skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't believe my enjoyment of CRPGs with slim-to-nil skill requirement comes from any sort of achievement-orientation; instead, it's just a simple variable-schedule addiction mechanism—I pull the lever long enough, lights flash. I don't enjoy the kind of lights slot machines have, but lights that tell a story I enjoy quite a bit. In its effect it's quite like a parent telling their child they'll have to wait for the next night to hear the end of their bedtime story.

When I was young I would invite my friends over, and they would play the games—I would simply watch them, and offer strategic advice when I could (which I gleaned from reading the included instruction manuals that they usually ignored.) Thinking back, I got just as much out of this experience as actually playing them[1] myself, if not more, due to the pair-programming-like social interaction of pilot and navigator. The variable enforcement schedule was still there, as there would be times that they were stuck, and, by empathy, I would feel stuck too. I was two levels removed from the game-world, only able to direct my friend to direct the character, but it was still just as fun.

I still play these games, already knowing their plots, just because I can immerse myself in the game-world's atmosphere by deviating in any direction from the "move the plot forward" one. It's a bit like taking a guided tour through a sandbox game; when someone points out a lion, you can stop the bus and ride it, then get back on toward the next stop. Even then, though, I know it's really just a movie, and none of the "scenes" I'm creating for myself would make it past editing.

If you find a lot of yourself in that description, by the way, I'd recommend checking out the Let's Play Archive[2] from SomethingAwful. Basically just people being your buddy and playing games with you, sometimes doing MST3K-like additions to the narrative to make the presented stories even more compelling.

[1] "Them" as in CRPGs. I would not compare for a moment the fun of watching someone play a skill-based game to actually playing it; the feelings are orthogonal.

[2] http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/
Dropbox is really awesome. I'm very impressed with how well they execute. Lots of companies big and small have offered the same basic service, but nobody has built a product nearly as good.
You don't see a problem with using autistic children as guinea-pigs for experimental treatment, based on nothing more than a preliminary study? In many of these cases, the study itself warns against using it as the basis for any sort of treatment!

Also, there's no double-blinding. Hello placebo effect!
Love the idea, too bad I have a baby :)
http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ (2007) has the best account of this effect that I've seen.

one page version: http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&...
That makes sense. Since you seem to have found your own quarters-to-dollars machine I've been wondering why you aren't exploiting every possible source of profitable traffic. Sounds like a case of diminishing returns.

I'm surprised prices @ Bing are higher, I'd assumed lower volume would mean lower competition and thus lower prices. But I definitely understand how the volume they can deliver isn't worth the time spent optimizing their system.

Thanks for elaborating.
Just bought, having live chat like this on the first day is a very good idea that I'll have to keep in mind when launching a new product... And as others have said the 5$ preorder in exchange for free shipping is a great way to make us impulsive buyers.

I confirmed with them that worldwide includes China too (so many companies do not ship there that I've become wary) so will be getting one :-)
Learning from your mistakes is fine. Telling others what you learned is fine. Learning the wrong things from your mistakes is fine. Telling others the wrong things you learned from your mistakes and passing them off as truths is bad.
Absurdly expensive.
Facebook prepping for IPO?
This could be better titled as 'Operations Magic Cure: Test Like A Madman'.

It's not the act of restarting the servers that solves problems. Rather, their nightly reboot policy forces them to have all of the infrastructure in place to be able to rotate servers in and out of service quickly. It forces them to centrally manage configuration. It forces them to architect their software and networks to handle restarts.

They use server restarts as a way to force all of these things to be in place, which isn't such a bad idea. More importantly, it doesn't sound like they use the nightly restarts as a substitute for actual troubleshooting (e.g., rebooting a server to 'fix' a problem, rather than figuring out what's really going on).
Indeed, the (early) Final Fantasy series actually becomes quite tactically complex if you limit yourself such that you'll never take an unneeded step except to move toward the plot, use various amenities (inn/shop/etc) or take treasure. Doing so also means you don't end up with a glut of money, disabling you from getting better equipment at every opportunity (but usually often enough that it never becomes a serious problem in-and-of-itself.) Most bosses can be "brute-forced", but they usually also have a strategic weakness that most players might have never even discovered due to their higher-than-required level upon reaching them.
One thing that struck me: his career seems totally optimized for the "custom business app, database-backed CRUDscreen" programmer.

