skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case it wasn't clear, the original blog post came from - http://www.vcdave.com/2010/09/14/top-10-ways-to-apply-game-m...

The points shared were great, but it seems a lot of bloggers who cover these topics never emphasize how hard it can be to 'get it right', let alone actually develop the system. A lot of thought and work needs to go into making sure you're rewarding people for the right actions and for the right reasons. People will do exactly what you reward them to do.

Also, with achievements, points, leaderboards, etc comes the baggage of needing to manage it and report on it. That's one of the bigger points we try to make when talking about the services we offer at http://www.IActionable.com

You can't just say "we'll give an achievement when they click this button, done!" What happens when you want more complex requirements in order to earn that achievement? Most implementations today require a developer to be always available to alter the code/logic which drives the reward system.

Of course my perspective is different than most since I'm very passionate about this stuff and have a startup trying to solve these problems. :)
Cool parallax comic strip in HTML5
A Map Of Wireless Dead Zones In San Francisco: Every Single One Is AT&T
Your English is great. I'm a native speaker, and reading your post, I thought you were too. A slightly sloppy one with a couple odd turns of phrase, but perfectly clear and comprehensible. I understood the quoted parts just fine.

That said, please don't make excuses about how little time you spent on it. It might be true, but it shows lack of respect for your audience. Like code, if it's worth writing at all, it's probably worth writing well.

Keep writing, keep coding!
If Google's CDN were hacked (as unlikely as that is), it's almost certain that you'd find out about it far sooner than if your own server were hacked. There would be a huge controversy and then it would be quickly fixed, probably in the course of hours or minutes, just like with the Twitter CSRF issue this morning.

Conversely, the Internet is absolutely littered with compromised sites that have been modified to inject malicious scripts.

The situation is similar to Linus' Law.
The Iron Fist Coding Standard
I don't know anything about Spokeo, but Rapleaf uses the APIs of various services, and when that isn't enough, they screen scrape.
Apt and yum are not very different. In the early 2000s, before yum Debian was a clear choice for packaging alone, but things have changed these days.

(I'm an Arch guy these days, but hey...)
I started off using Google CDN to host my jQuery file, then later ditched it because about 20% of the time there would be a noticeable delay in retrieving it (if I'd cleared my cache).

There's really no reason not to just host jQuery yourself. Use GZip, and set a far-future expires header. Ensure the jQuery file is named by version, so that if you update the version the cached filename will be different. That's all you need to do, really.

One last note: The benefit of putting script tags at the bottom of the body is very similar to having the scripts cached in the first place. Just in case you didn't know, putting script includes at the bottom of the page lets the browser render the page progressively as it retrieves the HTML text [generally very, very quickly]. Scripts in the HEAD block rendering, as the browser needs to be load each script file sequentially, in case there are dependencies. [Note: not exactly true, it will grab several in parallel and execute them in order, but there's still a delay.]

Whether or not the scripts are cached, very fast page rendering will make the page appear to have loaded quickly. Likely, the user will not require javascript by the time the scripts are loaded anyway, if they aren't already cached.
It's trouble enough to drive people away from Mongrel2. Also, I find it weird that you take me saying "we ditched python in mongrel2 because of Linux" to mean "Python SUCKS! Stop using it." Never said the latter, only the former.
Where is the messing? Where is the hassle?

wget https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.mi... -O main.js

cat local.js >> main.js
At our company we joke a lot about adding sound effects when users earn a reward.

And you're right, there is just something taboo and wrong about websites making unexpected noise.
HTML5 Is Not That Powerful
I have a problem with anxiety and for me the only way I can really combat it in these situations is to feel over-prepared, take deep breaths, and try not to talk too fast. Also, keeping a few portable face wipes helps (in case I sweat), but usually just having them on me is reassuring.
Yes, but there's bugs when used with stylesheets in IE7 & IE8

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/02/10/5a-missing-schem...
Aaron Greenspan, the author of the article, from his HuffPo bio: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan

"Aaron invented The Facebook while attending Harvard College in September 2003 and graduated with an A.B. in Economics in 2004."

Wait, what? I have heard of this guy and knew that he made some claim about Facebook - but 'invented', no way! From 'The Facebook Effect':

"Zuckerberg also had a little involvement with houseSYSTEM creator Greenspan. The two met for dinner in early January in the Kirkland dining room. At the meeting, Zuckerberg invited Greenspan to partner with him to create his new project, which he didn’t describe in detail. But the older student demurred. In a 333-page self-published, self-justifying autobiography he writes, “I didn’t like the idea of working for someone who had just been disciplined for ignoring privacy rights on a massive scale.”

The count of the number of people claiming to be a Facebook inventor, founder or co-founder must be around 10. Success certainly has many fathers.
>In my Java shop, we try to write ultra-efficient code. Avoiding the creation of numerous small objects in critical sections is one of the best ways to achieve that.

