skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What, no casino analogy?

Zynga products are games. (Note: I'm 100% anti-Zynga, but I'm also something of an amateur game theorist. Thus, this will be a bit pedantic.) Zynga products are essentially casino games (which are also compulsion loops) but reinvented for social media. Zynga differs from the casino in two essential ways: (1) instead of being driven by thrill and desperate hope, the compulsion loop is built on peer pressure and sunk costs; (2) instead of being a consummate pseudo-elite luxury experience, it's a habit-forming and largely pointless chore.

Poker (Disclaimer: I have not played Zynga Poker; I'm inferring) doesn't succeed because it's somehow more of a "real game"; Poker succeeds because it's better crafted, largely by years of free play testing in the real world. While in other Zynga products, you're made to feel like you're building up to something, you aren't in Poker. This means that the "user gratification [being] squeezed" is effectively infinite: the false hope being offered is far more acceptable. Poker is older than the Internet.

If you plunge deep into the ivory tower of the games business, sure, you'll find that the term "game" is very hard to lock down properly. You'll probably even find a useful definition that manages to exclude Zynga products without excluding sensible games. But you'll also inevitably find it is full of problems anyways. In the larger picture, Zynga products are games. They're well-designed for the short-sightedness that they're meant for: making money for Zynga in the present: but as you say, that short-sightedness is likely to bite them in the end.
I only skimmed the article, but that strikes me as a "mistranslation".

Adobe is emphasizing that they have to do more compositing logic, so they they need an RGB version of the video frame on the CPU side.

If they did the colorspace conversation on the GPU, they'd have to pull the converted image back and incur the latency hit. Apparently, they see less latency in doing the conversation on the CPU, and have made the call to trade processor efficiency for latency.

To be clear: YUV colorspace conversion on a GPU is really damn simple. I have a ~30 line shader that does it from my video processing codebase. But I can take the hit - I do a substantial amount of image manipulation using shaders on the GPU, and mask the read latency with heavy multi-threading. A Flash application doesn't have this luxury.

But this discussion is largely academic - if you're writing a Flash based video player that doesn't need the flexibility of Flash's full compliment of image manipulation and composting functionality, you'd be using their StageVideo API - an API that does do all the video work on the GPU. This API was introduced in Flash 10.2, which came out after this article from 2010.
Well it takes a while for the carrier pigeons to come back with ticket status. You can't have EVERYTHING.
Google Calculator Fun/Bug?
I realized tonight that Google Calculator will give you incorrect results.

http://www.google.com/search?q=10000.01+%2B+10000.03999999999999

...gives me 20000.1

https://www.google.com/search?q=10000.67+%2B+10000.02

... gives me 20000.7

I wonder why it insists on rounding my answers (and sometimes incorrectly)? Any hypotheses? Is it a bug? Do they only allow a certain number of significant figures?
In August of 2008, I was a senior in college and went to our school's engineering recruiting barbecue. There were a lot of finance firms, including Lehman Brothers in all their glory. I remember walking to the booth to ask if they were recruiting, and the well-spoken congenial lady gave me a warm genuine smile and said, "yes!".

Two and half weeks later, they declared bankruptcy.
I think the biggest problem I have with git is that I don't understand how people can't get it. (That's assuming they understand DVCS, but don't get git. Not understanding DVCS is unsurprising.) It's like when my nonprogrammer friends who took CS101 didn't understand for loops. What?! It's just applying a concept you already understand.

It's unfortunate that git re-uses some verbs from cvs/svn with different meanings, but is that really such a big hurdle?

And I'm always surprised to hear complaints about git's user interface. I find the command-line interface far friendlier than others: auto-paging, colorized output, text hints of what I should do next, and fantastic tools (like bisect) in the same package.

