skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 19 million? For a game developed by just two guys (iirc) over the span of two years, that's hitting the jackpot.

It's actually 10 people, if the Wikipedia page is accurate. Prison Architect is developed by Introversion Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software

> I'm seeing several projects that make a lot of money for a little effort - DayZ comes to mind, an early access game that costs $35 and has sold millions of copies already, but still feels like a rather bad mod, with little development effort going into it (seemingly).

I would agree with you. DayZ spawned a lot of survival genre indie/kickstarted games that are all more or less broken. Even DayZ itself has taken years to add features that were present in the free mod. This might be judgmental but I think the kind of people who primarily buy these games just don't care, because I don't think they're naive enough to believe in the "everything will get better once it's out of alpha/beta" thing that gets thrown around a lot (rarely true).

Even Minecraft is pretty poor in terms of development. Performance has gotten better lately but for the longest time it used to run awfully regardless of the hardware you ran it on. Not only that but there wasn't (and I'm not sure there still is) a proper modding framework so most people just use patched jars and hack the game itself. In Minecraft's case it is understandable though, as it was basically a hobby coding project that exploded in popularity. The only thing that would have saved it from that fate is a complete rewrite, which to my understanding is exactly what Microsoft is doing with it right now since they bought it (C++ rewrite).

> I'm still on the fence about Star Citizen; the demos they've shown so far are promising, but I'm going to wait until there's an actual game.

This is just my opinion, but in my eyes it's vaporware. Too much money, too many promises, and not a lot to go by. I'm sure it might come out in some shape or form but it will never justify the hype and many will be left disappointed. /opinion
Our IT guy has actually just blackholed all mail from any of the new TLDs. I don't know exactly what he did, but I suspect it's just a whitelist containing "TLDs from before the Great TLD Expansion." I don't think I've ever seen a legitimate website from one of the new TLDs, and to be honest I'm still suspicious of most country code TLDs.

The new TLDs are a massive problem disguised as a solution in search of a problem.
Maybe, but if true that's still in the future. The OP claimed they hadn't seen a NPE "in years", which simply doesn't match my own experience.

As for novices: yes, novices tend to do that. They tend to miss, misremember or fail to put into practice what they should have learned on day 1. I've also seen senior devs who were not exactly newbies (in general) still using nulls because they don't grok Scala; the famous "you can program Fortran in any language". The reality of software development is that you have to deal with all these people.
How to Run a Business While Kitesurfing in Spain
It's not a surprise considering when Doom was out, Amiga (Commodore) was in its last days. Amiga 1200/AGA was a beast in its day. I still have that mental image of it being powerful. Which is funny, considering that system is barely (not) able to play an mp3. Consider that fact for a moment.
I never said it didn't happen, I dealt with IE4 and Netscape (briefly), and that you mention "government center" is exactly the area I knew you were talking about.
Out of interest, is Natami still a thing? Anything come of CloneA (aside from that scan doubler that used some of its AGA implementation)?

I haven't followed Amiga developments for a while, last I remembered it appeared the Natami project was parked due to some differences in direction, with the project to create a new 68k FPGA CPU splitting off into a separate project.

I noted that the Minimig AGA core reached v1.0 this year, which is good news, is compatibility fairly good now?

https://code.google.com/p/mist-board/
"blocking popular services used for communication by much of the rest of the world"

Uhm... Google and Facebook shares more or less the same userbase and that in numbers ( I mean real users, real people ) is comparable to the people in China alone, so 'popular services used for communication by much of the rest of the world' might be a bit of an overstatement.

(We also might just all be much happier without Facebook and less locked-in without Google but that's a private opinion.)

Github is indeed an issue, that really should not be blocked.

EDIT

As for criticizing the government... the Chinese government had made truly significant changes starting from the 90s. It's a slow progress, yes, and they do sacrifice certain rights of free speech in order to prevent chaos and wars. I believe this change is slowly on it's way, but this takes a really, really long time.

Let me tell a small story here. The company I work for is trying to establish some business in China but so far, they've failed. One of the reasons is that people there doesn't seem to trust reviews online, if it's from unknown origin. Known origin is someone they actually know, and they do trust the word and recommendation of those.
This is exactly the environment I was raised in, in Eastern Europe - you don't trust what you don't know.

Believe it or not, this is a certain kind of criticism; questioning everything coming from the authorities. Yes, it is very different from the usual Western approach, and requires a different mindset; a mindset that is trying to avoid conflict and make the best out of the situation without upsetting anyone.

Criticism can happen on various levels, from drawing instigating pictures to a gentle smile, and I would not underestimate the power of the latter either.
I find myself looking forward to reading the article that this author describes. But then it never appears.

