skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"the number one key to success is dumb, blind, luck"

This is a red herring.

The number one key to winning the lottery is dumb, blind luck.

That is true.

But don't categorize the entire game industry, let alone this developer's story in that framework just because it's easy for the media to generate pageviews about a lottery winner.

The macro reality is that proven business models around building a studio on the back of high quality apps (or highly aggressive pay-to-play apps), purposeful marketing models, etc exist all over the place.

The micro reality of this developer is the guy has run his studio for 4 YEARS, had published several games before in a variety of formats, etc.

So he's a 4-year overnight success.

He didn't throw in the towel, and more important than "blind luck" in his story was perseverance, and he didn't "die" (1).

So please don't tell people that the most important factor in becoming successful is to go out and buy lottery tickets.

(1) http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
The future that everyone forgot – Some of the work we did at Danger
Show HN: PressFriendly – PR software built with machine learning for startups
An equation for intelligence...
man pages start with the function prototypes, that's your "quick summary".

Near the end there can be an examples section, and many man pages have one. If I run "man 3 open" I see a reasonable examples section.

I like manpages because I'm already editing or running programs in the terminal, and I can pop open the man page in the terminal quite quickly and conveniently, without a search online or even a single network request, without reaching for the mouse, etc.
>Side note: I wonder if the developer meticulously chose the "flap height" and pipe width such that it would drive us all insane, or if he just got lucky.

Its hard to say. I guess most people find this pretty compelling, but to me it comes across as an unplayable clone of helicoptergame.net. It looks pretty polished for a pixel game, but I don't consider bad controls, intentional or not, to be a clever game mechanic.
Is Flappy Bird just a clone of that rediculously fun helicopter tunnel game that everyone used to play on AddictingGames, the name of which escapes me right now? It's funny how many of these record-shattering Android and iOS games are just polished versions of ancient Flash games.
How Undo Timers Can Save Users from Embarassment
I've been looking around for the same. The problem seems to be that there are only a few big outlets (some with exclusive contracts) doing the stats for the big sports. It seems possible to scrape a lot of what you need though, unless you need up to date data daily (which could still be scraped but it would be a much larger undertaking).

My question is, how do you plan on getting data from the daily fantasy sites (e.g. salary caps and salaries of players)? I don't think FanDuel (or any of the other sites) has a public api for anything other than seeing user rankings.
Whatever we may WISH, Flash is still everywhere. And still necessary, for example, to play sounds across browsers
I believe I'd read the the Air Force's "space" budget is actually bigger than all of NASA. Don't have a link handy but will post if I find it. Kind of puts new light on the idea/misconception that NASA is our (the US's) only space program.
On Android, widgets would be an issue.
Breaking something expensive when you don't get your way is the act of a petulant child.

Detailed discussion of Apple policy is welcome, giving attention to the noise of 'fuck Apple' and shattered iPhones is not.

The App Store is a store. Breaking things because your sense of entitlement doesn't allow a retailer to pick what they sell is not something I, and (I believe) the majority of HN viewers want to see.
I think you're wrong, but am willing to be told otherwise. Here's why: one currency is not (generally) legal tender outside its country of origin, so there's an exchange rate determined roughly by the trade balance between countries etc. If all currencies were legal tender everywhere (a much more analogous) situation, the exchange rate would not be determined by the same factors, since the currency would in no way be pegged to the nation.

Then the question becomes: what does in fact determine the exchange rates? I.e., would one currency be "infinitely valuable" compared to all others? Which one? The first? Or would all of the stabilize at the point where 1 of A is always worth 1 of B, because that's easiest to work with?
the protocol depends a lot on content providers being well behaved

I think this is true of existing content, except there are much fewer content providers and there's no protocol.
There's no suggestion in that blog post that the security agencies have indulged in DDOS attacks.
I'm looking forward to the day that this technology is used for censorship; since everything political will need to sound positive, satire will rise again!
DRM can force you to do whatever you want. It's proprietary code running on your system.