And looking through my bash history, most of my commands don't use any options (the biggest exception is git commit). Possibly this is because I do most of my git interaction through vim-fugitive (and I have aliases for commonly-used complex commands). But I think it makes more sense to have a smaller set of commands that are logically organized (rebase mangles your history, reset re-aligns based on your history, ...) than a single command for every function.
In a hypothetical DVCS where that was possible, I think it'd be fine.
I know. But if I could enter it once as some kind of 'log into everything' option it would be great. It's so annoying to do on phone, iPad, laptop, appletv etc that I change my password too rarely as its so painful. Nasty aftershocks too (oh, so I have to find the appletv remote i to enable my account so that I can accept my phone as the remote).
Being multithreaded is hardly important at all. You can just have single-threaded programs, and they'll work. Almost all software doesn't need to take advantage of extra compute engines. Reasonably designed software that could take advantage of multi-threading can be modified to do so, and poorly designed software cannot -- it doesn't really have that much with being written on single-threaded machines as it does with being poorly designed. You can always spawn a worker process if your current process is some hair-brained monstrosity.
Useful Adobe Illustrator CS6 Tutorials
Classic sailing ships or underwater crown fish; anything you want can be possibly created with the latest Adobe Illustrator CS6.
The obvious question is, "Will it scale?" I admittedly don't have the patience to click through to your stuff and evaluate it myself, but if you think you can handle it... I imagine the trick would be to convince an investor that Zynga is creating a vacuum that needs filling.

(Also, grain of salt. I do not actually have any relevant experience. But if your stuff actually makes social games look good, I applaud that all by itself.)
Right now 17 of the top 20 grossing iPhone apps are freemium. Are you suggesting that these apps are only able to succeed because of accidental purchases?
Good analogy to C++ vs C. C++ gives you a lot of power previously unavailable, as git does. And there seems to be no canonical ways to do anything neither in C++ nor in git. And that does confuse a lot!
To me, it seemed rhetorically counter-productive, but its a minor point really.
Axiom: It's like Sinatra, but for Erlang
Ticketing is just plain hard and anyone who disagrees is just wrong.

The site is getting a few hundred thousands users a day right now trying to ger a few thousand tickets mostly between 7pm and 10pm.

While I agree LOGOC could of got a lot of the copy and menus better, trying to display "real-time" availability and keeping ticket sales fair is very very hard and Ticketmaster are doing a fairly decent job.
This article doesn't explain anything, and heavily engages in libel and other name calling.
Intelligence can be expected. Hard work should be unnecessary.
As a counterpoint, I have an office full of Macs and TimeMachine on a Synology NAS. Everybody lurvs it. I have done 3 full restores and 2 migrations with it (not even going to count the number of "oh, shit!" events). It couldn't be any simpler. As the office Mac expert I have to do very little except boot into recovery mode and get it on the network.

I'm not sure what your error was but it might have been for the best. If there was corruption in the backup image then you'd be complaining about how it restored a corrupt backup.
How to syncrhonize clock across multiple Linux distributions on the same machine
A common problem when multibooting OSes on the same machine is this problem of not synchronizing the hardware clock to the correct time zone as set in your distribution. Here's a simple solution to the issue without using NTP.
I'm working on a game that the author of the article would probably put in the "G2" category.

I wouldn't normally post a job ad in an HN thread, but the content of this one is likely interesting to people here: http://graffitilabs.com/jobs

"If Minecraft were a little more friendly, free to play, a little prettier and a little more easily hooked into social networks maybe that would be it."

That quote describes our project pretty well. We're not trying to be Minecraft, but it's definitely influenced us.

Browser-based games are just getting their start-- I think the future holds a lot of awesome stuff.
I use mercurial all the time even when I am forced to interact with git projects (thanks hg-git!) and I have no problem with rewriting history. What I do have problem with is atrocious CLIs that require you to remember cryptic incantations to do the simplest things. Two anecdotes:

- Colleague #1 has become sort of comfortable with git but only after heavily customizing gitconfig and setting up a dozen or so aliases for the most common commands.

