skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone in the AAA games industry, let me address the following quote:

"It only takes a little extra work to make your PC games play on the PC, and make gamers happy"

Sadly, that's naive. Like any other software company, there are diminishing returns for features / revenue. When the product is slated for release on Xbox, PS3, and PC it is typically done with one codebase with platform specific code where necessary. You often end up with a common denominator where the PC people usually feel left out in the cold.I can attest that it takes a monumental amount of work to support the myriad graphics card configurations for the sole purpose of getting your game to look/feel ROUGHLY the same on all three platforms. To customize the game for one platform would be at the expense of the other two (from a development, production, and QA perspective) and it often doesn't make sense to those paying the bills.

Sometimes the PC gets a dedicated port (such as Mass Effect for the PC), and those things that make PC gamers smile get added. However, this port is essentially a new project (SKU in retail games parlance) that is greenlit only if the console versions of the game have sold well enough to warrant it, and is typically done by a third party under extreme time pressure.

All these factors contribute to less polish, which everyone involved is keenly aware of. Hopefully I've illustrated that this is a complex problem that can hardly be addressed by a "it doesn't take that much more effort to do a good job" platitude.
I thought it was the fear of an "exothermic CDS chain reaction" that created the real prospect of a global financial meltdown - the CDOs were merely the fuse.
thankyou. I don't think I responded with too much class actually, and after I'd starting posting publicly about this, I felt like a douchebag myself. It could have easily backfired, so I think you're right. Assume good faith first, be very polite all the time, get your facts together, and then make your case.
Leaders set the direction and the tone of the organization. In a previous career, I was in the Navy. When our Commanding Officer (CO) changed, it was clear that leaders can dramatically affect their teams. We went from an A- CO to a C- CO who ran our submarine around, but who was then replaced by an A+ CO. Seeing all of that happen across 6 months convinced me that leaders are very important.
What would really happen is that a second trader would enter the market, offer to buy the laptop for 110$, hold onto it and then sell it on for 140$. Actual prices vary and with enough competition, will settle to something that gives the trader still a nice profit and enough cash to insure against the risk of such an operation (the trader doesn't know up-front when he can actually onload the goods and how far the price might move meanwhile).

Of course, if you're not desperate on selling right now and or the risk for the trader is too high (i.e. the minimum price you'll sell right now is higher than what the trader is willing to offer you right now), nothing happens.

Concluding, traders do add utility to a market. And as others have already said, with high freq trading it mostly results in massively reduces spreads (and the temporal utility as outlined in the laptop example essentially disappears).
A proud Textmate user.
That's a bit 'tarded. Why not just use google by default? You confuse me. If you don't like DDG don't use it, write a post about it, the end. This shows nothing. Wish I could downvote.
Ask HN: What do you use for developer documentation?
I'm working on a Rails project that is starting to get pretty large in scope, and would like to start producing some clear documentation for the newer developers who are joining the project. What are some of the tools that people use on their projects or companies that help you maintain clear and up to date documentation?
I'm quite acquainted with the general tenor of HN, thank you. I just don't have much nice words left for people who continue to spout lies, logical fallacies and also insult people to defend their failing business models. Your insults are merely prettily worded (in other words, ad hominem).

I could do that too, I just prefer to speak plain text instead of hiding behind verbosity, calling it 'treating people like people' to appear superior in a discussion.

Also, you haven't even adressed any of my arguments. The only thing I got from you now is even more appeal to emotion ('look what a nice guy I am!') and a change of subject.

Oh, and by the way: I'm usually a nice guy too. Horribly fallacious claims from people defending copyright constitute my beserk button though.
Wireless data from an LED lightbulb
Ask HN: Perceived vs actual computer slowdown, over time
The question of "perceived slowdown" came up at work when debating the costs of upgrading some desktops vs wiping/re-installing.

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the delight of a new, snappy computer. However, 3 years down the road, the computer inevitably "feels" slow.

I'm not looking for advice on removing malware, cleaning up filesystems, optimizing disk fragmentation or any of the other commonly talked about remedies. What I want to know is whether the phenomenon of the slow-computer-that-used-to-be-fast is a real thing or not. Is it our expectations that are changing over time, or is something else happening?

