skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks like Microsoft has added some language at setup to inform the user.

From http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-sticks-to-default-do-not-trac...

>Customers will receive prominent notice that their selection of Express Settings turns DNT “on.” In addition, by using the Customize approach, users will be able to independently turn “on” and “off” a number of settings, including the setting for the DNT signal. A “Learn More” link with detailed information about each recommended setting will help customers decide whether to select Express Settings or Customize. A Privacy Statement link is also available on the screen. Windows 7 customers using IE10 will receive prominent notice that DNT is turned on in their new browser, together with a link providing more information about the setting.
Microsoft owns part of Facebook. Is DNT the opposite of Facebook's own tracking goals?
They already did: the Galaxy S3.
IMO new entrants into a market usually take the position of "be as similar to a known brand without being the brand" quite often. It is easier to get early adopters that way.
What? No way, trains/metro are an awful system that needs to be displaced by robot cars as soon as possible. A train is a large vehicle taking a lot of people to somewhere that no one wants to go. A robot car can pick me up at my door and drop me off at the front door of my job. It would only need to drive when there are people who want to go somewhere instead of "every 15 minutes regardless of how few people use it".
Here is a good start:
http://benchmarks.cisecurity.org/en-us/?route=default
Speak for yourselves, I'm excited! Unity and GNOME and all the other useless crap civilisation has invented over the last decade and a half? Get off my lawn!
NASA and AWS - Curiosity has Landed
You need to justify those expenses somehow. How can you justify the police helis if you never use them?
Visible Technologies Updates Social Media Monitoring Tool
I understand the argument, but in the absence of any data we'll just be trading anecdotes. Take, for example, The Walking Dead: a purely story-driven single player game that would be the perfect candidate to watch instead of play. I bought it because I saw my girlfriend watching some let's play videos of it, and I thought it looked great - I hadn't even heard of it before.

That might just be my instinct - when I'm watching someone having fun, I want to participate and have fun too. I suspect many people watch these videos semi-passively while doing something else, which does not necessarily translate into a lost sale. If anything it's hurting TV.

If some games are a lot more fun to watch than to actually play for a significant proportion of its potential player base, then I would argue that's a problem with the game itself. It's possible that "let's play" videos might actually push the industry to make better games.

Overall my guess would be these videos are either neutral for the industry as a whole, or actively helpful by increasing exposure to games and creating stronger gaming communities.
Such a good essay!
Unlikely that such a thing would be deadly:

- Square likely has an exclusive or near-exclusive deal with Starbucks.

- Starbucks has fairly close ties to Apple, if such a system were coming they'd want to be sure Starbucks was involved (so they'd already know about it)

- Assuming #2 is true anyway, that would make the $25 million investment incredibly risky; their stock would be murdered once the news came out.

(Side note: assuming all of the above, this essentially kills any rumors of Apple buying Square; why would Starbucks bother investing in them and getting on the board?)
Airtel was penalized by an institution similar to the small claims court. Airtel didn't contest the complaint. Most likely because it would cost them more in legal fees than the maximum penalty a "District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum" can reward (Rs100,000. Less than $2,000.)

I'm pretty sure that if there were more complaints filed against them, they would have contested it aggressively.
%s/Stripe/Square/
Well, I guess that is his opinion. But, the poll question at the end is going to give misleading results.

"Have you lost the desire to buy a game by watching a Let's Play Video?"

Yes, I have. I can't remember which game it was, but what I do remember is thinking "Oh, dang, that game does not look like fun to me. Glad I just saved some cash not buying it." So, I would have to answer Yes. However, I watch others and have rebought games including Starflight, Ultima 4, and Star Control 2 from GOG because I watched Let's Play and wanted to play it myself again.

A lot of the time, I buy my games via Steam, GoG, or the discount bundles. On the pages, they usually have 1 or 2 videos and a handful of screenshots. Too often the video teaser they have is a bunch of fading text telling me that the game has "Over 20 graphics shaders!" and some snapshots of concept art and then half a second of "actual" gameplay which shows an external camera pointed at the player doing whatever to show off the graphics instead of the HUD or how the player will actually be playing the game. Those videos hurt game sales way more than any Let's Play series I have ever watched.
"Computer" science is more like "computational" science - reducing everything to numbers, using logic to make safe assumptions and find paradoxes, etc. Humans can't compute as well as transistors so we use them for all of the heavy thinking.

It's engineering in the same way that constructing a stainless steel table is mechanical engineering (buy a sheet, cut it, put 8 bends in it, weld corners, grind corners, polish corners with acid, weld legs on, grind leg welds, polish leg welds)
I can't believe the fuss. People are complaining that the start menu will be open when your computer boots up. You'll have to click on the desktop icon, or perhaps click on a non-"Windows 8 Style" application which runs on the desktop.
Down Syndrome? Really?

