skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reasons to do it in C++ - mobile and console is already in C++, so you can unify ports. Can make fancier graphics - it's Voxel graphics right now, but the next Minecraft could look like Destiny while retaining all the sand-box nature of Minecraft.

You use scripting languages to save dev time - Microsoft can just throw more devs at it. They spent 2.5 billion on it - labour is cheap at that scale...
Working with Touch ID API in iOS 8 SDK
He reminds me of Steve Wozniak a little bit. He's disconnected from the scene and it's refreshing in every way. Good luck to him.
I'm saying that he (as in, notch) has parallels to her. Cliffhorse is a game notch wrote, and Rowling already has written under a pseudonym.
Stop supporting them after two years and they'll have to upgrade.
It's not always about money, as he said.

Classy move by Notch. Respect.
1&2. The plugin doesn't have many options to configure. The usage: http://innovastudio.com/content-builder.aspx (I can send the readme file if you'd like, just email builder@innovastudio.com). The package contains several examples (explained in the readme file). In the near future we plan to include option to extend with custom image select.
3. around 2500 lines
Thanks
The 'he' refers in Notch in the above comment.
Probably enough to buy one bottle of vodka at Swedish prices
Awesome, though why wait to push commits? Just put in a branch people can play with/watch until it's ready to merge to master or whatnot. Dunno if I'll have time but I'd love to play and see where it's going, much easier if latest stuff is online and visible :-)
I think this just demonstrates the power of the internet/social networks and an increasingly interconnected world.

Notch creates a small game on his own, improving on Infiniminer, it catches the imagination of an entire generation. Without the internet and social networks this would have never happened. Without this game having a multiplayer mode added (which happened fairly early on) it wouldn't have happened. I wonder what it would be like it Doom was first released into a similar environment but maybe it's a little less universal.

People in their bedrooms recording themselves playing video games speak as loudly, or more loudly than traditional media. PewDiePie has 30 million subscribers - he can make any game just with a mention.

It's interesting now our networks are concentrating and distributing influence, power and wealth. Nothing I could have predicted and I'll enjoy seeing what comes next.
Currently the mobile and console versions are in C++.
Good buy IMO. Will help drive VR on Xbox and make MS' bet in that space relevant.
Microsoft Acquires Minecraft Developer Mojang for $2.5B
I have 3 daughters, all grade-school age, and they play Minecraft more than I do. We talk about it over dinner and watch YouTube videos about how to build things. I've also seen them make quick friends by talking about it. My daughters have even come to know some server terminology (mostly from hearing me say it while getting their games to work).

It is also a thrill for me, as a parent, to be able to see their young imaginations manifest in a 3D space which I can explore and interact with.
This, as much as the domestic spying stuff bothers me, this uber-left uber-pacifist view of things is asinine. China, Russia, Iran, etc aren't stopping their SIGINT or cyberwarfare programs and neither should we.

I also don't care if Germans are our "allies." 9 months ago Russia and Ukraine were best friends, now Russian soldiers are blowing away Ukranian civilians with total impunity. Shit changes. Shit gets real quick. Being at a information disadvantage can lead to serious consquences.

I think we live in a time too used to peace and as we can see from recent events, that time is now over. The far left's obsession with pacifism and the far right's obsession with isolationism are just impractical. This just causes conflicts that need to happen to be put away and ignored which leads to larger conflicts later. For example, the US and Iraq should have worked together when ISIS took Fallujah MONTHS AGO. The US should not have caved into pressure from the EU and Russia to not take out Assad. Instead, we chose the path of politics and sticking our head in the sand and an entire region just became destabilized. On top of it, petty dictators like Putin see our weakness and use it against us by invading his neighbors, knowing he'll only receive a slap on the wrist.

Downvote away, but we need SIGINT, now more than ever.
Which is how you should feel about it. Not approaching credit with a healthy amount of respect is a large part of the reason why it's such a general problem.

Sure, in the article the first example they posted was of a person down on his luck - but that doesn't explain the epidemic of high credit card debt we've had even during boom periods. In general, I think that people just aren't good at living within their means.

Having been on my own .com rollercoaster ride, I know what it's like to have to adjust your lifestyle drastically at times to avoid going into debt. It's difficult, but downsizing your house and selling your luxury car is a lot better than the alternative of living on the edge and losing everything when life throws your the inevitable curve ball.
Microsoft will absolutely screw this up. We shouldn't forget why Minecraft became popular: It was run by one (and later a few) guys who were close to the community. They cared about input and made stuff to be fun. They avoided all kinds of big business/management decisions to taint that or get in the way.

There is no way Microsoft will let it run like that. They bought it because they have plans for it and those plans will likely collide with the interests of the community. Microsoft is big in the gaming console business and struggling in the mobile market. It seems likely that they'll try to use Minecraft to push those markets.

