skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read the actual report from the professor prepublication, and that is not at all how I understand it.

Please correct me if I am misunderstanding, but he was killing "Villains" as a "Hero" character, at least as his primary personna. He did use "alts" for further testing and just to enjoy the game as well. He did not use glitches or bugs. He did exploit the rules to their fullest, but in most truly competitive games that is expected.

He did kill "Villains" that were not looking for PVP, but he only did so in zones that were designed (or at least had the stated purpose) of being designated PVP areas. I do not play "City of Heroes" or any other MMORPG currently but my understanding from his description of the zone is that at least by the stated purpose anyone in those zones should expected to be attacked.

As I understand it, he was accurately roleplaying a "Hero", albiet a ruthless one.
Charming Python: Distributing computing with RPyC
In someways http://www.fitbit.com/ is similar, with the pro that it'd be harder to cheat for some "healthy tasks," though not impossible.
Robo-bats with metal muscles may be next generation of remote control flyers
Actually, he was killing villains, not heroes. He was on the heroes team, therefore technically he was not killing his teammates.

Having said that, however, he did not engage villains in combat, but rather teleport them to a kill zone. That's unethical, for sure. Had he simply engaged villains, I'd see nothing wrong with that. If other players don't want to kill villains, even if that's their job as heroes, that's their problem.
if language == python:

self.smile()
> renamed libmixalot-mpg123, with these changes. The 64-bit binary doesn't have any of these problems, and should Just Work, but you have to provide your own libmpg123 as before.

I don't think he can lie. That's a big but.
Wow, the Birdman wrote a book?
Well you can click the logo on the right to get back home. But I agree; I reflexively looked at the top left for their logo.
Thanks for the summary!

And, ah yes, farming! I think I love a player who disrupts that disgustingly boring cycle that ruins the interest in most online worlds. No wonder they hated him, he disrupted their farming!
Sorry, I had no idea. Try this link.

http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/jobseeker/tools/ept/printallept.htm...

If that doesn't work, I'll just cut & paste it here (It's not long.)
You can rationalize his behavior however you like, but it's not socially acceptable to purposefully ruin people's time in a game designed to be fun.

The majority is clearly right to enforce their rules in this instance, since playing by the professor's rules ("anything goes") would make the game not at all fun.
You'll also notice that in his example of the Allman style, each code block starts with a comment. In my experience as an Allman formatter, I feel pretty much compelled to comment even the simplest code blocks, just so that it doesn't look stupid, thus increasing the number of lines of code even further.
Just out of curiosity - have you ever played any MMORPGs?
You should combine your JavaScript.

Also, the querystring timestamps break caching in some proxies. It's a bit of a pain, but it's best to integrate the timestamp into the filename.
3 ways the brain creates meaning: Tom Wujec on TED.com
In complexity theory, n is based on the length of the binary encoding of the input, NOT the decimal value as was used here. Therefore, the x-axis should be based on n = log2(k), for each number k.

Overlooking this would lead one to believe there are known algorithms that solve NP-C problems in polynomial time (e.g., knapsack problem can be solved in polynomial time with respect to the decimal values of its inputs, but exponential with respect to the length of the binary encoding).
But they did fix the loophole, which means they weren't supporting what he was doing, and didn't want other people to do it. I'm not familiar with their banning policy, but like I said, trying any cute tricks like that in other MMO communities can certainly get you banned.
It's my understanding that this won't work exactly as you'd expect under Linux. If you try to allocate more memory than is available, Linux can return a non-NULL pointer and hope that you don't try to use it:

http://alanreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/turning-off-over-...
Visual modeling: Is it worth it? An example...
Some thoughts about visual modeling / illustrative programming (illustrated with boobs ;-)
I saw him speak 1992.

He might be a bit weird, but arguably... RMS changed the world to both a better and a more interesting place.

When thinking about it, so did Miguel de Icaza... :-)
ktharavaad (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ktharavaad), the user who said he could clone SO in a weekend (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501), hasn't commented on HN since before the weekend (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ktharavaad), so I'm guessing he learnt his lesson.

That said, I think people are making too big a deal out of this. Even the best of us occasionally end up shooting comments from the hip without thinking about them first.
I think it's great that your framework is 100% tested. I hold my iPhone toolkit (ZergSupport) to the same standard.

The part I wasn't happy about was that you need 8000 lines of tests for 3000 lines of code. Without having actually read your code, these numbers make me think that your framework makes testing difficult. I strive to keep my tests smaller than the code they're testing, and I'm sad when that fails.

Perhaps it's better to advertise 100% code coverage, rather than say that tests are 72% of your codebase?

