skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First read "The In-game Economics of Ultima Online"[1] which I just submitted to HN for comment[2].

The hiccups of developing UO's in-game economy along the way are incredibly interesting in their own right.

--------------

I'll try to summarize some of UO.

UO was divided into Trammel (safe from PvP) and Felucia (not), and some servers only had Fel. In Fel as soon as you left a city you were more or less fair game to die from an extremely hostile environment, and (I think it was) PC Gamer described the learning curve as "A frozen wall of acid." Brutal, but very exciting. A goddamn wild west MMO.

(In Fel) UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal.

This Blue/Gray/Red name system created a sort of cautiousness among travelers. Being near a pack of "blue" people might be safe, since any person that tried to steal or kill would turn gray and they'd immediately kill him.

Unless of course, all those blue-named people were conspiring, and you are the target.

You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils.

The problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time.

UO had so much more than that. UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness really paid off, if you wanted it to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the ridiculously limited PvP found in games like WoW.

In a lot of ways it was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of MMOs. And it was great.

[1] http://www.mine-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890481
Great post! I couldn't agree more with your beginning words -- learning is huge in life.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw
New B2B App Store: need some feedback
In the words of one my cofounders, "We probably should have pitched this idea at the YC interview two weeks ago instead, ha!"

OEMdesk is the first B-2-B app store allowing big brands and retailers to market themselves by licensing existing consumer apps.

A little while back, my team and I (bunch o' Hackers) were approached by one of the largest PR and Marketing firms in the US to help build a product we are calling OEMdesk.

We did a few deals manually to test the thesis, which were quite successful, but now it's time to see if our platform is really scalable. That said, we need to see how many app developers would actually license their apps.

I outlined an example below, but if interested, please sign up at OEMdesk.com. Thanks guys!

EXAMPLE: The developer of a popular document viewer app (Word / Excel / PowerPoint) charges $4.99 in the app stores. The developer could license the app to a retailer such as Office Depot who would then reskin the app with Office Depot branding and give it away for free – a twist on the popular freemium model. The app would be promoted by Office Depot through whatever medium/vertical they choose (Office Depot website, affiliate networks, app stores, etc.), and Office Depot would only pay the developer for each download which OEMdesk would facilitate, making a spread on each download. The developer would also keep full control of their original app, making all income from OEMdesk = “gravy”
At least the risk of drunk drivers would fall to cero. Also they are probably more polite than the average driver.
Right, I got the empty margin thing but it seems to behave pretty inconsistently for me. I'm using a pretty small screen. Maybe that's the deal? 11 inch Macbook Air. I don't know. Maybe it's probably one of those real isolated problems.
Link to a generator with 95% efficiency please.

> I think the reason this contraption is valuable is that LEDs don't need much power to produce enough light

Actually, that contraption cannot produce enough light, unless you have a crazy weight, a lot of elevation, and a magical efficient system that converts energy to electricity, and then transforms it to whatever voltage/amperage appropriate for you LED lights.
Good point. My comment was reactionary and not very well thought out. I was recently, in Mexico, and noticed a much higher use of Android versus iOS products. There are significantly cheaper alternatives to the iPhone.
I really don't care about retrieving my IP address using curl ... it is in my browser that I care about.

Yes, test-ipv6.com works, but it is far some simple, running various other tests as well.
Mao belongs to a class of games called inductive reasoning games. They're mostly crap, but there are a few gems. IMO the best one of the bunch is Zendo where one player makes up a rule that determines whether a grouping of playing pieces is valid or not (usually played with Treehouse pieces, but e.g. a limited selection of lego pieces can also work). The other players then basically need to use an experimentation / induction loop to determine the rule. This can be really fun in a hackerly group. And once the players get experience, it's surprising how complicated rules are solveable.

The story of the Zendo design process is a great read: http://www.koryheath.com/games/zendo/design-history/
It's behaving a little weirdly.

- I have no idea how to make 'preview' button come up (and it doesn't look clickable when it does)

- Sometimes it inserts a tab character instead of a space in the middle of a sentence

- What causes it to save and how do I avoid the repeat prompt?

- How do I get the URL for sharing?

Overall it's nice, but it could do with some (auto-hide) UI for save/edit/preview.
> human nature is inherently self-destructive

Just because it is, doesn't mean it has to be.
Per one of the devs on Twitter, a lot of the difference in base memory requirement is that the original expected to have a significant swap file to work with on top of those 16 megs, while the iPad app has no such luxury.
The Power of Introverts - Ep 1
Zendo's design history
Que? How is providing the ability to have only programs compiled and signed by developers that have paid money "crippling their OS"?

