skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you say is true, but what percentage of people are not paying because they can't afford it vs. the one's who just don't want to pay for it?

While it is true that someone downloading a game that they couldn't have paid for doesn't deprive the maker of money, it's quite a slippery slope.
Also I just downloaded the demo and World of Goo is an awesome game.
I don't get why he mentions Mint as well, since Mint is a free product (right now, that is). Can't pirate something that's free..
It's not even true if you can't afford it. You have $500 to spend on "frivolity" this year. You choose not to spend $20 of it on World of Goo. Now you're not going to spend the money next year, either: you already took it. You might as well not spend the $500. Give it to charity, and just take everything you want. See, now you're Robin Hood!
Gradually. Except in very rare circumstances, not every visitor has to see the changes immediately. The main challenge is consistency of the data model, which should be separate from the presentation layer anyway, in an MVC-stylee. If you can upgrade the data model without affecting existing versions of the presentation layer, your presentation layer can be rolled out gradually.
Taking New Mobile Browsers Through The Acid 2 Test
They'll probably come up with the bright idea of requiring excessive paperwork any time you update the site so that innovation slows down to a more "manageable" rate.
I would suggest that girls form study groups. My daughter and 4 of her girl friends formed one in her senior year in high school for English, Calculus, Physics, etc. My daughter got a lot from it. Two of the girls were valedictorians; all went to top schools. It succeeded because they were motivated to get into good schools and the the simple model probably doesn't scale. School sponsored pairings in science didn't work so well because personality problems and differences in dedication.

Has anyone had experience (or their kids) with online study groups, particularly with collaborative aids?
Infinite set paradoxing has become a morbid infection that is today spreading in a way that threatens the very life of probability theory, and requires immediate surgical removal. --- E.T. Jaynes

It applies to other theories as well. Giving real-life meaning to a construction based on infinity and then shouting "paradox!" seems counter-productive.
"When faced with a binary choice — live or die — I made the following upgrades..."

I find it fascinating that death is one of the biggest agents of change that we know of.
The Economist, which isn't exactly some small rural newspaper, talked about housing looking bubbly a few years ago.
Haven't done anything of the like, but perhaps using something like apache mod_proxy to redirect visitors to machines that are already updated?
I think his point is that the software probably wouldn't cost $600 if they weren't figuring in theft. Things in retail brick & morter stores also cost more due to "shrinkage".

Stealing has a price whether we chose to "logic" it away or not. Think of it this way: if everyone just did as you suggested and took all games for free, wouldn't most companies just stop producing games?
Google might be interested ...
And for those of you who want to debate ethical considerations here at hacker news, you may want to think twice about the persona you end up revealing in this public forum.

Likewise. You might want to take heed of your own advice.

If you're treating everyone you do business with as people that will potentially rip you off, I wouldn't want to work with you. Its amazing at how quickly "Good intentions to prevent piracy" morph into "But my product cant be pirated. Fuck the customers. They're all crooks anyway."
Ask HN: Advertising Books
I'd like to learn more about the fundamentals of advertising and am not sure where to start. I'm looking for something that has both theory and examples, kind of like you'd see in an introductory college text.

Amazon lists a meager 249,349 books on the subject--any particular recommendations?
Sorry, but this argument is a strawman. Most people who are downloading games free aren't spending all their dollars on games and then downloading the rest once they run out of money.
i remember reading somewhere that ebay changed the background color of their homepage from gray to white, gradually, over 6 months, as not to alienate customers who were used to the gray. can't provide links, and sorry because this isn't really related. i just thought that was interesting. :)
They'll take a few webservers and their associated middle tier boxes out of service on their front-end loadbalancers, wait for all the sessions to migrate/fail over to others, upgrade them and put them back into service. The loadbalancers will be smart enough to do affinity (put this customer onto this pool of servers if possible). At any one time after the roll-out begins, x% of the customer base will be on the new code where x->100 if things go well, or if something unexpected happens, (100-x)% of customers will never even see it, and the rest (x << 100) will see only a glitch before the loadbalancers swing them back across onto the old code.

In apps like this the policy is to only add columns to tables and new tables, never to remove anything, so the database can be upgraded hot, and the old code can continue to run on it, only the new code will see any new columns/tables.
General Tso was in fact a famous general in Chinese history, however, he had nothing to do with the chicken dish itself. General Tso's chicken was a dish created in NYC (there are about 3 chef's claiming to be the first). In essence, it is an American creation. You would be hard pressed to find anything that is as deep fried and sugary as General Tso's Chicken in real Chinese cuisine.

This is just one of the many dishes that come from places you wouldn't expect: fortune cookies were created in Los Angeles, Chicken Tikka Masala was created in London, and Caesar Salad was created in Tijuana.
Feynman's strength (well, one of them) was that he insisted on a simple example to follow during an experiment. This is an incredibly powerful technique for understanding complex calculations, and no doubt many hackers here use it when doing a code walk-through.

