skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, this is a surprising reversal of trends as far as user generated content and micro-transaction based economies go, but the auction house really did change the core mechanics of Diablo 3.

As a player I really did kind of like the auction system during the initial grind from level 1 to 60, but when there was no more level progression and the only progression was item progression, it just stopped being fun because the only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops that you could sell on the auction house. There was no longer a use for almost everything that dropped.

The auction house mechanic might work on a MMO style game, but Diablo 3 isn't a MMO and the auction house broke the one mechanic that made the game a lot of fun - random loot drops.

It's treasure hunting basically. Auction house turns treasure hunting into a job, and thus it's less fun after a while.

This is a good lesson for game designers. The treasure hunting random loot mechanic works only if it can't be short circuited. The moment you can "buy" treasure, it's no longer treasure, it's a commodity and collecting commodities is a job, not a game.

Treasure hunting is a game.
I guess you make a good point. It is quite efficient in weeding out really bad question like 'help me with my homework it's due in 10 minutes'. Maybe there could be a solution instead of closing which is quite harsh, maybe tag it as 'QINI' Question In Need of Improvement. and a live agent will try to upsell Stackoverflow mugs and t-shirts. :)
For one thing, they're shown in Apple's promotional videos. How are users supposed to learn about any feature not represented by a button on screen? I'm thinking of the notification tray, control center, double-tap home button for multitasking, press home+power for screenshot, hold home button for Siri, and even older features like pinch to zoom and rotate.
Explain Shell Commands from your Shell
Same, I was expecting something like Mozilla's crazy 3d view for webpages
That would be great ... but I think the bigger thing is, just as open-source software has taken over much of the Internet, this is a critical step in helping open-source hardware take over ... well, everything else.
I wish they would have been more consistent with their screenshots (at least per app). Its kind of annoying to compare what is clearly an iPhone 4-sized screenshot (with no status bar) to an iPhone 5-sized screenshot with status bar.
Tell me what makes the US a better place to live, and don't say something like "freedom" or "democracy" (hah!).
I really want to run an exit node because I'm a firm believer in what the Tor network does-but I'm really worried about being arrested for running one. Does anyone have practical experience running a Tor exit node?
Smoothless?
As a side note, the second edition of "Datacenter as a Computer" was recently released: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y2...
Summary: The total amount being handed out is $3500, to only six organizations right now. In order to qualify, you have to know this guy, and be providing Serious Bandwidth.
Alas, that is a bit of a pipe-dream. It would be nice if there were an open-source codebase for this, with a consortium of companies contributing, as it would mean better systems overall and lower cost to the consumer; but the senior management of the companies that are involved get too big an ego boost from owning the IP on all that cleverness. Plus, the tragedy of the commons applies: everybody wants a piece of what is going to be an astronomically huge market. (Not just passenger cars -- a big chunk of the road transportation & logistics business will be up for grabs too).
They may be looking to buy Google's technology, and this is just a negotiation tactic: a threat to do it themselves to keep prices down.
> It doesn't matter if you "find" the optimal people to send a message to. The important thing is the message

Well, the message matters and the initial set of people also matters.

A good message has a higher probability to be transfered by a peer to its friends. So yeah spam emails don't go viral because they have a very low probability to be transfered.
But given two messages of the same quality, they may or may not go viral depending on where you inject them.

To clarify, the actual scientific paper do not claim that they "solved the fundamental problem of viral marketing" they just propose a new heuristic to find good seeds and show that it's good.

Edit: clarity.
Probably. I can understand that some people will want to do their own driving for fun, but driving in traffic isn't very fun. So they'd probably 1. have the car drive itself to the open highways outside of town. 2. switch into manual mode and cruise.
So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share.

I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auction house.

Within a few days, I had enough gear to handle most everything in the game and after a week or two I had a max-leveled character of each class. What was left to do? I hit the level cap, and even though they eventually came out with a second cap, the idea of grinding made no sense when the auction house existed. The most practical thing to do was trade and that got so boring so quick :/.

The design choices that Blizzard made as a direct result of the auction house are both terrifying and a fantastic lesson for anyone in the startup world.

As a direct result of making money off of the activities of people in the game, Blizzard made the following game inhibiting decisions:

* Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time

* Limiting in-game communication systems severely

* Penalizing players for playing in groups

I could go on, but the bottom line was this: Activision put profit over gameplay and burned one of the best franchises in the history of gaming for little profit. The game was absolutely atrocious as a direct result of the goddamn auction house. It took my favorite game and turned it into a stock simulator.

What made Diablo great was the camaraderie, the lack of a driving arching focus on optimization/monetization, and an amazing community of folks. Diablo 3 tried to turn all of that into money and it sucked.

