skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand that perspective, and I honestly think there is a bit of a double standard going on here. People hate on Origin and 'meh' the rest of the competition, but are in love with Steam. I know people who will only buy games if they're on Steam, it's bizarre.

Your games are locked into steam, and they may never be removed from there. You own none of them. The only way to play them is to open Steam (presuming it's up / not horribly busy / you have an internet connection^) and be shown their market place. There is no way to 'export' your 'purchases'.

Contrast that with other sites where you buy the game and get to download an actual installer, which you can do whatever you like with.

Steam could do a lot better for users, but by locking people into their service they do a lot better for themselves.

^There is an offline mode, yes. Except you have to put it into offline mode while you still have an internet connection, which sucks (what if your internet goes down due to a power cut / accident / misconfiguration at the ISPs end?), and it's not supported by all games.
Are Sony and Microsoft Planning On Nerfing The Next-Gen?
"systems based work where speed is important"

Speed, timing, or control; and the first is less true that it has been.
That's an interesting idea. It seems that a software marketplace is just going to become a part of the computing platform. It would be cool if some platforms would open up their marketplaces to other vendors. The "Steam" store in the Windows App Store. It makes the marketplace more like a Mall and individual providers more like stores.

It may or may not happen, but I like the idea of having multiple options.
The point I was making is that CL are increasing the utility of their service by using Google/Yahoo to provide specific maps of property locations. The distinction is that the relevant data curation (property locations) is done by CL, not the mapping providers.

I also noted that API usage would have been paid (or at least licensed), so in that sense, CL are (legitimately) freeloading on Google and Yahoo. While the argument could be made that CL are sending traffic to these sites, that same argument would apply to Padmapper.
Oops, my mistake. $240 extends the initial first year and makes it 3 years.
Quite a lot, actually. While some startups (e.g. Twitter) take a while to generate significant revenues, it happens that the most successful startups we've funded were not of that type.
Interesting. I went out to the balancedpayments site to see who they are. Absolutely no information. Am I not seeing a link somewhere on their page? The fact that they are using Godaddy as an SSL certificate provider/reseller and the certificate says run by "unknown" just makes me cringe.

Edit: Apparently there are some staff bios on the Community Page. Founded 2010. Is anyone familiar with other start-ups using them as well?
I don't think they have too much to worry about. Will take a lot to get gamers to switch to a Microsoft app store. Granted Microsoft could probably eat away at the very casual end of gaming.
At least in the United States, the express purpose of all patents, copyrights, trademarks, and other IP protections is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", i.e. for the public good. The vehicle used to achieve this end is the granting of a temporary monopoly, but the monopoly itself is not the end.
I used to use Yahoo! Pipes to scrape every major craigslist location in California when I was on the hunt for a certain model of car or motorcycle. I wasn't the only one, either, because eventually the RSS service started getting shut down every month when some arbitrary RSS bandwidth number had been exceeded.

It was beautiful, transitioning from sifting through CL by hand, to having carefully filtered ads delivered to my inbox within an hour of being posted.
If anyone is dense, it's you. It is certainly odd that the number of HN postings that follow the pattern "Company X raised $Y" far exceeds that of postings about revenue or profits, which are undeniably more important metrics for success. To some degree that can be explained by the fact that many incubated startups are legitimately in a phase where raising capital is important and revenue/profits not yet achievable. But why do we hear so little about later phases? IMO it's just as much a symptom of the dysfunctional aspects of the current startup scene that aims primarily towards acquisitions, where revenue, let alone profits, are ctively avoided because they're seen as an impediment to ridiculous acquisition valuations.
Collapsing threads, for one thing.
Easy: M.G. Siegler
Blogspam.

Original post is https://allthingsd.com/20120725/valves-gabe-newell-on-the-fu...
Dell U2711 has every kind of input known to man (well, the currently popular ones, anyway), has a decent OSD, and supports every common resolution starting from 640x840. The 30" from the same line is no different.

It's probably just your particular Dell models.
Sorry. You guys are right. I was thinking of Xbox/360, not PC.
Institutions, I do not know, but several scientists from renowned institutions have questioned the global warming theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the...
Transfer 4.8Gbps USB Berbasis SCSI Milik Asus
I don't see the Windows 8 app store as a competitor to Steam though, in the same way that I don't see the Google Play store as a competitor to Steam. Steam already has a strong community knit directly into the gaming experience that I doubt Microsoft will be able to reproduce, if GFWL is any indication. And there's no way I'd pay a monthly fee like on Xbox Live.

Hell, Origin isn't even that threatening to Steam, and that's a directly analogous service.
Siracusa's review is expected, and I'm sure a lot of HN folks saw it coming. Despite the fact that it's new and comprehensive, it's not nearly as new and exciting as Marco's blog post.

