skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there is a connection; "AAA" games suck for a lot of the same reasons that Hollywood films suck:

* The "average joe" gamer/moviegoer expects incredibly lavish productions with photorealism, explosions, over-the-top action, etc. Making a game/movie for this audience is very expensive and very risky: They need to spend a lot, and charge a lot to a huge audience to make up the difference.

* So that developer/studio tries to minimize their risk and sticks to what they know how to make and what they know people will buy: the same two genres over and over and over again (FPS and third person action, or over-the-top action and screwball comedy), lavish "set pieces" and gimmicks that look cool in advertising but don't contribute anything at all to the gameplay/story (like "the one building you can destroy" or the "quick-time event": "press X to watch the main character do something really cool instead of just doing something cool yourself"), big-name actors for promotional value, etc etc. Some aspects like writing quality aren't considered as important and aren't given as much attention. Some things that make a better game/movie would be actively harmful to its commercial success (true novelty, gameplay/plot that takes effort from the audience to understand/appreciate), and so these qualities are avoided.

* Despite being incredibly formulaic and so on, these games/movies are very successful with their target audiences. To add another layer of metaphor, they're the fast food of their mediums: unremarkable and probably bad for you, but highly available and consistent in their quality. You might wish it were better, but you'll probably enjoy yourself on some level regardless. Critics and more sophisticated gamers/moviegoers decry the state of their respective industries at large while temporarily ignoring all of the cool stuff put out by smaller studios and passionate hobbyists.

In the decades before expensive CG raised the expectations of gamers and moviegoers alike, there was always the equivalent of these successful but substanceless creations, but you saw a lot more experimentation coming out of the big studios. The same company could put out a generic space shooter (sorry, shmup fans) today and a unique exploration game tomorrow. It's simply not feasible for those same companies today to dedicate as many resources on niche titles as they do for their blockbusters, and at the same time they've forgotten how to do small productions. It's not the end of the world, because digital distribution and crowdfunding gives the little guys the power to strike out on their own, create niche, experimental productions, and survive, but it is sad to me that these media juggernauts do more to advance the state of the art in computer graphics than they do in gameplay or storytelling. (No offense, computer graphics programmers, I'm fascinated by the field)
I don't know. I would like to see evidence either way.
Ray-tracing works really well for movies because the camera is controlled by the animators rather than the viewer (as is the case with video games).
Well that's just silly. The native platforms already have the frameworks in place, and have done since the beginning. If you were writing a game in a native system you'd have to choose from different frameworks - or write your own.

With JS the restrictions and limitations of the system are different. People are coming up with creative and innovative ways to work with them. There's no problem with that, it a process that's ongoing in all software, and forever will be.

Also, "You" should really avoid using "They", especially when it applies to a broad group of people that you're making assumptions and judgements about. Maybe "You" have no idea what HTML5 apps offer (like portability)? I happen to think that html5 is going to be a major player in apps development, which puts me in your "They" camp, then again, I know what native offers - so I'm one of the many contradictions to your statement.
I'd like to see Marc be a bit more vicious about this, starting with Herbalife as the first target.
But without a pattern matching system, optional is still half of what it is in, say, Scala.
There is more to a native ui (common spacing, font usage, interface patterns) than just swapping out the underlying widgets.
This is why it surprised me that, as I understand it, the Firefox OS homescreen search bar seems to take exactly the opposite approach: every keystroke is sent to some obscure for-profit private company in Israel. Do you know what's up with that?
It is never safe to develop Java applets. It was a silly concept when it was devised, and it's still a silly concept today. We aren't developing ActiveX controls either, right?

If you have an environment where you need a full client, and the developer is trusted, use Webstart: You have to actively accept something on Webstart. If you do not trust the developer, make the interface in a regular webpage.
Convincing Google Docs Phishing Scam
If Bitcoin Remains Impractical, Treasury Will Let It Be
I'm so tired of writing null checks ...

Could the null checks of Java be compared to the ones used in C#? My C# code is often littered with ternary operators to deal with null values. And that's still not as safe as the Objective-C approach where one can just send messages to nil[0] which is really awesome imo.

I guess I kinda wonder if I could avoid the null checks in C# somehow ... I figured using a design by contract approach might be used to reduce the null checks somewhat.

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/156395/sending-a-message-...
From street vendor to surging NBA player, Greek Freak living the American dream
It should be "the problem OF photorealism" not "WITH". We all enjoy photorealism, but it is hard to make. We have a problem OF 3 times 6. Not a problem with 3 times 16.

Any how....

I worked on Flight sims in the mid 90's. We had a problem of Physics back then. So we didn't do real physics, we precalculated the physics based on a number of factors and loaded them in to tables, and if you were between point A and Point B in a table we took the weighted average of the two. It worked well enough.

