skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I think their argument about the technology is batty though. It's the same argument that gets made every time a new creative medium is created.

I'm not too off put by that argument, as there are plenty of technologies that have high hopes, but have always been 20 years away because it frankly the experience just sucks, or the problem is harder than anyone actually understands. Such as, 3D Pictures/TV, Paper-thin displays, Graphene Transistors.

Sure I'd love to eat my hat on most of these, but as some of these technologies are, they still just suck or don't provide a good enough experience to upgrade over the less-tech experience.
I'd agree completely, but your timing is off. We're several years into what I'd call "tablet-first" gaming (I would nominate 2011's Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery as the standard-bearer) and there is a good handful of (mostly independent) games in development that are indeed "VR-first," such as the atmospheric thriller Technolust or even the major-studio space combat title EVE: Valkyrie.
I am surprised that we haven't gotten discussion around point 4 ("Theo is an asshole, so is Linus, but Theo is worse"). These seem to be always present when anything related to OpenBSD is discussed. It's disappointing.
People are uncritically jumping to Max's defense because (1) he's a famous guy who created something they like and (2) as males, it's easier to put themselves in his shoes than hers.

Neither of those reasons are particularly logical, but we're dealing with humans here, not machines.
HTML5 Game Dev Contest $500 cash prizes
Interesting. How does this overlap/conflict with efforts like Diaspora or OwnCloud?
XDomain: A pure JavaScript CORS alternative
For jurisdictions that don't have their own state-run labs (so not NV, NJ, PA, etc.) everybody uses one or a mix of GLI[1], BMM[2], and Eclipse[3] Note: I'm only familiar with US gaming.

We do have a tool to zero these parts of the executable files out, but in our testing we still had unexplainable differences unless we were on the same machine working from the same sync.

The VirtualBox was generated once (installed Windows, Visual Studio, .NET, some others) and we just continue to use the same base .ova.

The package has to be sent to the lab on physical media where it gets loaded onto an offline machine that we've supplied.

[1]http://www.gaminglabs.com/
[2]http://www.bmm.com/
[3]http://www.eclipsetesting.com/
Maybe I misunderstood your comment but parent was about Aliens, this is about The Fifth Element. Different movies different fictional weapons. TFE's one is more fictional.
Of course an indictment is going to make the indicted sound like scum. It's not exactly an unbiased document.

The pertinent questions in the Nacchio case are P(insider trading), P(getting caught), and P(getting caught | rejected NSA).
Tiki Hangover: Unearthing the False Idols of America's South Seas Fantasy
As someone who stayed at home as a kid playing text-only MUD games and chatting on IRC, I think your minimum requirements for interactions in VR is way too high.
This functionality currently exists for any online password on Windows/Mac/iOS in 1PassWord, and I'm sure there are many other wallets and password managers for other platforms that do similar things. Having a USB key for this almost feels like a step backward - how do you plug that into your phone or tablet? 1Password will automagically enter and submit any remembered password in your browser, and any non-web password can be stored and retrieved from the app itself at any time. I didn't even care about that feature when I bought the app, but it has become a lifestyle changer for me and I'd say it's the killer feature.

The worst part is, I can buy 1Password for Mac for $50, and the iOS version is less than $20. Anybody interested in this sort of thing should really check out the alternatives already!
It was an official release, but it was a piece of shit. It was ugly, buggy as hell, missing major gameplay features, and had no sound whatsoever. Not only was it constantly grinding the floppy drive, but it came on four double-sided disks, and--just for example--the conversations were on a different disk than the towns, so every time you tried to talk to someone, you had to switch disks, wait 30 seconds, and then reverse the process when done.

Sometimes, you would drop an item and it would turn into a wall square, permanently. Sometimes a stack of items--ammo, potions--would stop decrementing when you removed one but keep incrementing when you added one, which sounds great except that U6 had encumbrance, so you wound up unable to carry anything but 60 pounds of potions. If, say, you fired a bow at an enemy four squares to the northeast, instead of animating an arrow flying at them, it would animate a bow taking four steps north, then four steps east. Ground hazards (bear traps and lava) proced every time you moved the cursor, so you could kill anything in one round by tossing a bear trap under them, wiggling the joystick for a while, and then ending your turn so the game would notice they were dead. Sometimes the game wouldn't actually notice when a PC was supposed to be dead--the whole party could splash around happily in lava as their HP went further and further negative.

I had been a huge Ultima fanboy up 'til then, but that was the last one I ever played. Twelve-year-old me felt seriously betrayed. They should never have shipped the C64 version.
Au contraire, the fact that Java actually has a memory model means one can reason about concurrency in a way impossible on other platforms.

