skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish someone would clone Cossacks.

I've been playing it since 2002 and keep an XP box specifically to play it on. After all these years I still haven't gotten bored of the game and probably play it 2-3 hours a week or more on average.

I don't know if this means it's a really good game or I'm just a boring person. But it beats AoE all over in my opinion. I've tried a lot of other games, played them for a bit and forgotten about them. But not Cossacks. I just wish they had kept the series going.
Oh I agree, if I were the one driving the car I'd like to think I'd have read every bit of local regulation on ridesharing. But if your suppliers were the ones who talked you in to driving your food truck around and their enrollment process ensured you that you were part of the legal future to delicious burrito delivery, their behavior would be at least negligent, if not outright malicious.
It's weird that Mr. Lessig refers to cryptography as "physics" instead of mathematics around 28:15 :-).
Two of your links recommend pseudo-scientific alternative medicine.
Looks like they have tiny bar stools for that reason: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/files/2014/10/Stand-2-Learn-...
It means willing to incur the significant opportunity costs (income and benefits) of not working for an established company.

EDIT: Also the risk to reputation and social stigma that goes along with being poor...and enduring this for years...until you're not :).
Brian from Backblaze here.

> open they are about something that is definitely a competitive advantage.

From our perspective, our biggest competitor is apathy. Something like 90 percent of people simply don't backup their computers. So pretty much anything we can do to have people hear about Backblaze and possibly overcome their apathy and start backing up their laptops is good for us. These blog posts have worked very well for us - people enjoy the information, and by disclosing the info we have potential customers hear our name and we get a bump in subscriptions. It's a win-win, the BEST kind of win. :-)
> KNOX does save the encryption key required to auto-mount the container’s file system in TrustZone. However, unlike what is implied in the blog, the access to this key is strongly controlled. Only trusted system processes can retrieve it

LOL no. If your security is predicated on the underlying OS perfectly enforcing permissions, then you're insecure.

> KNOX 1.0’s Personal containers, designed to let consumers experience the KNOX container, were not managed by an MDM agent. Therefore, they either store an alternative PIN or use a Samsung account to recover forgotten passwords. This KNOX 1.0 Personal container is not a part of the KNOX enterprise solution and was discontinued early this year.

My takeaway: unless you've had a 100% staff turnover this calendar year, at least some of the designers and implementers who thought it'd be OK to store a PIN in cleartext are still on the team. That's enough to make me run screaming from it.
don't forget the importance of open hardware, e.g. bunnie's novena project
I like that definition :)
This guy gets it! As I said before and got downvoted to hell:

"The comments here and a moments worth of overhearing the details of conversations held at any of the employers of coders can attest.

It is not for historical reasons, it is for the reek of sexism and "gamma males" trying to assert themselves as men in the absence of "betas" and "alphas" and failing miserably."
>My hands are sweating just thinking about it.

You have a phobia of flying. The solution isn't aircraft manufacturers accommodating that, but you seeking the right mental health services to treat your mental illness.
You should blog about it!
http://pando.com/2014/09/04/uber-continues-to-screw-its-part...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/johanabhuiyan/uber-drivers-are-prote...

http://uberpeople.net/threads/deactivated-3rd-time-in-5-week...

"In a week of driving (24 rides), you'll only make $312 once Uber's taken its cut" - http://la.curbed.com/archives/2014/02/8_secrets_you_learn_be...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/07/uber-s-batt...

http://www.thewire.com/business/2014/06/uber-drivers-protest...

http://www.businessinsider.com/undercover-uber-driver-short-...
It's more than rare, it seems that you're the only real-world, large-scale source on a lot of the topics you've been covering.

I may not work in IT but I crave well-written accounts of technical problem solving. Yours are among the most interesting as you're so open about sharing details that no one else would consider releasing.
What's funny about a video game that allows you to buy the services of a prostitute and then kill her instead of paying her?

Sounds like something Jack Thompson would say.
Interesting. I wonder if he was the first (only?) person into YC without an idea, but on the basis of the entrepreneur themselves?

That was something they tried out a couple cycles ago, though I think I saw pg say they didn't plan to do it again.
I pity someone who is 'passionate' about those things.
Sort of. In my opinion the major difference there is that the change wasn't driven by a particular corporate interest. I expect I'd feel differently about stings on ridesharing if hundreds of people individually decided it would be cool to start organizing rideshare services, and the government started running stings on them.

A similar example is content sharing. Leaving aside the debate on whether or not it should be legal, the community as a whole changed how they interacted with content and the market has begun to shift in response, with more and more content providers realizing that they need to adapt. (I know that's not happening nearly as fast as we'd like, but it is happening).
We Interview James Cameron on the Deepsea Challenge
From what I recall of Windows Support, you're going to have to reinstall it.
Sorry I meant for online matches, although some people would draw a distinction between age of empires: the conquerors and age of empires: hd edition.

