skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do Dave&Buster's and Chuck-E-Cheese avoid anti-gambling laws?
At arcades like this, you can often pay to play games which give you tickets depending on how well you do, and then exchange these for items of value, like XBoxes. Kids are allowed to play these games, so they can't legally be considered gambling, but...why not?
This article strikes me as a collection of weakly-defended opinions with no real references or citations on sources of information. I could easily write a post stating the exact opposite point that would read just as well.
run an app that maps similar amount of work to N children and measure the run time ; measure the time needed for compiling [big project] with concurency

These are both the kind of tasks Kolivas is willing to totally throw under the bus for better worst case latency.

Remember, the single goal of the project is to get worst-case latency for all non-cpu-limited processes on the system as low as it possibly can get. Throughput, and even best- and average case latency are considered entirely expendable. This is why the BFS is hard to benchmark.
A Plan For The Hamster Wheel
Survey: 50% of businesses to deploy Windows 7 in first year
52 percent of all money transfers in Kenya now done through Cell Phones
Microsoft book calls for 'data intensive' scientific discovery
How Microsoft won back the loyalty of a Windows 95 fan
> The computer is actually has a von Neumann architecture, that is, they have code and data in the same address space.

The ones that do not are actually pretty rare.

Most of those use the 'harvard architecture' and are DSP style machines.

And then there are vector processors and SIMDs, but even those can be seen as many von Neumann machines running in lock-step.
I'm going to recommend Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts". It will really show you how to get the most out of the language and avoid the nasty pitfalls.

As a side note, I attended a talk by him last night on this topic, and wrote up a summary. For a preview of the book, you may be interested in checking out http://www.felixcrux.com/posts/douglas-crockford-talk-waterl...
I can't find anything about that, it's quite interesting do you have a link ?

edit: found it:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-135319.html
Because he (and to an extent, Spolsky) get a rather large contingency of things wrong. And then I hear people repeat those things, a lot. Even if it totally contradicts their actual experience. "I must be doing it wrong because this guy who has no real experience or projects to recommend him said so." It's dumb.

He's like the Paris Hilton of programming bloggers: he's famous for being famous.

Outside of that, he seems like a nice guy. And Stack Overflow is a tremendous project. I just think his blog is a dangerous cesspool of ignorance sometimes.
Can you give a little more detail on Compass' CSS hooks and how you're using them, please?
The key question is, "When did open source take it and run with it?" After 1995 Microsoft came back, quickly won the browser war, and was putting together their server strategy.

I argue that 1998 was the key year. Here are some highlights. In Feb the term Open Source was created. In April Netscape open sourced Mozilla. In May the Microsoft antitrust case began. In June IBM announced support for Apache. In July both Oracle and Informix announced support for Linux. And in the same month we got the first truly mainstream press coverage of Linux that I'm aware of, Forbes Magazine ran Linus on the cover, and had a good article discussing open source. (Wonderful goodwill that they later destroyed with their horrible SCO reporting.)

I submit that had the lawsuit not started in May, then we would not have had the big announcements from Informix, Oracle and IBM. And during that explosion we would have seen dirty tricks from Microsoft to leverage their browser market into controlling the server as well.
Apple is never going to expose straightforward background processes, as it's way too late to switch to a Pre-style 'card' model that would make it natural. Fortunately there's a solution that's complimentary to the "no background processes" restriction that I'm sure some cretins at Apple have at least mocked up, if not implemented:

They just need to expose specific interfaces to launchd (Apple's clever init/rc/cron/xinet replacement), for doing particular kinds of local notifications. An app could register (with user confirmation) that it wants to have a limited helper run when an event has occurred: cron-style schedules, at-style timers, "Moved more than X meters", "Am near X:Y", etc. The registrations would be managed just like with the current push notifications.

With that, there'd be only a few other APIs needed to absolve the want for background processes. The ability to enqueue HTTP requests would make quite a number of apps friendlier to multitasking, and its already implemented privately in MobileSafari. The ability to play audio in the background would be huge, especially combined with queued HTTP requests, but I suspect that it'd be a lot harder to squeeze out of Apple.
The various Android handset makers are not only competing against RIM & Apple but also with each other. A good UI is a huge competitive edge. It would be interesting to see HTC for example offer their UI on the Android market place for any handset. I wonder if that's something Google would allow into the catalog?
I just have to nitpick here: Strong typing is always a good feature, and weak typing is always a bad one.

Now, whether the types should be dynamic or static, is entirely up to the situation and what kind of system you are building.
This is unlikely to be coincidence. Among other things, Brian Fox was the first person ever hired by the FSF.
Could you take this idea and use it to boost perceptions of a skill that you're not good at by introducing yourself with some other, completely unrelated skill that you are good at.

