skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This change is completely crazy. I don't understand the people who think that this is a good idea and I couldn't care less about the "gamer stigma" others are mentioning. People in my real life know I'm an avid gamer and so do (obviously) the people I play with. I'm typically a Blizzard apologist but in this case I just can't see the logic in this.

You can find anything about someone with their name and a little bit of time, especially when that name can be associated with a character name that could be that person's online handle on other sites.

Take this response in the official thread (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=257123...) for example:

"Lol. This doesn't really effect me, as I know you simply can't track someone down by name alone.

Enjoy your tin foil hats everyone.

- <REAL NAME HERE>"

Just as an exercise I spent 10 minutes searching knowing just this guy's online handle that he posted as and his real name that he willfully posted in his response. Within that time I now have his real full name, age, home address and i know his dad's high school and graduation year. Pretty scary.

I don't mind this RealID change in-game where I can give out my details to friends I trust but requiring that I post on my real name for any random person browsing the forums to see? Nuh uh.

There have also been responses saying "Oh, just don't post on the forums any more". This is not a good solution because A) I pay for forum access as part of my subscription fee (otherwise you wouldn't have to be a subscriber to post) and B) I'm an officer in a guild and doing recruitment would require me to post on the forums to recruit people, thus putting my real name out there.

If they want to cut down on forum trolls they should allow people to set a Battle.net account nickname and use that instead. It would still be a semi-anonymous name but would cut down on the trolling because people wouldn't be able to create a random character on any random server and use that to post on. Everything they say would be associated with that handle and through that with their online reputation in the community. This may not cut down on ALL the forum trolls (really, using real names won't cut down on 100% of it either) but at least it won't kill the community that's there.
> If they were only doing this on the general-discussion areas with no gameplay implications, it would be a lot more reasonable.

That's exactly what they are doing. The forums aren't part of the game.
That's largely true.

Writely and Word are in different markets - the market for web-based cloud word processors is very different than the one for full-featured desktop word processors. Same goes for most of the web startups that have succeeded.

Somebody is inevitably going to bring up Google, since there were established players in search when Google was founded. But at the time of Google's founding, all the established players in search thought that their business was in portals, leaving the search market itself open for a hungry competitor.

Clayton Christensen has more on this in The Innovator's Dilemma/Solution. Innovations that make things better for an established market's existing customers tend to be sustaining innovations, benefiting entrenched players. Even if a startup gets a foothold on one, they can and will be bought out or outcompeted by a big firm, which has more resources and every incentive to pour them into development.

Innovations that make things better for a new and untapped customer base, however, tend to be disruptive innovations, the sort of which new successful startups are made. The defining characteristic of disruptive innovations is that they're less profitable than sustaining innovations: therefore, at every point in time, the large entrenched competitors have every incentive not to succeed in the startup's market. Things like the PC for IBM, the web for Microsoft, free online access for newspapers, and search for Altavista.

Note that in all cases, those companies did enter the new market, they just didn't succeed in it. Because it was not in the company's interest to succeed: A success would mean that the company's overall profit is less than it started with, which is awfully hard to justify to shareholders.

I'm not entirely sure which category Tesla fits into, but I'm having a tough time seeing a $109k roadster and $57k sedan as disruptive innovations, which usually target cheaper market segments that big companies overlook as unprofitable.
I know there are syntax highlighting plugins for Serendipity and Wordpress using GeSHi.
> If they can get people to work for them at those wages, and they are happy with the employees they get, why not?

I'm not saying it's bad for the employees, I'm saying that Wal-Mart shoppers are paying more than they think. Wal-Mart sells stuff so cheap in part because they pay their workers low wages. The only way that works is because our tax money is being used to subsidize that income. Thus the cost of the things we buy at Wal-Mart are higher than the ticket price.

> Why don't the people who benefit from no crime pool their money and hire a security guard?

You mean the shoppers? The workers? Arguably the most efficient method of pooling this money would be for Wal-Mart to charge a little bit more in order to pay someone to patrol their own parking lot.

> Sources please. I know of one study about good effects.

I don't have sources for this, only first-hand experience. Smaller businesses are owned locally. They order inventory locally, and they spend the majority of their profits locally. Thus for the most part, money is being circulated about in the small town and everyone is getting the goods and services they need.

When Wal-Mart comes in, the merchandise is coming from not only outside the town, but often outside the country. Any profits they make are distributed to shareholders, or used for building more Wal-Marts elsewhere. By knocking several local businesses (mechanic, produce stand, general store, pharmacy, hardware store) out of business, they eliminate more jobs than they create while siphoning money out of the town, money which would have otherwise just been recirculated.
ToodleDo has tasks inside tasks, lists, etc. You have to pay $14/year.