The author spends several pages telling us how clever and interesting he is, with his unique method of infiltrating this secret world, putting him in such company as [some important famous journalist we would be familiar with were we as educated and worldly as the author] and gaining the insight and ability to write this masterful piece of journalism that you, Reader, are about to witness.

And then he spends a paragraph or two saying "it's secretive, and offshore". And we're done.

I want my ten minutes back.
It seems to be a particularly strong vice of British academic authors. I tend to favour American texts as a result.

Funny. At least at the university textbook level I tend to find that US books cost twice as much, have 3-4 times the page count and cover half the topics compared to UK books.
How to Play Chess Like an Asshole
Is that the video you meant to link? It concerns space debris.
Pandas 0.17 Release and Other Notes – Practical Business Python
The+Complete+List+Of+Text+Messaging+Email+Addresses+|+EmailTextMessages.com
He exploited and exposed it
Or MITs Enigma

http://enigma.media.mit.edu/
I'm not concerned about what it is doing, I am complaining that the script works differently to what I expect.
A hobbyist could do that. It's not an enormous system, but $3k buys you a Power8 system (http://www.tyan.com/campaign/openpower/).
The British people preparing for the end of the world
It means "input/output" to me, and I'm often confused when I end up at a clothing store. Or ".co" which makes me think I'm being phished.
Quite interesting is that I would argue such texts have only gotten more approachable and less complex as time has gone on. If anyone wants to experience complex writing they should enjoy some essays from the time of the Romantic movement and before that of the great poet Milton.
Pixar, Artists, Founders and Corporate Innovation
Is identity validation under any circumstances more than snake oil?

Neither users nor browsers could tell whether a site is supposed to run a domain- or identification validated certificate. (Fun fact, HN uses a domain validated cert.) All you get is higher costs for some X.509 fields nobody ever looks at, and nobody would miss if an MITMing attacker replaced your ID validated cert with an domain validated one.
European Parliament votes in favor of disappointingly weak rules
These networks tend to be mostly WiFi based because the hardware is cheap enough that homegrown "low-tech" alternatives (like FSO or custom radio protocols) are more expensive.

I remember that ~15 years ago building these sort of networks involved various experiments with hooking up various home-grown radio modems or gutted laser pointers to serial ports, but today the technology of choice is either WiFi or commercial microwave PTP links operating in unlicensed spectrum (which are order of magnitude more expensive than WiFi, but have significantly better performance, also unlicensed spectrum usable for such links is not available in every country).
>Am I missing something when all I really want are the free certs?

Yes, that setting up a respectable certificate must be easy for the masses in order for their to be mass adoption.
Ramses is trying to solve that by using a RAML file as source of truth. Regardless of the level of restfulness of your API, what you spec is what you get. Well, that's the ultimate goal, right now it has limitations and opinions but we're trying to solve them. I'm a core dev btw.

http://ramses.tech
https://ramses.readthedocs.org

Let me know you thoughts!
Big Pharma is way more of a puzzle game. Very fun, but different mix of genres.
Zen of Refactoring
This is exactly why we built out conf-builder (https://github.com/radiantiq/conf-builder). None of the existing solutions matched what we needed and so far it's worked out pretty well for us. If you use docker there is also a neat tool called registrator that we've played around with https://github.com/gliderlabs/registrator
That's fair. I come from a C# background and Mads Torgersen himself refers to the C#'s ?. syntax as the Elvis operator see (https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015/3-711) 30:50. It's all in good fun.
Insider Trading Becoming Harder to Prosecute
This is a very slick app and a very nice landing page. Well done and good luck!
This happens on a smaller scale all the time with most professionals without having to resort ot offshoring.

Anyone who works for a hedge fund will have their own company that will get paid thier bonus. Companies have two nice traits.

1) Their end of year can be any month

2) They have a lower tax rate than most high net-worth individuals do.

So consider 2 fictional employee's.

The first one gets paid a bonus of $500,000 at the end of the year(2014). His tax rate is 40% so he ends up with $300,000.
He reinvests the $300,00 at his hedge fund that returns 20% in the year 2015. As of December 31st 2015 he has a net-worth of $360,000.

Individual 2 gets the same $500,000 bonus at the end of 2014 but she has a company that gets the bonus. Now the companies year end is November so the tax year on on that bonus isn't until November 2015.

That hedge fund also returns 20% so as of December 2015 she has $600,000 ($500,000 * 1.2) and then owes tax of $120,00 (the corporate tax rate is 20% on her $500,000 bonus) so she ends up with $480,000.

Now when she pulls the money out of her corporation to spend she'll have to pay the dividend tax rate of %20. But she can let this money ride tax sheltered for any number of years.

To recap, she essentially shelters her money in two ways:

1) her bonus is sheltered for 1 year from taxes allowing the full amount to grow

2) she pays the corporate rate at the end of the year allowing her to hang onto an additional %20 until she pulls it out for her own use.

