skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some ideas for increasing revenue in this case:

1. increase the unique value of the physical game package; include a T-shirt, stickers, something that makes possession of the package worthwhile to someone who's played the game long enough to identify with it; mention this addition in the intro or scores screen.

2. Run a contest on the scores server; if you are one of the high-scoring players this week and you can send in the code printed on the bottom of the box, then you get the reward. For greater psychological investment make the reward personalised with the players nick/score/rank on it.
> I believe it is more often brain drain than due to the taxes.

Maybe the two are related somehow.
I'm not sure that asking people to document things that heavily is a good idea, because it creates a strong incentive against his latter suggestion to "Break your code into many short functions" -- you'll probably be less inclined to break out a fairly self-contained block into its own function when you know you'll have to write out yet another formal comment.

And agreed, code with many short, _well-named_ functions is generally more readable than code with a few cumbersome, but heavily documented ones. Also, the places where I'm inclined to put a line comment are usually natural boundaries for extracting code into its own function.
Exactly. It's not that Ruby lacks the ability to do some things, but rather, has its own additional idiomatic way of accomplishing the same task.
The last time I found Maddox funny was back in middle school.
And by the way, on color?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink

Did you check the references cited by that paragraph?
I love Cringely when it's a topic I'm already interested in because I'm sure he'll tell me something I didn't already know. In that case I'm willing to wade through all the profuse detail. At other times I read the commenters because they can usually summarize his treatise in a sentence or two with minimal significant signal loss, letting me know whether it's worth diving in for the full Cringely papal analysis. This article is 1378 words and scanning the article I see the word "TV" a lot so I'm guessing that's what it's about. Let's look at Geoff, the first commenter to shed some light:

"I couldn’t agree more. And it’s not just speakers. The back of most home theater setups looks like the snake pit from Raiders of the Lost Ark. There’s just no excuse for this."

Ok, so it is about TVs and Geoff The Commenter only took 33 words to summarize.

By the way, is it just me or does Cringely's wife (I assume) have kind of a Naomi Watts/Nicole Kidman vibe? And I mean that in the best possible way.
You are provably wrong on every point you just made.

1. The GPL is not a wing of a movement. It is a license.

2. The license isn't an ideology, it's an agreement willingly entered into by people who wish to use the FSF's copywritten creations. If people don't wish to use the FSF's copywritten creations, they do not have to license the software.

3. The majority of conflicts have been resolved without litigation - in fact you'll find the FSF has only recently litigated a company for the first time ever, despite existing for a couple of decades. Even in that case (Cisco Systems), this was after years of attempting to negotiate out of court.

BSD and MIT licenses have only provided a wealth of 'do what you want' source code with a license requiring little more than attribution. The major beneficiaries of BSD licenses have been Sun, Microsoft, and NetApp. If BSD licensing were a successful basis for growing software, every startup wouldn't be running on Linux, as Linux wouldn't exist. But it isn't, so they nearly always are.

In short: grow up hippy, I ain't giving you source code for free.
I will never be rich.
women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here.

It would be interesting if this phenomenon were correlated with 2D:4D ratio, wouldn't it?
http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+sailer+finger+length
By being too small to bother with.
"... I'm a bit sick of lists of advice on blogs. I wish this trend would stop .. the advice is pretty obvious in this case. Nothing really controversial here to make me think ..."

The cynicism can be well founded. The smoking reference is an example. But there is also a subtle message for those that look. You can improve your lot through small changes, mainly through perception. For instance, by micro management Om was probably being overly stressed. By letting go, he has reduced the stress. This slight change in perception of leadership just might him run his business a bit better. His change in perception about exercise - even a small one, might let Om live a bit longer, better.
Getting bought by Google just might be, though.

(And yes, I know they turned down an offer when they first started up, but they may have just been holding out for more.)
Shouldn't you have to back up a bold claim like that with proof though? Conventional treatment is often marginally better than placebo.
my friend, who just graduated with a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton, and is now a postdoc at Berkeley. She

http://www.google.com/search?q=princeton+affirmative+action+...

http://www.google.com/search?q=berkeley+affirmative+action+g...

Please post your friend's relevant scores (SAT, GRE, etc.).
I don't like that article makes it all or nothing. You can use many of the elements and ideas of a passive house, and still include a furnace.
Could you precisely define what you mean by "American exceptionalism"? I'm not getting what you're saying.
So you think that once a mashup passes a certain threshold of popularity they need to deal with this legal issue but not before then?
Incidentally, readers might think that this is psychobabble, but as an ENFP with ENTP/INTP tendencies, I've continually struggled with starting projects that I never finished. Then I met my cofounder. He's INTJ/ENTJ. In our working relationship, he's continually pushing towards completion. The amazing thing is that then completion actually happens! It's wonderful!
I have to be clear that I do not use unlicensed software. I also think that people should not use the software, if they can't afford it.

