contravert

You won't find a finer example of white privilege.

No one cares if a Chinese CEO (or anyone for that matter) speaks English, no matter the difficulty and effort the learning entails. Contrast this indifference with the flattery of the converse in this thread, and it's quite illuminating of the world we live in.

Out of curiosity, do you not watch TV series or movies (on a monitor), or is it just cable TV that you don't watch? What about popular music, news, video games and other cultural expressions that all subtly promote materialism?

I've always seen the Supreme Court as a farce. The very fact that laws are decided upon without consensus is troubling to think about. If these justices are the most authoritative judges of constitutional matters and disagree with each other on fundamental rulings shows the subjectivity and flaws of the legal system.

The law is not a democracy, and a 5-4 ruling is the greatest absurdity of this system. Presumably, if another political party was in power for an appointment, the decision may be the exact opposite. If the constitution is so treasured as a framework constraining the powers of the state and guarding the rights of citizens, why is consensus not the only standard for which decisions are made on constitutional matters?

This report is based on PISA test results, and you can find some sample questions here: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/

I think these questions are quite fair at testing the mathematical abilities of students. These questions don't simply test mechanical calculations, but also require applications of mathematical knowledge and insight towards problem solving.

If you disagree, then can you provide examples for better questions to test students at their mathematical skill level?

But can't you use the same argument for mass? Why focus on calories and not kilograms?

Chromebooks all have a hardware TPM and already encrypt each user's local data: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/p...

I'm not sure what you mean by having a good token to get access to the machine, though.

I just finished reading this book, and I found it extremely insightful. The overview of Western and Eastern history from paleolitic to the modern era really puts the entire question of West vs. East into a grander perspective.

However, the biggest twist and conclusion in the book comes from projecting the trends of social development into the future. Ultimately, this question will not matter as we march towards singularity or apocalypse at a frighteningly fast pace.

Why did you convert to Christianity as opposed to another religion like Islam or Zoroastrianism?

For this reason, I try to avoid ads and marketing as much as possible, although it seems almost impossible. Although any individual advertisement is trivial to dismiss, I don't trust myself to resist the ubiquitity of these messages.

On the other hand, many people don't have a healthy fear of automobiles, considering the lethality of the physics involved in a collision.

I don't get the obsession with making web APIs for raw data that is publicly accessible and small enough to fit in a single file.

I would like to see his original description as well. I've never understood the Fourier transform intuitively, no matter how much my professors and textbooks attempt to explain it. At this point, I'm just applying algorithms without fully understanding why I'm doing it.

Wow, this is one of the most arrogant comments I've ever read on HN. How does this story highlight how titles work in "a proper company with true meritocracy"? A true meritocracy assigns titles based on if the CEO shares the same background as you? You might be a great developer, but have you considered that you could be even better if you have a good foundation in CS as well?

A good board game that utilizes simultaneous turns very well is 7 Wonders. The game play is basically like a Magic: the Gathering draft. However, a common criticism is that there is limited direct player interaction (although there are very subtle and important considerations for drafting). The game is very fast, even with 8 players.

On a digital side, I think the Pokemon games does simultaneous turns very well. There is an entire competitive community that is built around such a simple system, and I think this format has much room for improvement. I'm currently working on an online multiplayer game of this format, which tries to explore design ideas that Pokemon doesn't (as it seems 95% of moves are of the variant, deal X damage of a certain elemental type).

Well, at the very least, it's getting attention, including yours. How many other startups are desperately seeking employees that you have no idea exist?

The real use case for the visitor pattern is to simulate multiple dispatch in a language that only has single dispatch. In a language like Java, if you want to traverse a tree where each node can be a different type, you don't really want to use a series of if-statements for every single type, so the visitor pattern is used in this case. The visitor pattern allows you to use method overloading instead for each different type instead.

I like the steganographic approach, and it could also work with a repository. Consider the following:

-Let Pc be a copyrighted package in the repository

-Let Pd be a public domain package in the repository

-Let Kc be the "key" of Pc

-Let Kd be the "key" of Pd

The keys are stored in the metadata of the packages, so we don't need to break any copyright laws to get them.

Suppose we have the following operations:

-E(Pc,Pd,Kc,Kd) = X

-D(X, Kc) = Pc

-D(X, Kd) = Pd

With this infrastructure, if we want to get Pc or Pd, we simply ask for X and then decode our desired file. This also gives plausible deniability, but I'm not sure how this will hold up in court.

I have given this subject quite a bit of thought, and I believe the solution is to fulfill this objective: Make filesharing simple and intuitive.

