skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love hard games, but there's a very fine line between hard and frustrating and pulling it off is difficult. For one, if I'm playing well and don't make many mistakes (how many depends on how far in I am - if I'm almost at the end, zero mistakes may be tolerable or even a good thing), then I expect to advance. For example, if I play really well and then lose because of an unforeseeable event, that's not "hard" - that's just frustrating. It's also closely tied in with fairness. If a game is only hard because the AI cheats (perfect aim, always knows where you are, always outnumbers you, infinite resources, whatever) then that is probably not going to be fun. It can be, depending on the game (eg infinite amounts of enemies are a fun challenge in one game but frustratingly unfair in another), but again, this is difficult to pull off. Repetitive stuff is rarely fun, no matter how hard or easy it is.

What makes hard games fun is the sense of accomplishment when you finally outwit or outplay the game. A constant sense of impending failure is a good thing. Failure is also not a bad thing, as long as you can learn from it and do ever so slightly better next time. Constant failure is not a good thing as it quickly leads to frustration. Anything out of your control is also a bad thing and leads to frustration (example: if I died because I made a mistake, that's fine. If I died because I didn't do exactly what the designer wanted and there's no other way to do it, that's probably not fine, unless it was obvious what I should do). Some games also expect you to die a lot, but dying isn't particularly painful, so its not all that frustrating (ie in VVVVV).

Finally, gamers often (maybe even "usually") make terrible designers, so unless you have proven yourself, designing a fiendishly hard game is going to be a pretty big gamble.
OK , the argument is more or less that the technology to mass distribute content online for free has made the content industries as they stand today obsolete despite the piracy being illegal.

As a thought experiment let's assume that technology appeared to develop a perfect cloaking device and a teleporter and these things could be made cheap enough to be affordable to 99% of the population.

This would allow anyone to effectively teleport into any house/shop or workplace, take what they wanted and leave with an extremely low chance of being caught (yes, I know piracy isn't theft etc etc, that's not my point here).

Would this then make the entire concept of owning anything that could be easily carried by a person obsolete?
No worries and thanks for setting up the site. Personally, I think it's great and a potential source of that discretionary income needed for, well, discretionary spending.
I think part of the point he's making is that it's easier to just use a language where the "safer" option is the default. Then I don't need to worry about it, and I don't have to listen to people repeat the same thing over and over.

And to be honest, people constantly pointing out the same advice over and over gets old. An occasional, "Hey, did you know..." with some new advice is cool, but people have been beating a dead horse with "use strict" and "use warnings". If somebody isn't using strict, it's not because they don't know about it.
Wayland - Beyond X
Perhaps if you only remember the bulk of his presidency, but he shepherded the end of the Soviet Union as much as anyone.
How many people here have installed any linux distro on a macbook pro after wiping OSX? how was the experience like? I would really like to know. And how much does the OS cost contribute to the overall price of a macbook pro? would buying one and wiping it clean make economic sense?
The price on Apple hardware isn't a premium. It's that price b/c it's top shelf quality. Even the displays on the Dell Precision laptops don't capare to those any anything Apple makes.

+1 for the user who suggested a used Mac. I've recommended them that option to a few friends, no one has ever regretted it.

As far as quality goes, I'm still using a 4 year old Macbook (not even a pro) on a daily basis. Still very relevant with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4 GB ram.
B&N has it almost 50% off.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-startup-owners-manual-st...
Many geeks/hackers don't understand or won't accept the fact that you just mentioned regarding maintenance and Enterprise.
lesswatts.org has a bunch of things you can do to improve Linux power usage.
A fresh new look for HTML5Rocks.com
Who are you Mr. and Mrs. Entrepreneur?
Startup Lingo Translation: Pivot = F*ck
YC is pretty remarkable and it starts at the top with PG. I also feel YC wouldn't be what it is today without HN as it extends the YC community just enough to make a huge difference... setting itself apart from the other accelerators. Congrats to all involved.
Oy. The reason I didn't explain what Bump does is precisely the question you thought it was improper to ask him: since he's a Bump user, he already knows.

What Bump does is mutually authenticate two smartphone users by having them bump their phones together, and correlating the accelerometer readings. On top of authentication you can build all sorts of things, starting with exchanging contact info. The hard/critical part is reliability.
You are selling yourself short by not reading it.
The End of Wall Street As They Know It
Behind The Kitchen Doors Of New York's Gramercy Tavern
I am fascinated by how people organizing the system to run a service/produce a product. I have the same excitement in watching those picture as I read out how Google's back end works.
Awesome Valentin's Doodle
Specifically, the relevance to startups:

“I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”
I feel that simply upvoting this is not enough. Thank you for writing this redthrowaway. You've captured my thoughts perfectly.
Ya... and Amazon almost certainly has more than 3000 TB of storage (3 PB).
what's ST:FU?
it is a clean interface to transfer data to a nearby device.
Surely most of us have an extraordinary number of friends who were born on January 1...
A simple implementation in Scala I just did for fun:

https://github.com/Mononofu/Simple-GeneticAlgorithm

Just like the Java one, but less code. Usually converges in 10 - 20 iterations.
Anyone that puts themselves out there gets respect in my book.