If you want to view the content, it will ensure that you've seen the ad before it renders the content.
as I said it's not ideal.

the only point of entry onto the machine is via the auth service, so if you get in that way you have access to it.

it's not a matter of injecting code, it's literally one line to run spin up gdb attached to the process, and then one/two more more lines inside gdb to put a breakpoint on the line and print the variables on the stack when it's hit.

add in the fact that something like 95% of our users reconnect every 24 hours, so you get the vast majority very quickly.

yes, if the admins go rogue then we're screwed, but the same is true nearly always as they're the guys that set up the defences in the first place.
Refresh for Google Glass
Well I did not mean that the strings are literally on the call stack. You can make your own stack (and it doesn't have to be a stack, just have the same semantics).
Sonos for every/all speakers. Really impressive. Does it keep playing after I leave the house and independent of phone streaming?
draftkings.com allows you to download salary data as CSV.
Wow, I went into the negative with that. You guys really need to learn how to take a joke (unless I'm being taken down by the hippie lobby, in which case I'll keep put. No surrendering to terrorists, even those who wield flowers).
If I understand your reasoning, TLS for HTTP should be considered useless as well. Users do stupid things that lets their information get stolen. SSL/TLS provides one layer of security, and at least prevents plaintext sniffing of traffic.
This Cadillac Has Eight Wheels, A Hot Tub, And A Barbecue
In fact, missile technology diverged from launch vehicle technology quite early on.

With missiles, you want a storable propellant so that you can launch-on-demand -- not launch-after-fueling. Thus, hypergolics and solid propellants.

As warheads became miniaturized, the payload capacity actually went down. When the Russians started selling their decommissioned missiles for satellite launches (e.g., Rokot), the only things they could launch with it were small LEO satellites.

It's actually military satellite launchers that drove the commercial market. Spy satellites kept getting heavier, so the launchers got beefier, which meant that communications satellites could also get bigger.
If experimental data does not confirm the theory, you need a better theory.

If experimental data does confirm the theory, you need a better experiment!
Medoo 0.9.1 is released. The lightest PHP database framework.
Medoo is a lightweight PHP database framework. It`s only one file, and easy-to-use and easy-to-learn. It can truly accelerate PHP development without considering SQL syntax.

Medoo 0.9.1 update log:

- Add support for column alias

- Add multiplication and division for update function

- Add quote for update column

- Supported MariaDB

- Fix MSSQL connection

- Fix double value error

- A lot of bug fixed and improvement

http://medoo.in

https://github.com/catfan/Medoo

Enjoy:)
I think you are confusing the use of IRC networks to systematically start a DDoS attack with a bunch of sleeping malware hanging inside an arbitrary channel.
Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
The space shuttle was (too) many things to (too) many people. Mediocrity by committee.
I searched around a bit and found this PDF link.

http://www.state-machine.com/arm/Building_bare-metal_ARM_wit...

It seems to have the full series.
"But maybe what game players really want is a game that is fun and free, with no strings attached."

I just respect any game that has no strings attached. I have mostly given up on iOS gaming because there's just so much niggling and begging and nickel-and-dining.

This will be remembered as a dark age, not a golden era.
I'm not sure why Ben used a false name for the CFO. One quick search got me her real name, and more details about her eventual indictment.
It's because high end web design companies aren't sourcing customers who are googling "San Francisco Web Design". What are you looking for more specifically? An agency?
Just throwing an idea a the wall here: Maybe it could be combined with the decentralization of the power grid, i.e. smartgrids? This would (a) give additional incentives to home owners (subsidizing their investment) and power companies (going after the broadband market) and (b) it would solve the question on where to get the bandwidth from.
Not just that, Ookla /actively partners/ with the ISPs. Comcast's site is actually at speedtest.comcast.net.

