skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, but this is on the user. Things like my birthday and address aren't available to everyone, just enough information to identity me from other people with the same name.

As privacy controls normalize across less sophisticated users, I imagine more people will behave like us geeks. Or not - plenty of average Joe's still sort through 500 spam email every day by hand.
I just paid my $5 site-unseen for the game and soundtrack. Haven't played the game yet, but the soundtrack alone is worth more than $5.
Yes, email isn't dead, neither is ice cream, shoes, reading, haircuts, breathing, christmas, weather, cups, the alphabet, kleenex, video games, sunglasses, intercourse, barrels, pigeons, onramps, krazy glue, pennies, and so forth....

how about a more important question, maybe one with a less obvious answer, like: is hacker news dead?
I/O is the scaling problem for most web startups, so it's really mostly about scaling RAM and to a lesser extent adding some SSDs.
I was a frequent app buyer for iPhone.
I would be a frequent app buyer for Android.
I have bought, or donated as is popular, money for Android apps useful to me.

iPhone apps currently dominate in being polished, functional, and plentiful. The sad truth is that most of the apps for Android look like everyone rushed out and bought "Beginning Android 2" and flooded the market with yet another Sudoku clone from the exercises contained within; not literally but it serves to demonstrate my point.

I do not follow the purpose of the poll. Is the money in iPhone (currently leading in the poll) or is it an untapped market in Android (currently trailing in same poll) waiting to be exploited as iPhone reaches possible saturation?

dondrapper21@gmail with bogus site seems to have found quite a number of people willing to purchase apps for android; see "Angry Birds", the download count, market date entry, and the comments. Funny stuff though sad for the scam it is.
The difference with Hot Coffee is that it really was created by the studio and it really was in the game — it just wasn't normally accessible. That's why Rockstar was able to patch it out, which wouldn't have been possible if the entire sequence were actually being modded in. Similarly, somebody who exploited a wallwalking glitch to get to Mount Hyjal in the early days of World of Warcraft couldn't really be said to have added Mount Hyjal to the game — it was definitely Blizzard content.
If the valuation of the company is higher than the VCs invested at (post-money), then assuming something screwy isn't going on with the pref structures in earlier rounds - ie, there aren't any or they're 1x non-participating, plus the round you're investing in isn't a down round - then they will.

Basically post-money valuation, exit price and pref structures are the only important numbers here. 1x non-participating means all investors get their money back, so as long as every round was an up round and the exit is above the last round post-money, everyone will do better by converting to common and taking their share rather than their pref right.
Does anyone really think that "prevent obscenity" is the real reason, and that it has got nothing to do with the fact that pirated copies will have a hard time connecting to Blizzard's servers?

Seems pretty obvious to me.
again, that isn't my point. i'm not arguing about what is or isn't DRM. here:

>"We released the game DRM-free which means it doesn’t include any anti-piracy protection, therefore the game doesn’t bother players serial codes or online authentication, but it’s also very easy to copy it," Amanita's Jakub Dvorsky explained. "Our estimate from the feedback is that only 5-15 percent of Machinarium players actually paid for the game."

1) they claim to not have any DRM, registration, pingbacks, etc.. they're saying that the 90% (average) number is purely based on feedback. how reliable is this number? i know i ignore most feedback mechanisms by default.

2) if they said all of this, and it turns out that the product does have a pingback or some form of automated feedback, is that not dishonest?
This is fantastic. Thanks for the detailed response Luc!
Does modding a video game really classify as an essential liberty?
Google Prediction API: Machine Learning as a Service on the Cloud
then stop looking for one and start building, eventually you will get to meet people that would be interested in your work.

This could be actually better in terms of equity. Since you already started the work you could ask for 50+% ;)
The game was just released. Blizzard does a great job of releasing incremental updates for their games and servers. I remember BATTLE.net changing significantly over time when I was playing the original SC, from pretty horrible to pretty fantastic. I'm pretty sure the same thing happened with WCIII as well.

They will listen to their community and continuously make this thing better, I guarantee it!
I paid 10$ when it was on sale. Game was worth it though and I got another game from them for free for those 10$ - Samorost 2.
"People pirate games with DRM because the pirate version is better than the legit one."

How do we know that the people that pirate games with DRM aren't doing it because it's "easy"?

"You could easily argue that the DRM is increasing both the number and social acceptability of software pirates, which is basically the opposite of what it claims to be doing."

No, the piratebay is increasing the social acceptability of software pirates. So is the increasing rate of entitlement among people in their 20s.

This small example shows me that having no DRM (or any other kind of protection) means an application developer will not make any money on their app because most people will just pirate it. DRM at least helps prevent piracy to some degree.

Downloadable apps are on the way out. Because of piracy, I predict most companies will move over to web services in the future.

