skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The Galaxy Nexus was released only 3 years ago. Since when was that beyond the expected lifespan of a flagship product from one of the world's largest tech companies?

It became beyond the expected lifespan when it became normal to buy a new one every 2 years thanks to contract pricing and carriers pushing people to upgrade.
Yea, I know that it's much better if you have cofounder (there are so many tasks to do), but I believe it should be the right person, and wrong person can make much more damage then help.

As a solo founder, how did you improve your productivity on early stage: what kind of tasks you usually delegated to someone else (like freelancer) if you did.
` As long as they are small enough, floating point numbers can represent integers exactly. `

Is this true? For example, if I want to do integer + floating point addition the CPU might dump the floating point into a 80bit register resulting in a form which does not play as expected with integers.
I am sorry, but I think brazilians buys things all the time, even the poor ones. They can buy term.

It is not the reason for startups complaints, I think the scenario is chaotic because they don't have money/mentoring adequate for early stage startups. That is the reason they are always looking for some copy cats.

Another problem is the culture. People are not used to buy things online, but it is changing
It was this same feature that made it so easy to run alternate OSes on the DC too. That was one of my favorite things about the system; I could switch from Unreal Tournament to Linux to NetBSD to classic PC Doom to a NES/SNES emulator, just by switching discs and rebooting.
I too have a simple app I built as a school project back when MeteorJS was at 0.6.2.[0]

I fell out of love with it then but I'd be keen to see what's changed. This mobile mindset looks pretty sweet.

[0] http://booktrad.es
How to create a successful YouTube channel (little bit funny)
Yes. Other commentators here assume he was starving and is now rich, which should be an improvement. But maybe he was not starving, maybe he already had a roof and some food, either from some previous work, or from goverment, or from his family.

Maybe, probably, he was already able to hack things he liked without worrying too much about survival: he actually did I guess, when he started Minecraft.

The problem is that he got an offer he could not refuse (as in The Godfather)...
And what percentage of the general population self-identifies as "growing up in a dysfunctional family"? I would not be surprised if that number fell in the wide range "between a quarter and half".
Good catch. Of course, we'd have to know the base rate of dysfucntional families to know if it's significant. We'd also need better data, as his sample is small and non-random.
Yeah you need to include information about IEEE 754 extended precision formats, 80bits on x86.
I don't really want to keep writing about myself in this thread because I'm not really that interesting...

We raised the money from friends, neither Dan and I are really financially capable of making investments ourselves. So, we're both privileged in that we've hustled and got people to have faith in us; however, both of us came from humble backgrounds (my mom and dad were a waitress and a postman, respectively) and neither of us have done that well for ourselves...yet.
What protects you in that scenario is those apps aren't really vulnerable to leaking anything in the first place. Malicious ads in games can only see what other ads you've viewed, it's not like you're signed in to your bank website in Angry Birds.

And if your banking app with its embedded webview has its site compromised, you're already fucked without even opening the app.
Yes, but you'll need a lot of it. Even a full universe sample takes almost 20 billion years to synthesize a relatively small amount.
The CPU doesn't make that decision, the compiler does. And AFAIK, GCC doesn't use the 80-bit 8087 floating point registers in 64-bit code (it sticks to the 64-bit SSE2 registers.) Even if 80-bit registers were used, they are still exponent+mantissa format, which represents small integers exactly.
love how git people like to shout "afraid of change"

i known it's the open source favorite. because it solve that problem.

for me all my corporate projects where in hg before git became a fad. but i guess I'm afraid of change/can't read a manual.
As long as the mantissa has at least 32 bits in it, then any 32 bit integer can make the round trip lossless-ly. That's true for 64 bit floats and for 80 bit floats.
Or as Neil Gaiman would have said it:

Notch isn't your bitch.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.htm...
If your machine uses 80-bit floating point, then those extended-precision floats can exactly represent any 64-bit integer, provided that your language's standard library/runtime correctly converts without an intermediate step using 64-bit floats (53-bit mantissa).
The thing about Minecraft is, it's a lot like Beatles music. It's a simple game with straightforward gameplay, but it comes together so well, it's extremely catchy and fun. There is the random drop element with blocks. There is the creative element with building. There are the exploration and social elements. Then there are the monsters that come out at night, the rush to build a shelter etc. And let's not forget creepers. I think there wasn't a single monster in the history of video games that scared me more than a creeper coming from behind with the "sssss" sound.

