skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a difference between games requiring intensive amounts of skill and a game that basically scapegoats your newest players.

I mean, look at the great online games of yesteryear - say, Quake for example. Quake's mechanics are fundamentally simple. Run, jump, pickup stuff, shoot. There's only 9ish weapons to figure out in the average Quake-like game, and in most cases the behavior is "point at what you want to die and click the button". Learn the maps so you can control the pickups. The hardcore players will have to learn to exploit the bugs in the motion model to get a little speed edge, but that basic stuff is all there.

And in a Deathmatch game, you know what happens if you suck? You die. Over and over and over and over again. But since it's a free-for-all, there's no teammates you're letting down. Nobody screaming at you about how much you suck. And even in a teamgame, the teams are larger so one weak player can fade in the back. And none of his teammates are watching him suck and screaming at him, they're all too busy playing and can't see what he's doing through walls. If he drops out, nobody cares.

But you can't say Quake et al are low-skill. See also RTS games - RTS team-games face many of the same problems as DOTAlikes, but in most RTSes the 1V1 matchups reign supreme, and FFA is also a popular option. In a 1V1 a newbie will get utterly annihilated repeatedly and there's the same bad slippery slope of DOTAlikes, but nobody will hate the loser like you'll see in a teamgame where everybody just watched one idiotic ally spend the last 25 minutes ruining their fun. Plus, RTS games at least will give you the dignity of a quick death unlike a DOTAlike where you'll still spend several minutes watching the towers go down before the victor is declared.

You could make a super-simple DOTA-like game with only one hero to choose from and super-simple combat mechanics and you'd still see all the cultural and mechanical problems you see in modern DOTAlikes. You'd still have players screaming at the newbie who's accidentally feeding. You'd still have players hurling verbal abuse at each other while they get pointlessly pummeled because the game is functionally over but doesn't have the dignity to end even though the leveling has made it completley moribund.

It's not about skill, it's about a long-form team-game with bad slippery slopes. A low-skill game with that format would still be cruel to newbies, just like high-skill games that avoid that insanity are newbie-friendly (see any twitch-FPS for example).
> If you're just going to install a Linux distro doesn't that defeat the point?

It doesn't defeat the point for the buyer, since its often the most cost-effective way to get basic hardware for a linux laptop.

It doesn't defeat the point for the hardware vendor.

Heck, it doesn't really even defeat the point for Google. Sure, it may not be as good for them as you using ChromeOS, but its better for them than you either using Windows or MacOS (or paying for Windows or MacOS to get a Linux box.)
He must have put the decimal point in the wrong place or something.
That base is too low to consider for that position (Also, what is the strike price of the options?). I don't know your personal situation and how badly you need the job but even outside of silicon valley I think it's low and would not consider anything less than 100k. If you can stand to walk away I'd counter with 120k at least. Recruter friends of mine are placing people at 120-150k all the time for that role here in California. Ping me via email if you want to chat off list.

EDIT: If they can't afford to pay market rates and you really really like the company then they need to come legit with serious equity but I would never play that game. Market rates or GTFO.
R spells for wizards
I bought one at bestbuy last week (as I was about to leave on a trip), and I definitely got the impression that most buyers didn't know what they were getting into. Several salespeople double-checked that I knew this was not a "normal laptop." One guy said they'd been getting a lot of returns from people not knowing what "chromebook" entails.
It's been done for design, architecture, and engineering. There are (were, at least) specialized, integrated revision control products out there by Adobe and AutoDesk. I don't think I've encountered them in the wild, but I haven't looked too hard.

I don't think it's lack of product. I pretty convinced that there just isn't any significant level of adoption. Revision control is just an intrinsically difficult thing for people to grasp. I'm sure more than a few folks here have walked into software shops that were either abusing or simply not using any revision control.

