skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but that's because you're already used to and invested in Reddit. Initially, you had to sign up with your credit card, fill out an annoying form and go through a few intimidating screens. That's exactly the sort of obstacle I'm talking about: it's certainly manageable but also certainly enough to turn you away unless you really care about something.

This is particularly relevant since one of the main reasons we're worried about the ad model at all is because it threatens the internet's decentralized nature. Replacing this with a model where you only make payments inside a few centralized organizations would not address this core issue.

That process won't scale to a whole bunch of random, disparate sites especially if you're not heavily invested into them. If you come across a cool blog post and want to tip a bit of money, you'll have to go through the same process, which is just not worth it. And that's before getting into transaction costs!

There have been various services that tried to fix them, but none so far that are convenient and ubiquitous enough to change things. And we really need change: this is, to a large extent, a social problem more than anything. The most important piece for moving away from ads is to make small payment expected and, for lack of a better phrase, socially accepted.

We already have this for small physical goods: it's easy to imagine buying a piece of gum or a magazine at a random newspaper stand. But a similarly small purchase online is both less convenient and less accepted, so it ends up being much less likely. That's the core problem.
hackysack? theremin?
It took 11 hours because of locomotion method of the Kilobots - they use vibration to move. Without at least looking at the paper, and probably studying it in depth, it would be hard to determine how good the algorithm is.

It is definitely nothing revolutionary, however bot movement is not externally controlled. They figure out their own relative positioning and where they need to go. Moreover they do that only based on short range led communications. So they communicate with small number of other bots at the same time (I think one, but I am not 100% sure), as opposed to lets say using central router to communicate all at the same time.

TL:DR Sensors, movement systems, and precision are shit on purpose, so important part that distributed algorithm actually worked.
Dynamic finders in Rails 3.1's ActiveRecord: http://git.io/hdb0QA
> a subscription service, like Netflix for websites, where you'd pay a fixed monthly amount and get unlimited access to premium websites / webapps

Isn't that what ISP is? Except for the royalties part, of course.
"If someone has ideas instead of children, he still propagates his genes."

In terms of selection pressures, my understanding is that this is only true if the ideas differentially help others with genes like his more than those with less similar genomes (hypothesize, say, a gene that contributes to idea-having and ideas that benefit idea-havers). Or, of course, if he helps his close relatives in other ways. But helping "the species as a whole" is not something that is selected for - though on a values level, I'd certainly like to encourage it!

Of course, if someone has ideas instead of genes, he certainly propagates his memes.
> What is clearly true is a more restricted version - no gene will be selected for if it causes zero reproduction

Like the genes that cause someone to become a doctor and minister to his/her genetic cohort? I think your argument doesn't go deep enough into how genetics works.

We should all remember that reproduction isn't about individuals, it's about genes. The old question about the chicken and the egg actually has an answer -- a chicken is an egg's way to make another egg.
Side question. Where do single indie developers get the artwork for games?
Not really. It won't take long for the blackhat to disavow some but not all of his links. A victim of negative SEO also can't disavow all of the incoming links, so again there's no real way to tell them apart.
If, for whatever reason, you're hell-bent on producing a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL, you could always use something along the lines of node-webkit[0] and distribute it the usual way.

Personally, I rather significantly doubt that people would play more AAA games if they could download them in their browser rather than Steam.

[0] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
By hiring a graphics person or by creating it yourself.

There are some free assets out there but they're mostly low-quality and the few production-quality ones are used in numerous low-quality games.
ICE does not support promise pipelining, though.

http://kentonv.github.io/capnproto/news/2013-12-13-promise-p...

I haven't looked at DDS.
"Why they're important". I feel like that is a pretty tough one to generalize.
> By adding only three operators: RTT, compose and remap, MathBox has suddenly turned into Winamp AVS or Milkdrop.

I have waited so long for a good hardware-accelerated 3D screensaver in my browser! ;)
Database Migration Handling in Go
Huh. I use Safari / OS X on a 4 year old MacBook Pro. I keep it locked on the integrated CPU and it worked fine, barely increasing the system load. Only one or two of the effects near the end made any noticeable difference.

Of course you're pushing 4x as many pixels as me.

Try Safari (you have to enable WebGL in the Develop menu). I wonder it's a Chrome issue.
How Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Technology to Spy on Thousands
Unity's JS is different. It's all Mono under the hood. It's not at all like working with browser Javascript.
> Anyway, I hope Unity will be competitive again regarding pricing with the imminent announcement of their 5.0 release.

