skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those football players who reject the paper out of hand without considering its merits are the ones who are "ridiculous". One of the authors is Persi Diaconis. If he says something about statistics, you don't get to just reject it.
Also for somewhat less theoretic and more market oriented reading on SSDs there is http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-buyers-guide.html
Jquery mb.scrollable 1.5
published the 1.5 release of mb.scrollable; enabled vertical scroll.
I'm with you. Whatever you use, don't choose C++. Sure, everyone on your programming team knows C++ already. Yeah, your libraries are all written in it. And successful games have used it again and again. But if it's not one of the "cool" languages, you shouldn't be using it.

Modern game developers should code in Ruby/Lisp. By the time you've finished coding all of your graphics libraries from scratch, Moore's law will have made computers fast enough to run them.
"This SafeBank article from Matt Mullenweg about how he would start a bank is the most brilliant piece I’ve ever read and I agree with everything he says too (Matt – want to start a bank with me?)."

I have to say I lost a tremendous amount of respect for Mullenweg after reading his SafeBank post. He enthusiastically posts his ideas to make the bank stand out (Recommend Firefox to customers! Build an iPhone app and sell it for $2.99!) while demonstrating a clear lack of even basic business principles.

Warren Buffet on Gates: "If Bill had started a hot dog stand, he would have become the hot dog king of the world."

Mullenweg on the other hand would go bankrupt selling umbrellas on a rainy day...
Why is C++ suddenly "fine" when you have no other options? There could easily be a language with all the close-to-the-metal advantages and none of the baroque, redundant complexity of C++; why must we be content to use the same language as everyone else in the industry, rather that scratching this itch and building a newer, more productive one?
If you are interested in making games for consoles you are pretty much restricted to what the console maker's software development kit supports, which is usually C/C++. It's usually impractical to reverse engineer the hardware and supply your own system libraries in another language.

Computer games are another story, but the same facts are generally true, that you should use the language which provides the libraries where most of the work is already done for you. There are the most number of game development kits for C++, so that's why C++ is popular for game development.

For what it's worth, I have done a few games using the ORGE rendering engine and plugged the game elements (physics, AI) with separate libraries and it has worked fairly well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGRE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havok_(software)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_2D
Wait, so why can't you use the C++ libraries from Ruby/Lisp?
They still do this, too. I got an email from someone using Hotmail a few days ago and this was appended to the bottom:

Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. Get it now.
Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now.
Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now.
Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. Sign up now.
Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now.

I kid you not, 5 lines. Something tells me that they're getting desperate.
But as the article points out, capacity per dollar/watt/cm^3 is increasing exponentially for all of these storage mediums, and is expected to do so for many years to come. However, throughput and latency per dollar/watt/cm^3 is not improving nearly as quickly.

This means that throughput and latency will be the scarcest resource in the future, and regardless of the demands of your application, a time will eventually be reached where SSD has enough capacity at $X, but HDD does not have good enough throughput or latency at $X, so you switch to SSD. And eventually, the same logic will apply for SSD -> RAM.
If you've taken a basic probability class, then you probably know the solution to this issue of obtaining a fair toss with a biased coin. Flip the coin twice. If both are heads, or both are tails, discard the pair of tosses and try again. If the first flip is a heads and the second is a tails, then count the pair as a "heads". If the first is a tails and the second is heads, count the pair as "tails". Even with a bias, the probability of getting a heads-tail pair equals the probability of getting a tails-heads pair.

Here's a blog post that explains this in more detail: http://www.billthelizard.com/2009/09/getting-fair-toss-from-...

You can be sure all future coin tosses I do will use this technique!
For those looking for the shortcut: the consensus seems to be that the Intel X25-M (80 and 160GB) is the best buy right now.
[Ask HN] Can I crash at yours for Startup School
Hey All

I am coming from Scotland to startup school, just about to sort out my accommodation and figured I would post here first.

I would prefer to stay with other people attending startup school / related events or are programmers / startup founders, I have checked out airbnb so if you are one of the hosts listed then please reply with your listing.

I dont mind paying etc, I would just prefer not to spend my time at some anonymous hotel, so if you have a spare room or couch and dont mind someone from across the pond invading your space then please reply or email me at dale@arandomurl.com

Cheers

Some about me, I am a cofounder of a web based spreadsheet company, coding most erlang and javascript, outside that stuff I like football(soccer) photography and music.
Drop the features. You'll never have an easier time doing so than right now. Once you have users, getting rid of any feature (even dumb ones) will infuriate someone. We've only managed to excise one major feature (a poorly thought out one that people migrating from a competing product wanted so that things acted the same in one regard; basically, we borrowed a feature from a competing product to make a few users comfortable, but found that it confused everybody else) in several years of development, and even that one is still merely hidden and can be re-enabled. Once users have added something to their workflow, you cannot change it without blowback.

