skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Listening to Zynga execs talk, they don't really consider their products as games, but rather 'social experiences'. They rely on having people you care about playing the games and enabling communication between players through self-expression, gifting and other mechanics. They constantly compare themselves to email and other communication channels. A lot of that is obviously feel good fluff, but at some level, I think its based in fact and a lot of the opportunities they have to materialize rise out of this too.
Will Facebook's new "Download Your Information" feature lead to phishing?
Absolutely.

Since the fire departments there lost popular support, the time is ripe for the community to organize and make their own independent FD; pool money, buy a used truck and train the jobless in fire fighting. In fact, make firefighting and emergency medical care a compulsory subject for high school seniors. Make the place into a self-sustaining kibbutz.
The mischief quotient for this is rather high
Well, it makes me feel a bit better, knowing they are reselling eNom.

Is there any route to direct access to eNom, in the event Google (lack of) support becomes a problem?
Well, we prioritize what developers need using our Moma tool (this tool does a static analysis of your executables and libraries and informs us what APIs are the most important to get).

In addition, a big help was the fact that Microsoft open sourced large swats of code in this release (DLR, MWF, OData, LINQ, and a bunch more).
Our Executive Assistant Can Kick Your Executive Assistant's Butt
clickable: http://markup.io
There is allegedly a huge amount of espionage directed at the US from Israel. You wouldn't have to be mentally ill to be involved in it.
Yes, so when his house catches on fire and you can put it out, you hand him a bill for $5000 or whatever the cost of a fire crew for several hours is. And if he doesn't pay, you sue him.

You get the cost of providing the service back, he still has a house. Allowing the dwelling to burn to the ground just results in a destruction of wealth for zero gain.
Try not paying the IRS a couple of years. Refuse to work with them when they try to work out a payment schedule with you. Don't pay any fines.

Then, let us know how that goes, if they don't filter this site from federal prison. :)
Just to note/ask though, this requires that you have a python script on the server that uses this as a lib? and requires tornado?
We capture the dimensions of the page when the toolbar loads. People viewing the MarkUp with different screen resolutions might see an "empty" background or need to scroll a bit.

Here's an example: http://markup.io/v/x9ybmz4e5k7r
I was wondering about that while reading the article... Does he really have a complete Amazon book price database on his PDA? If so, how does he keep it up-to-date? I imagine Amazon would object to someone constantly scraping their prices.
Israel's first nuclear bombs were believed (by the CIA) to be constructed from highly enriched uranium stolen from the US Navy nuclear fuel plant operated by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. So it wouldn't be completely unprecedented.
It's demonstrated in the article and elsewhere that they weren't expecting a free ride.

Again, there are numerous examples of systems working where uninsured people pay AT COST. Uninsured? An ambulance ride is really expensive. Uninsured? A broken leg is really expensive.

But you will still get treatment and you will eventually pay the price.
The thing is that sometimes when you've removed the redundancy you end up with a program that's more complex than the one you started with.
Where did he say it was the "root cause" and not a consequence of not paying taxes versus not paying a voluntary fee?
Can you cite a case where this has actually transpired? Obviously in the extreme example where the site is never available I can see it having an effect. But spotty downtime I've seen actually have the opposite effect - users become more loyal. On one forum I frequent the "500 errors" are sometimes looked forward to since they usually signify a big news event is happening. Reddit and twitter are other sites that don't seem to have been negatively affected by spotty downtimes. I do think that regularly (excruciatingly) slow performance can have an impact though - one of the reasons I left digg with V3.
Oh yes, that reminds me how much of Zynga's properties are ripped off from existing games. Farmville was a straight-up clone of Farm Town, PetVille was a clone of Pet Society... The properties that Zynga are most proud of are the same as the ones they didn't design.
The level of actual social engagement in a game like Left 4 Dead (between the four human players) far surpasses that in a game like Frontierville, even if they both have achievements. Likewise, the level of depth and sophistication in something like Starcraft 2 is virtually impossible to compare. One could argue that Frontierville and the like are simply serving people's need for a simple, relaxing pastime - that's probably true - but as games, they still fall short. Facebook games, for the most part, exist as a space with the sole purpose of creating reasons to spam your facebook friends. I applaud Zynga for adding things that actually resemble game mechanics, but it's still kind of insulting to call them 'social games' when they're not particularly social and still barely games.
I did this at first, but then realised that my brain and abilities didn't change when I did PM related work or back-end related work.

So now I have only one rate for myself. One consequence is that billing is easier and less error-prone :)
As someone said on another story about Zuckerberg, if a person can go from $0 to having a net worth of over $6.9 billion then they are most definitely a genius.
The reason this makes sense in Alaska is that a lot of places aren't accessible to the fire service - if your cabin out in the woods with no road burns down the fire service can't get a ladder truck there so why are you paying?