Here's a fun fact, I haven't even changed the settings for that downwards on the very laptop I'm on.

I can still compile stuff fine, run Emacs.app. Install Google Chrome and Firefox. Nothing of substance has changed.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much. You do realize the default of "Mac App Store and identified developers" doesn't mean what you think it does right?

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5290 for more info on Gatekeeper. I think you've a few misconceptions.
You don't actually need hnpickup. Just remember to post in the morning or late evening PST.

Since we're here: I'm immediately put off from writeapp for two very simple reasons: 1) very cluttered homepage, everything is extremely verbose 2) requires sign-up (and no OAuth) before I can see anything.

Can you imagine github's homepage with a "Publish git repositories and make them available for co-workers and contributors to commit, track issues and send patches to" in big bold letters? You are in desperate need of better copy.

The actual app is nice, I prefer it's UI over the OP's. Other issues: Museo in the preview doesn't look that good, the options button is not working, and I can't figure out how to get a public link to a post.
There were no classes, no levels. None of this "level 99 guy one shots level 1 guy". Skills did give advantages, but it was nothing that drastic. No real need to farm mobs to get items, as they weren't that important to begin with. Magical weapons did give a minor advantage, but were rare and you could lose them, so most of the time an old fashioned steel sword would suffice (bought from NPCs or crafted by player blacksmiths). Items mostly mattered in quantity: lots of ore, wood, reagents, money, etc.

You learned skills by using them. So, if you wanted to hit things better with a sword, you went out and hit things. If you wanted to become a better magician, you had to cast spells. Wanted to become a better tailor? You had to make lots of clothing :) That wasn't perfect and later gave rise to macroers, but the system itself is awesome.

Death was meaningful: you lost everything you were carrying (changed in later versions with the 'insurance system'), unless you made it back to your body before it decayed and noone got to it first. And your ghost had to find a healer (or a player mage or highly skilled healer) in order to get resurrected. And, while dead, you couldn't speak to anyone, except players with 'Spirit Speak'.

You could own houses (which did occupy real state, they were not instanced), to have a safe place and a way to store items. That eventually became a market by itself, as the world was finite.

There were just a few safe zones, all the rest were automatically PVP areas. Even in "safe" zones, you could get mugged or killed if you didn't pay attention, as you had to call "guards" in order for them to appear (other people could call them for you, so it wasn't wise to leave your character in an deserted place and leave the computer).

You could steal from other people's bags - and get caught or not. You could even steal reagents from mages and prevent them casting. Yes, you had to carry a supply of reagents to cast and could run out if you didn't pay attention, possibly leaving you stranded.

You could create weapons, furniture, potions and whatnot from basic materials. This is very different from, say, WoW crafting system - you didn't have to wait for any drops from monsters. In fact, you didn't have to kill anything (not counting maybe birds for feathers, to use in arrows, or leather)

They even experimented with real ecology and a food chain in the beta. That didn't work, because players are too predatory.

Basically, they did almost everything very differently from MMOs that came later. The end result is that the world felt more 'alive', as you could interact with almost anything, given the right tools. See trees and got an axe? You could chop them. No axe? You could mine those rocks over there, smelt at a forge, then build the axe. And so on.
Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site
Perhaps this is a little bit of inside baseball, but LOL at the breakdown by Course number for "Academically, I would consider myself above average at MIT".

Course 18 in the lead followed by 8 5 and 6. The only thing that's changed in the past few decades is that 5 is getting a bit more uppity.
Clojure on Android offers the possibility someday of live debugging on a customer's phone, very similar to the way pg talked about fixing customers' bugs while they are on the phone with tech support by attaching to the server with a REPL and fixing it live. I can imagine a popup on a phone saying "This app is having problems. Press here to connect to our tech team for live repair."
SodaStream hacking: Combine various flavors. Mountain Dew + grape is fantastic (and diet).

I've also taken to getting sugar free flavors from Torani and mixing them with other flavors. I love cream soda + vanilla bean + strawberry. The combinations are virtually endless.
Btw, Trammel and Felucca was a distinction that came later. Apparently, because Origin wanted to attract more players, which would be known as 'carebears'.

For quite some time, UO had only Felucca.
I know this could go on, but I think Debian should be mentioned. The Ubuntu team themselves refer to it as "the rock upon which Ubuntu is built."

http://www.debian.org/
In 3rd world countries like the Philippines, carriers are making gigantic profits off the backs of poor people.

But it's all about the money eh?

I see it more as a life-changing device. SMS was made a lot of difference in the lives of poor people. What more if your phone has a web browser?