The last couple of paragraphs from this Unity blog post from today seem to indicate that they are happy with the current pricing:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/08/14/building-and-maintaining...
Awesome project! Any timeline on vim support?
Am I right in thinking that GameBoy carts are now a precious resource? We'll run out one day?
It would probably be great for you if there was only one browser, but horrible for the Internet as a whole to be so homogeneous. HTML and CSS were designed to allow different browsers to interoperate, specifically so that users could have a choice. The fact is that in a heterogeneous environment, not every browser will behave the same, and that is what web developers should accept. Instead of trying to make pages exactly the same in all browsers, the goal should be to make the informational content accessible. Even the CSS standard has provisions for user stylesheets.

I know this will not work for everything, especially app-like sites; but if web developers would do this for sites whose purpose is to provide information -- which is arguably one of the main goals of the Internet; then maybe it would be a better experience for all browsers, and we wouldn't have such absurdities as static pages that require JS to display.
Very insightful post, thank you.

> I've started to even wonder if free (as in beer) open source needs to go. The idea that software should be free means that only software that isn't free gets polished to the level that anyone uses it.

I don't know. When I try to evaluate quality of a piece of software, my proxy (learned by experience) is: Biggest Brand In Particular Niche (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Spotify) > Open Source > any other paid software.

Anyway, when I think about whether the Internet should move towards more paid services and less ads, my first concern is, funnily, "think of the kids". I learned most of my programming skills as a teenager, at a time when I couldn't afford anything. A lot of things I know and do I owe to the fact that pretty much everything on the Internet is free (and if it's not free, check at Pirate Bay). I'm afraid that moving towards "Pay for it" Internet will lead to the next generation of kids not being able to learn by just hacking stuff.
Why should he? You clearly haven't repented of your impudence, and the authoritarian culture here only responds to criticism of a proper (read: flattering) tone.

I suppose it's kind of you to give dang the benefit of the doubt, but would he really be here if he weren't selected to follow in the path of those predecessors?
Google snoops on Gmail to catch pedophiles
related work: https://github.com/facebook/pfff which focused on languages srclib didn't. Also a polyglot source analysis library.
I've seen that before, but isn't that the same theme? db.find_by_userid(123) versus user.find_by("userid", 123)?

If everything is checked dynamically, does it really make a difference beyond the 3 characters? Sure find_by_userid looks somewhat nicer, for sure. But is that really it? Any examples that aren't trivially replaced by a string param (or two)?
No offense, but I think your comment is a bit short-sighted. Meta-programming is just another tool in your tool-belt. It's not going to take you 6 months of practice to "get it".
AppCache?
None of the original contributors use vim, so we wouldn't make a very good plugin for it. We'll help anyone who wants to make one, feature them on srclib.org (obviously), etc. Do you know anybody who'd be interested in making a vim plugin? A good place to start looking to see what's involved is in the code for emacs-sourcegraph-mode, sourcegraph-sublime, and sourcegraph-atom.
I don't see this as any different than buying something from amazon though, which anyone can do.

Micropayments are a problem, but as long as you buy a few dollars worth of reddit gold it is more akin to buying a gift card than a micropayment.

The psychological issues are valid, but I'm not seeing technological issues in this specific case.
Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. It looks the way Esperanto ought to have looked. I find Quijada's effort deeply impressive.

I don't know much about designing human languages, but I know how hard it is to design a decent programming language (see http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html), and building a serious human language seems orders of magnitude more difficult. I've never seen an attempt that really intrigued me until I found Ithkuil.
> That's exactly the sort of obstacle I'm talking about: it's certainly manageable but also certainly enough to turn you away unless you really care about something.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/

Think about this for a second. The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website.
What is a BOF in the context of a conference? I've seen this in several places but haven't seen a definition.
Hello World Design Launches Custom Website for Main Street Developers
I may eventually do the same for a project I'm working on, although for me the draw would be UE's battle-tested network prediction code.

For visual programming in Unity, there's PlayMaker -- an add-on available from the asset store. It allows creation and graphical editing (and graphical runtime debugging) of FSMs (though not hierarchical FSMs). It's quite a good implementation of a FSM / event / action framework. It's basically superior to some tech I spent half of 2013 developing for an in-house proprietary engine.

I agree on the collaboration problems. Even with purely text-based serialization, collaboration is one of Unity's weak points.
Any plans for Oculus support? I'm building a code analysis framework with a visualization tool and if MathBox were to support the Rift it would be a no-brainer over using raw SVG or D3.
I would definitely be more inclined to pay a single entity and get a "bundle" than make individual purchasing decisions. But you're right, it is all dependent on the content that would be offered. Something like this would probably need a big upfront investment to get going...
Walmart Fails
Drunk People
Even though 1.75% is only till 2016, it's still pretty good for new small businesses who benefit from the 1.0% difference between that and Square Register.
Why wouldn't you want to produce a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL? It should be the default, not some crazy thing.