I think that's the problem. ORM and generics are very specific things to me, not something I'd see as a long-term lesson to keep in mind. His programming experience seems very .NET/Visual Studio-centric. Programming in other paradigms might make his point about eg. unit tests more mitigated.
Right, although they don't have to manually look at this -- they have many sophisticated monitors in place that immediately notify engineers if things are not in normal ranges.
Hmmm, yeah... Until the customer is running old (2.6.9-78.something) kernels and you end up with a few new unkillable D state zombie apache process holding open deleted multi-gig logfiles every day...

Grrr... Till we sort _that_ one out, it's gonna be regular reboots...
in 6 months it will be re-written in JS/HTML5
I do this with webservers running trac all the time. Except I just restart the webserver I don't bounce the entire machine.

I also find it relatively unbelievable that the linked post claims that restarting servers requires a 24/7 operations team. He trusts his servers to do a bunch of other complex operations unwatched but doesn't trust them to do a restart? Obviously you need to make sure the next server waits until the one before it in the schedule comes back up before it dives down and send you an alert if one dies and doesn't come back, but otherwise this isn't something someone should have to run by hand.

These aren't mainframes, you don't need an operator anymore.

Have one if you want but you sure shouldn't need one.
I understand what you're saying and think it is plausible given your assumptions. For example, you think that Dropbox's primary acquisition engine is viral referrals, that the number of referrals it gets over a certain interval is the number of new users times some constant conversion rate, and that you can't just increase that number of referrals by dumping money at it like you could increase the number of new users by dumping money on an effective CPC campaign.

I think your assumptions are likely to be contrary to material fact. In particular, I think that the embedded assumption of "constant conversion rates" is false. For example, I think that inducing a customer to give a referral is a conversion like any other, and that one could spend a non-trivial amount of engineering resources to instrument one's site and then spend engineering/marketing resources to A/B test the "#$#$& out of it, and this process would predictably result in increased conversion rate. (Test the call to action. Test the design of the form. Test integration directly with Facebook. Test how much free space you offer for a signup.)

Do I have to mention that A/B testing in the context of a viral loop is hypereffective because of compounding? You get exponential returns to linear improvements. This is on top of A/B testing tending to give exponential improvements to linear work, because today's improvements compound on yesterday's.

The combination of these two factors means... wow. That's like a repeatable recipe to... wow. Crimety. I think I have to spend some more time thinking about this later, but my snap impression is that you could have Zynga-esque growth in an arbitrary niche (i.e. selling to people who pay money for things) without scamming anyone.
Too bad they aren't shipping until January. I would definitely buy one as a present if I knew I could get it for Christmas.
Man marries a videogame?
I now pronounce you husband and what?!
When I looked at the actual pre-order page, it doesn't seem like that is so. You pay $5, then you pay $45 later. Or you pay $50 when it comes out. What incentive is there, especially with an unreviewed product such as this? Will they tack on a subscription fee to use the device like the fit bit?
Well, this is interesting because it shows how easily you can social-engineer your way into the media spotlight by being utterly without scruple.

It also might provoke a discussion on how we might REALLY be able to tell what the poor bastard is "saying", instead of using his hand as a fucking keyboard wand.
You don't really need those features... yet.
Auditorium (gorgeous light & sound game) released for iPhone
I loved this game when I found it a year ago and just saw it was released for iPhone and wanted to share
haXe does some additional optimizations over the Adobe compilers; however, the real performance difference in the Alchemy-based code comes from its original nature as C code: it works with bytes, not the AVM2 type system. You can access these special "fast ByteArrays" from both AS3 and haXe - haXe makes it a little more convenient - but in both cases, you're essentially writing C from a language that doesn't have C's features. (Alchemy has some interoperability features, so it's not a total one-or-the-other equation, at least.)

Rendering is the bigger performance culprit, anyway.
I'm generally solidly on the "make money today" bandwagon, but I'd make an exception and invest in Milo if I had the chance. They have traction with retailers, which is the hard part, and though they may not have a plan to make money right now, they're connecting an audience of people who are actively looking to spend money on something with retailers who want to sell to those people. Tons of interesting ways to monetize that connection.
I know I learned a ton my first time out (actually second, but first failure :), but only after a year or so of reflection (once the sting wore off and I could see everything clearly and spend time thinking about it).

Unfortunately, my second time out I didn't encounter the same issues (probably because I learned from them) so the new issues we encountered we couldn't draw on what we learned to solve them anyway. Learned a ton that time too, so now I have experience with twice as many reasons for failure. I won't repeat those, but hopefully can draw on some of them when approaching future challenges.

