skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a guy. Years ago, in what feels like another life, I played World of Warcraft. My first character was a night-elf healer. I don't know what was going through my head at the time I created my character, but I named it a girl's name and, through my actions and the things I said, gave everyone the impression that I was actually female in real life. The results were:

- When I visited cities, random people would open trade windows with me and offer to give me gold, anywhere from a few gold to a few hundred. One guy gave me a thousand and I accepted. He then asked me if I would be his girlfriend. I said no. He told me to keep the money, so I did.

- People would offer me help, especially when I did quests. Even those from the opposite faction would do it (I was on a PvP server) by helping me kill mobs.

- I would get a lot of what in real life would be considered "cat calls". People would use emotes such as /whistle, /lick, /dance, etc. on my character. I guess you could consider this sexual harassment, although I didn't feel threatened (I might have, if I were actually female).

- When I played with groups, for example in dungeons, if the group leader was male, he would give me first dibs on loot. This often times made the other players angry. At other times, they agreed I should get the best loot, because I was a girl.

- People, especially those in my guild, would send me private messages of various natures. Some would make stupid jokes, some would share details about their private lives (without me asking), some would just say sexist stuff, etc.

At the time I quit the game, I was very rich, very popular on the server I played on, and had several people who thought I was their e-girlfriend (even though I had told them no). I was also the second highest-ranking leader of a serious raiding guild - promoted because the guild master had a crush on me. It helped that I was also good at the game, but I was undoubtedly given preferential treatment because there were people who were more dedicated and more skilled.

The whole experience, which lasted about a year, was very interesting for me, because I gained a first-hand understanding of how women feel when they get a ton of attention and receive special treatment, both positive and negative. I interacted with normal dudes, lonely dudes, creepy dudes, stalkery dudes, and girls who would complain about those dudes. And once I had this experience, my real life behavior changed: I stopped treating women as special objects on pedestals and started treating them like normal people.

P.S. I'm sure I will get some negative comments about how what I did was unethical, and I tend to agree. Although I don't really regret it. The way I looked at it at the time is that it was just a game and I was just having fun. I never went out of my way to hurt other people, although those who I declined advances from probably felt bummed for a while.
> While I know it does happen, it's rare to find women who marry 'down' in the status ladder (be it race, income, or position)

How is race among the others in the status ladder?
So we're gonna side with Zynga on this because it is innovating by bringing The Sims to Facebook and EA is trying to block innovation with IP lawsuits here, right?
So where does this leave Blue Origin?

There's been almost no news since last year, and they weren't included in this round of funding.
Two questions: do they tell you which three clicks are required, and why couldn't they just put an accept/decline button in the login announcement?
> In the years since, the Nexus 7 ... have established
> themselves

Wasn't the Nexus 7 just released last month?
if you care about the long-term, you will also care about stickiness and returning visitor
A Century of Controversy over the Foundations of Mathematics (1999)
with that money they could have built a whole 4/10ths of an instagram though
I've seen this idea on Reddit before, and it was explained that the issue of getting to orbit has nothing to do with altitude and everything to do with velocity.

You can be a great deal farther away from the Earth than orbital altitudes, but if you're not actually orbiting, you're going to fall directly toward the surface.
Average Windows IT pro salary: $87K
Zynga is vile. But they're the good guys here, without argument. The idea that you can protect a game genre is nonsense, and terribly damaging. Imagine if Id sued Epic or Valve to kill Unreal and HL2? Imagine if Blizzard killed all the competing RTS? Imagine if Sony killed WoW?
Getting upward isn't the problem. It's acquiring the massive horizontal speed required to orbit that is more energy expensive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#Launch.2Flanding
From my perspective, a fairy tale ending would be for EA to take Zynga to the cleaners, then cut a check to every independent label that Zynga has copied off in the past, or start some sort of fund for independent game companies. EA are still going to make a few bucks, but it will help the wider community.
Ok I'm rooting for EA in this. I think Zynga's been preying on smaller developers for years in this manner. Its about time they went head to head with an 800lb gorilla.
The Sims Social was already on Facebook.
I find myself rooting for the lawyers involved on both sides, which makes me slightly uncomfortable.
Yeah Daniel, I agree.

I think Ash's post goes even further actually. Your product is not your business either.

The concept of the MVP is becoming a proxy for both of these important aspects of the business.
It's a travesty that Boeing got more than SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada got any money at all. I can't wait to see those two bloated, horrifically managed behemoths fail miserable with the money. The only reason NASA gave them anything was to shut up the congressman Boeing and Sierra have in their pockets.
Remember this, because SpaceX, with slightly less money than Boeing, will produce FAR, FAR more.
Using Pivot Tables to Extract Meaningful Data from Project Time
http://freelancersunion.org/ ?