Plus, comedy will almost always do better than a review.
At least one big reason is Facebook.. it requires Zynga use its payment processing system that takes 30% of sales. So there's 100+ million right there.
One way to look at it is success, another way to look at it is redefining the value the company will need to create to be considered a success.
For whom? As I understand it, quite a bit of that "raised" money ends up in the pockets of earlier investors.
I'd go so far as to say that as long as Gabe Newell is alive, I highly doubt that Valve would sell to anyone at any price.

The man sincerely loves his job, his fans, and especially his team.
DealerPlatform.com Announces Addition of Mobile Sites
I'm not sure which model you looked at, but I believe the 13"/4g/128gb is priced at $1100 msrp vs. similarly configured air at $1200. Microcenter had it for $1000 a few weeks ago.
Many of these are very recent departures, eg. Craig Silverstein left in Feb 2012, Amit Patel was within the last year or two, Marissa was last week. I'm kinda amazed that half of the first 20 employees had 10+ year careers there, despite being financially independent since the IPO. I read somewhere that median Silicon Valley job tenure is about 2-3 years.
He promised to pull in (much) larger contracts, and delivered on it, without ever being formally hired.
What are the numbers based on? For instance, I have the maximum score for "well-read"... what is the ratio that score represents?
They're paying 30% to facebook just for processing payments (in fairness, Apple and Google take the same for mobile apps).

I think it would be tough to build a profitable business spending that much for something so basic.
[NEWS] Dealer Platform Announces Addition of Mobile Sites
Safari on OS X is excellent. It was complete garbage on windows, but safari 4+ on OS X is an ideal browser IMO.
You could take a larger initial stake. I assume that the value placed on the YC program, including the cash, mentors, exposure, network etc has probably risen over time.
I'm confident Zynga will succeed, and this is just a temporary setback. They are incredibly smart and have a solid business model. I don't think social games are going out of fashion any time soon, although I do think they are moving toward the mobile realm. Zynga also has an amazing track record of growing companies it acquires. After the purchase of Words with Friends from Newtoy for $53M, they doubled their daily active users in 6 months. I do think they may have to focus more of an effort on figuring out new avenues of driving revenue for the company. Because ultimately that's what investors are looking for.
It's also very difficult to start a new car company. But we don't have "car neutrality".
I think just as interesting, it was almost entirely predicted by people who are heavily in the tech industry.

The market writ large ignored the input from those in the know and is now acting surprised -- it befuddles the imagination.
It happens all the time. See GoDaddy
I don't know who any of these people are but if that was a DFW diss let me know so we can fight it out...
I haven't looked at the release previews yet but I can only imagine. The antique-looking Windows 3.1 font control panel persisted into Windows 2000, so I can't believe that we'll be rid of the trappings of more recent versions of Windows anytime soon.
the certificate says run by "unknown" just makes me cringe.

It says that because it is not an EV SSL certificate. go to amazon if you want to see the same message, but from a verisign (non EV) cert.
Glad you enjoyed the game, and thanks for the kind words. It was very exciting to build the game, particularly after the multiplayer code was functional -- we just knew folks were going to like it!
how is it going to be useful for everyday developer?
That's interesting.

My 27" Dell is covered in ports (5 inputs of all kinds, USB, CFCard, SDCard, you name it...) and has a pretty fancy OSD to go with the 5 physical buttons and 6 LEDs.

Granted, I don't actually use any of the ports other than DVI and USB, so it has always seemed a bit overkill to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Documents

Windows has had a "My Documents" folder since win98.
Pigs are actually similar to humans in many ways.

“What we've discovered,” says Lee, “uh, what we've concluded, you know, is basically that the machine that would fit a pig's teat is a human breast pump. It fits perfectly.”

Too bad they did not describe what pig's milk is like, or how “Anyone who farms pigs would say that pigs' milk would make an incredible cheese,” How would an ordinary farmer know, having never collected the milk?
If you need to properly prepare for this review checkout this video: http://patdryburgh.com/blog/preparing-for-john-siracusas-rev...
Some do; some don't. Source: both of my flatmates have bought these screens; the buttons don't work on any of them (and nor do any but the DVI inputs). It's not like it really matters (after seeing these things I'm saving my pennies to grab a couple myself :)!), but the quality and functionality does differ from manufacturer to manufacturer (and from batch to batch internally - 2 of the 3 can overclock to a 120Hz refresh rate, the other can't).
Greenland's Ice Sheet is melting at a shocking rate
A lot of reddit-style comments on this post, too.
This struck me as potentially a very durable way of measuring value for 'information goods' type businesses

Not to sound snarky, but was there ever another way?
Ask HN: MS in CS vs MBA in Technology for Working Software Professionals?
I'm a software engineer working for about 2 years and have been thinking of getting an advance degree part time. I was wondering what would be more helpful for my career in the long term if I want to rise up the chain of the company hierarchy.