But I don't agree that all pirated copies are lost sales. Some of them might be of course, but you can't expect that each copy is a lost sale.

Let's use MS Office as an example. Here there is a free alternative (Open Office) that does most of what normal users needs. But the piracy level is very high. This is (originally) a product made for businesses, that most home users certainly don't need. You don't think that most homes would spend $399 on MS Office if MS made it more difficult to copy?

The reason why schools expects reports to be delivered as Word-documents is because it is implied that parents will have a copy of MS Office. This can only work because software can be pirated. If the parents had to spend $399, all schools would accept ODF documents, because there is usually at least one person connected to the school who knows that a free alternative is available.

BTW: "Piracy" is a word that the companies used (probably advised by a PR company), so that it will seem worse. It has worked out very well for them, even the "pirates" use that word. Perhaps I should use a similar strategy against the things I dislike... I will from this day forward interpret DRM as "Digital Rape Model" :-) Copying software is not stealing. It is not legal or (in most cases) ethical, it is it's own form of crime. It may be difficult to define, but calling it "stealing" is not right,

You might as well say that I will steal a potential sale, if I write a false negative fact about a product. It is wrong, but I doubt you can call it stealing.
The page design is both inspirational, and raises the bar frighteningly high.
I really don't think this is at all a fair or even correct statement. For one (and this should be obvious), FuckedCompany didn't report on emerging startups, just ones that were failing. Another thing is (and I feel this is pretty obvious too), I'm not surprised to see more posts about companies in trouble than ones succeeding in the first place (most companies don't succeed), and in an economic downturn this is even less surprising. What would be surprising to me would be to not hear about companies failing after having had years of reporting of emerging new startups.
I suspect this is bullshit. My guess is that this is what they tell themselves their philosophy is, but tend to "forget" or "not get around to" paying for most of the stuff they actually liked.

Do you disagree?
I got a lot out of Claude Hopkins' writings. He was one of the earliest pioneers of modern ads (turn of the 20th century), but when you read about how he meticulously tested his campaigns, it's as if he had the internet in mind. It's not the contemporary textbook you're asking for, but sometimes I think the classics have more valuable information in them. His stuff is also highly readable because it's full of good stories.

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Advertising-Scientific-Classics-L...
How Iceland Rattled the World
I guess it also depends on whether it generates traffic (revenue, awareness, whatever) for the sites from which it takes its content. Don't bite the hand that feeds you and all that.
so someone is going to focus on building that next thing people will want; and however stupid it will be it will probably profit.
From pg's essay: (opened my eyes to this)

"Wealth is what people want. I don't mean that as some kind of philosophical statement; I mean it as a tautology.

So an idea for a startup is an idea for something people want. Wouldn't any good idea be something people want? Unfortunately not. I think new theorems are a fine thing to create, but there is no great demand for them. Whereas there appears to be great demand for celebrity gossip magazines. Wealth is defined democratically. Good ideas and valuable ideas are not quite the same thing; the difference is individual tastes."

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Maybe they don't want to be caught, as Greenspun spelled out. The women with the ability seem to have a better life perspective than the men, on average. They prove their better understanding of mathematics by working out the bayesian priors and adjust career goals accordingly.
"And it costs them EXACTLY $0 to provide you?"

Stupid question. What kind of game have you ever downloaded that cost the developers EXACTLY $0 in time and effort to provide that game?

You probably meant "$0 to them for me to download or copy the bits." But I don't see the point in ignoring the very real costs incurred by the developer in the honest hope of compensation for that labor.

I also get irritated by people (not just you, but others in this thread and legion on the internet) that consider the right to pirate software and entertainment a great human right worthy of moral outrage. I might understand someone tempted to steal health care through some sort of fraud if they can't afford it legally, or justify stealing food or shelter or some basic necessity of human life. But defending the right to steal entertainment (most of it pretty low artistic quality to begin with) is just kind of pathetic and not worth the time expended. You must feel some sort of need to justify your own moral misgivings if you're taking time out to rationalize the virtues of pirating content, when you could be spending that time more productively in finding other content to pirate.

