skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been thinking recently about what makes a good video game experience for me, and it's slightly relevant.

I can place the games I've highly enjoyed into two basic categories:

-Short and sweet, having one or more of 1. interesting play mechanics 2. great story/theme 3. interesting art direction.

-Solid all around, with addictive elements (e.g. leveling, collecting things) that make repetitive tasks seem fun and extend the time I play the game to beyond a few evenings.

Many indie games I've played fit into the former category, and most non-indie games fit into the latter.

I've been realizing that these "short and sweet" games that I've been getting more and more of a chance to play have provided more lasting and fulfilling experiences than longer games. The feeling I get from sinking an evening into a short and sweet game is kind of similar to reading a good book or playing a good chess match. Likewise, the feeling I get from sinking an evening into a longer game is some artificial feeling of making progress.

I'm overgeneralizing a little, but the point is I've started skipping AAA titles in favor of trying out lots of indie games. Most aren't great, but the cost of a few dollars or less and a half hour to find out isn't bad. For me, it's worth it to find the gems. And not having several-week-long addictions to games with low quality:time ratios is great too.

I really hope there's no indie bubble.
I'm willing to go with delusional here, at least as far as mistaking confirmation bias for reality goes...
Funny that you think Season 2 is the weakest. I've gotten the feeling that Season 5 was the weakest.

That said, as you put it, after multiple viewings, I love every season.
A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519671.
I have to tell you that things are very different when you're on the production side. It's easy to be idealistic about his sort of thing as a consumer, but if you do as a producer then you will go broke. And while one shouldn't be too cynical (otherwise you might just as well take up accountancy or some other line of work), it's a fact that consumers are a fickle bunch - they like novelty but not always originality.

I came across some good advice last week (aimed at designers, but relevant here): being 20 years ahead of your audience is not a recipe for success - people will just think you are strange. Being 20 minutes ahead, however, can pay off big.

For all their faults, this is something publishers understand well, and historically they have done a fairly good job of curating the authors they publish so as to support the ones that are a little too far ahead of the curve. They also look after a great deal of stuff that artists are either not good at or don't like, like marketing, accountancy and so on - so artists get to focus on what they do well rather than having to deal with the business stuff.

It's nice to think about art as being above commercial considerations, but being an artist doesn't get you out of paying rent or buying food or whatever family obligations you may have (which is why a lot of artists have precarious domestic arrangements). Even determinedly un-commercial firms like ThatGameCompany struggle with this; Journey was supposed to take one year but took three, and they ran out of money and couldn't make payroll in the third year so they had to let some people go and make others wait months to get paid. You often can't ignore commercial considerations becuas if what you want to do needs money then either you raise it or the work doesn't get made. As I've pointed out in relation to film, the costs of making even a simple one are pretty substantial.
It's PG's parameters for a naive Bayes model based on these LDA topics, learned by taking his comments on HN as upvotes for the articles content.
I agree it would be a better world and a better market if the best stuff really was at the top, but since it's not true in any other industry, I think it's silly to expect it to be true in games and just hope you will happen across the best ones.
"They even work!" Hah, that's reassuring?

Here's what I found when I googled for it: https://github.com/readevalprint/mini-django
Go Pro tour of Pyongyang, North Korea
I don't think thousands of hours playing roulette places you in the 'rational and detached follower of the scientific method' camp, somehow
How about we blame the metro ISPs and not the rural ones? The 80% of Americans that live in cities should all have world-class internet the way people in Tokyo and Helsinki do.
Now let's say you have 5 times the political influence. Is everyone still better off, or just you?
Url changed from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pluto-bound-spacec..., which points to this.
You're right, I obviously can't prove it, but here's one sample point. I subscribe to an RSS feed of iOS apps that have recently become free. Many of these are unsuccessful games that are trying to attract some attention. Some of them are interesting — maybe even good — but I don't think I've ever seen any as beautiful and polished as, say, Monument Valley or Dextris (just to name two of the current iOS darlings). On the other hand, occasionally I spot a game in the App Store new releases that looks really cool. If it captures my attention, chances are it'll soon get mentioned on TouchArcade or on Twitter.
Local law enforcement organizations do buy cell interception technology, regularly: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/meet-the-machines...

Seeing as companies like Harris build equipment for both running and spying on cell networks, it may make sense for them to offer a tower-mounted system...
Nice one Ian. Hope you're well :) - Mark
I'm assuming they meant hashed rather than encrypted. If they were actually encrypted, then it's strange that they didn't say whether the key to decrypt them was also stolen.
So close. Better:

"I know the itch you're trying to scratch. Do you mind if I email you a link to the game I've been testing?"
I think others have mentioned this already, but this is a problem that faces almost every industry these days. How do you get your product noticed? Why is advertising the fuel of the web? Competition. There are 10 versions of exactly the thing the buyer is looking for and 10,000 other things that are almost what they are looking for. Those 10,010 different sellers are all trying to capture that sale.