That's what everyone in NYC uses, at least. I've been on and off of it for years without any issues, definitely the cheapest option here.
Here is a quote cut & pasted from the article:
"Google didn't respond to a request for comment from me."

So the article details the attempt and failure of the devs to contact Google, and the author's attempt and failure to contact Google. What do you want, a seance?
The job of the rockets isn't to gain height (that is a side effect), unless you are working with a sub-orbital design. The job is to accelerate the payload to around Mach 25 or so. The reason this is challenging is that you not only have to accelerate the payload, you also have to accelerate the fuel, fuel tanks, engines, and other associated hardware too. Which is why the promising techs mostly revolve around using less fuel (such as rail launch for the initial oomph), or something like scram jet for the first stage (they part of the fuel and reaction mass comes from the atmosphere for the first few Mach). Or something that has very small fuel amounts, and only caries reaction mass (nuclear with H2O as the reaction mass).
"I am yet to meet a user - business users and college students in particular - who will think twice before paying between 5 and 10 dollars for a la carte Office apps"

Hi! Nice to meet you. I don't feel like I need office apps in my life and wouldn't pay 5-10 dollars for them. Between the web and ios apps I realized I don't need them like I did in the 90's.
I'm also interested, did some quick searching and found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease
Historical HTML artifacts to avoid
You actually have to disable your account and then not log in (logging in re-enables), and then send that email. That's what I had to do when I deleted my account. Not sure if their process has changed since a few months ago when I did it.
$1 is really not much to pay for your time in coming up with it. $10 would be more appropriate.

People spend advertising dollars in weird ways, so who am I to judge what people would pay for. Check out iwearyourshirt.com to see just how haphazardly they are spent!
look up gros michel
There's a lot of iPhone/Android apps with 1+ million daily active users. But I bet most of them aren't VC-fundable.

I think 1 million daily active users isn't as impressive as it was 5 years ago. iOS/Android/Facebook platforms have radically changed distribution.

All that to say, with 1 million daily active users... it depends on the app as to whether VCs would be interested or not.
I'm curious to know how this compares to other new aircraft testing, since there are already plenty of commercial companies in that space. Admittedly, spacecraft is a a bit different from normal aircraft, but something going horribly wrong in either situation still means almost certain death.
There's not really much of a connection between the ownership structure--corporation vs. partnership--and the management structure of a company. In Valve's case it is probably organized as a corporation, but it actually has only a few owners. It could easily be organized as partnership. Either way, what makes it special is that the employees (who are not owners) are allowed to self-organize. But that could happen under any ownership structure.
Read the complaint. It's about blatant, element-for-element theft of creative expression, not about claiming ownership of a game genre.
Social Media: The Trends behind the Trend
EA pay developers? Can you ask for a unicorn, too?
Prismatic is being a tease. See what product they are launching next.
Yeah this should turn into a class suit for the indie dev community.
Carmack is one of my heroes but I don't think that's particularly true. He's famous for not liking deep stories and throwing people straight into the game.. yet most AAA titles nowadays have ridiculously elaborate stories and it can take an age to get into gameplay. His opinion is always worth listening to, but I'm not convinced most people follow it.
I always thought this was a smart idea. Lump all the single biz owners together and buy coverage as a mega-group. That makes way too much sense to be considered...
First it was Ninja, Rockstar and Badass... now Chuck Norris
Equality is about far more than just law. It's about having similar expectations for people of both sexes in everything.
Save on Vacation Costs by Using Short Term Rentals
Navalny is one of the better guys, but don't mistake him for a saint. For example, his hacked mail included proof that he published articles discrediting commercial company on behalf of another one; the fact, which he later denied. Too bad that there were DKIM signatures in the letters. Later it was discovered that he was involved in some weird transactions with Kirovles, again hacked mail, again DKIM-signed.

Again, this is one of the better guys. But he's got an own horse in this race and a very unclear agenda. Whatever you hear about him, good or bad, you better check twice or thrice.

Hope this comment puts things into perspective.
Potentially they could win enough that paying the indie devs Zinga screwed would a.) cost a small amount of their settlement from the case and b.) be epic, epic PR

Don't get me wrong, I can't imagine them doing it, but there's certainly an argument for it.
This isn't about stealing from 'The Sims' franchise. It's stealing from the Facebook game, 'The Sims Social'. It's direct, not a matter of genre copyright.
What ever happened to Orbital Sciences?
If iPads are "PCs" then why not iPhones and iPodTouches? They run the same OS - it shouldn't be screen size that determines it, right?

This is a way to pump up Apple stock with intentionally misleading information. No one considers an iPad a "PC" unless they're being pedantic or trying to mislead.
It was bad behaviour because it was unsafe. Now it is safe.
I heard it somewhere, I can't find a cite either. It's not the kind of thing they would ever admit to doing, so I'm not sure it would even really be possible to find a cite.
Who were you getting supplemental insurance through? Blue Cross kicks in dental after a couple of months, from what I recall.
Well, they said the Titanic would be unsinkable, not less sinkable than previously developed ships.
I think you mean first world problem.