I'd like to know why you think creating numerous small objects is an issue... Short lived small objects should be negligible to an application's performance.
Whats to stop you from patching and compiling programs yourself to get rid of the python dependancies of your package manager?

If the Linux distro you choose doesn't meet your needs, why would you continue to use it? If your Fedora install requires it to be one way, but that doesn't fit the need of the server, it would like one should reconsider why they are using that distro.
That's not even close to the logical conclusion: the statement was "Enforce minimum wages that people can actually live on", not "Higher minimum wage is always better."

Contrast that with many right wing arguments about taxation, which usually take the form "Lower/more regressive taxes are always better, and here's why" - disturbingly many of those arguments are "valid" (i.e. if you accept the arguer's claims, the conclusion follows) no matter what the starting point is, and the end result would either be zero taxes for everyone or (surprisingly common) almost 100% taxation of the lower classes and no tax on the upper; hell, if we allow for redistribution, many of the conservative arguments actually imply that the upper class should be given money by the lower class, for the good of the economy.

If your argument pushes some number in one direction but doesn't turn around for some value of that number, then there's typically a problem with the argument; here, that's not the case, the poster explicitly provided that stopping point.
Chinese Market - Would You Dare Eating Any of These Food?
As mentioned below, Sightwalk is one, I forget the other one. I hadn't heard of the other one before the Street View mess either, so I'm not too surprised. But as far as I'm aware, Sightwalk made it very public that they were doing this, and did not get much criticism at the time. Their optout method is nearly identical to the one Google is currently offering.
CERIAS Security Seminar Archive (RSS feed available)
Have you seen any documented cases of websites moving real metrics using "game mechanics"? I'm not talking about Foursquare. I mean an established web property that added features like these and actually improved revenue or user acquisition.

I hate to be a skeptic, but I've seen a lot of bs around "game mechanics" ever since Foursquare hit, but I've yet to see real results.
Can someone post a text summary or the post in its entirety? I found the site url on google, but couldn't cache it from before the site went down.
That site is nice, but they also want to charge me close to $2000 for a list of sites using a single technology, I could definitely do this myself for much less.

Anyone want to build a free version with me?
Budgets don't generally work like that. Layoffs count as a capital not an operational expense. You see this when big firms write down their earnings when they do big layoffs.

When your company is laying people off, you have to understand where your loyalties really lie.
Andy Sack, Angel Investor: Man on a mission
Without using Googles CDN, they have to hack my website

With Googles CDN, they have to hack either my website, or Googles CDN.

Whichever you choose, it wont make any difference to how quickly you notice a local hack. Increasing the attack space doesn't make you more secure.
Some customers just don't want to pay up
I used to let Google host jQuery for me. And then one day their CDN went down for a large chunk of the midwest (where I live), and I noticed the render time of my site (and a few others) jump up anywhere between 5x and 100x.

That was the moment I resolved never to leave critical, blocking elements of any site I run into the hands of others, no matter how well known or reliable they are. (FWIW, this also includes ad network invocation scripts and similar, which always seem to be notoriously slow to load).
Submitted earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1712596
I've read some of the actual studies you've quoted (and others), and they seem to indicate that infants that sleep on their backs fair slightly better in statistics. Some also blame heavier blankets and "bumper pads" (the pads that wrap around the bars at the base of the mattress).

As I mentioned elsewhere, my understanding is that it's merely a recommendation based on statistics with no direct correlation.

My babies went on their backs, because even a %.001 difference is enough for me to play the game, seeing as I don't know what I'd do if one of them passed away.
Thing is... I don't know your dad.
Submitted earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713325
"This" is not a complete sentence.

</grammar nazi>
You may be right, but it's also not as simple as you make it sound. There are a number of discontinuities in the bottom line rates that can make a much larger difference than an increase in one's highest marginal bracket. Especially around the income that the Henderson refers to, when you're likely to be hitting the AMT, it's definitely not a smooth function.

For myself, a year and a half ago, this happened. There was a conjunction of several changes (particularly hitting AMT, and a significant decline in mortgage interest deduction, and a good chunk of additional one-time "unearned" income) that together made it appear that the marginal rate on the income (relative to the previous year) was on the order of 60+%.

FWIW, I know that it's a (hideously) complex calculation with many, many factors, and what I was looking at thus wasn't actually the marginal rate as such. Nevertheless, what I experienced was, financially, the equivalent of that.