In my use over 3G and WiFi, the cloud sync is fantastic, supporting complex task types, dates, and nestings.
Yeah, but the product cycle is 2-4 years. Plenty of time for you to get rich by being bought out by the big guys to accelerate time to market, or by land-grabbing a decent market share in that window before they catch up to you.
Please read before you get started with the FUD. It will be optional to display your main characters name.

EDIT:

To be clear

>so presumably their RealId will be as well when the new system is implemented.

Is false on its face from Blizzard's announced policy. This, of course, eliminates the last concern of the parent.
It's no surprise social networks are based on the network effect. Usually in these industry there will be standardization, which results in one huge player that owns the vast majority of the market share and small niche players. Facebook will be the huge player.

There are apps being made that are allowing people to not get stuck to one social networking standard, but I am pessimistic of their long term success.

Facebook already is killed myspace and Hi5, the other major players will not last long. Only very niched social networking sites will.
Both of them have their own payment gateway option. Eventbrite charges an additional 3% for this service.
>If they see your 2000 word rant about how a class got nerfed, you think they are going to say "well he's just passionate about his hobby"?

They will know that this will have their real name attached to it. If they don't have discretion before attaching their name to a long rant, I have no sympathy for them.
> No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.

Where would you classify magnet programs? Mine let me max out on Advanced Placement classes (around 7 over 2 years, I think) and introduced me to FIRST Robotics, which led to a programming job while I was still in high school. (It was not the greatest or the highest-paying, and my output was probably what one might expect from the situation, but having it at all was great.) The effect was to get me into college with 44 credits under my belt, which is equivalent to over a year's worth of classes. I then ignored the freshman advisors' advice to take it easy the first semester in order to "adjust" so that I could follow through and actually graduate in 3 years. Obviously, my experience was not typical, but atypical students are the subject under discussion.
Let's stop throwing around the word ADHD. It encourages people who just don't have the discipline to focus to give themselves an excuse, while lessening the perception of the problems for people who are actually debilitated by it.

There's no media-driven conspiracy to alter your mind. There has been an evolutionary trend to favor the animal who could quickly notice the approaching bear versus the animal too intent on its task. Conversely, human evolution has needed intense concentration to drive innovation in things like tool development, construction, and art.

There's media that caters to both. WIth action-packed movies and games thriving on quick attention-shifting, and grinding-based MMO's relying on the ability of players to do repetitive tasks for hours on end.

One could give the same attention-reducing arguments against books and for oral stories. That said, you shouldn't just make a blanket statement against all screen media. Teach your kids how to discriminate between what's good for them and what's not.
It's a nice theory but there is a second class which basically consists of two shades of White, Grey, Black, and Red.

Let's say you’re building a system to quickly find the degree of separation between two people on a network. For simplicity assume each node connects to 4 random other nodes. If you start from one end and do a breadth first search you would need to try ~(4^N) nodes to find the link. However, if you start from both ends and do a breadth first search you can try ~2 * (4^(N/2)) nodes to find that same connection.
A proposal for a cryogenic grave for cryonics
My job is to help other people do their jobs well.

straight from the Spolsky school of management

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...
Glad to see some love for Iain M. Banks. Easily my favorite scifi author at the moment.
Amazon Kindle patent granted; Nook potentially in trouble
It's interesting how this has changed since the dot-com boom, where shares of AMZN in 1998 had the same price that they did in 2008, even though it wasn't expected to turn a profit until 2002.
Or better yet, repeal the taxes that force hotel owners to subsidize stadiums, etc., which create the barrier to entry that leads to unlicensed hotels existing.
Intelligence: The Evolution of Night Owls
WordPress.com does latex and syntax highlighting.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/latex/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/code/posting-source-code/
"My brother was hit by a car."

"My grandfather was diagnosed with cancer."

"The US was robbed of a goal in their match versus Slovenia."

"I was spellbound by the movie."
This is largely from advice given in The Elements of Style. You are not alone in disliking it. http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549... is a good article attacking this and other bad advice given in that book.
US East Coast preferred, all locations considered.

HiiDef, Inc is hiring! - http://hiidef.com/ - We are a 14 person web incubator launching new ideas while scaling our mature products.

We're specifically interested in Python developers with strong web stack experience and excellent communication skills.

Get in touch - johnwehr@hiidef.com
Understanding iOS 4 Backgrounding and Delegate Messaging
I did read his comments back in '95, and I re-read the comments about Derrida now. (I am not particularly interested in Foucault, so I skipped his reading of him.)

