skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has played and stopped WoW for significant times over the past years. I think the article has some valid points about the addictiveness of WoW, on the other hand I feel that the choice between "real" work and WoW as presented here is a false dichotomy. "Real" work and WoW are not mutually exclusive.

The writer says he started playing he has spend his time working out. I started swimming for 40 minutes each day while playing WoW, a habit I continue now that I stopped.

He also states what if you spend the time you invest in WoW into achieving your goals. But you can't just work 24/7. I spend 8 hours a day doing research and hacking at the university, when I get home I just don't have the focus left in me to code or study. In the past I spend this time playing WoW, right now I spend this time reading fiction or hanging in front of the TV.

Now probably there are people who lose themselves entirely to the game and can't bring up the discipline to also work on their goals, but as everything in life, its really just about balancing yourself.

PS - I actually found myself being more productive during my WoW playing times then during my non-playing times. Reason? If I needed to do something I would not allow myself to log in until it was done. WoW was more addictive then procrastinating so I'd just knuckle down and do it. Now if I need to do something I find myself reading HN instead of just doing it...
> mobile social music local search review aggregators

Seriously?
Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy
- WebServices, to provide access for R, Python, and spatial calculations (WPS norm). Complex calculations without installing any client software, anywhere with an Internet connection.

- PostGIS raster capabilities (at last some raster storage and computing inside the database).

- Devon:Think / Bookends / Nisus Writer : Scientific papers and books intelligent storage, bibliography management and scientific writing.
Ruby on Rails 3: It's much more succinct than Rails 2.

Ruby 1.9.2: It was time to move up from 1.8.7.

MongoDB: I introduced this new technology to the company I work at which has now adopted it for two significant projects. One was the project I researched it for initially, which handles millions of writes per week, and the other is a rewrite of something we used to use MySQL for. It currently has a hundred million or so documents and is going strong. It's new and fun. My collection uses dynamic sharding; I think the other one does as well. One is hosted in our data center, the other is in the cloud. Both are in production and running with 100% uptime so far.
So you were basically saving $180 in exchange for a more polluted planet. Great exchange if I ever saw one.
Awfully pedantic, don't you think? This is a casual blog post, not an IEEE standard. Everyone that wasn't a computer program knew what he meant; "I start a process, the stack looks like it's about 10MB". And the size wasn't even the issue he was discussing, but rather what happens when you use all the space. Comment in passing; relax a little.

I agree that they are doing a bit of wheel-reinventing. I have used a couple existing coroutine libraries (libcoro from the Coro perl module, and libtask), and they both do a good job of conserving memory nicely. It's easy to write 10 lines of "threaded" Perl that can manage 30,000 slow HTTP connections with minimal overhead (a few k per fd).

I am not sure why they are writing their own library, but I do know that I have never used existing libraries for CPU-intensive purposes, only for IO-intensive purposes. I don't think they are doing a ton of socket IO, so perhaps that is where their need to reinvent comes from.
>I started swimming for 40 minutes each day while playing WoW

Waterproof laptop?
Well doing a hardware startup is hard and they've had a string of bad luck but at least, in this particular case, they are responsive about it and immediately started a recall instead of trying to hide the issues under the rug...
Surely you mean Voltaire?

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The Italy Vanice Canal Wallpapers And Pictures, Gallary
The muggy summer air cooks the canals and scrapes the paint and enamel from the city's finest pieces of art. This has - logically - spiked tourism in Venice. In Venice Italy, even the ambulances are waterborne. While Burano's fishermen were out on the lagoon, their wives would traditionally sit outside their coloured houses making lace. Visitors don't need to spend much time in Burano to see and photograph its main attraction: the colourful houses. The brightly-painted walls extend all through Burano, The standard of Burano's lace was very high, and the island became famous for its quality. The island's lace-making museum is one of Venice's civic museums and included in a joint ticket. There are many charming yards and squares where drying laundry adds to the general decorative gaiety of Burano.
Exactly why I don't play these, also why I don't try crack or heroin.
In principle, sure, but the point is that WoW is indeed especially addictive in a way that a bowling league isn't.
I always thought it was more from taking too high-level a view. Amazon is a site where you click a picture of a thing, and they send it to you for a fee. Facebook is a site where you can see a list of your friends and send them messages.

Simple!

Except that in real life, there are a few more details to work out.
I said "capitalism and free enterprise".

Not just capitalism alone.

Pretty much everything good came from free enterprise. The parts of society that engaged in free enterprise came up with the good stuff that would slowly spread free enterprise to the other parts of society.

Specifically:

Are labour rights really a thing? Were they created? "Labour rights" are a communication of certain realities, e.g., treat everyone nicely or we will poke your head with pitchforks.

