skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree that there is a lack of major innovation in the video games industry and there is a problem with most gamers just waiting for the next AAA title from a major publisher, I think your examples are all flawed.

SW:TOR is definitely World of Warcraft with a Star Wars skin. It also has the most voice acting of any game in history and it is the first MMOs that actually has a story for each player character that is worth following.

Modern Warfare 3 as an expansion is now arguing semantics. What makes it an expansion? Two years of development where they didn't really innovate but they continued to tightly tune their well oiled machine and CoD Elite is a great platform that almost every game would benefit from. Is it simply price you are annoyed with because you don't perceive the incremental improvements to be worth it? Modern Warfare 3 is definitely not going to push the video games industry forward in any major ways but Modern Warfare 1 & 2 have already done that.

As another poster has stated you're confusing Castle Crashers with something else. Castle Crashers is more like Battletoads or Double Dragon or River City Ransom.

The "hardcare" video game industry is moving forward albeit slowly. The "social" video game industry seems to have stagnated already and is just rehashing their current game mechanics with new graphics.
Huh?

You're looking at a simplistic measure of a single type of elected office. A broad measure isn't very interesting, because freshman house seats aren't very valuable. BIG money is spent to defend the seats of House members with seniority and key committee seats.

The reality is that Federal politicians are bought and paid for in many ways. Spouses, friends and family of congressmen can find themselves possessing an uncanny degree of luck. Spouses become partners in wealthy law firms, etc.

Then you have less shady practices. PACs and special interest groups will happen to run ads in your home district that happen to help you out. Most primaries for the general election happen in September... if you keep the teacher's union happy, lots of teachers will spend their summer vacations supporting your campaign.

The entertainment industry plays all of these cards. They use celebrities to attract people to paid fundraises. They have influence over unions that can bolster attendance at rallies or make lots of phone calls.
They fought hard with the police and caused some real damage to some of the government buildings, but there was no kidnapping, or terror. Poland is not some wild, crazy country.
Also, most of the society was against the protests and was literally pissed off on miners and on government (for the fact that they indeed agreed to most of the requests of the miners).
Another reason the arxiv should pursue a serious refereeing system. Perhaps it should work something like Hacker News--high quality work could be measured by community support.
I think the EFF is a great organization and advocate for individual rights. But their agenda is often at odds with the interests of the "industry".
Amazing iOS Background
Show HN: iPhone app to track security vulnerabilities and patches for software
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You need to convince millions of people not to watch Dark knight Rising, Transformers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight, Mission Impossible, and hundreds of other blockbusters and TV Shows, every year.

Then, the hardest part, you need to come up with something that is Waaaaaaaaaayyyy waayyyyy better than all those movies and TV shows combined -- and do it every single day.

Then, you'll kill Hollywood.
30 Before 30 | Stephen J Nims - Random Musings of an Internet Addict
There is a flip side to this: why should you have the ability to take the hard work of whomever came up with Mickey Mouse and take it in a direction that the creator doesn't like?

Say you wrote an open source software package in 2004. Should Microsoft be able to take your work and incorporate it into a proprietary package, just because 7 years passed?
>"Scala" is also the name of a typeface, the student chapter of the American Library Association, part of human anatomy, a unit of area, a couple of music albums, a software company with no connection to the programming language, a couple of entertainment venues, two locations, a surname for I-don't-know how many people, and a snail.

disingenous. He's not talking about repurposing the domain for any of those things.

>A "community" cannot actually own a thing. Who exactly do you think should have the domain? Who represents "the community"?

Once the community gets sufficiently large, a formal foundation like apache or the python software foundation. (Obviously for practicality it's fine for the domains of a smaller community to be owned by individuals, but they should act as custodians)

>And why exactly does this amorphous "community" have some special claim to one of an infinite number of domains that might be used for similar or entirely different purposes?

If you call your domain scala-tools and your site becomes known as a place to get scala tools you have a moral obligation to keep it about scala tools, or give it up and let someone else use the name. Doing otherwise would be cybersquatting - scala-lang may not be a single person's name, but it still means something.
Exactly. An "explain like I'm twelve" for Godel's Incompleteness Theorum itself would revolve around the idea of self-referential statements (such as 'the set of all sets which don't contain themselves', or 'the barber of Seville shaves everybody who doesn't shave themselves').

