skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My hunch is the "freemium is bad" argument is primarily an oversimplification of the underlying concern -- the erosion of trust and how that manifests during gameplay.

When I play a traditional "pay" game, I trust that the developer want me to finish the entire game. After all, the team slaved away creating all that content and the player should damn well appreciate their effort.

As a result, when I get stuck at some point in a game (Dead Space 2 being a recent example), I trust that there's a way forward and with a little more effort or practice, or perhaps if I retrace my steps, I'll become unstuck and move along the path toward completion.

Because the developer and I are working with a common goal in mind -- get Eric to the end of the game -- I am confident that at any point in the game I will be capable of completing the challenges set forth (no matter how stingy the Dead Space guys are with ammo).

With freemium games, that trust is obliterated. When I can't progress, I am forced to ask a fun-sucking question -- is the developer trying to extort money from me in order to continue? Am I unable to continue because I just haven't mastered some in-game skill or is this simply the point at which I'm supposed to hand over my tithe?

Candy Crush is an obvious (if extreme) example. When you can't complete a level after the 20th try, the player begins to feel that the developer is expressly barring their passage. And at that point, the game ceases to be fun, at least for the generations of gamers who saved the princess.

Then again, my kids (eight and six) just assume that buying gems is how one progresses in a game. It's not unlike when I was eight and pumping quarters into Gauntlet in order to reach the next level -- Blue Warrior's health dropped whether or not you were taking damage.

Everything old is new again.
> how many times have I bought a movie on iTunes to show my kids how to do it right, and then torrented it as I couldn't wait for the download, too slow.

Hey, at least you have the option of getting it on iTunes. Where I am, neither iTunes, Amazon Instant Video or any other online service is willing to even sell me the content I want.
This doesn't quite work. Suppose all cancers can arise in response to radiation, or for other reasons. Then an increased dose of radiation can boost them all equally (doesn't have to, but can). And the existence of non-radiation causes for cancer is completely irrelevant.

To argue that cervical cancers should jump by a smaller amount than other cancers in response to radiation, showing that cervical cancers are largely caused by something other than radiation is useless -- you need to show that other cancers are largely caused by radiation.
Very nice.

I wish, I had a better question: What is the software used to produce the "flow charts"?
ARTIST ON FIRE
I'd also like to be able to sign up for an up-to-date number blocklist, run by the community and not the phone company or handset manufacturer, so that most phone spam/scams just don't ever get through.

Oh, and I should be able to tell my phone to auto block any number that doesn't have caller id.
> what's the MBA-speak term for "trying to get everyone to pay exactly as much as they're comfortable with"? I can't remember

I don't know if MBAs have different jargon, but the term in economics is "price discrimination"/
I hope that this materializes. I work from home in Tacoma and send my son to daycare but I would take us both to Seattle on the Sounder train for the day if I could work next to his daycare.
I'm just feeling we are using the words in different ways. I'm not a native English speaker but for me effectiveness is a term that includes passion. You can be competent in your work but effective at deflecting it (it's painful to work with such people), I believe that if you are passionate about doing the work it will also mean your effectiveness is in the right direction.
More than that, if I get unknown numbers that don't leave message then they go onto right onto my blocklist.
so wait, you not going to borrow a CD drive and make an ISO of the disk you've already bought?
Evaluating expressions using Spring Expression Language (SpEL)
US Media Blacks Out Snowden Interview
I love that functionality myself, but I have the opposite problem—too often I'm trying to swipe a text or phone call and instead it just unlocks. Maybe we should trade phones. Or fingers.
Well, I do sometimes make the mistakes you give as examples, but only as I get very tired, when I curiously start to mix up all kinds of homophones and near-homophones with no apparent connection (particularly curious to me since, as you suggested, I picked up English primarily through writing; it's not like I have a habit of sounding out words. It took many years from I started reading and writing English until I ever used it in a spoken conversation)

For the same reason I can't ever see me using "should of" - it sounds too wrong.