There are many different information channels that companies can try to use to get the word out. Without having done an actual study myself (though I'm sure someone has) I would guess that if you can trigger a word of mouth or viral campaign they end up being extremely effective. Furthermore if I had to guess if you can get the attention of one of the 'hubs' (a respected member of a community) in a social network to endorse or mention you, there is also a huge payoff.

Search and algorithms is one way to approach the problem, probably 'the new way.' Maybe some day we will have AI agents that know us so well that they can search through the morass of content and products and find things that will actually enrich our lives, but for now we're still monkeys that respond strongly to social cues and our algorithms suck and are easily gamed (star ratings) or are extremely time consuming (reading tons of reviews). So we go find an expert or someone we trust.
> So instead of having your database mimic disk blocks on top of a filesystem, just expose the raw disk blocks to the DB. Instead of having your garbage collector fight the virtual memory system, expose the TLB and physical pages to the language runtime. Instead of requiring that every read() go through the kernel, have the NIC write directly into application buffers.

This sounds great. Do you know of any literature/writings on these kind of things for programming languages, specifically? For example the thing you mentioned about language runtimes.
Probably because they used a url shortener.
There's a third category that I would put most of the games I enjoy into:

-Long and Deep: Games you can play for huge amounts of time but don't depend on an artificial sense of progress to do it. Strategy games, roguelikes, competitive games, etc. Games where you level up yourself by getting better, instead of the character in the game.
For anyone into CAVE-like games, please give Danmaku Unlimited 2 a try. One of the best shmups on the platform, beautiful, made by one dude.
First game that I bought for my Amiga 2000. Single disc drive was torture
He did talk about value twice in the previous sentences, but maybe I read it wrong. I feel like being 'kind of decent' should be an adequate standard for making a profit, though not for getting rich. It's the 'winner take all' mentality I find troubling.
It's not easy, but, The Wire is amazing.

People who don't like it because:

1. It starts slow (it's character driven)

2. They assume it's another Cop Drama (it's not)

3. There is a lot of violence

4. There is a lot of foul language

5. Many of main cast are black and the show portrays inner city life
You got it wrong actually. Smalltalk is not supposed to integrate with everything. It is everything which is supposed to become Smalltalk based, the desktop/working space, the GUI and the IDE, right down to the OS and the kernel.

Smalltalk was not designed to be a programming language. It was intended to be the whole system. I think those developers who are treating and developing Smalltalk only as a programming language and a development environment have got it wrong, although it is the pragmatic thing to do. People who are ignorant of Smalltalk simply don't understand how backward contemporary computing its, relative to the way it should be now, 30 - 40 years after the first implementations.

After it emerged, the industry majors simply diverted it way from the original vision of its developers, which was focused on exploring and developing for personal use either recreational or work related, and turned it a development tool costing thousands of dollars.

My own interpretation is that the industry majors stifled it, masking the process as bad business and marketing decisions.

I mean what could be possibly have been wrong with Smalltalk when the IBM's first Java implementations and IDEs were built with Smalltalk, and Sun bought out the company which developed one the fastest Smalltalk implementations to put their developers into creating Java?

I think the current problem with open source Smalltalk is that the developers are spread among different implementations. It would be better if there was one vision and one implementation that they all focused on.
Economic History of Space Exploration in America [pdf]
I think the model of X dollars / Y developers is wrong.

When I see a good game being sold by a good price I buy it. I only stop myself if I've spent a large amount recently, which so far only happened during some Steam sales.

This means my "gaming money pool" is not a pool at all because I may spend no money for months at a time, or spend a significant fraction of my salary in a week. If my behavior is as common as I believe it is, this completely invalidates the model of X dollars / Y developers and paints a much less bleaker picture of the future.
The `cons` cell is a raw memory structure

It's associated symbol is literally a pointer directly to a memory location

A cons is not "raw memory"; it is a typed data structure, and in Common Lisp it is even considered an OOP object of the cons class. It is equivalent to having a data structure called "pair" that can hold two things.

All memory-allocated data structures ultimately have an address of some kind, so this whole discussion about pointers is utterly meaningless. For that matter, arrays, strings, and basically every known memory data structure is "raw" too. After all, they have an address.

The fact that cons/car/cdr can be implemented cheaply in hardware stems from the fixed and small size of cons. That doesn't make it somehow inferior.

