skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's hardly the only example, and I think it's better to say so-called disruptors provide a service preferable to some consumers.

Many industries create negative externalities and government regulations force them to internalize some of those costs. Hotels are full of loud, annoying people; we stick them in certain parts of town only.

Or many industries are a form of cost pooling. The US decided that we want to have reliable mail delivery. The post office (which does an amazing job as compared to the vast majority of countries) uses the profits from short routes and urban centers to subsidize expensive and/or remote routes. Of course a business would love to come in a cherry pick the profitable routes. We -- rightly -- don't permit that, because we wish to have universal mail delivery and this is how we've chosen to pay for it. Reliable city-wide taxi service is probably similar; I don't know if uber et al are just cherry picking the best / most profitable routes, but I wouldn't be surprised. (And don't get me wrong, I love uber -- at least in sf, it's a taxi that actually comes. Amazing! But still, service guarantees are important, as are flat fares to/from airports, in part to avoid screwing tourists.)

And this doesn't even mention tax revenues; I know HN tends towards the glibertarian but the simple fact is if we, as a society, want nice things someone has to pay for them. A (big?) piece of many of these controversial startups' innovation seems to be thinly disguised tax avoidance (amazon, airbnb).

I actually think disruption tends to be neutral at best. Cities, especially dense urban living, are a large set of compromises amongst many people, and valley companies often have little respect for that.
"Simulated materials instead of textured polygons and bounding boxes."

What does this mean? Like, what do you envision this changing?
Digital Bill of Rights? Ask rms about that one ... even I don't know if i'm joking.
This weekend, in between makeing a home for a catapiller we found on the way home from the park and riding bikes in the circle at the end of our street, my daughter said, 'daddy can we play the game (Hopscotch) where me make the animals move when we touch the screen. And she doesn't even know that I am showing her how to program (with an ipad). I'm sure there are android, windows, etc equivalents.

My point is that as her parent/teacher/friend it's up to me to show her when to use it as a tool for school, learning, manipulating and when to use it to consume. This is a much finer line as she can easily get lost in tangents of rainbow loom videos and forget that she started watching them to learn to weave a new bracelet. But apps like Hopscotch are genius for disguising logic, creative and critical thinking into a fun activity she considers a game.

So I posit that they are good. Like anything else good they should be used in moderation and it's up to the parentals to teach them how to use the tool instead of consuming from the tool. Both actities are using the tablet, but without moderation and guidance it's like giving a child access to unlimited money and expecting them to manage their finances themselves.

With regards to the quick buck apps - I tell here we don't download those b/c they just pop annoying adds and the other games she wants that have in app upgrades she has to save up her allowance ($3/week) if she wants them.

I'm saying that I think one can have both the tablet interaction along with the 'natural' interaction. And I say this as a biology major who grew up on 5 acres with a natural aquifer and a ravine that fed a 50 acre swamp. The onus is on the parents of the touch screen generation to recognize the dual potential for both creation & learning and consumption of the devices. The hard part is showing them how to balance the two or taking it away altogether and catching catapillers with them.
Alexis Ohanian on How to Change the World with a Little Code and Some Internet
Harder than the way that it is done in Angular, via services.
Yerp. Games just don't simulate it very well. People are hyperfocused on graphics and nobody pays attention to audio.

However I seem to recall Creative acquiring some audio company that had products with superior audio positioning technology, & basically axed the other product in favour of EAX or whatever its called..? Could be wrong
I KNOW what the fox knows.
Gotcha. I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=985262 on this; if there happens to be a standalone version of this benchmark that skips all the canvas stuff that would be pretty helpful.
Unity 5 Game Platform Announced
Is that feature being out-of-the-box, as opposed to available through an add-on, really that important? I love Tree Style Tab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...), but I don’t really mind that it’s not built in to Firefox. It’s easy enough to install on a fresh computer, and the default tab bar is useable enough for short periods.

Anyway, as someone else said, setting browser.ctrlTab.previews to true in about:config should work. For me, it successfully changes the behavior of Ctrl-Tab to most-recently-visited order, and it causes hitting Tab while keeping Ctrl held to pop up previews of the tabs, just like Alt-Tab does on Windows. If you still can’t get that to work, there is also an no-restart add-on for what you want, MRU Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mru-tabs/.
Ugh, I knew that. Have no idea why I typed four. I was going for a decade (2004).
http://www.techdigest.tv/2014/03/is_rescape_abou.html
"Free and Open Source Software" = "Freeware" according to Apple
I think you're hinging a lot on this incredibly faulty belief:

[Users of ADHD medication] no longer think naturally and
with the rational that they were born with. You think that
this is good?

So which chapter of Scientology do you belong to?