You can check the player history for steam here[0], it's almost at an all time low, although this number includes people logged in playing single player too, while voobly's numbers (just over 1500 at the time of writing) include people spectating matches and waiting in lobbies or idling.

Unfortunately there were performance problems on the release of aoehd, pretty much up until 1-2 months ago, leaving the community fragmented. Typically steam is where you'll find casual gamers and voobly is where slightly more experienced players go (although they do have a new player lobby with casual gamers too). During steam sales however the hd edition does get an influx of new players every time (you can usually pick it up for $5).

Since I'm talking about platforms it wouldn't be fair not to mention game ranger[1]. I don't know a lot about it but the rumours are they largely play standard (non-userpatch) aoc or the forgotten empires[2]. I have got no idea about the userbase size though.

[0] http://steamcharts.com/app/221380#1y

[1] http://www.gameranger.com/games/

[2] http://forgottenempires.net
Well, yes. You have to initiate things that could cause bandwidth use from a user interaction instead of, say, a timeout or an XHR or a DOMContentLoaded. youtube follows the same rules as everywhere else: it doesn't autoplay. Unless you're unwittingly opening youtube urls in the app instead of chrome.

iOS on the other hand actually -does- initiate bandwidth use on a <video> element, even if no interaction has taken place. If you watch Charles during an iOS video session, you will see 2-3 HTTP GETs before you even initiate playback. This can play merry hell if with your HTTP logs, if you pay attention to that sort of thing.

iOS also has major issues with multiple <video> elements; <video> must be full-screen on non-tablet i-devices (you cannot create custom controls); you cannot control volume via the user interface; it uses a nonstandard progression for its status-related events... (and sometimes they're just plain missing)...

I've spent the past few years working on web media players for mobile and desktop ;) I kind of know what I'm talking about. And due to its position in the marketplace, iOS Safari has stagnated - it's easier to get HTML5 multimedia working correctly in IE11 than iOS Safari. iOS Safari is the new IE6.
"There's a group of people I like to call "Semanticists" who've come to latch onto Semantic graph projects, not as a technology, but as a religion. They're kind of like the "6 minute ab" guy in "There's Something About Mary"
...
There's then another group of Semanticists, they recognize the approaches that have been proposed have kind of dead-ended, but they won't publicly announce that. Then when some other approach not affiliated with the SW makes progress (language understanding AI for example) will simply declare this new approach as part of the SW and then claim the SW is making progress."

Some of these things in your list were proposed specifically because the Semantic Web technology inventory had failed to produce anything useful.
If I understand correctly, the gitbook toolchain isn't freely available. Nor does gitbook address any of the limitations of Markdown that prompted me to switch to Asciidoc.
Great job!

A few suggestions:

1) You may have better results with your pixel art if you change the filteringMode of your SKTextures to SKTextureFilteringMode.NearestNeighbor instead of .Linear.

2) You might want to store SKTextures in your imageDict instead of full SKSpriteNodes. It seems you aren't reusing those nodes, just the textures.

3) Maybe use a plist file to store the level data instead of hard-coded array constants? It's a little more flexible once you abstract the data outside of your source code.
They're talking about ARM TrustZone (http://www.arm.com/TrustZone) here, which can do these kinds of things securely. However, I'm not sure if Samsung uses it correctly.
Just to be pedantic - this isn't a port as the original source wasn't used, this is a remake.
> If you look back at that graph, there must be some force that's pushing that red line down.

Very possibly, but not necessarily. It's hard to judge the existence of causation from a correlation in one aspect of this issue. Here is a larger chart, showing multiple fields:

http://gasstationwithoutpumps.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/pe...

You can see the same dips in CS here as in the first graph. However, two other things pop up:

1. The % of women in engineering rises slowly, and the % in CS basically drops _to match it_. This raises the question: is engineering odd in its slow rise, or is CS odd in its initial rise and then fall? Or are both odd? Is it a coincidence they end up around the same place, or not?

2. Large rises occur in some other occupations, well over the 50% mark. Should we be interested in what caused the large rise in biology or psychology, for example? It might be meaningful, but it might not be. There are jumps and changes in all fields, not just CS - perhaps some have significant causes, perhaps some are just side effects (increases in one field must be to the detriment of others)?

Overall, the data leaves us with far more questions than answers, I think.
Spruce – what mobile telemedicine can do
That big dip starts 3.5 years after the dotcom bust:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#mediaviewer/Fil...
There is a big difference between hustling (hardcore sales), being naughty (sneaking into a room you shouldn't, getting your hands on a phone number you shouldn't be able to) and breaking things (manipulating a system to your advantage) to something like this.