By the way, the Java stuff is implemented in hardware too, does that make Java inferior? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor
This is easy: there are professional poker players, there are no (long-term or non-cheating) professional roulette/slot machine/blackjack etc player.
1. User clicks CTA

2. ???

3. Profit
Seconded.

This is a guy whose total sales of games were low enough under his original model that one of them sold about 4,000 copies total since its release (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...).

Later, when he actually dropped the prices to something that average people might feel like actually paying for games built on such retro foundations, he sold 33,000 bundles in one week (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vo...)... while misunderstanding the effects of lower pricing on his target audience enough that he thought he'd sell "less than a third of that".
There's always room for improvement, but it's starting to get within range of the fundamental limits.

Fundamentally, non-nuclear energy storage is limited by the strength of chemical bonds. For combustion, you're taking chemical bonds of high potential energy, breaking them apart, and rearranging the atoms into molecules with chemical bonds of lower potential energy. The energy difference is the heat produced by the combustion. The situation is similar in batteries, but in addition to rearranging atoms, free electrons are also liberated or consumed, with the bond energy difference going into that. For something like a mechanical spring, the winding force distorts the chemical bonds without breaking them, treating them like extremely tiny springs, with the same principle of operation as the big one. In all cases, the chemical bond strength determines how much potential energy can be crammed into the system.

For example, Wikipedia claims that flywheel energy storage (a "battery" where you just spin a disc faster to put energy in, and use it to drive something to get energy out) tops out at about 400Wh/kg. Lithium-ion batteries top out around 250Wh/kg, somewhat similar. Gasoline has a vastly better energy density at around 12,000Wh/kg... but gasoline needs to react with oxygen to release that energy! In fact it needs to react in an approximately 4:1 ratio, so the total mass going into the reaction is 5x the mass of the gasoline alone, making for an energy density of about 2400Wh/kg. Still much higher than batteries, but not outlandishly higher. I believe the difference would be because it's much easier to turn strong chemical bonds with a lot of potential energy into heat than it is to turn it into electrical potential.

You can see how reacting with the air gets you a huge advantage when it comes to how much stuff you need to carry around with you to store any given quantity of energy. And you can also sort of see how they all end up hitting the same basic limitations in the end. If you want to go further, you need take advantage of a stronger force with more potential energy, like the strong nuclear force.

(Gravity would be another possibility. If you could store energy by raising and lowering the orbit of a heavy object orbiting close to the Sun, you could get a pretty high energy density. Or if you want to go more exotic, store energy in the rotation of a neutron star or black hole. These approaches, however, pose even more difficulty for adaptation to automobile propulsion than the nuclear option.)
Are you claiming I never witnessed the loose leg table bump scam?
That in fact I never beat the house at roulette with some degree of consistency?

Little snipes are easy. But I can tell you both are the case and I am neither lying nor delusional. And,

I'll go ahead and reply to your snipe at the very bottom of the thread as well. Don't mistake the word "observation" for the word "playing". I assure you my observations were fairly objective. And this is why I was able to win at roulette over a period of time. And I became known. This happens.

Feel free to regard it as delusion or whatever and snipe away. It would be nice if you believed me but hey... it doesn't matter. The table bump scam happens. You would be wise to admit that maybe it does if you play roulette and watch for it. If you don't... I guess believe however.
The state of gaming blows. Today's platforms pigeonhole the consumer and developer to being unhappy. Casual gaming is flooded, but there is always money for core gamers to spend on a quality product especially original and innovative indie games.
I assumed that was a tweak of his similar joke about in-flight wifi. And since many in-flight wifi systems use a combination of air-to-ground and satellite, it is going to space and back in a roundabout way.
Much like procesing power and moore's law, we're getting very close to shannon's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem.

Wireless isn't this huge gamechanger that people may think. To beat shannon's law you would need so many base stations in the long term it looks awfully like what we have now with DSL/Fiber/DOCSIS and wifi APs.
I live in Panama and was at Unido just the other day :) Excellent coffee and great people.
Where did you get the implication that I'm adverse to references to the 1940s? As for who has the right to be forgotten, that's for the EU courts to determine (as far as EU citizens go).
Yes, but there is still a very heavy cost in maintaining these conduits. They often collapse under a road (for example), which means closing the road off, digging it up, and then repaving the whole thing which is very expensive to serve a few houses or whatever.
The solution is to lurk gaming communities. Find a HoMM community, check in on it once a week, and I'm sure you'll find tons of games that you missed out on over the years, and that you'll be one of the first to know about any new games that fit that mold, long before they're even released.

