skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Create your own characters rather than borrowing someone else's creations and building them into your games. Pac-Man, Mario, Minecraft, My Little Pony are all great characters, just unfortunately not yours to make a game with.

Speaking as a game developer, this is remarkably bad advice for a young gamedev to follow. It doesn't matter whether or not they're "his". It matters that he continues creating. That's the most important thing. He's not making money off of other people's work. He's building a skillset that will serve him for a lifetime. Wasting time fitting society's arbitrary moral standard is time not spent becoming a better gamedev.

Even if he's served with a DCMA takedown notice for some of his apps, it doesn't matter even slightly, because the app isn't the end goal. Talent is. And the way to foster talent is to not stop working.

I'd encourage him to pursue art if he wants to, as it's also a skill which will serve him the rest of his life -- the creators of Minecraft, Super Meat Boy, and World of Goo were all artist-programmers, which seems more than a coincidence -- but it's not a requirement to be a gamedev.
Report claims Windows error reporting system bugged by NSA, Microsoft denies it
Nearly all political terminology is heavily overloaded. The best you can do is take the words as they are used; trying to infer meaning from them etymologically won't work.

For example, if we were to take the term "conservative" literally we would expect Republicans to be rabid environmentalists.
Well, you've got school, no? That eats up about as much time, if not more, than a job. ( 8 hours of school plus homework, right?)

On top of that, add chores (if you have any), family events, and other misc distractions I'm sure you don't have that much free time. I mean, don't sell yourself short. It's not like you just get to work on stuff 16 hours a day and nothing else.

Sadly, I'm 36, married with a < 2 year old son. Wife is social (so lots of distractions) and I'm an escapist (love to read) and lazy, so I'm seriously envious of you and the OP's dedication and success at such a young age.
Interesting point about hijackings.

Airplane hijackings are actually much more common than most people think. From 1988-1997, there were about 18 airplane hijackings per year, down from the peak of 82 in 1969: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking. Interesting to read the history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#196....
I think the concept of "activation energy" is a good one. If can get work done in 2.7. My job is not to port code - it's to get work done.

Until there's something that means I'll get work done faster using 3, there's really no reason for me to try and adopt it.
Just search for "notlob".
Python has been a pain on RedHat and derivatives for as long as I can remember. The problem is simply down to the decision to package only a single Python version. On Debian and derivatives you've been able to install distribution packages of multiple python versions (e.g. python2.4 and python2.7) at the same time. You lose all the advantages of a long maintained stable distribution when you have to install a bunch of hand-compiled packages.
It's not about chores, kids, wives. I purposely avoided all those in order to "stay in my 20s even well into my 30s, ideally forever". Sad to report that simply doesn't work, even with zero money or chore worries whatsoever!
A collaborative music jukebox that lets multiple people listen to the stream over a network. Because cloud-based jukeboxes seem to be all the rage, but none of them let you play music with other people at the same time. We gave it a fun name too: https://github.com/turbowookie/turbo-wookie. Go is used for the HTTP server, and is basically a layer over interacting with MPD.

Also working on a flat-file blogging system with an online editor, because flat-file is the middle ground between a static-site generator and a traditional database-based blogging engine.
Ask HN: Is it possible to create a new license that prohibits government usage?
Is it possible to create a version of one of the popular open source licenses that could prohibit use by government institutions?

I ask because I noticed that some of the devices created by the NSA in the catalog are built on Linux and some other open source tech.

http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/12/30/nsas-ant-division-catalog-of-exploits-for-nearly-every-major-software-hardware-firmware/
D changed a LOT in 10 years, especially since D2.0 has superseded D1.0 and added tons of fantastic features. It's definitely worth a look!

Did a quick lookup on Go's defer and panic, it does indeed have similarities with D's scope. Go's defer looks like the equivalent of scope(exit) in D.

The big difference is that error handling in Go uses error codes while D uses a Throwable base class subclassed into Exception and Error for recoverable and unrecoverable errors respectively.

D also has scope(success) and scope(failure) to execute code blocks depending on whether a Throwable is raised or not.
Here's a cookie ...
Bitcoin & The Precious Metals Market
Very interesting to see these retailers either accepting, or planning to accept BitCoin on their site. The implications of this are huge for a wide variety of reasons...
No. Next.
2013 in Tech – The groundbreaking "disappointment"
Are flights between European countries, say Denmark and Finland, as easy as the OP's experience? Or has post-911 NSA influenced the majority of modern civilization into encumbrance?
Don't have data on hand (it's not my field, I was discussing M&A with a finance type) but this looks like a potentially interesting take: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/subjects/accountinggro...
I remember the equivalent years ago. I would make (awful) games in turbo pascal, and submit them to BBSes. The sysops usually put them available for download.