Your point portrays this as simple by assuming that the income tax is represented by a simple set of tables, but it's much more byzantine than that. All this added complexity can sometimes make your best-case scenario turn much worse.
My impression was that there were about 50 or 100 pages worth of insight, padded out and repeated over and over again to fill a 1100 page (or whatever) book. I only made it to about page 500 before giving up, feeling like I’d read the same part 3 or 4 times already, and just skimming the rest and looking at the pictures. Wolfram’ prose also oozes ego, which doesn’t help.

Weinberg’s review in the New York Review was quite good:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/oct/24/is-the-...
I fully agree with you that this is more than tiny for a C project, but it can be big compared to a small script. I also develop/maintain the projects measured in zipped megabytes (where I don't even have a wish to try to wait to count the lines!) I only compared it to some script solution.

You're right, 600 lines more or less are irrelevant. I just thought you're measuring something else as I saw the total of 1000 instead of 4000. Still it is all tiny for a real C program.

I also think that the C solution is more portable than the dependence on any version of Python. I also cross-compiled the code for 32 MB RAM mipsel platforms and I agree that only C dependencies are better than any script language dependencies (not counting shell, when it's carefully written).

But I actively use both Perl and Python so I'd still really like to know what was lacking in Python 2.2 or 2.3 or 2.4, of course only in case you already knew that you were to have any Python on the target computer. But then if you couldn't expect to have any Python, then the fact that distros still use older versions wasn't of much relevance.
If you spent most of your life working two jobs for 16 hours per day, eating oatmeal, I quite frankly don't think you worked very smart.

But each to their own, and what they want to spend their time on Earth doing.
Coral cache is working: http://blog.amirkhella.com.nyud.net/2010/09/21/the-story-of-...
It's articles like these that attract them. You've got to flag them or they'll keep creeping up.
I admire Bruce Eckel for seeing limitations of the language he invested lot of time and effort in (he is the author of Thinking in Java). Many would stick to a field they feel comfortable in, but Bruce had a courage and an open mind to move forward. He actually advocated Ruby and Python during his talks on Java conferences!
I guess you did your homework right!
He gets downvoted anyway, simply for the backhanded compliment he just served up.
If you look at the regex they were using, once it sees an @, it then scans forward until it encounters a /, which is what let's you sneak in anything after the @ other than a /.
It doesn't work like that. The CEO decides, we need to lay some people off. The CFO decides how many. The senior management work out they need so many of this job title, so many of that job title afterwards. Then HR makes a list based on their #1 priority: not getting sued. Which means that if all your COBOL developers happen to be $minority, and your company is getting out of COBOL, then most of them are probably safe.

Basically the people who make the decisions are several layers removed from anyone who would have day-to-day knowledge of you or your work. It really is nothing personal.
The Wire, though fiction, is a pretty compelling antidote to the attitude you describe, imho.
In my opinion, having a reasonably clean architecture is all that matters.

Not that bad: the implementation of an individual function is counterintuitive and undocumented--as long as an intuitive implementation of the function would interface with the rest of your software just the same way.

Actually pretty bad: the function has side effects that would be better off somewhere else. If this is the case, fixing this function is likely to break something, which may break something else, and so-on.

The ideal case is one where even though your code base is messy, you can easily see how you could achieve a clean code base through a series of short, discrete steps, where each step begins and ends with working code.

Kind of like how if you've got a string attached to something at the entrance of a cave, it doesn't matter much how deep in to the cave you get--all you have to do is follow your string back.

Of course I'm just a 19-year-old kid. Someone who's worked on a large software project should tell me if they like my theory or not.
Canadian Startup SocialDeck acquired by Google
JQuery Widgets - Bringing Sanity to Complex Apps
Good point, but a minor correction: Layoffs are generally accounted for as "one-time charges," but technically they're not capital expenditures.
Where can I get source code of google?
If it's so decisive you must be able to cite it pretty easily, eh?

Google returns "about 1,150,000 results" for the term jailbreakme. I think that'll do.
Electric Sheep: a collaborative abstract artwork
Working on creating a static HTML file for the post
But our current tax code discriminates against this heavily

Why? You can always make more money. A higher marginal tax rate is at most a minor disincentive since you still end up with more overall. Everyone likes to complain about taxes, but I think it's pretty much bullshit if anyone says they turned down an opportunity for more money because of the marginal tax rate.

A better argument is that the rich spend money more wisely than the government, which is at least debatable.
Yes. Both data structures and CS theory (making proofs about different computation models, &c.) courses would benefit tremendously even from having better PC/web-based visualizations/simulations. Stepping through the behavior of turing machines, or graph searching algorithms, or what have you, is much much clearer on a computer than on a blackboard or paper.
I definitely read the opinion as more buddhist than geek.
They are trying to match URLs so that they can turn them into links. The @ character is valid in a URL. What I don't understand is why they don't URL encode the matching text.
I made these buttons a while ago: http://e-tjenesten.org/eksperimenter/knapp/
Was Stuxnet Built to Attack Iran's Nuclear Program?
have you tried pricing variations ? You might be leaving money on the table if there's such an incredible demand.
I'm thinking Apache with KeepAlive turned on: it kills more blogs than cancer!
Apple and Facebook Reportedly Negotiated Over Ping for At Least 18 Months
I was really looking forward to learning how the product was built, how the payment processor was set up so quickly, the tools used, and how he was able to build the product so fast.