Again, this is not aimed at you, specifically, but also all of the people on Reddit, Slashdot, and Digg who spend so much time coming up with these rationalizations. I have more respect for the people who just pirate and don't claim it as some moral crusade against the Evil RIAA and Friends.
Looks promising, but a) it seems more of a hardware/mechanics/electronics organization, am I correct b) the membership fee seems somewhat high (or rather would be somewhat high if I only made use of this space for software/development, but it's very good deal for the machinery/mechanical/electronic hacking!). I'll check it out eventually - I've an interest in mechanics as well (car and motorcycle tuning) but it isn't as extensive as my interest in software hacking (as my alias suggests ;-)).
In poker, it's great to have a lot of shitty competitors. What game has this guy been playing?
I don't think very many people really make excuses like this. Most (if not all) of the people I know pirate quite liberally and they do it without apologizing or feeling the need to rationalize anything.

Even though those who have their interests aligned with the current copyright regime like to loudly declare otherwise, it really seems that intuitively there is no ethical problem with piracy.
Because there is no way a woman could be that smart, is there? Oh...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant

She must have the longest ring finger on the planet, yeah, that's it.
lots of time it takes major funding or acquisition by another company to make them a target... (I.e. YouTube)
Microsoft + movies.
I've always found it interesting to see advertisements in movies. Recently I went to go and see The Day The Earth Stood Still and noticed quite a bit of logos for windows vista. I thought it would be fun to see how many movies we could list with a lot of advertisements from Microsoft.
If the upgrade is expected to change the user experience, this is also a great time to do some A/B testing across versions.
Thank you. The article screamed "fake" pretty loudly at me as soon as I started reading it.
You sound like Job's friends.
> Could you precisely define what you mean by "American exceptionalism"?

I'm okay with "American exceptionalis refers to the belief that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations, because of its national credo, historical evolution, distinctive political and religious institutions, ethnic origins and composition, or national ideals." from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

You seem to think that non-Americans should be bothered by American exceptionalism. Why?
So that Google can neglect it into atrophy the same way it did with Dodgeball and Jaiku? I doubt it.
I had in mind traditional as I think there is a lot that can also be applied to the web. That being said, the end goal is to apply what I learn to the web.
Wow, that's fascinating. If anyone has any more info on this, I'd really like to learn more.
You mean besides lighttpd and FastCGI?
Thank you for the thoughtful response; I will definitely check it out. Ironically (or probably not), that's also the first book that pops up when you do an Amazon search for "advertising".
Leaving aside the obvious ethical issue here, what's the solution? Don't do mashups? Or, do mashups in a moderate way so that you are only providing limited quotes of the originating site and providing attribution? Or, say to hell with it, I'll do what I want and only worry about legal problems if I get big enough that someone comes after me?
Stan Wagon's book about the B-T paradox is absolutely superb, but for mathematicians only. I've heard good things about Wapner's "The pea and the sun", intended for a lay audience -- e.g., the reviews at http://www.maa.org/reviews/PeaSun.html and http://www.ams.org/notices/200609/rev-komjath.pdf -- but I haven't read it myself.

(Speaking of Stan Wagon and beautiful mathematical exposition, his drably-titled paper "Fourteen proofs of a result about tiling a rectangle" is lovely and quite accessible. You can find it on the web with a bit of googling; I don't know whether any copy you can find in this way is legal.)
And GrandCentral.
All web sites are media?

For example, Ebay looks more like commerce. Does he have authority over off-line auction houses?
Appreciate it. The recent HN submission of Gladwell's 96 article on the scientific study of consumer shopping patterns is what prompted this post. It sounds like this guy used similarly meticulous methods.
Because it sounds like it is in the process of being peer-reviewed and that he has actually presented his ideas to people who actually know what they are talking about, it seems quite doubtful.
Large shops generally have in-house expertise so that issues can be resolved ASAP. What they paid Red Hat to do is provide a level of quality in the OS distribution and support in the (unlikely, in your case) event that an exceptional issue was encountered.

Sometimes it's cheaper to pay that fee so you don't have to worry about any licensing issues in the future. And even though the you're saying it was a "substantial" amount, it was most likely considerably less than the possible alternatives (especially if you're considering other UNIXes like AIX and HP-UX that also involve specific vendor hardware).

The GPL license isn't as big, bad and mysterious as it was previously perceived to be. A lot of that was due to the unfamiliarity in the early days of Linux (and Red Hat) and a whole lot of FUD that was being spread by the likes of Microsoft. While actual legal precedents aren't quite there (cases being settled, etc.), there's currently enough of a track record that it's pretty clear when you can or can't use GPL software.

A BSD-style license is pretty clear that you can use it for commercial purposes.
Ufc 92 start time at december 27
Steve Jobs:

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html
> the belief that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations,

Is that belief that the United States is better, or just different?
Twitter snubbed Facebook. And as far as tech media pundits are concerned, you do not do that. Furthermore, can we PLEASE stop with the acquisition speculation?
Wow. I never would have thought of that game ever again if I didn't read your comment. Thanks for bringing back those memories!
I actually stopped reading at that point :)
So would I. I think it's wrong; I'm pretty sure that the Hausdorff paradox, which is kinda-sorta the equivalent on the sphere, requires some Choice. But maybe I'm confused.

