skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's reasonable. Minecraft is one of the most popular games in history, period. That says a lot right there. Add to that the fact that it is insanely popular with kids and teens, folks who will continue to have a strong attachment to minecraft as they get older.

Minecraft makes a crazy amount of revenue at present without very much effort being put into monetization. If MS did nothing other than to offer paid high quality hosting and other basic features they'd bring in even more revenue. If they developed the game more thoroughly, came out with a sequel, more merch, etc, they'd be rolling in cash.
I'm Leaving Mojang
"We cannot simply fumigate entire cities at 0.3ppm for weeks at a time until an outbreak dies out."

It would be interesting to see the natural selection effect on other things, both primary like killing off something beneficial-ish and secondary like wiping out a niche which is then re-populated by something tough that is ClO2-proof. The tertiary effect would be most interesting. Imagine if you could kill ever garbage eating plague rat during the black plague era... and then after the plague burns out, all of the rats come back all at once and hyper over populate eating a years worth of garbage and debris in a month.
Why would this lead to those channels shutting down? Did i miss something in the posts?
Anonymous is actually a single group. The fact that anyone can elect to join the group does not disprove its existence.

One way to tell that Anonymous is a distinct group is to look for splinter or opposing groups with different names--because these would illustrate the edges of the Anonymous group identity. Both exist.

Maybe you are thinking of groups with more restricted membership, like the staff of a company? But that is not the only definition of the word "group."
Agreed. Warner Bros is already talking about a potential movie franchise for Minecraft. Merchandising seems to be going crazy too, I can't seem to turn around without seeing Minecraft posters, dolls, toys, etc. It probably has more long term financial potential than Harry Potter, even ignoring the core piece of software, and Azure could be an excellent fit with the move into providing and leasing servers to players that Minecraft has been dabbling with.
Show HN: Localmint - Quickly find local store opening hours
> Are you arguing that an implementation of generics in a programming language is free? (Whether it be performance or implementation complexity.)

I am.

Performance: if you replace all generics with interface{}, you get performance that is at better or equal to current Go code.

Implementation complexity: You could add some constraints to generics, for example only interface types can be used as generic parameters, and all uses of variables/methods/functions with generic types need to have generic parameters given. In that case, there's no complexity for code that doesn't use generics. Also, generics could actually be implemented as a preprocessor that would simply insert appropriate casts from/to interface{} at calls to generic methods. Since all variables/functions in Go are declared and have known types, you could of course go further and eliminate most generic parameter annotations.
The term Micro$haft seems oddly appropriate for this.
Looks like he's leaving Mojang: http://notch.net/2014/09/im-leaving-mojang/
The skype effect is near
Extensive Notes from SalesConf
It's funny because the Moto 360 runs an OMAP 3 processor and Motorola is still owned by Google until the sale goes through, so it's not like Google refuses to use or update OMAP processors anymore.
Would've been so much more awesome (not that it isn't already) if it could print screenshots of the game too.
Health is only part of the issue. The growth of ethnic minorities worldwide whose dietary restrictions keep them away from lard is probably very significant.

Devout Hindus, Muslims, and Jews won't consume products containing lard derived from pigs. I'm surprised that factor wasn't covered at all in this article.
Bingo. Better worded than I did.
I'm thinking this is an almost-certainty at this point. I doubt they can really do anything about existing builds of Minecraft on non-Microsoft properties, but a Minecraft 2 XB exclusive is the obvious way to get a healthy ROI on the Mojang acquisition.

I obviously don't know the whole picture here, but I see the purchase of Mojang as a strategic move to strengthen the Xbox One platform. They're banking on Minecraft being a strong property for the next few years; they could easily sell a few hundred thousand units holiday season 2015 if they have a exclusivity on Minecraft 2.
Maybe, but I fear it's a constant battle we have to fight. Chrome tends to want to be the New IE with specific functions implemented nowhere else, Apple still locks down users to their store and devices, etc... interoperability is far from being achieved.
Can someone explain to me why all this physics demos always seem to run in slowmotion?
Please don't use all-caps in your submission titles.
Did Minecraft ever take on any VC money? I think not, so this 2.5b is very, very different than the stuff you see here. Not comparable to Instagram in net profit for the founders.
I think it would matter a great deal.

If an opportunity to re-invest came along in that window then you'd miss out, microsoft stock is relatively stable but has seen both 'up', 'down' and 'neutral' years where up and down were on the order of 20 to 30%.

On top of that, cash is king, simply put: there is absolutely no uncertainty at all.

Given the option between x in cash and x in stock or a mix or stock and cash you should always go for the cash.

And something a bit less than x is probably still preferable in cash.
Technological Challenges and Their Silver Bullets
Your Business Needs Reviews
>There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC/Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop. Of course, Microsoft can’t make decisions for other companies or predict the choices that they might make in the future.