Even if they won't do it immediately I suspect that they'll eventually make Minecraft exclusive to Xbox and mobile. Meanwhile they'll drop or decrease support for systems they don't like, like GNU/Linux, Playstations, etc. Maybe this will be part of a rewrite or a new huge upgrade (which I guess we can call "Downloadable Content" or whatever it is called in the XBox universe from now on).

And Microsoft will put their game guys in charge of it. And those guys speak a different language than Mojang. They don't care about indie and close community. They care about downloadable content and making new sellable releases every 12-24 month.
Are you saying Notch waited for this big news story to break so that he could quietly announce a gender change without anyone paying too much attention? He should become a politician.
They already made a movie

http://www.gog.com/movie/minecraft_the_story_of_mojang_delux...
I agree, but they probably won't go to Reddit :)

In Argentina and Uruguay we have some local communities, such as Taringa! (spanish-language community)

There's probably one or several equivalents in the locals' language :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taringa!

See also:

http://www.wired.com/2012/02/st_internetoutliers/

And, it is a pretty interesting opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs :) (and Indonesians, Pakistanis, etc :) ).

Edit: what would be the Indian, Pakistani, Indonesian equivalents of those sites?
this is so awesome that he can make things that he loves. Become super rich with it, but still staying who he is. This kind of achievement is incredibly hard.

Thanks for great work !
I would go to Yelp for this info (usually the store hours). The site looks good but just throwing that out there, I don't think you have any info that Yelp doesn't.
I don't believe, nor did I imply, that all developers are introverts. However, presenting at conferences etc. takes a more than average degree of extroversion. IIRC, public speaking is one of the most common fears even among average people. A majority of developers certainly do fall below that threshold. Besides E vs. I, there's also an aspect of developers wanting to focus on their one favorite task and not context-switch to an entirely different one. For whatever reason, many projects do lack any developers with the skills or inclination to perform the community-manager role well.
Only heartbreaking in the sense this is the new reality for many people. If you ever gain some semblance of popularity, everything you say and do is over analyzed. From your Twitter feeds, your work, your public comments, everything.

Notch just secured the best thing he could have. Now he has the money to do what he wants and not be at the forefront of what he created. Something I'm sure he's been wanting to do for a long time. Just like he said, he gets to step back into the shadows, where he's more comfortable, out of the limelight and content to do what he really wants to do.

I can only imagine what we'd be writing had he opted out say a year ago, before MS bought his company. What would we be saying then?
OP was talking about Notch and parallels with JKR, the 'he' is intentional.
You've said this several times. I believe you, but can you please link to your source? There aren't a lot of comparative compile time statistics out there. Last time I checked, dmd was quite fast regardless--maybe no longer faster than the Go compiler, but within the same ballpark.
This has been a problem for a while, and by this I mean using the term community manager to refer to a business development, social media pr, or event planning role.

There is in fact a job out there that actually entails supporting and nurturing a community and its vitally important to the health of online communities (not firms dressed up as 'communities').

The best example I can think of is the work Heather Champ did at flickr: http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Nasty-as-they-wanna-b...
Ask HN: Anyone have use for programming on mobile devices?
Would anyone consider programming on their phone or tablet? For what purpose? Anything existing for this that's good?

I've been toying with the idea of making a mobile game where players would have to type in Libes of code as the main game mechanism. Curious if people have had experience coding on mobile devices.
A risk? yes. But if that risk is significantly less than the other high-risk form of "severely brain damaged, unable to eat, talk, or understand" known as death, many would take it. Remember, the point is trying something that doctors & pharmacists believe has a sensible chance of actual _cure_ (perhaps with acceptable side effects better than death/dementia).

I don't understand the propensity of some to demean "hey, there's a serious immediate problem, let's do everything we can to help" with "but it might (with minuscule odds) go horribly wrong! therefore we can't let anyone do anything that's not established best-condition status quo!" With that mindset, it's a wonder such people ever drive to work (you might die in a horrible flaming carbecue!).

Statistical prioritization matters. Just because there isn't a perfect solution doesn't mean there isn't a better one.
What is this incompatibility they are alluding to? If the data could be viewed in the old system, it can be extracted..
I never considered Bruce Wayne much of a tinkerer. More like Tony Stark playing with Legos.
“My price is two billion dollars” (2012)
AT&T U-Verse admitted to actively disrupting my connection whenever I used torrents.
He's already invested many years of his life into mojang, why do you think you are in a position to tell him what to do with his money?

Markus is 100% free to do whatever the hell he wants with his money and you nor anybody else should place conditions on or make demands on him.
you seem to have never been taught the lesson that clever wordplay doesn't prove your arguments
That's silly. If someone said they hated their house, they wanted to move out and it wasn't about the money, would you demand that they give the house away for free?
What would be the benefit of a native code extension over using a standalone application with some URL handler / file type integration?

