skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Games are one of the only pursuits that actually allow you to experience that you've accomplished something, and in fact they're all designed to do so, and it's neatly packaged in such a way that you can be certain it's possible for you to experience at least a set sequence of accomplishments.

Couple that with complete abstraction from "the real world" and they are capable of producing the type of persona that is immune to accusations of uselessness / slacking, the person in question constantly gets their "I did stuff" buttons pushed by their in game accomplishments, despite accomplishing very little in the real world.

The only other pursuit where this springs to mind is sport, and sport has been around long enough that culture has adjusted to it, and in some cases actually translates sporting achievements into real life achievements. South Korea is already taking this tack to a degree with video games, and with professional gaming leagues, etc, you can see it's probably the way that the pursuit will develop / integrate with mainstream culture eventually.

Speaking for myself, I've been absorbed in games at times, the degree to which this absorption is expressed is inversely proportional to my satisfaction with the real world at any given time. I think culture proper doesn't like the idea that "gamers" may be a group mostly capable of not caring what culture thinks about them.
Mozilla Firefox старая версия - Поиск в Google
Personalized Search for everyone
I'd pay $350 for the privilege of using it.
Well, it is Friday... :)
you saw that they're in microseconds, right?
That quote kind of loses its punch without the ellipsis:

'Yes, but I have something he will never have...enough.'
The comparison to eBay is a good one - this sounds similar to the reasons touted for eBay not integrating (or, ultimately, receiving value for) their Skype investment.

When you make it easy to put the seller and purchaser in a relationship - and teaching / tutoring basically does that as part of the product - then you make it easy for them to pay each other direct. They're not being unethical - it's just that it's harder for them to pay you than not, which isn't a great position for you to be in.

I look forward to the stories of other models. Thanks for sharing.
Google Docs was awesome at the time, however, it is not really a real-time collaborative text editor. You have to coordinate your edits so that you are not working on the same thing, otherwise you create conflicts which are a pain in the ass.

Once you use a real-time collaborative editor like EtherPad, you can never go back to something like Docs, it's too primitive.
beWeeVee Notepad is a techdemo but it works. It does more or less the same as Etherpad. It also have an SDK to develop applications on top of the Operational Transformation Technology.

The Url is: www.beweevee.com
Google's core service, the simple page http://www.google.com/ , has been getting more and more borked and broken over the past year, and especially over the past few days.

As it is, Google has been rewriting search result links so that they redirect through Google before forwarding to the final destination. It causes a noticeable delay, never mind the privacy implications. I've disabled this through a Greasemonkey script called googlePrivacy.

Now (as of today, on Firefox), they have fiddled with their home page, so that it gradually "fades in" when you mouse over it. Unfortunately, the googlePrivacy script interacts poorly with this, effectively disabling the fading in - leaving you with a very bare Google home page.

Also new behaviour, google.com keeps redirecting to google.co.uk, so much so that I've had to change my Google shortcut to http://www.google.com/ncr and install a Google US country-specific search provider, since Google's new behaviour essentially broke Firefox's built-in Google search provider. They also lost my search settings (in particular, I prefer 100 results per page).

Some, or many, of my problems may be caused by poor interaction with googlePrivacy, but the old ways worked, goddammit, and I am irked that I am unilaterally being frog-marched to a new version of client-side Google that I never asked for and don't want.
Not countering your central point really but I'd note that the distribution is pretty skewed[1], i.e. the 300k+ group is a plurality in some neighborhoods.

[1] http://envisioningdevelopment.net/map
This is sort of a neat tech-demo, but it is unusable for serious editing for obvious reasons.
The kitty is sort of out of the bag with the original page rank algorithm, right? I mean wasn't it partially funded by the government. I don't see why a free and open sourced search engine can't emerge to compete with Google on pure search. Now that they are a public corporation, there will be a relentless drive toward growth, to the detriment of most of their casual customers.
Well for one, RSS is pull. This is push. RSS also requires that you subscribe. This wouldn't necessarily require that.
That's how I've felt about it too. Back when it came out, Rails was very easy to fit into your brain in the course of a day or two of absorption, but now it's a very large collection of ideas, DSLs and overall lingo. It's probably more than a little bit overwhelming to newcomers, and even some of those of us who come back to it every year and scratch our heads in awe at just how big the Rails universe has become.

