skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's incredible to think that Marcus was sick (with an ulcer, more than likely), his wife probably cheated on him, out of 14 children, only 6 survived, and he was emperor!

It is incredible that someone with such wealth and power could remain deeply rational and humble. Gregory Hays translation is the best of the lot. If you are going through stressful and trying times, I would recommend reading any one page out of meditations. It will give you solace when life seems to be a battle against enormous odds.

The Enchiridion by Epictetus is very good. If you like Meditations, you would love this too.
In the paper, they say they are using "an Intel MegaRAID RS3DC040 RAID controller with 1GB cache of flash-backed DRAM, exposing a 100GB Intel DC S3700 series SSD as one logical disk". I'm not familiar with it, but is that raid controller insufficiently commodity?

Edit: I see now it's around $500. This list of cards and motherboards using the LSI 2308 and 3008 might be a starting point for finding something less expensive: http://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lsi-raid-co...
I'll go with $1000. If you want to waste the time of millions of steam users, putting something in front of them and taking up precious space in the "new" queue, then you should have some minimal level of confidence in what you've built.

Same thing goes for the App Store. I don't bother browsing Steam or the App Store any more. It's all just crap. The first ten, the first hundred, the first thousand retro games might have been interesting, but no longer.

If Valve wants to turn Steam into the Dollar Store, I guess that's their business. Apple's App Store is already there.
I've tried using this to test my tests— take some code that has (presumably comprehensive tests) and C-reduce it to the smallest program that passes the test... Then go see what important code it removed and fix the tests until it doesn't pass.

Kinda fun, but tedious because it ruthlessly trashes the formatting, so matching up the before and after code is hard.
People are working on bringing convenience to self-hosting. Don't assume that freedom precludes comfort:
https://arkos.io/
You are right, it should not. But it does for many people...because it's LIONS.

(The lions are always there, people are just more acutely aware of them at a startup.)
Author here! That's a pretty nice visualization :-)

I thought I'd just squeeze in a few words about nflgame/nfldb. Both offer access to the same stuff: play-by-play data back to 2009. Both can be used with live games so that they are updated in real time (well, at least as frequently as NFL.com).

nflgame is responsible for pulling the JSON data and provides some rudimentary searching features. But it's slow.

nfldb stores all this data for you in a relational database. It comes with a script that updates the database while games are playing so that you can get access to live data. (It will even migrate the database for you if I've made any changes to the schema.)

Here's a quick example that shows how to get all of Julian Edelman's touchdown plays from last season:

import nfldb

db = nfldb.connect()

q = nfldb.Query(db)
q.game(season_year=2013, season_type='Regular')
q.player(full_name='Julian Edelman').play(offense_tds=1)
for g in q.as_plays():
print g

Easy as pie!

There's an extensive wiki (almost 20,000 words) with tons of examples and explanation: https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/wiki

Other features: aggregating data, player meta data (college, height, weight, etc.) and fuzzy player name matching.
Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time
I was doing some background research for another essay and this is as good a time as any to produce an actual journal article on point.

There's a common talking point I've seen both in this comment thread and elsewhere that the number of entrants isn't the problem at all and the real problem is game developers aren't innovating, and if they just innovated more things would be fine.

Kevin Boudreau [1] is one of the earliest researches on this scene, who concludes that "incremental increases in the number of application producers in this context led to a decrease in innovation incentives, on average, as measured by the rate at which new versions of existing titles were generated" and further that "the strength of descriptive patterns alone suggests that marginal entrants curtailed overall innovation".

Kevin's research, while it has many limitations, suggests that innovation decline is actually a symptom of an overcrowded market, not an independent factor in its own right. If true, this could mean that the practical way to address an innovation crisis is to first solve the problem of the overcrowded market.

The idea that market crowding depresses the innovation of individual independent developers is sort of a surprising result, but once accepted there are many possible feedback mechanisms that may explain the effect. For example, market crowding may drive innovators to go innovate somewhere else. Crowding may also limit available funding which may be disproportionately required by innovative titles rather than non-innovative titles which can be more cheaply manufactured.

[1] preprint: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=%20182670...

jstor: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2F...
This, this, this. I used their (american) football data for a hobby project and it would take 30 minutes to an hour to clean one week's worth of games. Hypothetically, I found the sporting news to have much cleaner data.
Zenimax Sues Oculus
I look at what Norway has done with their oil wealth and compare that to what Australia done to manage its mineral wealth and I cannot help but shake my head in despair. Sure Australia isn't the same as Norway in many respects but the fundamentals are the same. Ensure you collect and save a fair chunk of the profits of your non-renewable resources for investing in a future that doesn't involve hauling large amounts of rocks out of the ground.
Alternate headline: "New Horizons project management launches campaign to get observing time on Hubble"
I'm sorry it sounds like I'm running you down; I don't mean to, and I really hope you succeed, because as much as I respect Burp, I respect it the same way I respect Microsoft Word: as something I would like to use less of.

