skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I apologize for my naivety here, but it would seem that the best (in the general sense, not simply financial one) way to make revenue would be to offer a desirable product, and price it accordingly.

The market would seem to suggest (as evidenced by the decline of once-decent rags like PC Gamer) that there is not a lot of demand for coverage of games if a cost is associated with it. Perhaps this is because anyone can blog about games and function as a journalist now, perhaps it is because demo discs are no longer relevant when downloads are available, perhaps it's because gamers are fickle feckless manchildren, perhaps it's a reptillian plot to take over America--regardless of the reason, it seems that trying to make a living off of games journalism is a Bad Idea.

I further question the decision to cheapen your site design and theming by allowing other elements into it that aren't under your control. If you are exercising any sort of integrity of product, it would seem obvious that letting somebody plaster garish random content on is a poor idea.

Don't get me wrong; artists since time out of mind have done payed work for patrons that would later become classic--but even a benevolent duke or aristocrat would be worked in an unobtrusive way into the greater piece (any art historians here are free to correct me) in such a fashion as to preserve the integrity of the work.

(the perhaps best writeup I've seen of games journalism was over at Triforce: http://www.thetriforce.com/?p=813 )
All of the classes in this were created for the purpose of mockery.
I would have assumed that competitor sites were the most relevant comparison to draw. It is highly likely that Destructoid sees a higher rate of ad-blocking than, say, yahoo.com, but that's not really relevant as Destructoid isn't competing with Yahoo!.
I thought so too.

But not necessarily. It wouldn't be that difficult to embed the article in an image, with the ad inside the image -- you could then redirect clicks with a box around the ads the advertiser.

Leave the first paragraph or so as text for google purposes. That would be really annoying to work around but rather trivial to implement.
So you want to be a games journalist?
Exactly. I found this article sorely lacking of punch, however. It's like saying what does the meter have to do with the mass of the H2O molecule? Well 1 Kg is defined as the weight of 1 cubic meter of water at 1 atm.
After leaving users exposed, Apple fully HTTPS-protects iOS App Store
Believing that Oracle is a great steward of technologies they acquire.
So what about employees who, for whatever reason, can't unionize? Do they simply forfeit the ability to avail themselves of collective speech?
My girlfriend is Irish, and we went for the 2-day "tour" to Belfast this Xmas.

The overall feeling was quite cautious and tense, and people looked at us as we walked around and sat in the bar.

Less than a week after we came back, there were "issues" - aka some confrontation between the opposing sides.

It felt really strange. You do not expect this in the north of Europe.

I hope it gets better and calmer and the common sense prevails. Belfast is a beautiful place to visit.

(+1 for enriching my vocabulary with a new word :)
Ask HN: Is anyone using Amazon DynamoDB?
It seems interesting, is used by Amazon in production and just had its price significantly reduced. Can anyone give some real world usage info? Thanks!
y u no normalize ?

?q=javascript+wtf / ?q=javascript = 6.8M / 3.04G = 0.002233

?q=lua+wtf / ?q=lua = 844k / 109M = 0.008110
Here is my startup idea: an ad company that also allows people to register and pay a few pennies per article in order to turn off all ads for anyone participating in the network, and for a little bit of premium / exclusive content that nobody else gets access to.

You set the price high enough that sites will want to actively switch to your network, since the premium users are worth a little more than the free users. And you require as a condition of membership that 1 article in 50 (or whatever) is premium-only content.
> It is most definitely JavaScript. It runs perfectly in other browsers - in fact it often runs faster than non-asm.js compiled code, so it is worthwhile even without new optimizations for it.

It can only run at speed if you interpret it as something that is not JavaScript.

In other words, the fact that it's valid JavaScript is essentially pointless, because it's totally useless (relative to actual native applications) unless you interpret it as something that's not JavaScript.

> asm.js, by design, can have pretty much the same level of performance as NaCl. Both can use the same sandboxing mechanisms, for example. Unless there is something specific in the asm.js spec you feel is preventing some additional level of optimization that is possible in NaCl - if so, what?

Stupid bytecode format aside (which incurs a cost for every single VM implementor, tool implementor, and developer that has to use the language, forever) ...

Here's a simple example: You can use NEON directly from NaCL/ARM. This matters on mobile. A lot.

Is asm.js going to define NEON and SSE intrinsics, too? If so, why the hell isn't asm.js just another output target for (P)NaCL so that people with Internet Explorer can run really really really really slow applications?

Or, how about the fact that NaCL can output ARM and x86 binaries directly, such that one doesn't need to AOT compile on every user's system, or introduce the cost, complexity, and overhead of JIT, when targeting standard/popular architectures.