I think the site looks good and Arduino is super cool- it is something on my wishlist of fun things to do when I have some free time. Robots rule and Arduino chips seem to be in lots of them.

If you are ever interested in coverage of your event (and we can get a writer where you are to go) its exactly the type of story we'd run on http://tech.li Feel free to reach out to us and best of luck
Hopefully this will be a good start towards a new understanding of nuclear power. Also, we need to start building again in order to keep the knowledge of craftsmen that know how to build these. From pipe welders to concrete specialists, let alone the nuke engineers needed. N-Stamp skills could be forever lost in this country if we abandon this power source.
How to get started with working remotely
That's vacuous reasoning.

I know the situations are different; I'm asking why one is ethically intolerable and the other is ethically acceptable to the point of making civil disobedience unethical (in freehunter's opinion, anyway).

To put it another way, what about that difference justifies the discrimination?
I think these demands are reasonable, especially the geographical one since you can't buy something if it's not available for you to buy.

The issue is that sometimes when you pay for something you end up with an inferior product, for example being required to install additional software that you either don't like or may not even be available for your platform.

I think you can mitigate piracy a lot by simply providing a slightly better service.
For example I know plenty of people who used to pirate most of their games but now they buy them on steam as soon as the price is reasonable to them.
BTW, the first event you do is always the hardest- remember Michael Arrington had the first TecCrunch meetups in his backyard. Provide a quality event regardless of size and build on its success for your next one
For those that like GA's I recommend checking out Cellular evolutionary algorithm ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_evolutionary_algorithm ) It is a GA with the addition that you can only mate with those around you. This tweak significantly improves my GA's.
I am fascinated by how people organizing the system to run a service/produce a product. I have the same excitement in watching those picture as I read out how Google's back end works.
I believe this is known as the slippery slope fallacy fallacy.
Hell, they've got pricing tiers for S3 customers that go up to 5PB.
Thinkpads have good quality, and may come in cheaper than a Macbook.
Haha, them be fightin' words. Better hope the EFF doesn't get wind of that! ;)
Really Awesome!

You need to not offer GoDaddy as the only suggested domain registrar, they're evil after all.
"but this 'think of the children' argument is the same one that will be used to pass SOPA like regulation."

I have no idea what your point here is. You seem to be implying that because someone may dishonestly use a "protect the kids" argument, that others then shouldn't really try to "protect the kids".

If that isn't what you are saying then I have no idea what you intended to convey.

"to what degree to we sacrifice our autonomy to satisfy the regulator's thirst for a censored communications."

WTF are you talking about? reddit had bad shit on their site, and they took it down. There is no boogeyman here.
Yes, you can reach me at bruce.hart AT gmail DOT com .
There are a number of issues with the project, but I'm assuming it was created this way to be easier to digest for newcomers.
Tell that to Angie Varona. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/angie-varona-14-year-unwill...
Take a look at ruby-readability: https://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability
Embedly Challenge Results
I no longer do .Net development and leaving it all behind was a breath of fresh air. It was ridiculous.

I find it monstrously overblown and while its proponents/fans call it elegant I think its a horrible inelegant mess. Great if all you do is Windows, no doubt.

Plus I don't trust Microsoft on Mono (which at one time I thought was a neat idea) and I don't trust them not to dump their existing .Net devs like they did with VB6 sometime down the line and without warning as soon as they and their marketing department decide the next shiny-shiny programming paradigm has arrived. There are plenty of rumours about this and I frankly don't discount any of them as being too far-fetched.
Your analogy is like almost all of them flawed, in that it is missing to contain the specific characteristics of the thing in question. You yourself state that, so what is the point? That not all possible things should be done and that's why the industry shouldn't have to change? Please.

But more importantly: that is not the main argument. The article, as i read it, is about the corruptness created by the refusal of industry to change. If the industry controls the US, and the US dares to control Sweden, and the justice-system is not working because of that control, than it is not longer about entertainment. It is about force and control. It's about

If you don't give up before you're sued, they corrupt the legal system.
Of course it's not purely about legality. Administrative burden was cited as the main reason. Also, the new policy is not only against child porn, but also "all subreddits that focus on sexualization of children", including pictures of teenagers in swimsuits. That's an unabashedly moral stance to take.

