skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was answering parent's claim for refund policy. I haven't really encountered a game with DRM yet.

EDIT: Yeah, it seems some multiplayer games need serial keys to play multiplayer on their servers. You can't blame GoG for providing serial to multiplayer mode of a game. Single player should work without serial though.

The benefits it brings (no serial typing) compared with faults (overloading servers and allowing bots) and costs (huge to re-implement server from scratch), just make it virtually impossible.
Public’s Views on Human Evolution
Your benchmark results could use a little explanation.

I notice that all your examples involve using the range() function, which was changed from returning a list to a generator. In Python2 the memory usage is O(n) where as in Python3 it is O(1), albeit a little slower.

The first two cases being compared are 3-4x slower in Python 3 but why? Is it related to Integer->Float conversion? What has changed from Python 2 to 3 here?

The difference in the rest of the examples is not huge.

In my opinion, changing range, zip, map, etc to be "lazy", ie. return generators not lists, is one of the best things that happened in Python 3. What you lose in speed will be gained back in memory use.

These toy example micro benchmarks don't really prove anything, it's not like the cost of iterating a range of integers would ever be a bottle neck in a practical application. However, the advantage of O(1) vs. O(n) memory usage is a major benefit and will make zip, map and other related functions a lot more useful, especially for large lists.
I wouldn't blame your host, actually. It's WordPress. It's a shame it's so often given a free pass on these issues when it really isn't good at handling peaks in traffic.
Extremely easy? To make 30 games in a year?
Even if using a game creator software, it is not extremely easy. Opening a door is extremely easy.
Although nothing was actually shown in the video - it dismissed several seconds after 'Send' was tapped. With this design, where the whole message thread is shown, I think it would be better to have a 'Done' button up at the top, in case you want to reread messages or send a second reply.
High frequency trading competition
This all-world trading competition is an effort to introduce people to high frequency finance data, and the process of learning patterns from it.
Well, I'd say the biggest reason why I like them is summarization and curation. Without them, it would take way too much time for me to gather and understand what's happening. Seriously. As well, it would take too much time and effort to choose what to focus on. Now we can debate on whether they do that job well, but I'd warrant that they still do it better and more efficiently than I could myself, and same when compared to social media or discussion forums.
You are probably right. But one question what if I don`t reply, how to go back. Definitely missing button or gesture.
Aaaah! Why should a remote application be involved? It sounds completely unneeded to limit this to a web browser running software controlled by others.

Just let the user select a media file and provide keyboard controlled playback controls plus a text editor. I think some software like this is available for subtitle editing.
From my experience, the key point in this story is that if you bother people enough with useless manual interventions, they will come up with a way to automate themselves out of the job.

Furthermore, the solution is often simpler and cheaper than the monitoring infrastructure.

And, well, the rest of the anecdote is based on the waste of money caused by the fact that the external company had everything to gain from overengeneering the solution.
But I think a strong trend will be that less experienced and less skilled (and over-confident) developers will be more easily lured. How do you counter this trend when recruiting, and filter for the one that is skilled enough but still can be lured? You can't just take any developer to be solo developer for a startup (much harder than team development), especially to work on somebody else's idea.
This all-world trading competition is an effort to introduce people to high frequency finance data, and the process of learning patterns from it.
Do people find it really ok to have video and a website spelling "try it free" and then have only an email input form ? I know that testing if demand exists is important, but doesn't it have adverse effect on your reputation to somehow lie to your prospects ?
So you're not concerned about the government themselves having a bad security record and leaking all the data they gather on you, either? (government leaks data all the time)

Or someone in government deciding to stalk you? (this has happened, within the NSA I believe, but certainly in other places)

Or someone deciding they dislike you and using your information to pursue frivolous legal action? (You never broke any law? Any law at all? How would you even know, there are so many and they're so vague!)

Beyond that, well I guess you just don't care about privacy. Me, I do. It's not somehow the right of a bunch of other people I don't know, with minimal to zero democratic oversight, to poke into my life just because they feel like it.
I'm in a hurry and didn't read the article - but on 1, developers are far from normal consumers or businesses, consider far different things reasonable and interesting and are a totally different "sell" - much as founders themselves are far different from normal employees and simply can't be judged on the same basis. I don't think your point 1 is valid at all. (Likewise, just because you can convince a developer, doesn't make you an actual salesperson, doesn't mean you can convince a customer!)
Happy New 2014 Year
I have a lot of plans for the next year and hope all of us will see their plans to materialize!

Happy hacking, building, learning and creating in new 2014 year, Y'all!
Instead, Apple should include another button in the next iPhone allowing for quickly switching back and forth between the two most recent applications (just like cmd-tab). The four-finger sliding gesture is just too heavy-handed.
Maybe they were requested to remove it by Square Enix?
Or to put it another way - 2013, a year that opened up myrriad opportunities for disruption.

