skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'm sure there are many here that dream of having their idea be a huge success [...]"

In the broader picture, I am struggling to understand some of the opinions of this story out there, particularly on HN. What I mean is, I suspect that a majority of us dream of this type of success. We dream of connecting our creative force with financial success, especially when that success would free us to work on practically anything that we wanted. I would say that a lot of us dream of being able to lead entirely self-directed lives that financial freedom can afford.

Therefore, why is it bemoaned when we see the very success that we dream of unfold for someone else? Why are there suddenly opinions of, "Well, I can't believe Notch would work on something that he would abandon?" Or, "Notch should spend his money this way or that way."

It just feels, well, extremely egotistical. Who is anyone to call out how someone else should spend their money, enjoy their time... live their life?

A similar situation happened with Dong Nguyen. He essentially tapped into the modern-day equivalent of Pac-Man Fever. In the 80s, it swept the world, to the tune of billions of dollars. It was the highest-grossing arcade game ever produced. People simply loved the game, and they couldn't get enough of clearing boards of dots, power-pellets and ghosts.

In a similar way, Flappy Bird took very simple game-play, and combined it with a simple challenge. This is, of course, not the first game to do this, but it took off. The power of the Internet has made Nguyen's name known, and quite sadly in some circles, despised for his financial success, when how much he was making on ad revenue was revealed. Or, with comments like those found in this piece [1], its intellectual lamenting with, "[...] I begrudge a society that would turn it into a phenomenon."

I suspect that the author would have said the same about Pac-Man.

I really feel for Notch, Dong Nguyen and those creatives of the world that worked to bring a dream to reality, only to have this happen to them. I'm reminded of a phrase from the song Limelight [2] ...

Cast in this unlikely role

Ill-equipped to act

With insufficient tact

One must put up barriers

To keep oneself intact

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/02/03/flappy-bir...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKpn0esJ73w
It looks like Google is trying to become more like Apple. Seeing that Apple does not make its own hardware (and it's made by contractors like FoxConn), the similarities are pretty high between A-1 and Apple.

Not an Apple fanboi, but I like the whole iOS ecosystem: less noise, things "just work", etc.
Remember "The Network Is The Computer?"

1984.

http://www.tcse-k12.org/pages/network.pdf
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Lawyers don't necessarily need to code to improve their own lives - but they MUST learn to code to improve their relationships with their clients.

If there is any aspect of programming involved in any contract or lawsuit (which is becoming the norm), the lawyer absolutely must have at least a vague grasp of the tech to be effective.
Too many lawyers and judges are just utterly perplexed, and it leads to bad law that makes things more difficult for everyone down the road.

Even the most basic understanding of programming would be so so helpful, if only because it makes the world of computers slightly less alien to your average legal practitioner.
Oh, these are the guys that are confused about XTS mode[1], thinking it was designed for protecting "bulk data". See my wonderful exchange with them on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Cyphertite/status/450616668126203904

https://twitter.com/Cyphertite/status/450616106001399808

which ended up with them calling me "some jerk on twitter who has nothing better to do than talk shit".

https://twitter.com/Cyphertite/status/450623654288969728

—

[1] See this tptacek's post explaining XTS: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/04/30/you-dont-want-xts/
I agree with you that startups in Brazil should focus on the internal market first. But Rudi also has a point that for many of the startups here, very few look past Brazil's borders, loosing relevance and being exposed to external competitors once they consolidated their markets outside.

Brazil is rather expensive and an extremely bureaucratic place to start a company in, so there is less competition when starting up. That is the only advantage of starting a business here, so doing one but focusing on the outside market before you validate a business model isn't optimal, you would be better off starting in the US instead.
Would you do that on a laptop hard drive partition or on a clean drive? Would you use that drive after formatting it? I think that physically breaking the connection between the camera and microphone and the laptop would be a good idea.
TODO: Talk Openly, Develop Openly
It's weird how this story seems to have disappeared from the front page of HN, despite sitting at 265 points currently and being only 10 hours old.

It was there a few hours ago. Makes one wonder...
I just came back from a month in the subcontinent. Practically everyone has a modern smartphone from some Chinese company or other. Good ones with modern specs, running Android 4.4. Many children had better phones than mine. And I am talking about regular people, shopkeepers, etc.

Their main problem is that there are no worthwhile mobile data networks. The ones they have are slow, expensive and with very poor coverage. This is the problem to solve - hardware is already a commodity at this point.
Just give me decent office space, flextime, and a sensible allowance for vacation, (self-directed) training and sabbaticals -- and, if you don't mind, a solid health insurance that doesn't deduct from my salary base in order to cover beyond the bare minimum -- please. That's all I need for "wellness."
Not at all. If you use LESS/SASS, you can use your own variables and mixin overrides stored in a file outside bower_components. e.g. https://github.com/apigee/ui-framework/blob/master/less/core...
Not sure about your make/model/year, but my Check Engine light most likely means that I need an oil change.
How to Quickly Preview and Test App Localizations
but the it isnt a role to manage a community as much as to manage the relation between the community and the corporation. So "community relation manager" would be more appropriate.
Am I also silly for having donated money to some open source projects?