Thanks,
SJ
I suppose this applied to a lot of engineers out there and answers from HN community would be really helpful.
Back in my more involved gaming days, Steam was a catastrophe for PC gaming. Other than picking up a game at a good price and automatically getting game patches from Steam, there was really nothing great about it. They had virtually no support. Your best bet was the forums. Throttled downloads were really fun too. Especially when you download a 5-gig game pack and have to sit there and resume your download every 5 minutes. Constant startup issues. I was patiently waiting for Battlefield 3 and was delighted to find out that EA decided to ditch Steam for this release, however their own Origin platform wasn't much better. Honestly, If i had to pick between slightly higher prices at the stores and Steam - i'd pick the stores. With app stores rolling in all over different platforms i'm afraid to say there is going to be very little room for Steam and this is probably a good thing. I'd rather see a good remake of Counter Strike and Half Life from Valve, than a new gaming platform.
Until his service grows much, much larger he'd be paying more with most merchant accounts. And he'd be on his own for paying out to the donation recipients, which this company is handling as part of their transaction fee.

I've worked with 3 different merchant account providers over the past 8 years. All of them, in the end, ended up costing more than twice the rates they originally quoted when I applied. Downgrading most cards to higher fee schedules, having a dozen fees 3rd party processors simply build into their flat rate, and the ability to raise rates every month for years can add up to a very high effective transaction rate.

PayPal, once you pass $10000/mo for the 2.2% tier, is currently my cheapest processor when you factor in all the processing, gateway and monthly fees. I still accept credit cards directly for various reasons, so I'm trying to move off directly storing cards in Authorize.net's CIM to a service like SpreedlyCore that will let me switch merchant account providers without losing my current customer billing info.
Except that his argument is somewhat moot as a practical matter, because there are no infinitely recursive sentences (given that all sentences are finite).

Long distance dependencies are an issue in language modeling that do need to be accounted for, but all that tells me is that Markov chains aren't the right structure to model language (unless, maybe you had a MASSIVE amount of data, and a markov chain of an order high enough that you account for the majority of sentences. maybe).
> However, when ignorance of the law is provably impractical (impossible, in this case, for a single individual) and acting reasonably causes you to violate it, it is absurd for our society to punish you.

While it may be absurd for our society to punish you in that circumstance, our society will punish you in that circumstance. In other words, "it's absurd" isn't a legal defense.

Ignorance of patents, like ignorance of law, is no defense, no matter how impractical knowledge is.
Hacker Hostel 'Illegal,' Says Code Enforcement Unit
What sort of data are you looking to compress? Most of these "fast, small implementation" compressors don't crunch down common bytes into <8 bits, but instead focus on encoding repeated multi-byte patterns only. (That's what "LZ" is).

For LZ to compress well, you need a reasonably sized lookback buffer, plus a hash index of previously encountered patterns, so you might have trouble finding an LZ encoder that works with very little memory.
And then

http://allthingsd.com/20120725/apple-google-warned-samsung-a...

happened.

From Apple's brief:

In February 2010, Google told Samsung that Samsung’s “P1” and “P3” tablets (Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Tab 10.1) were “too similar” to the iPad and demanded “distinguishable design vis-à-vis the iPad for the P3.”

In 2011, Samsung’s own Product Design Group noted that it is “regrettable” that the Galaxy S “looks similar” to older iPhone models.

As part of a formal, Samsung-sponsored evaluation, famous designers warned Samsung that the Galaxy S “looked like it copied the iPhone too much,” and that “innovation is needed.” The designers explained that the appearance of the Galaxy S “[c]losely resembles the iPhone shape so as to have no distinguishable elements,” and “[a]ll you have to do is cover up the Samsung logo and it’s difficult to find anything different from the iPhone.”
Show HN: BundleFoo - iPhone app bundles, delivered OTA
Pretty clever to generate the image for the app icon.

I did a similar thing where I converted a screenshot of a bus schedule to a data URI and saved it to my homescreen. I did it so I could check the bus schedule in places without service.
OSX Mountain Lion: Safari 6 gets a speed boost
Background for those who aren't following this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber
Google Fiber is coming
It's really the social bubble and consumer tech IPOs that are getting crushed, and those were always pretty obviously scams.

Guidewire is up over 80% even after the recent pullback, because it has a real business model and steady, recurring income. It'll probably get beaten down more by the lock up expiration over the next month or so, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it doesn't drop anywhere close to its IPO pricing.
Error handling using forever-loop
Not snarky at all, there are lots of ways you might choose to measure information goods. One would be to apply a loaded cost model to a product and then figure out gross margins on units. You can could equate product releases to inventory 'turns' and then craft a valuation factor which develops some sort of freshness metric. These all toy with the question of whether the user population is an independent or dependent variable in the valuation. If the user population is strongly influenced the rate of new game introduction for example, you would discount a decline of current users against the value created by the new titles. So in that case freshness would be the valuation metric not user population. Or you could say the population of casual game users is fixed, and the only ones who would consider a new Zynga game already have a relationship with the company (independent value). So if people stop playing Zynga games then have they stopped being casual gamers ?