How about this one -- I was going to write something up asking about thread-local storage and %gs-relative loads, or architecture-specific atomic operations on shared state, but then I realized -- asm.js doesn't define a threading model. At all. Unless I'm mistaken, it can't, because JavaScript itself doesn't define a shared state threading model.
Education equally as valuable as innovation? Why are you comparing the two at all? Apples and oranges.
I read all these complaints and they boils down to "I want to read this content but those ads really slow me down/annoy me." "The content publisher really picked some bad advertisers!" "They should try something that provides me with value."

The value the content publisher provides you is content. If you block ads on an ad driven site - what value do you provide the content publisher? But running a site, maintaining it, getting new content, building new features that all costs money. When you block ads you're simply not paying for what you're using.

If the ads on a site outweigh your tolerance - Don't go to the site. But if the content is there and you want to read it - well the cost of entry for most "free" sites is a few ad impressions. Ubiquitous ads was the most transformative thing to happen to the web. The bills need to get paid and ads do that without requiring everyone to put in their credit card.
Plagiarism and the link: Web makes attribution easier & more complicated
You know, planes are a very simple concept: something that flies. Aerospace engineering should reflect that.
The biggest problem with online ads is it's yet another sphere of influence which advertising is taking over and colonising with its discursive values (he said, idealistically). If I can click a magic button and have ONE place in my life with no ads, then why not make that the internet?

FWIW, I'm a semi-pro music journalist (try making money doing that these days), and I think online publishing is crying out for a non-intrusive way of monetizing that doesn't involve advertising.
> While we're talking about dark corners, please stop casting functions that return void *

The problem is, if I want my C code to compile with MSVC, it has to compile as C++ - and even if I abhor Windows for development myself, a lot of developers are using MSVC.

I just wish Microsoft would update their C compiler, at least to C90. But then I suppose the standard has only been around for 23 years, and nobody really uses C anyway.
Seems that monetizing content on the Internet is going to be an ongoing problem that doesn't have a really good solution.

I did click on the link, and whatever ads were on it were blocked by my adblocker. I think the writer may not understand that neither I nor anybody else specifically decided to block ads on Destructoid, a site that I had never heard of before today. We block all ads everywhere by default.

Most websurfers will regularly click to articles on sites they've never been to before, many of which are loaded with huge, bandwidth-sucking ads, often with loads of flash, javascript, pop-ups, pop-overs, etc, and sometimes even auto-downloading malware. I want to block all ads everywhere by default because I don't have the time to pay attention to the ad type and policy of every site that I'm only going to visit once, and I'd rather have the problem solved once and for all.

Paid subscriptions may be nice in a way, but they also seem to tear at the fabric of the internet. If all sites used them for most of their content, then most people would only read stuff posted at the 3-4 sites that they visited regularly and actually paid for, instead of surfing all over the place. How do you get new readers in that model?

It might help if there was some way to do micropayments per read - possibly with Bitcoin or something like that. Maybe some sort of big subscription network - like readers pay a subscription fee, and writers in the network get paid a small amount when a subscriber reads their article. I'm not sure what the long-term solution is, but I hope that it's one without ads.
The main reason is because it's in active development by the open source community.
I thought the reason why Chrome on iOS doesn't implement the "full" incognito functionality was because they couldn't disable localStorage?
I only selectively block ads and have never clicked on an ad, except perhaps by accident. I can't be the only one.
There is a wonderful book about the trickier parts of C called Deep C Secrets (with a fish on the cover :-). It is a great second or third book after K&R.
Which is the justification for pay-per-impression ads. Grandparent says that they are sorry if they are pay-per-impression; what difference does blocking or not make though if they're pay-per-click, and they never click?
Lua is it's own killer app. It's an excellent choice for embedding, both from a technical (small, pure ISO C codebase, no dependencies) and legal (MIT license) standpoint.
Simple. Have a 3 buck for a month button to make the ads go away.

Don't complain that not everybody would click it, that is way more than you make normally.
The Infinite Success Spectrum: Why There's No Such Thing As Failure
Free Education: Living Within Our Means
Exactly. What I want to know is where the mobile Debian is. Where the mobile Arch is. Where the mobile Slackware, openSUSE, Fedora, Linux Mint etc etc etc is.

There are a million desktop distributions driven purely by community efforts. Why is it so much harder to do it for mobile? Is the hardware just too difficult to work with? Too much variety? Is there no interest from the community? Are mobile interfaces too hard for hackers to do right?

What's the reason?
Very cool, again thanks for sharing. I actually liked the credits snippet as well, mostly because I didn't see anyone who didn't belong there. Software Engineer, art, effects, animation and sound. Not sure what VO is.

