skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unlike Dune 2, which only allowed the user to select a single unit at a time, and which necessitated frenzied mouse-clicking to initiate joint-unit tactical combat, it was obvious that enabling players to select more than one unit would speed task-force deployment and dramatically improve game combat.

Dune II is the grandfather of all of modern RTS (for good and for bad, the genre hasn't changed that much). But the unlimited unit select wasn't there and starting/cancelling an attack when you had twenty or so units was a joke. I wasn't even a teenager at the time and I can remember desperately trying to get large groups of units off the sand when the sandword was inbound (some people will know what I am talking about).

What I find really interesting in the article is this:

> Later in the development process, and after many design arguments between team-members, we decided to allow players to select only four units at a time based on the idea that users would be required to pay attention to their tactical deployments rather than simply gathering a mob and sending them into the fray all at once.

This, this is probably the reason why Warcraft and Warcraft II (even Starcraft!) had this limitation. As a kid I could never figure out why this was the case when Westwood had no limits on unit selection from Command and Conquer and onwards.
10 days of Wimbledon compressed into a 9 min, tilt-shifted video
Google will have to offer cable TV for this to work. I really hope they do. The MSOs deserve some competition.
Come on, it's not like you're trying to track down the original Italian edition of some rare art book or something.

The book is maybe $65 because of a random price spike, it was $30 not that long ago, it'll be under $40 again soon. I bet most of you have paid two digits more than that for Apple hardware recently. It's not rare and collectible, it's just a really solid book on virtual machine design that has regrettably gone out of print.

If you're going to engage in such shady shenanigans, at least save it for something actually rare/pricey.
NK is doing some textiles work for South Korea. Textiles is always one of the first things industrialising countries do, because it's only labor intensive.
Routing at layer 2 (via MAC) is already implemented in the data center. See TRILL or Cisco's FabricPath.

At Internet scale, LISP (http://www.lisp4.net/) takes on the problem of a 'static' host address being reachable at any location.

Both of these rely upon the idea of encapsulation (mac-in-mac or ip-in-ip) to separate the location and host identity.
Microsoft would have to get the community features right too. Also perception, Valve are well liked by gamers whereas Microsoft would have to work really hard to build that up.
Thanks Chuck, glad you liked my post. The tone was very frank, but I think the message is a little clearer when you spell it out for people in black and white!

Sam Russell
I really don't see the utility in posting stock updates for Facebook on here every single day. We get it. Facebook is IPO. Stocks go up and down. Up and down. Guess what, it will go up again in a few days. Then down. This is not news. This is like reporting on the sun rising and setting.

If I care, I'll follow the ticker.
Au contraire, having Steam available might be just enough to push for better driver support from nVidia and AMD.
In theory open access is a great model, but we've seen some problems in practice. DSL had a lot of buck-passing where your DSL was down but the telco and the ISP would both blame each other. Also, it's possible that all the competing ISPs could end up offering the same prices and evil TOSes. The easier it is to switch ISPs the easier it is to get adverse selection problems, like if you offer policies that are friendly to heavy users then soon you will have all heavy users which may invalidate your business model.
For non-anonymous answers, they ask the writer before publishing. I was just published on there, and got a Quora message asking for my permission. Not sure how they handle anonymous answers.
There is something that I call the paradox of Google. The only real content which Google makes that I can think of is their front page doodles. They are an entirely service focused company. For the most part google products fall into two categories: Services which serve advertisements, or services which feed into category one. Their entire strategy is to use content created by other people (websites in search, videos in youtube, etc.) to give a reason to provide content people pay them for you to see (ads.) Therefor the paradox lies in this: In order to grow and thrive as a company they must keep the internet free. If the web is monopolized by a small number of large corporations, the need for Google to facilitate access to a large number of small websites diminishes. Youtube is their most resilient platform to this notion, and even it requires companies to remain small enough where using Youtube's service still makes sense. Also, this is why I think their products are so good: Every last little bit of quality in a product allows that much larger of a company to still find it more useful to use Google as their gateway to the web.
So all in all, having a major website be an isp may be dangerous, but powers which guide Google guide it to be an open portal to a free web, instead of being the one stop content shop. In fact, I think this is possibly their biggest driver for doing fiber: to ensure the later doesn't happen.
Zynga doesn’t need to be “saved”
exactly and also understand that the 802.11g standard for wireless networking supports a maximum bandwidth of 54 Megabits per second (Mbps) so unless you're wired, you can't really see the difference.
"I use the term 'fake' here in the context of a product made entirely out of information, and your cinema example is a good one."

I understand the points being made here but using something like cinema isn't the best thing when you think about it.

The reason is cinema has been around a long time. It's something that started at a different time and also you are doing it the presence of other people and it's a cultural thing.

Things that are legacy are different in people's minds. So using it to either make or break an argument as to human behavior can be problematic.

