skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gambling isn't the same because the money users spend isn't used as a bet for a real-world money return. That is why when this stuff goes to court it gets thrown out.F2P relies on pure psychology and large sums of marketing dollars.
It's strange to me that a group of people that is sometimes stereotyped as being too preoccupied with logical fallacies will still invoke slippery slopes. Making good decisions now does not remove our capability to make good decisions in the future. Nor is it particularly reasonable to draw parallels between "don't fake users to befriend key targets" and "we may as well ban alcohol".

The status quo isn't as black and white as you've made it out. Advertisements and marketing have developed along with their regulations throughout modern history. Most countries restrict advertisements for prescription medicines. Many restrict advertising aimed at children directly. In the US, advertising is explicitly excluded from the first amendment.

A free market works only when people act rationally. That's one of the underlying hypotheses. Psychological manipulation and the Zynga Skinner box causes people to act out of alignment with their rational preferences.
What makes artifical intelligence more likely to destroy humanity than a person?
Cities don't plant fruit trees because the fallen fruit makes a big mess, attracts rats, etc. Meanwhile, there are plenty of beggars in tropical places where unlimited fruit of all kinds grows everywhere...
Dog Perfoms Amazing Tricks
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.

Out of genuine curiosity, do you feel the same about state intervention in other situations, away from gaming, that involve a more knowledgeable or deliberate party taking advantage of a less knowledgeable or deliberate one?

For example, what about full-on gambling where the potential exists to win big but players will probably lose, and having already lost, aggressive tactics are then used to get them to try again? Does it matter whether the person gambling understands the situation they are being steered into?

Is it OK for bars or clubs to offer a happy hour early in the evening to get patrons going, then turn up the heat and make it hard to find water so those patrons keep ordering more drinks and getting more and more drunk throughout the evening?

What about phishing attacks? If someone is ignorant of the possibilities for impersonating e-mail from someone else they know, should we turn a blind eye to those who would send such e-mails to trick someone who thinks they're helping a friend in need into parting with their money?

What about confidence tricksters who do similar things on the doorstep of old people who may not be familiar with what sort of credentials a genuine representative of their water or electricity supplier would carry today?

Or payday loan companies, who will offer what looks like a lifeline to those who have fallen on hard times, yet charge astronomical rates of interest that can rapidly lead into a vicious and sometimes devastating cycle of debt and despair?

How about law firms in jurisdictions where everyone normally pays their own legal costs after a court case, who send threatening letters alleging infringements of copyright and offer to settle for just less than it's likely to cost to go to court to challenge the allegations?

What about outright grooming of children or other vulnerable people for the purposes of sexual exploitation?

For these and many other similar reasons, I think it is appropriate for the state to regulate industries where one party may flagrantly take advantage of another. No-one can possibly be an expert on all areas of society, and laws exist to protect us all from those who would otherwise unfairly take advantage of those weaknesses. Of course there are sometimes grey areas, but the principle that governments should never step in to protect the vulnerable from exploitation seems a very bad one to me.

Also, I dispute your characterisation of the entire marketing and advertising industry as if everyone does these things. Of course all ads are hoping to engage someone in the target market and pique their interest, but IMHO that is a far cry from the kind of active and disproportionate exploitation we're talking about with some of these games companies.
Look, this is just commerce at work. People are going to use whatever edge they can get to make more money. These edges only go so far. If you think the only reason Game of War is popular because of the million dollar ads, then why isn't every single product, everywhere using these ads?

These games fulfill more than just some need to mindlessly click on shit. Just because doesn't do anything for you, that doesn't make the people it does work for stupid or rubes. As soon as something better comes along, all of these games companies are going to be toast, way, way deader than disco.

Assuming that any massive success is due to nefarious attention-gaming is pretty much categorically wrong. Video gaming, by the standards of global commerce, is a ridiculously tiny niche. There are billions of people who have never played a video game in their entire life. Game of War is the largest player in a sub-niche of this small niche. Big enough to buy ads on the Super Bowl, sure, but that says a lot more about the declining power of television and advertising in general than it does about the size of the gaming market.

That this market needs political attention to curb abuse is utterly laughable. How about we fix oil drilling, or pharmaceutical production first?
"We change, but interfaces haven't, therefore we need to change the interfaces" is a flawed argument. Change has a cost. The interfaces may be good enough. The new interfaces may be worse. Change may result in many standards where there used to be one. Change is fresh and nice in other ways, but to me, the foundation for this research seems to be more along the lines of "Glorified knobs for everyone!", which is cool in its own right.
He do sound like John Carmack.
One aspect of the difference is that the physical force and violence with white collar crime are indirect / externalized, because the crimes involve manipulation of intangibles.
Take a look at someone who spent $30k on ships in Star Citizen.

http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-a-fan-who-has-spent-30000-on-sta...

