skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To my understanding, the critical difference between framebuffer graphics and 3D API graphics is the processing! In a framebuffer scenario, the CPU does all the rendering. Since CPU is poorly suited to rendering 3D, we have a coprocessor called a GPU. The CPU has to feed the GPU work.

Because the GPU is cutting-edge, there is a certain amount of magic voodoo required for top performance that needs to get abstracted away- maybe this particular model of GPU you have doesn't support some common instruction. You don't want to handle that in your software, you want to hide that in the driver.

Beyond that, the API is also there to make the GPU easier to use. OpenGL is a mess, sure, but to my understanding most developers would pull their hair out and give up if they had to program the GPU directly.
Did you happen to read the whole thing?

> Does Dubia look too damn nice? Unrealistic? You came here to see the consequences of our current ecological irresponsibility... So here's Dubia, the worst-case poster child for global warming, and I've painted it as livable, even pleasant.

The author continues by saying a more-random planet will look inferior, and he's "fighting the Randomian factor".
Whoever downvoted this has a reading comprehension problem.
I think it's supposed to be "peacock", but I agree.
> Of course, someone has to write the raw code, just as some farmer has to grow the wheat that winds up in the box of rigatoni at Safeway. But, as happened with farmers, far fewer coders will be needed as existing code gets repurposed. Theoretically, just one person on the planet will have to write the raw code that makes a computer perform a certain task.

Just that one person. Sure.
Making transistors at home from silicon wafers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM
Re Optional<T>:

If I get this right, the source code of the signature of many (many!) methods will now be twice the size of before, unless the names of your types and variables were already considerably bigger than "Optional<...>" (10 chars).

I hope it's worth this cost.
Quasar also relies on JVM threads. Akka's lightweight actors are just as native as Quasar's lightweight threads.
I believe you can still use modern GFX in framebuffer mode.

It's slow, but the CPU can never render as fast as the GPU.
I went from w2 full stack web dev to a contractor about 3 years ago. I waited until I had about 5 years experience to do it. I got an accountant through a referral who guided me through the entire S corp setup, and the whole invoicing/tax stuff. It's really not that complicated, and I could probably do it myself, but he just sends me documents to sign and mail to IRS/State/Unemployment/whatever. Worth every dime.

I primarily write Java/J2EE code and the demand seems to be very high for that type of work. I have been on my current contract for over 2 years, and keep getting significant raises every 6 months when they renew my contract because they know I have domain knowledge and finding competent people is hard and expensive. My advice is to leverage your connections so that you can bill directly as possible. This is sometimes hard to do with vendor management systems at big companies, but if you're able to talk to the hiring manager directly, you can avoid the recruiter middle man and get $15 - $30 + more on your rate, which is huge.

In my opinion, if you really like to code and can produce quality stuff efficiently, you owe it to yourself to look into it. Times are good, you should get paid what the market will bear for your skills. In my case, I was able to triple my income in about 2 years. I was scared a bit at first, but the way the job market is right now at the very worst someone will pay you to do something . You can always go be an employee again. I have had 0 gaps in work thus far.

Trying to get to a point where there is not a linear correlation with my time and money, which will obviously require a different approach . But in the meantime it's a good situation to be in for someone who likes to write code.
I've read about "experimental partial MathJax support" or something like that in the changelog, but I haven't looked into it, yet.

It's actually one of the big questions I'm having, as well.
It'll be a lot of fun if Google publishes the requests as they take things down, in keeping with the spirit of transparency reports.
And most were White males.

Blacks: 190 (36.89%)
White: 230 (44.66%)
Hispanics: 92 (17.86%)
Other: 2 (0.39%)
Total: 515
>Who writes the code that feeds into it?

Yeah, they "addressed" that issue in the article -- the code will come from tagging the world's open source projects. Once it's all tagged, it should work together, right? I mean, it's all just code, right?
Hm, well now that I look back at the comment I made at 2am, it seems rather silly to say I'm passionate about the tech industry itself.

The thing is that I've always been fascinated with technology and what it can do. I love working with it and I love making it work. As far as I'm concerned, making something useful in Java or putting together a computer is just as much fun as watching a movie or eating food.

My problem with drive is the whole "do what you're told" thing. I've tried doing things for a friend, but I often get bored in the middle of it because I'm just doing what I'm told, and it's not of any particular value or interest to me. Things that I don't think are just really cool or things that don't benefit me personally are harder to work on... and I don't think I'm the only one with this problem.

But anyways, thanks for the link, it's a good read and definitely something to think about either way.
Here’s How GTA 5 Would Look on Commodore 64
Sounds unlikely.
I would like to not have to tell the computer exactly how to do stuff. We will see if that will be possible in the future.
The image? Haha yeah, we got it from http://unsplash.com - I'm guessing they did too!
I was going to address the problems of the article but it seems like other people have already addressed these points.

