skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are these theoretical or have they been done in the real world?

I have seen an endless procession of game-theoretic illustrations of nove problem solving techniques. In the real world the only technique I have seen work is "hey, you, stop shitting there or go to jail." The reason is that game-theoretic arenas are idealized computational worlds where all the rules and influences are known, while real environments are full of unknown perturbing factors not accounted for in the model.

Don't get me wrong. I would love to see such a real world example, since I dislike authoritarianism. But I'm just not encouraged by what I see. I do know that telling people "things would be better for all of you if..." never works. People would rather suffer than change their behavior, even if a change in behavior is low-effort and brings about an increase in wealth or standard of living. I actually sometimes think the problem is that people are insufficiently greedy-- inertia and laziness is more powerful than desire.

As evidence for my final cynical dictum I present: American eating habits. People would rather be miserable, fat, poisoned zombies than to stop eating empty carbs with a side of sugar and mystery meat. They choose the comfort of the known over a healthier, more alert, and longer existence.
I hope http://blog.tryghost.org/ isn't intended as a demo. It's only a single article, no permalinks, no archives, no RSS/Atom feed.
Im a little confused by the choice to use Node.js, whats the purpose? The creator says that ghost is not a blogging platform for developers, but then builds a node.js blog?
Do you take notes just shooting a photo?
I do, that's why I'm developing an app for that.

There are features like auto tagging based on texts in photo and organization in lists.

What features would you like to find in such photo note application?

http://app.nowte.com
So, you just released a game after what was likely a big investment in heart, time, and money and you haven't pulled any money back out yet? Did you expect something different after such a short period of time?

Also, you created a game that has pulled in $1600 in revenue so far and you're thinking that $24k worth of revenue is just not coming in because you can measure the freeloaders. Those freeloaders aren't your customers and likely never will be.

Focus on why 214 people bought the game and make them so happy that they will support you and the extended marketing of the game.

Had you not spent the hours developing, testing, etc. these features and trying to trick worthless freeloaders into exposing themselves for the sake of rhetorical blog posts, you could have improved your bottom line. You COULD have added features important to paying customers.

Also, the sad freeloaders posts stink of fabrication. They may well not be, but my cynicism puts together a picture of a hacker-news-abuse viral marketing scheme. Every link in the chain has an unsoiled feel to it. The game is about a game dev company, not FPS gore. The freeloaders write in full sentences and precisely nail talking points as if they came from a game industry association. The dev has taken great care to handle freeloaders gently in the post. exposing everything. Even if this were a marketing scam, the backlash would be ho-hum because everything is just so meek.

AND... of course there's an actionable pitch and link thrown right in there. You were supposed to hold back and wait for the crowd to demand links.

This game always had a very limited audience. RPG of a gaming software development company? Plan the scale and scope of your project accordingly.
Software Engineering History Maturity Model
Our nation's capital still has the same problem, although it's in the process of being fixed:

http://wamu.org/news/13/04/10/dc_water_takes_aim_at_sewage_o...
Really, FTFF is in the works? I'll believe it when I see it. (I don't know why Apple hasn't just bought Path Finder.)
It was Adam Bosworth's idea. People on Adam's team built it.

Edit: I recall seeing Bosworth's auction demo in late '97 or early '98. This predates Hopmann's timeline. Perhaps my memory is faulty.
The Story of Entry-Level Positions That Need Prior Experience
That's really fantastic that he was able to save his work from 28 years ago. I really wish I had the foresight to do the same from only five years ago, though I expect the result would be less like unearthing buried treasure and more like finding what stinks in the fridge.
Google Now is available for iPad and iPhone
This whole discussion is an example of why reductionism should be handled with care.

Have you considered how easy it is to stuff yourself with simple carbohydrates? Do you
No, it's not. It is akin to saying thay I have too much work stacked up, so instead of making progress on issue X, I'd rather invest my limited resources on issues other than X. That is not a logical fallacy, that's basic decisionmaking.
It's also well explained in the book 'Dragons of Eden' also by Sagan.
Obviously there are other scenarios. I worked at a company in 1998 who missed payroll for 2 (I think) periods in a row. They then pulled out of it, had a strong IPO, endured the crash, and then got bought for a billion dollars a decade later. Those who stuck it out through the dry period, who believed in the company and it's potential, were rewarded in many ways.
The New Pizza Hut App That Helps Make Kids Even Lazier
Why aren’t digital calendars smarter?
How did I know this story would have your comment and it would be up top? :)

To still add something to the discussion -> I never coded on a black&green CRT, but I did learn programming on an environment doing 24x80 16colour ... graphics? Text graphics. (this was ~1994)

It was fun. For the first few years of my computing experience I never really left DOS and kept trying to reproduce the shiny Windows stuff in there. I still think that was better and more fun than when I briefly tried learning how to make "real applications" before jumping ship to Web.
When I saw power user features I wondered if it might be something that might convince people that OS X isn't going further down the locked down iOS route and certainly multiple monitors and more advanced use of finder are towards the power user end of things.

