dnos

I wonder if a statistics-based cheating detection system could work in more of the esports style games? Chess.com seems to have a pretty good method to detect cheaters based on analysis of post-game data: https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-com-fair-play-and-c...

Even in something like an FPS, if player movements or action patterns could be compared to normal patterns, it would be incredibly obvious who is cheating regardless of HOW the player managed to cheat.

Even something as elaborate as a full AI-powered robot that physically hit the keys could be detected when it made a move that was not within the patterns of human players.

Of course, the cat and mouse game then becomes more about the cheat algorithms learning to act more human to avoid detection, but they have a long way to go. Plus, each time they have to adjust and become more human, the less and less of an advantage the cheater has!

Gotta love "net send".

I just recently watched an old episode of The Screensavers from 2002 where Kevin Rose talked about potential spam abuse of computers connected to the internet with the service enabled.

If you got some nostalgia from this Winpopup post, it's definitely worth watching! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNUhIy78Ro

Thanks for mentioning mermaid.js. I am bookmarking this and excited to try it.

I’ve always loved https://sequencediagram.org for creating sequence diagrams with text (highly recommend btw), but have also wanted to create other diagram types in a similar manner. Mermaid.js looks super intriguing.

Indeed. To expand to help save time for someone else:

“Retail sales increased 3.1 percent from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24 compared with the same period a year earlier”

What that means, if anything on its own, is up for debate.

Yes, I was thinking the same. I am super curious about what functionality in this could be used for sound generation.

It even looks like a full synthesizer. When I first saw the pictures, I thought it was some weird version of an EMS VCS 3 synth — which coincidentally is also from 1969!

In addition, six human genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig…

Oh my. This is quite an achievement but also shocking to me the extent of gene editing performed.

Super intriguing. I don't really know much about FPGAs, but the idea of using them to essentially clone old gaming system CPUs is flat out awesome. I assume that theoretically this would be identical to original hardware, unlike emulating it in software?

This Pocket device looks like a well made product. I wish all the best to this endeavor -- if nothing else just for helping preserve gaming history and letting people (more accurately) play older games.

The idea of creating computers out of virtual objects has always fascinated me since I first saw someone do it in Minecraft.

It really brings up some interesting scenarios that I like to day dream about sometimes.

For instance, in a real world simulation, you could build a processor with a gazillion transistors because you don’t have to worry about the same physical limitations like size or heat. Could it take an input and compute an output faster than something in the real world?

Would you be bound by the speed of light in the virtual world? You control the physics in your virtual world, so technically nothing prevents it right? Information can travel faster than the speed of light relative to your virtual objects. Say you model the earth at 1:1 scale in the simulation and have avatars on complete opposite sides of earth. They could exchange messages faster than they could in the real world since the information wouldn’t have to physically travel across physical space. (e.g. send message directly to memory address X instead of sending light through fiber optic physics simulator).

Essentially, in a simulation of the physical world that has tweaked physics, could information be processed faster than the processor running the simulation?

Is there some sort of conservation of energy law, but for information?

Great article that brought back some fond memories of the Sega Channel. As a young teenager when we got it, I was in awe of the technology and wondered how it worked and why something like it didn’t exist for the computer. Not having to tie up a phone line AND it was even faster! Loading it up for the first time really felt like it was magic and world-changing.

Interestingly enough, later on when cable modems came out in my city, you still had to use a phone line for the up channel. The Sega Channel still seemed superior to what PCs had and always wondered how they pulled it off. So, it’s neat today learning how it worked!

The Sega Channel was definitely too late though. The Genesis was old and I swear it seemed like the PlayStation came out a short few weeks after we got it. Of course, that was its own type of magic that felt world-changing when powering it on the first time. ;)

To be honest, I think he is more of a musician’s musician and a bit hard to “get”.

Outside the artistic creativity itself, I find his music more enjoyable by recognizing the craftsmanship and musicianship required to create his unique sounds and rhythms. Once you realize it’s not just random noises, perhaps some of the songs may speak to you like I found.

If you have ever tried creating electronic music with drum machines, synthesizers, midi loopers, etc, it would be a lot easier to appreciate his music I think.

Maybe similar to say, free jazz? If you don’t appreciate or understand the nuances, I doubt you’d enjoy listening to it.

I’m on mobile or I’d research, but I’m sure there are some great videos on YouTube explaining some of his or similar techniques?

I like your thought, but if a voter can lookup their vote to confirm it got counted correctly with some form of receipt, then it opens the door for vote buying.

I’m not sure if there’s a way around that, but it would be awesome to be able to absolutely prove all votes were correctly counted.

I find it fascinating that even the possibility of water existing on Mars was almost a foolish thought — just a few years ago even.

And now, here we are with an image of a 51 mile wide crater full of ice. Truly an amazing time to be a fan of space exploration!

I have apparently been living under a rock and hadn’t heard of Haiku. Looking at the screenshots, it instantly reminded me of BeOS.

I ended up reading the Wikipedia page on BeOS for some nostalgia and it mentioned Haiku. Glad to see BeOS still around in some form — definitely was ahead of its time!

In my experience, it’s not “magical” and isn’t noticeably different than chugging Gatorade, but I like it because it’s a more natural way to get rehydrated.

Some athletes use pickle juice for cramps as well.

Another benefit, if you use naturally fermented pickles at least, is the beneficial gut bacteria you get. Probably helpful after a night of destroying your innards from shots of tequila or the like...

Fascinating book for sure!