He seems like a reasonable person to me. He's not in financial ruin. He doesn't seem to regret his purchase. He's just putting money into his hobby, the same way a different 40 year old would buy an "unproductive" boat or an "unproductive" Rolex.
Realistically, the selling point of Drupal is the strong integration between the front end and the back end - if Headless Drupal becomes the norm, there won't be a lot of good reasons to deploy Drupal on the back-end instead of say, Rails API.

If the Drupal project gets solidly behind Angular, React, Ember, or something else, and Drupal 9 modules support client-side as well as server-side rendering, this could be a very interesting development.
I use this along with https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.mpcjanssen.... and https://syncthing.net/ for syncing.
Oh, I know that my tools are inherently not as good as the ones today, but that's not my concern.

I'm not sad that my tools from years ago aren't as good as the ones today. That's inevitable. I'm sad that many of them are useful but artificially rendered useless by decisions.

For example, I had no complaints about my phone's battery life, security, or performance in 2011, my phone hasn't changed, and I use it for the same tasks. The same goes for the other items I listed.
Try to make him do it while watching a 5 year old and an 8 year old while entering a car. It's a more realistic scenario for when you need a knob to work as expected.
Where do erotic web camera sites that allow tipping and rake money off the top fit in?

I'm pretty sure lots of people are addicted to these shows.
Perhaps there's a new product idea for Cliff: opt-in self-regulation. Whenever your urges become too strong, phone-a-friend for in-game counseling. Fight the pernicious Facebook-stalking fire with healthier Facebook-stalking fire.

Alternatively, a new game called Slimy-Game-Developer, which simulates mind-control of millions of players while you optimise your revenues using too-effective psychological techniques.
I've implemented a similar service in our company inspired from this project. There are few of differences though:

- we are using redis instead of leveldb. This way we can scale the service to multiple instances

- created an API to get all feature flags for an user which is also rendered to the client, so there are no unnecessary requsts to APIs not available

- next on the list there will be caching on the service side and syncronization using redis pub/sub

- currenty we are keeping the user ids explicitly enabled for a feature inside the feature array, but we are going to store them in a more efficient way. For example, if we are going to launch the v2 dashboard view, users should be able to opt-in for beta access. Storing half of your user ids in a leveldb/redis array and iterating each time over it is not efficient.

- Changed user ids from integer to strings. We are using uuids, but everybody should be able to hash the integer user id to an efficient string randomized represantation (hmac, sha1, md5).

- Using a hashing function to represent user ids on a scale between 1 and 100 is not efficient. What happens if you allow 5% traffic and only users with hash > 10 are using your site ? Hashing user id to a 1..100 key always yields the same result. Users having hash key 1 will always see the new features and bugs. Not a nice thing.
We are going to implement a more efficient way: first time a user is checked for a feature we put him in a bucket (there are 100 buckets). First user in bucket 1, second in bucket 2, etc. This way, usage gets randomized for each user on each feature, and inactive users will not have the feature enabled by default
An Inmate Dies, and No One Is Punished
The Sorry State of Physician Burnout in the US
i think the unique thing here is feedback gathered from other devs. note the percent markers. eg, here's all the auto-complete possibilities, 80% of devs chose java.util.List, only 3% chose java.awt.List.
compared to the massive degradation that come from room effects it amounts to nothing.

Truth.

Chamber music in an echo-y cathedral. With bad encoding, you can hear a noticeable difference in the length of time the reverberations are audible and and the timbre of those reverberations cab be quite different. With lots of acoustic music, the "accidental beauty" produced by such effects can be quite important.

Finding this convinced me to re-encode my music collection in 320kbps MP3 for anything high quality, and algorithmically chosen variable bitrates for lower quality recordings -- usually around 160 kbps. That was quite a number of years ago, though. I'd probably use another format today.
This is supposedly irresistible "psychological warfare" and yet not one of these shady games companies has gotten a penny from me.

At the end of the day the only one who decides to spend your money on stupid shit is you. Nut up and take responsibility for your own choices.
> People know what pushes their buttons, too, and we have a name for it: interest. Not "manipulation". Certainly not "psychological warfare".

The same argument can apply to people who stay in abusive relationships. I'm not taking a side on whether you're right or wrong in the whole, but there is a danger here that people seem to have some sorts of action linked mechanisms that do not necessarily favour their happiness.
Interesting! From their website, I'm not seeing anything that I'd consider useful proof. Plenty of people were successful selling Brewster stereoscopes, but that was basically a novelty business, not something with sustained commercial or recreational use.
Eclipse's usability depends a lot on what it use it for. It supports lots of languages, build tools and environments. All that is supported through plugins and the quality of those plugins determines your user experience. Without naming your use case your comment doesn't really help anyone.