But I still don't think this means that reddit from now on will readily bow to public accusations of creepiness. This time, illegality, administrative burden, creepiness, and moral principles all happened to coincide. I don't think the same set of circumstances will easily obtain with respect to /r/trees or /r/atheism, which @alecco worries about. Illegality alone would not justify blanket censorship of "grey area" stuff. Creepiness alone, or moral qualms alone, would not justify censorship, either.

From the announcement: We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.

When somebody else says things like that, we are often sceptical about that, and for good reasons. But I think reddit admins have earned enough trust among its regulars over the years to merit a more charitable reading. I doubt that they would ban entire subreddits for a small number of nefarious links if the subreddits themselves had other legitimate purposes. Maybe they'll tell the mods to take better care of their communities, but delete them unilaterally? Unlikely. That's the point I was originally trying to make; sorry for the diversion.
First off, a thousand apologies - I went to your site before I read your reply. Consequently, you'll have a visitor from Regina, Saskatchewan polluting your results....

I'm going to start by talking about some things you are doing extremely well:

1. Great work coming here and asking for feedback. That takes a whole lot of courage!

2. I love how deeply you are dissecting your own work - you've got a great attitude!

And now for some general questions:

1. Are you sure there is actually demand for this? I know that this is the ugliest question to ask (and the ugliest answer to ponder), but I suggest that you start here.

2. Are you sure that the people who you think will be most interested (males between 18 - 30) are actually interested enough in this to convert? Have you ever thought of targeting some retired people (especially engineers)? As an example, I know an engineer who just retired who would sign up for this in a second (if he lived in South Florida)

And finally for some criticism:

1. I really like your website, but I have some problems with the text. While the writing itself is great, I question whether 12px helvetica was the correct choice. I also wonder whether your conversion rate wouldn't improve if you increased the line spacing and decreased the total amount of text on the homepage. With the web, the more words you have the lower the chance that anyone will actually read all of them!

2. I question the information flow - if I were in your shoes, I'd likely design the information flow around a 'what is Arduino - what can I do with it? - why should I learn about it?' pattern. Might be worth doing a split test to see if that sort of flow has a higher conversion rate.

3. Here's a picky little thing that I only noticed because I'm a little obsessive compulsive about such things. Consider this scenario:

- I live in South Florida (I wish) and arrive on your website.

- I get down to the bottom and decide, "This sounds cool."

- I decide I want to sign up for the newbie package, so I click "Signup Now" (below the newbie package).

- I arrive on the Eventbrite page and discover that 'newbie package' has a quantity of zero.

Now I'm in some trouble. I can't remember whether I wanted the newbie package, the auditor package or the loaner package. Do I hit back? Will that mess everything up? Hmmm...I wonder what is happening on Hacker News....

All in all, great work throwing this event and if I lived closer, I'd definitely take it. I hope some of this helps!!
It seems that the only way to scale a site like this is to build decoupled services maybe using a messaging queue (AMQP, etc..).
How can I learn more about this kind of systems? Also is there a open source application[s] built in a distributed way that I could learn from?
Ray Kurzweil for President (Seriously?)
Ah, thanks. I hadn't encountered that.
I like DuckDuckGo but Google just indexes way more pages than it, and as a result I am able to find more quality results there... If DDG can index more of the web, I would definitely switch over.
http://coloradoindependent.com/111645/pro-marijuana-montana-...

Apparently she hasn't been charged yet, she's currently being investigated, but it seems that RICO is the framework that they are considering using to charge her.
It's a weird hypothetical, but I think it would: if you need something, just teleport and grab it. With the exception of personalized items (basically just my computer these days), I don't care much if somebody takes something I own given that I could get something equivalent easily.

As long as the technology was symmetric (that is, everybody had equal access to it), I think it would just make allocation of most items more efficient. Why should I own a hammer that I use once a year if I can just grab it from somebody who isn't using it at the moment? And then they could grab one from somebody else when the time came.

The issue with personalization actually has a parallel in the IP--there is copyright and then there is privacy; the two are different and it is eminently reasonable to support one but not the other.

Now, there would be some issues with your hypothetical world (e.g. who would produce stuff in the first place?) but I do not think they would be insurmountable. So yes, I think that would make owning small impersonal items obsolete.
The bump makes transactions physical, solves the I-think-I-voted problem (which gets worse with 2 people, and much worse with money).

Just a guess. I haven't used it.
I have worked pretty much my whole career in .NET, and I think it's pretty good in terms of actual coding and development. It has gotten better by leaps and bounds in recent years. .NET and C# aren't the problem, the insanity of the Windows stack is the problem. So many stupid little things unrelated to your code can go wrong, the toolchain is paltry, and deployment is still a mess.