National parks were not created either. They're an abstract political concept that simply communicates the wishes of a group and the consequences to those who contradict the wishes of a group.

The sexual revolution, another abstract thing, came directly from free enterprise because free enterprise produced the prosperity and technology that caused the changes. e.g. The Pill.

These above good concepts, which are all really just recognitions of the power of the masses, are tightly linked to the power of the masses. And the power of the masses comes from their productive interdependent free enterprise labour.
OH Come on! Life is not meaningless and maybe those people will NOT die anyway.
Maybe it's just because you didn't found out by now, what is important for you in live.
One example what changes life for ever is having kids. Seeing them grow, laugh and learn things is just amazing.

I dunno if this is cry for help, if yes I would like to help.

Edit: Why study to become a paramedic? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever wanted to work as paramedic. Cause it makes you feel better when you help people. Cause it makes you happy helping people. Cause it makes you happy to work with people.
Shipping to Apapa
Shipping to Apapa- One of The Well Organized And Cost Saving Mode of Shipping
For 2011.
I don't see the reason for downvoting parent.
Full quote is "Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values", and first part struck me as completely irrelevant to the second part, somewhat unworthy of this otherwise well-convened letter.

In addition to that I don't see it as an "elegant way of giving finger", how mentioning of historic figures conveys the "finger message"?
I hadn't even noticed that ambiguity. I blame fever headache + English as a secondary language. Anyway, that cheered me up despite the headache :)
Would you rather it be a bunch of cat pictures?
The smartphone wars: Fortune catches up with me
1024cores
Reminds me of this -- http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7873033/ (cartoon version of the theory of rational addiction) -- which you'll find especially funny if you hang out with economists much.
Traffic Squeezer - Open Source WAN Optimization
Facebook group, from the bug report

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=123692817683864
I also believe there is no other content of this quality available for free. Once you try to listen or watch, you can't compare something taped from hand cam where you understand every second word and the professionally produced material.

I'm just a happy customer, still I'd just like to point that their customers are also Bill Gates and John Carmack. Both blogged/tweeted about that.
eeeeehhh. As a very avid WoW player of some years now, I would say WoW is something that can easily be something that holds your "life progress" or whatever you want to call it back, but it can also just as easily be played at a successful level (define that however you like) without that effect as well.

In the guild I'm in now and a guild I was in in the past I see both: players who are quite literally on welfare or unemployment and just play WoW and other games all day (colloquially "living the dream", mostly tongue-in-cheek), while others have what I would consider successful lives. One of our best priests works as some sort of company programmer or server maintainer/admin. Our best healing druid entered his first bodybuilding contest sometime in September of this year and plans on doing another next August iirc. Our guild/raid leader has an office 9-5 selling toys to retailers or something like that. Lots are in college, myself included. An old guild officer of mine was a Googler. A decent amount have wives/kids/gfs/main squeezes. etc.

I think the best argument of the post is the social obligations point. There are definitely some people who do "no-life" for the guild and such, but again, I think this is a some do some don't thing (as well as being limited to basically people in guild leadership situations). For every guild leader or officer I know who hasn't left a dead-end guild because of a feeling of obligations to the guild, I probably know twice as many officers who did left anyways, and 3-4x as many raiders who did as well. Anecdotally speaking, I left a guild where I was probably next in line to be guild/raid lead for a much better one, and am now debating doing some sort of ESL teach/travel program next year despite having been an officer in my new guild for roughly 6 months now.
I play WoW for five years now. When I started, I used to be an occasional player. But when I hit level 60 (that was the highest level a few years ago) it was impossible to advance further without being in a regular raiding guild. So I started hardcoring: obligatory raids from 19:00 to 23:30, each evening, five evenings per week. Lower attendance was not tolerated. And gathering/grinding materials for potions/powerups afterwards, util 01:00 or so. This took place in a few months around the summer of 2006. The reward was worth it: access to all high-level content, epic items, and being member of the most succesful guild on the server. However, after a few months hardcoring like this, the game felt more and more like a boring job. One day I realized that with this playing style, I would quickly lose all interest in this game, which I didn't want, so I quit the guild (only hardcorers were allowed to stay in) and changed to a casual player, which I still am today.

I didn't want to quit altogether because there was so much more game content to check out (I enjoy the sights & sounds of WoW very much), and so many other classes to try. Up until then I played exclusively Holy Priest.

Blizzard must have somehow realized that players weren't able to get any further without hardcoring. The last years they have created more and more features for the casual player: the Dungeon Finder system, player-vs-player battlegrounds, cross-realm instances, other reward systems; all these have lessened the dependence on a guild.