The odds do go up each time. I lucked out and my very first company was successful (9 years and counting), but the next few endeavours weren't, even though the one was gaining traction (costs were rising faster than profits, didn't see the obvious ways of reversing that trend until too late), and the other was technically superior to other solutions out there (weak sales/marketing side, since the other two seemed to gain traction too easily, I took those things for granted that time out).

Now I'm doing my homework big time before leaping into the next venture, and setting more modest goals short term and stretching out my definition of success. Basically, I'm working on a 10-year plan on a music career with milestones along the way. I know it takes time and perseverance in this industry (as with any), but I do have a wealth of previous business experience to draw from and that is already helping in several ways. I don't believe we don't learn because I know I have.
He uses the more interesting "One thing in every one of my speeches will be true" technique. Makes for entertaining press conferences.
In fact, this is happening to me right now around the third time in the row, and it still is interesting.

However, in our case, this is happening, because this is the third time in a row we organized and talked a professor to give us a lecture around 6 people (which, at the moment, is 1/3 of all students in this term and study course). The conclusion is that the professor is not that prepared, and because the entire course is pretty math-heavy, errors in proofs and lemmas just slip in. Pretty often, they are just little typos, but it still is fun to hunt and spot them.
Hehehe. Prisoner's Dilemma, writ large.
The professor wasn't perfect. As has been pointed out above, the last lecture did indeed contain a lie.

"On the days when nobody caught the lie, we all sat in silence, looking at each other as Dr. K, looking quite pleased with himself, said with a sly grin: “Ah ha! Each of you has one falsehood in your lecture notes. Discuss amongst yourselves what it might be, and I will tell you next Monday. That is all.”"

If, as the article said, he repeated this message as usual at the end of the lecture, it was a lie. (Unless, of course, the students all wrote down his oft-repeated message in their lecture notes - which I find unlikely.)
This seems like it could be useful for start up devs who can't afford to buy web hosting/aren't sure if they want to (at first).
I found that site hard to navigate. Here's some sample code: http://kenai.com/projects/duby/pages/Examples

(note to self for own project: make samples very accessible)
Well, if your prepping (and this isn't the Terminator rules), get a hand crank or solar charger for your phone.
In my humble experience -- I'm an introvert -- the essence of introversion and extroversion isn't necessarily how you act out socially.

For example, I'm sometimes very extroverted and sometimes very introverted, and often something between. And that's me, so I'm not pretending to be anything else.

However, the key question, it seems to me, is that introverts eventually lose more energy than they gain while interacting with other people. Then they have to recharge themselves alone. Extroverted people seems to gain energy from social interactions, and eventually lose more of it when they're left alone. Again, they can enjoy solitude but it drains them.

Both can do both but an introvert being extroverted or an extrovert being introverted isn't sustainable in the long run.
Mainstreaming Psychedelics: From FDA to Harvard to Burning Man [GoogleTechTalks]
Affluence masks the fact that the average American's relationship with material posessions is fucked up. I imagine that most of the people who vote up these stories have an inkling of that in themselves.

People need frequent reminders that material possessions are not necessary for happiness to counteract the cognitive biases and societal pressures that are perpetually indicating the opposite. To go without such reminders in the face of economic reality is extremely stressful, leading to depression, anxiety, and the growing problem of pathological hoarding. There are even now several television shows on the subject, one in the same format as the show about drug interventions. It really can get that bad for otherwise well-adjusted people trying to cope with the difference between what they need and what they want.

The truth is that you can never have enough of what you don't need, and sometimes you need the example (if not the experience) of someone living very close to the edge to illuminate the problem in your own life.

Less charitably: There is a widespread meme associating simpler lifestyle with productivity, and many people here have a craving, if not an addiction, to "tips" or "hacks" to enable them to be more productive, or at least seem more productive. Because they profess to have obtained a desirable state, people with unconventional lifestyles are just as common a subject as famous historical figures or business leaders. The idea being that if you emulate something this woman or Thomas Jefferson or Steve Jobs did, you can achieve great things as they did. The term "productivity porn" is apt.

In essence, many are just looking for another way to get more of what they want, rather than learning to want less. Two sides of the same coin, so to speak. Both present at HN.
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In regards to the ethics of organ donations: I have known quite a few people who purposefully deny the organ donor stamp on their drivers licenses out of worry that because someone else may benefit (moneywise) their life may not be saved and their organs would be harvested.

This is a very sad state regarding saving lives when people worry about corruption in health services such as emergency medical care.

