skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also a worthwhile case study in the Neopets economy, which as far as I know didn't really adapt in these ways. You could grind on puzzle games for the local currency, but it stopped being about the puzzles and started being about trying to make in-game money. And then, what happened is that non-casual gamers would know all of the shop-inventory respawn times and would camp them, to buy up all of the commodities that the shops contained -- especially medicines and such. They would then resell them for much more money in their own user-defined shops. So it became the exact opposite: at first things were really easy to obtain, and they were mostly going after kids -- casual gamers. But their surge in popularity seemed to create a change in focus towards hardcore gamers eager to camp the spawn points and use multiple accounts to get freebies. At one point I even remember putting all of my money in the stock market just so that I could feed my Neopets with free soup from the in-game welfare department, because getting food was such a nuisance otherwise.

There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this, I feel -- and unfortunately for me it has deep ties with questions of meaning and purpose and thus gets bound up in my religion, which I do not want to talk too much about here. But the question is, "what makes a game worthwhile? why do you keep playing?" My Neopets were not very worthwhile and, since they're immortal, I imagine they've been starving in a cold computer database for the last way-too-many years. I obviously got bored with the grind necessary to take care of them, but why? Why did I complete all of Morrowind and yet found Oblivion impossible to play? What is it in my human quest that I am looking to create in a game, and are games unreal or real or hyper-real or something else? If we don't enjoy "having it all handed to us" but yet we also don't enjoy "working for it", what exactly do we want?
Google Rebrands 'Android Market', It is now 'Google Play'
"You're either buying into a platform or you're buying gadgets."

This is it. Manufacturers are still in the mindset of selling gadgets, not a platform. Each gadget ships with featureset that doesn't change after it is shipped (ie. they don't expect to upgrade the OS).

On the other hand, we're buying into a brand that represents a platform. We expect apps written after the phone was released to work.

I think it's interesting that this is exactly what a Linux distribution solves. The "gadget" (ie. computer) does not matter any more.

My laptop is the same as your laptop, except perhaps in the specs. But we can run the same version of the same OS if we choose to. But my Android phone probably isn't running the same version of Android as your Android phone, and we would probably struggle to achieve this if we tried to.

What we need is a vendor-independent Android distribution. Is CyanogenMod the future?
Peter Molyneux exits Microsoft, Lionhead
Terminal scrollback written to local disk, including remote ssh sessions.
Look cool, two comments:

- The heatmap is sometimes off some pixels, see http://imgur.com/FyqOG

- It's not possible to click links any more after applying the heatmap. This basically makes it useless, as you have to refresh to page in order to click a popular link.
I agree with your general point, but configuring Xorg is a form of torture no man deserves to go through.
Deficiency doesn't mean that he sees colours diminished in hue value, but exactly that he wouldn't be able to distinguish between some colours.
We have a very similar approach except we encapsulate settings into its own package just for readability/maintainability. So it looks something like the following

settings/
__init__.py
defaults.py
dev.py
live.py
testing.py
users/
__init__.py
*user specific settings*
BDU mandatory to carry it. Will destroy dress pants in no time.
رنج روفر - سوبر تشارج -
A review of Django 1.4's Password authentication
Whispers of a reponsive OS (a take on windows 8)
If you find this interesting, you may also like this Chrome extension:

http://github.com/wuzhe/social-hotness
It's annoying how there is no canonical way to do it. You need to spend some mental energy learning how to do this when starting up a Django project. Django should really integrate one solution into the django core, and then everyone can just use that. Make it much easier.
Thomson Reuters feeds tap stock sentiment from social networks
So how does it work?
I do something very similar. But I just have dummy files in folder depending on the environment (so I do something like 'touch PRODUCTION' or 'touch STAGING') and based off which file is present I know which settings to serve.

Here's a good example (start at line 207): https://github.com/armon/DjangoProjectExample/blob/master/pr...
Google promises a unified social and mobile game platform
What is Pinterest? [infographic]
21 Jump Street Movie Details
21 Jump Street Movie Details
Schmidt and Jenko are more than ready to leave their adolescent problems behind. Joining the police force and the secret Jump Street unit
Not necessarily if you want the weights to match other icons. But in many cases this is the best option.
Between stupid complexity requirements and "you can't repeat that password", I end up with "password" on one site, "Password1" on another, and "Password1!" on yet another. (Obviously I don't use "password" but a secure passphrase that I only use on less-secure sites.) I don't remember which site has password, but I could potentially remember that site X was Green-Blue-Magenta, and correct accordingly.
You're begging the question. Apple doesn't do it for iOS, but why does that make it unthinkable? Apple don't perfectly sync up their Mac OS X and hardware releases, you buy your hardware and then shortly afterwards you pay(!) to upgrade.

