skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
iTunes App Store, GPL is incompatible so it was pulled by request, I've still got a copy on my iPad though.
New bioluminescent cockroach possibly already extinct by volcanic eruption
Acting as though arguments for the common benefits of a competitive market should be dismissed unless the proponents are selflessly altruistic is an even bigger load of bollocks.
> There's also the rather-disturbing phenomenon of a small percentage of people spending an outlandish amount of money on these games. Sure, some of them might be enthusiastic fans, but that seems unlikely to me. Free-to-play games are just . . . not that kind of game. It seems more likely that they're folks with poor judgement, or who are even mentally ill. I don't know, but it doesn't sit well with me.

I have heard this about the gambling industry, from colleagues when I used to work at an online gaming company. I think it is true that a large amount of the profits from these type of things come from a small percentage, and often those people cannot really afford to loose such great amounts of money either.

Of Zynga's games, apparently "less than 1 percent [of players] are responsible for between a quarter and a half of the company’s revenue".[0]

[0] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/zyngas-quest-for-bigspe...
Danger Maps Shows You How Safe Any Address in China Really Is
You misunderstand the situation. CL-WHO is not a templating library, and many templating libraries are available (like CL-TEMPLATE).

Your point about unmaintained libraries: Most CL libraries are just really stable. Yes a lot of CL code hasn't been touched since 2006 or even 2000. Because it didn't need to be touched. See we have been around for some time. Our ecosystem is quite mature.

CL is a language for experienced programmers. It's not a toy like ruby for instance. I can see why a lot of new programmers are put off by the non-consumerist nature of CL. You have to understand that if you develop WITH CL you also develop CL as itself.

Small plug: I wasn't happy with CL-WHO either so I created my own HTML generation library. It's like 100 lines of code, and solves my needs http://mr.gy/software/html/
Good for them, I guess. Though VLC's popularity still makes me pretty sad and how better video players like MPC-HC (on Windows) and mplayer/mplayer2 (on everything else) are much more unknown in comparison. I mean, most of VLC's development outside of the streaming stuff has been about playing catch-up with these two for years.

But well, the unfortunate truth is that many people are bad at computers and if they manage to mess their system playback up, VLC can certainly feel like a "rescue" with its stand-alone nature. But well, I doubt most people care about high-quality media files to begin with, and VLC sure plays those 700MB XviD AVIs and so on just fine...
Why You Should Consider Using Git Rebase?
Your reasoning is pretty ridiculous. There are many things that cannot quantified. How would you quantify the contribution of a person who's done a lot of bad, say murdered some people, but whose actions inspire policy makers to change their policies for the better? Or how would you quantify the life of an african baby, dead at the age of 6 months, that inspires rich Americans to buy anti-malaria drugs? Or a horrendous event that results in a work of literature of such beauty that it lasts for centuries? Or some random, unknown person, dead for millennia, whose skeletal remains teaches us about human evolution? Some things require a completely different way of thinking from a data-driven, "rational" perspective, but to put it in your terms, "life" is such a complex, intractable, system, that quite often defies any kind of "left-brain" analysis.
Thanks for that.

I was a little baffled why MS would make this images only run on Windows when the people most likely to need to emulate other versions of IE / Windows would be non-Windows users.
I've been using them for a year in Japan, so there: You don't sit squarely on them (I don't know where you got the notion that your feet are on either side of the bowl), your feet are in front of the bowl, with the lowered pants in between. The pants are obviously below the opening of the bowl, so they don't get in the way.
Don't think so, considering the limitations as to how many devices you may download the application to. If i am not mistaken was it five.
The business model should fit the design of the game, not the other way around. If you try to force a freemium model into a traditional game, you cheapen the whole thing. The quality of your game design should be your selling point, not cheap in-game nags and enticements. It's like if Apple subsidized MacBooks with on-screen advertising. Sure, it could make a buck, but if your core vision is a quality product experience, this goes totally against that, and it defines your brand into something you may not have hoped for.

On the other hand, if your priority is to create a profitable entertainment product, and you'd like to capitalize on the enticement of a well-designed in-game purchasing system, then you should go all the way. If it's to succeed financially, the purchasing aspect of the game has to be the core in which all major design decisions are measured against. If you want to switch to a traditional single-sale system, you have to alter the game design in extreme ways.

Business models are not interchangeable within games, because a freemium system is inextricably tied to the game design.

