skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This game is especially egregious. There is a great video [1] on YouTube where a guy known as NerdCubed talks about the 'game' for almost 10 minutes (and lots of cursing).

In the game you have to dig out squares of terrain. Terrain squares can take 24 hours to dig out. It costs about $2.50 to dig out a single square. If you buy the largest IAP it's only about $2 per square.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpdoBwezFVA
I made that! It was a shock to see it on here, thanks for posting.
This seems familiar:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738223
Agreed. I've yet to have ego death, or the overwhelming feeling of solipsism when sleeping. The only time I've had even a remotely similar experience when sleeping was the time I had a fever that caused me to hallucinate. That's once in my life, you know of entering a dream state every day of my existence.

I've also yet to have a dream that can overwhelmingly shift my perspective and motivation. An LSD trip made me "take the risk" and move continent with no support to be with my girlfriend. I say "take the risk", because I can just walk into any police station and get my ass deported and land right back at my parents house. Everyone thought I was crazy, but LSD made me see the real probability of risk in that it was negligible.

Mushrooms made me motivated to lose weight. I remember standing in my bathroom naked looking at myself and I came to the conclusion I wanted to be in shape for my son.

Another mushroom trip made me reevaluate risk and see that I have to start my own business. In fact, I just registered a business name and got insurance so I can get licensed.

Funny that dreaming did none of this for me.
Try using a preprocessor.
Thanks for the link. It did help cement some of the concepts presented on the website, but the presenter did a really poor job of selling some of it: "This... [points to screen] ... I don't know, it's crazy. [next slide]". How does that in any way convey the value of this thing?

Also, his answer to the question "How do we debug GSS styles?" was pretty worrisome: "Just add and remove constraints, and see what breaks it". That sounds to me like what a lot or people are doing with CSS right now, and the idea is horrifying. It's tough to imagine embracing a nondeterministic system where there's no telling what rules you've given it will be obeyed, and which will be ignored - at least in CSS, it's pretty clear when something will be overridden.
Every Android system update already has stage where it prepares every app.
Sensationalist headline... this is not news. Any vehicle stands a significant chance of splitting in half and exploding in a collision at 100+ MPH
I completely agree that 100k is a very steep price for the coursework/books. If that is all you aim to get out of a MBA, you will not get value from the MBA.

It is now everything else besides the coursework/books and framework of teaching that is now valuable for a budding entrepreneur: access to additional funding, VCs, and a structure to support you.

Indeed, and I may have been remiss in mentioning this before, for an entrepreneur, some MBA programs provide a very safe opportunity to pursue your initial idea. You have two years with a large amount of unstructured time, amazing resources (including funding) and typically a strong financial support network (feed, house, cloth you). At the end of your two years you can have built either a successful initial idea or indeed cycle through 2 or 3 ideas. And at the end? If you haven't made it, you will have a strong position to re-enter the workforce - with some great stories to tell.

That a MBA is purely coursework/books is very myopic.
MPV: A free, open source, cross-platform media player
This is a topic that's really sensitive, and what kinds of experiences "permanently ruin" someone, and which can be bounced back from, are subjective and hotly debated, so... I'll try to tread lightly. And I really hate the stud/slut dichotomy. If a woman who hung out with typical frat boys in college and got flash-lighted is untouchable, then why aren't those frat boys, who did the flash-lighting, likewise? They should be. The idea that horrible men are "cool" because they "got away with it" is revolting. That double standard makes me angry.

The problem isn't physically abusive partners alone. There's more to it than that. If dating a jerk or a crazy person or even a physically abusive person made someone "permanently damaged" there'd be almost no one left.

The main issue that is gendered is that women have more opportunities, when they're young, to involve themselves with really terrible people and for things to go seriously wrong. We're all bad judges of character when we're really young. The typical 15-year-old boy isn't any morally better than a 15-year-old girl, and would probably make choices that would destroy him if given the chance... but typical 15-year-old boys are considered unattractive (even to girls of the same age) and don't get those opportunities. I was a fucking idiot at that age, but no one wanted to be a fucking idiot with me. For women... it's a different story. The opportunities to make really bad choices and ruin yourself, if you're a young woman, are quite available.

