skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that I want to share more complete thoughts on this subject, as it could easily be used to develop the next generation of money-sucking social games, but here's a partial response.

Casinos offer a variety of different games, which have different appeal to different types of their clientele. There are lottery type games, in which there is a faint hope of a extraordinary windfall, which appeal to people who want money without working for it (i.e. people in debt). There are games in which there is a large degree of control and which the winner emerges because of his/her psychological prowess which appeals to the serious gamer (i.e. professional poker players). And then there are the run of the mill ring-ding-ding games, which appeal both to the idea of winning money, the suspense of the spinning wheel, and various other attention keeping mechanisms.

Social games have the ability to emulate virtually all of these. Although ostensibly buy-in is limited to virtual money that can never be removed from the game, there is nothing stopping large markets to grow around virtual items that can be traded (as happened with Ultima, EQ, SL, Eve, etc.).

The clutch here is that the "fun" of the experience in both cases largely revolves around ideas of advancement, social enhancement of the idea of advancement, and (potentially) some real world tie-in.

Actually, in many respects the social game is far more advanced than the casino already, insofar as it offers the idea of advancement which is potentially not tied to money (i.e. leveling up), but which can also be tied to money if people want it to be.

The problem of this right now is the fact that virtual currency cannot be liberated, but as soon as that problem is solved the casino will be an obsolete institution, soon to be extinct.
Sure thing. Email, blog, twitter all the same.
What about hellofax : http://www.hellofax.com ? It's a YC company (W11)
Something you and the parent are missing: the Zynga-style "social" games are overwhelmingly (80%+) played by a completely different target group than 99% of all computer games before them: adult women.

They are most definitely not going to disappear unless there is competition that appeals to that target group more, and the (admittedly short) experience says it's not going to be something with a big element of skill.
Maybe all this is true, but even if 8 billion people die in that period, the author's statement is still true since 7 billion people have to die in order for 8 billion to die.

I don't see the point of this kind of nitpicking. It's doing nothing to further any sort of conversation on the topic -- it just seems needlessly critical.
The point of the article is not that she's incompetent or bad at her job. The point of the article is that once Facebook hired her to help them come up with a business model, ads were a foregone conclusion. She led the charge on the monetization problem. There was never any serious consideration of real, creative alternatives.

I don't think she's done a bad job at Facebook. She's actually done a great job at selling ads - that's something she's been doing very well for 11 years now.

But a company like Facebook doesn't come along often, and when you're the COO of Facebook you owe it to your employees, your investors, your industry, and the world to attempt to create entirely new ways of doing things. There was no real creativity in the Facebook monetization solution - which sucks because up to that point Facebook was one of the most creative technology companies.

But blaming Sandberg for selling advertising is like blaming Elton John for selling music. It's what she does. Sandberg didn't make any real mistakes - she did the job she was hired to do. Facebook made the mistakes by letting her decide how to monetize.
It's actually a common misunderstanding of evolution to assume that it is optimising anything other than suitability to a particular environment (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution#Definin...). So no, it doesn't make sense to use evolution as evidence that suitability in one domain implies suitability in another domain, especially when the domains have almost nothing in common except a shared requirement for management of scarce resources in a very abstract sense.
So he prepped them by reminding them such life extending technology might not exist (at which point they feel like it's a test) and then, shocker, they didn't opt for nonexistent tech?
... That reassuring tone sounds suspicious !
When I was on a jury we were instructed to use only information provided through the trial. Not to rely on "expert opinions" within the jury pool.

I'm not sure if that always applies, though.
I concur! In fact, I think this would have made an excellent release of the "first man on the moon" photo; It's just a recrop of their original: http://i.imgur.com/PyiKT.jpg, so no disallowed manipulation.
History will be a lot easier, which is good, less myths is always good. But maybe it will allow our brains to be lazy since there's no more missing link to solve.
How to minimize a window: OS X and Mountain Lion
The film was precious. Every gram of film had to be brought back into orbit by Eagle in lieu of some onboard instrument, backup system, additional fuel and air or sample from the surface.
Comparing the photo that Neil Armstrong took on THE MOON to a sketch of his cat is silly, and you know it.

Also, every single image you see of Saturn from Cassini has been manipulated. Almost every photo of Mars from Curiosity is manipulated. So what then?
I'm replying to you from Windows 7 running natively on my MacBook via Bootcamp.

What's your point, exactly?
Which aspects did these two infringe? The only thing that even seems plausible is the home screen/icons part of the claim.
Self taught programmer in a senior position here.

