory if they have a counter for that and can show up at the next board-meeting saying "30% of our (force) converted G+ accounts results in people deleting their accounts and leaving our ecosystem entirely", that might in theory, affect them to change their course of action.

In the real world, probably not, but at least it gives people the satisfaction of having felt that they may be sending a message.
If "this thing" is Google it's fairly understandable why someone would work there.

It's only been in the past year or two that Google's been popularly seen as focusing on G+ to the expense of users and innovation. Internally a lot of parts of the company are probably quite similar to the Google of 2010 which everyone liked.

And if they hate social networks what are they going to do, move to Facebook or Twitter?
Petition against forced Google+ integration on YouTube hits 112,000
You're arguing a point unrelated to the post. The author is saying that as a highly competent SE, paired programming would be a detriment to him due to his personality etc.
MetaFilter. You have to pay $5 to post comments, and the comments are formatted in such a way as to discourage trolling, long digressions, and other annoying Internet comment features. The material is usually not amazingly interesting to me, but the community is very pleasant.
> At work we have a consultant in at the moment doing technical mentoring. He's gone right back to basics on a lot of stuff

How did you go around to finding him? I feel we really need that where I work, go back to basics and take up some "good habits"[0], but without a consultant/trainer to suggest it feels like whining without contributing. Attempting cultural changes internally on a suggestion basis doesn't really work, people (me included) just go back to their previous stable state.

[0] both small scale, the testing and refactoring stuff, and larger-scale with system architecture.
Nicholas Notabene : Some thoughts on Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky
Only two of those reviews are Verified Purchases. That looks fishy to me.
Almost missed this post becasue this is one of my "I don't want to read any of these" titles.
The problem lies here:

> I don’t believe that I’m alone in my opinion. All of my colleagues are very similar. In my 20+ year long career, I’ve only known one person that I suspect would be comfortable with pair programming

So I can easily imagine that he was unlucky during his 20+ year career, because it is not easy to find such group of people especially in Age of Everyone Can Become a Programmer.
It would have tripped the flamewar detector. If a submission engenders (get it?) a flame war in the comments, it gets buried automatically.
Our Gladwellian Future
I really like this kind of approach to 2D games JavaScript development.

I'm regularly using CraftyJS to develop 2D games but I feel like there's something wrong in the development process. The library is huge and therefore hard to maintain, and I'm only using a little part of it.

By using a "gameloop" library and npm + browserify to define dependencies you can include whatever rendering library you want (pixi.js, three.js, etc.).
I'm fairly sure that's an 'and', not an 'or', per your reference [0].
Spot on! And very funny, too. :)
That's fine so long as you trust Google to abide by their word on how they do or don't link or structure their services.

The point of the G+ article referenced by the OP that I wrote, is that I had repeatedly responded "no" to the option of linking my (pseudonymous) YouTube account with my (pseudonymous) G+ account, strictly on the merits that I'd used the same (pseudonymous) Gmail account to originally register for both.

At the time I'd set each of these services up, they were a freestanding service. I'd created a Gmail account some years back recognizing that having a pseudonymous identity would be useful to me. I later created a YouTube account to be able to access the occasional restricted video. I've occasionally commented on and/or rated videos, but as those actions became increasingly public and accessible, I've periodically purged my content there under that account. And when G+ started up, having first created an account under my real name, I rapidly decided that I didn't want an "identity service", deleted that G+ profile (elements of it remain but I make very little use of them) and switched to a pseudonymous account as my primary persona on that service.

Now Google have, against my wishes, elected to merge the previously independent G+ and YouTube accounts. And for the life of me I can't figure out how to un-do that, or to disable the YouTube account entirely.

I also no longer trust Google to keep separate aspects of my online existence separate.
I don't see anything wrong with Pair Programming unless we overdo it.

Does this mean Code/Peer Reviews should be given a rest too?
The Urgame for this seems to be RobotWar:

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

Which I'm aware of because it inspired Robot Battle:

http://www.robotbattle.com/

Which inspired RoboCode:

http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

Which seems to have inspired a lot of others.

(Reads a bit like the Old Testament; all that begetting.)

One problem is that almost all of them are language-specific. Robot Battle implemented its own language, RoboCode uses Java, this game is in Python.

One game in the genre is RealTimeBattle, which instead allows bots to communicate with the game simulator via standard IPC. So, in theory, robot programs can be written in a variety of languages.

http://realtimebattle.sourceforge.net/
I quite like Alex McCaw's http://monocle.io/ - It's quite similar in topic to HN, but with less of the news/gossip/drama stories.

It also moves a lot slower, so if you miss a few days, it's fine. Just one page or so of links will show you all the best from those few days.
My problem with /r/programming is the front page. If you go below 15th place you'll see a cesspool of posts with interesting looking titles, tons of downvotes and no comments explaining why. I feel like the readers there are too discriminating about what they'll allow, but at the same time nobody feels like submitting anything.
I am not sure;
Here they say that CISCO also down in Brasil, Mexico, India and Russia

http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2013/11/14/nsa-spying-cr...

