skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More like:

Internet: 2 Ubisoft: 0

The internet scored its first point when the DRM was cracked almost immediately. This second failure is just going to motivate everyone, even those who actually bought the game, to download a torrented copy of the cracked version.
Many new and superior entrants into a market used advertising to gain a foothold. Think Sears.

The economics of the web are different and have lowered the value of advertising compared to the value of word of mouth. But there is still some value left in advertising, especially in markets for more traditional goods that don't spread as easily through viral means.
Foursquare Just Made Your Location History A Lot More Interesting
I like the goose metaphor and I see it in education all the time. We constantly tell undergraduates that learning math is not just about crunching numbers but about learning how to abstract and reason more efficiently and yet the tests and homework assignments tell a different story so the undergrads just learn how to crunch numbers.
Does anyone have a full dump of HN posts and comments?
I wonder if they were DoS'ed.
PJ O'Roorke's "Parliament of Whores" has a chapter about "Sudden Acceleration Incidents" and the investigation and politics thereof that your piece reminds me of (and it's an entertaining read).

http://tinyurl.com/yhkq6k9 - Link to Google books for this chapter (using tinyurl because the URL is truly massive). A few pages missing because it's a "preview".
Totally :-)
This is clever. But surely, 'l' and 'o' should be simpler.
Reason Magazine does this a lot. The author of this article clearly doesn't believe the government has any business monitoring private Internet traffic. That's admirable, and I agree. But here he crosses the line from reporting based in a perspective to breathless evangelism.

The government's current plan to beef up cybersecurity does drastically increase monitoring. On government computers. Government networks are currently a shambles; they can't even fend off prepackaged malware, let alone a concerted attack.

I think the current plans to improve this situation are misguided. For instance, they call for signature-based deep packet inspection monitoring, but say virtually nothing about application security or standardization. It's security designed first and foremost as a carvout for contractors like Lockheed.

But that doesn't mean that it's an Obama administration plot to read all our email. It's unlikely Obama had any input into this at all, beyond "I want to see something tangible and significant done to address cybersecurity".

Of course, Reason isn't going to give you any of this context, because they're acting as an advocacy operation, and not journalists. They could call around and get details, but they aren't doing that.
The Seattle Public Library: Children's Books, Movies & Music
How about a copy-able version of the equations so that we can test them to see if they actually work?
Thanks for the dataset. FWIW:
%s/&quot;//g takes it from 170M to 100M

Of course, compression negates the saving, but it still seemed odd.
I think it's significantly more difficult to safely encrypt a message that the NSA can't read than people think. There are bugs in widely-used crypto implementations that won't come to light for 10-20 years.
-E is your friend:

-E Stop after the preprocessing stage; do not run the compiler proper.
The output is in the form of preprocessed source code, which is
sent to the standard output.

Input files which don't require preprocessing are ignored.

Take the output of that, compile it, and you will typically get a sensible error message.
A few site owners have indicated that they will be paying for StackExchange, but I suspect you're right that most won't.

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4118/will-you-pay-fo...
Seconding this. Plus then you can be really nerdy and say "yo, graph this" and send the equation to them and they type it into something and see the message.

Usecase: if this had come out like 2 weeks ago with copy-able equations, I probably would have asked someone to prom with it.
Glad to hear that it worked out well for you.

This time.

If you did that to me, I would blacklist you permanently (electronically and otherwise).

Why? Because it's dishonest. You're trying to trick someone into believing that something (a thread continuation) is something other that what it really is (unsolicited email). I learned this line of reasoning from business people far smarter than me: "If they'll stoop to a dishonest trick just to make an introduction, who knows what they'll do when the stakes get higher."

Make the most of this opportunity now that you have it, but I'd seriously reconsider ever doing it again.

Other HN readers, just because OP is sharing something that worked out well doesn't mean you should too. Please don't do this. The world has enough people taking shortcuts instead of doing the right thing. There's plenty of opportunity for smart hard-working people to succeed on the up and up. That's what you should be focusing on.
You missed the point.

The grandmother hypothesis doesn't contradict what I said at all. If you wanted to model evolutionary processes, you only stick in the reproductives, because they're the ones that will be producing more copies of their genes in the next generation.

As for risking your life for a stranger, evolution doesn't always find the maximum; it often settles in local maxima. If a strategy works 51% of the time, it will persist.

And yes, there are more forces at work than biological decent, but I don't see how that's relevant to anything I said. It's so imprecise it can't help but be true. So much for physicists.
+1. This is what I miss the most as HN becomes more popular and slants toward a karma-game of news submission.

I would also like to be able to submit a URL and description for readers who click on comments as a way to provide context and clarification around why I submitted a URL without having to post another comment. Adding a comment later doesn't guarantee it will be at the top unless everyone collectively votes it up which is hit or miss.
Apache.org defaced - Security archive case study
"In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but his intact frogs attempted to escape the water"

I tried to do this with an human. Once I removed his brain he stop perceiving danger... it must be a coincidence.

