skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The designers of free-to-play games, by using an intermittent variable to dole out small prizes, found that they could keep players engaged—and spending—for longer.

I'm really glad the article also touches on the loot-box phenomenon. I think it's by far the worst thing to ever happen to game design.

It's exploitative in the same way that gambling in general is exploitative, but isn't bound by the tight legal restrictions that prevent gambling companies from targeting children who might be most vulnerable to these exploitative tactics and more likely to fall into a vicious cycle of addiction early in life, which can have dramatic, literally life-changing consequences.

That said, I can't really deny either that at least part of this trend is self-inflicted on the part of the gaming community at large. Gamers have all but collectively rejected the subscription model where we pay for the games we play on a recurring basis. For games like MMOs that require ongoing funding to develop new content in order for the community around it to thrive, what other funding models outside of the freemium model do designers really have?

The DLC/expansion pack model also worked adequately for some time, and still does for games that involve mostly episodic experiences, but not so much for games that have living worlds and require ongoing development of new content and incur ongoing infrastructure costs. It also comes with similar problems as the model of paying for software upgrades, because developer incentives and users' needs can become misaligned. Oftentimes in this model, bug fixes and quality of life improvements get sidelined in favor of more content/features, and the community becomes fractured across expansion packs, undermining the natural network effects that these kinds of games inherently tend to create.

It's also really difficult to fault freemium games for using exploitative tactics that target players who do end up paying to pay more, when the distribution of people who actually pay for things in these games is often so wildly unevenly distributed that the top percentage of paying players often account for a disproportionate percentage of overall revenue, while the vast majority of overall player-base pay absolutely nothing, and those who do so often wear it as badge of pride, no less.

I've always wanted to build a game myself, but I could never figure out how to align my own need for ongoing revenue to support the development of a game that I might love and end up wanting to keep working on indefinitely, with that of a gaming community that has soundly rejected any funding model that makes it possible to achieve that without resorting to tactics I'd rather not stoop to.
These companies want it both ways - they hide behind their terms of service etc. saying consumers should actually read this stuff and be inforned, and then when they get busted for failing to disclose something it’s “oops, our bad, we didn’t think anyone cared”
> But that's people bullshitting themselves.

No it's not. What Google did here was illegal. There are also people who value their privacy and don't have an Amazon echo or other listening device.

You're trying to argue that SOME people don't value their privacy so NO ONE should ever have an expectation that a device they buy isn't secretly listening in on them illegally. I fundamentally disagree with that take.
Worth reading the entire article, it's a great, if depressing read. I seriously wonder Facebook is up to the challenge here - they made algorithmic changes to make the news feed a better place and it very obviously failed. And yet they haven't changed a thing in reaction. Was anyone even looking?

It all feels incredibly reactionary: make a change to answer your critics and then forget all about it until it becomes an issue again.
MotoGP: Tire Cooler or Aerodynamic Device
An Open Letter to Jack Dorsey (2016)
How's this advice good?
Long time ago, my facebook newsfeed was full of my friends' sharing, it's been very useful place for us to keep friends update. But now, it's a different place. It's a place for ads, for livestream, for real "social" stuffs, but most of them is useless to me for what i use facebook for.
The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed "win on the third attempt" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting. It reminds me of the way designers of the modern XCOM games have also fudged with probability to mitigate the anger of missing a 85% shot [0]:

> “The fact is, we’re trying to entertain players,” said Solomon. “So how do you deal with a player who’s missed an 85 percent shot? Emotionally, they’re probably strained. We don’t want the players missing multiple 85 percent shots, because then the game starts to feel punitive...That 85 percent isn’t actually 85 percent. Behind the scenes, we wanted to match the player’s psychological feeling about that number.” That 85 percent, according to Solomon, is often closer to 95 percent."

As much as I love the XCOM games, I really enjoyed the refreshing deterministic approach by Klei's Invisible, Inc. [1], another turn-based squad tactics game, in which all valid shots are guaranteed to hit. This places all of the onus on the player to correctly anticipate positioning -- so, basically like chess. There's still plenty of luck involved, with the levels and loot locations being randomly generated. But the "luck" feels more of a fun obstacle to overcome, rather than a cruel arbiter of fate.

On a tangent: the fact that the human mind finds randomness to be unappealing reminds me of another game design essay, "The Nebraska Problem", about the optimal way of generating visually-pleasing grass [2]

0: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/266891/Jake_Solomon_expl...

1: https://www.klei.com/games/invisible-inc

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7692332
In defence of Apple’s bug process
According to your newspaper analogy, message boards are more akin to public spaces (privately owned).

A government banning them because there can be some dissent speaches is equal to banning a pub because someone has said unpleasant things.