I also hope that Rails 3 will cut down some of the noise for newbies and oldies alike.
This one is so close it hurts!

It is almost a perfect clone of EtherPad, but it's written in Silverlight. Therefore, it's painfully slow, takes forever to load, and doesn't act like a standard Mac OS X text editor (ctrl-t to twiddle characters, for example, or ctrl-d for fwd delete.)

I am so desperate, I may have to bite the bullet and use this in the meantime though.
Looks kind of neat, but it's a desktop app. :(
Your line makes more sense now, since you're talking about a different situation from the article. It's a different relationship; since anything you do would have to benefit the many of your users at once to be worthwhile, it makes sense to have users who are similar to each other, ie, to say no to the outliers.
I've been working on a little notification app idea. You create an account with a web service. That account gives you a unique email address to forward all your notification emails to (presumably with automated rules) or to just set as your email address on systems that send you notifications. You'd also be able to add RSS feeds.

Between these sources, you build a list of notifications. Then there's a little iPhone app that let's you do six things with each notification:

- Read the full article or email

- Create a new todo

- Add something to your schedule

- Send a copy of the notification to someone else

- Bookmark the notification

- Ask for a reminder (Reshow the notification after a certain amount of time)

This is just something I've been playing with as my fun-hack project. It came about because a friend was complaining that she wished her inbox could be about correspondence, not notification.
It's like you're looking perfectly into a newsroom.

Journalist: "How about this pitch: 'Second Life, where is it now?'"

CoS / Section Editor: "Brilliant. An exploration of how the media jumps on a new technology bandwagon, defines it as essential, assumes it will last forever, and then forgets about it almost immediately. Just be sure to put a link on our Twitter feed when it's done."
He doesn't like frameworks? Yeah, it only took Apple a decade and millions of dollars to make the framework, but I'm sure I can knock up something better in a week or two. While we're at it, why bother buying an operating system when we can just write a better one ourselves? Can't be that hard.

As a Cocoa developer, I can say that this is the stupidest stuff I've heard in a long time. I can't believe I'm reading it on the front page of hacker news.
I can't be the only one. I'm faster overall in vi and xmonad with a browser window opened to the SDK docs than using arrow keys with code completion in XCode.

Interface Builder though, don't know how I lived without it when the first version of the SDK came out lacking it. shudder
Classic oldies: Hunt the Wumpus, advanced cave topologies
What if UN Peacekeepers had Smartphones?
Before someone says something about the xmonad thing and it sucking on the mac, I'm actually writing the code on a linux machine and building it on a mac via synergy :) Yes, it actually works pretty well!
I used AppJet myself for small personal projects, and liked it a lot. However, it wasn't complete enough for commercial use, perhaps as a platform for another startup to build their web app on. For example they didn't support development outside their web IDE, multiple code files in a project, a storage system with known scalability properties, or paid accounts with higher resource constraints.

I know they were working on at least two of the four features I mentioned above before they decided to abandon AppJet in favor of EtherPad. Building their own app to prove their platform was a good idea, but I guess they just didn't have enough resources to work on the app and the platform at the same time.

I'm not sure what the AppJet guys would have considered success to be, but if they expected other companies to build commercial apps on top of their stuff I think they gave up too early.
Or even better: hold down Ctrl-Cmd-D and hover over any word.

Works in Cocoa apps that use native text controls -- Safari, Mail, etc. all work.
Vegetarian low protein diet could be key to long life
What's your point?