On the other hand it would be fair to say that they're relatively a small investment on Apple's part and it would be possible to read too much into them.

Looking at changes like this my take is that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I don't think Apple are going to lock down OS X the way iOS is locked down but nor do I think that power users are as critical a part of their target audience as they once were.

The end result - small changes for power users, enough to give them faith that they're not being completely ignored, and more significant investments for the new breed of typical Mac user.
Google Now comes to iOS, missing a few options but none of the utility
Google Maps URLs could sure use some help. But I don't know that street addresses are a great naming system. If you want to use lat/lon, many open source tools like Polymaps, ModestMaps, and Leaflet (with the leaflet-hash plugin) support updating the URL automatically on navigation. (No "click here for URL"). For example, here's a clean URL to a map app that describes the base layer, zoom, and lat/lon: http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782
Google Now comes to iPhone and iPad with new Search app update
That is exactly what I have been looking for! So much easier! Is this some kind of simplified Evernote app?
Brilliant. Really enjoyed this. Also enjoying this lively thread.

There's an awful lot of strange rationalization going on in the comment. For those of you who point out "Hey a lot of those pirated people aren't going to pay anyways!" here's a sobering fact. If just 7% of those pirated copies were paid this developer would have DOUBLED first day sales. Could be the difference between getting to work on their dream, hiring another dev, or calling quits on the whole thing. 7%

I have a hard time believing 10% of those pirates are not just cheap, lazy folks who - per the irony of the comments - are the first to squawk if they ever feel short changed in life "The steal because it's easy" is a great way to encourage draconian measures. I'd be a little more fired up if we were inclined to self police than rationalize away.
>they would still buy for the same amount if pirating wasn't possible? //

I thought he simply said they would spend the same amount. So they would consume less games and so have less "cultural" experiences if they couldn't pirate some games:

So, like, if they'd pirated Gears 1 and bought Republic 2 [made up names] then next period they might have bought Gears 2, but then would have pirated Republic 3 and ArmsRace 1.

With stronger anti-piracy measures Gears 1 comes out at the same time as Republic 2 but they can only buy one so they get Republic 2. Next period they get Republic 3 because they don't want to risk the new ArmsRace 1.

In both scenarios they bought 2 games - ie spent/bought the same amount. In the second they played 3 more games than in period 1. The makers of Gears benefited from piracy by winning a convert to their franchise (but notably the industry didn't gain in this scenario).
It doesn't matter if there are 100 free riders for 1 customers, as long as you have enough customers.

I cannot put into words how profoundly this line of thinking upsets me. It is, quite literally, the antithesis of Western society.
I saved a lot of stuff: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year-old...
It's up now: http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges
Athletable: Professional office sport tracking
While I agree that this is a very individual choice (at least one other has referred to it as a calculated bet), it's a bit appalling to generalize this and codify it into a checklist. The situations where you should go down this line of reasoning are very, very rare. This is not general purpose advice.

General purpose advice: Learn to recognize a [sunk cost][1].

If you decide to be an early employee of a startup (especially one which is not yet profitable) build the expectation that there will be an uncertain future. Tell yourself that you're going to work fiercely hard, and be fiercely loyal as long as your employer can support you. Tell yourself that the experience gained will be worth the long hours and uncertain future. But please, please, don't tell yourself "I'll probably have to work without pay." Don't tell yourself in advance that you'll ride it out for the equity, or because it's just so interesting, or because these founders are geniuses/nice/cool/whatever. If they can't pay you, it's not time double down on what you're paying them; it's time to move on.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
> It's interesting that getting people to cooperate to improve the commons is so hard

As an Indian I attribute this to a combination of the bystander effect and broken windows theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory)...

By their powers combined, all of us (even those among the 'educated class') turn into captain litterbug.
Ask HN: What free javascript charting library do you use?
I'm curious about what charting libraries you guys use for websites. Which ones do you recommend that have simple to use developer API´s and nice default stylings applied?
Catalog View and Information Schema - T-SQL Step by Step Course - Lesson 16
Just in case you don't know: there's an customer-only internal forum at http:/forum.hetzner.de/ for which you can sign up.

There's no guarantee that anyone from their staff will look at your post but even Martin Hetzner, the founder, frequents the board and occassionally answers & helps out, so that's another route to get support there.
My Own "Cloud"
iOS Safari supports element.classList since iOS 5. You can do...

element.classList.add('classname')
element.classList.remove('classname')
element.classList.contains('classname')
element.classList.toggle('classname')
My point is more that SimCity doesn't attempt to model a complex dynamical system at all. It just defines certain aggregate relationships as true. That approach can be fun for a game, but also encodes ideological assumptions— not facts, but simplified models.