Mobile device penetration reached a point where we can rely upon the platform for application distribution.

Wearables continued to look for a compelling app.

Former giants continued to make way for new technologies and companies.

M&A replaced innovation in big companies (great for the rest of us).

Technology leaders continued to be pr$$$s (so whats new?)

Social Media - again achieved platform status - ready to be used, abused and replaced.

Media (and bitcoin) blah blah

NSA and GCHQ screw up the initial cloud business model and (again) open up new opportunities.

Pretty good start point for a great 2014 I would say
Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees
CMS trends for 2014
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels: Cloud and SaaS are going global, fast
Procedural Content Generation for Games: A Survey
the income of college graduates has been flat or declined slightly

Except that's not exactly true either. The average income of newly minted college graduates has been flat or declining, but the set which is being averaged is expanding -- and expanding downwards. Unless you think that college education is the sole determinant of income, it is unreasonable to compare the "average" college graduate from 30 years ago against the "average" college graduate today -- who would very likely not have been admitted to college 30 years ago.

The same fallacy is applied in the opposite direction by colleges who are seeking to increase their student numbers: "The average graduate earns $X more than the average non-graduate." True, but it ignores the fact that the average graduate is quite different from the marginal graduate.
soon : the Butlerian Jihad
That's a good point, I don't think he thought about that.
BMC journals are somewhat going in that direction strongly suggesting to put the methodology after both results and conclusions.
Ask HN: Share a learning & a happy moment from your startup in 2013
With the year ending & many a startup founders around the world working on their dreams through the midnight - it would be great to celebrate it with your best moments and share a learning to help others

PS: One liners preferred
>>I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers".

Actually, I disagree. Even if you're not a developer, you should still strive to learn enough development such that you can push out the first version of the product yourself, even if it's imperfect. Doing so will have several advantages:

1. It will make it easier to find a developer (they will respect you a lot more)

2. It will make it easier to get customers

3. It will make you appreciate the technical aspects of the business

Number 1 is the most important. The reason non-technical people have difficulty convincing developers to work on their ideas is that developers tend to look down upon non-technical people, especially "sales types." In addition, most developers have a thousand ideas of their own - you need to give them a reason to work on your idea instead. And that's a lot easier to do if you already have a version 1.0 out there that you have developed and have customers paying for it.
> person obviously not familiar with Office 365

More like, a person in an office. Adopting new technology has less to do with new technology becoming available, and more to do with retraining, support and backups. I imagine the majority of the workforce is not familiar with Office 365.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production#Marxian_eco...
Someone show this to Apple! I bet they could even use it in their desktop operating sy- [1]

[1] http://cdn.tips-and-tricks-in-mavericks.com/images/2013/07/R...
YC has 3 female partners.

http://ycombinator.com/people.html
while I would like to believe them - just how concerned are they for their largest customers?
Yhea should have called it AppPlanet.io or GetAppPlanet right? Or what about ooozunmba or any other meaningless name that sound 2013 startup. Kickstarter + Airbnb for iPhone themes.
LG Lifeband Touch fitness tracker leaks a little early
What about jailbroken devices?
Which is the 3rd circle of hell.

Breaking with this sort of practice is exactly why agile development and it's ilk were born.

While writing a formal specification can be useful, it is rarely as useful as defining the problem and placing your solution in the context of other possible solutions.
Why I Actually Have Become Pessimistic About Indian I.T.
Try pass the Cisco CCIE v5 certification.
Such a great write up, thank you for sharing.

Question: what are you going to do with the product now?
They do better than that - if you get high spam complaints on your email (>2% approx. equals high), your account will be locked. Even if you've been a paying customer for months. If you go >1% they'll put you on double secret probation and you have to explain why it's actually totally legit for one of your campaigns to have such a rate and promise never to do what you did to cause that again to get it reinstated.

The second part is from personal experience. Although not a spammer, any list that you harvest from third-parties has an inherently high spam rate and MailChimp will catch it fast.
In fact I am learning how to program, so I agree with your points - but I don't think it is for every one. There is plenty of space for non tech founders.

BUT I do believe it is easier if you do know how to code.
"The developer had no intention of being the project’s developer (?) he was not really a developer, he was a computer science graduate who owned a webdev shop and was used to managing, not coding."

Heard this story so many times. Amazing how many people join a startup and don't want to do the actual work. Remember that scene in The Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg calls his outsource team about progress on that latest feature? No? Me either.
Learning: Single Focus. Speed. We digressed a bit and we lost the game both ends a bit. Wish we had focused on one thing.