You could use, as an example, people's behavior with attending sporting events pointing to why people spend money to see a team win. And then why they will or will not do "x" activity. But as we all know the chance of starting a new sports league and getting the same type of attendance and devotion simply hasn't and most likely won't happen. (Professional soccer in the US is an example. It's big in the rest of the world but it doesn't make the nightly news in the US and there is very little attention payed to it relative to Football, Baseball, Ice Hockey, Basketball. And even Ice Hockey is much bigger in Canada.)

So you could say "this would work because look what people do with respect to Football" or "this wouldn't work because look what people do with Football" and you are comparing something that has a huge advantage because it's so entrenched in the way we all think at this point. (And High School Football in small towns vs. big cities even bigger difference.)
For those wanting to experience those days again (or for the first time?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M

Another one that springs to mind is from Constructor; "Hello this is constructor are you receiving?" with that very distinct British accent.
It usually is. Designers tend to say, "Gee, I've got an entire 1Gbps link! I don't need to think about efficiently using bandwidth ever again!". This is fine if the pipe never fills up, but if it does (like I am sure it will) you pay the price.

This is a cycle that has repeated for decades with every type of computing resource, and the end result is usually, for a 10x improvement in hardware capacity, you get a correlated but much smaller improvement in performance.
While it is fun to bash on now and assume things were different in the "good ol' days", the conversations around software patents and the complaints from developers in the field about large companies were the same then as they are now; any difference is only attributable to more fervent journalism playing up the battles, as well as the rise of legal play-by-plays of court cases.

For some evidence, back in May 2000 people on Slashdpt were up in arms about Microsoft nigh-unto patenting package management; the conversations were newer (Slashdot was maybe "Web 1.5"), but even back then I had to point out this wasn't really new: take any patent you don't like, start tracing back the references, and you realize IBM or Xerox probably patented the basics back in the 80s.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/00/05/05/1033208/microsoft-pat...

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5330&cid=1089815
It's a convenient library of games on an application built specifically for that purpose. It keeps games updated and doesn't get angry about mods, it's also relatively easy to tell which games you have played and which you haven't. It also has superior sales to other places (such as Origin). People like having everything easy to find and in one place. Amazon's service is superior (in terms of DRM, sales, etc), but it's almost impossible to tell what games you have played/completed and the UI is not nearly as pretty. It looks like they took the order list and tried to update it for digital downloads.

Basically, Steam knows what product they are selling, they sell it cheaply, they sell more of it in one place than other (like GoG and GMG), they let you mount games that aren't Steam games into it to help keep it organized. Other services simply haven't caught up and gamers seem willing to accept limitation in exchange for convenience. It's an easy target for disruption, but no one has managed to yet, Amazon is working hard but their UI is not up to snuff.

Also, achievements, friends, and groups are a nice touch that doesn't exist elsewhere in the same quality or quantity.
He says camel's milk contains insulin and can improve quality of life for diabetics (seems legit) ...

Not legit. Insulin can't be ingested, it doesn't survive the stomach. So while it may contain a ton of insulin, it's broken down long before it's of any use to anyone. So either you make it yourself with a functional pancreas or you inject it.
LZ4 a very fast lossless compression algorithm
Facebook derives a large amount of revenue from Zynga, so it's probably not completely unrelated.
That's a good thing. Instead of relying on third-party providers with loads of bandwidth for cloud storage, you and your family create your own private cloud, with direct peer-to-peer transfers across your gigabit links. The reliability would be as good as the size of your family.
> In Australia we do have a sparse consumer distribution

Nonsense, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. We are less dispersed than the USA.

> There is a lot of resistance from the opposition as the government is largely funding our new network.

The government is right that FTTP is the most future-proof technology choice. But the way the project is being run is shameful -- they're carefully hiding the costs and debts behind "commercial-in-confidence" for a company wholly owned by the government.

And the dealing with Telstra, and creation of a new monopoly ... there's lots not to like.
It sucks to see BuckyBalls go the way of lawn darts, but as a parent of a very active and impulsive 5yo I can totally understand why they were banned.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_darts#Safety_and_bans)
Bingo.

It has been uniformly dismissed/ignored by the larger node.js community. Take from that what you will.
Elaborating on what knowtheory posted, in modern linguistics, "Chomskian" doesn't usually refer to "everything Chomsky said". For example, Chomsky was probably the foremost advocate of the overthrow of behaviourist theory in linguistics, and now no-one takes extreme behaviourism a la BF Skinner serious (as an explanation of linguistic behaviour), but this rejection is not currently labelled as "Chomskian". It's just linguistics.