As someone who hopes to see more games that are made first as a game, and second as a product, I'd like to say that a quality-first focus can carry your game to success, if you have the ability to execute. As long as you don't overextend yourself, like the blog post stated, you should be able to continue making hits if you can maintain quality in design and execution.
The quote:

> Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into IBM 704 machine code, fixing bug, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today...

a shorter version from "History of Lisp" page 9:

> S.R. Russell noticed that eval could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.
On a reading of how it was done, I guess if anyone had contributed stuff under the GPL and particularly objected to LGPL relicensing the could probably still make arguments about derivative works...

Interestingly there's no mention of dissenting opinions from anywhere. Not that I'm implying that this move is a bad thing, I would just expect if you ask a large enough group of developers any question about licensing you would get a variety of arguments cropping up.
VLC has been able to handle pretty much anything you throw at it for many years and always been available across diverse platforms. It's an awesome product.

Why so negative?
You don't say.

All that effort that went into humanizing BSD is absolutely laughable.
The 3d view is pretty impressive, although opening the webinspector crashed my Mac :(
There was an interesting post from one of the founders after the series began:
http://melanie.io/2011/09/30/techstars-lies-videotape/
I was referring only to this quote on the parent:

> it is ugly Python, boring Python, without any hint of elegance it could be. No list-set-dict comprehensions, which is what makes Python interesting

I disagree that list-set-dict comps is most of what makes Python interesting. Its meta programming is more interesting IMO.

Not implying at all that Scheme has no meta programming or lacking meta programming. Instead I'd argue it's more powerful than Python's.
And another funny one:
http://betabeat.com/2012/10/silicon-valley-reality-tv-show-s...
I can't design or implement clever algorithms. I must be the best programmer in the world!
How Long Should a Landing Page Be? Simple tips and a few case studies
Should I go long or short-form? Is there too much content on my landing page? Should I write more copy? If you find yourself asking these questions over and over again, you’re in luck! Because this article will help you find the answer – every time.
have to disagree:

- life of youths is more valuable: ancient tribes will say the opposite: they routinely sacrificed their children to gods, not so their elders, who were considered valuable for their wisdom.

- Money is a means to buy services and goods regardless of their moral value. You can buy hookers, drugs, murderers, malware and other life-wasters. I think you couldn't be more wrong about this.

- "Good" has not been defined yet. Also, there is no rule that good people earn the most money; not even close
Surely keeping the records up to date for marketing is pointless if a user has decided to not receive marketing information?
It's like saying you never encountered a "normal" toilet while visiting Europe. That's how common these are in Japan.
How to manage project teams remotely
Does this mean VLC will be back on the App Store? I remember it being pulled due to a contributor (who around ~2010 worked for Nokia) complaining to Apple.
What do you think about this Wordpress theme?
> In the same way that BMW is a luxury brand, except to those who want to buy Ferrari and Bently. These people have even more money to spend and are not receptive to Starbucks.

Starbucks / Blue Bottle makes even more sense considering that BMW is already a driver's car. The driving experience is at best marginally better by going to Ferrari. Whereas Starbucks is anything but a coffee drinker's coffee. People go there more for a caffeinated treat vs being into coffee per se. If Starbucks started producing the lighter roasts and more subtle flavors that coffee drinkers value, it wouldn't work with the heavy cream and sugar. So the whole Blue Bottle philosophy dovetails nicely. That said, they'd need to keep the association under wraps to avoid frightening away the coffee snobs.
First, bear in mind Apple consciously modeled itself on Sony (but, as it turns out, not slavishly).

Second, Apple tends to follow its own standards (e.g. iPod dock connector, magnetic power cord thing). Sony not only uses proprietary interfaces, it's inconsistent about them. E.g. At one point they had a range of MP3 players none of which used the same connector as another or earlier generation products.
Because better and equally free and open source alternatives have existed for about as long yet remain more unknown. VLC sure plays a lot of things, but it's a a real jack of all trades and master of none.

I certainly understand it's appeal, but there's certainly better yet equally simple solutions out there as well (eg. CCCP for Windows, various MPlayer2 bundles for OS X like MPlayer.app). Of course, the "downside" of DirectShow-based playback solutions on Windows is that if a user has managed to fuck up their DirectShow beyond recognition, it's going to need a lot of unfucking before you can do anything about it, whereas VLC in its stand-alone nature can play stuff even in a situation like this. Though you could also always get a SMPlayer2 & mplayer2 bundle in such a situation too...
New Microsoft Windows chief 'shocked' by Sinofsky defenestration
That's irrelevant to the quality of your argument.
Heh, I actually clicked the link hoping to see a cache of the 503 error.
You might be missing out on an easier way to do it. When I plug my Nexus S into Ubuntu and enable tethering, Network Manager recognises a new Ethernet device, acquires an IP address via DHCP, and I'm connected. I've never had to configure anything on the computer.
Be aware that the LGPL still has some pitfalls in store here:

http://multinc.com/2009/08/24/compatibility-between-the-ipho...
Not with Unity. One big advantage is that git subtree has is that not everybody has to be proficient with it, you can designate someone to set it up and to periodically push the subtrees, and everybody else can ignore it.

