skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think so. Games written before 1999 were MUCH higher quality than anything today, even the art was better. I guess since they were written in assembly, they were forced to produce higher quality products or else they would have wasted their time whereas now everything is done in very high level languages and any idiot can make a half ass game and make a few bucks.

About difficulty... take for instance Crysis where it has nothing but graphics and it's almost impossible to die. Any Wii game that has nothing but a new controller. Pretty much every FPS is EXACTLY the same, and have no challenges. And World of Warcraft... way to waste your life. I have to admit some RTS games are very nice, like Red Alert 2 (does that count as modern?). Halo 3 is easy btw... and being hard doesn't necessarily make a game better anyways. Halo games were decent too imo, but older games are still much better.
What about Half Life? System Shock 2? Bioshock? Portal?
What technical reasons are those? I remember hearing this when I was 15 or so, as part of a "Unreal Sux"/"No Quake Sux" debate. (I was observing) It didn't make any sense to me then, nor does it now, how a 3d graphics engine could be limited in color palette to just, say, brown. And I distinctly remember the color blue showing up in that game anyway...
Perhaps. I feel, though, that turning a promotional vehicle into something they expect people to pay for is not the way to go. The value is in the promotion.

In my experience, people don't want nudges turned into the product. They like the nudge, and taking that nudge away is quite often a turnoff.
Became?
Most games started out as consumables. Adventure wasn't made with a mind to the future if you catch my drift.

Even several board games are made with a consumable nature. Trivial Pursuit, for instance, will become very boring if you play long enough to have memorized most of the cards. The only solution is to buy new packs of cards.

It's also why Starcraft still enjoys immense popularity despite being over 10 years old. The story mission is only a side note to the multiplayer aspect. There is no answer, no pre-determined path you are taking. Any game with a narrative and no multiplayer aspect is essential a consumable product.
I don't think that's what he was saying. I think he's talking about services such as Grooveshark and Hulu.

having access to most things i want to enjoy freely and legally online to stream.
Who else sees this as a challenge to either find a more annoying site, or make one?
If anyones looking for an old school frustratingly hard yet incredibly rewarding game, I would like to nominate ninja gaiden for the xbox. It is incredibly hard, yet always feels fair, and rewards clever strategy rather than /played time. I'd love to hear others recommendations for similarly hard games.
And Scientific Researchers prefer topics that grab headlines to more worthy research.

From :: http://www.twin-research.ac.uk/publications.html

Research::

* Emotional intelligence and its association with orgasmic frequency in women

Result ::

* Metro.co.uk :: Intelligent women enjoy more sex

http://www.metro.co.uk/metrosexual/article.html?Intelligent_...
I imagine the EU may make Windows present a choice of non-IE browsers to use, so no download is required.
I suppose it is just going to get worse and worse. We will see run away selection if women continue to choose arrogance over substance.
This is an expression of it, certainly... Facebook, to users, had a very clear idea of what it was but Facebook the company doesn't know who it is and keeps trying to force changes.
> System Shock 2

Thanks... there goes my day.
I completely agree. Billboard is completely out to lunch on this one.

I'm just saying that in general, paid content is not necessarily a bad business plan-- remember, a lot of folks thought that cable TV would sink because "why pay for TV when you can get it for free?"
I wonder if art directors purposefully choose darkness, or maybe they simply stumbled upon it by experimenting? "We this game to look realistic, and out of all of our mock-ups, darkness wins."

Many Sega games have a very specific look to them that's colorful. Jet Set Radio Future (Xbox) was an extremely vibrant game. Most Nintendo games are too. Though some of those types of games tend to be more cartoonist-looking than realistic-looking.

How about special effects in movies? They use similar technology that's used in video games. Is there a trend here that's more into dark/brown/gray?
Anchoring doesn't seem to account for the effect here.
Anchoring (another term is mental accounting) says that when the price range of an object is high, consumers don't mind a $1 change in price as much as when the prices are low. But this doesn't explain why stores wouldn't just charge $1 more for the base system, versus stuffing it into profits on the cable.

At least part of the effect seems to be from consumers merely not accounting for the cost of the cable when deciding when to buy the TV.

As mentioned in the article, its very similar to why printers are cheap but ink is expensive, and why credit cards advertise great features and profit on high hidden fees.
When consumers pay a great deal of attention to a certain sticker price, that sticker price will fall and stores will stuff profits instead into areas when consumers don't think as much about.
HDMI is digital and component (with "RCA" connectors) is analog. Why do you prefer analog to digital for video transmission? Unfortunately, yes, HDMI has HDCP. I try to use DVI or mini-DVI where possible.
Mashable The New Tech Blog #1, Passes TechCrunch
My point was that it was odd to repeat a word in two different spellings in the same sentence, unless you have a point in doing so. Different strokes, I suppose: some favor "favor"; others favour "favour".
If the stores sell literally nothing but the expensive cables, is this anchoring, or is it simply cartel pricing? You need the cable to use the player, and nobody wants to wait 3 days after they make an impulse purchase to actually use it.
There is research suggesting that when there is 80% or more overlap in requirements it makes sense to use a library and when there is 20% or more divergence it makes sense to write your own code. Obviously there's no precise way to measure such divergence, but I'd say that rule of thumb sounds about right intuitively.