What about the people who back to-be-released-as-free-software projects on kickstarter or such, are they silly?

I might be silly. I know, I'm not like everyone else. :-)

But hopefully there are more silly people like me.
> Don't get me wrong, I like watching his coding stream as much as the next person

Can you please post a link to his streams? I bet it'd be fascinating to watch.
Peermesh: P2P GIS
I'm guessing it was moved by the admins. For some reason.
Hmm, that last tweet is enough to make me disregard this and wish I hadn't upvoted.
The most impressive thing for me: I was at the playground with my 2 sons and we started to role play pretending we were superheroes. I said something like: "I'm Hulk", and my seven years old son: "I'm Venon Extreme". Venon Extreme is a guy who has a Minecraft channel in You Tube that has millions of views. This is really impressive. Ah, we live in Brazil.
You said that profiting from debt is alright since parties have agreed to it. I'm saying that it's not, and such agreement comes from limiting circumstances, not because it's a good practice.
> To help ensure a consistent experience, Android One devices will receive the latest versions of Android directly from Google.

Finally! Hopefully we'll see all new Android devices going this direction in the future, with carriers and handset/tablet vendors (who have no incentive to support a device that's already been sold) removed from the software side of things entirely.

That's one of the most significant differences with Chrome OS, where the software stack always comes directly from Google no matter who you get your Chrome device from.
You do realize _how_ isolated these villages are right? Like the only stranger they see in a month is an itinerant trader? How exactly are they supposed to safely get word out to the "civilized" world? That is assuming that they have already heard that there is a disease going around and what the proper precautions are...
Apple Watch Will Power the Internet of Things
Dart isn't just another javascript abstraction. It has the option to compile into JavaScript, but so do many other independent languages, like Scala, Clojure and Haskell. It is its own language, with a VM, spec, an independent set of libraries, etc. This as opposed to for example CoffeeScript, which is purely (and intentionally) a JavaScript abstraction.

That said, my personal wish would be a language-agnostic virtual machine (or where the only "language" is that of the virtual machine itself) for the DOM, with a well-defined standard that could be implemented by different browsers. This would allow a lot of performance optimizations and remove the need for JavaScript to be a compile target. Instead, JavaScript would simply be one of a number of languages which target this VM.
A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317943.
It seems to me that the relationship between Homejoy and their "contractors" is more akin to you being hired by a contracting company and carrying out the contracts, in which case you are an employee
This comment is rude but the basic idea is right. Phil Fish and social media is a combination that does not work. He gets into massive nasty arguments. There's no connection to the game he made/makes.

And yeah I've seen the video about him becoming a symbol, which is terrible and all but still not a consequence of his creative output.
> On the other hand, how long did it take Microsoft to figure that out - remember the Windows 95 TCP/IP stack?

Having a good TCP/IP stack core isn't about figuring out that plugging into a national computer network is one of the key values of a computer, its about knowing which national network will be the key one (and, more specifically, which technology stack that one will be built on.)

The web -- the bit that made the Internet win that battle as the consumer-facing network that would matter -- was fairly new when Windows 95 was released and hadn't even been invented when work on Windows 95 began. At that time, dialup, largely-text mode offerings that didn't rely on a TCP/IP stack not only dominated local BBS's (some of which were part of national interBBS networks), but also represented some of the biggest (inter)national consumer-facing services to which computer users were likely to connect (like CompuServe, which had already secured leadership in that space when Jobs gave his 1985 interview.)

> The point is, plenty of smart people missed this boat for years, and I don't think it was at all obvious in 1985 that getting on a network would be the driving use case for widespread computer adoption by "non-techie" people.

It was widely accepted. Its true that in 1985 it wasn't at all obvious that the Internet or any specifically TCP/IP-based network would be the specific network, the recognition that connecting to a large-scale network was a compelling feature and likely to become the most compelling feature was widespread in 1985.
Work hard, live hard and learn from each other!
World First Peer Powered GIS...
Yes, I could come up with a lot of ideas at any moment
Somehow, it takes me a lot of thinking before coming up with few ideas
No, coming up with ideas it's really hard to me
GitHub Hall of Fame (WIP I Guess)
And removing lead paint and lead from automobile exhaust and putting more cops with better technology on the street and funding abortions and birth control and funding internet pornography and keeping funding prisons to criminals in there longer.
Easier said than done. Logistics of flight scheduling is very difficult. You need to schedule aircraft routes, flight crew routes, and attendant crew routes. Also have to include refueling stops and maintenance stops. Sabre Solutions made a name for themselves doing this for American. Your solution can be done but there are serious cost consequences.
I think that's mainly because small animals don't generally walk like that when they're going slow.
I can't help but think this deal is going to have the exact opposite effect on Notch as he intended. Now everyone knows he's a billionaire and people will come crawling out of the woodwork to try and get something from him. Also parts of the Minecraft community will be pretty upset about the decision, and if a year from now things go sour and Minecraft isn't what it used to be then people will be even more upset with him. I dunno, if he wanted to get away from it all why not just leave? No need to sell the company for billions. Give his ownership to the other founders and walk away.
I keep seeing this in your blog post: "Attackers could [rewrite] /bin/ls into a bindshell."

