skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can set-up your own UTMA, but you would need to be the custodian.

Quoting wikipedia[1] on the difference this makes.

> The donor can serve as a custodian, rather than transferring the property to someone else to hold for the minor. However, the value of custodianship property is included in a donor’s gross estate if the donor dies while serving as the custodian.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Transfers_to_Minors_Ac...
That is really what a lot of introverts feel. It's okay if you are uncomfortable with that. We can recognize our own so in case it was not obvious that it was a blanket statement, let me just say "it was a blanket statement".
I don't think anyone is making so extreme a claim that technological changes cannot "cut back" on social interaction. The average amount of time spent socializing certainly fluctuates from time to time and place to place. It's certainly not unimaginable that the introduction of TVs, phones, wearable devices, etc might result in less time being spent socially.

What silverbax88 and others are saying, however, is that there is a limit to this. We are not on a trajectory to a world in which social interaction ceases to exist. In fact, we're not even close.

Consequently, most of these gloom and doom complaints seem overly extreme. If we accept as premises that (a) the world is only changing by a small amount, and (b) it has changed by comparable amounts innumerable times in the past, then our conclusion can only be making a big fuss about this change in particular is extreme.

Which is more likely: That Google Glass is finally the thing that will push social interaction off the edge, or that the people of today (like the people of last decade, and the one before that, and the one before that...) are nostalgic and resistant to change?

With respect to our generation, you said, "...I observed our outside time diminishing as we got older..." Okay, so what? Is this change somehow a bad thing, or is it simply change? Is decrying this change a necessary and useful thing to do, or is it simply nostalgia-fueled alarmism? Of course the people of today will behave differently than the people of yesterday. Why is this surprising? Why is this bad? Why should we care?
[Retracted; I was conveying my point incorrectly.]
The great thing about the 360 isn’t beating the games, it’s showing everyone online that I did.
> I'm pretty sure the "inner voice" is just a metaphor to describe a concept.

Amusingly, as someone with an inner voice, I used to think the same thing about the mind's eye. I couldn't visualise anything with it, and I asked someone else and he couldn't do it either, so I decided probably no one could do it.

Since then I've realised that the people who talk about visualising things are... y'know, actually visualising things. It turns out that some people do and some people don't.
Happy Birthday HN! Despite the complaints I see here every now and then that the content is going to hell and becoming another reddit, I dont think there exists a better site that can both simultaneously waste free time and make you better informed. :) I don't think I can remember a day that I haven't visited at least once.

Here's to 6 more! CHEERS!
It's possible to compete, but to quote Ben Horowitz, you need to be not just better, but many times better, to avoid the inertia of people using the status quo. To that end, I suggest you consider going the Etsy route and catering to a specialist market, building your product out, and then expanding. Taking on eBay in a frontal attack is doomed to failure.

I like the messaging idea - build that into your support side as well, possibly by crowdsourcing and rewarding loyal users. And I also like the ability to flag on craigslist which is seriously missing on EBay. User-driven tagging would be a boon; I trade synthesizers/audio gear fairly frequently on EBay and nothing is more irritating that searching for a synth and getting pages of accessories that mention that device in the headline or text. I loathe and despise seller spam.

Tech stack, I have no ideas.
Pinterest as compared to Instagram is better deserving of this kind of valuation, I think. Their product is so good (pretty much a picture focused front-end) that thousands of others (myself included) have copied. And it works, brilliantly.

I'm confident that they can drive sales... however, can they do something interesting with that.

Or maybe Yahoo should buy them.
It's a lovely system but without XeTeX it's not that useful to me. I've totally switched over to make my font life easier.
The 'Steroid' Housing Recovery
"Our security comes at a high price: our freedom."

"We already live in a culture of fear"

That just got political real fast.

(From the live stream)
Sure it does. So many things happen in cycles. Contiuums are really the trace of a penduluum.

We may still be swinging toward "programmable" buttons, but trust me, things will start swinging back at some point, though perhaps not for the reasons we might think.
"They have executed well in financing the building of this network..."

They have executed well in the building. Financing is kinda easy for a country of only 1.3 million people heavily subsidized by the European Union (which Estonia is a part of).

During the 2008-2009 crisis (which is not done yet but I digress), the Estonian GDP took a gigantic hit: -20% of the GDP. That's what you get when you're taxing the private sector like crazy: the private sector, in usual circumstances, can barely survive. If any crisis happens, then the private sector dies and the economy crumbles (thank you socialism for the crazy high confiscatory tax rates on the private sector).