(I read about this in Robert Glass' Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.)
We must also consider the fact that big box stores rarely make good margins on high-end purchases. It is the small things like cables and accessories where they have high profit margins to make up for selling larger appliances at very low margins.
Cell Shading makes colors easier cause its not trying to be realistic.
What about "I'd google it"?
It doesn't sound crazy at all. This (particularly in the software development world) is exactly the sort of situation I had in mind when I read and posted the article. It seems to be a particularly acute problem in an industry where those responsible for who gets promoted know little about the technology involved.
Giant hedge fund cracks down on investors forwarding reports
Next Week, Opera Claims It Will “Reinvent The Web”
Palm Pre is shipping GPL incompliant
I used to be a die-hard Squid aficionado too.

Now I used Varnish, and it's awesome. Far more powerful than Squid, and massively better performance too. Want to drop cookies from some requests/replies? Simple. Want to direct some types of traffic to a different set of backends? Simple.

It's possible to do all these things with Squid using external helpers too, but Varnish makes it so much easier, I'd never go back for a reverse proxy cache.
Ah, but security isn't windows-specific. It's essential if you want to use anybody's APIs that require SSL (and sometimes have broken certs). And it doesn't work in Mono today.

This could possibly be fixed by now, but last I tried, the C# sample code to interact with Amazon S3 didn't run under Mono.
They play at least 4 games (or 5, given the current situation), maybe that shall reflect in the word. And yes, I am aware that the NHL, too, has a best-of-seven format.
Article summary: "Games have become easier over time to appeal to a broader audience. Players no longer have to spend days polishing perfect timing to get perfect moves in a side-scrolling platform game, as they formerly had to do just to get past the first level."

Games trade off challenge and frustration. In a serious competitive pursuit, the challenge becomes more important, as does the dedication to advance to the next level. In video games, though, I sure don't enjoy the frustration of playing the same battle over and over again (Baldur's Gate 2, I'm looking at you --- so much potential, yet I can't force myself to get more than half-way through Chapter 1).
These two are inversely proportional in most cases.
I used to love video games when I first got my own PC. In fact, I got into programming just so I could build my own games (the fact that I never even tried is a completely different story).

Some of my favorite games used to be the tycoon games. I can clearly remember gems like Caesar 3, Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2, SimCity, Civ3 etc. Now, the focus has shifted to storylines and graphics. No, I don't want to waste 15 minutes of my gaming time looking at your silly cutscene. I don't want to waste an hour getting used to your horribly complex interface. All I want to do is kick some alien ass, build a theme park, kill some Romans, conquer the world, do whatever and then get back to work.

Although I have stopped keeping up with developments in the gaming world, but I do look at a few games from time to time. Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 has fireworks and what not. The newer version of SimCity allows you to drive through the town. Those are nice add-ons, but they add nothing of value to the gameplay. The new Civilization looks so complex that I gave up on it after about 10 minutes of play.

Bioshock? Crysis? Portal? Gimme a break. I, for one, didn't find anything new or innovative about them. But then again, I only watched the videos, read the reviews and looked at forum posts discussing those games. I'm sure I'm not the best judge.
You can't sell your beer cozy "company" like you can a successful startup.
We're running C# code, and increasingly some F#, but not at all interested in taking desktop or web applications from Windows and dropping them onto Macs or Linux.

We're historically a microsoft shop but recently (in the last 18 months or so) have started running linux backend servers for many of our services running on EC2. If I wanted to be buzzword compliant I'm sure I could come up with some string of cloud nonsense to describe it.

We have something that looks kinda like Hadoop crossed with an app server that we can deploy components in.

I'd be happier with a solid final version of Mono.Simd rather than slavishly filling in any missing parts of older .net.
I don't agree with the author, but games DID get a little less interesting around that time, but the reason was actually 3dfx.

In my opinion, fixed function triangle rasterizers killed a lot of the wonder and excitement that used to come with each game release. Before that, it was thrilling to see what people like Carmack were going to come up with next.

Hope is not lost, though. One word: Larrabee
From the comments:

I know, from personal experience (my dad has a setup), that on sufficiently high end systems (tube amps, premium quality vinyl records, $5000 turntables), the cables make a difference. Some of the cables are hand made, and have markets of less than 1000 buyers. They really do sound different though.

Woohoo, expectation bias in action.