More info on the book itself: http://www.voynich.nu/

Scanned images of book from Yale University: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3519597

I worked at a software company that went through a "lean transformation" where management effectively idolized Toyota's production philosophy and wanted it used in each and every department.

While it helped our customer service department quite a bit as-is. The Toyota Way is definitely not something you can directly copy/paste and use in software development. Building a Camry 5000 times is not the same as shipping 5000 different software projects, so a lot of the analogies and examples you find in text don't always apply. I always found it amusing that you never see or hear examples used from the R&D and engineering of the actual automobiles -- just once all that hard stuff has been figured out and the manufacturing starts, all the principles are magically, easily applied.

To be honest, a lot of it is just "common sense" or things that just naturally transpire if you have a good team (especially if Agile dev and ideas like continuous delivery are used anyway.)

With the negatives aside, the problem-solving culture part of it is something that can really change things for the better and is worth researching. If nothing else, I found just being able to have a framework for solving problems as they come up is huge -- surely regardless of what a company does. For instance, integrating a standard to collectively write out the "Five Why's" and clearly define the problem statement when a team is gathered to discuss solutions to a problem can save so much time. How many times have you been dragged into a meeting, go through a huge discussion, design a solution, only to realize later that it wasn't really solving what needed to be solved?

Outside the culture aspects, it mostly just felt forced, frustrating devs, and really made things feel almost like a cargo cult waiting for the goodies to drop from the sky.

I've recently been playing with F# on the side to learn more about functional programming and his website version has been a key part of what has kept me going. It's good to see an easy-to-read ebook version!

F# is impressive and so is the website. I highly recommend reading this if you are interested in F#/functional programming.

You find it odd that Sublime Text is so widely loved? Seriously? It combines the greatness of some of the best editors out there into a single one that is approachable and sexy and you can't see how it appeals to the masses?

Let's list out some of my favorite features of Sublime Text (please keep in mind I switched FROM vim to Sublime):

1.) VIntage mode that allows for 99% of day-to-day vim stuff 2.) A plugin system that uses Python and offers a full-featured API (vimscript anyone? pfft) 3.) Full mouse/windows support (i.e. it's not ghetto mouse support thrown over a terminal window from the '70s) 4.) Textmate-style themes that even allows tweaking to the UI 5.) Native Linux, MacOS, and Windows versions

The only negative is that it isn't open-source, which I hate, but the licensing is very reasonable (it's per person, not machine, so you can install it on as many devices as you use)

I'd really like to see you give a real-world example of how it's slow compared to vim/emacs, because maybe I'm missing something. I've been using Sublime Text for over a year and have only had to break out vim a couple of times for some crazy vim-style search/replacing or to quickly open some super-large text files (I think better large-file handling is in the works for sublime though...).

Oh, and one of Sublime Text's best feature? It doesn't come with the elitist attitude that a lot of vim and emacs users seem to get... :)

Yes, I am very disappointed. I cannot comprehend how the handling of large files hasn't been addressed yet. I really hope at least there is a setting for toggling the syntax on/off based on file size, if nothing else. I mean seriously, DOS' EDIT.EXE is better than Sublime Text in this regard. It almost makes me want to punch a wall or something, all because of a text editor.

Not on topic, but HOLY CRAP that is an annoying website. Slyly "inserting" pages in your browser's navigation history as you scroll down is clever, but it's a sure-fire way to piss off a reader! I thought I had just blanked out for some period when I clicked the back button expecting to come back to HN and saw a whole history of pages I had supposedly visited.

Never mind the horrible user-experience when the site takes a few seconds to load the next page and halts your scrolling...

/rant

I think the author is getting at something, but I don't think he articulated his thoughts too well -- or at least not well enough to be analyzed by the HN audience.

To me, it came off as just pure garbage, spewing from a wealthy and/or insane person who cares more about the things he owns than what he actually does with those things, with a means of not necessarily communicating with others, but a way to convince their own self that it's OK to spend many hundreds of dollars on a flatware set.

The type of thinking the author seems to be making an argument for can consume you. You will NEVER be happy if you filter the world like this. Sure, there's a time and place for it, but don't try to convince me that it was "liberating" when you spent $50 or whatever for a fork.

I'm not up-to-date on networking technologies, but it's surprising to me that some sort of error correction hasn't already been made a standard yet.

I wonder if something along the lines of old-school Parity files would work in the packet world? Basically just blast out the packets and any that were lost, you just reconstruct using the meta-data sent with the other packets.

You might be able to group Google in that category too, depending on how far you take it.

In a way, I think it's exciting. It should allow them to do some cool things and Apple definitely has the resources to do such. Although, when I put my tin-foil hat on, I find it a little worrisome when one company controls everything. But ultimately I keep going back to my capitalism hat (don't ask me what it looks like) and I find it to be the best for us consumers for the competition it creates. :)

jellybeans is my favorite color scheme ever. There is a Visual Studio theme for it here:

http://studiostyl.es/schemes/jellybeans

This seems to really be an exercise in futility because at any real job, they would all be "blamed" for screwing up. If I had to pick one person to fire though, it would be the front-end developer I guess because he caused the issue to begin with.

Wow, that truly is amazing.

On a funny note: I wonder how many of those questions were answerable by the first result of a simple google search? :P

Make it where people want to grow up to be teachers. The only idea I have for changing that is to pay teachers A LOT of money. Not just decent money. I'm talking about medical doctor money or more. Make it where teachers are not only respected for what they do, but for how much money they make. Maybe doing so would cause more great-minded people to teach instead of being tempted to other things because of money or status.

Think of the people who have inspired you. Surely if you have had a great teacher, that person would be in your list!