skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People have always been, and always will be, willing
to pay for good products. We have always understood
Return on Investment, even if we don’t call it that.

Which is why World Of Goo[0], a fantastic indie game that was priced at $20, that has a 90 / 100 Metacritic score[1], that has absolutely no DRM is a game that had over 80% piracy rate at launch? The "People want to pay it's just the companies stopping them" argument is so much bunk it's insulting that people continue to write it.

People want stuff consequence free, if they have to pay to get rid of those consequences then they will. For a lot of people the consequences of media piracy are non-existant, they don't believe they will ever be caught (and it's not as if "getting caught" even matters) so the only result of media piracy is... saving money! So they do it. For me a consequence of media piracy is knowing I did not pay for something I have, that is why I don't engage in media piracy. For people that don't have this feeling that they should pay why would they?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Goo

[1] http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/world-of-goo

[2] http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo-pira...
We have a rule. No electronic devices at the dinner table. Ever.

If we're out with friends and our kid is 'bored' then we usually let her play on her tablet. It's the upgrade from crayons and paper when she was young.
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The argument of "I paid for it so I can pirate it" is especially funny when coupled with "Too many ads!"

When you watch a show on cable, you're not just paying with your subscription but with your eyeballs. Advertisements, shockingly, aren't designed merely to irritate the viewer but to bring in more revenues.

(What do you think is going to happen when Sky realizes that their viewership is down even if their membership is stable?)
I wonder how much people would pay for advertising-free television?
For those of you with a US or UK credit card who are located outside the US or UK, contact me and I'll set you up with an account on a spare Linode I have in the US or UK so you can use that as a SOCKS5 proxy (via SSH). I'll let you kick the tires for a bit and after that it's $20/yr. otbdto [at] gmail. Please include your SSH public key.
How to Implement Animation in Android
This post is just plain beautiful.
Thanks for the explanation. In most cases cleanup is handled in finally blocks and the unit of work fails if any of N calls fails, in most case it makes no difference which one failed. Where the difference does matter it's probably in a different method etc.

Your explanation does seem to make the case for this type of error seem somewhat sensible, maybe I'll give Go another try. Are methods which return errors and the types of errors returned clearly documented/visible?
Running RescueTime is still no data, it is a claim of authority... Have you analysed it properly, was it peer-reviewed, can we see it for ourselves?

I don't believe that people who put in more than 35 to 40 hours of real work will be more productive. A lot of people pretend to work a lot, or are forced to be in the office 50 hours or more, but that does not make them more productive. It just makes them seem more productive, and have less of a life...

When I worked in the US I considered the whole startup-hours-macho culture of the SF-area to be quite pernicious both to productivity and happiness. In private conversation most people I spoke to had the same view, but nobody dared speak about it with the boss within reach.

I mean I loved coding, I was excited about the project, and was on a team I liked, but the forced nature of having to show this love by being there 10 hours a day just reminded me of the two hours a day Cubans had to volunteer (in addition to their day-jobs) to show love for their regime.

No data here either, but at least I don't claim empirically, apart from my own experiences.
Turbo Boost Your Website Ranking... Effective SEO
Netflix is a good start, but what I want is Spotify for television.

Name your price, networks, I'd pay for a super-premium Netflix in a heartbeat. It just doesn't exist yet.
Having seen how journalists will blow hundreds of dollars on proprietary but basic scraping and processing software, I wouldn't be surprised if the software was an adroit use of NLP with OCR, but nothing out-of-this-world fancy. Management of documents and data is important too, so perhaps this software provided a good front end for it?

edit: in response to the downvotes, I'm not saying journalists are dumb, but that the data/technical problems they face are myriad and they often don't get the grounding they need to tackle them, so they, in my opinion, are too quick to pay for commercial software that only solves part of the problem they need to fix. Not just "opinion" here, but actual experience with colleagues and consulting on projects with outside groups. That said, the software they allude to sounds like a system that can mass-process scanned documents, OCR them, and I would assume, use NLP to reduce the amount of work needed to hand clean. But I'm betting that there was still an incredible amount of hand-cleaning that had to be done.
HTTPS is not really that effective for privacy. An attacker can still see what site you visited (Well, the IP, but it would be fairly trivial to get the domain as well) and with a little bit of analysis could most likely make a fairly accurate educated guess about exactly which page you requested.
Seems like this has been said before...

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/288199968932630528
You're talking like Node offers real concurrency. It doesn't.
EDIT: I don't know why parent deleted his post, but the message was that HBO doesn't run commercials. (Which is true, although it does run promotions for upcoming HBO programs in between programs.)