I doubt anyone ever did.
Actually, screen RAM on the original Mac is not contiguous. The last byte on each "line" is used to provide 8 bit PWM sound. As each line is drawn on the screen the last byte in that "line" is sent to the digital to analog convertor instead of to the rasterizer.
The strongest-correlated single factor to violent crime is, in fact, lead pollution. When lead antiknock compounds were abolished in gasoline, and lead pigments abolished in paint, lead pollution peaked and began a long, steady decline. Violent crime followed. The prisoner incarceration rate has stayed high, despite the decline in violence, because of the money interests.

For-profit prisons are the ratchets that prevent the wheels of justice from turning backward. Sweden consolidates prisons and mothballs the emptied ones. America tricks the ignorant into fencing stolen bicycles and selling weed to informants.

Remove the profit, and you also remove the paradoxical idiotic behavior that generates it.

My outsider's perspective would first segregate all revenues from fines and forfeitures from justice budgets, perhaps exclusively dedicating them to public education and pollution abatement and cleanup. Then I'd abolish incarceration in any facility that was not entirely publicly owned and state-operated. I'd also abolish plea bargaining, as it seems a perversion of due process. After that, I'm not sure what else might help; keep following the money and pushing the Nash equilibrium toward "everyone respect the law and each other".
Interesting idea. Many crimes are committed due to a lack of options caused by poverty (theft most directly, but many other crimes are correlated strongly with poverty levels), so if a prison has to pay if a released prisoner re-offends, perhaps it's in the best interest of the prison to pay directly to the ex-prisoner, to get them on their feet. Give them a place to live, food budget, whatever. Probably still cheaper than incarceration.
To devil's advocate your devil's advocate with a similar analogy: Ok so I've deployed an app to heroku. I'm using 2 dynos, but suddenly my app becomes fairly popular and a bunch of people start getting timeouts. Oh no, better up the dynos to 20. Now no more timeouts but pretty expensive. Seems like now is the time to start benchmarking and figuring out what the right balance is.

I think we're starting to see some of that sort of benchmarking taking place with the TSA, so that's good, but the incentives don't seem like they're lined up properly for the bureaucracy to shrink significantly, regardless of the true level of risk.
It's not so much that everything will look exactly like postgres. It's that the biggest difference right now between the designs is complexity (the kind that comes with maturity).

Every mature general-purpose database system makes use of both CoW/immutable design principles as well as locking and update-in-place in various contexts. It remains to be seen how "temporal databases" (as you call them) will adapt to real-world demands, but it might not look as radically different as you think.

Also, for anyone who thinks that CoW is the be-all-end-all design principle, I have my doubts. The main reason is that it doesn't compose very cleanly -- a design that involves CoW over CoW over CoW starts to look wasteful after a while.

That being said, I would not be surprised if some of these new databases found some new trade-offs that worked very nicely and got adopted by more traditional systems. Storage is not nearly as much of a concern for many kinds of problems, and it seems natural that such a shift would lead to some design changes.
They were playing with fire not securing the cockpit since the beginning. Anyone who had slightest idea of how physics worked would automatically see them as a cheap form of guided missiles. Even back in the days of old-fashioned hijackings for political statements, a secured cabin could have possibly done some good.

But they were relying on statistics I suppose.
TSA complaints are getting absurd
It's ridiculous the amount of people complaining about TSA on a regular basis. Yes you have to get to an airport early and submit to some waiting in line and checking of luggage. Guess what? Seems totally reasonable if it reduces the chances of letting someone dangerous on a plane with you. You wait in line for hours for a lot of ridiculous things like black friday shopping, a particularly crowded fast food joint, buying the latest and greatest iPhone (or other tech gadget). Waiting in line a little bit longer just to make the plane more safe than not is NOT A BAD DEAL! As for the privacy issue, yes it does suck to be patted down or have to walk through a body scan. But honestly, grow a pair and just walk through the damn thing. I have never felt harassed by a TSA agent and I've had the "lovely" experience of both a body scan and a pat-down... They are professional, do their job, and send you on your way. Doesn't take long, no one gets any pervy pleasure out of the experience, and the 2 whole minutes is not a huge inconvenience to my day. Plus, i'm a lot easier to racially profile than the lot of you complaining about the TSA and am pretty positive you don't have to put up with as much checking as I have.

And for the people making arguments about whether TSA checks actually reduce threats on a plane or just substitute them with other non-plane threats, I fail to see how just letting someone buy a ticket and walk onto a plane would be a positive change. Letting any Tom, Dick, or Harry on a plane with no safety measures would increase risk of random violence on a plane, fire arms/weapons on a plane, hijackings, etc. I would rather spend some time inconvenienced in a TSA security check 100/100 times than spend time on a hijacked flight 1/100 times (numbers are used to make a point, not depict an accurate probability of occurrence). I'm sure many of you would agree...
The point of assert is to check your code has values within your required parameters, so you the code is easier to debug while coding. Asserts should never be left in your code compiled for release. Even c library assert is aware of that, as it has the NDEBUG macro, which removes every assert in the code. That is also the reason why you should Never put code that might mutate your variables in them.( function calls or assigning, for example)

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cassert/assert/

Quote from the link: Therefore, this macro is designed to capture programming errors, not user or run-time errors, since it is generally disabled after a program exits its debugging phase.