Re: the previous TDD comments... TDD is supposed to make you think about tests, so when you write the main code it's more testable. TDD projects supposedly have smaller tests. Disclaimer: I haven't grasped TDD yet.
Some full size screenshots would be good to have on the Tour page rather than the current lengthy text descriptions. After skimming through the whole tour, I still don't have a sense of whether or not your app is better than Basecamp.
Why an economic collapse is likely imminent
Open Source iPhone Development: XML to the Rescue?
I like his point about focus in new companies. Do one thing, make it work. When it does, use your expanding group of resources to add on.

I don't understand his distinction between companies and features. If you have a product that can stand on its own, clearly a business can be built around it. But I don't think selling features that will contribute to a larger product is any less legitimate of a business. A hardware store can be a very healthy business even though a bolt isn't very useful until it's attached to something larger.
I have a soft spot for books that I can read on my BlackBerry. SICP, The Art of Unix Programming, Software Engineering for Internet Applications, SQL for Web Nerds, Practical Common Lisp, Dive Into Python, now Simply Scheme.

If only the Handbook of Applied Cryptography had their chapters in HTML.
Yes, mostly FFXI
Pretty sure the contrast is on purpose, for humorous effect. It's just not very funny.
Customer Development Fireside Chat
Kanban just means "visual card" or "sign", but it's a name for a technique used in lean software practices. (Specifically, the board display in Zen is called a "kanban board".) It comes from the JIT inventory system of the Toyota Production System.

More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development
Out of beta? More importantly, who do I call if I have a problem with my Gmail account?
Actually I never thought of it that way. :)
7) log files record all traffic, even if javascript is disabled

You can have a tracking pixel in noscript tags as backup.
"It sounds to me like he was killing his own teammates... He was killing people for which "PvP mode was not enabled"."

I don't think that's right. The original nola.com article (linked to in this one) says: "Eventually, according to the game's design, the players -- who can choose to play as either heroes or villains -- gain access into an area where they should battle each other. The battles are designed to distinguish the most skilled players."

So he plays PvP.

Also, the point of the game (or at least its original concept) was that you have Heroes and Villains and the two factions fight each other. He played as a Hero and fought Villains. As you're supposed to.

The issue is that most players don't want to do that, so instead Heroes become friends with Villains, team up and mix socially.

When this guy comes along and griefs Villains (using underhanded but not illegal methods) he's playing by the rules of the game but not by the social contract of its inhabitants. Their reaction is what makes it interesting.
It's not up to you to decide how people should enjoy a game, is it? If the majority of the players feel that someone's behavior is impacting their enjoyment then arguably you are in the wrong, as after all, people sign on to the game to have fun, and being killed without defense is probably not fun to most people. So, whether it was explicitly allowed by some written rules somewhere, arguably his behavior was counterproductive to the aims of the customers and I'm surprised the company let him get away with it as long as he did.

In one MMO game I've played, they had very strict rules about this sort of behavior. Essentially, their position was that "if you, through a bug or glitch or undocumented function find yourself being able to do things that you arguably should have figured out was not intended, and you take advantage of this in the game, you are subject to a lifetime ban without warning."
This feels like it has to do more with the changing culture at Google. A beta label would not have lasted this long at a company like Microsoft because the business team would not even consider it. They would have thought about the implications of companies hesitating to use beta software. I really liked google's gung ho techhead culture personally. I hope they find the right balance and not push their engineers into too much rigidity.
i love that idea. covers all the bases and keeps it simple.
I started watching SICP lectures, they're much easier to absorb than book :)
Work Smarter Using iPhone Push Notifications
> the eternal beta syndrom (like Gmail).

Of all days to make that claim... :)
Yeah, there are definitely opportunities for performance tweaks. I left it as-is until I can integrate it into our build process.
I believe that. Not even sure how long that professors griefing was allowed to continue. It sounds as if he primarily had one trick he used, which should have been fixed after a while.

Or if it can't be fixed "physically", then maybe there should be rules and misbehaving players should be evicted.

I hope they won't fix Diablo 3 so much that it becomes boring.
Forget land speed records.

My point was that 1920s cars would be perfectly adequate at maintaining the maximum legal speed on nearly any modern US road. And mileage has scarcely improved at all.
CSS Sprites are Stupid - Let's Use Archives Instead (Firefox Demo)
Who Killed California's Economy? 5 Suspects
My kernel is pure .NET, but it will most likely never be a complete implementation. Why? Because many parts of it (e.g. the file stream APIs) are completely extraneous with my design. It may eventually have the unimplemented parts as wrappers for other components, but I find it highly unlikely it'll ever be a completely standards-compliant implementation.
And yet you're exactly missing the point, the paid offering was also marked as beta. There wasn't a non-beta version.
"The longest program I have ever written was for a CS lab, and I got extra credit for it because I am the awesome."

