skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of the other reasons a customers is trained to expect a dryer last them, with minor repairs, for thirty or more years. Anything less and you lose those customers.

I had the unpleasant experience of trying to get people to buy smart Appliances w/ App integration. Quite a few times I was flat out told that their current model works fine and that they couldn't see a use for the feature. NFC/Wifi Controlled dryer settings and timers are a failure point that many are uncomfortable with.

In other cases I was told that reliability is or could be an issue. I actually spoke with one person that bought one of the units but was concerned with recommending it to a family member because it failed after two years and required a warranty replacement.

Compared to this games are a disposable commodity.
Cool, it's much easier to build a system into your routine when you can rely on having your data.

What kind of approach will you be taking to long term retention? Do you expect it will differ substantially from the existing srs approach?
Hmm this is a tough one. Firstly I should make it clear that my wife works in the games industry. She works on PC, Console and Mobile titles. She has mentioned several times how there is a lot of pressure put on developers and publishers to "catch the whales". They employ psychologists and gambling specialists to make games, mostly mobile but it is also creeping into PC and Console, super addictive.

Personally I am of the opinion that people should be able to do what they want* but my wife is genuinely concerned about just how they go after certain types of people. They do want to get the gambling types. They are the people who spend money. Lots of money. I have seen numbers where people who obviously have more money than we can imagine spending $50-100k on IAPs. Some games even have "limited" IAPs that were designed for just one player as they spend so damn much.

However I can't help but feel there is something else behind this post than what the author seems to spin it as. What I am not too sure but it seems quite the ramble and he doesn't actually have any solid sources or data to back up his claim. Of course neither do I outside of what my wife tells me :)

* Okay so there has to be some limits.

Edit: I would like to make the point clear that while I think people should be able to do whatever they want, I do find this kind of predatory game design unethical. As does my wife. Thankfully nothing she has had to do so far has been totally deplorable.
تور کیش در هتل آریان ویژه آخر آذر ۹۴
> Crooks tend to be uneducated and ignorant.

While this is true in the general, there is (at least in Australia) a number of crooks I've come across when I was younger and doing things you shouldn't do that were incredibly intelligent; which is why they had others commit crimes for them, and were suitably paranoid. And were rarely caught. I assume that's likely the case in most places around the world.
A co-worker uses it at work exclusively for editing markdown documents. I find that a little funny.

I had great optimism for LightTable, helped Kickstart it, but was disappointed with ultimately for the very reasons he outlined at the beginning of his talk: it couldn't shift me from emacs. It's not religious for me, but I could try and fail two or three times over in the time it took me to boot lighttable, figure out how to load my code, eval it and begin to debug it.

I enjoyed this presentation though. His Eve does strike me as a sort of proto-semantic web, although I'm warier of pouring my optimism into it this time though.
Funny that this comes up. Donald J. Boudreaux wrote an entry just earlier on the same topic in response to Akerlof and Shiller's recent book: http://cafehayek.com/2015/12/the-role-of-market-forces-in-pr...

There's also a bit of a double standard about how advertising is perceived. Banner ads, editorials and similar are frowned upon. Yet it's quite likely you'll interpret someone promoting a work in the comments section of a site you frequent as a friendly recommendation, never mind it's still signaling availability of something in a manner identical to many less invasive ads.
Why Online Business Still Has a Bright Future [Infographic]
Edit: forgot one major element. A lot of schools have such poor placement that their unemployment rate is significantly worse than the national average.

This is all hidden on the front end by school marketing and the age old idea that law school is the ticket to the upper middle class (used to be, isn't now).

There are great tools now to see how a school performs, but they've only been around a couple years. A lot of graduates who enrolled about 4-5 years ago found out they're more or less unemployable as lawyers, and it's not even worth taking the bar.
The Founder of Outlier Talks About the Best Biking Clothes
To take your question a step further, and into legal territory, where is the line between social signaling and false advertising? Alcohol commercials also fall in this weird conflict space.
Almost seems like he's... advertising it? Doing some mild "psychological thing" on the readers.
A lot of people here seem to be missing the main point of this post. It's not about crowdfunding or advertising, it's about using hugely manipulative tactics within the games to get people to basically throw money at them.

The reason they're called microtransactions is because they're small, usually priced at a point that's negligible. Using these tactics, they entice people to buy over and over again, each time the spend is a negligible amount but over time it adds up to hundreds or thousands.
Show HN: Manage all your online profiles from one place
I think we agree, except I'd call it a possible future. Maybe it's the future of jetpacks, Google Glass, or anaglyph 3D. Or maybe it's the future of the smartphone. I keep hoping it's the latter, but 3D has such power as a novelty that I worry that it's the former.
He has two titles at his company called "Democracy 3" and "Big Pharma".
He's probably the biggest government regulation fan I've ever seen; at least in the way that you'd imagine somebody who makes games about trains might fancy trains.

