skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, you're being sarcastic, but aside from the fact that you're scorning blind people for crying out loud, there are laws that might well apply to you.

Do you do any work building government websites or sites that serve other large public services? Do you sell services to schools or universities? Do you run a site that people might be obligated to use for some reason (i.e., website for a utility)?

Think of it like this: "I know it's kind of a shitty thing to block disabled folks from my site -- but given that I'm an X (offering X, hosting X, etc.), is it ILLEGAL for Xs to discriminate against disabled people?"

Laws are progressively covering more ground as time goes on, so while I doubt there will ever be much enforcement for teensy hobby sites (like the guy at the side of the highway selling strawberries probably won't be building any handicapped ramps), it's pretty reasonable to expect gradually more requirements from all serious sites. In the UK (for example) the Equality Act 2010 gets a bit more explicit that all sites should at least makes reasonable efforts for accessibility:
http://www.shoosmiths.co.uk/news/3441.asp

Some info for many countries here:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/

(Caveat: I'm not an accessibility legal expert by any means, but have been doing a bit of reading on the subject over the past year, as I'm developing a site we intend to be fully accessible).
I wasn't placing blame on the game but on himself. The game was the final straw that broke the camel's back. Yes, there were other health issues which I addressed later in the post.
I guess what he meant in essence was - would Android exist at all if iOS hadn't shown the world how great smartphone OSs could be? Just like Apple showed the world how good PC OSs could be back in the 80s.

Very important not to underestimate the polish and usability that iOS brought to the table. I remember looking into developing an app for symbian and realising how tricky it would be (tools, guides, lack of examples, crappy devices, etc).
Choose for Change - Developing For a Cause
It's a bit odd that the main example on the home page references an object called DS on 8 of 10 lines, but DS is never referenced elsewhere in the documentation.

I know from prior exploration at their github account that DS stands for "data store" but I still think it's pretty weird that searching for "DS" on the docs page brings up nothing.
Fair point - there isn't one true formula on this. I was just trying to share some concrete examples to point folks in the right direction
Agreed. Excessive video game playing over many years may have contributed towards decline in health and eventual heart attack, but not a 3-day sprint.
Not knowing anything about this individual I don't want to make too many assumptions but the broader point here is valid. The whole culture of 'hardcore gaming' is pretty creepy to me. There's a fine line between fun and mental illness. It's too easy to look at this as just a harmless eccentric hobby when, past a certain point, it really needs to be treated more like a serious problem with interventions & rehab. I really dislike how the culture around it is so supportive of obviously destructive behaviors. It's eerily similar to hardcore drug culture at times.
Students - Buy a PC, get an Xbox 360
I assume you're talking about a scan using "-O"? For example "nmap -O 192.168.0.1".
Sure why not. Some people don't even mind the lack of polished modules and instead spend time to write their own.

Not a big fan of node.js (or JavaScript for that matter) and probably never will so I can't comment much.
Choose for Change is so cool! Bought 11 footprints, great cause, great idea! Love when people use tech for a great cause
But how much of that was actually tied to games? Maybe I'm being needlessly nitpicky but I didn't even notice the comment about lifestyle as I first read the article, tucked away near the end.
They should mount this inside a keyboard, I don't want an extra dongle randomly lying on my table.

On a completely different note, though, I wonder what the range on these things is. Could have excellent applications to robotics, I hope they don't completely close the vision outputs behind their own gesture APIs or something...
To me 50% of this show was Dan Benjamin. Without him it will not be the same show, even if Gruber is the main draw card. Sad to see him leave, but I'm more interested in what is ahead for Dan. He has a great network.
First off: I am really sorry you have to lose a friend like that.

But please, don't blame yourself. Asking him to come in or not might well have not changed anything. While gaming certainly can be addictive, he had a heart attack. That has nothing to do with gaming. You can get a heart attack at any moment. Heck, you can have one while sleeping. (You can even have one without any recognizable symptoms)

So, instead I suggest people learn what the symptoms of a heart attack are - so if you or somebody close to you has one, you can actually recognize it and get help in time. Here's one link giving more detail: http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/heart_disease_heart...
Managing distractions is incredibly important, be it reading useless stuff online, or gaming.
I recognize that you're posing a (presumably rhetorical) philosophical question, but it seems worth pointing out that there are certain contexts where accessibility is a matter of law.

If your content is intended for use or distribution by a US federal agency, or was created using federal dollars or as part of a federal contract, you are responsible for ensuring that it is compliant with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which specifies that your content be accessible to individuals with disabilities.

Leaving aside for a moment the larger question of whether specific blind and/or deaf individuals consider their sight/hearing status to be a disability or not, section 508 is generally interpreted to mean that your content needs to be as accessible as you can make it. That means (among other things) working to make sure that screen readers and other such software are able to make full use of your site's functionality.