In any case, plenty of people do struggle with it- the old especially. But that's not the biggest factor. With a swipe everything is done by one person- the cashier. PIN entry requires a back and forth between customer and cashier, and I've seen plenty of cashiers not notice that the PIN entry has gone through, etc.
If your game offers the same experience when played or watched played then it's a really crap game and should've been made into a film instead.
While you would probably be naive to expect courtesy on the Internet, there is no reason not to offer it.

It's no harder to write a courteous and constructive criticism than it is to write a harsh and mildly condescending one. The former can serve to foster creative discussion while the latter often kills it.
No excuse for Google here. Even if these were DMCA take-down requests, AFAIK Google can ignore them if they are confident the requests are baseless. They simply lose the safe harbor protection in case the complaint is legitimate.
First heard that one in, what, 1990? It was "in 5 years" then, it was "in 5 years" in 1998, and it was "in 5 years" in 2005. Good to see that the marketing departments are getting more realistic ;)
First, now you're guilty of exactly the tone the OP is complaining about. Second, youre implying design is how so,etching looks. I said it in the original thread and I'll say it again, it was really pretty how they redesigned Wikipedia but it still wasn't good because they glossed over very important critical concepts am functionality of the site. It was no different than slapping a fresh coat of paint on any "ugly" website and calling it a day. Visually appealing had nothing to do with it.
The problem is that the spec of the DNT header says that the DNT header can only be sent in response to a conscious decision on the users part. By turning this on by default, the only thing MS accomplishes is that DNT will likely never have an effect for IE10 users.

Which could also be exactly what they wanted: Get the good press for enabling the header by default while ensuring that they and everybody else will be able to track IE10 users normally, regardless of the setting being enabled or not.
>We are at the stage, that merely acknowledging someone's sex or race will earn you these labels.

That in itself is too broad a generalization though, because there are many times when mentioning someone's race/sex is, due to context, subtly racist/sexist.

Generally, if you mention someones race or sex and that information is not actually relevant in any way to what you're saying, you are helping to perpetuate stereotypes and prejudice. It doesn't matter that doing so feels normal to you; shouting slurs at minorities feels normal to neo-Nazi[1] skinheads too. The hard part about prejudice is that it isn't simply solved by honest people acting naturally. It's solved by honest people trying really hard not to be prejudiced, because prejudice is innate.

[1] ed: thanks for pointing this out, peterwwillis
I wouldn't be too concerned about Google's profits personally. Look at how they got around iOS Safari's blocking of third party cookies(and are paying a fine for it). They'll find some way to do it. Also, DNT does not apply when the user is logged in.
No, there is a lot of better ways to inform the designer about his mistakes than just ranting about them.
Try telling that to my university, the majority of my non CS classes that are required are suffixed with "for engineers".
If Microsoft wanted to make DNT completely useless and ignored - they may have accomplished their goal.
The author is assuming that people not buying games because of let's play videos is a bad thing for the industry.

He's right that it happens, but it's actually a good thing.

If a game is so boring and forgettable that watching a Youtube video is an effective replacement, a player who purchases it will not be satisfied with the game. This directly harms the industry, because it disincentiveses people from purchasing more games in the future.

Ideally, you want to match up games with people that want to play them. Crappy games should sell zero units, and people shouldn't feel burned having spent their hard earned cash. Let's play videos aren't perfect, but they're a damn better solution than text reviews or advertisements.

Disclaimer: I'm an indie game developer that's just released the first alpha of my game [1], which has gotten most of its attention so far via let's play videos (made by myself, and others). So I'm biased in that direction, but I would have said the same thing a year ago when I was making Flash games.

[1]: http://www.underthegarden.com (shameless plug)
Trx exercise straps
Almost the same, the "J" in Iimmy descended and was overall taller than the "J" in Jmagine.
For me, Let's Plays fall into two categories. Some are like audio commentary tracks on DVDs - they can be entertaining and informative but you'd never listen to it without watching the film alone first. Others are more like MST3K/RiffTrax, where it's a particularly bad game that I wouldn't have played anyway made funny by the audio commentary. Some good examples of the latter are the famous Let's Play of Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 [0] or the Retsupurae guys doing Dark Seed [1].

Basically, I've never watched an LP instead of actually playing a game and I've actually avoided watching LPs of games I intend to play at some point, just to avoid spoilers. There might be a few people who have but, overall, the marketing benefit outweighs the downsides (unless, of course, you release an awful game that gets famously ripped apart).

Interestingly, Michael "slowbeef" Sawyer, the Something Awful goon who's credited with creating Let's Plays, can't stand a lot of YouTube Let's Players. He and diabetus do Retsupurae [2], which is basically them commenting over other people's commentary tracks and mocking them.