Of course you can name your macro whatever you want, even assert, but it will confuse other developers used to c library functions.
Entrepreneurs fill the void to capture rent from stupid regulations. Why not start a conference yourself?
It's sad that this headline (presumably) is not tautological.

First, the TSA itself has admitted that there is no evidence of terrorist plots against aviation in the US[0].

Second, the circumstances under which 9/11 happened would be impossible to repeat. Plane cockpits are all but impenetrable[1] - the only reason that some of the 9/11 hijackers were successful was that the standard protocol for dealing with hijackers assumed that hijackers wanted to take the plane hostage for ransom, not use the plane as a weapon. This protocol was fixed almost immediately. (Note that United Airlines Flight 93 did not face the same fate as the other three planes, because the passengers knew what the hijackers were planning.)

Since it's impossible to take control of the cockpit as a hijacker these days, even if someone managed to bring a gun on board a flight, the most damage they could do is kill all the passengers (leaving the pilots unharmed). That is truly a horrible scenario, but that makes flying no more risky than going to the movies or going to school (eg. Newtown, Arapahoe, Boulder).

Of course, one "logical" conclusion is therefore to establish TSA-style security at every school, cinema, mall, etc... in which case we have turned the country into a police state, and we should expect the same crime rates as within federal prisons: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=194

[0] http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-...

[1] I believe I read another comment on Hacker News a while back in which the pilot had a heart attack after the cockpit had been locked from the inside, but before leaving the gate, and it still took the fire department almost an hour to cut through the door.
Amazing, i wish that my cousins would be as productive as you at that age.
Yet another in a long line of "data wonky" articles that misuse statistical data to support a position that is emotionally attractive.

> Would this increase hijacking? Probably. But there's no reason to believe it would increase casualties from terrorist attacks overall. That's because increasing airport security just leads terrorists to direct their assaults elsewhere.

There are two huge problems with this statement.

First, you cannot draw such a causal conclusion from statistical data alone.

Second, it's pulling a subtle slight of hand--the goal of airport security is NOT to reduce terrorist casualties overall. It is to reduce violent attacks of any kind on airplanes, specifically.

At the base of this argument is an implication that terrorist attacks are zero-sum: reduce them in one place, get an equivalent more in another. But that's not how security works.

Look at it in digital terms--it would be like saying that we don't need to bother with strong passwords, because all those did was drive up the number of phishing attacks. Maybe we could just get of passwords, since the total number of intrusions would not go up. And besides, just think of all that wasted effort to create, hash, store, remember, and manage passwords.

Does that sound stupid? I hope so, because it is. But that's exactly the type of argument that this article is making.
> We need to make sure we're not being manipulated. Here the Guardian is just serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion (...)
> We all know war is hell.

Yes, but the drone attacks are unlawful systematic assasinations that are turning peace time living into hell. As there are no declared war zones (afaik, as I understand it the situation in Iraq is in a peculiar state of limbo, and there are presumably interventions in some of the civil wars that could be accepted as "wars", even if not decleared as such) were the US (or NATO) is involved.

So your comment is doing quite a bit of manipulation, itself -- accepting the use of leathal force against foreign civilian and paramilitary targets as equivalent with waging regular war.

I think history will show the push by the US in normalizing this type of terror to be a significant blow against the geneva conventions and agreement on the "rules of war" (which have never been followed to the letter, but have at least held the hope of bringing war criminals to justice and be used as a sound basis for refusing illegal orders).

I can't see how this stance by the US can't be used for justifying attacks on senators and lobbyists on US soil (for "their role in funding and facilitating illegal terrorist attacks against civilian targets").
Router Wrangling
True but boring. And not a defense against a company with a truly innovative product. If you have something people really want you should have to make fewer compromises.
Its not that people 'bought' anything. Its just the general population doesn't care. They just want something that works.
I'm definitely glad to see another 15 year old taking a interest in computing but I guess the reason i'm not overly impressed is that for me- and I don't mean to sound arrogant,- this would be an extremely easy task and the reason I'm not doing something like is because I prefer Software Programming more than Gaming and I hate Windows (I'm on Ubuntu).
Bigger pot, less water as to bigger budget, less freedom.
Surely it matters for legal reasons? I thought that was what the parent was implying; he could get his games pulled for copyright infringement.
Sorry for the late response. No, the 700k didn't. However, our house isn't worth much. We live in a rural part of Canada, and our house here was just under $70k. It's a pretty nice house too. You can even find cheaper houses, if you're willing to compromise a bit. It's not that far from Kelowna, which is a nicer area but over priced. In the States, I've lived in California (SF Bay Area) and Hawaii. Those places are WAY expensive. I would probably end up moving to a cheaper part of the country with cheaper housing. But, the health insurance thing would really worry me. Health care in the U.S. is dauntingly expensive. I know that private HMO insurance for people over 55 y.o. is over $10k a year, and that goes higher as one ages. Canada is why my wife and I are able to retire pretty young.
FYI, using the term "clip" in this way is common but incorrect. Colorado limited the size of magazines to 15 rounds.