This should make most people happy because now, instead of paying for software once, you will need to pay for it every month/year.
Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
Articles in this vein can spur thought which leads to unexpected ideas.

This is perhaps a point of overlap between reddit and HN and really has very little direct relevance to startups, hacking, programming.

The piece in question here was not particularly deep but made for pleasant lunchtime thoughts about recursion and that fun little Linux fractal viewer that I havent played with in ages (xaos). I wondered how the guy figured this out and whether or not the Capian Sea were really the largest lake... Then when I looked at the comments I saw a few good points and this metacomment.

Not terribly deep thoughts. But I am not so sure that articles like this are irrelevant. It is good to have ludic content that generates seemingly random thoughts.

I used to follow a site called everything2.com - which i imagine lots of people remember (or still use).a simple Perl driven site that if I remember well was related to the slashdot engine(slashcode).

Spending an hour on the site following tangential entries could be really fun but beyond that could be a way to get unstuck when in a mental rut.

HN has that ability at times. In recent months articles on airplane safety; playing GTA with one's 4 yr old; pneumatic brass tubes at Stanford; Feynman on Science and religion have had that affect. None of these articles were particularly 'relevant'. But I am glad to have stumbled across them.
I assumed that the grandparent commenter was being sarcastic, based on the frequency of Debian stable releases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Release_history
Does anyone remember the item that you had to carry around in the zerg single player missions in SC1? If that wasn't a giant penis I don't know what is.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى واتحاد الشرطة
could you shoot me the name of that site in an email (it is in my profile). Not that I want to switch, but I do like having multiple sources of information. As for HN granted I have only been here for a only about a year and a half, but I don't think that it is that bad. I was on Slashdot from day one and the quality there has gone down to the point that I don't even visit, but that is due to a flaw in how Slashdot does there submissions (not every submission, gets posted) at least here on HN it is available you just have to weed through other stuff. I read "new" and find that there is a lot of good stuff that does not hit the first page. But if there is a site where some of the old timers have gone, I think it would contain a lot of topics that would be specifically interesting to me and I would like to know about it.
real article, not that I'm particularly interested in this instance of navel-gazing:

http://www.r-chart.com/2010/07/hacker-news-user-base-changed...
A lot of it is an anti-piracy measure. Activision wants games to be bound to their servers as tightly as possible, because that's the best possible defense against piracy. It also creates a kind of lock-in that they hope to exploit to get WoW-style recurring income.
Yeah, I imagine the technology should have improved from a few years ago when the delays seemed prevalent. You're also right that some messages may not go through at all. I'll probably need to research deeper into the current technology and issues surrounding SMS.
Scaling from 10 to 1000 is quite likely early on, though above 1000 I'd say the rule would apply.
KeyTweet somewhat magical sorts your Twitter feed by relevance
This is generally true.

However, just for fun, I'll note here that we are/were an extreme case where we spent a lot of time thinking about scaling in the early months and it paid off when we finally got traction (100 visits per day to 2,000,000 visits per day in 30 days). Sometimes it does matter. Moral: don't follow advice blindly.
> Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's a smart idea.

I think that goes for the whole fixed-gear story as well, even where it's legal it isn't very smart. As a bicyclist you're already vulnerable enough, no point in adding more factors to increase that vulnerability.
You were pre-empted by the article itself:

> "Keeping people from seeing your hate speech and obscene images on our private game service is not the same as relinquishing your constitutional freedoms in the hopes of increased personal/familial security," Bashiok continued. "Ben [Franklin] would tie you to a kite and let go of the string for making such comparisons."

While I don't necessarily agree that all user-made mods should be stored on Blizzard's servers, I also don't think that SCII map mods are a valuable or important form of personal expression. Blizzard isn't censoring an important channel for political opinions, they're making sure their game stays a game. This isn't necessarily a decision I agree with, but I think it's a defensible position to take.
Why would we want to bring Japan back from the 22nd century to this mess?
> Seems like the long-standing users aren't posting links
to deep, interesting articles anymore, and are instead
being drowned out by swarms of new users with more of a
social media agenda.

Yeah, sometimes it does seem like that...
I would sympathize if this was Blizzard's first networked RTS with a modding community, but it's hard to understand why they would decide to throw away ten years of aforementioned incremental improvements to SC:BW and WC3's community features and implement a far worse system from scratch.
Or, they could, as the article suggest, not host all the content themselves, and then there's no need for a tradeoff.
Sure, they do. But there's a fixed amount of money in the department budget, and the money they pay to the recruiter comes from somewhere.

