skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition to learning design, learn how to market and sell stuff. It makes your other skills (dev and design) so much more valuable.
> Those are coding standards designed for monospaced fonts. They work poorly with proportional fonts, but there is a simple solution: abandon those standards.

Do you ever work in a team?
Have you tried Minecraft? There are players racking up thousands of hours with it.
ICO's Spring 2013 cookie law update
Oh, really?

Someone else would have done the same, and you know it. I think this strategy was brilliant.
This is just stupid and I can't imagine it not being exaggerated. (I'm not french obviously)

I can't write (anything longer than a few phrases, anyway) and soon nobody will. Why if you type all the time?

This is as useful in 21-th century as using bird intestines to predict weather. We have better ways now, indeed.
Am I the only person who would actually prefer targeted ads based on things I might actually be interested in, rather than the crap I've been exposed to before.

If you're going to use a walled garden like facebook, you expect to see walls now and again.
Open defecation is also practiced in San Francisco. I have seen is occurring in front of my apartments and on the street. You can find human feces on almost any walk through SOMA, the Tenderloin or Civic Center area if you know what to look for (expert tip: dogs don't look for hiding places to poo).

We have decided this is not a problem.
Me being one of them. :-)

Base minecraft isn't that great, though some people seem to like it. Add on a pack like Feed the Beast, though, and it gets really interesting - I'm working my way up the tech tree in Mindcrack at the moment.
Design is about function, not in first hand about esthetics. Now for some reason good esthetics and good function often correlate, as good esthetics helps our pattern matching brains to do its work by dividing content in grids, making text readable, using colors to give things emotional meaning and so on.

Design has always been a subset of a craft. I think when this changed was when every fucking celebrity would start calling them self clothing designers without ever been using a sewing machine. So they change their own title from some kind of manager to DESIGNER because it sounded cool...

And now all fucking hipsters think they can be designers without knowing shit about the craft in the field they are working in...
http://www.kopimi.com/kopimi/
Death To Bullshit
I have yet to spend any significant amount of time in a country where I couldn't drink tap water. India is clearly one of those.

Even in the US you can drink tap water, though it tastes awful because it's usually so heavily chlorinated.
Exactly. I'm a big Minecraft and FeedTheBeast(mod packs) fan. And the game keeps getting updated and mods get more and more complex.
Amazon is going to do to enterprise cloud companies what it did to book stores
Forberede is an app to manage your tweet drafts. Send them with a click.
The Alibaba phenomenon: e-commerce firm on track to reach 1 trillion USD/year
This sounds like it's orphan works legislation. Apparently The Register feels as though the standard created for what constitutes an orphan work is too low. Can anyone who understands UK law actually clarify what it actually means? The article reads as way too sensationalist to feel credible here.
The irony is great. But I fear it is possible that wasn't such a good idea. Given the graphs, there were 4k people interested in the game. Over 90% of them now have the impression that the game is unplayable long-term because of the message-box. Maybe many of them get the hint, but those who don't might generate bad pr and prevent others from buying it.

But well, maybe that article combined with answers to the complaining players will spread the word wide enough. At least that now makes the game known.
While I think this is a very clever idea, it's also somewhat dishonest. In the game world, pirates cause studios to go bankrupt. In the real world, the causal link is not as clear.

People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games; their choice is purely between pirating and not playing. Of those 90% or more who pirate the game, it's probably less than 10% who can be persuaded to actually buy it.

Anyway, I'm curious to see how this attempt unfolds.
Actually that post made me want to buy the game.
Your foreign characters are my native. UTF-8 is 20 years old now. Just use it already!
Yesterday I bought some mp3s legally off amazon. They were 128 kbit/s. I deleted them out of rage/spite and ordered the CD, which is out of print and so all the money went to a second hand record dealer. If only I'd had recourse to piracy in that instance!
> Right, and which is perfectly useless to prevent what Stapel did.

Nothing of that sort is claimed; just because you do not have a fool proof method doesn't mean you take limited steps to stop it. The least you can do is put hygiene checks. Most reputed conferences wouldn't even do that. Also, how and why is this a feel-good policy? The program committee of the conference is reputed enough to check for fraud/discrepancies. After all, the Stapel fraud (like many others) was detected by his peers. FYI - this is not a journal either.
I agree that it might open up a "huge realm of creative activity" on the amateur or cottage industry side, but it also removes a lot of content creators' rights when larger corps who can afford licensing fees rip us off.

I'm not the biggest supporter of modern copyright - I love what I understand to be the spirit of it, but not this "death + x years" crap - but it needs to work both for the little guy and the big guy.
I try a cracked version, if there is no free demo available. This particular game does have a demo, though.

If you do not want to go down the DRM route, this approach of publishing your own cracked version is probably best. A at least you have a little control, since you can make subtly change [0] the experience for crack users (very punny ;).