Look at the state of the art for a product made by programmer for programmers: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/rever.... I was trying to explain this process last week. It's just not easy.
Big fans of the liveloop guys, great to see other people tackling the problem. For us we're trying to make UX our key differentiator, and keep things as simple as possible. Also, we're doing slide by slide version control, rather than the snapshots of the whole file, which a few other companies in the space go for. One other interesting thing to note, is that when we were doing usability testing, people seemed to prefer the idea of new drafts of a slide rather than pure realtime. It seemed to suit the way they currently worked rather than, realtime. This surprised us.
When I read "crowdsourcing" in the headline I was expecting more of a discussion about how Instacart was enlisting a broader base of "delivery" people but it sounds like its messengers are still a pretty tight circle. Which makes sense, since, as the article also notes, there's a quality level that probably needs to be attained to be viable.
Every search engine suffers from a particular paradox which I will describe, but Google suffers from it twofold by virtue its contextualized searches. The paradox is simply this: it fundamentally cannot, for instance, offer a meaningful search on something like "cheap car insurance." It can only tell you who the best advertisers are. If the cheapest company has little to no advertising budget, you'll never find them on Google. Your best bet will be to find them through a secondary insurance search engine which, by virtue of its massive advertising budget, does show up on Google.

I don't know if DuckDuckGo solves this problem. It probably doesn't because the problem is driven by keyword searches and only exacerbated rather than created by advertising-centric filtering. I'm not even sure it can be solved. It's something I'd like to see tackled, though.
Sitebuilder installs on top of your WordPress site
Snaplive (my sitebuilder project) install on top of your @WordPress site:
• in-context editing for #WordPress
• automatically synchronized
The Robot Ballet Powering Fulfilment
This clearly highlights one of the big challenges for mass market surveillance proof apps - there are too many obscure alternatives (unless one counts iMessage as one of them). Getting the critical mass of users (similar to what Whatsapp and Line accomplished) will be a huge challenge.
I think it's more profitable to install Google Chrome or the Ask Toolbar, even "reputable companies" have fallen to the dark side :/
If someone has the document then they can get the changes. We know this isn't the perfect way to do, but it's the simplest way to start off with. Would appreciate any thoughts on how we can make this better. I'm on zefi@
So if you diff xml docs, will users be expected to read the raw xml diff output? Or, is there enough documentation on the file formats available so that when you diff two Word docs, for example, that you can create a third doc using Word's "show revisions" feature?
I'm guessing they're running a reverse SSH tunnel through their own servers which your devices then connect to to get to your hard drive. Probably connecting to a common port such as 80 or 443 to avoid any issues with firewalls.
Perfect examples are local Founder Institutes.
useful thing to do to traffic charts: log scale
Navy Drone Successfully Lands on Aircraft Carrier
Maya already supports Linux: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=12311...

But even then, ignore Linux for the moment, and just pretend I said Mac OS X instead. My point definitely applies there even with the pre-requisite you have for running Maya and Photoshop.

However, you're right that for some members of the asset pipeline, they may continue to use Windows. But for the developer who is debugging in-engine scripts and/or engine problems, being able to build and debug on the same platform would be a huge win.

My guess is that if you can get the editor running on Linux, you can also have it on OS X and vice-versa.
> Perhaps, crony prisons or quasi-public prisons?

Very true, and equally applicable to many other "private" companies (Lockheed-Martin comes to mind).

> How can this be true while tax payers are simultaneously footing the bill?

Private prisons (that include inmate labor) charge from both ends: per-head to the taxpayer (ostensibly at a lower rate than if the state handled it in-house), and per-hour to businesses seeking cheap labor. State prisons have only the first incentive, with the countervailing force of finite tax revenue.

Also, the prison guard unions have the same incentive to lobby (and/or support the lobbying of their parent corporation) regardless of who signs their checks. I would claim that union influence and lobbying is a constant in either case.

> But when there are unions, and the jobs of union members depends on the number of prisoners, it becomes much less clear.