It just happens that this is a conversation that happens semiweekly at Matasano. :)
Thanks for your opinion.

Observation is observation and it makes one a bit of an expert.

Was it "confirmation bias" and "delusion" when I saw a practicing dealer place the ball on the green zero 4 times in a row? Was it "imagination" when I took advantage of that and won a bunch of money? I have a lot of stories like this.

You weren't there. You don't know. You don't have to believe me. If you want to take the time... go observe for yourself.
> It is everything which is supposed to become Smalltalk based, the desktop/working space, the GUI and the IDE, right down to the OS and the kernel.

Correct. This is a strength and a weakness. I was enamored to Smalltalk early on (back in 95 when I learned it in a course) for this very reason. But then the Internet was happening, the world of computing became a lot more heterogeneous, and the idea of a mostly uniform world of computing mostly faded away.

> I mean what could be possibly have been wrong with Smalltalk when the IBM's first Java implementations and IDEs were built with Smalltalk

It was handy after IBM's acquisition of OTI.

> Sun bought out the company which developed one the fastest Smalltalk implementations to put their developers into creating Java?

This is inaccurate. Animorphic was bought out for its compiler technology to improve Java; Java was already invented at that point.

> It would be better if there was one vision and one implementation that they all focused on.

Developers are moving on to new things. There is Dart of course (if we are talking about developers of smalltalk), and Kay's VPRI which are attempting to develop the next best thing.
Why does "character driven" have to imply "starts slow"?

Maybe we have different ideas of what that phrase mean, but for example, I'd say that Firefly was "character driven" and yet was able to hook me (and lots of other people) within about ten minutes.

Anyway, the discussion here isn't so much about why people like or dislike The Wire, but more of a meta-discussion about how you can determine whether a show is worth watching, and how much of something you have to see before you're allowed to say you didn't like it. dublinben seems to imply that you can't declare dislike unless you've literally watched the entire thing from beginning to end. The question is then raised as to why you'd spend that much time watching a series if you didn't like what you saw of it to start with, and responses which talk about how great The Wire is once you put a lot of time into it are then entirely missing the point.
Give Zimilate a try: www.zimilate.com. Evernote functionality without the clutter, plus it saves the entire webpage when you email a link.
The Australian government is technologically illiterate and will do no such thing. If we're to have any real competition between countries to improve their governance, entrepreneurs have to vote with their feet and actually move to the countries with the best policies. Only then, when governments realise that they're missing out on tax revenue, will they be motivated to change for the better.
It feels to me like the author is trying hard not to offend his community and ending up a ways off the point.

Knowing Jeff, it is hard for me to imagine that he is trying not to offend.
I always like to think he wrote these things to help himself bootstrap out of what looked like some very strong painful feelings.
I used to work in one of the taller buildings in a city. At the top of the building, there was a bunch of cell infrastructure. We were installing some radio equipment in the radio room (the same place AT&T and the others had their stuff), and I noticed two identical locked server boxes. They were very heavy-duty compared to the server cabinets I'm used to. One was marked "FBI" and the other was marked "USMS/DEA" (or something like that).

I couldn't really tell without going through a bunch of ceiling-mounted wires, but I'm pretty sure these were connected to some of the civilian cell infrastructure. There wasn't much else to connect to up there.
Go 1.3 Linker Improvements
Has anyone seen Open Calais [1]? It does tagging and categorization. It's been around for years and seems pretty powerful. It's a bit lower-level than Algorithmia (not href aware), but it seems more powerful, and a system like Algorithmia could be built on it.

[1] http://www.opencalais.com/about
It is incredible that someone with such wealth and power could remain deeply rational and humble.

This is so true. And, from what I gather from the "A Guide..." book, Marcus wasn't much a fan of people (although, that may just be the interpretation of Irvine), which I think speaks to his great character to be loved by so many in spite of that.

Epictetus was another great Stoic philosopher, having been born a slave and yet live a "good" life (not even sure that needs quotes around good). That's another book to the "To Read" list; thank you!
Related to your topic, there's a large body of criticism against MBTI. My understanding is that it's basically not used by anyone doing professional psychological work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Cr...
That's a great point. I play Nethack now and then, and I like how I can play it for an evening and then walk away, satisfied that I'll never beat it.
Singapore already has an (unjustified) superiority complex about Australia, articles like this don't help. I don't mean to diminish what Singapore has accomplished over the last fifty or sixty years - it could have turned out very differently - but the reality is that Singapore's civil society and democracy isn't robust. The human rights issues are a big thing, but even if you write that off, then politically Singapore still has all its eggs in one basket. If the ruling party ceases to be competent, it's difficult to say what will happen: any viable opposition parties are sued into oblivion and there hasn't been a peaceful transfer of power in over 50 years.
Technically Pluto is also in the Kuiper Belt.
So scientists are scrambling to find "another" KBO for New Horizons probe to visit.