Third world problems include poverty, epidemics, and starvation.
What does The Ville do that The Sims doesn't? Where are the aesthetics drastically different? Where do the two games behave differently.

The Ville has identical behavior to The Sims Social, and strikingly similar artwork.
This is all very reminiscent of the video game industry of the 80's, where everyone was making largely the same games and trying to figure out where they fit in the marketplace. Some lawsuits like this were successful, and others weren't. It's a tough call, though I tend to side with Zynga here.

Copyright on characters, art, text, code, and logos is great. We obviously don't want direct clones. But, Copyright applied to a genre and style of gameplay is ridiculous. We wouldn't have any of the great games we have today if those things were enforceable.
OP Here: For anyone who re-visits this thread, we kicked him to the curb. Thanks so much for all of your thoughts and insights. More so, thanks for re-assuring I'm not [completely] crazy.
Without apps does it really matter?
It's not the genre that was copied, it was the exact behavior and appearance of the game.

Read this, or at least view the comparison images: http://www.scribd.com/doc/101954002/EA-v-Zynga-Complaint-Fin...
I don't like merge commits when you can avoid them.
No content for any of the blogs?
Absolutely! I would gladly pay money for my Twitter account each year (in return for them not offering the sponsored tweets). How much is that worth to me? I would pay $20/year for that, easily. I would probably even pay $5/month. But you know what? No one has ever asked me!
I really feel this way as well. Its as if the system is designed specifically to punish self-employed workers.
I'll go with EA on this one. Zynga is perhaps the most unethical video game company I've come across in my 20+ years of gaming.
I totally agree with the "meta-meta issue".

I realize this isn't the point of the original article, but I couldn't get around the fact that either way the theoretical CEO phrased it he was basically saying "Because of a few people abusing a privilege and our management team being too spineless to confront them individually, now everyone at the company has to be penalized. kthx bye."
What is considered a big website?

I guess what I am asking is what benefits does OG bring you? If Bootstrap and OG took the same time to do would OG still be a necessary step?
It's not specifically for me building an app it's for a User Guide I'm putting together for our content on our company's website. That being said, in what specific situation would it be useful to use a backend service and what type of situation would make it better to create your own? Or does this depend more on the developer's experience maybe? I'm also interested in cost differences overall.
The L connector suffers from the problem that you usually have to twist it a little to line it up with the laptop, and eventually that torque causes the connector to break off the cable. I'm on my third Magsafe in two years because of this. Thankfully, they just hand me a new one when I bring the broken ones into the Apple Store, though I'm out of warranty.
high status men and low status women

Do I detect a roissysphere shibboleth? :)
How Rock Concerts Work
Yes, and it also implicitly includes assumptions on endianness, stack size, alignments, etc. It is very hard to make it portable.

It's a great compiler IR though! This isn't a criticism of LLVM bitcode.
fwiw my previous comment got 25 votes
I can't imagine them doing it either, but the PR would certainly be incredibly epic and a nod to the quality of the indie game scene.

PS: My introduction of "fairy tale ending" was chosen specifically to reinforce the unlikeliness!
This is a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana

Many wild, seed packet bananas exist, but all (as far as I know?) bananas that we eat have no seeds and are actually all clones. Thus they are all under the extinction by disease threat.

Someone could in theory continually keep developing new strains of bananas in case of future diseases. Practically however there is no profit in that. You could argue a charity or NGO should do stuff like this.
To set an infinite value on the life of an astronaut is to set both the goals of the space exploration effort and the needs of the rest of humanity at naught.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astrona...
It certainly looks similar—one thing you might have noticed is that the entire rest of the solar system (including some mid-sized asteroids) is in there and decently textured. Really terrific!
Physicists Demonstrate Quantum Router
I'm not quite sure how you could mistake The Ville for The Sims. Besides both games being set in a buildable house with interactive objects, the games are largely completely different. From what I can tell, It doesn't even simulate people.

Imagine if in the 90's the makers of Dune 2 decided to sue everyone who made a game which looked like their RTS. I don't think Warcraft would have stood a chance!
berberous, your account has been hellbanned as of 23 days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224422
The previous versions were more TRON-inspired graphically. I have not seen the project since a few years and was astonished by the changes in presentation.