My Google-Fu reveals nothing relevant here, so I turn to HN. Does anyone know if studies have been performed that compare actual PC performance vs perceived performance and how this changes over time?
Political activists and major news orgs are among the earlier adopters for most platforms. There are plenty of sports people and celebrities too, and all their watchers. But you could say the same about Second Life a few years ago. Twitter's certainly gone well beyond that, but I still think it's much more of a patchwork of many niches than "the social fabric" that Google Plus and Facebook are heading towards.
As you point out, the issue is that the UPO doesn't enforce that as rigidly as it should (or maybe, is reasonable to expect). As tjr pointed out in a separate thread, 'This American Life' did a great piece on software patents specifically, definitely worth a look if some of you are interested in learning more. Certainly gave me better perspective.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/tal-when-patents-attack
Can someone who has done some graphic design do a write up and comparison of this and the Adobe Edge preview? I'd be interested to see how they compare, especially in terms of the ease of creating stuff and the quality of the output - speed, browser support, size.
SEEKING WORK (Providence, RI, USA or anywhere via TCP/IP)

Slightly out-of-date resume at http://quadium.net/work/resume.pdf

Contact me at vsync@qt.quadium.net and it'll pop right up in my "clients" mail group.

(I normally live in Orlando but I'm in Providence for the summer)
Wimm Labs Launches Wearable Wrist Computers
I think maybe the article has been updated, or else I'm just blind. Cause I sure didn't see that when I first read the thing. Thanks for pointing it out.
As a sufferer of sleep paralysis, I would think it almost impossible that sleep paralysis itself could persist through dying painfully, since pain or other external stimuli (or passage of time, usually less than a minute) will generally kick you out of it.

That doesn't preclude the existence of some other paralysis mechanism, but I am not aware of any, so I think it's just wild speculation.
Well that's a huge bonus! Wish you shipped to the US. I'd buy some tea from you!
That sounds exactly like an idea I had for a video rental service. I was thinking of having a virtual DVD drive connected to remote DVD's and renting things out for 48 hour time periods. Granted, I assumed you would be sued but I am currious why they lost. After looking into it you would either be making copy's of the content or have DMCA issues but this seems to come down to public preforamance issues.

Edit: On second thought http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/16/that_zediva_thing... suggests that http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6496522323472709... is probably a limitation.
It seems that everything is one year old or older, so there is a hope that they don't continue this behavior.
In line with how you were able to understand the Monty Hall problem, one key to understanding this issue is realizing that:

infinity + 1 = infinity

I think the hurdle here is: "0.0001 is between 0.999 and 1, so for every additional 9 you put after that decimal point, I can put another 01 thus making a number between 0.999... and 1." This turns into a race to a non-existent finish line.
It's still more likely that he'll read it if you comment there, no? Or e-mail him (WHOIS has an e-mail that looks real).
Exactly that happened when I looked for a hotel in Laos.

The hotel in question was overall reviewed quite favorably. There where a few complaints, notably that two of the bungalows where very loud, or about the restaurant. Essentially quite small fry.

For each of those complaints the management took the time to address the specific issues, acknowledging specific problems and indicating how they intend to fix them.

This convinced me to book and I didn't regret it at all.

There is a big difference between boilerplate bullshit of the "your call is very important to us" variety and taking complaints seriously, responding to them on an individual basis and really trying to make it right.

That's often quite visible from how a company handles complaints.

BTW: The noisy bungalows where no more when I stayed there.
Looks great Dan.

I would have expected you to pick different key bindings though. for example ,y instead of ,c for copy or ,/ instead of ,s for search. Is that because you already have those binding for something else or do you just find them more intuitive?
Command Line Feedback from RVM and Git
Unlikely. At least, if it is true that the site was hacked, it's unlikely that this is the official announcement. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33646.msg420489#msg4...
He knew it was a bad deal, and that it didn't seem to work with their business model, but he did it any way (as pressured by other people in the company, which he admits). There's absolutely no surprises for them in this post, just regret. Sure, they didn't "realize" that it would garner so many free downloads, but that was always a chance, and in any case could have been quickly determined before agreeing by contacting other developers of featured apps.

The one piece of legitimate news here is that app of the day developers aren't being compensated at all, but that comes no where near justifying "rotten to the core", especially as they're all well aware of the terms when they agree to them.

He seems overly concerned with people who download the app just because they think it will trigger some micropayment to the developer, but that can't be a large number of people (developers paying attention to the launch terms of the market) and in any case are very unlikely to make up much of his support burden.
"Nefario
Global Moderator
Hero Member
*****

Re: Important Announcement Regarding the Mybitcoin.com Downtime
Today at 09:44:33 am
#55

OP is not owner of mybitcoin.com thread frozen."

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33646.msg420613#msg4...
So it drops the half-baked built-in http lib from libevent in process of switching to libev. That's cool with me. What was the motivation for the switch?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=0f35e6daf7c9d42b...

made my day. :-)
I don't think the proper way to thank This American Life is to pester them about a data format that less than 1% of their audience can use. Idealism needs to be tempered with practicality and radicals like RMS make all patent reformists lose credibility.
The data shows that the startup community of Cambridge MA is growing fast!
Either they have been straight-up lying about it, or Arrington and EJ have been.
I have done discounted promotions in the past, but we did revenue sharing and it turned out great. 100k free downloads is painful. I wonder if there is a way to tell amazon to limit the free copies to the first 5k people who download, then go into discount mode.
Silly question, but aren't the patents on MP3 almost due to expire?