The best argument against javascript + WebGL is "javascript is bad." But the disadvantages of JS are sometimes strengths. The lack of static typing, for example, allows a REPL. It's true that with an average gamedev team, you'll get below average results. But with an above-average team, powerful languages tend to translate into stellar results.

Oh well, I guess I'll wait a few more years for browser vendors to implement some kind of concept of a webapp installation.
Those are extremely in demand and high paying skills. For that area (Orange County, CA) the average salary with benefits is ~$100,000/year+ for a Ruby on Rails Developer.

You can use sites like indeed.com and salary.com to get an average, but depending on your skill level: beginner (journeyman), intermediate, senior, expert or master you may be better placed in the top percentile or higher. For now since you may be starting out going with an average of what you find on indeed.com/salary and salary.com

I recommend reading up on rates of employee vs contractor, as contractors will bring in more than an employee since they have to pay costs that are normally covered by an employer. Read http://www.salary.com/pay-yourself-right-when-being-your-own... and http://career-advice.monster.com/salary-benefits/salary-info... for more details. I also recommend searching glassdoor.com for senior software engineer and senior consultant.

As one mistake you and your designer would not enjoy and could not change if it is in black and white is getting what your worth and cover all of your expenses + personal money for entertainment and the big rainy day. It does feel strange raising that rate but for a Senior Ruby on Rails developer contractor the going rate in major metro areas is around $150/hour to $250/hour or more depending on your specialty. If you want to play it safe I would recommend doing some more research on RoR developers salaries/contractor rate to get an average and move it up or down depending on what your expenses are and how much left over money you would be happily comfortable with after expenses and taxes.

Here in the USA as a contractor your in the highest tax bracket so pulling in a gross of salary of $350,000/year+ is not unreasonable as you will net 50% of that (around $175,000) or less depending on your businesses and tax expenses. Just be careful with the amount as you have to be careful that your being paid a fair rate to take care of yourself. If your really good you should be compensated very nicely for it.
About the same... Over 10 years the S&P is up 83.6% excluding dividends. Going back to July so month to month comparisons are valid it looks like the annualized return is 6% excluding dividends and 8% including them.

http://dqydj.net/sp-500-return-calculator/
Your anger is misplaced. It's precisely these countries' governments that prop up dictators and princes that accumulate all that wealth instead of investing/distributing amongst their own people.

What goes around, comes around. And please don't tell me that the people are not representative of the govt. Most western governments are democratic....and I don't think ordinary civilians can have any more power than what they already have(even though they might not exercise it).

Btw, this makes me wonder if we should make foreign affairs something that is more actively debated amongst the general public than Kadarshians/Hollywood/Royal Babies.
Why aren't more production quality ones free or available for sale? It seems like it might encourage more foss games?
You truncated my statement in a way that changed its meaning. I was explicitly focused on the gene. If it causes zero reproduction across all carriers then ministering to my relatives does not increase the chance of that gene spreading, as any of my "genetic cohort" in possession of the gene will not be reproducing. It may help my other genes, but that doesn't cause the one to be selected for.

Note also that I said "reproduction of any sort" - some infertile strains of produce have done quite well in an environment where humans clone and graft. Theoretically, that could apply to humans although at present I don't think it does.
> In terms of selection pressures, my understanding is that this is only true if the ideas differentially help others with genes like his more than those with less similar genomes ...

Yes, which is why I emphasized membership in a genetic cohort. But think about that cohort -- being a human distinguishes you from the cockroaches competing for the same resources. So if you only taught people how to kill cockroaches and nothing else, you would have contributed to the fitness of the human genotype.

> But helping "the species as a whole" is not something that is selected for ...

On the contrary, see above. Imagine that someone does nothing except make fire manageable to his tribe, and the fire technology serves a number of beneficial purposes like cooking and warding off predators after nightfall.

It's also been suggested that an altruistic act like saving an unrelated human at some personal risk, can be explained this way, rather than by way of a religious or other explanation.

> Of course, if someone has ideas instead of genes, he certainly propagates his memes.

Memes and genes are linked.
Experts discuss public health and policy about Ebola
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_a_feather_(computing)

A discussion group, sometimes informal, interested in a particular topic.

Conferences often refer to their themed tracks as "BoF" sessions.
That's the whole point. The psychological issues, not the technical issues.

As much as us geeks would love it to be, this is not a technical problem. This is a social/marketing problem.
Hey Ivo! Remember you from the Nintendocast days. Great to see you're still doing awesome stuff! Rock on!
What if there was a discussion site that didn't use link-baity titles for articles? Then I'd know if I wanted to click through in advance.