If, as your other comments in the thread suggest, that seems like too much effort to you, then I'm sorry to be blunt, but I guess you don't really care that much. There's nothing wrong with that; no one can devote 100% of their energy to all of their hobbies. It's just that you can't be passionate about something while also expecting everything to find its way to you. Either put the effort in, or just admit it's not that important to you.
In Jeff's case, I suspect that the low audio/visual quality of the games that he's been releasing since 2000 has been a significant factor in the weak reception he's seen them receive. Reviewers have been consistently dinging his games since Geneforge in 2001, and he's still using the same game engine (and a lot of the same graphical assets!) in his current releases. Plainly put, his games look and feel dated.

Is graphical polish a make-or-break factor for games? Of course not. But that isn't a license to ignore it, either. "Lo-fi" graphics can be attractive as an intentional design choice, but that isn't what he's got, and I suspect it's turning off a lot of potential players.
> Minor quibble, but the proper way is to use validation data to find the best model and training parameters, the test data is only used once to test how well it actually works.

No: I was assuming that at your step, the text with the 'validation data' fails. So, we have to return and use the validation data on each of the fitting efforts. Then to my question: What do we have? Not so easy to answer. Net the two step approach of 'training data' and 'validation data' is not so good. Also we need some assumptions about the two boxes of data and, then, any data we plug into the resulting model.

For the self driving cars, once they see something not on their static map of the street, apparently they have to stop and wait, maybe drive around. The point is, those cars can only drive on streets very carefully mapped out, down to 1 cm.

Apparently the basic problem is, driving a car takes some basic intelligence, that is, available essentially only from humans. For anything much like real human intelligence, we don't know how to program it. In particular, machine learning doesn't know how to program it.
Agreed! But don't over estimate the burden of debt. You might be able to wipe it quickly if you get the right job after graduating.
Your clients have the right idea, by using only encrypted email to discuss sensitive information. Anything less would be a step backwards.
Yellen Tells N.Y.U. Graduates to Expect Failure and Learn From It
Well, it's not that easy. The algorithms are very primitive and too full of noise to be useful.

For example, try this on restaurant reviews like http://www.yelp.com/biz/el-gaucho-seattle. I get these tags:

steak reviews seattle food service gaucho restaurant review

Not useful, right?

The current state of the art would use much more sophisticated NLP for generating POS tags and use sentiment analysis. For example, check out MSR Splat at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/msrsplat/defaul....
I actually have played a video game to a crowd of thousands of people. The finals of a Guitar Hero tournament were on stage at Family Values Tour. I can't find reliable attendance numbers from Pittsburgh in 2007, but the venue had 23,000 seats. Well, the lawn doesn't have seats, you know what I mean.

I was pretty good at Guitar Hero. I recently checked, and I'm still 8,884th on Guitar Hero II for XBox Live, out of 2.3 million. So when I heard this tournament was happening, I was in. I spent hours practicing extra hard. First round was at a local bar, and you had to be the Nth caller to the local radio station to get a spot. Through some persistence, I made it happen. Lots of the people weren't even that great, one guy had never even played before. I ended up winning that pretty handily. They held a ton more of these preliminary tournaments, and then 16 (I think) of us got free tickets to the tour. Woo!

Showing up, there was a tent where people could play Guitar Hero. We held another elimination tournament there, with the top two facing off on main stage. A friend that I knew from the competitive Guitar Hero forums and I had both brought cheat sheets with the optimal star power patterns on them. Such nerds. We were the only ones who did, and we pretty handily wiped up everyone else.

So, he and I got to play "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine on main stage, winner got a real guitar and to hang out with Korn. Of course, said friend (who now works on C# for Microsoft, actually...) was even better than I was, and solidly beat me. Oh well. It was still super amazing.

From time to time I find an arcade machine (they made them for Guitar Hero II) in the wild, and once or twice I've gotten a little crowd. Mostly from kids. I can totally emphasize with the end of the article, it is pretty exhilarating.
I saw Dragon's Lair running for the first time on Amiga when I was something like 9 years old. This was a complete shock because it featured full motion animation and it was running from floppy disks! This feat was achieved by using polygons instead of bitmaps, to save memory space. This gave the idea a few years later to Eric Chahi to use polygons instead of bitmaps for his new me Another World which would become an immediate hit as well... leading to the game Flashback (from a different creator) reusing the same technique, and the adventure game Cruise for a Corpse as well, making the game company Delphine Software very rich in the process.

There are tons of fun stories when one starts talking about Dragon's Lair.
I don't see a lot of value in this post. No one is really there to judge you on what you used to get your stuff done. Unless people are just intrinsically pressured to use the latest stuff, which is quite illogical.
CMSes exist because they make the maintenance easier. Not because they are the in-thing to do.
I could beat both Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcade. Although in Space Ace, I used to skip the rocket boots portion. Space Ace was the rhythm game of it's time ... getting the actions down with the music was the way to go!