skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Does anybody actually use MongoDB anymore?
Does anyone still consider MongoDB a viable data storage option for new projects? If so, why?
Show HN: Yardage Tracker
USB refers to the bus, that is the wires and signals linking a device to the computer. People probably mean "USB device".
The Haxe language has a php target. Here's an intro (older, but still works):
http://old.haxe.org/doc/start/php

Haxe has a lot of the language features mentioned here... static typing, better namespace organization and support, etc. It's also incredibly quick to compile, and you can easily support older php libs through externs.

As a side note, there's also a Haxe target for javascript, meaning you can have a super nice modern language workflow for both client and server side on legacy php/javascript infrastructure.
I really, really love David Foster Wallace and I've also never gotten through Infinite Jest.

If anyone is interested in reading DWF I'd recommend checking out his shorter fiction (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) or non-fiction (A Supposedly Fun Thing) if Infinite Jest (rightfully) seems intimidating :)
Plink: Multiplayer music experience by Dinahmoe
I have never heard that before, it definitely sounds weird to my ears.
From personal experience, the biggest downside to this advice is that it builds a culture of being in or out. You either tow the company line or you're not part of the team, it leaves little room for challenging the status quo when you see mistakes being made.
Are you able to contrast it with Tribes' / Garage Games' model? What about RakNet? I'd love to hear more.
There is a lot of hubaloo over WebRTC in the telecom space, because there's nothing else happening there. Traditional V/VoIP has been stagnant since people started doing video chat using large TVs a decade ago, calling it telepresence.

WebRTC is another feature to check off, and the opportunity to develop and sell another SIP gateway product. WebRTC is in no way a replacement for SIP, much less an existential threat to the telecom industry; it is simply another transport layer.

Personally, while some OTT innovation is welcome, I hope the status quo isn't completely shattered. Going all-out on WebRTC implies a siloed architecture, which is antithetical to the purpose of an interoperable standard like SIP.
It's a Swiss organization. What did you expect?
Show HN: Open source, JavaScript game
Design for Hackers - David Kadavy

A rebours - J.K. Huysmans (in dutch translation: 'Tegen de keer')

Bad Astronomy - Philip Plait
> As a player (and a programmer -- but mostly a player), I'm concerned about the articles conclusions about the value of prediction, and the recommendation to avoid position popping by applying smoothing -- to quote the article, "it ruins the virtual reality of the game".

I agree, predicting remote objects causes more problems than it solves. Any remote player input that affects the object causes noticeable position popping when the local client receives the update.

The Source engine has a better solution - instead of trying to predict remote objects, delay rendering by 100ms and interpolate the received updates. This makes the position updates appear smooth without any stuttering. However, now the client lags 100ms behind the server.

The server has to "undo" this lag when the player wants to execute a request (like shooting). It does this by rewinding the world state by 100ms + client ping when executing the request. This makes it so that a client's actions appear to execute without any lag on their view (i.e. they don't have to shoot ahead of their target).

This causes some temporal anomalies, for example, players can shoot you around corners because they see your position 100ms in the past. However, most players seem to prefer this over having to constantly shoot ahead of their targets to compensate for prediction errors.
First Directory Ltd - Milton Keynes, UK - Full-time - REMOTE

We are seeking a talented software engineer to work on all aspects of the development process.

The role covers everything from adding new functionality to our website (used by over 3 million people a year) to working on bespoke internal systems. As well as a whole host of other projects.

Because you’ll be joining a small team you’ll be given a high degree of autonomy and expected to be able to manage your own work load and take responsibility for the full software development lifecycle from initial inception through to completion. We also offer a high level of mentoring and training to improve your skills.

You’ll be working in C#/ASP.net with a mix of other Microsoft and Open Source technologies.

We’re looking for someone with a ‘can do’ attitude and who is prepared to muck in and get their hands dirty in the code so to speak.

More information: https://1stdirectory.co.uk/vacancies.htm
-- Read --

Don Delillo: End Zone

Luc Ferry: A Brief History of Thought

Brett Easton Ellis: Less Than Zero

-- Working on --

Don Delillo: Libra

Hubert Dreyfuss: Being in the World (it's taking me a long time...)
Yeah, there was a really interesting paper on the Tribes networking model in the '97 or '00 GDC conference proceedings.
I'm a good way through Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

So far it has given a lot of insight into his upbringing and general history that would be the bedrock of his philosophy. Hopefully it gets into how he identified and executed on his business strategies.
Read: Dune by Frank Herbert

Reading: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

I have been trying to get back to science fiction after leaving it for so long. It's great so far!
The company I work for (IoT Design Shop - http://iotdesignshop.com/) is actually releasing beacons and software that does exactly this. We have a BLE beacon called Signul that couples with an app that allows you to do all kinds of hyper-local interactions.

