skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a test on Ubisoft's part. They're testing how the crackers, pirates and market react. I'm sure if they make significantly less money than expected they'll scrap the idea. On the other hand if they make more money, they'll roll it out to future releases.

My guess is that they'll make less money. Even if a some people buy the game instead of pirating it, the abysmal reviews on Amazon will have a stronger effect.
A long while back William Gibson quit blogging, saying (IIRC) that having an easy outlet for his little thoughts was keeping him from incubating them into big thoughts. Perhaps this is something similar. FWIW, Gibson eventually started again.
Speed Dating for the Hiring Process: Software Talent in NYC
Ecological Sabotage Threatens Italian Agriculture
More Patent Nonesense
That is what "Building new site and selling it" fits :). Selling website without domain is not a good idea...
Interesting. I had a flash of real violence breaking out over the game.
The reason Lua has a small standard library is because making it substantially larger would undercut one of its major strengths. (Look at the difficulties people have with embedding Python.)

There are quite a few semi-standard libraries (such as LPEG, LuaSocket, LuaDoc, lfs, Lanes, etc.), but they can evolve outside of the core language. It's always easier to add libraries than remove libraries people assume you have.

If you want a "batteries-included" setup, there's Lua for Windows (http://luaforwindows.luaforge.net/), LuaRocks (to automatically install packages), etc. I'm going to post several new/updated OpenBSD ports related to Lua once the ports tree is out of lock for release, too.
the original binary doesn't need to be modified in any way

It's easy for Ubisoft to also force the binary to be cracked: have the client request the server sign a random token with its private key, and verify it with a public key embedded into the client. This way a third party server could only be written if the client was also cracked to either change the key or remove the check.
Agreed. It's the system that's broken and at fault, not companies taking out patents.
I think you miss a point in your thoughts: People will hate it because they've payed for the game. First they invest money and then they find out that due to an draconian protection scheme they are unable to play the game at their discretion.
And after that happens - and now they will hate Ubisoft - a significant portion of them will probably find out that there is a pirated version out there which does not have this problems. A version which can simply be played. And then Ubisoft has lost many customers. Maybe forever.

One would think the software industry / computer games industry has learned something from the fates of the music and film industries. When their sales declined they put DRM into their products. When that didn't help they made the DRM systems more draconian. And, unsurprisingly, the customers hated it and their sales declined faster. But the software industry / computer games industry seems to be unable to understand this lesson.
In my case, I'm interested because I hope to someday (hopefully soon) follow their path - not exactly the same, but knowing how other people monetize their expertise gives me idea on how to do the same with mine!.

So I hope to learn a bit from each example.
And, in fairness, how much of what's in any of those would get much agreement these days? The Republic advocates the abolition of families, a ban on poetry, and a systematic campaign of deception on the part of the ruling classes. The Meditations contain what despite stiff competition is still one of the worst ever attempts to prove the existence of God, and the whole "assume nothing and work up from first principles approach" is pretty much completely discredited. Leviathan is a sustained argument for totalitarianism.

I suppose the Nicomachean Ethics might get a bit more love, though it's a lot more self-centred than you might expect from the title. (Aristotle's basic question is "how should one live so as to attain eudaimonia?", and that last term means something much more like "happiness" or "well-being" than, say, "virtue".)

Which isn't to say that those works aren't historically important, or interesting, or produced by first-rate thinkers. But it does kinda suggest that if what you're after is truth, opinion and rank speculation aren't very reliable ways to get that even when done by geniuses.

(Yes, "kinda suggest" rather than "prove" or anything similarly strong; it is of course possible that we're all wrong nowadays and that, say, Descartes was right. But it's not looking likely.)
Bringing P2P in from the cold
Schneier: Spy cameras won't make us safer
email you where? i'm interested in testing it out.
Don't forget my direction - a guy who always buys his games, but has been deeply disillusioned by the way games have been "consolified" of late, hence has spent less and less on games, and has built up a level of resentment of publishers who think that reduced game sales is owing to piracy, rather than crappy ports.
you know it was kind of nice back when artistic endeavors took major investments of time and money. now I don't have any excuse for not being creative >_>
I'm working on Forrst.
Huge iceberg breaks off Antarctica
Why I Wish My Competitors Well and You Should Too
Donald Knuth's First Computer
Perhaps we are in a multiverse and in many other universes you did get that job and you didn't meet her.
Obviously if you are a libertarian, you will be opposed to unionization in general;

That's utterly untrue. Libertarians oppose the special legal privileges given to unions, not the right to free association. You have the right to form a union, but your employer is not compelled to negotiate with the union and can still hire/fire at will.