I guess because of these sophisticated man in the middle attacks that the NSA is doing lately; I guess one has to fiddle a lot with BGP routing tables for these ...

What I don't understand is: why are Chinese routers supposed to be more secure? absurd!
"Why I stop coding and focus more on my blog" 39123 comments

Gold :)
Even though I agree that pair programming is not necessary (I think it's useful, I sometimes do it and enjoy it, and sometimes I really need to work alone), I do not like how this post sounds. It does not sound like "pair programming is good, but I prefer to work alone and I think it's equally good", it's more like "I work for 20+ years in the industry and I'm highly qualified engineer and I don't want to work with people, so shut up all of you that try to encourage people to try different things". That does not prove any point, it's just a rant.
> served better with cryptocoins than with cash, bank transfers or credit cards?

Buying things online from other countries without having to go through the "demoninational dance"

Anyone who is unbanked and/or uncredited (still most of the world, btw) could benefit from doing business with cryptocoin

Anyone who is in a country with a completely overinflated currency

Anyone who wants to take their money out of a country with lame capital controls

Anyone who wants to carry their money inside their head (brainwallet) instead of in a controlled-by-third-party bank account

Donating without giving any personal information (don't even get me started about the outright harassment I experienced after donating to someone who unfortunately got my number)

Kids can use them to buy things online without credit
> Internally, G+ is marketed as a unified login/account system

Wait, there's already Google account - a unified login. Is it not?

> though "Pages" continues to be a confusing and unclear term

Pages were meant to be confusing because you discourage multiple identities. Most people have no idea they even exist.

> I don't believe Google+ management is malicious, but they do seem woefully unaware of how internet-native communities behave.

I'd be glad to attribute it to stupidity, as well, but it's one big assumption to consider the whole upper management at Google+ (one of the crown jewels) "woefully" incompetent at the very subject they were put to manage.
Emoji Blitz - Free Android Game Download - Would love People's thoughts on it?
You mean stuff like this? http://www.fcc.gov/guides/obscenity-indecency-and-profanity

or when the FCC in 2006 declined to investigate whether AT&T et al were breaking the law by sending data to the NSA?

...

The FCC may do some good things, but it's history isn't near as nice as you suggest.
In NYC downtown could be the southern portion of Manhattan and pretty much anywhere in Brooklyn. The two most southern (down) areas in the city, not counting S.I. which really doesn't count anyway. That is why the subway signs say Bklyn/Downtown. Uptown would be anywhere north of Central Park in Manhattan or anywhere in the Bronx. The most northern parts of the city. That is why the subway signs say Bronx/Uptown. In NYC the terms 'uptown' and 'downtown' are purely geographical.

In other cases I would consider the term 'downtown' to be the oldest portion of the city. For example in Philadelphia. This would be much harder to pick out in a city like London that's much older.

I live in Washington DC. Here, the term is only used when you are outside of DC and it is used loosely to describe any location inside of DC. If you were in Virginia or Maryland and said you were going 'downtown' that would mean only that you were going to any location inside Washington DC.

I'm a strange city I would assume the term downtown referred to the less kept more rustic area that looks kind of ghetto but is a little more artsy/trendy than the rest of the city.
Hi Folks,

Would love people's thoughts on our new game Emoji Blitz.

Thanks for downloading it and playing with it.

How can we make it better? Any suggestions will help?

Thank you.
It's interesting when you hold up the type of creature reddit breeds when OP was linking to a re-share of a post originally made by a pseudonymous Google+ user. Namely me.

At my request, I might add, due to some idiosyncrasies of G+: a re-share of a post preserves the content of a post even if the original is deleted. But a re-share and the comments on it is not itself re-sharable. A link to a G+ post, however, is.

So, should I delete or purge my G+ account (I haven't yet decided which, if either, I plan on doing), Andi's posts will continue to exist with the content on them visible.
One instance of this would be the Linksys WRT54GL wireless router which Linksys specifically sold as unlocked so users could install OpenWRT and other alternatives.

Worked on me, I've bought a few of that model.
This whole article is predicated on the absurd straw man argument that there are legion pair programming evangelists ruining the software industry with their philosophy. In reality, even the people I know who practice pair programming only do so less than half the time. It's hardly an epidemic.

As an aside: I am pretty tired of people saying "I'm an introvert," when what they mean is "I'm an asshole." Even if you're introverted, you have the same responsibility as everyone else to communicate in order to get things done.
They care, it just takes a little longer at times. One day, a person wakes up and realizes that the technophiles are someplace else, all of those blogs, videos and snippets they've been seeing hit home, and they have been personally affected by a real name policy. It starts someplace.
Down now.
I can only pity those tasked with maintaining such systems.
Looks like it's back up!
I've actually been using Ember for quite a while now and it's formed the basis of one of our products.