Right now you can support our Indiegogo campaign (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/signul-the-world-s-first-...) and get a Signul beacon. I have a prototype version and it's really quite good.

If the Indiegogo campaign hits $50k (it's currently sitting at $31k) we're going to release an SDK for Signul allowing anybody to write an app that interacts with the Signul beacon for either iOS or Android devices.
Redis Running Slowly? Here's What You Can Do About It
Zero To One - Peter Thiel

Tribes - Seth Godin

The Four Agreements - Miguel Angel Ruiz (life changing) The

Seven Spiritual Laws of Success - Deepak Chopra

These are some that I am reading/read recently.
FDA approves the Deka arm, the first commercial mind-controlled prosthetic arm
How EA’s jet-setting founder avoided $26M in taxes
EuRathlon 2014 Sea competition recap: Day 1 and 2
See mperham's reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401372
We should all be cringing at headlines like this. Or not. I dunno. Which ever makes them stop.
Bringing web-scale IT to the corporate data centre
Corollary: only hire employees who wear hoodies and wear logos.
An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000TB on a CD
>How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?

The same way you know that top search results are accurate for a given word/phrase. As stated multiple times throughout the introduction[1] the solution for filtering out spam will probably have an implementation similar to internet search engines.

[1]: https://github.com/google/physical-web/blob/master/documenta...
Quirks mode would create a lot more work for the maintainers that could be better used for advancing the language. If you really have an old codebase that cannot be altered for some reason, you could keep using an old version of PHP. I'd rather they kept 5.4 around forever as a long term support version than doubled the complexity of developing PHP as a language. The breaking changes and deprecations with each new version are relatively minor, if those cannot be made to your existing codebase, you also likely wouldn't develop anything new there and wouldn't need a quirks/strict mode.

If you really need to, you can run multiple different versions of PHP at the same time.
I'm not sure what that accomplishes. In order to provide input, the HID device must register itself with the OS, in order for the driver to be set up, etc. Sending HID messages without actually enumerating a HID device isn't going to work. Waiting 60 seconds to provide input doesn't change the fact that it has to tell the OS it can provide input in the first place. Yeah, it could wait 60 seconds to say "hey, a HID device just got plugged in", but that doesn't actually bypass the safety mechanism...
I dunno. I hear "USB Drive" mostly. Never "USB flash drive" or just "USB".

Sometimes "USB thingy".
Articles like this make me believe that even if I managed to find my way into Silicon Valley I simply wouldn't fit in. My job is not my identity, I feel its healthy to generate a life outside your work that is entirely separate; heck I see it as a necessity for longevity in life to have such segregation.

I've turned down jobs that promote "monthly massages", "beer fridays", "gaming evenings", and other perks like the article mentions because when you step back and look at it they're trying to replace your life outside of work with excuses why you shouldn't leave work. Bind your job to your necessities and leaving becomes so much harder.

I own one T-shirt with my company logo (company uniform not counted) and I only have that because we got "sponsored" jerseys from the owner when we did a rec sport league. I don't wear it outside of the gym or doing laborious physical work, I feel a bit weird wearing it in public in a way; we are not a "brand", we do not need social marketing to be the multi-million dollar small business group that we are, hell the Joe standing behind me in the coffee lineup isn't interested in what we do anyway, he's not our market.

But it goes beyond that... Rule #3 raises alarm bells where having one person solely responsible for entire aspects of a business leaves you in a tight space should he hit the road, or fall ill. Heck even daily situations like ego or pride masking his greater vision can mean death for the company no? Even having a second individual sharing the load from those responsibilities allows for collaboration, brainstorming and are those not productive?

Perhaps I write a lot of these questions hypothetically. I'm not in the start-up biz, I don't really see an interest in it as you might be able to tell it clashes with my personality. Is life really seen as this dogmatic in the culture? I know its not universal but it certainly seems prevalent when I read the comments on HN and the like.
Ask HN: Feedback on landing page
Hey HN,

This is my first submit on here - Looking to get some feedback on our landing page for our product:

https://atama.io

Keen to hear what you all think - Does the product make sense and is the website easy to digest? There's something not quite right with it but can't seem to put my finger on what exactly needs to be changed/improved
> It's like Guido van Rossum realizing that nobody wants to migrate to Python 3, and instead making Python 2 awesomer again.

Source?
Well, I cringe when people talk about their "Bluetooth" (implying headset) but that has gained acceptance as well. When one product is so thoroughly associated with a brand, it can happen.
Forwarding is done in hardware so it's line rate. Those swp interfaces aren't real interfaces; they're just proxies.
He fails to mention the fact that people who run cults are the ones who benefit the most. The startup I was with in Hayward got bought by Peoplesoft back in 2002, and so 90%+ of the employees transistioned over (the CEO spread some rumor about signing bonuses if people stayed on...)