In my experience, the process of getting a project compliant with section 508 is generally very valuable- it makes you think a lot about how your content is organized, and rewards use of semantic markup. It can be frustrating at times, but the end result is definitely worth it for a wide range of reasons.

Here are a couple of places to get started learning about 508 issues:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Re...

http://www.section508.gov/
I'm sorry for the loss of a friend; I don't pretend to know how you currently feel.

That said, I think there's a pretty big leap you're taking from "playing a lot of games" and "had a heart attack at 32." Obviously, I don't know this person; but I do know a lot of folks who have gone on binge gaming sessions who have never had heart attacks.

I'm not saying there isn't any connection or that it didn't contribute in any way; however, let's be honest with ourselves and admit that a binge gaming session, while not in any way healthy and certainly a likely contributor to this person's poor health, most likely did not cause a heart attack.
Which does suggest an interesting activity: a DB shootout. Presented is a set of data and specified queries. Build solutions against a database you're fond of and show us how fast is can be.

Would have to be something like a public github repo, because valid solutions would need to at least include DB configs and possibly post-query data massage.

Something like jsperf.com but for persistence.
Does anyone have a link to where on Space X's site they will be streaming the video? Preferably including a countdown until launch.
Babelverse Is Out To Democratize Translation
It would be cool if entering some special code erased everything but the contact info for your lawyer.

Maybe it could be better still. Send out some automated texts, erase everything but the number for your lawyer, and start recording audio and video and storing them on a remote server when possible.
VOIP for games is the most obvious. I imagine someone can build out a "Say Something" competitor to Draw Something pretty easily using this API.
I heard Microsoft Visio team probably have less than 50 people working on it (granted the name Microsoft and the Office brand provide a huge selling point).

Visio almost hit $1B according to insider... (can't verify).
Gaming? So fast food with no exercise would not have killed him if he had just not played games?

I had a friend with diabetes, he was way over weight. One day we talked about his new apartment, WOW and girls. He mentioned he had a good view of the joggers from his window. I mentioned I am frequently one of those joggers, and you see a lot more of the cute girls that way.

The topic of conversation moved to WOW, and I mentioned how I hate to touch a computer after spending all day at work sitting in front of one.

Despite subtle and not so subtle hints he did not start to exercise and died alone in his mid 30s.

And you know what, a lot of people die exactly the same way, with no gaming what so ever involved.

This whole heart attacks are a top killer, so eat well and exercise deal pre-dates computers by decades.
AFAIK garnishing wages is generally done as a percentage or fixed amount based on income. It will not prevent him from paying rent.
http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

Doesn't look like they have a countdown yet.
Social Business Software
Software suite of tools for helping your business from idea to launch.
... day trading ...

Well, if you're a successful day trader I'd say rather that the normal rules for not letting work consume you, rather than play. If you are unsuccessful, then it probably does fall more in line with a gambling problem.
Just another roudnabout way of supporting Chinese sweat shops.

Enjoy the 'fruits' of your labor.
Creating the Windows 8 User Experience
Does it really have anything to do with gaming?

It's not like he was a physically healthy guy who sat down for a 30 hour Diablo 3 bender and died, right?

Regardless, I'm sad for anyone who dies so young.
Because consumers don't demand it. They want Facebook and pretty colors and high megapixel cameras.

The people who do ask for it are obviously criminals.
Anyone know how people without hands can program?
People who are 32 years old don't die of sudden heart failure for lack of a gym membership or a poor diet. He almost certainly had a serious health issue, possibly one he wasn't aware of. That kind of progressive heart disease comes slowly, with lots of warning.

Gaming certainly didn't help him, but it certainly didn't kill him.
... and when we look at the um... "old" fart Java... their roster is even more impressive: LinkedIN, Google, NetFlix, Amazon.

Just commenting ... :D
Wiping your device is justification enough for them to subpoena the iCloud backups in most cases.
I think the point was more that the psychology of the disorder is independent of what society chooses to call the activity.
But of course the "newly monied social media entrepreneurs" will "invest in their dreams." Many already are. Dreams like space exploration and reforming education seem to be shared by a lot of entrepreneurs today.

After we make money from easier-to-start startups, we can be like Musk and Thrun...
I guess if you punish a few people hard enough it will make everyone else suffer enough that they'll stop rewarding themselves with free music.
> When the only source & output of creativity and energy are all wrapped up in playing a video game.

One day I imagine we'll be able to map real world problems to video games, in a way that doesn't require knowledge of the solution to create the mapping.

Programming itself is very similar to a game. If someone could make it into a virtual world, where I "write" code simply by putting together various machines in 3D space...well, that would be fun :)
I hate to touch a computer after spending all day at work sitting in front of one

The funny thing I have discovered is that while I don't like it on a high level of thinking, it actually can be relaxing. As a consequence, I am trying to slowly add physical activities instead of going cold-turkey- it isn't a leap I can make in one day, and finding myself with no stress relief is murderous.
In a normal distribution the probability of a value higher or lower than mean is 50%. So if you find mean, the average of your +1/-1 noise is zero -> if you're on mean you'll remain there.