For reference, here is some of the marketing copy of Democracy 3: (yes I know it doesn't mean he wrote it)

>*Ever wanted to run the country? Have you ever wanted to be president? or prime-minister? Convinced you could do a better job of running the country? Let's face it, you could hardly do a worse job than our current political leaders. Crime, Unemployment, National Debt, Terrorism, Climate Change...Have you got the answers to the problems that face western industrialized nations? Here is your chance to find out...”
> People know what pushes their buttons, too, and we have a name for it: interest. Not "manipulation". Certainly not "psychological warfare".

So if people are interested in Ponzi schemes or magical remedies, the state should not interfere, right?
Yes, this is a big thing.
Our goal is it to make the creation of objects so easy that it can become a simple part of the workflow of a product + web designer.
Very very very low entry barrier.

This is something we continuously work on with the open hybrid development tools.

On the other side, the marker is limiting the visual shape of an object. The limitation do provoke new shapes as well. It has some interesting properties.

Long story short. Technology is on its way and the marker will disappear. ;-)
Ha, I don't live on the West Coast.
I was momentarily good friends with someone who went on to become a well known entrepreneurs in this space. Right before he got his business off the ground he emphatically told me :"I am going to exploit the living fucking shit out of these people". He wasn't just talking about his users, but the investors and the entire silicon valley ecosystem. It kind of blew my mind when he actually did it. He went on to be extremely successful in the free-to-play space.
Would love feedback on my new landing page
That I've seen, Netflix and VC firms.
UK Movie Pirates Facing Shocking Prison Sentences
Ponzi schemes and magical remedies promise you something in exchange for your money and do not deliver. If they were advertising a game in which for $x you get A and B and you don't in fact get it, then yeah, intervention is required. That is not what the article is supporting, though.
At high temperatures, steel loses strength long before melting. By 600 C (~1100 F), steel has lost half of its strength.
Can you name a language which doesn't have large numbers of code snippets in stack overflow answers for performing common tasks?
It's a landing page. Why does it need the loading animation? Even though it takes less then 2 seconds, it instantly put me off.
First year CS can be boring, the more interesting classes come later. I highly recommend sticking with it, I was in a similar place freshman year and really enjoyed the later years of the degrees.

I also recommend talking to the TA's and professors to see if you can get involved in any of their research or projects. That's something I was able to do junior year, and if I'd known about it I probably could've gotten involved much sooner.
Those are fraud, not just "manipulation".
Most people don't want to reprogram stuff, they don't want to customize stuff. They want things to "just work", they don't want to choose which button controls the car windows and which knob controls the bass. This is the job of the designer. Most people want a finished product.

People don't want to "rewire" their products, they don't want to hack on this kind of thing. Except for geeks and technical people, who can also handle normal apps and interfaces.

The analogy with the Internet breaks down because the Internet is mainly successful because it connects people. That's what people care about, other people. The telephone was a success because it lets you talk to other people.

Unless this thing helps people deal with other people, it's too complex and uninteresting for the masses and probably too simple and tedious for technical people.
I have a tor hidden service set up with ssh access and, I sometimes connect this way. Although it's fairly slow and laggy it enables access to web interfaces.
The solution is to teach people to be savvy consumers, to have a skeptical eye to the world, to be able to sort out fact from fiction from opinion, to understand incentives and identify ulterior motives. This skill will never become obsolete. The government can never protect you from everything, but politicians are happy to take your freedom away while they convince you that they can. No consumer protection law can ever supplant caveat emptor.
Even with parental controls, why should companies be allowed to advertise expensive microtransactions to children? Certain types of advertising aimed at kids are already banned in various countries.

Companies are well aware of the power of making kids nag their parents to spend money. But now they have an even worse tool: many kids have almost direct access to their parents' wallets if they borrow their devices.
This is jealousy, at the core of it. Not just the gaming industry uses these tactics. I work in an industry that does that all the time (I hate it).

Certain kinds of games shouldn't be regulated, though I would agree that creating fake profiles on social media in an attempt to gather more information from users should be regulated to some extent.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, are you in favor of people having a free will, or do you want to mitigate what a person can and can't do with their free time because in your opinion, it's bad for them?
There's plenty of legal Ponzi and pyramid schemes out there right now. Amway and plenty of other multi-level marketing enterprises, for instance. As long as you're (sort of) honest about it, it isn't even fraudulent to run one.

"Magical remedies". I assume you mean alternative medicine. Does this mean you're going to ban various herbs, or what?
I was totally and completely addicted to WoW for two years. Almost lost my girlfriend, friends, etc. When I finally quit I had the shakes. Literally.