As you note you rarely need to concern yourself with the details of the memory model as most of us are users, not designers, of concurrency primitives. But you should you need to design a new primitive you can actually have some guarantees it will work in a cross-platform manner, which is more than you an say about any other platform I know of.
The US has a population of 318 million. We would expect change to be slow.
If I were their manager, I'd be talking to them regularly about their work and how they intended to approach their assignments. I'd probably be spending time pair programming with them if they had problems they couldn't solve on their own. I wouldn't need to try to figure out how good they were just by watching them. (I was a technical manager in my previous job.)

If I absolutely had to evaluate somebody just by watching them code, I'd use this heuristic: People who repeatedly try random solutions that don't work are probably poor programmers - they don't understand their own code, and are not in control of the process. People who spend a lot of time thinking, reading the code or tracing execution methodically in their debuggers - and then do something that quickly works - are probably good programmers. If you want to have a chance at solving difficult problems, you have to spend more time thinking and less time typing.

Also, people who spend a lot of time fighting with syntax errors are either bad programmers or don't know the language they're using very well.
Cool, thats your opinion. I still want VR.
Interesting, I've written very much the same thing with the same name. Only difference is I've written it using C++.
Observing everyone isn't about targeting everyone, it's about targeting anyone. So even if they really did miss Ukraine, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about them recording everything else.
> I know I'm not alone in seeing this decision as a mistake on Xerox's part. I was certainly determined to avoid it at Microsoft.

But they still missed on touch and social. I am not counting in tablets, mobile because they at least tried in this space
what about the "strength of the Rap Genius Mission" makes you believe in giving hours of your time to them for free? When they have some kind of an exit with this product you will get nothing, they will get a fortune.

I don't understand you.
Yeah, they basically ginned up a half-finished alpha, realized it was impossible to complete, and then fucking shipped it anyway. Not a pleasant birthday present for a twelve-year-old boy who had idolized Richard Garriott up 'til then.
I think you can tell if they're bad pretty easily, within the first half hour or so. They won't know where to get started, or they'll start reinventing common knowledge from first principles.

I think it's very hard to tell if someone is good. One of my hobbies when I was at Google was to occasionally go read through Jeff Dean or Rob Pike's code reviews, and just look through the code they were writing. On a daily basis, it really didn't look all that much different from the average Googler's code, in either output or style. On a monthly basis, they got a lot more done, through clever re-use of other components, understanding exactly what the requirements were, and not having to go down blind alleys and re-write stuff.
The problem is that for the rest of his life this will come up when someone googles his name. Whether he is applying for a job, going out on a first date or looking for venture capital, the words "accused of rape" will be hanging around like Banquo's ghost.
Six hours on and not a single comment. I think it's pretty fitting, to be honest.

"Despite the impact of Snowden's disclosures, the general consensus among experts in the intelligence community holds that no amount of global outrage will affect the Five Eyes relationship, which, to this day, remains the most powerful espionage alliance in world history."
On the other hand, I took a low dose daily for a year and felt nothing untoward. No idea if it helped my hangovers, but it was a heavy drinking year that didn't result in that many hang overs. But I was much younger and relatively healthy.
back your self up with well written code, committed into a VCS with proper comments. For each one that is rewritten mark those commits somewhere in a list of notes. Discuss each one with him if his check in comment is not clear as to why. When he's right, leave it, when he's being a jerk note it. If all else fails you have documented your reasons. Then go and find a new gig cuz you've done all you can.
wonder how historians will write about silicon valley. you can probably use that same text
That's a little silly. This makes the assumption that everyone will be playing this "ultimate" MMORPG, and our society will turn into a dystopian future. People who play MMORPGs now, will play it. People who don't play them now, will probably not play it then either. Doesn't really change the overall landscape though...
AI – The paradox
Just confirmation bias at work. I am sure there are many things they did not have in common that they choose to ignore. Humans are pattern recognition machines which in truth is a lot of fun.
> Right, because my mom's rotary phone will work like that.

No it doesn't. That's why you shouldn't market products with the claim to make secure calls to her.

There are product to encrypt PSTN calls. These products needs to be used at both ends to be effective.

> If end to PSTN can make it more expensive for the NSA to collect, then it's good,

It doesn't, that's the point. You can count on the whole SS7 being compromised, all the time. It's where these agencies came from.

> If the default config for apache were to generate self signed certificates, you would say, that's useless, because MITM.