But seems like you guys run a lean operation - and I love that. That's what most teams should be.
The Secret Plot to Rescue Napoleon by Submarine
Granted, the article is poorly written and seems to imply their involvement. But it explicitly states, near the end, that the law firm involved has yet to find any plaintiffs:

He’s spoken with one customer, who has since backed off. “That being said, I am in the process of drafting a complaint, in case their feet warm up,” he told us.

Furthermore, Tom (the dude pictured) commented in a thread above saying he didn't even hear about the lawsuit until Wired called him to interview him for the article. Consider putting away your "Jump to Conclusions" mat and joining us in the world of facts.
>What's needed is a way of expressing a half-closed interval, but that's not common in programming languages (despite it being a great aid to correctly expressing many algorithms concisely).

A slightly lesser known construction in Ruby, the ... Range operator does this.
No it is not. People are still the same, and nothing much changed in humans since we left the trees for huts and and cows and cereals. Radio was promised to change the world, then cinema, then TV, then internet. All of them did, and none did. People are still the same, only with technology, and saying "you will never get it" does not make your misdirected enthusiasm close to the truth. Yes, internet changed a lot. No, it's still the same old world.
Review: What Compsci textbooks don’t tell you: Real world code sucks
I live in Polish town of Oswiecim - where the former Nazi Auschwitz Concentration camp is located. There is a quote on the wall there, one that I will remember forever.

"The ones who forget history are bound to live through it again"

And this is exactly the reason why we should teach history at schools.
I don't use adblock, but Destructoid automatically redirects me to the mobile version of their site because apparently webkit nightly isn't a good enough browser for them.

Ironically, I like this, since it's more lightweight and easier to read than the normal version of their site. Further, there are no ads on the mobile site.

What percentage of their readership do they do that to?
The 'elephant in the room' of a question: what do you feel gives you the right to block ads? The content-creators establish the terms, and their deal is you get content in exchange for ad-viewership. If you're unwilling to view ads, don't partake in the exchange -- do not visit that site.
I run an Android app which is ad supported, and couple of webpages which are ad supported as well. I STILL block ads on my machines. And I expect a lot of my users will be doing the same. Get over it. Earn money from those who don't (like you said those 96% IE users), and sell content if you think your content will be worth paying for.
Business models change with time. At one point of time web ads had become the main source of web income. They went overboard, and users started getting frustrated. Right now mobile ads are on their peak. They'll subside too with time (adblockers are already there). You will have to keep rethinking ways to earn money, and reinventing yourself. That's life.
> which is a bad idea for another reasons, but not libertarian ones

I don't think it's a good idea, Libertarians do.
> Look for ways to make the link between someone reading your content and someone buying something a connection, instead of merely a random, uncorrelated activity.

What do you think targeted advertising is?

> Or consider selling byproducts and content collections such as physical and ebooks (for blogs, for example).

Revenues from this sort of thing won't even cover operational costs for someone of Destructiod's size, let alone provide recurring revenue.

"Premium" services that just remove ads are generally a non-starter because...AdBlock does that for free. Subscriptions are awesome, but you have to find a way to implement a paywall where some content or value is withheld from free consumers, and that's a problem that has proved very difficult for content providers like Destructoid to solve on an internet where people expect to get their content for free.
OK. Now go and take this opinion to its logical extreme. Any record, any meta-commentary, any summary, must become suspect, whether it was made 500 years ago or 5 minutes ago.

Oops, now you can no longer communicate with people - no "catching up" on events or "living vicariously" through them - all anecdotes. Can't be doing that. You cannot study a timeline or a log of events and believe it. You can't believe a story unless it happened in front of your eyes, but if you try to remember it, now you are recalling a history, so it can't be trusted.

Clearly, not a sensible opinion. So then what are you really saying? Are you saying that you don't care about _political_ history? In that case, you have plenty of people agreeing with you.

Political histories are popular in school curricula, but are only representative of a tiny, tiny fraction of all history. We also have a history of mathematics and sciences, social and culture histories, histories of the planet, the stars, and all known life forms. All "postmortem" style articles are historical documents. In each of these fields, the specific techniques differ and some are more or less falsifiable than others, but we are ultimately limited by physics, which imposes the final limit on how much of the real world can be "proven."
Your comment is based on a very flawed understanding of what the study of history is.

First, while it is true that historical evidence is imperfect, it is extremely uncharitable and frankly unjustifiable to call it a "pile of anecdotes," "based on broad stereotype or outright lies," and "worse than zero." Historical research is centered around primary sources, and while no primary source gives you a complete picture or has a single interpretation, they are not mere anecdotes or outright lies.

Second, no serious historian thinks you should use specific events from the past to draw grand conclusions about the present. The past loses potency when taken out of context. But the study of history still has applications to the present. When you have worked with incomplete evidence and conflicting interpretations of the past, you start to realize that your view of the present is similarly imperfect. Any one person only has an incomplete picture of what is happening in the world, but despite this, I encounter many people who think events or trends have only one cause and they know exactly what it is. As another example, people often expect the future to work out a particular way, and fail to appreciate the effects of other, unseen forces. It is easier to realize these fallacies when you have studied history, where information is more obviously imperfect and you have the benefit of being detached.