Say for example I want to get a job programming Erlang. Now my Erlang isn't very good, and let's say I'm not much of a programmer at all, but I'm an excellent photographer. When I apply for a job, instead of leading with my technical skills, I start with my hobbies and include some really nice 8 X 10 glossies of some of my work. I then talk about my technical skills. If the recruiter is impressed with my artwork, would they see my other short comings in a better light? What do you think - is it worth an experiment or two?
Jeremy Keith's "Dom Scripting" is a pretty good guide for getting up to speed with the basics of good JavaScript coding. If you want to transition to something more advanced later, I'd suggest "Pro JavaScript Design Patterns" by Dustin Diaz.
I use a mixture of cURL and PHP's DOM and simpleXML functions to scrape what I need.
JOP: A Tiny Java Processor Core for FPGA
DASH Robot Can Fall Off a 28m Building and Keep Running
I read most of my books, first time through, on the computer.

Reading is a discipline. Reading well partly means ignoring, or eliminating distractions.

If you're truly interested in attaining as much information possible, then e-books are miraculous tools. Learn to love them. You can search for words or phrases. And you can comfortably switch pages in a fraction of the time than what would be needed with a physical book.

You should go through every good book at least twice. First time, using an ebook. If the book deserves a second read, then buy the physical book and go through it with a pen in your hand.
I was in the same shoes as you were. I really enjoyed Javascript & AJAX 7th ed. by Negrino & Smith. It's an easy read and has great examples. It nicely builds up from simple javascript to DOM manipulation, JSON, AJAX, and ends with a brief touch up on javascript frameworks.

As I was reading this book at the same time I set myself a goal to build a simple implementation of Lightbox without using Jquery or any framework. As I read more, the easier it became. So as you read, you might want to choose something to construct to practice and fully understand what you're reading.

A great continuation for it was Pro Javascript Techniques by John Resig.
The point I was trying to make wasn't about C++, it was that the article starts with a question it never answers.

It would be a more honest opening to just say "lots of smart people hate C++", and then proceeded with the examples.

Instead, it pretends like it is going to answer the question of why it is so popular in spite of being widely reviled, but then never touches on that.

edit: grammar
mobile stylesheet, plz!
It's a play on words, but I believe "priced in dollars" means oil payments made in dollars. In other words, the currency you need to have on hand to trade with. See the article linked below:

Excerpt: "Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India."

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2009/gb2009...

Also, Saddam Hussein was threatening to take payments for oil in euros...
Meh.. Consolas better
The key is that for gambling to be gambling the element of skill has to be less important than the element of chance.

Otherwise it is a game of skill, not of chance.

So, lottery -> 0 skill -> game of chance

As soon as you get above a certain threshold of being able to influence the outcome of the game it is considered a game of skill.

good article here, apologies for the ad (just click 'skip'):

http://www.phoneplusmag.com/articles/361FEAT4.html
What you're missing here is that Google has built its own network with large global reach using dark fiber. Almost everybody will peer with a party like Google if they pop up at the local exchange.

By doing this Google can skip most of the usual transit bandwidth tax, which is where most of the money traditionally goes to if you're sending massive amounts of data to end-users.
the crockford book is really good, but in reality the best thing is practice. javascript is a tricky language, and crockford helps to simplify it, but you can get a lot of practical knowledge on how to use the language and jquery just by practicing a lot (sorry). but read crockford too :P

also heard an oreilly cookbook for js is coming out soon, may be worth looking into if youre into those.
There's Jazelle for ARM, it's essentially a instruction overlay that makes the cpu execute all simple and common java bytecodes directly, and call a kernel function for all the hard ones.

However, even that is dying -- it is being replaced by the thumbEE, which is a more generic instruction set designed for efficient code generation from intermediate dynamic code.
There's nothing wrong with continuing to use jQuery. In fact, there is actually something wrong with "hand-coding" things for the sake of avoiding jQuery. Spend your time where it will make a difference.
Amen, sister! (In)consolas, sans serif, beautiful.
If it's not fit for your purposes, fine. Don't use it.
My biggest problem with ImageMagick is the command-line API. I never use it enough to learn it off by heart, but it's not intuitive enough to quickly pick up again when I need it.

Unfortunately, GraphicsMagick seems to use the same paradigm, so from my perspective, it isn't better at all.

Can anyone suggest any other libraries?
What you're saying might be true, but some of us, like me, like to understand what's under the hood. Learning javascript from scratch, in my opinion, is a great way to fully take advantage of what javascript has to offer.
Working with people who are "strategically incompetent" is a nightmare. Don't do this.
Education Inflation
It's kind of ironic that you are mentioning Jeff as being a troll considering the overall tone of your comment.
Aah, Frontpage Extensions, I remember those.
I learned a good lesson too.

