skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was my thought too. Nonetheless, that's a technical misfeature (they assumed the walled garden provided all the authentication they needed, and it doesn't), and technical misfeatures happen all the time. Now they have to decide whether to implement that feature or not, and that's a business decision: they know what the (legitimate) sales numbers are already. If those aren't enough to justify the cost, then it's simply not worth it and they should just shut it down.

Or, more cynically, they know they can get a bunch of press (and thus, more sales) by "shutting down" the game temporarily while they implement the authentication layer.
The 'genius' of Lego is that the pieces from one 'build one thing' set work with the pieces from other 'build one thing' sets. I had a ton of those as a kid and they all ended up just being source material for whatever I was building. As a kid, whenever I saw new sets the things I was most interested in were all of the new custom pieces. "Wow! That set comes with a shark!" instead of "Look I can build some underwater vehicle!" I don't think that I ever rebuilt any of my sets after they were deconstructed back into 'source material.'
I think the question is whether two devices connected to the same hotspot can send packets to each other. Ideally, you want to isolate them as much as possible, letting them connect only to the Internet.
You better be sure that all your. Ode is built using 100% recycled electrons.

Make your app receive LEED accreditation!
Ask HN: Anyone else tired of sidebars?
Lately, many of the sites I have been going to from here have what I would consider obnoxious sidebars. They are filled with ads, links to more content, social button groups or (the very worst) the smug ironic-looking face of a blogger and a total of 3 navigational links. Copious amounts of my monitor pixels are dedicated to these, while the actual content I am there for gets very little attention by comparison. It is almost comical how much disappears with a tool like Stylish. But I digress...

Which sites do I mean? Wired, Tech Crunch, BBC, Huffington Post, NY Times, Kotaku, Gizmodo (Gawker anything, really), Engadget, ArsTechnica, the list goes on... I won't point out blogs of individuals, but you know who you are.

As a community with many web professionals, do you feel they have actual value? For those using them, have you measured or noticed any benefit to their presence? Why are they so common? I would hazard a guess that for them to still be there, they must be doing something right. Or have we just thought of nothing better and they are the 'de facto' standard now?
I didn't look at how they make users pay but if it's not in app purchase they do not have a way to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate users therefore they must accept all server requests or none.
Hey Dennis, this list was really fun to go through. Discovered some cool stuff. Thanks.
If that happened to me, I'd be too embarrassed to repeat that story even to a group of close friends, let alone tout it as my proudest "life hack".

I wouldn't. I think it shows exactly what he is trying to show: a tremendous amount of "hustle", indomitable fortitude, drive and passion... sometimes if you really want to make something happen, you have to take some chances and go a little over the top. And more importantly, it shows that this is a guy who doesn't just sit around and wait for things to come to him; he takes action and makes (or at least attempts to make) things happen.
I'll try to keep it short, since my thoughts on this subject can easily turn into a long-winded rant. Also, this applies to both industrial design and architecture, as there is a lot of overlap between the two.

1) Practicality vs "creativity"

When you see design projects, such as the cardboard bike, that are clever but completely impractical, design schools and design contests are largely to blame. This is the kind of design that will win you prestigious awards and good grades, but will never actually see production. There is a huge disconnect between the kind of design that most designers want to do, and what they actually make a living doing. As a result, they fetishize these impractical concept pieces.

2) Design education vs professional practice

Most design schools are still teaching (and grading students on) their hand-drafting skills. The number of professional firms that produce finished work entirely by hand is getting smaller and smaller every day, and yet many schools do not teach their students digital design, or do so on a very superficial level. Note: This applies to hand-finished final designs. I believe that hand-sketching is still invaluable in the early stages.

3) Cost of education vs reward

The job market for designers is abysmal. And if you do manage to get a job, you will be paid much less than the rest of your college-educated peers, despite working longer hours and (in the case of architecture) spending longer in school. Design school itself is outrageously expensive, even at state institutions, due to the cost of class materials and the fact that most programs do not leave you with enough free time to hold down a job.

In short, I'm studying computer science now, and couldn't be happier.
What does that have to do with anything? Spam much?
i had to get back to the uk to sort some business stuff out. email address is in profile for anyone interested.
Fwiw, I had a very similar YC experience as a solo founder in front of PG, Trevor, Robert and Jessica (S12). After the rejection email I had an acquisition offer from a market leader (term sheet). Decided to turn it down and raise a round. Going after the market. Currently closing with top-tier investors and launching product.
> The high load revealed technical issues which we don’t feel we can fix to the level that our paying customers deserve.

That doesn't scream to me that piracy killed the game. Rather, piracy just revealed the reality that their server software was shit, and they didn't want to invest in fixing it, so they refunded everyone's money.