What does that mean? And how is it related to disk encryption?
He's doing the only thing that makes a repeat of Minecraft possible. If he stayed "on" and tried to make "the next big thing" as part of a Mircosoft team there would be no chance.

Going straight up _why is about the only way he might create another important work. I'd lay even odds.
"I really feel for Notch"

I don't. He cashed in and, well somehow wants the sympathy of free & open-source wish-keepers.

He's in the money; and that was his choice.
A few scattered thoughts about the parent comment's statements:

1) Your first edit makes it sound like you value hardware over software. I don't think that is your intent, but it confused me for a bit.

2) The implied definition of "the real world" scares me. It seems to be a common cultural thread. It creates instances like this, where parents dismiss interactions in video games as less real than those in flesh and blood. But, in its extremes, it also creates a culture where threatening someone on social media or in game chat is ok, because "it is not real". It creates a weird dichotomy where making a new friend at a bar is somehow better than making a friend online. A lot of pop culture media is currently struggling with the narrow pre-internet definition of the real world. I think that this is going to be an ongoing issue as our lives become more digital.

3) Based on your other comments below, it sounds like, if you had been my parents, you would have banned everything I loved for my entire childhood. My childhood was defined by a series of obsessions up until I graduated high school. A large portion of my early life can be summed up by Legos, Power Rangers, GI Joe, Sonic the Hedgehog, Scooby Doo, Dragon Ball Z, anime, and live theater (think Shakespeare). None of those things have any direct real world application, but they did give me a series of common frameworks for social interaction. "Oh you liked Scooby Doo when you were a kid? Me too!"

4) Based on Edit 2, I would downvote you, but I don't think that is the purpose of downvoting. I don't favor downvoting items that are adding to a discussion just because I disagree with them. Instead downvotes should be reserved for posts that are off topic (to the point of attempting to derail a discussion), incendiary, etc.
Rss started working again for me a couple days ago. Guess I never bothered taking it off.
Micro Focus to buy the Attachmate Group in all-share deal
It's purely about protecting them from obsession. Whenever they play legos, they don't pretend to live in a lego world for months on end afterward.
> Is the fear I feel that irrational, founded only on Hollywood movies in which mankind always ends up fighting the rise of AI?

Almost certainly, yes. AI has its dangers, but it's also potentially the source of a huge amount of innovation and the solution to a broad class of problems.

> I don't think the capitalistic structure + unbridled automation is a stable combination.

There are other structures that could potentially work in a post-scarcity world, but let's create a post-scarcity world first, and file the rest under "problems we'd love to have".
I know, I know. It was only a half-joke.

Once upon a time I stumbled upon the ITA slides[0] and the complexity involved with fares and routes pretty much blew my mind.

[0] - https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.itasoftware.c...
How to Kickass in Networking
I appreciated the "what the heck am I looking at?" section. Very smooth.
I've been a Java developer all my working life. It's not cool.
After looking at the Thinkpad W540 the specs and price are pretty close compared to the MBP, but I think I'm gonna go with the Mac. It looks a lot nicer, is lighter, has longer battery life, has plus I get to play with the Mac OS which I have never used before.
Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All
What’s new for designers, September 2014
Roughly even, actually!

I've also had quite a lot of success with a half-butter, half-olive oil mix.
>Our kids are homeschooled,

Now it all makes sense. You're fitting right into the home-schooling parent stereotype.
The thing I can't wait to see is how Microsoft intends to recoup the cost in FY2015 like they say they will. From what I read Mojang only made ~$300 million off Minecraft last year, so where is the other $2.2 billion going to come from in the next 9 months? I will be surprised if there isn't a big write-down on this purchase come July.
But, they're not coming for TOR. Comcast is explicitly stating that they have not problem with it. Here's their response to the issue:

On Monday morning, a report surfaced claiming that Comcast has been discouraging customers from using the Tor Browser, a browsing program designed to allow users to surf the Internet with greater anonymity than most browsers. Monday’s report was repackaged on a number of other sites, stating that Comcast has "declared war on the Tor Browser." The report goes on to suggest that Comcast has contacted some users telling them that they risk disconnection if they continue using Tor. The report may have generated a lot of clicks but is totally inaccurate.