The article states that the girl ultimately failed to download what she wanted, which I don't doubt is due to the complexity of navigating a torrent index and installing and running a torrent client.

For most computer users, torrenting is too sophisticated, and it doesn't help that most torrent websites seem to be focused on scamming their users (including the venerable ThePirateBay). Other protocols for file-sharing are usually no better.

What if a technologically ignorant user can find, download, and play a work of video or music in just a few mouse clicks? I think this would have huge ramifications. Simply exposing file-sharing to a wider audience will increase political support and help counter the content industry's anti-filesharing propaganda.

I really like the analogy of 4 currencies when thinking about filesharing: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20120222/91144/Pir...

Improving the user experience of file-sharing will not only reduce the first three costs to near zero, but after file-sharing becomes easy and accessible to everyone, it will become more normalized in society. In turn, this will gradually decrease the last cost, integrity, to zero.

The endgame is increased tolerance and political support of file-sharing, and disrupting the revenue of the content industry.

So how can we achieve this vision? I am thinking of a high quality package manager application similar to iTunes or Steam. The biggest usability improvement would be the concept of a repository, in that there is a curated database of files rather than whatever users want to upload, which is the standard right now for most forms of file-sharing.

As a consequence, there will be a canonical version of a title, removing the choice of picking between 10 different torrents and looking at seeders/trackers. Because there is now one destination when searching for a specific title, we can leverage existing and user-generated content to include things like graphics, videos, reviews, etc. on the landing page.

There are definitely huge technical challenges involved. For example, an application like this probably can't rely on a central server. So without a reliable server, how can we maintain a repository and support an easy one-click one-download feature? Moreover, we want to protect our users and implement some sort of private information retrieval.

This is an idea I've been thinking about for quite a while, and when I have time (not enough these days it seems), I have been tinkering around and trying to implement solutions to some of the technical problems involved.

It really stood out when you said that you paid an statistician to analyze these games. I assume you did it to understand and try to replicate the successes of the top grossing games. What did you learn that was surprising? Did this level of analysis help you make better games?

Can someone explain the technical details on how this program works?

While I agree with your ideals in general, I don't think TPB is a paragon we should uphold. TPB is not like "Robin Hood" at all. Have you seen the extremely deceptive ads on each torrent page that looks like the actual download button? The real download button is a small hyperlink, but they are clearly trying to deceive people into downloading whatever malware is linked. It's more like the rich stealing from the rich and poor in this case.

I can't speak for AP classes, whose quality depends greatly on the teachers, and I believe the many of these classes offer very high quality education.

However, I think AP exams are a "scam" in a sense. The scam isn't financial, but educational. You can undeniably save a lot of college tuition by passing AP exams, but that alone is not sufficient for truly understanding the material.

Because my school didn't have AP classes, I self-studied for 5 AP exams in my last year of high school (Calculus BC, Biology, Chemistry C, and both Physics C exams). I got a 5 for all exams, except Electromagnetism in which I got a 4. However, now, I can barely recall any of the content I crammed for, except for calculus for which I took more advanced courses in university, and I feel poorer educationally as a result.

The biggest problem with AP exams is that they're so easy to pass without truly internalizing all the concepts. The exams are graded on a bell curve, and if you look at the average scores, they are disturbingly low. Anyone who truly understand the course material should be able to pass these exams without difficulty, but the only conclusion I can make is that AP classes are pushing extremely unprepared students to take these exams, probably with the lofty goal of giving them a step up in university.

This is incredibly true for me. I blocked time sink websites (like HN ironically) in /etc/hosts for about a day, and then I constantly went back and reverted my changes. Then, I wrote a daemon that constantly checks the host file and puts the blocks back if I changed it. I tried making the installation and operation as obscure as possible and try to forget the metaphoric key. However, I eventually ended up spending a bunch of time to rediscover what I did, so I ended up disabling this script as well...

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "how easy it is"?

Keep in mind that the console versions of MW3 usually has an order of magnitude more concurrent players than the PC version.

Would pseudo-code be permitted as well?

Well it's not beyond the realm of imagination for pirates to create a platform like Steam but offer all games for free. Torrents are somewhat inaccessible to the average user and they they lack content management support.

The obvious question that I don't see anyone asking is what happens when pirates build a more convenient service than Steam? There is no way a legitimate digital distributor can offer more convenience when they are saddled with many business and legal limitations.

I would have to agree. When I was working as a full-time developer (for internships), it felt like I had all the time in the world compared to homework and studying.