skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The battle was lost hundreds of years before you were born. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first quotation for the loose "to destroy or remove a large proportion of" meaning of "decimate" in 1663.
"Zynga’s share price is down 3.52% to $2.33 from its $10 IPO price a year ago"

???
Google has indicated that writing will be provided through a history api: https://developers.google.com/+/history/

History sources can be set to default to public, and will show up on a user's profile when that happens (like +1's do today) - but they won't show up in other peoples feeds unless the user explicitly shares the moment within G+.
What's the battle? I'm seeing two definitions:

1. Kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage of.
2. Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".
As for koans + tdd as the means for learning a lang, ymmv. I for one prefer an undisciplined, bootstrappy approach:

- find a function / aspect of Clojure that calls my attention

- read the doc / try to understand the rationale

- give it a sample use case, try to connect it with previous lessons

- recur!
Startups launching in 2013 (A selection curated by Beta List)
Numbers coming out of America are always revenue. It's a lower bound of value delivered.

So with a Million Dollar Consultancy, the value unlocked is upside of a million dollars.

All that value goes into a global account called Civilizational Progress.
You can sometimes make the same product by either shaping it directly or by making smaller, simple parts and binding them with e.g. screws. That's why I feel industrial robotics should be part of the discussion.

I do actually agree that 3D printing has pretty convincing use cases: food industry, small aluminum parts for airplane engines, customized cartilage replacement etc. I just think these are relatively small and non-revolutionary niches.
The implication here being that writing an interpreter is easier? I've found it easier to write a compiler.
Decimate means to remove 1 out of 10, so a decimated share price would have fallen by only 10%, technically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Current...
"Native technology allows for excellent apps, whereas HTML5 apps will be at best just OK"

Sometimes "just OK" is what people want, and what meets the needs of the business.

The truth is -- building a mobile web app can be fast and can fill an iPhone/Android/Blackberry/Windows phone with the content and interactivity the business and users need and want. It can also be much cheaper. Different businesses have different values, and whatever works best to achieve those values is best.

Calling devs lazy for not learning native mobile languages seems like a cheap way to get clicks. New Year's Resolution: Stop clicking on them.
As an operations guy I find this really interesting. What I find interesting is the cost vs revenue of these games.

Obviously to me there is a bunch of up front costs, art assets, game play design, etc. But once you've got the basic HTML5 code going, and the art assets in place, what are your on-going costs?

Clearly there is going to be bandwidth at scale its like $2 - $3 per megabit per month, you've got power/cooling in a colo, so that's going to cost you maybe $3K/month for a 42U rack's worth of servers. And presumably you've got a couple of opsen types tending and feeding that rack. But they are split across say 100 racks so 1/100th of their salary/benefits per month, lets call it $160/month [1]. So lets give the game 500Mbits of bandwidth a month (that is 4.3TB of data transfer per day) We can put 20 beefy servers in our 42U rack with 20TB of disk space and 1/2TB of flash in each (we do this at Blekko)So 400TB of disk space and 10TB of flash, and if you wanted 3.8TB of RAM (192GB/server) and 480 threads of execution.

Now I'm making a huge assumption here, and so I'm calling it out, but my assumption is that the "game" is essentially a front end on a database, where player actions become database transactions, and those transactions show up as changes in the game 'world', further those transactions are both shared (everyone in the game can see them) and private (only you see the changes). So a system that is slightly less beefy than our setup (the Sun setup) gets 10M transactions/minute in the TPC-C benchmark [2]. At that level it suggest our stack-o-servers might support 1 - 2M players.

So our monthly cost is on the order of $6,500 and we're hosting say 1.5M players. That means we need to extract something like a half cent per month out of those players in order to pay for running the hardware. For a gross margin of 50% that is about .86 cents.

I may be completely off here somewhere, please point out my math or configuration errors! It seems like one could essentially run a game 'forever' until that average number got too low and then you would have to wind it down, but one wonders about how hard it is get get someone to pay a penny a month.

I did leave out the maintenance (warranty) cost of the servers, a recent quote from a server vendor had 'everything covered, onsite tech' for $175/server/month. So if you wanted to add that in then there would be another $3,500/month to cover.

It looks like a license to print money but clearly there is something here that sucks all that money away. Curious what it is.

[1] That is two ops people with a combined salary/benefit package costing $200K/year or 16K/month which divided by 100 (1/100th of their work) is $160.

[2] http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?result...
I've been disappointed by it - everytime I use it for real work it's missing basic utilities and shell features. Has it been more than a novelty for you? If so, I'd love to hear what you've found it useful for.
Calling B a high level language is something of a stretch.
Great stuff! A great list of companies.
Fine, I'll bite.