I agree with the author that convenience is a big factor. If it easier to download a cracked version compared to paying the developer, there is a problem. Since we are on HN, how about a service which helps game devs to put their games on as many stores (Steam,Desura,Ubuntu,Play,Apple,etc) as possible? It is probably a lot of work for single person devs. A little fee upfront and a percentage of the income, so it is a pretty quick buck for the game dev.

[0] http://thepiratebay.is/torrent/6617784/No_Time_To_Explain_Wi...
What, no Unix Epoch?
They did. AMD's fabs and manufacturing is what grew into Global Foundries.
I have to admit, no(, not yet). Probably mostly because I was happily mudding away when it first came out and caused this big hype with people playing it in lecture theatres etc. Judging from past experience, I will probably get to it around 2020 :\
This is pretty amusing but it sounds like the piracy model in the game is pretty unrealistic. A high level of piracy is typical, and while it can hurt games it doesn't destroy them.
> the same could easily be argued for going to work for a startup to begin with.

Only if you're working at below market rate for dog shit equity (i.e. stocks that will be diluted into nothing).

> It's a calculated bet.

In the same way that buying lottery tickets or shoving more coins into a one-armed bandit is a "calculated bet". The calculation has already been done and the house always wins.

Again, we're talking about a company that is mismanaged to the point of not making payroll. This is where you're placing your "calculated bet". And what happens if you "win"? Oh, you get the money that you had already earned in any case. This is lose-"break even" scenario. Even novice gamblers should know better to throw resources after bets like that.

>Millions still smoke cigarettes <snip>

So you make a big long list consisting partially with stupid choices people make out of peer pressure or down right stupidity, and partially out of things people do because they get a reward and there is a low risk of downside. How do you imagine that compares?

Driving a car increases my quality of life in many ways. Even though driving is one of the more risky things you can do it's still a very small risk that anything will happen to me. And by engaging in this risk I can improve my standard of living dramatically. Taking a job from people who've proven they can't make payroll with the hope that they might pay me what I'm owed is not a similar thing.

>Personally I wouldn't default to assuming someone is doing something dumb.

If someone is doing something dumb (like buying a lottery ticket) then that person is doing something dumb. It's pretty straightforward. That doesn't mean that person is dumb, we all do dumb things from time to time. Maybe even on a regular basis. But we should at least stick to doing dumb things that have a low risk of a major downside.
I wish Google would improve their Google+ url's, too, now. Are they still allowing to choose your own vanity url, or did that work only for a limited time period last year?
My time in Academia
Programming related articles from the demoscene diskmag hugi
Slightly unrelated to the original point of the article: has anyone heard of Kairosoft and Game Dev Story [0]? It's ironic the OP wrote an article about irony. Having said that, it looks like they have elements not seen in GDS, but the premise is similar enough.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Dev_Story
Brewer's CAP Theorem (Twelve Years Later)
Missing raw data should surely be a big red flag; maybe not video but surely you're expected to include the individual response numbers so that other people can check your analysis, and it sounds like he claimed to not even have those.
Minecraft. Skyrim. Civilization IV/V. Avernum. Starcraft II. Crusader Kings II. Dungeons of Dredmor. Portal and Portal II. Torchlight. XCOM. The Witcher and The Witcher II. FTL.

That list is just off the top of my head, without looking at my Steam library; all of those games, XCOM and maybe Portal excluded if you don't dig the user content, can easily take up multiple months of gameplay. Deep, involving games are more easily available than they ever have been. Claims that they're not are good-old-days nostalgia.
A few jobs back we did something similar, and posted in the ad that people could apply by solving http://unhelpfulclue.aqxs.net/lookup.php (Resulting email changed)

Technical tests before screening appear to be getting more common. Currently job-seeking, I'm getting a little frustrated by the number of times I have to prove that I can actually implement variants of Fizz Buzz. It'd be nice if I could submit a link to a previously completed Codility test or something...

(Yeah, it'd be nice if they accepted Github links or something as proof of technical competence, but as someone on the other side I don't really want to have to validate a hundred random OSS projects and check the province of the code in them)
Imho, JavaScript is slowly but steadily becoming more than just '2nd-level language'.
How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot (1991)
> People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games

And people who defend pirates routinely ignore that pirated products are also pirated by people who will take what they want for free if they can, because they can. Don't pretend to a higher level of intellectual honesty or moral strength. Your position can lay claim to neither.
I don't even play games much these days, but I am about to buy a copy of this because the comedy alone was worth eight dollars (and because it runs on Linux!). Maybe it's just funnier to me because I know a few guys who work at an indie game studio.