- Colleague #2 is a devops, lives and breathes inside the command line, and still uses a GUI instead of the cli for git.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
+1

Expand my mind with documentaries on history, science etc - not just full length hour long ones, even 2-20 minutes is good. As long as it's engaging.

I like the idea that TED release talks and books so slowly that you can consume every one (not true for talks, but they're trying with books.)

Pity TEDBooks is apparently crap (given the info from the featured article)
...and it's getting worse with all the extra 'security questions' random sites now ask. Why do I have to drop all these obscure-but-not-really-secret details into all these databases? Are they all guarding them as well as a salted-hased password? Do I now have to give them all unique fake answers lest it become another path-of-least-resistance for compromise?
It's pretty much the same thing. Since they already support the use of auto in Obj-C++ mode it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, although Apple do currently caution against using auto for Obj-C variables due to some Arc issues.
> Flash Player solves a different problem: It plays linear media files from start to finish while combining the video with a wide array of graphical and interactive elements (buttons, bitmaps, vector graphics, filters)

And therein lies the problem with Flash video: dozens of video player implementations, each frustratingly different and user unfriendly than the next. People are building custom chrome on top of HTML5 video too, unfortunately, but at least it's standardized (and semantic) which allows users to consume web video with any interface they want.
This is old news: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011...

Also does "scamming" not involve some kind of lie or misrepresentation? They just bought lottery tickets.
New Research Suggests Codeless Programming is the Future
That was the first thing that struck me as well. This article didn't even pretend to be objective.
Poorly thought-out websites seem to be a pattern with high profile sporting events.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup site was shoddier than the Olympics, with rapid time outs, and other instabilities. They also lacked any way of keeping bots out, and I suspect a few people made money by blasting the site with automated ticket requests.
Hacked. Hard
Here's the thing though. I have been using SVN for years and am not learning Git. For a long time I figured I was just disoriented and eventually it would come. Now I am less convinced. The article really described my experience pretty well to the point where I am thinking the only sane way to use git is along with subversion.....

In essence, the more I learn, the less I like it, and the more convinced I am that it isn't what I need right now. Building accounting software there are certain things I need in a revision control system. These are:

1) revision control as audit trail. I need to know who committed a change and I need an audit trail on that. SVN isn't perfect here. I'd like to be able to audit changes to commit logs too, but that's pretty minor stuff.

2) collaboration among a smallish number of committers (right now maybe 4 active at any given point in time).

Folks have pushed git because it makes it easier for users to share modifications with eachother. That's fine, and it's a good point, but it isn't worth getting rid of a clear and reliable audit trail in order to achieve. To this end I suspect we are more likely to pursue a hybrid solution with all the complexity that provides (and indeed it is already partly implemented) than a pure git solution.

Allowing rewrite of commits is a problem not because developers might do it but rather because you can't show that developers didn't do it. If there is a question about whether a security issue was intentionally added to the code or not you need to have a clear audit trail. A basic principle of any audit trail is that your audit trails may not be overwritten.
Google Chrome's biggest annoyance: Download bar
> Status is a minority interest in games, and sales of status items tend to be small compared to sale of utility items (in cases where both are available).

Funny you should say that - I was just playing TF2, which Valve has called "America's #1 war-themed hat simulator"... which has apparently been successful enough with its move to free-to-play, apparently relying mainly on sales of status items, that Valve will be using the same model for Dota 2.

Of course, both games have solid foundations as actual games, rather than awkward socializing environments.
Yeah, nervous about any landing on Mars really. A failure would be a disaster for a cash strapped NASA and set back the program years.
> Hate Zynga. Hate Groupon. Hate that they made such a big splash as tech IPOs yet will ultimately crash and the harm will spread to tech startups in general as the markets learn to distrust tech IPOs again.