There's a financial dis-incentive for them to do so.
The First Thing You MUST Do When  You Receive a Customer Support Email
Ask HN: is single founder startup really frown upon / despised?
I applied to couple of accelerators and got shot down.

I am pretty sure the startup idea got their attention (I have shown my startup here and generally it is a positive feedback), however I think why I got denied is probably due to single founder.

Why is that single founder frown upon in the industry? While I understand single founder has twice as much work, but I also think if they can build the startup from ground up to launch, it shows that they are capable of running the business.

A bit about me. I am a business founder with Product Management background. I do have engineering background, but not in web coding. I build the startup myself by writing requirement, testing, everything that a tech co founder (CTO) can do except writing codes. I outsource the development using freelancers. I have few marketing strategies on how to spread the words out. As people usually say, Product Manager is like a mini CEO. I understand the mechanics of how it works, why it works, and how to run it.

The other reason I am a single founder now is because I want to prove to my future CTO (tech co founder) that I have what it takes to run the startup. Without a web background, it is hard to attract or gather interests from a savvy web programmer, so I think it is necessary for me to show them that I understand it.

what is your take on this?
And that has absolutely nothing at all to do with DRM...
Who would work for a government agency like the NSA or GCHQ? Anyone who is intelligent and well-minded must realize that these government agencies stomp on people's liberties in the name of security. I am sure that employees of these agencies come to work every day telling themselves that they are keeping the world safe. But their reassurances to themselves must sound hollow to themselves. I hope everyone working at these agencies realizes that. At least Edward Snowden did.
Build an Open-Source Electric Car In About One Hour
I dont really appreciate the way you argue.
Just tried that helicopter game, while it has similar concepts, the gameplay mechanics are different enough - in the helicopter game you hold the mouse button to stay aloft, versus repeatedly flapping. Also Flappy Bird has a nicer feel, the physics (ie. fall rate, because that's about all there is) feel more 'right', and of course the graphics and everything are just more fun.

So no, I'd say it's not a clone.
Remote Perils: the timezone productivity gap
Do you mean this: https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/c10/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll?b_act...

(Aaahhhhhh! Cognos! Aaahhhhhhh!)

I don't have a good source for the number of contractors, other than wikipedia. (...which cites http://employeeorientation.nasa.gov/contractors/default.htm. Huh.)
Getting Started with FreeBSD Screencasts
Don't get discouraged; people who greatly appreciate a well written man page are still around. They're the users you might not hear about because the fine documentation actually helped them. :-)
I really like MeetUp and the niche doesn't sound much different. Can you share the differences?
Check with the founders at NumberFire.com
Very cool project. You see new Linux distros but this if the first I've heard of someone "forking" off of a Windows system. Potential in the Windows 8 world -> very high.
Business is hard. Programming is hard. Good at both programming and business? More than twice as hard.

Also, from a scalability perspective, one founder means that everything blocks on you. Going from one to two people significantly increases throughput.
Meetings, presentations etc - I may not have my power brick with me.
That sounds like a randomly generated title from the HN Headline Generator :)

https://github.com/sursh/markov-hacker-news or
www.blarworld.net/hackernewsgen.html
CONTROL { print 1; $_.resume }; print 2; warn; print 3 # 213

That's obviously a contrived example but I think it shows the basics.

Some related excerpts from spec doc S04 (blocks and statements):

Warnings are produced in Perl 6 by throwing a resumable control exception to the outermost scope, which by default prints the warning and resumes the exception by extracting a resume continuation from the exception, which must be supplied by the warn() function (or equivalent).

...

Since warnings are processed using the standard control exception mechanism, they may be intercepted and either suppressed or fatalized anywhere within the dynamic scope by supplying a suitable CONTROL block.

...

As with calls to return, the warning control exception is an abstraction that the compiler is free to optimize away (along with the associated continuation) when the compiler or runtime can determine that the semantics would be preserved by merely printing out the error and going on.

...