Going back to your argument though. It doesn't matter if majority of Android users are poor people. As long as Google has enough eyeballs that would make ads worth it (e.g. in developed countries), it would be enough to support the costs of developing Android.
Yikes, this is just awful. I keep expecting James Randi to enter stage right and explain this was all some kind of test for the audience.
1. It's not a button. It's just a label to indicate that you're in preview mode. You get in and out of preview mode by hitting ctrl+p or clicking the empty right margin.

2. It inserts a tab when you hit shift+space. I initially put this in because I thought it would be an easy way to get tabs on the iphone, but apparently the ios shift key is not really a sift key so it doesnt work on the iphone anyway. Have to remove this.

3. Ctrl+s or click the empty left margin to save. The repeat prompt will be changed to prompt on first save only soon.

4. The url to share is the one in the addressbar.
Because otherwise it doesn't happen to any great extent.
I read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_week and don't see the point of this. It just seems like stressing people out due to poor coordination and time management.
IFTTT Recipe to Bypass Instagram Turning Off Twitter Cards
Nicely done. However, I would strongly recommend making all links from preview mode open in a new tab, since you lose all unsaved progress whenever you navigate away. Or you could do an "onbeforeunload" check instead.
How much money do you think Google should make to be profitable with Android?

Let's say it costs them $50m a year. Google could make that money of the 10% of the Android user base.

Looking at your comments, it smacks of elitism. (i.e. lots of Android users are poor while iOS users have money...)
Any way you have some proof? I At this point I honestly don't doubt it, but I'd like to see some technical data.
Inconsistent as in not changing modes when clicked or changing modes when clicked in places other than the margin?

I suspect it's the latter and I think I know why it's happening. Will fix soon.
I used to play board games with people like that, and the problem is easily fixed with a kitchen timer :)

Timer goes off? Turn over, too bad. Given the average number of turns in a game and how long you want to play for, you can work out what to set it at (maybe with a 25-50% leeway)

An interesting variant is to put the timer in a box so that you don't know how long you have left.
All device permissions should be opt-in from a checklist on first launch, and there should be an option to make your device pretend to opt-in but use fake data. "Can such-and-such app use your location?" "Sure, I am in the middle of the Pacific."
Technically this is just GlobalFoundries wafer starts, they don't mention whether or not there was an equal uptick at TSMC.
I don't think it's pointless to talk about median outcome. The median outcome or worse, by definition, is what most entrepreneurs will achieve, and as you say, that's likely zero even for YC companies who based on this data have an order of magnitude higher success record.

Sorry if my estimate is off - another $10B in exits would change the number significantly, and maybe the filter and assistance of YC is sufficient to change the expected outcome. That doesn't so far seem to be the case with other accelerators.

As you say, "for most people," startups are a terrible way to make money. Based on this data, "most people" is almost all people that get into almost all accelerators. I do think that's an important, though perhaps not new, deduction from this data. It's even more important for people hoping to make money by joining a startup as a non-founder, where the financial upside is so much lower.

I'm not sure what you mean about a misunderstanding of probability. Certainly there is a large amount of both luck and character that determine the outcome for an individual, and that can be summed up with probability, especially for any given startup, since as at a poker table, luck is relatively stronger short term, and character overtakes luck in the long run.
For those who don't know the numbers, 18, 8, 5, and 6 correspond to the sciences, math, physics, chemistry, and EECS, respectively.
If by '#wolfgame' you mean what we call Werewolf, where there are a bunch of 'villagers' and one or more randomly selected 'werewolves' where the werewolves get to kill a villager in the night and the villagers get to lynch someone during the day, we have a group who frequently plays this (or the Mafia variant) at uni through IRC or their forums.
If you like the win condition, and others do too, it's a pretty straightforward rule to introduce early on.
> Expect to get paid about half of what you would for contracting work you source yourself.

Being in a position that hires said contractors, I have to say this is false. Rates are competitive; we're not the one's setting them, the market is. Recruiter's commission may play a factor where it's involved, but it certainly doesn't halve the rate.

I'd also say "good luck" to acquiring contracts in your area of expertise directly from the companies that are buying them. They're looking for complete packages and the effort involved in acquiring and maintaing those relationships is quite often beyond the abilities of a single person.
By themselves, no.

Now, it depends on if he actually knows more than what he stated. They could be weasel words if he actually knows on some future date such a prohibition will be made, or that they are currently prohibiting Python on some level.

My suspicion is that he was trying to be specific, not weasel-like.
Also, epicmafia.com is a great online implementation. There's a nice little community there, it's a great time sink.
A much better game is Bartok (sometimes called Bartog) - it starts out as something approximating Uno[1]. Each time someone wins, they make a rule.