Once you get over the massive learning curve with Ember and keep within the 'emberisms' (i.e. the way Ember does stuff), it's an incredibly powerful framework. In terms of hiring people to code in Ember, it's much easier to onboard people once you have a few developers that really know ember through and through. The biggest problem i've found is that for a long time the API's changed around a bit (they are fixed now) and that meant that sometimes if you're on StackOverflow, the fix may not work anymore.

Having used Backbone, Angular and Ember; I would describe Backbone as the past, Angular as the present and Ember as the future.

Ember's got some pretty big people using it, Zendesk's new agent interface is built in it, Discourse, Square and (indirectly) Apple (iCloud uses Sproutcore which is where Ember originated from).
[FoRK] And then there's Haskell... (was: Bone / Greenspun, etc.)
The problem I have with this (and Gibson's article linked below) is that there is an incredibly patronizing undercurrent to the complaints that everything is clean and works right. Grinding poverty and picturesque slums might be a creative ferment for Western expatriates (who can almost always pick and choose what they experience), but the Asians, Africans, South Americans, etc who are forced to suffer those conditions their entire lives don't see it that way at all.
Good question..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6748029
http://www.reddit.com/r/apple+Astronomy+gadgets+geek+linux+m...
I upvoted. More uplifting to read about him than many of the people so frequently touted as heroes here (Jobs included).
http://www.cointagion.com/

Check this site out. Seconds after you send the specified bitcoins to the QR code/address using your smartphone or bitcoin wallet app... It triggers the download.

No entering in of CC information or account creation required. Just blip, get download of book, done.

How fucking cool is that?
PostgresSQL Database can not be deployed on Amazon RDS Service. Postgres 9.3.2
> I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived.

On the other hand, MySpace was not hooked on so many and so important portions of one's Internet life, nor did they have the advertising upper hand that Google has.
Advanced R programming by Hadley Wickham
I don't get what all the fuss is all about. Why would you want to hide your identity unless you are writing something crappy or being a troll on Youtube or Play Store. A single sign-on service is a great decision and that't the way things should be when you have multiple services from same company.

You guys don't mind using all services like Spotify, Quora etc that are so closely tied up with Facebook login. But when google tries to integrate it's own services it is so wrong? What are we, Hypocrites?

Coming to Google+, it is a much better designed and well thought off social network. What is the whole issue about?
https://www.google.com/search?q=random+name+generator

Heck, some of my "names" are just a random, unpronounceable string of letters.
> Why Go Is Better Than You And Everything You Own And Why It Always Will Be
ah, what choice do they have? The NSA has the goods on them too.
> "Well, what's the problem? if you don't like it just delete all your youtube videos and discard the years of investment you've made into your youtube identity"

No, you don't have to delete or discard anything. Figure it out. It's not hard. And do us the kindness of not being a troll to those of us who have.
"First, trying to find out what actually happened since London won't call us back (no doubt ashamed of their gross negligence not recording any information on the passenger who called and their following inability to recover the now-considered stolen bag)."

Nope, just minimum wage and very busy people. The 'miracle' the OA refers to is based on 'driving out cost' at every possible point in the chain.
I know you're not agreeing in this statement, but I think part of anyones role as a senior SE is to help raise others to that level, even if it's to the detriment of his own productivity.
How many people, numbers wise, do you think were discussing particle physics? Yet, there we are: the Web was devised to foster such niche discussion and make the information in there easily findable and sharable amongst researchers. It just turned out that what Bernes-Lee & Cailliau came up with, could be applied to what the general public likes to talk about, too.

So I don’t believe that innovation in web and search technologies is keyed around what consumers want. Rather, it’s the other way around: more demanding use cases drive innovation, some of it can be repurposed and then gets fine-tuned thanks to the bigger R&D budgets that come with mass market application.

But the seed of innovation lays in the niches.
Just doing my bit.
Advanced R programming
> How Redis+Memcached+Node.js+Go+MongoDB+MariaDB+postgres+Clojure helped my start-up scale (from 10 to 20 hits per day)
> Yes. Google reached the point where it resembles AOL and Microsoft of the past.

The engineers step back, the marketers take over. Seems to be unavoidable for any economically successful company.
12 Unusual Towers From Around the World
US has Already Ceded Dominance in Bitcoin Trading
Windows has had a kiosk mode since at least XP. It's still there in 8.1 (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/hyperyash/archive/2013/10/25/enable-...).

All the benefits of a managed Windiws installation, and suitable for 99.9% of kiosk requirements. Probably.
How is it a disaster? I keep hearing this from people who like to peddle filth on youtube. People who love Apple, people who have no problems giving up their privacy with Facebook.