Assuming you're belittling Objective-C, let's not forget that Objective-C is simply C with Smalltalk bolted on. I'm having a hard time imagining a plane of reality in which either is not "half decent". Objective-C is, in my opinion, much better than C++ to accomplish the same task (they have semi-equivalent aims, though implemented very, very differently).

I learned Objective-C and iOS (then called iPhone OS) from scratch to write a quite-complex app once. The app has been in the store for two years now. Like you, initially, I balked at the brackets; everybody does. Eventually, I was actually pleased that my C experience carried over so well, and it was a pleasant experience in the end. As you do, I wrote two to throw away until I mastered the platform, and I didn't mind it at all.

Assuming your object user has an update method which takes a name argument and you want to store the result of calling update somewhere, here's Python vs. Objective-C (the Smalltalk-influenced terminology is different, but the concepts are the same):

save_result(user.update(name="Larry"))

saveResult([user updateWithName:"Larry"]);

I don't find one much more horrible than the other.
Some of the impetus towards cross platform HTML5 development was probably because the state of Android app design in the 2.x era was so bad. You could basically get away with using an iOS-look-alike web toolkit on Android in a WebView, and it was "good enough".

With Ice Cream Sandwich, the new Holo look and feel actually has a real design language that is markedly different from an iOS app.

As to Windows Phone - there is such a strong design for Windows Phone apps that those jQuery Mobile apps in their app store look really out of place. Microsoft's working on some CSS that will make jQuery Mobile apps look more native, but it's still missing some of the key Windows Phone UI like panorama.

From developing HTML5 and native mobile apps for iOS and Android, and from follow ups on some mobile application strategy consults, HTML5 mobile apps just don't deliver a good user experience, especially if the app does anything other than content consumption.
Not doing native development isn't about laziness. It's about freedom and flexibility. As much as is possible, you should strive to minimize your dependence on any single company (at least until you have some clout), and having a code base that is locked to a closed platform breaks that principle.

And look, what I'm saying here isn't ideologically motivated. It comes from hard experience. If I had a dollar for every time I sat on a blanket with two corners held by a single company, and then got that blanket yanked out from under me, well... I'd have three dollars.
I think the thesis of this article can be expanded even further to, "The Entertainment Industry is driven by marketing stories", and as gaming is part of the entertainment industry, it therefore abides by many of the same themes and customs.
Google has never really struck me as a company that has "clean urls" in it's corporate tradition. The worst offender is probably Google Maps.. I have no idea why they insist on making their own url shortener for those clusterfucks of permalinks available only through a "lab".
You are overlooking opportunity costs. All of your players could be playing a more profitable game instead.
Suppose Google rightly keeps API closed until the problem of maintaining acceptable signal/noise level in social networks is resolved. My twitter/FB stream is full of garbage (G+ is more or less OK). Not because of wrong people I'm subscribed to, but because of lack of proper filtering tools.
phpsh is probably the best, but I also use Boris https://github.com/d11wtq/boris - "A tiny REPL for PHP"
I can't think of a single company that needs TV advertising to survive less than Apple does. They have a fanatic user base that will advertise Apple products for free.
Quite frankly, the words with friends board layout and tileset was so badly balanced that after then first couple of weeks I could no longer stand to play it. I think a better route would be to have quackle play itself millions of times and get data from there (it's a reasonably common thing for people developing scrabble heuristics to do nowadays).
That's OK, there are dihonest people everywhere.

The only correct response to such a situation is: "I will tell everyone I know about your tactics, and go with the dealer that was shooting straight."

Then execute on exactly that plan.
My main work is on a complex application, but we write it in Parenscript, a Lisp that compiles to Javascript (so yes, I do like languages like Clojurescript). That gives us escape hatches for controlling complexity that raw Javascript doesn't have. On the other hand, I do still write some raw Javascript and I prefer the same style in both. As far as I can tell from various measurements, the Lisp I write is about half the size of what I would write in JS. That's a win, but not so big that it can be the only strategy for limiting complexity.

Do I come from a functional programming background? Not really. I use closures and lambdas a lot, but my code is rather imperative. My obsession when building systems is to keep the code as simple and small as I reasonably can. Mutable state and even global state don't scare me as long as they help with that. What scares me are architectural assumptions about how one "should" structure complex software.

This sort of thing is a bazillion times more fun to discuss in person, whilst drinking beer, than it is in the contactless format in which we find ourselves. I'd try to convince you that you might do well to drop your OO assumptions, but I'm afraid of coming across as shrill. There isn't enough context here to make one's claims nuancedly enough, and then also "nuancedly" is not a word.
She's a mathematician and used to teach at Ohio State. A decade ago she switched to being an oil painter and a photographer. She's now teaching herself web development, because she thinks we could use a second income in this turbulent economy.

