skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Warehouse club members tend to be higher income households with kids — the type of shoppers that have huge lifetime value to retailers."

Assuming that this is true, I think this is a brilliant, long-tail, idea from Amazon. If the kids get accustomed to seeing Amazon boxes full of stuff arrive every week, when they move out on their own they probably will also buy from Amazon. Similar to computer manufacturers (e.g. Apple, Microsoft) giving educational discounts to schools/students. It's hard to know if this implementation will work but I would start worrying if I were Costco/Sam's. Amazon has shown that they do find innovative approaches to markets. If this approach doesn't work they'll come out that will later on.
> On the other hand, societies that are narcissistic expect people to do more.

And also have a very skewed perception of reality. It's pretty easy to have large swaths of population premising their entire world view on what is essentially self-serving mythology.

It's almost like the human psyche needs some amount of adversity to stay healthy. The cat that is too fat is also probably slightly insane, or at least unrealistic - it's only after you rub its nose into the dirt that it comes back to its senses.

(That came out more blunt than I intended, but the general idea is the same.)
You will need to dual-boot. Or stream from another PC running Windows.
That's a really great point. I'll be sure to share this with the team today.
That is an interesting concept, but I am really wishing someone like amazon could provide a group buying plan. (Th following is likely poorly articulated):

I find that there is lots of waste in my buying habits for a couple reasons; I typically only need half or so of the buy able serving size of many things, but would prefer the prices of bulk items.

An interesting model would be to allow several people, ideally geographically close to one another, but not necessarily friends with eachother, to build a communal list of standard/often purchased items.

When some threshold is met, the items are purchased and divided among the buyers.

The items would need to be divisible easily by the number of buyers...

A service like this should also focus on minimalist packaging.

Set the fee at stepped level, $25 $50 $75 $100 -- and I just have a running list of items I use regularly. When enough people need the same things and my buy threshold is met, the box ships, I am billed and the counter restarts until the next month/interval.

There should be a simple way to report how quickly you consume an item and the system would determine the larger average consumption rates over time and make suggestions on how often items should be added.
Consciousness and free will seem mysterious, so he posits the only mystery he knows in the universe at that scale. Predictable human bias not unique to physicists.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_...
Top 5 Financial Goals You Should Consider In 2014 - Top 5 Awesome
The game was Sushi Warrior: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBx3MIAaXTA

A rar of the game is here, req kinect sdk installation + oculus rift. http://motionos.com/sw2.rar
Facebook Video Ad Pitch Deck Reveals Plans To Steal TV And YouTube Dollars
JT and I left our jobs to start a company together. We sought out a stagnant industry to disrupt and saw ripe opportunity in mattresses. Most of the products were mediocre and designed without taste, and there seemed to be a lot of greed among the major players.

So we launched with a very simple v1 product — an all cotton mattress — and then iterated from there based on customer feedback and surveys.

Thanks for your feedback!
We made a game of life game for a game jam once. It's GoL on a diffusion process. You have to prevent the yellow (infection) spreading in the blood stream.

http://edinburghhacklab.com/GGJ2012/
How does Magento websites speed affect sales conversion rates
Where did the site go? I was digging it!
Google Fixes Credit Card Security Hole, But Snubs Discoverer
Not being an Apple guy this is the first I've heard of SWEET16. Does anyone know how widely this was used?
Ageing: Theory needs to be revised
What Cellular Signals Would Look Like If You Could See Them With The Naked Eye
Colored Coins - BitcoinX
Google Executives Got Discounts From Government on Fuel for Private Aircraft
NS2 is currently ported and works on Linux. They have an OGL, D3D9, and D3D11 renderer for the game: http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/reinforced-expansion-released/ (Search for "OpenGL")
Thank you for sharing. I really enjoyed your netwire Asteroids post. I used Asteroids for teaching myself OO concepts many years ago. It's good to know that it's still a valuable teaching tool.
I'd just go S3 for static content though I pay for two DigitalOcean droplets to run some dynamic content.
Good point.

