skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of validity to this argument, but Farmville is not unique. If you take his criteria and replace Farmville with World of Warcraft, most of it still holds:

(1) WoW is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility;

(2) WoW encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely separate from it;

(3) WoW is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor skill;

(4) WoW is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon which Blizzard and Activision depend for their wealth;

(5) WoW is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple
cause-and-effect;

(6) WoW is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor suspension of disbelief.

WoW does require more skill. And it is governed by rules not 'simple cause and effect' - but so is Farmville. WoW is also more immersive.

These differences are what make it a 'better' game to most gamers. But they don't change what the OP finds sociopathic about the game, namely that they're applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs.

It is much more controlling, it just reaches a narrower audience. It is also equally social - the social interactions are arguably deeper and more meaningful, in fact.

I say this as someone who works in the field of online games (I run Kongregate). I do think the feeling of accomplishment and social satisfaction provided by games are powerful, and not totally positive. I also hope that the positive aspects of online game communities balance this out to some degree.

Edit: WoW succeeded in a competitive field largely on quality (and massive capital outlay). Farmville succeeded through the hyper-fast and skillful application of the A/B-testing 'lean startup' techniques widely admired and practiced by most readers of this site. If you hate it, it's worth thinking about how it came to exist.
"Even if the source told the reporter the names, all she's got is her word,"

and maybe a photo of a naked guy on a boat.
> when you're copying and pasting code into the repl it would be easy for the code in memory to diverge from the code on disk

Ah, I take it you're not a fan of the old Lisp/Smalltalk approach of image-oriented development, where tweaking the running system is the canonical version of the code?

(Apologies if one of your essays already covers your views on that; I don't remember it being mentioned, and a quick search didn't turn up anything.)
Nasa and GM send robot to space
I study in computer vision. One of the professors in our department had some of his papers refused by some publishers. They thought it was morally unacceptable to put a playmate's face in the paper.
Would be nice if his replies had a signature so we could be sure they actually came from Steve
One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

Ebert tries to set up definitions in a way such that games and art are mutually exclusive. That is, that the difference between art and games in the interactivity, the ability to affect the art itself. I disagree. Much like a tree falling in the woods, can a piece of art that is not seen, or not heard, or not read, or not watched, be considered an art? Therefore, it is necessary to concede at least the minimal level of interaction, between that of the person and the art. Then, why does further interaction, that of the participant being able to effect the world presented by the game, remove a game's ability to be art?

Second, the point has been made that the participant's interaction with the game is not that of one who wants to interact with it as 'art'. Well, if I were to use any famous painting, say, the Mona Lisa, as toilet paper, does that make it not art? (Well, maybe after I've made use of it...)

To conclude, here are some games that I consider to be art.
There are the various art games that indie producers have made. Jason Rohrer has made many such games - in particular Passage and Gravitation. (I also saw Sleep is Death on the front page of HN a few days ago). No points, no rules, maybe an objective, so perhaps Ebert wouldn't consider those to be games. 'The Path' is another such art game, though again perhaps Ebert might not consider it to be a game.
There are various RPGs that are particularly story intensive. In fact, a common complaint seems to be that there's too much cinematics and story and not enough gameplay.
Finally, I consider the game 'Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time' to be art. Maybe not its sequels though.
I'm willing to bet the anonymization isn't coming from the journalist.

In general, victims should just post/tweet charges under their real names. The internet will pick it up, link to it, retweet it. Even journalists will give it press as 'alleged charges'. That it's not anonymous will give it weight.
This easily Engadget's best reporting yet.
"It makes me wonder if the affiliate links are the purpose of the post."

Is that a bad thing?
This "essay" could have been two paragraphs. I almost stopped reading when the first two were talking about Howard Zinn.
If this is a prank, I'm really impressed by whoever thought it up.
i do! pretty cool site if you ask me
me to mate!
You don't understand. Once stdout blocks the whole program blocks, so it makes no difference that stderr is not piped. The program is stopped, it won't be making any errors.

Obviously you could make some complicated buffering scheme - but you can do that and flush things anyway. The flush or no flush makes no difference.
Design-wise, it looks like a step backwards: I don't buy it.
I think its good you have a business model, but I think you're price points are little high. I would put one option out there as free. With a 14 day trial at $40 a month, to me is very high. I wouldn't even go through the 14 day trial, as you have a lot of competition in this space. More than likely someone using this type of product is not someone that will want something that complex. Theres wufoo, google spreadsheets, formstack, all offer a free option. Good luck
yeah, it's pretty elaborate if it's a hoax. I believe engadget has been hands on with it themselves, right?
Top Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The Web
im with u!
helluva cool site there!
yup!!!!!!!
This looks great! I'm going to give it a try.