On top of all that she is a very nice person. I consider myself to be a very fortunate guy.
> In what other language you have direct access to methods as first class objects to do an immediate execution of a method returned by an execution container (parenthesis in JS) ?

Not sure if i understand the question. This seems to work in Python:

s = "Hello"
up = True
(s.upper if up else s.lower)()

Not that it's a very pythonic piece of code, but it works, and i would expect many other languages support something similar.

Anyway, that's tangential. And i wasn't discussion what "most people would" do either. What i was trying to say is that by aliasing "var self = this" you're not automatically immune to the quirks of "this" in JS.
A good point, and I have struggled with this idea alot. But, I don't think you can simply look at "what the world wants" as the final word. I think you have to temper that with what might be good for the world. My guess would be that the person with the complaint is really expressing their feeling that information products aren't doing something good for people. I haven't consumed any, so I can't say.
I did a few Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net) problems in Clojure after doing the koans. I found it really helpful to implement solutions in some imperative or multi-paradigm language, and then go back and do the solutions again in Clojure. Each problem made me curious about the best way to solve it in Clojure, which led to lots of learning.
It doesn't matter if the percentage of skyscrapers is low, the point is that a large number of them has been built in absolute terms while strictly complying with earthquake regulations. That is, it is entirely possible to safely build skyscrapers in an earthquake zone.

There are a variety of other reasons for Tokyo's urban sprawl, not least the presence of what is the world's most comprehensive public transportation system.
There's an old Chinese proverb: "A man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the man who is doing it."

That's the feeling I get from opinion pieces like this. I've developed web-based user interfaces for several projects in recent years, some of them with a strong mobile focus. I'm still waiting for all these demons to come and bite us, where our paying customers don't find the experience satisfactory and run away to the competitors who are going to beat us by having a highly polished native app instead.

Sure, there are occasional irritations with mobile browsers. Many of them, perhaps even the majority I've come across, are actually by design because Apple actively chose not to make their browser work like everyone else's... again. But do we spend as much effort getting our web apps to run effectively across all the major platforms (including Windows) as we'd have to spend writing a native UI on every platform we want to support? Not even close.

And native apps still have the same horrible downsides as ever: the app store approval lottery, Apple wanting a huge cut of any money you make, yada yada.

If I were running Facebook, where for practical purposes the budget and developer time required to develop a mobile app on every platform were negligible, sure, maybe it's worth it for a more polished experience. (Maybe.) But for more modest projects, where resources are finite and we don't magically have developers on tap who speak a different "native" language for each platform, I can spend the time and money once to build the web app and then the same again refining it or I can spend the time and money twice just to get the basics done without any polish. I don't understand how anyone who has actually done this can be in any doubt about which gets better results.
To punish them, I think.
You are not even "technically" correct and I have to say it's really annoying seeing this come up again and again in every HN thread where someone uses the word. Even setting aside that, yes, usage dictates meaning in English, the OED has included the definition against which you rail for 350 years.

You're wrong. And you're the worst kind of wrong: pedantically wrong. Please stop.
Steve, how did you get reinstated so quickly? I am still having issues with Twicsy.
In 2013 Google, Apple and Valve will kill piracy
Not always. Some dare to make something unusual and succeed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24qJXgiuO1E

The industry seems to get healthier now. More interest in cross platform games, OpenGL, SDL and etc. and less lock in into DirectX.
A common workaround for this is to ask for a VIN.
Can I ask, which city?
It used to mean that. A long, long time ago. Not for several centuries.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the etymology of words is intensely interesting. It always makes me happy to learn how words were originally used and how that meaning changed – but all that doesn’t help you decide what a word actually means right now.
And in JS is really easy to create an abstraction for this issue:

function wait(o){
return setTimeout(function(){ o.action.call(o.this) },o.delay*1000)
}

To use it like this:

wait({
action : function(){ console.log(this) },
delay : 1,
this : this
});
Cycling to work was one of the reasons I lost 50lbs. I biked about 10km each way from my apartment in Kitchener to my office in Waterloo (Ontario). Now live in Toronto where, outside of winter I cycle on a daily basis. Sold my car last year too, which is a nice cost saver.

If you know how to get around safely, I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't want to cycle. Most people are worried about sweating, but is easily solved by not riding like some Tour De France wanna-be and enjoying a nice casual ride.
Great story. Thanks for sharing.

Congrats to you for finding something you're passionate about and sticking with it, and improving your health.