The best thing you can do as message board owners is flagging the specific message as being offensive. Unless it breaks specific rules/laws, where you must remove the content, of course.
[random remarks from the internet]

I've had similar frustrations.

It's not so much that tools like Ubuntu Core are only for large companies. But the use cases for which they are designed is complex. The level of complexity is better handled by a team than an individual. I think about it this way, suppose basic competency requires 300 hours of research and experiment. A team of six can readily get up to speed in a month: while you figure out how to manage updates, I can work on the maintenance contract, Bubba can be fiddling around getting devices to talk to each other, and Joan can be working on application logic. Each with just a few hours a week and we're done in a month. 300 hours for a hobbyist is an entirely different proposition. That might wind up being a year with a year's worth of opportunity costs...Ubuntu Core instead of Go-lang (and whatever else looks like the coolest thing this month (twelve months over)).

It took me a long time of feeling incompetent (I'm a hobbyist) to realize: when I think I'm not in the target market, I'm probably right. Kubernetes, Spring Boot, and Hadoop aren't for me. I don't have the scale of problem they solve. I have different scale problems and am better off investigating technologies that work at small scale. For what it's worth, If I was exploring IOT on RPi, I'd just run Raspberrian to get started because IOT business logic doesn't depend on the OS. I can always optimize the OS later if it matters. Over top of Rapsberrian I'd apply Erlang because it scales down to teams of one because it's a programming language not a OS configuration and Erlang was designed to do IOT (before it was called IOT) type activities. YMMV.
Is it your position that increasing the annual expenses on properties available for rent by 1-2% or so of market value will have absolutely zero effect on rents?

That seems to mismatch with fairly well-established economic doctrine, possibly to the extent of being Nobel Prize worthy if proven.
Prisoners in England to be taught code
>If the next generation of smart devices is advertised as "no hidden cameras and microphones! (we'll just spy on you with the visible cameras and microphones)", I don't think this would be a win.

Agreed but we have to consider that it's entirely plausible that we're in the minority in this line of thinking.
Not millions, BILLIONS. The gulf between the two is wide. If you could count 1 number every second you could count to a million in ~30 days. It would take you 30 years to count to a billion.
But the ADSB data was available right away, even while the plane was flying. It's available to everyone on sites like FlightRadar. Why does the FAA keep saying they had to wait to get it?
Some would argue that the fact that you have all of those alternative forms is part of the problem. Lisp is one of the (if not the) most individualistic programming languages around. Lisp makes it easy for a programmer to create their very own impenetrable, arcane, domain specific languages. This causes large organizations to avoid it like the plague.

Large teams don't want artists, they want replaceable parts.
Real World Experience with R1234yf: The New Refrigerant Is Finally Here
Figuring drawing is a great first step to loosen up, relax, and practice seeing and abstraction. There's probably a class nearby.

Photography, especially digital, is a great way to explore composition and narrative.

And a key bit of advice - take a class in oil painting first. Acrylic and water color seem simpler, but are less forgiving of mistakes. Dedicate a studio space / corner to practice painting.

Art is like exercise - pick what you enjoy doing and will keep doing over what someone else says to do.
Even then, you could do worse by actively avoiding the sorted state with a bad distribution.
> livestream

Watching very closely to see how they handle this.
The implications of a cashless society on privacy are terrifying
How exactly are corrupt parents representitave of 'the meritocracy'? This is total nonsense.
Couple of reasons why I think the fuzz is approp:

1. The fact that things are already bleak doesn't justify a more bleaker tomorrow. The fact that a large section of humanity is oblivious to privacy breaches doesn't mean the select few who do care about it should stop protesting against it, regardless of behaviour of the masses [0].

2. The law makers (governments) and the king makers (tech conglomerates) shouldn't be given a free-pass to do as they please at the expense of security, privacy, free-speech, and other ethos that make internet such a powerful medium. Policies needs to be continually renewed in response to emerging threats at pace [1] and so it is important to keep naming/shaming said entities to drive the dialogue.

--

[0] Bruce Schneier on Censorship, Surveillance, Propaganda, and User Control https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3NJ-Ow2Lvg

[1] Bruce Schneier, again, on Security of Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkJCI3_jbtg
You can judge your programs as good or bad despite being the programmer. God doesn't judge morality how we judge. I think God's judgement might be more akin to how a programmer might judge which program to enter in a competition, after generating billions of programs through some generative process.

We have free will to the extent that we can seperate internal and external forces, and to the degree that internal forces play the causal role in any given event. Of course, in reality, this is just an abstraction, and there's no true seperation between internal and external just as there's no real seperation between bodies of water, but the categories are useful, so we use them.
> If you have these different ideologies, it’s associated with different filters on the world, different intakes of information, and so when it comes to constructing reference knowledge on an encyclopedic web page that’s supposed to thoroughly characterize an area, you do a much better job because you have a lot more information that’s attended to by this ideologically diverse group.