A combination of above would be to stalk down Tim Ferriss' number, organize $150 in car rental credit or whatever, and then text him to let him know that the car is ready for him. Or, even still, rent a car for him and send it to his building, and let him know its waiting for him.

That is an example of breaking the system. Blatantly hacking someone else's phone doesn't do anything for your sales; it doesn't do anything to showcase your product (unless your product is a phone hacking/security device); and there is nothing personal to it at all.

That's just my view on it anyway.
Brian from Backblaze here.

> their market research indicated consumers are highly responsive to changes in price

That makes it sound like we carefully thought it through. :-) Our "market research" was the 5 Backblaze founders asking their friends and family questions like "Mom, how do you feel about paying $5/month for a backup?" After asking that question to 15 different people, it seemed like there were reasonable tipping points around $5/month and then another one at $1/month. The math didn't work at $1/month - so $5/month it was! And we've never changed prices, because we got lucky and it worked out for us. So we've never run the experiment of whether we would lose half our customer base if we raised the price to $6/month. And I hope we never have to raise prices, because subscription customers seem to HATE that - like when Netflix raised prices it was a hate fest towards them.
Considering that people like to sleep on planes and the flight attendants / cabin crew will get people to close the blinds / dim the cabin lights as quickly as they can, this will never take off.
You want to separate content from presentation? Use pandoc flavored Markdown. LaTeX is a render target. So, for that matter, is Word.
I don't know anything about the PPA, but that's not really a good comparison. The taxis that were without insurance were presumably working around the clock to get it sorted out, and had some communication with the PPA to let them know about the problem.

Uber on the other hand knew that what they were doing was illegal from the start, had been warned about it and had every opportunity to delay the launch of the service until the legal stuff was sorted out.
That's why I chose my definition carefully. Being able to raise capital is determined by a lot of things that unfortunately, you cannot control.

This is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about Treehouse. We can empower more people with the skills to build their first product, without raising capital. Once they have a working product, they're much more likely to be able to raise capital.
Do you think you had to go through those first few small wins in order to finally take a swing at a homerun? What changed when you did treehouse vs those other smaller businesses? Was it the fact that you didn't need to worry about money in the short-term anymore (because of those small exits), or something else?
Markov chains can also generate good ideas.
Want to help me work on that? Contact details are on my profile.
I would love a glass plane, but I don't think it would take a flying "phobia" to be uncomfortable with this. Besides, if you're trying to get more people to fly in your planes, telling would-be customers that they need psychiatric counseling to overcome their anxiety probably isn't the best approach.
Netflix: More Movies. Sooner. For Everyone
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.4615v1.pdf
> the ones that succeeded were lucky, and we were just lucky enough to be able to take advantage of that luck.

Amen. Amen.

I'd love to hear more about your past adventures. What were the large companies and the failed/tiny ones?
CVS follows Rite-Aid, shuts off Apple Pay
No voicemail passcode was set. The skurt.co folk spoofed his number and set whatever voicemail passcode they chose.
Truly free but in the hands of very few vs mostly free and in the hands of many?
> An other example that comes to mind is : you query a person and instead of a list of related website you get a set of tabs with : bio from different sources, work, news, images & videos.... Bonus, you don't need to be google anymore to do that ! Ok that's far fetched but imagine the potential for webapps.

So that's kind of one of the canonical examples for the SW that's always given. Query for an object and get an entire dossier back on that object, assembled, federation fashion, from tons of disparate sources all over the web.

It turns out that

a) that doesn't refute the API access to a bunch of relational stores all over the place and the better performance you're likely to get from those stores

b) the notion that just compiling all that stuff in one place works better

c) really any of the issues presented by Doctorow, read his essay again with a critical eye and think about how each of his criticisms would apply to something like this.

Modern search engines have largely figured out how to provide a fairly high-level ontology equivalent to this use-case by simply parsing out the content on the pages and centrally storing it. This is not the Semantic Web.
Yeah, so it matches with the lag of people already in the degree programs.
Haha Thanks! Every time I typed "port" I couldn't help but think "I don't think this is a port" but didn't know quite what to call it. :)
> HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering.

You're joking, right? HTML+CSS requires heaps of workarounds to achieve the most trivial layouts. The people behind these standards have no understanding of documents and no taste in software: they deem the absence of variables in CSS a feature, and the result is Less, scss, and similar preprocessors.

Had the CSS committee at least the sense to copy the boxes-and-glue model from TeX, things might not be so grim. As is, we seem to be stuck with their clumsiness for a long time.
>It's a very different Gates from the philanthrope we see today, but back in the 90ties he was a bit of a dick.

IMO Gates the businessman is just a ruthlessly competitive adversary. I don't even see a conflict between him then and his philanthropic activities now.