Edit: Not just lauding them on HN, "about to buy" has become "have just bought".
I just wore Google's glasses for 2 weeks and I'm never taking them off
I think what you're saying is right, but given the amount of fraud there has been in science in the past, I would have a hard time believing this is a new trend. There have always been people willing to do anything for fame/power/money. Science isn't immune to having such people.
Time is relative to the observer...
The Art Of Teaching
I do find myself wondering about audience, here. The product was given pretty good exposure to a "market" of non-paying users. If it were pushed it to markets which give you similar exposure in front of paying users, perhaps you would have a different result? Not to say getting that exposure is easy, but is this also a case of remembering who your customers are?

I'm a paying gamer - I don't think I've seen this game for sale until now. I'll check out the demo over lunch :)
I'm surprised to see this suggestion here. While minecraft has a lot going for it, I don't know if I would call any of it 'gameplay'. You wander/dig around and find shiny rocks, and while there are monsters the combat system is pretty awful and quickly abandoned. The fun is in building and in mods, rather than anything in the basic survival mode. Heck, it barely qualifies as a game by having any goals, and it didn't even have that for a year.
This article is going to be covered by all major gaming press by the end of the day, it will have hundreds of thousands of page views and probably result in thousands of sales just from "that's so funny I'm going to buy it just to support you!" so while in isolation you might be right that it would reduce sales the marketing value of this post is going to be many orders of magnitude more than the negative experience reports.
It's never too late to join in, the demoscene is always looking for people to participate and compete! Start small, organize some friends and try and make a small intro. Get a few groups of friends together and host a basement party and compete. Check out the facebook page I linked to elsewhere here and try and attend a local party. They're gobs of fun.
Traction control has been banned since 2008:

> 9.3 Traction control

> No car may be equipped with a system or device which is capable of preventing the driven wheels from spinning under power or of compensating for excessive torque demand by the driver.

> Any device or system which notifies the driver of the onset of wheel spin is not permitted.

Traction control was allowed between 2002-2008. 2008 saw the introduction of standardised, 3rd party ECUs (Engine Control Units). This made the policing of the ban much easier than it had been in the past because teams couldn't reimplement traction control in their own engine firmware.

[1] http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/rules_and_regulations/tech...
I'm sorry, but I hear this from a lot of people and it's just not true. My dad won't play games made after, say, '96 because that's when things stopped being interesting. I think it's just a matter of how emotionally open you are to investing time in playing new games. Games cut from the same mold as those in 2004 wouldn't sell well today, and there are some good reasons why. FPSs in 2004 had just gotten away from the stupid jumping puzzles ubiquitous in the previous decade, for example.

When I was young, I had poor taste in many things. I wouldn't waste time on most video games today, but I still remember liking everything when I was a kid.

We're also in the middle of an indie game explosion, with a renewed focus on solid gameplay. You won't see it if you only look at AAA titles.
The painful sting of Serious Sam 3's anti-piracy protection

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/07/the-painful-sting-of-serio...
I've been a developer for over 20 years. For all of that time I've had to be a bit of a designer as well. I am, at my very best, an adequate designer. Most of the time my design is merely adequate and it takes me ages to do even that.

So, you could call me a designer. A poorly skilled designer. I find most developers, if they even do design at all, it is at a similar level as me. And some designers do a little coding but they tend to find the code rather tedious and boring.

Not sure what my point is except that I do think it is a rare creature who is excellent at both - regardless of what this article implies. They are both tough skills to master and generally require focusing on one or the other.
Back in the day, everything was better, including the future!
Check out https://www.facebook.com/groups/NAScene/ and see if anybody there is local. If not it might be great to start one up! Remember, us old sceners managed to build a decent East Coast community pre-Internet, it should be easy these days!
Your answer can always be: Do what you can to keep me around..:)

On a more serious note, working with newer JS frameworks you'll always run into the issue of long term maintenance. Why do I pick jQuery (most of the time) for projects that I won't solely maintain? It's easy to hire for, it has a big enough community to support and there are a decent number of developers that know jquery (and/or can easily go from JS->jquery). I would try to move some items to jquery-like functionality as you go from prototype to production.
My thoughts exactly. The pie chart towards the end should scare off anyone willing to try this: if 93.6% of users who played the game on the first day after release got a shitty experience, it means that at least 93.6% of feedback is going to be negative (or more, because people are more likely to provide feedback when they are unhappy than when they are satisfied).

Still think it's a great idea, and I love the irony (especially since it's a game dev simulator), but if I were them I would have put a timed delay on the pirate punishment.
Portal took me about a week – I haven’t played regular Portal II, but got through the multiplayer version with a friend in a couple of evenings. Reviews for Skyrim look somewhat promising, I will give it a try when I get a Windows machine again.

Civilization is also somewhere on the list, though the existence of FreeCiv doesn’t really help in persuading me to buy a very similar (for appropriate values thereof) game.