However I will mention that it seems no one on Newsweek's staff must have an iPhone or browse via mobile because their site experience was terrible.

Page loads and I try to scroll past the image. Can't. Wait a while and finally I can start to scroll. Then the site does a huge redraw and once again I am stuck on the top of the page unable to load. Finally an advert (which I guess is the reason for all the lagginess) takes over the entire screen. It is animating, has an optional video to load, and refuses to acknowledge my touch on the close button.

Is this what the web has come to?
By the way, anyone who is new to the whole artificial life area should also take a look at Chris Adami's Avida: video [0], site [1]. Some Nature papers even came out of it, e.g. [2].

I'm going to shamelessly plug two abandonware projects of mine, being an agent-based neural network evolution sim [3] and a spatial game theory lab [4]. These might be interesting to people who like this kind of stuff.

But there's a huge amount of other stuff out there, e.g. projects like DarwinPond and prolific researchers like Martin Nowak [5].

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouF8wKxXWFQ

[1] http://avida-ed.msu.edu/

[2] http://adamilab.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reprints/2003/Len...

[3] https://github.com/taliesinb/floatworld/wiki

[4] https://github.com/taliesinb/spatial-game-theory/wiki

[5] http://www.ped.fas.harvard.edu/publications/
Here's the original paper:

low-res pdf - http://www.connellybarnes.com/work/publications/2014_portrai...

hi-res pdf - http://www.connellybarnes.com/work/publications/2014_portrai...
Anyone know the status on POV-Ray compared to other open source renderers? I jused to play with that a lot.
And its rendering APIs are nothing close to OpenGL.
Washing clothes for those with money to spare is not the same as providing clothes for those without. It's tangential rather than fundamental.
Alan is a good friend of mine. Taking lead from patio11[0], I have been trying to convince him to charge money for ngrok. He's put together a great hack here to solve the problem, but charging a monthly or one time fee (ala Pinboard) would prevent many of these shady sites from popping up.

[0]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
Bitcoin Crosses The $600 Mark As Its Rally Endures
Or just count the number of <tr> elements and subtract one to account for the table header. That's what I did to find the average race.

$('tr').length-1
When I was 20 (and still overly ambitious) one fine evening I started a program optimistically called 'the last one'. It was meant to replace me. I figured that I knew enough programming by then to write a program that would take a spec and spit out another program.

Why it failed I'll leave as an exercise to the reader (go build it!) but let's say that 30 years later I'm not at all worried that programming will be dying as an art form any day soon. Because for that to happen we'd have to elevate computers to the levels of creative thinking normally reserved for us humans.

We can make tools to make it easier, ways that will afford us higher levels of abstraction using better programming languages. But those are mostly incremental steps, a better drill versus the previous generation drills.

And those tools will allow us to do more with less input from the programmers. But for now I don't see any revolutionary development on the horizon other than quantum computing and practical implementation of those for general problems seems to be at least several decades out.
Dream on. Most likely you are gonna be wiped out by intellegent machines just in a few decades.
I wonder if it would be possible to automatically flag ngrok sites for manual review based on certain criteria. E.g. if the phrase "citibank" appeared on the site, it would appear in a moderation queue.

Though there may be bulletproof ways for criminals to bypass such automatic scanning. For example, I've heard of criminals creating two versions of their site: One, a harmless site, that you get if you type in the domain name cold, and then a criminal one, that you only get if you have the right referrer header or query string. Which makes it difficult or impossible for an outside entity to see the illegal content without access to the spam email, referring site, or what have you.

I don't know much about ngrok, but I take it you can tunnel SSL over it such that it's impossible for ngrok to inspect the contents of your traffic. Which would rule another viable strategy: Monitor traffic for suspicious keywords, thus bypassing the cloaking techniques described above.

Any other techniques for automated flagging that I might be missing? Maybe some kind of content-agnostic traffic analysis that spots a likely spam fingerprint, e.g. certain chronological traffic patterns?
The 1970s called. It wants its uninformed futuristic bullshit back.

"Everyone should learn to code" is a bit ridiculous, given that technology's biggest problem right now isn't a lack of capable coders, but that of the competent people who are out there, few are rarely trusted to tackle real work. (See today's blog post: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/technologys-l...).

The theory might be that AI will render programmers obsolete. The reality is that we've been commoditized and humiliated by process and business nonsense, even though we're nowhere close to achieving AI. What has actually rendered our prospects poor in comparison to what they should be isn't AI but the diametric opposite: Human Stupidity.
Go also has true closures and easy concurrency support, both of which are very handy in UI development.