Translation: MS hasn't killed them yet, but probably will soon.
> I'm not the typical frontend developer though apparently. Div class="row" is not something you'll see in my code, ever. I'm not going back to table layouts by faking rows and columns with divs. That to me is working against the grain of HTML and CSS. When you start working *with" the grain, with the native behaviour of HTML elements, suddenly a lot more is possible and easier to accomplish when it comes to responsiveness and compatibility. But anyway.. carry on with your "not table based" layouts!

Interesting. As somebody who loathes front-end development, I'm curious to know how you work against what I consider to be the shameful lack of support for laying out elements on a page in a coherent way (something which has been present in widget toolkits for fat clients since forever). I still remember with dreads the hacks necessary to achieve a three-columns fluid layout in a cross-browser fashion, and I'm certainly not going back to that.
>> That's 2.5 instagrams. What do you feel, realistic, too much, too little?

I don't think there's the revenue growth potential in Minecraft like there is in Instagram. On the other hand, Mojang made $330 million in revenue and $129 million in profit last year. They can probably hold on to those margins because their sales system doesn't share revenues with retailers or distributors (or Valve, Google, or Apple for that matter).

The interesting question is whether Minecraft has legs to continue selling for ten or twenty more years. I think it might. I know lots of parents that don't let their kids play video games except for Minecraft. When I pick my kids up from school, I always see a handful of kids wearing Minecraft shirts and carrying Minecraft lunch boxes. It could become like Lego--a toy that's viewed as educational and beneficial by parents.

If I was Microsoft, I'd do two things: First, I'd work on performance and clean up the presentation a bit, especially on the loading screens and menus. Second, I'd roll out a service to make it easy for parents to set up a locked-down server for their kids. You wouldn't believe the number of parents who have asked me for help in setting up a Minecraft server for their kid and his/her friends. I finally stopped showing them because it's too complicated for them to keep running. A service that cost $4.95/month and was reputable, simple, and secure could make a killing.
Hmm.. this "next five billion" market will hardly ever connect to the Internet, even if they do, OS upgrades might get pretty expensive for their data plan.

If Google could make really cheap quality Android phones that this segment can buy every two years, it will be a quite good accomplishment( or if Google could partner with carriers to offer these updates for free then it will be even more awesome ).
If people who don't speak English get onto the Internet in droves, I would imagine they would flock to sites catering to their language, until the point where they learn enough English to join the English speaking parts (assuming they have interest in learning English, which they may not).

The Internet does have sites dedicated to other languages. I frequent reddit.com/r/de, which is reddit but completely in German.
That's quite irrelevant. Rape is prosecuted by the state, not by the victim. If an action fits the definition of rape (e.g. having sex with a person who is unconscious and thus unable to consent), it's rape, no matter what the "victim" feels about it. The purpose of the courts is not only to seek retribution, but also to discourage similar behavior in the future.

I agree that Swedish definition of rape is a bit bonkers (e.g. I don't think that "sex without a condom" is rape, at most it's "fraud" or "lying"), but I think that sex with a sleeping person is always rape (unless you've been explicitly given consent that it's OK beforehand).
What about preventative treatment? Say we have a prototype vaccine. Now you have to find the cutoff between a chance of getting a fairly deadly disease, and the chance of a vaccine not working or having nasty side effects. That's a much greyer area.
Looking at this, it seems something that sits between the view (html) and the controller (data) would be needed. I understand the reactive html is used for now, but that would not work for complex UI interactions.
Regardless of what the right amount of money is, microsoft will screw this up.

Repeating the success of minecraft is nigh impossible, it was the confluence of several factors at the right place and the right time. The best that can be hoped for is good stewardship of the minecraft community and client. Unfortunately this isn't the way microsoft thinks about games or products(see halo), expect a Minecraft 2: Creepers Return, Minecraft 3: the Blockening, etc... They didn't spend 2.5 Billion to steward a community.

How long before they port it to C#?
The HN effect... A pastebin http://pastebin.com/n1qTeikM from https://twitter.com/notch/status/511508557200498688
We have built Localmint to help consumers avoid the tedious task of browsing store locators, which typically offer terrible user experience, especially on smartphones. Would love to hear any feedback you have. Oisin Ryan - Co-Founder
Fair enough. What I meant to say is that they suck in terms of power density. They are obviously a useful form factor, but having a battery that lasts for a while would be better, especially in my application.
This post echos my sentiments about the Stack Exchange community managers. Stack Exchange the company doesn't want to pay for the manpower and expertise to moderate all their sites ("communities") so they hold moderator elections and get people involved with the site to do it for free. They provide these volunteers with a sense of authority and ownership over the communities, but if there's ever a disagreement between the moderators and the "community managers", guess who wins?
Site is massively overloaded.