I think there is a lot of new territory here that is just being explored now.
Actually the influences for Starcraft were -- I think -- much broader than those for Warcraft.

Warcraft was heavily inspired by Tolkien and Warhammer, whereas Starcraft drew inspiration from basically every sci-fi series ever made, most particularly the Alien series (compare the Zerg Hydralisk to Giger's Alien) and of course from the art direction of Starship Troopers. But yeah, Warhammer 40K was inspirational too.

The artwork for the two alien races in Starcraft were each redone three separate times. The biggest challenge was that players couldn't easily (and quickly) grok the differences between the various units.

In Warcraft, you look at a lumber mill or barracks, and you have an idea what it is and what it might be used for. In Starcraft the difficulty was that -- upon initially playing the game -- it was tough to tell what any unit or building did for you.

Consequently making game units that looked visually familiar by including known sci-fi elements is useful in that -- when done well -- gives players a clue as to the function of a unit.

Or at least that's what we told ourselves when we ripped elements from other games & movies :)
Tangentially related, but still interesting: most people think hard drives have a bathtub curve when failure rate is plotted against time. Turns out this isn't true.

Schroeder and Gibson: "Contrary to common and proposed models, hard drive failure rates don’t enter steady state after the first year of operation. Instead failure rates seem to steadily increase over time."

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/Failure/CMU-PDL-06-111.pdf
Another example of FUTILITY
Installers are an annoyance when game patches are released. Steam makes game updates seamless.

Right now, the benefits of Steam far outweigh the fact that your games can't be exported. I guess time will tell if that will change. It's not like Steam has always been the darling of gamers.
So true. Ran into a few Mac Safari issues that weren't visible in Windows.

I now run a Mac VM to test, which has the added benefit of an iOS emulator.
How does DVD Player going full screen "not make sense" ? Don't you want movies full screen ?

And if you have other monitors, you want them to be useless while, say, Quicktime is full-screened ?

I have triple 30s on one side of the room, and a 60" on the other side of the room. With snow leopard (and presumably, any other OS) I can watch a DVD or other video output full-screen while other output continues to display on the three other screens.

Also, what about full-screening a guest OS in vmware on one monitor, while you do other productive work in your other physical monitors ? That must be a very common use case, right ? As in, all day every day for most vmware users ?

I'm not going to waste time talking about the "maximize" issue - even if I conceded every point of the maximize issue, there's still a problem with an inability to go full screen in one physical screen while working in another...
Unlikely to be any news about service beyond their long-planned Kansas City project. The skyline in the teaser is a dead ringer for the Kansas City skyline (for example, http://4photos.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Kansas_City_Skyli...)
the windows appstore is metro only
I was using it before Chrome arrived. But the font rendering was jarringly out of place in a Windows context.
In which case, those users should be accustomed to half-broken sites and creating exceptions where necessary, just as I am with Flashblock.
Not far.

http://www.france24.com/en/20120723-minority-report-software...
> While Warcraft was a DOS “Protected Mode” game, the modem driver could be called from both Protected Mode and Real Mode due to quirks in the DOS operating system and the 80386 chip-architecture it ran on [...]

Could someone provide more information on this? I'm guessing it had to do with the fact the serial interrupt could occur while some DOS system call was executing 16 bit code (or perhaps BIOS code)?
I am absolutely ecstatic that Google is attempting to build the next generation wired network.

Why does this matter? Well owning the pipe is always a good move especially in the face of net neutrality. But there are all sorts of other tie ins. For one, payments.

Our current payment infrastructure is based around private leased lines. If you really wanted to take on the payments industry you have to start with the infrastructure. Otherwise you are always at the mercy of a credit card processor just shutting you off. When you own the network where the transactions actually flow it is a different story.
But does someone have a patent or design patent that covers the Apple implementation of notification? If not it doesn't matter. If so Apple should have to work around it.

There is a separate question about what should or should not be granted and whether the law should be changed regarding patentability and duration. Now I think the law should be changed and less should be patentable but that isn't the law or the situation now.
Only in an exceptionally mild way, and no worse than you should reasonably expect from posting absurdly uninformed critiques of basic science to a technology oriented online community. Besides, I meant it more for humour than offense, as I find it hard to resist such a good feed line.
Any chance that in the future, this project will drive ISP prices down? Internet in the US is ridiculously expensive compared to, say, Eastern Europe.
I wrote up what worked for me: http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/07/using-datomic-free-editio...
A vert.x quickstart with Maven, using both Java and Ruby.
C persistent hash map with Python bindings
Using mushrooms to harvest electricity