Can't help but wonder ... how is the weight now? I am sure it is a lot better.
This is really sketch, in my opinion; There are people with hundreds of dollars invested into their facebook game microtransactions. "Take the money and run" to a whole new level...
Does anyone know how to run these in Light Table? I really love the idea of that and was hoping to try it to learn Clojure, but I have absolutely no idea how to run the koans from inside Light Table.
Space Settlers is an online multi-player Sci-Fi game for iOS iPhone iPad 
Space Settlers is an online multi-player Sci-Fi game for iOS iPhone iPad, featuring "mecha combat and real-time strategy".

★ ★ With exquisite, dynamic and sharp picture and next-gen style, this game will bring you an extraordinary visual impact.

★ ★ Space Settlers is diverse and easy to play. If you are an online Sci-Fi game novice, it is absolutely worth your first try.
There is a fine line between maintaining the current player-base and attracting new players, and the money in both is fast and hard to come by (however the latter is more exciting).

It would be an unfortunate charity to give little to no attention to attracting new players but instead letting the current player-base stagnate, and it's troublesome to keep assigning hard-working developers and artists to maintain the slow and steady decline of a game.

Make no mistake; killing off the stagnating games is in the best interest of the artists and game developers in the same way that it is financially sane.
He practically begged me to accept their offer and said I would be helping him out, meaning my purchase contributed to his sales commission. He told me he "was having a really bad month [for sales]" and had earlier on the phone tried to forge a personal bond based on our mutual hometown, despite completely forgetting who I was when I arrived on the lot. The problem was it was July 6th, and because of the holiday, the month had really only just begun. I reminded him what day it was and he admitted his lie. Low offer or not, that statement was typical of the attitude of all the sales people there (who yells at a customer who is trying to pay cash for a car on the spot?). I had already decided I wouldn't buy the car there since I didn't want to reward them for their poor treatment and didn't want to have to return there for service. The dealer I ended up at was the polar opposite - polite, accommodating, and not pressed to make a deal.
I finally landed a paying job (an internship, but I'm still in school) doing the thing I love: coding and problem-solving. I actually got the position through a Who's Hiring thread, which for me validates my browsing of HN heh.

As for 2013, I graduate in May and am looking forward to working with startups in NYC. Hope to eventually found my own. I'm already building the first product!
looks like they're looking for package maintainers see the quote at the bottom of the post:

"If you are a packager and would like to package Simon 0.4, please do get in touch with us. Thank you."
"books" appears 3 times on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canada
Totally, just remember to use var. Dangerous this is much scary then accidentally adding a global variable.
Works here, 10.8.2. You do need more than one window open on your system for a perceivable effect.

OP, at current I'm typing from an 11" netbook, so I don't exactly find this useful. But I'll be giving it a try on my desktop, I feel it will be better there.
As a house rule (since none of us have any plans to ever competitively play Scrabble), the list of all legal two-letter words which came in our "deluxe Scrabble" instruction manual is available to all players at all times.

It has really helped cut down on the number of games where we get stuck or frustrated because there's "nowhere to move", both by making more moves legal, and helping us keep the board configuration more compact, while at the same time eliminating what we see as trivia (what 2-letter words are legal) vs. "regular English" in the games we play.
The Communication minister (Stephen Conroy) is, apart from a horrible "filter the naughty stuff off the internet" plan which has since gone away, pretty switched on about tech.

Although he has been critical of iinet in the past, be's also said that he's not going to push new laws into place unless both sides agree on them.
A whole lot of people who try to get started with Clojure without lein never actually get to a repl or runnable project.
Slideshow: 18 Months of Fab
Yeah, I know. It still strikes me as an odd usage though.
Most of the comments are made up.
Ok, so you're saying I need to measure this stack against another game that I could ship on this stack. So leaving it generating revenue $X is a loss of additional revenue $Y-$X if I deployed a game that had $Y revenue on the same hardware. Does that about cover it?

The assumption in that though is that game $Y cannibalizes $X. Which is to say if you also release a new game $Y your returns on $X go away.

And while I see that as true with similar/derivative games "CashVille 2" is just like "CashVille 1" but with unicorns or something, I am not sure I'm persuaded that we do accrue an opportunity cost against different game. This is the root of the reasoning in my print money comment.

The reasoning is that if this config pays for the development cost and then generates marginal $ over time, you just add another stack to increase the marginal dollars you get. A writer releasing a second book doesn't 'cut into' sales of the first book, if nothing else they can sometimes increase the revenue of the first book by getting wider visibility.

I'm interested though in how we might reason about the opportunity cost here.
Mobile OS developers, don't be lazy and give me a way of embedding HTML5 into an app that doesn't completely ruin the whole experience.

Seriously, a web app will be running beautifully in Mobile Safari, but when I put the same code into a WebView, it all goes to shit.
I do agree such a world would provide clearer signals. But while I admit that I am speaking well out of my depth, I don't see much evidence that people currently value television above 'Free' or 'Unlimited After Monthly Subscription'.