It was also covered pretty well at Groklaw http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107...
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/markcooling
OpenBSD's strings outputs this:
BFD: strings-bfd-badptr: invalid string offset 1179403647 >= 0 for section `'
This is from part 6, priceless:

Q	And first let me ask a general question, and that is: Did you believe that from Microsoft's standpoint it was desirable to have as many pure Java applications as possible?

A	We weren't focused on that as a goal, no.

Q	In fact, is it fair to say that you preferred fewer pure Java applications to more pure Java applications?

A	We preferred more applications that took advantage of our APIs, and so we worked with ISVs to maximize the number that took advantage of our
APIs.

Q	And your APIs were not pure Java APIs; correct?

A	No. Some were, and some weren't.

Q	Yes, sir, some were, and some weren't. But the APIs that you wanted people to use were APIs that were not pure Java APIs; correct, sir?

A	No. We were glad to have people use both.

Q	Were you indifferent as to whether they used your pure Java APIs or your proprietary APIs?

MR. HEINER: Objection.

THE WITNESS (Bill Gates): You've introduced the word proprietary, and that completely changes the question. So help me out, what do you want to know?

Q	BY MR. BOIES: Is the term "proprietary API" a term that you're familiar with, sir?

A	I don't know what you mean by it.

Q	Is it a term you're familiar with in your business?

A	I really don't know what you mean. You mean an API that you have a patent on?
Brian from Backblaze here.

This is EXACTLY one of the reasons we released the information. People would write about Backblaze and say we were losing money and it was an unsustainable business funded by deep pockets. That was frustrating to hear because we self-funded the company for years (no VCs) and I assure you there are no deep pockets here.

So we released the info on the pods partly so we could point at it and say "see, the math really DOES work!"
Geographically diverse locations now at Sitemeer
Keyboard NKRO test
just one thing: computer science ist not about programming. CS is about the math involved in solving problems using a specific set of instructions in a manner sufficiently specific that it can be implemented. It is intimidating at first and quite helpful once mastered. Don't avoid it and don't let it deter you.

build a tool set of algorithms and you will begin to understand. Then you will want to study cs (possibly).
resources:

Introduction to Algorithms by Leiserson, Rivest et al.

Algorithms, Sedgewick

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley

http://bookboon.com/en free ebooks about math, cs, programming, office...
I strongly suggest you stay away from the "dive into python" series and look at Zed Shaw's excellent "Learn Python the Hard Way" series. To read it online, it is free[1]. I've got a random collection of links I send to some of my coworkers when they ask about newbie python devs that might be of use to you[2].

[1] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/

[2] https://gist.github.com/SEJeff/7103604
Thanks a lot, It was certainly a battle of figuring out Swift while making continual forward progress. Thanks for the suggestions. I didn't even know about the filtering mode! I also agree on only storing the SKTextures.
In regards to the level data. I hated storing hard coded arrays but couldn't figure anything else out in time :) I would 1000x prefer to use a plist file to store the data. That way I could also more easily parse the common level formats. For example: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/ai/yoshio/sokoban/handmade/soko001.tx...

Thanks for taking time to read through the code!
+9001 for this. Cossacks was and always will be the best RTS I have ever played. I want a mac port, an HD re-release and sequel right now.
FWIW, as a father of a 5-y.o. still remembering the early days, I believe your target audience (for a KS) is really small.

Think of it like this:

My child is born and I come across your KS page. I'm not going to invest because by the time the KS ends and development completes I won't have a perceived need for your product. So, what I really needed was to come across your KS page when my wife was 3-4 months pregnant. Yet, as a would-be first time parent I really had no idea what I would or wouldn't want/need. And after the first child, I'm not feeling the pressure to get and use such an app without a specific concern (e.g. a genetic condition or predisposition to watch out for). There's definitely more fear with the first child.

So, for a KS, your paying audience is a couple (or person) that is 3-4 months pregnant with their first child. That's a very limited audience.

Now, the audience for the app itself is potentially very large. I remember that after my daughter was born going online to find all sorts of information and apps for all sorts of things related to her early days.

My gut says this is just an app that would be much better off ignoring crowdfunding all together. Just make it, list it, and market it. It has a lot of potential. Also, I'd pay attention to what vitovito stated about updates and keeping up momentum as it holds true after release as well.
My Flattr experience
When's the last time you've seen someone plead "innocent" in court? From what I've seen, the only two choices have "guilty" in them.

Seriously, if you're ever up on charges, see if you can plead innocent without the judge counter-offering to put in a plea of Not Guilty instead.
It's unclear if it's a criminal case (my guess is no). It is relatively common to indemnify partners against civil penalties.
Very good explanation. I think you are spot on. It's funny how ideology so often flies in the face of reality and comes back full circle to resemble it's opposite.