skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A hack I'm rather proud of
A few months ago, my partner and I purchased Chron X, the original online collectible card game. It was first written in 1995-1997, and brought a lot of ideas to the table which were later implemented by Magic the Gathering Online, and other collectible card games.

We're working to make a new version of the game, that's web-based, free to play, and easier for anyone.. But until it's done, we had the question of "How to we keep the old game going long enough to transition?"

One of the key problems with the old game is that games are peer to peer. While the game server authenticates users, the actual card battles have one client connect directly to the other, and play directly.

This worked out well in 1997, in the age of dialup and open ports, but today almost everyone has a firewall, either in software or as a Linksys router.. They just can't get through to play, and the popularity has taken a corresponding hit. We're excited to work toward the new web version, but until we do, we want to help the player base grow, which means we needed to slay the firewall demon.

I had started looking into Hamachi, which creates a direct machine to machine VPN, and lets users connect to one another. Sounds pretty decent... The problem is, it's free for up to 16 users, but after that, users would need to pay $5/month, just to be able to connect... Given that they'd be paying a monthly fee, and we wouldn't even see it, that's a pretty big negative.
The second problem is that since it puts everyone on a VPN, BOTH players would need to have it installed to play, not just the player behind a firewall.

Instead, I put together a hack that I'm rather proud of.. I hacked together OpenVPN to put together a quick click-and-run installer, which creates a VPN into our servers.. Unlike the Hamachi VPN, however, our VPN assigns each user a public, routable, IP address, on the outside world, such as 72.10.x.y.z.

Then, we set their default gateway to go through the VPN, and block all ports except for our game.

What this does is give them a public, routable, real IP address, which can only be used for contacting other Chron X clients.

What I really like about this solution is that it's expandable to any other game system.. If you wanted to run a Diablo 2 tunnel, it'd be just a few configuration changes to open up those ports, and bam, it'd just work.

Players each have a public ip and can play against each other, and we get keep the old client workable for a while longer, while we get more done on Chron X 2.

I'm just excited, and wanted to share the hack ;)

-Colin
A few thoughts on ad supported SW:

-It's interesting how TV is moving towards a pay-per episode model (HBO orignals, ITMS and netflix) and SW is going towards advertising. I haven't owned a TV in 10 years b/c ads became so intolerable. But I now rent / buy TV episodes commercial free (I missed the TIVO revolution.) I'm the type of consumer who would rather pay for something and not deal with ads / potential privacy violations.

-People can only spend so much time on the interweb in a day. And a site has to go nuclear to make real money off ads. So if you're going to make money off ads you have to steal traffic from google, yahoo and FB etc or you have to grab traffic from emerging net markets.
It's not much of a distinction mathematically, but it's an important distinction in emphasis. Saying something is growing exponentially does imply that it will just keep on growing, at least for a long while. Saying growth is sigmoidal emphasizes the eventual slowdown.

Talking about "exponential growth" often leads people into unrealistic hyperbole. Of course, by "people" I mean marketers, investment advisors, and headline writers at Business Week...not us rational computer scientists!
Get used to it, unless you are making a product for geeks (who are pretty much the only opera users) there are probably better things to do with your business than tune your website for 1.5% of the population (even less if it is mainstream).
GameSiteOnline
Fresh revamped flash and video game site.
"I tend to figure that if someone is using IE6 or IE7, and the browser is buggy, its microsoft's problem and not mine. I do not have time to hack javascript and css that is out of spec."

IE CSS and JS is annoying but with this attitude you are just screwing yourself.
Toy applications are legal.
M&A Dealmaking Best Route Billionaire Status
Forgive my naivete, but I don't yet understand what's interesting or unique about the site. I took a quick look, but it seems to offer the same sort of flash games and videos that are common on many sites these days.

Is there something in particular you'd like to discuss?
http://programming.reddit.com/info/61h2e/comments/
Does your page load size suck? Mine does
You have read the appropiate joelonsoftware articles, I suppose? I just found this one, for example: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html (might be good reading for your manager, too).

I think the modern way would be to not rewrite from scratch, but to refactor module by module. Presumably with .Net you can find a way to use your old code as a .Net component? Then you could just replace components one by one...

If your new code is already looking like a mess, what is the point of the rewrite? Except of course to secure your jobs because after the rewrite, there will be another rewrite...
This is the way I code too.

See http://c2.com/xp/TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign.html for some nice related discussion.
Modding this up is an even truer sign of mathematical illiteracy. The sigmoid itself contains an exponent that is damped at higher values. One could go further and say that it is not even a sigmoid because all web traffic will peter off eventually, with the eventuality in the undefined horizon.
Does anyone really assume an exponential growth in the literal sense with users rushing in via some inter-galactic network when all earth users are exhausted?
Sweet! Now, with some government subsidized liposuction, we can solve America's obesity epidemic and foreign oil dependency all at once!
WSJ: Facebook's Tracking of User Activity Riles Privacy Advocates, Members
Who are your favorite commenters on Hacker News? Now you can filter by them.
Tech design with thought
On the sites I tend to create, Firefox usages is above 50%.
Safari is like 10%

And the site looks OK in IE7, but is not a pixel match to Firefox at all.

