skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to repost my comment here, because I cannot read blogs that have Trackbacks in their comments:

If the used game market goes away, so do AAA titles. You cannot have the risk mitigation of resale in digital distribution. Plus, the console makers control the pipe to their machine. With physical distribution, you can play GameStop off of Target off of Best Buy off of Walmart.

I like Dave, but he uses the same example of a hidden camera showing a GameStop rep pushing new buyers to used product every time he speaks. There’s no rigor to the objection.

Yes, I’m biased. But I did this analysis before I started Dawdle, and no one wants to give Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo the same power that the music industry gave to Apple.
The Perils of Confusing American Companies With American Jobs
I had something of an experience like this in the US system. My mom was overly concerned about my grades because, in her view, the only way to get a good education and "be successful" was to test into the top math+science classes, as that was what my older brother did. (She wasn't able to admit that until last year after I finished college and got a job. My brother is finishing his PhD and now realizes that he doesn't want to research math the rest of his life, he just liked studying it.)

Fortunately, the pressure was far less in my instance, and I ultimately found a satisfactory compromise in college between my own goals and "successful" goals, but the bitter feelings are the same. Learning isn't helped by making it a threatening experience.
That Was Quick: QikCom Hits The Deadpool
Yes, from http://source.android.com/roadmap :

Q1 2009

Input method framework (IMF)

This feature will enable support for input methods other than physical
keyboards, for example soft keyboards. IMF will also enable application
developers to provide IME (see below) applications based on the framework.

Input method engines (IME)

IME will support soft keyboards, a dictionary of suggestions, and a
suggestion algorithm. The Android platform may contain a few reference IMEs,
and developers can provide IME applications through the Android Market.

Personally, I'm looking forward to something like Palm's old Graffiti for quickly entering a bit of text without having to pop open the keyboard.
I don't quite follow your argument about AAA titles going away -- how does the sale of used games help the game developer? how does it encourage them to make them?
Hyperlocal Is Happening
That didn't explain "how".
This projection seems faulty (or at the very least it needs more analysis) to me. All the previous [machine] generations yield an increase in bandwidth, something that is not obviously the case for progression from blogging to tweeting. Especially if we consider signal-to-noise ration not brute information.
That would probably be the "risk mitigation". In simpler terms, I think he means "people are more likely to buy a (AAA, thus probably $50+) game if they know they could sell it used and recoup some cost if they end up not liking it, grow tired of it, etc.".

The AAA gaming market is already pretty fragile, as the games cost so much, the production values are ridiculous, and so on. It's a very hit-or-miss industry, where a partial success is a financial failure and blockbusters are what keep companies afloat.
I read a theory once that happiness is designed to be fleeting because otherwise we would eat one meal and then starve to death or procreate once and then die.

Also, related article I read in Newsweek recently:

"If you want to test yourself, take a quick look at this domain name sometimes used by stress researchers: www.opportunityisnowhere.com.

What do you see? For many people, the web site seems discouraging: opportunity is nowhere. But others see the exact opposite: opportunity is now here. When it comes to hidden messages, lucky people perceive more of the world around them. "It is not that they expect to find certain opportunities, but rather that they notice them when they come across them," Wiseman writes in his book "The Luck Factor." This ability (or talent) "has a significant, and positive, effect on their lives."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/181290/output/print
It reduces the risk for the buyer. A buyer bears less risk than the $60 cost of a game because of the resale value of the game.

In 2007, there was at least $1 billion in new game sales funded through the proceeds of used game sales (between GameStop data and paid industry research).

There's a multiplier effect - game publishers can receive more than $100 in revenue for a given $100 in purchasing power.
>Turns out A->B means that A can be reduced to B (using a "polynomial-time many-one reduction"). So if we assume that B is NP-complete, A is too.

