skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PC gaming has been getting sloppy seconds from the console market for a while now. Graphics have been held back by cross-platform development with consoles, which additionally has slowed the PC obsolescence rate to a snail's pace and killed PC sales. There have been many poor console ports with sloppy interfaces and poor utilization of PC hardware. However, there are a few titles (e.g. Skyrim) that are best played on a PC, and the vast difference in image quality, interface, and community mods is astounding. When developers trouble themselves to put some effort into the PC version, it shines.

In most previous console generations consoles began with clearly superior graphics quality to PC's of the time. The Xbox360 and PS3 changed this trend by being barely ahead at all, and the latest generation of consoles is apparently behind right out of the gate [1]! Consoles offer inferior graphics performance and inferior input (you can always hook a gamepad up to a PC!), but they're relatively cheap and have pretty effective DRM.

This situation presents a big opportunity for Steam. Make steamboxes as cheap and simple to use as a console and you effectively have a console! If you do this while providing superior image quality and supporting better forms of user input, you have a contender. Unfortunately, Valve isn't going to get much help from game producers right away. They'll prioritize whatever market generates the most profit. Steam is going to have to make steamboxes popular before game studios will prioritize the Steam experience vs. that on other consoles.

[1] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-battlefield...
Perhaps you're younger than me? I was in college when the PS1 was in its prime. I literally know of no one (both personally and on the internet) from that time that didn't buy at least two PSXs, if not three. The PSXs poor reliability was a huge deal and controversy at the time. The PS2's poor reliability was enough to warrant a class action lawsuit (that Sony lost).

I've not kept up on PS3 reliability, as when my PS2 died, I decided to never buy another Sony product again.
Thanks for mentioning about the company. I've never heard about it until now. Surprisingly enough I had to look at Wikipedia to know what they do and further details. Their website currently gives no clue about anything they do but a new product called "Stories", which for newcomers like me means zilch.
Relevant: http://toys.usvsth3m.com/google-plus-simulator/
Please read the comment you replied to again. He is saying that, because it is impossible to rate 0 stars, as people who received broken consoles surely would have, the rating system should be considered 0-4 rather than 1-5. The comment is about the psychological effects of changing the number system to illustrate that better. It isn't about math errors.
This would make a fascinating study of reliability - can you determine statistically if a product will be reliable based on rating distribution.

You could study Amazon, App Store ratings, etc. Cool insight!
I'm using linux. This site's scroll behaviour is infuriating.
They don't tend to have tentacles into your mail or phone, however.
What books to buy for christmas
Every year I buy myself a bunch of books for Christmas. Suggestions for this year? Technology, startups, business, mind-opener, fictions, you name it.
A minor point, but important to understand: the error came from the linker, not the compiler. It compiled just fine.
You mistakenly are thinking that I literally meant these specific individuals and not in general those who facilitate this kind of thing.
Python most def :-)
I posted that link to G+. One person claimed it must be a disgruntled YouTuber, another seriously claimed b3ta must be Microsoft shills. I despair.
Anonymous-hacker senetenced 10 years for exposing Dow chemicals
Anonymous-hacker gets 10 years imprisonment . He exposed Dow chemicals spying on Bhopal gas tragedy activists
Also : I'm a customer of my isp. Not too happy about them at all. In fact, I'm a lot happier being Google's product (and I would argue that at least in a few instances this is not true).
>You are right, though remember Hawaii wasn't a state at that time.

I had to interview a lot of elderly people on their thoughts about hearing WWII for a high school exercise. Overwhelmingly they said their initial response was "Where is Pearl Harbor?" but it didn't matter because it was US military attacked by the proper military of a foreign empire If that doesn't say act of war to people, nothing will. The second thought reported to me most often was one of rage. Comments like "It was a dirty rotten trick!!!" and such.
Sounds not so much like an issue with legalized prostitution per se, as with a lack of willingness to (aggressively) address the human trafficking issue.
Has anyone yet been able to articulate a defense for BTC against von Mise's "regression theorem" for the origin of money? or show that von Mises was wrong? "this time it's different" is not good enough.
I'll rephrase: The fact that I was previously ignorant of widespread hardware failures of Sony hardware probably says something itself.