Isn't the DK effect something that should be expected, given how the human mind works? To keep plowing ahead despite adversity, you need to have some trust in your abilities. It seems as if erring slightly in favor of over-estimating yourself might be beneficial for motivation - as long as the error remains small.
Did you try it with one first? That's what I did, but maybe I just got lucky with the positioning.
A post-paid plan with no long-term commitment.
How about we instead stop turning off page zooming on mobile sites. The least of my concerns here is the stupid 300ms lag, when it seems like 80% of mobile sites these days don't even allow pinch-zooming anyway. Remember when one of the great things about smartphones was that you could use the "real" internet? Yeah. My poor eyeballs (and fat fingers) miss those days.
Well yes, as a thought exercise I started idly wondering the other day how, if/when we reached the stage of development ourselves, we might go about making contact with the next layer up...

Probably make a decent sci-fi short story. Now if only I had the talent or patience for writing...
If you're participating and live in or around Seattle join us for a "Show & Tell" on Monday evening to share what you've created:

http://www.meetup.com/SeattleGames/events/153593212/
Looks like someone's trying to make it possible to bundle Chromium with your app: https://github.com/pwnall/chromeview
I apologize I wasn't more clear. I don't mean to come across as judgemental of Ikea. I haven't personally slept on one before other than just testing them out in the show room, but we do have quite a few customers who have replaced their Ikea bed with ours who have shared their feedback.
Yes, you could be a brain in a vat.

This sentence is false, since you do not have any basis to refer to a vat. This is simply the same as talking about pointers in java script. Either you are not talking about pointers, or you are not talking about java script.

The fun thing about this quack philosophy is that's it's falsifiable [...]

It is actually not, the moment you set up any experiment, I just assert that the experiment is a elaborate simulation, which does not tell us anything about the "true universe."
It was easier to walk into the T-Mobile store 5 minutes from my house than to order from Apple or Amazon and wait. And I can live with 45 days.
But it's AFAIK unplayable because of abysmal performance and random crashes.
Bullets, shells sure, that might be a problem. But as for drones:
If you know there is such a laser defence system, dispatch one or two silver drones (which maybe high in maintenance) destroy it. Then send the normal drones.
Based on what I've read, 7DFPS allows you to use the full 7 days for development, I could get about 12 hours of development in in that time span... The same goes for 1GAM, you have 30 full days for it in theory. I don't think people do that in practice though.

A jam where you're only supposed to do 48 hours (or better, 30) of work within 30 days would give all games roughly the same scopes and make them comparable for a competition.

But I realise that the audience for this kind of game jam consist of me and probably nobody else, so no real point in trying to start something like that. I have a non-jam game to finish anyway.
Summary: Most frameworks sux.
Seedstars world : network with investors and entrepreneurs from around the world
Could a laser system be effective against small arms/sniper fire?

I recall an article in wired from ~2005 which talked about a tracking system that could track all bullets flying in the air over a vast area. Couple this with a laser and could you shoot pistol/rifle/sniper fire out of the air?
Thank you. We really appreciate the support.
Amazon Wine Announces 1¢ Shipping in Time for the Holiday Season
>The pointer has been dereferenced, if you will.

...'dereference' means 'access the pointed-to data'
While you guys are reinventing mattresses, can you do me a favor and invent the "square king" mattress that can be rotated and flipped in a bunch of different ways for even wear?

If you make it, I promise I'll buy one.
I've always used tabs, and just translated them to spaces. No real difference
Every time Amazon rolls one of these services out that is supposed to make it hard on the brick-and-mortar competition, Amazon's fulfillment centers are mentioned, which also have to be brick and mortar.

I believe Walmart/Sam's Club, Costco, and Target have a decided advantage on the real estate/fulfillment center side. Every store can be a "fulfillment center". The trick for these guys is going to be not waiting until the foot traffic dries up before they attack Amazon directly. And of course they already are to some extent, but if you read these articles about Amazon that seem to appear every week, the perception seems to be that the old players have no chance at competing.