It is rarer for me to make the mistakes you list than mixing up completely unrelated homophones, though, as they're definitively ones I'm extra aware of.
That's IDA, the interactive disassembler. The free version's not too bad, but if you're doing any work with 64bit, you'll need the pro version, which is a fairly hefty sum (at least for a student like me).
Binwalk for the graphs, IDA Pro for the flow charts.
MailChimp - Atlanta, GA

Database Engineer

MailChimp is a DIY email-newsletter service based in Atlanta that serves more than 4 million users worldwide. We're self-funded and profitable, and we're growing fast.

Job Description
MailChimp is seeking a database-focused infrastructure engineer to join our team. You’ll build, maintain, and monitor systems that support millions of users across all products and applications at the company. We operate in a high volume environment and are growing rapidly, adding 10000+ new accounts/day with that rate increasing every week. On the infrastructure side we do interesting work to support that scale and growth rate, working closely with developers to build and support our applications.

The engineering teams are small and focused, our benefits are unmatched, and internally we function much like a startup aside from established stability and abundant resources. There are no sales people, no investors, no board, and engineering teams are trusted to make good decisions with resources with minimal oversight. We are competitive nationally on salary and benefits.

Applicants should have strong Linux experience, extremely heavy operational MySQL experience, independent troubleshooting skills, and a love for automation and monitoring. Our core persistence layer consists of hundreds of horizontally sharded and paired Percona 5.5 instances. We are seeking an experienced engineer who would be part of the core infrastructure team with a focus on maintaining and improving this crucial MySQL layer in addition to contributing to the systems that feed off of it (emailgenome.org, Elasticsearch, Postgres, Redis). We take a pragmatic and practical approach to our stacks using proven components and building our own logic and complexity on top of well understood building blocks. This is a large, well built setup with consistent hardware, configs, monitoring, backups, and tuning in place.

Skills and Experience:
- Linux servers
- Experience with modern MySQL at high volume: sharding, replication, backups, monitoring, tuning
- Knowledge of the current MySQL ecosystem and an interest in where things are headed
- Deep understanding of InnoDB performance, recovery, tuning, and backups
- Experience with replication and an understanding of all options and components involved
- Exposure to HA solutions like MMM, haproxy, PXC
- Scripting and coding (python, bash, php)
- Puppet or other configuration management tool experience is a big plus
- Zabbix or other monitoring tools
- Familiarity with other infrastructure pieces of our stacks (nginx, apache, memcache, postgres, redis, elasticsearch) is also a big plus

Please apply here, the applications come directly to me:

http://mailchimp.theresumator.com/apply/oJIqi3/Database-Engi...

Many other positions available as well:

http://mailchimp.theresumator.com/
Yeah, try having a fat controller or view, on a rapidly developing codebase with poor specs which change mid-project regularly while avoiding getting fired.
IDA Pro most likely[1]. Pricy but if you're doing professional embedded stuff I've heard it's worth the money.

[1] https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/
Also there is a list of tools located at http://www.devttys0.com/tools/
I signed up for BizSpark after reading this blog post a while back (I know the author), and I can say, its not as bad as you people are making it sound. Sure, it tries to force MS crap in your face; but if you are diligent enough you can avoid it all.

For instance, I'm just using a medium Ubuntu VM, which I can deploy/clone at will in case Azure goes down.
Inequality for all
Inkscape and gimp.
Eh? I remember the snow globe page specifically saying that the cards would be removed at the end of the sale right when the sale started. It was why my interest wasn't that high.
Early (2009) iPad devkit leak – this is real, right?
This was launched yesterday at the FOSDEM conference and attracted quite a crowd and interest. However, judging just by their presentation, the current team will not be able to bring this product at the level it needs to be to solve the problems they started on. They are smart people, and they get things done, but don't put all your hopes in this basket. Good ideas but acute lack of depth and sophistication.
many = 2 ?
thats cool, i didnt know GO does that (bought it during xmas sale, haven't even played yet).

its nice to be back in the PC world. my friend gave me an xbox360 & i was playing that for a bit but now instead of a console i have geforce 770... hadn't even realized the notion of "custom servers" still existed, hah :D
Fake £100,000 Marc Chagall painting 'to be burned'
I can't guarantee it's not for anything else but the innocuous reason I can think of for this is the 'recruit agents' invite system (ingress was initially invite-only).