Hell, I'll spell it out for you: those issues were not in the same league as the Xbox 360 failures. Even non-gamers, such as myself, are aware of the 360 RROD. There are fucking Cracked articles about it for crying out loud.

A mechanic might know that a 2005 Toyota Tacoma has an issue where the fizzbuzz widget wears out after too many miles... Everybody knows that the Ford Pinto had an issue. The 360 RROD was Microsoft's Pinto.
Nice story. :) Is the town name Balaklava?
It's been done, and I've seen it as a worked example in introduction to Bayesian stats pages, maybe some of which were posted on HN.
For anybody that doesn't know what's going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water,_gas,_and_electricity
Learnings from Client-side and Server-side rendering in Backbone.js
Android vs. iOS Development: Fight
The outdoor London shots show the protagonist waking up 28 days later and having no idea the apocalypse had just happened: http://vimeo.com/7138423

So it in no way contradicts when you can and can't travel on account of there being zombies everywhere, he doesn't even know about them at that point.
World's smallest smartcard reader
Geospatial Managed Objects using GRIFIN Platform
So you get the worlds best and most powerful email inbox - for free - and the small price you pay is to be continually asked for PII and very subtle upsells on using additional, also free, services.

I don't know but that sounds pretty fair to me.
I use to own a PS1 and a PS2 (The PS2 being the last console I have owned). I never heard about these problems until now.

You'd be hard pressed to find a 360 owner that doesn't know of the RROD. You'd be hard pressed to find a non-gamer below their 30s who hasn't heard at least once something about the RROD.

Don't mistake this for praise of Sony. Obviously they have a serious problem with the PS4, and I despise the corporation for plenty of other reasons. All I'm saying here is that Microsoft's 360 problems are in a class of their own (it is too early to say if the PS4 will match or exceed the 360 issues, perhaps it will).
Can you give some more info about the corrupted repo?
SCTP is used in WebRTC DataChannels, so it will see use in web games hopefully. However I think Chrome and Firefox implement it on top of UDP at the moment (perhaps because not all OSs support it?)
God Is Not A Genie, He Is A Guide
Change is good for growth and spiritual awakening. If you are unhappy in your life, it can only get better if you change. Many people lean on God and prayer when unhappiness is consuming their lives. Churches in El Paso TX can teach you how God is there to guide you, but you need to choose to follow and work to change your life.

By attending a church in El Paso you can gain guidance on how to make life changes. Consult a church leader within an El Paso church for one-on-one counsel. God is watching over us, but he is not a genie fulfilling wishes. El Paso TX churches will support your life changes and God will help light the path.
The yellow "inserts" that pop open are neat but appear too often and become an annoyance. I think you should keep it limited to the fortune teller, cover color voting, and cointagion link. The rest of them seem like filler and add no value, in my opinion.
Steam does offer [1] their anti-cheat system to developers, along with features such as matchmaking, leaderboards and achievements. It's all on a platform called Steamworks, which offers devs very similar features to Sony and Microsoft's online services.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat#Games_that_sup...
Tulips, except you don't even get the flower delivered this time round..
VimFx: Vim-style keyboard shortcuts for Firefox
Ask HN: Looking for a developer to assist with SaaS product
Hi HN,

Team of two here with an early stage SaaS product we recently launched (check it out at www.ZenMaid.com). We've validated the idea (multiple active users, all paying) and are in the process of finishing out the features sets we've decided on/promised customers.

As one might guess almost everything is turning into just a little more work than expected and it's beginning to put us behind on the product road map we've set. We're looking to add a developer to our team to help us catch up, and more in the long run.