In my understanding, Godel created a system that mapped statements to numbers, and then looked at the numbers that represented statements like 'this statement is provable' and found a way to show that the equivalent number had a property that wasn't provable.
And presumably why it's pretty poor at discriminating Alpha & Beta, since they'll be quite easily stopped by the barrier as well (and probably the lens even if it were exposed)

IIRC actual radiation detectors use very thin mica films to protect the sensor, so they can admit the lesser penetrating particles.
Google should never censor its search results. It would lose a lot of credibility if it did. However, perhaps it might choose not to sell ads to organizations that threaten the internet.
Management Part 1
I believe the game he's referring to is "Crush the Castle".
We can all think of many works that continue to be popular decades after their creation, but that's precisely because we only remember the popular ones. These are by far the exception to the rule, and we shouldn't tailor our copyright policies for them.

The intention of copyright is to promote the creation of works. Rewarding authors is the means, not the end. In the case of LOTR, Tolkien didn't write it to provide licensing revenue to his grandchildren; he wrote LOTR because the creation of fantasy languages and histories was his passion and he could make some money from it. A much shorter copyright would have sufficed to inspire the creation of LOTR. Furthermore, the creation of movie adaptations would be helped by LOTR coming out of copyright, not hindered. Disney's empire was built on adaptations of out-of-copyright stories. Shorter copyright would in many ways encourage the creation of more works.
Program lifecycle phases
Why it's better to be a generalist than a specialist
Argh - I am an idiot - I meant to say the opposite. You are right, tautology what I was looking for.
Cross-posted from the G+ thread:

Regarding limiting copyright to 10 years, and since you brought up ponies, I feel that solves the wrong problem. The issue I see is that a few large greedy corporations effectively monopolize the copyrights for the vast majority of the nation/worlds creative output, that they then further exploit a corrupt political system to extend those copyrights indefinitely is almost secondary.

A thought experiment: make the sales/purchase of copyright ownership illegal. This would still allow an artist or creator to license the right to sell and distribute their work, but leave them unable to lose (legal) control of such distribution. This still allows a lot of room for the mega-corps to profit, but with less outright exploitation of artists than we currently see. Copyrights are held by the creator(s) for life, and works pass into the public domain after death, not the artists estates (or more often, the organization that owns the copyright). I feel this is simple to understand, fair to creators, and still provides business incentives to non-creators to invest time and money in the production and promotion of quality content.
I support letting companies keep their copyrights on the grounds that it will be a lot easier to get this actually passed, and in the grand scheme of things, Steamboat Willie is not what we want. Steamboat Willie doesn't matter. What matters is the 99.995% of the rest of the stuff done in the same year that Steamboat Willie is shielding, the stuff with zombie owners, the stuff with owners that don't really care, the stuff that you simply have to presume is owned by somebody, somewhere, who may sue if you try to use it yet at the same time there is no practical way to find out who these people are so you could seek permission.

I also support continuously raising the price necessary to renew the copyright as you try to carry it longer and longer. And again, I'm not trying to hurt the mighty Disney corporation; sums they'd laugh at would still be sufficient to open the bulk of the content back up to us, and that's what I care about.

To make my point clear, this is entirely practical. In theory, should Steamboat Willie be public domain by now? Yeah, sure, there's no really good argument based on the public interest otherwise. But as a practical matter, if we could distinguish between Big Copyright's interests and the vastly larger "everything else", we'd be much more likely to come to a compromise that leaves everybody reasonably satisfied, if not ecstatic.
A solution is for the Internet industry to start giving free advertising to political campaigns on our own new media assets... assets like YouTube that are rapidly displacing television.

I'm not sure what this fixes. I already get to see and hear campaign ads incessantly. What would be my desire to go watch more on YouTube? They've already become background noise to me because the messages originating from the candidates and super PACs range from heavily spun at best to plainly false. I don't learn anything from them.

Better would be to offer more compelling solutions than ads. Things like highly interactive, real-time Q/A and debating schemes would engage the electorate by allowing them to rapidly see who is for real and who is an empty, purchased, Presidential-looking shell.

I'll throw out one specific idea: during debates, let's have a Watson-like presence on stage that is, in real time, able to display the BS-factor of what's being uttered. Wouldn't that be fun?
Agreed!
...
Anyone have suggestions on what idealistic things to ask for?
Not to mention hypothetically if It where illegal for corporations to petition congress SOPA might hypothetically not be a bill. Given that it would have been illegal for Hollywood to lobby. So Google may have never felt the need to get involved in a situation that did not exist.
Communism and the French Revolution didn't solve poverty. Quite the opposite, China was far more brutal and unequal under communism than capitalism.

And Salman Khan can do Khan Academy because he was able to become super rich from Wall Street.
I wonder how plausible it'd be to make a little spinthariscope[1] attachment to stick over the camera instead. Rather than affecting the CMOS camera element itself, you generate visible light flashes with a fluorescing capture material.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinthariscope
I think that's a lot of trust being put into Google, Facebook, etc to not use this same lobby group to lobby for laws that would benefit them over smaller companies.
The problem is not just campaign contributions; it's also the "revolving doors" system, of which Mr. Christopher Dodds is such a shining example. That's extremely difficult to regulate, so the best option is to find some place where ex-political operatives can be "re-purposed" for the tech community.

