skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I won't call it luck, but there were certainly circumstances that enabled Minecraft. For example, Notch being born at the right stage of personal computers; the development of Infiniminer. But all successes will have such circumstances, because all events happen within a historical stream.

I see the particular success of Minecraft coming from multiple overlapping individual components or features that are each works of genius. The piling up of so many feats of genius in one place produces runaway success.

One of these features was borrowed from Infiniminer - the idea of the persistent, destructible/constructible world, modeled as a regular 3D grid to make it tractable, relatively simple to code, and easy to understand and manipulate. An innovation here is treating parts of the world like cellular automata at times (water, fire, etc). The next bit of genius is the crafting system. One might say other games had already done crafting, but I'd say none like Minecraft. Minecraft captured an earthy, complete-feeling microcosm of the whole supply chain. It captures something deeply geological, anthropological, and primal. This is the part of the game that, once I had figured out the very basics of wood and stone, my jaw fell on the floor, because I then intuited where Notch was going with it. How comprehensive and primal it was. I'd played plenty of games with 'crafting' before, and this was something very different. More natural, more tiered, more 'realistic' even though still a simplified model compared to the real world.

Next, the very effective use of lighting as a mechanic. The terror of being exposed on the surface, and the claustrophobia in tight underground packages. The breadcrumb trail mechanic of torches. Other games have used light before, but I struggle to think of one that used it quite like this.

Finally, Minecraft has the type of polish that comes from intentional simplicity, so that you don't even notice it. Part of this is very, very good controls. Another is perfect collision detection, made possible by the simple 3D grid structure. Even though this kind of thing is notable for what you don't notice, it comes from Notch being a good game programmer with a good grasp of 3D programming. Not just anyone could have realized these ideas in such a polished way, even if they had the ideas.

Sure, everyone is a product of their environment, the time they live in, their influences and so forth. You can say that about anyone. But with Minecraft, Notch did a perfect storm of right things, and it resonated with millions of people.
I understand & agree, but my point was that conversions would still be accomplished from the existing site, just entered via a static landing page. The conversions weren't coming from the static page, it was just an entryway into the existing site.

Enter = no bounce, Exit = bounce

Correlating stats collected once they leave (click anything) with these static pages is a bit less scientific, so I was interested in hearing the logic.
How open API's are changing the face of Banking
I agree that imbibing alcohol shouldn't be mandatory and rapist are terrible people. but, If the above statement is true and you do choose to drink in public, a large portion of your personal safety is up to you. If you don't feel safe, DO NOT PARTICIPATE. You are a skewed minority if you believe that that social functions with friends AND coworkers are enabling a culture where the logical extension of that culture is your detriment.

If you feel like you are in danger, stay out of danger. You choose your own level of involvement, don't project.
Build your own Google Alerts substitute (Python)
Hi all! I never expected this to reach the front page! Thank you all!
This was a quick writeup of a talk I delivered in our college's Open Source Community (http://pesos.pes.edu).
This was meant for beginners and average C programmers and summarized it through a blog post. I can understand few things do seem a bit different, but the post intends to mainly convey the idea than the exact implementation aspects!

Hope you enjoyed it! Thanks!
Comparing the age of Rails to Java and PHP seems awkward, even more so since Ruby, PHP and Java all appeared in the same year - 1995.

Apart from that Rails and a handful of other frameworks that get you started quickly are a sane choice in the beginning.
Not the case. I'm surely not going to spell out exactly what they are doing wrong publicly in the post.

We are competitors now after all. :)
Indeed. I'm thinking this is less and less secure with every word I hear about it. Here I was imagining it used overlay effects from a system process and some kind of Kerberos certificates or other mechanism to convince the computer to login for real. A fake password screen... sigh. Sounds like the next virus.
Looks like somebody wants to be aqui-hired.
Great attitude. I've known a start-up or two that either pivoted or dropped their project altogether at the news of Google releasing a similar idea.

Google is great at engineering, but the new iteration of Google Maps is proof IMO that they're not a great at products.

With that said, I'm sure y'all at Live Ninja will throw the knock out punch.
Phone apps might, most web apps do not. Hence this post.
This sounds cruel, but Everpix was effectively operating as a Ponzi scheme. They offered services (photo storage) that they couldn't afford unless new money came in. Then the money stopped.
http://www.truffle.io/ is on similar lines but for dating among start up people. It's only launched in Seattle though.

Disclosure: It's my startup :)
Worldwide 48 hour hackathon featuring static web apps.
From the article:

"The reaction was positive for you as a team but weak in terms of whether a $B business could be built."

Wow, fuck these guys. It seems like a lot of good ideas are getting left on the cutting-room floor because people are holding out for the next giant thing.

I hope the crowdfunding thing is enough to help unlock capital for things like this.

