skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to create a complete HTML5 “2048″ game
Have you ever tried to scan a barcode using a phone's camera? The process is pretty terrible, it takes forever to focus, and you better hope you have perfect light.

Compared to a dedicated barcode scanner, phones are pretty terrible for this.
Is Checkster's Release Form fair?
I was recently asked to use Checkster as part of a reference check. Their User Agreement/Release Form states:

- I CONSENT TO [the] PUBLICATION AND REPUBLICATION [of any collected information] EVEN THOUGH THE STATEMENTS MAY [be] ... DEFAMATORY, SLANDEROUS, LIBELOUS, FALSE AND/OR UNRELATED TO THE INFORMATION REQUESTED IN THE CHECKSTER CHECK. (par. 3)
- I CONSENT TO THE PUBLICATION AND REPUBLICATION OF SUCH STATEMENTS ABOUT ME ... EVEN IF I AM NOT THE ONE WHO INITIALLY IDENTIFIED THOSE PERSONS [making the statements]. (par. 3)
- I further agree to not sue, and to waive any right to a lawsuit for damages against, [anyone] relating to any communications published or republished pursuant to a Checkster Check. (par. 5)

I understand this agreement to mean Checkster could publish anything about you - even lies that are criminally punishable - from anyone, not just your selected references, and you will not sue anyone for it. Does this seem fair? Would you agree to these terms?
It is only available in 3 cities, has technology easily deployable to smartphones, and the prices apparently aren't any better.

I always wish I could try amazonfresh, but like Google Fiber they are snails at deployment. And Amazon doesn't even have the "company has no experience with end user distribution" since that is literally their primary business.
Now they just need to port it to *nix platforms. Well, perhaps Visual Studio Online is their way of doing that...
For anyone who's curious, it works in LA.
Ethernet Discovered in Tesla Model S
I tried the alpha a few months back, and found it to understandably be lacking, My biggest frustration with it was trying to profile the performance of a complex piece of code with a number of callbacks and such. NTVS would only look at the first iteration, and not tell me anything useful (at the time I was tracing a memory leak). There were a few other inconveniences which I noticed that issues were raised for, hopefully most were fixed.
This was not a crucial tactical error, it was a deliberate gamble.

Disruptive communication is hard, and they lost this gamble. That does not make it an error :)

(Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc, all are things int he "must fully jump onboard or ignore it", and they've done fine, because they are incremental improvements that are less disruptive).
I thought these were really great, and the UI was nice too, once I figured it out. Some minimal instructions might be helpful for someone thrown directly into the puzzles without having gone through whatever led up to them.

I ran into a situation where it seemed like there was no viable solution which kept the figure under manipulation within the visible bounds at all times, so it was made more difficult by having to visualize where it went offscreen in order to keep track of what I had to do next. It's entirely possible that I could refactor the operations into something that kept it onscreen the whole time, but I couldn't find it, so I really wanted a way to zoom out or pan around, or at least some encouragement like "this should be possible without the shape leaving the visible area." Maybe giving the user the ability to zoom out but also drawing a bounding box that shows the space you're expected to do the transformation in would help.
Grocery is really low margin, and hard to make money on when you factor in delivery. Source: I worked for a grocery distributor for six years.
Facebook "Click Farms"? They don't matter, with this 3 second fix.
Go scan a bunch of barcodes on your phone, in varying light levels and angles. The process is pretty terrible, phone cameras cannot beat dedicated barcode scanners at actually scanning barcodes.
Quote from GoDaddy:

Go Daddy offers Protected Registration, which prevents a domain name from being transferred to another registrar. The product includes our privacy service, as well as a Deadbolt lock.

Our Deadbolt lock means that in order to cancel the service, you must show documented proof of your identification, which makes the lock more robust than a standard registrar lock. This may seem “cumbersome,” but that is the point; if the domain name is valuable to you, you would be well-served to use product that safeguards against making it easy for a hijacker to gain access.
"I think it is due to multiple factors, but mainly the small, targeted scale of the audience,"

This is just good marketing advice for smaller businesses. Find as specific a niche as possible and market to that. Maybe the parent's product serves a very general audience which may make it harder to market.
Respectfully, there's geek-thinking again. Wifi password changing is a straw-man argument - most households use the default SSID and password that came with the router (if you don't believe me go to a residential area outside of SF and see how many 2WireXXX or ATTXXXX SSID's there are). Those that do set their own password never change it again.

Apps enabling multiple scanners - again assumes multiple smartphone ownership in the house in order for everyone to use it vs just having a single dedicated scanner that (as Amazon suggests in their site) hangs on your refrigerator.