Edit: 30-second overview: I enabled automatic updates and sent in the requested anonymous system profile--but both are strictly optional. The default hot-key selection is excellent (Shift+Command+Enter). The set of preferences is small, but useful: font, hide dock icon, hot-key choice and behavior (open/close). The Accessibility pane asks you to mark DTerm as "Trusted" in order to correctly present its window in apps other than Finder. I didn't even realize that it was running again until I tentatively tried the hot-key. It works, it's small, fast, and it works invisibly. Very nice, kudos!

Personally, I'd love to see support for Ctrl+r from BASH. Also, I wonder if there could be some way to use URLs from browsers.
Can you summarize Powershell for someone to doesn't get it?
Sorry - I was thinking about costs different to what they normally pay. So you're right - it's almost exactly what they pay anyways. But if you manage to actually have a number of planes flying internationally, I'd imagine you should have enough money in reserve to support the company for a month without much income (also, people are still buying tickets for the following months). It was not even a week so far - that's probably comparable to the number of flights stopped every year because of snow. Should I seriously believe that they don't plan for those kinds of events?
Displaying http:// in the UI is no more
I still complain about this, still refuse to use gmail, and SpamAssassin does a decent job of removing spam from my inbox.
I'm guessing this is a development mule to test the new internals. I'd be surprised if that's the actual iPhone HD case.
That's exactly the way I use RSS as well and that's exactly why I'm building http://blogazineapp.com .
A nice compliment to Visor. I wish it played better with Safari's download window though.
Is it really valid to assume that fair decisions should be split 50/50?
Hey, good work with Kongregate. It's got a great concept and great execution, though (being a Street Fighter fan) I never really played much beyond Kongai myself.
I do not understand the use of the word "decentralized" here. Usually it is defined as "withdrawn from a center or place of concentration; especially having power or function dispersed from a central to local authorities". Are you really proposing a new mechanism? Why is it going to be advantageous? How would it interact with the patent system? What leads you to believe that the US FDA could grant "exclusive approvals" on drugs when the drug industry is worldwide?

The quid pro quo for patents is a short term (17 year) monopoly to the inventor in trade for adequate documentation so that the invention can be generally exploited and used after the monopoly period has passed. Your proposal seems to have a different view of what the role of patents is (or should be).
Ding! We have a winner!

If you are so blind as to think that looking around and seeing nobody like you for values of you in minority groups in a position doesn't discourage qualified people, well, then you're not only ignorant of the last 30-40 years of social science research, but also live a life so self-unexamined as to not be aware of your own privilege. Thank you for the demonstration.

Queue the downmodding... now.
Patent abolitionism, Britian, 1860-70
My experience may be useful only for sf, but I live in the city in a nice (by my definition of nice: 100+ years old, solid wood floors, plaster walls, detailed woodwork, thick aged wooden doors, handmade ironwork) apartment. My landlord would like to sell the place to us, but our rent doesn't even cover the mortgage with a $100K downpayment. By the time you add HOA fees, insurance, taxes, and a 3-5% of value annual maintenance investment, my landlord pays me some $800-$1000/month to live in his apartment. Which is fine by me.
No Lisper that I know of is a fan of image-oriented development. And copying core-files across the network does not help your down-time issue; you still have to restart under the new core.
I'll play along even tough I'm pretty sure Engadget is just faking this all to drive some traffic. Probably an old 2G prototype. 80GB might suggest a 1.8" mechanical hard drive inside. A "different OS" would suggest an early build of iPhone OS or some other internal mutation. The name is also simply "iPhone" like the original 2G. The thickness, not hidden by rounded or angled corners, would have been a lot more par for the course circa 2006-2007. Why leak it now? Probably going to end up on eBay in a few days and the owner wanted some free advertising.
If you were curious about what this looks like in IE8 http://i41.tinypic.com/24eatud.png
Ask HN: What's the best way to create a web app the first time?
I have a confession. I feel like I am cheating. I have been slaving away at this web app concept I have for the last few weeks, but haven't been making as much progress as I want to.

I did CS in college, and am familiar with the web, but I have never built a web-app from scratch. I can understand most programming languages, and most markups, but since I never went into a programming job right out of college (and never really had much motivation to do it on the side) I don't know how to build something from scratch completely.