Agreed. It is bad policy and a waste of taxes in either case.
Social Local Mobile - The Future of Social Networking
I will take this speech with a fair share of reservations. Not discrediting his ambition, but I will let time to tell. For example, Google started with 'Do No Evil' and has (had?) decent ambitions. However as it grows and pressures start to grow from shareholders, internal war for turfs, etc, market economy is slowly but steadily gaining an upper hand. What I meant is: when a company grows to a certain size, it will slowly morph into something that cannot be changed easily. Look at MS, Zynga, Novell, IBM, HP, Intel, AMD, and so on and so forth.
Yes I agree wholeheartedly. There are two very fair knocks against PHP: it's not the fastest, and the API uses somewhat inconsistent standards and conventions (isset vs. is_array for instance...so frustrating). But for the slowness aspect, it's not so slow that you are really hindered by this unless you are doing something that requires very intense performance, in which case why are you using a higher level language anyway. Pretty much the rest of its bad reputation is undeserved, and the downsides are on the level of give and take you get with any other language.
Move over Pinterest, make room for...Hyre?
It's one of the pre-installed (and undeletable etc) vendor apps on my Sharp 200SH (and doesn't seem to be in the play store)... unlike most vendor apps, this one is quite good (accurate, invisible, keeps a nice history, and seems to use no measurable power).

I don't know exactly how it works, but I think it uses the accelerometer to count steps like a traditional pedometer.

There seem to be a ton of other pedometer apps in the play store, though I don't know how well they work.
PRISM wasn't funny? Deal some privacy
This game is a real changer!
> If people react to the end of drug prohibition the same way they reacted to the end of alcohol prohibition, the whole country will be strung out in weeks if we legalize the stuff.

None of the drugs currently prohibited were as popular before being prohibited as alcohol was before it was prohibited, so I don't see any reason to expect that they would be as popular after prohibition as alcohol was.

Heck, none of them are as popular while prohibited as alcohol was while it was prohibited.

Not that I think your statement correctly presents the response to the end of alcohol prohibition, either.
Seriously? Got a repo we can watch? Or a blog we can follow?
I found the gameplay of LoL to be a bit stale and DOTA2 much more dynamic.

Also, 'buying' champions to play with did not sit well with me at all.

Edit: Also, yes, LoL was made to run with much lower-spec PC's than DOTA2. That being said, DOTA2 has much higher levels of polish when it comes to characters, voicing and environment.
The best way to get the author to read your comment might be to email him using the address on the very page!
NSA Spying Isn't About You
> You could make a super-simple DOTA-like game with only one hero to choose from and super-simple combat mechanics and you'd still see all the cultural and mechanical problems you see in modern DOTAlikes. You'd still have players screaming at the newbie who's accidentally feeding. You'd still have players hurling verbal abuse at each other while they get pointlessly pummeled because the game is functionally over but doesn't have the dignity to end even though the leveling has made it completley moribund.

Games like that already exist and they don't capture any of the aspects of Dota I find compelling. The new Infinite Crisis game is essentially the Dominion game mode from League of Legends with DC superheroes and villains. There was another game like that announced recently for iOS with the slogan "No farming, just fighting." Those games all sound terrible to me. They're tailor-made for the attention-deficient iPhone gaming generation. Can the rest of us have a few games to play?

Quake was a great game but it's strategically and tactically shallow. Dota is an intrinsically team-based game with the tactical and strategical depth of a game like Starcraft. Arguably it surpasses Starcraft's depth in some areas owing to the many 5v5 match-ups you can generate from a pool of over 100 heroes. I disagree with nearly every adulteration Riot made in designing League of Legends, but even they realize that you cannot alter these features without making a different kind of game entirely.

Not every game has to be like chess where the rule set can be learned in five minutes.
The Case of the Missing Human Ancestor
It's a significantly better game than the festering, cancerous legion of predatory money extracting non-games that have turned the iOS and Android app stores into cesspits of addiction and credit card fraud.
The intended method of use is Chrome OS, there will be geeks who buy it as a cheap Linux laptop but that's not really the target market or how they are mostly used.
Users will never know because EC2 runs on paravirtualized kernels that don't have access to SMBIOS, which would tell us that information.

