skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a strange world the author lives in where someone's free labor of love (which, incidentally, looks and plays very differently than Threes, and was originally released on a whole different platform) is somehow more of a moral offense than the sleazy nickel-and-diming Skinner boxes which pass as mobile games these days.
Spending on welfare programs is a tiny share of our budget. Add up everything -- state and federal -- and it's about 600bn from the data I've seen -- and before the recession it was half that.

Your comment about the 12.5% you save from social security should tell you what you need to know: In order to provide a "basic income" for JUST SENIORS we have to have a 12.5% tax. Now, nominally it's less, because social security taxes cap out at like $110k/yr so there are a lot of income dollars in the US above that amount that aren't paying Fica. Regardless, it's still a tax somewhere near 10% to provide about $15k/year to mostly just seniors. Disability and survivior benefits only make up 20% of social security.

I obviously looked up some facts here to test my assumptions -- everything is just on the social security website and usgovernmentspending.com
> Pushing the conversion rate from signup to paid closer to 100% means crippling the free plan, probably killing the chance of viral growth.

That's pretty reasonable. Of course pushing the numbers up means fewer people will sign up at all (i.e. not every signup can be converted), so there'll be a trade-off of some kind.

At any rate, it might be worth setting a top-end of what kind of growth you might be able to expect and try and build your business model out that way. Right now the number of uniques you need to come seems a bit high to me. Might be worth modelling out what you could do with 1 million uniques, 10 million, etc. and try and model around that, then go out and try and get those eyeballs to your app. That kind of analysis can help you decide on marketing approaches. 10 million, for example, might require some investment in actual advertising, radio ads, late night tv etc. 1 million might be easier to do for "free" + your time.

Some things that might help get more eyeballs on your site

Once you're satisfied with where the site/product is, you might think about taking a few days and writing to sites like LifeHacker as well as language learning sites, any reddit about languages (e.g. /r/korean) to help kick things off (see below)

Other than time, these can be decent free ways to kick off some growth as well.

note: I've gotten some decent notice through the following in the past just by writing them with some information. Eventually most were able to carry it, and often it spilled over into twitter and drove traffic for a while while the news bounced around the globe. It didn't cost anything and was entirely free.

http://lifehacker.com/

http://www.businessinsider.com/

http://www.killerstartups.com/

http://feedmyapp.com/

Also might get coverage in various newspapers tech sections, global news or travel sections.
Consider a venn diagram containing "people smart enough to game GameStop into being their bank", "people not smart enough to avoid overdrafts", and "people not creative enough just to set up a prepaid debit card system for themselves". In the overlapping space of these three circles, you'll find this guy, and a very confused leprechaun riding a unicorn.
The Free Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook
This article makes me sad. Here's a guy who has only relatively recently acquired skills in hardware and firmware development, but he already thinks he's in a position to arrogantly shit all over what he calls '“Maker” folks who are usually web programmers that want to declare to their coworkers and friends with self-righteous indignation that they are “going lower level” or “getting into robotics”'.
I think this is great news. NPM is as vital to Node.js as Gems are to Ruby on Rails. If funding means NPM can provide better packages, better services and overall a better product as a result of the investment: everyone who uses Node.js wins in the end.
Hi these look really impressive, at the moment I'm building something with Openlayers 2, any feel for how big of a jump it is to port stuff to ol3? Are things like selectfeatures/styling the same or has all changed?
Always wondered about audiophiles. Seems like a simple truism: The best quality reproduction of a recording will come from whatever the final mix engineer was using. If he was using a 400 dollar pair of Sennheisers and similar equipment, I'm not sure how you could possibly do better. Maybe you could do better if you had the masters and could remix it with more expensive crap, but that's unrealistic. And if the engineer really screwed up, no pricey amp is going to fix it.
US government doesn’t want online courses to be open to Iran, Sudan, and Cuba
You should still meet Woz. From the likes of it, you probably would get along swimmingly.
One solution to this is use a circular data structure filled with random numbers. Then dedicate a thread to updating that ring with new random numbers. Meanwhile you pull random numbers as fast as you want. It's not good for encryption, but for simulation it's fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_buffer

Another approach is to keep reseeding a fast RNG with a slow but higher quality RNG.
Is Threes really better? I thought 2048 is much more fun.
This reminds me of when I filed for divorce in Philadelphia. I did all the paperwork myself instead of hiring a lawyer. There was one document which was required to be filled out with a typewriter. You could not print it out on a printer, or do it by hand. It needed to be a typewriter.

I didn't have a typewriter and I did not know anyone who had one. I called many copy/printing places in the city to see if there was one for rent - not one place had one to use or rent.

I found some that I could buy, but it was $100+, and I didn't want to pay that much to use it once.