It's worth noting that this doesn't just apply to groups. There is such a thing as an ideologically diverse individual. See for example the Ideological Turing Test [1]. If an individual can successfully apply the filters of diverse ideologies, they at least have the potential to swap out those filters and apply them to their scientific judgments.

Perhaps we should should systematically apply and score such tests to scientists and use the results as additional data with which to evaluate their work. True, ideologically homogeneous people could learn just enough about their opponents' views to score well on such a test. But even cynically pursued, learning to do that would train them to have those diverse lenses in their toolkit, making them easier to apply and consider.

[1] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm...
Sunspots Vanishing Faster Than Expected – Spaceweather.com
s/bad/unfashionable
What if the approach to the simpler cases is not applicable to the harder ones. Studying the simple may shape ones thoughts in a way that prevents seeing the way to harder problems. Maybe? Sometimes new things are discovered because someone didn't know any better and tried something they were not ready for. Innovation sometimes comes from the self taught.
There's an old saying for drivers (and it's usually trotted out when your favorite driver has had an off) that goes "In order to know where the limit is, one must occasionally cross it."

Usually drivers are going to test that limit in an area with less risk, for example a corner with lots of paved runoff. But small factors such as the ambient wind changing direction, or the sun coming out or going behind a cloud, can affect grip enough that the limit changes enough to catch a driver out. In these cases there's usually warning, that the car very slightly stops responding as exactly to your inputs as it was the lap before.

However the most common scenario for a single car shunt is when the driver is testing the track limits; for example riding 3 inches of his tire over the kerb instead of 2, or using up the edge of the track to where the tire is now on a painted line rather than bare asphalt. In these cases there is often no warning, the car just steps out.
Operators can certainly be nice. And I do like allowing the programmer to create new ones too, though I'd tend to prefer the Haskell approach of creating new ones out of existing symbols like >< or such rather than the C++ approach of letting the programmer redefine an existing operator for a new use, << in the streams library being one of the worst common examples.
The edits to most popular pages will be most scrutinized. Obama's and Trump's talk pages have the most revisions out of all Wikipedia articles [1] and are second and third most viewed [2], so they are the hardest articles to edit in a way that won't have hundreds of eyes on them right away. The Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 mil in revenue per year and having these two pages look non-neutral would be awful for their fundraising. I think it's just that extremely high interest => usually high quality and polarizing topics have lower quality than average. The consensus was never established on some quite popular controversial articles e.g. [3] and this is heavily criticized by one side of the argument [4].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Pag...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multiyear_ranking_of...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

[4]https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/9l30zj/how_...
> Many of the points he is specifically isolating for Apple are quite true of most of the big tech firms.

I am an apple fan myself, but this is not true. He isn’t “singling out” apple. Apple is the subject of this article.

Perhaps there should be other posts about other tech companies, perhaps there already are, it doesn’t matter.

The discussion is the ethical behaviour of companies, and This post is specifically about Apple.
Racket also has a Prolog-Style Logic Programming DSL named Racklog.
I thought the worst was the one where you had to install the version of the OS with volume you wanted.
The Facebook news feed is dead to anyone but trolls, at least in my anecdotal experience.

Facebook is only useful for its yellow pages function. Unfortunately that alone is enough to keep my social circle on Facebook. It’s just really hard to break away, because social circles consists of people with different social circles, and not everyone is going to replace Facebook with the samething, and then everyone is still on Facebook.

Maybe e-mail could be the core of the next generation yellow pages? It’s the only thing everyone has.
Sorry, is it

xz + yz = x(y + z)

when using operators?

That seems wrong.
My experience as well. Boot off a floppy, external disk drive because the one PC we had at the time was shared so I didn't want to mess with the boot or partitioning.

I got a lot done with that setup.
Even cheese knows blatant plagarism.
You can’t build influence and control with $5 million a year in lobbying. It’s just not very much money. There are a lot of public interest organizations and concerned individuals who could spend that kind of money (and do). They spend it on other issues instead because they know this tax filing issue won’t go anywhere.

You’re missing the point of the Grover Norquist example. Why is tax filing something Grover Norquist cares about? He’s rich—this doesn’t affect him directly. And he doesn’t make any money off tax preparation. He campaigns against tax filing simplification because it taps into a very large anti-tax movement that he’s part of. It is that movement that keeps tax filing complicated. Intuit and H&R Block don’t create that movement through lobbying; they lobby to tie their issue into the larger movement.