This used to be the policy with private fire services in most cities - until somebody realised that the house of a poor person with no insurance burning could start a fire that could destroy the city - so it makes sense to put out that fire, in the same way that it makes sense to give people free vaccinations against TB if they are going to cough next to you on the subway.

Interesting that the police are still covered by commie taxes - if the firemen wanted protection they should have paid the annual police tax, or got a better deal from a private security firm, or just bought their own guns.
The rule that I use:

- everything user-generated that you have little control over (for example, forums or blogs with badly moderated comment section) goes to subdomains.

- everything you control goes to subfolders.

Thus, if you can keep your blog free of spam, it should go to subfolder.
Totally agreed. Underscore has quickly become the one js library that I cannot live without, no matter what.
It's kinda sad that I've been called a troll and modded down for being the only one in this thread to suggest that perhaps social skills and popularity rather than violence are the best way to avoid being a target of bullies.

bullying them for being different is wrong.

We're not arguing about whether bullying is wrong, we're assuming that bullies exist and arguing about what the best way to protect your kids from bullies is. And I still argue that a dozen good friends is worth a whole lot more than an orange belt in karate... and those social skills are probably a lot more useful in later life too.

not giving a damn about fashion

Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey. -- Ambrose Bierce
Porter : Strategy :: Booch : Programming.
Sure, but to be charitable to edw519, it's possible to interpret the remark as "can be shortened ... without compromising meaning".
First off, congrats! I was in charge of the website when Oprah featured The Secret a few times on her show. Here's a few pointers from my experience.

1. Remember the show airs in Chicago in the morning, then more than once across time zones, so this will be an all day treat. We had a lot of buzz (Oprah's own forums went down under load for our show), and our URL was displayed on the screen. Regardless, you can expect a lot of traffic, mostly during the show and a few days afterward.

2. Your db will likely be your bottleneck. Make sure you don't have any unoptimized queries, or better yet, cache as much as you can so you're only hitting the db on writes for all the orders you'll be getting.

3. If possible, offload static content to a cdn. Akamai saved us here, because the site was not optimized size-wise.

4. What ultimately caused us issues was slow clients. I would definitely try to have a caching proxy up front. The snowball effect would cause us to tap out our 100Mb connection at times. Since you're using cloud hosting hopefully that's not a hard limitation for you.

5. It's really fun watching your bandwidth. I used a console tool called bmon. You'll be able to tell when commercials happen during the show.

6. +1 for a backup plan. Have a static page ready that you can switch over to. I'd highly suggest having an alternate payment processor, even if you have to go with Paypal. Since you're SAAS, you can't rely on retail or Amazon, so you may not get visitors to come back if your site fails. Make sure you can capture those customers the first time.

7. If you don't plan on having a free account, offer something so you can build your customer list and capture contact info. A whitepaper, newsletter, etc.

Have fun!
Interesting. I note that Mark Forstater was the producer of the film. There doesn't seem anything strange to me about him trying to bargain the censors down. What seems odd is that he thought Monty Python would be interested in trying to get (the equivalent of) a G rating.
You're ignoring the detail of insurance. I elsewhere point out examples of other government services that allow people to pay the costs if they don't pay the fee/purchase insurance, but the fact remains that insurance works differently by definition.
Managing a large, rapidly scaling web business such as Facebook is not exactly trivial, either.
Yeah, tend to agree with this.

In addition to the insurance comparison, which is apt, there is the danger aspect to consider as well. If insuring your house isn't worth less than $7 a month to you, why the hell should the firefighter consider it worth their life (potentially)?
Odd, I've never seen those. While some of my friends (bless their hearts) are not quite au fait with the how-to-avoid-spamming-your-friends thing, I don't think any of 'em have ever added any apps quite that annoying.

Then again, I wasn't born in July, don't have a name starting with S, and am most definitely not a Saggitarius Chica, so maybe I'm just missing out.
Not sure why your were upvoted (probably for the sentiment that freely entering one's password without reason should not happen) because that is not correct.

In the US, "customs" typically refer to ICE and TSA, both are enforcement functions of the United States Department of Homeland Security.
I suppose things could have changed since I left, but they weren't really rigged for that sort of thing when I was there, and I was in two groups who would have been very close to that sort of thing.
I second the advice with: put yourself in a situation where you really don't need work (or at least not before a few months or years).