Stimulants are, of course, psychoactive substances and nobody denies that, but you're blowing this so far out of proportion that you have zero credibility.

I bet you have lovely opinions about antidepressants and antianxiety medication as well. I suppose those people, too, should also just find lines of work that value depressed and/or anxious people just like Xenu intended.
Operation Windigo: Linux malware campaign that infected 500k computers worldwide
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1203948132/rescape-fps-...
> Ancient Greece did not genetically survive

I'm not sure if that's true (considering just Hellenism and the descendants that Alexander the Great's people must have left between Thrace and India), but to address this more generally: of course if you don't have children you won't "genetically survive". The question was whether it would preclude you from great work. In this regard, Ancient Greece is an example of work that did survive - and even, for many centuries, served as a model.
I played both consoles for about 3-4 hours pre launch (each), knowing that I was going to buy one. I was a 360 owner last gen, and PS2 the previous gen, so I don't have any real allegiances. However, I much preferred the PS4, not only for game selection, but the controllers felt better, and Kinect is great at first, but it really is a bit gimmicky after a while. Kinect sports is fun with friends, but not so much on your own. PS4 has exclusives like Infamous, Killzone, Knack(which I thoroughly enjoyed), Resogun, and loads more. Xbox has Ryse(didn't like it) dead rising(granted, it's fun) Forza(I want this one)and Titanfall(on the fence, probably don't care to be honest). The selection of games on PS4 is far superior, coupled with faster installation times, a much smaller box, and better looking games, makes it a no brainer IMHO
> families earning less than $61,590 a year in rural areas will spend the least, at $144k

Amazingly, rich people spend more than poorer people.
You could display a much smaller web game while the main game loads. The trick is finding that proper balance where people are entertained long enough for the real game to load, but not so much that they'll want to keep playing the loading game afterwards. I, for one, can't wait to be waiting for a loading bar for a loading game to play while the main game loads.

Or how about this: Game Loading Lobby MMO, where you can hang out and chat with everyone waiting for their real game to load - IN 3D!. Maybe you can break out the character builder and have people do that, then get dumped into the MMO lobby while they wait for game assets to load.

Or you can just put a reddit iframe above the loading bar and call it a wrap.
Will there ever by a YC recipe book? Pretty please? I want to know all of PG's culinary secrets.
The whole point of entering your email address on that page is to "receive product information from Motorola". That's what signing up for updates on the Moto 360 is: asking to receive info on a Moto product.
I hate to agree with Ichan, but eBay is probably one of the worst run brands ever. 15 years ago, my grandparents were excited about buying and selling crap on eBay, and they know nothing about technology.

Nowadays, it's a place to get ripped off. I have to say that I haven't even thought about eBay for many months.
Since you're going to provide nothing but anecdote after condescending with != data, I'll provide mine. As someone in his late 40s, the majority of my age and social group who are "single and childless" are poor impulse control horny drunks. Love every one of them, but it is what it is. The second most numerous are gay, many of whom are now becoming not-single as laws change. Most of the remainder are sociopaths. But anecdote != data so feel free to pretend my reality doesn't exist.
"... the potential that these technologies have to revolutionize the user experience from mobile and console gaming to virtual and augmented reality."

I've been interested in ray-tracing since the early '90s, and I'm glad it's finally coming to real-time, but this isn't going to "revolutionize" shit. It's going to make 3D games and VR slightly prettier than they were. It's not going to enable new styles of gameplay or new modes of interaction. We will never again see anything like the enormous forward leaps in realtime graphics that happened during the '90s.

I'm also a bit put off by their comparison showing that PowerVR has better reflections, shadows, and transparency than a raster engine with reflections and some shadows turned off and a very poor choice of glass-transparency filter.

On another look, I don't even know what they're going for with the shadows. The rasterized image has "NO SHADOWS" printed right between the shadows of a building and a telephone wire, and their hybrid render has the light from the diner windows casting shadows across outside pavement in broad daylight. Bwuh?
The display is LCD so will be interesting to see how they do on persistence, but the FOV is 90 degrees horizontal - about the same as Oculus' units. Full PR here: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-computer-entert... (confirmation that this is horizontal FOV in the Japanese PR: http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/140319.html )

From the presentation (see: http://live.theverge.com/live-sony-playstation-future-of-inn... ) it looks like 1) they've been working seriously on this for over 3 years and 2) they have taken the ideas of immersion/presence to heart and are focused on VR as a medium, not as a gimmick.

Personally, I think it'll be good for Oculus and VR in general to have a strong competitor w/ Sony. If it weren't PS4 only, I'd seriously consider grabbing one. Of course, we'll have to see what Oculus has up their sleeves w/ DK2 tomorrow...
It's awesome and other tools (bundler) are copying it or build on top of it (gradle, buildr, Ivy repo). XML is horrible, not Maven.

