skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surprised the exit happens at the relatively low price of $200M [1]. Klout had about 500 million users from what I understand. While monetisation might have been tough with deals, Klout got so much data. So much talk of 'big data' but it does not seem to be worth so much... or was there some founder fatigue at play here after almost 6 years of existence?

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/klout
my guess is they won't have to. I would imagine for most coding projects the coding interfaces will become easier and easier.
I recommend Puma and work for Heroku, though threadafety is still a huge issue. It also pre-forks in hybrid mode which makes it super awesome. Also it takes care of slow clients!
The Internet powered by drones, satellites and lasers
New leak may give us our first look at the iPhone 6′s dimensions
Hi - my advice is probably cliche but you are your own best teacher. That, and Google. I did not really have Google when I started game dev (resources were very poor 20 years ago, at least). Build things yourself if you are interested in how they work, otherwise I advise prebuilt engines like Unity or GameMaker. I used to be very poor at math in school but gamedev helped me learn it. I started out on the DirectX tutorials that came packaged with the DirectX SDK (I had done other stuff prior, but DirectX was where I really got into 3D programming). There are plenty of good OpenGL tutorial sites out there but Google will know the links to everything better then me. :) If you want to really learn 3D programming, write a software renderer, you will learn a lot and its not as difficult as it might seem (although it is quite hard).
It's not completely trivial to change what font the government uses. There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change.
Sounds awesome. "The entire program is only" - I think you left off halfway through?
"Based on the idea that food is a universal language"
The project will be based on the idea that food is a universal language and that the future of nutrition depends on the political, diplomatic, social and technological ability to solve in a creative way the problems connected to nutrition at world level.
> Open source projects might seem like a good place to look since the code is readily available, but be wary as they are also known to be heavily gatekeeped and often getting started is more difficult than it should be.

This is certainly true for some projects, and as a beginner I'd steer clear from them. To pile onto the generalizations with another one, I've found that a project is FAR more likely to accept contributions (or even discuss ideas with outsiders) if it has some kind of mechanism for accepting pull requests (be it on GitHub or elsewhere).

What's that you say? Send a patch? To your mailing list? And then we'll talk? No thanks, I'll lend my support elsewhere... (Not always true, of course, but it should sound familiar to some of us.)
Look what they did to Toyota over the Sudden Unrequested Acceleration that never was. $1.6bn fine!

EDIT:

By they I mean the Media.

I guess I should add some substance.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/nasalife/features/nesc-toyota-stu...

NASA's Toyota Study Released by Dept. of Transportation
02.08.11

WASHINGTON -- The results of a ten-month study by 30 NASA engineers of possible electronic causes of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles was released today by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

"NASA found no evidence that a malfunction in electronics caused large unintended accelerations," said Michael Kirsch, principal engineer and team lead of the study from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) based at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

The studies cost over $3 million, including the cost of purchasing the vehicles that have allegedly unintentionally accelerated. Upon completion of the studies, the NHTSA will determine whether a formal investigation into Toyota is necessary.

ABC made a totally fake video demonstrating the alleged phenomena.

"Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington today before the House Appropriations subcommittee on Transportation. LaHood first told the subcommittee that owners of Toyotas should stop driving them, then clarified his statement and told owners to get their cars fixed promptly."

Later LaHood told reporters it was "obviously a misstatement"

Toyota have been abused, IMHO, their "blame no-one else" culture is being rinsed by the US Govt.
Well it only applies to inkjet printers one one hopes that schools that are printing large numbers handouts use a cheaper laser printer and not a 6 color photo quality inkjet which are designed for small numbers of high quality prints.
Thanks so much Jessica- we're so glad we did. YC was an unbelievably valuable experience. To the commenter below who asked how YC changed us & our company, there's not much that's more useful to an early, growing company than getting to spend time with people like Jessica & PG, and having their regular/honest feedback on what's working (and what's not). I'll try to write more about that here later.
Sorry, I meant mutable state on classes, which is just a sneaky way of having global state.
Part of it would have been access to YC deal flow, sure.

But to me it was also like an index fund - i.e. invest in the basket of companies rather than picking and choosing because on aggregate the group is going to do very well.

Really, you're blind betting on YC having chosen a few winners in the cohort. Not a bad bet to make!
So far it's been just a theory of mine. An interesting observation is that Facebook can easily deny this concept saying that "slow rollout can prevent excessive server stress", which is without a doubt true.

It seems to me that it is hard to test whether the random rollout just aims at preventing server crashes or it has behavioural connotations as well.
Consequences of Bitcoin Classified as Property
I like this retro look too.

It enables you to make the players feel like "back in the days", but also to surprise them with state of the art concepts.

Games that are made like this create the feeling most people hope they get, when they play old games. They think about the times they had, play it again but often isn't as good as in the past, because over time they got used to much more stuff, which is missing in the old games.
Very nice work, really great to see how it's improved as a result of your sustained effort.