I don't think it's even sex itself that does the damage. I used to think that, but I think casual social contact is what erodes the person's values. Being around bad people makes a person bad. What makes college casual sex evil isn't the sex itself (the sex is vanilla) but the acquisitive, manipulative, and dishonest culture around it. I have no problem with swingers or people in open relationships or above-board promiscuous adults, because there's nothing gross or wrong about sex itself. But the culture around college casual sex (the alcohol abuse, the focus on man as conquerer and woman as defeated, the "gray rape" that isn't "gray" at all, the fights, the "pickup artist" nonsense, and the reward of bad behavior in both sexes) is pretty disgusting.
Wongene Daniel Kim - Google+
Wongene Daniel Kim - Facebook
The exact costs will never be calculable in advance.

We are never going to reach a point where we can accurately predict whether someone will be hit by a bus or shot.
Once again, a TokuMX engineer steps up to explain issue and offer a potential solution. I can't help but wonder why MongoDB engineers aren't doing this. But no matter, just glad we're using TokuMX.
Enough people use it to have the company valued above a billion dollars, have their first MongoDB World (http://world.mongodb.com) and have a HN darling like Stripe as a power user.

Sure, MongoDB has its shortcomings, but so does <Someone's favorite database>. It's much more productive to understand the pros and cons of using it and use it (or not user it) appropriately.
You should read this article if you're a (mobile) application developer. It's not just webpages that have colour.
I would bet even money that open-plan offices cause more permanent mental illness than psychedelics.

That, however, is another debate.
Who decides how your time is spent? - The Globe and Mail
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

-Dwight Eisenhower, 1961

I don't think its credulous to insinuate that we have not sacrificed decades worth of opportunities to grow societal and physical infrastructure at the altar of the very thing Ike was warning us about.

We can absolutely adequately defend ourselves and our allies with much less money.
My first impression of HealthKit
Product Hunt: the best new products, every day
I like the quote from Dijkstra better: The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
I didn't mean to suggest that you would work slowly. Your clients expect you to work with CSS, because it's the accepted solution, and anything else would be reckless. Within those constraints, CSS is a good solution -- circularly, though, because CSS is required by the constraints.

I work in web development, myself, though I haven't been doing it consistently through the years. It seems to be somewhat of a low-margin business, and the day-to-day challenges are mostly around producing reliable results within a budget. In that context, complaining about CSS is beside the point, because the day-to-day concern is doing CSS quickly and well, not replacing CSS with something entirely different. If styling became 5x faster overnight, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing for practitioners; just like it probably wasn't good for horse-related businesses when cars came along.*

*I'm not taking that analogy too seriously. I will not believe this new styling is a revolution until I see it.
You must not play MMOs. Gaming is almost always a chore in them.

I wonder how much of this finding against EA is because the time limit is a completely artificial game mechanic. E.g. Everquest is free to play now, but you can also use real money to buy points to instantly level a character to 85. However, the act of leveling up a character is pretty much set in stone for RPGs for 40 years now.

In original Everquest, leveling was definitely a rough chore. But what is too chore-like? Back then it took me like 20 days of playing time to hit max level for the first time. A lot of people played through it, but most didn't. It was slow and painful. Back then, you couldn't pay to bypass it (it also wasn't free to play, but if it were) - does it become a problem the minute you allow people to buy things? Whose bar for too chore-like are we using?

I've played some MMOs where there were some very highly set limits you could only bypass via buying things with real money. However, they were transferrable, and players created their own market. All the most powerful players never paid real money. Instead, they could collect resources so fast they exchanged those resources for these items. Can we call this game free?
A lot of Android is written in Java already. What would be interesting, however, is Android transitioning to a message passing micro-kernel (instead of Linux) and writing as much as possible of the rest of the kernel in Java.
They partly diagnose some of the dysfunctions of marriage, but their prescription that we should psychoanalyze the "candidates" (as if you can treat a good person that casually) and try to match ourselves based on some kind of psychological compatibility is nuts.

The reasons marriages are failing so much these days is that we live in a culture that does not value, or even understand, what marriage is. Marriage works when both partners treat it as a lifelong partnership and they work to overcome their problems. If you were to engineer a marriage between two people with perfectly matched personality types, phobias, etc, they'd still end up divorced in a few years if they've been taught to think of marriage as a temporary exchange of romantic favors "until I get bored" or "until something better comes along".
Well, indeed. I'm far from convinced there are easy solutions to the problem, and in my more conservative moments I can entertain the idea of abolishing even pretences at welfare aimed redistribution on this basis, but ultimately it's very hard to stomach. Credit should probably be harder to obtain, regardless of the position I'm feeling in at the time!