Playing it with Mathematicians/CS types is brain-hurty (think mod-13 arithmetic and prime numbered cards behaving differently).

---

[1] Some of the different rules:

- If you ask a question, you get a 1 card penalty

- If you have one card and don't say "bartok", you get your hand made back up to 7.

- We played with a bunch of broken decks all smushed together, so you couldn't count cards.
Do you have a LinkedIn? I'm constantly contacted with offers for positions (full and part time) in areas of my expertise.
You mean something like this? http://en.parkopedia.com
Yes. Slavery had little to do with the civil war. You've totally rebutted the parent post. We're not heading straight into crazytown on this thread at all.
We will add Android apps support in the future, but we need to figure out what the best way is for doing that, as the variety of screens sizes and resolutions on Android devices is much greater.
Don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter or follow @uxarchive on Twitter to be informed when we add Android support :)
The Anti-Spec Movement Is Going Too Far
Is there a freeware or commercial WYSIWYG editor that supports pasting of images like this awesome tool?

I have a use-case where users are creating charts in Excel and want to paste them into a HTML textarea and WYSIWYG editor that supported paste of images from the clipboard would be awesome. Thanks
AFAIK all the processors are made at GloFo and discrete GPUs are made at TSMC. I would guess orders are down for both product lines.
No, sigh. I have been avoiding linkdn forever as not being "cool", and should probably change that, eh?
> Mornington Crescent.

... can be made into a Nomic, but the way it's usually 'played' it is simply a parody of over-complicated games with no actual rules of its own beyond, perhaps, 'be funny' and 'confuse the new guy'.
Thanks for reporting this.
May I ask what OS and screen resolution you are using?
Diffbot extension allows you to view Instagram photos in Twitter.com
Or, you know,

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
If you're interested in that type of connection, I'd say it's unavoidable. Im not even very active, nor do I have a complete profile and I still get pestered.
How to completely erase SD card? 
SD card has been widely used by compact storage devices. If you want to empty sd card to make place for new files, you may just format the card and restoring it to a factory setting. However, formatting will not let you completely wipe sd card. The process of formation means to overwrite data again and again. Meanwhile, it won't guarantee every file to be overwritten. The unwritten files will be found and get back with data recovery software. Are you shocked? Take it easy, the following words can help you find out how to erase sd card.
yeah, i thought that was the entire point of nomic
What makes you say he has been non-constructive? I can think of GNU, Emacs, The GPL, FSF etc. off the top of my head.
Maybe if the dogs were driving 30 year old cars. The dogs obviously know those Minis have synchros.
See the numbers below. It's about the equivalent of a 2 W incandescent bulb, or 5% of a 40 W bulb; but more importantly, it's comparable to a kerosene lamp, which is what it's supposed to replace. So I don't think a "crackpot" charge is warranted.
For me personally, most of the stress does come from being challenged academically.The professors pull no punches, and some of the classes are downright exhausting.

Although I appreciate being challenged, it can be disheartening whenever I observe the local coding guru / math major knocking out problems in a fraction of the time it takes me.

However, I believe that this student response best sums it up:

"I still believe it’s true that at MIT, students generally compete more against themselves than against each other."

Everyone simply wants to be the best that they can be.

- MIT Sophomore in EECS
Been doing this for the last 5 months and has worked very well. Like others have said, push is great.
You took the parent post in completely the wrong way, it's my opinion that he was pointing out exactly what you wish he had said purposefully in the most offensive way possible to show how flawed the choice of photo was.
King James II of England, when he saw the restored and expanded St. Paul's Cathedral, called it "amusing, awful and artificial." The architect, Sir Christopher Wren, was not offended. On the contrary, he was flattered.

The king did not mean that it was funny or entertaining. He was not calling it atrocious or appalling. He did not consider it fake or pretentious.

In 17th century England, amusing meant "riveting." Awful meant "full of awe" or "awe inspiring." And artificial meant "artistic."
I thought the point of playing Mao was to torture the new player, like a hazing ritual.
As much as I respect this for being way cooler than anything I'll ever teach my dog, I can't help but think there are better things to teach them to make them seem more adoptable. Maybe train them to fetch beers from a minifridge, then package the adoption with a dog-accessible minifridge and a 30 rack for an extra $200. Boom, sustainable charity
Evernote requires more private data
Just got an email from Google saying that this account will remain free.
CheckIO is a videogame you play by writing Python.
Right, but we're talking about the (now current) pricing model. There are many many many small family units that have not yet converted to "vanity" gmail. Now they won't ever.
Meaning Apple is a startup?
You should turn these rules into a G+ Hangouts game.