skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might like some of the Heroes of Might and Magic games.

The last one I played was III, so it's been over 10 years, but they were always fun.
Hey everyone, we're here to chat and answer any questions!
I hope the plastic can get recycled to make more bricks.
And business-wise, we don't really know where the links are coming...
Microsoft is definitely targeting Android - its just that they don't think they need to 1) fork or 2) provide hardware that runs Android to be successful.
The game of today is: Guess the acronym!

My guesses:

M dot: for a website, redirect mobile visitors to m.example.com and serve them a mobile site.

RWD: Responsive Web Design, where your website adapts itself to the smaller screen.
I don't think reality is as clear cut as that. There is genuine complexity. Being a cop is legitimately dangerous, gun or no gun. A gun isn't an off switch. People can confront an armed cop and shooting doesn't always stop them.

There are also all sorts of rules that are learned on the job and aren't not in any manual. Ways for maintaining control and authority mostly. Many of these practices are unsanctioned and unofficial, but still essential for being able to do the job. Some things are both crucial and illegal.

Cops usually feel like when they get busted for being arrogant, bullying or outright violence that they are are victims of these situations. They do what everyone does, what has to be done for policing to be viable. Those pencil pushers with their removed perspective are making judgments about their irrelevant rules being broken.

They are under stress. Violence is a part of their days. Most of the people they deal with are lowlifes, lyres, cheaters. There is real stress. Real danger

That said, a lot of these practices aren't benign and they aren't inevitable. The police does genuinely attract many problematic people and it makes other. They get used to defending their authority and meet challenges to it with extreme responses. They develop a cops & robbers, us & them worldview that becomes their reality. More specifically cops, criminals and naive spectators, citizens & bureaucrats.

They develop a bullying mannerism.

Police manage to do their jobs without guns at all in many places. They deal with violent crime just like cops in the states. I'm not saying this should be adopted by US department, but is proof that there are other ways of doing things.

I think lights good for the paradigm. But, whatever that light reveals needs to be dealt with. Maybe police modus operandi needs to changed. But, maybe the rulebook needs to change too. It can be dangerous trying to enforce the official rulebook after long periods where it has only been enforced selectively. Maybe the official way of doing things doesn't work.

That said, this following cops around only plays to the problem paradigm. It's harassment, like what paparazzi do. It's belligerent. Maybe it's valuable as a protest, but it isn't as solution.

What I think should happen in law enforcement is that everything should be recorded. Every interrogation. Every arrest. Every time a cop pulls you over. This is all evidence and it should be part of every booking.

Hopefully that will make the need for this sort of thing go away.
What Does Your Company Blog About?
Why?

How do you choose topics?

How do you promote your content?

Does blogging work for your business?
Show HN: A Javascript library to overcomplicate Five
Bump the numbers by, let's just say 50k, and I'm sure they'll find talented people applying.
US Copyright Office says Aereo not a cable company under terms of Copyright Act
White paper finds Customer Stories Drive 13X Ad Improvement
No. It's just hard to find good people willing to work for crap. A lot of what startups offer is crap.
'Ugly hack' is an ugly hack of 'kludge'.
Oh come on. Referring to unproductive jobs as dead wood is a perfectly fine idiom.

Nobody is implying the people who hold those jobs have any personal failings or aren't capable of doing productive work, but the jobs themselves are not helping the business.
http://play.freeciv.org - play Freeciv in the browser.
Letting 80% marketing and PM go? Wow. I thought PM are pretty good in Microsoft.
Largely because Brian Reynolds designed it
> Given that C++ is in fact used pretty much everywhere, I'm not sure what you mean by that.

1. It isn't a given, from what I've read, that their product would need a language that could be realistically used everywhere. A lot of applications can get away with technology that is more "limited" in that sense. And being "limited" can be a plus.

2. Even if a language is used everywhere doesn't mean that it is/was an appropriate choice in all those cases. Look at people implementing stuff in Python, then reimplementing it in some static language later, giving a performance boost and less bugs, and almost/just as productive (though having the experience of doing it for the second time probably helps). Turns out that they didn't really need the dynamicity of Python after all. In C++'s case, maybe someone started developing an app and found out that they didn't really need the performance that a no-cost abstraction language is able to give, and so wouldn't need to pay the cost of dealing with the complexity of C++.

> And I think Rust is applicable because it hits all of the big features the author is touting as good in OCaml, such as first-class functions, immutable values, strong static type checking and type inference, ADTs and pattern matching.

And you also have the added features of smart pointers, managing pointers, heap/stack allocation, explicit use of views vs allocated memory (string allocated on heap vs string slice, for example), etc. These are all features, or burdens, depending on your application area. But why would they be features, in this context?

> It also has benefits that OCaml doesn't, such as full memory safety,

Doesn't OCaml have full memory safety?