I'd also be careful not to stir the hornets' nest that is the patents system. Depending on how you do it, you end up on the opposite side of companies like Apple and Microsoft, which you need on board for any push on copyright (easing copyright rules would make it easier for them to keep building tools for creatives; easing the patent system will just make life easier for their competitors). Patents, copyright and trademarks are not as closely intertwined as some people believe, they are actually very different concepts.
I got tired of seeing notices to "contact your senator" on Wikipedia/Craigslist etc and sent a note to Senator Feinstein. To my surprise someone from her office actually responded. My response was pretty similar to Joel's.

Its easy to kvetch on your favorite Internet forum, but if you get things started your Congressional reps will listen.

This is way easier than cold-calling a customer!
The only way I can think of directly monetizing this is to do a courier service.
agreed but for how long? further, playing poker for cash is slightly different than feeding your cows and selling sunflowers. I am sure not everyone will switch.
The lives of the poor are of equal value to the lives of the rich. So the calculation must include the suffering throngs created by privileged and selfish nepotists and cronies.

Literal guillotines are unnecessary. Just take away their money, prosecute the criminals, and hold meritocratic elections free from the media circus.

Creating a better world is common sense. Tie the hands of the psychopaths among the superrich, discredit the mentally ill Christian fascists, and use scientific reasoning to fix the government and economy.

There is no shortage of resources when you recognize that the vast wealth of the superrich is unearned and won throug bribery, cronyism, nepotism, monopoly, and oligopoly. Wealth amassed through those methods is illegitimate.
Seems a bit pretentious saying the domain 'can't be priced' while shutting everything down at the same time. He's gonna take his ball and put it in some closet for eternity, and it sounds like he doesn't really care if anybody else wants to play with it. Yes, this is his 'right', it's also pretty lame.
"Clean Tech" is a big scam...politically connected VC like Doerr ripping off U.S. taxpayers to fund crony capitalist boondoggles like Solyndra and Fisker. The VC get all the upside, and taxpayers have all the downside.

If the elites really cared about solving climate change, they would advance honest, technology-neutral policy solutions like a simple tax on carbon production. Instead, from battery cars to ethanol, Green Tech has been an excuse for a multi-billion dollar money grab.
Which 2011 TV hits can you legally stream?
"Super PACs" can spend freely on their own political speech (i.e. their own ads). Legally, they can't give money directly to candidates or even coordinate with them. Only traditional PACs can do that.

Giving ad time or ad space directly to candidates, as Joel proposes, would violate that rule--even if it was done by a Super PAC.

However nothing would stop a Super PAC, or even the tech companies themselves, from creating their own ads supporting candidates, and running them on their own sites. (as long as they are not coordinated with the campaign)
According to this text: http://prawo.vagla.pl/node/9637 (in Polish, from a lawyer who is against ACTA), there was no real attack on any of the mentioned sites, it was just that there was so much interest in the case that some sites went down due to naturally increased traffic. Case in point: his own website went down, even though he is against ACTA.
Steam game service doubles sales, reaches 5M concurrent users
Oh, come on, guys...
You all are over simplifying a complicated calculation.
Have you considered that you don't know the distribution of the 3M players? How many of them had just joined compared to how many had been around already for a while? (this could push both ways)
Also, have you considered how many new users they were expect to get just by word of mouth and no investment?
What is the percentage of regeneration of users that quit in 12-15 months but maybe also brought in other users to play with them?
Without knowing the details you can't say anything.
I'm not saying that I agree or not with the article, but I assume that every person working as an analyst learns on their first day what you were suggesting above. So, it could be that the analysis is wrong (and it does look wrong), but the calculation that an analyst should do is much more complicated that you guys seemed to think from what you wrote (and two wrong analysis won't make a correct one).