So, don't add things you aren't sure about.
This story gets it backward. Jack Smith came up with that idea. Sabeer Bhatia makes this explicitly clear in Founders At Work.

I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned it yet.

Livingston: You had a tagline in the body of the email encouraging email recipients to set up their own free Hotmail accounts. How did you come up with
this?

Bhatia: It was actually Jack’s idea to do that. We ran it by our VCs just to make sure it was OK. When you alter somebody’s email, you’ve got to be very careful.
You’re sending an email to a friend of yours, and we are kind of violating the sanctity of that email by putting in a tagline at the end of it that says “This message has been sent from Hotmail. Get your free email at hotmail.com.”
So we asked Tim if it was OK that we did this. We said, “We don’t want to be perceived as the evil company by altering their email.” And he said, “Absolutely, you should do it.”
And the next thing we know, he claims that this idea was his. He’s given a number of interviews literally claiming that he was the father of web-based email — without him it would not have happened. I can’t believe he’s just taken
credit for everything — including the tagline (which later became known as the classic example of viral marketing). He blatantly claims this at conferences, which I don’t think is right.

Livingston: He claimed that web-based email was his idea?

Bhatia: That it was our idea, but without them, it would not have happened and that we would have done JavaSoft. Their version is that “we told them to do web-based email at that [first] meeting.” Why would they tell us to do web-
based email?
Oh, sorry - don't know why, it works fine in Chrome and I have no registration there. Try this instead: http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_13579962
>> So he would just eat the interchange fees that the owners of the other ATMs/networks charge him? That would add up pretty quick. There's also the issue of the service fees that non-bank ATMs charge directly to the consumer - would his bank cover those as well?

This is not unprecedented - where I live there's a bank that offers free ATMs worldwide:

http://www.bangor.com/FreeATMsWorldwide.aspx
According to the article, you could still bias the toss. For example, let's say you're trying to get heads, which in your system is "first heads, then tails". You would hold the coin heads up on the first toss, and tails up on the second toss.
Well, for once, it's not particulary fast, but that's not a concern for all games(it's not slow either, but it's quite hard to optimize). The real deal is that it's a completely functional language with not much support, as far as games go. You won't find any graphics libraries, so you'll have to make them from scratch. Unless you have been programing in funcitonal languages for a long time, this will take an absurd ammount of time, and you probably won't be able to do it at all.
Haskell is great for math-oriented programs, but I wouldn't recommended for much else, in my opinion.
http://hackage.haskell.org/ is suppossed to be a good source for libraries, if you are intersted, but I can't get it to load.
"Newer" isn't necessarily better or more productive. Especially given the monumental task of having to write a game without the benefit of any of the libraries developed over the past few decades.

Perhaps the reason there are no other viable options is because C++ is pretty well suited to the task?
Then perhaps there will soon be a market for automated coin-flipping machines that impart a consistent, if unknown, bias into every flip!
I think it's more that although C++ sucks there is no realistic alternative for this "niche".
It's pleasant. Rough around the edges of course, but it's moving fast.

And thanks, was lurking for a bit and then finally realized it was past time I created an account.
I have an i7 and am using firefox and the demo maxed out one of my cores...
well pc-gaming/xbox is also getting more and more c#
And what about Quake in Haskell : http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Frag ?
We don't even have that. Instead of a TV, we have a projector that is on the same desk with my computer, and just project on the wall. For music I have Spotify, for games there is Steam, for books I have my Bebook. Instead of a sofa we have bean bags that can be stacked when not in use, although it has turned out not to be such a comfortable solution. Still, always looking for ways to get rid of more things.
Well as noted there is a headphone issue with the Hero, I got two in Hero's in four days and had same headphone jack issue. For me having these types of devices connected my car stereo to listen INternet music services is very important, thus I couldn't keep Hero because it has headphone jack malfunction issue.

I liked a lot of things with it, but no doubt it's slow and laggy, as well the virtual keyboard felt clumsy comparative to the iPhone. Let's hope this Droid provides all the best things I liked about the Hero, while solving what I had issues with.
It's not a biased coin.

It's a biased flip.

Your solution does not help with that.
All true and good points, but if you feel the need to say that perhaps I was not being clear enough.

1. In the situation described so far, a relational database is almost certainly not the optimum solution.

2. If you must use a relational database, you can mimic the ability to accept arbitrary input using something equivalent to Varbinary(max) columns.