No harm, no foul.
I love the story. The title of this story sounded like it was a note venting out frustration and telling everyone that though dejected, I will make it without YC. But unlike the title, you are so full of positive energy and I hope others at YC could have seen that. I am sure you will make you dream come true. Keep hustling and wishing you the very best of luck.
That's pretty much what http://www.couchsurfing.org do, but for free. Clearly there is both supply and demand for such a marketplace. Were airbnbs or YC aware of couchsurfing?
Actually I remember hearing over the radio some statistics like over 70% of engineer and architect played lego being kids.
I can really identify with that flow state you describe so well.

I have built 5 or 6 of the larger Technic and buildings (each thousands of parts) over the last year or so.

The structured play (simply follow the directions and you will get to the goal) is a very welcome counterpoint to the somewhat unstructured way in which I spend my days (here's a blank page, describe a complex product in any way that you see fit).
Packagist is important because if you don't mention it they're going to use PEAR or PECL or (gasp) Zend Framework, all of which are generally inferior to what is offered on Packagist.
Seems like a great way to loose a lot of bikes.
I guess the post can be seen as a cautionary tale about the dangers of spending too much time on your domain name and not enough on your product.
MDN holiday calendar
SendGrid partners with Twilio to add SMS, voice and push notifications
I'll augment indiecore's answer. What kind of code are you interested in? Suppose you are, like me, interested in cheminformatics software. Find a few different packages (Open Babel, RDKit, Indigo, and others), download them, and compare how they implement a given task, like SMILES parsing or fingerprint generation.

If you're interested in text compression, then download a few compression toolkits and see how they work. Also read a few articles on the topic. Regular expression engines? Dozens are available. Interested in networking? Take a look at ZeroMQ and other networking packages.

Databases? That's a big topic, but you don't need to understand the entire package. Pick some aspect which interests you and see if you can figure out how SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL handle it.

Here's an easy one to start off with - how do Lua, Python, and C++ implement hash table-like data structures?
It's less about the font itself and more about how people are using them. For some reason, people think that type on the web should be small and on top of that, don't take font-smoothing into consideration. Adobe buys TypeKit and this is still the way they lay out web typography.

One of my biggest gripes with [Adobe] is that for a company that tries to be an end-all be-all for designers and content creators, their application designs, splash screens, icons are all incredibly weak if not outright dated. If they don't even understand (or care) about the industry they're marketing to to do these things internally, how can I expect their tools to be the right solution?
Sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem. Unless your area is already saturated with karma users, you likely won't get any data benefits.
Shipping containers do however make amazing retail shop fronts. They're all over the place here in Northern Ghana.

Obviously there is still a ton of room for innovation on the industrial design front and it's great to see your focus on how much work actually goes into solutions that scale. That lightning bolt idea you get may be the start of something if you have the persistence to work out the details.

Incidentally this is one of the huge problems with work being done in the developing world - people think they've created a magic bullet idea but don't have the persistence to work out the details and eventually they give up, usually blaming some external factor.
Most people would rather have an excuse to fail than have a reason to be successful.
Isn't an online authentication mechanism what got Mojang and EA sued by a patent troll? http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Uniloc-Patent-Troll-Mojang-EA,ne...
"A favorite theme of science fiction is "the portal"--an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed.... It turns out that they do, sort of,..."

Yes, if by "sort of", you mean, "not at all like how science fiction uses the term". What a terrible opening.
I don't know, I feel like there's more to success than simply having unrestrained ferociousness. While i'm gone, my dog will spend hours gnawing a bone to get every last bit of marrow he can out of it. Imagine if he put that same kind of undetermined effort into figuring out how to get on my kitchen table where there's a limitless supply of snacks he would love.

Giving up completely may mean accepting failure, but strategically choosing how to invest your resources is not giving up. Spending thousands of dollars & days simply to obtain a domain name... in an effort that ultimately still failed seems like a series of poor decisions.
The killer feature would be to sell the computer with a preloaded Steam account that already has the orange box plus portal 2 and the L4D games.

Now that's a Steambox.
Spectacle.io - API for grabbing relevant images from any Web page
>> You can't use the results to say that... <<

That's a different claim.

>> It doesn't even make sense <<

That depends on what `notJim` meant by "to compare speeds of programming languages".

`notJim` might have thought that everyone would understand he was talking about particular language implementations and particular tasks and particular programs.
DDoS Armageddon Unlikely, Experts Say
There is no minimum requirement in most universities in US. Most good PhD advisors however do have a minimum pubs requirement. Typically, in non-theory areas, it is 3 first-author top-conference papers, and higher if you are directly applying for faculty positions. The reason is that if you meet this requirement, they feel comfortable letting you defend yourself against the committee. (A student failing a PhD defense would be a big embarrassment for the advisor).