Thank god and good riddance to that rubbish auction house.
That's the crux with most quantitative studies in social sciences. They are able to deliver impressive sounding claims, but in the end the external validity is more than questionable.
One of the arguments the article makes is the prison system elsewhere creates the permanent criminal class.
That's correct: control over the first few bytes (the size of the encryption block) is needed. In addition, in practice you will also need a Same-Origin Policy bypass in order to submit requests to the target web site.

Surprisingly, the Java SOP bypass used for BEAST originally is still without a fix. In addition, IIRC, Java continues to treat sites behind the same IP address as belonging to the same origin. I think that, with some trickery, the latter could be used for arbitrary SOP bypass too.

In my research I discovered that XmlHttpRequest allows you to use arbitrary methods, which is handy, because those are the bytes that are submitted first. So that feature, along with keep-alives and a SOP bypass could also make BEAST possible in a vulnerable browser. (Disclaimer: I tested this approach a bit, but I haven't attempted to exploit it all the way.)
I think s/he's saying that current security only protects us from script kiddies; so whatever we do only 'protects' data from them but data cannot be protected against state-sponsored attacks (but gives people a false sense of security)?

Altho' I don't quite agree with some of the implied premise, because it's not as if script kiddies can/would take data away (making it unavailable). But the false sense of security is relevant.
I've tried it for a simple project and it worked flawlessly. The new build system is quite well developed at this point, so most developers should be able to get their app building on it. It's not 100% complete or 100% bug-free yet though - for a mature app you might want to wait until it's out of beta.
CPU Cores and ECUs for AWS Instance Types
The problem with 7% annual inflation rates is very few people can maintain those pay increases, every year, for an entire 30 year mortgage... So eventually you end up house poor.

Actually you end up inflation poor, not house poor. Your house payment stays mostly fixed. In your scenario of much higher inflation than reported, rents are also likely going up. In such a case the renter will be worse off than the home owner.
I imagine depth sensing will be more useful for Glass-like devices that can really benefit from hands-free gesture recognition. It seems like a much better fit than cell phones.

PS -- Hi Grant! From a fellow GT Robotics alum.
Great question. I would check out this page: https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en
La Surconsommation
Didn't know that - wouldn't have mattered much, they never really followed up. I do wonder how many people took anti-biotics for no good reason.
I am assuming that services which rented out automated cars would have large numbers of them. I’m referring to them as a fleet in the same way logistics companies refer to a fleet of trucks even if there not all driving the same rout.

If only ¼ of car owners are on the road at peak traffic times then it could make sense to have automated car rental for a specific trip instead of car ownership. Assume drives to work take 30 minutes and that most people go to work from 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Also assume that we have inefficient routs requiring the car to drive the same distance for all pickups and drop-offs. Between 5:30 AM and 8:30 AM you could get three people to work with one automated car. Assuming this would it be cost efficient for companies to charge a low enough trip cost to make it more economical for people with fairly predictable driving requirements to rent a car as needed instead of buying one.
There's no denying that Amazon have a great product and think long term, but saying you have the customer's best interests at heart sounds a bit like a generic "corporate values" statement.
Can you tell us if you were able to successfully download the old version? Just curious if it definitely works for your use case.
Gabe Newell teases Steam Box news
Who says it isn't being used in a legitimate manner for high profit potential? It seems you can offer up subscriptions to zero days for millions in annual fees and never have to worry about prosecution. Just so long as you aren't the one doing the actual hacking (your clients in the government will take care of that).
I agree with you 100% and I'm coming from a similar situation. The question is, are you going to play again once it's removed? I almost definitely won't give it another shot.

Still play D2 on occasion though.
I ran an exit node on a mostly unused dedicated server for a while. I made the mistake of not limiting traffic to ports 80 and 443, and got a couple DMCA takedowns as a result of people torrenting stuff over tor, which caused the provider to cancel my contract. (I got all my files off first)
Unsurprisingly, excellent advice phrased as succinctly as it could be for such an enormous topic.

I'm glad Paul Graham think that decks are on the way out, because they're a ludicrous (or at least inefficient) way of understanding what a startup does. If you have a product, show me that. If you have financials, show me those. Otherwise it becomes a competition to see which companies can dedicate their design resources to make the prettiest deck, and which investors can do the math on your '30% growth' number to figure out that you're growing from 3 to 4 users.