I will usually let things like margins and padding slip a bit, its not like the site is totaly broken, i just do not develop for IE or spend any significant time optimizing it outside of CSS or Javascript spec.

If something does not work in IE i usually ask if its worth doing, because I have spent way to many days chasing rabbit holes in that stupid browser.
yeah, TCP/IP stack latency. ;-/
I've taken advantage of a bunch of these flights (I'm from the UK).

I live in the US now though and I'm wondering why this model hasn't taken off here. For me to fly just over one hour (San Francisco to Las Vegas) recently cost me around $80 each way - and that was after an hour of looking for good deals.
a local .net developer claims that mono is really good at matching microsofts .net deployment in every way.
Voted up just because my name is on the shortlist ;) Seriously, though, this is nice.
Thanks. It's good when things actually work ;)
What makes you think a web-based system is best for this? Here are some problems that have prevented me from pursuing this market:
1. Perceived security ("My information is out there in cyberspace? Won't it be hacked?")
2. Offline usage ("What happens when the internet/power is out?")
3. Speed and technologies (Is web-based better than local application, i.e. MYOB/Peachtree?)

Most of the problems are probably in customer perception, but because you're dealing with small businesses, perception is really hard to overcome. They presumably don't have IT people to talk sense into them.
Your next poker partner may be software
Yeah, but if it's crap and it's free, does it really matter?
Always make sure "this end up" is pointed away from the body!
Ask YC: how could investing by crowd wisdom actually work?
The idea to somehow leverage crowd wisdom for investing has been on my mind for a while, and probably on that of many others, too. So far I haven't acted on it, in part because of other projects, but mainly because I could not yet think of a way to avoid abuse of the system. For example, if users would invest together and vote on investments, somebody could vote on an irrationally high price for something he wants to sell outside of the group, and use the shared money to buy it.

Now I have been invited to a german startup in beta (sharewise) where people can give recommendations, predictions, and do the social networking thing. And it makes me feel even more clearly: why should I trust the projections of those people on sharewise more than the projections of the actual stock market? It costs nothing to create a projection on sharewise, whereas people "voting" on the correct price in the actual stock market better believe their projection, because they put their money on the line.

In general, if somebody (analysts for example) is projecting a higher value of some stock, why do they not buy it? Either they believe in what they say, then they should buy it, or they don't believe in it, then perhaps they should better keep their mouth shut?

So I guess it is back to investment clubs again? I don't know exactly how they work, I would guess everybody can speculate with the money they put in only, but wins and losses are shared? But even that seems to be exploitable in the same way as described above. Presumably one would only start such a thing together with trusted friends, but still?

At least there seems to be commercial software for managing investment clubs, and quite expensive, too, so perhaps there is still a market out there for web 2.0 style managed investment clubs. I just don't think that any of them will provide a magic bullet to outperform the market.

I should add that I don't know very much about investing etc. anyway, but I am always happy to learn more...
"... It seems like the default plan for the MBA students is to work for investment banks or consulting firms upon graduation. But a significant number seem to be rebelling against this. Many planned to start startups instead. ..."

It's not just about being smart and hardworking. How do MBA's hack Or do they resort to "old-think" [1] and latest business fads using other peoples money? Given that a lot of startups are tech-centric with weak business skills this leads to some Q's?

- How do MBA's create startups?

- How can MBA skills best be used in startups?

[1] Do MBA programmes and graduates in particular foster forward thinking? ie: Throwing out old ideas and thinking up new ones? Do they have enough technical skills, curiosity & frugality to build new products or services without resorting to the "old-think" business case studies they learn at school?
well im referring to the earlier events a few years ago - this was the first one pg and jessica attended and they're far more relaxed about who can attend now.
I rarely leave my laptop unattended, but I once melted it. Honey mustard potato chips, it appears, are EXTREMELY flammable.

The point is, just because you keep it with you, doesn't mean you don't need insurance.
Leopard fixes this. When you log out, it "recovers" disk space and cleans itself up.
Yeah, and then your car insurance will go up. Not really worth it.
That's really good elven.... and you get treble points for your openness and willingness to share.