If Apple can do it for laptops (and the first iPad), why can't Sony do it for phones? Because a third party has released a device with a fourth parties updated software? I understand that Google's releases schedule is different from Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X and iOS, I'm looking for reasons why a consumer should care. Personally I see benefits to their approach e.g. rapid evolution.

(Note, I understand that making promises and breaking them is bad, it just seems most of the comments focus not on the breaking of a promise, but the very thought of disjoint hardware and software release dates)
Flow?! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
thanks for the feedback, I should probably gather the row height of HN dynamically instead of having a hardcoded value that seems to work for my devices g

You should be able to click on the links again after closing the heatmap (there's a little x on the right upper corner of the heatmap control that makes the heatmap disappear)
"Phone manufactures sell phones to carriers, not consumers."

Where do you get that data from? I just tried to challenge your claim, but I did not find any worldwide statistic about how many people buy smartphones with or without contract.

My personal guess is that not only do a lot of people buy their phones from Samsung (e.g. through amazon.de/co.uk).

From the people who buy on contract, many people are in a position to choose between many providers with very similar services and prices. Meaning that they choose the contract by the price and quality of the phone, not the contract.

At least in Europe that's the case, and I believe it is similar in most Asian markets.

Companies like Samsung are not primary concerned about carrier satisfaction, because in most parts of the world, carriers are exchangeable pipe providers that need Samsung more than Samsung needs them.
It's a very good question. Maybe Apples new interactive textbook initiative will help, although I'm not sure about that. But I think that if _any_ electronic device is going to make a difference and be usable in education, it will be a tablet-like device instead of a traditional laptop, simply because they are more portable, take up less space and have longer battery lives.
I'm curious, what 'China hackers'? My google-fu has failed me..
None. Advertising clauses were removed from pretty much all BSD licenses as they are unworkable.
"Yet once again, we were stuck looking at a binary blob. And this time, we had no real HLE code to go off of. Luckily, Cydrak recognized the ISA just from looking at the binary: it was an ARMv3 CPU!"

From the perspective of a software guy, this sounds very impressive. Can some hardware guy chime in and tell us just how impressive it is to recognize a CPU from looking at a binary dump?
I wonder, are these tricks proven for all primes?
> If you want to use the ActionBar UI style

More like "if you want to design your app according to standards". ABS is a necessity for any new app.
My old SE phone got random OTA updates regularly, but non of them changed the android version number. I have no idea what those updates where though.
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Why using Fonts as Icons can prove tricky: Subpixel Aliasing and Webkit
The problems with Smalltalk as embedded platform
What does it do? What does "hot" mean? I think it would be great if you could answer these questions in very briefly on the site.
6 Simple Tricks to Fuel Up Your Google+ Circle
At Google, advertising is crowding out search results
Long rant on Erlang-style Actors
I guess it's hopeless.
And anybody behind them as well.
Awesome: how humans compare with other beings in size
I have seen a lot of pictures trying to depict the "mightiness" of humans against smaller organisms or their "tinyness" compared to celestial bodies ... but for me this one takes the cake - be sure to give it a shot.
Good interview from a couple of years ago along the same lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvHcoqru7I&feature=play...

+1 for Julian Dibbel's book Play Money also. Great read if your into virtual economies, along with Castronova's Synthetic Worlds.
What does market dominance have to do with profit margins? The two are pretty much orthogonal.
How I finally got over the hump and contributed to open source
Indeed, at many companies this kind of moonlighting is expressly forbidden.
Was anyone else reminded of Catch-22?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Minderbinder

"At the beginning of the novel, it [Milo's syndicate] is merely a system that gets fresh eggs to his mess hall by buying them in Sicily for one cent, selling them to Malta for four and a half cents, buying them back for seven cents, and finally selling them to the mess halls for five cents."
I have and I also played UO and my friends played EQ.

Comparing to those two tittles WOW is super tame and casual.

Edit: I played EVE too and it is pretty much up there with UO in terms of there being a real possibility of getting a heart attack by playing the game.
Happened to me at a small company that was swimming in cash (swank offices).

They told me that if you get seriously ill within the first 60 days, you can sign up for COBRA and be covered from then on through your previous employer's health insurance.

You have 60 days to decide if you want COBRA or not, so even if you don't go for COBRA right away, you are "safe" (sort of) for 60 days. Got diagnosed with cancer on day 59? Sign up with COBRA, pronto.

Implied: If you do get seriously ill right after starting - the new company wouldn't want you working for them anyway.

This is Uh-merica, roll with it ;)
Android Market Is Now “Google Play Store”
Well based on the experience of when Adobe joined the Foundation, I'd say the impact is going to be pretty much zero.