Right, which also explains both why a HBO subscription costs so much and why they air so many reruns. However, not in all locales can one order HBO without also having a cable subscription.
So how would offshoring help someone in the US sell marijuana or raw milk?
That's addressed in the article.

And Sky get this. If you wait another 24 hours, the show appears on “Sky Anytime”, and you can watch it with no adverts and at any time you please. The adverts are an additional tax on the consumer for having the audacity to watch the programme when Sky decides.

Are you playing by the rules? Yes? Are you paying for the show? Yes. Are you watching it when we say? Yes? Are you watching it where we say you can? Yes? Good for you, here’s some adverts as a punishment.

And people wonder why that business model is failing…
Oh yes. Now I remember EFnet in the 90's.
With all the vague claims about attacks and building a "bullet proof" system I have a hard time trusting them any more than a trader at a big bank selling their own complicated financial instrument. He seems to be trying to manipulate the prices with these statements too. Good thing it is unregulated. Oh yeah, and "He warned bitcoin traders not to panic or invest more money than they're willing to lose." IMHO this is a straight up admission it is a speculative investment and not a real currency at the moment.
Interview with Durgesh Kaushik - Marketing Manager at Facebook
I think the mistake is in thinking a corporation can act like an individual. An individual can disregard most contractual agreements with impunity, a corporation has to navigate a myriad of byzantine international contract law because they have real assets that could be at risk. No conspiracy needed.
I don't know about you, but for me $20 is a lot of money for such a simple game as World of Goo.
In this article Mt Gox says that the attacks are to manipulate the currency. My first guess was this was a shakedown; it's not uncommon for organized criminal gangs to DDOS a site until they pay a ransom. Grey market sites are particularly vulnerable to extortion; online gambling, for instance.
Show HN: MedicLib - A better medical litterature search engine
MedicLib ( http://www.mediclib.com ) is medical literature search engine that rank and categorize articles from Pubmed/Medline ( http://www.mediclib.com/about ). The goal is to be helpful to physicians by filtering noise and boosting landmark papers in the results (still in progress).

I plan to add fuzzy search, enhanced filters and also a new datasource, the FDA drugs descriptions.

Any comment, question, or suggestion is welcome.
I pirate all the shows I watch. I know of no legal on-demand service that is available to me. I guess that if there were such service available it would be way too expensive (it's international market, highest price is usually the global one). But it would be something...

I wouldn't watch them in TV if I had the chance (I don't) either, because of all the ads. So if I want to watch the shows (I know I don't have to), I pirate them. Luckily it's not illegal for me, but it's still not the best thing to do I guess.

For now, I'm glad that I don't have to pirate software (games included) and just have to restrict myself (prices, see above). Though sometimes I wish I pirated a game instead of buying it (GTA IV for example - never played it thanks to their DRM mindset).
This comment falls on the fallacy of assuming prices are defined by the cost of goods. They aren't. Prices are defined by what the market can bear. If the market is perfect, prices will fall down to zero Economic Profit[1], and are thus highly correlated with the cost of goods. However, if the market is not perfect, then the low limit of price will be higher than the point of zero Economic Profit.

Alas, the cable TV market is not perfect. Not by a long shot. Too many barriers to entry, too few players for competition.

The end result is that consumers are certainly overpaying for cable TV, be it through the subscription price or the advertisement time price.

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicprofit.asp
I read that. I was addressing this:

> The adverts are an additional tax on the consumer for having the audacity to watch the programme when Sky decides.
Can you fix the background image so that it doesn't scale with the width of the browser? MLK looks uncharacteristically short and wide here...
An Interview with John Gray: 'Human Progress Is a Lie'
I did too. I would happily pay a reasonable price for the show, but HBO doesn't offer an option to do that. I cancelled my cable subscription months ago because there's really only a few shows I want to watch and they're on HBO. Paying an extra $50 a month ($600 a year) to watch two shows is ridiculous.

I like the way Downton Abbey was distributed on Amazon. It was, I think, $2 an episode with a small discount if you paid for the whole season at one. New episodes became available to stream as soon as they aired. I'd happily watch every show I like that way If I could.
To expand further on those points with a personal anecdote... I worked on a "big website" for a very big government department. I was still in university at the time, had about a year's experience with the platform, and was earning close to callcenter wages.

The government only contracts to companies on a particular whitelist, which we weren't. They paid a company something in the region of £300,000 for the website.

That company then outsourced 100% of the work to the tiny (single digits employee count) company I was at.

They paid us £40,000.

My share of that works out at about £2,000.

The fact something cost half a million dollars in no way implies any kind of quality, or that the people working on the software will know what they're doing. (Really: another horror story involved a website that only needed to work in IE6... and had been built and tested purely in Firefox)
Seems like false advertising at least.
Give This Guy A Medal
Intel Wireless Display: Connect your Laptop to your TV wirelessly
>For example, he claims it's a political move, yet the official FAQ lists many practical reasons for the move.