Will the FSF no longer be against the MP3 format once all the patents expire?
But did your supervisor ever ship a product that did it?
It's not a Trojan if you have to install it, specially as one has to enable side-loading to install it. FUD.
I don't know of studies, but my anecdotal experience suggests that computers do actually become less responsive with use, and that reinstalling the OS restores them to their original performance.

What I am almost certain happens is that computers accumulate cruft (registry entries, competing installed software, forgotten preferences) that slows down what seems to be normal operations for the computer. This is far worse with people who don't know anything about computers. I just saved my in-laws from buying a new computer because they thought the old one was wearing out. Turns out they had installed two anti-virus suites, which is enough to bring just about any machine to its knees.

If you had a machine you locked down and never installed anything on it, there's no reason why it would slow down gradually over time. Computers just don't work that way.
Swede held for building nuclear reactor in his kitchen
The thread seems to end with the conclusion that the poster is not the real owner of Mybitcoin.com, and that the whole thing is a prank/hoax.
It doesn't always work, though. Sometimes it will still create a new post, even with an identical URL.
posted on wrong thread.
Upgrade to 0.5.x is on the roadmap, along with some other housekeeping. That should replace our custom backbone-history completely, just need a way to trigger an event on pushState that other components can handle.
This can't be surprising to anyone. Trying to use technicalities to skirt the law rarely works out with any meaningful success.
I haven't used rails in quite some time and have been publishing with Yii lately instead. It feels very similar. I feel like the right thing to do would be to dynamically mixin behaviors based on whether you are in the console or not. Though I guess that changes behavior between tests and production which could defeat the purpose of the tests.

Right now the big ones are that our console needs to deal with permissions and there is no user logged in via the console. Simply skipping permissions modules when in the console has been one solution.
Developer: News Corp... ;)
We use that for example for formatting a timestamp into an "5 hours ago" format.
At face value, Yegge's comment lacks substance and the opinion is not well-supported, that's about the only valid criticism. Speculate about the author's motives at your own risk.

I think people downvote rather than comment to avoid uninteresting nit-picky arguments like this. I would love a way to attach an anonymous private message to a downvote but that's probably a non-trivial feature to implement.
Read the forum thread. Brian DiVita essentially admits that he never actually tasted the tea.
Funding 2.0? Polish startup sells 1% stake on auction site
"MyGuidie is a platform designed to connect travellers with local guides in the places they visit. The company takes 15% commission (minimum $4) on fees paid to the guides. It only launched two months ago and is at the very start of its journey."

Sounds like a nice way to collect very seed capital among individuals and move forward with the work.
Zediva's argument that the service isn't really transmitting copyrighted movies over the Internet but is more akin to one person lending a physical DVD to another--just using the Web to accomplish that task--was rejected by Walter.

"The Zediva service transmits performances of Plaintiffs' copyrighted works 'directly under the language of the statute,' Walter wrote.

Sounds like Slingbox and music lockers.
Techstars has been doing this for a while: http://www.techstars.org/thefounders/

It just wasn't on TV.

The idea originally came from Hollywood, but they produced it all by themselves: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/06/the-techstars-story-...
I use `cls` in my ruby code, as I do in other langs; I think `klass` is unsightly.
var x = document.getElementsByTagName('p'); for(var i=0;i<x.length;i++){x[i].style.lineHeight = '140%';}

There, much better to read.
How long would I last in a zombie apocalypse.
No, a Trojan is something you are tricked into installing that opens the door of your computer to the attacker, much as the Greeks used the Trojan Horse to trick the Trojans.
D3: Elegantly Empowering Charting and Visualization
The key thing I noticed in the relative study is also that they said people experienced literal amnesia about the additional time required to choose a shortcut.