I think several people on HN could end up benefiting from doing the same thing. Either because the numbers work out to their advantage, or because they are willing to make a small hit to stiff the tax man, or they just really want to help out some cause such as their school etc.
One shouldn't fault Google for capitalizing on most people's low regard for their own privacy when the opportunity exists. If it's giving you grief, why don't you use a search engine with a better privacy policy?

http://clusty.com/privacy
I need 'personalized' search results like I need a hole in the head. I use search a lot and I personalize it by using the search skills I've acquired. I don't need some unknown algorithm making unsubtle decisions. Making this opt-out is a PITA ... but it's their sandbox ...
This has to be the stupidest critic I have seen yet on this whole thing. In particular, complaining that the code is not commercial quality is laughable.

Most of the scientific code is awful, in climate science and elsewhere, because the constraints are totally different than commercial code. Maintainability is not so much a concern, and it is only a tool to obtain a result, not an end in itself. People don't care about the code quality most of the time.

There is another concern, which is that you rarely know what you exactly want when programming for research. You don't always have the time to design reasonable API, because the requirements keep changing - and keep in mind that you cannot spend too much time on this because you have to write papers, do some actual research, etc...

Even in my field, which is engineering and where people are expected to be more "programming methods-aware", most of the code is awful. My own code for research is awfully bad compared to what I release as open source for scientific programming: when I release something, I easily spend several times as much work on the thing, because of documentation issues, etc... Doing this for all my code is simply not possible.

If you want to dismiss climate science because of code quality, be ready to throw away the majority of science, from biology to IA through EE. Just look at lapack code: the code is awful, using goto to avoid structured programming, etc... (e.g. http://www.netlib.org/lapack/double/dsgesv.f). And it is used by 99 % of code which does linear algebra, including commercial software.
I think Hunt-the-Wumpus is one of the earliest computer games in which you have to move from room to room as a player. And at the same time dodging threats and finding treasure ;-)

In modern times, this concept is still the same in adventure and action role-playing games. Take for example World of Warcraft: it's the same, but just with a lot more eye candy.
I'd believe that, except for at least two of the times I've seen a comment in this vein, they've cited specific words in the PEP. I guess they just skipped the relevant parts.
Runs on OS X is a bit of an exaggeration though. It can supposedly be installed through MacPorts, but the two times I ever tried, MacPorts installed about half of normal Linux distro, before failing on some broken dependency.

If you want to go through several hours of compiling and several hundred megabytes of dependencies, with your fingers crossed that things won’t inexplicably break 3 hours in, feel free to try to install Gobby on a Mac. Personally, I’ll stick to SubEthaEdit, or whatever web-based editor, if I need collaboration.

* * *

I really think desktop collaborative editors should try to provide a web-based alternative front-end, for just this reason, that it’s nice for everyone to be able to contribute, and there’s no better way to ensure that than through the web.
Scamalot: More than ever, shoppers need to be wary online
A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity
Blizzard didn't pay out much in royalties in those days. Now Diablo 2 was a different matter...
People interested in caloric restriction, optimal nutrition (CRON), should find the latest research reported on in this article very interesting.

This article reports that a diet low in the amino acid menthionine is hypothesized to be the key to longevity in humans, rather than calorie restriction.

…in a series of new experiments on fruit flies, scientists
discovered that simply varying the mix of amino acids in
the diet affected lifespan.

*Further study revealed that one particular amino acid,
methionine, made all the difference.*

Although flies and people are very different, the
researchers believe the effects are likely to be conserved
throughout a wide range of different species including
humans…

"If it turns it has the same effect on humans, then the
message is avoid high levels of methionine."

From Wikipedia:

High levels of methionine can be found in sesame seeds,
Brazil nuts, fish, meats and some other plant seeds. Most
fruits and vegetables contain very little of it. Most
legumes are also low in methionine.
The moratorium is only on syntax and builtins, not the stdlib, nor the interpreter. I don't see how this can be a "perl 6 moment" when we have multiple, functioning versions, a plethora of alternative interpreters, etc.