However, if we can determine what machine models they use (assuming they buy branded hardware), then we will know their chipsets, and from there, we should be able to deduce whether the RAM is ECC or not.
The question I was going to make has been asked here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17483271/is-there-a-way-t...
And every year around the holidays a comedy group called Loading Ready Run marathons playing the game for charity: http://desertbus.org/
The salary is too low for Chicago. I've seen $100K+ in Minneapolis. In the Bay Area and NYC it's $120K to $150K.
As incredible as these customer interaction stories are, they are 100% true. Customer service is an area where having experience as a parent or at least working in a day care or school before being an entrepreneur would have really paid off!
Querying their API and we have a backup source as well when USPS goes down (ie last week)
Taking more than the hostname of the link into account; the title maybe.
This is interesting. Can you go a little into the tech stack you used? I'm always interested in things like this. Did you roll your own charting solution? I see your just using standard div elements no svg or canvas...
I think it is a fun game that was meant to get a message across. That being said, I will never spend more than a few minutes on it.
I don't doubt they version things like this, but I do doubt the watermark is easily found. A bit here, a bit there and you can bury a lot of info in a graphic with no one the wiser.
You're still supporting them. They do get paid, and you figure into the usage statistics and eyeballs for which they get paid. Like it or not.
New Chrome developer tools bring Bluetooth, iTunes integration to packaged apps
Plain text HTTP (and all the other ASCII-based networking protocols) is already a layer of abstraction on top of TCP/IP data packets. So a better comparison would be HTTP as the higher level programming language and the raw TCP/IP packets as the assembly. In which case we're back to the point that developers would care if they had to write websites in binary.

The problem with many web developers these days is that they don't understand or don't care about the networking side of things. Web development is such a high level view of programming that many developers who've only grown up with targeting the web, those kinds of developers don't also appreciate just how many layers of abstraction there are between them and the users navigating their site. As far as they're concerned, they just bang out some PHP, copy the files onto some shared hosting provider and let the sys admins worry about the rest. Which is fine if that's all they want to do, but there's a whole plethora of technology at work - even beneath the HTTP protocol.

As for tools to query HTTP, I swear by curl:

curl -i --silent example.com | head # http headers (written by web app)
curl -I example.com # http headers (written by web daemon)
curl -v --silent example.com | more # verbose output; great for tracking down faults
curl -H "host:example.com" ip.address # set the host header; useful when using named based virtual hosts
curl -A "opera mobile" example.com # sets the user agent; useful for working around mobile / desktop redirects

...etc. Rarely does a day go by and I'm not using curl.
If that is the prime directive, we're doing a really poor job at it. We haven't even gotten off the planet and we already have started to deplete resources we rely on and either ignore or deride those that provide us with food while we live ridiculous lifestyles whose primary purpose is to consume and pretend to each other how great we are on a multitude of lit screens in unsustainably growing suburbs and cities.
Dota is no more difficult to learn than games like starcraft IMO the only difference is aRTS games have significantly worse communities than pure rts games.
I think you've missed the point Chris. I wasn't bashing Stripe at all; quite the contrary actually. I have a ton of respect for their founders & team. However, there are some elements which are essential to our platform and payments model, which Stripe/Connect/Marketplace cannot provide; Descriptor & Money Management, among s few other nuance things. With so many options out there today, (many VERY BAD options), I merely wanted to share our process and headaches, in the hopes of saving another entrepreneur a bunch of time.
The metal coating that makes iPhones touch sensitive is running out
I think what the GP is arguing is that if you want to be really fast you should forget using Java arrays and just wrap BLAS, LAPACK, etc., which are written in "close to the metal" languages, optimized within an inch of their life, have been around for decades, and are used by others with similar goals (numpy/scipy, etc.). As the GP says, Java libraries that already do this are probably available, so this may be a pretty trivial task.
I did some on the side admin work for a Photographer once, a real big name. He was in the middle of making up exactly what this was, however he came up against the same issues everyone has. Firstly space costs money, Hardware costs alot too, not to mention bandwidth, this guy would easily do 100-200gb of photos in a couple shoots. all very high res shots (talking about for big company ads) his idea is to sell a server with a software suit that people can dump into a datacenter or at home and upload photos to it, personally I liked the idea but local storage and hardware failure + the ability to grow the storage was a real killer for his idea.. (not to mention that your playing with peoples businesses and lives if you lose those photos)
SecondMarket is launching a bitcoin fund
LoL does some things I like, such as fixing creep-denial (a bug that becomes popular to exploit is still a bug, I don't care what the pro-gamers say), but it still has the fundamentally grief-oriented play I loathe.