A huge caveat for Amazon is they still don't make a profit. Whether that's by choice, I'm not really sure.
Nairobi – africa’s silicon savannah
Brooklyn Tweed
I, too, will buy one of these. And three sets of sheets.
Sim locking is purposely breaking the normal functionality of a device in order to limit competition.

I wouldn't care so much if there were plenty of other affordable ways to get a phone and coverage, but sim locking is so prevalent in the US that it's unavoidable in many cases, and most phones you can get unlocked are incredibly expensive.
I'm working on my own "shooter" based variant of Life called "Xtaloid".

http://www.genjipress.com/xtal

It's being designed as an homage to 1980s arcade games, complete with color-cycling effects.

Still in development, of course -- I'm hoping to have a fully-polished product sometime early next year for various platforms.
How about Directed Energy Advanced Technical High Barrier Equipped Affixed Machine (DEATHBEAM).
TL;DR from the post:
"""
My take-home for you, the persistent reader who has read all my ramblings in this post...

Don’t build your app on top of a pile of crap in-house framework.
"""
I'd rather learn about being a better developer in general then to learn about the infinite amount of things people may find racist or sexist. Some people just can't wait to find something to be offended by, I'd rather avoid those people, then to fuel their minority(superiority) complex.

There have been numerous occasions when people said stuff to me that were offensive, but I just ignored it because I knew that that those people didn't intend to offend me, they had no idea that that particular thing is offensive to me.

There is a difference between someone harming you on purpose or by accident, those who can't see any difference are just not worth my time.
No worries. I was talking to the GP with those comments. I should learn to use more words to make my intended audience clear. :)

Sorry about that.
Pthreads and PRNGs, oh my!
That is a quote from the Oculus website and therefore cannot be taken too seriously. They are engineers not ophthalmologists. The problem I see is the lens in between the screen and eye, which might cause strain.

I do hope their statement is correct, but it sounds too good to be true.
Protective Energy Neutralization Intradiction System
Don't ever think you need to apologize for writing your own code.
I've always been under the impression that Django/Flask and Rails/Sinatra were more or less the same things but with different languages?
I've tried the Oculus for a weekend. I'm relatively unimpressed until 1080p or higher becomes available. It's currently too low resolution. Blurring and scanlines interfere too significantly with the suspension of disbelief.
That's an awesome idea. It would make sense to test that market once we come out with our own bedframes. We'll discuss it with the team. Thank you!
The weight that Adwords pulls in the industry brings in higher dollar campaigns which means better payouts to video creators.
Deahee,

Congrats!
I think the even more interesting question would be:

* Might any of these questions be answered in such a way that the answer ought to influence our future behaviour?

If the answer to that particular question is No, then why bother with the others? If the answer seems to be No, it makes sense to delegate bothering about it to a few philosophers in their ivory towers ;-)
The purpose of the college degree is to provide insurance against economic change. Learn a trade, and you're good as long as that trade is valued (and not outsourced). College is supposed to provide general-purpose skills that guarantee residence in, at least, the middle class.

That's no longer true, because college degrees have been overproduced and there's a shortage of people who (a) can actually do things and (b) want to do them.

The real problem, though, is that society doesn't train people up in the trades (and help them relocate) when their jobs go away. They're just discarded, and the fear of that happening is what keeps middle-class people going into college-- which is designed to insure against the ups-and-downs of specific trades (e.g. plumbing). Widespread college is a partial solution that is now clearly failing.
Seems like someone should try a Kickstarter for this to see if there's enough demand.
Wonder if anyone's tested setting no-cache/expires headers on the beacon. I'd like to expect google honoring the cache headers because its a good citizen of the web.
Chromebook shootout: Which is best, the Samsung, Acer 720 or HP Chromebook 14?
"billions of applications that would simply stopping working".