It's the other way around. For a given problem to be NP-complete requires that every problem in the NP superset be reducible to it in polynomial time. So in the A->B case, if we know A to be NP-complete, we have just proved every problem in NP is also reducible to B in polynomial time, by ways of any-NP-problem->A->B, ergo B is NP-complete.
Actually, Scoble follows everyone _because_he_can_receive_DMs_ from them.
Now, all he has to do is to follow @dmpp.
Women already get enough special treatment. If you register for a computer forum with a female avatar, the amount of attention you get and rapidity with which your questions get answered is inordinate.
Maybe if you'd written it Not Safe For Anything, that would make the brain click correctly. I too misread your original.
http://www.justin.tv/search?q=porn&commit=Search&sec...

Justin.tv directs me to a porn site.

It's wrong to just blindly forward people to porn when most of them are younger kids.
Think of it something like this.

"U can now receive DMs from people you have @replied sometime, even tho' you dont follow them anymore."

The above represents the default behavior, however, U could modify access to be able to receive DM from anybody/only followers
Saw a recent documentary "Independent Lens" that was about the Fermi Lab. Said it had lost funding a while ago. Good to hear it didn't completely shut down.
more info - http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/atomsmashers/
Markoff's Gated Community Should Die in a Fire
Recovery.gov has gone live
> But, they still have to follow you.

No. If they ever @replied to U, U can DM them. (default behavior)

>It doesn't litter my timeline. In fact, I've never seen a direct message on my timeline. It gets emailed to me, and shows up in the "Direct messages" tab.

If you follow someone, so that they may be able to DM U (say @rememberthemilk), your timeline now includes their tweets, which U may not want.

Don't I do this already by just not following them?

Nope. Twitter decides this for U. U can now only receive DMs from people you follow. By following this, you could beat this restriction and define your own restriction. The default restriction we use is people you have @replied can send U DMs.

Not seeing a use for it, sorry.

You are free to do so. Meanwhile please care to have a look at this: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22cant+dm%22 There are a few people each hour, not being able to DM someone.
So Fermilab's chances of being first (maybe in next year) in what they claim "is not a race with" CERN's LHC are improved by the LHC's injuries...

The fact that we must... keep... waiting... isn't news.

Now let's get back to the office pool: Will the Higg boson "God particle" show...

? She's female ?
? He's black ?
? Just like Michelangelo showed us ?
What is Information?
(It’s pretty great to get a subscription from people that don’t even play, so expect more people to design games were they will clearly KILL your characters if you stop paying. Not good for players, but it’s on the list as it’s a monetization method.)

I sort of disagree. I am getting occasional emails from CCP about how they still have my EVE Online character from 2005 and how awesome it would be to re-sub. I feel it's more likely to get people to spend more money versus "kidnapping" their characters. In EVE's case, though, I am pretty sure their policy was to delete characters 3 months after you cancelled your account, but they seem to not actually enforce this.

I would like to see some sort of figures to give weight to either side of the argument.
Actually, now that I think about it, the only thing the C code is there for is libpurple support; it's all Perl and there's no compilation you'd need to do at all if you don't want to use libpurple.
It seems -way- overpriced at the low end of the spectrum. I used to run a live show + Q&A for my Facebook game last year using Ustream. To use Watershed, it would have cost me over $600 a month for something that was inferior to what I was already doing. In a few work hours (and $0), I was able to throw up a branded page on my site with the ustream feed embeded next to a customized Meebo room. Saving this one time hassle would not have been worth the cost.
I've decided, for personal reasons, that the best thing that could be done for gaming today is to grow a community of amateur game developers.

Therefore I'm working on a project - some open-source technology, and a targeted community portal - towards this end. I think there are a number of possible related business models, but at the moment I'm not going to jump for money. It doesn't motivate me well.
The Indian Software Exports Scam
Ask HN: Do you use FreshBooks? If so please review my new application
Mel Karmazin Gives Away the Farm, Saves Job
Why I Write Software
Howdy friends,

I've just launched a beta of a new application that adds extensions to FreshBooks. Please take a look if you're a FreshBooks user! New modules coming out shortly for budgets, improved reporting, and some other goodies.