This position would be part time (20 hours per week) and for equity only. It should be noted that we're not looking to take a traditional start up approach but rather like a lifestyle business. Having equity means payouts in the near future (as soon we start paying ourselves) not some off chance of making millions in a couple years.

About you:

Familiar with jQuery, Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Heroku (most important, Ruby on Rails and jQuery)

Design experience is a plus

Able to work part time (~20 hrs/wk)

If interested please send an email to Amar (at) ZenMaid.com with details on your experience, why you're interested and with any questions I'm sure you'll have for us.

Thanks!
Genuine Curiosity: How else can you destroy/rewrite history in git besides a force push and gc?
That's not my point. Of course the RROD was a monumental issue. Probably the biggest video game hardware related issue ever.

My point is Sony's hardware is quite famous for being extremely unreliable. Every Playstation generation has been plagued with issues. Widespread, class action lawsuit worthy, issues. Sony has never once addressed them, admitted them, or made any effort to improve their quality. Sony simply doesn't care.

The PS4 already having quality issues is not a surprise at all. Yet the Xbox One having quality issues would surprise me. And that is where the difference lies.
I'm not asking for myself as much as the community. Linking to things you reference to helps multiple people & makes the thread, site and your comments all that more valuable.
National Spy System of Microphones Can Record Conversations
How about just sniff the user-agent and deliver perfectly rendered views/fragments of your SPA through a serverside PhantomJS process to crawlers?

If you used backbone routing properly this shouldn't be a problem.

Or, use one of the "Full-Stack" Frameworks for Javascript which merge the client and the server almost completely. Derby.js comes to mind, maybe even meteor.

[edit]: you mentioned PhantomJS in your summary, didn't see it. But you don't mention why you didn't use it.
>The same ACLU is a strong Second Amendment supporter.

Could you tell me specifically what definition of "strong supporter" you're using here? I can't think of any reasonable one that would make your claim true. Supporter, maybe.

But a "strong supporter" is not someone who endorses a watered down version of the Second Amendment, and then spends zero effort defending infringements of that.
What a cliffhanger.
If you register a new account, verifying by mobile is mandatory now :(
To make steamboxes cheap and with good enough quality graphics to compete with the PS4 or a high end PC they're going to need to sell the boxes at cost (or maybe subsidize) and cut great deals with hardware manufacturers.

I don't know if this can square with their plan of having third parties sell Steam boxes unless they are going to give these companies a cut of game sales or something like that.
Mars Rover, comms with Earth
>And here comes the problem: SCTP is not used, even for projects where those features are needed.

sctp's achilles heel is its inability to work with NAT. It was designed to not work with NAT. NAT has since become widespread especially for connecting homes and sctp ended up not being so.
Vanilla Sky, also The Devil's Advocate did this elsewhere in NYC. Both were eerie.
Yeah, I was thinking Chromium when I wrote that and should have been more specific. 6M is all of Firefox.

And Gecko uses reference counting a lot too, of course... but most objects are stack allocated or uniquely owned. It's a very different situation from a language in which all objects are reference counted.
Here's an interesting paper on this subject that I found via reddit a few days ago. http://konradsgraf.com/blog1/2013/10/23/on-the-origins-of-bi...
How to download torrents directly in your Dropbox?
At work we're just switching from a centralised VCS (not Subversion, but of similar capabilities) to Git, using Github as a central repo.

We do in fact need the superiority in branching/merging that you have with git - not having it has been a PITA several times recently. We'd really outgrown CVCS and needed what DVCS had to offer.

That said, we've been having a fun time getting used to git's little ways. Everyone's shot themselves in the foot at least once, me included. If you move from centralised to distributed VCS, you will shoot yourself in the foot unless you have an accurate mental model of what's happening.

A few developers have complained it's all too hard and complicated and they have to use the command line now (they don't) and why can't we go back to the old way. I've been reminding them programmers are supposed to be smart and able to learn things ...