As for your complaint "oh noes, I don't like to hear libertarian's opinions, but hacker sites are full of the libertarians", sorry to hear that. You are welcome to create your own HN-type site which allows limited discussion on politics but forbids libertarian opinions - HN is open source so it shouldn't even be that hard.
Not to nitpick, but Metal Gear Solid is from Konami, not Capcom :)

Nonetheless, the analogy seems to be relatively adequate here.
> just another sequel

Somewhat off-topic but: AC2 is pretty much the game AC1 promised but never delivered.
The title of this is something I would have thought all start ups did as a matter of course.

Even big companies (Microsoft excluded) often go with that mantra. To start on the offensive before even beginning is dooming yourself to fail.
They could (probably have) limit that approach too by signing the data (as already suggested) or encrypting it with different keys for sending / receiving.
The premise is inaccurate - the game allows you to save games locally. You still have to be online but local storage of the save games is a selectable option.
US laws make it tough on contract programmers.
Reference for Airbus and Eurocopter: http://www.esterel-technologies.com/technology/success-stori...
It's a 'checkpoint' system. Save game or not, the game is constantly checking with Ubisoft's servers - if it can't talk to them it just boots you out. The save thing is a bit of a red herring.
Can anyone suggest how this item might, in the words of the guidelines concerning what is regarded as on-topic, be something that "... gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." ??
The reason they will be hated is aptly summarized in this (though that's for DVDs, but same principle): http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg
Pirated vs. paying customers - this is what you get with a DVD
Yeah, good luck getting that into fonts.
€ got there.
Using Subversion with Notepad++
I remember a while back hearing that the Russians were going to introduce a rouble symbol, in the belief that this would make the rouble stronger and more stable.
Oh god! it burns! I'd have to work! =P
Java was my first "real" programming language. I went to a Java school. I did primarily Java programming at my first job. I've done almost exclusively Java programming at my current job. I made a business selling downloadable Java software half just to show people it could be done.

I say this so that when I tell you DO NOT USE JAVA you won't think me biased. Its strengths are more apparent in Big Freaking Enterprise applications with teams of dozens or hundreds of people working on them. Its deficiencies are even more glaring when there are only two of you -- chiefly, the productivity lag you'll suffer to do even the smallest things.

You'll have a bit of a ramp-up period learning Rails, Django, or your favorite modern MVC framework of choice. Trust me: it is worth it. It will probably even make your cofounder a better Java programmer in the bargain.
Did you even bother to read the linked article?
What is surprising is that they got so much traction so fast. Does anybody know what tactics they used? Or do they have a buddy in the App Store?
1. Good idea.

2. Will recruiters be involved?

- Recruiters are always going to try to be involved in events like this. I guarantee that recruiters will try to attend by either posing as candidates in order to meet real candidates or by actually paying the $300 fee to attend as a hiring company. Maybe that's a good thing for hirelite's bottom line but is it a good thing for the event overall? This event seems like a good opportunity to cut recruiters out of the process but there doesn't seem to be any plan here to deal with this unavoidable contingency.

3. It says candidates who want to attend have to pass a programming test to qualify for free admittance.

- Wouldn't the programming test need to be tailored to the job each candidate is applying for - in which case it wouldn't make sense to give a test until during or after the event?

4. Is St Patrick's Day in NYC good or bad timing for a job interview?

5. In real speed dating, the 1-minute date is often strictly enforced. It says the interview will last 5 minutes. Is that a strict 5 minutes?
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Sorry, false. We used this in 2003 for commercial purposes, as a way for Site B to verify the user had used Site A without setting a cookie.
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I've typed two(!) replies to this and deleted both, so here goes a third time.

Boobs beat bombs.

By that I mean that very, very, very rarely does a kid watch Terminator and go out and become some killing machine at the mall. But all the time kids watch porno and go out and get the neighbor's kid pregnant (or get pregnant themselves). So parents have a highly irrational fear of doing anything to increase the already high sex drive that kids have. Especially in ages without birth control, controlling procreation until there was a good chance at child survival was a critical part of maintaining the species. Even with birth control, STDs travel through younger populations at a much, much higher rate than older ones, usually due to passions overcoming practicality.