Also - I remember that Nova Logic game (Commanche?).
"But it's a drop in the bucket even if it were that much of a savings."

Yes, everything is a drop in the bucket when looking at the Federal bugdet and the current debt of 17.5 trillion [1]. However, a 14 year old kid has a well thought out and proven plan to save money. Where do you recommend we start? The drops fill up the bucket faster than you think.

[1] - http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Oops...thank you, fixed that.
Anistock | Visual.ly
Gotta love those reflection api attacks and other remote procedure injections. Also, don't forget that everything is an object.
"Augmenting their funding" through the site also allows operators to build relationships with new investors and expand their network. It's lead gen for them for future deals.
yes - https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/wifi...
Introducing Michael Abrash, Oculus Chief Scientist
You forgot to include the pre-order form!
Toward a better programming
Honestly, the only incredibly disappointing part of this project is that there currently doesn't exist a way for me to throw my money at you through the internet.

In case you missed it, a link to be notified for the Kickstarter:

http://ci4v8ia31.launchrock.co/
Plus Fours Routefinder - World's First Navigation System
Expectation from a personal blog
This is my first attempt at writing a personal blog. I am interested to learn from people who have already published blogs with ~15+ posts, what personal expectations did you have from your blog and how have these expectations change over time?

My first blog post describing some of my expectations: http://www.tejbirwason.com/hello-world.html
Dead Space is free on Origin until May
and for some tasks having it printed works better
> Still, trying to understand Euclid makes you thankful for the more than 2000 years of advancements in mathematical notation and theory.

The importance of notation is greatly underestimated, IMO. Even when programming, an arguably mathematical activity, many people still resist improvements to notation that allow for clearer expressions. The contortions some of my colleagues have gone through in Fortran or C++ (because they refuse to use libraries that would clean up their code significantly, they roll their own versions) to express their ideas.
Fascinating read. In summary, the author's research seems to show that males tend to rely more on motion parallax to judge depth, while females have a greater reliance on 'shape from shading' - the minute difference in shading that occurs when you move your head about.

Since current systems rely on the former, and shape from shading is damn tricky to handle with real-time head movements, women on average are more likely to feel sick in contemporary simulators.
The best way to look at the uncapped note is like investing in an index fund.

Rather than picking and choosing specific companies, the money behind YC VC is betting that the basket of companies as a whole is going to perform well on aggregate (thanks to power law).

It's really putting faith in the YC selection process / mentoring multiplier as a whole rather than any particular company (which they can do later after demo day).
I admire your recent work with threads in Ruby with the Puma libraries and the threaded in memory queue (I was working on something similar myself, I keep forgetting to get back to it though). Most companies I see using Heroku are always wondering if their bill could be lower and most of the time they are using preforking servers and background job processors.

I look forward to your talk at Ancient City Ruby next week!
Trial and error. The easiest way I have found to learn is to take something that already exists (i.e blog or forums) and modify it to your liking because many of the puzzle pieces are already set. This way if an error comes up you can undo/revert and compare revisions to see what causes errors and what works.
Neither do the anti-poaching agreements. Zing!

Thanks, I'll be here all night!
this is impressive!

btw do you have any numbers on how bezie drawing using OpenGL compares to regular drawing on 2d canvas, performance wise?

let's say I have an html5 app which draws stuff using 2d canvas. do you think it makes sense to draw to webgl instead using implementation like yours, i.e. mapping 2d canvas api to webgl?
On the website: "Welcome! We noticed that you are in Canada . Would you like to view the Canadian version of the site? Visit the Canadian Site" as a small unobtrusive banner along the bottom of the screen that disappears if I continue to scroll through the article. This is the BEST implementation of this geothing I have ever seen. Especially compared to Newegg's massive grey screen banner that asks me every fucking time and never remembers my answer.
Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter Combines To Launch WebScaleSQL
Ask HN: Why did you begin writing a personal blog?
I recently made my first feeble attempt at writing a personal blog. I am interested to learn from people who have already published blogs with ~15+ posts, what expectations did you have from your blog and how have these expectations change over time?
Another vote for puma. We're using Unicorn in our production environment right now with the unicorn-worker-killer gem, but our initial tests with ruby 2.1 and puma in dev/QA are going well so we're looking to move to that setup in the near future.
Why you'll be a Borg in 10 years
> They come in at 8am, and leave around 10

> Now they want us to come in on Saturday.

I would definitely GTFO!

Productivity != hours sitting at a desk.

I have worked at a company like this and the issue was definitely poor management direction and poor technical discipline.
Also "of the nearly 200 submissions they have received since 2011, Suvir's project was a real standout"
I don't know what "most countries" you're on about. I flew around Europe. I had spoons, fruits, water confiscated and thrown out by whatever the European equivalent of TSA is.