If you're actually using drag-and-drop you probably already lost.
As a state that's 49% nuclear power (New Hampshire) I really welcome this news. It almost seems too good to be true.

I hope we will someday be able to close down the single coal plant in my state (coal is 14% of NH power).

For all its faults I think Nuclear has gotten a bad reputation from an extremely small amount of catastrophes. Obviously those events are very salient in the public's mind, but it is worth remembering that coal plants are a catastrophe every single day.

There are lakes in New Hampshire with abnormally high mercury levels that have never been touched by humans save for testing the water. Coal from as far as Ohio give rise to uncomfortable asthma statistics. I know it won't be soon, but there's at least one technology I can't wait to shutter.
LDS has now become a staple of my domain research process. I haven't bought any domains through it yet, as I mostly just use it for research/to see what's out there, but I really like the results I get back and the overall feel. It just seems to give me the best idea on domains available for the concept I'm looking at, while requiring minimal creativity/shuffling on my part.

Nice job, Matt.
How are they doing labs? The FAQ mentions that there are labs, but there is no information how how they are to be accomplished or submitted.
Growl notifications for GitHub updates
I second the eBook Version. It'e pretty frustrating that Steve doesn't want to create/ship one. I offered to pay MORE for an ebook than the paper book...
Well, I don't ... and it isn't just me who thinks claims made about the "enterprise" are pure marketing BS.
> Developers aren't "normal people" then?

No. They aren't. Developers have needs far greater than that of your average everyday user. Apple sells a machine that is the best possible for the greatest number of users, and doesn't really cater to niche markets. I don't get what's surprising about this.
The Paikilizer
Help Women Take the Stage
president@whitehouse.gov I assume.
I was referring to the sendfile system call there. We've seen reports that on some versions of Linux kernel, it doesn't work, for some value of "doesn't work" that we haven't yet properly determined. We've also seen web pages that suggest Flask's send_file and send_from_directory would ultimately rely on that system call in some circumstances, though again I haven't checked through the code in detail yet so I don't know how accurate those reports are.

In any case, we haven't tried using the X-Sendfile functionality yet, and I'm making no comment about how well that works.

We do know, without any doubt at this point, that serving our video files using Flask's send_from_directory (using the default file wrapping behaviour, not X-Sendfile) is not working reliably for us with many different clients, where serving the same file statically straight from a web server like Apache works fine. We're still trying to identify exactly what it is that doesn't work, but in light of our discussion here today and what I've learned since then, I'm now hoping that we can just punt the whole set-up over to the known-working Apache implementation by using X-Sendfile and avoid the problem in the first place.

(Edit: Thanks again for the suggestions, BTW. I had a fairly long list of ideas to follow up in relation to this problem, including investigating X-Sendfile, but your mention of that here prompted me to look into it first and will probably have saved me quite a bit of time if it does work for us.)
IP rights to the same work in different countries are sold separately, and can end up being owned by different companies. Also, different countries have different economies, which means it makes sense to manage distribution in separate countries separately.
I think you mixed up something (a detail, really): the author actually mentions Ruby, and Rails. Only a comment is mentioning Python, once.
Overall I think the site looks great. Here is a couple things I would at least A/B test:

* Putting the prices on the page. I hate not knowing how much something is going to cost and I think it can surprise people when they click through.

* Your linked slideshow is okay, but I think it might be beyond a lot of the audience that you want to reach. I would scrap it and...

* I think you need to add an example project or two about what you can do with the Arduino (like maybe this one - http://j4mie.org/blog/how-to-make-a-physical-gmail-notifier/). As a software guy this would "sell" me.

Good luck with it! I think you're onto a great idea and I like the "loan" option to allow people to just play with one.
Shipping containers are often used, which can be had for half this used. Usualy a much better idea IMO. Refrigeration units offer good insulation, often alongside partial burying of them. They can also look fairly like the western norm inside.

Heres an example built with 2; http://thechive.com/2011/07/26/unbelievable-home-built-out-o...

e: also, a more aspirational one.. obviously more expensive and more containers required; http://www.lowimpactliving.com/blog/2009/07/07/affordable-sh...
Why I'll Never Trust a Human With My Data Again
Good advice, and interesting because languages and syntax are interesting to me. But I would never introduce this in my team as a replacement for semicolons at the end of each statement. It seems too random a rule to just follow, hence you'd need to understand the specific problem that it solves. At that point your mental model has become slightly more complex, which doesn't seem worth it.
Would you point out a few of them if you don't mind?