I would have spent at least part of those $120M in funding startups to develop new games (and later bring them in, in case...). I'm pretty positive the return might have been better...
And don't forget that the government of a country with 1340 M people, has an enormous incentive to keep the status quo. If automation destroys hundreds of thousands of jobs, it's a recipe for chaos. The ones ruling China, surely want to keep people working with low wages, so they can be replaced easily if they start causing trouble. Having hundreds of thousands, or millions of unemployed people is by far much more dangerous for them, than loosing a few bucks per phone by not automating the process.
Yup, that's my favorite response too. FYI, I wasn't criticizing. Just stating a natural response to articles like these. I'm busy working on my gig as well.
Orwell's "Animal Farm" was rejected by one publishing house on the grounds that it was "impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.".
Pow Chuck Norris endorses Newt Gingrich
I don't think Joel is wrong per say, however, I don't think he is attacking the symptom not the problem. The answer lies in federalism and giving power to the states. If the federal government didn't have such broad and sweeping power it wouldn't be worth the money to fund their campaigns in the first place. Let's take the power away from the federal government. Big business can only benefit from massive donations if the clowns in power can give them a return.
Ask PG: Should HN have a "Top Submissions" tab to prevent re-posts?
I love reading the greatest essays of the startup community, even the ones that are quite older, but it sort of erks me to see several re-posts of the classics. It seems like a cheap way for people to get up-votes and seems to get in the way of HN providing a good current picture of the startup industry world-wide.

Ex: "How to Make Wealth" by PG:
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3209385
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010854
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1394597
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712

So I'm wondering if it would be helpful to provide a section of HN that shows the top voted submissions (limit it to 50 or whatever). This could even just be a YC curated list or something.

I think it would also be an awesome resource for younger and beginning startup people like myself. I'd love a list of the top submissions and I think it would help prevent re-submissions.
I agree with this exactly.

There's another article that I can't seem to find that talks about this exact process. It takes time for a country the size of China to grow. People's living condition doesnt just suddently get better.

I see people complain about the working conditions when they're living in the US in their single family homes with 2 cars in the garage with boat loads of disposable incomes. They just dont understand the alternative of these giant factories is just no work or even worse jobs. Overtime, when these unskills people becomes more skills at what they do, they will have more options and things will naturally get better.
I am in full support of Joel's intentions here. But...

1) How are we going to prevent this powerful lobby group from betraying us (the smaller guys) in the laws they lobby for?

2) How are we going to determine who gets to participate in this equal share of air time on these YouTube/FaceBook spots? Do I get a spot if I want one? Who gets to decide? The same GOP/DNC? How do we prevent YouTube/Facebook from working deals with candidates for favors after they get elected? How do we guarantee candidate A has the same face time as candidate B? What if candidate B is campaigning on shutting down this technology lobby, will he still get face time?

I suppose all of his suggestions are better than the current situation, but I don't feel they are that much better. We are still going to have to become incredibly vigilant and anti-apathetic with these new powerful groups we form, and I just don't think that's realistic, given our current situation.
Now if you're looking for a Linux IDE with C++11 support, KDevelop already does a lot more.
FBI and DOJ put warning on megaupload.com
In case it wasn't clear above, I totally agree with you. If we could ever get copyright shortened I would expect a surge of creative output.
Laura Dekker, youngest solo circumnavigator
Apple announces partnerships to publish textbooks on the iPad
This sounds like a lot of clicking. I don't want to manage my email even more than I already do.

Maybe have email be read by default and have the ability to mark it as a task... or make a gmail addon that lets you import an email into your GTD app.
Thanks for your answer! I forgot about the /comments page for each subreddit (including r/all). How often did you poll the API for comments? It seems like there are so many comments that you'd have to do it every couple of seconds.
Well, presumably ads are fairly effective for the majority of the populace as candidates are willing to spend a lot of money on them.

On a side note, I personally see a Ron Paul ad every other Youtube video on the occasions when I have AdBlock disabled, which may be why he has such strong support among younger voters.
Could you stick a smoke detector in a smoke-filled bag with the americium pulled out to make a geiger counter?
Yup, communication I think is separate from UI (sort of in between UI and IA), it's going to be its own post entirely, I think it is incredibly, incredibly important and can only really be done after getting your hand in users' hands or really understanding the points of confusion (which is hard, since you know what your product does and how to use it)
Why Businesses Succeed and Fail: HBS researchers answer 10 perplexing questions
US to keep 11 aircraft carriers to show sea power
HttpURLConnection’s Dark Secrets
I recently tried a beta for a company that received wide acclaim, won a bunch of competitions, and appeared on Tech Crunch. Yet their product had a lot of big bugs. You know, the kind that slow down your computer and make you worry about data loss. Fun stuff like that. It was clear that they decided to launch the beta even though they had to have known about these serious bugs. That's what you should bitch about.
In the US giving equal time to all would likely be considered unconstitutional because you're limiting freedom of speech. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...)

What I like about Joel's approach is that it doesn't limit speech, but instead expands it online. I have no idea if Google (et al) would go for such a thing, essentially giving away ad time for free / cheap, but it's a great idea. YouTube has already sponsored debates where candidates take questions from the public (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN-YouTube_presidential_debate...) so it's not unthinkable.