Again words in my mouth. I believe it is in fact the default in the major distributions, and it isn't "useless". This has absolutely nothing to do with the PSTN so I won't discuss this particular straw man further.
We have operational code which combines Tor with Bittorrent. Operates exactly as you describe in this delightful read.
Current download speed is 23Mbit/sec for a 3-hop Tor onion circuit on average laptop. We're in contact with the real Tor people.

https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Anonymous-Downloadin...
Thumbnail navigation is also included in this client. All going into next code release.
Would you guys trust Amazon data services like EC2/S3 for backing up your system which includes all your GPG/SSH keys, photos, important documents like tax returns, etc.?
Counter examples. Civil war, Japanese internment, numerous actions against native Americans although you may not consider them protected by bill of rights.
ummm... so I can't restart the game :P
This doesn't make sense because the current successful business model for MMORPGs is subscription fees, not advertisement.
Same for med students on amphetamines
Hammer.js: Completely Rewritten for 2.0
I know Synology runs Linux so it should be straightforward to set up but we haven't done it yet.

This is the first time I've heard of this particular Seagate drive but the notion of having a drive you can connect to over wifi and which also fits in your pocket or bag is really interesting.
This may not be what you want to hear, but if your supervisor is unresponsive to your complaints then you may be best off switching jobs.

Assuming it's even possible, changing your colleague's behavior would probably take a very long time. Being miserable at work drags you down emotionally and will affect your whole life, so I recommend getting out of there.
You made the speaker the target of denigration. The previous poster was appealing for tolerance; you added name-calling and personalized shunning. You skipped any acknowledgement or engagement with cookiecutter's points, jumping straight to negative labels without supporting argument.

I suppose your armchair snap-judgment blackballing would also extend to people like Catmull, Jobs, Schmidt and others themselves. All of them, a pox on the industry who should have never held leadership roles. Sure, right.
I'd suggest putting somewhere in there making sure you create backups with the CREATE TABLE AS SELECT command. I've used it a lot, and it's another one of those steps that makes rollbacks, etc a lot easier.
I believe Coffee is an addictive substance well suited for human beings. Although it is addictive, it is self-limiting. Most people will naturally stop drinking it at the sweet spot.
I think this is just the most complicated description of "grid system" I have ever heard.
Obviously useless to you, but it's by far the best lyric site for hip hop. And with all of the subtle references in lyrics, the annotations can be invaluable in helping casual listeners understand an artist's message.
The VRs of Snowcrash and Neuromancer were ad infested. It would be silly to believe that any system that gets used by millions or billions of people wont have ads. But no one's going to use VR if the ads are ultra annoying. The author doesn't mention what exactly he thinks VR ads would look like.
Which it acquired itself in February 2014: http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/geniu...

Interesting timing. I would not be surprised if the May launch of genius.com was just something hacked together over a weekend and launched just to push the domain price up.

There isn't much talk about genius.com around the May launch (apart from a bit of press-release marketing). And the focus in acquisition in February leads with LeadRocket, tacking on the brand Genius as an afterthought.

The domain details of genius.com was only switched to CallidusCloud's details in June: http://www.thedomains.com/2014/07/11/rapgenius-com-upgrades-... -- 4 months after acquiring the domain.

Interesting set of coincidences. I wonder when Callidus software knew of RapGenius' interest in the genius.com domain. And their original intentions for it when they acquired it in February.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the early nineties, there was A Rape in Cyberspace http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html
You have to at least give credit to the coorporate lawyer guy, who eventually was kicked out as a founder. He could have done less interesting and safer things with his education.
"Good but fragile" - under English law this communication risks falling foul of disability discrimination and also health and safety law (protecting employees from harm, which includes stress).

I have no idea how it works in the US.
People take offense at everything nowadays. Obviously he was an idiot for making jokes that anybody with common sense knows would offend people, but it wasn't any more offensive than jokes other popular figures have said before.
Track editorial changes to the news (revised UI)
Netflix recently redesigned to an mostly-white interface and I can't stand it. Harder on the eyes, boring, and less-recognizable as the Netflix brand. Their old color palette was perfect for their product.
I'm a dropbox customer. I'll be staying with them for the foreseeable future, but I'm glad to see competition might bring me more space and/or cheaper pricing.
That's an awful framing. Here's a less-prejudicial, more-correct framing:

Leaders at some major tech companies, responsible for their teams' productivity and often-recognized by their employees as effective and inspirational, turn out to have used reciprocal non-solicitation agreements, now considered illegal, to avoid talent turnover and bidding wars.

This likely reduced some employees' compensation, especially for a few superstar performers, but also may have been a key component to the magical product results their teams achieved, ultimately rewarding everyone involved in those companies (including their satisfied customers). The net effects on employee welfare and total social welfare are unclear, as they've not been carefully studied.
For instance, here's the guy responsible for their latest text ads: http://adnanvirk.com/ -- now I'm not saying he's bad. He's good. But is he good enough for Google?

> AdSense does let you specify all sorts of things about the look of the text ads though (font, colors, etc).

I'm afraid that's not enough. We need to control margins, paddings, line spacings, as well as media queries. We need to be able to remove the arrows, lines, buttons etc. that don't belong there. Ie. "perfection is achieved, not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away".