[0] http://lparchive.org/Sonic-The-Hedgehog-2006/

[1] http://blip.tv/slowbeef/real-estate-headaches-5568062

[2] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Retsupurae
According to the authors of that terrible design, they spent two months on it.

"Not once in the comments did I see an alternative suggestion."

The onus isn't on us to spend two months coming up with an alternative suggestion, when we can clearly compare the existing design with their proposal.

If I'd personally spent two months trying to re-invisage Wikipedia, I would certainly have brought that up.
Are those metric steps or imperial?
Obama fights ban on indefinite detention of Americans
Most are gone, but there seems to still be a few left up. No idea why.
In the UK it's very common to pay with cards. It's even more cashless than the US or Canada, I feel.
Also, Political Science.
Dynamic Analytics Using Objective-C on iOS
Something like Freenet would be better for this I think, since the "what" you share is limited by how much space you give the datastore, unlike bittorrent where you consciously decide what and what not to keep seeding.

It still has a problem with non-popular content being hard to find, but not nearly as much.
In the face of a decreasing availability of demos for games I feel that let's plays are the closest available thing to find out whether you like a game or not. A review can only go so far.

The decreasing amount of demos for games is probably feeding into more people watching LPs or pirating the games. I know a few of my friends pirate games because they don't want to sink £30-40 pounds into a game only to find out they hate it. Even if you've owned previous games in a series you can't rely on that experience to determine whether you'll like the next game, as I've discovered with several games lately.

Also, the author's assertion that watching the LP was a sufficient substitute for playing the game seems like it may not stand up against more choice based games like Mass Effect, at least for me. I could certainly see myself not watching any longer if the person playing started wildly diverging from how I'd react to situations. Even if someone is generally close to how I'd play there would be divergences in the choices.
Regardless of your actual point, your 3-year-old's coining of "Yourcraft" is really adorable.
I think "no password reuse" is an over-optimistic pipe dream for most users; also, it's unlikely that two people will be compromised at once by the same (not specifically targeted) attack; a compromise of all accounts of the same person is much more likely.
Hacking Scrabble
Saving this for the next yelling match I get in over a system design...
Nice shameless plug. Can you give us the twitter summary of your game? The screenshots and site look cool and really remind me of Clonks, another game that I played a long time ago.
What do Christian fundamentalists have against set theory?
Not for coffee-sized amounts at major coffee chains, no.
Apple's smartphone market share drops as Android jumps to 68%
Ah yes, the alpha nerd syndrome. Symptoms include not commenting code because "it should be obvious!"
From first glance, JavaScript, Google Maps API, and jQuery.
Nice idea, browsing through Themeforest is a bit of a painful, multi tab experience most of the time.

How about adding a text search as well? I regularly search for stuff like "admin" or "app" to narrow the search.
The Economic Impact of Ramadan - DailyFinance
Having gone through design critiques in architecture school and presented designs to clients in practice, I would say that taken individually the specific comments were largely constructive criticism when I last read through the thread (yesterday evening) and that the discussions of the problems with designers were largely consistent with my experience in a design discipline.

The project in general looked to me like the response to an academic design brief, and taken individually, the comments were largely consistent with the sorts of comments which might be made during a juried crit in a US architecture school. However and although piling on can occur in a juried crit, the pack mentality is constrained by time - unlike typing on the internet.

On the other hand, nothing in the comments when I looked at them stood out as even close to the limit of what a paying client or one's boss might say during a design presentation or review. Tptacek's top comment might have been conveyed as a Jobsian "This is shit," and perhaps accompanied by a discussion of whether or not the designer should seriously consider ever reproducing.

One factor I think led to the volume of comments is that unlike most "Show HN" threads, this one was not couched as an MVP (or in this case a minimum viable design), but as finished project. In other words, it wasn't "Here is the landing page with a new logo and a drop down menu for choosing the language," with changes to the editor left for version two.

What I think contributed to a more visceral reaction among HN'ers is that the designer as hero approach feels at odds with the particular ethos of Wikipedia which is iterative and collaborative - particularly telling considering that audacity and heroism are among the common fetishes of HN.

In my opinion, the level of criticism was not unusual for HN. I've read plenty of blunt responses (closer to "This is shit") on "Show HN:" threads. It was really the volume which was unusual, and that I attribute to the subject matter.
This was awhile back, but when I saw the time-attack video for Super Mario Bros 3, I just about gave up playing video games out of a sense of abject inadequacy.
This is the W3C's problem. "An ordinary user agent MUST NOT send a Tracking Preference signal without a user’s explicit consent"? How, exactly, are they intending to detect the user's explicit consent via the medium of HTTP headers? Why introduce a header which almost everybody in the world would probably want to use by default in every one of their HTTP requests and then say that you can't do that? What if I chose my browser specifically because it has DNT by default? Why introduce a header which doesn't do anything unless you really really want it to?