One thing though is I've never saved more money than when I was playing WoW because I never went out. These newer games do seem to have a different financial model that exploits addiction in potentially a much more dangerous fashion.
Well, I'd imagine that this person is doing it because they think it's cool.

But companies like Intel are doing it because they want to sell the servers that will eventually back all of this stuff.
Most academic languages don't have large numbers of stack overflow answers. Look at Standard ML or most dependently typed languages (Agda, Coq, Twelf, etc.). Though, Agda produces snippets for you with hole based programming and there are entire books written about generating snippets with tactics in Coq; as far as Twelf and others are concerned, well, you're on your own.
Make School
>Are there specific genre's of games that have the sorts of traps the author describes?

Free-to-play games are the obvious example. MMORPGs are another, though I would say they are somewhat less sinister as — while they use many psychological tricks to keep players coming back — they are at the core generally an attempt to produce an interesting or enjoyable game world, which is generally not the primary goal in F2P games.

I feel one of the worst (or at least most interesting) offenders for gambling is Valve, through Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike. In those games people can buy "keys" to open randomly dropped "chests" which may or may not contain valuable items (valuable in the sense that they can be traded to other players for sometimes hundreds of dollars in Steambux). They are essentially running a lottery. I will concede that it's quite similar to Magic: The Gathering's business model (small chance to find something valuable!), but something about the exact implementation (perhaps the ease of trading and valuation of items, or the heavy use of Steambux which can only be redeemed in a Valve store?) Valve uses feels a bit more skeevy.
Dear Eclipse Detractor,

Please make a more reasonable and detailed critique.

Sincerely,

Someone who prefers Eclipse over IntelliJ (strongly, I cannot STAND IntelliJ), Textmate, Atom, Sublime Text 3, Vim, Emacs, and NetBeans.

(EDIT: davnicwil, your reply to me disappeared. Was it deleted? I appreciated the discussion and had written a reply.)
Is there market evidence that websites are getting penalized for serving up html and not using client-side frameworks?
I can't compare just using HN! but I can say that I also go to sleep earlier.
So in your opinion there's nothing a gaming or marketing company can do that's legal now, but really shouldn't be?

I'm also not buying that it's a slippery slope and banning, say, cross compiling profiles on customers from different, unrelated platforms would "take down the entirety of marketing and advertising as an industry".

In capitalism, companies will do everything within the legal framework to make more money. That's their job. Ours is to set and adjust those bounds to keep the whole system productive.
I actually agree with you, I think that this is really interesting, but I don't really think this is much more useful than: http://nodered.org/

However, the reason that this is interesting to people is that it makes device discovery easy, and effectively makes the node-red interface builder available as an AR thing.
How Elon Musk Plans on Reinventing the World (and Mars)
At first I thought this was the name of a court case concerning intellectual property.

Was a nice read. Thanks for posting!
"You think you are not manipulated by ads? Get real, read some of the latest books on the topic."

Any book recommendations? Sounds like this would be really interesting to read about
Because they're not the same thing. One is a record/field lookup, the other is a map lookup.

For record lookups, there is no key. What would you pass to the get function as the key? A string? Now the compiler can't reason about it at compile time. It turns into a runtime lookup. In languages like OCaml, there is no reflection, so there is no way to do a runtime lookup of a key. It has to know the name at compile time, and the name is then translated to a byte offset into the record.
>Some people have better impulse control than others; it's not the state's job to regulate the impulses of their populaces, or regulate systems that know how to manipulate them.

Individual freedom part of me would agree but in reality governments do this all the time and I can't say it's all bad either.

A good example is drug control - while it's currently taken to the extreme there's no doubt in my mind that fully legalizing drugs would lead to a more volatile society - even if drugs were legal they would still cost money, as would other basic necessities - and hard addicts aren't in any position to be productive. At best they will be a burden on their community. At worst they turn to crime. Not to mention the increased number of psychotic breakdowns.

I value a society which is based on individual freedom but I don't like the idea of living in a society where I have to be afraid of a junky robbing me if I step outside of my house or dying in a random guns blazing suicide shooter spree.

>but this shit has been around as long as humanity itself has existed

Interesting and somewhat obvious point that gets overlooked a lot. For example the "mainstream media conspiracy" argument (which is rather accepted considering how implausible the argument is on the grand scale) of dumbing down the population and intentionally shoving superficial crap/shocking stories as a part of some coordinated conspiracy to divert attention from "important issues".