Back on topic, a neat trick is to go to your friendly low margin neighbourhood computer store; they tend to have every cable you could possibly imagine for $10 or less.
I stole your images, put them back or I will call a lawyer?
Dell etc would probably have the stuff installed on all new computers.
According to Webster:

cockiness: boldly or brashly self-confident

confidence: a: a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances <had perfect confidence in her ability to succeed> <met the risk with brash confidence> b: faith or belief that one will act in a right, proper, or effective way <have confidence in a leader>

Big difference.

On many technical issues, confidence is necessary but not sufficient. Cockiness, OTOH, is often used when confidence doesn't exist (see "poser").
More to the point, until someone/some intellectual body comes up with a credible replacement for IP (as we now know it) that precludes the middlemen and rentiers from profiting disproportionately from their clients hard work all this talk about IP and it's protection/abuse isn't going to do much more than stir an already seething cauldron of personal opinions half-heard and badly retold.
I try to use DVI or mini-DVI where possible.

Hear hear, in fact I refuse to buy anything that won't accept proper computer inputs. Which reminds me - any TVs have DisplayPort yet?
Sniffing Browser History with No Javascript
Point well taken. I usually use a simple request to show interest in a new category, and hope someone interested gets involved. My interest is in something slightly more complicated than the turnkey sites that are out there, as well as more of a helpful tool to entrepreneurs and advertisers - the thesis of the idea is best represented by an "ornot script" but it goes beyond another "me too" site that already exists. My thoughts of adding value using something that is fairly widespread may be futile though.
The belgian Government publishes source code for election software
Actually, mutable cons cells are in PLT, they're just created using mcons instead of cons, and accessed with mcar/mcdr. While this does make porting code a bit difficult, it's a very old change - Matthew's original blog post on the subject is dated from end-2007:

http://blog.plt-scheme.org/2007/11/getting-rid-of-set-car-an...
I've seen Mono used to great effect in the Unity 3D game engine (http://unity3d.com/). Game engines are one of those interesting spaces where speed matters quite a bit, but so does ease of modification; you want your developers to be comfortable enough to implement whatever crazy ideas are designed up for game mechanics, and you need to be able to make sweeping changes to game logic quickly. But you need those implementations to be fast as well. With its multi-language support and JIT-compiled nature, Mono seems to sit at an interesting saddle-point that makes it attractive to applications like this. It's also cross-platform compilable, which in this age of multiple consoles-plus-PC-plus-mobile platforms is extremely attractive.

I couldn't tell you why they wouldn't use Java, however.
I definitely disagree w/ that, there are a lot of cocky arrogant people who are also extremely smart too. It's just about finding the balance.
this is going to be my favorite thing i read all year. i just know it. if this turns out to be fake, please don't tell me. i don't want to know. i just want to think back on this and remember it like childhood- the land of summer vacations that stretched out to the horizon as far as the eye could see.
How-To: Web server on a business card
So much hate. No wonder you don't think you can convince anyone - you hate them too much.
France constitution council: Access to the internet is a basic human right
Isn't PageRank deprecated by Google?
I found his example rant informative:

http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/...
I'm sure I've seen this somewhere before.
Knowthecar- Upcoming Indian Cars Blog
This Blog Content awesome info about upcoming Indian cars. and give such sweet and short information about upcoming indian cars.
That's exactly what he was doing. The codebase had reached the point where it was overly complex, and he wanted to simplify the design. If look at his conclusion he only refers to making design decisions, not writing new code or designing algorithms.
Yeah - likewise, if I've already spent $400 on a player, the sales pitch "you've made such a good investment in this piece of equipment, why ruin it all with cheap cabling" seems to sell itself.
Persuasive Words That Build Rapport
That explains the popularity of talk radio.
Totally agree. People love to chest-thump and talk about how everything was better when they were young. Bullshit.
Xbox had a couple of difficult gems. Try Gunvalkerie or Panzer Dragoon Orta on the hardest difficulty.

I remember everyone saying Ninja Gaiden for Xbox was this massively hard game, but I remember beating it without too many problems. It was downright easy compared to the original Ninja Gaiden series (1-3).
At Linuxcare, we had these business-card sized CD's with mini Linux distributions on them. They were quite cool, and very popular.
yeah this is very old
It's definitely a generational thing. I hear what the author is saying as we're probably the same age (original Ninja Gaiden is my all time favorite game). As others have said, though, you don't remember how much crap you had to wade through on the NES. For every Faxanadu, there were a dozen Indiana Jones & the Temple of Dooms. For every Ninja Gaiden or Bad Dudes, there were twenty Fist of the North Stars. It's like thinking that in the 70s on the radio, it was all Led Zeppelin and no Foghat.
it's been kicking around since some time in 2006 :) I cant dig out the original source though.
True. This sentence discredits the entire article. Men never buy lottery tickets.
A histogram shows a distribution of values. This just looks like a bar graph. Still useful, but I don't see how it's a histogram.
user of cli knows 'alternative package exists and can be installed for free' = true nearly 100% of the time;

user of browser knows 'alternative ...';; returns "distinctions packages missing';
Sounds like the author used to be an avid gamer that has only really skimmed over modern games.
Yes! Getting enough sleep is the #1 productivity enhancer, IMHO. All of the other tips and techniques are smaller terms in the equation.