So, not that I'm 100% clear on the details, but Chomskian refers to more specific claims. For example, some claims about what aspects of language knowledge are innate (Chomsky claims a great language engine with a relatively small number of tuning parameters). As another example, at least at one point, I think Chomsky was rejecting syntax rulesets with productions that were not binary? I think?
None of the reasons given seem correct to me. Many of the reasons I see given are conventions arising from use and misuse.

The simple answer is this:

An IP address identifies a host, whilst a MAC address identifies an interface.

That is all.

Absolutely everything else, such as route aggregation, routing policy, and the behavioural differences between layers, stems from this primary distinction between logical and physical.

(Note: it remains a common - indeed, conventional - configuration & design error to bind an IP address to an interface. There is no such requirement and this complicates many networks. I was irritated to learn that IPv6 makes use of the MAC address in self-autoconfiguration)

(ObAuthority: I used to make ISP management systems for a living)
Java for iPhone
Ex Oracle/Sun Engineers build this tool that Java developers can use to run their code on multiple platforms including iOS. Beta version is free, so download and check it out!
Xcode 4.4 is available (for Lion and Mountain Lion)
"I see these "social games" as largely parasitic and should be regulated in much the same way that gambling is for much the same reasons. "

Do you mean to say "addictive" or do you really mean parasitic?

Both "social games" and "gambling" are addictive. In both you can loose money.

But there are other things that are addictive that you can loose money in as well (stamp collecting, art collecting, buying and building model helicopters (great fun btw)).

Where do you draw the line with this?

In any case if you did mean parasitic could you explain further?
Paying customers are (rightly) far more demanding.
But Zynga already operates the largest poker site in the world. They just need to add real money play and they're set.
AKA the Jevons Paradox, first observed with regards to efficient coal stoves.
First batch of Google's Nexus Q sells out one day after launch
With Steam on Linux there will be more pressure for GPU vendors to clean up their drivers mess.
It's easier to know how you're doing when you charge money. If you have 10 paying customers you're not doing well. If you have 100k free users you probably won't know how you're doing, you may need them to some specific behavior or need larger numbers to make your thing work.

I wouldn't pick one because you think it will be easier than the other. It's safer to assume they'll both be really hard, but probably in different ways.
Thanks for the clarification. I do agree they look trendier. I am a developer not a designer but I will keep that in mind.
That's amazing. Assuming the valuation of $5B, YC is now worth $250m.
Wait, they can? Reach into pockets? Are you sure? (I'm not, btw).

I know the NYPD is demanding that people empty their pockets. But you can respond to that demand with a polite refusal, like "I do not consent to any search". Similarly, the police (everywhere) will routinely "demand" that you open your trunk; it's happened to me several times, and while they sure as hell do get pissy when you say "I do not consent to a search of my car", they will eventually back off.

I've read the General Orders for the Chicago PD, but not NYPD's, and consistent with the "Terry Stop" doctrine, the Chicago Police cannot search pockets without probable cause (which is to say, they can't randomly stop people and reach into their pockets).

A much bigger problem with "Stop & Frisk" is that most people will casually waive their rights and, more importantly, will not have the wherewithal to fight a charge (especially not a petty charge) over chain of evidence issues.
This was true until Google started making phones and tablets and opened the Google Play store and Google Apps for business and ...

Actually wait.... Google has been "making [and selling] content] for a while. Their main business might still be search advertising, but that doesn't mean that rerouting the pipes won't benefit them and absolutely destroy others.
Hilarious! Chick-Fil's anti-gay stance prompts other fastfood chains' stance.
> DSL had a lot of buck-passing where your DSL was down but the telco and the ISP would both blame each other.

This is a huge problem, yes.

It can be mitigated in general by having very clear lines between responsibility, and easy tests. Set the system up so you have one fiber strand from the house to the CO; at that point, well, if the light meters say it's okay, it's the fault of the ISP. (or the end user, in any case, it's not the fault of the owner of the fiber.)

But yeah, every time you have a service that involves more than one person, you have that problem. Even when one company owns the whole thing, you often have people trying to point the finger at other departments; but yeah, this is worse when it's two different companies.

>. Also, it's possible that all the competing ISPs could end up offering the same prices and evil TOSes.

Possible, but unlikely. The capital to start an ISP at that level (e.g. selling connectivity within a datacenter) is way smaller than the capital required to, say, buy a house. (I mean, marketing that sort of thing is damn difficult, but re-selling bandwidth within a datacenter/co is not a capital intensive thing.)

That's why I think that from the CO to the internet should be a free market; the barriers to entry are so low (except, maybe, marketing, but hell, I'll go knock on doors.) that if the existing players are doing something that irritates customers, there is a lot of incentive for new people to enter the market.

>The easier it is to switch ISPs the easier it is to get adverse selection problems, like if you offer policies that are friendly to heavy users then soon you will have all heavy users which may invalidate your business model.