The advice about valuation is also great. I listened in on a conversation with very smart founders who are used to optimizing things, and they were super concerned about having a great pre-money valuation. It's tempting to focus on it because it's your only benchmark at a really stressful stage, but if things go badly it won't matter, and if things go really well it... won't matter either.
All this will do is make users use external auction houses. As long as they keep in-game trading of rare and legendary items, people will just take it to eBay or some other site, and then arrange the swap in-game.

It makes it less instant gratification, but won't stop the buying of items.
Does LivingSocial Have an Identity Crisis?
It's really more than simply adding it to a repository. I can store two text files that have nothing to do with each other on my HD or in a repo or wherever, and I would not be creating a derived work.

But if I have file A (kernel source) and file B (zfs code), and I compile A+B into a binary (the kernel image), then I have a single work that has been derived from A and B.

When it's suggested that ZFS be added to the kernel repo, what's really being said is that a single work (kernel+zfs) should be created.

In contrast, ZFS is currently a kernel loadable module. We have the kernel binary, and the module binary.. two separate works. (What Linus was clarifying was how integrated the module could be with the kernel and it still be considered a separate work.)
Those are all great points and credit to Sweden where credit is due.

However, please take into account that your country's population is nearing 10 million whereas the US's population is over 300 million.

What I am trying to say is: The programs that are working out so well for you may be much more difficult to implement in a country with a population the size of the US.

Incidentally, I have no idea why my comments are being shadow-banned, but thanks for replying anyway.
Righthaven (copyrights, not patents) was eventually shut down for lack of standing since they didn't own the copyrights but only the right to sue over them.

In the Apple/HTC ITC case, 5 of HTCoogle patents were thrown out over lack of standing (Google sort of gave them to HTC but retained some control over them).
Only after the fact. Maybe.
When a dating site gets gender wrong
Actually there are 10x more OBJ formatted files than STL files. I created a Chrome extension to visualize these on GitHub as well: https://github.com/danielribeiro/three-hub

Collada format is also very popular, particular with WebGL guys. The problem with diffing these is that you start diffing animations as well. Which literally adds a new dimension to the problem. If you take textures and materials into account, then the problem soon becomes really hard to visualize
"Only a tiny percentage of prisons are for profit"
Can you source that?
Too Tired to Hustle
Building Vine on Android (video)
i find this indicator not to be consistently reliable. anything that gets to the front page (which will never be pure crap), will always get upvotes.

but many (all?) submissions that make it to the front page get there by being manually curated there, not by accumulating upvotes first. on the flip side of the same coin, a lot of good things never make it to the front page, even if they gain a lot of points.
While I think individual several of the apps look better after the redesign I liked the consistency of UI between apps that the before shots gave. The after shots kind of remind me of running KDE apps in a Gnome desktop environment or something. They seem too radically unique to provide a good user experience to the system as a whole.
ditto. I even asked for (and received) a refund as I was quite irate that the game mechanics had obviously been tuned with something other than fun as the top priority. This makes me think of giving it another go. I was hoping stuff like this would start happening after they broke away from their parent.
So where does the NSA apply?
(This is a joke, they don't need exit nodes to break Tor)
Colon + indentation is actually the most natural way to signify a block that I have ever seen. Pretty, non-cluttering and sort of light for the eyes. And it's not without precedent: it resembles how colon is used in text.
> the only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops

which is not different from what people were doing on Diablo II for ages.
Unfortunately, the best I can do is provide a link to the TIMSS Data Explorer (click the link for "TIMSS IDE"):

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/

After agreeing to the terms, you can choose:

1. Subject matter (I chose math)

2. Grade (I chose 8th)

3. Jurisdiction (U.S., Finland, Massachusetts, etc.)

4. Variable (ethnicity, income, etc.)

5. Years (not every year has data for every variable)

Not every combination of year, jurisdiction, and variable has data (e.g., Finland doesn't seem to disaggregate by race).

When I built the report for Finland, it included a caveat about issues that "interfere with proper trend analysis", presumably by year, so I avoided that.
Even if the accuracy gets good enough, you could just seal products in boxes.
Because there is no purpose of humans; each individual must decide for himself what he wants his purpose to be.
* For example, algorithms tend to be built from a pipeline in which the first stage is feature detection. *

Yeah,

Computer vision is an amazingly hard field that I've only done a small amount of work in. Basically, everything here seems "broken".

A lot of the paradigm involves layers (a "pipeline" etc). The researcher is, just for example, supposed to "segment" an image into object or boundaries and then use the segments for further processing. "Segmentation" then is "low level" to be followed by clever stuff later.

