skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep, so that's the meat of the issue. Gamification then is a rebranding more than it is an innovation either technically or conceptually. I don't want to quibble over the definition of the word "game" but i strongly believe that the word "game" implies and is tied strongly to the notion of fun/play/things done in one's free time. [1]

I guess i'd say that's too bad, but businesses are going to do what businesses are gonna do.

I'm happy you've found a niche, and are running a business off it. I hope you're encouraging your customers to behave in humane ways (given my aforementioned criticism of competition in the workplace).

--------------------------------------------

[1] For example, there are linguistic tropes that people rely upon like "it's just a game!" or "this isn't a game!" which indicate the contrast that games have with topics of import/seriousness.
Lewis also wrote a SciFi trilogy to explore these ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy
The year's biggest surprise at the Supreme Court: Elena Kagan's prose
Discussion from 3 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850191
Qt also "uses native widgets". It doesn't matter, it's still wrong. Yes, the buttons have the right pixels, but nothing behaves exactly right.

I think it's actually worse feeling than a toolkit like GTK+, which is more of a Linux toolkit that "happens to work" on Mac OS. Qt apps feel like they're trying to sneak something past me (except on KDE, of course), and there's a very uncanny valley-esque effect. A GTK+ application is more "upfront" about it, so at least I understand what to expect immediately.

Cyberduck, a file transfer application, is written in Java, but I had no idea because it uses actual bindings to Cocoa. If you want to provide the best user experience in a Java application, that's the way to go, write swappable front ends for each operating system with the native toolkit bindings.
That would be consistent with what he's discussing. If he believes "gamification" to be bullshit, the term isn't something that can be mapped to a true/false claim. It's undefinable bullshit.
Do mean by comfortable and overpaid institutional devs who are deathly afraid of losing their cushy position and thus measure the quality of any programming language by library availability for their bloated corporate standards checklist?

I'm not sure because I don't really talk to those folks.

As far as bleeding edge web development is concerned, Ruby has been a serious tool for the past 7 years, not sure where you've been.
Slashdot's moderation system got this almost right. Instead of up and down votes, you have to choose from categories:

- offtopic
- flamebait
- troll
- redundant
- insightful
- interesting
- informative

and unfortunately two final categories which are misused as up/downvotes ("underrated" and "overrated").

Although people can use some of those as proxies for up/downvote, they don't tend to, and you can see that they don't in meta-moderation.
BlackBerry blog site hacked by TriCk – TeaMp0isoN against London riots
We've figured out how to move some iron in a 2D plane, using magnetic fields normal to the plane.

...

Cancer therapy (3D, in vivo, ...)!

WTF.
RCom launches Android 3G tablet in India for Rs.12,999 (288 USD)
It will be tough to detect duplicates from Facebook, where they recompress and strip metadata.
"Confuses" is one way to read it. "Shines a spotlight on the intersection of" would be a somewhat friendlier way to read it. Is a fact that can't be known, even in theory, even a sensibly a "fact"? I deny your implicit claim that that isn't an interesting question because the answer is transparently obvious.

Epistemology becomes much richer when fed with mathematical proofs of statements like this, and some older snap answers at least have to be reconsidered.
one would expect that such language would have fixed js objects, e.g. arrays not allowing wild things like

a = []; a[10] = undefined; a["x"] = "foo"
The point of the system is to enable someone who doesn't have your knowledge to do the initial screening with a high degree of accuracy. The weighting of the criteria is usually what prevents someone from getting tossed for the wrong reasons.

- The college degree example is solved by weighting, as I mentioned. I agree with you - we've hired plenty of people in the past who didn't have a degree. That's why it would be considered secondary criteria - if you do it right they won't get heavily penalized for not having a degree if that's not important to you.

- LinkedIn, portfolios, etc. - the point is again what's important to you. For example, not giving me a portfolio is a deal breaker. I have hundreds of resumes to look through, and if I can't easily see your work I don't have time to hunt for it. It says at a minimum you didn't take the time follow instructions in the posting.

