skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I haven't seen written about this yet is where does the nickle and diming stop?

As an adult I shrug of 1 dollar for this hat, 2 dollars for this shiny hat but I remember well being younger with a very limited budget and trying to decide which 50 dollar game to get knowing full well I would most likely not even play the game I didn't choose.

These mods are on top of expensive games, when a sword is a dollar and a horse skin is a dollar and the sky UI which is required for 80% of other mods is 3 dollars.. how can most afford this?

I worry about kids ability to understand budgets when a few dollars seems so small now but adds up at the end of the month, at the end of the year. Especially when it is now extending into the modding community.
That doesn't hold up. The argument that Y% of X is better than 100% of 0 for 100 > Y > 0 doesn't seem to hold up if we set Y to be really low, say .01%. Thus we accept that at some point, a certain percent of some amount of money is a 'slap in the face' compared to it being free and based on donations. That some people think that is at 25 instead of .01 does not mean they have a hidden agenda.
It's funny how people like the market when it's going like they want and dislike it when it's the opposite. The majority of the population does not want to eat GMO, everyone have their own reasons, maybe they are scientifically good, maybe they are scientifically bad but at the end it does not matter. People prefer non-GMO products, that's just a fact gathered by hundreds of polls and statistics. The only thing which is keeping the GMO business still alive is the fact that there is no labeling on GMO products thanks to the lobbies. If you really want to know if the GMO business can survive alone in a free market, just label it and see what happens, it would close the debate once-for-all.
And the modders are building on the incredibly successful IP of Bethesda, riding on their coattails. Why shouldn't Bethesda get something like a royalty? It happens in pretty much any other kind of IP - music, books, movie merchandise and so forth.

If you're selling something that's largely due to the popularity of the source material, why is the idea of a royalty problematic?
FWIW, David Simon's response: http://davidsimon.com/baltimore/

> Yes, there is a lot to be argued, debated, addressed. And this moment, as inevitable as it has sometimes seemed, can still, in the end, prove transformational, if not redemptive for our city. Changes are necessary and voices need to be heard. All of that is true and all of that is still possible, despite what is now loose in the streets.

> But now — in this moment — the anger and the selfishness and the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray’s name needs to cease. There was real power and potential in the peaceful protests that spoke in Mr. Gray’s name initially, and there was real unity at his homegoing today. But this, now, in the streets, is an affront to that man’s memory and a dimunition of the absolute moral lesson that underlies his unnecessary death.

> If you can’t seek redress and demand reform without a brick in your hand, you risk losing this moment for all of us in Baltimore. Turn around. Go home. Please.
>Only 25% going to the content creators? Really? //

What percentage do the actual content creators get usually in a blockbuster game release? That probably provided a floor for what Valve/Steam consider reasonable.

Is that 25% of gross or net of sales taxes or ...
Does anyone else think they're taking over the world one step at a time?
The right has Climate Change and the left has GMOs with the extremes of both having very different reasons to reject vaccines. Humans are not scientific animals.
This is what happens when you have populations that think they are above the law, and that prey on other citizens that aren't like them (FTFY)
Removing the roaming charges would be fantastic. At the moment, there are caps on the roaming charges, which is a start. It's scary to see what they want to charge without these caps. For instance, I recently traveled to Italy and then Japan.

In Italy (capped): Calls 18p/minute, data 19p/MB

In Japan (unregulated): Calls 149p/minute, data 800p/MB

Data is over 40x as expensive ! The pricing that telecoms companies charge when they can are obscene. (The capped 19p/MB is still vastly overpriced IMO as well...)
> When I was implementing that, I managed to get several segfaults from my Python code

Well, it wasn't really DBus' fault then, was it?
You don't _generally_ do arbitrary pointer arithmetic in Rust. You can, with the 'raw pointer' type, but this paper attempted to use all of Rust's higher-level features. Raw pointers need `unsafe` to dereference, and unless you're doing something like this, aren't generally needed, so are 'discouraged' in a certain sense.
There is no justification for this kind of violence. And it's not even directed against law enforcement.

Further more, in the near future it will be used as an excuse to further militarize the police, increase its budgets and reduce civil liberties even more - think Camden, NJ where drug traffic is an excuse to discourage white people to walk and black people to sit on street corners (VICE S02E12).
Show HN: Spinach – An Android lock screen that's good for you
A new system? This is how society has been since time immemorial. It is the basis of our capital punishment system.