So what? They couldn't make up excuses?

>Also, he says it will fragment the web: half the comments in this very thread explains why it won't.

And others argue why it will.

>Then he says it's not open source because it's hard to understand how an HTML parser works? wtf?

A complex multi-million line project representing 1000s of manyears of work, essentially needs dedicated full-time highly skilled engineers to be forked. It might be technically "open source", but it's not bazaar-style open source, the way something like a simpler program or web framework is.

Even a highly skilled C++ programmer has to spend months to understand the WebKit codebase, much less do any pervasive changes or take over the code. This kind of devotion cannot be sustained by unpaid volunteers. That makes it essentially un-forkable unless some other company can devote resources to it.

Highly complex codebases seldom progress much as community projects after the original company has abandoned the paid contributors (see the lackluster Gnome development the last 10 years, after all the late 199x early 200x backers backed down, Open/Libre Offices --haven't progressed much from 2000's SUN's offering--, etc). And those are the cool cases, others die completely or languish (e.g Hazel's Nautilus, or Evolution).
Pardon the middlebrow dismissal, but why is this remarkable? I mean,

Didn't we all?
Yup, but the vice-versa is not true i.e. if you love what you do, you may not be doing what you love. It is more out of force than volition.
Interesting. I'll definitely check them out as a replacement for dotCloud.

Would anyone happe to know a trick to view localhost apps on the iOS Simulator, so I don't have to deploy to an external site to view how my CSS behaves on iOS devices?
> If there was a legitimate content source that did all this well, and gave me the content I wanted when I wanted it (right when it airs), I would be paying for it.

I won't be available for everyone and for a fair price. So piracy will still exist.
If every blog on the internet had a static IP to serve HTTPS over, we'd have even less IP addresses available than we do now.
I'd rather pay the content producers than the content providers.

In my case I can't pay either producer or provider to see the same content my brother saw last night so it's a moot point. He's my brother and I'm going to do whatever it takes to be able to start a conversation with him.
Wow, that's pure awesome, and ballsy.
I'm sure they have the numbers to support decision. It's never a one-size-fits-all, unfortunately, and I think I'll stop using dotCloud at this point.

Not that I want to make the impression that there are any obvious alternatives for a fairly easy Django deployment experience.
I'm still banned for life from EFNet for some mid 90's transgressions.
So one more site that works only in Chrome. Sad.
For what it's worth, I don't think a master's right after your bachelor's would impress too many private industry employers.

Save your master's degree for later in your working career, when you might want to get an MBA or specialize in one area.
Private Beta Social Calendar: Datehitter
Cgdb: a lightweight curses (terminal-based) interface to GDB
> For me a consequence of media piracy is knowing I did not pay for something I have

If you don’t engage in media piracy, you often end up paying for something you don’t have – be it because the DRM servers got shut down or because you moved from company X to company Y without being able to export your music collection or because you have to sit through N minutes of advertising/FBI warnings to watch 2N minutes of a movie.
The Key Elements of Great Social Media Reporting
Could you please identify the ad hominem? I don't see it.
About $1.99 an episode.
A particular style is enforced automatically by go fmt.
>1. Google isn't going to stop giving them money, as Go solves a ton of Google's problems with C++.

So the Go team says. But Google is still using Java, C++ and Python as it's main languages. And Go wasn't especially planned by Google execs to use for "solving their problems" -- it is a grassroots project by some Google guys to solve those problems. Which is something different than a mandated to use language.

>2. There are over 300 non-google contributors already

The level of contribution matters a lot. If Google staffers do all the core language, runtime, compiler, tooling etc, and the rest just do little stuff here and there in the libs, add documentation, etc, then it's not like this matters much.
nice flickr uploads... http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/...
But not because of technical reasons. See: Steam.
The article presents studies which contradict that exact claim.
The industry hit a bad limit and is now in reset mode... starting again from mobile.
the government is spending your tax dollars already

They should be spending a lot less of them, shouldn't they?

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

I mean, what business would ever be allowed to spend money endlessly without thought to income? Why do we let the government do it?

Besides, we already have angel funding, ycombinator, venture capital, self funding, debt funding, crowd funding, etc.

http://www.instigatorblog.com/an-introductory-guide-to-start...