Text: http://pastebin.com/GLuR7T9t

archive.today: https://archive.today/KKNNA
I don't know, one look at the site tells me that this will not be a Minecraft killer.

I don't doubt something will succeed the current version of Minecraft but Microsoft has all the cards, it's up to them to lose it.
It isn't SARS, it isn't Spanish Flu... it isn't airborne. And the way it's composed, it isn't a simple mutation away from being airborne.

Guns down.
The guy has such a classic engineer mentality - spend a while hacking the printer (the important bit) and then spend the next 3 months trying to get Doom to run (completely unnecessary, but oh such a great challenge!)
Millions of Americans Get Wages Garnished Over Credit Card Debt
Performance is a difficult question to answer because it is very workload dependent. However, I can say a few things on performance:

1. Solaris's EULA prohibits the publication of benchmarks without the explicit permission of Oracle. I have not done any benchmarks of Solaris and if I had done any benchmarks, I could not publish them without placing myself and/or my employer at risk of a lawsuit from Oracle.

2. Block device drivers are known to influence performance. In situations where Linux has superior driver support, ZoL will outperform its counterparts on other platforms.

3. There is a key performance fix in a pull request that is planned to be included in 0.6.4. I have seen benchmarks where it enables ZoL to outperform its counterparts on other platforms, although the other platforms were subject to inferior block device drivers. Before the fix, ZoL performed worse:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/spl/pull/369

4. I have posted some information on performance to the ClusterHQ blog:

https://clusterhq.com/blog/state-zfs-on-linux/#comment-15844...
https://clusterhq.com/blog/state-zfs-on-linux/#comment-15880...

5. A list of performance improvements in Open ZFS is available from the Open ZFS wiki:

http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Features#Performance

6. It is quite likely that I will post a future blog post discussing performance. However, performance is a difficult topic to discuss because it is extremely workload dependent. No matter what I or anyone says, or any benchmarks you see, the best measure of a storage stack's performance will ultimately be a test of your own workloads.
No one has mentioned merch or licensing yet here.

I would offer an educated guess that Minecraft is/was the single most valuable indie game IP outside of actual game sales.
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Their cars definitely won't change the world. The one area they're working on that might change the world is battery technology.
Panasonic Announces an Epic Cameraphone
They talk about this:

In an effort to reduce data costs, if you have an Airtel SIM card, you’ll get these software updates for free for the first six months. As part of this same Airtel offer, you’ll also be able to download up to 200MB per month worth of your favorite apps (that’s about 50 apps overall) from Google Play—all without counting toward your mobile data usage.
Chinese city tests out sidewalk lanes for cellphone users
New algorithm enables MIT cheetah robot to run and jump
Indeed, Minecraft is the most popular non-bundled game ever.

The most popular version of Minecraft in terms of raw sales is the Pocket Edition which is Android and iOS only, so I suspect MS is seeing an opportunity there.
This makes me sad. I see that there is the potential for good to come from this, I don't think it will happen. At least Jeb is staying. There might have been some pretty big problems for Minecraft if he didn't stay.
Precision Touch for Precise Gestures
If Microsoft did anything like that they would be flushing their 2.5 billion dollars down the drain. The community that surrounds Minecraft is why it's worth so much.
Official site is http://minetest.net

For those that don't know, Minetest is a free software Minecraft-like game written in C++ and Lua.

Interested and looking for a server to play on? Try the LibrePlanet server: http://games.libreplanet.org/minetest/
With Microsoft, I think Minecraft 2 is a given. You didn't expect Disney to NOT release another Star Wars trilogy after acquiring the franchise from Lucas, did you?
>As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments.

It has always amazed me how down to earth Notch is. Now, he's going to be a billionaire doing little game jams. It's hard to believe and quite awesome. It's like Bruce Wayne deciding to spend the rest of his life playing with legos.
Jakob =/= Jens

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Jakob_Pors%C3%A9r

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Jens_Bergensten
Eskimos still eat large amounts of blubber without issue.
I doubt they'll rewrite the original. They'll probably create a Minecraft 2 thats written in C# so they can sell it for $59.99.
Microsoft Has Acquired Minecraft for $2.5B
> Comcast Is Threatening To Cut Off Customers Who Use Tor, The Web Browser For Criminals

Uh, it's not "The Web Browser For Criminals". It's for people who want anonymity. And being slightly pedantic, Tor is also not a web browser. Tor Browser is.
cough iPhone 4S, released in 2011, can be upgraded to iOS 8 cough

Just sayin'
Watching the Birth of a New Breed: The Werewolf Cat
"Microsoft Studios includes 343 Industries, Turn 10 Studios, and Lionhead Studios just to name a few."