Any one can do this, the only preconditions you need to make it worth while are

1) a large bonus

2) a way to make the bonus money grow at a decent rate.

Among Doctors, lawyers, etc this is a common practice.

Now if you want t up the ante, you move your hedge fund to the Cayman Islands where you don't pay any tax on the gains until you repatriate the money back to the North America.

When Renaissance Technologies finally has a tell all book written about then, their brilliance will be acknowledged but I'm going to guess that a very large portion of their returns comes from not paying tax.

See:
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-08/irs-mo...

people worry about paying fees as a drag on their retirement earnings but paying tax is the single largest drag on creating wealth that the wealthy have. The above corporation sheltering is legal well tested under law and used in a very pervasive manner in the North American and the UK, I don't know anything about the rest of Europe but I'd imagine its the same.
Do you try to hold on to the money you make legally as against giving an even higher proportion of it to an organization that's managed (in one case) to run up a debt of $16 trillion rising.
"Ironically, my only complaint might be that Taleb seems to get a little more self-congratulating by anecdotally revealing the lifestyle he is able to enjoy as you progress through his series of books."

You get already a hint of it in the small excerpt linked, IMHO.
Here's the link to the plugin:
You would need to download it using Atom editor tool from www.atom.io and then need to install the additional package: https://atom.io/packages/image2react

Feel free to open issues on github ( or even contribute :) ) :
https://github.com/ganarajpr/image2react
Indeed there are many possible applications. One is an interactive e-book reader that solves the spatial awareness problem of reading technical material in a digital format.

Demo: http://eagrereader.appspot.com/
Amazon, the company that “will never make money” surprised Wall Street last week with strong profits and it seems to me that they are going to start producing cash like these other big tech companies now.

I missed this... any good articles about it?
We use StartSSL for many business domains and never had any problems
If software is the new oil, be prepared for a wild ride. The oil industry is notorious for decade-scale cycles of over-hiring and then layoffs and under-hiring, rinse-lather-repeat.

Regardless, it's a good analogy, but be careful how far you take it. There's a _very_ important difference between the energy and other major industries. It's a difference that the software industry shares, but in the opposite extreme: The amount of capital needed to do business.

The energy industry is notoriously capital intensive. For my employer, a project has to be over 250 million to be considered a significant project. We have a _lot_ of those, including multiple projects in the 10-50 billion range. Sure, I work for a very large company, but even a "mom and pop" oil company (there are a lot, actually) needs tens to hundreds of millions to get started.

By contrast, the software industry prides itself on being able to get an initial product out the door with essentially no other investment than time.

At any rate, it's a fine analogy, but keep in mind that the oil industry is _very_ focused on building _big_ infrastructure. In that sense, oil companies have more in common with independent nations than with other companies. It's something to think about, at any rate.
That's what I'm using now. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to drop in an inline image though.
Well, attorneys are likely a bit paranoid about the requirement to protect their trademark against abuse or lose it.
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Well - that gives me the opportunity to say thank you for your work! It's helped me on numerous occasions to test things out, and to demonstrate concepts to others.
It looks cool, but it seems it's for Mac and iPad only…
Nope. Parent Poster added to the explanation so you could be less ignorant. The second paragraph you referred to is still there, it is just expanded upon with more paragraphs for greater detail and clearer explanations. The reason this was done was because I reached my post limit. Not like anyone else is looking at this anymore anyway. I can move the additional explanations to the responding post if you want, as that's where I intended it to be at first.

I could've waited for the rate limiter to expire but I responded hastily because I was highly, highly offended by you saying that my paragraph was "utter nonsense." You don't say these kinds of things to people in real life. I'm not sure if your post qualifies for a flag but I do know really negative comments like that are frowned upon by the moderators.

You never once mentioned startups. That is true. But you do mention the creation of a company. You're telling me that the creation of a company isn't a startup? Ok I now assume that the creation of a company isn't a startup. You're talking exclusively about split-ups, as that's the only other time I know about where company creation occurs without the creation of a startup: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/split-up.asp.

If a company splits up. The old company is destroyed and the new companies are the sum of it's old parts. No new value is created. Understand? Or is my assumption incorrect? Clarify if i'm wrong about what you're referring to by "sole creation of a single company."
Android development is 30% more expensive than iOS. And here's the proof
Additional detail can be found in the author's 2012 paper in Sociological Forum, "Trust and Estate Planning: The Emergence of a Profession and Its Contribution to Socioeconomic Inequality" (pdf).

http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&co...