Ironically the better approach may be fairly close to what's in the games, and that is to expand the scope of food stamps (or similar) to create a sort of two tiered currency setup, where one currency is only legally usable for basic needs. Unfortunately that's likely to have exactly the same consequences as exists in the games.
You can see the remedy attempts already

* push for cloud storage over local storage

* push for locked down devices over general purpose computers

* push for DRM on the open web

* big ISP companies fighting against net neutrality
Digital Ocean has a preconfigured GitLab droplet available. Costs $5/mo, I've been using it for over a month now and have had 0 problems. Setup was a breeze and I haven't had to do any complex maintenance tasks (aside from setting up a user for myself on the box, but I'd hardly call that complex).
We Did It!
That's a great point. It would be interesting to see a list of largest mobile apps by code size instead of just code + resources.
One of the best pieces that I have read regarding love and marriage. I loved the part on savouring the fleeting moments of happiness in our life.
Show HN: Automatic web page content extractor for Node.js and the command line
HN Bugs and Feature Requests
It's one of these things that many people may not actually know (like how a ship in english is referred to as a 'she').
What does the in-app purchase mechanism in any app have to do with wealth redistribution?
With millions of games released, we've essentially been conducting a wide experiment into what methods (free, IAP, free/pro) is effective (at getting in the top categories for revenue & downloads).

Now, we see that the top charts are dominated by games like this. Free, with IAP to accelerate. That's what the market evolution bore.

If we don't like it, we can try to ban practices, but unless Apple (as a gatekeeper) bans these things, they will persist, as that's what millions of apps across billions of downloads/players have evolved to, & will evolve back to.

To change the dominant business model, we'd need some new mechanic to supplant it, not just trying to tilt at windmills & complain.
> People play a game that is not enjoyable

You are begging the question here, from which you derive your predetermined conclusion.
Well, what makes it kind of strange (IMHO) is that it's intermixed with native code via the NDK (which is heavily used by games, an enormous segment of mobile apps). So, in practice, the platform independence of Android isn't the same as that of the Web.
Sounds good :-)
Apps and web pages are different use cases. An app you expect to spend a moment "installing" and are likely to use regularly, so AOT compiling is useful. Web pages on the other hand are often visited briefly and a few seconds delay can make a huge difference difference, and often contain lots of script executed only once or not at all - so AOT compilation would actually hurt performance.
Lessig has in the past advocated for a variety of solutions that don't involve restricting speech, or organization. One option is to give each voter a $50 voucher that they can give to whatever political organization they wish. This retains all the of the functions of politics that we see today, but restores the dependence of politicians on the people, rather than the few who give most of the political money today.
it depends on what you consider "BDD". The linked library is nearly identical to Cedar ( https://github.com/pivotal/cedar ), which is, in turn, nearly identical to rspec ( http://rspec.info/ ). Both of these libraries are very much considered BDD. You seem to be advocating something closer to cucumber/gherkin?
One side effect of supporting .dex as the intermediate form is the entire existing infrastructure (including side-loaded apps, third party app stores, etc, etc) continues to Just Work(tm).

It also allows for devices running different architectures (including those not currently supported) or with workarounds for weird architectural bugs to work without having to coordinate that with a central authority.

DEX remains the canonical intermediate and wire form of "native" (meaning compiled-from-java-source) Android apps.
I think if I was working from someone's codebase, with about 80-90% of what I need already built-in, I would have the time and resources to make improvements on my fork, and shine glorious over the software making the base of my product.

I wanted to try TokuMX months ago, but when I learnt that the version at the time was based on Mongo 2.2 I shied away from it, because I need GeoJSON capabilities. I remember that with 2.6 one of TokuTek's engineers said that they needed to look at Mongo's code and start playing catch-up, I don't know if they've done that so far.

What will Mongo 2.8 mean for TokuMX? We're seeing document-level locking, possible B-Tree improvements (I presume Toku's R-Tree/Fractals [can't remember which they use] will still be superior), possible transactions (although what's on JIRA hasn't convinced me so far) and a few other improvements and Performance Boosting Things. So to what scale with Toku remain relevant if they don't keep up to date with Mongo, because in my case, using their versions based on 2.2, their ideology of being 'a drop-in replacement for MongoDB' doesn't work.

I'll go to their Github page and try see whether they've merged the 2.6 codebase to their latest versions though :)
EDIT: from looking at their release changelogs, as of October last year, they were in parity with Mongo 2.4, with the exception of geo-indices and full-text search, and 2.6 is still an open milestone.

