skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which is why nobody plays single-player FPS games anymore and everyone loves GTA even in single-player mode.

Being hand-held from one cutscene to the next is not playing a video game.
Depends on how they respond.

If I write "I'm finding $productA obnoxious because of $foo; any suggestions for a replacement?", and I get an automated tweet about $productB that shows no signs of actually solving my problem, then yeah, that's spam.

On the other hand, if I got a human reading my tweet (whether they found it automatically or not) and responding with "You might try our $productB; we've solved $foo by doing ...; see $url", then I wouldn't mind seeing that, because they've actually offered me a solution to the exact problem I was complaining about.
Exactly my point. How do you reconcile the idea of rebase "should not be" used vs "a merge should only occur to merge a finalized branch in".

I'm on your side. My objection was to the latter statement, not the former. The basis of my objection to the former was (in part) because of the problems with rebasing when a branch is distributed. The idea that the only merges that occur are merges of finalized branches seemed very naive to me.
Newer versions of Windows include BitLocker which provides full disk encryption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitLocker
There was some talk about how BitLocker in newer versions of windows removed an "elephant diffuser" component or something, was that ever explained properly?
Startup success is, to a great extent, about good timing
This is what synthetic biology can do. Instead of taking on challenging chemistry routes to produce ever more exotic small molecules [1] which we then bathe an entire organism in, in the hopes it rubs against the HIV proteins in a way that disrupts them, synthetic biology intelligently repurposes the machinery already in place in one's body to accomplish a slightly different task. This is a primitive, if seemingly effective example.

Here, a decoy was created. It's the same set or proteins that HIV binds to in order to gain access to human cells. But the proteins are only tiny chunks from the original and are floating around on their own rather than acting as the keys to the cell. Not all that different from redirecting a heat seeking missile with a bunch of flares. But because the 'flares' are actually identical (in part) to the real proteins in a human, were HIV to mutate away from being able to bind to those chunks it too would become less virulent when attacking the real proteins. And if the strategy is effective, it takes less than a week of labwork to design and produce another similar tactic - very much unlike the small molecule variety.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenofovir
I'm not in a position to ditch Word, but I am happy to hear that there is a more robust alternative for numbered paragraphs with multiple sub-levels. Word appears to get confused when paragraphs change sub-levels.
Also: speaking in no "official" capacity whatsoever, I'd advise you to stay away from the forks of Truecrypt.

Unless something new has come to light since last I looked, the licensing situation on the TC code is weird:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/distributions/2008-Oct...

... which means there is a pretty strong disincentive for people with serious crypto and systems expertise to invest their time and energy building on it. You don't want to trust crypto platforms with built-in adverse selection problems.
I've tried to play Vogel's games lately (I own them all on steam) but I just don't have the time and focus like I used to for enjoying them. It makes me sad. I played the Exile series over a few years in high school, long hours of my summer spent in his amazing world. I think maybe I can't recapture that magical feeling of the first time I played them, so the newer ones just don't seem the same to me.

I wish Blades of Avernum had done better. Blades of Exile was one of my favorite games. There were some community scenarios that were just so amazingly good. I think if I'd had some way to port them over as well it would have worked out a lot better.
Glad you finally agree about the FDIC. Maybe I'll create an account for each thread on HN and start calling people names, since that seems to be popular now.
> I'm guessing it's a lost art because available system memory is much larger

This is true, but locality also matters a lot more these days. Minimizing padding keeps more of your structs in a single cache line. That means doing this not only makes your program use less memory, but it can also be faster, in some cases significantly.

> many programs are written in other languages these days.

True, but most of those languages or their VMs are themselves written in C, so it still matters at some point. :)
Arab Hackers Conduct Two Malware Operations Against Israeli, Egyptian Targets
Yup. In his reddit AMA a year or so ago, he said he hasn't hired a sound designer, so he buys sounds from stock packs.
I see. Do you post street art from Instagram because that's just what IFTTT can work with? I have tried Zapier automation service to repost from my Tumblr blog to social network groups. Not sure if it attracted anyone.
s/Contiguous/Continuous/

Although Contiguous Integration sounds intriguing.
Yeah, I think the issue is that we're not willing to do this. Japan and Germany remained peaceful for a number of reasons. First of all, they knew that they had lost, and lost hard: their cities were in ruins; many of their leaders were dead; a large portion of their populations were dead; and huge numbers of foreigners were occupying their nations, making decisions on their behalf with little consultation. Psychologically, they were cowed.

Secondly, there was still an external existential threat: the Soviet Union (or, for the East Germans, the West). We were considered the lesser of evils, so they were more willing to do our bidding.

We won't reproduce these conditions: we're not going to shatter cities and decimate populations (there's also generally no other existential threat). That's morally good, but it makes successful nation-building much more difficult, or impossible.