I would more willing to hear the Python 3 is Python's Perl 6 moment, except we actually shipped a near-production ready version already, which while slow, is seeing gradual adoption.
I'm certain Apple has put a lot of hard work into the framework. As well as the operating system, etc. Your point is a good one, but let's please be civil here.

The article is interesting because I agree with a core concept of this rant, but the author's presentation fails to convince. The gem of the article is the last line "I can go about the business of making my own mistakes and learning from them; so that one day all of this might make sense." That is exactly how I feel about frameworks.

Sure, Apple put a lot of hard work into it, so that I don't have to. However, I'm going to have to put some hard work into something at some point. If I can't even understand the hard work in the underlying basics, how can I understand higher-level hard work?
Requests per second. How many is good? - Tornado Web Server
Gordon Brown called this "sophisticated enlightenment" in a recent TED talk.. that is, aligning one's personal interests with what is good for those outside your immediate obligations.

I wouldn't be so quick to call it evil. It's about as good as it gets. True altruism doesn't sustain a business.
It's rather like the fact that the inflation rate has been skillfully manipulated since the 1980s... if you see it mentioned at all any more, which it used to be. But just because you're paying for the statistics doesn't mean you need them, unless you live on Wall St.
just signed up. they have a pretty interesting model. they let you upload your purchased music and play it. songs are just 79c, as opposed to 1.29 at itunes.
So could this acquisition be characterized as more of an HR one than a technological one?
Amino Acid Recipe Could be Life-Extending
Really? For me it still works.

Anyway, I've made a mirror copy:

ftp://motoom.net/pictures/alien-sentry02.jpg
Cool, but the IP and associated search query are still stored, no?
> It's definitely not cool though that Yehuda's keeps saying things like "Sinatra has failed because..."

Agreed. That's apples and oranges! Rails and Sinatra are different tools for different problems, IMO.
In 2005, the below paper was published showing life extension in mice allegedly due to methionine restriction.

So the instant article would make it appear that at least some scientists think they are closer to showing a similar mechanism at work in humans.

From 2005, "Aging Cell" journal:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15924568

Methionine-deficient diet extends mouse lifespan, slows immune and lens aging, alters glucose, T4, IGF-I and insulin levels, and increases hepatocyte MIF levels and stress resistance.
Music education was important to him. For other people maybe other things are more important. They can donate to other cause, or pay voluntary taxes.
That's a pretty cavalier attitude to have when so much depends on the results (and I mean research programming in general, not just the CRU case). Maintainability may not be a concern, but verifiability certainly should be.
Nerd rap battle in /r/programming (on-going)
There's a lot to be said for it, but it is clunky, and hard to learn ...

OTOH there's WOW, which is better looking and easier to get started in. They're heading for 12-million users, which at $15/month makes SL look like Woolworth's.

But the ability to design objects, do shows et al means that for Maker-types the equal of SL exists nowhere else (that I know of).
well it seems like their technology is extremely valuable as well, since from what i've been reading on HN, they blow the socks off all would-be competitors
Sounds like an abstraction and extension of Twimailer (http://twimailer.com/). I for one would love a service like this.
VCs Get Ready For Some Tough Fundraising Times
It's replacing a subset of email, and email is often pull.

Needing to subscribe is arguably a feature. In fact, if subscription was required on the protocol level like RSS spam would be impossible (for some values of "impossible").
- CrunchBase is a very poor source for this data: established companies like Scitex/Scailex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scailex_Corporation) or Saifun (http://www.aboutus.org/SaiFun.com) don't appear at all, Zoran's entry (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zoran) doesn't list a location, Zend Technologies is listed as a Cupertino company when it was founded and still does its R&D in a suburb of Tel Aviv.

- Tel Aviv is just one town, whereas the topic is Israel as a whole. Many of Israel's major players are in Haifa (where Israel's equivalent of MIT is located) or Jerusalem or other places - Israel is a tiny nation, the commute from Haifa to Tel Aviv can be quicker than taking the subway from Brooklyn to uptown Manhattan.