Lesson learned: don't let them remove your brain
More like a lessons learned from the Apache defacement.
The author comes across as a whiney and effeminate control freak. Japan has it right; meat is awesome. 80's music is awesome. The liberty to choose what drugs you inject into your body is again, awesome. Seems like he would fit well with hipsters in NYC or SF. Apologize for the condescension but he just rubbed my the wrong way.

I suggest he chills out and learns to go with the flow sometimes. But happiness is probably the last thing this guy wants, he's the type of guy who thrives on finding things at fault.
This is pretty cool. I have been poking around with Learn You a Haskell, and I like it, but the Haskell Platform seems to have some issues on OS X 10.6.

Here's to hoping somebody puts a good GHC formula on HomeBrew.
Timezones. It's still pretty early in the morning there for a hacker. I imagine he'll be along within the next hour or two.
Beep beep. Welcome to "I-told-you-so"-ville.
> The only reasonable explanation I can think of for such a terrible failure is that anti-DRM people are DDOSing the servers.

Don't forget Hanlon's razor.

It might be a DDoS, but given how stupid was the decision to implement such a DRM scheme in the first place, I would not be surprised if their incompetence also extended to a really lousy and unreliable implementation of the idea.
I should rephrase that "every permutation of every instruction executed by the program". I'm not trying to prove that every program is correct, only that my program is correct. That is possible by using a well-defined and fully-proven subset of the available features of the language and processor.

For example, designing your program and CPU as a set of state machines allows you to define all possible states of the system (which are deliberately limited), define all the state transitions, then verify that every input condition for each state results in the correct state transition. Even if you simply brute force your way through every state and every transition instead of using mathematical generalizations, you've still proven that the program is correct.
The Deck perhaps a good example of one of a new breed of advertisers that work together with the sites they actual advertise on. I can't wait for this to get more common.

The problem with this wish, though, isn't that people aren't willing to charge $7900 per month, interact with advertisers, and do it right and with class.. but that there just aren't many companies who want to advertise in that way.

Big advertisers like Microsoft, IBM, or whoever, could approach small, boutique sites and directly advertise with them in a tasteful, selective way.. but they don't. Their ad agencies farm everything out to the big networks to keep things easy.

The problem is with the advertisers avoiding anyone who isn't a giant network or household name in publisher, not the small publishers.
This is my concern.

I'm trying to lay out a full magazine with a number of graphics in Linux right now.

I don't need WYSIWYG but I do need to be able to position graphics on a page and have the text "smartly" flow around it.

I've been using Scribus. It's OK but a system where you tagged text and could edit it will a text edit would be nice.
Is there an RSS feed for just the ask questions? I can't find one there...
or they could just keep doing software, the business that makes them huge profits.
Why does every "string" end in (y^2 - 6y +8 + sqrt(y^4 - 12y^3 + 52y^2 - 96y + 64))^2 ?!?
I need more than what hotels can offer and would like to pick what I like. I think the success here will depend on price/ selection.
If they'll stoop to a dishonest trick just to make an introduction, who knows what they'll do when the stakes get higher.

It's good that the people Richard Branson and Bill Gates dealt with early in their careers didn't feel that way.

Branson pretended to be a big magazine company from a phone box (using the operator to appear to be a switchboard operator of sorts) and claimed to have sold lots of ads when he had sold none. The magazine was a success. Gates pretended he had a BASIC. This "lie" was the start of the accumulation of the world's biggest fortune.

Blagging and telling white lies is a big part of starting out, especially if you're an entrepreneur. Looking bigger than you are, looking more established, making your deals look bigger than they are, portraying a better image than your checkbook can support.. all deceptions.

Sure, there are many totally honest and straight talking folks who've made it big, but look at the stories behind most of the well known entrepreneurs and there was plenty of blagging and exaggeration going on at the start of their journeys. (Not to mention most of our dating careers..)
Honestly, that is no excuse. Even if every black-hat hacker in the world had it out for a certain game, people who buy physical copies of the game should still be able to play it that day.
That's cool, but make sure you also visit Jim Carrey's website. That's really over the top: http://www.jimcarrey.com/
Does a website have any effect on the success of a restaurant or other local, offline business?

Restaurant websites are frustrating for me (and you ;-), but do they matter to anyone that doesn't read HN?
Like most posts, the commentary reflects the content and tone of the article itself.

He starts off by saying the reason he doesn't like Japan is he doesn't like anime. How high brow did you think the responses would be?

Many of his complaints just sounds xenophobic. Sure, some of the things sounds absurd, but I'm sure plenty of US customs would sound equally absurd to the Japanese.