Google has great designers, I'm sure we can all agree on that. Unfortunately, none of them are part of the AdSense team.

For text ads done right, see the ones in Gmail.
rape has an unusual position in crime - conviction rates for murder are at 90% or more, for rape they rarely get above 1/3 - and that's for rapes reported which is assumed to be a lot lot lower than committed.

Yet imagine if all those rapes were reported -over social media. We would still hav this anamolous conviction rate and yet a sea of accusations.

Not sure what part of that is worse really.
Collectively annotating scientific texts would be very useful aswell. In certain fields books in libraries usually have hand written pencil notes on their margins. Most math and physics texts would benefit a lot from extra steps in derivations and filling in proofs of "obvious" and "trivial" identities.
Seems like most of your issues with it are to do with the particular implementation, which I can agree with. I'd wager that as the tech gets more mature, a lot of these issues will be solved.

VR goggles are like headphones. I might be devoting much of my sense of hearing to them, but not all of it. I'll still be able to hear if someone knocks on my door, prompting me to take them off. As the VR goggles tech gets smaller, this will become more convenient.

The neglecting parents probably won't hear their baby knocking, but I'd argue the VR goggles don't make a difference here. This is an issue of bad parenting. When you have a child it means you choose to devote a lot of your time to them, and VR isn't any exception. Just because you put on some fancy goggles that make yourself blind and deaf doesn't excuse you from taking care of them. You have to choose between making limited use of the tech and caring for your children. Then again, isn't that true for almost everything about your life after having a child?

Ironically, VR is a lot like leaving your house. It makes you unavailable to everyone in the house, like going to see a new movie. No sensible parent would leave their baby alone if they went to see a movie, at least not without someone else to watch on them while gone.

Of course you don't actually leave the house completely, so we could develop tech that can help detect and notify you if there's something urgent in the real world that needs your attention, but this won't help bad parents who don't care, because in their eyes the baby is only a distraction. They'd probably just disable those features.
I think that we really need to stop talking about the "quality" of developers without being able to quantify it. There are lots of different dimensions among which one can be a good or bad developer, and not all of them are equally important in all situations.

For example, I know several people who regularly win or get top ranks in coding competitions. However, they wouldn't be able to produce production-quality code due to a lack of experience in the industry. Are they "good" developers or not?
Sorry to hear that, seriously. About all I can guess is that they were so desperate for cash that they were making some really bad judgment calls. This would have been just prior to the EA buyout, I imagine. (I'd left by then.)

The C64 port of Ultima V almost drove the guy who did it into a rubber room, and he was an extremely sharp guy. I just can't believe anybody thought it was a good idea to put U6 on an 8-bit computer in 1990, or to ship the result to paying customers. If it weren't for that video, I would have said chipsy was smoking crack.
It is well known that a graduate student is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.

But who knew that the American soldier can be a machine for converting coffee into freedom?
I'm talking about requirements for societal collapse. I'm aware Warcraft et al have millions of happy users.
India sets up US$1.6B fund for startups
Birchbox Aims to Bring 'Artificial Intelligence' to Offline Retail
There was no need for you to mention your company's name.
Great. You are 1 out of 100,000 people that understand the metaphor.
Another application area for switching data representations explicitly is Computational Geometry. The abstract reason for this is that the initial representations of geometric objects are highly implicit.

As an example, consider a set of points in 2D specified as a list of pairs of numbers. When you need to find the point in the set closest to a given location the easiest and fastest method is to run through the list and look for the minimal distance. However, if you repeat such a query for different locations while the set of points remains the same every time there are much faster (and complicated) ways to do it: geometric search trees and Delaunay triangulations. These make the implicit structure of the geometry of a set of points explicit. Whether this is actually worth it is a matter of understanding the application and its profiling data.

This can also be seen as 'acceleration data structures'.
Haha I saw this happen today, actually. Painful.
This. Maybe Amazon should have hired the marketing geniuses here on HN.
Steve Jobs was right: Flash must die
>How to be more zen about this situation

Worry about the things that you can control and ignore the things that you can't control.

The things you can't control is how your coworker and supervisor will behave. Can you control their behavior? If not, then why worry about it and get stressed about it. You can't change people. Your coworker has been there from the start, so he has the rapport and line of communication you don't and most probably will never unless your coworker falters or you move into a different group/project where you can shine on your own. You will likely lose a head-on battle.

The things you can control is your reaction to your coworker and supervisor behavior, working on this job, working for this company, etc. So decide, how do you want to react? Complain, whine, hope for the best or quit.

If you want to stay at the company, why not make friends with this coworker? Improve your personal relationship with him. You might then be able to influence his behavior. Arguing, complaining, escalating wouldn't take you far except out the door.