I now sometimes fire up WoW, not everyday, and play a few hours. I still like it, after all these years (and 3 expansion packs).
Maybe this: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/12/kinect-hack-world-of-w... :)
I think it may be regional but some people take their bowling very seriously.
17 years old, 11 startups
Can you solve this TextEditing challenge in less than 5 keystrokes?
I think you're being way too harsh on the computer thing; I read "my computer" as "my box", i.e. "my specific configuration of hardware and software".

Secondly, when meaning to be precise when talking about memory usage, you need to specify what kind of memory: paged vs non-paged, reserved vs committed, shared vs non-shared (private), backed by a file vs backed by swap, in Windows-land whether the memory is part of the working set or not, etc. It's not clear to me what you mean by the memory usage of stacks, but when Daniel talks about it I know what he means: with memory as a bottleneck in the context of thread stacks, it's clear that the relevant metric is reserved space - i.e. virtual address space. This is what kills you quite early on in 32-bit processes in particular.
Address space exhaustion is a problem, sure, but it has nothing to do with the buffer cache. The kernel's address space is completely separate from any particular process' address space.

For various reasons we don't use the kernel's cache, we have our own cache implementation that's in the same address space as the rest of the process.
Maybe but not really.

Show me a slave who made something good. There are degrees of freedom, and the good stuff tends to come from those with a lot of it.
Have a good resource on "tabata style kettleball swings?"
This is not guaranteed to work. There is internal buffering and readabilty/writability is unrelated to the readability/writability of the underlying fd. You have to get ZMQ_EVENTS, check that readability/writability does not exist, and then make an IO watcher on the underlying fd.

IIRC, you can't do this in pre-2.1.0 ZMQ; hence, using your own event loop is experimental.

(I suppose it is also possible to see if you get EWOULDBLOCK during an IO operation, and then create the IO watcher, regular-socket-style.)
And you say this because you know people "addicted to WoW" but you don't know people "addicted to bowling"? Two million people playing in competitive bowling leagues each week across America. WoW has nowhere near two million competitive players. I don't have statistics for the number of casual bowlers but I'll bet you a lunch that more people spend $15/month bowling than playing WoW.

Do you think it is any different on the social obligation side for somebody to show up for a raid in WoW versus showing up for the league match? Is there a lower social obligation for the bowler to practice between matches than there is for a player in WoW to prep for that raid?

Competitive social MMOs are the recreational sports leagues of this generation.
Oh dear god.

You have my sincere and profound sympathies.
I am not sure why they are writing their own library

We aren't, our code is based on a slightly modified version of libcoroutine. We've just added a few bells and whistles here and there to do a little bit more than what the library offers out of the box.

I don't think they are doing a ton of socket IO, so perhaps that is where their need to reinvent comes from.

Our real-world load can easily change between between disk bound, network bound, and CPU bound, so we need to support both IO bound and CPU bound workloads really well.
But the license states otherwise:

"Content" includes but is not limited to the art, sound
effects, music, and anything covered by national and internation
copyright and trademark laws. "Content" SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDES all
source code found within the "flixel-ios" folder of this archive,
which is distributed under a different license. All other source code
is considered "Content".

https://github.com/ericjohnson/canabalt-ios/blob/master/GAME...
I haven't tried crack or heroin either but I wonder if they're more addictive than alcohol or tobacco or anything else that gives instant gratification. I tend to lean toward the addictive personality viewpoint.
For instance I know people who can open a bar of chocolate and eat just a square or two. If I open a bar it's all gone
What, the same social pressures don't apply in other team sports? Try to play any sport at a high level and miss a few trainings because you'd rather read a book at home. You'll get bad looks the first time, yelled at the second time and kicked out the third time.

(I'm not saying WoW is a sport, just to pre-empt a diversion in that direction).

What is morally superior about exercising an hour a day over playing WoW an hour a day, provided the lack of exercise doesn't make one dangerously obese or similar? Yet all rants like this one are based on that premise - 'I used to be such a loser, now I work out, I'm so much better than those WoW losers'. Usually from former players, too; just like former smokers are the most obnoxious about how awesome they are for quitting, the former WoW players seem to know something about self-righteousness, too.

Anyway, like anything, it's about moderation. If you play a couple of hours a week and don't let it take over your life, there's nothing wrong with it. I asked my girlfriend to set up the 'parental control' feature on my account, so I only got to play 4 hours a week. If anything, WoW at least lets you do that; I have yet to see the first skateboard or piano that has a lock like that, and there are many people who 'waste' (in the article's definition, not mine) much more than 4 hours a week on those.
It's pretty unusual for databases to delegate something as vital to performance as caching to the OS.
I'm not of the opinion that video games are inherently evil but to say the social experience you get from playing a video game is some how equivalent to that of meeting people face to face is simply wrong.