But the "segmentation" problem itself is entirely unsolved in any conventional conception of solved. It's not even solvable since there's no real criteria as whether a segmentation algorithm has succeed or failed other than what a later algorithm might think it wants.
In my case, the final criteria was someone looking at the lines I drew and deciding they "looked right" - terrible relative to a "real" test but also inevitable since a thousand images "correctly segmented" could only be produced by a person making their judgement by drawing lines on the image (which isn't much less arbitrary).

And then there's the question whether a segmented image even carries the information the next step really needs, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_segmentation

It seems that human (or animal) vision is an amorphous computation process with sight, judgement and action all run together. Description like this article are interesting for this:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/fly-eyes/

But I lack the optimism of the article. Any algorithm we create has to attempt to simulate these amorphous processes but using modular systems that in the end can't really hope to do so.

Edit: Also, the video is hilarious and typical in that the effort is totally ad-hoc; stare-at-it and tweak-it till it works. "scalable and repeatable it ain't"
Team Led by Caltech Wins $10 Million Award for Research in Molecular Programming
http://www.paulgraham.com/convince.html

"But the foundation of convincing investors is to seem formidable, and since this isn't a word most people use in conversation much, I should explain what it means. A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way. Formidable is close to confident, except that someone could be confident and mistaken. Formidable is roughly justifiably confident."
I am neither authorized nor inclined to speak for GitHub, but if you were to suggest devoting more resources to convincing the people running botnets to go fold proteins, that would be nice.
I doubt Android will be making any more large style changes - Google has finally found an identity for Android, and 4.0 made large changes that the majority of the Android user base seem to be happy with ( I know I am ).

Regardless, I think both iOS7 and Android both look very pleasant now.
The big bee bummer (2013 TED talk) - Why bees are dying, and what to do about it
Hipmunk really makes the problems of flat design stand out. There is a common belief that simpler design means better UE. The things that are being tossed out in flat design are the things that often made good designs intuitive in the first place though. Many designers are reaching incorrect conclusions about simplicity and the whole KISS principle. The whole KISS principle doesn't require throwing out pixels and properties in the name of "a trend".

Good UE is memorable and intuitive - and is often lacking in the many flat designs I've been seeing lately.

I really fear that flat design trend is making products less emotional, memorable and usable.
this is valid, though for stuff that occurs so frequently there should just be a sticky that can accumulate suggestions, not a clean slate submission for every time it happens.
His only fear is that the cords and locks should not be strong enough!

Ha!
Formula E: new FIA championship with electric Formula cars
Entrepreneurs Feel Closer to God Than the Rest of Us Do
Pentagon still using a stand alone FAX machine for all outside communications
The Monthly Lunch: How I do one on ones
Hacks to Improve Your Google Search
For the uninitiated, Naukri.com is the most popular and most widely used (particularly in Software sector) job site in India.
Anecdotal evidence, but I know a lot of people that have zero idea about the double-tap home feature.
USA the country is roughly equal to Europe the continent in square kilometers. I think the ability to compare USA the country and Europe the continent ends there, though.
Well, it's also worth noting that the presence of the auction house necessitated that drop rates for good stuff be depressed, as well, since the increased ease of trade means that the effective supply is higher. The effect of this, of course, is that the average player never sees the really good gear in the course of play - if you want good gear, you have to go buy it. Not only is the treasure hunting mechanic short-circuited, it's actually retarded by the presence of the AH -- most folks I know (myself included) quit playing D3 when they figured this out.

The other factor exacerbating this was the gear design in D3 - they drastically boiled down the potential combinations of gear by reducing the number of potential stats on items and baking everything relevant to the character's viability into the gear (rather than using a character progression path independent of gearing), so that while in other loot grinders a piece of loot may be useful but not perfect, in D3, there's basically "has everything I need" and "not useful at all". When you combine this binary gear usefulness with deflated drop rates, you end up with a situation in which most players feel that actually trying to play the game as a treasure hunt is an exercise in futility.
The accident that created an app millionaire
It's a quote: http://homepages.engineering.auckland.ac.nz/~snor007/docs/Ta...
I'm a security noob and I've been thinking about writing an encrypted chat application with Node.js and Socket.io. I have the chat part already done, but not exactly sure where to proceed with the encryption part. I don't want to store data and I want the data that is being received and sent to be encrypted. I was thinking of having users enter a room together with the same key to use for decryption. This could potentially be something I use and I was also considering using SJCL. Am I totally way off in my approach to this...? Suggestions?
keyboard scan codes. Nice, huh.

I started with a fresh slate. It has to be perfect -- God's temple. It's divine intellect, like the Bible.

God says...
hobnob quit uh_huh gosh nevada Russia
Another really good article on distributed systems along the same lines is this one:
http://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distribu...
What Interviewers Wish They Could Tell Every Job Candidate