That's not quite true; they should split their commit so they don't span trees. But it's not a requirement, it just makes things a lot nicer.
My point is writing a blog post saying python is neither call-by-value nor call-by-reference is made up shit and does nothing for someone who doesn't already understand it. Someone who doesn't already understand it will have to work through to get the gist of call-by-value and object references.

The blog post didn't simplify anything for someone who doesn't already understand it. So why not stick with terminology which is used by Java, C#, C among others?
An advent calendar for nerds
Really impressed by the fluent 3D view and the exploration mode for some cities. Good job Nokia!
There is also a lib called 'HTML-TEMPLATE' ( http://weitz.de/html-template/ ) which is IMO a bit easier to use than CL-WHO.

Hunchentoot has been updated, it is just maintained by somebody else now AFAIK ( https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/downloads ). I do remember that there was a version (1.2?) that had some backward compatibility problems and that was last year.

Try quicklisp ( http://www.quicklisp.org/ ) for all your lib needs, it is a nice lib repository and it is very up to date (though still beta).
No, logic is not subordinate to anything. That's you putting numbers on stuff again.

I think you try to draw the term "fuzzy" into a negative light here because you have trouble dealing with ambivalence. Then you go absurd and use things like Crusades! and Holocaust! which I clearly wasn't talking about (because blind faith has as little to do with reason as applying quantitative analysis to every question in the universe, and I was following up those terms with what my actual, concrete conviction is made up of) in order to discredit my whole point without trying to understand where I'm coming from.

You're wondering why I find the things you've written disturbing. It's because you put a price on human beings in reply to an article that's about altruism. I'm convinced (WATCH OUT, FUZZINESS AHEAD!!!) by my feelings of compassion that helping people in need does not need a reason beyond It's The Right Thing To Do. I trust my instincts on that one, and I think any attempt to make an altruistic act appear logical is ugly and coarse. And take note that I don't equate “logical” with “reasonable”. Especially not in a case like this.

Again, your trying to put the practices of fear mongering institutions like the various churches and the Nazis in the same category as basic altruism based on the fact that all of these somehow involve belief and conviction (which can be logical, depending on the quality of abstraction you apply) is lazy and disingenuous.

My replies to you probably convey a more hostile tone than I feel comfortable with, and it's kind of random that I'm writing all of this to you, who I only have a vague idea about, in effect addressing many of those I put in the same category as you right now. I would rather discuss something like that in person to take the edge off of it. But I can't shake the feeling (and my impression might very well be wrong) that you've developed some kind of arrogance because you've detected at an early age that you're very intelligent, and how pleasing it is to figure out an axiomatic system and use this enlightenment to your advantage.

That has its place. But that place is not when dealing with the welfare of humanity. I do not object your conclusions. I object the path that led you to them.
I think this is much more fun than Codecademy.
Here's the thing. Answering the question "how much would you sell it for" when you actually own something just turned out not to be such a good idea.

Perhaps the real lesson is not to answer that question. I don't know what correct way to answer this question is - maybe "lol, it's not like you have a budget. Since you can't pay anything I will say, one trillion billllllion dollars. But I don't wan't to hear '___ holding domain he owns and has been paying fees on for ransom for one trillion billion dollars.' Seriously, this is not a real question."
I quite liked the following
1) Angelmaker
2) Gone away world
3) The Hobbit
4) Fables the comic seriers
Non fiction
1) Steve Jobs
2) Thinking fast and slow

Have a look http://blog.kaipakartik.com for the books I enjoyed reading
Terrfyingly, nearly all of their engineers list a LinkedIn profile, but none link a github/bitbucket etc profile :/
Because while every piece of free software is a wound against proprietary software, the more liberal licences like LGPL and the BSD/MIT-style licences are a wound against free software: proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back.
Isnt there a dryer built in?

Ass-jet, dry, ass-jet, dry?
Ask HN: Need advice on marketing and distribution
Hi

I need your help regarding marketing and distribution of my web app - DomCop.com. I am a techie at heart and find myself a little lost when it comes to sales, marketing and distribution. I hope someone can help guide me.

I launched DomCop.com a few months back and I've had lots of great reviews from (paying) customers on the app functionality, but I am having a terrible time reaching out to new customers. I have tried the following channels for distribution.

1. Posting to forums in the seo/domain auction niche - I got most of my customers from here. However, I do not want to spam the forums and therefore this channel becomes very limited.