> no required garbage collector,

Why is a garbage collector problematic, in this context?

> , and good C FFI (I'm no OCaml programmer but glancing at the beginning of the Real World OCaml's chapter on FFI, it appears OCaml uses dlsym() to look up functions at runtime, whereas Rust can outright link to them like any C program would). I'm sure there are others too, but I'm not familiar enough with OCaml to list them. I'm also not sure what the performance of OCaml is like (a glance at the Computer Language Benchmarks Game suggests it's often slower than C++), but Rust aims to have C++-equivalent performance.

It boils down to fine-grained control over performance, I guess. But, again, I don't see how that is a plus in this context. It can also be a burden, hence all the languages that deliberately do not let you have explicit control over memory - it makes for less stuff in the language, hence less complex language overall, or perhaps more room for other stuff that might be relevant to the application of the language.

I don't get the apparent attitude of "it has all the features of OCaml, plus all this other stuff". More stuff is not necessarily good, and can be a burden if you don't really need it.
While I am no fan of the deal (to say the least), Nokia would have had to make these deep cuts independently based on the continued inability of Windows Phone to sell enough to support a company of Nokia's size.
You use another delimiter if you need commas. CSV isn't comma only (contrary to what the name implies), you could use '!' or anything else.
Patent on linked lists
The Symptoms of Low Internal Software Quality
RHEL 7 (and now CentOS 7) has native Docker support built in... seems that would have been a good choice of distro if they were looking for good, long term Docker support.
Dropbox switches to Qt, looks great in Plasma systems
NYDFS BitLicense Draft
Well, it has probably been overseen in case of Copyright infringement. That is why "synergies and strategic alignment" is repeated.

Unbelievable how "We have decided our business requires 18000 less employees than there are now" can be strategically and synergetically rephrased and aligned.

Culture, ah, culture.
Java API for JSON Binding (JSON-B) (The Aquarium)
Six Months Later: We’ve Given Away More Than $50,000,000 in SaaS Apps
I use 1Password but it's sharing functionality is sort of a mis-feature. I frequently work with contractors, and use GPG for sharing secure information. Sometimes a GPG-encrypted text file is all that you need.
Java 8 Consumer and Supplier interfaces
In fairness, RHEL/CentOS did not support in-place upgrades between major releases until RHEL/CentOS 7 (just released). Prior to 7, it was recommend to always do a fresh install.
"We don’t claim to be experts on HR.." then they list some prerequisites to hire and say "Don't have these prerequisites? Don't hire. Period."

...couldn't read past that. I really despise the "our way is the only right way" opinions.
If anyone is interested, you can grab Colonization at GOG.com [1] for $5.99

[1] http://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_colonization
Tcl is a perfectly fine language for writing web servers with, actually. It was possible to do a nice, lightweight, evented web server years before Node.js showed up. AOLserver is also done with Tcl, and for a while in the 90ies, was one of the best systems for doing dynamic web sites.
What I think should happen in law enforcement is that everything should be recorded.

We can expect that pretty soon with storage and chips becoming ever smaller. 10-15 years perhaps?
Disregarding security of this particular implementation and trade offs, the problem is that while it's a simple solution, it's not convenient: password managers are more usable. I'm saying this as a guy who wrote similar password generator once, and used it for some time, then switched to a password manager.

When you need to change a password for some website, you'll have to add something to your "door id", e.g. a counter. Then you'll have to remember such counters for every website where you decide to change password. Due to this I was a bit reluctant to change passwords, which is dangerous.

If you want simplicity, the simpler and more convenient solution is to keep an encrypted text file.

--

As for security, the best approach to deterministic password generators I've seen is this:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bwaters/publications/papers/www200...

(Today you'll want to use scrypt as the hash, though).
Full rewrites are dangerous, especially if you insist that the new software is going to match all of the features of the old software.

In particular, if you have some old software that has been in production a long time, you will probably find out that it is doing things that you don't know it is doing.

Refactoring is usually the way to go. Often a small amount of effort can address many of the worst pain points.
This keeps coming up in recent months. I suggest you look through what folks have been recommending.

Discussion about KeePass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7174595

Discussion about Pass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495337
I think the best way to say the above is not that "Microsoft lays off half of Nokia group."

It should instead be "Microsoft saves half of Nokia's employees jobs."
Would hollow pyramids work?

Since LEGO™ pieces are pretty uniform and there are known pieces, it seems that the engineering math would be easy enough. Once someone has done the work of transcribing the 1x1, 2x1, 2x2, etc pieces and plates into a LEGO™ Calculator.

I am sure these already exist in a minimal form to help pack a cup with LEGO pieces when you buy them from a LEGO™ store.
Attention Nokia (MS) workers: Nokia (Nokia) is hiring.
Just read your blog post about it. [1] I find it amazing that it was a "20% time" project and your first iOS app. It's one of my favorite apps. Well designed and fast. Thumbs up.