- The third example is your strongest argument. It can also be solved by weighting though, by giving more difficult technical skills more weighting. I know plenty of people who look for folks that know Java because it's relatively easy for those folks to pick up Ruby.

You're right - a few diamonds might slip through the cracks. But in most cases I think you'd miss them anyway.
My impression is that people with CS degrees have done at least half of them through coursework.
The Daily Show did a great piece on this last night.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-8-2011/the-fore...
ILoop Mobile: How to truly engage with your customers through mobile
As already referenced elsewhere in this thread, C.S. Lewis hypothesized

3) Extraterrestrials did not necessarily experience The Fall, and therefor have no need of a savior.
I don't know what the GP was specifically referring to, but one of those things is not like the other. If the GP was talking about lo-fi or procedural assets, then Starcraft doesn't fit in there, as it required a significant investment in asset creation. If the GP was talking about the kind of slow growth and relying on a sort of "long tail" of fans, Starcraft also doesn't make sense since it was a big budget game following several other hits from an established studio.

If you just mean that your game won't be a hit, that's a risk no matter what you invest in it, whether it's long nights in your free time or a 100 developers and artists and several years.

But I think Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are examples of breaking out of the mold of big AAA titles laden with creative assets and a heavy script, which are closer to interactive movies than DF and Minecraft.
Axl Rose,Lyrics
Axl Rose,Lyrics
Reinventing Axl Rose Lyrics Reinventing Axl Rose Lyrics We want a band that plays loud and hard every night That doesn't care how many people are counted at the door That would travel one
Ask HN: any interest in a Rails based HN clone?
I wrote one recently during some downtime. I can clean up the code and put it on github if there's any interest ...?
Another nice quantitative measure may the number of questions you answered and got accepted in SO in your selected area of expertise.
Interesting story which I would potentially upvote. But I flagged it because it's not related to "hacking" or startups, which only pushes more relevant news out of the list. HN is already being overloaded with submissions -- I'd love if we would find a way to focus more on hacker/startup/tech stories again.
I agree with you that the author had some really crazy preferences in his example. Penalizing a front end webdev who aren't on LinkedIn as harshly as you penalize those who don't know HTML is absolutely bonkers!

In his defense, I think it was just meant to be an arbitrary example. You could avoid this problem by dramatically lowering the point values assigned to college degrees and LinkedIn profiles and upping the credit assigned to having Javascript skills.

The real problem is that there's no distinction made between someone such as myself who knows a bit of Javascript and someone who is an expert in it. Some criteria are binary, others are not.
As far as I know Dijkstra's algorithm is the fastest path finding algorithm in general directed graphs without cycles of negative length. But you have to employ fibonacci heaps (or so) to get the best run-time.

If you have some heuristics to guide your path finding, e.g. if you are trying to find paths on a map, then you can do better than Dijkstra's algorithm. See A*.
Art and Synthetic Biology Exhibition (May the horse live in me)
yes. Do you think it is because of adblock?
An article on the same: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/08/que-le...
For the ones wondering, quote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129387/quotes?qt=qt0410938
Anonymous will attack Facebook on November 5, 2011
Samba 3.6.0 Released
I'm not really sure why being defensive would undermine someone's point.

When you begin your point with something other than your point, you undermine your argument. This is true even when you say something popular. If you begin a point with “As everybody agrees, ...” You have wasted the three most precious opening words on something other than whatever it is everybody agrees is the case.

don't hate the player, hate the game.

I am not hating the player, if I didn’t care what people had to say I wouldn’t be suggesting ways to say it more effectively. I also don’t hate the game, in fact I am giving you strategies for playing it well.

Speaking of which, here is another: Be careful with clichés like this. Their real value is as a social signal, a way of telling people “I’m hip, you’re hip, we are the same kind of person, vote for me.” They don’t actually make your point very well. In most cases, they have become so overused that people register their tone and move along without giving them much thought.