Thanks!
Agreed.

In this safety-addled society, though, I would not be surprised if some of his worst ideas did not come to pass.

When society prizes safety above all else, then creativity that would have in the end actually made society more sanely safe is de-prioritized, and is therefore counterproductive.
Does Capital Efficiency Matter?
There is... it's just not launched yet.
I know I did. Thanks so much for writing these great "What I did and how it worked for me" posts with such detail, I really enjoy seeing how other entrepreneurs have gone about their businesses.
There was a last minute, partial rescue of funding, which had as at least one focus a personal contribution in the millions of dollars (5MM, I seem to recall?).

Compared to the Federal budget, the amounts involved weren't even the husk on a discarded peanut. Penny wise, pound foolish.
"Silicon Valley Index" Shows Signs of Weakening
There are plenty of examples of programmers writing systems that are too grandiose to solve simple problems, as well as programmers writing systems that are hacky and not reusable enough.

People should try more of the first -- there is way too much of the second. If your project is going to fail horribly, at least write some open source libraries. ;)
The economic crisis prompts an outbreak of politeness in business
Free Slide Makeover for 2-3 Startups
It's interesting to note that, of the two software companies mentioned, Google's feedback loop is a lot shorter than Microsoft's. If they find a bug they can, theoretically, patch it then and there, whereas Microsoft does something like Patch Tuesday, and of course Microsoft doesn't get the rich interaction data that Google does.
An Underkill Approach To Negotiating Your Startup Employment Package
In one of the 5 largest retail banking operations in the US? Use of HTTP Auth --- digest or otherwise --- at all --- a doc-able finding.
Every time Chris Poole talks to media it's to fuck with them.
Eclipse tool for Silverlight
We will not be able to work with you 
Hey HN.

I've been to business meetings with many companies and people from many different sectors with varying levels of profesionality and revenues for years. In meetings, I introduce myself, tell them about what i can provide and how i can help them with their projects. Everything seems to go fine during the meetings,
we are professionals, we put our cards about "what they need, what i can give etc" on the table. We seem to have a spoken agreement there.
After the meetings i send my offer for the project.

And never hear from them again. I call them some time(a week or so) after i send the offer, they just say "we'll get back to you" but then, days pass by and still no response. This happens most of the time.

Why is this so hard to say "Sorry, we'll not be able to work with you"? What happens to the professionality we have seen in the meetings?
I need to be able to get any kind of feedback from the meetings and people i try to do business, to improve my skills and styles and to see what i did wrong or right. No feedback means just a waste of time.

I guess i expect much from the people. Is this always the same HN? Any stories to share?

Any feedback is very welcome. Thanks.
This was great reading. I've put off A/B testing with Google Website Optimizer long enough. Looking forward to boosting my revenue! ;-)
I see, you're not just talking about network effects of aggregating all of the startups together, it's about having a common pool of investors as well. I wonder if angelconf is a first step towards a ycombinator-like structured approach towards the investing side of the equation?

http://www.angelconf.com/
It is sad but this mentality seems to have spread to the U.S. at least in the form of Chinese grad students. It isn't very intellectually stimulating to discuss chemistry with someone whose idea of being great in Organic Chemistry is having memorized Org Chem textbooks in English before he could speak English. What is worse is that professors admire the amount of work Chinese students put in compared to their American counterparts. I feel a lot of pressure to work mindlessly and without any creativity. I think that this model of education is not sustainable and will damage American higher education in the long run.