Animations today do the same thing.

Anti-aliasing is now done based on point of contrast rather than the whole image. This works well enough, you notice the jaggies on white and black borders more than 45% grey next to 65% grey.

This doesn't strike me as a well informed post. Others have pointed out that it is directed at those new to the space, fine, but if that's the audience then explain "uncanny valley" in there somewhere. Where you can't be "right" be far enough off people accept it as fake because it is. We see this all the time in Pixar. We also see it in racing games with "arcade physics".
Yeah, the still retain the watch division, as well as the shoe division and shirt division.
I have trouble imagining a person who would care what text editor you use and would then be surprised to hear that you use Vim or Emacs.
Someone once told me that a smile is the greatest sign of wisdom. While I don't agree with that statement literally for various reasons, the idea behind it has stuck with me.
Interactive raytracing is the future both in mobile and desktop. My project http://clara.io, an online 3D modeler + renderer, recently gained the ability to do embeded interactive ray traced 3D embeds using V-Ray (one of the best and most accurate renderers in the world).

It works best on Chrome, Firefox and Safari:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BenHouston3D/posts/DYq2RKJENC5

Here is another example:

https://twitter.com/exocortexcom/status/443538733661704192

I can only see raytracing becoming more popular.
I see headlines like this and I'm like "are they still in the driver dark ages? Yep? Call me when they stop acting like a 2 year old and play ball in Mesa"
In one of the photos, in the background, there are several crock pots. What's up with that? What are they cooking and why so many?
How can it seem to be anything, it's not even real yet. It's a marketing mockup.

AMOLED fits the bill easily because the technology allows you to place dots however you need to place dots and doesn't restrict you to arrays or rectangular shaped emitters or even planar geometry. The only challenge is running wires to each LED to drive it.
I think modern animated movies and top offline renderers use path tracing those days, which much more naturally approaches the real light dynamics.
And that's not the screen. Your linked screen is 240^2 pixels, while Moto circular display is is 320^2 pixels. Additionally, that screen has too big a bezel (especially on the bottom) to fit inside the moto's case.

According to the android emulator profile.
"If raytraced scenes were hard to control, why would every single animated movie be ray traced?"

I'm not entirely sure that's actually true.

In this paper (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/RayTracingCars/paper.pdf) Pixar talk about how the first movie they even tested using ray tracing on was Cars. Before that they were using scanline rendering.
Asking me to strap a computer to my risk is like assigning me homework: it requires a new way of thinking and interacting.

Having said that, I'd better see a significant improvement over using other interfaces. That's why I'm at least initially disappointed with the Android watched.

I get that we all love new interfaces because they're new and fun to play with, but what will this watch do for me that my smartphone can't do?
Programming from the Ground Up (from x86 assembly to C)
Or you could just end counterfeiting all together.

http://indolering.com/puf-bitcoin

It can be applied to normal currencies as well.
Unless they do the same thing with private automobiles, which exist in far greater number than common carriers, this is hypocritical at worst and useless at best.
Well, if AMD had taken the need to get their GPGPU offering out the door seriously or if they had later taken the need for CUDA compatibility seriously then Nvidia would have had to compete.

Alas, we're talking about a company that doesn't even think it's important for their installer to reliably replace existing drivers. The result: I get to pay through the nose for my predecessor's CUDA lessons. Yay.
We need to regulate the negative outcomes of a service, not the service itself.
Easy way to access Symfony2 profiler when developing API (REST)
In the wake of the Boston bombings, someone said that clearly those events show that we need to interpret the Constitution more loosely and give our government more power. This makes sense - our founding fathers never could have imagined terrorists with access to black powder.
Even if we take street congestion to be a tragedy of the commons, it's not obvious that more cabs imply more congestion, since as part of a network of public transportation, they may help reduce personal car usage.

But even if we take it for granted, I still think your approach is pernicious. The issue with your - and the city's - method is that while the claimed problem is congestion, the solution is to limit the number of registered cars per service. But the error in that reasoning is that it presumes that they are perfectly correlated, and so it prevents market players from coming up with better solutions that reduce congestion without reducing the number of cars.

For example, services like Uber which rely completely on calls via the Internet have the potential to cause much lower congestion compared to a service that relies on having idle drivers drive around looking for people waving their arms.

If one wants to reduce congestion, then the only good solution is to tax cars driving in congested areas.
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/417797539870416897
Uh, what. Sampled raytracing is the most natural approach to indirect lighting, displacement mapping, subsurface scattering, and anti-aliasing.

As far as non-realistic rendering goes I am not sure how this is relevant, you can alter the properties of light and still use ray tracing, and many effects use image based techniques anyway.