If you try to build a dynamical system as the model, things get weird very fast. Even in simple ones you can build as toys, there is a lot of system-internal behavior: there are feedback loops, oscillations, attractors. Minor changes can have significant counterintuitive effects, if they dampen or excite various resonances in the system (which we're assuming here is a stand-in for "economics of a city"). That kind of Sim City I'd be very interested in. :)

But would it be a fun game? Quite possibly not: players really tend not to find complex and chaotic simulations very fun, when the knobs affect the outcome in ways that are too indirect. Chris Crawford found that in a few of the games he made: a lot of players found Balance of the Planet, which tried to model all sorts of complex ecological effects, frustrating at best.
Human evolution: science’s golden child or spoilt brat?
Yes, but Evernote is too complicated. Nowte takes just 1 click to make a note! :)

The great benefit of Nowte also is also simple sharing options.

Anyway - thanks for your feedback!
The original ghost platform was supposed to be developed in php http://john.onolan.org/ghost/

Im guessing thats why OP specified node.js in the title
Maybe because modern quality products can't be backward-compatible with el cheapo php over ftp platforms forever. Supply meets demand and point-and-click PaaS are on the rise.
My money would be on Cave Lion or White Lion (the two lion types other than mountain that aren't geographically described), though for giggles I'd prefer East Dillon Lion.
I don't think the event you describe was possible, because Mozilla had tabs before Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox even existed. In any case, Opera copied the tabs from other browsers too, so I'm not sure what's your point with that story.

By the way, it wasn't just about the OSS license. Back in the day Opera had a big honking ad right in the main window. They only released an ad-free version in 2005, when Firefox already had 16 times the share of Opera.
File based locking. If you want to write something to the database file and something else is writing there (User stats, logs, new blog), the database just gives you an error instead of a database connection.

I went for a pretty tiny install of a webapp with SQLite, figuring being the only user, what can go wrong, but had to migrate to postgres pretty soon because I kept getting errors when my actions clashed with one of the background task (that ran every 15 minutes).
Slightly different story at http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm with an update regarding Bosworth:

Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to do the first major app that tied it together (Outlook Web Access). Without the earlier contributions of the Trident/IE teams, it wouldn't have been possible, and its absolutely true that Adam and many folks he worked with had the conceptual vision for tying it together (he called it weblications at the time).

Note to OP: this blog was reference 6 in the Wikipedia article you linked to.
I think a better way of doing that is to create a test that fails in exactly that condition.

You can then put documentation in that test, as that's what the developer will look at first. You also get the bonus that, if someone finds a way to fix the function that causes that, then you can go back to possibly nicer code.
Speaking for Bangladesh: everything from attitudes about women and Jews and gays to acceptance of free speech to business ethics to expectations regarding the rule of law.

My father was a college student at the time of the Bengali independence. He had great hope for the country when it adopted a constitution with western-style attitudes (secular democracy). But now he's bitter because the people reinstated the theocracy, made Islam the official religion, made the religious leaders ever more powerful, turned the democracy into dynastic rule by two families, and perpetuated the culture of corruption and graft that exists in government and business. This didn't just happen to them. They're not the victims of external forces. They got the government and society they deserved and tolerated.

There are good people and smart people in Bangladesh. Letting people immigrate in a controlled way, and an emphasis on adoption of American culture, works. But but letting them just import their culture wholesale would mean the destruction of what makes America worth living in in the first place.
No. That's not appreciated.
If you are compiling on multiple platforms, then stuff like this is a disaster.

If you are not compiling on multiple platforms, then complaining about stuff like this because of compiler issues is a nuisance. (You could still object on the basis that it is fugly.)
Yes, the only way to go is your own domain.
Use an add-on like Virtual Identity for Thunderbird to keep track of which From address goes with which recipient.
https://www.absorb.it/virtual-id
(their cert seems to have expired over the weekend)
Your app idea has an 70% chance of tanking
Daddy, what’s a stream?
Hmmm...I wonder if this is my roommate's problem. Last year I gave her my 2008 Macbook Pro (a fully decked-out one at the time) because her 8 year old iMac broke...and she has been complaining constantly about how slow it is. She incessantly curses out the beach ball and will slam the mouse down repeatedly because she swears it makes the ball go away faster.