It's automatically a lot easier to get the rates you ask for.
ah - so what you are doing speeds up deploys to multiple servers, while what i'm doing is meant to speed up an individual deploy.

i mostly just got tired of waiting for an individual deploy to my staging server.

btw thanks for emailing me! - i'll definitely look at your branch and see if i can help! (wasn't aware of it until today)
Some "fucks up" their life with drugs because at some poit they tried to evade some things. You do not always deliberately fuck your life with drugs sometime you think your life is so fucked up that drugs can't make things worse even if indeed they do but you're past beyond reason
What do you use for threat modeling? Is there some sort of common formal process, even tools? Or is it still pen and paper / spreadsheets?
The last two points are pretty weak. A CNAME results in an extra round trip to the DNS server, even if it does reduce the packet size. What the author did not explain is that some DNS servers can preemptively send the reply to the CNAME target along with the result, avoiding that extra round trip. You can see this for example with www.google.com. However, Google returns only one CNAME (www.l.google.com.) and it does not seem to vary over time or location. My sample size is admittedly quite small. On the other hand, one could just as easily skip the CNAME altogether and return only as many A records as will fit into a packet.

The GeoDNS section didn't even attempt to link the feature to the article's subject. Presumably the complaint was that it is harder to delegate the 2LD to GeoDNS, but Google manages to do this as well. When squeezing out every last millisecond of latency, you could do worse than to imitate Google.
The greatest thing I ever did was get rid of all of my game systems and used that time to further my goals. I was amazed at how much more productive that I had become. I easily doubled my capacity to get stuff done. I eventually got of of watching TV shows as well. That one was much harder but again the time I have now to get my freelancing gig's done so I can take more vacations as well as build things (restore a 68 bronco, remodel the house) is amazing.
One thing you can do to decrease your taxes is form an S-Corp. That allows you to pay yourself a moderate salary of 50K a year on which you pay all the income taxes. The rest you make you can take out as dividends and only pay dividend taxes on it.
That would create an incentive for firefighters to burn down people's houses. I'm not saying they would, but it's best not to create such situations.

It would be harder to determine the right price to charge people. It's not the water that costs anything, it's the equipment. Remember, this organization is not seeking to make a profit, just cover costs. If people pay in advance, you charge (number of houses / cost of maintenance). Very straightforward. If people pay after the fact, you have to charge (number of houses that will burn down / cost of maintenance). But you don't know in advance how many houses will burn down.

Finally, while letting a house burn down is an ugly business, it's also pretty ugly when you have to send out collections. You already know they were too poor or irresponsible to pay the fee upfront, so it's not like they have a nest egg sitting around.
This thinking would only work in places where fire can't jump very far AND a very high percentage of people have paid. Living in Southern California with Santa Ana winds (warm, dry, and often over 50 mph) this would never work. The fire fighters can't just spray down the neighbor's houses because sparks can jump too far. A similar problem would occur if only 50% of people paid. Too many houses would burn for a reasonably sized fire department to protect the homes of the people who had paid.
well said ... a designer isn't going to be utilized 24/7 in my mind but the engineers will.

I'd be curious to find out how a company like 37signals keeps its designers completely occupied though.
First off, thanks for all the ideas. I like your enthusiasm.

We'll look into auto-completion. Thanks for the article.

We love the fact that you can see what you and another user want to see. It's a simple idea but one people love the most.

For now you can make lists by adding a tag. e.g. http://watchth.is/tag/one-day. We're working on making lists more interesting (rewards when you watch a complete list… like badges maybe? :)

Some options for sorting movies would be very nice indeed. It's on the list.

Privacy as a premium feature is a great idea. Maybe add the ability to export your data like nithinpb suggested in the comments?

The year is on the hover overlay in the search results only for now. But yeah, maybe we could add it everywhere.

Other HN users suggested that we be clear about our intentions regarding how we'll use the twitter/facebook data. We'll definitely do that. In the future you'll be able to auto-post your comments, but we'll always ask nicely first, of course.

We have some issues from time to time with IMDB. Their CDN can be a bit capricious and their data on movies that are not yet released is often incomplete. That said, we don't want to focus on recently released movies but more on movies you should have seen a long time ago. The goal is NOT to watch recent movies but to build yourself a solid cinematographic culture (not sure that's correct English but I'm sure you get what I'm saying).

We'll definitely add affiliate links. Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix.

We'll write a post in a few weeks just for you. Thanks again.

UPDATE: follow http://twitter.com/WatchThis_ ;)
However, being tagged in a photo and joined to a group is COMPLETELY different. I think people know that you can be tagged in a photo without approval, but the underlying idea of groups are opt-in. This should have have happened!
I sent an email to your gmail account a few weeks ago, never got any answer...
I promise that if you don't pay your taxes and refuse any additional fines, people with guns will knock on your door.
Garage biotech: Life hackers
This is why I have both singleforest.com and singleforest.net. I will be using the .net domain for apis, cdn, and other stuff as I need it.
So, clear this up for me - is this a secret plan made without public involvement, or is this due to public ignorance and disinterest in the subject, despite the people outside the city being offered the fee every year and the guy in question knowing that he hadn't paid the fee?

And what responsibility do the 300 million members of the "American public" have to know the firefighting policies of some county in Tennessee?
The Real Original Remote Control: Zenith Space Command
Whenever I read a blog post like this, my reaction is "can't we just agree that both are crucial and have that be our answer?"