On the other hand, you don't need any Choice for the Sierpinski-Mazuriewicz paradox, which says that there's a subset A of the plane, which can be written as the disjoint union of two "smaller" subsets B and C, but where A, B, and C are all congruent. (But A is countable, so this isn't nearly as startling as Banach-Tarski.) Specifically, let T be translation by (1,0), and let R be rotation about the origin by 1 radian; then let A be the set of points you can get from (0,0) by applying some sequence of T and R, let B consist of the points where the last operation in the sequence was T rather than R, and let C be everything else. Then B = T(A) and C = R(A). (The key point here is that it turns out that the sequence of Ts and Rs is unique, so that B is well-defined.)
The 80/20 Ratio Promotion Marketing In Social Media
Something is wrong here. What is fair price? It depends from country to country. In US, USD20 may be a fair price for everyone. But, how many of the game users are actually from countries other than US?

In some developing countries, USD20 is about a day salary or 10 meals.
Top Online Security Threats for 2009
You need to develop with mind to differentiate between the pay version of your software and the cracked version that the pirates will inevitably get. In gaming, the traditional differentiator is multiplayer, or access to a community forum where people exchange levels made with the level designer.

This is one thing that makes SaaS so attractive to developers -- generally it's impossible to pirate.
How ironic that ever since the future has arrived...
Even more interesting; the erudite scholars vanguard inquiry into the nature of a gay germ:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=steve+sailer+gay+ge...

Brilliance. To be cited in Nature, surely.
I remember that game! Wish they would port to the Source engine a little faster...
You know what's way harder than transmitting an asynchronous 160-byte max message? Transmitting a real-time several-KB-per-sec stream of voice data.

No matter how you slice it, text messages are a scam. If it was even remotely a load of any significance on the network, we wouldn't be able to make voice calls.

Even if SMS is the most expensive traffic per byte, for the sake of argument, it's still insignificant.
Why did you choose to phrase that "I would suggest that girls form study groups" and not "I would suggest that all students form study groups?" Just because you have a daughter? Because the topic of the article is about women and mathematics? Or because there is something about study groups that especially helps girls, but not boys?
However, mint has no ads, doesn't charge for the iPhone app I use all the time, has never spammed my account in any way... the only thing mint probably does make money from is commission from banks for referring new customers, but if mint can provide unbiased information about why switching from one bank account type to another can give me some sort of benefit (and in my limited experience, it has), it's a mutually beneficial relationship.

I am aware there are costs to providing a service, but when you provide them at no cost to your customers, that is not piracy.
> The members of Cuil have profited, learned and lost nothing - in other words, they are in an enviable position.

Don't be so sure they haven't "lost nothing". The VC community is pretty small and large profile failures like this don't go unnoticed. I'd imagine that they'll have a lot harder of a time raising this much money ever again.

Perhaps that won't matter to them, but then again if they have designs on another company this could have a negative impact on how that plays out.
Netbooks snag 15 spots on Amazons Top 25 Bestsellers
I'm afraid it's much easier to bypass personal rights than to uphold them. Even though the technology for either is there, the panopticon is a design pattern that keeps occurring in political space.

I'm curious, though--does your company do the kind of thing covered by Steve Rambam in his talk at The Last HOPE? ie, recognition of activities as well as of faces, text, etc.?

http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speak...(Part_1).mp3
http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speak...(Part_2).mp3
Not a game, but a visual chat called The Palace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)).
I started doing VB programs to "hack" other people avatars and some other stuff... We kinda killed it when we found a bunch of way to overflow the server but that's another story.
Yes, I do. Because I know these people, and I know that they do these things because I have watched them do them, repeatedly.

Edit: It may be bullshit in the general case (applying to people who make the claim of "try before I buy"), but it is not bullshit in the case of myself or the people that I actually know who claim that.
https://itts.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Piano.woa has worked even while iTunes Connect has been down
I don't care, I make the claim I make:

Big guys have free advertising from piracy, small guys are hurt from the same thing.

Edit: I guess we mis-understand each other -- I didn't mean VERY small guys, who may suffer from obscurity.
Hack in Zamalek
I'm Canadian living in Vancouver and certainly do NOT get taxed 50%. In fact, my income tax (percentage) now is less than it was a year and a half ago when I lived and worked in New York city.
Why? What would Google get from this? That they couldn't get from just indexing Twitter on their own, I mean.
"... Software piracy is a fact of life, and there's very little you can do about it ..."

To those who see only what is, not what can be.