The first day of orientation at Peoplesoft involved listening to a HR person constantly attach "People" as a suffix to key terms - i.e. PeoplePeople. It was brainwashing 101 and quite annoying if you were a hard-bittern veteran of the startup ecosystem. Capitalism is just as much a cult as religions are.
Interestingly, the RakNet developer now works at Oculus.
It's all over UDP, but there's some reliability built on top of it. Most irregular events -- chat messages, weapon pickups, door openings -- are sent over and over, until they're acknowledged. Shots are an exception. By the time you can figure out the shot packet was lost, it would be weirder to send it than not to. 300 ms is a very long time in combat.

I do display connection statistics to players -- they use lag to lead, and loss to know if the number of dropped shot packets will be tolerable. A lot of players don't like playing at worse than 0% loss, and will meddle with their net settings (or play another day) if they see any.
I have a love/hate relationship with cmake.

Writing non-trivial functionality in cmake's language is possible but you're fighting the language the entire way. It would have been so much better if they'd just started with something like Lua and extended it instead of building their own barely-adequate scripting language. Some of the grossest code I've ever written is in cmake macros.

On the other hand, the results you get from cmake are fantastic. Want to use ninja instead of make? Just pass a compile flag. Need Visual Studio project files? No problem. Xcode? Kdevelop? You're covered.

Honestly I couldn't imagine ever going back to autotools at this point.
Currently reading:
- "When Google Met Wikileaks" by Julian Assange
- 1984 by George Orwell
I've never wore my company logo. Perhaps that means I'm not passionate at what I do, and a bad fit for startups.

Or it could mean that I separate my job from my life, and consider them two different things. Perhaps it has no impact on the quality of my work, or my willingness to work with others.

When dealing with people, making grand statements about how to make the right decision feels wrong. We're all our own world, filled with our own opinions, thoughts, and desires.

I think the sooner you recognize the inherent differences in people, the better you can make quality decisions based around how they will fit in.
Because name is not for you to enjoy in solitude, but for others to identify you with. Facebook already supports nicknames already. Whatever is on your passport/ID, that's your name. If you don't like that, stay off the social networks and go back to the underground niche forum-based networks. Ello is not the answer either as it will face the same problems all social networks faced - identity, spam and fraud prevention, etc. Real name policy is to address that, not to discriminate a demographic.
"Make" India a democracy?
NFC is tough because you have to be within about an inch of it to get a reliable connection. For the use cases of a parking meter or vending machine it works, but for a bus stop or store it becomes yet another thing to stand in line for.
Amen. There's so much more the life than work. I think I probably realized this more after I had a kid, but it saddens me when people work and that's it.

That's definitely their choice, and if it makes them happy, then kudos to that. But if it's because they haven't tried other things, that's the part that's sad.
Somebody catching up on their reading, maybe?
Thinking of Quitting? Remember, the Sun Will Rise
I just want to remind everyone that India is already a democracy and has been like that ever since her Independence from British colonialism. In general, I can understand the speculation that US is pushing money to India to balance China. US's perception of India has changed recently after their unsuccessful collaboration attempts with Pakistan. But in this particular case, I think the successful launch of a Mars orbiter at a budget price is a story that NASA would like to emulate too. I don't see political motivations behind this collaboration.
I agree 1000%.

And I'm not sure, but honestly, the couple of YC companies that took an interest in hiring me convinced me to stay far away. One of them expected me to build a demo project on a national holiday before interviewing me.
> There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells.
>
> Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted.

Do you have proper data to claim this? Good sales and wide adoption? And how can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-enthusiasts and early adopters?

I mean: it is rather "easy" to see a big increase in sales for a given technology, when it is "young". The big question is how sustained that growth will be, when the early adopters are served and the company needs to target "regular" people.
What? Care to give some context for discussion instead of promoting your site?
Hands on with Windows 10 Technical Preview
> why you'd want to filter the _GET/etc supervars on input

I get that the solution he proposed is different, and also reasonably sane, but isn't this basically what magic quotes did? Now that that nightmare is finally over, I'm not too keen on reliving it again.
Show HN: Hyperlapse View of Hong Kong Protests
Reading:
Jaron Lanier - "Who Owns the Future?"

Read:
Jessica Livingston - "Founders at Work"
I dropped OneDrive because Microsoft Office kept trying to sync to it instead of just saving files locally and letting OneDrive handle the sync. The result was you'd hit "save" in Word or Excel and it would lock all windows for 30 seconds or more while it was communicating with "OneDrive in the cloud". So I switched away from the Microsoft product and started using Dropbox because it was more compatible with Office.