In this case: "Free: The Internet's Original Sin" is 100x better than "The Internet's Original Sin".
Yeah, pfff seems very cool. It seems that pfff has written parsers and type inferencers for a variety of languages in OCaml. That is an impressive achievement.

For srclib, we are way lazier. We try to use existing libraries (written in the languages they target) for parsing, type checking/inference, dependency resolution, etc. We hope that makes it easier for JavaScript hackers to hack on srclib's JavaScript support, Python hackers to work on srclib's Python support, etc.
Basically, it's:

1. Client makes a request, somehow indicating that it wants to do long polling (url, header, etc.).

2. Server receives the request, but does not reply, the socket is left open.

3. An event occurs, then the server finally responds to the initial request with information about the event.

4. Go to 1.

So it's basically polling, except the server just seems to take a really long time to respond.

In the end, both ways are completely valid methods, I was just wondering if there was any particular thing that swayed you either way.
Funny video of our be doing our makeup, must see ;)
This guy has a blog with some useful articles that could get you started: http://flagtheory.com/bvi-company-formation/

There are some upsells, but the articles suffice as an introduction to offshore company formation and offshore banking.
There you go, a bunch of my favorite tracks to get me in the right state of mind:

http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Programming001/95161345
> Tuff including all graphics, characters, ideas, sounds and maps are Copyright (c) 2014 Ivo Wetzel. All rights reserved.

(emphasis mine) IANAL, but my understanding is that at least in the US, it is the expression of the idea (the software and code, the graphics, and the other things mentioned on that line) that are subject to copyright, not the idea. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea-expression_divide.
Actually, that was my first thought - that the ISPs could pay royalties to websites, but that reminded me too much of cable companies -- too centralized. But who knows, this may actually happen with wireless internet providers offering unlimited Facebook bundles and the like...
I've been thinking about doing the same thing with X-Wing. My goal is to build a control panel for the game with levers and switches, and indicator lights for power levels and status, and video screens for radar and craft identification. After that, I'd replace the cockpit window display with a high resolution screen and more detailed models.

I worked on this for about a month before I dropped it for other side projects. I ran the Windows version of X-Wing and used a utility called Cheat Engine. I found the locations in memory for the throttle, power settings, laser and shield power levels, remaining torpedoes, etc. My next step would be learning how to do DLL injection, and using a debugger to find a good place to inject code.

I wouldn't have to do any of this if LucasArts would release remakes of X-Wing and TIE Fighter that supported custom controls and displays, or open source the old code. But the market for that is small, and now they might have to coordinate with EA since they granted them the license to make Star Wars games.
> Users will pay for services that they love.
>> Users do pay for those services, but not very much and not very often.

I'd say users are more readily paying for services which provide them something that others don't. For example if they value privacy they are more likely to use a service which doesn't monetize their personal information. That can be as service which charges a monthly fee, or it can be a free service which functions through decentralization.
Wow, that's horrible. So what do you recommend?
Based on reading some of the docs (can't check out the source on this phone), looks like this has great potential; for a long time I've wanted something better than cscope, and not limited to a single language, to use with vim.

My main concern is that any system based on scanning entire source files offline is unlikely to have the same interactivity as IDEs. That is, if I type a line of C++, I don't want clang to have to churn through the whole file and any header files before the navigation updates...
It sounds like AppCache limit is 5MB. I can't find very much info, though, but a reasonable limit for gamedev circa 2014 would be 16GB or so.

http://grinninggecko.com/2011/02/24/developing-cross-platfor...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6757945/cache-manifest-si...
Internally it's not xmpp, but instead an xmpp facing compatibility layer.
Bank accounts are't for storing your retirement savings. Even with the current low rates you can get 3% from 20 year Treasuries. If you want more yield you'll have to take some risk, which is why diversified portfolios are always advised.
Probably overkill for your needs, but I use CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org) to do that for my work. It's basically a centralized web-based contact list, for which you can then link them between each other (different types of relations), add custom fields, etc. -- the program does a lot more than that (online fundraising, mass mail, event management, and other tools mostly aimed for non-profits/volunteer groups), but you can also just use it for that.

It's then possible to expose the contact data to LDAP using "ldapcivi" (https://github.com/TechToThePeople/ldapcivi), so that the contact data can be queried from any mail client (including phones).

We also integrated CiviCRM with our IRC bot, so we can query emails and other info from there. Ex: "who is John Doe" on irc will respond with the basic data (name, email, phone), as well as the relationships of that contact, ex: "John is Manager of foo at ACME".