One additional level of control is the notion of lazy warnings. ... Numeric and string conversions use these lazy warnings to allow (but not require) failsoft semantics.
Chromebox For Meetings
U.S. says no evidence Obamacare software written in Belarus
Hey phest! Great looking game! It has got a really unique style.

Is the music/sound procedurally generated too?

What is the process like for creating the soundtrack for the trailer or effects for the game?

What's the squiggly black icon for/go to in the options list (Settings, Leaderboards, About, goes to a black screen???)?
While driving on the Autobahn I see plenty of people going 200km/h+ and yet Germany has one of the lowest accident rates in Europe. It's all about training and responsibility.
Opera has this since about 8 years. I used Opera heavily back then, but I never felt that this needs to be baked in. Other opera features I miss much more, most importantly free keyboard hotkey programming. I always had y, x, c (without modifier) mapped to back, forward and fast forward.
Did you have anything to do with bringing the the scarf that's for sale on attractmo.de to market? I got one for my wife and it's really beautiful.
Docker and Security
I understand that, but being a PM, I outsource my development to freelancer. If you see it from the outside, it's like two people startup. I am in charge in everything else, the freelancer is in charge of coding and build the site based on my requirement
I don't think anyone would complain if it hadn't been advertising those links as officially supported direct links for years before sneakily changing them to deliver the ad page instead.
Very short bursts of activity are brilliant for mobile gaming. That "just one more go" feeling is strong.
But the mechanics are indeed similar enough. It's obvious it was inspired by it. Look at Angry Birds and that other flash game i used to play in school. Castle, Catapult something?
Luminus is basically just a set of sane defaults for Ring. Anything substantial (e.g. cljs-ajax) is split out into its own library.

Basically, I'd recommend luminus until you get opinions of your own (e.g. I rather like bidi).
Legacy browsers sure, but deciding whether to add DRM to HTML presupposes a browser that plays sound according to the standard.
I was thinking carbon-neutral for the individual miner, not for the whole network. The latter would be a very ambitious project.
If you want to go below nlog(n) during generic sorting you need to choose high information gain algorithm, its easy. This is no way.
Sublime/TextMate theme editor in JavaScript
Wow, I am super out of the loop as this is the first I've ever heard of it.
Just as it's hard to tell if someone's a good coder without yourself being a good coder, it's hard to tell if an attorney or financial expert is giving you good advice without seeking for yourself a basic understanding of the legal or financial issues. A good attorney or financial expert will help you understand the issues enough for yourself to see why their evaluation makes sense. It's not good enough to just completely outsource responsibility to someone else.

Always do and trust own analysis (with an attorney or expert you trust when needed) instead of falling for the lure of "it's fine with these other experts so it should be fine for us." That's a recipe for a herd mentality random walk through and across the gray areas of the matter.
>Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP

This is very true. More so if you look at countries like the UK where ISPs have recently been consolidated into MAFIAA-complying monopolies that censor just about anything that Hollywood and the government ask them to. It's scary how close ISPs are to the 'governements' of the UK and USA. Obamas' recent NSA 'reform' proposal even suggested that ISPs be in charge of surveillance & storage of Metadata instead of the NSA! WTF? Fascism.

Mesh networks have a big role to play in decentralizing the the post-NSA internet. Micropayments through bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will encourage individual nodes to provide bandwidth to users [1]. Smartphone apps like OpenGarden [2] and systems like the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) [3] are the frontrunners of the new internet.

[1] https://crypto.cs.virginia.edu/courses/14s-pet/2014/01/30/aw...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Garden
[3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-pr...
I actually got to try the Beta for my soon-to-launch company Fittr, and was amazed at how well PressFriendly worked, especially at getting my sh*t together--it really made sure that I had every detail correct and outlined well.

I haven't sent out the emails yet, but the list of contacts was stellar--I recognized some of the names, and looked up others, but they were all on point. I'm excited for our press launch thanks to PressFriendly!
If AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other ISPs are intentionally limiting bandwidth to certain content providers, as the measurements seem to indicate, they may be actually doing us a favor. By doing this, they are causing people to discuss the issue and eventually lead to market changing trends or new regulations and potential legal hazards for ISPs that do this in the future.