Eventually I asked my soon to be ex-wife, who worked for the city, and she was able to locate one which I used and was able to successfully file the document.
Anybody interested in listening to loads of this kind of music should check out https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/ which has a crowd sourced radio station. Some of the music is incredibly good (lots of it is so-so, but hey, it's group participatory radio!)
Gamification is clearly the future of banking.
You can Vim
If this were anyone but Jobs -- let's say your startup -- and I told you some Stanford MBA wanted to license the software you developed in order to market and support it and keep 85% of the proceeds for themselves, wouldn't you would say the MBA is the one being a huge asshole?

Eighty-five percent???? That would in fact be ridiculous, right?

This is the usual double-standard trope about Jobs/Apple. What's normal and even admirable business practice for a startup -- negotiating a fair deal -- is cast as evil and nefarious when it's Steve Jobs.

When was the last time you heard WhatsApp leadership referred to as "assholes" because they negotiated a high valuation? How about Instagram? Or any other startup that negotiated for a high valuation / better deal?

Never, right?

And let's keep something in perspective: Jobs/NeXT owned the IP in question.

How the heck does negotiating for 50% share of IP you're licensing to someone else to sell and support constitute being an "asshole"?

(Granted, tearing up the contract was a bit theatrical.)
including RHCP members where Californication is famous for being terribly mastered. Such a disgusting snakeoil campaign...
With all due respect to those comments, would it really be a loss? I really, really don't want this comment end up taken as a personal attack on those commenters, that's not the point or intent. Rather, the point is let's rationally, without emotions about our egos, question what is the point of those comments. There is none. If you like something, you upvote, and iff you have any new information to add, add it. It's bearable in a submission with a low number of comments such as this, but in large ones, there tends to be also a large amount of such redundant comments. There is simply no point in posting such comments---they don't get you any karma (I hope!), they don't add any information useful to anyone, and they make it harder to go through the whole comment set.
And Bing?
The turks are very sophisticated, it might stop the rurals from getting to twitter but not people in teh cities.
Unix-like operating systems commonly implement IP address blocking using TCP Wrapper, configured by host access control files: /etc/hosts.deny and /etc/hosts.allow
http://above70k.blogspot.com/2014/03/why-startlingly-simple-...

Also Goodfellow's theory becomes even more unlikely if it's true that the programmed change in direction occurred 12 minutes before sign off[1].

Either way the speculation run amok from the U.S. media, namely CNN's television coverage, is atrocious.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-p...
The book is about VC period. Authors switch sides in perspective throughout. The rookie mistake, covered at length in the book, was not knowing the difference between the cap table, employee options pool, and fully diluted shares. See, e.g., Appendix A.
#Turkey has now #blocked 8.8.8.8
I must be pure evil and morally deprived because I liked 2048 and even worse, I use linux, a free operating system that clearly copied ideas from paid operating systems for the sole purpose of devaluing them
>For a community that's all about "disrupting" everything in the world, this place sure gets itself in a tizzy over every little change to its own world.

It's that same ethos that makes it counterintuitive to heavily moderate such a community. It's a little ironic that it's a problem that the "the rebels are being disorderly".

Or perhaps the irony is that such a community actually does require moderation.
Yeah, but did you read what people were doing with it. You can hire someone to buy a corner store/franchise and "run" it for a year and then just sell it to someone else coming it. I bet it brought very few jobs to the country.
As someone about to implement something this is relevant to, I'd like to know what's wrong with just having a gender choice of: "Male", "Female", "Neutral". Your profile on some web site doesn't need to be a precisely accurate description of the real you. Those three options should be considered not what you are, but what you're okay with the web site referring to you as. If you identify as neither male or female, I don't see how you can be offended by choosing the option that remains neutral on the issue and identifies you as neither.
Bad news for Tesla; Porsche is on electronic sports car
I second that preference.

I'm not the only one. The new owners of a forum I was a member of switched from threaded to flat forum software and the majority of the regulars left and started their own site with the old software. It's grown continually since.
I do not work in IT. Family and friends think I should be a millionair because I am "so good with computers."

Worked in IT in the 90s for 18 months as IT Manager and well I went bald at 22. Did programing when I was 17 and well I woke up with ideas on how to do to fix my issue. To much stress and to little pay for the jobs.

Don't see the change for a "good" IT job for most people. When students start asking about the industry from people that work it they usually get a negative response and told to do something else.
Google faces lawsuit over email scanning and student data
Ultimately, why should anyone care whether 2048 hurts Threes' sales? Should developers (or anyone for that matter) have any obligation to consider the impact of their work on someone else's product's commercial viability?
* https://www.torproject.org/download/download
* https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/

They would have to block every VPN provider on the planet.
I'm kinda confused, has this dude never heard of Credit cards? Or is he already so bad at money that his credit score is too low?
That's why I transferred all of my earnings to BTC via MTGoX.