If what you want is to establish that tone and encourage people to respond favourably to you and your words because of your style and tone, carry on. However, if what you want is to persuade people of your point, I suggest arguing your point more directly and eschew rhetorical tricks.

I don’t know how you perceive things, but my impression is that discussion on site slike reddit are dominated by rhetorical tricks, memes, puns, and other instances where social signalling dominates discussion. Hacker News is not immune to this, but it is certainly more understated and at least attempts to prefer reasoned discussion to ad hominems and other emotional devices.

JM2C, YMMV ;-)
Grind up on apps which solve business problems in underserved markets. The gold drops are better, the mobs easier to kill, and you'll get ganked less than in the hostile PVP zone of Stuff For Poor Twenty-something Men. Your support inbox may end up looking like Barrens chat; this is normal.

A note with regards to specs: you may be tempted to dump all your points into the Programming tree. Don't. It gets nerfed every few years anyhow, and respec costs will be murderous. Instead, spread some points into Soft Skills and Domain Expertise. Get the ult in Domain Expertise and you'll melt your competitors' faces regardless of their programming ability on virtually any raid except Next Google. (P.S. Expected rewards per hour on that raid are terrible, since everyone wipes. If you're good enough to do it you could AFK your way through any number of raids, pick one of them instead.)

Many developers get deeply into debates over who has the best class. "My class is better than your class" doesn't kill mobs, no matter how many times you repeat it.

Improving one's grinding skill can improve gold per hour marginally, but understanding the economic meta-game has a much, much better ROI.
For those who don't get the reference: it's from Gladiator (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172495/quotes?qt=qt0404384).
A foolproof business opportunity,try it for FREE...
'Looting is predominantly a western-world problem'??? Citation?

"Egyptian Museum Looted: Egypt Looters Rip Heads Off 2 Mummies At Famed Cairo Museum": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/29/egyptian-museum-loo...
We've been down for 3 days now.
Study that deemed Android 'least open' put out by competitor
Travel Expenses: a possible solution
Increase Conversions with Call-to-Action Buttons
It is binary, mainly because it has to be. You couldn't reliably job out a screening like this if it required the person to understand the nuances of JS, or any other skill requiring domain expertise.

But as long as you weight it properly, any candidate that makes the short list has javascript as competency. Their level of expertise can be teased out as you go. This is meant to be a first step to go from 300 down to 20, not to take you all the way there.

There are other ways to make it more nuanced - identifying keywords that would make it more likely to identify a JS expert in a resume or cover letter (not a replacement for looking at someone's code, but again something a non programmer could do). Or looking at someone's github account and seeing if they have JS repos (maybe factoring in the # of people following those repos). The formula would need some tweaking, but those are objective measurements that could get you closer.
Apple Will Start Selling Real TVs This Fall: Rumor
Haha I love it :)
Talking and sharing things with friends wasn't new before "social". Gamification is about better feedback for the end user in real time.

Yes, people have been doing it for a long time but they've been using low-tech means. I've seen a lot of "leaderboards" on white boards, Word docs, and emails. They get updated every few days. The data exists to make these measurements much more complex and yet present the results in a simplified, easy to consume fashion. Gamification is taking these existing practices and moving them into the modern age.

Managers get a lot of this data already, it's just often not exposed to the end user, and it might be confusing if done so in the same manner. Gamification allows us to present meaningful metrics to the end user to help them understand how they are meeting expectations. People may resent that information but not displaying it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Instead of getting feedback in an annual review now they can get it anytime they want.
Please Google, make a Desktop OS
I just read the article about just saying what you have to say (http://raganwald.posterous.com/youre-probably-going-to-downvote-this-but). And here's what I have to say. Linux is awesome, and it's too sad that there's no good Desktop OS around it (and don't count Gnome, KDE, nor XFCE as desktop environment, they are not, they are a go-buy-a-mac-if-you-love-the-cmd-line-and-want-to-keep-your-hair desktop environments. You'll ask, Why Google ? Well, it can be IBM, or Intel, or anyone with cash willing to rock the Linux on the desktop. Because really, without that, no developer will make the first step, and when a hero does, the project dies within a tiny period of time. So please Google, make this happen, and give back to the community. I'm sure lot of beautiful programs will be made with love on a GLOS - Google Linux OS.
Extraterrestrials did not necessarily experience The Fall

I'm not aware of Lewis's argument, but I did think about this. It seems to me that we'd be able to determine this by simple inspection.