Magazines hold ammunition in a way that a gun can pull a round from it when the action cycles. Clips are a specific kind of device for loading some types of magazines.
Divining The Underlying Value Of Bitcoin
It depends, I think. Human willpower and resources are a finite resource.

If a terrorist could bring down a plane by clicking a button on a website, we would see hundreds of planes downed every day.

If it takes a day of preparation, we'd see perhaps a dozen per day.

If it takes a week, we would see another order of magnitude fewer.

If it takes a year of training and preparation by one or more high IQ individuals with several hundred thousand dollars, we'd see almost none. This is why we haven't seen any more 9/11 style attacks even though they were so amazingly effective as a terrorist tool: it's become sufficiently difficult to pull them off after counterterrorism efforts were amped up.

In other words: criminals can still break into my car if they really tried, but I still lock my car doors.
> Had a discussion at work a few weeks ago about this. Roughly, it came down to this - if you need any backwards compatibility whatsoever (Do you ever expect your code to ever run on machines with operating system releases younger than 2013ish OR do you ever plan to interop with code older than 2013ish)

Python 3 runs on operating systems older than 2013 and, while it might not be the OS default, there is no reason a non-library project can't bundle its own interpreter in the distribution and use that instead of the OS default interpreter.
My last trip to London from SFO, according to the ticket fare breakdown, fees were more than 1/2 the ticket. Probably closer to 60%. I would love to see every line item.

Just over Christmas break, we flew from the Vancouver commuter terminal to Tofino. Aside from the delays due to weather, no TSA, super friendly staff, quick mostly comfy flight.
Metal detectors are no big deal. They're quick and they preserve your privacy. Those body scanners are a freaking mess.
This is just business as usual.

No, it's not. It's about attempting to influence a foreign government into doing business with you via corrupt practices. Which makes it subject to regulation by Congress. Which in the SEC's view, JPM may have been in violation of.

Please read the article again. It's really quite clear about this.
I'm a scientist (although not currently living in the US) and I definitely think we (the US in particular and humanity in general) should go back to the Moon and eventually Mars.

Yes, we can (probably) do more science and for cheaper with robots. Yes, we can (probably) develop the same technologies we would other wise by focusing just on automated exploration but there is one very important thing only human exploration can do:

Inspire generations of future scientists

Never underestimate the power of seeing someone personally going where no one has ever gone before or doing something that has never been done before. Thousands of people cross the straight between England and France everyday, but when someone swims across it makes the news. Thousands of people skydive everyday, but when Felix Baumgartner jumped from higher and faster than anybody before it made the news. How many of the older generation of scientists and engineers chose (at least initially) that carrer path because they grew up watching Neil Armstrong bounce around on the Moon? Or watching the now defunct Space Shuttle take people to the edge of space and dreamt of doing the same? A big project similar to the space race could make science and engineering sexy again, and would have one other advantage that only giant projects with clearly defined goals have:

It focuses research in one direction, speeding up technological evolution

The reason why a bunch of nerds in the middle of the New Mexico desert were able to build an atom bomb in practically record time was because everyone had a clear idea of what the goal was and it was immediately clear when progress was being made towards it and when it was achieved. The same thing applies to the Space Race. When Kennedy first said "we choose to go the moon in this decade" it was far from clear that it would even be possible. But it gave everyone a clear and inspiring goal to strive for. "We choose to send a bunch of circuits to the moon" wouldn't have nearly the same effect. This is the reason we now talk of "moonshot projects" (and google has a whole division for them). They are almost impossible but the goal is sufficiently clear and inspiring to make people work hard until they are accomplished.

Imagine what would be possible if Obama were to say "we choose to go to Mars before the end of the decade" and actually provided NASA and private contractors with the funds to do it? What technologies wouldn't be developed and commercialized that we haven't even dreamt of?
Would there be a connection to the more often they quietly paid to hush things up the more hijackings that would happen?
Fair enough -- assert was just the first name that came to mind. Perhaps something more descriptive like RETURN_ERROR_IF_FALSE would have been a better name.