We should carefully consider if, given that we won't do what it takes to succeed at a task, it makes sense to attempt it anyway.
Not only did they find a molecule that binds to the HIV virus like an antibody, they manipulated another virus to produce that molecule. Very impressive.

"Farzan’s team stitched the gene for eCD4-Ig into an adeno-associated virus (AAV) that is harmless to humans. Those viruses, injected into monkey muscles, continued to produce eCD4-Ig for the 40 weeks of the experiment. “Everyone expects with AAV that this can go on forever,” Farzan says."
That is not standard C but a GCC extension, although clang probably supports it.
Really the thing that is/was cool about Yik Yak is how unfiltered it was. Facebook has all these algorithms to see who sees what and when, but Yik Yak just worked like a localized 4chan with simple voting. This doesn't really help that image (but also come on what an awful way to "prevent spam")
Surely this is a matter of personal taste / opinion -- I actually prefer when different sites have different designs. For example, I don't like RSS readers that put all content into the same format, and prefer ones that just link to the articles so I can read things in the context of the site's design (as the author wants it, not me).

And I think the diamonds next to the hyperlinks on this article is a neat design flourish (because it is still intuitive and usable... although admittedly most other designs that do away with the standard underlined text are a usability loss).
"EDGE" may be a better term in that case... meaning it may cut you... there's risk... "CURRENT" to me brings a thought of, okay, it's current and up to date (safe from known exploits).
The "diffuser" was an attempt to provide last-ditch data integrity for a system that is fundamentally incapable of providing real data integrity. XTS doesn't provide integrity either.

Long story short: that change does not matter much.
You shouldn't implement HMAC yourself, of course. I repeat: you should not do this.

However, if you read Wikipedia on HMAC, you'll find that HMAC is in fact probably one of the easier crypto primitives to understand and implement (as a TOY project). As long as you do the padding thing exactly as specified.

But really, use a library.
Poires Au Vin Rouge – Pears in Red Wine
I think that both of those are valid ideas, and that neither should be encoded it law; it should be up to the shareholders which they prefer to pursue.
I've used the StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice line for a decade. The last Microsoft Office product I purchased was Word 97, and I ditched that when I retired the Windows 2000 machine.

That said, LibreOffice is still too buggy for a 10-year-old product. The article says "Writer has a couple of instabilities under Windows, such as locking up if a new document isn't saved within a few minutes." That's pathetic.

LibreOffice .doc import/export almost works now. You can usually import a Microsoft Word document, although the margins are often wrong.
The 'tool' seems stupid (every minute if post contains 'fade' downvote), but im genuinely curious - are there any rules against this kind of censoring? The article made it sound like this was a bit of scandal, but is there anything more to it than bad form?

Also Fade's notYikYak thing seems pretty juvenile.
Sure, but Yik Yak could have had a "report spam" option, or made users type captchas, or reversed down votes if it saw other people gave attention to the post. I can think of a million ways that would be better than what they implemented.
One in every thousand tweets is porn
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the problem with Soviet Union Communism, not Marxism

"Communism" was the name of the system Marx advocated (the title of his work with Engels is The Communist Manifesto.)

Now, Soviet Communism is distinct from Marx's Communism in that it is based in Leninist vanguardism, which still calls itself Marxist, but radically departs from Marxism in a number of ways, both in terms of understood preconditions and program, in order to address the fact that Russia was not an developed capitalist society of the type Marx's theory was based in.
The problem with emergence in MMOs is that once an emergent trick is found, it becomes an exploit, and then the emergent behavior has to be eliminated somehow, for the good of the game.

For example, in the MMO I am creating, you can catch bats, hold them for a while, and then they become your pets (if you don't hold them long enough, they remain wild). Some people gathered up hundreds of bats, then released them in a small room. When other players came into that room, they were swarmed and die. After letting the trap sit for a while, they would return, cast a fear spell to disperse the bats, and then collect the loot.

It was a cool trick, and probably super fun for the players involved. But, if I left the exploit in, it would be happening all the time, and would wreck the game for everyone else. In single player games, the worst a player can do is beat the game using an exploit, which is not necessarily bad.
This is beautiful! Great job!

I have a minor complaint. When I zoom in, the rate at which the globe is rotated does not seem to scale down adequately -- a few pixels, and what I was trying to zoom in on (e.g., Hawaii) zips off the screen. It feels like my mouse dragging is setting a wheel spinning, and it doesn't stop when I let go.
That is the primary reason I keep office around for as well. No alternative offers decent footnotes / endnotes / reference without going to latex (that I have found). For something as simple as a two page paper for an undergrad class, I do not want have to use latex just to get footnotes done correctly. I would be interested to know if the latest version actually does any better.
I think the key was full disk encryption. I _think_ XP supported individual file encryption.
What I miss, probably more as a PowerPoint competitor, is a Visual Studio/WPF-style editor with WYSIWYG and mark-up side by side.