Boobs beat bombs.
A new old fossil found
I'm sitting here eating my oatmeal and honey, thinking "Imagine a world without oatmeal and honey!" Seems to be working.
Can you justify your job title?
Why Social Computing Is the Future Of Interaction
I'm trying to get laid, actually. And failing thus far :/
Working on an experiment for my psychology class. It's fun because I made it a web application, and it's been a good chance to mess with Couchdb. (project is here(http://github.com/vault/Word-Superiority-Effect), it's pretty crappy currently)
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First? I doubt it. Also, I don't know if they were before or after these guys:

http://www.didyouwatchporn.com/
Peter Thiel Interview: Can You Say Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn and PayPal
Plants vs. Zombies was very popular before it ever hit the AppStore. And, PopCaps already had a massive fan base from Peggle and Bejeweled before P vs Z ever came out; they've been cranking out great stuff for a while now.
Plants vs. Zombies has been the most popular flash game on popcap.com, which is the #804 website in the US(1), for a while. iPhone gamers must have a large overlap with flash gamers.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/popcap.com
Wow. If that's your ideas of slightly NSFW, I'd like to see the really dangerous stuff.
While I agree that this is probably what will happen, it is probably not going be as easy as you make it seem. There is a very good chance that in this case the entire conversation with the server will be encrypted. In order to emulate this, the encryption will have to be broken. That's hard enough as it is, and you also don't really know what the plaintext is.
1. Thanks!

2. Recruiters will not be involved. They are one of the main reasons I created this - to get job seekers and companies talking directly.

3. Currently, the programming test is pretty simple (less than 10 lines of code) and is meant to qualify people that show up. We don't want to put people with no programming ability in front of companies.

4. Thank you so much for catching that. The date is actually the 16th (typo before).

5. We enforce the 5 minute limit.
Cracking Down on Botnets
This is semantics. The whole point of forming a union is that these organizations are legally protected. Libertarians are opposed to the relevant protections.

The trouble with libertarian opinions is that they're always the same boilerplate whatever issue is being discussed. I've heard the views you're expressing literally hundreds of times previously on this and similar forums, and it inevitably becomes tedious and frustrating to read them over and over again. You seem to be insinuating that this is because I want to be insulated from opposing views -- but why would I be here, or be making this comment, if it were so? Surely you can understand that reading the same boilerplate hundreds of times over is potentially frustrating.

Also, Libertarians tend to address people who hold opposing views as if they were idiots. See e.g your assumption that I am completely uninformed about libertarian views on unionization, which derives from a refusal to adopt minimal standards of charity in interpretation. Do you really suppose I'm unaware that libertarians are not opposed per se to voluntary organization? This is a libtertarian talking point; I have seen the libertarian position on this issue exposited countless times. The bottom line is that you made a comment saying that public sector workers should not be allowed to unionize, but are now complaining that you are characterized as "opposed to unionization". I'm perfectly aware that those three words don't capture every nuance of your position, but I think it should be fairly clear what they mean in this context.
The server side javascript guys are more interested in templating than most client side and all server side templating engines will run in the browser. Here's a pair of discussions on the subject:

http://groups.google.com/group/commonjs/browse_thread/thread...

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/b...

The most notable framework missing from the pandoraform article is mustache.js
- How will you identify a recruiter? Often they pretend to be a hiring company. And are you committed enough to the idea of them not attending that you are willing to turn down their offers to pay the $300 attendance fee?
imagine where facebook would be today if someone had patented 'social network'.
Retiring a Data Center. With an Axe.
I'm not sure if a virtual machine (VM ware player) allows you to have direct access to your graphics hardware. I think VMware workstation allows you to use the hosts video card. But is only supports acceleration for OpenGL.

Besides, this makes justifying PC gaming and the PC as a games platform even more difficult. Especially considering that the xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have already had this game for a while and don't have this DRM system.

Shame, seems like a good game.
More info here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1241059...

In summary, B9B, a 97-kilometer long iceberg, crashed into the Mertz Glacier Tongue in the Australian Antarctic Territory on Feb. 20, 2010. The collision created a new 78-kilometer long iceberg. Those two are now drifting around, chilling out. Complicated ocean currents will most likely be affected, possibly depriving huge parts of the ocean of oxygen, interrupting millions of biological feedback systems we know nothing about, shifting them to newfound equilibria, making this little ecosystem of ours a lot more livable for obscure branches of bugs, and a lot less livable for us.

tl;dr: We're all going to die.
On awarding college course credit for participating in varsity sports
Site seems to be in progress still - the "companies attending" list is empty (http://hirelite.com/companies) and so is the blog (http://blog.hirelite.com/).

Interesting concept though, looking forward to seeing which companies will be attending. Will you be updating the blog as new companies are added?
Plato's Allegory of Cave
I'm glad you're a stickler about recruiters. I am too. I am 100% committed to not having recruiters at this event, even if it means turning down money. They will ruin the experience.