Frankly pointing to to being able to implement algorithms as a measure of a programmer's ability is next to useless. Any code monkey can ape a data structure they've seen in a book. Designing code so when requirements are changed you can easily swap that data structure with another is the real test.

ps I can implement any number is algorithms and design patterns, though I rarely get to.
It's interesting how the left are alternately wishy-washy moral relativists, and then neo-fascist adjudicators of public behaviour.
This is actually rather important. But I guess there is a high chance he misremembered? Hm. When they sent out a correction this should be able to track down?
If my old HP iPaq had a black, not silver bezel and had less hardware buttons, I imagine it would have looked something like that. Hmm.
You may see a return to canvas with ace. I saw an upcoming version at Google IO and believe it used canvas and webgl.
I've been temporarily looking for a job in the UK so I can point you to some of the sites I checked or that were advised here:

http://hackerjobs.co.uk/ It was recently launched, you'll find some posts they made here on HN.

http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/ I've found some interesting job openings here.

You should also check the monthly post "Who's Hiring" here on HN they have some openings in London. I think I've seen at least one each month.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323597 August version

EDIT : I've kept a list of companies that I was interested in and had openings in may/june, would you be interested to have it?

EDIT2: Added link to august discussion "Who's Hiring"
>But Apple simply doesn't allow for people who reside in multiple countries, and have credit cards in multiple countries. I guess that lifestyle doesn't fit the "Apple way" -- it's thinking too different.

Yes, the irony is very fitting, because as we all know some evil masterminds at Apple HQ are all about making it difficult for non-conformists to have credit cards at multiple countries.

Or you could arrive at the rational conclusion that dealing with different countries, tax systems, economic agreements, copyright laws, regulations, accounts, currency exchanges et cetera AND tracking all that is

_so_difficult_

that despite being a very lucrative outcome for those who manage it, VERY VERY few entities have managed to somewhat overcome those problems a worldwide basis. Namely, Paypal (I did say "somewhat"). And this bloody mess has nothing to do with Apple or any specific company.

Just because we got worldwide connectivity via the internet 20 years ago, people expect boundaries between 200 countries with widely varying economic systems, allies, agreements they participate in, level of technological sophistication, willingness to change their laws, etc etc, will suddenly be unified into one harmonious system so that people can have iTunes accounts in both California and the Congo?
Well no, I should have been more clear. I accepted a contract instead of full-time work. After being bought out of the 1-year recruiter deal I now get paid by the company instead of the recruiter but at a higher salary.

I also posted in the wrong thread, seems I had too many tabs open.
>Samsung chose to copy Apple's 30 pin connector over the Android default

Depends which phone. Some of their phones have BlackBerry-style micro-USB-esque connectors.
The key insight is that data retention may, in the long term, exceed human life expectancy. So that most of the visible records of people will be about the dead rather than the living.

US (and to some extent European) culture tends to have a big taboo surrounding death and the dead, and only a small part of it is to do with the USA being a very young nation that has grown rapidly in population (so that it has a much higher living:dead ratio than many other countries). In pre-computer times, our records of our dead were confined to dusty parish registers and the occasional photograph. What does it mean to live in a society where dead people all leave thousands of geotagged photographs, videos, lifelogs, blog entries, and canned rants?

The long term cultural implications are fascinating ...
The question I came away asking, as someone in the United States, was how can we launch quickly in other countries? It's hard enough launching in the US with the regulations here, but I'm at a complete loss as to how to launch internationally.

Is localization/internationalization enough? For my company, we work with/through VARs, which requires an in-person visit. We've barely got enough bandwidth to cover the US as it is today; expanding internationally would be pretty difficult.

I'm just not sure where to start!
>Comparing the photo that Neil Armstrong took on THE MOON to a sketch of his cat is silly, and you know it.

Sure, but not much sillier that saying that putting up a picture of a different person is a "slight inaccuracy".

>Also, every single image you see of Saturn from Cassini has been manipulated. Almost every photo of Mars from Curiosity is manipulated. So what then?

Notice how I, unlike TFA, never said anything about manipulation? I only raised the issue that we DO care a lot, as photo editors (1), if it's a picture of Neil in the article or if it's a picture he took of Buzz.

But, since you ask, you show those images with an explicit notice that they are manipulated. If they were images of events with political aspects, war images, images or persons etc they would not be published manipulated, but in this case we are talking about essential manipulation (stitching, colour correction, move to the visible spectrum, etc), and not creative image doctoring like pasting some space or removing a person USSR style.

(1) And presumably as readers. You don't just put out some different image that one assumes from the article content and then except readers to check the caption (which they seldom do). All sorts of perception manipulation can be carried out that way.
Wouldn't it be possible to just use ALSA with software mixing? Because ALSA has very low delay as far as I know.
This is awesome, thanks very much - BetaPunch looks incredibly useful.
You're being excessively literalist about this important point.