The problem was that the mathematicians fell into the trap Feynman laid and gave overly simple descriptions. Feynman seduced them into trying to give physical descriptions when it was, in truth, important to think about the details.

Banach-Tarski is a specific example of that, as many of you will know. I think Feynman knew full well what he was doing - just one of the games he played.

The technique has its limitations too. Restricting yourself to consider only the physical loses the power of abstraction. Many of you know that too, although perhaps you don't think of it that way. When you extract a method you're using abstraction - the method may not represent something physical. Feynman's technique can limit you there.

The story comes from "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynam", in the chapter called "A Different Box of Tools."

http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?a=DisplayParaSent&fname=...

Feynman makes a big deal about having unusual tools in the box - they let you solve problems that others find intractable. That's one real lesson. Acquire a wide variety tools, and know how to use them. Functional, Object Oriented, Imperative, Logic, Database, etc. They all have their place, and knowing them, really knowing them, gives you enormous flexibility.

Never stop learning new tricks.
You can't shop around for trauma care. But why can't you shop around for the cheapest non-emergency MRI, chemo-therapy center or dermatologist?

Hint: you can, I've done it. Now that I have insurance, I just pick the guy closest to me. Why should I bother to price shop when I don't get the savings?

When consumers price shop, corporations compete on price. See for example Walmart, Jetblue and Dell. And a lot of medicine is delivered by individuals or small businesses (i.e., 5 doctors in 1 office), not by corporations.
Blame human psychology. Jeff knows it's harder to pirate from "the little guys" so he plays on guilt. I'm sure most pirates are open to rational arguments though.
Steve's story has reminded me of the other HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=399967

This "other side" is exactly what makes low-level languages so powerful.
Have neither you nor your father heard or visited the mcmansion-filled exurbs around any large city? A friend of mine's parents recently brought one of those, and as I was looking through the booklet, I was awe-struck by the uniformity of it. There were 3 or 4 basic models, with 3 or 4 facades available for each one.

They might not be factory-assembled in the literal sense, but they are very much cookie-cutter and highly uniform in both visual and structural design.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Markham-s...
I'm surprised that with all the talk of ethics, no one has mentioned the GNU/Stallman philosophy: those who are unethical are the ones making software but not making it free.
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Teens-Maneesh-Sethi/d...

I even had a tv show about teaching game programming back when I was 15 yrs old, on TechTV's call for help: http://www.courseptr.com/gamedev/maneeshsethitechtv.mpg

Good times---book was a bestseller and translated into like 5 languages. Good times for a 14 yr-old :)
It's totally different for different types of sites.
Facebook is different than Amazon is different than Yahoo is different than Flickr.

In general, I'd say, most sites data is sharded or clustered.
Amazon, I'm guessing, basically has many many different instances of their app running on different clusters all over the world (multiple clusters per datacenter). So they upgrade a cluster at a time, and their databases all synchronize with others of the same version.

Facebook's data is, obviously, sharded by network. So any given cluster runs x number of networks. Upgrades are then, again i'm guessing here, rolled out network by network. The data layer can be different from network to network.

Most of the time though, updates to large scale services aren't changing db schemas or making huge changes to the data layer, so it's as simple as updating the code and rebooting some app servers.

(Obviously I don't know exactly how they do it, cause I don't work at any of these places, but deploying it's that hard of a problem to solve)
Go read Gladwell's Outliers. It explains all this.
I got started on my Apple ][+ mostly by typing in games from magazines and then modifying them. Softalk was the best - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softalk. They had a Rogue style overhead view ASCII art dungeon crawler - I added my own weapons and monsters and stuff.

Typing something in was a great way to learn how it worked.
The Shootorials section of Kongregate is our attempt to recreate that for Flash games - http://www.kongregate.com/labs
Then don't take something until you have $20 to support them. I'm not perfect when it come to piracy but I do feel guilty enjoying something for free when I know someone put a lot of effort into it expecting compensation.

$20 is cheap too. If you can't afford $20, get a better job. Or spend the time you would have devoted to playing World of Goo teaching yourself the skills to get a better job. Again I'm not perfect but I can't justify stealing a $20 game from an independent developer. Stealing a tv show or $2000 software might be a gray area, but World of Goo deserves support.
That money (cash reserves) is taxed as well - unless you spend it within the designated fiscal year or quarter.
150K uniques a month are literally nothing for a search engine. That's called failure.
I had a heart attack.