3. A non-relational database may be the optimum solution in your particular case, but perhaps it is not. Before using some form of key-value store or object oriented database etc, think about non-database solutions. Depending on precise circumstances perhaps simply writing the input out to a file or into an ordered file directory structure is a better fit. It may or may not be depending on further details.
"I need a break from thinking about code. I'll go to a website that's mostly about code!" If you need a break, take it -- don't wait for someone to hand it to you.
What other languages are out there that compile into machine code?
Fraq was made in 2005 and it looks worse than quake 3, wich was made 6 years early (addmitedly by a big studio instead of jut one person, but the point still stands). It is possible to make games in Haskell, but it's closer to a theorical exercise than it is to an aproach to proffesional game-making.
Not correct.

If it was random, the output does not depend on the input (or there is no meaningful input).

But they showed that the output depends on the input. So it's NOT random.

Biased random means the result is not uniform, but it does not depends on the input.

No so here. Here it's not biased - it simply depends on the input.

(Obviously pseudo random number generators depend on the input - but those explicitly are not random, they are simply useful.)
I don't think he is dismissing NoSQL options at all. Rather, what I think his point is (and know mine is) is that many people recently tend to dismiss SQL options out of hand for various reasons, often just the newness of NoSQL.

Sometimes NoSQL is truly better, but sometimes SQL is better. Neither should be neglected out of hand.
Elephant Roads: PostgreSQL Patches and Variants [pdf]
Tribe teams with Google to make stand in Amazon
It's a funnel you can optimize like any other. For example, Hotmail could have A/B tested the footer copy to see which resulted in the highest conversion rate.

That would also have told them something about how their product should be positioned in the market (e.g., whether people care more about flexibility or security).

The iPhone is hard because you don't have many hooks. Loopt tried to make it work and then blamed it on an errant "bug," but it was clear they were trying to get a viral loop running over SMS.

http://getsatisfaction.com/loopt/topics/how_can_i_never_rece...

Really you can do this over any social network, where "social network" is defined in the broadest sense as a collection of people with message-carrying connections.

This includes email, IM, SMS, Facebook, snail mail, etc.

More specialized markets work, too. For example, Xfire spread this way through gaming circles, and Raptr is trying to do the same thing except over third-party IM networks like AIM and Yahoo!
If you are a customer of Credit Suisse, you can also withdraw money at every single ATM in switzerland for free as often as you like!
I think that best thing to do is look at 1) the libraries you'll be using, 2) what your team is proficient at, 3) what's worked for other groups, 4) optimization potential.

If you think that Ruby/Lisp is your answer to the above points, go for it. But I have the feeling that it won't be for many people.
Functional languages are good at math. Graphics involves a lot of math.
It also has perverts out in the bushes, watching.
In Australia, it takes a day. Three steps to open a business, and you can complete them on one day.
Not necessaryily true. Mike Speiser wrote a great article about people who "hack traction" by designing aggressive/spammy viral loops: http://gigaom.com/2009/06/07/hacking-traction-the-dark-side-...

It depends on your definition of "works," I suppose. The above "works" for Tagged, but I imagine most people on HN would say that that isn't "working" -- it's spamming.

The best kind, obviously, is the sort people like Seth Godin write about, where people are so passionate that they are actively seeking to spread your product.

Unfortunately it's often easier to fall to the dark side ("easier, more seductive") and spend time optimizing your viral loop than building a product your customers are excited about.
Maldives cabinet signs document underwater to highlight global warming threat
There is a very interesting talk by Tim Sweeney to this topic: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1277
When i'm new to a group, I like creating my own snark comments instead of acting like I get theirs. Then I can hijack the assumptions others have and make them my own.

Besides if you don't use direct references you have to rely on assumptions. Which makes us all speak babble.
A lot of that "baroque, redundant complexity" comes from standards committee's refusal to make things easier on programmers at the cost of any smidgen of performance.

And for certain tasks, like the highly competitive video game industry, uncompromising performance is exactly what the doctor ordered. You can always hire smarter programmers if you have to. On the other hand, it's hard to sell a game that runs or looks like crap at 60 fps.
this is one of the best pieces of theater i've ever seen. it's beautiful both in form and function (coral, fish and submergence threat).
It's not that the inner workings of financial systems are obscure, but rather that there is so much misinformation around. Ask a simple question like "how does money work" and you will hear responses, in very loud and belligerent voices, from the gold-standard crowd, the full-reserve banking crowd, the anti-Fed crowd, the Rolling Stone-influenced true believers, the hyperinflation fearmongers, the deflation fearmongers, Austrian economics true believers, Randists, socialists, And most of them are wrong. I don't really feel like addressing them all, or at all, but you should see most of them are wrong because most of them are mutually contradictory. About the only thing the have in common is an irrational fear of banks, as if banks are breaking into homes and stealing money from single mothers. The signal to noise ratio is very high.