When I was a management trainee, my training manager abandoned me (physically left). I was two people short, meaning I was dealing with drive through (taking orders, filling orders, and taking money) and making the food. The dude at the fry station, it was his very first day. Oh, and it was lunch.

I made a mistake and the customer contacted the franchise owner about it. I'm guessing she yelled pretty loud because I lost my position, even after explaining what happened.

Actually, I don't know what the lesson was.... needless to say, I got out of there. I don't miss being a teenager.

The whole thing still bugs the hell out of me, like I somehow went up against three destructive forces and I still can't make sense of any of it.
It does, but I didn't like it as much as some of the other options in the app store.
Except that if oil is priced in dollars and you have a dollar printing factory then oil is effectively free to you.

If my ISP accepted pictures of my cat rather than insisting on pictures of president Jackson it would make a big difference to me.
Programmer slip-up produces critical bug, Microsoft admits
I agree with you -- not everyone has to code. I am not against non-technical founders at all. The great nontech cofounders are people who can either design or hustle with the best of them. Those are the phenomenal non-technical cofounders.

Note: MBA does not a hustler make. MBAs are made to be great at working for others in larger organizations. But getting an MBA does not preclude hustle, nor value to a startup.
Kevin Warwick?

http://www.kevinwarwick.com/
Oh, I agree, but it would be cool :)
It's not a hobby if you intend to make a living.
Some really interesting ideas that are close enough to what I already do that I might well try them. Working to no schedule would be brilliant if I could pull it off, but I worry that as a mix of coder and pointy haired suited type, my conflicting need to fit in with the rest of the world's "let's meet in two weeks' time at 3pm" and desire to have things just happen will lead to frustration rather than fulfillment.

Only doing things that both your head and heart say yes to - yes. Once I started doing this and followed a piece of advice passed down by a fellow entrepreneur - "You don't have to do anything" - my load felt so much lighter. Why was I wasting time? God knows.

The phone/voicemail checking doesn't really for me, though (whether that's a UK thing or not I don't know). I tend to do this automatically for unknown numbers since I get plenty of calls I don't need to take; I also forget my phone far too often. Instead I get nagging emails, or worse, someone recently emailed my cofounder since I didn't answer the phone. They had my email address. I don't get that.

Strategic incompetence, though, seems too close to passive aggressive workplace politics (I don't want to organise the office party so I'll just balls it up..) to my liking.
Maybe this will finally shame US banks into removing fees for wire transfers...
Interesting. Which ones?
I would honestly recommend reading through some of the code and trying to figure out what it's doing. Find a function in jQuery you use all of the time and figure out how it accomplishes it's goal. Also, John Resig has a decent (albeit may miss some of the points you'll need) tutorial application: http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/

(Edit: I'd also recommend any time you need anything, look to see if it exists first regardless of how small it is. And http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/ will help you enormously.)

As far as AJAX, I'd recommend to just understand how it SHOULD work. Understand what the Xhrconn object you have should contain and what you should be able to retrieve from the "raw" object if you need to do so. Trying to understand where it fails in IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera is overkill (there are so many little bugs!).
I find more and more recently I'm not just procrastinating in parallel but generally working in parallel. I'll switch from task to task and keep forgetting what I was doing, go back to a tab and realise I've left something half-done, walk through my office on the way to the toilet and sit down and do the crossword instead... I actually feel like an absent-minded professor!

I can't really figure out why I've started doing this or quite how to stop it; it feels a bit like those Choose Your Own Adventure books where I used to skip ahead to see if certain choices would end up with death, end up with about ten branching paths (I couldn't mark any more than ten pages with fingers!), then collapse the paths one by one. I ultimately do get everything done and marvel at it, but the sheer bamboozlement I face when realising I've "done it again" is getting annoying.
UI's like that are not applications; they are actually built into the core of Android. Changing system themes, even on a rooted phone, requires downloading an image specific to the ROM you're running, and flashing that over top of your current ROM. Changing to another theme, or reverting to the standard theme, requires re-flashing your phone every time.

That said, I would love to see installable themes where the user can download/select/apply multiple themes on the fly without flashing/rebooting their phone, but at the moment, I think it's a result of Android taking the simple/efficient route for implementation.
If the Higgs really does kill everybody, the anthropic principle should make it impossible to create. Which would be pretty cool, but- Friends don't let friends prove the theory of Quantum Immortality.
They are pretty much the same, but GraphicsMagick's big CLI improvement over ImageMagick is that everything's based off an executable called 'gm'. IM's horribly generic 'convert' becomes 'gm convert', etc.