Sometimes I feel out of place in graduate school in an engineering department. I'm the only person I know of here who reads Faulkner and listens to Coltrane in his spare time. I get the feeling that if I told my adviser that I was teaching myself French on the weekends, he would consider it a waste of time. Not that reading Faulkner helps me learn Quantum Chemistry, but I feel like a well rounded education will help me make breakthroughs later in Quantum Chemistry. But I'm finding that dissatisfaction with the slavishly work hard in one chosen area is the minority opinion and it is hard not to be disheartened by this.
Another use of netcat is to stream video or audio from one computer to another. All you need is a player that supports playing from standard input.
Cloud computing with Amazon Web Services: Dataset processing with SimpleDB
Which names in particular are you talking about?
(wow, i never thought my obsession with knitting would come in handy here)

Basically, that's it. My only problem with the pattern is that it's not entirely specific about what to repeat, typically patterns will go "(p2, k2, p1, k1) repeat to end", using parentheses or asterisks to clarify what to repeat, but that's a nitpick at most.
They would be very useful in survival situations.
And even worse, crackers do it as a hobby. DRM makers just do it as a job, so they have less incentive to make their DRM innovative. Crackers will see a hard to crack DRM, and view it as a challenge and a reason to get excited. When the iphone was cracked, the kid got news coverage worldwide.
And to again quote the article: "Programmers often take refuge in an understandable, but disastrous, inclination towards complexity and ingenuity in their work. Forbidden to design anything larger than a program, they respond by making that program intricate enough to challenge their professional skill."

The article points out that programmers instinctively look for ways to make their jobs more interesting, and that many of these approaches end with solutions that are unusable or unmaintainable. There may well be no interesting and effective way to specify that Arizona and Texas need documents SR008-04X and SR008-04XI.
Fax machines are still in use for the most important messages.

E-mail is still in use for important notifications.

Blogs are still in use for minor items.

Twitter is in use for... inconsequential items?
Honestly, I might just be cranky here. First day back at work and all. But this article making the front page seems like a sign that HN's quality controls are failing.

As you point out there is no "how" explained. In fact, there's no real insight here at all. Even the logical conclusions are kind of stupid. Blogging replaced E-Mail? OK.

I can only hope this is just a result of lower traffic due to the Holiday in the U.S.
I routinely get contact for business on twitter. That might be because Tipjoy does a lot of business on twitter. http://tipjoy.com/twitter

But the process is awesome: @reply saying hi, follow to get a DM, get a DM with a phone number to call. It takes a few seconds if you're using something like TweetDeck.

This is to get a hold of others. I just give out my phone number of email in public, and skip the step to DM.
> 5. Tedium is Inescapable. No O/R-mapper or code-generator can ever solve the fact that records, fields, validators, etc. need to be defined, by hand, in at least two places (front- and back-end). A UI generated from the database is just as bad as the database that’s generated from the UI.

Tedium may be inescapable, but defining something multiple times pretty much guarantees that at least one of the defintions will be wrong and usually takes more time than defining said something once.

Normalization isn't just for databases.
Even with not being able to explain "how" and to appreciate the importance of fax and other mediums even today, the author also failed to mention the fastest mode of communication: IM.

And the reason why Twitter won't replace email is the same reason why IM can't replace email: Email is a standard with no central ownership. On the otherwise Twitter is a "closed" platform with open API. If you want to twitter, you have to use Twitter (R).
Installed. Much nicer than Courier New. Cheers :)
The Right of Websites to Link
How To Find Everything Uploaded In Rapidshare
Rapidshare is a great file sharing site , but sometimes it´s difficult to find wanted file in rapidshare. In this post i´ll show simple keyword trick, that can help a lot.
On some pages I have mail, e-mail or Gmail.
It might be related to the fact I'm in switzerland right now and it seems some services appear in french and other in english and other in german.

I wonder why, but it also depends on where I am.
For example, at home it is only Gmail, at work its all different.
Yeah, this appears to be 10x the price of Wowza EC2 on the low end. Granted, it's more powerful.
If you haven't read his book, I highly recommend it.

Also, he gave a great speech at sxsw a few years ago:
http://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060311.Da...