By the way, do you have a source on the Israel-China VC shift? I think Sarah Lacy wrote something to that effect, but it seems strange since the two places have almost opposite characteristics. I can see China competing with India or Israel with Estonia, but not with each other.
Unfortunately, the wetware interfaces are not ready yet for someone to upload to a virtual world...

Let's just be nice and say SL was a couple decades ahead of its time.
my decoys would say DARPA

They would probably be more effective if they looked like the DARPA balloons.

https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/gallery.aspx
National Physics Laboratory made tiny 10 um snowman
you are working to advance the art of war

And I suppose it would be better if that were left to potential enemies.
Could you please get rid of the apostrophes in the phrase "sell's it's"?
Good idea. One way to mix it up might be to use a simile with different implications: how about "dauer mode" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dauer_larva
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature... this will soon be a bit too real =)
Done deal: Yahoo/Microsoft finalize search deal
Ask HN: Keep flash videos in fullscreen with dual monitors __on OS X__
Hey all. I just read the lifehacker article found here:

http://lifehacker.com/5419028/keep-flash-videos-in-full-screen-on-dual-monitors?skyline=true&s=i

On how to keep flash videos in fullscreen while using the other monitor to multitask. I've been dying for this functionality for quite some time however, the lifehacker article only describes a solution for windows.

Do any of you supremely intelligent people over here at Hacker News know of a solution?

Thanks for your time,

Greg
Like trying too hard for that love interest that's out-of-your-league ... it's probably natural for people exposed to "big opportunity" for the first few times to try to oversell themselves ... and in the process give away the store to a business that's already demonstrated (by its big suc-cess) that it plays hard-ball.

Too bad it takes hard knocks to get past the star-struck stage. To quote Rodney, "It's a jungle out there!"
> email is often pull

So... when is it that I pull an email sent to me from the SMTP server of the person sending it? Pulling it from the server to the client to read it doesn't count as email being 'pull.'

The difference is that with RSS you are pulling from the source not pulling from your personal 'cache' (unless you use a web reader like Google Reader, but even then Google is pulling from the source; RSS updates aren't being pushed to Google). The email equivalent would be querying all SMTP servers out there (or a subset) to see if they have mail for you rather than hitting up your IMAP/POP server to see if anyone has sent something to you.
This is really cool. It'd be fun to throw stock price data into this.
One shouldn't fault Google...

Why not?
> "Google's core service, the simple page http://www.google.com/

Anyone got stats/link for this showing relative amount of searchbar traffic versus that on the landing page.

I mainly use google (my main SE) via a keyword in the FF address bar.
Saying that everyone could have obsoleted EtherPad is like saying Intuit could have obsoleted Mint - Hard to argue with except by pointing out the facts on the ground don't support that version of reality.

Etherpad ROCKED - I've spent a couple weeks now with Wave, used it for a bunch of projects, and every time I use it, I did so grudgingly, realizing that Etherpad was lighter, cleaner, and more elegant compared to Wave's all-in-one platform approach. Yes, it's true that I can insert YouTube Videos, Polling Systems, and even a freaking ChatServer into my WaveDocuments - but it always felt like more of a technology exercise than a useful use of an application.

Let's hope that the EtherPads can do for Wave, what the Mint Team will (hopefully) do for Intuit.
NYT: Apple has acquired streaming music service Lala
Free Chipotle and Video Games (PS3, XBox 360, Wii) at 385 Sherman in Palo Alto
Bespin definitely does not have the same sort of "just start editing a shared document" user interface that etherpad does. That isn't really our primary goal.

As for the command line: I really wish TextMate had a command line. I truly think the command line is going to be one of Bespin's fantastic features (though I'll agree with anyone that it is not a replacement for other nice bits of UI).

(ObDisclaimer: I'm on the Bespin team.)
First come, first served! 5:30 - 8:30 P.M. tonight if you're in the area.
Intel 48-core Single-Chip Cloud [pdf]
YESSS!! Ill be there soon