Even more so redefining death in philosophical terms brings to my mind some weird workings behind this as in a science based field such things should not weigh so highly.
Does "gifted" mean intelligent? Or is this a case of the horse following the cart?
I think you are being very insightful with using this as means of forcing things to be in place. It inspired me to actually attempts something like it.

Being an Erlang fan, I also recognize some other aspects of high-availability strategies such as:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microreboot
If you are starting to lose users because of somewhat simple features you may actual need those features.

In Reference to posterous comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956118

In a market as crowded as webblogging one might think that polish and perfection with a healthy set of features would be needed to compete.
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I think the real point the author is arguing is closer to the difference between inductive v. deductive reasoning.
It's main points are is games like WoW teach the wrong lessons, like "investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill".

For the vast majority of our fellow humans, this is exactly the lesson they should learn to prepare for whatever they are likely to do for the rest of their lives. It's a vanishingly small proportion of the population that cares about cultivating a skill beyond "good enough", and that includes a greater majority than you'd probably expect of programmers, academics, and people in other "thinking" professions as well. Plenty of people need little more than a stable income and a few loved ones around them to be happy.

And it's not necessarily a bad thing: shoot for mastery if that's what you feel compelled to do, but if you don't feel you have what it takes, carve out a comfortable niche and try to be happy in other ways. Everyone evaluates their success against a different metric, and we should never be so arrogant to assume that our personal metrics are valid when we measure others.
I wear your shirt
Polyphasic sleep for knowledge workers has been thoroughly debunked by real science.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

The science has been done. The tests are clear. Polyphasic sleepers suffer performance losses in mental tasks compared to normal sleepers. In particular, it significantly impairs long-term memory coding.

Charlatans like Steve Pavlina always refused to do even basic scientific testing. His results simply can't be trusted, especially since he has a massive vested interest in it being effective.

If there is some reason you need to sleep less than 3 hours per day, then polyphasic is the best way to do that. However you will always have reduced performance compared to those who get a full 7 hour sleep.

If you want a sleep schedule optimized for creative/intellectual performance, free-running sleep is the best available. Piotr Wozniak has plenty of science of his website showing that this is the case.
Hi,

Ideally I would like the whole slide to be displayed in the browser without having to scroll down. So if possible you can test by making it bit smaller.

Cheers
Pogue's Battery Rant - AMD proposes a measurement standard
Battery Life of Newest Kindle +85% and Native PDF Reader
Fortunately a good chunk of this entrenched, existing technology is open source, especially in the server market. And the GPLv3 closes a lot of loopholes that hardware manufacturers might have used to achieve that lock-in anyway.

I agree with your basic point that the Web is one of the most open "platforms" we have, but I think the dire prognostications for the others are too pessimistic.
How would it be a horse? Reinventing the wheel refers more to reproducing a tool that already exists with little to no benefit.

But sometimes the wheel needs to be reinvented, like perhaps the wheel that is available can only be used on a horse driven buggy.
The answer is better browser-independent (as far as that's possible) libraries, I think. jQuery and Cappuccino are definitely steps in the right direction.
Michigan Liberal: Michigan Politics & Elections Blog
Uhm ... does he mean equilateral triangle everywhere he says triangle?
That is a great point, although there are some things you can do with local caching it's not really a solution in that instance.

My main argument is, as a developer you KNOW what the App store approval process is like, it's been beaten to death all over the Internet. So either accept that you're going to have to play by Apple's rules or make a web app and save yourself the trouble. It's Apple's garden and we all just play in it.
Was this sarcastic? Honestly I have no idea about these two except that Getsatisfaction got some bad press from 37signals etc.
They're planning on opening an API.
Free shipping all the way to New Zealand, apparently!
Without knowing exactly why, my feeling is iframes are broken. If not.. why arent iframes used in say yahoo and google customisable home page mashups?

Differences :

granularity - share one div, not whole page

scope - how should javascript interact between the inclusion and the whole page? [ Im not sure.. this wasn't on the radar when iframes were designed I guess ]
This is classic. One thing I've learned from glimpses back at history like this is that the more off-the-cuff negative comments there are about a new idea, typically, the better. Simplicity is often met with disdain, mainly because people hold the belief that anything that becomes hugely successful must be insanely complicated. It pains us to see something so seemingly easy to come up with become such a hit.

I feel this way with a lot of successful startups today; a combination of jealousy and flippant denial. With Twitter, however, I remember being excited about it and joining really early on. I was mainly excited to hear what my friends were up to or thinking at any given moment since we've all spread out across the globe, but it wasn't until it became super popular that my less technical friends started joining and it became valuable. Now I love it.
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