I think it's opened up now, but hopefully they can drop that when/if they ditch the whole recruit agents thing (no idea if they plan to do that).
You might want to take reading lessons, since I said the exact opposite of that.
Pretty weird. I'm reading the poster while sitting in my apartment, which is literally across the street from that church.
I would like to request a hellban for my account, please? I think it's what I've wanted from this site all along, to be able to feel like I've address this sad group of over-engineering fools without the social consequences.
Whitney Houston gone wrong
If you need a good laugh please check out my video its super funny. I have over 20,000 views on YouTube channel I guarantee you will laugh If you like it please share it on your page
<ahem> I've been playing it for the last two hours. The ads don't bother me at all. Apparently.
You get great Linux support from Amazon ?

I love AWS to bits but their support is basically non-existent.
My wife and I both work full time in demanding jobs, and we have a 4-month old.

I'm in the process of setting up a business with a friend for pretty much one reason - we want to work full time and be close to our kids. Part of the plan involves either having a daycare section in our workplace, or our workplace being a couple of minutes walk from our daycare.

It's 2014, I want to be able to play with my son during my coffee breaks and lunch. And I'm sure as hell not dumping the responsibility for my kid on my wife..
If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.
Is the idea of your startup or the technology you use to build your idea? BizSpark is a program like no other. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx

Leave preconceptions in the past and start building your idea!
Isn't this kind of a supply and demand thing? There is plenty of demand for indie games and fantastic indie games get created frequently enough (e.g. Hyper Light Drifter, Dustforce, FEZ [I know, I know]). If you want to change the medium for the better, the most permanent solution under Capitalism is to change what people will pay for.

This article harks on mobile games a lot. Why do you need games on your phone? More artistic, less crass games appear on systems like the 3DS, and PCs. If I really wanted an art piece of a game on my hypothetical iPhone, I would try to make one myself.

I do disagree with micropurchases in children's games. They just don't have the thinking power yet to realize what they're dealing with. That's a more pertinent moral question, I think.
Whitney Houston gone wrong
Yea, this is probably when [otherwise cautious] people are most susceptible to falling for these scams.

When applying for jobs, there is nothing more irritating than seeing a missed call, getting excited/anxious, and calling back...a #%*@^ telemarketer. On the flip side, I briefly forget that I am unemployed, since all I think about for the next 5 minutes is inflicting the most sadistic forms of torture on every telemarketer that has ever lived.

Seriously though, googling unknown numbers does help.
>The only games that are worth playing is stuff released years ago.

Wow. I absolutely detest the kind of games talked about in this article but I believe more great games are being made now than anytime in history. The whole gaming space has grown so much that every single niche is better served now. Not in the AAA space but indy game quality is so high now, they can easily best games from 15 year ago.

Look at the Steam top 10, it's not bad at all. DayZ and Rust are both extremely interesting game designs that like of which had only been seen in MUDs before.
Side point - it's likely you had many more "visitors" than the <10 / day indicated in the article. On most sites I run, I see about 10% of my traffic as showing up in Google Analytics. I hypothesize this is because most of the traffic on the internet is bots.