That said, such requirements do not matter to superstar candidates, their bar is much much higher. Typically, by this time, they are already giving invited talks at famous venues, so defense is merely a formality for them.
I sent him an email with a similar thought. The fact that he left and didn't try other venues could make some people question his true grit. I liked his story and wanted to meet him just to hear the story in person.
It is just ridiculous enough to me that Poe's Law came to mind. I have no idea if he is serious, or sarcasticly praising Lego.
Spelling mistake in the header of the country-specific pages: Zippoptamus (e.g. http://www.zippopotam.us/static/sample_us.html)
.NET + RabbitMQ: Scales to 100s of Millions of Passenger Messages at 15below
There are different sorts of IAPs. Consumables need to be bought for each device but non-consumables are recoverable to any device logged into the account. If you try to purchase them again they are free and the developer SHOULD implement a 'Restore Purchases' UI to allow you to recover them all without accidentally buying ones you don't already own.

With IAP the developer can also retrieve a receipt from the device that can be verified by Apple's servers (process different in the Mac App store). This does not apply to the original purchase of apps from the store, only in-app purchase.
Quite a lot of people seem fixated with the money aspect. Not that I feel the need to defend myself and how I spend my own money, but I used the trip as a holiday too. After reading some of these comments I wish I went to the beach instead!
If You Have You Way | Socyberty
Ask HN: HN URL tips and tricks
Hi All
I am a relatively new user at HN even though I think I have a decent amount of karma to be able to do thing such as downvote, create poll etc. This other day, I came across a post that mentioned how to create a poll. The trick is knowing the URL which is not necessarily publicly available on HN. Is there a list of these URLs somewhere or can someone share a few ? For example,

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Google Announces $23M Global Awards Program To help Nonprofit Tech Innovation
MariaDB Foundation to Safeguard Leading Open Source Database
> a coherent response to "Fractal Of Bad Design,"

There have been numerous responses already that debunk many of the claims presented there. Suffice it to say, you came to this with your mind already made, and nothing is going to change it.

So, why bother?
Using Adobe Edge Tools and Services with Kendo UI
Do you talk a lot? T-Mobile has an unlimited data, unlimited text, 100 minute no-contract plan for $30/month. I'm using it with my Nexus 4. Additional talk time is $0.10/minute.
Well, be sure to check the coverage map, because there are some large cities with no coverage (like San Diego).
I only commented in the context of distribution limitations. As others pointed out, it wasn't really the main reason for this publication failure, but it was definitely a flaw regardless of other reasons.
A PhD is virtually never granted based on unpublished work. It might be tentatively offered pending publication, but not granted.
Google’s Knowledge Graph Expands To More Languages
Software developer creates a program to randomly choose and buy stuff
My interpretation was that they had a budget of $x to run their servers with from y paying customers. $x in no way could provide the services that y+z needed (z being the number of pirates) regardless of infrastructure or efficiency of code. Instead they decided to cut losses and refund without finding a way to block z or monetize it.
In general, I totally agree with you. The epitome of this was a recent design for a folding bicycle that didn't have any way to pedal it. I'm starting to think that for anyone to call themselves an industrial designer, they should be required to get an ME degree, and actually see how products work and are manufactured. Your design school degree means nothing to me.

I do disagree with this though:

that what the third world really needs is a cheap laptop with a hand-crank on the side, etc.

Cheap and widely available computing devices can do a lot to raise literacy and technical skill across the world. BTW, the latest iteration from the OLPC project just uses solar charging.

I also think there is still room to apply 1st world design techniques to 3rd world problems.

I've been quite intrigued by some of the projects I've seen, such as the cylindrical water container that can easily be pulled with a rope, or some of the other water purification devices which can be made with local materials.

There are some other projects than can help turn a mobile phone into a medical diagnosis tool. I'd like to see more things like that.
Good domains are valuable, so a few thousand pounds is a small amount to risk. Zap.com is a really good domain. His approach was smart. A billionaire is too busy to discuss the sale of a domain, but if you do manage to catch his interest, he may well give it to you free/cheap because it isn't an asset he spends time worrying about.

I love the conservative objections here. Stunts like this only work if most people aren't willing to try (EDIT - thanks).

EDIT: Outlandish stunts are the best way to improve your hustling abilities. If you have the time and money to try it, you win either way.
ITunes (Music) is now available in India
I wrote a gem for postal/area codes in the US that does mostly the same thing w/o the web request http://github.com/jgv/area
The article brings some good points about habit formation:

1. Start with one habit, one part of life at a time

2. Create repeated, consistent incentives for abstaining from bad habits

3. In place of bad habits, put into practice positive behaviors

4. Change happens in a supportive, nurturing environment

Even though the article is mostly about one man's relationship to his adult kids, the author manages to include a few decent ideas about change.
huh?