Even if one day someone establishes a sound mathematical proof that design is more important that engineering or vice versa, what will we have gained from that? Reminds me of the joke about the most important organ in the body...
How Design Choices Impact Virtual Goods Purchases in Games
The poor have their needs met. Once you reach that level, why spend precious leisure time just to become marginally wealthier?

So that when you are too feeble to care for yourself, you can afford care that doesn't involve turning you into a blob by overfeeding you or conveniently killing you off with a negligently spread staph infection after years of soul destroying institutional care by the embittered and underpaid. Becoming marginally wealthier than poor wouldn't do this, but I suspect this is the real goal of most 9to5for40 life plans in the US.
I've always wondered how ycombinator handles design.
Do they have designers on site , do teams hire designers to get it right or do they count on the teams to do it on their own.
I'm no good at design and I don't know anybody who's good at it.
I just browse Themeforest and buy one if I need one.
I have the lucky position of having to do scaling for not only Oprah, but american idol, the superbowl, x factor, inaugurations and more.

we have had artists on Oprah many times, probably a dozen in the last five years. It has nearly no effect. The largest bump we see is during the central timezone broadcast. The east and west code feeds have negligible effect unless you ask for it by doing an "expensive" call to action on the site. I define that to mean asking every user to do a db or server intensive task, like signing up for a site, logging in, commenting, etc. We generally avoid db writes during load events.

I would recommend a good cdn though and offloading as much as possible to them.

Incidentally the biggest impacts for us have been xfactor, american idol, glee, and the biggest was Tom petty on the superbowl. The only time I have ever watched it willingly.
Many YC startups have stunning design e.g. heroku, wufoo. When you come across a beautiful site, open it in Firebug to see how it was done.
sometime you think your life is so fucked up that drugs can't make things worse

Word to the wise: this is never true!
When faced with the same situation (3 years ago), I decided to train myself to at least be able to create decent looking UI.

It's not that hard, if you read a few books and practice a bit, to be able to cover 80% of design needs (and you can stay in the code these days, ie: work in CSS3 and take screenshots for instance - staying away from Photoshop).

You can also subcontract to a UI designer for the inspirational bits and do the rest of the work yourself.
Does this mean it would be a good thing to shorten time spent in school? I hated those 6-7 hours in the classroom, most of it was wasted and I wish that the next generation doesn't have to go through it too.
This is coming up because of the Tennessee "firefighters watched it burn over $75" story. But there's backstory to that story.

The fire department in question served a nearby town, and had no responsibility for the area where the fire occurred. As a service to people living outside their area, you could pay $75/year to get "out of area" coverage. The people who lost their house did two things to keep them from being covered: they didn't pay the fee, and they chose to live in an area without a fire department.

There are many thousands of communities in the US that don't have official fire departments; a large subset of them have no fire service whatsoever. It can't be the responsibility of every other community in their vicinity to provide fire service gratis.

I know 'jrockway finds it hard to believe, but I am as liberal as they come. Even I don't think that when you choose to live in East Bumfuzzle, TN that you're automatically entitled to the services of the West Bumfuzzle, TN fire department.
This is pretty awesome, I might be using it a lot!
This is probably why people within that city's limits pay taxes for the firefighters.
Already, for the uninsured, if you break a leg and need an ambulance ride you get one. It costs an arm (in addition to your wounded leg) but you get it.

Would you say this creates an incentive for EMTs and paramedics to break people's legs?

Again, systems are in place to already collect from people who can't afford lump sum payments. Amortized scheduling occurs in pretty much every industry.

Yes, a certain number of people cannot and perhaps will not pay. But the net benefit to society is manifest when your neighbor's house isn't burnt to the ground.
I'm sure Zuck and Sandberg went straight for the delete button on that email. "Oh its linkbait Calcanis ranting about something stupid and trolling for an Adviser gig."

Its so odd, I do really like JCal's stance on other issues (paid pitching groups) but his fb rants are annoying.

He should have wrote them a thank you letter for delivering an easy to use tool for exporting all content rather than just a simple PS mention.
This would be more of a "Big Deal" if it hadn't been available for many years in Mozilla via PyXPCOM: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/PyDOM

That being said, there's definitely room for competition. PyXPCOM is far from a joy to work with.
Thanks for the feedback! I've added (1) to our bug list. Others have asked for (2), so we'll definitely be adding that sometime soon.
I don't play video games
I would disagree with the central thesis. You can sacrifice P for a weaker version: assume a network which "eventually heals": any live node will answer at least one message in a hundred, say [any node which does not is assumed to be unavailable]. The alternative to P is not "perfect network", it's "bounded from below on the badness thereof network", a significantly more realistic beast.
^^ this was basically my point.