I'm not even sure the average consumer is sufficiently trained yet about opening apps. I heard a segment on NPR recently where multiple callers (and the host) referred to a company's mobile-optimized website as an "app", many normal people don't really know what an app really is. I'll dig out the Pew Research study on mobile phones that said something like 20% of smartphone owners don't install any apps on their phones beyond those that came with the device (perhaps because they're fuzzy on the concept).

UPDATE: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-30/sm... - 17% of smartphone owners don't use any apps at all according to Pew.
Why would you urge that? Seems like it depends on what you want to do with your skills. If you want to make an app, you should follow the money. If you want to get a job, you should follow the demand for developers.
Thanks Kareemm. We agree, too many things have happened in the tech and communication world for people to still be buying cars the same way they've been buying car. Thanks for the note.
Why is Amazon gold plating their fresh service when they didn't manage to meaningfully expand it since 2007?
Yes - Kinesis is awesome. This is already a little out of date but shows how we're now porting our open source event pipeline to on top of Kinesis: http://snowplowanalytics.com/blog/2014/02/04/snowplow-0.9.0-...
I'm having the same issue. I can't start it.
Edit: Keep refreshing the page to get it to load.
It's also why I continue to wear a watch despite carrying a cell phone.
Linus will not be merging any code from Kay Sievers into the kernel until Kay changes his pattern of not fixing problems in code he previously submitted.
It's not a genetic algorithm, but FFTW's planning system actually does perform experiments to optimize for a particular machine's hardware.
This is a lovely overview. Good work githubbers.
I've just begun starting a group to create a Scheme implementation from scratch in London (UK). If you're already somewhat proficient in Lisp/Scheme and interested in participating, see [1] for further info and send me a message through meetup.com or through the link on my contact page.

[1] http://www.meetup.com/London-SICP-Study-Group/messages/board...
Are there any better financial tools out there for this? Cashier's checks are almost free, but prone to fraud, wire transfers are bullet proof, but expensive.
You can hand over the task of bidding for conversions to Google. Besides presenting your business on a silver platter for them, you lose control over the finer points of your campaign.
Steve Jobs wanted to 'further lock customers' into Apple's 'ecosystem'
wait, no shot of a blinking switch port led?
One drastic solution if your web site has lots of IE users: Simply don't answer the phone on port 80.

[Edit] Duh. As agentS points out, this won't work.
And when you go to somebody else place, you like something, "ok, I will add it to my Amazon shopping cart", etc... So many use cases this is amazing.
I figured it was a trick question. My rant was still very informative about our product - we have a working app on 4 platforms (which share codebases to reduce amount of code written) and demo videos so I don't think I really needed to justify it with a number.

My philosophy was that a developer should be judged on how few lines of code they take to make a working product, not how many.
Consider that some people may want to create an account as a way to explore the service more, before committing to using it.
Should definitely push this as a feature on your landing page. It's hard to find out what all I can/can't do with the service and the FAQ is a little unconventional.
FYI, deleting the resubmitting links is against Hacker News rules. This is the second or third time I've seen this URL in the past few hours.
The CueCat has a wire.

Possibly a case of doing one thing wrong that ruined the entire product. We'll see.
It was expanded last year from just Seattle to also include San Francisco and LA.
I'm not saying that it's mostly wrong. I am saying that it's a biased perspective, but most of the contents is factual. You can learn interesting things about the markets, and about the individuals and the companies involved. However, this is one side of the story. Michael Lewis' facts were gathered from people that were close to him and the people that he could get to speak to him. It's one circle of people with their own agenda. But there are many other views out there. So he is presenting the facts that he knows about and that he thinks are important. But there are things that he is perhaps omitting on purpose, and things that perhaps he just doesn't know or understand. The book is not the whole truth. As with any good book or article, you can learn a lot without having to agree with the author's conclusions or his personal views.
The loop on the end is for opening beers.
The blurb might well have been written before he got that award.
Native as in .net framework not needed as in I can run on XP without the trying to install .net?
They may be on Seamless or Grubhub (both the same company) so that their business may be noticed in the crowded NYC delivery market, but when they can offer a +25% reduction in delivery price by having their own site you will see people using GrubHub as a directory not an ordering platform. What I am getting at is that it is not a sustainable business model, especially because chain restaurants which make up most of the growth in restaurants can afford to make and market their own ordering platform. Also for a small business outside of a "hip" city there is little traction for a service which creates bad faith with customers by jacking up prices, which I've seen can make some people really angry.
Thanks for the notes guys. A few things that might not be as obvious:

1. Cars with Loans on them. This actually is a hassle, especially in states where the loan holder owns the title. You literally can't just sign the title over to them. In most cases, the buyer has to pay for the car, the seller uses that payment to pay off the loan and then they get the title to transfer over. There has to be a ton of trust there. Even with a bill of sale, everyone is afraid of getting screwed.
2. The straight craigslist process is not quite that easy, respond to emails, some of them from people not even really interested in the car. You have to go back and forth scheduling viewing and test drives. Roughly 40% of the time, you have to drive out to meet someone. If they no-show? Or low ball you? Or don't want it? Time is wasted at all of these steps.
3. Some people hate negotiating, and don't know what a fair price is. We help.
4. In Cali at least, you need Reg 262 for vehicle transfers. It's a form you can only get directly from the DMV (can't print it online). I went to the SF DMV the other day to pick some up, the line was over 2 hours, just to get a form. Needless to say, I put it off for another day.