Comcast is not asking customers to stop using Tor, or any other browser for that matter. We have no policy against Tor, or any other browser or software. Customers are free to use their Xfinity Internet service to visit any website, use any app, and so forth.

Here are the facts:

Comcast doesn’t monitor our customer’s browser software, web surfing or online history.

The anecdotal chat room evidence described in these reports is not accurate.

We respect customer privacy and security and only investigate and disclose certain information about a customer's account with a valid court order or other appropriate legal process, just like other ISPs. More information about these policies can be found in our Transparency Report here.

We do not terminate customers for violating the Copyright Alert System (aka "six strikes"), which is a non-punitive, educational and voluntary copyright program. Read more here.

Our customers can use Tor at any time, as I have myself. I’m sure many of them are using it right now.
Same thing was said when Facebook acquired Oculus Rift. We have yet to see the horrible "downfall" and "messing around" with Oculus by Facebook. I think sometimes people are exaggerating the perceived damage acquisitions cause.
I use Samsung's ML-2851MD, an inexpensive black and white laser: http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/ML-2851ND

Pros: fast, reliable, inexpensive to operate (I've had it for 4 years and have yet to need to buy a new toner cartridge), speaks PCL & PostScript out of the box so it works fine on Linux without any vendor-specific software, includes an Ethernet port so I can plug it into my home network, supports duplex printing (printing on front and back of a sheet of paper).

Cons: can't print in color. Really, that's about it.

I don't think this particular model is still for sale, but this $199 model from their current lineup looks like the modern equivalent: http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/printers/SL-M3320ND/XAA
That's unlikely simply because it would upset a lot of people, non-cheaters, as it both alters their itinerary but also alters the total travel time (e.g. 8 hrs instead of 6 hrs).

Plus that isn't really how aircraft travel works, it isn't a single aircraft which travels from A to B to C, it is a connection which only exists because aircraft A and B land at the same airport within 30-60 minutes of one another.

Now everyone understands if there is an aircraft issue/emergency and the airline needs to re-route you. But if they started making a random habit of it just for "fun" (to catch less than 0.1% of their customers) people would get upset very quickly.
> I would assume that canvassing with false information would then become a federal crime, as it would be a conspiracy to prevent a legally compulsory act.

Lots of the suppression tactics that are like this (as opposed to the suppression-disguised-as-anti-fraud efforts) are already federal crimes. Doesn't stop them from happening.

Making voting compulsory wouldn't change this (nor would it stop people from proposing anti-fraud efforts that make voting more difficult in practice. Just because voting is compulsory for people who are qualified doesn't mean that there aren't non-citizens and criminals who are forbidden to vote, and that you can't sell bureaucratic "safeguards" that make it more difficult for qualified people to prove that they are qualified in order to vote as mechanism to prevent the unqualified from voting.)
The Content Upgrade: 21 Examples of the Strategy That’s Changing Blogging
The article's premise is that the music industry is about to change due to the model that the movie industry uses called windowing, thus extracting the maximum dollars in order of one willing to pay the most for it up front.

What it fails to mention is that this practice by the movie industry is hated by he various consumers, and thus exacerbates the piracy problem. The difference between the movie and music industry is such that, movies are difficult to leak and the most widely used methods of leaking them typically don't carry high enough quality to be worth watching for most, thus the consumers oblige. For music, ripping full quality sound waves at ones liesure and releasing them is much easier. I'd suspect that introducing windowing into music will only exacerbate piracy during the most exclusive periods.
4 Best Practices for Rewarding Your Team
Bandwith is a huge problem on GIS apps. Thanks guys. Big WHOA !
Manuals instruct you to to wait for the light to appear on multiple driving cycles because the light can trip during a particular drive due to spurious sensor readings or malfunctions. That does not make the light useless.
Yes, rotary telephones :)
In the name of strengthening the case for 9V batteries:

Not many people know this, but it's now possible to get lithium, secondary (aka "rechargeable") batteries. They really put out about 8.0V, but sub swell in many apps.

And have ~70mA constant discharge rate.

I've been enjoying using them in many applications, esp with a buck-switching regulator.
I disagree with most of what you said. I don't see Minecraft as "for children" game. It was a game made for the full spectrum of the gaming community and its early success was as far as I'm aware primarily adults. The fact that children flock to this game as much as they do surprised me, but for what I hear from parents and teachers I would bet that a large majority of this very loyal following are still < 16 years old.
When you put it in those terms it seems almost insane. How can any company operate on such low margins? I mean, yes, the "Walmart model" is the answer, but it seems like they could go under very easily if hit by something unexpected.