Why did that happen? Most people do not have heart attacks.
Soon enough, they may not be thinking that the portion sizes are too large. Since the '80s, food consumption in China has skyrocketed. The typical traditional Chinese cuisine used to be chock full of vegetables in healthy portions. Now, the consumptions of meat has gone up 100% in the past 20 years. Really, eating more meat and fatty foods is one of the first signs of a nation growing in prosperity.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-06/24/content_679022...

China will soon have the same problems of obesity as the US.
You might want to take heed of your own advice.

For better or worse, I stand by everything I've ever posted here.

If you're treating everyone you do business with as people that will potentially rip you off

That's a leap you made, not me. I have always given everyone I've ever worked with every opportunity to succeed. Once they take advantage of me, all bets are off.

I wouldn't want to work with you.

One less thing for either of us to worry about. See how well this forum works?
In my humble opinion...nothing really. While it certainly has it's benefits, it also leads to xenophobia and sometimes borderline racism (ask the average American what they think of outsourcing).

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
-George Bernard Shaw
This is not Reddit thankyou.
MacGyver! Save Iceland!

Ok, what do I have?

Girl power, Gaia worship, $800k, and Bjork. You have one year to make 61 billion dollars, and you can't exploit any natural resources.

Oh God...
I always add a one or two sentence description for a method and reference book or url if it implements a particular algorithm. I go for the meaningful names approach and document parameters and returns when meaningful isn't enough. I try to keep methods short enough that internal comments aren't usually needed.

If there are assumed states or input ranges, asserts are better than comments. Comments drift out of correctness, asserts don't.

I try to design data and configuration files with comments and then comment them with field descriptions and examples.
Good grief, where are you meeting all these "partners"?
"So where does Jeff base his "in fact" anti-piracy claim on?"

I would attribute it to wishful thinking based on an assumption of human morality. The truth is that people are lazy and don't consider the morality of their actions. How else can the rampant piracy of tv shows freely available on hulu.com be explained? The commercials are very short and the quality is good. Pirates are in the habit of getting their software from bittorrent and don't even look for a legal method of obtaining the software they use.
What's your reference for saying that live.com can hardly get any traffic?

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang... has them at #4 (which seems unbelievable but definitely past the bar of very high traffic sites)
No-one in Iceland thinks it's odd that a musician should also be a VC.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bono+u2+venture+capital
I'm a bit sick of lists of advice on blogs. I wish this trend would stop.

Also, and I mean this as politely as possible, the advice is pretty obvious in this case. Nothing really controversial here to make me think.
You see, Jeff Atwood prefers talking about software to actually making software, by a long, long shot. Most of his writings are nothing more than summaries of other people's work, sometimes padded with some theorizing and sweeping generalizations of his own. His writing style may make him seem like an expert, but he isn't.
Stealing does NOT always have a price. And using shrinkage is a fallacious argument. Physical goods in store have an actual production cost. What's the cost of dragging and dropping a file to make a copy of it?

A few cents for your time, maybe fifty cents to a dollar for storage costs? It's not equivalent to a an actual physical good which could have a material cost of anywhere from a few cents, to hundreds (thousands) of dollars.
Somehow you managed to pick up more than your fair share of unethical people. Maybe you are doing something wrong.
And the allocation and efficiency of the taxes already in place. If you work for the government, largely due to lack of competition & indifference, there's very little meritocracy and it's hard to fire people.
25. Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin - Streams
also biggest injustice for humanity in my opinion.
his time, effort, and skill DO have a value, so no.
Of course it does. Shrinkage isn't fallacious, companies look at how much they lost to theft and adjust their prices accordingly.

What do you think companies do when they see that their product has an 82% piracy rate? They think "we only made 18% of what we should have on this!!!". What they do after that depends on a lot of things, but some people stop making things, some jack up the price to their real customers and some implement ridiculous things like DRM that even terrorize their customers. But all these things have a price and most of us pay it one way or another.
My software got pirated too: http://appulo.us/appdb/?page=viewapp&id=2732

I'm wearing this as badge of honor. :-) Of course I treat this lightly because I think that less then a quarter of iPhones are jailbroken, so I know there is a fairly low upper limit to this, uhm, "free promotion" so to speak.
Eventually, computers will be able to do the job of the human, and 4 million cameras won't be a problem to watch.
I constantly remember the story of that damn drill, precisely because it is such a good metaphor. It might be worth learning that style of writing.
No, it's not like they're claiming you can do this with a physical real ball. So I don't see why it's 'absurd'.
Well, against the Axiom of Choice, at least.

Attempts were once made to show that Euclid's fifth postulate could be deduced from the others by assuming it was false, and seeing where that led. A perfectly valid technique, as you know. Several assumed that it succeeded, because the conclusions were so obviously ludicrous, and from that it was assumed that Euclid's geometry was the only one.

Of course, now we know that the conclusions weren't contradictions, and are "simply" non-Euclidean geometries.