(j/k crowdfunded equity is going to be a shitshow)

EDIT:

The folks probably blew some money they didn't need to, but the quote I brought is specifically "Yeah, so, you guys are good but we don't see this being a billion dollar business".

A glorified photobucket doesn't need to be a gigantic billion-dollar business. Most startups which solve simple problems and solve them well are very useful to consumers but aren't going to be massive juggernauts; that doesn't mean that they're bad investments.

Had the investor said, "Yeah, we don't see this becoming a $100M any time soon", maybe that'd make sense. But the additional order of magnitude (one billllllllllion dollars) strikes me as unreasonable.

This is a great example of why everyone thinks we're in a bubble folks.
I agree with you. From what I read it seems they cared more about raising money than making money.
I didn't "prove" anything. I offered up side comment conjecture. At this point I'm unsure what your motives are.
It is exactly that a country like India, with a growing population, that needs to invest in space exploration. We are going to inhabit other planets if we are to continue our species.
I think Live Ninja team realize this and they made this really good PR move. It really deserves upvoting IMHO.
Yeah, pay-per-assist interactive 1:1 video.

Basically IRC.
Well in defense of that - it's easy to underestimate the value of a good, creative, productive workspace.
great stuff!

thanks for sharing.
While the article concentrated on the incomnig AWS cost, if you look at the infographic the expense of AWS is tiny compared to their overall expenses.
If a screenwriterly narrative is moving away from scientific history, how could we move closer? Simply publish historical data in table form? It seems like as soon as you employ verbs that imply causality you are subject to White's analysis here.
Perspective:

"Blogger was a success and quickly gained traction. But unlike their enterprise product, Blogger had no way of making money. Pyra Labs eventually had to lay off all of their staff as the money ran out. For a year, Ev worked on Blogger by himself in order to keep the site online. After a year of struggling to keep the site afloat, Blogger eventually started to make some money. Google would eventually make Blogger it’s first acquisition."

http://culttt.com/2013/09/11/founders-work-review/
Just wanted to add another view on this: wasting a few days creating a perfect design for something that you never even create is not necessarily wasted time. During that time you're thinking through all the different interactions your product could have and getting experience on putting together a good design for when you do need one. It's pretty good training and you learn the same whether you wasted the time or not. It's obviously better to not waste the time, but don't knock yourself short for having done it after the fact since you probably learned a lot of important stuff that will help in the future.
> As a user, why would I want to delegate my key management to you?

The beauty of it is that Scramble encrypts and signs whenever the recipient is also a Scramble address--automatically. The goal is to protect even users who don't know what a "PGP key" is.

(Don't get me wrong, we're planning improvements for power users as well--for example, we want to make it easy to use Scramble over Tor. But the goal really is "Encrypted email for everyone".)

> So then why am I trusting you with my PGP keys?

No, as explained in the writeup, the server stores your private key encrypted with your passphrase. The server never sees your passphrase, or your private key.

We've used a good key derivation function (scrypt)---this makes it difficult to brute-force the password.

In short: Yes, the server stores things so that you get the Gmail experience, sit down at any computer and it just works. No, the server never sees your plaintext private key.

Thanks for the feedback! If I get a chance, I'll paraphrase your questions and add them to the upcoming FAQ.
I play (the old) Starcraft quite well on Linux.
tl;dr: Please buy us.

Having Google enter your space must be one of the most crushing things that can happen to a small company. The feeling these guys felt when they saw the announcement must have been mortifying. Even if you have a superior product, like LiveNinja says they have, Google will outmarket you by so many orders of magnitude you just disappear into nothingness.
Yes, macros are to be fully enclosed but just for a better readability sake I've avoided them here. As I said in my comment above, I mainly intended to convey the idea. I did explain every aspect during the talk though.
I'll make a better effort from next time! Thanks
This. At this rate, Microsoft will do it first to sell more phones.
It seems that being forced to use IE on Windows is more limiting than having to install an extension for whichever browser you choose on whichever OS you choose. If the security protocol were published or reverse-engineered, a clean re-implementation outside of Win32 could take place.
I'm really curious about your use-case. Are you just looking to tweak the behavior of the VCS w.r.t. a timestamp-sensitive build system?

I will say that file timestamps invoke horrible, horrible memories of an employer that used Visual Source[un-]Safe -- a VCS that relied on accurate client system time for history integrity. I.e. the repo was easily corrupted if a client wasn't on synchronized time. Also, race conditions. AFAICT, it met none of the conditions casually denoted by the words "Version Control System".
Come on, HN. Talk about the product, not about the dude's beard. What is this, middle school?
That is a presumptuous attitude, completely wrongheaded.

I have a ton of music and that's what I put on the microSD. If I lose it, no big deal, but it's really nice to be able to have all my music there.
Same here. The last of my 50,000+ photos just finished uploading. Just my luck.
This is an interesting question that Google can probably answer, but I would guess that most people don't download it on the first ad impression.
From the investor perspective, the company is the product. Not the company's product.