I don't see the advantage of "do it in the browser" here.
Heroku Vector: Autoscaling Dynos on Heroku
Congratulation Notch !
It happened again. -1 is the new 1 it seems. Pity.
At the opposite end of the spectrum of the startup CEO who's intent on cashing out for fame is Notch, who sold to remove himself from the center of attention.

I think we all believe we could handle the spotlight and the attention and fame that comes with it. But until we're faced with it, we'll never know.

All the best to Notch and thanks for a game that brought many people many hours of happiness and shared experiences.
Sweden has capital gains taxes of about 30% and he's reportedly the "majority" shareholder, so ~$900m after taxes even if he only owns 51%.
From what I can tell they still depend almost entirely on Minecraft, which, if I've followed gaming correctly, has as many registered players as WoW but pay no recurring subscription fee. Rough calculations seem to indicate MS are going to have to double year on year profitability for ~4-5 years to break even.
How about this:

If you travel quite a bit (say 10 international flights/yr), would you pay 15k/yr to never have to think about travel? You book meetings on your phone "Jan 20, Calcuta | Feb 23, Tucson, etc | OScon in X, etc" and everything else happens behind the curtains.

The startup books flights, hotels, taxi, shuttles, trains, etc, and your Google Now just talks to you: You have a flight tomorrow at 8:00. When you land: Take train A293 at 3pm, etc.

The more you travel, and based on feedback, the app learns (less train, a little more up-scale hotels, she doesn't mind taking the bus, etc)

Like being a millionaire with a full-time assistant, but for the middle class. Does that exist? Could AI tackle it? Maybe a semi-automated version?
My assumption is if you're at a stage of dev worth running New Relic then your app is probably worth the constant uptime. Out of the dozen or so Heroku apps I have only one or two are using New Relic. The rest are just experiments not worth the additional infrastructure waste.
- Option 1: Avoid getting into debt

- Option 2: Pay your bills on time

- Option 3: File Bankruptcy

If you haven't taken option 1 or option 2 and you start getting court notices - then it's time to start talking to someone about option 3.
I think it's just simpler than that. The impression I got was not that he left because of hate he was getting, but just because Minecraft got really popular and turned into something much bigger than he expected.

It sounds like he doesn't want to be a part of anything that big - he just wants to have fun hacking on games.
hypothetical :)
>Minecraft servers can only be run in Azure, legally

I wouldn't mind if it would use Azure Cloud CPU farms for some bad-ass physics and other cool stuff. Not very likely though.
Aren't there bankruptcy protections?
I'm trying, but I just don't see any good coming of this. The comments from Mojang seem incredibly naive, everything is going to change.

First people to make money on this will be lawyers. There's going to be a blizzard of copyright takedown notices going out to every unlicensed (most all) Minecraft merchandise and spinoffs. The offline fan ecosystem is going to get slaughtered.

Mostly I'm just sad for all the kids. They love Minecraft, and this won't end well.
The mods, however, can be quite compute-heavy. Minecraft needs to be written in a reasonably performant language to work.
Maybe, but this one makes 100x more financial sense than Instagram or WhatsApp's valuations.
>It's like Bruce Wayne deciding to spend the rest of his life playing with legos.

I like this image. Bruce Wayne's character in batman is always thinking big. He tries to push things in the direction he thinks is right. The idea that someone would have all the power and decide to play with toys makes me worry about the rest of us. I would like to see people like Notch (creative, thoughtful people) having a say in what the future holds. However, it seems inevitable that after a certain point, you have to choose between living the life you want or ceeding at least some of your time to the whims of the masses of the public.

Someone else mentioned Jobs and Wozniak - Notch feels like Wozniak and Mojang has no Jobs. How can we keep the Wozniaks and Notchs of the world involved in making decisions in a way that keeps them happy? We don't want to have to choose between scale and creativity.
> pearjuice 10 minutes ago:
> Go to bed, Markus.

Are you seriously suggesting I'm a sockpuppet for Markus Persson?
You serious? Leaves calamity in his wake. All about populist policies without a great deal of substance. Parallel IMO is along the lines of doing whatever suits him and maybe incidentally benefiting others along the way.
Looks and works great! Here are a couple things:

Have some sort of indication of what's currently open or not. Many folks would look for whats "available now" if they are on mobile... .

When you select a category it doesn't give you an option to search an area - especially when you are already looking in an area.

I've been developing something similar for a small area doplaces.com
I second that. I had troubles when running Linux on a HP and on a Toshiba laptop, but on a Lenovo one things have been working fine for 2+ years.
Or just use the C++ version. Only the PC version is written in Java.
Integrating with their non-games services seems far more likely. Server hosting, voice chat, mod development, etc can all push people towards MS products.
They will most likely rewrite it to C#. C# games run perfectly fine on Linux.
For people without children, here are some quick notes on the situation in kiddieland:

- My son is 7. We bought iPad edition first, shelled some more for PC edition last month, and I'm sure I'll be forced to buy more in the future if MS puts a price tag on it.