Happy Moment: We were 17 people and we went out for a trip from the company, stayed in a good resort, had a time-off. It made me happy to think back from where it started.

edit: going by what I said on the post - one liners. removed rest.
But how do we get the idea? :)
Look at http://thefoundation.com/ , they have some cases about this kind of approach.
I love the "physical" back button on my Galaxy S and find Android's overall back button concept really useful, regardless of the os version. I feel disoriented whenever I try to go back to where I left on an ios device, it's always app specific and non-standard.

Opening another app from a notification and returning back would be quite difficult, not all apps have a specific action marking the end of an interaction, as in "sending the email" in this concept. How will I go back from editing a spreadsheet or some notification putting me right in to the middle of a game?
> But when I'm writing new code, I'm of course using Python 3.

There's no "of course" about it, which is the point of the article. It is interesting that you're using Python3. It means that you're not blocked by library availability (public or company-internal). It means that you are permitted by management to use it. It probably means that you prefer it.

My situation is different on the last two points, but I am also not blocked by library availability.
"...having unlocked phones, pre-paid cards, and even mandatory unlocking is (and has been) the norm since mid-nineties." This is what I am disputing from experience. It is categorically not the norm. Phones are sold locked to contracts. Pay-as-you-go is possibly marginally more popular, but the phones are subsidised and locked. Yes they can be unlocked and normally for a fee. The French law you allude to is out of date and falls foul of Directive 2005/29/EC (see the entry on Belgium in the wiki link). There is no law in France or most other EC territories as illustrated in your link.

Phones sold, in France on pay-as-you-go (forfait bloqué) and monthly deals (forfait) come with a locked phone. Yes, they may be unlocked at any time (http://assistance.orange.fr/desimlocker-votre-mobile-2839.ph... and http://assistance.sfr.fr/mobile_forfait/mobile/desimlocker-m...), much like the can in the UK (http://service.o2.co.uk/IQ/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE?New,Kb=Co...) or indeed in Germany (http://www.t-mobile.de/sim-lock-entsperren/0,20638,23789-_,0...). The end user must still pay the remainder of their contract even if they choose to use another provider. SIM only deals; either 30 day, PAYG or 12 month contracts, are commonplace. Suggesting that in anyway they are the norm is incorrect.

EDIT: Funnily enough one of my parents, a resident of France, has had an iPhone 3G, 3Gs, 4s and 5s on contract with Orange. Not one was sold unlocked with their contract.
I don't really understand the rationale behind making kids choose a master right from the start.

My experience at university and that of many others is that not only do we often end up choosing a master's that we wouldn't have thought of initially, we often even switch bachelor's early on, or change direction midway.
Technically you would be required to pay the VAT on imported goods to the EU - even if they are considered duty free.
This is FUD. Do you have any evidence that iOS allows any Apple server to get some kind of full control without asking permission and without using an exploit? I suppose that if you are restoring from an iCloud backup and Apple has been convinced to allow the NSA to modify that backup, some kind of MDM stuff could be enabled, but this is limited and detectable. Otherwise, it may be possible, but you have not provided any evidence.
The link he gives at the end, Advice on research and writing, is dead.

I believe the updated link would be
http://http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mleone/how-to.html
And I would disagree. I think you're underestimating the time and effort required for a complete beginner to produce version 1 of any non-trivial product.

As a developer what I'd be looking for before coming onboard is a) a clear idea of what is being built b) that there is the money in place to pay me.
iOS7 revolves around the concept of panes. The app, home screen, background, and notifications are all on separate panes to give a user a sense of context of where they are. This defeats that completely by muddying the waters and mixing panes. Like others have said, link bait, no design concept, there was really no thinking involved, someone just threw a video together of iOS8 with an added button.
I read that as selling the venture to the developer, i.e. convincing a developer that the company has all of the pieces it needs to be successful already except for a developer. Note that good freelancers usually have paying customers already, so even they will need some convincing to take on a new client.

As far as offering equity to a developer, this may be as weak a move as building a product before proper validation, since it essentially means bringing on an investor before proving that there's something worth investing in.
They are only able to remove the DRM on their own games (which is what he was surely talking about). The article is about a game that is not made by Valve but merely distributed via Valve's distribution channel.
I've been lucky enough to attend one of Peyton Jone's talks in person. He is not suggesting to "write a formal spec" before you do research. In contrast, his attempt is to be agile: keep going back and forth in the paper writing as you do research. Only then you will see what's missing.