These design decisions could have been lucky, but I think it really takes a person who "gets it" like Notch, who spent years up to that point thinking about and building games to internalize what makes a game fun, and turn it into something that comes together like Minecraft.
The Habit Loop
Yeah I was trying to insufflate new life in this tired debate, glad someone noticed :)
The GN wasn't planned obsolescence so much as "Google doesn't actually own the hardware, so they can't update drivers"
Some of my best memories of me and my late brother were playing Soul Calibur together on my DC. He was a master at fighting games, and we'd spend hours together every week learning all the combos and moves of each character. I was better at deathmatch FPS games though, so the roles were reversed when we played Unreal Tournament. I was a natural on the keyboard and mouse, and he preferred the gamepad anyway. He still got good enough to take me down half the time.

Good times...
The Case for a Federal Robotics Comission
It's Not the Product, It's the Person
Have any long-suspected irrational numbers turned out to be rational?
Well, honestly, it's not just Android.

iPhones have built in time lines (more or less replaceable anything. Need a new batter? Have fun...).

And then there is the face that if you want ANY kind of app support - not just OS. Facebook, Twitter, etc... - then you can't use old phones. Years old Windows phones. Look at Blackberry phones. Palm OS. No one supports them because well... no one supports them anymore.

I think it's more a function of the rapid change and growth of complexity that makes smartphones obsolete so quick. Screen density, cpu, graphics capabilities, hard drive space, antenna speeds, etc. EVERYTHING is increasing so quick that it's hard to compare a new phone to a 2 year old phone.

It'll most likely be years before it slows down enough that you can treat a smart phone like a PC - keep it for YEARS and expect most stuff to simply run on it.
Example? I worked quite hard to get my grandma to install Chrome.
> I wish we could get a phone like that in the first world...

I just picked up a LG Optimus L90-D415 (refurb) direct from Tmobile for $80. The non-refurb is $100.

4.7 qHD (960 x 540) IPS Display
2,460 mAh battery
1.2Ghz Quad Core CPU - Snapdragon 400 Cortex A7
Adreno 305 GPU
1GB RAM
8GB storage (with microSD slot)
KitKat (4.4.2)
5 megapixel rear camera, 0.3 megapixel front

I added a 32GB sd card, I wish you could default apps to installing to sd instead of having to move them (and a couple apps don't move). Really the only bad things are:

a) no soft buttons, and the hard buttons aren't lit.
b) no ambient light sensor. by default there is a setting to adjust brightness as specific times (which sucks). But a $3 app (Lux) corrects the problem by using the front camera when you unlock the phone.
Luca Cardelli Fest
Good for them. Sidecar has always been my goto in San Francisco, although I have been using Lyft Line more because the prices are ludicrously low.
The scariest part about these cases is with Trans-Pacific Partnership[1] they set a precedent for not only the United States, but a whole slew of other countries[2].

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Intel...

2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Membe...
Like I said above... Look up the majority of founders and they all fall into a category type. Not saying it's a bad thing, but it's a type.

Yea I did say that, but you are talking about success and failure like that has anything to do with applying or not. If you think I wont have success because I don't apply I feel bad for that thinking.
Hakaru an embedded probabilistic programming language in Haskell
I've gone full BEM on a recent project of mine, and it's been a godsend. Name our block elements by function, take advantage of SASS's abbreviated BEM syntax, reuse actual presentation styles with mixins, and use helpers within our templates to vastly minimize BEM's noisiness in the markup we work with. The modifiers are also great for capturing variations.