Chomsky claims to have found "Of Grammatology" full of "pathetic misreadings." Unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to outline what these might be-- and oddly enough, neither does anybody else, to my knowledge. I know of only one publication claiming that Derrida misreads his sources in "OG", and that was in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement many years ago; several responses were published, and personally, I don't think Derrida misread Curtius as claimed.

Now, although the subject matter of "Of Grammatology" is nominally linguistics, we have to remember that Derrida is not a linguist (nor pretending to be) and is interested, rather, in the philosophical implications of several arguments concerning linguistics made by Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Rousseau. And, to the best of my knowledge, Chomsky shows no interest in his published writings in the latter two, and isn't much enamored with the former.

So, "Of Grammatology" is only tangentially related to Chomsky's field of interest. Which is fine, of course. But I suspect that this lead him to be more dismissive than necessary: I think he mistakes his lack of interest with Derrida's lack of a point.

Derrida does make an important argument in OG, but it is largely aimed at a certain group of Structuralists, who were active in the French academy at the time it was published. In other words, Derrida's in the middle of a fight that Chomsky has nothing at all to do with, and I think his lack of skin in the game got in the way of an open-minded reading.
The main difference here is between action and puzzle games. I personally disliked the pure puzzles because they felt too restrictive. Large-scale strategy games like simcity were a better fit for me. The same pattern shows up in my coding. I really don't like simple puzzles, but love challenges where I feel like I'm building something, not just solving it.
Foursquare Launches Location Layers
Copy and paste work just fine in all of my browsers without Flash. You show me some text, I select it and copy it. You can even use fancy Javascript to select all of the text if I click anywhere on the text you think I want to copy. Just in case I don't want to press "Command-A."

I don't get the need to gratuitously replicate functionality that's already dead simple. It's a personal project, so I suppose it's as much art as engineering. But of this were a business, I would be very interested in some A/B testing to measure whether you are losing users by not having a one-click way to copy the script code.
Green stocks sputtering out on public markets
Getting Clojure into the workplace, how do you do it?
Then you've already failed. Getting a layman's explanation of a topic should not require one to become the equivalent of an undergrad in that topic.

What you should be saying is "Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is apparently founded and showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible" (courtesy wikipedia).

And then the layman asks "how does this approach expose contradictions?"

And you say "Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose and undermine the frame of reference, assumptions, and ideological underpinnings of the text. Although deconstructions can be developed using different methods and techniques, the process typically involves demonstrating the multiple possible readings of a text and their resulting internal conflicts, and undermining binary oppositions (e.g. masculine/feminine, old/new)."

and there we have it, good enough for the layman to realize it's a line of thinking he's probably not interested in pursuing anymore. And then...if they keep on that, you say, "this is getting a bit into the deep end for me to make it simple and explainable, if you are really interested, start by reading these books first."
Somehow I got it in my head that jwz implemented it. And I'm not the only one. But I can't find actual proof of the evil deed, and jwz in fact denies it -- although he does take credit for adding "MilSpec blinking". It seems that at worst jwz was responsible for eventually adding it to the linux version of Mozilla. While the original implementor fessed up last year, and actually got into mozilla's credits for it at long last: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2009/03/credit_...

Urk, now I'm remembering one time when I walked by jwz somewhere in SoMa, and thought "if he wasn't on the other side of the street already, I'd have to cross to avoid that evil blink tag creator". And now I'm feeling all regretful. Will the pain that tag inflicted on the world never cease?

(BTW, Microsoft are responsible for marquee.)
The dynamic/compiled distinction needs to go away

dynamic / compiled are orthogonal.

CL is dynamic and gets compiled as you enter in the REPL.
I use and quite like the SyntaxHighlighter for wordpress http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/
The 200 slide solution
But it’s even more of a shame if people won’t even be able to try these languages because we lose them from Fedora entirely.

That's really overstating the problem. I've worked with several of these languages, one of them for quite a large project - and I've never relied on anything but the language's official site to get the necessary tools. A lack of maintenance from Fedora isn't going to kill anything.
How the P~=NP problem could save your life one day
I am one of the co-founders of Guestlist. Wee are not event close to the same scale as Eventbrite, but I can give some insight.

Of all the events hundreds of events we have hosted we have only ever received one complaint from a purchaser. Somebody was apparently using our service to sell "power leveling" sessions for a game the he never received the service after he paid. The ticket price in this case was $20 I believe.