As for Condi, I don't see the big deal. As far as politicians go, she's a little too left-leaning for me, but she's a nice enough gal and it's not like the Dropbox board is a government position.
I am the same way, my job is not my identity. I don't want any work perks, I just want to work. It doesn't say anything about my passion, or desire to succeed. It just means I have a full life outside of work, and don't desire someone replacing my activities with theirs.

I've worked in a couple startups, and I doubt you could find a person who wasn't happy with my work, or ability to work with others.

I just don't socialize with colleagues. I already have friends.
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

Highly recommend

Next up: Zero to One - Peter Thiel
Currently reading

Mature optimization handbook by Carlos Bueno
I'm ignorant of this stereotype, care to elaborate?
The olympics basically ruined Greece.That's not a good idea,unless someone else pays for it. Olympics were a financial distaster for that country,olympic installations are basically roting today.
It is, but I think the really interesting part is to making the connection seamless and as direct as feasible. e.g. how do you do it on one end of the spectrum if neither the embedded device or the users device has access to the internet, but they can see one another via bluetooth and wifi?

I think an app makes a lot sense to initially bridge embedded devices (that may only support simple web interfaces or even lower level network messages) to smartphone browsers (which are currently oriented to handling fairly rich web interfaces from full servers).

But where it should get really interesting is if you make the app support a generic enough protocol that you don't need an app-per-device type, but the app/protocol can handle a wide range of generic embedded device interfaces without requiring a full featured / high performance web server on every embedded device. After that you could basically get the protocol supported at the browser/os level and the app disappears.
Currently working on Robert Caro's series on Lyndon Johnson. Awesome, dense books.
what is an unsafe_string? Did you mean "non-literal string" instead?
Kevin Mitnick is rather famous for this type of attack [1]. These are dangerous attacks and we do depend on this working correctly. Phrack also has some interesting reading about spoofing attacks [2, 3].

[1] http://wiki.cas.mcmaster.ca/index.php/The_Mitnick_attack

[2] http://phrack.org/issues/48/14.html

[3] http://phrack.org/issues/53/6.html
That's one way of doing it! I suppose it all comes down to what your players expect.

Mine viscerally hate lag, whether they can see it or not -- but especially if they can't. I think if I built 100ms of lag into the client, I'd have a mutiny on my hands. ;)

But I do remember having a pleasant experience in TF2. Source probably is a good source of inspiration, those Valve guys know their stuff. :)
It doesn't sound like that at all. The person you're replying to just said that they were sufficiently frustrated with the physics engine's treatment (or lack thereof) of network phenomena that they bypassed it completely, telling the physics engine "this car is just a static object at this location."

That doesn't mean that there wasn't some other process which determined how that number was generated before it was handed to the physics engine -- either via a central server or something more distributed.

Speaking of the latter, I wonder whether consensus algorithms can be pulled off with a small enough bandwidth that you could incorporate them into a high-intensity game. Your consensus bandwidth is not the slowest-peer bandwidth but rather the median bandwidth, which can be much higher -- the question I'm asking is whether there's a good way for a slow peer to say, "hey, to improve my performance by reducing my bandwidth/latency, can one of you guys act as my server?"
On the contrary, Obama is speaking at Kellogg/Northwestern today which has closed class for the mid-morning and afternoon.
Translation: hire only people who are willing to eat your shit and take almost as much risk as you, but for pennies on the dollar because they believe so strongly in your "mission."
Three months at Y Combinator: what it’s like and how to get in
Is it all on the CPU? could they not have used shaders?
If anyone wants to do non-recursive make for big projects, I would take a look at what the Android platform does. They have this elaborate Android.mk makefile fragment system.

At the beginning of the build you go and find all the fragments, then process/concatenate them into one huge makefile, and do a single make invocation. It results in a very parallelizable build.

It seems kinda crazy and hacky but it definitely works better than recursive make.

For some reason the best docs seem to be on this Korean site:

http://www.kandroid.org/ndk/docs/ANDROID-MK.html
Company policy states that if customer will buy-out one of us they will revore the contract and company x want to start own dev team to get rid of dependency on 3rd parties.

I know that they will find other projects, what I'm worried about is how to leave in peace as managers will be mad as hell and HR wchich i love will also feel consequences of not being able to keep me.

Other aspect is that probably I will take with me 2 other guys from company.

Long story short - I want to leave without causing damage to myself and my friends
If my memory is correct, historically the IOC seems to have always been really corrupt going as far back as before WWII or even earlier.

The only thing that's interesting to me about this is what has prompted this change? The Internet (assuming it has created more aware citizens)? Dwindling budgets? A combination of several factors?
The Goal is one my favorite books to recommend to anyone joining a startup, but also for product management types. I first read it around the same time I read The Lean Startup, and I found the two to be very complementary.