I don't doubt that there is plenty of media manipulation from political and private circles - in the grand scheme of things a far more plausible explanation for the media we have is that they cater to their audience and know which buttons need to be pressed to get viewership. And their profit model is not aligned with quality content either.
The problem is that there is nothing that can be done due to the fact that its all opt-in and is based on ( as the article points out ) psychology. Free to play has gamed the inherit structure of the world wide web.
I think the new specifications for bluetooth with ip6 and Mesh networking are interesting.
But the open hybrid platform builds up on the most common ground. If WiFi pollutes the spectrum, jet there are more and more SoC's with WiFi on board pushing in to the IoT marked, maybe the WiFi consortium will take care of the pollution with a LE standard update.
As someone who worked in the customer-facing ends of the gambling industry (hell, I haven't been able to totally let go, I just ordered a true casino machine for my home... for reverse engineering and pentesting)... that online shit is far worse than "offline" gambling.

With gambling offline, well you have to leave your house, gonna dress up, and people will notice if you fuck up your life by gambling every day. Also, maximum losses per machine and hour are usually regulated and you can have yourself banned from gambling venues.

Online gambling - and online playing of the "free to play" or "pay to win" sort - however, does not offer any of these advantages. Instant pay-ins of five-figure sums (and instant pay-outs, publically shown)... or just the pleasure of 0wning an opponent because you paid for the "by-cash-only" battleship.

No limits at all, disgusting. And no one will see you going down and down, except the pizza delivery guy and the coroner when it's too late.
Amazing post and amazing story telling.

Sure, I got a bit lost in the middle (did the blog post ended? am I in a new blog post?) but all in all it was quite insightful on many levels (the lines themselves, the dual FOIA requests, etc.)
Moreover, it is non-obvious how to contact the author via private email. The "about" section of the blog just links to a twitter account:

http://danluu.com/about/

This is especially strange as the author then mentions email there, without providing an actual email address:

| Please ping me on twitter if it looks like your email got eaten by my spam filter

Maybe the author expects a reader to brute-force lots of addresses "something [at] danluu.com"?
I would be in favour of anyone selling homeopathic "remedies" being banned from calling themselves a health professional.
Gambling is the same yet there are a whole host of things that governments have done to try and help protect consumers.
But isn't wood turned to ash at 1100F?
Should Tech Companies Be Subject to the Fourth Amendment?
Well, my family spends a lot on educational technology. Two years ago we bought a violin, and this year, a cello.

My exposure to educational software goes back to the early 1980s, when I had a summer internship at an educational computing facility. They had a "lab" with copies of educational software for teachers to try out. Most of it was crap: Mostly glorified flash cards, arithmetic quizzes, and crude hypertext books.

Today, my kids are in 8th and 10th grade, and they use educational software that is provided online. How far have we progressed? It is still crap: Glorified flash cards, arithmetic quizzes, and crude hypertext books. The UI's are more sophisticated and there is a larger quantity of content, but I haven't really seen any new ideas since 30 years ago, for instance that would qualify as "inventions" to someone like Alan Kay.

In my view a problem is that the mechanics of developing software is onerous enough that it's too cumbersome to create very much variety or interesting interaction. More ominous today is that the software is sold by the same companies that peddle the school curricula and standardized tests. And the amount of time that our kids spend wading through that crap is exactly why they don't have time to do things like learn programming.

Still, we have plenty of educational software, but it will be hard for us to spend 3% of our income on it, because it's all free: Scratch, Python, Arduino, etc.

/rant
It seems there are enough people with modest-enough expectations to carry on the torch. As opposed to the perpetual silver-bullet chasing types.
There's a massive difference between fraud (promising impossible returns or cures) and advertising.

Game makers aim to addict you, but they don't lie and they do give you exactly what they say they will.
> Wouldn't you rather see relevant ads, rather than the something completely irrelevant to your life?

Absolutely not. The cost to my limited time & attention span is not worth it. If I feel there is a problem in my life that I can solve with a product, I am perfectly capable of finding it using sources I trust.
Of course you have to be able to get along with people, but friendship is way more than just getting along with people. It's being involved in each other's personal lives for non-business reasons.

When someone is explicitly looking to hire not just colleagues but new personal friends, it can be a sign of immaturity, and that they might not be great at understanding boundaries.

On the other hand, there are probably some people who would like that kind of a work environment. No harm is done if the potential employer is up front about it, at least they're being open about what they want. Much more awkward to take the job and get surprised by Overly Attached Coworkers if that's not what you want.
there's no doubt in my mind that fully legalizing drugs would lead to a more volatile society

Many hard drugs (including cocaine and heroin) were legal in the United States prior to the 1920s.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no massive social breakdown as a result.

The ultimate irony is that a major motivation for the criminalization of cocaine was, for poor rural whites, a fear that drugged up blacks would start raping white women. [1] Needless to say, this did not materialize and there is no reason it will if we lift the ban.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/why-we-too...
Can you expand/clarify what you are referring to? Is that in regard to my example of milk?