People only point it out as being some sort of new phenomenon when minorities are the ones lashing out.
This is a good idea but as others have highlighted the issue will be with data quality. At TagniFi we've been pretty vocal about the quality of the XBRL data because we find a lot of errors. Using the XBRL data directly from the SEC is the equivalent of drinking pond water since there is very little validation occurring[1]. This has resulted in a significant number of errors that will need to be corrected before consuming the data. We've automated some of this error correction but there are still quite a few that need human involvement. We also run all of the data through hundreds of QA checks to ensure data quality in the absence of validation.

[1] http://www.tagnifi.com/dont-drink-the-pond-water/
There is a specific guideline against mainstream politics and crime stories on HN.
"People, in general, pirate because it's free and really, really easy."

So's smashing car windows, but most people resist the temptation to do it.

It's actually not that easy to pirate stuff. You have to make your way through a minefield of malware and seo spam and figure out what sources are trustworthy. Compared to that just signing up for Netflix seems pretty simple.
Well, the XBox 360 was big endian. Not very recent but newer than Sun Netra.
There's an article in the Atlantic[1] that explains that there have been a good deal of civil cases settled for police brutality and racism, but none of the perpetrators have been charged. It seems to me that there is no reason for a person to die in custody, but right now, the people in charge of Baltimore don't have an explanation of how Freddy Gray died.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviole...
That list is misleading. One of the items is the Vancouver hockey riot in 2011. It was definitely called a riot at the time, and two years later they were still prosecuting the offenders. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vpd-rec...
It's the same C code doing IP, going through the same steps and the same number of steps, whether the underlying machine is little- or big-endian. So if you're saying about wasted cycles...
>With shared memory (IPC) or sockets (RPC), applications can talk to each other.

The whole idea is the "standard" part, not merely the "talk to each other part".
I'm a software developer.

I hated being bored and I didn't like working hard. ;) When I was a teenager I asked myself what kind of activities I enjoyed doing for long periods of time that made decent money and working with a computer was one of those, so I pursued a CIS degree.

But I'll be honest. I hated my job for a long time. My original two reasons are awful reasons to pursue any line of work. I eventually became disenchanted and started making serious plans to switch to photography full time because I loved photography, which had started as a hobby and was growing into much more.

But two things happened which changed how I looked at my job. One was I got over a lot of the initial learning curve and switched companies and found a work environment I liked considerably more. The other was due to my interests in art, which unlocked my desire to understand things which was eventually fed by software development.

I love my job now (weird how that worked out).

Anyway... thats me. :)
> I guess the 'anti-scientific folk' in Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, and Russia who have banned GMO crops altogether are beyond the pale.

Governments banning something doesn't mean it's either a) based on science or b) the right thing to do.
> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales.

They produced the game engine, and are letting people develop on it for free. And them getting a cut from people piggybacking on their work and making money from it was distasteful to you?
Making Sense of Amazon Web Services: Introduction for Noobs
you can't even stand behind your own comments.
Not really true! All of our grocery stores hereabouts bake every day, in-house.

And don't assume a restaurant does a worse job than you of managing their freshness. They buy from the same grocery most likely. In fact, the grocery you buy from is a store; their fresh food is managed quite well. In fact everything you make is worse than that, because you have to buy it from them, THEN make something out of it. So its not as fresh.
Key point: evolution does not necessarily working towards more complexity or a specific endpoint. Rather, the unique selection pressures that exist when organisms attempt to reproduce vary, as do the particular genetic changes that happen due to any number of factors (mutation, viruses, gamma rays, copy errors, bacterial absorption, whatever). Each generation may face similar or different pressures. Certain mutations may be more or less likely. In some cases, the mutations that survive may be pure random chance. In others, only a specific mutation may have saved the organism's particular genes from extinction. The future organisms and genes that emerge from this chaotic process are unpredictable. Sometimes those organisms will lose features, sometimes gain, sometimes have weird changes that don't appear to make sense. All that matters is: do the organisms continue to reproduce successfully generation after generation?
Actually, in abstract the idea of a game with no 'game' but just engine with full mod support sounds interesting.

I guess that's what things like second life covered though.

One game that I love that has very little in the way of story is Don't Starve. It has a great mod system that uses Lua to provide so pretty amazing mods to the base game. Basically the entire game is written using the mod system with only the lowest level engine parts being compiled code.
As I understand it the games industry has made some "innovations" since I was a gamer back in the 1990s - such as pre-orders, paid early access, DLC, micropayments, retailer-exclusive content, Google Play and Apple App Store, releases of buggy and untested games that just plain won't run, extensive DRM and so on.

Many gamers feel [1] where in the past you paid $a for a complete game, today you pay $a for a fraction of the game then an extra $b and $c and $d and $e through these extra mechanisms.