The insidious thing about sleep deprivation is that people can be measurably more stupid, yet feel like "oh I'm just a bit tired -- I'll have a coffee".
Newly discovered snow roots are 'evolutionary phenomenon'
Baloney. Many of us who do want better threading in python still prefer message passing and processes. That's nothing new. Different tools work well for different jobs.
Charging people directly is definitely a growing niche, but I do believe it's still a niche and likely to remain one.

There's far more money to be had in advertising than directly, so don't ignore it ;)
Every medium has these articles.
They essentially boil down to: "everything was cooler when this was a smaller, more dedicated crowd".

Well, guess what? There -are- still games out there for those who preferred gaming in the 90s. They just don't line up with what's popular anymore because the audience shifted.
Humans don't prefer cockiness to expertise, they just have a hard time differentiating between the two.

If human beings can't recognize nuanced, tentative conclusions as a sign of expertise, they definitely have a problem.
In a statically typed OO language, why not have an implicitly created MissingObject? Whenever you define a class Foo, you automatically get MissingFoo for which you must define any methods that Foo understands.
> I couldn't tell you why they wouldn't use Java, however.

Visual Studio and value types come to mind.
How Europeans Do Layoffs
I just bought an upscaling DVD player for my son because I was tired of wiping down the PS3. The cheapest one came with DVD player, quick start guide, remote and batteries. Cables?? you're gonna pay extra for that. Of course the retailer had only the most expensive cables (it didn't matter, component, composite, HDMI) in stock. And since I was going to tell my son he was going to have to wait up to a week before he could watch his movies I felt compelled to buy the heavily marked up cables in the store.

Fact is cables are the new print cartridges. I won't be surprised when CE devices only come with a proprietary power cable.
blatant lies from that CTO. He knows the site is deceiving.
He mentions Okami in the comments -- I don't think that's quite dadaist but it's certainly not photorealistic.
I don't think people would have minded as much if IE weren't the worst browser ever created. Add to that the fact that Microsoft abandoned IE for years, leaving everyone high and dry.
my guess is that we will see an almost immediate fragmentation of the internet.

Are you saying that we haven't seen that already?
I wish I could find the comic (I think it was on salon.com) which stated that the best things were made when you were 14. Most people feel this way about music. It is inevitable that people feel the same about video games.
Great but I would be really interested if someone could demonstrate an application deriving some real world use out of these information. Seen many demos of this browser sniffing but is any one using it for real?
Summary: Act like simple generalizations are somehow profound because they don't explicitly include the word "probably".
Smalltalk, in normal operation, never crashes when an unexpected nil is encountered. An exception is thrown, but this is actually just more bog-standard Smalltalk code running normally. (You can get a hard crash if you're doing something out of the ordinary, like calling out to a DLL. One "out of the ordinary" snippet that I like: "Semaphore allInstances do: [ :each | each release]")

If you had an OO language mandating a Missing version of every type you define, then you can guarantee that you will fail at compile time. This has a better granularity than requiring the programmer to catch exceptions. The compiler can tell you which methods you need to implement, and the IDE could even scaffold them for you!
I could be mis-remembering, but I think Quake started out with a software renderer that operated in VGA mode. So the game has a 256 color palette.
it could be useful in targeting ads, i.e. tracking users other website habits to show them much more relevant ads.

Let's say HN has ads. And it sees that you just came from a Python tutorial site. Instead of showing you a random programming book, the ad would show you a series of Python books.
Some guys who are cocky like that are insanely driven to justify their cockiness. I'm sure that's exactly what your VP was looking for: a classic driven, workaholic, alpha male executive.

This is an interesting topic from a geeky point of view, since geeks tend to be the opposite of cocky guys like this. Geeks tend to be meek and have bad posture and avoid boasting. The downside of this is that some geeks manage to avoid ever being in a position where they have to stretch themselves to live up to their boasting. Competition and arrogance drive a lot of achievement.
> Art is not about making more realistic copies.

Indeed, but maybe it's just that (certain) games and film are getting closer. Films use realistic special effects to get you to suspend disbelief when the setting includes magic or aliens. We have sci-fi and horror games that try to evoke emotions and senses of otherness/horror, and I think the photorealistic approach does that more effectively.
Wait...

I thought my startup was going to reinvent the web...
I agree. I think that you can put the tags into CSS classes and avoid most of the structure. My response got a bit lengthy, so I made it a post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=654730
Something's Got To Give