skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game

1. The endgame is too easy and boring.

2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots

3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically)

4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, and polypiling are too powerful

5. The game is nearly unbeatable without spoilers

6. Sokoban is boring after you've played through it a few times

7. There's a bunch of cheap tactics like pudding farming

8. It's too generic and boring to put together an ascension kit. There are very few trade-offs you need to make in choosing what armor and weapons to use

9. The religion aspect is too simplistic

10. Combat gets tedious in the endgame. Most of the time you're just plowing through monsters. This results in tons of "battle spam" with you getting several messages like "You hit the minotaur!" every turn, forcing you to not read them and possibly miss important information

11. The game requires several patches to be playable (menucolors, sortloot, hpmon, etc.)

12. The default options are pretty bad

13. Traveling and exploring can be boring

Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be. But I only write so much because I care :) I had a lot of fun beating nethack and and it's one of my favorite games of all time. I'm possibly prouder of beating nethack than of my MS degree :)
Nutbaggery. Use a HRTF and just swap the channels of a stereo sample if you want to get an 'inside your head' feeling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holophonics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
The line is in the intent of the design. A certain class of game is designed to immerse you in addictive feedback loops purely for the sake of keeping you in place and (usually) draining your wallet.

It's the difference between the architectural design of a casino and a museum. They're both very technically beautiful and nuanced in the subtle intent, but one is about trapping you by exploiting your animal brain whereas the other is about something else, like walking you through a narrative.

Alternately, distinguish between writing a computer virus and any other kind of excellent code.
I worked with Mark. I never saw any misconduct, but given what I have read I imagine there must have been some. It really saddens me. the sort of research he did is interesting and important. but if you can't get ahead without making up data at Harvard, then our society is in a pretty sad state overall.
Mixpanel: We now visualize numeric data better
what is with all the markup and css in code? this will never work for any project that requires designers. (ie. 95%+ of commercial projects)
How is IMAP unreliable for backups?

If you want to keep the tags, take a look at heliotrope[1], a personal email server with tag support that can sync Gmail accounts.

[1]: https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope
Alright, s/atheist/communist/

I was being lazy :P
When I joined, they automatically signed me up to follow them! (C'mon, why not sign me up for a trial at least). In addition, they added mobile tweets. THANKS, Follow Trial, I love getting spam on my phone!
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This American Life is an amazing program. And so is Planet Money! Planet Money people doing a piece for This American Life is amazing-squared.
Obviously the solution is to control everyone.
Currently plastered all over the Toronto transit system: ads for http://www.basicfunerals.ca/
Ah.. I didn't know that. Next time I give the game a try I'll have to look in to that.
>The sex thing is a big problem.

Seriously? Not everyone in the world is a sex addict. He's living his own life. He'll look for what he needs when he needs it.
What spacecraft will replace the Space Shuttle?
To be fair to Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures is not his only interest. He is an intellectual goad.

Read this epic thread about him sponsoring a trip to elBulli for FatGuy, founder of eGullet

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/138044-my-last-an...
Great Introduction! It is nice how this project makes the point that "JS is Assembly Language for the Web"[1][2]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2783060

[2] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/JavaScriptisAssemblyLanguagefo...
I've always felt the words "intellectual" and "property" should never be that close together for any reason. (With apologies to Jerry Seinfeld)
I do the same thing and I run a postfix server to reforward the mail to my gmail account after it hits my domain. I actually don't have any redundance or backup server-side and rely on the mail client to sync content to disk. While Google disabling my account may put me out for a short time, it will only be however long it takes to reconfigure postfix to actually store my mail (or forward somewhere else) instead of just forwarding.
this seems like a very good reason for Google to adopt application-specific passwords. Oh, wait...
ABC Zoo: Learn by playing with your iOS Device updated
Exactly like with Google Apps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_method

“Despite continued anecdotal reports of successful results, Bates’ techniques have not been shown to objectively improve eyesight, and his main physiological proposition – that the eyeball changes shape to maintain focus – has consistently been contradicted by observation. In 1952, optometry professor Elwin Marg wrote of Bates, ‘Most of his claims and almost all of his theories have been considered false by practically all visual scientists.’ Marg concluded that the Bates method owed its popularity largely to ‘flashes of clear vision’ experienced by many who followed it. Such occurrences have since been determined to most likely be a contact lens-like effect of moisture on the eye.”
"Attacking back" with shock images may be genuinely legally problematic, given the untested new Tennessee law on the subject. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/tenn-law-ban... . Using the included nimp payload is even more legally problematic since it actually does redirect the user to a site that contains malicious code.