The change is totally worth it, though. The pace of development has accelerated.
Plus, flat management structure doesn't mean flat team structure - when a group of people work on a task at shadowcat, there's generally one person who acts as effective lead for that project, whether we get around to writing it down anywhere or not.
Alas, no. Mental tests in childhood and early adolescence predict subsequent educational failure. The effect is independent of race, culture, parental socioeconomic status, etc.
Programming interview question on trees
That's just how Xbox people think.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s17e07-black-f...
>> Is your goal to bully GP into supporting privacy?

http://i.imgur.com/YLgZ7t6.jpg

No, it's to point out that once your privacy has been compromised, you might not be able to undo the damage.
Well, Windows-supporting hardware is cheap. Raspberry PIs don't have the processing power to run anything more than basic HTML pages. Finding 'cheap macs' is a losing battle - Apple hardware holds its value. Running Linux on a display-ware system with a fancy video card relies on drivers for that fancy video card, and there aren't any.
It's not that SCPT is less known by developers, I think most developers actively looking for a solution to the downsides of TCP will come across SCTP.

There are two real reasons, the first and most important is that Microsoft never implemented SCTP. Apparently there was not enough customer demand, but that's a lousy excuse, I'm not sure what the real reason is. Perhaps they just have no one thinking about networked applications besides the Web at the moment. Sadly lack of forward thinking is something that bugs the Windows team a lot I feel.
The second reason can be partly blamed on Microsoft as well, but most network devices operating at the transport layer have difficulty with SCTP. Why implement it when no one uses it right? just like IPv6 support. Anyway, apparently the difficulty lies with checksumming packets, which requires some more memory than is necessary for TCP/UDP.

It's a shame really. I think you can safely say that SCTP is the perfect gaming protocol. It supports almost all features gaming networking libraries usually implement on top of UDP just by configuring your streams.
You're right about not mentioning why I didn't use it. Thanks for bringing this up.

I had the rare opportunity to re-imagine the profile app in the context of another app that was being built from scratch and went with the server-rendered approach.

The phantomjs approach is totally valid. Thanks for reading!
If I knew your phone number, then I already gave it to Google and linked it to your real name, email, employer and other contact info - just so that my contact books sync between my devices, and your picture shows up next to your name on my phone. Ah, if you hadn't put up your picture, my phone uploaded the picture I had, and linked to your name.

Just so that you know. No need to worry about giving up what's already given up.
What do we expect when we take free candy from strangers? Of course it's creepy.

This is just another reason to curate the things we let into our lives.
This is a good, readable paper, with clever pictures to illustrate the points. Many of the ideas in it are well known (especially if you are already familiar with XP).

I like the fact that the authors recognize that the BIG BALL OF MUD architecture is successful (in the sense that many working systems have this architecture – or rather lack of architecture). In the paper, they describe the BIG BALL OF MUD architecture, and several related patterns on how you end up there, but also ways to deal with it and how to work towards a better architecture.

Some of the main reasons for ending up with a BIG BALL OF MUD are simply time and money constraints. But the authors also do a good job of discussing other reasons, for example that in the beginning you simply don’t know enough about the problem domain to be able to come up with a good architecture. This ties in with the notion of programming as learning and discovering, more than simply constructing.

Of the seven patterns discussed in the paper, the only one I hadn’t heard about before was the SHEARING LAYERS (I also had not seen the term BIG BALL OF MUD before, but the concept of “lack of architecture” is of course familiar to everybody). I think it’s a good concept, and something I’ll look more consciously for in the future.

It is also interesting to note that PIECEMEAL GROWTH can be both a cause of a BIG BALL OF MUD and a solution to it (when coupled with refactoring). KEEP IT WORKING also an important strategy, in my mind.