Either we're living through the digital dark ages, and any and all personal records we make will be toast within 30 years, or we're going to leave a lot of information about ourselves cluttering up the datasphere. Whether it's curated by Facebook or by some other successor entity is beside the point: the question is, what is the net going to be like when more than half the people with a presence on it are dead?
Surprise, both of you guys are needed! The "get it done" guy, is almost never the "do it right" guy. Some are closer to each other then others... but almost never are they the same guy. The thing is, when you're building that first prototype, the most important thing is getting it out there and proving the concept works! It doesn't matter if you build the perfect architecture that can scale effortlessly if in the end no one decides your product has value.

Of course, I've been that guy who has to clean up too. That job sucks :( almost never is the product designed the way it eventually ends up being used.
> I _effin_ care. E.g. I want a picture of Neil Armstrong for my article. Not a picture that _he_ took of somebody else. Not a quick sketch he did of his cat. I want a picture of HIM, preferably on the moon.

Neil is visible in the photo, in the reflection on Aldrin's visor. In this photo which he took while walking ON THE MOON. Which, if you take a step back and lose the journalistic tendentiousness, you will realize makes this about as cool as any picture ever taken.
What games are you claiming need the same level of information about me as a doctor?

Frankly, your analogy is ridiculous. Facebook apps aren't integral parts of my health and well-being. They don't need to delve into my personal life.

They want to. That's one way to exploit me to advertisers. But a Doctor absolutely needs to, for my own well being. Games and the advertisers they serve don't have that claim.
It's 'just business'. Agreeing or not doesn't really matter and the 3 people here not buying Apple products because of it also doesn't matter. Apple makes (in my opinion) great hardware: I haven't found a better iPad-like or Air-like or even Macbook-like. I like the Lenovo t420 but I like my Macbook more; I really don't care at all about looks or brand; it's just nice to work with IMHO.

This kind of 'practice' has been going on for a looooong time. All 'younger' people should read about MS in the 80s & 90s. You didn't see it and maybe you think they are great now and Windows 7/8 is so much better than mac/lin etc; read up on the history. They used to be hardcore evil. If HN was around in those times, there would be stories of disgust and misery on the frontpage every single day. It's nothing new.

Companies defend their backyard in any way possible and they just add power-points to their company by taking this kind of action. If they didn't take this action or they would've lost, maybe Samsung could just 1 to 1 copy their products and get away with that. Would that be good for consumers? I don't think so. I am against patents and i'm actually against all patents; I don't believe they are for the greater good of humanity. If you cannot get your 'invested research money/time' (which is bullshit for most patents) back by execution, maybe you should just sell the entire research to a company that can and not try to peddle it yourself.

But as long as this kind of shit exists, don't worry about it. It doesn't affect you nor 'the consumer', Samsung has to say that as 1000s and 1000s of companies did before them who lost. In reality Samsung just pays something per infringing product sold to Apple and that's it. Hopefully cases like this will have companies fighting harder against patents and make pacts to open up patents for the real greater good. Not sure if I'll see that in my lifetime though :)
Can you do user agent spoofing on an iPad? Because iPad browser is perfectly capable of viewing desktop websites except those with Flash.
I posted a much longer reply just now, but you get to the heart of it.

On your PS of "I rarely get to", would you go further and say "I rarely need to" as well? Because that's how I feel for about 95% of the work I do. There's a few places in larger projects where I enjoy getting to test out a few different approaches to data structures in anticipation of potential use cases (speed, concurrency, reporting needs, etc). But after a while, I tend to know in advance what will work 'well enough' (or maybe even what the 'optimal' structures are) and don't need to (or get to) spend much time experimenting.
"True Do" - An idea.
NASA - Neil Armstrong: 1930-2012
An app to remember everywhere you have been in your whole life time
>Neither is likely to happen.

You'd be surprised. With the cost cutting of proof checking and editorial departments, and the rush to catch internet time news, I've seen much much worse misattributions and even hoaxes running around in respectable publications (far from only online ones).
this works well for the most part.
>Which, if you take a step back and lose the journalistic tendentiousness, you will realize makes this about as cool as any picture ever taken.

If I want to depict Neil Amstrong, the "coolness" of a picture showing some other guy does not come into play at all.

Isn't it obvious?

I mean, seriously, "as cool as any picture ever taken"? "visible on the reflection on the visor"?
I didn't read it that way. I also find it ironic that in arguing against self-important people, there is a hell of a lot of self-importance inherent in the post (and yours, too).

The degree (or lack of) isn't the issue. Having a CS degree doesn't make you immune to any of your assertions. What you're describing is just a bad programmer.