I agree and would add Facebook to this. None of these companies seem to understand the transactional nature of value: of providing enough that people are willing to give it in return. Even going off of nothing but statements from their leadership, there's so much arrogance and condescension that even if they were providing value, I'd be leery of their products.

Steve Jobs was widely regarded as an asshole, among many other characteristics, but he was also widely regarded as an inspirational figure who gave a shit about quality for quality's sake and valued Good Things like beauty and harmony. These guys? Zuckerberg's great value is the death of privacy. Pincus proudly states that his company is evil. Mason... I don't even want to know.
Ask HN: Anyone blogging about their new niche web app?
Hi HN, I'm wondering if there are any HNers out there just starting a new niche web app as a side (or full time) project. And is anyone blogging about their experiences?
One way or the other.
Original post was posted here --- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337938 --- with 271 comments so far, currently #13 on the front page.
Right, .hs-boot files. I was being naive and trusting the compiler warnings.
"Way better" at what?

The thing that people need to get through their head is that distributed version control is a whole different concept. There are some things it is great at. There are some things it sucks at. Centralized version control is great at some other things, and lousy at some other things too.

I am thinking for example that if you are going for a PA-DSS-certified application, git, particularly with the ability to rewrite history, is going to be a problem, but dvs generally will provide more problems in assuring the auditor that you can locate, trace, and take corrective action if someone introduces a security issue (perhaps intentionally) into your application. I don't see git really working in that environment.

On the other hand, if you have a lively project that everyone is experimenting with and you need to merge patches occasionally to create a stable release, yeah, it's much better.
Scammed? They played by the rules.
Wonder if Linux video drivers have added the ability to retrieve the decoded video data in the two and a half years since this blog post was made.
This articles is now 5 years old - any Erlang programmers who can enlighten me about the current state of Erlang compared to the predictions in this article?
Just require commits that are signed off with GPG keys. Then you have a clean, verifiable audit trail through git. Beyond that, you'll have the full development history on your machine, which they can't just arbitrarily change.
We are talking about programming tools here. A little intelligence and hard work on the part of the DESIGNER of the tools is expected.
This is true, namely that git aliases in ~/.gitconfig cannot override git built-ins.

That said, the parent post showed what looked like a bash alias, not a git alias.
Here's some good resources on the landing:

* An overview on CosmoQuoest.org: http://cosmoquest.org/blog/2012/08/curiosity-landing-remembe...

* A Google+ hangout that'll be covering the landing: https://plus.google.com/events/c7c2fbd2gil25fjimln1jnr1134/1...

* Conversion of the landing time into various time zones: http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=NASA+Cu...
I play Dota2 and has never bought or traded any item. Agreed Dota2 will be free to play, but compared to TF2 - it brings another aspect which is professional game play and ability to watch it within Dota client.

I am not sure, how much money valve will be making eventually but they are already selling tickets for watching professional games within Dota client. I think once it comes out of beta, selling tickets of professional games is a element we can't ignore. remember nearly 40-50K people turn up to watch any competitive dota2 game.
He said he spends ten times more time on building than on managing revision control. That doesn't mean 10x more deployment or development.

On the other hand, I can tell you we have almost 10x more downloads than we have svn commits ;-)
Any startup should not just plan how to make money, but also test if their idea is feasible. As someone stated, working for startups carry a much higher degree of risk (mostly because you would be working for less $$$ and the difference you are 'investing').

It would probably be a good idea to ask yourself - are you willing to invest in this company? If you are, is it for giggles or a future?