"Counter-Intuitive" is not the same as "Contradiction."

Just because the Axiom of Choice leads to such counter-intuitive results it doesn't mean they're not true. Just because infinities lead to bigger infinities (via Cantor), flasks of finite volume but infinite surface area,

http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/277351.aspx

and hotels that never run out of room,

http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=5584228&t...

it doesn't mean that they aren't useful, or don't, in some sense, exist.
A regex of machines?
Every odd machine in the first datacenter?
Software load balancers?

Uh, I'm guessing most places do it much more scientifically than that, and I would be very surprised if anyone in the top 100 sites is using a software loadbalancer (I only know of Wordpress using nginx http://barry.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/load-balancer-update/).

Most places run a dedicated hardward loadbalancers from F5 or Cisco or Juniper.
Look up the fraction of search traffic they get compared to Google (or even Yahoo) - and the ad revenue they can generate from it.
Maybe you mean "figuratively nothing" based on the standards you apply. 150K is certainly not "literally nothing" nor is it "called a failure" without consensus. I'm applying a different standard for 'fail' than you are. My standard comes from "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?":

A contenstant starts out strong and then "blows it" but still goes home with cash they didn't have when they started. Did they 'fail' or not?

Cuil had five million visitors during its first month and still has 150K, plus they have received $33 million from someone else's pocket. Even if they go under, the members will keep a nice slice of that for the ride home. The connections they have developed from such a high profile project position them well for their next endeavor. In addition, individual members are unlikely to be remembered as causing the 'failure' unless there is political backbiting among them after they leave (something that could well happen).

I'm sure pg would prefer people to think your way rather than mine. But I can't help feeling I wouldn't mind being in the position of Cuil's founders even if the hackers think I failed to slay the giant.
Oh, Bono was always in it for the money. It's worth noting that Bjork intends to invest in Iceland and Bono has moved all his money out of Ireland and into offshore tax havens.
Actually the "free" TV shoes are easily explained. Not everyone who lived in america and got addicted to these shows lives there now. You can't watch the shows on the broadcaster's web site unless you live in country, so if you live in another country that speaks a different language then you will have to either (a) wait some months to get a dubbed version, (b) wait over a year to buy the season DVD or (c) download it.
The state is arbitrary to the Host system, just like the state of memory before it is initialized is arbitrary to us. In the guest (Embedded) system, it's unknowable. Arbitrary is a term Gods (creators of embedded systems) use to refer to things that are unknowable from within guest systems, and that they don't particularly care about from the vantage point of the host.

The only assumption Yegge is making is that the Big Bang wasn't self-started from a confluence of previous state, but "initialized", overwriting that state, which almost makes sense: black holes overwrite later state, rendering incoming material arbitrary to its later states (they're an "information sink"), so why couldn't the Big Bang overwrite earlier state, rendering outgoing material arbitrary from its previous state (an "information tap")?
On FB I've often seen account unavailable while they do maintenance, but I've never been unable to log into Amazon or place an order. Sharding is very much overrated. However it's physically implemented, Amazon have one logical database and a customer's data is always available.
> Does anyone comment to that degree?

As an undergrad, it's probably better to err on the side of too many comments. Then trim them down later as you get better at it.

Good comments also probably helps your prof grade your work.
What are you saying? The creators of games don't have a value? Ok then, let them know that so they can all stop producing them. It's a terrible shame to have so many people devoted to something that creates no value for anyone.
The last I checked we don't live in some kind of bizarre socialist society where you can have things just because you can't afford them.
That's a leap you made, not me. I have always given everyone I've ever worked with every opportunity to succeed. Once they take advantage of me, all bets are off.

That leap was primarily made because of the anecdotes you gave followed by If you steal from me, I will seek recourse in any way I can. Period. — There was nothing in the post that indicated that you would continue trust people (partners or customers) in business.

However, you have since said otherwise, which is enough for me.

One less thing for either of us to worry about. See how well this forum works?
Quite well indeed. However I've never had a complaint about the workings of HN, on the technical side or otherwise.
This is true even on the micro level of HN karma points. I find myself wondering why certain comments or submissions get voted way up more than others. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that our brains evolved to discover relationships so we have this innate drive to explain and prove what we experience so that we can replicate it as we feel our survival depends on our ability to do so.
An interesting psychological effect: Diffusion of responsibility, in reverse. If, in a situation where individual contribution to an act is miniscule, no one is to "blame" for making something negative, then no one is also to reward if the result is positive. If a big company creates value, no one individually created that value in any meaningful way, so the value is psychologically "ownerless."

Is this an actual effect? I feel like doing an experiment.
I'm talking about the writing, not the subject matter. The first post was well written, not overly verbose, and well paced. The second was his usual verbal diarrhea.