[1] http://harveynick.com/blog/2013/08/10/so-i-made-an-iphone-ap...
BitRegulation NY aims to regulate virtual currencies
>> Some things are both crucial and illegal.

Well that's where I draw the line though. If it comes down to a choice between accepting that law enforcement is allowed to break the law or making law enforcement less effective by increasing transparency, I choose to decrease law enforcement effectiveness. I'd rather citizens undermine the police by recording them then have citizens get shot without cause with little oversight.

>> What I think should happen in law enforcement is that everything should be recorded.

I agree. I would hope that in these "discussions" they're having with these groups to reach a compromise, that's the solution.
Bitcoin regulations proposed by New York State
Ask HN: Where do you go to discuss machine learning?
Can't seem to find a decent place for good ML discussion. /r/machinelearning is highly inactive, and the freenode IRC channel is a bit unwelcoming.
Mobile Phones was the feature phone division. Smart Devices was the smartphone division.

All an academic point since now they're just going to be "the phones division"
Yep. An easier way to remember this is to note that Velocity + Time = c

The faster you move, the lesser "Time" needs to be in order to be equal to c.
Your first statement here is not true.

Humans are excellent at learning from very few or even 1 example. Show a toddler a single image of an elephant and the toddler will generalize perfectly on new examples; show a machine a few thousand images of elephants and it might generalize decently if your machine is really clever.

There are very few tasks where machine systems achieve anything resembling human level performance. But on all such tasks, the machine requires far more data and still underperforms.
Most likely he was logged in remotely to work from home and they monitored his activity. They make it sound nefarious, but it sounds pretty much like a standard day working from home, except that he looked at some code he wasn't directly working on out of curiosity. I think that bringing criminal charges in a case of a minor violation of the employee handbook, as this appears to be, is ludicrous. But I guess it's supposed to send a message to all the tech geeks on Wall Street - don't get too uppity, and think twice about leaving for a better job if you might have ever violated the employee handbook.
Who? The engineers? Clearly many of them would be liabilities as their product lost. Some visionaries are needed, some business people, some engineering leaders, some bright engineers, etc.

Unfortunately, some acquisitions are for talent, others for revenue, others for customers, others for technology, or a mix, and the talent here may be a mix bag.
If you have a bunch of accounts, they are unsorted and you can't search through them. They are probably sorted by ID or something.
Never use magic values when writing your code
And Elop burns another platform. I've lost count at this point.

This is the THIRD round of major layoffs Nokia has gone through since 2011. I feel bad for my former colleagues.
Vintage Fashion Photographer Guy Bourdin
"In order to maximize shareholder value in the long term..." I would hate to be fired, no matter the phrasing, but kudos to a CEO brave enough to say things just how they are.
I've a Pinterest board dedicated to my favourite shows: http://www.pinterest.com/srikar/podcasts-i-listen-to/
Actually, I don't think this is true. Your tower has to taper exponentially, which means there's characteristic length scale L (probably in the dozens of kilometers) such that cross-section has to double every time you move that far down the town. The width of the tower that is 1 cm at its peak exceeds the Earth's diameter (12,700km) at its base after only 60 doublings, which happens at a height of 6,000km if L=100km. (Obviously, things get more complicated as the height becomes comparable to the distance from the Earth, but the order of magnitude should be right.)

Also, this only works if, for any given slice, the weight of the legos above is evenly distributed over the legos below. Without stronger materials to transfer this weight, the legos in the center of the bottom of the tower will fail before those on the side of the bottom.
Echo chamber anyone?
WebGL Transitions for your image/video slideshows
I always connect via bluetooth to my car or to a jambox. The most recent time it randomly stopped playing was yesterday afternoon while driving - right in the middle of an episode on a long straight on the highway. For the record I have never had Google Music randomly stop playing using the same device(s) to the same car and jambox.

The position loss usually occurs with Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast where each episode is 3 - 5 hours long. I listen to about 30 minutes each time on the same device and sometimes it just resumes from a previous stop point rather then the most recent.

To demonstrate it forgetting about playing a list of items, start playing from an episode filter choosing Play All. Stop playing and then come back later. The lock screen will show that current playing episode as does the bottom of the UI. Press play in that. It will then play till the end of that episode and then stop - ie it forgets you were doing a Play All.
This is good. The Lumia 520 proves that Windows Phone runs fine on the lowest end - in fact, it proves that it might be a better choice there.