So what? The user can just re-enable the app's access to whatever it was trying to fetch.

I don't buy the "millions of apps simply stop working" line. If the apps stops working because it was blocked trying to access my address book, then the app developer should have done better to expect the unexpected when fetching anything from outside the application that isn't essential to its core function and purpose.

Even the simplest of javascript functions will handle a null value or failed fetch. There's even an "onerror" handler for HTML img tags! And you're telling me that millions of apps will fail because they don't receive what they're trying to fetch? Sounds like an exaggeration, or bad programming, or a bad OS.
"The bottom line: For the large majority of college students, rising tuitions have nothing to do with the availability of student loans or Pell Grants. What’s happening, instead, is that the burden of paying for college that was previously provided directly by government has now been shifted onto the backs of students, in the form of crippling debt."

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/tuition_is_too_damn_high/
How an on-campus incubator converted this wantrapreneur
This has been a behaviour for many versions of Chrome and Firefox for a while (zoomable sites vs non-zoomable) and we haven't seen confusion around this.

This is why we have the beta, to test this stuff.
That is a refreshingly sober point of view. Blaming frameworks is easy. Speaking of technical debt is hard.
Introducing: Groupon's New Delivery System
We buy in bulk and store it or share it among two to four local households. Makes for a big savings if carefully planned. We also share coupons and other discount programs. My spouse figured out that our household alone saves over $1500 US per year by careful consumer purchasing outside of other savings means, (aka eating at home, taking lunches, car pooling).
> Tuft and Needle is rediculous name for a mattress company

I like it. It's classy, rustic, gives the impression of hand-made, and everybody likes seeing an ampersand in a nice typeface. Compare "Crate & Barrel".
Here's our attempt to fix this problem, for mapping only: https://github.com/citymapper/CMMapLauncher
Or other nations (say China) develop these systems and deploy them throughout their allied states. US air superiority is severely reduced.
If it is truly static, just use S3 (and optionally Cloudfront). If you need PHP, look at putting Cloufront in front of your existing shared hosting, or better, get a VPS and run Varnish in front of Apache with Cloudfront.

You can set up rules in Cloudfront to point to different origins based on URL, so you could point at an S3 bucket for /about or /news pages, or the /images* folder, and to your PHP server for /contact or /blog. That way you have maximum uptime for all the static pages and content, and you only hit your server for stuff that absolutely needs to be dynamic.
Mirrors aren't perfectly reflective, even if they deflect the majority of the energy for a fraction of a second, they will absorb some of it, scorching and becoming less shiny.

You can use mirrors in laser optics because the beam is relatively diffuse at that end.

I believe the best defence against a laser is likely to be a matter of having a material with a high vaporisation energy for its mass and to spin your projectile very fast so that the laser has difficulty maintaining a single point of contact.

Or, you know, just fire your weapons in mass and hope to saturate their point defence systems. These things must cost like a million bucks each or something - mortar rounds must be pretty cheap. And war is, when you get down to it, an extension of logistics and thus to an extent of whether your system is cost effective.
This doesn't sound right to me. I don't think developers are doing this.
The proposed applications (network control plane) don't correspond to what you would write in PHP (the main Facebook app).

The arm64 stuff on the other hand is looming like being the first new RISC architecture since er alpha and there may well be a move towards using it. There was a story recently that Google has an ARM license too.
Decently paid Costco employees vs Amazon contractor wage slaves? Consider what you wish for...
This also does not seem to be compiled with full optimizations, standard emscripten -O2 output looks somewhat different than what is here.
It's not about resolution, it's about angle of view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_view).

My phone has the same resolution as my computer monitor and 45" TV. But due to size and viewing distance, the same font & image sizes shouldn't be used on all.