You are right about the limits of reason, but you are wrong to say that history is harmful: to the contrary it is one of the best ways for us to realize those limits.
VO is voice over (the announcer). Uber Entertainment definitely runs a lean operation, with everyone wearing multiple hats. In fact, the person responsible for VO in the game happens to double as our office manager. You can check out some of the other stuff we do at http://www.uberent.com/
I think that the subscription model is great, and there are places where I would be willing to pay if they moved in that direction. I pay $16 a month for a NYT subscription.

One issue is that some people seem to be even more offended by the subscription model than the advertising model.
I think it sorely needs a framework on top that handles and generates the nginx.conf. There's quite a bit "hacking" to get every piece to work with each other (e.g. to talk to a database in Lua it needs to be configured in nginx.conf).

But all in all it's surprisingly effective.
Unfortunately, you are right on the bs part - just recently SC declared that police drug dogs are always 100% accurate despite clear evidence to the contrary, and as such can be used as a probable cause. So we have a situation where we made a step forward with requiring probable cause, and step back with allowing the police to invent it by signaling a trained dog to bark. Maintaining liberty is never easy.
> That's true (except for C), because I can't see how a create_function-defined function closes over its environment),

That's why it would be a fake closure.

$foo = someNumber();
create_function('', 'return '.$foo.';');

You would generate a new string to be evaluated as the function body each time.

> talks casually about "returning the name of an anonymous function". It shows just how much twisted the logic of these people is.

I think you read too much into this. The point of an anonymous function isn't to make it not have a name, but to be able to define it where it is needed instead of referring to some specific function name in your code.

It also fits well with the way PHP handles "pointers", by storing the name of a variable in another variable.

$foo = 42;
$bar = 'foo';
print($$bar); // Prints 42.
Are you implying that it's also wrong to skip television ads with a DVR?
I don't believe there was an explicit comparison being made. You are reading too much into it.
It's not a contract to which I've agreed though. If they want me to get content in exchange for something, then they should make sure I do, otherwise, they are putting things on an open server that I can easily read from. What I tell my browser to take from it is up to me,

Would you have a problem with me reading the site in lynx?

You could enforce a contract by having a paid for membership, as he alludes to, which gives you rights to see articles early or have post rights on a forum or gives you some physical thing.
Non-app related question, is there a stock service that will slice together and create the animated screen transitions you have? I am about to put together a site for an iOS app and I'm guessing that this is common enough that I can spend a little money and save a lot of time. (any link related to buying designs/layouts welcome too)
Another note, once you get the base graphics working start the game, go to downloadable content and download the zBase graphic pack, which is around 207MB. Those are vastly superior to the OpenGFX pack, and gives OpenTTD a very polished and modern look.
Yes, that could happen, but it almost certainly wouldn't.

The general problem with ad blockers is that they are a set-and-forget scorched-earth solution to the problem of annoying ads. As a web publisher, it doesn't matter if you carefully tweak your ads to be as unobtrusive and relevant to the user as possible, because users running ad blockers won't see them to begin with. Asking users to whitelist your site is a non-starter.

If you use some fairly trivial tactics to prevent your ads being blocked by the default settings of the ad blocker, the vast majority of users with an ad blocker will never bother to set up some custom filter to block your specific ads because the default settings are the program for 95% of people.

If you have some really obnoxious ads then yes, perhaps more people will go to the bother of blocking them. But if you don't, I assert that almost no-one will bother.

If you're facebook, the people who maintain blocklists for popular ad-blockers will write some custom rules for your new ads. But most sites aren't facebook.
https://www.youtube.com/user/luaworkshop
I'm not even talking very advanced stuff. I wouldn't say my math is particularly good. I've forgotten most of the specifics of what was taught in those classes. I totally use Wolfram Alpha when I can, I don't do math for the thrill of doing it, but because I have a problem and I'm trying to find a solution. I think it's more important to have the ability to break down a problem mathematically, and then read up on the parts you need than to remember everything by rote. The problem is that if you've never taken any advanced math, it's very difficult to read up on it and knowing where to start.
Congrats, thanks for sharing this.

As a game dev myself, I'd definitely love to hear more about the custom engine you used and why you chose it over the other options on the market (like Unity, which you mentioned).
Ads are just content that you're delivering to the end user. The user has zero obligation to view that content, or your native content, or any other kind of content. Ad sales are predicated upon this understanding, and it's why delivery rates (rather than just content pageviews) are such a big deal for content providers and advertisers.