I'm not going to defend their CLIs beyond that though. The fact that 'mogrify' modifies an image file in-place and 'convert' doesn't has bitten me more than once.
This is excellent advice.

Answering e-mail twice a day and leaving the inbox empty every time is crucial to email productivity. It's obvious how it saves time - the more you answer emails, the more people reply. So you end up sending three times as much email each day as you would have if you only answered twice a day. You do more "work" but get less done. On the other hand, answering email twice a day gets things done and keeps your mind clear.
I submit that had the lawsuit not started in May, then we would not have had the big announcements from Informix, Oracle and IBM. And during that explosion we would have seen dirty tricks from Microsoft to leverage their browser market into controlling the server as well.

Of course, it's precisely their habit of using dirty tricks to force their way into new markets that got them into legal trouble in the first place, so there you go.

On the other hand, Microsoft can do excellent work when faced with real competition, so in a counterfactual world where they never abused their monopoly position they may have won the browser and server markets anyway.
>done just as nice with a properly named function call.

So instead of view = projection * model; you would prefer.

view.SetVector(Multiply3x3matrixWith3x1Vector(projection.GetMatrix(),model.GetVector());

Should we allow floats an doubles to be multiplied with a'*' or should that use properly named classes
I remember a post on here a while back that suggested that YouTube costs Google about $1.6 million per day. :D
Good to hear! It's an excellent book.
> Except that if oil is priced in dollars and you have a dollar printing factory then oil is effectively free to you.

That's not exactly how it works (although that edge helps keep our oil cheap). The more money that is in circulation (printed) the less value to each person that holds it. Imagine a game of Monopoly where everybody had as much money as the Bank; nobody would have much spending power. When this happens in the real world, such as the 90's in Argentina, in Zimbabwe, and elsewhere throughout history, it's called hyperinflation. The U.S. has uniquely been able to get away with excessive printing because of the dollar hegemony, a good credit rating - "backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. governement" - from having a stable government, and dominating the world economy. But we're not invincible... even Rome fell.
Er. While I don't think that all applications should be constructed using C (I'm a fan of Clojure, JS, Python), clearly Apple'c choice of going with C (or a minor variation of C, Objective-C) has paid off in spades.

By innovating on C they have a fairly expressive and extremely performant application language. By adding blocks Apple has added a useful higher level construct as well as an excellent tool when writing concurrent applications without the burden of locks.

Considering the fact that the iPhone is largely built on C, I would hardly call it the "wrong language for entire applications".
right, but with millions of transactions a day this serves to boost aggregate demand for dollars, since currency is constantly being traded into it for a commodity which is then consumed.
The DevoLab at Michigan State University is doing ongoing work in this area. At least one researcher (Jeff Clune) is looking at evolving generative encodings for neural networks, using the gait of virtual creatures as a sample problem.

http://devolab.msu.edu
I like to go through past puzzles from the Informatics Olympiad (http://www.olympiad.org.uk/) for a more theoretical less programmy type of challenge.
Actually, Kolivas states in the FAQ that compiling in particular is measured to be significantly faster with BFS:

"For years we've been doing our workloads on linux to have more work than we had CPUs because we thought that the "jobservers" were limited in their ability to utilise the CPUs effectively (so we did make -j6 or more on a quad core machine for example). This scheduler proves that the jobservers weren't at fault at all, because make -j4 on a quad core machine with BFS is faster than any choice of job numbers on CFS." [1]

[1] http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/bfs-faq.txt
The trick, with something like jQuery, is to learn enough to begin to understand why you're lucky you didn't have to implement it yourself.

At that point you stop, thank the deity of your choice for the existence of people who abstract away browser incompatibility so you don't have to worry about it, and move on to something else.
I got an HTC Hero this week and love it! Haven't had any problems :)
That is my other likely theory. The kernel could just be crawling in a hole and staying there for a while.
>> One dangerous assumption in the hoteling model is that there are no costs to changing your position

location cost is not really necessary. think of this as a game that the ice cream sellers play before they locate. they figure, where do i place my hut to get the most business? it's at the center, no matter how many operators there are.

>> another unrealistic assumption: there are only two players

doesn't matter how many players there are. suppose there's one ice cream guy. where is he going to put his ice cream hut? in the center. let's say another one shows up. where is he going to put his hut? in the center. the logic repeats.

>> A third assumption is that it is a one dimensional world or that consumers judge choices only along one spectrum

yeah, this is a model for a perfectly competitive market. ice cream is a good example, as well as gas stations. this model is probably bad for products with lots of differentiation.
I'm imagining a really hard arcade game which costs a dollar to play, and if you win, you get a million dollars and the game can never be played again by anybody. The business makes money from players as they try to up their skill, and nets everything at the end minus the reward.