skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is brilliant. I think people here can rail against addictions to WoW while lurking/posting on HN for hours a day. It's all part of the same addiction for points/prestige/social validation.

"Posting all these years to get higher karma, reading the source articles, reading the comments, for what? To help another person who thinks they have an innovative startup idea? They're all just going to get bought by Google anyway. Life is meaningless!
Makes sense, good decision then.
Given how long this went on, I'd be willing to bet that an advertiser noticed the abnormally high referrals + abnormally high bounce rate, and complained to Google. The whole "Google's impersonal algorithm did this to me" stance is entirely a guess, because they explicitly don't disclose what was detected nor how it was detected.

Heck, I'd bet an algorithm would've caught it (or at least flagged it, caused a review, and had it confirmed) a loooong time ago. Which would've cut off his income while it was smaller. A smooth-functioning, impersonal algorithm may have been preferable in this case.
Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) nicely sums up why we founders do what we do
The first online MultiCompiler in Spanish
I think people are primarily motivated by social status (after basic needs are taken care of). The deal with WoW is that it becomes your social status to the people you spend most of your time with, the other people in WoW.
Even now I think all these games are fairly formulaic with the same basic mechanics and psychological devices (compulsion loops, etc).

Basically, MMOGs are all like resort casinos. There's some spectacle and entertainment. The driving mechanic is the addictive variable schedule of reward.

I'd like to make a game where true exploration is the base mechanic. There would be no storyline, just exploration. All content would be either procedurally generated, created by the users, or evolved through genetic algorithms.
My games are consistent sellers, both as free-with-ads or for 99c, whereas my utility apps that actually do something useful (such as True Shuffle http://bratton.com/trueshuffle/ which plays through all your songs with no repeats ever) get very few sales.

So yeah, I'm focusing on making games... Everybody wants to be entertained while waiting for the bus, but very few people go out of their way to search for a utility aside from a very few like Camera+/Hipstamatic/Instagram, which all being photography-related are somewhat entertainment as well.
agreed, we've made it darker on this latest updated here: http://thenextweb.com/voice/2010/12/31/the-next-web-has-a-br...
Reminds me of this:

http://xkcd.com/189/
Ask HN: Rescuing a book collection?
In early 2001 there was a major piece of digitization work scanning and putting online the Hockliffe Collection (a collection of about 1000 early childrens books from 1685-1900), sometime in the mid-2000s they seemed to have lost their funding. Their website is now broken, the staff no-longer work there and the physical book collection has been merged with a bigger library. I don't know if the bigger library has a copy of the scanned works.

I wasn't involved in the project, but at the time I scraped their website for some literature analysis I was working on, so I've got a complete copy of all their scanned books.

What should I do with them ? - I'd be hesitant to post them online myself without direct permission from someone (although I'm guessing the books are all out of copyright), but I don't want this valuable collection just to be lost either.

Would someone like the Internet Archive accept them knowing that I didn't have any specific ownership of them ?
it's also important to remember that that top 1% use far more government services than the rest of us.
Wow, your sstatement read like the past six months for me. Good luck.
Tamil shanthi movie actress archana hot seduction video clip PART 1
3D Search Engine for Videos -- Beta testing. How could it be COOLER?
maybe a time machine embedded?
Such a "game" has been tried - Secondlife. And it's boring boring boring. Best give up these game things and find some real world hobby/job with a variable reward system. :-)
> Always seemed to be to be a bad practice from a security point of view

This is why I can't understand people's recommendation to use Google's or Microsoft's CDN. Even if you assume they're not going to be malicious, you have to trust that they're secure. Not to mention that the CDN owner can derive accurate traffic stats from the number of requests for the JavaScript.
-leading a guild in wow actually helped prepare me to manage people in real life.
The Tao of Backup: http://www.taobackup.com/
pretty sweet. Add a pasta maker to it, and you're on to something.
Teaching vs. Doing - My 2010 Postmortem
Most (all) of the actual books should be out of copyright at this point and thus public domain. This means, from a copyright perspective, there is no longer any ownership of the books and you can do anything you want.

However, since the scanning was done recently, the scans may be copyrighted by the Hockliffe Collection. The website certainly would be. It may be prudent to speak to a copyright attorney about it. I think it would also be the polite thing to do contact someone from the original foundation if possible to discuss this.
What didn't work for the critique? I'm the author, and. As someone who does a lot of global business travel I simply haven't found a huge need for only translating signs. It might be a good first step but the immediate next step is to try to communicate about the content of the sign which is where a real-time translator would be really handy. The question I tried to ask (and might have put badly) is, what is the need this is serving?
"Network Diary": Your year in WIFI hotspots
Try growing one for a minimum of six months. It takes dedication and courage. At the very least, it's a great social experiment. You'll encounter prejudice, admiration, and endless hours of fun like the guy in the link!
Really good point. I'd intended the video to show the other half of the solution, but as you point out you still wouldn't have had any idea what the other person replied, leaving you with another version of the translation problem.
My facial hair is somewhat denser now at 26 than it was when I was 24. No idea how common this is, though.
There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer.