Did you mean to write "I am the awesome"? Because I swear I heard that same phrase from notable CS kids at CMU.
Outliers like Google are the exception. Not the Rule. There are very few exceptions to a over used rule.
The UI is really clean, and the workflow seems pretty straighforward. Great job!

The "Add Story" sidebar doesn't render properly for me when hints are enabled (FF 3.5, Windows 7). The submit button is hidden behind the hint bar -- maybe the sidebar could be shorter so it's not covered by the hint.
Who Killed California's Economy?
There are two kinds of student: those with ability, and those who need lectures.
Combine advantages of crunch time and a regular schedule
works just fine for me.
Thanks... and yeah, several others have said that as well. The hint panel was meant to be an overlay, but it does tend to get in the way. I'll have to tweak it. :)
I'm 99% sure we're using FPS and not Simple Pay. We're using the Remit gem (tylerhunt-remit on github), and I helped write portions of it. This was a while back, before they even announced Simple Pay or broke the API doc up into N separate docs. Man, that's irritating.

It just irritates me that pretty much everything has to be done via the API. Like I said, 5-10% of our transactions fail, meaning like 1 or 2 a week. If I could inspect the error and handle it from the console it would be much simpler than writing a ton more code for it. FPS-related code is brittle and takes a long time to test, since there are so many error/failure conditions to account for.

Sure, manually handling everything doesn't scale, but I'll deal with that when we're processing 1000s of payments instead of 10s.

Plus, I think it's pretty ridiculous that they won't give out the reason why it failed. Sure, I can write some more code to query the transaction status and error messages, but that means more code That's what I've found with FPS. Everything I do requires way more code than seems reasonable.

If the PayPal API can do even 1/2 of what it claims and is friendlier than FPS, I would drop FPS like a hot potato.
You should prolly update your copyright...
since the last line is 31415

That would be brute force,,,
They signed up to play heroes vs villains. That's what they got. They wanted to farm experience points and socialize, but it was harder than they wanted it to be because someone else was following the rules and using their own skills to defeat them.

The rules of the game, in this case, are essentially the bill of rights, protecting the minority from the majority. The majority appealed and got some changes to the rules, but the fundamentals mostly stayed the same, and individual players can continue playing as the professor did, if they wish, regardless of the desire of other players to conduct boring activities like build up points by killing NPCs.

Perhaps the people who want to do this safely should petition the developer for some NPC-killing only zone. Oh, but then the game would really be ruined. LOL, there's got to be some danger to simply building up points in a game like this.

I really wish more people would question the damage being done by this type of common but fantasy-killing majority behavior to the original intent and storyline in MMO games.
On the landing page the headers don't actually say much – the real lines are underneath, which I didn't read while skimming. Instead of:

"Enhances visibility and communication" -> "Make it easy to understand the status of your project at a glance"

"Simple and flexible" doesn't really have any meat in it. See Kawasaki's opposite rule – your competition doesn't describe their product as "Complicated and rigid."

"Easy to get started" -> "Get started in seconds"

Specific claims add a lot more punch and right now they're ousted from prominent positioning by phrases that don't say much.
Agreed; I would definitely get rid of that part. Zen isn't so much about crushing others. I feel like it should be a requirement to study a philosophy before using it to promote a product.

Edit: Signed up; looked around; certainly appears to be a solid product. I kinda like the story-board style stuff. Good luck! :)
This is more than just an updated .gif, this is Google committing itself to its product. Good to see.
Buy every iPhone app for $144,326.06
Handling multiple pollers when using Activemessaging and ActiveMQ
The dual sensing and flexing feature of the actuator material seems the most useful development here in terms of simplifying Micro UAV systems. Not having to integrate a completely separate system that determines and confirms the mechanical angle of the control surfaces of the vehicle seems like a big step forward.
I'm not familiar with City of Heroes.

According to the article, all the action took place in an area where heroes and villains are supposed to be dueling each other, but the social norm was to not do that.

If that really is the case, why get mad at a guy who's fighting villains in an area that's all about heroes and villains fighting? Or was that aspect misrepresented in the article?

I don't have an opinion; I'm asking questions because I don't have any direct experience in the game.
Of course it's better! :D Kidding. Yeah, actually, we launched the marketing site almost a month ago to build buzz before the launch, and since parts of the application weren't finished, the screenshots are outdated. I need to take the shots again and sprinkle them around the site.
Consider how destructive this kind of attitude is toward the programming profession. By trivializing any project, a programmer is by extension making it seem like programming is easier, and cheaper, than it really is. What starts out as an ego-pumping "hey, I'm smarter than THAT person." turns into a devaluation of the work we all do, all to fulfill some desire for acceptance among non-technical peers. You wouldn't pick the brain surgeon that told you he could get the job done in a fraction of the time his colleagues could muster.
Both systems have gone through a transition from an amateur cms/portal system, which has matured over time. Drupal has come a lot further in this process that Joomla has, which means that today it's closer to be a general purpose framework. It still holds some of its heritage, so you'll probably find it somewhere in between Joomla and RoR. That's not a bad thing, if what you're building is some kind of cms.