In the Asias, I had an umbrella confiscated. I had prescription drugs threatened to be taken away until I paid the necessary bribe.

I see strong indications of the export of USA bureaucracy and "way of life" around the world. It's a very convenient excuse for tyrants everywhere. "The USA is doing it, and they're very successful!"
I was also a software developer, not as successful but was living in a nice flat in downtown, but I ended up getting fired a few times within the year.

The first time it was smoking heroin and cocaine. Lasted about 2 months. I used to do it at work too because I was addicted. Shortly after getting fired, I smoked crystal meth to get through the heroin withdrawl. This is how scary heroin is, I was addicted after the second time I picked up. With the help of a marijuana dealer, I got clean after he cut off my heroin dealer. I'd call like crazy but he would no longer sell it.

I still remember laying on my bed on my 25th birthday, withdrawing from heroin, thinking how seriously I fucked up.
It took a few months of feeling complete apathy until I began to improve. However, I still relied on tobacco and weed to get through the hard stuff.

Few more months later I found another job, higher paying and less stressful. However, I began drinking this time. Half a bottle of vodka everyday after work and smoking weed before and after work. I'd come over with a hangover everyday and I eventually couldn't keep this up for long.

Fast forward to now, I'm totally clean from any substance. I have absolutely zero fucking desire to repeat what has been a complete wreckage of my financial savings, losing my flat, and a waste of time.

What does worry me is the health effect it might have, especially the street drugs I took during this short period of time on top of the weed and alcohol. I'm alright now but I still can't wash myself of the guilt and the regret. However, it keeps me well away from it.

Looking on to the future, I am willing to be successful, and I realized that I can't do it with dependence on drugs and alcohol. I simply couldn't allow it to get in my way.
Phusion Passenger author here.

The article mentions that Unicorn's out-of-band garbage collection is problematic because the way it works - running the GC after every request, and requiring turning off the normal GC - is overkill. But there the community is working on a better solution.

In particular, Aman Gupta described this very same problem and created a gem which improves out-of-band garbage collector, by only running it when it is actually necessary, and by not requiring one to turn off the normal GC. Phusion Passenger (even the open source version) already integrates with this improved out-of-band garbage collector through a configuration option. This all is described here: http://blog.phusion.nl/2014/01/31/phusion-passenger-now-supp...

Just one caveat: it's still a work in progress. There's currently 1 known bug open that needs reviewing.

Besides the GC stuff, Phusion Passenger also has a very nice feature called passenger_max_requests. It allows you to automatically restart a process after it has processed the given number of requests, thereby lowering its peak memory usage. As far as I know, Unicorn and Puma don't support this (at least not out of the box; whether there are third party tools for this, I don't know). And yes, this feature is in open source.
If you aren't already looking for a new job, why aren't you? It sounds like a bad fit and they don't appreciate your contributions.
Puma really is great. I was floored by the performance gains compared to two unicorn workers.
In addition to having a bug "scoreboard". That is so easily gamed it not funny. Grab all the easy bugs, get the top score.
glTF by KhronosGroup: the runtime asset format for WebGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenGL
Using ARC with Objective C has been an amazing experience, and I come from the brainless world of Javascript GC.

Any reason why more environments don't adopt this approach? It seems entirely efficient, reasonable and well-designed...
Well, that's a pretty cheap/MVP way to implement an H-bridge. I have a more expensive standing desk at home that has a giant control box mounted under it (it oddly looks like an old Snap! NAS server actually). I don't think the value of 1-switch control was worth the extra expense and the huge wart under the desk. I'd rather have the cheapo 2-switch option and an opportunity to hack.
Mobile is an entirely different medium with a completely different target demographic.

They are most often targeted at casual gamers with a huge focus on micro-transactions. Most hardcore gamers stay far, far away from such games.

Most of the mobile development I see is as you said, for the publishers/sponsors to make money rather than for the consumers to enjoy. Rather sad indeed.
Thanks - the night lighting was only implemented a few days ago. :)
Google App Engine to support Dart
Its hard to do, but I really think you need to leave.

Give your 2 weeks but be OK if they let you go on the spot.

If you dont have a lot of money, maybe you could put in a few more weeks before you quit and literally try and save every penny you can. If you have vacation time in the bank hopefully you get paid out for it.

I've been in situations where the "Boss" doesn't have a clear technical understanding between different roles and it is very hard. It feels like a Dilbert and/or Office Space moment to me.
Like everyone else said the best option is to find place with a better fit. Second, I would throw them a bone here and there until you find something else. third, do enough to get off the bottom of the list.
Yes sorry! There is a kickstarter signup page though (hint hint) :)
UX advice for your Rails app
Environments like this aren't worth dealing with, +1 for bailing. When you're looking at new gigs, ask questions about what the culture is like, oriented around work / life balance, and try to get a feeling for the number of people with families. I personally am a single guy with no children, but I like working around family oriented folks because they are used to the idea that you have many aspects of your life that are more important than your job (whether that happens to be family obligations or not).
This looks like version 1 of using interference to produce feature sizes smaller than the wavelength of the light used for the lithography.