AM strikes me as clever, but I can't see it replacing class-based styling. At best, with some extensions, it might be a slightly more abbreviated way to write BEM, but decent tooling can do that for you anyway.
Re-thinking Prolog
Unless they add multi-processing to the mod system, they can't. You can't "sandbox" a Java class like that. You can't deny it access to JNI. You can't deny it access to java.io. You can have the host OS do this, of course, but now we're talking something far, far more complex than any mod system ever.

Which is, frankly, an absurd demand.

Mojang should have a mod API, but that won't do diddly squat to improve saftey. Don't execute code if you don't want that code to run.
mSpy[0] is the software that is featured in this story. For iOS, jailbreaking is required. For Android, some features (Instant messenger tracking and Keylogging) require rooting the phone.

Also, Windows phones are not supported yet, so go for one of those if you happen to have a psychotic partner.

[0] http://www.mspy.com/compatibility.html
$1.43 of every $100 in America goes toward hospital administration
Technically, Markus "Notch" Persson would need to write under a new pseudonym
65 Accomplished Writers and Marketers Reveal Their Secrets to Productivity
>If a child developed a stron[g] attachment to a jumper would you prevent them wearing it? //

I've prevented one of my children from wearing a favourite jumper (well, hoodie), either because it needed washing or was inappropriate. He likes to wear his hood up all the time and I require him to take it down rather than indulge his desire to not confront his surroundings - namely communicate with other people. He is like I was, afraid to initiate communication and willing to 'hide' to avoid it. But I was always far more fulfilled when I was unable to avoid other people and "forced" to make the effort to communicate; it seems the same with him.

Someone said 'call obsession "passion" and see how it fits now'. Would you call staying up all night, missing work, feeling terrible, ruining your sleep patterns "passion". That's more akin to addiction: I've been on a Minecraft binge recently. My analysis is that it allows me to escape the real world and control my interactions; it's definitely escapism for me. Yes, Minecraft has a lot of potential educational value but I'm very cautious as my personal history with computer games - and other things - has been one of unhealthy obsession.

Veg out with the computer? Well I'll allow that for a short time but to me real world interaction is also far more valuable; I can appreciate the position that sdegustis appears to be presenting. I'll let my kids play for an extended time on the computer/console with a friend, for example, but not by themselves.

It's interesting that the reactions here are similar to the reactions we had when we quit having a television. We have reneged, we now have non-broadcast TV: in part I see that as a failure.

I notice you've set noprocrast on ... a little like denying a child a favourite thing for a while ...?!

/slightly drunken early morning comment
I think I disagree with you on that.

You know, on principle.
Huh? What are you talking about? This is his Reddit account:

https://www.reddit.com/user/xnotch

Three comments since the announcement that have nothing to do with the money.
It's a federal court...
I don't fit, which is fine.

But you missed my point, which I'll make explicit.

"But you have no idea why" is condescending and dismissive. It betrays an arrogance that's very off-putting.
Ivory Coast's home-grown tablet
That rule applies to more than just programming languages.

The U.S. Healthcare system has tried to switch to ICD10 standards for a while now, but they keep bumping back the deadline. I think it's EOY 2015 right now.

ICD10 was released in 1992...
I don't see it mentioned much but Aptana Studio is a strong IDE. You could think of it as a distribution of Eclipse.
While agile terms (spike, sprint, ...) become common parlance, I will show myself the exit.
This was a long time ago (1994), but even today, if you're writing a 3D renderer from the ground up, your polys are gonna pass through a big ol' pipeline to get onto the screen. No way around it.
Care to elaborate? Much of the modding community is eagerly awaiting an official API.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
Escape the Pit
If he still has equity in the company, isn't he only hurting himself by interviews and keeping this in the media cycle?
Such an amazing interface. Love it!