(I was hired into finance by a recruiter. The recuriter took 50% of my income until I was hired as a full-time associate. I got a raise and the department probably saved a ton of money.)
I put in a generic 'yo momma' joke and got this:

It would take
About 8 octillion years
for a desktop PC to crack your password

I think desktop PCs might get a little faster in the next 8 octillion years :)
Congratulations. Now quit screwing your customers and I might decide to give that company money again.
With war3, we always had to download 10 different maps manually and put it in the "right" place to watch a replay. For instance, the replay wanted the map in:

maps/download/(2)blabla and not maps/frozen throne/(2)blabla.

I honestly hope that blizzard will fix that by hosting everything.

And I'm sure that if 25mb is not enough, blizzard will increase it.. It's one of the few game company that encourage users to create maps and fan art.

Lastly, in my 10 years playing starcraft1 and warcraft3, I've never seen a map with mature content or things like that.. so in my opinion, it doesn't make a difference whether blizzard control maps or no.
Can you bump a Droid with an iPhone yet?
Yes, it's dead. You can officially stop checking in now.
This is typical Lisper fare. Steve Yegge is right.

Open source math packages and academic software isn't "industry". Sorry.

And the bit about not needing libraries is just insane. It doesn't make any real sense unless you're interested in reinventing the wheel, over and over and over. Again, it makes sense in an academic context, because most likely, he's usually inventing something totally new and the user interface to the code is pretty mundane.

As for embedding the data in the code; Well, lispers love to talk about this, but realistically, people have been doing this in other languages for years. See lex/yacc as a somewhat recursive example of a domain specific language to generate data to parse other domain specific languages that might generate data :-). Just because your "domain specific language" is forced to be sexps, certainly doesn't make it superior, IMO.

Honestly, the idea that everything must be done with the same tool is a crazy idea -- and emacs adoption of that lispish philosophy (which is unsurprising given its origins) is what makes it such a turd.
http://www.xkcd.com/776/
I'm still here, though I don't really ever post articles anymore. Too much competition - a good article is posted here within minutes, and I'm not interested in a race. I was on the top 10 at some point, but the amount of effort it takes to maintain position is significant.

I still comment and still read most everything every day.
Auction markets require critical mass, and markets with critical are difficult to displace. If you wanted to build an eBay competitor, how would you get around that problem? It's tough.
I am an entrepreneur myself and I think an 1x liquidation preference makes sense. You cannot get X dollars at a 3X valuation and then turn around and sell the company for X keeping 2/3 of X and only giving 1/3 of X to the investor.

I think what most people disagree with are the 2x and 3x liquidation preference terms that are not uncommon in term sheets. They are a very effective way, for the investors, to push the founders to a more risky / bigger potential path so that they can also make money. This works well in the context of the VC model (for the VCs).
Sorry no: Tower Defense games began in 1990 when Atari Games released Rampart.[6] Early tower defense games later began to appear post-1997 in minigames for other platforms, such as Final Fantasy VII. By 2000, maps for StarCraft, Age of Empires II, and WarCraft III were following suit.[7] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_defense)
It sounds like Jay Leno would like people like Jay Leno to continue to be able to drive without all those other drivers.
Well, as a brief mention said in the article, any exercise benefit to the brain used to be thought of mainly as an increased blood flow and oxygen uptake.

But more recent research is focused on the hippocampus and neurogenesis, actually growing new neurons by exercising. Unfortunately, there's no test that can actually prove the new cells are responsible for new learning.

This happens to be the focus of my current research paper. :-)
Linux 2.6.32 will be quite outdated upon release, I hope they will make a squeeze 'n half like they did for Etch.

Also, I hope python 2.6 will be enough for the Squeeze lifetime, as python 2.7 is stable now. Python 2.5 on Lenny (while 2.6 was already released) was problematic in term of lacking features.
Ask HN: My brother is addicted to alcohol. How do I help him?
Hi, I'm a regular here, posting under a throwaway account.

My younger brother (23 years old) seems to be addicted to alcohol. He may also be suffering from depression.

His problems started more than a year ago when he was going through a lot of existential angst. He was quite into reading deep philosophical books and would have heated arguments with his orthodox family about all sorts of metaphysical stuff. He was at university but he would never go to class, sleep all day and read all night. This was passable until he started drinking. He would come home extremely drunk and would shout and swear at his family. Sometimes, things even got a bit violent.

I live abroad, so I could never help much. But I had to fly home a couple of times when things got a bit out of hand. My brother once nearly had a fatal car accident when he was driving drunk.

In the last few months, he seemed to be recovering. He got his degree and had recently started working. His drunken bouts reduced to once every few months. But they still haven't gone completely. In the last few days, he's been getting drunk very frequently and going home in a bad physical state.