I think this project, much like all "offensive security" projects, is fundamentally misguided. At best, this project loudly alerts the hacker every time an attack is detected, providing an easy way to black-box test the service's attack detection criteria. At worst, it provides an easy way for jerks to goatse, Last Measure, etc. third parties using the webmaster's site. While I understand the kind of spiteful thrill that would come from redirecting a (maybe not) attacker to a shocking image, quietly stopping and logging the attack is always the best option.
if it was possible, it'd have made the 'features' list without that disclaimer.
Yup. And everyone in your country is a solid potential customer.
yes, it can execute /usr/bin/firefox, but that doesn't do much good without eth0, iwi0, wlan0, en0, etc, etc.
Here is an equivalent extension in Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/moepiacmhnmbiilhpo...
He found a default password but didn't take it any further for fear of burning down his home???

At this point this is nothing but hypothetical. I want to see him turn that Apple into a baked Apple!
If I had a Billion Dollars
Last I heard, the cable uses some proprietary Apple chip that does some sort of authentication. I could be wrong.
Speaking from the perspective of a tech writer and someone interested in cameras, optics, and this sort of thing in general, I have to say the technology is absolutely amazing. But from the perspective of a photographer, I’m troubled. To start with, a large portion of the photography process has been removed — and not simply a technical part, but a creative part. There’s a reason focus is called focus and not something like “optical optimum” or “sharpness.” Focus is about making a decision as a photographer about what you’re taking a picture of. It’s clear that Ng is not of the same opinion. He describes focus as “a chore.” The Lytro solution simplifies photography the way hot dogs simplify meat. Without focus, it’s just the record of a bunch of photons. And saying it’s a revolution in photography is like saying dioramas are a revolution in sculpture.

The jury's still out on questions of whether digital is going to kill film or whether photography is going to kill painting, so I think you can safely ignore his doubts. His technical misgivings, which are so obvious as to seem trite. I do a lot of creative photography, but other times I just want a grab a good picture in a hurry and I'm happy to let the autofocus do the work. News photographers and videographers will find this a godsend because there are many situations where they need to shoot under difficult conditions with limited time, and maintaining perfect focus can be extremely difficult. If they get it wrong, the resulting images may be commercially worthless, and editors are then faced with a choice of an inferior substitute, an expensive reconstruction, or simply dropping that imagery from the print/tv/movie to the detriment of the story being told.

What this is guy is upset about is that he's spent years learning the tricks of proper focus and getting good at it, and now they're going to be available to anyone for a few hundred bucks, regardless of their photographic skills.
What's so hackish about this? Seems like pretty typical low-level programming.
This is what I used to do in my free time as a kid.
When I was younger, around 6th or 7th grade, I was addicted to Diablo and Starcraft. The funny thing was, I never even enjoyed playing the games, I always loved day dreaming about hacking them. I loved the idea of, what I thought was, outsmarting the programmers of the game and bending their game to my will. So, instead of caring about football or going to the mall or movies, I enjoyed staring at assembly language and debug output from Diablo and Starcraft all night long. I loved coding in C++ and ASM. These are things that I don't think I'd even attempt to devote time to now days, sadly. This code is a huge blast to the past for me and I figured I'd upload it to Github for you guys to check out ... if only for some good laughs. I was around the age of 14 and completely self taught at the time - the code is pretty rough. Here are links to some of my projects:

https://github.com/ryancole/soupbot

https://github.com/ryancole/battlenet-moderation-client

https://github.com/ryancole/broodwar-loader

https://github.com/ryancole/broodwar-lib

https://github.com/ryancole/broodwar-chat-enhancements

At least one of them became widely used and managed to work for several years after I quit maintaining it. I was pretty impressed. This project was the broodwar-loader. Do you guys happen to have any enjoyable code repos to browse that you wrote a long ago?
Ok, I do not want people to be crying at my funerals, but I am not sure I want them to be happily enjoying a bottle of cabernet at my expense. (referring to the picture on their homepage)
God says, "are_you_deaf do_you_want_another on_the_otherhand off_the_record
SupremerCourt Bam basket_case Mom glam imports how_about_a_comic
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qed merry_christmas look_buddy Jesus crazy "
Be a god among Internet users (bookmarklet)
My android games, hands down.
While I am sure that there are people that try to game the system- there should at least be a warning or some way for appeal. I am extremely upset that Google took MY domain schema.org without even any attribution at all to my project OpenDomain. I have been too afraid to say anything because I also might get 'removed'. PLEASE show me that Gooogle still supports open source and at least acknowledge my contribution
They don't.

Issue 7589: Android dev team ignores its own bugtracker http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=7589
This is all true. However.. how many years of gameplay did you have to put in to learn it?

Speaking for myself, I've been playing nethack since the 80's. How many other games can you name that will keep an audience interested for 20 or 30 years?