If you're not on mean you have a (50 + error)% chance of moving towards mean and (50 - error)% chance of moving away from mean on the next random value -> the trend is towards mean.
Yes, that number is ridiculous.

For reference, that's about four times bigger than the iTunes music catalog (20mio MP3 files * 5MB average filesize = 100TB).
Making your app feel at home on the host OS is a hipster thing to do now?
I'm not really sure what this has to do with gaming. Spending days at a time hunched in front of a computer with little sleep is like the quintessential image of working the start-up life. He could have spent those three days working in vim rather than playing Diablo and he'd probably still be gone. More importantly, don't blame yourself for letting him take that time off, a heart attack at thirty isn't something that a day in the office could prevent.
I'm guessing the initial lack of female pirate LEGO minifigs had something to do with the fact that 99.9999% of actual historical pirates were men. And that pirate ships were not exactly woman-friendly environments. Just a thought. Sounds crazy, I know. :)

Back to the neverending gender persecution fest discussion on the web. That has nothing to do with HN and shouldn't be on HN, please.

ps. I'm personally not happy that every time I go into a haircut shop like GreatClips that all the haircut folks are women. It makes me feel oppressed. I want to see men working there, and have men cutting my hair, so I and my sons have that as a role model. As it is the feminarchy is distorting the perception of the array of actual career choices available to my sons and grandsons. ... Have I made my point?
"Burning" seems like an understatement.

Looks like a switch to dedicated hardware would amortize within... 3 months.
I'm genuinely embarrassed that this seems so revolutionary. Brilliant, but seems like it shouldn't be strikingly so... as though it SHOULD have been done before.
A story of Hunting down obscure Ruby Enterprise Edition GC bug
"Them" is just as incorrect in your example. "I saw a patient today. Sad case." "Really, what was wrong with them?"
I'm reminded of the Heinlein quote "Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before."

The same is true of markets.
It's silly to associate this with gaming only. You can say the same thing about getting sucked into anything. I'm sure quite a few people here have coded non-stop for a few days, or pulled some all nighters to meet a deadline. Everything should be done in moderation, not just video games.
any historical case of that actually working?
“Ryan, I think I can increase your revenue”

I don't know about this. To me, it reads like spam. I take your point, though - we like it when we hear our name or read it in print. I do try to use the subject's name in the message body when I want to sound a bit more personal.
I read somewhere that the ROI from Apollo and NASA generally exceeds any other US public spending by a massive amount. The amount of space age derived technology is hard to imagine and perhaps not communicated as well as it could be.

I don't live in the US, but if I could wave a magic wand and do anything I wanted, increasing global space exploration spending x10 or more would be top of my list. The benefits would be enormous to everyone- you are pushing the very boundaries of what's possible, you are going to uncover some interesting new tech along the way. If the US got into a massive space race with China (sending a manned spacecraft on Mars for example) the benefits would be felt globally for decades. Pity it takes a rivalry to create the urgency for doing such ambitious projects, instead of doing them because they are worthy goals.

http://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff/database
s/hardcore gaming/competitive horseback riding/d

s/hardcore gaming/competitive Go playing/d

s/hardcore gaming/dedicated Iron Man competition training/d

s/hardcore gaming/frequent weekend get-away-ing/d

s/hardcore gaming/dedicated volunteering/d

Perhaps I'm not familiar with the hardcore gaming you've seen, with exception, perhaps, of WoW addiction, but you need to be careful of looking at a particular use of a person's pass-time, or even an entire culture's use of their pass time
Facebook: the ultimate drug
"...a pretty boring business-to-business industrial sector"

The outcome was predictable from reading the first sentence. This is not a story about any failure of Facebook, it's a story about not understanding how to market to an appropriate demographic.
You don't need dumb programming tricks to handle vendor prefixes. What I'm against is making CSS more complex.
Do Facebook ads carry their weight?
Jebus. Ok, I need to look into disk encryption (and maybe TrueCrypt) for my phone. AFAIK, there is nothing incriminating on it, but the cops can always find something if they really want to.
backdated garbage

I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Yea, I would not recommend using Rails for this purpose. Middleman (http://middlemanapp.com) is the best parts of Rails asset packaging in a more lightweight package.

https://github.com/emberjs/website is developed with Middleman so may serve as a good model.

This leverages Middleman as well: https://github.com/wbinnssmith/ember-frontend-boilerplate .
Chameleon is what the Android tablet UI should look like
I believe someone already did this in Minecraft.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/09/minecraft-users-go-wild-b...
I remember seeing an old ad re-posted on the net, featuring a girl playing with Lego. It's a little reminiscent of Apple, in a way.