Everpix, from a user perspective is a great product. So says this paying customer.
Meh, there is already an idiom for that. It's

#include "data.h"

Where data.h has "extern double array[SIZE][SIZE];" and data.c has the data. I don't see what's clever or useful about this.
Given the probably smallish market for helpouts for a giant like Google, I think we should see Helpouts more like a marketing thing for Hangouts than a full-fledged competitor in this space?
This seems like a little detail that there's no harm in including, especially since you focus so much on macros, and this is kind of macro 101.
Android only has system level BLE as of 4.3 if I'm not mistaken, which has <3% adoption currently per Google.
> I can see no use case for it aside from standards-avoidance.

That's true, but one's platonic idea of the browser does take a backseat to reality.
I'm actually curious about what sort of mistakes Google is obviously making here besides being a competitor to LiveNinja. Did I miss something or is this post just vague trash talking?
In particular, I wouldn't use mercurial without a .hgrc like this:

[ui]
editor = emacs -nw

[extensions]
color =
pager =
record =
graphlog =
purge =
progress =
transplant =

[pager]
pager = LESS='FSRX' less
attend = annotate, cat, diff, export, glog, log, qdiff, heads

histedit and rebase are also useful but not for my usual workflows.
Thanks for sharing all these links! I'm always trying to find new and interesting DB technologies, especially time-series.

Can you share anything of your experiences with kairosdb so far - what's the use case and how has it performed?
KDE4 came out a long time ago, back then 4.0 was derided as a beta-quality clusterfuck but it's come a long way.
It's really nice to see Miami as a tech community getting attention lately.
If you follow the links, it becomes obvious that the post is sarcastic.
Yet you are willing to tell Google what they are doing wrong face to face.

You are clearing shooting to be aquihired
I am in the same boat :( so sad. Loved the product; checked the flashbacks everyday, shared through the easy photomail feature. It was way better built out than Loom and didn't have a storage cap. But yeah, what is that worth when it's not viable? :/
Trending Topic Everyone is Talking About it
GOSPEL ARTIST POSES NUDE!

Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies" and "It Is Time" happens to be two of the titles. She even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. How can this so called "Gospel Artist" be a role model if she's posing news? For more on this story.....Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail. I seen the picture on Google!
Their focus wasn't on the product, it was on living/working in SF. They could have saved a year's worth of AWS payments alone by trimming the fat that comes with wanting to be in a "hip" location.
I legitimately missed the rest of the page and dismissed it as totally broken until I read this comment. Hopefully that emphasizes how right lifeformed is.
Apache CouchDB 1.5.0 released
That was fascinating read. Kudos to the team for opening up their finances and talking about them openly. It brought some scary memories when I was in a similar situation a while ago and had trouble paying AWS bills even though they were much smaller than what you guys have to pay. Startups are indeed hard.

One thing that I've learnt is that market size matters the most in venture backed startups. And if your addressable market is not large enough then product or team are irrelevant.

Regardless, good luck to the team. I'm sure things will work out eventually for everyone.
> They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. They began marketing too late. They failed to effectively position themselves against giants like Apple and Google, who offer fairly robust — and mostly free — Everpix alternatives.

People on HN crap all over MBAs, but these are the types of problems many of them have been trained to solve.
There have been a number of similar startups and companies, so it's a stretch to assume that Google stumbled upon your company and decided to copy it. (Not to say they don't do exactly that -- but they target big proven markets, like Dropbox and Groupon and Facebook.)

It's easy to forget that at any given moment, lots of smart people are independently identifying a market opportunity.

The good news is that the revenue for Google will be so low it will likely be shelved when they put more wood behind fewer arrows. I suggest writing your "We're sorry to see Google Helpouts go, here's how to import your profile" post in advance.
+ Excellent website

+ Really well thought-out interactions (noticing when I download, auto installing to /Applications)

+ Plain-English ToS under creative commons.

- An unsigned latest.zip for downloading, at least use a dmg so you can sign and have more control over the presentation

- Extremely difficult to find Knock on the app store. The app could open a web page or itunes, right now I'm left searching and wading through knock-knock joke apps.

- Making me run software before telling me the price of the software

All in all, you're doing great with presentation, but it has a few minuses. I can't use the software because I don't have an iPhone now, so this is where my review ends.
Everpix shutting down
i know, it sucks being a member of that <3%.
The trick is in opening the app and knocking. The knock releases the advertisement. Similarly, in other use cases, geofencing from the phone means the phone has to think it's nearby to release the signal. Not saying it can't happen, but that's a lot of work. Easier to just hack the device, prompt the user with a fake pin-pad or login screen, or do social engineering and/or gain physical access.