I agree, for some people it makes the most sense to just sell it themselves. But it's not always a straight shot.
The site offers alternative downloads of the video file. You should be able to watch these videos on linux with vlc or one of your favorite video players.
How to get an effective email introduction
TrueCar.com for dummies: use spamdecoy.net for email and Burner for phone number
Why wouldn't you need a dealer license for this?
It'll be interesting to see what Amazon does to continue to get more information on people's shopping habits.
Ask HN: Which engine do you use to develop indie games?
I was reading about the Havok engine - http://www.havok.com/ and how its being used in advanced games, with super fast physics and rendering.

I was wondering which engine do game developers here prefer to get started quickly. Any suggestions or recommendation? Thanks in advance.
Wait a while and then the wear-headphones notification may eventually drop down off the screen. If so, then press the arrow keys and the thing may start playing.
"Ah snap. The Night Walk experience is not optimised for your device or operating system."

No night walk if you're not in the googleverse.
Feature-wise you also lose a few more things like OCaml modules and functors (and OCaml style objects, which is not a great loss). You gain integration with .NET (and its classes and objects).
No point needed, that was a fun read:)
NASA photo, meant to inspire, sparks useless government investigation
Some people view source.
This is the type of thing that Google Glass was made for.
Top 5 Reasons Companies Choose Outsourcing
Outsourcing your call floor could be the answer to saving money, expanding your business, and increasing your bottom line.
Excellent points ufmace. The short answer is yes, I believe so. I worked in a car dealership before. The capital costs are massive, between physical locations, inventory, personnel, etc... It's truly astounding.

Part 2 is adding that selling side, and we will do it, but we're not there yet.
Explain 'nobody', 'scenario' and 'that'?

This sidebar conv. seems to be degrading a bit.

General comment: I think you are over simplifying the P&L of a trader. The HFT stuff impacts hedging costs. And the ability to solicit grey/NPI. Note they are not urelated.

Also, if you just look at bid/ask and Volume...you never see the $$ value of this.

Las comment: the so called: "profit guarantees" just means perfectly hedged trades with no ∆ (net exposure). its not literal its a simplification yet directionally correct.
I paused when I read that too. In sales copy sometimes that extra friction can grab some attention as long as everyone comes to the correct conclusion after thinking about it.

The big "selling" point to me is: this is really easy -- and it won't cost you anything extra in time or money. In fact, you could end up getting more money for your car and with almost zero effort. Which, I think the copy does a good job of.
The only sins on Hacker News are being uninteresting and being rude. If PG can post about the margins of medieval manuscripts, anything interesting goes.

Given that the top comment in the thread is a relevant (and deservedly upvoted) quotation from a late-Renaissance text, I'd say we're doing pretty well here.
Grocery stores should be worried. Amazon is predator that will take on any market it thinks it can win. Pretty soon they will not only be competing against the store next door, but the Amazon grocery warehouse with all the advantages of scale and convenience.
This sort of Slashdot-esqe misdirection is not exactly appropriate on HN. It starts with black-holing universities with a link mislabeled as a response, but could quickly devolve into misdirections to other black holes of Slashdot that (I assume) we really don't want here.
Works in Firefox.
>It's actually not perfectly accepted among religious communities.

Well, the overwhelming majority of people in our country use some form of birth control, even if its just the rhythm method, in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are Christian.

>Fertility is never guaranteed in heterosexual unions, but infertile heterosexual unions are allowed and blessed anyway for a few major reasons.

This really doesn't have anything to do with what we are talking about. I mentioned specifically those who CHOOSE not to have children, not those who are unable.

>First, a happily married heterosexual couple supports and promotes marriage as the bedrock of social cohesion and encourages others to get married by example, whether children can be produced or not. Second, you never know when infertility will go away, and if the potential is there because the partners are heterosexual, it's worth it to wait and see. Third, the male-female sexual duality is still ideal for child-rearing and the stable married couple may be able to adopt an unwanted child and provide him with a normal and healthy upbringing where both sexes are represented and where marital protections are in place to safeguard the domicile.

These arguments aren't logical, objective, or rational.
Aggressive Chess Openings
Best Shampoo For Hair Fall -Top Rated
I quite like Dark Pools even with the obvious bias. I will say that occasionally it gets technical aspects of things completely wrong, but that is pretty easy to do.