Raster will die in the long run, it's pretty obvious.
I don't think so, not with modern tools anyway. Raytracing is in my experience the technology that most closely models the real world. Most technologies used in games even today are hacks, using precomputed values oftentimes derived from ray traced models. Raytracing is quite natural to work with because it simulates real world objects and does so in a realistic manner. The only difficulty might be caused by the lack of such real-time raytracing hardware as depicted here causing slower development as one has to wait for a scene or animation to render. IMO, raytracing is indeed the pinnacle of photorealistic rendering currently.
Thanks for the feedback. Will fix the scroller thing.
It has always been violated, fortunately we have organizations that take up various fights and do what they can in order to re-establish some sort of order.

Unfortunately while it doesn't always work out, that doesn't mean you scrap the whole idea.

Currently us citizens literally have nothing to combat our Government essentially having their way with the Internet to get at our data. This is an issue to both the individual but also groups/companies.

We need something, anything to use for defense.
Congrats Marcus, really enjoyed your Arduino course at UQ a few months back...
> Either way, who could've guessed back in 2004ish that pixelated retro games (including FTL, TowerFall, and countless iOS hits) would be what gaming would look like 10 years later?

Flash games were probably the 2004-era precedent.
Sorry for the typos; I wrote this on my phone and can't edit it. Also, I should note that I'm putting myself in others' shoes with the "homework" analogy. I'm a geek, so I don't mind learning about technology for tech's sake, but the same isn't true for most non-developers.
Edward Snowden at TED: Here's how we take back the Internet
Mostly, there are screenshots for each test case steps. Test cases aren't fragile. In some extreme cases we can tests only certain part which are more stable.
Guys this is bad new! I don't see why everyone's cheering this on. Xamarin is what gave life back into the Mono project. It renewed interest in the Mono VM ecosystem, educated people about the possibility of running Mono in the enterprise....Xamarin was giving Mono the boost it needed. Mono sat dead for years...Microsoft's probably just trying to buy Xamarin to cherry-pick the cross-platform mobile development and kill off the VM outside of a mobile app context.
This was quickly debunked; it's not MH370.
> I always have an hard time with the amount of indirection an average Java developer can reach.

It probably has to do with the "enterprise" culture that tends to err on the side of overgeneralising things and applying far too much abstraction (Java came into being at a time when the OOP fad was gaining significant traction.) The standard library also being in that style encourages this too.

But things like Java4K suggest that it's definitely possible to do a lot in a tiny amount of code.
There aren't too many Kickstarter projects that I've wanted to back before reaching the end of the initial description, but this is one. A superb idea that looks beautifully executed!
Nine years of skeptical discussion lost
"Due to an error on our part during the move to a new, cloud-based server, the forum database was lost. This includes all of the posts and all of the user data."
Right. I think the point is that you shouldn't be relying on experimental standards for one's web architecture unless you recognize its experimental status.
On the other hand, the most significant way you can reduce your environmental impact (short of ending your own life) is to not have children. In that regard, it's the most responsible decision anyone can make.
The Roman Empire lasted a thousand years, but I've never seen anything suggesting that they lionised the nuclear family. "Lay aside the concept of nuclear family" didn't seem to stop them, and few cultures have lasted as long as they have.

The whole point about the term 'nuclear family' is that is refers to the (generally WASP) family structure in the nuclear age. It is specific to the modern age. Trying to retrofit it to historical civilisations is only going to end up in trying to explain away why this one or that one doesn't fit.

Strangely, you dismiss Ancient Greek culture as not being up to the task, but then grant that Florentine success was only because they copied old Greek culture. It's also worth mentioning that the Renaissance wasn't just central Europeans rediscovering archaic artifacts, as there was a host of new ideas and technologies being founded at the time, eventually accelerating into the Enlightenment period.
You're right, bitcoin is the obvious alternative to a physical coin used daily by over 60 million people being easy to counterfeit.

You should run for queen of england, the current one is getting a bit old.
This article is specifically about America, however.
Path tracing can be seen as a extension of ray tracing that supports a much broader range of effect like indirect lighting, soft shadows, anti-aliasing, etc. With the correct function for the material, you can simulate subsurface scattering relatively easily too. But, to me, the beauty of this technique goes beyond the effects you can achieve: it's an incredibly compact, uniform way of simulating light. Compared to rasterization, which to get the same result, you need a enormous code base that deals with very effect with caution. Adding a reflection in a rasterized scene might not reflect your shadows, etc. You need care about every possible interaction between every effect.
The idea isn't to write Emacs extensions in Scheme instead of Elisp, but to give Elisp a much more powerful environment in which to run. The Guile VM brings features such as delimited continuations, threading, and a C FFI that Emacs could benefit greatly from.
How Do You See Gravitational Waves?
I've taken to repeating it twice. For example, "When the board saw the CEO's plans for the company-wide reorganization, they literally-literally cut him off at the knees"

(As in, they drew a sword and severed his limbs, such that literal-literal blood was everywhere)

Very sad.
Bingo.