It's like Poland, for example: I love this country and it feels incredibly more "new" and even sometimes more "hi-tech" (e.g. in big cities malls) than western europe... But Poland is receiving crazy funding from the EU to get up to speed.

As an EU taxpayer, that said, it's good that at least some of money is used to invest in technologies that are bound to become very important in the future...
GDDR is really a requirement when it comes to graphics chipsets when you want to max out fill rate, etc. Now consider that this sports a unified memory architecture for the CPU and GPU.

Armchair programmer speculation: The latency of GDDR5 matters less when you don't have to transfer data back and forth between system memory and GPU memory. In fact, effective latency should be less all things considered compared to a traditional PC architecture.

This might also prove useful as a reference: http://solidlystated.com/hardware/difference-between-gddr-an...
I've been curious for a while as to how path-finding gets implemented in real world games.

For example, the common algorithm appears to be A* where you use some heuristic to guess the most efficient path but update the path when you find another is more efficient (for example you hit a large wall on the first path).

This is easy enough when you have only one moving object (because you can just compute that path at the start and then follow it), however in a real game there are likely many moving colideable objects and you might choose a path that causes you to get stuck or have to take a very suboptimal path.

The most "correct" way to do it would be to recalculate the path for each moving object on each frame, but this would probably lead to unacceptably poor performance.

So you can wait until you get stuck and then try and find a path out (which may be impossible). Or you can divide your path into recursive sub-paths and compute different sub-paths as you move.

Now for simulation this is interesting, for example if you order a military unit to move to some location in real life then you would expect them to at least consult a map before setting off however there may be unanticipated situations on the ground which mean that they have to take a suboptimal path. So pathfinding inefficiency might add realism.

I have noticed that overall path finding is much improved in modern games, especially RTS. So curious roughly how their implementation works.
Yeah.

In an economy with a healthy labor system, someone skilled in a certain field (say, software engineering) can just get a new (sufficiently lucrative) job if they lose the one they have, so there's no _necessary_ tension between those two.
Still missing a "like" button though.
It doesn't matter if they are Microsoft II since Microsoft is their only competition in this space.
What I find strange is that this story even exists. If OP truly wanted to live in solitude, truly didn't want to be bothered by others, this story would have never been written. Why even bother?

I'm not suggesting it is a cry for help (though it certainly could be), but it certainly is an attempt to connect with others.

I must admit I haven't read the full story. I found it too lengthy.
This reads like someone didn't get the offer they wanted, and the reason given was that they were not a good fit for the company's culture.

First, if this was the motivation for this post then I'd recommend you take a deep breath and relax. Its not about you, its about them. And trust me when I say if someone doesn't hire you because they don't think you would fit into their culture, thank them. Nothing is worse for your own self esteem and sanity than trying to get stuff done in a company trying to reject you culturally.

Second, understand that culture rejections are like date rejections, sometimes its the real reason, sometimes its a more polite way of saying 'no thank you' but in either case move on.

That said, you spend a lot of time at the office, and you interact with these people in a day to day way, startups are by their nature small and like families small issues can be big problems (do you squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom or the middle?). Unlike families, you get the opportunity to pick a new startup when one doesn't fit. Avail yourself of that opportunity.
It is also possible that we haven't found intelligent life yet because we define both intelligence and life in very specific ways that we as humans can relate to. For example, there can be an intelligent microorganism species out there where each individual microorganism leads a life as complex as a human. They may have invented all sorts of things in the micro scale, but chances are we might never find them simply because we are not looking for intelligent life in such a micro context.
> The uptake of the web was on its way, but Google was an incredible catalyst for it.

By the end of 1999, Google was averaging 7 million searches per day: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/google-in-2000.html. This was an increase of from only 10,000 searches per day at the end of 1998. Alta Vista was at 80 million searches per day by the end of 1997. Google had less than 1% of the search market at the end of 1999: http://www.seo-expert-services.co.uk/blog/posts/search-engin...

Google probably didn't surpass Altavista until well into 2000, which would have been after the bubble popped in March 2000. How could Google be the catalyst for internet uptake when the dot-com bubble peaked before it became popular?

As of 2000, when Google had basically no market share, there were already almost 100 million internet users in the U.S., or about a third of the population. It's grown to 80% of the population now, but that's much more attributable to much cheaper computers, cheaper and faster internet access, and the popularization of smart phones making internet access accessible to lower-income people and children.

> You deride gmail for being a ripoff of ye olde Hotmail, but it's a lot more than just 'a free webmail account you can sign up for'.

What is it other than a free e-mail account you can sign up for?

> There's cutting-edge technology in making shoes, too, but that doesn't make a shoemaking company a 'tech company'.