This is why we have ppx/device-pixel-ratio on the web.
Gmail Images Displayed By Default: What’s The Impact For Our Customers?
Why He Is Crowdfunding His Book
Of course I agree with Dekorte.
Having written compilers written in perl, C and LISP - the ones in perl in pure OO, and the ones in C and LISP without, I conclude that I rather add classes and methods to my compilers than trying to improve it without. In the one written in C, classes are supported by the intermediate VM though (dynamically typed, very similar to Io), which is still better than having to write it in horrible C++.
I'd argue that a certification from a technical school (auto tech, HVAC guys, plumbers, electricians, etc) is worth more than a lib arts degree from a state uni at this point.

I sometimes think the "T" in STEM should stand for "Technology/Trade skills".
So is Google:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/google-said-to-mull...
Our government seems to be fine with willfully disregarding the 4th Amendment.

What makes you think that it's such a great conceptual leap to the point where they disregard the 5th (due process)?

They've already applied it to American citizens outside the country, if they're in the company of known terrorists.

Ten years ago, twenty years ago, the scope of the NSA's constitutional violations would have been unthinkable.

Now look where we are.

If you can't conceive of such a "leap", that's your problem. It's hardly outrageous to worry about such things now.
I think 4K will be the minimum necessary to have a real VR experience. I mentioned it in another comment: suspension of disbelief is everything, but currently my eyes focus too keenly on the scanlines and my immersion is ruined. It doesn't help that all my consumer devices have retina-like quality, so I'm used to nearly flawless clarity in my displays. When I'm using the 720p Oculus Rift it just bugs me too much. 1080p will be better, but still not great.
Not if you have 10,000 anti-artillery 100KW laser on vehicles. Let's say each one costs 1 million dollars, you would have to spend 10 billion dollars. Lets' say your operating costs are 3 billion a year (2 man crew at total cost of $100,000 each and another $100,000 for support, maintenance, and command, per unit). Over ten years the system would then cost 40 billion dollars, ($10B upfront + $3B/year x 10 years). This averages out to 4 billion a year. Per wikipedia, there are 25 million people in Seoul metropolitan area. This turns out to be $160/per person per year (or 43 cents per day per person).

You can bet the US government and the South Korean government are going to look seriously at that option.
How many targets could these hit at once? I imagine it will take a significantly non-zero length of time to hit and heat each shell with the laser, so to get past the lasers you need to know the average airtime of your shells, the number of lasers, and the amount of time it takes to kill each shell.

I mean, that would dramatically change warfare, but I don't think it is making anything moot.
Digital Cameras are Messing with Your Memory
The results from this search are at odds with your assertion:

http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=watermarked+image...

Regardless, you seem to have missed the gentle humour in my original post.
This discussion is turning useless, you are arguing with an imaginary strawman that isn't me. You are assuming and stating things about me and this community and it's becoming tedious.

Reread this thread, I didn't claim fiction as a whole is better than non-fiction in any way, but you did claim non-fiction as a whole gives you more information about the world by default, irrespective of individual examples. I'd be thankful if you stopped denying that you said what you said, or at least admit that you were mistaken.

You can't make blanket statements about categories like that, it's a futile exercise because you are putting great books and garbage books in the same box. They aren't all the same, neither in fiction nor in non-fiction. That's the critique we made to Bill Gates' blanket statement.

Instead of arguing for argument's sake, read what I wrote calmly and analyse it, none of your previous answers apply and I don't have the time to answer to each part of your comment. I'll just answer the only one in which you could have a point.

About Paris Hilton's book, it's true that there's some value in it, but you can't compare it to the value that you can take from 1984 and the insights it can give you about society and the human condition. And that was my point, a counterexample to the blanket statement "non-fiction gives you more information about the world than fiction by default". It simply isn't true. Literature is much more complex than that.

And by literature I talk both about fiction and non-fiction, I don't redefine things or refer to an imaginary "most of us".
I don't know if you read the article, but the whole point is to drop the 300ms delay while retaining zooming.
Strobist: Why I Moved Comments to Twitter