You'll go a long way my friend, I'm sure.
That's a horrible price. You can get flights for about 39 dollars each way (JetBlue, Virgin America, etc). Try Kayak.com, virginamerica.com, southwest.com, jetblue.com.
Nothing will ever be faster than hovering over a word and pressing control-command-D on Mac OS X.
have you looked at caps.fool.com? several online brokerages are building communities such as tradeking.com. covester.com tracks your real trades and is going to allow others to follow successful traders for a free.

good luck, there are a lot of great sites out there already.
How are you different from http://volity.net/
Be careful what you wish for:
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2666...
"Download a copy of Gamut, our client software, to enter the world of Volity gaming."
They're also developing a web-based version: http://www.volity.org/wiki/index.cgi?Web_Client

Anyway, you should probably have something more to distinguish yourself besides just being online-only. The Volity system is actually pretty interesting; it works over Jabber.
Thanks. If you are interested in implementing anything similar, shoot me an email and I can help you out.

The code is all pretty simple, once you get it working.
I deactivated my account a short while back after hearing about the beacon ad nauseum.

That'll teach them.

I kinda want to come back, please tell me I am not missing anything.
Thanks for the link! caps.fool.com looks very similar to sharewise, and therefore probably has the same flaws (if they are really flaws).

And even tracking real trades might be open to abuse - trade a small amount on the tracked system, and then a large amount on some other system? At least I can see some incentive for participating, though: perhaps you are more likely to attract followers to your trades, which in turn increases the value of the stock.

At this point I am not planning a real startup (as obviously I don't have the right idea yet). I was contemplating to experiment a little together with friends, though.
The interviewer seemed determined to get his Linux v. Microsoft sound byte. Linus has to be sick of that line of questioning.
There are a ton of sites in the multi-player gaming niche. I think there's still lots of room for competition, and many ways to compete with existing sites. Whether on game selection / implementation or technology improvements.
ah, got it. that makes a lot more sense.
As if legality is the litmus test for morality or worth.
heh I wasn't that bothered about the 'suggest' feature. You still have to wait for the definition to appear.

Still cool, but I'm not sure it's much faster (Assuming you don't care about the suggest functionality).
The Chameleon Paint is a Troll...
Just when I started to get my hopes up after reading about it on slashdot.
I love it when a hack comes together! Kudos, Colin
Now if you don't mind me asking, how did you get your hands on such a large pool of public IP addresses?
Seeking our Niche: Targeting our users
Nice topic--I'd really enjoy seeing more discussion of this kind here.

>>why, oh why are we all chasing the same ad biz model?

I think this may be--at least partially--a case of "get rich quick" versus "get (sort of) rich slow."

I believe if you follow the pay model you go your own way and forget about VC and GYM money, at least until you're successful enough for others to notice. This may never happen, however. I used to work for a guy who was probably one of the first ASPs in existence, only it likely never even crossed his mind because he's a businessman and not a techie. I'll bet he's barely even known in his niche, but he owns a successful business with about five employees and just keeps on adding customers.
I HATE the "CPM and a prayer" mindset that masquerades as a business model. I don't understand why anyone starting a business these days would rely exclusively on ad monetization for their business. I personally would never invest time or money in any startup that had ad sales as the only source of revenue (and I've invested in magazines, fergoodnessakes!)

I believe in MULTIPLE revenue streams. Most of my startups have charged directly for the product or service, but the most successful have all had multiple revenue streams. A startup I'm working on now, for example, has six distinct revenue streams...and there are probably others we haven't figured out yet. One of the revenue streams is advertising, but we deal directly with the advertisers (no ad network or agency taking a cut), there is a minimum $50K ad buy (reducing time/communications overhead), we have no dedicated ad sales staff (just 'order takers' and ad screeners) and it is our smallest source of revenue by a significant margin.

There are too many opportunities out there to rely on the whims of the ad market.
Making 40K a Year Selling Weeds
How Empathy Can Make You The Most Powerful Person at Your Company
hey,
send me an email bkmrkr at yahoo.com
"What makes you think a web-based system is best for this?"

Doesn't matter what I think. Only matters what they think. I am building a business in response to a tremendous demand.

There seems to be a low level theme running here that the <enterprise><small business><IE using><anyone over x years of age><you name it> crowd is missing the <Web2.0><social networking><everything cool> boat. Don't you believe it! They're not all PHBs. (Most of the smartest people I know run small businesses.) They see what's happening. And they don't understand why there's so much going on these days and they're still stuck with garbage business software that costs a fortune, is hard to use, and doesn't serve their needs.

So who to they complain to? Me! "Give me something that does business the way we do, make it simple, price it right, and put it on the web so I can stop paying XYZ Systems a small forture to never be available!" Every demo I give ends the same way, "Finish that and I'll buy it in a minute!" (Needless to say, I do know the difference between a promise and a check, so we'll see...)

Hopefully it won't be too long before I post one of those "How Do You Like My App" posts.
Grady Booch on collaborative development skills
Maybe I misinterpreted what you are saying, but if you change their default gateway and block all ports except the one for your game, then you effectively shut off their internet while playing. For me, and I think most people, this would be a huge negative.
I think you're on a hot trail, edw519!