I like IntelliJ but do prefer Eclipse and am quite happy with it's core functionality. It's when you install all kinds of extra plug-ins is when it's starts to become less usable. But I've heard similar things about Sublime and Atom.
The whole free-to-play market is premised on exploiting the psychology of a few people with cash and very little self control ("whales"). As a game developer, I think it's
pretty slimy.
> FWIW, I hate consumerism and advertising. I block ads everywhere, I hate big branded items, I don't know the last time I bought something from an ad. Just because I feel this way, I don't go around trying to violently force that opinion upon others by begging the state to do it for me.

huh? this literally sounds like "fuck you, got mine" but spun as a benevolent positive, somehow. You had the education and the know-how to be able to learn to defend yourself from ads, and out of some sense of modesty, you're going to keep it to yourself?
Because they might want their API to be accessible from JS (maybe through CORS) and that's only possible if you go through a CA.
Because having collections be value types makes them really nice to work with.
That means it works!
uhm, this is your fault. why were you working for free?

a quote is one thing and as a sales professional you should expect to waste a huge amount of time on quotes that never go anywhere, but a proof of concept is supposed to be something you charge for. it's engineering work!!!

if they don't want to pay for a poc, that's a real good sign that they're not worth working for.
Hi .. It is mainly there for slow connections and mobile devices. Will look at potentially not displaying it for a few seconds so fast loads will not see it.
Well if you always wait for market confirmation before getting involved with something you'll never reap the benefits of getting in early. Personally I have a bit more confidence in my own ability to tell the BS from the real deal. If other people were wrong about the Segway or Google Glass that doesn't necrssarily make me wrong about VR.
The Art of Flying in the Movies
May not be relevant to OP's use case but OpenVPN setup is not that bad, and could be very easy if you are willing to use pre-made setup script available online (e.g., https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install).

In other words, you don't have to be a poor man for VPN if you have the freedom (say with a throw-away cloud VPS).

Having said that, I need to point out again that OP's use case is completely different.
As a counter point, I've never even heard of that book. I may go read it now though.
I'm no fan of these games, but is it fundamentally different from, say, Harley-Davidson?
There is a difference between most games and "whale hunting" games, generally a game will be an interactive experience with a slightly addictive edge to it, but these games are generally between 15$ and 80$ and are a one time buy.

Whale hunters are often free to play games that have an ingame shop where you can buy either cosmetic or game boosts. Examples: Mobas are on the small scale here, they profit from whales but could do without them while facebook games, mmo's or phone games are generally a little more shameless about it.

But nowadays, the line is thinning due to expensive games starting to offer more and more minor downloadable content, which isnt priced high, but can quickly accumulate.
MMOs/FPS/MOBAs are repetitive and addictive because of the fact that each gaming session could be unique.

Blizzard completely stopped making single player games (until Diablo 3) because of WoW's unprecedented success (quite a few other games were cancelled to keep this machine running).

LoL and DotA 2 are similarly addictive since each game nets you drops, some seasonal exclusive cosmetic items, couriers, etc. They also have challenges to keep you coming back.

They're explicitly designed to draw the player back and get better, a fallacy since a player is only as good as his (current) team. So these games usually have a bunch of people who hate the game (Griefers) yet keep playing to grief others with relatively better success.

I'm of the opinion that games without intellectual value must be avoided. And I was a semi-professional gamer (COD & DotA) for a while. One of the best games I had played that were short yet memorable would be the Age Of Empires series, Braid, Hotline Miami.
First, can you prepend your title with 'Ask HN:', that's pretty standard when asking for this kind of help.

You have some big content on the main page, pretty clear you want to get email addresses. Strange that you're asking for advice here when your first selling point is ' our experts will perfect your web content', but... ok.

The spacing across most of your site is off. You've got good whitespace and then text and boxes squished together. Mostly your vertical space needs lots of work (I'm not a designer, so I can't tell you exactly what is wrong, but everything feels off).

Your tagline "Group Collaboration..." is wrong. I don't want "group collaboration" with your team. Just focus on the problem you are helping me solve, which is the rest of your statement. "Our experts help you perfect your web content, investor pitch deck, video script, presentations, and more."

The 'learn more' text and arrow are way to hidden. I completely missed it and thought all you had was an email box.

The 3 steps is ok.