I assume that when we met these aliens, we'll be able to observe that they are sinful creatures: they will lie, steal, murder, etc., just like we do. This being the case, they'll need some mechanism for unloading those sins, won't they?

But: (1) maybe they won't be sinful; or (2) maybe there's some theological point that makes "The Fall" as such pivotal, so that other sins can be freely absolved, so long as one (or one's ancestors) haven't eaten from the tree of knowledge?

EDIT: As already referenced elsewhere in this thread, C.S. Lewis hypothesized -- a search through the thread for "Lewis" shows our interchange, and one other mention that doesn't reference aliens directly, but only the evil that humans could bring to them. And searching for "Fall" shows it nowhere else as a single word. So I think you're unfair in suggesting that my post was redundant.
Awesome.. I was halfway through implementing the same thing. Thanks!
Uncomputable problems are not necessarily NP-hard. You can for example encode a version of the halting problem such that the instances are simply very long. For example, consider the language L defined by k is in L iff k=2^2^2^n for some n and nth Turing machine halts on the blank tape (some reasonable listing of Turing machines). In order to feed an NP-hard problem to an L-oracle, one needs to ridiculously expand the length of the problem far more than polynomial length so this certainly can't be done in polynomial time.
I completely disagree with this article. Not too long ago, many in the game industry probably would have said you needed a million to make a game; now, mobile development and indie console development have changed people's perspective. That still doesn't mean that the cost for a studio like Rovio to make a game is the minimum.

Making a game for cheap requires realistic expectations and constraints. You're not going to hit every platform, you're not going to have AAA graphics, and you're not going to have 100 levels. That doesn't mean you can't have a compelling experience.

You can make a polished, successful game with two people and a couple weeks of work, if those people are experienced and you pick the right platform. Canabalt (http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/) is an excellent example of this. One developer did the coding, art, and sound. Another developer did the music. The Flash version only took a week to make. When that version was a wild success, a third developer ported it to iOS, which took a couple more weeks.

There are numerous examples of this throughout the indie games community. It takes a smart, experienced designer to make a successful game with such reduced scope, but it can be done.
Strunk & White was never good to begin with. Classic texts can stay good as they age.
The rioters aren't really organized, and it's hard to claim that many of the looters have BBM. I don't doubt there are some people inciting things, but what would their aganda be? violent anarchy doesn't seem to be in anyone's best interests. http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-lon...
Improved Tagging – Stack Exchange
if you feel the need to deploy "defense" against downvotes, you are either saying things that don't need to be said, or you are being needlessly defensive and thereby undermining your own point.

The problem is that the majority of the voting community on HN tends to think a certain way. When I first joined, I went through several spurts of "why did I get downvoted for this?" I wasn't trolling, and I was being constructive. However, my opinions differed greatly on those subjects. I haven't really been downvoted much recently, and I'm pretty sure it's because I'm subconsciously conforming to the culture/groupthink.

If you want a specific example: just about anything in favor of increased government control will result in downvotes, regardless of the arguments presented. You could win a policy debate with a given argument, and still have it down voted here because people don't agree with it.
S&P's Ill-Advised Downgrade Ushers in Buying Opportunities
S&P's horrendous decision Friday afternoon to lower the U.S. credit rating has rattled global markets, pushing Wall Street deeper into negative territory.
Most people will never run a 5 minute mile either (the author's analogy, not mine).

