jjjeffrey

That's a great point. I play Nethack now and then, and I like how I can play it for an evening and then walk away, satisfied that I'll never beat it.

I've been thinking recently about what makes a good video game experience for me, and it's slightly relevant.

I can place the games I've highly enjoyed into two basic categories:

-Short and sweet, having one or more of 1. interesting play mechanics 2. great story/theme 3. interesting art direction.

-Solid all around, with addictive elements (e.g. leveling, collecting things) that make repetitive tasks seem fun and extend the time I play the game to beyond a few evenings.

Many indie games I've played fit into the former category, and most non-indie games fit into the latter.

I've been realizing that these "short and sweet" games that I've been getting more and more of a chance to play have provided more lasting and fulfilling experiences than longer games. The feeling I get from sinking an evening into a short and sweet game is kind of similar to reading a good book or playing a good chess match. Likewise, the feeling I get from sinking an evening into a longer game is some artificial feeling of making progress.

I'm overgeneralizing a little, but the point is I've started skipping AAA titles in favor of trying out lots of indie games. Most aren't great, but the cost of a few dollars or less and a half hour to find out isn't bad. For me, it's worth it to find the gems. And not having several-week-long addictions to games with low quality:time ratios is great too.

I really hope there's no indie bubble.

This is great!

Some other things about ssh that everyone knew but me (until I found out):

-scp supports bash completion for files on the server if you use a key pair.

-Keychain (http://www.funtoo.org/Keychain) makes having a password on your private key less of a hassle by prompting for your password when you first log in to your local account and using that when you ssh. (ssh-agent alone is similar but requires your password for every new login session).

"[LinkedIn] does not sanction the creation or use of fake LinkedIn profiles or the exploitation of its platform for the purposes alleged in this report."

If I understand things correctly, it's not claimed that GHCQ made fake profiles or exploited their platform. It's possible that whoever made the statement didn't really understand MITM, but this kind of reads like another one of the usual carefully worded non-denials.

Full paragraph in the article:

When contacted, LinkedIn stated that the company takes the privacy and security of its members "very seriously" and "does not sanction the creation or use of fake LinkedIn profiles or the exploitation of its platform for the purposes alleged in this report." "To be clear," the company continued, "LinkedIn would not authorize such activity for any purpose." The company stated it "was not notified of the alleged activity."

At the bottom there are two lines that taken together really confuse me:

    <grsecurity> If you're running Linux 3.4 or newer and enabled CONFIG_X86_X32 , you need to disable it or update 
    immediately; upstream vuln CVE-2014-0038

    <grsecurity> In case there's confusion, this vuln is not about 32bit userland on 64bit (CONFIG_X86_32), but the new X32 
    ABI.  Ubuntu enables it recently

Say I change security.tls.version.max to 3, which changes it's status from 'default' to 'user set'. In the future, if the default for security.tls.version.max is changed to, say, 4, would the fact that my setting has the 'user set' status prevent it from incrementing to the better default?

I'm not proposing that this is a risk or that Firefox behaves this way---I have no idea. Does anyone else know?

After reading this, it reminded me of Cauchy's integral formula. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%27s_integral_formula):

"In mathematics, Cauchy's integral formula, named after Augustin-Louis Cauchy, is a central statement in complex analysis. It expresses the fact that a holomorphic function defined on a disk is completely determined by its values on the boundary of the disk, and it provides integral formulas for all derivatives of a holomorphic function. Cauchy's formula shows that, in complex analysis, "differentiation is equivalent to integration": complex differentiation, like integration, behaves well under uniform limits – a result denied in real analysis."

Does anyone who knows this stuff better than me know if there's any meaningful connection?

Welp, that made sense.

I thought the whole article was pretty interesting, but I responded to that part exactly the way you did.

One of the big things I retained from my stats classes is the idea that, once you deviate from a pre-specified analysis technique, the strength of your conclusion is strongly diminished. Also, sophisticated statistical techniques are often less robust than simple ones. Maybe some other ideas apply that I can't think of off the top of my head.

On the other hand, the author may not have appreciated the statistical iffyness of that phrasing, and perhaps misrepresented the rigor of the actual analysis.

Did anyone else find Inception to be basically straightforward (though interesting and enjoyable) with an insignificant binary question at the end?

There certainly may be more depth than I'm seeing, but there wasn't anything that made me need to wonder why anything happened the way it happened. As mentioned in the thread already, Momento's the one that isn't straightforward.

I'm not intentionally trolling---I suppose I probably am missing something. There just wasn't anything obviously confusing on the movie's surface for me.

After reading this article I realized I have a completely unrelated nerve wracking situation in my life that could benefit by having a "superior" work for me rather than the other way around.

I lived with a Russian family a few years ago for a month in one of the ten largest cities in Russia. As an American, I found many aspects of their society to be rather hostile, but I found at least one region to be a beautiful area of the country with interesting, warm, and dare I say _happy_ people. I think many of us can trivially find reasons that the state of Russia is less than ideal, but the way you describe it is a bit off the mark.

Does anyone know of any free software that allows you to manage and visualize tasks in the manner advocated in the article?