It's impossible to point out that someone is blatantly lying without drawing attention to the fact that they are the sort of person who would blatantly lie.

Character and speech are inseparable. As the line from Shakespeare says "Speak, so that I may see thee."

Indeed, we are constantly evaluating the intelligence, integrity, goodwill, and authority of people based—in large part—on what they say.

It's absurd to think that we cannot demolish an argument as dishonest, stupid, ill-informed, or made in bad faith because doing so would inevitably imply the same of the speaker.

One of the he best reasons for maintaining a culture of free speech is that it permits the dangerous idiots to self-identify.
No, you are one of the two.
I recently moved from SF to Austin, quite liking it here. Doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all and knowing I have the option of starting a family, owning a home, starting a business, or just living large is quite freeing.
Getting something on GitHub will immediately put you in the top 10% in my experience, even if it's not written in the latest/most hip technology. Something on GitHub that other people appear to actually be using = top 2%. :)
Interesting storage method; I like it. Some notes:

- A MySQL backend should be very fast, but scaling it into multiple shards will have to be an exercise for the user. Perhaps CitusDB (PostgreSQL compatible) could be useful here.

- Metrics cannot be tagged. This will make it useless for any sort of rollups or breakdowns ("give me the sum of requests over my servers in the XYZ data center"; "give me the requests for each server in the XYZ data center by hostname").

The second issue in particular needs attention before it can complete with enterprise-grade metrics solutions such as Datadog.
"The whole point about the term 'nuclear family' is that is refers to the (generally WASP) family structure in the nuclear age."

That's not my understanding at all. It refers to the "nucleus" of parents and children, as opposed to extended family.
Won't somebody think of the recording industry?
I'm an American, and I think it needs to be approached in exactly the opposite way. Obviously everyone has their own opinions about the people who implemented the current pervasive surveillance system, but their legal culpability has to be the first question.

Platonic discussions about how the ideal version of America would run are nice, but they're not very useful if a huge section of the stakeholders (members of the intelligence community who may or may not be guilty) have a lot of motivation to exercise their fifth amendment rights. Once it's clear what the law is now, and who (if anyone) has violated it in the intelligence community, people will be freed to speak to law makers and officials and others.

Once we understand where we are - who & what we listen to, how we use it, who we share it with, and why people thought we should (and could, under the law & the constitution), then we can have a conversation about how to move forward. Which of those goals cross lines that we don't want to cross as a country? Which of them are the right idea in the wrong place? Etc. People cannot engage in that kind of conversation with legal action hanging over their head (nor do we want people who will be convicted of gross ethical breaches speaking without that known).
SBT, also known as Slow Build Tool in my office.
>Physical work isn't necessarily easier for those with ADHD than desk jobs. In high school and college I had some physical jobs. Those jobs are often menial, and the monotony and repetition are really the opposite of what those with ADHD (especially those with ADHD and high intelligence) are "naturally" suited for.

You simply had the wrong type of physical jobs. There are physical jobs that are mentally challenging as well.

>We don't "pump them full of steroids" because unlike the (admittedly imperfect) ADHD treatments we have now, muscle-building steroids have negative side effects that greatly outweigh their benefits.

OK then change steroids to HGH.

>We do give them the best medical care possible. If an aspiring athlete breaks a leg or has plantar fasciitis, we treat those things. We don't just say, "guess you weren't meant to be an athlete."

Apples to oranges. Bones heal naturally. ADHD does not go away by "resting".

>Yeah, and if you had bad eyesight, you were probably steered away from those professions as well.

And if you were left-handed people assumed you were under demonic influence or something.

And if you were dyslexic people assumed you were stupid.

I'm glad people like me are winning against people like you.

I see you are missing the point. How about this. In 20 years, 90% of people working in office jobs are taking ADHD medication Only 5% of them really have ADHD, but the rest have learned that they can concentrate longer and be more productive by using it. Now those with ADHD are no better off (on a relative scale) than those before these medications were invented. They often cannot compete with their non ADHD counterparts and lose their jobs (just like before ADHD meds came around). As a side effect, now billions of people on earth are taking a drug everyday that alters various things in their mind. They no longer think naturally and with the rational that they were born with. You think that this is good? This is where we are heading.

Like I said in another post, in those I know who changed careers VS those who take drugs every day, the ones who changed careers are far happier and have better quality of life mentally and physically.

Don't you want to be happier? Blame yourself and this system which has nudged you out of your natural path.