It changed my life
OpenFeint: A Plug-And-Play Social Platform For iPhone Games
> It changed my life

Without being too nosy hopefully, could you go into that a little? I find I read a lot of books and the imparted wisdom/motivation decays exponentially.
I have to be honest here, I hate signing up to test a product more so for invite on beta. Over the years of building online application I found out that is the case for a lot of people. You may want to consider providing a demo kinda open interface for your app.
It wasn't presented as "a start". It was presented as "all over the state" in response to someone who asked about coverage.

Honesty matters if for no other reason than dishonesty destroys credibility. If they're misrepresenting coverage, what else is other than as advertised?
Yeah, except this time, Truman will know he's being watched.

It's a little weird that we've somehow collectively chosen to embrace the 1984 vision of constant surveillance; throwing ourselves into it ahead of even the government's capacity.
If you're interested in this topic, I recommend reading Michael Pollan's books - The Omnivore's Dilemma or (the shorter) In Defence of Food. He explains more why reductionism in nutrition makes absolutely no sense - both scientifically and from a health point of view.
Coming up next - how to get more men interested in sewing.
Luis von Ahn's blog
I don't have much to say about the actual plan, but it's just so nice to see this stuff online.
Ask HN: Your Feedback on www.PlopQuiz.com
> IANAL, but a bank being taken into administration by the central bank is what should happen, rather than a huge injection of taxpayer's money.

Why are those the only two choices?

Or rather, there are other things that one might do.

Always beware someone who says that the only alternative to doing things their way is some disaster.
As Obama signs the stimulus package in Denver today, I'm launching a preview release of a site I've been working on called PlopQuiz. The site makes it easier to show what you know about subjects of public interest, such as energy efficiency or the economic recovery effort.

You'll notice that we now have a handful of community sponsors, as well. While sponsorships don't amount to much more than a badge on your profile at the moment, I'm interested in how a site like PlopQuiz could eventually help students finance their educational careers and avoid crushing levels of debt.

Ultimately, this site needs to evolve to best serve the needs of people, HN users included.

So lay it on me - if you don't see any utility in PlopQuiz at this stage, how do you think it could be improved to help you?
The Evils of Patent Litigation
Quite. _why's style is simply there to get you interested. The substance of his work is what keeps you interested.
America's crisis in a historical context: Worse than Japan?
Is paying govt for security "investment"?

It may be that some forms of govt security are superior to some forms of private security in some way, but that doesn't make govt security qualitatively different. It's still an expense.
It's Fermilab vs CERN in the Race for the Higgs Boson
I think the last item on the FAQ is probably the most interesting for hackers:

Q: Is the spending data on recovery.gov available in a format (like XML) that developers can use to create mashups and gadgets?

A: Not at this time. But, as new systems are developed to capture the allocations and expenditures under the Act, we plan to make that data available in exportable form.
Thank you for your answer. I'm 25 and considering what I should next in my career. I've been reading about product management lately and it's seem to be a good fit to my personnality and aspirations.
Yes thanks for the comment. Eventually I'm going to have a test account that people can use. The issue is that I'm 100% tied to another application so I have to be careful with the data / functionality I use. They do have a sample account though.
Poll: How do you begin coding?
Inspired by the recent post asking people how they read code, I'm curious: How do you start a new programming project? I understand the choices are simplistic and aren't well-defined, but if you work off of a variation of the choices, let us know!

This is meant to cover projects that tend to be larger in size.
First, create the entire execution flow/object diagram in my head or on paper. Have as much done conceptually before writing a single line of code. Start filling in the differences between conceptual model and what works.
Dive into a REPL, or a main.c, and start prototyping as early as possible. Write good ideas to a file, and go from there. Start with elementary ideas, then try to tape together something that works.
Create the GUI first. Lay out exactly how the user will interact with the app, then fill in code to make that a reality.
Create some form of a conceptual model, create tests, then start committing code to make them pass.
A mix of the above, it depends on the problem domain. (Expand in the comments)
Talk about gender stereotyping. This may be shocking but I'm a woman who can sew and use linux.

Guess what? so can my boyfriend!