The Explicit Consent Requirement is nonsensical. But then the DNT header itself is also nonsensical, because there's no legislation or tangible benefit to make request handlers respect it.

Nobody should be tracked unless they've explicitly asked for it.
yeah sure, you almost got me fooled, microsoft. this kind of remake is just a microsoft stunt to foul people to adhere to their ridiculous UI from windows 8.
Not sure we should compare a design firm to a toddler... are you joking?
This doesn't have to do with marketing Internet Explorer as being more secure / privacy friendly. Its about using Internet Explorer's still substantial market share to expose the level of tracking that occurs w/out user knowledge. This hurts companies with an advertising business model (google) because it forces them to either explicitly & openly ignore IE's DNT setting, or to turn off tracking and significantly decrease the value of their advertising. From MS's perspective, that's a win-win.
>This post is just an example of the latest trend of a new and unusually hostile HN.

It's not a new trend, you're just starting to notice it. I've been coming to HN off and on for years. It has always been unpleasant. I get physically uncomfortable whenever I come back here.

The community here is toxic. It's dressed up in the veneer of thoughtfulness, but it doesn't take a genius to identify the cultural attitudes, group-think and see how the detractors are treated. I got burned by my wrongheaded assumption that it actually was a place for reasoned discussion. Not gonna make that mistake again.
The idea of all cars following the same set of rules even if they are all AI driven is actually way too complicated. Bugs and misunderstandings of the standard would cause deviations that the other cars would need to react to anyway.
Agreed about the "engineer" label. My acquaintances at university were engineering students, and they would themselves correct me if I called them engineers - that requires licensure. (They're not even "engineers in training" until they've passed that monster FE.)

You betcha, PEs are justifiably proud of the title.

We have sysadmins around here who call themselves "Microsoft system engineers". It bugs me, but title inflation is a Dilbertesque fact of life.
Quote from http://wikipedia.org/wiki/engineer
"An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin roots ingeniare ("to contrive, devise") and ingenium ("cleverness")."

Software engineers definitely fall under this definition.
So you would implement like a virtual smart-card in the Client application end that then communicates with the API in our end and authenticates?

I also think this might be a bit overkill - maybe something for real enterprise apps... :-)

But it's a cool thought!

Thanks for sharing!
Thanks! Hopefully not derailing the thread too much... (Fires up TweetDeck)

You land on a deserted island. Survive the elements, build shelter and craft tools, explore the environment. Find your way home.
Chrome (right click)-> Open Link in new Incognito window.
Absolutely. This has got to be a huge partnership and I'm sure everything is going to be custom/branded. I'm anxious to see how Starbucks handles this. Will they use iPad kiosks that the user can interact with? Part of the Starbucks experience is being able to custom order a half-caf splash-of-cinnamon dolce latte with soy. Having a nifty UI to deliver that experience + an easy way to pay might be a good strategy. Will this tie in with their own Starbucks app so that I can order on my walk to Sbux, auto pay, and then walk out without waiting in line?
Huh, I didn't realize that some hardware folks are still so irrationally jealous of the label "engineer" being applied to software engineers as well. In truth the distinction between a physical versus information end-product as a prerequisite for the term "engineer" is arbitrary, self-serving on your part, and not recognized by any common definition of "engineer" of which I am aware.

Not to be too hard on you though; yes, the biggest aesthetic difference between hardware and software engineering is that with the latter, the cost of fabrication is essentially zero. But as described here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jajones/papers/p439.pdf

> The essential distinction between software and other engineered artifacts has always been the absence of fabrication cost. In conventional engineering of physical artifacts, the cost of materials and fabrication has dominated the cost of design and placed a check on the complexity of artifacts that can be designed. When one bottleneck is removed, others appear, and software engineering has therefore faced the essential challenges of complexity and the cost of design to an extent that conventional engineering has not.

So naturally the set of constraints is different than the ones with which hardware engineers contend, yet software engineers do fundamentally apply math and science to design products to meet hard, real-world constraints: Development time and cost, program correctness, time and space performance under expected load, reusability, and maintainability to name a few.

If there is a valid objection to the notion of software engineering as a "real" engineering discipline, it should be that a subset of the science upon which the discipline is based – that of software architecture – is at this point still underdeveloped and poorly understood, and as a result software engineers generally rely on their own intuition when it comes to architecture. (This in contrast to fundamental computer science, which is well developed enough that we can typically determine from mathematics or empirical evidence what kind of algorithm or data structure to use under given circumstances.)

But an arbitrary bias that engineers produce only physical artifacts does not constitute a valid objection.
Being sexist is bad.

Accusing a man of sexism just because he doesn't agree with a woman is worse.
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