My beef with Go is weak web-programming and prototyping support and immature libraries. I'm surprised there's been so much uptake in the Ruby/Python communities, which are very strong in those areas, but I guess Ruby/Python are now being used outside their original domains and those use-cases are pretty ripe for a language like Go.
5 month old laughing
Momma gets her 5 month old daughter laughing
Four Technology Fallacies That Need To Die
JSON REST API Slated For WordPress 4.1 Release
gist.github.com serves https, so you can use it whenever you need something sent over https.
> Give them a chance to undo their wrongs

Unless you can raise the dead, I don't think there's much you can "undo".
Pity! Still, thanks for the tip (I can see one usecase for which it is handy, proofreading).
Good cartoon picture
Good and nice cartoon that will make you smile!
Now you can give it an example image, and it will automatically make your image look more like the example.
Hm, for some people they are martirs and for people denying the right of the State to the death penalty, they are martirs because they bear witness to the futility of the act.

Regardless of what they say.
When does Breivik get released?
Games these days are insignificant experiences for people who've already played plenty of them. Taking Secret of Mana, that was surely the first game at all of its kind that I'd played. But I'd barely part with any money to buy an RPG today. Games today have a much harder job being original, and tend to be shameless in their lack of originality anyhow.
Curious, why Ceki Gülcü (Log4J author) is no longer in team?
Just think of the legal licensing concerns this database would entail. GNU/BSD/ASPL/MPL/whatever else code all living together, and trying to assemble it into a reasonable harmony would be almost as complex as actually compiling viable software.

Then we get into architectural details, like 32/64 bit, endianness, unicode flavor of the decade/ascii/ebcdic strings. Not to mention call by value, call by reference, calling across cross languages, reference counting, value boxing, garbage collection, thread-safety, pointer data alignment, struct packing, dynamic linking dependencies and symbol versioning.

I'm sure someone long ago wrote that we'd have replaceable car parts by now, so that one spark plug works in every car. And we'd just pick out an axel, suspension, steering wheel, paint color, transmission, starter motor, and wind shield wipers from a catalog and be able to build the car of our dreams just by pointing to its parts.
alternatively, a disproportionate number of people who can afford competent legal representation are white.
Google opens path in Europe for being 'forgotten'
Wow,

I'm upvoting this only to encourage someone to write a good article with a similar title.

gavinpc writes: "'Art' is the worst term the author could have chosen for anything that is in danger of automation."

Indeed,
The only logical argument for computer programming as dying art is that the art aspect is being drown by armies of low-paid contractors and start-up worker. But I'm not saying that's true. I'm just point the way in case someone wants to write the good "Computer Programming Is a Dying Art". I'll wait tell then to comment.
http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html , you'll catch the DSN every now and then downlinking the voyager spacecrafts at about 160 bits/sec.
There's also 2 guys declared 'unfit to execute' yet they are still in solitary on death row since the 70s
I moved my blog from Wordpress to a static site but I'm actually thinking of returning to Wordpress. Wordpress gives you comments, RSS feeds, search, categorisation and mailing list subscriptions out of the box. I'm missing those features in my static site. I don't want to outsource comments to Disqus. And there are caching techniques you can use to speed up Wordpress.

I'm guessing most of the static site generators probably fulfilled the needs of the programmer who wrote them (which is totally fine and kudos to them for releasing their work so others could benefit). However, static site generators are not what you'd call "user-friendly" (in my view) unless you're comfortable with the command line and like markdown. (Wordpress isn't particulalry user-friendly either, but more so than static site generators in my opinion.)
Beautiful, and I'll use it for my first book.

But I have to call out the claim:

> I think Pollen just won the Hello World Tournament.

That tournament was won permanently by the M4 language in 1977. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hello_world_program_exa...
Except that the 'good parts' of LibreSSL consist largely of two things:

1. Removing a ton of broken, obsolete, or poorly-designed code
2. Fixing bugs and incorporating fixes from the official OpenSSL bug tracker

In short, the 'good parts' of LibreSSL are a team of people willing to devote significant time and effort to making the OpenSSL codebase secure, clean, portable, and trustworthy. That's something that the OpenSSL devs either didn't have the time or energy to do.

As for interoperability: OpenBSD's process has always been to write a single core with a single target (OpenBSD) and then to have a separate team take care of platform-specific issues. This allows the team doing security work on LibreSSL/OpenSSH to focus on the results by writing a single implementation, and the porting team can spend their time porting that implementation to other platforms (rather than having someone implement functionality while trying to be aware of how each platform handles things).

It's worked well for OpenSSH so far, so I don't see a problem with using the same pattern for LibreSSL.
Maybe my point was taken away because I didn't provide an insightful reply to the original comment?

In that case, one of the reasons why I switched to a day job (after spending about the years in-between, during and after college working on small business ideas) was because I didn't have a strong enough business to sustain myself with the lifestyle I wanted to have.