I'd also say if you are looking to join a startup, pick one that is incubated (ex. ycombinator, google umbono etc.)
Here are some more I've collected:

Awesome 3D live in-browser visualization of Curiosity's journey: http://eyes.nasa.gov/ [doesn't work on ubuntu :( ]

There are Curiosity landing parties going on around the world, see map: http://bit.ly/NFwMTk

Curiosity Twitter account: https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity

NASA TV will stream landing live at: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Picture of the 3 generations of rovers next to people for size comparison: http://bit.ly/NZBKb3

A well-produced video of 7 minutes of terror, if you haven't seen it yet: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1090
Ticketmaster should no better as they are the main ticket operator in the UK. However to make matters worse I believe they have signed all these exclusivity deals with record companies etc, which means there is no serious competition, certainly for the next few years.
Therefore they don't care and so innovation will be throttled.
I think they should be fined, as they have been consistently the worst part, of an otherwise truely outstanding games.
Ticketmaster you should be ashamed!
As someone who jumped from svn to hg a long time ago, I can answer simply: the transition was smooth like butter, http://hginit.com/ explains everything on the concept, while hg's ui provides abstraction and is very svnuser-friendly, so - everything just works. http://hgtip.com/ is also very useful.

IMO it's easier to embrace git after mercurial, because the part where you understand how a DVCS works is already behind you, and you jump into the syntax and specific differences.
you have terrible reading comprehension.

The article says he paid 67.5 million in fines to settle a securities fraud lawsuit brought by the SEC. It was a civil lawsuit, so the penalty if he lost (instead of settled) would have been a fine.

The criminal case was dropped because a grand jury would not indict after 2 years debating the issue.

The settlement has nothing to do with the criminal case.

And in the other case of the "low-level countrywide loan officer".. the level of fraud detailed in your link goes far and beyond the fraud occurring in the mortgage industry at the time. He had countrywide issue 38million in fraudulent loans, of which 8.7million went into his own bank account.
Do you think that's more or less complex than just using svn-git to manage the authoritative audit-trail repository?
> I would say a game like Diablo is basically just the same kind of "compulsion loop". Just done better. :)

Look no further than the extraordinary backlash against Diablo 3 to see the problem with that "compulsion loop" applied against modern gamers.

To be honest, I don't think the problem is necessarily with the compulsion loop itself (Diablo 2 had no such backlash). But when combined with a real-money "Paid Advantage" model, it creates a huge populist backlash against the game.
erlang is a quite old language, as such, it doesn't move very fast.

Erlang R15 brought some nice features, like (FINALLY!) line numbers in error reports, there will be a better (built-in) dict rather soon.
Not really. Just a different mentality where an autodetect script or a GUI interface would be considered bloatware when you could simply edit a .conf file instead.
Real pirates prevent global warming.
>>I swear, someone needs to invent a Git-wizard program. Interactive with a wizard-like interface, it will walk you through all the common kinds of tasks, even if they're fairly advanced, explaining all the ramifications along the way.

http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/
This is a bug with Firefox's implementation, there's an open ticket for it here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769892
The original source http://fundamentalphysicsprize.org/
What they meant was 10:30 PM pacific time on Aug. 05. For US East Coast and all areas east (Europe, Asia etc) this means Aug. 06. They posted the article early in the morning on Aug. 05 so they could have it up and relevant for a full 24 hours I guess!
you mean bash scripts don't count? ;-)
Yes. I am aware that there a further attacks, and I mention that in the blog post. There is still significant security value in doing what I'm doing though.
There's actually a very simple solution to this problem: "Save As" before you make any changes at all. Only then, in the new version, start to make your changes. Problem solved.
I would argue they are succeeding due to greed and ignorance, the likes of which will necessarily cause a crash and hopefully subsequent rebirth of true gaming.
They really are horrible. When I'm given a small list of questions to choose from, they generally fall into three buckets:

- Completely non-applicable (I'm not married and don't have any kids or pets)

- Transitory and inane (I don't really have a favorite meal or movie, and if I did, who is to say it will be the same forever?)

- Rely on information that is relatively easily to figure out (birthplace, high school mascot, mother's maiden name, etc)

Security questions alone should never be sufficient to reset a password or gain access to an account, and I'm not really sure they add a whole lot in other contexts either.
> (FINALLY!) line numbers in error reports

Are...you serious?