The steel industry was the "tech" industry of its time. It absorbed all the highly talented engineers, made the billionaires, and developed the technology that defined the time.
So basically a console?
Plenty of tiny companies have been able to write games for both XBox Live Arcade and for the Playstation Store. I'm not saying it's easy to get going, but the portion of the difficult attributable to the console is significantly lower than just writing a game.

The real problem with having a separate instruction set and architecture is that it's going to be longer before game engines come out that can be targeted to your system and thus you'll be giving the other guy exclusives that would otherwise have been multi-platform.
This is really the classic features vs. benefits conversation. Don't build features, build benefits instead.

I've spoken with lots of developers who swear that they understand this distinction, but most actually don't. You ask the question, "so what's this product going to do for [target customer]?" and they start spouting off features.

It's interesting to hear about Ryan's light-bulb moment, because I had a similar epiphany a couple of years ago. In making that leap, what surprised me the most was just how invisible that distinction had previously been to me.

Feature: Reminds you of your upcoming appointments
Benefit: Never be late for an appointment
What happened in mid-July last year? A massive spike in page views, it seems, for what looks like about 2 weeks.
It's a good lesson for overfunded startups to see what one PG achieved compared to the multi-million dollar, multi-person implosion that was Digg.

Keeping a relentless focus on scaling value and utility rather than spend and headcount is a much more sound way to build long term value.
You, of course, have to be social to some extent with or without an income. Food isn't going to just magically appear in your fridge.

But beyond short bursts of contact (which can often be automated via computer systems), I'm not sure I agree with your premise. I work as a software developer and farmer, and beyond sending an occasional email there is little need to be in contact with anyone in either profession. The former doesn't even require me to leave the house, ever.

I don't consider myself anti-social. I still enjoy social events outside of the workplace. But I see that it could be very easy to essentially disappear, while still making a decent income. They do not seem to be related concepts at all.
Yea, I actually loved this feature with OnLive when I was accepted into the beta. And they had the full VCR controls on it.

I really liked this controller as it had the bulk of an xbox controller but with aligned sticks.

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/OnLiveController.jpg
Google Shows Off Glass UI, Asks What You’d Do #IfIHadGlass
I'm going to argue a bit.

"you've been integrated into society your whole life"

Not really, no - this way you would have to say that wild foxes that eat garbage from backyards or birds that nest on buildings are integrated into society.

"But mere creation is not enough to make money."

That's true in a sense that you need other people to give you money to have money. Obviously self-created money is useless.

But mere creation is not useless if it does not produce money. One can create without even a shred of hope that his creation will give him money. And one can be very happy about it. I once knew a person who lived in the middle of the forest and was making mosaics; he tolerated guests (to some extent) but never went out to town or did anything social by his own will. And was really happy there, until he died.

"since money is vital for your very survival [...] To rail against this fact is to rail against the need to eat, or to breath."

That's absolutely not true. You can live a decent life without using money at all, or using money very sparingly. There is that one man who was "dumpster diving" and living years and years on a budged around 50$ iirc yearly. I forgot his name but he has a website and many articles detailing how exactly he pulled it off. He he is now retired and I once saw his comment here, on Hacker News...

...and I just spent half an hour to find him, because I forgot his name and really, really wanted to show you his writings. I'm feeling a bit stupid for forgetting the name, but I remember what he said clearly.

Anyway, here is the site: http://www.ranprieur.com/ and here is an essay that directly contradicts your statement: http://www.ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html

Oh, also: we really don't need society to be breathing, you know...

"Don't worry about just "getting back to normal"."

That's right, don't worry about it. One can always go Ran Pieur's route and never. Well, I know he was socializing, but I imagine he could have such meaningful social interactions exactly because he "dropped out" from society...

Anyway, you seem to say here that people need to socialize in a way you know as "normal" to be able to live. They do not. They can choose to be outside of social norms and expectations and still live meaningful, happy life - it's rude to forget about them.
This is actually discussed in some length in Jacques Hadamards "The Mathematicians Mind" - although I'm certainly no psychologist or neurologist, and some of the ideas are probably incredibly out of date, it was interesting reading nonetheless.
Though these generalizations are certainly dripping with bitterness, I have definitely seen bits and pieces of these phenomena in the startups I've worked at and the startups I've been around/interacted with through my work.

I've definitely seen cases where lack of defined roles leads to not a flat culture but in fact a culture where unspoken dynamics rule. I've seen "cultural fit" used to basically exclude a few introverts who aren't able to hit it off on a personal level with the founders (in this case, this meant liking to party and drink and talk superficially), which meant passing over some extraordinarily brilliant people. I've seen a lack of meetings lead not to collaboration, but to siloing of different activities. This is often not necessarily intentional, and the founders actually mean well, but it happens more often than you think.
The evidence suggests it does. How much of this belief do you base on your ideals and how much is based on reality?