I propose this: a space game where you are encouraged to write bots. Place the space game in an ungodly huge procedurally generated universe. The base economic activity is based on mining.

Give users a custom scripting language and API to write their own bots. The number of bots and the amount of CPU time they can have is constrained by tokens in the game. (As in StarCraft.) Players can write scripts and license running copies for in-game money.

What will result? Macro-miners. Then pirates who raid the macro-miners. Then fleets of Macro-miner protection drones supervised by highly motivated Chinese professional gamers.

Voila! Emergent user-generated content!

For the coup -- base the procedural generation on interesting mathematics. Perhaps some macro-miner outfit can be motivated to find a pattern in prime numbers or pi!
Why would I be less sure that they're secure than my own personal hosting?
MIT's Poverty Action Lab did a study of micro finance, and found it much overhyped: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/...

My personal impression is that microfinance have gone through the same hype curve of many developing world projects: it started as a local initiative by people who knew their environment and did nicely. Then organizations from developing nations picked up on it, knowing little about the place, ridiculously overhyped it and messed it up.

What we're doing in Africa and Asia now is a continuation of the imperial age. In the past, we needed stuff, so went in and took it, regardless of the impact on locals. Now we have our stuff, and having climbed Maslow's pyramid we're looking for self-actualization - so we go to Africa and do projects that make us feel good, again regardless of the actual impact in the field (health projects not included). We should start listening to Esther Duflo and Bill Easterly, rather than Bono and Angelina Joli.
Do you think that Paris Hilton is happy? Do you think that the OP's guild leader is happy?

Man is a creature of creation, to be happy Man has to improve upon himself and the world, to create by definition one needs to have some values. Else we just become decadent and decadence does not breed happiness.
Firstly, congratulations. You're a very impressive person. I hope to see many great things from you in the future.

I second that, you should definitely apply for the Thiel Fellowship. At first i was skeptical of it, but now i understand. The entire program is structured for individuals such as yourself.

Ok, I know this is completely inappropriate, and i'm sorry about that, but i have to ask. Having founded 18 companies, sold more than a few of them, been featured in alot of very popular publications like techcrunch, mashable etc. Most startup founders won't achieve anywhere near what you have.

So my question is, are you rich yet? Rich being defined as a millionaire? (By that i don't mean valuation, i mean physical finances).
I agree, but I think you feel that way because AS3 really implements the ECMA standard, with classes and all.

What about it do you like besides having classes?
Wired 15.04: Mixed Feelings (2007)
How are you preventing hotlinking while still allowing the files to function normally on jquery.com? Inspecting the referrer or checking to see if other resources were previously downloaded?
Great! That was quick.
That's true, but batteries are for storing energy. Separating water into Hydrogen & Oxygen is for producing energy. You'd need to have a battery on board to do it and you might as well use it to run the electric motor since it'd be more efficient.
I am trying to find an answer here.
I was shot by a .22 from some kind of semi auto pistol.
It was night on a porch with 1 60watt light on.
I rushed to the door after hearing my daughter screaming opened the screen to see a boy on the porch turn toward me with a semi hand gun in his right hand.
He was 1-2 feet away.as I saw the gun coming around to shoot me.
I knew I had to get the gun and reached for it with intense urgency.
I saw a flash and felt something hit my upper chest HARD.and heard a 'pop'
I remember thinking I failed horribly and was going to die.
The next thing I remember I was chasing him down the street hitting him with the butt of the gun until all I was hitting him with was the barrel.
...much happened..
As I was calling 911 very distressed I told them I had been shot -- but looking down I could see no blood and no hole in my white cotton shirt..
The police recovered a .22 slug a couple feet inside the door to the left (door opens to the right) ..and no I have never owned a .22 and the slug in no way belonged on the floor.

I later found what looked like a lead colored smudge mark above a button hole on my white shirt and my chest was bright red behind that spot.

How the heck did that .22 not enter my chest?
I had a thick cotton work shirt on with a tee shirt on beneath it -- But that is not enough to block a .22 in my experience.

?Anyone?

This happened 4 days ago so my recollection is fairly fresh.
How to Write Research Proposals for Approval
The research proposal is an important part of the research paper. Without the approval gained from the proposal, students will be unable to write the research paper. Therefore, it is vital that students learn how to write research proposals that get approved.
The problem is not many people would play that game. Of those that do, not many would play for very long.