And many of his complaints seem pretty absurd to me. Like complaining that they put a piece of tape on his drink if he doesn't get it in a bag. They do that in US grocery stores too, for milk.
I looked at the beginner's manual and user manual on their wiki. The first document looks terrible (I expected Comic Sans any moment, after seeing the heading/special section frames), the second has broken layout on some pages. Not inviting unfortunately :(
The URL of the equation image contains the equation in TeX.
The "Pat Signal" for short.
I guess that's a valid point of view. For me, I have an interesting job with some hypothetical equity. I don't know its supposed value, and quite possibly never will. It's not something I stress about, but if it someday becomes valuable, it will be an unexpected surprise. I'd hate to think of not getting a job based off that point of view :) Of course, I've always seen stocks as a funny form of gambling, so that might skew my views a bit.
Why PuSH (or PubSubHubbub) Could Threaten Twitter
If they expect you to work harder because you have equity, then yes, you definately have a right to know what you are getting in return for your extra work.

In reality:
(A) The chances of your company ever having a "liquidity event" are slim.
(B) Even if it did, your share of the windfall would probably be less (per hour of overtime) than if you just worked at a "normal" job.

If you accept the above, what your equity is worth becomes somewhat irrelevant. You better be doing it because you love the work.
Copy image location of the img gives you the equation in TeX.

Then you can use ToExpression[...] in Mathematica to try and graph it.

I haven't tried it myself, but I assume that should work.

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/Generating...
That's two awesome Greasemonkey scripts in one day for me! That's enough to get me to install this awesome add-on. Thanks!

(P.S. The other is for searching your YouTube favorites: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/62580)
Gates pretended he had an OS ready to go.

False. Gates made it quite clear that Microsoft made comilers and didn't have an OS. He sent IBM to Gary Kildall at Digital Research because they had CP/M. When that didn't work out, IBM came back to Microsoft and that's when Paul Allen purchased Seattle DOS for $50K. Nobody "tricked" IBM.

There's a fundamental difference between putting on your best face (nice website, big company image) and intentionally deceiving (putting "Re:" in an email subject line.) If you can't tell the difference, remind me never to conduct business with you.
Ask HN: ad server recommendation?
Hi, my startup will (probably) be serving ads and we are looking for a platform.

To be clear, we are not looking for an ad network like DoubleClick, but simply the software to do the serving and management. We'll do the selling, in other words.

Of course we could build our own, but that would be so much reinventing of wheels. We prefer not to install software on our own servers, it should be SAAS, but it's not a dealbreaker.

We will look at configurability (things like CPM vs CPC, weighting, keywording, URL targeting) and reporting as the main drivers. Of course, reliability and performance matter too.

Do you have any recommendations based on experience? Thanks!
As would I. However, these are restaurateurs we're talking about here. They chop animals and plants with metal implements, cook them over fire and serve them on earthenware. It's not exactly a bleeding-edge-tech industry.

If the worst thing about a restaurant is its website, I'm a happy guy. They'll catch up, but I can't say I blame them for focusing on other things.
Perhaps we need a "designers from hell". I'd put somewhere up there: typography geek who insists on paying absurd sums for typefaces because they're so amazing. But at least "insists on making your whole site in Flash" seems to be on its way out.
To clarify, that wasn't the experiment the story is based on.
I'll pay you $50 for fixing my sink because you seem like a nice plumber, but remember that I have an adjustable spanner in my toolbox and I would use that to fix my sink for free if I only knew how.
Back when I was in the need for an ad server, I remember using phpAdsNew, now called OpenX I believe.

It's not for everyone, so I recommend you give it a spin before deciding anything, but it does offer a lot of configurability and analytical tools.
To be clear, did you specifically need the code so you could self-host/tweak or did you need a free service variant?

If you need services, one such free meeting service is dimdim.com.

For open source stuff I had heard of the old JWebPresenter (e.g. http://zhao.sourceforge.net/#introduction ), but I'm not sure what else is out there nowadays.
Original:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgkMlEn8L2E

Acoustic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPlP-M1WEik

One the singers was writing about his father slowly being overworked so that he'd quit and give up his pension.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiled_Frogs

"And my mother went to this conference talking to different generations in the workplace and they referred to her generation as 'boiled frogs.' The analogy is that if you take a frog and put it in boiling water, it will jump right out immediately, but if you put it in cold water and then you slowly turn the heat up, they'll just eventually fall asleep and die. Same way with people in the workplace. If it's too hectic when they first get there, they'll just quit and get another job, but if you slowly up the workload, lower the pay, they're more likely to sit there and just boil."