I have been trying to 'tried and true' way of just sitting down and struggling and it has been very, very difficult to stay motivated. Whenever I come across a problem that Google doesn't help me solve, I post a question to some tech help site (like stackoverflow) and that helps me much. Sometimes I read through reference files and figure out the problem.

When I do figure it out, it feels like I scored a winning touchdown in the superbowl (especially if I have been struggling with that one problem for days).

I am tempted to use jQuery plugins to help me do what I need to do, but to be honest I feel like I am cheating.

Maybe it is the college mentality that is forcing me to not want to re-use any code from anyone else (it took me about 2 weeks to convince myself that using jQuery was fine). It sounds stupid I know...but I guess I have just always done all of my work from scratch and so doing it any other way right now is so hard.

So my question is, do you have any tips about how I can go about building my web app (given that it is the first time).

The UI functionality I am trying to build is like a hybrid of many functionalities I have seen in many places (popular sites as well as not so popular ones), but I feel like by viewing their source and taking bits and pieces I am stealing :(

Do I just continue doing what I am doing, but how do I stop myself from feeling like I am annoying people with always asking questions...because I have ALOT of questions.

I am feeling very conflicted right now, and discouraged to be honest...but I KNOW that if I can get this thing to be the way I want it to be, it will solve a very specific pain problem that many people face.

By the way, everything I am talking about is just getting it to some form of a minimum viable product. But I am still struggling :(

Help!
"I would stress that with Excel, changing the underlying data set, especially dimensions of your data is annoying and not very automate-able. This is the case even when the analysis is the exact same or very similar as the original. You either need to copy formulas over for every data set/sheet or write VBA code to automate this, which still isn't as flexible as in R."

In certain circumstances you are right. Wanting to use the same spreadsheet for a very, very similar task is often annoying. This can be avoided if you knew from the start that you wanted to make something more reusable, but sadly that isn't always the case. Of course there are ways of automating them (VBA as you mentioned, or DB connections when appropriate, sometimes UDF, or just organizing the data in the correct way) but this is definitely one of my major annoyances.

"Excel has indexing capabilities (F5 which goes to an address), but not by row/column names."

Actually with the name manager you can do this. Simply name the row(s) and column(s) you want to index by, press F5, and type "my_col,my_row" and you are there. It even does the "and" selection for you, which you can easily exit out of if you want. Not sure if it is in versions prior to Excel 2010, but I don't really find myself using this all that much.

"Additionally, you can't do multi-step analysis that involves segmentation/sub-setting of the data very easily with Excel. This is related to the first point about changing an underlying data set or its dimensions. There are ways around this, but they are VERY annoying."

Your first statement is only correct if you mean "you can't do some multi-step analyzes" because some of them are just plain simple. Also, I don't find the occasional annoyances (which typically have to do with using match(), vlookup(), cross_product(), or similar functions) anywhere nearly as annoying as some of the other things I have to deal with when programming. Dates can be a pain in the ass. Even in Ruby.

I'll be clear in saying I have no idea about what R can do. I've only toyed with it due to lack of time, but I do know that Excel can do a bunch of really cool things. Solver, remote UDFs written in any programming language (including Ruby running on a linux box), forms for pointy haired bosses, pretty awesome charts if you know what you are doing, cubes, goal seek, data tables, macros, formula auditing, db connections, etc.

What I don't like is the general vibe that Excel is, and only is, for MBAs and R is, and only is, for comp sci kids. That just isn't true, and I don't have to know anything about R to make that claim because I know some comp sci kids some of the time get a ton of value out of Excel. Right tool, right job.
Who is the king of advertising online? Google! Look at how they do their ads. Yet they make more from advertising than anyone else, and if you measure results give real value for money.

Sometimes people simply hear you better when you're not yelling.
CS people might be put off by the fact R is really a pretty lousy language if you've seen any other language (like, for example, Python). It's obvious that it wasn't a programmer who designed the language R uses.

This blog posts points out a list of specific gripes about the language: http://tjic.com/?p=10739 There is some real weirdness to this language.

The R Programming Language for Programmers: http://www.johndcook.com/R_language_for_programmers.html does a lot to ameliorate this, but the fact the weirdness is there at all makes a programmer a little uneasy.
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To me that email kind of validated the idea that Gruber is a real-life Apple shill. Meaning, on the take from Apple to publish their desired propaganda.
Warren Buffet is a full time investor, so that's a viable strategy for him. For most people "invest in what you know" is equivalent to "invest in the industry you work in" which is a bad strategy. Much better is to invest in low-cost index funds, a strategy that could be summed up as "don't know what you're investing in."
I call my wife Farmer Pixel because she's never off Farmville.