/s
C++ is mostly an extension of C (there are some subtle differences like changes in the type system), so I also recommend C before C++; understanding how classes and methods are implemented (which would be the natural way to do it in C anyway) gives you better knowledge of practical, pragmatic use of OOP.

As you mention, the layering of C++ is another thing that can guide the approach to learning the language: begin with the simple concepts that C++ added, like classes with methods, and then move on to inheritance, virtual methods, overloading/overriding, operator overloading, exceptions, and then templates, making sure you understand the previous ones before proceeding to the next extension. It's a big language, with many features, not all of which you'll need to use for any one application.
Serifs are irrelevant, and browsers have had variable-width fonts since Mosaic, WorldWideWeb and ViolaWWW, so making textareas use a monospaced font and specifying their size like that seems to have been just laziness. If there was a good reason, I'd be interested to know it.
That's easy to fix, Twitter sets their TTL to 5 minutes and changes their frontend address every 5 minutes.

Now if they block Google Public DNS, that's a problem, but again, that involves very carefully tweaking route advertisements (since it's anycast). You can also always grab the DNS record out of the root nameservers.

Ultimately, filtering the Internet only works if you filter all of the Internet.
https://zenmate.com/
I would have most likely never purchased and played Three's if it weren't for 2048. I almost never download mobile games, even more rarely do I browse for mobile games. This underscores the importance of giving fair attribution to your inspirations as was done in the case of many 2048 games with a credit to Three's. Having said that, I thought Three's was terrible and regretted my purchase. Maybe someone can write an article about how paid games are evil for that reason or just not make wild assumptions like these in the first place.
"X is dead, long live Y" is dead, long live original headlines.
Please please please switch away from Network Solutions. They're terrible, the only thing they have going for them is inertia.
There was a short window where games needed lots of music, but had enough other art assets that CDs wouldn't have worked. Low quality digital samples of the music sounded terrible, and the alternatives like FM-Synth (ad-lib) weren't good enough and MP3s were still too computationally intensive to decode while rendering a game.

It turns out that this type of music technology, first invented to work in the low memory environment of the original Amiga, and then advanced considerably since then, offered a great alternative. Digital samples of individual instruments were played back at different rates to simulate different notes and the note data itself was incredibly small.

While almost all Amiga (and a large number of Atari ST games) used a 4-channel version of this technique, notable games that used this kind of technology in the PC era include the original Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit, Hitman, Deus Ex, Pinball Dreams, etc.

I can't say if Impulse Tracker was used in the production of all of these. There were custom trackers, and other popular tracking software at the time, but the basic technique was very popular during this time. It's likely that Impulse Tracker was less used than people think though as for a long time accurate playback of some of the advanced effects (filters, NNAs) outside of Impulse Tracker was pretty rare.

Quite a few video game music designers got their start writing music in this kind of environment because it was incredibly cheap to get up and running and producing music. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Brandon

Back then most trackers were free, or like Impulse Tracker, basically free except for 1 or 2 major features and you could simply rip the samples out of other songs to reuse in your own music. Since you could also "read" other people's music files, you could also learn a lot about how to construct music. Different techniques, music theory, rhythm and percussion, etc. It's kind of like open source music in a sense.

see more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
Open source vs. Paid product. Classic argument. Is throwing it out there for free unfair to the people who are making a living off of the same product.
I obviously don't know the details there, but I'd say there's a big difference: Job's developers got the 50% they wanted (and Jobs cut a fair deal with the other company), while the guy you know agreed on something and then got something else. The latter is something that I believe is unethical, as it's changing the cards on the table after making a deal, and not even telling the other party.
Ask HN: Freelancers/Contractors – what software do you use for accounting
I recently switched over from a FTE to being a 1099 contractor and see there are some additional tax filing responsibilities i'll have the burden of now. I looked around for something simple - I put in my income for the quarter, and the forms are auto filled out and filed with the IRS. So far i've just come across accounting software for businesses with multiple employees. Any freelancers have any advice on a good tax/accounting management application?
XMPP on feature phones? Not sure that would have been an ideal stack for constrained devices.
Nice! Suggestion on the animation 'Fly to Bern' - change how far the map zooms out depending on how far it needs to move.