(Sorry, I really like the song)
Yeah I know, I just thought it was a pretty funny experiment though
I'm willing to wager it's not just the NSA either. The uk has GCHQ and those guys are stupidly smart - I'm sire other countries have similar.
Finding Your Roots
I read the whole thing and I actually liked the style. It's not like he's randomly reviewing video games in the middle of the article, he's using his examples of things he finds stupid to show how the arbitrary and nonsensical social conventions contribute to a lack of creativity in Japanese business.
I'm not sure Nathans theory is correct but...

Botnets aren't particularly expensive to rent any more; you'd have to be pretty committed to taking ubisoft down but I reckon it's doable.
"Our schools are biased against mesofacts."

Not sure if that's the case: schools undoubtedly hit you with bits of trivia, but this is done to develop students' mental powers. (Good) teachers know what they're doing and are training you to accept more of these 'mesofacts.'
The post suggests 20%/25%/60% for founders/management team/investors is a typical outcome. I assume that employees take their share from the 25% management and that it typically isn't very big.

It would be interesting to know what an average employee stock option at a start-up is ultimately worth discounted to the time when it's earned.
Deep tour of game design and analysis in 63 minutes (skip to 1:45) [video]
We just shelled out something sick for FF DIN for our website, because that's what our designers spec'd. I'm not upset about it, because I'm a type geek, but I'm not kidding myself that any of my customers can tell it from Arial.
I think this highlights how strange the practice of employee stock is. If you were receiving the money as salary from your startup and investing it in another with the terms/information available to you, it would seem mad.

Do you know what percentage of one's salary is typically considered to be stock?
From wikipedia:
"In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but his intact frogs attempted to escape the water"
I wonder what did they expected to happen?
The Problem with Social Media: a Critical Read of “Is VC Dead?” Articles
Let's say you edit point.h, and many files include it. Then these files must be compiled too, and the files that include them, etc. until eventually you compile nearly the whole application.

I've been bitten by the dependencies in C++ before. I have this file "image.h" which contains a templated image class with quite a few algorithms. My app is about image processing, so nearly everything uses the image datatype. I hate having to edit this file because it means recompiling nearly everything. Of course templates make it much worse than pure C...
Curious to get HN feedback!
"Blogging Pro"? Right. My unborn child has a better grasp of basic grammar rules. What an annoying thing to read!
there was a bit of discussion on this yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173058
RSS never caught on among the masses like many hoped, and PuSH really doesn't address much of the usability concerns, as nice an upgrade as it is to bringing feeds to real time.

Positioning PuSH as a "Twitter killer" I think forgets or ignores most of this history. Instead, Twitter and other microblogging services are likely to adopt or co-opt it and CloudRSS. More succinctly: PuSh is plumbing, not a full service.
"If you have bought the game, you have an implied right to play the game (if the small print says otherwise, it should be null and void, and Ubisoft charged with fraud, for that would be making money by deception)"

That would be nice, but it isn't the way things work.
The empty string does not.

http://www.xamuel.com/inverse-graphing-calculator.php?phrase...

But, I have no idea. Perhaps it is a bug wherein a CRLF is being added to the internal string? However, I highly doubt that.
It seems that most of the people replying are "Designers From Hell"

As a techie, I understand the frustration behind web designers not commanding the amount of respect they truly deserve.

But, I agree 100% with this post. The author's very right.

There are many things that can be done to get more respect. Making fun of 'clients' behind their back is not only low, it also does absolutely nothing to better the situation. If anything, it makes it slightly worse.
Despite the clever marketing (and it is quite clever), hand-formed room-set silicone has been used in the building trades for almost a decade--mostly for long-run ductwork dampening and high-service-interval electrical junction box seals.

It's precisely analogous to when cyanoacrylate adhesive compounds were re-marketed as Krazy Glue.
Color me absolutely unsurprised. If I had dropped some coin on that nonsense I'd be asking for it back about now.
Even if it is a DDOS, the hackers are doing us a favor by reminding us how much DRM harms us as consumers.

Let's hope Ubisoft does the right thing, owns up to their epic failure, and patches all DRM out of their games.
If something you built into your software can get you negative publicity, maybe you shouldn't build it into your software?
I'm not sure if you are pretending not to understand.

The point being made above is clearly that it is not possible to have an exit strategy at that point because the world & the product will change.
I actually uploaded the linked video as a bit of constructive criticism of the somewhat annoying March 4th "Day of Action" protests on campus. I can't get behind closing off streets in demonstration as a way of addressing the high student costs of education when I haven't yet expended the option of digitally pirating said education.

I think this video is a surprising dense sample of what students are exposed to in our intro game design class. If simply viewing this video, for free, on your own computer gets you to think a little more deeply and objectively about game design, then I am successful. I have just reduced the average cost of education through rational, non-destructive means.
Oh, so that's what became of _why.
It was reported cracked, but the crack didn't work.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ubisoft-drm-internet-assass...
A U.S. president describes climate change: a puzzle