I believe the GP's argument is about programmers with CS degrees who don't 'get' simplicity, because they can't validate their own intelligence and qualifications with it. I would never tar all programmers with the same brush, but much like the ignorant 'get it done' guy, there's the ignorant 'flex my brain muscles, fuck everyone else' guy too.
I'd rather only have to deal with these 'high level only' folks vs the ones that literally could not code up a fizz buzz solution to save themselves. My biggest surprise is that people like this really do exist in the industry.
It would certainly be naive in the extreme to suppose that the whole national economy would improve if every person of working age spent the time, effort, and money to add one degree to his or her resume. At the individual level of analysis, in some occupations, a typical degree for that occupation seems to be all upside for the degree-holder. A commonly made statement in books about industrial psychology is that an engineer has higher earnings over the course of a lifetime, adjusted for the cost of obtaining a degree, at ALL levels of IQ. In other words, if you like technical occupations, do whatever it takes to be classified as an engineer rather than as a technician, and in many workplaces that means get a college degree.

But at the societal level of analysis, it is much less clear that increasing the societal percentage of college graduates is really beneficial. The example of different national development strategies during the 1960s and 1970s helps clarify what might be involved. Some newly independent former colonies, especially in Africa, pursued strategies of promoting higher education with publicly subsidized college for elite students, so that the most capable learners would no longer have to study abroad to gain degrees. Other countries with a similar degree of wealth (the year my wife was born, Taiwan was poorer than Zambia) pursued a strategy of broad access to well delivered primary, and then secondary, education, with higher education paid for in larger part by family resources of families willing to pursue higher education. The broad-based national education policy of making the masses better educated promoted much more economic growth (and political democratization and liberalization) than the focus-on-elites policy of directly increasing the number of college graduates.

There is formal research on how much students learn during college attendance,

http://www.todroberts.com/USF/PerfectStorm_UndergradEducatio...

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_la...

and the unsurprising finding of that research is that some students learn quite a bit during their college years, but some hardly learn anything at all. College-as-such, without regard to what major the student pursues, and what the academic atmosphere of the college is, doesn't necessarily lead to intellectual growth for the enrolled students.

P.S. Noting an early downvote to this comment, I'm wondering what people who disagree with these observations of the real world have to say to provide evidence for their disagreement. I learned during my high school education, and continued to learn during my college education, to ask for citations of facts as I form my opinions about public policy.
I don't think I care at all if genetic modifications ruin athletic exhibitions (or the list of great mountain climbers or ...).

(I would say the potential for experimentation gone wrong is a much bigger concern;)
That's what I figured.

If you want a challenge, try installing Arch on an 12" PowerBook G4. I spent three days one winter break in college getting that on there.
Well, they're phones. And black. And Samsung is the bad guy in this story. Alright then, 4 million.
I have also been on the side of finishing a new product quickly and imperfectly, and I acknowledge the trade-offs involved. I rail against the "get it done" mind-set in quotes. I find that a programmer who prides themselves on getting it done is, more often than not, a "get it done" moron who means get it done badly. The kind of programmer who thinks "getting it done" means stabbing the code enough times that the bloody wounds congeal just enough to compile. They are not smart or experienced enough to know what they don't know.
The thing is, there are bad recruiters... but there are also good recruiters. I've worked with a few great recruiters that actually took the time to match me with a position i'd truly like. Guys like this may be rare, but they exist.
Google Analytics is probably your best bet. It's designed for web pages but can be used for the analysis of anything. Personally, I store the data myself in a database like mongo db and run analytics on it yourself.

Hope this helps
> it's interesting that your instinctive reaction to a message
> you don't agree with is to suppress it.

I think you need to explain why not providing a communications tool to someone you disagree with is equivalent to actively suppressing that person's free-speech rights, otherwise we might just assume you're just trying to deliberately turn this discussion into name-calling.
Nice idea for my wallpaper (1080p) for next week.

I fiddled the curves a bit on the inset photo, but still need to do something with that blue/violet cast on the bottom right.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8403291/armstrongs-picture-of-aldrin...
Fair enough. "Get it done" is a trigger phrase for me, so I responded in too personal an attack. There are many "get it done" morons out there, and I have worked with several, but that of course does not mean you are one. You recognize the inherent trade-offs involved, which I appreciate.
Well. What he says about including stripes in the astronaut suits for future missions checks out - http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-CDRStripes.html
There is only a finite number of living beings this planet can sustain at any given moment - if there really is a possibility to "disable" aging, how do you think we should decide which of all those potential beings will be given a chance to live? Who are we to consider ourselves more worthy of life than any of the previous or possible next generations?
It isn't quite start to finish, but I've been enjoying Code School's Anatomy of Backbone.js: http://www.codeschool.com/courses/anatomy-of-backbonejs

(Really, in general, I'd highly recommend Code School. Likely too basic for most here, but great to pass along to that person you know just starting out or in the early intermediate stages.)