skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kickstarter does a quick review of projects to make sure they meet their project guidelines/rules, and provides a Creator Handbook, but is otherwise pretty hands-off.

I think from Kickstarter’s perspective, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to move into what would effectively be the management consulting space with projects - it would represent a huge expense on their end for no real reward (YC operates by investing in their companies and then giving them various tools to succeed; Kickstarter is a platform with no investment in whether or not projects are ultimately successful). Obviously they have some interest in projects being successful to maintain the credibility of the platform, but that seems to have largely self-regulated (a few bad apples get lots of press, but a foray into the unsuccessful projects reveals the power of group vetting).

IMO, expanding post-campaign creator support is something that would greatly enhance the ‘Kickstarter community,’ and somewhere they currently fall down, especially for tech and gaming projects that tend to be some of their highest earners, and also most susceptible to problems in delivery. That sort of service might find a home at Indiegogo, which is far more company/startup-friendly.

The new guidelines are definitely a step in the right direction, and represent a clearer understanding on the part of KS with regard to what’s possible for creators who truly try, and simply fail. Shifting the focus to reparative measures like providing expense breakdowns, alternate plans, explanations, etc. seems more inline with the idea(l) that creators and backers are all part of the project, sharing in the risk and reward.
The money is already spent. In the article it states they returned about $700 to the dozen-or-so people who requested it. But the rest of that money, in addition to a lot of personal runway, is gone.
It is awful, you want to use an alternative.
"Big O notation is like math except it's an awesome, not-boring kind of math"

Except big O notation is math and the use of it for complexity analysis is one application of it - this is a completely off-base statement.
That is most likely intentional. The headline was probably come up with from on high before any experts were even solicited to write the piece.
The (grandparent post's) claim was only for powers of 2; i.e., 1, 10, 100, 1000, etc., in binary.
Never taken the Hurtigruten, but if you're after a bit of an unorthodox vacation I can't recommend anything more highly than the Lofoten Islands in summer.

Fly into Tromsø, spend a couple of days there, then rent a car and head west. Gorgeous scenery, twenty-four-hour sunlight, great hiking, and mild weather - we loved it.
How do you return money that has already been spent?
The comment I replied to is talking about Kickstarter projects in the abstract, not just CLANG.
Off the top of my head, I can think of one counter-example to the title: Tesla.
I mean, the entire thing, including the aluminium from a bauxite mine.

Just perhaps not the coca plants and kola nuts, unless they want to make a greenhouse.
>The problem is that games like Red Dead Redemption, Hitman, and Grand Theft Auto systematically reward sexist and racist behavior (tying a woman to train tracks, brutalizing prostitutes, etc.).

This sort of dishonesty is precisely what causes the backlash. No, those games do nothing of the sort.
Salt? Sodium chloride? Or you mean the salt of phosphoric acid?
Diversity in a Startup: Skill, Personality and Culture
There was/is a great UI library for J2ME called LWUIT. It arrived pretty late, but it was very good at abstracting the differences of various J2ME platforms (i.e. differences key codes/keyboard layouts, screen sizes and such). https://lwuit.java.net/

Back then, I wrote a Twitter client app for them J2ME phones with some processing offloaded to the server, which was done in Erlang :) Ah, the times.
In the case of Clang, he did actually fulfill all the rewards
Douglas Crockford, is that you? Oh the lengths people will go to avoid using 'new'...

I wonder if any linters out there warn when they see something like:

something = SomeCapitalizedFunction()

Because forgetting to use 'new' is really the only thing I could think of that makes this pattern dangerous.
The easy way is to not promise any rewards that depend on completing a complicated project. Like, send people a novelty pack of gum and also figure out how to get them a copy of the game if it happens to be completed, just don't promise them the game.
> they should return the backers money

Yes, though it generally comes up only if there is no money left to return. I think there should be a statement about what will happen if the money runs out. Note that CLANG is a project by Subutai Corporation and thus that company (not Neal) owes it's backers. Someone as rich as Neal Stephenson could promise to pay out of pocket if the company goes bankrupt, but that is not practical for many.
If by that you mean that the outbound radiation of Earth will increase to provide negative feedback due to black-body radiation, then that's absolutely right. T^4 in fact, like you said. But if the greenhouse gas levels are coming up 50% higher than they ever were just a few hundred years ago... anyway, I shan't talk about it any more. It is too complex to do justice here.
> But to be more specific we could say this is worst case O(n) and best case O(1) runtime.

Those should really say θ(n) and θ(1).
You should not discriminate people who decide to create an account with Google and not give them an option to pick or change their username.
I don't think the attitude of being allowed to be hand-wavey is a good one for this sort of thing. Big O notation has very precise semantics, and it is very easily misused.