Python tools don't even come close. Ditto with .NET NuGet. Find me a tool that can compare feature by feature with Maven and still relevant for a long time.
Does that mean they're more successful? Honest question. Millions of people adore Brad Pitt, very few people know who the CEO of Apple is.

Now don't get me wrong, there are plenty of downsides to being a famous Hollywood actor. But I wouldn't assume success is absolutely all about money.
You're missing the point. He refunds a purchase if he's not seen the name before plus the other two conditions. My question is: what exactly does he mean by "I haven't seen the name before"?
the amount of boilerplate reduced by marionette, even if used just for view management, is very substantial and shouldnt be overlooked.
Perhaps morbid and cruel, but nursing homes of abandomed elders are certainly sustainable.
Reading the examples is a little clunky because I have to scroll up to the dictionary every time I see a word I don't remember from skimming the list. Which is often.
You disproved your own point.

In statistics, σ refers to an area under the normal distribution defined in terms of standard deviations (1σ = 1 standard deviation).

In statistics and probability theory, the standard deviation (SD) (represented by the Greek letter sigma, σ) shows how much variation or dispersion from the average exists.

I think you're missing the difference.
A false midnight
I must say that my Dell XPS 13 is a pretty good machine for development. I can take it anywhere without any problems. Sure it is 13", but I can go below 13".

On the plus side, it has a Ubuntu logo on it instead of that crappy Windows logo.
Usually you want to deliberately distort the real world significantly, to reduce the distances by an order of magnitude while keeping the 'feel'.

You don't a GTA-style game to take 40 minutes to commute from one place to another; so you want to keep the noticeable landmarks but cut out huge parts in the middle. You want wild alley chases to be possible, so you make many places connected and cross-navigable in patterns that don't occur in real life. You want to drastically increase density of 'interesting' places, not mirror their density in real life; and leave out endlessly repeating miles of similar suburbs or apartment blocks.
Not only that, but homosexuality is actually completely legal in Russia.

The law that everyone was in uproar about is that in Russia you're not allowed to promote non-traditional sexual relationships.

Yet in what many claim is a 'free' country (India), homosexuality it outlawed outright.

Funny how propaganda works.
The biggest problem here is content..
Producing content is the most expensive aspect of a game.

Improvement in tooling and reuse are the only way we can actually properly use better rendering
2014 and the best we can do is a Dick Tracy watch.

http://i.imgur.com/hpSgOcA.png
I have to admit I thought Java was dead in the water after Java 6, but Java 7 while a fairly quiet release was a decent release and Java 8 actually moves the language forward into a better place. As for the future here's what I would like to see:

- Separation of language and libraries. Really the JDK should just ship with just a very small core of classes and everything else should be optional installed via a dependency or package manager. I know jigsaw is going in this direction, but I fear they are going to go the same way as J2ME with profiles. They should also clean up the cruft while they are doing this. This would allow the libraries to evolve separately from the JDK and even allow 3rd party framework to flourish while still keeping things reasonable manageable.

- Multiple return types. Scala has hacked around it, Python has them, Go has them. Bite the bullet and implement them so you can do sensible error handling without exceptions or returning `null`. While they are at it they could also fix the type system to finally allow `Integer hello()` and `String hello()` to exist in the same class.

- Implement Categories (or mix-ins). Seriously if I have to see another class called StringUtils or IntegerUtils I will gouge my eyes out.

- Get rid of the primitives. I read somewhere that this was on the cards for Java 10.

- Implement proper Generics.

- Implement @property just like Objective-C and .NET so that 80% of class files aren't getters and setters. I'm really surprised they never did this when they implemented annotations as this was the first obvious annotation to add. I know you can do it with Aspect J but you shouldn't have to. There was a JSR for this at one point but it seemed to disappear into the ether.
Harborly Is Launching In Canada
Read his posts on volokh, etc.
It's not satire.
By that logic, suicide is the most responsible decision anyone can make.
Currently, headphones are pretty much required hardware for VR, because the positions of the speakers relative to the ears are fixed. Achieving realistic binaural audio with external speakers isn't currently feasible because of the need to compensate for reflections and interference, let alone maintaining positionally invariant virtualized audio sources through head rotations and translations.