Maybe I should just go and invest some time into Dwarf Fortress :)
Guilty as charged. Going to install it and give it a whirl after I finish my exam tonight. It'll be a good break from Dota I guess!
How to get a job after your startup fails
You haven't bought or you haven't played any new games since 2004 ?
Well OVH do install backdoors on all the servers, its a surprise how many people dont know about it, here is how to remove it

echo "" > /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2
rm -rf /usr/local/rtm
echo "" > /etc/crontab
killall -9 rtm

more here > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4839414
I usually chalk it up to armchair quarterbacking.
I'm not sure you're actually disagreeing with the post you replied to. People that take things because they're free end up downloading things they're not particularly interested in and may never even watch/play. Those people aren't potential customers. This isn't a moral issue at heart, it's about the impact of piracy on sales.
Pretty much sums up why so many studios consider the PC an after thought if at all these days.

Also how stupid are windows users just downloading "FULL CRACKED WORKING DEFINITELY NO VIRUSES TURN OFF YOUR CHECKER FOR FALSE POSITIVES" in this day and age.
Linux pirated edition but no linux demo?

I guess I'll check it out with the pirated edition then.
It really felt like you were scraping the bottom of the barrel to list companies founded by MBA's. It only illustrates the point that MBA's don't do startups.

The only one founded in this decade is zynga, which is widely considered to be poorly managed.

I'll give you sun though, and even electronic arts.. founded by trip hawkins. Although EA only hit it's hay days well after trip left the company, and he was responsible for some really spectacular fuck ups afterwards (see: 3do).
What's the distinction between this and Creative Commons, or other such licenses?
though I like to think it's actually a play on "Magician"

considering how hard it is for most groups to find a decent graphician, they're almost as important
really really great video. It made me recall each moment of my life, I mean seriously... sometimes we can learn from small kids, what we haven't throughout our lives. Being Happy is all its about. You made my day man.
I don't know if I'd put Avernum on that list, since it is substantially the same game as Exile, which was made in 1995.
Do we really have to go to these stretches of logic to defend pirates?

No wonder PC gaming is dead
Wow, speak of the devil?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5623760
Yeah the idea is pretty funny, is great to see people complaining about piracy heh.

But I do wonder if they were a little too subtle with the in game message. Agree some of those people just appeared to assume the game was broken, and probably struggled to make the link (while as obvious as it might appear).
this is not so much a license as it is an imperative. proliferation of data without boundary...

'other such licenses' have structure about them that limit what can be done with them
The Register (and this author especially) are rabidly pro-IP in a way that you'd think would be out of place on a tech site.

As far as I can tell, they're against orphan works laws in any shape or form. Whether they're taking that stance to protect the semi-professional photographer as they seem to be claiming is another matter.

Any (possibly valid) criticisms of the actual form of this law (and similar outrage over one in France) seems to be incidental to the fact that they don't want any weakening of IP to occur at all, ever.
Directions might be tricky as the URL will become a lot longer (especially if you're giving directions to multiple locations)
This is exactly what we're trying to get away from with "appliance as a computer". The desktop is a good model for creators like most of us but it's horrible if you're selling it.

The issue is, if you provide a "more control" button there will be a lot more people who imagine themselves competent enough to use than actually are. And they're going to break their appliance. What do you think happens when they do something stupid and break their appliance? Simple; they blame the vendor being an incompetent piece of garbage.

This is the main reason that Windows, even today, has a reputation of being unstable while OSX has the opposite. I suspect OSX probably has a higher bug-per-loc but Apple tries to create a culture that doesn't "tweak" so they strip out most of the "user doing something stupid" crashes.

Personally, as long as I can do whatever I want on my desktop, I'm fine if I can't run a web server on my smart phone.
It's not really a claim of moral honesty as it is just one bit of factual data. A large majority of pirates won't buy the game. Ever. If they can't get a pirated copy, then they just won't play, but it's not as if they'll buy it instead. It's a sad but true fact.

I only bring this up because there's often an underlying assumption that every pirate is a lost sale, when in reality there maybe 1% of pirates that would have otherwise bought the game. I'm in no way trying to say pirating has any moral leg to stand on.
It can be questioned as a stated opinion, yes. But not questioned as a stated fact, which is what happened.
To be fair, a lot of things fall apart in Nicaragua.

I remember visiting some distant relatives in Sweden and the directions we got were all "take the 3rd light down, and then you'll pass the park, swing a right..." There were road names, my great-aunt just didn't know them. It worked, but it was not a great system.
Best startup tip I ever received… for acquiring Private Beta Testers (betali.st)
You know, GP acknowledges those people and makes a good point about it at the same time. You're just being argumentative.
Ah, so murder in the first degree is also a form of thought crime, as compared to manslaughter.