These games are formulaic because the formula works. I've thought of numerous things I would like to see done differently, but really the way they are done now are what get people to play them for so long. I've played some really great games, but I've never played any of them for nearly as long as I've played WoW.
Related John Sculley interview on Jobs from October. It's a lengthy read but incredibly insightful for fans of Apple and great minds in general:

http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full...
Did all the financial institutions in the States get together to come up with the most ridiculous sounding names?
No reason you would be. But you can be sure that your personal hosting is more secure than (your personal hosting ∪ Google). In the latter case if either breaks you're screwed.
I wasn't trolling.

The netherlands has increased its area by an extraordinary 25% by reclaiming land from the sea.

Despite this the netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries on earth.

It has further increased its population by allowing immigration on a large scale, which whatever else its consequences is not going to reduce population density.

Now if you look at a nightime satellite view of Europe, the Netherlands is an uninterrupted patch of light.

I'd rather live in a country where I have the possibility of escaping from my fellow man every once in a while.
That's not possible in Holland so I'd rather not live there.

I can, however, see why cycling is popular/necessary there
"Later that year I got laid as in the aftermath of e telc bubble bursting the previous year (it was 2002 by now)."

Not all bad news, then. Was she pretty? :p
This is what kills me about advertising--I literally can't believe it works. Yet, heres an article about a guy using an ad company to show ads to generate revenue, and in the comments here at HN, a viewpoint from some one using an ad company to have their company advertised. In both cases they actually state that: a) there is actually a conversion rate between ads on a site and purchases for a product, and b) imply that the conversion rate is substantial enough to facilitate ad companies and the whole ad process.

This flabbergasts me, because I have never ever once clicked on an advertisement [on purpose] with the intention of finding out more or purchasing an advertised product (nor the purpose to "support" a site). I literally liken it to falling for Nigerian scams. That's not to say I've never been influenced by advertising--but in general I do tend to buy store brands [cheaper] over name brands. I certainly have never been so influenced to feel the immediate actionable need to buy a product after having seen an ad.

But this isn't a rant about how I hate ads, actually I'm hoping one of you amazing HN people can explain, with logic, why and how ads work? Whats the mentality of people (sheep?) that see and ad after watching a truck video and think, gee I really must visit this car wax website and buy some car wax now. There gotta be some kind of psychology or game theory that explains the successfulness of the [online] ad industry.
How to Build Links in 2011
FlipFilter V2 Preview - Find Aged Domains and High Value Sites
Wow. That script is all kinds of awesome. Javascript is unconventional and unpredictable as it is, without intentionally hosing the entire runtime environment like this.
An interview with David Barret, Co-founder at Expensify
I'm not disputing either. I'm just pointing out that the dynamic language communities are neglecting a really valuable resource.
Nothing personal, but you are highly confused about the real world. You will not be employee #10 at Apple and they will not value contributions as wanting to make a difference.

It's nice to think they will, but I so long as I have direct line to someone who thinks it's "different," I feel the need to tell you it's not.
While the electrolysis car is the realm of snake-oil salesmen, there is some legitimate research going on in the field and a few that are promising, all that are promising use a third consumable catalysts like aluminum to aid it breaking the bond with lower energy input. The reality is that cars are already a net loss for energy you just have to get the net loss of water energy to be equal to or less than that of petrol. There is also energy that goes into creating these catalysts so it's not like they give you a free pass it is just a alternative way to bank energy to be used for motion. As I said there is real research going on in this field, they are far and few between but given that the researcher is out of MIT and it is Tate investing, I would assume that this is one of the more legitimate efforts.
Myspace May Soon Lay Off Large Portion of Staff
I lol'd @

'PI': 3.2
If Crockford used it in production though, the alert() would be removed there, right? So someone could still in theory hotlink that.
You can get one of those:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztFDqcu8oJ4
That's nonsense. Each of those people had tons of smaller projects before they hit it big - they didn't just immediately know what was great and started working at it.
You can do this research yourself. Or else, you don't really care.
I haven't seen this videos yet, but peepcode has two good screencast about using vim. I am a emacs/viper user and I learned a some nice tricks with the peepcode videos.

I am recording a serie of screencasts about how to use emacs/viper/org-mode/elisp/configuration-emacs, but I am doing it in Spanish. My accent and grammar is not good enough to do it in English.
Pleasure Systems in the Brain - Motivation & Reward
The speaker admits his English isn't perfect; probably an error as much of the site seems geared toward lock-free _atomic_ operations.
haXe + FlashDevelop. http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Feature... Lightning fast compilation and IDE plus a language that can target multiple platforms = major time savings for a bootstrapped startup.
Also, while it will probably always be easy to accomplish inside-man attacks, it will also be generally harder to get away with them than you might think. (Especially if real money is involved!)
The “Almost” Billionaire’s Blueprint for an Abundant Life
How the heck do you accomplish so much in such a short period of time. This dude is an animal.
> People don't join a club so they can experience body language.