What differs the most from the other Q3-likes (direct clones like OpenArena and more distant ones like Nexuiz) is the core of the game: while the others merely handle framerate-bound physics, bunny hopping, rocket- and strafe-jumping as gameplay side effects, this one is designed from the ground up to integrate such rule-abusive gameplay into its core. Jump features have been added (bounce-jump on walls), physics has been tweaked to provide less hackish strafe jump, configurations options abound to make the game tunable for enthusiasts (like coloring walls and floors instead of simply disabling textures and lightning). It seems this version goes even farther in configurability, with configurable coloring and extensively configurable/scriptable UI.
Start high in negotiations and low in auctions
Your original assertion was that person X might think a code sample is good, but person Y will not think it is good. Those are two different assertions - you need to test them independently if you want to draw conclusions.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if "lesser" programmers cannot recognize good code - that's just Dunning-Kruger. That was why I suggested looking for crappy code instead - more people can recognize crappy code, because more people are beyond that skill level. If you ask for samples of good code and your replies all differ in their assessments, you don't know whether that's because "good" code is intrinsically hard to recognize, or because all your respondents were crappy programmers.
Samsung Galaxy S III (Sprint)just for $199.99
starting prices are a form of 'anchor' - a piece of information which is known to affect subsequent decisions. As the authors note, anchoring has a powerful influence on our reasoning:
G+ is fair to middlin' at a bunch of stuff. Comments lack threading. There's poor noise control. Content filtering is limited to "+1" or "flag". There's no "-1" button (though various Chrome extensions have offered this at various points.

The main advantage is that it's a large community (10m+ users presently) initially seeded by Googlers (e.g.: tech-savvy people), and including a few notable luminaries such as Rob Pike. And if you've got the right circles, eventually good content finds its way into your stream. Sometimes (content discover/surfacing is something G+ does surprisingly poorly, and is an area at whch HN, Reddit, and StackExchange win hugely).
The Ville was launched in June 2012[1]; the Sims Social was launched on August 9, 2011[2].

---------------

[1]http://investor.zynga.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=686775

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims_Social
I predict the obsession with college and therefore collegiate rankings will dissipate in the next 50 years, maybe even by the close of this decade.

Consider what a college experience offers more readily over what you can accomplish with a high-speed internet connection.

- a community of people around the same age with no liabilities or responsibilities

- guaranteed access to an expert on the subject who can answer direct questions

- verification of knowledge

Anything else?

Why do we need thousands of college professors giving lectures on linear algebra each semester? We have the bandwidth to distribute a complete video lecture series from MIT to all college-going people in the US.

The collegiate model is predicated on the inaccessibility and uneven distribution of information. That's why the top colleges have the biggest libraries. That's how information was primarily stored and accessed and catalogued.

The developed world is a completely different place now.
They're suing for The Sims Social, not The Sims. In all honesty, I think the title should be edited to read 'The Sims Social' instead of 'The Sims'. They're very different games.
Want to Boycott Chick-Fil-A? Look No Further Than BoycottChickFilA.com
Transmission - a BitTorrent client - is already signed with a (free) Developer ID certificate and passes Gatekeeper just fine.

I will fil a Tor bug report, right now, requesting Gatekeeper support.

Let's see ... :)
It also turns out that, contrary to conventional wisdom, making the first offer is also a good strategy:
Wonder if real life counts as prior art.
Responsive design is nice and is a very good and useful tool. If done right, it makes your site react better for a larger group of users.

However, your QA time and effort explodes when you do responsive layout. Your testing matrix goes from basically 2 operating systems and 4 browsers all at a fairly standard screen resolution target to supporting 4+ operating systems, 6+ browsers, and at the very least 4 significantly different resolutions/form factors as well as the ability for the user to change orientation.

Visual bug testing and layout issues add a ton of work and testing, especially at the beginning of a project.

Also, making a WHOLE site with multiple different areas, layouts, functionality responsive is a lot different than just making a single blog layout responsive.
Yeah, the game right now I don't think is that good. I was talking with the developer and he's planing on doing some big gameplay changes. I really hope it turns out good, that game has a lot of potential.
You're right, it is. I always thought that was just Rensselear, but I've never spent long enough to actually notice the town lines.
Well, Apple's stock has increased massively over the past few days of the trial between Apple and Samsung, so the shareholder's can't think it's "embarrassing". Looking at the share price, I'd have thought the shareholders think its going quite well, especially when you think that they didn't have an especially good quarter.
If you're going to do this at least put the 'fact' call before the git command, otherwise it seems to defeat the purpose of reading the fact while the git fetch / merge completes.
I think EA should also sue Zynga for its CityVille's resemblance to SimCity.
Boiling this down you are essentially talking about the same business idea that 99% of the internet runs on. Provide content and make money via advertisements.

Only difference is that you have to go through the legwork of finding your advertisers where as a typical joke site would just show affiliate ads and/or ad words.

I think the time you are spending finding advertisers to sponsor your jokes would negate any extra revenue you would get vs. just letting a ad network find the advertisers for you.

If your content is actually good and you execute this well and you manage to get traffic then you probably want to focus on your joke writing and not finding advertisers.
Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx for $99.99