2. Running banner and text ads on forums - this has surprisingly not been effective on the very forums that customers have converted from regular posts.

3. Google adwords - these are proving to be too costly and are not as effective as forums.

4. Facebook ads - these ads were cheap - but have not been converting.

5. Stumble upon - same as facebook - cheap, but not converting.

I've read on HN that blogging in your niche and contacting other bloggers is a great way of getting good traffic. But, I feel like that would take away the time I could use to add more features (especially ones that current customers have requested for). I am trying to work on SEO as well - but this would take a while before it generates decent amount of organic traffic

Are there any other channels that I am missing out on? How do I go about this? Should I try and get someone on board who has knowledge of internet marketing and sales (a business co-founder). I am a programmer by profession - so not very sure if I have been going about this the right way.

Thank you for your time.

Akash

A little about DomCop.com - The app provides information on expired domain auctions - verified page rank, SEOmoz and SEMrush data, social stats.
VLC has always lagged behind in proper x264 decoding. For most of the 1.x and the first few versions of the 2.x series I had dozens of video files with visual artifacts whilst the newest versions of mplayer at the time did not.

I maintain this kind of test suite since I do video production using open source software and I have to make sure it works in all the major video players.

VLC is useful and important but it is no where near perfect.
Where Do You Go To Learn To Teach Computer Science?
Nice art direction… but the gameplay was even more mindless than Farmville, few steps above CowClicker
Clickable - http://www.domcop.com
ICPC restricts you to C, C++ or Java. Most contestants I know use a dirty mixture of C with STL containers. Java often gets a little relaxed time and memory limits (although it doesn't really matter as the intended solution doesn't really hinge on the relative speed difference of languages but algorithms).

Many popular and large contests allow any language you want. This is often solved by letting the contestant download a problem file, running his solution and uploading a solution file along with the source code for verification (cf. Google Code Jam). This frees the organisers from having to support every language, interpreter or compiler anyone would perhaps use (which is often the largest problem when it comes to supporting different languages).
What does other players do better than vlc?
Now we're talking! Great comment. Looking forward to it.
The aerial data for my location are at least 8 years old and very low quality. It's interesting to see so back into history but not really useful.

edit: comparing it to other sources, it seems like it's from 2003
didnt Id make most of their money with the licensing of their engines (id tech 1-5)?
If something more Lisp-ish is your style, you can also check out 4clojure.org . Same kind of idea (just not presented quite the same).
I'm not sure if http://splst.com (directory of side projects) is what you're looking for. (disclaimer I'm the author of splst)
The planet that escaped its star
Their street view is horrendously low quality. Would have thought that if you were going to go to the effort of mapping out streets (quite extensively too), you'd use high definition cameras.
I would really like to see the game... as I've never heard of it which is a shame, can any existing player send me an invite? Add me on Steam under the same name as here if you're willing :)
Said he was targeting that, but anyone who played it would tell you how utterly mindless the game was.

Literally was just wander about clicking and waiting for progress bars.
a Maps Service that Lives in the Cloud

What does that mean? Honestly, I do not understand it. Name-dropping the "cloud"? Is that meant to be negative or positive? Any big map service is bound to run on multiple redundant machines, isn't that the cloud?

Seeing http://static.here.sc/maps/39568/core/features/intropage/img... I cringe. Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line. Distances must be calculated by appropiate means of travel, eg streets for cars/bicycles or ways and walkable areas for pedestrians. Somewhere at Nokia a team of cartographers must be sobbing into their glasses of beer.

Looking at random places I know, I can debunk their claim of "Most accurate map". OpenStreetMap is more accurate at those. (Anecdote!)

This leads to my next critic. They want people fix/enhance the map data for them. But then it is NOT shared back, only as map image. The data stays with Nokia and you probably cannot even export your own contributions. Same as Google really.

Adding "social" to a map service is a great idea. I was always wondering why none of the big players did that.

The 3D stuff is amazing.
Energy Flow: A Non-Linear Film Experience launching on iOS and Android
I was disappointed to hear when he joined there, knew it would end like this and would rather he build his own things.
Show HN: Persona authenticated, wwwhisper authorized web server on OpenShift.
Any comments are very welcome! The readme file includes links to a demo site that anyone can access (sign-in with @mockmyid.com email if you don't want to create a real Persona account).

Do you have any use cases for which an authorization layer like this would be handy? What additional features would you need?
I'm from India , wanted to ask how this logic applies to companies supplying IT Services instead developing original products.
Looking For Beta Testers
Looking for better testers, ideally hackers, spelling nazis, and perfectionist to rip the site to shreds before it goes live.
OOTINI!!!