The costs of running a server with even 20x the expected traffic for a few weeks is more than all the time and moey it took to develop the game? This does not pass the smell test at all
If you're in SF, Sundance Kabuki doesn't show ads beyond a trailer or two. Much nicer theater overall vs. anything in my corner of the world.

(Sundance has theaters in a few other major cities as well, but SF's is the only one I've personally been to.)
RESThub 2.0, the Spring + Backbone.js stack, just released
They would have had the same problem if this were a free-to-play game.

Actually, they would have had a smaller server load (though it would have still overwhelmed them) because I'm sure a percentage of these people are playing it merely because it was pirated -- like kleptomaniacs, these people want to play the game mostly because they aren't supposed to be allowed to. Some people just want to break laws to show they can, as a latent rebellious streak.
Be that as it may, I think counting papers is an absurd academic standard. It replaces evaluation with enumeration.
Thank you for breaking this down.
Very true. I hope everyone who is trying to build something and want to show it to HN realize this very fact and keep working regardless of the kind of comments.
Do these "how I blew it" articles make anyone else uncomfortable? They always seem so self-deprecating, presumptuous, and often very seriously glorify YC and/or PG. Reflecting on an experience, especially one that you were hopeful about, but didn't go the way you wanted is good. But being so attached......
If someone just uses your hotspot (signs in through Facebook :/ ), you get free data.
I think you're trying to read between the lines of what the article stated.
Startup Mentoring Sessions: How to be a not-too-sh*tty mentor
Would Do-Not-Track lead to “data oligopolies”?
This article is brilliant. As I write this, hundreds of thousands of protestors are protesting outside Morsy's presidential palace, according to Twitter.
I don't know about T-Mobile, but I think AT&T and Verizon both require smartphones to have a data plan, and they can detect if you have a smartphone and force you to have a data plan because of that.
As a parent of 3 kids who have more lego than they know what to do with, I disagree. They've got a ton of lego city stuff, a few technics, and a couple of the character/themed ones. That's enough to cover the living room floor about an inch deep, with a few spare pieces to hide near their beds for me to step on at night.

There are special parts, not that many of them really. A lot of them can be worked around with a little builder's ingenuity. The special parts that are the most annoying are the ones where we have one or two, they're small, and they're somewhere. Not where we're looking, or where we've been looking for the last half hour.

My kids build the kit design once. Then the pieces go into the bins. They'll build it again, in motley color schemes, with adaptations. They'll build boats, cars, towers, trucks, and spaceships. And some things that I can't name, but they can tell you exactly what each piece is for.

And in the last year or so, they've started downloading the instructions for sets that they don't have from the lego site, going through them and figuring out what pieces they don't have and need to work around, and deciding if they can build those items. (This is a 5 and an 8 yr old). At 5, the kid is looking through a set of instructions, identifying pieces, remembering if there is one of them in the thousands of pieces we have, and deciding if it's something that can be worked around. That's pretty good training for engineering.
I love the conservative objections here. Stunts like this only work if most people don't have the cojones to try them.

I get the point, but why the snark? Why be so dismissive? Especially since this "stunt" didn't work. (Yet?)
Not exactly because you don't have the ratio idea where you have to share XXX MB with someone before having YYY MB for yourself.

In France Free is a well-known ISP offering this kind of feature with its ADSL box. You open your WI-FI to others and then you have access to every other WIFI shared by users from this ISP.
Everything About eBooks & eReaders, Pt 3: Apple's iPad
>Perhaps I over-estimate the HN crowd.

Perhaps this has something to do with China's absolutely atrocious record regarding:

1) The environment

2) The rest of the world

3) Human rights

--

Is it really that difficult to understand that some of us have the foresight to realize that China's method of interfacing with its environment is not something that we want to see tarnishing a yet-untarnished planet?
They could simply have adopted what games like Minecraft do - the game client is free(perhaps with free single player version too) and require people to have an account to play online.
This bike essentially requires the same skilled labor to build as a carbon fiber bike. Its only claim to fame is that it doesn't use the $8 (guess) of steel you need to build a standard bike frame.

The rest of the components cost about $90. It's competing with Chinese bikes.

The plan has not been thought through, but it's great news bait.
Do you have internet at home? Do you have a wireless router? If you can use karma, why don't you just set up your own home wifi?
Not at all. As I state in the post, I think I spent too much time on preparing the product and not enough time on interview prep.