I suspect some people saw the 75% profit margin, and felt this was more about adding on $f, a new mechanism to transfer yet more money from gamers to big publishers, rather than anything to do with rewarding mod creators.

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/743258-video-game-logic
'Piggyback' is a loaded word. Its something we all do when we use a compiler or desktop machine. Yet those folks don't stick their hands into our revenue stream.
Check out this new knowledge based social platform – the next big thing?
Edit: The original was deleted so I'm removing mine.
Yeah, and they're not talking about it in a way that supports the cause are they?
> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful.

So, you agree that Valve should get some part of the sales, because they are the ones (Steam) actually taking the payment and assuming some of the upfront risks of processing payments (fraud) and, because of the network effect and the customers they bring (read ... marketing)

But Bethesda who developed the actual game that brought the modders and gave them a platform to derive their work on, not to mention creating the actual game and game engine and putting it in the hands of the actual customers; they should just get nothing out of this whole deal?

I agree that the whole thing is a big hairy mess, and as a developer and an underdog myself I agree that the split should be approximately reversed, but I'm not sure there's much else we agree on.
How secure is it? Lock screens have been quite notorious for being too easy to bypass.
I think Baltimore is run by a black mayor and a mostly-black city council. It can't be written off as race problems this time.
There's a linguistic problem. Assume there are real-computers [or real-holograms]. Inside the simulation the word "computers" refers to simulated-computers. Even if we invent the term "real-computer" inside the simulation it's fully qualified referent is simulated/real-computer. Global variables aren't global to the extent their referent persists across system boundaries.

Sysadmin privileges are required to configure the same name to the same value across systems. Once a proof assumes there is a sysadmin, we have to rely on faith along with our reason.
Cool, looks like the url parsing bottleneck will be removed. This means io.js 2.0 should be surpassing node by 2x on some of the TechEmpower benchmarks (provided they add it to the tests).

Thanks petka :)
You are wrong. DRM != copy protection

You can own the DVD with a copy protection and even legally create a backup-copy. You simply cannot own a DRM product, as its bound to a server side check. DRM products may suddenly vanish from your PC, or change its content. Valve already wiped some games and changed the regional settings (removing games from certain parts of the world in retrospect) and Rockstar released an automatic patch for GTA San Andreas (2005) over Steam which altered the game (broke several features like widescreen support, removed several songs from radio stations)
It's not just about the police. It's about an entire society that has self-assembled into a caste system by treating some portions of the society as wards of the state.

The wards of the state aren't expected to be independent and responsible. They're given handouts in exchanges for their votes, and over time you have a whole generation that can't take care of itself. That's when the state steps in to take care of its wards "for their own good", and it's inevitable that over-corrections will happen.
Several reasons:

1. This is a community primarily for technology posts. Occasionally news makes it here but it has to be a pretty big story.

2. Although this is a relatively big story it's a US centric story when HN is a global community. Personally I've seen so many of these horrible police brutality stories from the US in the last year that they've lost my attention. I saw the Twitter hash tag a few days ago, saw it was a police brutality thing, and didn't even bother looking further. It's almost become accepted fact that police in the US are militarised, heavy handed, and criminal, and no matter what the reaction there or around the world is nobody seems to have the ability to (or want to) change things.
For all we know, it's solid. We've worked hard on getting to this point.
> Given that the "passionate content providers" only make 25% of what users pay, I think that's a very generous interpretation.

True however market rate for platform/store is 30% + 20% royalty if you use an IP + 5%-10% for engine or more for publishing dollars.

Many regular game breakdowns are the game developer only get 40-60% revenues, 70% if they have no other costs on most stores including Steam.

With the paid mods Valve took 30% (industry average although it should be challenged -- set by Apple), Bethesda took 45%, 25% for royalty and 20% for their take. Leaving 25% for the content creator.

Other developers could have given up to 50% to the content creator which is as good as many developers get on an original title. Valve probably wants to give more but they can't because other developers would be scared away due to unfairness since Valve owns the platform. 25% is low yes but it is more than people make at a crappy job or more than anyone gets at their day job in terms of ownership or points on profit/work.

I think with the backlash it is good that people can influence companies but much of it was black and white. Mods will always exist with or without Steam. Free mods would only grow with a paid mod side market as any economy grows when money is added in, the free side would have grown. Many of the sharing issues could have been alleviated with a shareable license the creator could add. Pay what you want with a simple breakdown could have been default like Humble Bundle. They also should have launched it with a better breakdown on the initial developer and game chosen.