Essentially, what he is suggesting is actually "agile academic research", compared to the "waterfall academic research" (do stuff, then write-up a paper with what you've got...)
I wonder how much their conversion was impacted by internationalisation problems. It looks like they were attempting to target the US, but their pricing page wasn't localised for that market. Unless they really were charging one thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars per team. Price is shown as £19,90 instead of $19.90

Also due to what I perceived as a thousand separator, not a decimal mark, I initially read the price as nineteen thousand and nine hundred dollars!
I agree with some of what you say (e.g. a non-technical founder that learns some technical aspects of the business will be more respected).

Though in practice I've experienced too many cases where I couldn't imagine non-technical founders I've worked with learning enough, and fast enough, to launch a v1 on their own. It's possible, but between OP's suggested flow vs. yours, I'll side w/the OP's. As a developer and co-founder, I'd much rather a non-technical founder concentrate on finding paying customers (or other cash flow), marketing, becoming immersed in the target market, etc. than learning how to code.

To supplement, the article's Where it went wrong and Where it went REALLY wrong sections cite non-technical reasons for failure. So while you raise great points, it's not clear that the OP's situation would have been better if he had learned to code first.
Sidebar: why do we say defrauding instead of just frauding? Isnt defrauding the opposite of frauding?
Wordpress vs. the rest
Ask HN: What is your New Years 2014 tech resolution?
Mine is to learn Haskell
It saddens me to see efforts on getting people even more hooked on gmail.
I'd love to have something as good as sqlalchemy in go
>Google engineers are brilliant programmers, so I don't think it's about being used to a certain paradigm either.

Well, it could very well be a major factor in this.

Google engineers in general and Go engineers in particular might be brilliant programmers, but the team behind Go is quite old school (you don't get much older school than Thompson and Pike, unless you go to, dunno, Chuck Moore?), and mostly devoted to procedural code.
A manual isn't particularly useful on its own, since it's full of implementation details for one particular widget. SPJ is emphasising that details and descriptions of implementations should be avoided in favour of ideas and intuitions.

A purely theoretical paper can still be useful. It's even more useful if it's followed up by an experimental paper demonstrating or refuting the idea.

For example, it's silly to write a manual "How to use Google", then make Google. It's very sensible to write a paper "A proposal for improving Web search with mutual-popularity measures", then try to make Google. If Google succeeds, we can write "Mutual-popularity measures and Web search: large-scale experimental results". If it fails, we can write "Scaling issues on the Web: impacts on mutual-popularity algorithms".
Yes, this! Exactly to the point. This is in my view THE argument against all-out snooping. It is about control, not about criminality.
U.S. to China: We Hacked Your Internet Gear We Told You Not to Hack
I know this headline generates traffic by being about the iPhone, but this is a minor point. The big message from Jacob's talk and the original articles in Der Spiegel is that the NSA can intercept anything. Period. Full stop. People have suspected such far reaching capabilities for some time. This talk and the articles demonstrate that it exists. I'm personally a little uncomfortable with this kind of disclosure. On one hand, the NSA exists for the express purpose of spying. That is their job. You can not like that the NSA is a spy organization and we can debate whether we should conduct spy operations as a society, but I'm not sure what exposing their methods in this level of detail does for advancing that debate. Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? A group that makes crappy and obvious listening devices stamped with "Designed by the NSA in Maryland"? On the other hand, the cases of potential abuses and dragnet surveillance capturing everything indiscriminately are extremely worrying. I don't know how a free society can do all this spying in support of legitimate foreign policy goals and at the same time not grow into an out of control, unaccountable organization ripe for abuse.
Sure, but none of them are "hackers" in the current context.

Carolynn is a lawyer, with a bachelors is in political science.

Jessica previously worked at an investment bank, and has a BA in English.

Kirsty is an accountant, and although she holds an MEng in electrical and information sciences, it's not clear that she ever worked as an engineer.

This discussion is about young girls hacking with computers, which (I'm assuming, given their bios) none of these women did at that age.

I'm just disappointed that YC doesn't have a woman partner with a CS degree of any sort.
That's what's really stands out to me as foreign in the article - the idea of an entire system consisting of hardware, OS and even applications designed as a unit with no regard for portability, and people considering that a good thing or at least as the normal thing to do.

We've come a long way since then, and in retrospective the most interesting thing about the article may be what it does not mention at all: the IBM PC, released in the previous year, which would go on to establish a mass-market platform where software compatibility became such a strong concern that praise of elegant and innovative hardware details that support a custom OS seem quaint or absurd.
Spring from the Trenches: Invoking a Secured Method from a Scheduled Job
Really great writeup, thanks for sharing.

I'm left wondering, though, what you actually did over the two years? You imply that you were working on it full time. Two years full time is a lot of time. You can do pretty much anything in that time (including, as others have mentioned, learn to code).

> idiot plans, budget forecasts, BUSINESS CARDS, fancy website [and writing articles]

I find it hard to believe you can work on those things for two years, day in and day out.