If you're going to use an image where you've blurred all the content, don't use an image. Ideally, you should really just create a mock project that people can see, or have a public project. Or get rid of the screenshot. Oh, and get rid of the weird underline and title 'screenshot' if people can't figure out that is a screenshot....

Why are the colors on your homepage (the orange) so different from the color of your screenshot? You should be thinking of branding (I can't believe I have to explain this to somebody who is creating a site offering help to others...but...)

You're crazy using that image of the night sky. The text on that page is a mess, horrible spacing, very difficult to read with that background.

Your site is also completely unresponsive, I'd suggest you fix that as it looks horrible on mobile.
You downvote, but realistically that's what Tor contributors/operators wind up doing a lot of time.

But some people have decided -- for a number of understandable reasons -- that Tor is actually a good thing to help with.

Everyone's got different ideas of worthwhile uses of their time. Some people love contributing to something; others won't spend 5 minutes on it. It has to do with desire, goals, values, and passion, rather than strictly mathematical aptitude, as you suggested.
Designing Robots That Learn as Effortlessly as Babies
I don't believe that the original author is making the argument that "marketers sometimes do shady things with data." From its title and lede to the end, I read it as "some of these games are manipulative and use manipulative tactics and mechanics to suck money out of people, sometimes to their own demise. The government needs to regulate this industry to protect people from themselves and ban these mechanics." This is roughly as simple to regulate and ban as it is to ban any other type of mechanic. It is what leads to weird laws such as some of California's casinos having weird bingo-based slot machines, or pachinko machines in Japan needing you to trade a pseudocurrency for goods.

The point I'm trying to make is that it is impractical, costly, probably impossible and dangerous to attempt to limit the mechanics the OP is really pissed off about in a way that does not also impinge upon the freedom of the majority in order to protect those with poor impulse control.

I am capable of going to a casino and walking out of there without losing my shirt. I am equally as capable of going to have a few drinks at a bar without becoming an alcoholic, or to have sex with somebody and not turn into a raging sex addict. Should my ability to go to casinos, drink, or sleep with people be regulated too, just because some people's lives are ruined by these things?

You can project this argument into a thousand different things just because people like them. For example, I spend an absolute eternity on the Internet. The vast majority of my life is spent reading, writing code, or doing other coder-type things. Because of this, I have also had to eat the opportunity cost involved; I have missed out on some social gatherings, I have lost friends and also lost any and all experience I would get otherwise. It's safe to say, by some general decree, that I'm addicted to what I do. I'd argue I'm passionate. Should my work and passions be regulated because there is an opportunity cost to me doing so? Should I not be allowed to have the Internet at all because someone else has racked up inordinate amounts of debt at World of Warcraft?

I don't believe it is the fault of the mechanic that these people have poor impulse control, for some reason or another, and I also don't believe it's fair to limit the existence of these types of games because some people are incapable of walking away from them. If we should do anything regulatory down this path, it is building in proper harm reduction systems for these things versus taking a puritanical "ban it" approach to them.
I would absolutely love to get involved with a research project. Unfortunately the CS program at school is relatively new and I'm pretty sure there nothing like that going on. I know most of the TAs and they have a habit of coming to me for help with their coding homework. So that's a bit of a dead end. I'm sure you're right about the later classes being more engaging, so at least I have that to look forward to.
Hootsuite wrote a blog post on doing this sort of thing with Consul: http://code.hootsuite.com/distributed-configuration-manageme... (The post itself is over a year old but the concepts still apply today)

You can use the Go API client[1] to make this possible from Go. I'm biased as I work for HashiCorp but just wanted to add a server-based option to the mix if a local BoltDB won't work for you.

[1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/tree/master/api
What distributed filesystem do you work on?
North Carolina citizenry defeat pernicious Big Solar plan to suck up the Sun
Thanks for the info. May I ask why/how you have one if it is so much trouble?
I think there would be a better case for regulating in game purchases. Some kind of limit, or a at least a warning at the beginning so people know what they are in for. "This game contains purchasable items. You may spend more than 10 000 dollars in this game."

Marketing on the other hand is a different story. We cant really ban that.
Where to start?
The author didn't just make it out of the good will of his heart, he wanted to turn a profit and set out to make money off the iPhone version from the outset. The $100 fee is a triviality in the face of the hundreds and hundreds (thousand, even) of hours it takes to create and maintain Anki on iOS. You don't have to look far to see the development of the native version of the iOS app was even contracted out, for pay. It was taken very seriously.

Not all FOSS software developers are against making money. Often FOSS projects can be a starting point to launching a commercial product or service, whether it was originally intended to be one or if a long-time hobby project happened to grow to the point that making a business around it becomes a viable new option.