Many of the examples are wrong. A python "print" statement is (for the built-in types at least) O(n), so printing the first item from a list must be at least O(n).

Fundamentally, looking at big O notation as a way of measuring runtime is misguided. It is a way of describing a class of functions. But there is typically a level of indirection between the function that is being talked about, and the one which the analysis is applied to. For the "return the first item in the list" example, the function which is being analysed is a function from Int to Real. That function iterates through all values with size corresponding to the input to function, for each of these it runs the "return the first item in the list" function and measures the time it takes. The maximum time taken is then the Real output.

That intermediate function is important, and needs to be specified properly. If it isn't, then you get confusion The section "N could be the actual input, or the size of the input" is an example of this confusion. Here, the intermediate function which is being analysed is much simpler (but it is still present).

I should probably also add, that I am not by any means an expert here, and I wouldn't be surprised if I've made sloppy mistakes here. I'll just make the pre-claim that this only further proves my point that being hand-wavey is not a good thing :-)
A Raytracer Implemented in LOLCODE
They gave their game as part of the rewards. I wouldn't say that a prototype fulfills this promise.

Perhaps Kickstarter shouldn't allow to give the product people back with money as reward because if the project fails this product reward goes down the drain too. I know like 90% of all projects do that and its kind of what makes Kickstarter but still its not really logical. Or another option would be a rule that backers have no rights at all. This would force the project makers to publish budgets and more details about the project otherwise nobody would back anything.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11556958

"Dissolution levels with all of the mineral waters were very low and for several still waters were undetectable. Sparkling mineral waters showed slightly greater dissolution than still waters, but levels remained low and were of the order of one hundred times less than the comparator soft drinks. De-gassing of a sparkling mineral water reduced its dissolution, but the total levels were still relatively low suggesting that carbonation of drinks may not be an important factor per se in respect of erosive potential."
According to his post, he apparently wrote a book about the whole thing. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/9... If he's not going to open source the project (my vote) maybe he could give his backers an epub!
Totally agree - both that the new terms are more closely aligned with the idea of a Kickstarter project (and the creator-backer relationship) and that their real effect will probably be pretty minimal.

What I find compelling is the softening of the ‘refund’ language - I think that the notion of refunds is sort of at odds with the idea of a project being sort of a joint effort between creators and backers for the reason you mentioned. Emphasizing the communication/accountability reinforces the collaborative creator/backer relationship that exists elsewhere in the site (like in their deliberate naming of ‘backers,’ ‘creators,’ ‘rewards,’ etc.). It encourages backers to think of themselves of investors taking a risk because the believe in something, rather than consumers. To me that’s definitely more compelling and a huge part of the value of crowdfunding platforms as a funding mechanism that is changing the relationship between consumers and the things (products, games, artwork, etc.) we consume.

In reality, most people will only be perusing the ToS as it pertains to refunds once they’re already agitated and are looking for their legal recourse. If the relationship between a project and its backers has already eroded, I’m skeptical of the impact of wording changes in the ToS that don’t concretely impact anyone’s obligations.

For those interested in the space, though, it does let us speculate about what Kickstarter is thinking about, and what pains it perceives.
An increase in efficiency only leads to an economic benefit if the aggregate demand can go up...freed resources would be a balancing act in this case. Is the marginal reduction in cost of a taxi worth the loss of all the earnings and expenditure of that person? Probably not, since not every dollar saved ever gets spent, while a person has a necessary level of consumption. Things have to be significantly more efficient to offset the loss of jobs.

The worker after all is suddenly saddled with being negatively valuable, in that he has to continue to meet his living expenses, and has to be retrained, either at the cost of his employer, himself, or the government OR he can go on welfare.
It is a bit of an existentialist threat. It's one of the possible answers to the Fermi paradox. Why haven't we met anyone? Because they boiled themselves to bits before they could interstellar space. Which, inherently, requires huge amounts of energy, possibly enough to change climates.

I can't think of things more fundamental to existence or non-existence in this universe than it being the wrong temperature.
Dropbox's widget is also fairly unnecessary — it just gives you a list of recently modified files.
Nice wages you have there, huh…

No, seriously, I pretty damn well understand that projects fail, it is hard to guess how many resources will be needed, etc. But if you are not another scam artist you are probably to calculate in advance, what you will need, then add some risks, then dive into adventure. And the argument "they didn't have enough money, what 0.5M is nowadays, really!" seems to me completely invalid. For several reasons.

First off, the head of the project is Neal Stephenson. He is a public person, well known. It is important. If I'd back the project (I didn't) it probably would matter to me that it belongs to Neal Stephenson, not John Doe. Well known name is worth a lot. And as you know with great power comes great responsibility.