At the same time we have moved over $700,000 in the last 12 months all through PayPal. $20 is a very small percentage so I don't really see events as a high risk. Of course, EventBrite is much larger and they probably attract more scammers.

We exclusively use PayPal as our payment processor and have yet to run into them closing down somebody's account. Our main trouble with PayPal lies in their terrible interface and people being able to override the pingback url.
MSRC: Microsoft-Spurned Researcher Collective releases 0-day
Spending any money on a logo is simply not necessary in your position. Until you feel like you need to cultivate a brand, don't do anything. When you do, consider just picking a unique (but not too unique) font for the app's name. You can pay for the font if you must.

Designers get offended by this, but I've yet to see a case where logos are even slightly important to a bootstrapped business. You can always change it later.
Carl Herold founder of Clickalyzer (a google analytics competitor) and author of http://www.highercomputingforeveryone.com/
Maybe not change the way the government "works", but to say that internet didn't help Obama get elected is just simply false. In that sense the government of the USA is working differently because of the internet?

Maybe a stretch, maybe not.
Women Are Addicted To Facebook
What every developer needs to know about “public” data and privacy
I freely admit this is an oldie that has been posted on various sites many times, and furthermore I confess that I gratuitously editorialized the headline. I apologize and throw myself at the mercy of the court. My only excuse is that there is a heatwave in Toronto at the moment and my brain is malfunctioning in the afternoon's sultry, oppressive heat.
No, I was talking about a more personal connection. In the publish or perish environment it's easy to submit gibberish that sounds reasonable just to get another paper out there.
Imperceptible? If it showed what it'd actually show, you'd either be missing half of Spock's head (zoom), or it'd be letterboxed.

But I agree that they did do a good job of editing the image for the promo.
"The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar."

Clearly the author of this article does not understand the basics of linguistics. I suspect that he or she does no better than chance in summarizing the results of research.
I think extreme isolation can lead one to believe anything... even in the face of all those facts. The human mind is an elaborate machine and will comfort you in the strangest ways.
214 mpg with DIY aerodynamic fairings on a Honda 125cc motorbike
Is anyone aware of the long-term effects of taking melatonin before you go to bed every night? Just curious, maybe worth a try?
This sort of defeats the purpose of a "Role Playing Game".
Yes, thank you.

I would like to point out then, that to this layman, "I would say that deconstruction consists most often of a micrological reading (that is to say, a very close reading of the actual words of the text, not not just the broad concepts) which takes into account the (usually unconscious) assumptions that the author is working within" sounds almost exactly like, "Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want..." since we can't ever know what the unconscious assumptions are of an author.
This is obviously inspired by the pirate bay, especially since that's who one of the founders is. how do we reward people for giving away stuff for free?

this may be the solution. I'm definitely interested.
Happy to provide ~120 feed URLS from http://roomcu.slinkset.com. Drop me an email.
It's interesting how these guys got so much traction in so little time, even when in private beta:

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...;

While the future of flattr is still TDB - I wonder what the problem with tipjoy was that they didn't have similar spikes - not enough emphasis on traction/getting the idea out or not enough iteration on the idea when they didn't have traction?

Just goes to show, you need to know who your customers are and how to reach them effectively and efficiently - and in the end that's the harder thing compared to building a great service.
You're right, I take back what I said. There are everyday uses of the passive voice. Thanks for correcting me.
Firefox keeps a copy of every image on screen decompressed in memory anyway, that's one of the downsides to using large sprites, they can take up a large amount of RAM. I doubt non-sprited base64 images compare in size issues.

See the discussion on http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/2009/03/27/css-spriting-tips/
I just tested some PNGs that I am currently using in a sprite. These are transparent arrows used for slideshow control. Four images make the sprite:

Individual image sizes: 1811, 1809, 1774, 1817 bytes

Combined in a sprite: 5970 bytes

Individual images after base64: 2448, 2444, 2400, 2456 bytes

Individual images base64+gzip: 1890, 1887, 1858, 1901 bytes

Concatenate base64 files to simulate embedding in a CSS file: 9748 bytes

Concatenated file + gzip: 7073 bytes
Good to hear :) I imagined reddit advertising would cost much more than that.
and while holding down shift, the selection is extended in those ways as well.
Everything I Know About Tennis I Learned from Cow Paths
What should a young person do with $20,000?
It's not that he won't tell you why.

It's that until you've at least acquired core competence in Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas, being exposed to the OT VIII levels of post-structuralist theory is likely to cause your brain to explode.
Can you get into a college? Yes. Are you equally or more likely to get into your particular college of choice? I'd want some damn good evidence of that claim.
Youtube and Context