I've tried to get her to go out in the garden, but no avail!
For a site like Myspace with declining traffic I would guess they're simply trying to make as much money as they can while traffic levels are still high enough to make it work. Does anyone think Myspace can turn it around and start growing again? I doubt it. They have no incentive to look at a bigger picture of what's good for advertisers or visitors at this point. Might as well make as much money as possible during the long drawn out death spiral.
I suspect Apple's PR team plays a role in at least some of the email responses. The emails serve as a channel that's 'official' enough for people to take it seriously, without Apple having to bother with making an official announcement or giving a reporter a quote.

It also helps make the company seem more accessible ("hey, Jobs will answer an average Joe's email, he loves us!") when in reality Apple PR is notorious for ignoring the press unless it serves them.
Are you nuts?
In Australia we have a concept called negative gearing which allows you to deduct that 800-1000/month off your income taxes.
It still appears to be a significant breakthrough.
The style of this information leaves me feeling trolled, though.

EDIT : if I were less drunk, I could probably figure out if this was a troll. I'm rather excited if it's real, I'm obsessed with longevity.
I did not say fuck you to everybody
Many of the people you assume are foreigners were probably born and/or raised in this country. A bunch of them probably had parents that were born or raised in this country.

Don't confuse ethnicity with citizenship.
Great fiction is one thing. SICP is another.
Probably not, but if you know that arbitrators are paid by the employer, and will be doing repeat business with the employer, and then find for the employer 88% of the time, it ought to raise a few eyebrows.
Rod, there's more to Humanities than circle-jerks. There's reach-arounds, tea-bagging...all kinds of stuff.
IANAL, but NO. Duress only applies if they bullied you to sign.

On the other hand, other laws may invalidate that clause. See a lawyer.

Also, before you sign any contract (in Australia, if the contract is written by the other party) you can modify it by just "asking for clarification". If you ask the manager what the fine print means, and they say "nothing", it strikes out the fine print (in theory, but in practice you need to convince the court that this happened). You might want to have some written record, preferable signed by the manager, though.
A SIM tray on the side makes sense if they are filling up the upper area with an additional camera.

Even though the aluminum PowerBook look would be a natural change, it would make it a big less pocketable than the current slick plastic pill shape.
Six months ago (keep in mind the rate for an ad placement was lower back then) I heard a figure of $4,000 a month for a Deck Network publisher. Which is a lot better than I've heard of a similar Google Ads setup doing (it's about enough space for maybe two text links).
Only if you're using blocking IO. Just set O_NONBLOCK if you don't want blocking IO.
You could find much better test images, that’s for sure. Lenna looks like what it is: old-style film printed fairly well and then scanned fairly well. It has a strong color cast and no full black. It’s only used everywhere because it’s already used everywhere.
> What if there were a machine to make everyone moral?

is the issue addressed by jjs
Search ads are very different from content ads. People click on search ads because they look like search results and they often give the user what they were looking for. There isn't a huge quality difference between search engines, so sticking ads everywhere would likely lead to an exodus of users.

Content ads make money because people see something that catches their eye while reading the content they came to the site for. This requires having several ad spots rather than just a couple at the top of search results. Content is usually unique, so there's a high annoyance bar to reach before you start to drive people away.

Yes, fewer ads make the ads shown more effective. I remember Hulu ads more often than I remember TV ads. (Then again, I watch far more Hulu than TV these days.) The problem with this approach is that advertisers aren't willing to pay enough money to cover the losses from showing fewer ads.

What you and the author are suggesting is a demonstrably unsuccessful strategy for someone who is running a website until you can convince advertisers to pay more money for ads with less competition on the page. I don't think this is impossible.
> No Lisper that I know of is a fan of image-oriented development

A lot of the lisp-machine veterans are, but I agree most current lispers aren't. One reason, though, might be that no recent Lisp actually provides a good environment for image-oriented development (the facilities for inspecting/manipulating the running image are a lot clunkier than those in, say, Squeak).
The Deck requires you to only show that one ad on the page. You can show more Google ads without losing readership. There is something to be said for the clean, appealing pages that sites using the Deck end up with since they aren't cluttered with ads, but that is likely (opportunity) costing the publishers money.