Pluto has a fascinating history - from being unknown to being deemed a planet to being demoted to a "dwarf planet". What else is waiting for us out there...
I wonder how hard it is to write a program that will parse two C source files into AST's, diff the AST's, and then map the AST back to the original files and highlight where all the differences are?
What about encoding messages with numbers, and then filtering the letters that are added to the message when you are drunk at the receiver side, just before decoding it, would that work?
Most triple AAA video games would qualify as well.
In a bubbly, Ponzi scheme way. Last one in is left holding the empty can.

I used to read this blog back when I was watching for the crash that never was. (Doesn't appear to have happened in Canada either) He had an interesting tax story from a few days ago too about inheriting property.

http://www.greaterfool.ca/2014/05/19/gross-me-up/
Hi all - I work for Andrew Leigh MP, the Shadow Assistant Treasurer who is responsible for Labor's tax policy leading up to the next election.

I'd be interested in hearing your views on what a future Labor govt could do to support startups in Australia. If you'd prefer to email them, thomas.mcmahon@aph.gov.au.
Created stairclimbing robot – Thoughts?
Video 1: http://bit.ly/1o7KfF4
Video 2: http://youtu.be/5fdXqIkuDAk
Picture: www.walkerbotsystems.com<p>I made this because I wanted to make a robot that worked better than what a major company like iRobot could make.<p>Spent years on it, very interested to hear what the hacker community thinks about it.<p>I'd like to open source it to the world, giving ground drones a boost like air drones have had in recent years.<p>Thanks!
I think you'd need to whitelist some useful acronyms if you implemented that rule.

USA

NSA

DOJ

TCP

POS

etc.
And let's be honest: VIM has been heading in this direction for a long time as well, especially now that it had a built in python interpreter.
And entrepreneurs should look very carefully at the human rights records of any countries they move to, including Singapore, regardless of how clean the streets are.
But still there are more new indie games than AAA titles out there I care about, it's not a tragedy if there only 2 to 6 outstanding games per year that reach me through the noise, mostly by direct recommendation.

The best thing about Greenlight is that pre-2005 games get some new exposure and even patches, like in the case of Jets'n'Guns. So if you want to stretch the music industry analogy as others did, you currently not only competing with the ever increasing amount of new releases but also with back catalogs on the same platform.

Another problem with an awful lot of indie games (especially those 40% unplayed fillers games from bundles, which are not even always strictly speaking Indie) is that you can see that there was little to no user testing, so they are just not fun or even impossible to play on specific not too exotic configurations.

Just to name a few (each of these happened in at least two games):

- no way to remap keys
- no way to remap mouse buttons or game ignores windows swapped buttons
- fixed resolutions
- optimized for small resolution,
resulting in insane mouse travel on today's native screen resolutions
(just drop that retro stick if you just cant effort a proper artist please.)
- no way to run a game windowed
- touch optimized ports from Android don't even register windows touch events.
- Content is cropped off screen
with wider aspect radios with no way to change resolution.
You can think of static electricity as potential energy, like a brick on a ledge. If something causes the brick to fall, its potential energy is converted into kinetic energy. Work can be done when the brick hits something, but not for long.

Likewise, if something discharges the static electricity, it's not "static" electricity anymore, but a pulse of current electricity. A limited amount of work can be done by the kinetic energy represented by the moving charge.
The evidence is not on your side.

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/04/07/study-no-link-betw...

You can downvote me but you still have no evidence for your beliefs.
The Four Seasons on Market Street: San Francisco's answer to the Rosewood
How clean are the streets on Manus Island? Mopped up the blood there yet from the last time one of our asylum seekers was shot dead?

We haven't got standing to criticise anyone about human rights.
> The paradox of choice means that you may be less happy about your eventual choice, but you're still going to make it.

I don't think this is true. Faced with a wall of indie games I will throw up my hands and go play Mario instead.
That sounds like you're effectively using it as a test coverage tool to find code paths that aren't being tested, would that be an accurate summary?
n=32 leads can lead to lots of sparseness, memory pressure, bad locality (given sparseness); its not going to fly easily as the default. The shared memory aspect is even a bigger hurdle: people share memory for a reason, its not very often accidental. FRP is hardly the answer, but I work on a competing paradigm so mark me as biased.

The systems people I work with do a lot of key value stores (sharded NoSQL-style databases), there is a lot of pipelining for data parallel processing (MapReduce, Pig), and there is still a lot of classic locking going on, throughput is important. Oh, and lots of Paxos, logging, state replication, etc... The normal stuff you could find at Google (note I don't work for Google).