All Microsoft needs to do is come up with a way to support more than a very select set of Qualcomm SoCs. Bringing Windows Phone to the same markets as Android and maybe Firefox OS will go for is very hard if you stick to a subset of the SoCs made by one vendor.
It's... it's like a really, REALLY long chess game... that's AMAZING!!!
The situation is almost reverse in smaller scale companies. It is not unusual for a mid-sized company to acquire another mid-sized or small company, keep the factory workers, engineering, R&D and lay off all mid and senior management (though with pretty good severance usually) to install their own people.
Has venture capital changed?
Or, for balance, Obama saying "I am acting alone on the border" and then at the border "Congress does not do its job."
Absolutely. Police should have a lapel camera or a Glass like camera rolling at all times. Prevents brutality and (more prevalent) false claims of thereof.
There seems to be discord between how the Supreme Court ruled on Aereo and the copyright office's opinion of them. Even though the Surpreme Court ruled against Aereo's arguments, in doing so, they explicitly likened them to a cable company:

"But given Aereo’s overwhelming likeness to the cable companies targeted by the 1976 amendments, this sole technological difference between Aereo and traditional cable companies does not make a critical difference here." [1, p. 3]

To me, either they should be treated the same as the cable companies and have the same right to a compulsory license, or they should be treated as a cloud provider of antenna access and not have to pay for that license. But I guess the good news for them is that the Copyright Office, while disagreeing, has left it up to the court to make a decision. Otherwise, Aereo would really be caught in a classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

The implications again are far-reaching. The last time, the multi-billion dollar retransmission fee regime was imperiled by the possibility that the pay-TV companies might adopt Aereo's techniques. This time, it's the ability of companies to innovate in the space where TV and Internet intersect, and I think it's a place where real innovation is long overdue.

[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf
So monitorseo.com basically sell backlinks "through our extensive network of bloggers and web workers."
Is it me or this guy is trying hard the SteveJobs look in that picture?

Simple solution to all of microsoft's woes: Drop the WINNT kernel and replace it by a unix based variant. Is there any value in keeping the kernel closed source ? Hasn't that fight been lost a long time ago?

Windows is going byzantine fast; there's no value in compilers and in os kernels anymore, the open source ones are better but MS still thinks that they have these as a competing advantage while they are a R&D money pit.
How to install APKs on multiple Android devices with just one command
It seems there should be a nice market for improve safety. Making hard objects slow down or crash safely is not a total unexplored area.

Has there been any experiments with airbags? I did find experiments with parachutes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdhrZbiK0T0), so safety seems to be a work-in-progress in order render that 1KG of deadweight into something more manageable.

Last, I must ask since this is a security issue, what is the statistics on this problem? Is a person flying a 1KG quadcopter in a crowded areas more dangerous than a person using bicycle in a city? The comparison is not perfect, but it would be nice to have some comparisons to other recreational activities performed in crowded areas.
It's funny, I'm doing my MBA right now and many of our profs specifically warn us against using "MBA speak" or "MBA jargon" in presentations and assignments.

It's much easier to retreat behind MBA speak, especially when you don't have a clear grasp of what you're trying to communicate or are saying things you don't want to be heard saying. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit".

It CAN be a useful tool to deflect and confuse, but sadly I think 99% of the time it's not used intentionally. It's simply much, much harder to communicate complex ideas in a simple and clear way - it takes a lot more effort and deeper understanding, and many people are simply incapable.
Might be too simple when measured against those heavies, but check out Neptune's Pride 2: http://triton.ironhelmet.com

Slow, real-time 4x strategy game with no randomness and lots of fun.
'If I end up in chains in Guantánamo I can live with that'

I'm sure the US authorities can too so that feels like agreement at last... ;-)
I'm not sure I understand how ProductHunt is better than ShowHN. Maybe I just like having everything I read in one place, but after having our product listed on ProductHunt I haven't really gone back.

Ryan: I would be interested to hear your take on why ProductHunt is better/different than ShowHN. I don't mean this to be a jab, I just want to hear your perspective.
Linux Distribution Basics: Rolling Releases vs. Standard Releases
In startups, you can be gone at any time.

In large company, you can be gone at any time.

So, the lesson here is: prepare to be gone, and be gone before you are gone.
Varnam – Cross platform predictive transliterator for Indian languages
I have a (homemade) thin bash-wrapper around gnupg, which stores the passwords in a folder, that is backed up by git-annex..

The main work is done by a vim-autocommand-group (augroup) which runs the file through gpg on open/save if it ends with .gpg
Don't underestimate the value of the Nokia brand. Until recently, IIRC, Nokia was the world's largest seller of mobile phones. That brand image is worth a ton to help MS sell its phones.
"For our business to remain competitive... "
Being under constant scrutiny can help avoid abuses. But it causes a chilling effect - normal people (including police) can freeze or become passive, constantly aware of everybody looking over their shoulder. They become useless.
I don't think the tech is ready just yet. Can't the glass record under half an hour and gets really hot while doing that?

Since the police are wearing a uniform, an integrated camera might be better.
Study Finds a Genetic Link to Autism, Researchers Hope to Find More