Second (actually, the first one, but I'm ordering then as they take into action), they asked for 500k, they got 500k and then some. It doesn't sound like a big money for such an ambitious project for me too, but if you ask for that you have to know already, how much will be spent on what, right? Planning shouldn't be payed by public. It isn't a backer to think if 500k is enough — ideally you should not only prove it for yourself, but for them too. Maybe you outsource to somewhere, where human resource aren't so expensive, how can I know? By the way 20k for 1 person for a month of work is pretty much hilarious. I mean, yeah, I know that somebody somewhere gets paid that well, but on the other hand I know others, who aren't paid even close that good and often happen to be much better specialists than that first one. So, anyway, as a project manager it's your job to plan right.

Third. Ok, 500k turned to be not enough, you failed. That happens, sometimes things are so complicated that it even isn't really fair to say it was your fault. But taking into account first 2 points it would be pretty natural to explain explicitly why you failed and how that money was spent. How many people worked for you, how much you paid them. What they managed to do over that time. Making it open source if possible, to show that money really weren't spent for nothing, it just wasn't enough, really.

So, I understand that it is always easier to talk sitting on the couch, but I'm trying to imagine myself on Neals place and I can't explain that kind of behavior. Especially because of my first point. For some people knowing that you disappointed people ("a fan" would be right word in case of Stephenson) that believed in you so much could be easily worth of committing seppuku or something. Not just "sorry guys, it didn't work out, we tried; support us some other time, we'll do better, maybe".
Oculus Rift Development Kit 1
Does anyone know if that last part with the spinning globe was created in D3.js? I'm constantly gobsmacked with what can be done with that library.
Not necessarily. The only reason why this toolchain is global is that the bauxite is cheapest in Australia. If you mined bauxite in US, you would have a very local operation. In the case of Moon or Mars, I'm sure they would find it much easier to mine on the planets surface (especially since it doesn't harm the earth's environment that way).
By not complying he 'sold out' every single one of his customers privacy instead of the sensible choice of complying with the legal order to turn over emails of just one customer.
New gadget lets police detect when you're texting while driving
Just released a few minutes ago at Oculus Connect :)
>I don't think a "backyard grillout" builds social cohesion quite like a war in Iraq does.

I used the "backyard grillout" example because the poster I responded to mentioned it as a tool for unit cohesion in a later comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8342642
I made two apps, and sadly, not many people have heard of them, since I was working for a small company at the time and we really didn't have the clout to deal with carriers or a sales force to sell. Both apps were agricultural related.

The first app was a general purpose data collection app. It was purely data driven. I could define a template on our server which defined what fields you wanted information for, the type of field (text, number, list selection, etc) and if it was geo enabled. This would be sent out to the phone, and a user could enter the information, send it up to our server and view it on a map. Doesn't sound to exciting, but you could pretty much create a template for anything, This was before google maps, so we also had to manage the shapefiles and handle displaying and rendering them on our website.

The other app was a payroll app for harvesting crews. We could set up the crew members on the server, they would get downloaded to the phone where we used a bluetooth card reader to scan them in/out. Also added some bluetooth printing.

Overall, you could be productive using J2ME. It was just all the stuff that went with getting it out to users.
I created the Gmail application running on J2ME, which we shipped in 2006 [1].

When we shipped, this application ran on about 300 different devices which, for those of you who ever wrote J2ME code, is pretty impressive. J2ME development was an absolute nightmare. There was no debugging on device, pretty much no tooling, even doing a println to find out what was going on in your code was not supported (I had to write entire libraries that would display debug messages in the window titles).

The default J2ME widgets were absolutely horrendous (and they all looked different on various phones) so we had to write our own widget library. This came at a price but it was invaluable in being able to make the app work on hundreds of devices.

Looking back, I honestly don't know how we did it, but the team was absolutely brilliant.

Shortly thereafter, I joined Android where I was asked to create the Gmail application and help build up the operating system. With my experience on J2ME, I knew exactly what I wanted Android to have:

- Seamless on device debugging

- IDE support

- Powerful view system

- Java API's that look familiar to Java developers

In short, everything we never had on J2ME.

Needless to say, my subsequent work on Android was infinitely more pleasant than the year I spent on J2ME, which I don't miss one bit :-)

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/gmail-mobile-client-i...
None of this would have happened if he would have complied with the legal court order.

I guess he made his point, but he screwed over his customers twice in this case. First by dumbing down his crypto to be easier to use and allowing it to be broken as it did by the feds, and second screwing every customer over by not complying and shutting down his service.
That first one should be a big O.
It seems that the article has a simple thesis.
a) climate is hard
b) human activity is affecting it but because it's hard it's tough to know how much
c) hence it's difficult to know what the correct policies should be.

As an economist might say - without clarity on the positive, it's challenging to resolve the normative.