I don't even want to think about the amount of time I spent trying to select some text I want to edit, buried under other transparent layers or empty, invisible boxes. It would make it also very easy to introduce dynamic references in the text of a textbox in powerpoint (something currently impossible!).

It wouldn't hurt the basic experience for normal users and would make PowerPoint infinitely more powerful for advanced users.

Word is less visual but this side by side approach would also be very useful. Particularly since a lot of the visual formatting is "invisible" in a WYSIWYG editor.
What kind of data are you pulling? Have you tried scraping the subreddit RSS feeds?
I don't think (s)he meant sorted alphabetically, but rather, sorted in such a way as to minimize memory usage, ie: packed.

This is obviously not the default in C, but can be enabled via compiler extensions. It's also important that the compiler doesn't automatically do this since structs of the same type can be of different sizes. In order for this to work, the memory layout needs to be as originally defined in order to be correct. For an example of this see the simple dynamic string library used in redis.
Good luck!

I released an indie game in 1994. Three of us worked on it and two of us had high pressure jobs by the time it shipped (we'd worked on the bulk of the game in easier times). For its time, the game was pretty successful but it didn't make us very much money and so we went on to more lucrative pastures.

It's very tough just to get noticed -- and it's far harder now. We were in Australia at the time, the web pretty much didn't exist (we released initially as shareware, later as "commercial", although the shareware release made us more money).
Those are all C++ compiler options.
Either the BBCs "content" is good enough to win out, or it's not. The way that content is presented is of little concern. The BBC website of years ago works just fine.

You've really shown your biases in that statement...
UI looks good, you've got some real work left for functionality though.. Also, congrats on your first awesome design!
85 Years After Pluto’s Discovery, New Horizons Spots Small Moons Orbiting Pluto
Not as an open-source feature though. I am happy with dm-crypt on Linux, but surely the Windows and MacOS built-in encryption methods are not to be trusted by people who might be targeted by the state?
Gcc and clang both have -Wpadded. It's not in -Wall or -Wextra though.
The travel time between any 2 airports is random and increasing the speed value just makes that random value smaller in general. I liked the way it looked at fast and slow speeds so I figured it was worth adding an option.
How visible would this have been in the night sky?
Given that... wouldn't -DEV or -EDGE or -UNSTABLE make more sense?
I'm curious about autoresponders. The landing page says that you can setup an initial autoresponder which is great, but to get the most out of email marketing you need to setup a series of autoresponders to guide customers through things.

So am I able to do that?

Also, can I have multiple lists or do I need a separate account for each list?
I am the founder of SendOwl and this is not a project by us. It's clearly ripped off our brand though. Will be getting in touch with them to discuss the matter immediately.
Using Augmented Reality Code for a Better Stretch Gesture
I use Instagram because the sheer number of photos posted daily and the geotagged meta data.
I've actually had a question about this on my programming interview for a games development company. And yes, I have had to use it several times since. So no, the art is definitely not lost :-)
>As balance improved fun went down.

I don't think balance ruined WoW, I think it was that Blizzard just kept dumbing it down.

Once they decided that every single player gets to do every single thing in the game it was ruined because you have to make everything so accessible. I remember killing C'Thun... we had a diagram on where to stand, responsibilities for which stalks to kill and in which order, hell, even running into the room wrong could wipe the raid. We were the only guild on the server who could clear AQ40. It was challenging and it was fun. Now 25 strangers can queue up in raid finder and just mow down every boss, usually without even knowing a strat. Just move out of the fire and cycle your 3 buttons.

All of the complexity has been relentlessly striped out of Wow. What's left is a game where you can logon, join a raid, kill the biggest boss in the game, and logoff all within an hour or so.

They took chess and turned it into tic-tac-toe.
Curiously enough, oftentimes the delivery mechanism for many of these genetic tools is the HIV scaffolding itself. It's very good at what it does - and delivering genetic payloads is one of them. Strip it entirely of its ability to be infectious and you have a very functional delivery mechanism.
Question: I originally heard HTTP/2 would force TLS and have it baked into the protocol. Is this still the case? If so, is this going to be strictly enforced? I think it's a really terrible idea to melt a protocol and a transport together. Or am I misunderstanding how it works?
We simply don't apologise for jumping ship from MS Word. For us, the productivity gains have been irresistible.

That's awesome. I wish I could. I'm a technical writing consultant who does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (www.seliger.com if you're curious), and everything we get from clients and public agencies is a Word or Excel file. Everything we send out has to be in the same formats.