I'd count that as a fantastic success in game design.

Despite that, I do agree that the game has its weaknesses and could stand to be improved quite a bit. One of its greatest weaknesses is its glacial pace of development. The last release was in 2003.
I would assume that he called him a flake because Woz openly praises "the competition."
BlackBerry PlayBook First Tablet To Gain NIST Approval
Cool, what kind of games/how much did they bring in?
Android: The $49/Night hotel with the free continental breakfast and free wifi. (But there might be roaches in the rooms)

Ipad: The $349/Night hotel that charges you $25 if you open the little fridge and $45/hour for the wifi that never quite works. (But the elevators have chrome, move fast and are never out of order. No roaches.)

There's no reason in the world that a $350 room shouldn't come with free wifi and snacks when a $50 one does, but they never do. Watch out, that bottle of VOSS is $15...
I only have 1 side project, which is a utility for Windows laptops (a battery meter). It does about $1500 to $2k per month in sales. I've been thinking about expanding it to have a Enterprise (B2B) product.

I'm trying to get another idea I have into a startup, but I haven't been able to get that off the ground.
I came in here to suggest the new wistia site, glad to see it was already mentioned!
I made a very simple iOS gym log app for my own needs and decided to sell it in the App Store. I think I've generated almost $5k in revenue. So, not a 'business', but it certainly paid for my developer account! :)
"He'll never be smarter than he thinks he is right now."
Please read the whole interview. If not, we'll agree to disagree.

"My whole life was basically trying to optimize things. You don't just save parts, but every time you save parts you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time it takes to understand something. And how good you can build it without errors and bugs and flaws.

Livingston: You were designing all of these different types of computers during high school at home, for fun?

Wozniak: Yes, because I could never build one. Not only that, but I would design one and design it over and over and over—each one of the computers—because new chips would come out. I would take the new chips and redesign some computer I'd done before because I'd come up with a clever idea about how I could save 2 more chips. "I'll do it in 42 chips instead of 44 chips."
I am not in the mood to defend Java, but I would like to give a tip to people who keep mentioning J2EE: J2EE is from a bygone era; learn to say Java EE 6, which is better (although JPA 2 is really the only part I like) and take J2EE out of your vocabularies. Discussing J2EE kind-of makes it sound like your knowledge is out of date.

Also, Scala and Clojure are wonderful languages so I don't understand some of the negative comments about them.
Cool, do you have a home page?
Attacker from Oslo, Anders Behring, a WoW Player
Coach Bags
Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik's only Tweet
Coach Outlet
It's entirely possible, but the big three cues to me where his extreme social awkwardness, the rocking, and finally, his dedication to technical interests. The final one alone wouldn't make me think Asperger's. Even the first and the third wouldn't make me confident, but unconscious rocking is a symptom of autism in general.

I'm a big proponent of the idea that genius is more about raw effort over extended periods of time rather than innate intelligence. But perhaps some people are wired for that kind of dedication moreso than others.
A Day Without Native Apps: My Chromebook Experiment
Well I read a quote on HN that went something like "if you want people to see something, show them one thing."

You mixed up too many issues. If your intention really was to just focus on the evals, why mention their impact on your salary at all, especially in the conclusion?

That was poor judgement on your part. As a reader, it is natural to conclude from your post that you are most upset about the salary loss resulting from the evals(and thus you've learned a lesson to do better on evals so its negative impact on your salary won't repeat).
This is all basically a "stupid tax". We Americans are too stupid to engineer a reasonable patent system, and the price we pay is cramped innovation and increased costs. The Myhrvold guy is a parasite, and so are the source of his $5 billion capital and the ridiculous state of patent law that enables his behavior. The patents being cranked out by the PTO look like they were written by a group of 5 year olds with a Markov text generator.

Also this was a great piece of journalism.
I made a few JavaScript scripts that I'm selling on CodeCanyon and the last month I made around $200. I'm thinking of expanding the business, but this time in ThemeForest building WordPress Themes.
The notion of hacker-points is just so tiresome and not the kind of discussion that I want to have. We don't need to constantly one-up people, even if we're comparing this person to that person.

Put another way: it's possible to praise his behavior without pissing on someone else.
> The purpose of a corporation by definition is to maximize
> the bottom line for the shareholder.

No, the purpose is whatever the corporate charter says. It's just that most of those are pretty vague, and for a publicly held corporation it's been held that within the bounds of the charter there is a duty to maximize shareholder value (whatever that means). For privately held corporations, of course, the private holders just call the shots.