There used to be just game buttons (joystick + one button on Atari, for ex). There there were start and select. Then there was a console-specific power button (the "XBox" button and the "PS3" button on the Xbox controller and DS3 respectively). Now there's a share button. I dunno dude, it looks like the arrow of history is actually pointing the opposite direction from what you said in this comment.
Actually, there've been a lot of complaints from developers that it was much easier to develop games for the 360 than for the PS3. Thus, this is an unsurprising move from Sony.
I'm also sure we could make a sort of pin-yin conversion system for said syllables to make a pseudo-pronunciation.
aaaaaand it's gone. my horrible government has now decided to regulate Wi-Fi.com signals as they do radio, because of fears over some sort of revolution happening here with access to free and uncensored information.

it was championed by the telecom monopoly lobbyists, who are fearful with so much free data around they wouldn't be able to charge excessive fees anymore once the masses discover free and encrypted voip.
I totally agree with you in principle. But you're being too generous with your density advantage as compared to hotswap. I can't tell if your pods are 4U or 5U, but your motherboard vendor sells a 4U front & back chasis that has 36 3.5" sas trays.

Obviously that setup will run you more than yours, but I'd be surprised if the delta was more than 1k once you subbed in your consumer mb, controllers and backplanes.
> What really freaks me out is what Dolphins looked like when they were still land animals

I took a look at that picture, then imagined the creature sniggering like Mutley from those old Hanna Barbera cartoons.
Soo.. can it play used games?
Not exactly. There are now a lot less PC games produced every year, and instead there are fewer but much larger hits (courtesy of the scale of the PC market globally).

The peak of the PC gaming world was Windows 95 to Windows XP (2003/2005 time frame). Shareware was extraordinarily popular and accessible during the first part of that, and the Internet had made downloads / patches / updates / modding possible in the last part. Meanwhile consoles began to present increasingly superior accessibility to casual gamers while providing enough of the eye candy to satisfy many serious gamers.

If you go down through this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_g...

You'll find the lopsided majority of those hits occurred during the 1995-2005 era. The biggest hits however, are since then. The PC gaming market has simply become smaller and consolidated to a few hit franchises.
Yahoo goes social, teams with Facebook for site revamp
Wow 6 years already - I found out about HN 2 days after you did. Long live Startup News :)
Honestly, the headphone jack is the coolest thing on there. If it's not a custom MSFT headset style thing, that rocks! I would much rather play with headphones on than my crappy speakers.
Off Wikipedia:

"Estonia has the highest gross domestic product per person among the former Soviet republics.[10] It is listed as a "high-income economy" by the World Bank, is identified as an "advanced economy" by the International Monetary Fund, and is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The United Nations classifies Estonia as a developed country with a very high Human Development Index,[5] and the country ranks highly in measures of press freedom (3rd in the World in 2012[11]), economic freedom, political freedom and education."
The web is becoming more and more client side. Will native technology always be comparitively more powerful?
Tell HN: Perfect job for someone trying to break into tech
Are you the kind of person constantly wondering if your self-taught programming skills can get you in at a "real" tech company? Are you looking for someone who will hire you based on your experience alone, and let you try new things and learn on the job? Do you currently live in the Bay Area?

I have the perfect opportunity for you!

I'm leaving my job as of next week and I need to find a replacement, and I thought I'd give you all first crack at it. It's at a non-profit, it's half-time, and the job comes with healthcare and other perks, like free invites to really great parties.

You need to have experience with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WordPress, light systems administration, and Python/Django.

Knowledge of how to get various disparate APIs to work together is crucial, but this is less difficult than when I started because we standardized most of our business processes on two APIs that are robust and easy to use — Stripe and Podio.

Experience with Capistrano and git is preferred but optional.

Get at me if you're interested, my email is in my profile.
They should just open up the PlayStation store like the app store. Sure you'd have a lot of crap, but the market will sort that out and they won't rise to the top. It will be well worth it if any small studios develop a hit indie game.

That would be far more revolutionary than social integration and some buzzwords.
90% of that drive is through LA... I go from Pacific/Washington to approximately Robertson/Wilshire. BH starts between Olympic and Wilshire, and MDR ends just after Wash/Lincoln. Currently working on the south-east end of BH.
This is a very short-sighted analysis. There are other players and forces involved in gaming than just the big three of last generation. In fact, if I had to bet, I would bet against any of them being the largest force in consumer gaming in four years.