For this particular event, the attendees will be primarily companies I know who are hiring and companies that read HN. I'll be monitoring the companies that sign up and kicking out people that I think are recruiters. I have a good handle on who is hiring tech talent in NYC right now, so I know the companies that are likely to show up. If they're not on my mental list, I'll be suspicious.
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"I have a good handle on who is hiring tech talent in NYC right now"

- Are you a recruiter?
This is assuming the game is complete, what if the server is sending back parts of the game in response to state saving. For instance, perhaps some of the AI is running remotely. This could explain dropping out of the game: the game is unable to continue.
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I have absolutely no idea what the app will look like, but that landing page is absolutely drop dead gorgeous.
For now, who shows up on the "companies attending" list is manually populated (when a company signs up, they send me a job post that I put on that page). I'm in the process of getting job descriptions from the attendees.

The blog is currently empty because I haven't written anything :). I plan to get some content up there this weekend.
Reminds me of that _old_ game from MS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker

Couldn't do text-to-speech, but you could record voices.
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True.

It's a loss for them either way -- if Ubisoft goes out of their way to add this feature, the effort required by the crackers is proportionally smaller.

I tend to think most of the draconian copyrape is actually internal political maneuvering at these large publishers. Ways for one department to counter another's with figures "look! After implementing xxx DRM scheme in order to prevent loss from copyright infringers in market yyy, total predicted sales volume was not met by zzz! In addition, piracy rates remained at or above zzz1! This proves that our console-focused sales track etc etc" Kind of like how the digital distribution from EA for Crysis actually did not work at all, probably on purpose, for various reasons pertaining to retail and corporate in-fighting (my theory, anyway.)
"That's a fairly even-handed and informative summary..."

And it was on Fox! Neat.
I am not a recruiter. I'm a developer. I know who's hiring because I've been watching the job boards and attending events in NYC for the last few months.
They could do that. Run some portions of the game on the server, which would remove some of the game logic from the client, making any sort of crack to require adding back in instead of simply stripping out logic.

They probably will not do anything non-trivial for this. It costs money to run servers, and they would have to run much more powerful servers in order to be running game logic for each player. That would eat into revenue, and this game is not even subscription-based.
A Big Case of Oops
Many of the major game protocols are not only encrypted, but are extremely complex and irregular. They're absolutely no fun to reverse.
I had E.T on the Atari 2600. I remember playing it for hours, unable to figure out how to progress in the game. I only found out 20 years later that it was literally unwinnable.

If that happened now, I would get on the internet and find out quickly. In fact, I would have looked at reviews of the game and never bought it in the first place.

So this kind of quality control is not nearly as beneficial now as it was in Nintendo's heyday.
The latest volume in Knuth's "Selected Papers" series, "Selected Papers on Design of Algorithms" is due out any day now. (According to Amazon, it was supposed to be released on the 15th, but my pre-ordered copy still hasn't shipped...)
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Yep, Hilfinger is teaching the class this semester.
Looks good! I submitted feedback using the demo account but I'm not sure it'd make it to you. What I'd like to see added..

- Support for other ranking systems such as EPGP.
- Integration with existing guild sites (or Facebook?).
- Links to profiles on the Armory.
- Support for an addon so that events on the calendar sync with the game itself. Ideally, it would link to the in-game calendar, but I'm not sure that is possible.
- Additional options on creating an event. Min/max per class or per group (tank, heal, DPS), minimum rank, private invites, private events, or something similar to (but not quite) GearScore based on their Armory profile.

The two major hurdles for adoption will be the in-game calendar (convincing people to use this over it) and existing guild websites (integration).
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Yep, I am also waiting. I got the Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms, Discrete Math, Computer Science and now waiting for this.
I couldn't possibly treat all my competitors as enemies. Anywhere you can post your doings is my competitor.
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SnapGroups: New Startup Coming From Creator of Yahoo Groups & Bloglines
Is the programming test:

- online or offline?

- open book or closed book? (can the candidate use the internet?)

- timed or untimed?
Road Map for an Application/Software Security Architect (Part 6)
Ubuntu Python: raise an exception, import 190 modules
The test is currently online, open book, and untimed (though it won't take long). If you start the signup process as a Software Engineer, you can see the test. I haven't posted the test blatantly in the open so people won't easily be able to Google an answer.
Here's a simple, applied example I came up with while I was applying to med school: http://nielsolson.us/MedSchool/#odds

[edit]: there was subtraction error, now fixed.
Feb 2010 New F# Compiler Bugs
He looks so old for 20.