A physical process distorts the "clean" image in the final product, so the distortion is mapped and doubly reversed, so that a "clean" final product is generated from an intentionally distorted original. As long as the physical distortion is consistent and predictable, you could do this with anything.

I'm thinking the same technique could be applied to improve volume printers. Instead of ink traps you have thermoplastic traps.
Yes. But support for Aman Gupta's improved out-of-band garbage collector, is in the open source version.

The Enterprise version also happens to support out-of-band garbage collection even for multithreaded apps, which as far as I know is not supported by Puma (yet?)
Interesting, a close friend of mine just did the Vipassana retreat, and I was considering it for myself too.
"The phone, first introduced in 2011, will be re-released as 'The Classic'."

This seems to indicate that he means it's a new device, the Classic (formerly known as the Q20 [1]). Seems just like a BB10 version of the Bold.

[1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2014/02/blackberry-q20/
I am now waiting for the Zen of Oculus Programming.
Thanks! Map generation was actually far more complex than I thought it would be (in particular, generating meaningful networks of roads that don't criss-cross too much).
To nudge a brain cell or two, the plugin is RayFire ( http://rayfirestudios.com/ ) and is a really awesome tool for destruction!
Metafont, the scalable font system for TeX, had per-printer definitions to adjust the font's bitmap rendering for a specific printer. This stackexchange answer briefly describes those parameters:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/120414/what-are-gf-and-pk-font-files#answer-120419
According to their annual report [1] only 14.8% of their sales came from financial services. What are you exactly referring to?

[1] http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/2013/shr/pdf/An...
I understand why Google would want to provide free wi-fi - they essentially make money whenever someone visits a web site - but I can't understand why Facebook would follow suit. I can only assume these drones will be more oriented towards messaging services, since that seems to be their new initiative.
No matter what, get out. They are toxic people with twisted values who do not understand quality. Get out.

Accept their offer to buy out your contract. If they try to terminate you, be ready to lawyer up for a breach-of-contract suit.

Get out.
Holy sh*t!! That is very very impressive!! This guy is obviously an amazing game programmer.. I hope one day to be that skilled!
Nearly everything but the kernel is auto-updated to the latest version on all Android devices, even if they're several OS versions behind.

This benefits users, but not developers. Developers still need to code and test against old API levels.
A good point, put as offensively as possible, loses it's luster.

I believe that spirituality has a place, but that spirituality is pointed toward more by Goedel Escher Bach than the Bible, or the Koran, who's description of God is so filled with contradiction (a just loving God that will burn you for eternity no matter how you lived your life, if you don't mouth certain words?!), I'm not really sure what people even mean when they say "I believe in God."

Spirituality in practice, to me, means meditation. And meditation is a wonderful exercise in culling down one's experience to an absolute minimum. If your mind is an organic computer, then meditation is an intentional starving of input. This extreme, austere environment reveals details about the low-level operation of your mind that is fascinating to discover. Empirically, it's useful too, because you can view your experience with ever greater objectivity. And it's mostly inexplicable, in the way good spiritual experiences are. Highly recommended.
I started coding at the age of 10 on a ZX Spectrum back in the early 80's with BASIC.

So I would expect a 9 year old to be able to write simple programs, drawing simple 2D figures or question/answer programs.
4K Ultra High Definition Media Player VLC for Mac OS X available
Yes, Commanche was my first experience with voxels...I was never huge into flight sims but I played it just for the graphics. :)
Agreed, in many cases you have early access to those firms (as they have some very small interest in your company) - but I've not heard of anyone experiencing signaling issues from those LPs
Poll: Which unix-like platform do you use for work
Which unix-like platform or GNU/Linux distribution do you use for your development work?
Other GNU/Linux distro
FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Other BSD distro
Solaris/OpenSolaris/Minix/AIX/HP-UX/Any other unix-like platform
Cygwin/Windows
Still not in the list
Love it! Much better than the default, especially in Chrome.
Programming tools like Logo and HyperCard give children a chance to be creative, like writing and drawing do.

Beyond self-expression, children could learn the basics of

* interaction design ("'Click here' doesn't explain what a button does"),

* debugging ("It's okay to be wrong at first. I can just keep fixing it until it works")

* and geometry ("I can make a shape look more like a circle if I give it more sides").

EDIT: Here's a neat example of HyperCard's power: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568. It's a bit complicated for a child, but it gives you a sense of HyperCard's potential.