As to the amount of lobbying: private companies don’t spend much money on lobbying every year. Total US lobbying expenditures is $3.5 billion, out of a $20 trillion economy (and a $4 trillion federal budget). (And that’s not just companies, but includes public interest organizations.) If lobbying had direct, non-speculative impacts on legislation, companies would do a lot more of it. Look at the tax filing example. H&R Block makes more than $3 billion in revenue each year. If lobbying had direct results, they wouldn’t be able to protect that cash cow with less than $3 million a year in lobbying. A competitor would come in and outbid them for legislation. (Indeed, corporation versus corporation lobbying is probably the most typical kind. E.g. all the money Google spends on copyright lobbying is best seen as a proxy war with Hollywood over whether copyrights should be weak, which favors distributors like Google, or strong, which favors Hollywood.)

Of course lobbying is important enough that companies do it. But it’s not transactional like people make it out to be. Lobbying involves hiring professionals to make presentations to staffers about specific issues, tying them into general platforms that politicians already believe. Tax filing is a great example. Intuit and H&R Block aren’t going in and spending $5 million to convince people who love taxes to oppose automatic tax filing. They’re using that money to lobby legislators who already want Americans to be outraged each year in April 15. They connect their specific issue to the larger platform the politician already supports. “Simpler tax filing is the first step to Danish style 60% tax rates.” Then, they educate the legislator about relevant pending legislation. “Elizabeth Warren has introduced an automatic tax filing bill.” And they arm the legislator with arguments and white papers they need to oppose the lesilation. “Making deductions opt-in will result in a $45 billion effective tax increase on seniors, who will be to scared to challenge the ‘bill’ sent by the IRS.”
If the top sites were nytimes, new yorker and bbc you would be very happy right? ;)
That’s part of the reason that I’m an OpenBSD user, because there is a much smaller development team that has more of a cohesive vision. However, that doesn’t get in the way of user freedom. I’m just of the opinion that another desktop environment or window manager (or text editor, etc) that doesn’t take off isn’t an issue at all and it often pressures the incumbent to innovate and adopt new features.

Competition and a common vision don’t need to be mutually exclusive.
Uh, yes? I don't think it's an open question that product updates should detail the updates made. And since recording someone in any way without their knowledge is illegal in many contexts, that would go double for something like you describe.
vocabulary fail on my part, I thought siblings was a larger class
That’s why I no longer participate in Facebook other than their marketplace. I also turn off retweets on Twitter. I want to see what my friends have to say, not what they share. Shared content is either garbage, propaganda, or news which I get elsewhere.
Hey Mr. Zuckerberg,

Send me back my friends list, it's how facebook originated.
And if you continue down this road.

It's how someone else might take over.

It's just common sense.

With friendly regards,

A facebook reader ( not a user anymore, since i don't post anything on it)
I'd love to see companies that use an algorithm to create "feeds" also release a full explanation on how the algorithm works. I prefer a chronological feeds mostly because then I know I'm not being manipulated by an algorithm. Making in transparent would give me confidence in it.
What is the modern path to study this area now? I’m sure it’s better understood now and one wouldn’t have to follow the historical approach to study the same concepts.
Angry? It makes you angry but that doesn't mean it's angry. Just like hate speech that causes you to hate but isn't necessarily motivated by hatred.
It seems the author has not learned how to use OOP appropriately. His main argument can be summed up as “it’s hard to name things and hard to compose things” and that seems to apply to all programming.
Reiserfs wasn’t quite complete - if it got heavily fragmented, you had to backup, reformat, and copy your data back.

Unfortunately ... if you let it ride much above 80% disk usage for very long (or less time the fuller it got) it would fragment bad and the performance just fell off a cliff bad.
Why not? Those things also tell me what sort of person you are. If you took away that extra information and only told me which job applicants got accepted to Princeton and which didn't, then it would still be useful signal on its own.
Google admitted to congress they're constantly tracking people via their devices

>Hawley pointed out on Tuesday that a user's location is sent to Google hundreds of times a day, even when the phone is not in use. In fact, Hawley said, a user's location is tracked "every four minutes, or 14 times an hour, roughly 340 times during a 24-hour period," even when the phone is not in use.

>DeVries confessed that "location information is absolutely core to making a mobile phone work the way that you want it to work." He said that Google has an "optional service" called Location History that is opt-in and "can collect location over time when people turn that on."

>"But Google collects geolocation data even if Location History is turned off, correct?" Hawley pressed.

>"Yes, senator, it can in order to operate other services—"

This should be illegal and was admitted to congress -- justifying it with BS excuses -- but virtually no major media outlet is covering this.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-tracks-you-even-when-loc... (one of 3 articles I found about this)
Rocket Launch Seen from the International Space Station [video]