I fail to see how that is a problem.
Honest question: what sort of support can you expect when something goes wrong? Fiber attracts backhoes (buried routes) and bored hunters with shotguns (aerial ones). It's a fact of life. Who's going to do customer service, Google, or some other agency? What's their track record like?

(As the old gag goes, this is why you should carry a short piece with you, in case you are stranded on a desert island. Bury it and when the backhoe shows up, get a ride back to land with the driver).
I think they're not so much dense as bitter. There's a subset of HN readers who regard startups as a whole as a sort of con game, and are angry that the participants get so much attention. There may not be that many of them, but their anger makes them disproportionately active as commenters and voters.
xCode 4.5 Beta versions are available too
Definitely in my case - I play a lot of my Steam games on both platforms. Gaming PC at home, and Macbook Pro on the go.
...until Google algos shut down your account; now you loose gmail, docs, drive, etc., etc., etc., and fiber.

OK, I am kidding to some extent. Maybe not. I'd sure like to see them move in a direction that assures users that all services will not be cutoff without recourse for unknown algo violations.
Twitter Kills Unfollowing App
I've never had an issue with throttled downloads. Doesn't your ISP have a Steam mirror?

Also, Counter-Strike: GO is being released on Aug 21. http://store.steampowered.com/app/1800/
Global elastic IPs – multi-region routing
> An IP address identifies a host, whilst a MAC address identifies an interface.

... while a MAC can host multiple IP addresses (see vmware bridged network for guest OS), and the same interface can have multiple MAC addresses. And a devince can have multiple real/virtual interfaces.
After hours trading statistics shouldn't be taken too seriously, because there are far less traders resulting in less liquidity/larger spreads. For all we know, the -40% quote was triggered by a single trade [perhaps a panicked investor agreed to sell his shares at a 40% discount]. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_hours_trading]. For all we know, it might tank tomorrow, but it hasn't yet.
I will give it a thought. I appreciate your honest feedback.
Thanks for the context, the page itself was quite devoid of information

I imagine that's because it says in big letters "Look out for an announcement at google.com/fiber on July 26" which is tomorrow.
Pretty much everything MS buys gets ruined, so I'd rather that didn't happen.
Going to the 404 page reveals a menu which hints (well, it says that there's going to be some plural number of cities, not too much else) at what is being announced tomorrow: http://fiber.google.com/savethedate/404

The main menu has links to "About", "How to get it", "Plans & Pricing", "Cities", "Help" and a button "Pre-Register"

Also, since that page doesn't seem to indicate the time, the Google fiber blog (http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/) says it's at 11AM CDT. Also an impressive stat is that they've apparently laid down over a hundred miles of fiber.
I notch you up a point good sir for discovering my bias. (mathematics)
It's arguably less of a Lisp book, and more of an excellent book on programming that uses (a dialect of) Lisp.
I read it as a statement that he doesn't like the Active Record pattern
EDIT: clarified in response to your edits :)

> Nonsense, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. We are less dispersed than the USA.

That is a good point. To be fair, I am not fully aware of what our distribution looks like.

Perhaps I should clarify the point I was trying to make.

Whilst it is true that a large proportion of our population reside in urban environments, one of the aims of the fibre roll out here is to reach almost all of the population with fibre to the home.

For those not in urban environments (which is still significant), the geographic spacing is quite large, and I would imagine in that context we are sparsely distributed. Is running fibre to the home in that context a viable option? Hard to say, and perhaps even the google roll out will not give us much more information or real world example then we currently have.

> ... the way the project is being run is shameful

The thing I hope most to see out of the google roll out is how they handle it. I don't know of many data points regarding nation-wide roll out of fibre technology, or any similar infrastructure, in recent times, so the potential to 'see it done right' is an exciting one.
I don't think there have been services like Instapaper around "much longer than Instapaper." I'm not sure Instapaper was the first of its kind, but it was certainly one of the first.
Rule 34 likely applies.
Presumably Quora knows who the Anonymous Users are and can facilitate contacting them
re: windows - nonsense. GDI+ has been capable of doing resolution-independent rendering since 2000-ish. I think since vista there have been DPI-settings within easy reach. More recent UI platforms like WPF and silverlight are vector-based and resolution-independent. My primary monitor is 2560x1440 and it looks beautiful.
Firefox Olympics Doodle about:home
An Olympic pyre is now on about:home. Is that legally OK to do that? Didn't Google patent this Doodles thing?
Not sure how owning the pipe would help them there. Google's search domination is (arguably) a result of them having a superior product, with advertising being completely coupled to that.
It would be nice if sizes could be standardized in some way that I could have one large landscape monitor flanked by a couple of smaller ones in portrait, without looking lame.

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Oh god, I just finished integrating Filepicker.io with a client site and I was thinking "man, it would be great if the button showed an indicator that it was done uploading".

I think I'm in love with you guys.