But back to charters... you may be interested in the fact that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation exist and distinctly do NOT maximize shareholder value. Also, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#Mutual_benefit_corp.... And in recent years there has been a movement to create charters that look just like your typical public corporation charter but impose certain restrictions on what the corporation is or is not allowed to do in the process of making money. Several states issue such charters at this point. Again, the corporation is responsible to shareholders but within the bounds of the charter. Which shareholders should read before investing, of course; that's basic due diligence.
We use a company that has their accountants in India. They access our quickbooks file via a cloud server. It costs about 3K/month for a full time accountant (that is 40 hours a week).

Keep in mind that most accountants are actually tax guys. They can put things into categories and track the numbers but cant actually make any recommendations about how to structure your finances, your corporate structure, how to reduce taxes, exactly how you should accrue your revenue/expenses and what kinds of metrics you should use to monitor your business. It is helpful to get a CFO level person to set everything up and then you can get a lower level person to just crunch the numbers into the right places.

At the end of the year you will have a tax accountant do your taxes. Even within the tax guys there are tax guys that will simply calculate your taxes and ones that will help you to optimize your taxes.
Even assuming the OP pulled some stunt with AdWords (and this is just an assumption that you're putting forth, without any evidence whatsoever), does it justify wiping out that guy's entire online existence? His photos? His emails? His documents?

This is like sentencing someone to death for shoplifting. GMail, Picasa, etc. are not about AdWords; they're a means for people to connect with each other. Unless, of course, Google is agreeing that you are indeed a product and not a user.
400电话
I made an iOS application for reading comics in literally 6 hours. I released it back in May and it's currently earning me ~$1000 a month via ads. Impressions are still increasing by ~25K each day, so profits are likely to increase in the coming months.
"mp3 available Sunday 7pm"

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...
I've had money both forcefully collected and incarcerated by paypal. Seems reasonable to me.
Norway police: 'Eighty killed' in island shooting
It's been an emotional roller coaster, and things just got even worse. I don't have words that can describe my feelings right now.

-- A Norwegian Guy
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Google+ experience from a Normal user
public broadcasting has been consistently excellent from the beginning. to me it feels more in tune with the hacker mentality than any other source of media, so i'm glad to see it on HN.
Why do you imagine that the WSJ writer or Gruber feel that they have a firm grasp on the matters? They are just speculating, nobody is calling it here. As much fun as it is to deride these articles, you seem to be missing the point.
So terrifying! With that photo of him!

One more bit of evidence for the centrality of Twitter in current events. Obviously it's become a key way for anyone, hackers, politicians, criminals, to speak directly to the public.
> if you've rooted your
phone yourself, any OS security is null and void

Are you sure? If I am not mistaken, even with a rooted phone, a program has to ask the user for root permission via the Superuser.apk app.
Gumroad - http://gumroad.com/ - right now I'm trying to turn it from a million dollar business (current valuation) to a billion dollar one. :)
Well said. That was my reaction to the post too.
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Android 3.x supports full disk encryption.
What kind of comics?
Freakonomics had another entertaining podcast related to Nathan, namely his work on "molecular gastronomy" and comparing to traditional cooking. http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/01/27/freakonomics-radio-wa...
Where do you sell such apps?
Lean Startups 101 for Developers
Dice reports top five emerging tech skills
-1? The first place girl was from the Fort Worth area and I was showing pride... I don't get downvotes.
If your intention really was to just focus on the evals, why mention their impact on your salary at all, especially in the conclusion?

Maybe his intentions were not to "just focus on the evals". Maybe he wanted to, oh, I don't know:

1) show that cheating is a lot more widespread than we think

2) describe several reasons why simply pursuing and punishing cheaters is a bad strategy

3) use that to point out that we need a better solution (such as designing better evals, perhaps, but it's not the only option)

I mean, he know best what his intentions were, but that's my interpretation of his posts, both of them, taken together.

But I agree with you, it was evidently poor judgment on his part to "mix up too many issues", since most of his readers can't be bothered to try to separate them ;)
Unless it is a dumb protocol, you should be fine. Session IDs FTW.
Don't Let Congress Order Internet Companies to Spy on You
These guys are nothing less than pirates. If they were so true about helping the patent owners, they would simply have an agreement with them to be the middle man and take a percentage of the revenue generated. But no, they actually buy the patent (and I am sure for pennies on the dollar) and license it to more companies for top dollars or sue them out of existence.
http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com and http://www.contemporaryartvenues.com earn about $2,000 per month, and indirectly generate lots of web design business.
How to Build a Quality Blog Network Powered by Guest Posts
Mea culpa. I just wanted to close the loop and identify a point that people would relate to. (I was not sure that people would relate to the fact that the student evaluations dropped. Apparently most people do not even know that student evaluations are used to determine salary increases.)

In retrospect? One of my biggest mistakes to even mention it.
Kuté Fall/Winter 2011-12, Russia
10 Incredible Examples of The Minimalist effect