-Danny
Interesting. Is it like Python's Gevent in that it patches otherwise blocking calls (say socket.recv) to return to the Quasar runtime so it can switch fibers?
Application path scanning follows symlinks recursively. One upwards link, and it never terminates.
Ask HN: I want to resell CRM for local businesses
Hi,
I own an IT consulting startup, and I want to sell a cloud based CRM software to the local businesses in Egypt.

I want to rely on open source CRM, so I wonder if you can help me to decide which one to choose?
Let's have code create Rammstein instead
$15/mo is still too high for dabblers. It should have a free or cheaper tier (with low quota, or $0.20/hr, bill as-you-use like AWS) for people who want want to fiddle.
Convert DVD to iPhone 5S Faster Than Ever
Is that image for real?
It was a jury trial.
Actually, that Go bug is the scanning code getting confused about an incorrectly stored stack pointer value during a very small race between returning from a FFI call into Go and generating a traceback for scanning. I'm not familiar enough with the internals to comment on if that can lead to freeing FFI memory, but I don't think so. Not that crashing the process is much better. :)
We actually work in the same space you guys do :)

We're all dealing with having to display more complex math to students once you get past 5th grade in the Common Core, also on web and iPads. Appreciate you folks taking the time to release something like this to the public. People haven't been hounding us down because of the slow UX yet, but I can see that happening down the line. I'm hoping we can open source some of our tools as well once we're your size :)

My only other question was: is KaTeX 100% interchangeable with MathJax as far as syntax goes? What I'm asking is if we already have a lot of content written for MathJax, will we need to massage it into a new syntax or should it work for the most part?
So? Federal judges and juries in the eastern district of Texas are from the eastern district of Texas. They don't commute from magic federal land every day. They attended the same schools everyone else did.
A coworker of mine was telling me a story about how his son was supposed to be doing some homework with his friends. He walked in and saw him playing minecraft on the xbox. My coworker was obviously mad that his son was playing a video game instead of doing homework… until his son showed him that he was doing homework. They were all logged in to minecraft using the blocks to solve math problems.

That same coworker describes minecraft as an 11 year old boy's Facebook. I think he has a great point. Minecraft is more than a game now.
This Is How You Fly 200,000 iPhones from China to the US
The third-party program MathType (http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/) is an GUI math editor that can export to LaTeX. It costs $97 for end-users though. I think it supports embedding math objects in arbitrary third-party programs, since both Microsoft Word and Apple Pages support that.
Macy's rolls out retail's largest beacon installation
I think this distinction may have caused the disagreement in this thread. A dictator as a "call all the shots" is very different than "maintains board control". The latter can mean you don't even work on product at all, but have the assurance you can't be kicked out of your own company.
Relatively cool: between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius.

That sounds a bit on the high end, considering that 65 is the highest my system (early i7) goes when fully loaded... but then looking at the temperature graph, it looks like they're really pushing them to the limits and letting thermal throttling take care of the rest - the spec for that particular model is ~80 max.

Since this is a VM, there's always a remote chance that they can trap the MSR reads and return whatever data they want. (Maybe it could even be used as a convert channel...?)
Lessons from Real-Life Revolutions That Fictional Dystopias Ignore
I feel like the lesson here is not to put mission-critical systems on leading edge software. I'd be porting to Java at this point. GitHub is a big boy company.
Didn't legislation rule Lyft Line illegal? Is it still operating?
I keep reading the lego comparisons but i think that's staying a little too inside the box. Block for block, if you will. A better comparison is "Minecraft is the digital equivalent of playing in the sandbox".
Speaking of 'not particularly honest', how about 'There are no scientific advances in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, i.e. between 500AD to 1000AD"? It's not even a couched statement allowing a little leeway.
I've been quietly hacking away at a tool like that if you are interested. https://github.com/rcaught/todos_export
No, because this represents a good deal of engineering coming together and actually functioning in concert with itself and working.

It's not just some "woot let's crush some code" and a weekend later everything works and that one difficult feature is working well enough for your live demo; this is having several different layers of functionality coming together and working in unison, each being relatively worthless without the rest of the whole.