The key difference being body language. So much of successful human interaction comes from non verbal cues and if you're someone for whom that doesn't come naturally then socializing in WoW is not going to provide you the same benefit as in person interaction period.
Looked at the code a bit and tried to see what gives with the 1D example. Conclusions: 2D arrays were fast in Chrome, slow in Minefield, 1D arrays were fast in Minefield, Minefield had a tendency to occasionally get pummeled by the GC in the write test, data layout matters even in JS, you should use get(x,y) instead of get([x,y]), counting downwards in loops only helps in making the code buggier.

Passing the pos coords as x,y instead of [x,y] halved the get/set runtimes.

The difference between data layout performance was around 30%-100%. That is, accessing [x][y] by iterating over x in the inner loop is a good deal slower than iterating over y in the inner loop. And vice versa for [y][x].

Arrays and typed arrays had roughly equal performance in this. On Minefield, typed arrays were 10-20% faster than initialized arrays and initialized arrays were faster to access than uninitialized arrays. Zeroing out an array was a good deal slower than relying on the zero-initialized nature of typed arrays.

On Minefield, a 1D array was 5x faster than a 2D array. On Chrome, a 1D array was 40% slower than a 2D array. The Minefield 1D array version was 60% faster than the Chrome 2D array.

Accessing closure variables was slightly faster than property access.

Typed arrays are easy to use: new Array(wh) -> new Int8Array(wh). if (type Int8Array == 'undefined') Int8Array = Array; gets you backwards compatibility for simple uses.
PSGI/Plack: http://plackperl.org/

node.js for HTTP-related activities. (I needed a rate-limiting proxy that returned a special HTTP code when the rate limit was exceeded. 20 lines of node.js later...)

0MQ: the way network messaging should be. (Did you know that the same socket can be bound and connected multiple times? Amazingly flexible.)
And that comment is now ranked first on Google for Ogaki Dog Care :-)
Where to Find the Designer Custom Doors
If you're looking for a cool and easy way to change your house's style, think about getting a beautifully crafted Custom doors. It is very important to have right set of custom furniture and custom tables that have been specifically designed for whatever purpose you choose.
Sure, a database needs to cache. But it doesn't automatically need to cache at that level -- usually they can get away with caching data rather than pages.
Still your statement stand corrected. We learn a lot from our first job that is.
Passpad » Smarter, more secure.
There is a substantial difference between improving your physical life and your Avatar.

The illusion of success is there and almost tangible - if you didn't have to "wake up" to your neglected real body and nonexistent/handicapped real life.

And most people I know don't play WOW due to nihilism or at least not initially. They play it just for opposite reasons - it makes it easier for them to achieve something.

Disclaimer: I have played UO and got severely addicted by it. I also played WOW and EVE, I'm very competitive but in the end I figured that to reach the level of performance I wanted to - It would take me 8+ hours (rather 12+) of work a day. So I just quit the damn thing and focused on building my real person - no regrets. I saw WOW at a friend some months ago - and I instantly felt sick, the sounds, the animations... It just made me want to throw up.
Top iPad Apps 2010 | Tricks Window
I didn't realize that about using the "parental" control. Great example of a commitment device! And that's what I really mean about the difference between WoW and most other hobbies and social activities: WoW sucks you in in a way that makes you regret the amount of time you spend on it. I sometimes have the same problem with Hacker News, hence this: http://beeminder.com/d/hn
Wikipedia: An Ephemeral Surrogate for The Universal Knowledge
Interest rate is basically the price of money. In a developing economy like India, growing at 8-10% the demand for money is greater as a result, it's price is also greater.

If you make a term/fixed deposit in India for a year it attracts an interest rate of 8-9%. Education, Car and Home Loans for credit-worthy individuals from established banks range from 12-18%. Personal Loans, not backed by a security range from 20-24%. So a micro-finance institution lending at 24% p.a to 'non-professionals' in rural areas with no known credit history is not bad at all considering the risk that they take up and the cost of funds that they incur(as pointed out by someone else)
You discuss how WoW either hold back life progress or doesn't. Have you (or anyone you know) encountered a case where WoW has helped someone?
Realisticlly, if you don't do it then a competitor will and not only will he pollute the planet, but drive you out of business with his cheaper units.
Is it possible to combine the microfinance program with the assests , at least for some classes of assets ? maybe things that increase agricultural productivity , or decrease energy costs , i.e. things like drip irrigation tools or solar panels or efficient stoves ?

That way you have some partial collatera- so you might reduce the interest , and you can help people choose the best income generating assets , so you increase loan repayment chances.

Also you can share distribution costs between loans and assets.

Does this model make sense ?
This is a PR piece from the Teaching Company disguised as insightful marketing lessons. I suppose that is the master marketer lesson?
Jina Bolton: CSS Workflow | Fronteers 2010
Well, force is an underpinning of the individual. Without the ability to exert force (or to express opposition), an individual ceases to exist.