But I am a little puzzled by the failure to discuss outcomes in terms of mathematical expectation. And of course, the author knows more than I ever will about this.

Hence:
If our activity might just trigger a sequence of events leading to human extinction...(in other words such a sequence is conceivable and credible) then even if the risk is low as estimated by our (weak) ability to assess such risk, then the outcome is surely so hideous that if our policies are taking us in a direction that makes such an outcome more likely (even if we are not sure by how much) then there is cause for caution and re-examination of policy.
It seems to me that our situation at present is of this form. Despite our poor understanding and the fact that things aren't 'settled' (as if they ever will be) this unsettled 'knowledge' is all we have and we have to take it seriously, most particularly if the possible outcomes are ghastly. We can't just wait for better science.
Of course you realize that if there wasn't any Phosphoric Acid in the drink, you would vomit due to the intolerably high concentration of sugar. The acid is fooling your body into drinking the stuff and besides damaging your teeth depletes calcium ions.
That actually matters far less than most people think, because humans writing Asm do not (and should not) generate code like a compiler does.

The article has a great example of this in the int_to_str code. While it's far from optimal code (e.g. the "mov rbx, 10" should really be outside of the loop, the "add rdx, 0x0" is useless, etc.), it's using the stack in a way that a compiler would probably never do, and something that likely isn't possible to express at all in a HLL. The C version would involve at least allocating an array with some pointers into it to act as a stack.

It's in these approaches - fully exploiting the features of the machine - where human-written Asm really shines. In some ways, the compiler "has its hands tied" when it comes to generating code, since it is limited to generating code that represents ideas in the corresponding HLL; it can make use of extensive knowledge of microarchitecture to schedule instructions/uops, sophisticated algorithms for register allocation and instruction selection, and generate code that is faster on a particular model of CPU than if it did not, but this falls short of the human who realises that neither a separately allocated array, nor such instructions to manipulate it, are actually needed.

The human can apply even more extreme optimisation making use of microarchitectural details if she so chooses; but the fact is that even without this, the code is probably already better than what a compiler can do. In practice, for general-purpose-code (i.e. excluding additional features) most models of x86 are all quite similar since the P6, and Intel has been doing a great job at making existing code faster with each new generation, so there is little need to go to that extreme; the optimal sequence of instructions for one model is often the same or close to optimal for the next one. (The odd ones out are the P4, and possibly some of the early Atoms.)

Another item that appeared on HN a while ago illustrates this "think outside the HLL/compiler" idea too: http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/overkilling-the-8-q... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7301481 )
This was doomed from the start. By trying to make it more realistic they exposed the limits of technology.

A key problem is that the weight of a blade is a huge part of swordfighting. A light bladeless controller can't capture the the experience. Especially since there's no feedback from hitting another blade.

On the other hand they might be able to recoup their investment.

In the leadup to Star Wars 7 there's a huge potential market for a lightsaber duel game. There's still enough time to develop a tie in game, and I can see the tech being bought for over 500k.
And Altair, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, Osbourne, etc. for PCs.

And Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, etc. for Google.

And YouSendIt & clones for DropBox.

And Hotmail, Outlook Web Access, Y!Mail, etc. for GMail.

As an entrepreneur, it's generally much more lucrative to take other ideas that people have been playing around with and getting some modest success and then perfect them, rather than to have your own ideas.
First, /fantastic/ clarification.

As for "terrible for growth", I'm referring to... well, mostly nevermind, because on a re-read I don't get the same sentiment from you at all!

But to clarify anyway: At low values, the degree to which you are safe to make mistakes correlates with the nurturing-ness of the environment. (At high values, you get spoiled). If team bonding only happens over successes... well, are you free actually to make mistakes?

I think I got hung up your examples of a "day-to-day" interactions being end-of-story success moments, making it easy to forget that that also includes the planning, brainstorming, putting out of fires, etc.
He didn't. The prototype doesn't fulfill his promises made in the Kickstarter video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV39GiK4Hw0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYVnBe3XjE

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang
Globally Coordinated Hackathon Across 16 Cities Sept 26-28
What sort of physics calculations can you do within a cell? I would have expected the data structure for a cell to contain a handful of scalar parameters (e.g. temperature, pressure, humidity, velocity vector) related by a few scalar equations - a negligible amount of computation. It sounds like there's quite a few orders of magnitude more stuff going on within a cell than I would have expected. What am I missing?
Am I the only one that sees a problem with the name? MPD (Music Player Daemon / http://www.musicpd.org/) has been around for eleven years, and is relatively well known.
Limestone is the brittle yellow rock that you can find sometimes. Hmm, now Im interested in how they locate it underground. But there are many naturally occurring open deposits like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Cliffs_of_Dover