It kind of feels like the Joyent vs Strongloop thing on Node.js, but I wonder if TokuTek employees push bug-fixes upstream to Mongo, or whether they just fix them on TokuMX and use that as a selling-point; again with this I'll have to do some digging to inform my opinion, but I'd appreciate if someone who knows could clarify it.
I think the big difference is you must play the game in those MMOs to complete those chores. In these F2P mobile games, you have to simply wait some amount of time without playing the game to complete the chore.

Presumably, the MMO gameplay mechanics are sufficiently fun and engaging to keep you playing. The F2P game just wants to keep you paying.
DEX is not a bytecode as such (more of a halfwordcode if you will) and it was designed with the idea of being both efficiently interpretable (look at lua's snappy performance with their wordcode format) but also a more reasonable IR for a JIT or AOT backend.
In my experience, ARC is only much slower under -O0, where the ARC optimizer isn't run.
Americans never give up your guns
Why Companies Should Kill Job Titles
Needing a preprocessor to be usable doesn't argue for CSS not being broken. On the contrary.
As someone with a high IQ, I can't help but agree with this in its entirety. For those who thought this was too long, I can summarize it as thus: "Don't overthink things, and refine your brain power. An unrefined brain is a useless tool, no matter how smart you are."
CPUs often come with many variants and optional features, and compiling on the target device allows the compiler to identify the feature set of the given CPU and generate optimal code. For example x86 is not "just" x86 - it can have a number of extensions, like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, AVX, CMPXCHG16B, AES, and so on. Some of those even have sub-types themselves (SSE4.1, SSE4.2, etc), and there are flags to indicate the presence of extra single instructions. That's only the 32-bit type; there's also the 64-bit type. Other architectures like ARM have their own extensions like NEON. So in fact the APKs are likely not all the same, and will vary depending on the specific features available with the CPU model.
Nickff is making the same argument that the Supreme Court did. Lessig's organization is specifically choosing strategies that don't conflict with that decision.

The Supreme Court ruled that you can't restrict any organization from using money to influence elections, because that infringes of the fundamental rights of people to organize, and pool their money to get their message out.

Lessig's strategy as a result is not to restrict money in politics, but rather to augment it with some fashion of public funding (for instance, vouchers given to all registered voters.) This shifts the balance of power away from the big players with narrow interests, and makes the money game itself more democratic. It's a much more pragmatic approach than the campaign finance restrictions that have been tried in the past.

I personally think that Citizen's United was the correct legal decision, but it struck down a necessary law. To me that means that it was just the wrong mechanism to bring about reform. Lessig's is much better.
Time for EA to put a fast talking voiceover and some tiny text at the end of the ad.

In my opinion, rulings like this will only lead to minimum required compliance. A lack of paying customers will lead to real behavior changes.
>>Which any skilled coder can do away with in a few minutes.

I think the skill you're talking about must be skill with CSS. General programming knowledge doesn't help much in a CSS trainwreck scenario -- at least, it doesn't seem to help me.

Basically what you've said is that CSS can be efficient and powerful when in the hands of an experienced CSS expert. That's not an especially good reflection on the design of CSS itself.
1. It would have been helpful to be more specific about what is meant by "intelligence". I get the sense that it is referring to knowledge and/or aptitude.

2. I think the message is, "Intelligence isn't enough. You also need perseverance to succeed." I don't know if the implication is if those two conditions are necessary, or that they're sufficient, but it sort of felt like it was saying that they're sufficient. The examples seem like they were making the point that, once you add perseverance on to the intelligence, you get success.

Anyway, success is obviously more complicated than "intelligence" + perseverance. I'm sure the author knows this, but the article seemed to oversimplify things, and didn't try to really break success into its components.
Python was sped up 30x, according to the same post, so the difference between best Python and best C++ becomes "mere" ~170 times.

Of course, on numeric problems like this, plain CPython inevitably sucks performance-wise (no JIT, a lot of lookups, no value types).
I very much agree. I hope that, capitalism, ironically enough for DRM, is the probably always the solution to overstepped DRM remedies. Regardless of the issue of piracy, which I am not advocating.

For instance there will always be a market for custom computing and "PCs", and so non-locked PCs will (hopefully) always exist in a capitalist environment. That market I think ultimately circumvents any attempt at ubiquitous control of hardware. The same thing is at play with software. And hypothetical new methods of connectivity may be able to circumvent many attempts at central control of the net.
Plenty of people are not 'intelligent' and have no motivation.

Dinner with 'vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the world'.

That sounds like something out of:

"Intelligent?!?! Read TOP 10 things that you are doing wrong right now!"
"Bloat" is emotional, not factual. It's meaningless without well-justified examples and alternatives.