Note that my brother and family are in India. His drinking habit may sound like a normal thing for young people to do in the West. However, his drinking is anything but normal. He doesn't hang out much with his friends, mostly drinks alone and ends up in a state where he has no clue what he's doing. Even after nearly killing himself, he is in complete denial that he has any sort of problem. We have tried to get him medical help once but he refuses to co-operate.

I'm scared we will lose him sooner than later if things carry on like this.

I know we need to seek professional help, but doing so is a bit complicated in India. Social complications aside, I'm not sure about the quality of medical services for this sort of thing. I'm not even sure where to start - seek psychological/psychiatric help or medical (as in physical) help.

So, I'm turning to the HN community, which always has some good advice even regarding personal issues such as this. I'm sorry this is not exactly relevant to this forum, but I'm desperately in need for help. I'll appreciate any thoughts or ideas if you have had personal experience dealing with similar problems.
http://blog.posterous.com/todays-outage-and-changes-for-cust...
I would suggest pre-caching the conversion results for a bunch of popular sites. Grab the Alexa top 1000 or something. Basically, I can understand why my random site takes a little longer, but not big, fast, popular sites.
Finally - indisputable proof that lisp was, in fact, the language from which the Gods wrought the universe.

http://xkcd.com/224/
You got downvoted for trying to make a joke, that hardly seems fair, that's why I voted you back up.

Now remember everyone, Hacker News is for SERIOUS business only, no joking, no lightheartedness, no screwing around.

I would say in regard to the original post that a low tech solution might just be a digital watch and some self-control. The thing is you have to be concrete before you go into it. I used to have a terrible time exercising until I said beforehand "I'm going to do X minutes of this or Y reps of that" Giving yourself a goal provides you with a kind of instant gratification when you complete it, which is similar to the stimulus you are getting from StarCraft 2.
Super Angels, Lean VCs, Proto-Incubators, whatever. Focus on social contract
Your game crashed my FireFox, FYI.

Version 3.6.8
On Windows 7 64 bit
They're also shipping Perl from the three year old 5.10 branch, instead of the 4 month old 5.12.
I think it's at the point of immediate, but subject to delays just like any other technology. I haven't had an SMS delay in quite a while.

I would curious to see more insight into the history of SMS, technology behind it,etc. Wikipedia does an okay job. Correct me if I'm wrong, but SMS does not use the data network? I have been able to send sms messages with no data service before.
Download Google Chrome 6.0.472.22 Beta - FileHippo.com
Heh, it was still taught until a few years ago here (Uruguay).

I remember it from 1990, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still taught in some schools.
Well tower defense was indeed further defined and expanded in warcraft 3 where it saw its biggest market, and this just further supports modding of games. DOTA however is from wc3 and it is especially amazing that there have been two independent games made from it, as well as many other interesting game types.
That post isn't a long term solution. It's a patch. One that they are going back to again today by flipping the IP address.
Anyone else notice all the fields on the comment form are prepopulated on that page with a guy called "Brian Armstrong"? I didn't put them there and this isn't a shared browser.. WordPress vulnerability?
Auto Tilt Patio Umbrellas with L.E.D lights
Patio umbrella's and outdoor patio umbrellas lights will lighten up the night time sky with its on board LED lighting system. Simple on/off control pannel gives your garden and beach, very decorative.
Its amusing that none of these comments even touch on the articles premise, which is that you need to be solving problems that someone (i.e. customers) else believes is important.
Penny Arcade covered this wonderfully regarding Little Big Planet: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/10/22/
Jolicloud 1.0 Review and Screenshots
Warning: the above link autoplays audio.
Videogame reviews are bad for a multitude of reasons.
Until the y-axis is normalized to account for the fact that the userbase might actually be growing there is not much real information here. If a site had 50 users a year ago and 5000 users today you would see a similar curve even if all of the earlier users were submitting and commenting ten times as often as they did in the previous year.
In your somewhat contrived example the cyclist could certainly be cited for reckless behavior.
bwh2: Great idea. My question is: Would it be kosher to pre-cache? ;)

There is a powerful caching module for the sites you access from your mobile phone though. I will have to ask my developers how to implement this in the preview.
It's a straw man argument, anyway- I played custom map games for WC3 throughout high school, and never once saw a penis map, race war map, or anything else particularly objectionable. There were a few copyright infringing maps, but most were either blizzard-derivative or bizarre and novel.
Which is why I said it was a different issue. My point was that the public attention that issue received could make publishers more wary of anything perceived as similar.
The software was written originally at IBM.

Axiom was sold commercially, before it was open sourced.

Axiom is also not written in one language. It is really the opposite. Lisp is basically the runtime for a complex domain specific language for mathematics. It is in some ways similar to Haskell. The language allows, how can I say it, a structuring of the mathematical domains with a typed language. Probably one of the most advanced pieces of software in that area.

The capabilities of Axiom are really amazing.