We should not be taking tax money by force from some to fund the next facebook.
And so are you suggesting that if it had DRM it wouldn't have seen such a high piracy rate? The fact is, there's going to be some level of piracy no matter what you do. There will always be people out there who will obtain the game but would have never otherwise bought the game. There will always be people out there for whom $20 is a reasonable price and will gladly pay it to obtain the game. It's up to the game author to determine the optimal price point to maximize their return. The option of preventing piracy, frankly, will never exist (barring egregious internet freedom encroachments). And people like you can continue to feel morally superior to everyone, if it helps you sleep at night.
Excellent. Now you can go ahead and implement all those things in the modules YOU have written and open-sourced. I think everybody is free to rant on their own blog. But if we were having a conversation, I would tell you that this entitled approach to open source simply doesn't work.
The piracy rate is meaningless. The figure you want is the piracy rate amongst people who would have paid for the game if it hadn't been available to pirate, and determining that is close to impossible.
The hypocrisy is so common. I just read on that site that the French politician leading the tax avoidance crack down resigned as he had 600,000 euros in an off short account!
“It's also not free.”

Sure, but the creators also don’t receive any compensation from you. It’s like jumping the turnstile at a subway station, figuring that because you bought NewBalance sneakers you're already paying the government for providing public transport.

That said, if I could pay, say $100 a month for ‘all you can eat’ pirating (providing that money would go to the studios and artists) I’d love to.
"Christianity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus"

It may be possible for modern Christians to claim this while sounding reasonable (because it seems this way, listening to the words), but the statement falls apart when we try to verify.

Specifically, I've met and had in depth discussions with many Christians (including priests and lay people) from different schools. None of them could tell me what the teaching of Jesus is. Some were able to tell me words that they had learned, like "love" or "truth" or "law", but upon my questions made through those terms (e.g. What is love?), no one among them could answer with substance.

Other religions have the same condition. Buddhist monks, for example, do not know Buddha's teaching. But they use the name of Buddha to propagate their own words. Their one aim in doing so is to deceive people. I don't say this without extensive proof and verification. If we make a gist of what Gautama Buddha taught for 45 years, we come up with two things: the theory of transmigration, and the law of cause and effect. He taught this to people in order to explain what exists, and how it exists. But there are no Buddhists today who know, nor want to know, this extremely valuable teaching of Buddha. Instead, they claim that Buddha taught the four noble truths, precepts, and that meditation is a way to enlightenment. They claim that Buddha taught that the way to nirvana is to never be reborn again and that Buddha taught like that. That's absolutely wrong. Buddha taught people to save themselves through what exists in the truth. The purpose of his continuous effort was to make the quality of people's lives go up. He regarded life very preciously. That's why he taught people to confirm everything before accepting it. How could a Buddha teach people to kill themselves forever?

Teaching always stays in the questions. Without substantial matters (a problem that people can confirm) then there is no way in the teaching from the problem to the answer. The religious scriptures only have answers, but no questions, that's why they have no ways for living people. So it's not helpful at all to people. On the contrary, if we confirm what the result is in reality, religious practice only makes people serve and become a sacrifice for the dead.

I can't find any evidence that Jesus Christ recommended that people start or propagate religions. I agree that Jesus was a great philosopher and a saint. He sacrificed his own life in order to awaken humanity -- but it's because he told people the truth about religions that he was killed by the religious people in those times. That's how I know that education/propagation of Abrahamic texts is quite antithetical to the life activities of Jesus himself, and their inclusion in a religion precludes the coexistence of the true teaching of a saint such as Jesus.
Link: http://www.mediclib.com
Finally, a way to combine the elegance of functional programming with the unwieldy, verbose syntax of Java!
Go is a low level language compared to Haskell though. It's like walking back to 1982.
The price was way too high. $20 for a casual 2D touchscreen game? When they shifted to "pay what you want" they made $100,000 on it in one week.

The lack of DRM had nothing to do with the piracy rate that rate would have been identical either way. If they had released it "pay what you want" I imagine that would have made a big difference.

Why people bring up that World of goo was DRM free and got pirated makes no sense to me. Games that aren't DRM free get pirated as much or more, I say more because then there's a legitimate reason to pirate it. To acquire a DRM free version.
And today I learned about the existence of cGDB (a curses frontend for GDB, http://cgdb.github.com/ ). It seems very nice and I agree with what is said in one slide of the Valve talk:

«* gdb: debugging from 1970

* cgdb: debugging from 2000»
I use GolangIDE[1] after getting fed up with Eclipse. It's really nice as it's a much lower memory footprint, yet basically does everything you need an IDE to do (ie edit code, debug, etc)

[1] http://code.google.com/p/golangide/
Anonymous threatens cyberwar on North Korea, steals 15,000 passwords
Like it was so much different when you were staring at the holiday you weren't actually experiencing through the viewfinder of a polaroid camera, back in the day.

Don't blame twitter for this.