We're in a situation similar to the graphic designers and photographers and so on who say that everything they take in and send out has to be Photoshop / InDesign / etc. compatible. The industry has standardized around these programs and formats and perfect compatibility is mandatory.

LibreOffice is great. I've mentioned it in class (I adjunct on the side), but I can't use it.
Since last year.

They were spun off as an independent company, but Advance Publications still has a large amount of equity in Reddit. I think it's because Reddit wanted to try a bunch of things that were too risky for AP.
Mapping the Most Stressful Places in Life to Figure Out How Stress Is Killing Us
The 17 emails we send to engage customers, reduce churn and increase revenue
Nothing makes my blood boil more than Nathan Myhrvold's weird justifications for his behavior. It all sounds plausible, maybe even admirable, and then he turns around and funds 'inventors' that have patents for absolute malarkey. At this point, I hope he is ONLY remembered for being a troll and nothing else.

Once people make it to the top, they almost always try to change the rules so no one can follow in their footsteps. "Well, yes, that was okay for me, but you are going to have to make it on your own, kiddo."

Establishing a capital market for inventions sounds like a great idea, but it is predicated on the notion that the patent office is not asleep at the wheel. Person-in-garage-invents-life-changing-technology is a great trope, but where the rubber meets the road we have the Eolas patent and various "using a computer or network of computers" patents.
It seemed a bit better with my bose headset, but still was quite lacking.
Heh, gotta love the folks downvoting anyone who criticizes Google. ;) Real classy, folks.
Ping me if you decide to do it, maybe we can join forces, I've started working on the basics over here, @farhad_hf on twitter.
One of the things I liked about BG was that it faithfully implemented all kinds of loopholes in the AD&D rules (which have since been "balanced" more-or-less out of existence). E.g. the optimal way to create magic users was as two-classed (indeed the female character you pick up is designed to be turned into a two-classed mage). So you go to level 5, say, as a warrior, then switch to mage (starting at level 1 all over again, but with warrior hit points).
People have given a surprising amount of thought into how you could move a star:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
Just playing devil's advocate here, your assumption is that Michael's goals are to master a topic and to gain depth. What if his primary goals are to discover new ideas that he never knew before?
Danger Java8 can leave files open if you are not careful
Years ago I worked on a few projects that used complicated structure ordering, but even then it was my understanding that (with the right options) compilers could optimize these things better than most people could by hand.
IMHO it all boils down to habit

No—it boils down to network effects and coordination. As I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9069761 , in my business we use MS Office, our clients do, and funding agencies do. There is no easy or simple way to move everyone from MS Office to an alternative simultaneously. So it doesn't happen.

People who never or very rarely need to do document interchange may be okay with Google Docs or LibreOffice, but people who interchange complex documents on a regular basis must use MS Office.
I find this a very strange response: "this technique doesn't work if I have to comply with an external standard." Fine, then don't use the technique.

Although, I believe the more common approach is to define two structs: one using the packed standardized layout, and one using a layout more suited for whatever you're actually doing. In that case, you may wish to consider sorting the elements by size and alignment for the internal use-only layout.
Why does it blow for you? If the compiler can do it automatically, that seems very useful.

Or is it doing it suboptimally? (Say you want two fields in the same cache line, but the compiler sorts them away.)
What difficulties are you having with footnotes? I just finished working on a 200 and something page document in LibreOffice 4.3, with multiple footnotes on most pages (and mildly complicated things like re-starting the numbering for each chapter), and working with footnotes seemed pretty straightforward. I'd be interested to find out how your (and the parent poster's) experience differed from mine.
Real-Time Analytics at Pinterest with MemSQL and Spark
Docker in Action – Fitter, Happier, More Productive
Public transit is pretty good in MSP. Rent for homes is also reasonable. Schools are decent. And the commutes are not terrible if you do need to drive.

I moved from Sunnyvale to Chicago suburb cause I could not afford it anymore with a second kid on the way. Yes I do make less, it goes way farther though.

I'll bite my tongue about the perceived skill gap. It's been eye opening to read what some of my peers think on HN today.
By public branch he means something like "master", a branch where we (developers) are using, public to the team. this is not about open-sourcing your code.

Feature branches are throw-away, this is a big part of the zen of Git.
I have coworkers whose official job title is one that involves programming and they are bad at it. I shouldn't speak for myself, but it's not that simple. If you continuously strive to advance, it means constant learning, and most people I see really can't or won't learn like that.
YapQ app is a threat to national security – Iran says
A few times in the past I've taken a hard drive out of a failed computer and retrieved data from it on another computer. Sometimes this was cross-platform, reading Windows data on a Linux machine.

I haven't had to do this often, but the times I have had to do it, it's been a lifesaver.

Any advice, apart from keeping better backups so I don't have to do any cross-platform data recovery?
Mors Medicina: Cannibalistic Healing Practices (2013)