By the way, this attack is much more successful in reverse, for listening to and replaying keycard transactions. I was shocked to discover how little materials would be needed to make a decent amplified antenna.
Thanks for the link. Interesting to see how slow it gets with such a large codebase. From what I could tell, people seem to think the project should be split into a number of smaller projects to fix the issue.

This post brings up one of the major issues with DVCS, if you have a large single repo, it just doesn't play well with git/hg. This is even more apparently if you have a lot of binary objects.
Clue: you don't need the video part.
BTW, your motto is not perfect IMHO.

"Experts" and "expertise" in "Find Experts. Sell Expertise" is too general. I would try to come up with more concrete examples though I realize it's not an easy task.
Yep! That's the game. Side note: my mother wrote the theme music.
"...I’m pretty underwhelmed." pretty much summarizes every single Google asset ever. Don't worry, Helpouts (who the F comes up with those names, Google), will be dumped in the dustbin before long as Google starts finding interest in the next thing that it only haphazardly cares about.
Canonical is now starting to throw its weight around on things like Graphic interfaces (Semi-proprietary Mir vs. Wayland), User Privacy (Selling Unity Lens search results to Amazon), and then there's the Reality-Distortion Field; Shuttleworth is starting to become a little too much like Steve Jobs (harrassing people like the KWin Author), but without all the legal/business chops Jobs had. People are starting to become Ubuntu zealots. Not linux zealots or GNU zealots, or even those interested in Free Software. just zealots of the Ubuntu distribution. And if you say something against it, they'll downvote and flame away in response.

I moved to Arch and Gentoo, personally.

I wish you luck with your microsoft vestment. I'd advise you to diversify, however; Skills only relevant in a (rapidly decreasing) fraction of the computer market will only provide limited rewards in the future.
My thoughts exactly. Frankly I assumed the very reason this was on the front page was because they weren't just doing a fullscreen app.

This is a gimmick, as far as I'm concerned.
Haha, yeah - in that case you're screwed ;-)

Edit: although ideally Prey will still be running. They'll just be able to run amok in the meantime...!
I like this!
Btw some of us have slow internet connections. The video was buffering and stuff I couldn't watch it without manually loading it up separately.

I can't get it to work? Are there minimum requirements for the mac end? I'm using the last 17" mac they made.
Man doesn't explain what Google is doing wrong.. I think OP just wants to let Google know that he is a competitor and considers himself ahead of the game.
HUBS Delivers Superfast Broadband to Scotland
Hey Will,

Kudos and Best of luck. Sometimes the smaller nimble player are the key for a solution, which a decade back Google was, and now you may have that chance. Get it going, make it big and put a $X Billion price on the door.

...and yes don't go for knock out, make them sweat. Cheers!!!
I don't know how the Nexus 5 is, but my Nexus 4 usually lasts for a day and a half and I'm always checking my email, writing messages, browsing the web and stuff like that. If I keep it idle, then it can last for 3 days, but that never happens.

The big problem with smartphones is that if you forget to plug it in at night, the next day you can end up without battery in the middle of the day.

I also have a dumbphone that I keep in my backpack for family emergencies. Battery lasts for at least 7 days, so I only have to remember to charge it once per week.
One of the many challenges in science is that there is no publication outlet for experiments that just didn't pan out. If you do an experiment and don't find statistical significance, there aren't many journals that want to publish your work. That alone helps contribute to a bias toward publishing results that might have been found by chance. If 20 independent researchers test the same hypothesis, and there is no real effect, 1 might find statistical significance. That 1 researcher will get published. The 19 just move on.
Why not LXDE? I've been putting that on my debian VM's when I need a GUI, it seems reasonable.
I really really wished he would have told me what his product does a lot sooner. I don't read LiveNinja's blog every day. In fact, I had never heard of them before today.

I got to "Google copied us, and they suck," and then I simply lost interest.

I have had bigger companies copy my stuff before, sometimes including the typos, so I can feel for his tough position, but this doesn't sit very well.
The negativity in this thread is a perfect exemplar of the say-anything-critical-to-look-smart, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.", poisonous middlebrow dismissal that pg complains about.

This is an amazingly light convenience, with really solid, streamlined execution. People, it's ok to think something is good.
So sad to see this, Everpix guys were doing some cool work.

Coincidentally, my startup (pivotal.ws) was going to be a competitor to Everpix, makes me wonder if the YC rejection letter last night was sent with the knowledge that photo backup and organization is a bad place to be right now.

I shall soldier on though - while no one seems to be getting solid traction, the problem is still out there and I want to solve it for myself at the very least.
Yes, I get your point :)
The post doesn't focus on the preprocessor actually, its just that there's more to explain in it which people usually neglect. So I've somehow written more on the preprocessor which looks like I've focused on it.