Also, as with any discussion about HFT look into the people who are making accusations against it. Most of the time they are ex execution traders made redundant by HFT or failed at HFT themselves.

Basically, I really enjoyed the history part of the book and found the expose part riddled with mistakes, obvious biases and vague terms that could be interpreted in many different ways.
Considering that Grocery Gateway (services parts of metropolitan Toronto; has a website and mobile app; is owned by a nationwide premium grocery store chain in the country) charges $10/order, you'd make it up if you ordered groceries every week.

If you don't order that often, the margins probably aren't high enough that Amazon can afford to service you.
Thanks AMS6110,
We actually verify all cashiers checks immediately when received. It's usually pretty easy to google the bank the check is from and call them to verify the authenticity of the check.
User Interfaces 101: A brief introduction to User Interface Design
> Ultimately we shouldn't assume consumers value convergence, especially when it creates ever increasing complexity in user experience

Reminds me of this excellent article by Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

Making everything an app narrows the bandwidth between the user and the tool. Now everyone needs a phone, and you can't leave the scanner where it gets used, and you have to go through the generalized touch interface to get to the functionality instead of (and this is a valid UI) just picking up the scanner.
Any chance it will support INSERT some day?
> Allthough Googles own server was never released as Open Source itself, they did release “FedOne” as a reference implementation of it. It was open source, and allowed people to both run and federate their own wave servers together. It did not connect to Googles main “wave.google.com” server, but did connect to a special “sandbox” server allowing testing of the protocol, server and clients.

What idiot greenlighted that feature? :P

"Yeah let's make a distributed social network but don't let them connect to the one EVERYONE IS ALREADY ON"
EBay Now Allows Virtual Currency Sales
I think it's interesting how GitHub is trying to push open source contribution.
However, we shouldn't rely too much on GitHub for (open source) collaboration.
Git is decentral after all. Open source should remain too.
The github repo contains the entire engine and editor source. The only thing not included there is closed console support, which you have to ask for just to ensure NDAs are in place. So, yes, you could in fact port it over to Linux.
Are there plans to release the simulator you used to train the AI? I was thinking it would be fun to mess around, but building out a simulator or all the tools needed to drive Threes in a VM would be a pain.
Surely chunked encoding would work more reliably for sending chunks of data from the server?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding
I think it's loading. My wifi LED was flashing furiously while that message appeared.
Even if they hadn't expanded beyond Seattle, Seattle is their "home market" where lots of their employees live and a rather good market for a wide-availability grocer. Fred Meyer stores nor its QFC sibling hold a candle to any halfway-decent actual-Kroger from back home. Safeway is just Tom Thumb with a 20% markup. This isn't exactly the Dallas/Fort Worth grocery region, with 11 (yes, eleven) full-service grocery chains. Besides, having innovation on a local scale probably matters as much to Amazon as innovation on a national scale because it gets them shopping data and a "test platform" that can serve as the basis for expansion.
Which is the conventional wisdom (no one scans anything) but its not actually correct. I've done some QR tests which have picked up hits (not huge mind you but non-zero). There was also the story of the guy[1], on Sharktank, where one of his props was a QR code and he picked up customers who scanned it (from their TV) while watching the show.

It isn't common, that is for sure. And the bar code folks don't make it easy for folks. Simply publishing the bar code database would be a huge 'win' for barcode adoption.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/04/how-a-startup-accidentally-...
I love that he is entitled to his views, but nobody else is.

I'm not accusing him of secretly scheming. I am saying that helping to strip marriage rights from gay people -- which is indisputably what his donation did -- is reasonable cause for employees and partners to suspect anti-gay animus.

It's up to each individual to judge his actions. If you would like to give him one scorecard titled "at work" and one titled "not at work" and believe them unrelated, great. Then you can make your judgments about working at Mozilla on that basis. But that is a very particular view. You don't get to decide that for everybody. Me, I think that people are unitary individuals, and their beliefs don't change depending on what building they've walked into.
> If correct, it means we will start to lose the high quality entertainment I enjoy.

That didn't happen in the music industry. It was disrupted by piracy, but music today is no worse than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
Orky,

Awesome feedback. We'll eat this up and spit something improved this weekend. We really appreciate it!
Well, that's how it is according to the UN. I'm attempting to find something more specifically about the USA- the UN's opinions are often pie-in-the-sky...

Obviously reality is more nuanced; notice the unrest of SF residents recently. Many can't afford their SF flats anymore; is that a violation of human rights? Do we need to subsidize their housing?

Clearly there is a positive aspect- Section 8 housing, anyone?- but it seems like that plays a small part in the overall "right".
To some extent, though. When I'm home, my mother gets extremely frustrated (still!) that there isn't one remote that does everything.