I think they do actually. Otherwise, why would people go through the trouble of meeting physically when they could do it on the Internet? It's not like people who meet in real life don't know about the Internet (I'm thinking of tech conferences, HN meetups, etc.) The physical experience is simply better.
Show HN: I wrote a script to turn a webpage into bitmap HTML. (Caution: huge)
The speed of the translation, the directness of the interface, that you don't need to fumble about typing with your thumbs THAT is the future... But the extremely limited application of translation technology which meets an edge-case need isn't the future. It's a good first step toward solving translation problems. Criticism is a valuable part of a product's lifecycle. Glowing praise is fun to get, but it doesn't help you move forward and improve.
WakeMate Warns Users Of Major Safety Issue
Doesn't sound good, is there any Chinese competitor to Skype?
It should be trivial for them to scan their access logs for referrers, and then send a mailshot out to each domains webmaster address.

To me, that seems like the polite thing to do.
Better yet, add a bit of structure so that SecondLife resembles a popular MMOG genre. If done correctly, a small company can rake in the profits while the users busily create all the content.
"I'm going to mull this over and see what I can come up with."

This idea is kind of like having a math game: the majority of the population will not bother with it. The reason WOW is so popular is because it allows you to get away from your real life.
Use this list from Wikipedia, and order by population density:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...

The Netherlands is at the 28th spot, behind countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and Macao. Then compare the densities of e.g. Singapore (7,023 per km^2) and The Netherlands (401 per km^2).

Stating the facts makes it all seem far less dramatic, doesn't it?
Just for the record, here are the CDN versions:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js (always the latest version)

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4.min.js

http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js
Apparently it's an executable.

http://www.fittingbox.com/web/en/20-live-technology.php
Intel Lifts the Hood on its "Single-Chip Cloud Computer"
> get laid without legal worries

Not entirely true. Now he's gotta be careful not to become a statutory rapist.
Reddit runs Cassandra with just a few nodes. Cassandra scales up well, but doesn't scale down as well:

http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/c2spc/reddits...
It seems to be stated as a fact in this discussion that you can't play a game such as WoW and do anything other productive on the side, but it's a lot more nuanced.

Anecdotally, I've been playing WoW almost non stop since it launched and have been raiding once to three times a week. During this time I also got married, had a kid, founded Shopify, overtook the CEO role, grew it to be a multi million dollar business. In this community that seems far from being a failure.

I'm engaging in anecdotal junk science here but my theory is that the people who really loose themselves in games like WoW are people with very poor time management skills. I'm convinced those people have always been around before. However, previously almost all activities came with some inherent caps on the time you can productively spend on those. All sports wear you out and force you to stop after some time. TV repeats pretty quickly and there is no original content during the night. Reading works but that's a socially fully acceptable timesink.

WoW is just extremely good game that fulfills a lot Maslow's needs, especially the top ones. There is a great asymmetry in the lure of this game and the established defenses of some people.

I think one of the key parts of parenting for our generation will be to equipt our children with the time management skills and the willpower to handle and enjoy games like WoW properly.
I used CSS3 border radius over the sliced image and it didn't blend well i guess! Thanks for letting me know.
Great comment - besides spending time with my girlfriend, nothing makes me happier than bizdev and planning (even if it's for another company rather than my own)
Actually, people have been talking about the "hydrogen economy" for a long time, and whenever it's about electrolysis of water, it's about hydrogen as a way to transport and store energy.

You put electrolysis near a "stranded" source of energy (a hydro dam in BFE where costs/losses to run electrical lines to users is high), produce hydrogen, then ship it out. One of the more interesting (kooky or technologically interesting, your choice) is "Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion" (OTEC), where differentials in water temperature at different depths are exploited to generate electricity, which then is used to make hydrogen, which is then exported from a platform in the open ocean to users elsewhere.

I think there are a lot better ways to get hydrogen than electrolysis (right now, steam or kvaerner processes, and eventually, a biological or biocatalyzed process), and I'd prefer current liquid fuels to hydrogen, but it's not utter kookiness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy

I find it inspiring if someone in a position of power in the economy like Tata is actually talking about things like that, although cynically I guess it's probably just feel-good posturing.

I'd like a world in 2050+ with 50-100x more energy production, and all of that from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, etc., with a mix of electrical consumption and synthetic fuels for transportation.
There is also a good sitcom skit. See "how I met your mother". Man, I don't know what episode. I think the one where he breaks up with robin, grows a breakup beard and says, "You're suited up, I'm bearded down..." see all the styles they got out of just one shaving session! :)