Support for the few pieces of linux software that they used to make (prior to joining the Foundation) has now stopped/ gradually being wound down.
OK, HN front page effect, the server crapped out. Any advice on how to handle this? Cannot even SSH on the server.
.SkimThat provides summarized world news - a video interview with the founder
For any given city/sector/investor portfolio you can view recent activity, see the historic stats, see a cohort analysis to see what happened to startups founded in different years, see how long it took companies to raise their first investment round, who the top investors are (angel and VC), etc. Essentially it's Crunchbase supercharged.

What's going on in London:
http://seedtable.com/city/london

Who got VC funded in NY last year:
http://seedtable.com/city/new-york/2011/vc

The mobile space in San Francisco:
http://seedtable.com/city/san-francisco/mobile

Which YC companies exited last year and a breakdown by when they were founded:
http://seedtable.com/investor/company/y-combinator/2011/acqu...
Free Smalltalk Books
drag the 'HN heatmap' link to your bookmarks bar, go to HN frontpage, click the bookmarklet, enjoy. It's basically just the visualization for now.
I wrote the g65816 and spc700 cores used in MAME/MESS, but I haven't been involved in the emu scene for almost a decade now. I could take a look and see if there are any quick things I could graft in, but my time is so limited these days...
Not particularly - ARM instruction encoding is rather distinct. Repeating "always" values of the ARM condition field really stand out.
Same subject, vastly different caliber. I can't read four sentences of Doctorow's writing without seizing in a paroxysm of grimacing and twitching and all sorts of disapproving body language.
> In C++ it's called RAII, and it's the saving grace of C++ that almost completely makes up for C++'s other warts.

Great! The best C++ compliment I've ever read.
The Kinesis I have with brown switches is fairly loud - people always know when I'm typing on a conference call! I need a stealth keyboard for when I'm on the phone.
Sampling Challenges
Because researchers can seldom study the entire population, they must choose a subset of the population, which can result in several types of error. Sometimes, there are discrepancies between the sample and the population on a certain parameter that are due to random differences. This is known as sampling error and can occur through no fault of the researcher.

Far more problematic is systematic error, which refers to a difference between the sample and the population that is due to a systematic difference between the two rather than random chance alone. The response rate problem refers to the fact that the sample can become self-selecting, and that there may be something about people who choose to participate in the study that affects one of the variables of interest. It is very possible in this situation that the people who actively seek help happen to be more proactive than those who do not. Because these two groups vary systematically on an attribute that is not the dependent variable (economic productivity), it is very possible that it is this difference in personality trait and not the independent variable (if they received corrective lenses or not) that produces any effects that the researcher observes on the dependent variable. This would be considered a failure in internal validity.

Another type of systematic sampling error is coverage error, which refers to the fact that sometimes researchers mistakenly restrict their sampling frame to a subset of the population of interest.

First and foremost, a researcher must think very carefully about the population that will be included in the study and how to sample that population.Errors in sampling can often be avoided by good planning and careful consideration.However, in order to improve a sampling frame, a researcher can always seek more participants.In the case of the response rate problem, the researcher can actively work on increasing the response rate, or can try to determine if there is in fact a difference between those who partake in the study and those who do not.The most important thing for a researcher to remember is to eliminate any and all variables that the researcher cannot control.While this is nearly impossible in field research, the closer a researcher comes to isolating the variable of interest, the better the results.
The instruction size is the first thing that is apparent. By looking at the pattern you can distinguish between fixed-sized, or variable-sized instructions, telling a lot about the architecture. ARM either has 16 bit (thumb mode) or 32 bit (normal) fixed-size instructions.

Also for every ISA there are some instructions that are very common, for example x86 has very-recognizable NOPs (0x90).

Having said that, seeing it is ARMv3 code specifically in one glance is pretty impressive.
Great article, I am going to upgrade to 1.4 as soon as it comes out and use py-bcrypt
The Last, Arduous Mile of Startup Fundraising
I just signed up to a fresh stackoverflow account and got this "passwords must contain lowercase, uppercase and a punctuation mark" BS. It's the only site in the last 2 years+ that I've signed up with that has historic requirement.

I prefer the >12 character simple password to the random digit type and I'd have expected better from a site devoted to technical experts as Stackoverflow is.
The article was almost good until this part: "They do not necessarily know all of the details of syntax of a given language, especially if they are used to a good IDE which does it for them..." followed by description of IDE guessing which package the class is in. Um, no. If I'm interviewing a software engineer for C# or C++ position, I'd expect them to know syntax of the language they're claiming their proficiency in. I wouldn't care if someone wouldn't remember details of standard library/framework (heck, I wouldn't even ask - this IS a stupid question), but if a person can't write 10 lines of framework-agnostic code in the language they claim they are specializing, that's the end of interview right there.
RaspberryPi Case (prototype)
Create your social media persona, not just a profile
tldr; 'Scaling' WordPress is simple. Install a caching plugin like WP Super Cache.