I'm not sure how the "60 virtual speakers" would work (it sounds like marketing terminology), but currently, the state-of-the-art in immersive in-game audio involves constructing an acoustically realistic head model, and harnessing the raytracing abilities of game engines and graphics cards to apply a material-based frequency attenuation curve at each bounce.
There is a partial TodoMVC implementation available here - https://github.com/jpmonette/todomvc-mithril
There is an example available here: https://github.com/jpmonette/todomvc-mithril
I'm skeptical that encouraging all the thoughtful, responsible people to stop breeding will turn out to be a good decision in the long run.
You're right - that's a much better word. I think the sentiment remains the same though.
I don't have any of this experience with GMail. Not saying it doesn't have flaws - but my experience is pretty great.
There's a sample TodoMVC posted here - https://github.com/jpmonette/todomvc-mithril. If you have any idea to improve, feel free to send a pull request!
China’s Rapid Growth Hits the Brakes
If flying cars existed, I'd drive one. If pigs flied I'd never leave home without an umbrella.

If it could be done, maybe. But I do not think it can be done well. A watch's screen is maybe 2". It's designed to be glanced at and not stared at for extended periods of time.

I don't want a watch that has the Web. It fundamentally doesn't do what I want a watch to do.
Mithril TodoMVC Example (JavaScript MVC Framework)
Oculus Rift FOV is 110°.
Hyderabad techie uploads satellite image of missing plane on CNN site
I like this guy's writing. The multiple ellipses every 3 sentences bothers me.
I think touchscreens are just fine when the screen is 4-5+". I think the argument for the utility of a touchscreen completely disappears at <2".
I think though is that programming is a tool. You don't need to have side projects to say "oh I have a problem and I think I can quickly hack together a program to address it." And then do it. That's no different really than a chef coming home making himself a sandwich.

Side projects are overrated. Chances are if you have a side project you have a reason for doing it. Maybe there is an open source project that almost meets your needs but is missing that one thing you need.

But I agree that one needs hobbies that are not programming. For example, I study history, play with the kids, do a bunch of other things. I think HeinLein was right, that specialization is for insects and often domain knowledge is as important as programming knowledge. If all you ever do is program, you aren't building the domain knowledge skills you need as well.
The Secret to Sales Success: Think Small to Make Your Sales Big
> nothing here is inconsistent with a mechanical problem

The total lack of communication combined with hours of continued flight with course changes is inconsistent with any plausible failure mechanism. I have seen no plausible theory of a mechanical failure that can account for these facts.

> Almost everyone believes it has crashed.

So? This would not be the first time that almost everyone was wrong.

> This seems like random speculation

It is certainly speculation, but it's not random. I'm a pilot with a degree in electrical engineering.

> When the NTSB/FAA say otherwise

"We cannot rule out X" and "it is probably not X" are not mutually exclusive statements. (And, BTW, an inside-job hijacking and a crash are also not mutually exclusive.)

We cannot rule out anything until we know for certain what did happen. But that does not prevent us from drawing tentative conclusions what is and is not likely based on what we do know.
I'm sure he's a remarkable person, but not so sure about the examples you give as concrete achievements. First, I would not consider Loopt a success. Second, can you give examples of startups he helped succeed?

There is a saying to the effect of "If your financial advisor is so great, where is his yacht?"

Similarly, how can a person be a great startup advisor without significant successes under his belt? If he is that good at strategy and finding product/market fit, why doesn't he apply these skills to his own ideas?

The basic lesson out of this may be that, even if you are a remarkable person, and have great insights and great strategic skills, finding success in the startup world has such a big element of luck and "being in the right place at the right time" that a lot of remarkable people never find success with any startups they start.
New Google Android Wear Smart Watch OS Launched at GDC
This is a really wonderful post that captures a lot of what people overlook about Uber, AirBnB, etc. To some extent, these companies are built to arbitrage on government regulations intended to limit negative externalities, or achieve cost pooling or achieve universal coverage. Particularly Uber, because its not exactly some great innovation to be able to call a cab with your phone. The business model relies heavily on being free of taxi regulated rates and cherry picking the premium customers.
GDC is going on right now - this announcement was at GDC!

Oculus is likely to announce DK2 at a session tomorrow:

Wednesday, March 19 | 11:00am-12:00pm (PDT)

Working with the Latest Oculus Rift Hardware and Software (Presented by Oculus VR)
Speakers: Michael Antonov (Oculus VR), Nate Mitchell (Oculus VR)
Format: Sponsored Panel
Track: Programming

Summary:
Since the debut of the original Oculus Rift development kit at GDC 2013, we've shown off a set of critical improvements including a high-definition display, positional tracking, and low-persistence support. Likewise, behind the scenes we've also been making critical improvements to the core Oculus SDK like new feature support, optimizations (particularly around latency), and overall simplicity.In this talk, we'll discuss everything you need to know to get started integrating the latest Oculus Rift hardware with your VR game or experience. The talk will be split into an overview of the latest hardware, a technical breakdown for engineers, an a game design discussion relevant to the new features. We'll also talk about our vision for future development hardware leading to the consumer Rift and what that path might look like.