If anything, Amazon is a smart company, there might be an opportunity here for last-mile internet delivery...Amazon Fiber Prime anyone?
Start Your Freelance Career
As this was intended for his book, I assume he wanted to extend her some common courtesy. He makes it clear that she was well liked and, in his opinion, had made mistakes, not committed fraud intentionally. Despite the matter being very public, I think it's reasonable, even kind, not to mention her actual name in this context in his book.
Chromebox, now for simpler and better meetings
HTML5 Internet speed test
Yes. But standing inside the sphere it is kindof intuitive that the far-away parts of the sphere are not negligible---they fill up the entire night sky!
I just saw your response to my comment. No, sincerely, it wasn't clear to me. I wasn't being deliberately obtuse.

Letters of Last Resort are/were written in the context of the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.) which was predicated on the premise that if you wiped me out, my retaliation would wipe you out. My comment was made with that in mind.
I agree 100%. I eventually started jumping around to a bunch of different problems and I found the Monopoly question[0] to be a great source to test your programming skills that only deals a little with math.

On face value it sounds easy but I tried to implement my solution from a very high level with objects and interfaces. My thought was that at a later point I'd like to come back and flesh-out my solution to a full blown monopoly game. My language of choice at the time was Javascript.

OP, try this problem, it helped me a lot!

[0]: https://projecteuler.net/problem=84
I have heard about this happening to others. In the kernel I developed as part of an operating systems course, I pre-emptively commented my use of goto with a short justification of its usage and cited its use in the linux kernel. I didn't get any response, so I have no idea how the T.A. felt about it. I didn't lose any points, at least.
Just curious. Suppose you did your due diligence, asked your general counsel, and they said, "It's within the law, go for it." Then, acting on their advice, you did the same thing this person did. Would you go to jail for the same amount of time in both cases?

E: Name removed to protect the accused, although it's thin protection indeed considering her name is disclosed elsewhere in this thread.
Eh, I like my C idioms. With C++ it's easy to make it safe so that accessing an unassigned string doesn't cause a crash (make NULL equivalent to empty strings except for tests).

I have the same gripe with the way the STL is designed. Too tedious to test for empty first before reading an item.
Another case of user-hostile behavior enabled by browsers betraying what site the user is on to third-party services. Down with referer headers~
A more correct version might be:

#include <stddef.h>

int buf_offset = (int)offsetof(struct sdshdr, buf);
struct sdshdr *sh = s - buf_offset;

This is because the compiler might insert padding between your struct elements and the flexible array member. In your case, you're using only int types in the header, so padding shouldn't be an issue on most architectures, but consider the following:

struct header {
int i;
char c;
char data[];
};

sizeof(struct header) on my machine is 8, but "data" starts at an offset of 5 from the beginning of the struct. So, to go from "data" pointer to the pointer representing the beginning of the struct, you will need to subtract 5, not 8. Here is a test program:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stddef.h>

struct header {
int i;
char c;
char data[];
};

int main(void)
{
struct header h = {0};
printf("offsetof %zu\n", offsetof(struct header, data));
printf("sizeof %zu\n", sizeof h);
printf("start %p, data start %p, delta %d\n",
(void *)&h, (void *)(h.data), (int)((char *)h.data - (char *)&h));

return 0;
}

http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n983.htm is relevant for this case as well.
I really enjoyed reading this story. Now imagine being in this situation if you don't have a Jordan: you've got this super reputable head of finance who implemented this great option granting process at another huge company (PwC in this case) that was approved by their accounting team, how do you figure out if the process is legit? Where do you find people like Jordan?
I'm pretty sure android doesn't run on the iPad, which is what the person I was responding to said they use.

(That said, yes, you can do this on android, with skype and a skype-in number.)