Compared to other general purpose frameworks, Drupal has a lot of stuff out-of-the-box, and it's quite easy to get in to. The community has been gaining a lot of followers recently and in some areas it is becoming the cms of choice for larger businesses. It's especially popular in the news paper world.

Judging from my observations, I would say that Drupal is a much more mature system that Joomla is (although I must admit I have limited experience with Joomla). I think they are about equal in how easy they are to learn. Both of them are fairly low-tech, procedural systems. I would pick Drupal of the two.
How Disney Innovates
Argonne National Laboratory's broken implementation of SHA1
Sun Valley Stress: What’s a Media Mogul To Do?
Patent Heat-map mashup
I dunno, there are some nifty things that you can't turn into companies. Sure there are things that some people thought was too small but turned out to be significant, yet for each one of those, there are 1000 other startups that thought their idea had a business plan, but didn't.

Case in point: I have an idea for a cell phone program to set the ringtone volume relative to the background noise (the ring is loud when your surroundings are loud, and quiet when your surroundings are quiet). It'd be an awesome feature to have on cell phones, but there's really nothing to sell.

I think it's much less about the idea you have for the product, but much more about the business plan you use to make money.
All very good points. I'll take another look at our features page to see if we can improve.
I completely agree with this, that's the first thing I thought. I immediately search for a sample site or demo account that's a lot quicker for me than reading all that text. Or if not a demo at least a concise screencast.
Ask HN: What websites do you regularly visit?
A few years ago a friend introduced me to artsandlettersdaily.com and I've been addicted since. Recently it got me thinking, what interesting (SFW!) sites might the folks at HN be visiting that I am missing out on?

Here is my list to get the discussion started. Not a very interesting one I'm afraid!

- slashdot.org

- salon.com

- rediff.com

- artsandlettersdaily.com

- reddit.com

- joelonsoftware.com

- Hacker News

Then there is a set of secondary sites, such as Seth Godin, Paul Graham, Onion news etc, that I don't visit that often. I of course check my web mail several times in a day.

So.. what are your frequently visited web sites?
Improving jQuery’s JSON performance and security
Ask HN: Startup vs Girlfriend
I'm in a kind of dilemma...

I'm 25, computer engineer with masters. I have a day job, I also have a halftime startup. I also have french lessons at saturdays. In the startup, we have several ambitious projects in execution. I enjoy my work (although sometimes I recognize myself as feeling exhausted...), however as I come from a mid class (more towards poor) family, I have a strong perception (with evidence) of that if I do hard work I can achieve some moderate level of wealth. I really did like my relationship with my girlfriend, but lately she keeps saying about how little time I dedicate to herself, and how my main interest had been turned on the startup success...

I admit the quality of our relationship has been seriously lowered, and I feel very sad on both of us. I imagined a future with her. I really love her but according to her expectations (reasonable after all) my dedication is not enough.

I don't know what to do. What should I do? should I focus more on my gf and quit my aspirations of becoming "rich" in the near future (with high costs like losing her)? or should I prefer a more balanced lifestyle with lower expectations?

Please some experienced advice would be grateful.

[ EDIT ]

She was involved on the startup with ideas and support, and formally too with 33% of representation and legal paperwork.
A couple of days ago she told me she want to leave the thing because my lack of commitment with her. Her argument was a sort of "given that you aren't going to anywhere with me, I want to quit of the startup"
I researched this question thoroughly earlier this year and decided that C was the best language for AI. For a few reasons:

a) You can find examples of all the standard AI algorithms online

b) It doesn't get much faster then C

c) There is a huge C community so you'll be able to find more developers easily if the project takes off (the main drawback of LISP)
I think the point of the question is, "Does this fit into a vision for product(s) that a company can be built around?" The answer for many of the twitter-feature startups is obviously NO. So its an important question for many people to ask.
I agree with you with a caveat. Everything you say is absolutely true, but remember that many startups are highly focused on conserving cash, and moreso than hacker time.

The retail price (I know discounts can be negotiated, but for a point of reference...) for MS SQL Server Standard edition is $5000, enterprise edition is $25000. I have never had to research Oracle prices but I understand they run even higher.

I worked as an MS SQL Server DBA for a while for a mid-sized company, and I wrote and employed some "ugly hacks" to emulate some of the Enterprise features because management at the time was unwilling/unable to pay for Enterprise Edition.
While the concept of the brand is definitely a reference to Zen Buddhism, the name actually comes from the japanese word "kaizen" -- which is used in lean processes to mean "continuous improvement".

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