When you're building something like a high-performance 3D pipeline, or a low-level embedded system, there's no MVP that really counts and there's seldom any little features to egg you on until these black triangle moments.

It's like being an aerospace engineer--the whole damn thing works, together and at once, or nothing does. That's why I've found web development to be such a nice break from the work I used to do: I can always make seeming progress, because I can always see the results of what I'm working on.

At the same time, I never get the same rush of accomplishment of seeing, say, a model loaded from a custom conversion tool rendered using multiple threads and being lit properly. It's a different sort of work.
Ask HN: Buying Alibaba?
Just curious what the sentiment was on HN regarding the purchase of BABA shares? Excited? Over-rated? Buy at any price?
Tim Cook on iMessage Security: It’s Encrypted, and We Don’t Have a Key
Ways to think about watches
They might seem dumb, but on closer look IEEE754 (which is what you probably mean when you say float) is a pretty clever piece of engineering.

Here's a great bit of info, interviewing professor Kahan (one of the principals behind it) http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.ht...

Believe me, they might be painful, but they're definitely one of the least painful ways to handle non-integer values.
What happened to the ballot box that saved Lyndon Johnson's career? (1998)
re: "As long as they are small enough, floating point numbers can represent integers exactly."

I recently discovered a wonderful floating point bug in the Apple A7 GPU (fragment shader). I would pass a float from the vertex shader to the fragment shader, that was either 0.0, 1.0 or 2.0 and use that as an index to mask color channels.

As such, I would convert to int and use it as an index. Problem was, the GPU would sometimes, on some random region of pixels, decide I didn't pass in 1.0, but 0.99999999999. Perform an int truncation, I have 0.0, I get the wrong index, my app starts flickering, I want to rip my hair out...

Even on desktop machines, I had similar problems with large sets of tests that would produce different results depending on which (modern desktop) processor they ran on.

Lesson: floating point is certainly dangerous for consistent representations that "matter". Regardless of a compiler decision or what the spec says.
Is it just me, or do you think that Nintendo acquiring a company like Mojang seems more appropriate? I shudder at the thought of Microsoft stripping Minecraft of its creative and inspiring qualities and turning it into a simple FPS.
actually.. thats exactly why it makes it useless.. its not reliable. so people ignore it.
I used to use Borland Turbo Prolog. But not that many people could understand it. I couldn't find anyone to work with me in it so I went back to Turbo Pascal and Turbo C.
Probably any framework is painful to be two major versions behind with.
Actually the intended message was that I'll gladly pay for it since you promised to make it free. But I guess the message gets lost and this is another reason why voting with one's wallet doesn't work.

We're still looking for a way to fund free games. And I don't think donations work too well. More importantly, the people who actually make games don't seem to find it working too well, because they are not making free donation-supported games. On the other hand, many game authors already see the value in eventually freeing their work. So if they promise to do that, it is a reasonably effective way of getting a free game by first helping them do what it takes to make it profitable enough to actually build and finish the game and eat something too. Is it not?
I created an HN account when we applied, because I had to. I lurked beforehand, but never commented. My cofounder had about 14 months on me account wise but he had been thinking about applying us to YC for that whole time. So I don't think it hurt us.
This is all about AT&T setting bad precedent. Once they have a precedent set that speeding up, or slowing down applications is normal, they'll start screwing with us. I guarantee it.
A lot of complaints about East Texas in here. I've had a few myself since I grew up there. That being said, this isn't the only example of gaming the patent/courts system. Blaming the jurors for being prototypical dumb hicks that some of them are is fun but misses the point. The real problem is that a tech patent case wound up there to begin with. There is definitely no interesting podcasting or other telecomm technology being invented there (Longview); and that isn't the fault of the jurors. These companies set up sham offices in the area to pretend that they belong in the Ninth Circuit court. Fix the courts and you'll improve the situation a bit. Of course, the company was predicated on a sham to begin with, so I'm not sure how you fix that.