It was awesome at first, and I was able to direct my energies to really improving things here at my workplace, but in recent years, with the job morphing to such a degree that I'm no longer primarily a developer (more management at this point) the fun level is no longer as high as it used to be.

I completely separated from having my LLC for the first few years after I started my day job, but then a few years ago I started a side business selling software on my website (under the sole proprietor model, due to the $800 minimum tax I didn't want to have to pay again for LLCs in California) and so far that small business has been semi-profitable and keeps the hosting bills paid.

Recently though, with those changes I mentioned above with my day job no longer being quite as fun as it used to when I was more free to do development work, I've looked towards contacting local businesses via snail mail and seeing if they have any business problems they need solving (anything repetitive/time-consuming for their staff, which I feel would be ripe for some sort of software automation or process to be put in place) so that way I'll have some more interesting problems to solve and get some insight into what problems our local businesses have (the # of software developers in the area is close to nil).

I'd like to eventually build up something significant where I could hire a few people and maybe earn enough to maybe switch to being a full-time entrepreneur, but at the moment the day job pay is just too good to leave (all of my savings goes to long-term accounts I can't tap, such as a 403b, life insurance savings account, and Roth IRA, so I don't save too much each month...plus there's the credit card debt and personal line of credit I'm still paying off).

Now I feel lucky I was able to experiment much more (some with my money I earned through the business, but also with parental money, mainly my mom since she was awesome enough to believe in me and provide me that opportunity) while I was a late teen/early twenty-something and make mistakes I've learned from. Profitability is a big factor now whenever I'm trying something new.
Since people have complained about the article title, we've changed the post to use the subtitle instead.
The LLC was his team's preference (and I was happy with it as well, having prior Delaware LLC experience), it was formed for the investment.

We used YC docs (http://ycombinator.com/documents/) for the employment contract among other things, with a few adjustments for things I wanted changed.

The due diligence, formation, agreements, etc. were all a very easy process. His team is excellent to deal with, very professional, and his people and lawyers were always available if I had questions. They're pretty much an entrepreneur's ideal.

Regarding the LLC. I think for this business it was quite desirable, as it has slightly unusual attributes and prospects. It was always understood it wasn't going to be a billion dollar funding company (that would eg take numerous rounds from large VC firms). It was always going to be profitable from early on, requiring no substantial further funding. You could say it's a partnership in a corporation's body.

If we were going to agree to an investment from Andreessen Horowitz tomorrow morning, we'd likely reform to a C corp for future purposes.

I echo your sentiment about getting hung up on corporate form though. The hassle involved can vary depending on your partners of course. With a partner like Cuban, if there's something that needs to be done, like shifting to a C corp for business or investment purposes, then it'll get done with minimal drama.

Most of these things simply are not going to be a major problem unless you have shitty partners that might cause problems in the process of reforming the company from an LLC to a C. Mostly these are trivial issues that people sometimes waste large amounts of time on because their partners suck.
It seems to just happen. You could delete yours if you wanted to ensure the focus was on only one submission.
>The problem is that the memory contents are "hidden" from sight unless the programmer uses a visual debugger or prints out all the values to inspect.

I think that's what most people do when they are programming.
Just to close the loop; a better picture:

https://flic.kr/p/nMA6kz

I quite like the 'l' and 'i', but the 'V' is worrisome.
Great response to this post in the comments section by sociologist Dr Zuleyka Zevallos (@OtherSociology).
Clearly, I have much to learn. #n00bfeminist

http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2014/05/female-privileg...
How about doing like the Norwegians:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18135537
Their kids (have been taught to) kill less than kids in any American state.

EDIT: Don't know why I can't reply to any post, but the Norwegians actually have a diversity not that much unlike the US (15 percent immigrants / children of immigrants):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Norway
Show HN: Mighty Spring – Passive job search
Microsoft called. They want their Live Tiles back.
Genomics data is produced by machines. And R is quite popular with bioinformaticians that analyse it.
Quit your job and volunteer until you run out of money, then get a job doing something worthwhile for lower pay. With less disposable income, i think you'd find yourself buying less stuff, because you can no longer afford it. Groceries, rent, utilities, transportation, healthcare, occasionally clothes and toiletries are quite expensive and all-consuming income-wise for most people, those without cushy jobs at least.
Yeah, I hope I am interpreting this the wrong the way. But instead of doing

X.getA().getB().getC().getD()

we have to

X.flatMap(X::getA)
.flatMap(X::getB)
.map(X::getC)
.orElse("UNKNOWN"); //[1]

Not sure why this is going to be better?

[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/java8-option...
Click-bait.

For the foreseeable future, computer programming will be a flourishing art and non-natural languages will be the primary way of interacting with computers for non-trivial tasks, if only due to the ambiguities of natural language. There's a reason mathematics still uses specialized notation after all these years.

I do think we can say with relative certainty that Newsweek is a dying company, however.