To be clear, my complaint is not about skill-intensive gaming. My problem with the DOTA format is that it makes you hate the weak teammates in so many different ways, and putting together a single match requires such a large commitment of time from so many players.

Compare vs. TF2 where the 6v6 pro circuit exists but casual players still have access to 12v12 pubs where nobody cares if you suck or you drop. Or compare vs. StarCraft where there's an extensive single-player campaign and a 1v1 community online, and the only person who hates you if you screw up in 1v1 is yourself, and at least when you fail in a 1v1 starcraft game the end will come blissfully swiftly. And nobody would say that SC or TF2 are low-skill games.
Well, they are descendants of RTS games in that they retain many mechanics and conventions of the genre.

IMO, that's really what makes DOTA/clones uninteresting to me - an interesting and strategic action game saddled with a non-relevant RTS interface.
All this discussion about dota (and LoL etc) boil down to one thing: you NEED to play as a team.

A lot of games involve team work, but it isn't crucial: that is you'll play better if you work as a team, but you don't need to and you can still enjoy the game if you ignore your team.

This is manifestly untrue for Dota. if you ignore your team you'll have a horrible time and so will the rest of your team.

As result this is actually an interesting social experiment: based on dota it looks like a lot of people don't like working as a team.
What is an "aRTS" game? The term is un-googleable.
But what happens when you screw up in a 1v1 RTS game? You fail, you die quickly, you rematch. In a DOTAlike game? You spend the next 10 minutes getting insulted by your teammates and watching your game end painfully slowly.

The skill level with DOTAlikes is not the problem.
How is it for speed? On my old low-end Dell netbook and desktop, I would get frustrated every time I did an "apt-get upgrade" or install as I waited what seemed like 10-15 seconds just for the "Reading package lists..." step to complete. On my MacBook Air this step is instant, which I attribute mostly to the SSD. I'm suspicious of regular hard drives now (though on the flip side I now only have a tiny amount of space).
I agree. Much of that attitude is also pompous.

Engineering should be about taking complex things and making them simple and easy (the best engineers do this), on the other hand you have engineers that try to add complexity because they understand something and over engineer it to obscure it on some premature optimization or cool factor. Taking something simple and making it more complex is the epitome of bad engineering.

Cool is useful and useful is simple or at least simple parts. Keep entry to technology simple, just like good games are simple to start, deeper in it gets more difficult. The door should be easy to enter even though the labyrinth might be immense.
If I were you, I'd go directly to the source: @cjc (stripe) and @jkwade (balanced) It seems like you would be served well by both companies, so you should definitely share your specifics and see which one is the best fit.
Ode to Flight Attendants
There's also a bitcoin information page on https://www.secondmarket.com/education/learn/bitcoin-educati...

The evidence seems pretty solid.
No we still disagree. A poor library, or poor use of said library, is not a reason to use an entirely diffrent language. It's a reason to use a diffrent library or fix your code.
Thanks! We're working on it! Next release will have ability to create an account w/ email address as well