- I spend a fair amount of time during weekends for deciphering the modding world, trying to find something called CraftBukkit, learning to mod, finding launchers, finding maps shown on some Youtube video etc. because the son is mad about it. BUT, he's spending hours trying to learn JS (ScriptCraft on Bukkit) just to make an exploding arrow. I truly believe this is analogous to C64 days back then.

- School started today, he's moved to another school this year. The first thing he asked to his news friends was about Minecraft. Then he advertised how PC version is superior to the one on iPad.

- My 2 yo daughter knows what Minecraft is, tells she'll play Minecraft when she grows up.

- While we were shopping for school supplies last week, saw two people asking for Minecraft licensed school bags for their kids.

- We live in Turkey.
Or just more like Tony Stark from IM1/IM2 movies, period. He has a lot of money, but he basically outsourced every day-to-day company decision making somewhere else (up to making his secretary a CEO) just so that he could do what he really loves, i.e. high-tech tinkering and saving the day (and drunk parties).
>Basically "I was successful once, it was awful".

This seems to be a theme. The guy who had the frontpage the other day, flappy bird, etc. Must be nice to have the cash entitlements to "keep it real." I can't blame him, I think money just becomes arbitrary numbers after a certain point. Minecraft has probably grown to a point where its just only going to get smaller in the future and in a few years be a fun little nostalgia piece for the tweens today who will be in college, the same way we dusted off the NES when I was in college.

Obviously, there's something about the nerdy personality that wants none of this, but it really makes me wonder about guys like Gates or Carmack or Zuckerberg or Jobs who thrive in these environments. Are they the rare ones or are guys like Notch the outliers?
What a long strange trip it's been. So long Markus and get ye back to javagaming.org for the next 4k!
Try Not
This is super sad. I never want to read the following from a programmer:

As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.

I feel for anyone who has felt such stress to want to kill anything that they are working on that gains traction...
I'm really happy for Notch as long as he's happy. To me, the most disappointing thing about this is that the story becomes more complex. I loved telling my kids "this was created and developed by one person in his spare time." That's not been true for awhile now I realize, but it was fun telling my kids that. I guess I can figure out a different way to convey reality, but it's more complex when they say "but isn't it from Microsoft?"

Anyway Notch, good luck to you and I love you too! You really gave us something great and no matter what you do going forward, you can't take back what you've given!
If they didn't do that with skype or office why would they do that with Minecraft?
Web Browser that works without Wifi or 2G
Too many people use VPNs for work.
Pretty sure the every version outside of PC is not Java, so there is already an existing minecraft codebase that could potentially be ported to WP (Xbox version seems mostly likely for porting since it will already be using directx for rendering).
I would guess that the EULA shitstorm has been the last straw.
Just like they first update skype on Windows Phone, right?
Since law is "code for society", I am all on favor of equipping its practitioners with more insight into software.
There are a lot of parallels with people who got immensely rich while doing what they loved with no specific monetary goal in mind.

I think Notch represents quite well what a lot of us would be like if one of our software got incredibly popular overnight (We're talking worldwide sensation) and we got a massive amount of money out of it (Billions with a B).

Confused, dazed, surprised. "That's quite cool but I never actually meant for that to happen". Try to do good things with the money but end up with responsibilities we don't want regarding the product, the money and ourselves. Not be able to have a private life all of a sudden and wanting out of the drag.
Actually the core will unbundle as soon as there is a platform that can decentralize the actual social networking. The accounts, connections, authentication, subscriptions and notifications, realtime group experience (like chat) etc etc.

Right now to see what your friends have posted on fb you have to be on fb and be in their friends' list. Which leads to a snowball network effect. Imagine if you had to do the same in order to receive your friend's email from down the hall!

Right now people in an african village have to be connected to the internet using baloons or drones in order to communicate WITH EACH OTHER and share videos and photos taken on their phone. Why does their signal have to travel halfway around the world to a fb datacwnter just so they can plan what's for dinner?

This centralization is actually perverse and a SYMPTOM of the lack of standard for decentralized social networking, and open social network implementations. Diaspora was one attempt, but what else is out there?
Exactly. Even among other technical groups, you will find those who would rather be "in the weeds" than having to deal with people problems (people suck).
Helping India grow long-term tech expertise
I don't see the parallel with KDC at all. Assuming we're talking about the same Australian politician here.
He should not give a fuck about random people on the internet, but just about opinions of the few he knows in one way or the other and respect. I understand this is more complex to do than to say, but still, how to have fun working in the current IT development scene without this crucial step, especially for a famous person like him?
InfiniBand Performance Over Intel Haswell – First Numbers