On the HPC side, the people that really care about performance, there is some map reduce via MPI, but most of the big gains are to be had in CUDA, which is an extremely imperative programming model with very synchronized core executions and memory accesses.

I've learned that whenever the FP people talk about high performance, they usually mean something else (like concurrency that isn't so slow), rather than the real high performance stuff that the big kids (systems and HPC communities) are doing.
Ask HN:  Help needed. Server hacking attempted before even making site live
Hello Hackers ,
Me and my brother are making a website. We installed apache server and took a day off. Next day, when we went to upload files we saw server hack was attempted.
Two attacks came from Moscow and three from china.
Worst part is that they are using free scripts found on github.
I would like to know what shall we do ? I mean we are literally getting started.
Apparently , hackers tried to steal password and also did "camera" scan thinking this is IP address for Cisco PVC-2300. This is what we see in logs.

1. GET /oidtable.cgi?grep='$IFS/etc/privpasswd;
2. /oamp/System.xml?action=login&user=L1_admin&password=L1_51

All suggestions are welcome.
The demo login credentials doesnt works on https://www.empatica.com/demo/connect/login.php
This story put a smile on my face, even though I'm not of the Dragon's Lair Era. But I lived through the original Street Fighter 2, which was well before the death of the arcade and the prevalence of Internet tipsheets. As much as gaming has advanced since then, I still miss the thrill of having a line of 10 people in our small town arcade waiting their turn to take me on as E Honda.
Really? I had it for Amiga too and I can't remember it looking polygon-like. I recall there were multiple disks and the frame rate was very low. The resolution was only 368x567i.
If Dragon's Lair were created today, they would print the commands you're supposed to press on the top of each screen (similar to rhythm games). There is enough difficulty in getting the timing right that it would still be difficult and people would feed in more quarters. Maybe there would be an 'expert mode' to remove the command hints and get an alternate ending.
When the government is hacking at education and slashing essential infrastructure for a services-based future (like the NBN), I hold no hope for Australia supporting startups.
Totally unrelated, but how does this post rank so low on the HN front page? 84 points in 2 hours is huge ... but its at number 22 right now. Has something happened to the HN rank algorithm?
At one time, all an Operating System did was load other programs into memory so the processor would run them instead. All of the sandboxing, garbage collection, security, and other features were added to make it more usable.
French railway operator orders hundreds of new trains that are too big
You know, what really got me into indie games was that most of them had something unique and interesting to offer. They weren't all auteur works (although a lot of them were), but they generally felt like they weren't just made "to make a game", they were made because they had a reason to exist. There were definitely a lot of rough edges, but they were interesting. There wasn't the hegemony you'd see in AAA titles.

But... you don't see that so much in the indie scene now. Many of those games feel like they just exist because someone thought "I should make a game". There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's somewhat counter to the spirit that made the scene interesting in the first place.

I feel like a lot of indie games now capture the form but not the function. They look indie, but they don't really feel indie. I don't think there's an indie "bubble", I feel like the scene that had those values has moved somewhere else. Or if it hasn't, it will. We've always had a glut of mediocre games that didn't really make anyone much money (see: flash games in the mid oughts.) Same thing, its just the platform has expanded and the branding has changed.
An Introduction to SR-IOV Technology
Nice suggestion. Will definitely add to my list..
I love the idea of doing this.

I wonder if publishing them somewhere public is also a good idea, as a sort of reminder to stay humble and admit your own faults and lessons learned.
Easybreath snorkeling mask
At Theneeds we use a "sliding windows" approach to deal with polling. Say you run the scraper every hour. Each feed F_i is scraped once every n_i polls. If the feed returns more than his average news, then n_i gets decreased, while if the feed returns no news, it gets increased.

Perhaps with a similar trick you can run your scraper more frequently on some feeds, still keeping the cost under control.
Yeah, it's blatantly false. $10k these days is barely enough to fund a few months of development for one person. If you're just building it for fun and you're taking donations, $10k is a lot, but it's not going to fund a game with any level of polish or seriousness unless it's just some sort of bejeweled or triple town clone.
Noam by IDEO bridges the gap between hardware and software
There's little about exokernels because to my knowledge no exokernel has had widespread production use. Lisp Machines had a garbage collector that was integrated into the kernel's pagefault system, though, which meant that most collections would not trigger page faults:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125...
This appears to be in the same space as shenzhen: https://github.com/nomad/shenzhen (which works wonderfully)

Can you differentiate your service/system?
This could help https://www.empatica.com/demo/demo.php
Minecraft has the advantage of (relatively) easy decompiling and recompiling of java. There is still the large amount of breakage on each new release, however.