I'd be interested not only in a better study of the effect of expertise as well as looking at the effect of this "amnesia" on productivity. Even if it takes me longer to do a task in Emacs, that amnesia suggests that the interface is less distracting, which might be far more valuable than speed.
I think you're misunderstanding Sun Tzu's "a battle should not be fought unless it's already won". He's not saying you shouldn't go into battle if you're not certain of the outcome - he's saying you should secure the victory before you engage the enemy directly. It's a subtle difference, but an important one.
These guys are doing something similar and are demonstrating more dynamic lighting and destruction tech: http://www.atomontage.com
Turning the Internet Off
How does this compare to something like Alfred, where you hit something like option-spacebar, type "itunes uprising" and hit enter to start playing it?
Spotify Becomes Spotispy with Secret Tracking Cookie
I wouldn't even call a single instance of a bad job a yellow flag. Lot's of people have accidentally taken a crap job at one point or other in their life. I'd say it's actually a credit to the poster that he realized so quickly that his prospects there are limited and doesn't want to waste his time there.
I don't know why I wrote this field off as boring several years ago. This is absolutely fascinating (from a technical perspective, I mean)
Yes but I could write this as

1 * 10^(-inf)
That's awsome times four, people.
"MyGuidie is a platform designed to connect travellers with local guides in the places they visit. The company takes 15% commission (minimum $4) on fees paid to the guides. It only launched two months ago and is at the very start of its journey."

The idea of selling 1% of their shares looks like a nice way to collect the very seed capital among individuals and move forward with the work. Neat!

clickable: http://myguidie.com/
All the time. I think about this stuff for every new feature that needs implemented server-side. Our system is very read-heavy(posts need to be circulated into different feeds for users), and all the mysql joins were starting to slow things down. We ended up using redis sets to store post_ids for specific feeds, it speeded things up considerably.
Agreed. What I'm looking for is a study that quantifies some of what's going on here. How much actual performance is lost over time, how quickly does it happen, and how are both of those factors perceived?

The case of your in-laws sounds pretty typical, we've all heard it. Purchasing a new computer seems like a rather dramatic solution, but in their minds, fairly justified.

I guess another question in my mind is the opportunity costs involved. Is the time spent restoring a computer to it's original state worth it when compared to simply purchasing a new machine? Of course, this varies with the ability to quickly re-install, so I'm considering this question mostly on the small end of the scale (home users, small businesses, where economies of scale haven't kicked in).
25 jQuery image galleries and slideshow plugins
For some sites, image galleries are an absolute must. Portfolios are the first to come to mind, but galleries are also useful for blogs, e-commerce sites, and really any site that regularly displays multiple images on a single page.Below are 25 fantastic jQuery gallery and slideshow plugins.
Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of as I slice and dice in vim. But short of recording an editing session for an hour, making note of the things I actually edit, and then trying it with both keyboard/mouse and vim a few times each, I'm not sure how to empirically determine which is faster for me.

Also, a lot of people compare it to "moving your hand allll the wayyy over to the mouse and back", but I do a lot of coding on my laptop, actually, with my trackpad just inches away from the home row.

I could potentially even learn to use the trackpad with my thumb without even leaving the homerow. I wonder if anyone uses it that way?
Not much of a trick if you had to allow alternative markets and still get presented with its permissions before installing it.
very nice article
Ask HN: How to start/host a blog
I would like to start up a blog/personal page but was wondering if i should buy a wordpress theme and host there or host my own? I just bought my own domain name and there seems to be plenty of free cloud hosting instances out there like heroku
Thanks.
Yes, but did anyone try and revive him?
Watch World Golf Championships live ESPN|Bridgestone Invitational Akron,Ohio
I've actually been using the PHP... perspective?... for Eclipse and have found it to be pretty decent. (The author is right, some of the terminology is amusingly abstract.) Configuring the program just-so and learning to accept the slow boot-up are spot-on assessments.

That said, I should take some time to look for another IDE that captures the basic advantages of Eclipse. I'm mainly interested in having a panel with the project's directory structure, intelligent navigation (e.g. Ctrl-click on a function call to be taken to its definition in another class), and decent code completion and syntax checking. I might even be willing to pay for it.
IPad 3 to launch at current price points as iPad 2 is discounted, discontinued
I felt like I made every mistake in the book with launching my first start-up.
I think a lot of us out there want to be entrepreneurs. It's getting easier and less costly with technology, but the challenges of launching your company to great success are still there. I worked 6 months with my team in launching our first start up. It wasn't a complete failure, but it wasn't a huge success. In retrospect, we felt like we made every start-up mistake in the book. Although bittersweet, the lessons learned are priceless.
Preparation is also a good way to waste your time procrastinating when you really need to be bold and charge into battle as an entrepreneur.

"Well, gee. If I stay at my day job another 6 months, think of all the extra runway my startup will have!"

"We can't release now! Feature X isn't even ready yet!"

I would say preparedness and entrepreneurship aren't automatically great advice.

When it comes to actual war (and other direct competitions, such as a negotiation), though, the advice is spot on. Preparation is how the US got Bin Laden from an (arguably) foreign nation without a single casualty, even after losing a helicopter in the process.
Absolutely agree. The comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek anyways. Also, not having to switch applications is a great time saver of course. By the way, there are also great apps like Bowtie or Coversutra that add global shortcuts to control iTunes