I was all ready to comment about how it wasn't a very fair comparison, but then I thought about it more and realized that I actually do agree with the analogy. My belief (and I realize this is probably a minority opinion) is that most people can never be great developers - it requires some combination of hard work and just "getting it".
Also important: stop doing stupid shit. http://jinfiesto.posterous.com/how-to-seem-good-at-everythin...
If this is really the case, why is anyone still crazy enough to use BitTorrent?
Good luck to them. Facebook is capable of handling huge amounts of traffic, so DDoS attacks are out of the question for them, and I seriously doubt facebook will have any SQLi or xss vulnerabilities.
You need that many to understand the basics of the algo behind it? If that's how you debug your code than you might need to learn some better ways to do it...
Another factoid on ants: typically, when a person spots an ant inside their residence, they assume the worst. They fear a swarming, thriving ant colony is breeding inside their home.

This is almost never the case.

Most species of ants live in hollow trees, logs, landscaping timbers, and soil, and will march hundreds of metres from their colony in search of food.

If you see ants in your home, there's no need to napalm your carpets or use traps and poisons. Have compassion. Keeping your floors clear of carbohydrate rich foods will keep most ants busy looking elsewhere.

And for the odd ant scout that goes walking by? Look the other way. They're not the enemy. They are your friend. They are a part of nature.
Who is j-ashkenas? jashkenas's crazy uncle?
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jashkenas
;)
This or a hundred other solutions. There's no political will to do it, because designing more efficient systems does not get you reelected.
Wie arbeitet ein Spanisch Übersetzer
Get the best Spanish translator online that would give you the best services and satisfaction
This is a recipe for mediocrity.

This is really no different from the HR filters many large companies have that result in people asking questions like "I see you have 6 years of Java experience. Do you have any J2SE experience?". The only possible difference is weighting of criteria and I'm not convinced HR departments don't do that already.

So, fail.
I guess imitating famous JavaScript programmers is a new pastime of HN users.
BlackBerry blog defaced
Awesome, but I'm interested in your username. Are you jashkenas?

Whenever I've done PHP, I've always used a hand-rolled functional library. I will certainly be using this now, though.
An Amazon "small" instance in no way compares to a Linode 1.5GB server. Linode beats the pants off of Amazon at every price point so badly that it's hard to even compare the two. A 4GB Linode performs faster than an 8GB EC2 "large" instance. Only the Amazon "High-CPU" instances come close, so you'd need to compare an EC2 "medium" with a Linode 2GB to make it even close to fair. The Linode also comes with 8 virtual cores, the EC2 unit with 2.

The real trouble with Amazon is the erratic performance of the EBS system which can kill an otherwise fast system. Linode's I/O does seem to be much more consistent and predictable.

Amazon's storage capacity and the cost of storage is unmatched, though. If you have a mountain of data, Linode will be prohibitively expensive.
I think the lack of "actual money instead of bits and bytes" is the primary difference, though. Gamification is about trying to use gameplay as something that incentivizes just by being played, without requiring actual transfer of monetary incentives like rebates, discounts, or vouchers. If that works, the appeal is obvious, because why pay users to achieve some goal when you can incentivize them via gameplay, which is free? (In addition, advocates argue that it may engage in ways that money doesn't, by pulling people into an activity they feel part of.)

As an alternative to incentivizing via payment, it might actually be more related to Soviet attempts to use achievements and game-type competitions in factories to up production and build community/engagement, albeit obviously less coercive: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html
Because USG bails them out when it blows up.
With AWS, the development, operational and financial burdens are higher, and the frequency of failure is much higher.

EBS is not a unique feature, as there are multiple equivalents of EBS, along with higher level methods of replicating data, namely, couchDB, riak, cassandra, etc.

But I think you've answered my question- people use AWS because they don't realize this.
Also hone your communication skills until they are as razor sharp as the post above.
Bizarre and Annoying Causes of Fiber Cuts