Because of that last bit, I've never taken her seriously. That laptop was working fine when I was using it for Photoshopping raw images while having 15 browser windows open...her use-case is literally to have something to check GMail with and sometimes listen to her iTunes collection. I've gone into the laptop several times to make sure there isn't bloatware on it, and have disabled every extraneous feature...and yet she still has the few-second freezes issue (and I've been unable to reproduce it)....Hopefully this is the solution to both of our problems.
I've never had to reinstall my *nix tools when using OS X.

Where are you installing them? OS X respects all of the guarantees in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard so if you aren't installing custom-built binaries in /usr/local then the problem isn't OS X.
The difference is the $8 purchase price. That's the optimum.

And the players are not completely stuck, they are at the local optimal of their current gaming model - a plateau. That doesn't stop them from taking a different path towards a different optimisation strategy and find one where the localised high point is better than this one.
Much obliged - totally missed it
But it certainly loads quickly.
> glitches

Panic? OOPS?
Ubuntu 11.10 was Oneiric Ocelot, so Apple might not want to muddy the waters there.
I think this is a disingenuous argument that comes up all the time.

I was once a teen who was a heavy pirate and although I said it was because I couldn't afford games (I didn't have a job in highschool) I had a $400 modded Xbox, I had a 1800 gaming computer I had a few real games. I managed to afford these things by getting money and gifts from family and working odds jobs here and there.

Really the only reason I was pirating was because I needed games right away, I was entitled to have them on release day. I simply couldn't wait to get money to buy it. Unfortunately now that I'm a bit older I realize that a lot people have this mind set. Its not that they can't afford it, its that they need it right away.
#3 was intended to read as "what concessions do I need [from the employer] to make working without pay feasible?"

I wasn't that much of a tool. :)
I don't understand why someone would do this nested comments thing. This is what macro block are for...

And tests need to be separated from the code. Hopefully using a test framework.

If your code changes depending on if it is in 'test mode' or not (which is what is proposed), then the test code is not the same as the production code, i.e. the production code is not tested. I'm not just talking about timing issues - extra variable names and objects will be in scope in 'test mode', and might logically change the behavior of the program.
+1 for Pick. I've met several people who were/are Pick devotees. Also heard stories about how Dick Pick was kind of crazy.
Is that a lisp config file? Blimey. Is this common in OSX land?

I'm somewhat skeptical that this will fix the random beachballing, because I'm pretty sure I've been seeing that since before ML. The fact that I put up with it is testimony to how badly windows and (desktop) linux suck.

EDIT: tried the config edit and rebooted, not seeing the "deny mach-lookup" error any more but I am still seeing regular "Unable to talk to lsboxd" messages. I guess I'll try the safemode thing later.

EDIT2: another thing I've done in my quest to banish the beachball is to uninstall iStat Menus. I'm sure there are many others here who use it. It was causing lots of crazy behaviour in the SystemUIServer process. Now I've binned it, things seem better. It's a shame, I liked those graphs. Anyone know another tool that can show me per-process bandwidth usage?
The painting and the love affair are interesting, but, as a landlord, I found myself wondering: How does an apartment remain untouched for 70 years? How was the rent paid without interruption? How were rent increases handled (or did the rent remain constant for 70 years?)? How did the landlord not have to access the apartment when the other parts of the building/infrastructure were renovated/upgraded over the decades? Also, Pigalle was/is a bit of a rough neighborhood, so why wasn't there a break-in over those 70 years?
Well, pirates sure aren't making you money. You care about paying customers.

Makes sense to me.
> That, they say, boosted both wages and employment for U.S. born scientists and engineers. There were undoubtedly winners and losers; while average salaries rose, some older Americans almost certainly gave up their jobs to younger immigrants with fresher skills. But if the paper is right, that price seems worthwhile in the grand scheme of things.

I'm sure those older Americans also agree the change was worthwhile.

Why wouldn't those older Americans not be happy with the fact they've lost your job, safe in the knowledge their former company is now making an increased profit selling their job to a younger, cheaper imported worker.
God, I hate posix. The UNIX Haters were right about a lot of things, but none more so than the utter brain-damage of the shell's argument parsing unfeature.
Thanks :) I'd love to hear more about your user studies.
Backed Or Whacked: Fund These Undies
A Dumb Proposal for the NSF
Vim: The Alpha and Omega
People are still complaining about them all over this page, though.
OSX is unix??? It already comes with the standard set of tools.

And what's a unix hacker doing complaining they need to recompile their toolset?? Whimp :)
I'm pretty sure that in most places, your signature is only legally binding when you are the one that signed it. It doesn't particularly provide authentication, but in cases of fraud it provides some evidence of intent.
I have tried to find said discussion in vain. It's more about the attitude of Firefox users against Opera than anything else.

That big ad is a sad bit of Internet history. A wasted opportunity.

Also: they had a deal with Google to make it the default search engine before Firefox had one.