Bing Bot is the worst at this. They hammer my sites, send me zero traffic, and don't appear to allow me to control their behavior very well. I get 50x the traffic from google cmp to bing, but google is about 1/3 the hits (when looking @ raw logs).
Interestingly flying transpacific west-ward at night is far better in terms of sleep as much as radiation.
Why do they bother with doing this? I could see signing firmware, but maybe I'm crazy, but I don't see anything in the WRT120N which is particularly innovative in hardware or software that they'd be trying to keep secret, or RF stuff which they'd need to keep locked down in a baseband to keep their FCC/CE certs.

Did they do this just for the lulz?
According to Matt Cutts, who works with the Google Search quality team, you actually lose some of the link value passed through a 301 redirect.
I wanted to try Rackspace but needed more than a single IP and couldn't wait for their approval process.
This is where AWS shines...
iunno, i fancy myself a "gamer" and i don't play any game on mobile. i keep trying them from time to time. i paid a few - never paid one based on microtransactions.

Heck even paid some that THEN required microtransactions, that sucked... in these cases i mailed the authors to tell them to go to hell.

I play a few recent games on pc/consoles, and quite a few old games which seems to still be fun. DungeonKeeper actually is one of those good games ;-)

The last game i enjoyed on mobile was carmageedon, which happens to be the exact same game as on PC (which i also bought a long, long time ago).
It was fun and i completed it in a couple of days, having fun. Probably my best mobile game ever, and i fear, the only one too.
3. Measuring the amount of bullying that occurs is not an exact science?

Not to say that letting the kids get their hands dirty is a bad idea.
Amazon billed me ~$40 for debugging their service (problem: micro instances become completely unreachable after a few minutes, suggested course of action: spin up a few instances, tell us which ones they are, and we'll have a look). This does not seem like good support.
>but the times a regular user needs to do that are becoming few and very far between.

How much is a few?
But doesn't this effectively reduce to "we don't know?"

FWIW I have had one CT scan in my life (in childhood I had a seizure which was probably caused by medicines I was taking) and they did one to rule out brain tumors. Probably a reasonable choice given that all the other tests for other stuff kept coming back negative. But I wouldn't suggest doing one without either a clear immediate need or else a significant concern and no materialized alternative causes for a symptom.
Bullshit. Free to Play was not prompted by piracy. It took over the industry via the Apple App Store which supposedly has the best piracy protection for game developers yet! Free to Play got a foothold due to the race-to-the-bottom pricing for moving up the charts of the App Store.
paying 3-4000 USD for playing a game.. yeah.. yeah people hate paying that. I doubt ANYONE finished dungeonkeeper on mobile, for example..
When I think how much money I spent sinking quarters into Galaga at the local diner as a child, I just can't feel that bad when people complain about Candy Crush charging $0.99 for another 5 lives to people that are too impatient to wait a couple hours for the free set. Is that really so exploitative? Meh. I played past level 100 on Candy Crush without spending a cent, which is probably dozens of hours of gameplay.

The market is speaking pretty clearly: it is not even close to profitable to make premium casual games, the group of hardcore people that are willing to pay up front is way too small to make it worthwhile. IAP lets you get many more people enjoying your game, and you make a lot more money doing it, which is IMO a win on both ends. I get that a lot of gamers hope these games will fail, but as of right now, this is the most profitable and fast growing sector in the games industry, so I'd be hesitant to predict its downfall yet.

If there was some magical way to get the same number of mass market users to pay a fair $5 up front for games (hell, even $1 would be great), every one of us in the game industry would be thrilled to hear it, because it's much easier to make premium games than freemium. I'm open to ideas, but I haven't heard many realistic ones.