Ouch.
Ya, the people don't care and that's the problem for us developers.

App development sure is easy if large percentage of the user base are on the latest version of the OS, Apple does win here.
Full text of post until the site becomes less overloaded:

------------------

I don’t see myself as a real game developer. I make games because it’s fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world. Minecraft certainly became a huge hit, and people are telling me it’s changed games. I never meant for it to do either. It’s certainly flattering, and to gradually get thrust into some kind of public spotlight is interesting.

A relatively long time ago, I decided to step down from Minecraft development. Jens was the perfect person to take over leading it, and I wanted to try to do new things. At first, I failed by trying to make something big again, but since I decided to just stick to small prototypes and interesting challenges, I’ve had so much fun with work. I wasn’t exactly sure how I fit into Mojang where people did actual work, but since people said I was important for the culture, I stayed.

I was at home with a bad cold a couple of weeks ago when the internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with. I was confused. I didn’t understand. I tweeted this in frustration. Later on, I watched the This is Phil Fish video on YouTube and started to realize I didn’t have the connection to my fans I thought I had. I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.

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.

Considering the public image of me already is a bit skewed, I don’t expect to get away from negative comments by doing this, but at least now I won’t feel a responsibility to read them.

I’m aware this goes against a lot of what I’ve said in public. I have no good response to that. I’m also aware a lot of you were using me as a symbol of some perceived struggle. I’m not. I’m a person, and I’m right there struggling with you.

I love you. All of you. Thank you for turning Minecraft into what it has become, but there are too many of you, and I can’t be responsible for something this big. In one sense, it belongs to Microsoft now. In a much bigger sense, it’s belonged to all of you for a long time, and that will never change.

It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.
In the context of 1985, Radio Shack was a different story. In most towns, it was the closest thing people had to a computer store. There was no Best Buy, there was no way to order $3 cables from Monoprice via China.

When you needed an RS-232 cable or a box of floppy discs, sometimes Radio Shack was all you had.
Free? How much does that thing cost to insure? And fuel?
Correct, I was just using a narrative technique, not implying any brands are more susceptible than others.
considering the fact that all of the PC versions are just JARs it's probably fine.
I presume the assumption is that with Microsoft now owning Minecraft (and presumably the copyright over it, among other things), they could leverage that to get videos of Minecraft pulled off of Youtube.

Personally I doubt it extremely, but you never know.
I very much doubt it. The two companies have been working closely on the Xbox version. I don't think for a second that Microsoft has any intention of making a game similar to Minecraft.
Ink is so expensive, that this sounds less like cleaning of printer head than it does a cleaning of the wallet. The conspiracy theorist in me says its designed to purposefully waste ink so you need to buy more.

--EDIT-- @DSMan195276 I cannot reply to your message (we're too far down the thread) - but the sensible less wasteful thing to do would be to offer the clean action as an option, not as a default on every startup.
Wow... 15,000 views in 10 minutes!
Heartbreaking to read what we do to people.
On the other hand, Mojang made $330 million in revenue and $129 million in profit last year. They can probably hold on to those margins

The margin is interesting, because Mojang supposedly paid Notch personally another ~$129m in licensing fees.

If he has managed to sell the company and will still collect such large licensing fees, he's laughing all the way to the bank. If he sells whatever rights he is licensing to Mojang/Microsoft first, however, then their margin will leap up as their expenses are, in reality, a lot less than they seem due to this arrangement.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-19-mojang-made...
Dreamcast was the second system I learned about embedded systems with, after working on 1.5-megabyte Linux distros for old 486's turned into routers and terminal server clients. Nowadays Android provides a similar experience for many new people, but Dreamcast had to be hacked and reverse engineered and have custom drivers written for it... it was a romantic time.

Also the games kicked ass. The only flaw was the GDROM was literally not fast enough to keep up with how fast I played Crazy Taxi, and you'd get occasional jutters from the GDROM as it worked hard to seek to the next data segment. (I always wondered why GDROMs didn't become a new consumer device, since it had expanded capacity on CDROM without a change in media?)
BitTorrent to ISPs: Pay us and our users to stay in the “slow lane”
I don't really see what point you are trying to make.

Very few people keep the same phone for ten years; most people upgrade every few years, such that their high-end phone never becomes deemed a low-end unit.

If you're particularly cost-conscious, and don't see the added value of a high-end phone, then buy a low-end phone.
Sure it doesn´t. I wasn´t trying to prove anything, but to show that smaller governments are as corrupt as larger ones.

At least in Spain, all those smaller governments - Comunidades autonomonas - are severely corrupted (Valencia, Andalucia and Catalonia being the worst)
Noticing this aggressive downvoting trend quite alot on HN lately. Perfectly valid inoffensive arguments are downvoted just because the downvoter disagrees with them.