The mod market will get money invading it again as it is immense and we live in a capitalist system where nothing of sufficient size evades money, but it will be smarter next time. Over the long term, it will make mods more prevalent and overall quality will go up at the top. There may even be a mod professional job someday, I think it is good when people can make income from making or playing games. If you can make money doing what you love then you can spend more time doing it. And donations aren't enough for good mod makers to keep doing it when there are other things they can do.
It's a simple strategy for reminding people that the law enforcement is the lesser evil in the face of chaos and destruction. And it works every time.
Hey,

OP here. We'd love to get your feedback on a few of things.

1. Writing a lock screen on Android is hard and full of hacks, please let us know if you've managed to spot any issues.

2. At the moment we monetise with ads and a paying-to-remove-ads option. This is not satisfactory, especially since I'd hate annoying users with too many ads. Do you have any other monetisation ideas?

3. Copy is a bit weak perhaps, suggestions are more than welcomed. :)

If you have any other suggestions, please let us know.

Thanks!
So did io.js decide to turn down the proposal from the node upsteam folks to merge and turn it into a non-joyent controlled foundation? Seems sad to take so much brand and toss it down the toilet even if most of the development has moved to io.js.
They should have probably made tiers.

0-1,000 downloads = nothing

1,001-100,000 downloads = donate button

100,001-1,000,000 downloads = big donate button

1,000,001+ downloads = set your own price, 50% share to modder
Sweden's Next Financial Debt Crisis
Slightly off topic, but I have a bachelor's degree in Management. The courses were a joke. I wish I followed my passion in college, but figured a degree in Management would get me a job. The Manaagement classes were basically business classes. I was young, and naive.
Yes it would be a big deal. But it is even a bigger deal/shame that the telecom lobby was able to delay the decision.

Where do I need to sign the petition to push this through? (Or do I need to create one)
So basically, GitHub offering a service where users could charge for software, and get the source code as well? And not just a core dump, but be part of a community building up that source? ...That's a pretty solid idea.
Tyk 1.6 Released – Now with an API portal and docker support
Baltimore is a city that has extreme poverty, very poor social services, and a tax structure (city/county border) that prevents regional economic growth from benefiting the poorest residents.

As a result, there are a lot of opportunistic criminals. The protests just tied up enough of the police force to create an opportunity.
Well in sweden (which is to supposed to be a peaceful nation) there are city districts where the police can't go because the "natives" try to kill them.

Unsurprisingly these places are full of immigrants.

You can pooh-pooh over how they have lousy conditions and are poor and riot because of that, but the fact is that they get everything they need from the state (food, shelter, spending money, schooling, healthcare), and also there has always been poor people in sweden and they haven't had problems with eg. cops or looting and rioting.

So it's probably some kind of cultural thing for people from some places.
Was Tim Cook Wrong About IPad Enterprise Sales?
A robust CAD package to serve as an alternative to AutoCad for the uses for which people correctly purchase AutoCad. If you think there is one, you don't appreciate the technical capability of AutoCad.
> while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business.

Hah. If only that were true. The government's only positive role in commerce is ensuring political stability. Lots of times, they fail hard at that one job.

Once you have political stability, then the government becomes a power broker. The tax system is really an elaborate financial instrument for big business, has been ever since the dawn of mercantilism. The value you gain from the government is proportional to how close you are to the giant sums of money being funneled through it.

Sure, there are things like welfare programs that ensure an adequate baseline of minimum prosperity, (i.e. the homeless in the US won't starve to death, and might get a bed to sleep on a couple times a week) but you only really benefit from them if you really need them, and relying on them is no fun. And we only have those because those of us close to the poor, who can't just shut them out, threw enough of a fit to force the elites to.

The rest of us, lower and middle classes, small and medium businesses, including entities like Valve, don't get squat from the government. We have to earn our own keep, we can't rely on the government to bail us out.

The government is entirely too small to help out the rest of society in any meaningful way. They can try to pass laws, but laws breed loopholes and suck for the same reason Valve's lofty initiative failed, it's impossible to consider the incentive structure of the new world you're creating with a law until you actually enact it and see what's going on, and there's only so far hiring experts will get you. Legislation is a long, slow slog towards a saner world on the aggregate, and a vehicle for pork in the particular.

The only thing worthwhile the government provides US businesses is in just being there. Great that we have one, but extremely hard to point out specific things it does that aren't already being far better done by other commercial entities.
"nuance is important"

Says someone comparing plants with human children to make a point. (And no, not much of a difference, other than with modern technique we have more control over the results)
That's what we do in America. Look at how we chop, twist, and hash the Constitution in public debate.

It really doesn't matter how well-crafted the statement; we'll misinterpret because we're Americans and that's what we do.