Here it is:
http://cdn.twentytwowords.com/wp-content/uploads/Awesome-198...
Google Chrome is the world's most popular browser, beats Internet Explorer
The title of your post blames gaming pretty directly.
I guess it's an overreaction to the more zealous of Apple customers. They want to give Apple all the credit when their contribution was to create a significant stepping stone. I know most people who use Apple's products see the company as an important part of an enormous mix of players all doing something important.
As a long-time 60 minutes viewer I was actually a little shocked by what a dick Morely was last night. The piece really did seem very slanted against Thiel, with not much substance to back it up.
> consumed by pornography, alcohol, gambling, day trading, and I'm sure other things

other things being startups?
Optin Surge Blueprint
I posted on his blog comments as well but hand written thank you notes are a huge differentiator.

They are one of the most important yet most ignored thing all entrepreneurs should do.
Inside Apple's secret plan to kill the cash register
How do you define digital storage?

There is an astonishing (2^70B) bits of data just from the digital (open/closed) state of all the fingers of the living people on earth.

Sorry if a tad bit irrelevant.
It's funny, I completely disagree that "video games are great fun when played in moderation". The "in moderation" part obviates the whole point for me.

That's why I don't play them anymore.
Transgender at Five
The inspirational 18 year old who changed my life.
I'd try a chordic keyboard used by toes or foot positions.
> The people who do ask for it are obviously criminals.

You're being sarcastic, but we're moving in the direction of "police need unlimited power to investigate, so let's make it illegal to ask for privacy". And yes, we're a long way off from that scenario (at least in the USA) but I can see it on the horizon.

The thing that really scares me is the UK system -- CCTV cameras on every corner explicitly built for surveillance. We have a lot of cameras in the US (traffic, ATM, etc) but they generally belong to different entities and there is no comprehensive framework for getting (near)real-time footage from all of them.
Not to feed the addiction, but that's pretty much exactly what SpaceChem does. You're programming, without programming. And you have some very clearly defined limits, letting you be remarkably creative with your solutions.

Now then, that doesn't apply well to a real world problem, but there are definitely parallels.
I would guess when these numbers are closer to parity. http://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/women-stem-gender-gap-innovat...
Here's the fundamental problem. If you can't understand very basic security tools and concepts, you cannot securely operate a computer, much less hope to ever write secure code.

SSH is one of the easiest security tools to use safely that has ever existed. I would say it is second in usability only to HTTPS in browsers, while having a much better actual security record, and is infinitely more powerful, while keeping basic operation so simple I once taught my mother to use it.

I am 100% confident that anyone competently engaged in development or systems administration can understand the basic concepts and operations of SSH in five minutes. Any fear of it is irrational. It is not hard, it was specifically designed not to be hard.

I'm equally confident you've not taken the five minutes to understand these relevant concepts, because your statement about setting up a "safe" environment makes no sense in the context of OpenSSH. The defaults are inherently safe, as they should be. You must take specific actions to make the system unsafe.
Neat idea for that initial feel-good phase. I can see this being an interesting toy to take on a camping trip or similar. Pass it around and people can have some fun. I get it.

On the other hand, I echo some of the sentiments expressed by others who have experience actually playing guitar. I play classical guitar and have been teaching my kid the same.

Once you get past what I call single-note-at-a-time pieces progress into more interesting music requires real work. On the guitar, just like the piano, fingering is of paramount importance. Without developing an understanding for this you'll twist your hand into a pretzel and simply will not be able to advance. Then there's proper right hand technique, which is different between and electric with a pick and classical or finger-style.

The guitar has weird and difficult simultaneous left hand finger motion that one must drill and learn. I suppose they could include such drills in the app. My favorite source of pain for both left and right hand training is "Pumping Nylon" by Scott Tennant. Most who know the subject would probably agree.

Reading written music is, in my opinion, very important and --I'll venture that far-- the only way to go. Tab is cool, but why go there if reading actual musical notation isn't that hard at all. As someone mentioned, there's a ton of information in a score. Scores written for guitar, particularly at the beginner level, include right and left hand fingering as well as all sorts of other notations. All of my sheet music has copious notes on pencil as I learn the pieces.

A neck full of LEDs just can't take you very far at all. I'm sure I could be fun, but there's a real brick wall that'll make the fun stop pretty quickly.

That said, if something like this inspires the player to move up and learn the right way then I am all for it. I might actually get one just because I'm a sucker for gadgets, but it will be just that: a fun gadget to bring out, show off and possibly take camping. I believe that because of this, they have a good chance of becoming the next million-dollar-plus Kickstarter project.
I love SpaceChem! Fantastic game...though when I'm playing it, I think "I should just be programming instead." If only SpaceChem had more freedom and could actually create code.