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/6301872

http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/zoompan.pdf
You wouldn't happen to be either of these Leviathans?

https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/artist/1696/

https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/artist/661/
One dare might interpret this as metaphorical to an immigration policy. Control who operates in your jurisdiction if you'd like to maintain conditions.
Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey
After having censored the turkish people via DNS and thus restricting their access to Twitter everyone moved on to other DNS Services like Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) and OpenDNS. Earlier today an IP-Ban was issued and immediately Tor-Usage from Turkey starts rising. What a magnificent people. Keep on fighting!
Agree 100% with you. I never for a single moment regretted spending the time in Tibet. It was literally a life-changing experience.

A lot of times it is said that you should pursue your carrier while you're still young and without many responsibilities. But the same goes for creating something meaningful with your life, for exploring the world and widening your perspective on life. It is much easier done when you're young and it beneficially affects the rest of your life.
TBH that's the only use of votes I've seen agreed on as valid here.

Despite your relative long-standing I'll bow to your claim of factuality and request citation of that fact?
you'll no longer have to be tied to a specific carrier

This was always the case before with an unlocked handset; it's not entirely obvious how "carrier-free SIM cards" make any difference here.

Imagine it: a world where a SIM card is fully integrated with your device; no need to swap it out when you change carriers or travel overseas.

Isn't that basically what CDMA did?

The article also seems to ignore any mention of multi-SIM devices, which are quite common in most of Asia.
Another really well organized one here

http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Modland
Right, and if you want to generate them server side, you either need to have separate templates for server side and client side, or you can execute the javascript on the server (which is what the OP decided to do).

Noone is saying there aren't other solutions to the problem, but I think the OP's solution met his goals pretty well and I thought it was a neat concept.
Hmm. I wonder if this is how your iWatch will connect to the iNternet through any nearby iDevices? ;-)
What world is this article living in? I got a job making $100k as a software engineer, right out of college (top-tier I guess). And then I realized that I was worth more than that, and 8 months later I'm now switching over to a job making $150k in total compensation. And TBH, I was middle of the road compared to my classmates.
15% of gross receipts is not atypical for a publisher that takes on the responsibility of support, packaging, distribution, sales and maintenance.

Honestly, as the owner of the IP, I would much rather have 15% of gross receipts than 50% of net. Taking a cut of net just encourages the publisher to beef up their costs, which are difficult for you to precisely track.

I've had to negotiate these in the past - and the "rational" approach, in which you sit across from a lawyer, and walk down the various details (usually it's a staged agreement, with certain levels of return for certain levels of sales) - can be painful. I'm not saying that I would enjoy Steve's hysterics, but, it would be refreshingly to the point.

A Lot of Steve Jobs success came from him eliminating the days, weeks, hell months of guidance/direction/management, and just saying let's get this f#%$cking thing done.

It might not be pretty, you really don't like the person doing it - but it can be effective. Alternatively, it can also be incredibly destructive. Very fine line to walk.
Ambiguous headline: 'over' meaning 'finished'? Or 'over' meaning 'located'?

Veritasium has an interesting related video explaining some of the Facebook shennanigans where they withhold your posts from a large amount of your subscribers if you're popular, unless you pay them money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g
> What isn’t alright by me is a game that releases for free and makes no attempt to make money,

This article is a good candidate for Poe's Law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

For the Onion version, I recommend the headline:

"The very idea that someone would put out any content for free is appalling," writes blogger.
Was 2048 actually inspired by threes? OP seems to be pretty sure of that.
I've just heard about 'API backend' and consumers (Web, Mobile, etc) and it makes a lot of sense to me on paper. The engineer in me foams at the mouth to dive into this.

I just haven't had the time or right project to really use it. For example, in one of my pet projects[0] I could write an API data store and easily consume it client side or in my planned mobile applications. IT MAKES SENSE!

Does this architecture have an official name? I would love to learn more and avoid mistakes made during it's infancy.

[0] - http://www.smitecamp.com
I agree and disagree with you.

What you describe is clear and straightforward for "traditional" crimes, but when your talking about highly abstract/technical or transactional crimes, I don't think that any non-millionaire could afford representation capable of dealing with multiple counts of honest services fraud, very technical violations of something like a firearms law.

I also think that in the federal space, things like lying to a federal agent should not be crimes -- look at the Martha Stewart case. We should be convicting people of crimes they commit, not for statements made during an investigation.
Had I gotten that call from Steve, I probably would've laughed in his face. Hard. For close to a minute.

When I was calmed down enough, I'd have been like, "Well, Steve, I was just reading through the instruction set, interesting how it does X, Y, Z, seems like that would make it easy for it to do that thing you said wanted in a disassembler, I was just about to borrow a little simulator time to test out my theories, knock up a quick and dirty proof of concept, but since it looks like you think I can't do it, I'll just go ahead and toss these pages of notes I wrote up away because they're obviously useless." Then shut up and wait for him to crack. You have to talk to people in a language they understand.