I'm not aware of any book that describes all the major parts of finance in one go, but Warren Buffet's shareholder letters (which have been collected in book form) are a good place to start. He explains so clearly what business is and is not that I think it will arm one with a good signal-to-noise filter. I think the hacker feels that highs, lows, Jim Cramer's screaming, stock charts, naked shorts, uptrends/downtrends, and all that other stuff is a basket of canards, but is unable to articulate this; armed with the knowledge of how and why exactly public corporations work and what their stock is for, he should be ready to use the same patterns of knowledge to tackle the rest of finance.
I didn't say I wanted to use Ruby or Lisp--I was simply denying the parent's point that one would have to "write the graphics libraries from scratch."

Besides, isn't the advice for optimizing every other kind of project:

1. Start in a high-level language

2. Port any bits that profile as slow to a low-level language, and then interface them into your HLL code

Why, all of the sudden, when you're coding a game, is it a better idea to start in the low-level language? Because your team "knows it?" by that argument, all games would still be being developed in assembler, because the most senior members of the team would have more experience with that than any new-fangled language like C++.
"Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers."

SEO is the catch all term for "spreading the word" on the internet (I do some SEO) - we don't limit it to search engine baiting (!) there is a lot more to it.

One can see things very simply - a bit of widget bait, an active forum, a good product, these can all create great inflows of PR and visitors. Then of course you've to optimise your landing pages, ...

SEO is built into the sites I design/write but there's always more one can do. Good inlinks go a long way.

If you build a store away from civilisation and just wait for customers - you may have an awesome enough product and enough capital to sit it out. But, sending a few flyers, issuing a press release, having promotions, a TV advert, some on-street ads, etc. are all going to help.

Ditto building a website - if you build it and your product is awesome I think it'll get out there eventually (probably as a copycat site by someone who pays for some SEO!?!) but using some PPC, gathering good inlinks, being part of an authority link community, getting blog coverage, getting diggs, etc. are all going to help.

Good web dev does include _some_ SEO. But SEO is too big a field for a web developer to do properly by themselves, a web dev team would have an SEO. Like expecting builders to have painter-decorators, if you want trompe-loeil rather than a slap of magnolia then you're going to need a dedicated expert.
Exponential Money in a Finite World
Here's another article from this guy that's been predicting doom and gloom for our economy and our lives: http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/exponential-money-finite-world/29744

What do you think? Is this guy being too serious, or is our economy going to collapse? Are economies all over the world going to collapse? What will happen to us, and so on.
You're right, C++ pretty much has no serious alternatives for games. And not just games, anything that involves computer graphics, physical simulation, computer vision or image processing.

Python is excellent if some good soul has already written a library that does exactly what you need (in C or C++, obviously). The combination of numpy+PyOpenGL+PyCUDA is great for certain kinds of research projects (I have written a volume renderer in it) but probably far from commercial usability.

Haskell has great potential, but the community is too small and too academic to produce the necessary libraries and tools (which is a lot of work with minimal scientific content). The key problem is the absence of an industrial-strength array facility - there are many kinds of arrays in Haskell, all somewhat clunky and incomplete.

D might be a contender, but last time I looked the tools seemed very basic and it did not even support 64-bit systems.
Nice! Well done.
Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich
Does anyone know what the actual real world difference would be like between the Apple 256 GB SSD upgrade and the Intel 160 GB drive that everyone talks about?
Looks like there's some sort of javascript on the article page that redirects you for some reason...
Why would you have to lose the libraries? .so files are .so files; it doesn't matter what language they were written in, as long as they expose an API that can be cleanly wrapped by your own language.
Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality
There's a role for lisp (and prolog) in gaming, but not on the outside.

As an embedded core to sort out a bunch of logic they definitely have their place.
No, I was referring to nytimes.

Please, what information you need? (you have the email)
You won't find any graphics libraries, so you'll have to make them from scratch

Haskell has OpenGL bindings: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Opengl

So does OCaml: http://glcaml.sourceforge.net/
If you let the language trolls on proggit and HN convince you that you must avoid C++ -- particularly whatever 'subset' of C++ scratches your itch with minimal complexity -- you've made a classic pointy haired boss mistake: letting the whims of the crowd make a technical decision for your project.

Don't buy into the nonsense. C++ is a fine language. People have been using it for decades to do real work, and they probably still will be in another two decades, long after Ruby and Haskell and Blub have been discarded as 'archaic' by the next generation of 20-year-old language snobs.
Last time I heard, assembly wasn't considered out of bounds for high performance game programming by any means.
Same here in Norway, I don't pay a nickel for withdrawing money – No matter where I might find myself in the world.

http://sbm.no