Disclaimer: I work on F2P games (not for King), so take all of this with a grain of salt based on self-interest.
Yep, I was reading through as joke dawned on me :) It wouldn't be as funny on any other day, but specifically today "he noticed in Google Trends" :)
I suppose I am apparently doing very well at avoiding such x-rays. I have had two such x-rays in the last 20 years.
Git is a product that's really replicable in any space. I for one, use gh when projects are hosted there and bb when they are there. Git makes it trivial to move things around quickly if cost becomes an issue. Also, i generally find working with git through a browser to be tenacious. I find sourcetree to be far more powerful than GH's client but still think all the thanks goes to Mr. Torvald. what a guy.
They don't offer the binary because cracks and keygens get out that make installing it trivial. And since the version N-1 or more back is still totally useful they don't want to support shooting their own bottom line. What they _should_ do is offer a signed realtime .dmg for logged in users. But since they are Adobe and have their crufty ass codebase head stuck so far up their hard drive they will never do that.

It is time for terracotta, porcelain or some other ceramic to start pushing their media wielding wares.
I spent a few years freelancing as a PHP developer and then transitioned into python for the last 3. It's fairly easy to transition between PHP/Python/Ruby and I'd suggest getting a little bit familiar with similar languages. I know that knowing a bit of all three has led me to be able to develop more quickly and cleanly. Also, more diversity in your understanding would help with your job security concerns.
I'd be careful accusing people of being uninformed and dishonest, especially when you make errors in your own post.

.dmg files are disk images. In the case you are discussing the disk image contains an .app package that is copied to the users (or more generally, the systems) Applications folder. A closer equivalent of the .deb file would be the .pkg file, which works in a similar manner as you describe.

As to whether 'Linux' is a usability nightmare or not I'd argue is purely subjective. It is disingenuous to suggest that there isn't a steeper learning curve, however slight and for whatever reason it exists.
On couple Christmases I was not at home and the only open places we found to eat something were (packed) Chinese restaurants. So there is pragmatic explanation for this tradition.
The GEA is the trade association for the geothermal energy industry. Their website http://www.geo-energy.org/ has a 72-page booklet with a lot of info including details on how a geothermal plant works (pp. 9-16) and a comparison of the capitalized cost of geothermal energy per megawatt hour compared to other energy resources (p. 58). See http://geo-energy.org/reports/Gea-GeothermalBasicsQandA-Sept... [pdf]

I'm a big fan of 2000AD and Judge Dredd comics. Mega-City One is powered by geothermal energy. A description of the "Power Tower" appears in prog #122, "Judge Dredd: Father Earth, Part 1":

"Power Tower is Mega-City One's southern electricity generating complex. It is built around a di-crystal central bore hole that descends one hundred miles into the Earth's crust tapping power from the planet's molten core." Source: http://dreddalert.blogspot.com/2013/12/judge-dredd-father-ea...

So MC-1's fictional bore hole descends about 40 times deeper than the real one in Iceland described in this article.
Because almost no-one is born with them, and many choose to end them.

It is clear that they are undertaken with free will, and ended similarly thereby. All of AA and everyone who's ever quit smoking stand as evidence.
Ask Facebook.)

hint: hhvm
Any idea what the error bars are on that .7% figure?
How is offering a few extra lives, extra moves, a powerup, or another set of levels for a buck or two apiece at all fraudulent? Do you think users don't understand what they're buying?

Or is your issue just with the fact that some games offer unlimited opportunities to spend money? There are many areas of the economy where you can blow as much cash as you desire, I hardly think that alone should qualify something as "defrauding customers".
The Adobe hater I am ... 16 bucks a month for EVERYTHING THEY SELL is a fucking steal. You should be using it more, not less.
I don't know why you picked Linux. Its a particularly poor example. Linux, unlike a modern OS, lacks any kind of sane dependency management. Thus, it throws this responsibility on the repository maintainer to maintain a MxN matrix of packages and dependencies. God help you if you add another repo with a different set of dependencies which conflict with the existing repos. Dependency hell is a still present problem on Linux. Anyway this is nothing new, as users of Linux, we all know about this and the developers know it even better.

The Apple App Store distributes _self contained_ binaries+dependencies (excluding OS libs) which is one sane way of doing things.
Have you considered implementing HHVM?
Yeah, and replacing amtlib.dll is something which does not work very well. Crashes all the time.