When it comes to RECONSTRUCTION – it may be necessary for several reasons, but there are also many good reasons not to do a re-write from scratch (Joel on Software has written a good article about that, see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html )

In the paper, there are many comparisons to physical buildings and architecure in the traditional sense (even many of the pictures emphasize this). These analogies are good to a point, but it is important to remember that in many ways developing software is NOT like a constructing a building. In particular, in software there are no physical laws that constrain the structure, so it is possible to make things a lot more complex, and with a lot more coupling than in a physical building.
Also, when the program is running there is the whole dynamic behavior (objects created and destroyed, threads interacting with each other etc), that is not present in buildings.

There are also several pages of useful references at the end (and it is particularly cool to be able to have a reference to Vitruvius 20 B.C.!)

All in all I think it is a good paper, with many important ideas presented in an easy to read way.

The above is a comment I wrote in August 2007 (how time flies!) on Scott Rosenberg's blog (author of Dreaming in Code), http://www.wordyard.com/2007/08/07/next-up-in-code-reads-big...
It looks like the explain xkcd community finally cracked the codes:
http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1286:_Encryp...

Check out the discussion - it took a while to find a solution to the last 3.
"Changes in incarceration and crime are significantly related during the period under consideration. Increases in state prison committals per 100,000 residents tend to reduce crime the following year, whereas increases in the number of persons released from state prisons per 100,000 reidents tend to increase crime the next year."

The National Research Council's "Understanding Crime Trends Workshop Report," eds. Goldberger, A. and Rosenfield, R.

It's tricky to isolate other social trends in the research though. Steven Levitt did a major study of prison overcrowding legislation, which can suddenly change incarceration rates if the legislation is successful, but not if it fails, a bit of a coinflip not directly connected to social or demographic shifts. He found evidence of a link under these conditions.

Levitt, S. The effect of prison population size on crime rates: evidence from prison overcrowding litigation.

Obviously those aren't the only two studies on the subject, it's been a focus of criminology research since it's been a discipline. Levitt followed up with a good meta-analysis that covered ten different explanations for the reduction of crime over the last few decades:

Levitt, S. Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004. pp 163-190.

He cites John DiIulio (ie, DiiuLio) in that work. DiIulio has written a lot on the subject as well, usually arguing that incarceration rates have an impact on crime rates, but adding the nuance that three strikes laws rarely do much good.

Crime rates are very complex, and tied to many complex factors. Incarceration rate appears to be one such factor.
Donations are the way Make-a-Wish can fulfill dreams like Batkid's
Restoring symbols to a stack trace originally generated without symbols
If it is using native SCTP, I don't see how well it would work with firewalls and routers (both enterprise and home ones). It would have to fallback to user-space over UDP presumably.
Saying these are DHS spy cameras is misleading. DHS and other government agencies (like the DoJ's COPS Program) provides grants to lots of police departments so they can buy technology, like video surveillance.

That police cruisers can access municipal cameras (whether funded by local businesses, local tax revenue or federal subsidies) is a common and well known implementation.

Beyond that, what is the real concern here? Unless you are simply objecting to any publicly owned and managed cameras, which is something much more fundamental.
If you're wondering when PC hardware can "catch up" to console hardware, history shows it's simply a matter of waiting a year or two. Rather than the traditional new console generation land grab, Valve is playing a long game; they can afford to let Moore's law catch up a bit.
AMD Dual R9-290X Hawaii XT – Codenamed Vesuvius
BitTorrent Sync cannot be considered secure nor privacy-respecting as long as it is closed source.
Just add a file. I seem to recall that an empty .gitkeep is traditional.
Fair enough, maybe it only affects a small number of people. Still, if there's an easy to spot solution (like if the photo and counter are in the same <div> or something) it'd definitely be worth checking out. Especially if you plan on using that feature in the future.

And for the record, I really dug that feature. I often wonder exactly how valuable HN exposure is, it was nice to see a real metric.
"Gypsies and trailer trash are just as screwed as minorities of color."

I thought it really funny to be so "politically correct" when speaking of black people, yet quite happy to refer to "people with less color" as "trailer trash."
Senate hearings on Bitcoin live online Monday & Tuesday