Most of the post was actually about dealing with the uncertainties of launching a product before you're comfortable with it and being pleasantly surprised by the results.

There's very little information on the process of how Amir launched it in three hours except using paypal and buying a $35 theme from themeforest - I'd like to hear more about this in a feature post.
User research
Can someone provide me with a list (or suggestions) for companies in the UK which specialise in ethnographic research?
That's not a very high cost. They don't choose to hit you, they let their scripts and botnets look around for old and vulnerable software.

Have you looked at your raw httpd logs? When I look at mine, and grep away known-cookies, I see that I'm frequently scanned by hundreds of IPs looking for vulnerabilities in common software packages.

And that's just the stuff that shows up in logged HTTP queries. I don't want to think about how likely it is that tools like nessus are constantly being scan-run against IP ranges that I sit within.

Ok, sure, you can believe you're going to be more on top of things keeping your site secure than a high-value target like Google. I don't know how the target value of your site, but I doubt it's as high as the server the jQuery plugin you're afraid of pulling remotely sits on--and you can bet that Google knows they have high-target-value externally-facing assets, and are watching them even harder and with more eyes than you would.
Apple and Twitter have both now launched new features integrating with Facebook only to have them disabled within hours.
I decided it's outside the scope of that post (which was already laboriously long winded), but you can/should use a fallback technique like this to mitigate the potential for Google downtime: http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2010/01/21/using-cd...

Also, HTML5 Boilerplate has that built-in: http://html5boilerplate.com/
You're half right: you may not actually be able to think of them like features. But "game mechanics" were "video games" and "psychology" a long time before they were distilled out, which means to take advantage of them properly, you really need to know a lot from both of those fields. Like anything else, you may have to design with them in mind from the get-go, and you'll probably get it wrong the first few times out, which means you'll need to practice (or have betas).

Instead of completely retooling your software, perhaps instead you can add a meta-game on top: Office Hero was a game added atop Microsoft Word by Lost Garden writer danc: http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero && http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning...

You'll never be able to "let's just add badges!" just like you can't "let's use gradients and glossy buttons!" to move the needle.

There's even the notion that video games and traditional UI interaction design are incompatible: IxD is about making things easy, but video games are about intentionally challenging the user. If your users aren't expecting a game, they may end up incredibly frustrated instead.

I did a workshop on adding game mechanics to an existing product (a calendar/dayplanner) and the results varied wildly. One group (Ray and Nicole) integrated social game mechanics into the application really well. Another group (Cecy and Brody) treated each mechanic as a feature, and by the end of the discussion I felt like it was "missing something." You can read the write-up of the workshop here: http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/

My notes include a lot of references, as well as images of the handouts and my own distillation of these principles: http://vi.to/gmnotes
Not true.

What you need is a type system. All data that comes from the user is of type UnescapedUserString. When the templating system sees this, it escapes it when written as HTML. Strings that you type into your program that you don't want to be escaped are of type EscapedString. Add some concatenation rules, and you're done.

If you were using Haskell, you wouldn't even need to change much code to do this, thanks to overloaded strings.
Why Programmers Shouldn't Study Programming
"I watched with increasing alarm as red streaks traced bloody spiderwebs across her thighs."

Vivid.
That's a good reference.

In that post, Prof. Cowen alludes to the strength of the argument being related to the complainer's marginal utility, relative to that of, say, a poor person. The complaints about the Henderson piece by the poor (or by others claiming to defend the poor) implicitly assume that the marginal utility of a rich person must necessarily be lower than that of a poor person, for the very reason that the former has more money.

However, Mr. Scalzi's other piece featured in HN today, about being poor, illustrates that one might be so deep into a hole that a little extra [1] might not be enough to make any difference. To the degree that's true, the marginal utility for the poor person would be very low. Perhaps low enough that more good would be done for him by whatever contribution to society that Mr. Henderson makes.

Or maybe not. But the answer is not a foregone conclusion; one can't simply assume that the answer is obvious.

[1] that little extra being what's taken from Mr. Henderson and his ilk and divided up amongst the poor.
Sure. If enough folks want to dig into this much detail, I'd be happy to put together an in-depth write-up.
er. "known-cookies"? That was supposed to be "known-good queries." I think it's time to break for lunch...
The fallback technique does nothing to mitigate the "It can connect but loading takes forever" case surely.