WP gets a bad rap because it seems to spit out the oh so unattractive "Error Connecting to Database" message under the slightest load. Perhaps it's inefficient, i'm not sure why it seems to die so easily.

But... good news is, there is a simple solution. WP renders everything dynamically on every request. It fetches the post from the DB each time you load the page. But, more often than not, the content is only going to change when 1) you write a new post, or 2) a comment is made to a post.

A simple caching plugin solves this. It will render the page with a specific timeout (3600 seconds is default I think?, 1 hr) and then just serve up that HTML rather than hitting the DB. This will solve 99% of your problems. I've never really seen a WP site die when used with something like this. Duh, because it's just static HTML at that point haha.

Combine this with a PHP cache like APC (my personal favorite opcode cache of the moment) and a fast webserver like nginx, and you're gonna pretty much survive anything.
You're right, the description on the site is not very helpful, I'll add that.

TL;DR It's just a visualization layer above the HN frontpage. Hot means a post has either 'a lot of comments' or 'a lot of points' (configurable with the filter dropdown). It's not much but I was wondering whether anyone would be interested in having such a way of looking at HN. If there's someone who found that useful I'd probably develop it further
Every brands had a Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc... page. But it's not enough. If Lady Gaga tweet only a couple of times a week is not so important, she's still have millions of followers, she's Gaga, you're not!
I want to suggest you to take paper and pen and start to write a successful Social Media Campaign to create your Persona! How? Start with one social network and focus on it.
Yes I agree that you cannot target the the latest API, and there is a lag, which has been exceptionally long because of the Honeycomb blip.

But it just means that, form factor and to a certain extent performance differences are more likely to be a problem than perceived platform level fragmentation IMO.
The focus of the comments is not the disjoint between software and hardware releases, but rather that manufacturers are very slow to update to newer software releases. That's what everyone's complaining about. Sony Ericsson releasing a new phone with an old operating system is just another indication of that.

For your comparison to be accurate, Apple would have had to release a new Mac that didn't run Mountain Lion, two months after Mountain Lion was released.

Or, HP would have had to release a new laptop that didn't run Windows 7 after Windows 7 was released. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but it's unlikely to happen simply because Microsoft is providing HP with prereleases way before a new Windows version is announced, while Google is currently only providing that service to their Nexus launch partner (at least that's the excuse that Sony Ericsson had).
Attacking the clones: indie game devs fight blatant rip-offs
Sounds interesting, got a link to that study?
I believe the reason for those disgusting cameras (on iPod touch and iPad 2) is thickness... The camera manufacturers don't make such thin cameras. iPad 3 is thicker, so they can shove a higher resolution camera in it.
Human rights groups are the new extortion gangs
This is different, as sed is the proper name of the program (and just happens to be an acronym as well.) awk, while also being a stream editor, is not "a SED".

Anyway, complaining about redundant use of acronyms is IMO pointless and needlessly prescriptive. Language is a fluid thing.
Open source is a mean, not an end. We tend to forget that.

Open Source is both a means and an end. It can be a means to collaboration, but the ongoing sharing of knowledge is itself a virtue.
I feel the opposite, Over the 3 years or so I've worked with django full time there have been very good reasons to have different setups wrt environment, virtualenvs & web servers.

That said I tend to use env vars to identify which environment an app is running in and build everything off that, which branch / db / logging target etc to use.
yep, it's back up again, will install it. Thanks.
> My favorite phone interview question? “What’s your favorite language?” followed by “What are it’s weaknesses?”

This is also one of my favourite questions to ask when I'm interviewing someone. Unfortunately most of the time the only response I get is confused stares. Maybe this is just a UK culture thing but it feels like many people are not prepared to display critical thinking on a job interview.
Is this a license/sub type of thing or an "I get it permanently for free" once I've downloaded it once type of thing?
If you happen to be asked such questions it might be a good indication that the type they are looking for is code monkey. Or they are just not good enough to assess engineering skills. In both cases it's a red flag.
What's the normal price?
Sorry. When I say "case study" I mean "case to be studied," in the future tense, as opposed to in the past tense. I do not know whether anyone has ever done an academic user-economy study of Neopets.
It seems the same person writes all these "we have been acquired" posts.
Nice data, thanks, you might be right with your estimate.
WRT scalability - it's scaling UI components over time. I build large complicated metadata driven applications and it's quite hard to compose an application on the fly.

Agree with performance. I hope WinRT is better. I have little faith based on my experience with Win8 so far but it's not RTM so I shouldn't comment on it yet.
How to Back Up a Linux (or unix-like) System The Right Way