An interesting thought is what kinds of standards you can hook into. Perhaps stuff for tax file exporting, calendaring, sales /product channels, etc. The standard formats might be easy to provide and could increase the value of your pitch.
He said "such as" ;P
They can still use Java and let users launch the application via Java Web Start.
I've wanted a good implementation of web-irc for a long time. That alone is cool enough for me.

However, the UI is really bad; I'm not sure where to begin. Once I log into an irc server, how do I play games? I remember seeing a selection for it when I first came to mibbit, but now it is gone.

When I first start chatting my messages aren't visible (because they're scrolled offscreen).

And it's really, painfully ugly. You might want to recruit a UI designer, or steal some styles from adium or xchat.
Thanks for the feedback, I'm a programmer, not a UI designer ;) I do plan on getting some decent UI design in the future.

To play games/connect to other IRC servers/etc etc just click on the 'welcome tab' again.

Not sure about the scrolling messages, the chat output will scroll as long as the scrollbar is at the bottom.
If you resize the window that can sometimes affect the scrollbar position so it could have been that.

I should have explained, this isn't something I'd show end users, it's just an early stage hard to use prototype.
"Quantum Information and Quantum Computation" by Nielsen and Huang is also a fascinating book if you want to look at Quantum Mechanics from a distinctly mathematical and CS perspective.
Yes. No need to replicate the horizontals. The verticals are what everyone is clamoring for. Hooks into existing horizontals seems to be the way to go.
You know that you are a lousy programmer (and also lousy at doing other things) if you start to make rules although smart people know:

- rules are for people who cannot think

- every rule has a context where it fits perfectly, but

- every rule has many contexts where it doesn't fit at all

Rules only reflect your current knowledge and your current working situation. This is subject to change.
You know, I was wondering how to apply Paul Graham's essays to non web-related products ...
Artificial Satellite Tracking guide
The problems with Copyright
I was using ant, and hated it. What I do now is check in all code into subversion, then if it's ready for release, tag it, then check out the tag directly onto the production server.
That was hillarious, you really had me cracking up there
I dont understand how what you propose successfully traverses NAT. Just curious: How do you punch through, and then keep your NAT pipe open?

There is no guarantee that this part: "our VPN assigns each user a public, routable, IP address, on the outside world, such as 72.10.x.y.z" will always lead back to a client behind layer(s) of NAT, unless the listening port is manually forwarded in the router itself.

Protocols such as STUN have developed methods to attempt to solve this, but its not easy because of issues such as there being no standard for the amount of time that NAT must keep pipes open after they are finished being used.
Thanks.

I was trying to point out that the idiom becomes while(line=readline()) which I'd rather avoid since = and == often get confused in a conditional.

It would normally be silly to get into this level of detail but I use this so often.
Hey I was going to work at Tradeking... too far though.

p.s. check out this site I am building:

http://investorscrystalball.com/
If something goes wrong, the guy who picked you is going to look like an idiot for choosing a free service.
"And as Saul noted a few moments later, most of these curves aren't even sigmoidal, they are sinusoidal. (This is, incidentally, why Ray Kurzweil is most likely wrong about the singularity.)"

Am I the only one who gets tired of sweeping bullshit generalizations like this? I can't believe people will pay to hear this kind of nonsense.

He isn't actually saying anything you can rebut.
Really great advice.
Ask YC: Finding start ups?
I've heard "the best way to learn about start-ups is to work in one" - it strikes me as great advice. I learned a lot more about selling working as a salesman than I would have if I just spent time reading websites about it. Thats where I am stuck now, I've spent a lot of time reading about start-ups, a lot of time hacking, but I'm not quite ready to start my own company. (I have 2 years left of college, and I definitely want to finish), so I'm looking to intern somewhere this summer.

Unfortunately I can't find any start-ups around here (NYC, northern new jersey). I know there have to be some in NYC and I would gladly commute but it seems nearly impossible to find them. I assume its because people in a start up are too busy actually doing work to bother posting ads for interns. I watch here and search google and craiglist but the results are not promising. How do you find your way into the loop? I feel like it is a game of who you know, not what you know, and at the moment I don't know anyone.

Thanks,
Kevin
kevinsch@udel.edu
Not necessarily true. I used to date a girl who was dumb as a brick . . . but could beat the shit out of minesweeper.

Incidentally, years later I had a roommate who tied the Intermediate minesweeper world record at 10 seconds and could beat Expert in under a minute.

I'm sure there's some Bokononist term for this.

[after wikipedia search] - maybe Minesweeper is my vin-dit
Intuit Finally Buys Homestead for $170m
I'm still not clear why a public IP address is necessary. If the traffic is going over the VPN, it shouldn't matter what IP addresses are being used.
Oh, THAT kind of weed. Never mind.