"... when knights of medieval Europe departed for the Crusades, leaving their lands vulnerable to seizure by the church, the state, or rival noblemen—some adopted the practice of putting their assets in trust. This involved transferring legal ownership of the property to a trusted kinsman or friend for the benefit of a third party: usually the wife and children of the original owner, who had no legal standing to own property themselves and were thus left vulnerable to dispossession."
More Earths are appearing?
wonder when amazon shed's it e-commerce business to focus on it's real money maker cloud computing?
I work for a small map tech company and my job role is basically a graduate C# developer, with some configuration duties also to cater our product to different customers. I didn't know C#, only Java, before starting the job so it's been nice to learn about concepts like WPF and Linq this past year.

I do some freelance work for a small business owner in which I code small Java apps that hook to the eBay and Amazon APIs, for the benefit of his business. It makes me a little money but I've recently asked for a pay rise.

Other than that, I want to make my own mobile apps using tools like Xamarin but I haven't really built up the confidence in myself to create any of my ideas. They mostly seem like things that have been done before or where I don't see that they might get as much use as the idea does in my head.

On top of that, I enjoy my free time. I find it very hard to come home and have the energy to code after my 9 to 5 where I've been doing the same thing, staring at a screen, 7 and a half hours. Instead, I try to exercise a fair bit and build hobbies outside of programming. I'm a bit of an everythingist, admittedly, though it's not a quality I think leads to becoming a master in programming.

Has anyone else faced similar problems to me? What is your answer to your own question, OP?
I'm currently using vimwiki with md syntax, which I like better than org mode. I'm pretty happy with it, although sometimes I would like to drop in an inline image or have md rendered in nice fonts in a native app.
Difference between oil and software is that you can easily quantify oil (1 barrel) whereas it is tremendously hard to quantify the value of software product.
I can't edit my entry anymore, but please be able to read between the lines.

"protecting people from porn, extremists and pedophiles."

That sounds great, but who decides what falls under extreme? For example, in the eyes of a religion, every other religion can be considered extreme content.

--

Also: yes, censorship is bad and yes, there should be no such thing, but there are worse things than that.
There's alternative tools that use the same standard API, you don't need to use the standard tool.

If you want it to only register and authenticate to fetch a cert but not install it, and you want it to just tell you what you need to do so that you can do it manually if you so wish, then that's possible.
It's at least partly about status. But in the UK one of the possible outcomes of the housing system is a family being accomodated by the council in B&B or hotel accomodation on a "temporary" basis. This is for the very sensible reason that having children sleep on the streets or in homeless shelters is especially bad for their safety and future development. But it can still produce some very weird outcomes, especially when extended for weeks or months.
Depression Among Entrepreneurs Is an Epidemic Nobody Is Talking About
http://uk.businessinsider.com/analysts-wrong-about-amazon-pr...
According to Bob Lutz having car dealerships is a pro. LOL, I am yet to talk to anybody who actually enjoyed the car dealership experience weather it's buying or servicing the car.

The whole car dealer enterprise is a rent seeking business. In many states you cannot have the manufacture sell the cars directly. That's changing slowly -- thanks to Tesla -- the dealer lobby is a big contributor in many local and state wide elections. The pricing for the automobile / features is not clear to begin with. It's to the point that there's many competing business that try to give you true car pricing. And, every step of the way the dealership tries to extract another fee / charge for you via various tactics like destination fees, myriad of financing fees, unneeded insurance (tire insurance, ones that overlap with the manufactures warranty).

Personally, I would love if the dealership model died. The alternative being ordering a car online and having it show up at home at a scheduled time. I imagine the same experience can be replicated the other way when the car needs servicing, schedule it online and have it picked up / drop it off and a point of aggregation of the car maker where they handle volume.

And before you tell me about the test drive and getting a feel for the car. Meh. Your fooling yourself if you think that a 15 minute test ride will tell you much about the cars performance, comfort or even layout. You will only learn that the seats are uncomfortable on a 3 hour trip once you take that 3 hour trip. If a test drive is really important to you, you should really rent the car for a couple days.
> AWS reported an operating income of $521m during Q3, which is almost on a par with the amount brought in by its parent company’s entire North American online retail business ($528m).

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500256048/Amazon-turns-s...
While data de-identification surely has its limits, it is useful in many contexts.

If someone is interested in tools for data de-identification, ARX [1, 2] is an open source software that (among other features) supports exactly the set of methods used in this study.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the developers of ARX.

[1] Website: http://arx.deidentifier.org

[2] Source: https://github.com/arx-deidentifier/arx
I believe the biggest disconnect is that working requires government authorization but owning real estate does not. Ordinary citizens not only compete with locals for real estate, they compete with the world's millionaires who are looking for (relatively) safe investments.
But isn't most people's response to high rent in NY to commute from NJ and not live on a roof? I can't help but think that this man's choice to live on a roof isn't the one that most people would make.