I was once in a situation where I was forced to bum smokes for several days while essentially living at an international airport (forced as in it was the only way I could smoke during that time). It was pretty scary, especially at first, but it led to some surprisingly amazing experiences. Learning how to bum a smoke (and really, the generalized skills that went into that) was one of the most beneficial things I've learned in life.

(Don't interpret this as me recommending smoking. Worst. Habit. Ever.)

You address an important topic, but I think the problem at hand comes from a more fundamental dysfunction within the system. Once a president is elected into office, he/she is in charge for a minimum of four years, almost guaranteed. We can't simply rely on improving the chances of getting better people into office for at least two reasons: a lot of damage can be done in four years, and even then, most of the electoral branch isn't elected by The People and at least some of it is allowed to carry influence from one president to the next.

I believe the most effective way to solve this problem will be to approach it from many angles with the ultimate purpose of restoring accountability to the executive branch. Improving voting methodology seems to be one of many possibly useful angles. Another might be to put weight on congress to begin scaling back the powers of the executive, such as by repealing the Patriot Act, defunding the NSA, etc. Another still might be to support legislation to protect the voices of other power structures and communication enablers, such as the internet, journalism in general, and organizations like Wikileaks.

Sorry, I suppose this doesn't really bring any new insights to the table. Rather, my point is that there's this really big problem (an overly powerful branch of government) that's been brewing for a while, and it's going to take a lot more than a single fix the repair the whole machine.

Of course, any single effort is better than no effort---I absolutely do not wish to discourage!

What's so sketchy about them?

That was a powerful story, and it's well written too. I think it would make a great article for Vice or something like that, but obviously it's nice to read posts like this on HN.

Princess Mononoke a film for children? I'd say it's a touch too bloody for most parents to deem it appropriate for their children.

Does anyone know what it means to simulate brain activity? Is the brain being emulated in any meaningful way? Or is it just modeling the physical behavior of neurons?

Idea: Perhaps election voting should be separated into different dates for different groups. I've certainly been guilty of knowing more about the president I was voting for than for congress persons (and even worse, state and local elections and bills). I've voted for people based on nothing more than the information on the ballot sheet. (Thankfully, I know better than to do that now.)

If people couldn't vote for lower offices simply because they showed up for presidential votes, but rather had to show up to vote on another date for other elections, then only people who actually cared about lower offices would vote for those. I think that might make it a lot harder to keep incumbents in power.

"Well, I didn't vote for the PATRIOT Act the last time it was up," she said today, at her weekly press briefing. "I don't want anybody to misunderstand a vote against the Amash resolution yesterday."

Er, I don't think there is any way to misunderstand a vote. It's really as simple as it gets. I doubt that some supposed underlying strategy holds more truth than the vote itself.

I really don't like trying to judge this case with analogies to non-electronic gambling. It's not a terrible way to start thinking about the issue, but taken too far it allows someone to come up with almost arbitrary conclusions.

Rather, I think it's best to judge this by what a certain outcome would do to the greater picture.

(And now to argue for my own interpretation, which happens to use the above argument.)

I was in the middle of writing what I thought was a pretty interesting argument, when I realized...

Why the hell is the federal government even getting involved in this? I mean, I know why, but it has nothing to do with them. This is (or should be) a case about what constitutes fair play at a casino. Jumping into this and flexing the CFAA just seems beyond ridiculous.

Seriously, there's nothing wrong with seeing a psychologist and/or psychiatrist. There are many possible scenarios, including that something other than ADD is causing your symptoms, or even that there's nothing "wrong" with you. I think there are many good mental health professionals who focus on providing a minimal viable treatment for patients. Simply getting diagnosed with something doesn't mean you need to be medicated, and being diagnosed with something isn't even a necessary condition for a professional to help you find a way to help yourself succeed.

Taking a look at things from society's perspective, society decided that individuals should privately own for-profit businesses because, for a large subset of society's needs, that is the most efficient way to produce these needs. In that sense, capitalism as it exists is meant to serve society. It merely works out that the incentive to maximize profit in this system _approximately_ aligns with society's interest in acquiring goods at minimum cost---that is, if certain conditions, such as adequate competition, are met.

Of course this isn't the only reasonable perspective, but it certainly isn't false.

If a spacecraft were to travel orthogonal to the plane on which planets orbit the sun, would it experience the heliosheath as it exits the solar system? For that matter, have there been any spacecraft launched that didn't travel on the orbital plane (ignoring earth-orbiting spacecraft)?

I've had a T61p for 4 or 5 years. 1920x1280 screen. A Core 2 Duo that doesn't feel dated. I dread the day that something happens and I need to get a new laptop. I think other fans will know what I mean when I say this one is perfect.

I'm going to try using this next time I find a web site that I can't read because the background and foreground mix together.

I hate using a microwave when other people are sleeping. Loud beeps on every button press. Beeps at 30 second intervals saying it done (as if something terrible will happen if you don't rescue your food!). Even opening and closing the door makes an excessively loud noise.

This article is exceptionally difficult to read because of the low contrast between text and background color and because Firefox won't allow me to highlight the text for some reason.

Somehow I can't imagine lab-produced gold being worth less than naturally occurring gold for jewelry, etc. I imagine the only potential difference would be the distribution of isotopes. But I suppose it could still happen if large players would benefit.