skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very good question. I think we have stereotypes of people who are 'too in' to games and we've all probably known one of them.

I know one thing that many people don't like about (most) games is that they are engrossing and not easily interruptible. You can't "pause" your WoW Raid to go have dinner. There's no DVR. People seem more accepting of sports for sure, even though they are often engrossing and encourage poor behavior (just watch the people outside Fenway after a game and then tell me hardcore WoW raiders are bad...) Also the fact that you can spent more than 2-3 hours on them at a stretch easily gets to some people.

Some people view games as anti-social because they don't always require others in the room, even if you're interacting virtually.

I know that when I was single a few months ago, I kept seeing women on dating sites saying, "No gamers", but then they'd go to list the books, movies, sports and TV shows they liked.

Its my free time and I do what I want with it. The last two companies I've worked for (GamerDNA and imVOX) have been gaming related and its been great. I kinda love it actually. I don't watch any television shows, or sports. I rather like music and almost always have it playing. But games are something I find highly interactive and fun.
There's some truth in Klosterman's analogy, but I think it misses the point that much of other entertainment/art (in movies, TV shows, books, etc.) doesn't push you to think differently than you do. It simply feeds some emotional or whatever need - like masturbation. Don't get me wrong, I think this is ok.

But I think where games need to go if they want increased legitimacy is to develop games that cause you to think differently about the world. That ask questions without simple answers. I think it'll be hard because of the interactivity of games, but I think it's necessary.
Building a NYC subway car
> I can't find a way to turn off "Mafia Wars" spam.

On the notifications that display, hover over the top-right corner and an X should appear. It prompts to hide all notifications from the application.

Thankfully notifications are one thing Facebook is removing. Perhaps the signal-to-noise ratio will improve when they make the spamming more difficult.
No, the WikiReader doesn't run on Linux. It's a tiny embedded micro that doesn't really have any operating system -- just a little flash file system and a couple of small drivers for the LCD screeen, touch screen, etc.

Also, as my article notes, it's not "developed in Forth" (the main wiki app is in C), but it has a Forth compiler on it for hardware testing and small apps.

Note that the point of my article wasn't to link to the WikiReader (that would be blog spam), but to show how and why the WikiReader uses Forth for testing and apps.
This was a big story in 2007, when the Second Life hype bubble deflated. Seems strange that the BBC suddenly notices/remembers.
Facebook Connect Will Be “Everywhere” on MySpace Next Year
SubEthaEdit: http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

This is what EtherPad was based on. The only problem is that it only works on OS X. I remember using it to take notes with a bunch of other people at the first couple Startup School events. I haven't really ever used it since, but I can say that it held up extremely well even with a dozen people typing as fast as they could all at once.
Oh, sure. Like I said, I’m in favor of the the mindset—but Yucca Mountain less intellectual-idealism than Long Now, and if it’s improbable that a clock will last maybe ten thousand years, what are the odds a nuclear coffin will survive a million? I just don’t think it’s something even the (no doubt) highly-skilled engineers on the project can truly grasp.
Will fusion fade ... or finally flare up?
I don't know about laughing all the way to the bank, but I would probably have more difficulty writing machinery control code in anything other than C++
An energy answer in the shale below?
€80/hour
I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that these timescales won't even matter. We will be digging up this "waste" in a few years to recycle it anyway. I guess fissile material is pretty rare.
We're checking out the Closure Compiler - it looks like with the simple compile options on it takes it back down to about 64KB minified, 21.6KB gzipped (a very modest increase over the last release, about 2-3KB).

(Un)fortunately we've been doing a ton of refactoring in this release. The internal structure of jQuery was a bit convoluted and needed some serious love. Needless to say things are much better now: We have cleaner code, consistency in variable names, and a better internal structure. All of this is leading towards a two-prong goal: Cleaner, more readable, code and the ability to dynamically load portions of jQuery, targeted toward mobile development.

jQuery 1.4 is the first step towards jQuery being the best possible JavaScript library for doing both desktop and mobile development - expect more details here soon.
I think 1000 is a couple orders of magnitude too few. Thanks for the link.
VC firms could see tax hike
If you're looking for collaborative code editors, Mozilla's bespin is (going to be) epic: https://bespin.mozilla.com/
There are 2 tax advantages. You don't pay taxes on the first sale, and the annuity does not pay taxes when it sell's it's assets.

Let's say you are a 30 years old and need to pay taxes on 14 million$ and decide to retire. As you get the money you need to pay taxes for simplicity let's call that 4 million$. You now have 10 million$ if you then buy stocks with a 5% dividend that keep up with inflation your income is 500k /year(which you do pay taxes on). However, if you ever sell those stocks you need to pay tax on how much they appreciated.

If on the other hand you setup an annuity it does not pay that 4 million in taxes. If it then buys those same stocks with a 5% dividend that keep up with inflation it's paying you (10m+4m) *.05 = 700k / year (which you do pay taxes on). And if the annuity manager want's to sell the stock and buy something else it does not need to pay taxes on the sale.

The final question becomes can you buy a life insurance policy for less than 200k/year that pays out the value of the annuity when you die. Expect your family does not pay death taxes on a life insurance policy so even that has tax advantages.

PS: In the real world all those numbers are subject to change, but it was setup by congress as a tax shelter and with proper management it can do that vary well. I only bring this up because it may be a good idea for other people on HN who decide to sell their company and retire when when they are young.
SubEthaEdit is awesome, and I bought a copy for ~$45 back in the day. However, because it is expensive and a Mac OS X only desktop application, I have only had opportunity to use it maybe once or twice. :(
Did the author just do a system clean before a Win7 update and realize (s)he hasn't touched it in years?
This looks like the most promising successor. Unfortunately it does not look like you can embed a collaborative pad or share it via a link. You need to register an account, go through Mozilla's website, and actually use the command line to join up. Why a website has a command line is a little beyond me!
I support blogs getting bigger, fatter, and more seductive in that order. Excellent writeup Matt.

A smart bear is good stuff, I've subscribed, and more importantly I sometimes even read it.
Python Moratorium: Let's think about this
Ask HN: Reasonable expectations for designers?
I've worked with and hired several graphic designers who all claimed to know HTML/CSS/JS. They have all produced beautiful .psds of their designs, and offered to help implement it.

However, without fail, when it comes to actual code, they disappoint. For example:

-They never know how to use any sort of source control (so I have to manually merge things together every night).

-Their Javascript is always spaghetti code, and demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of scoping, closures, the libraries they use, and the JS object system.

-They insist on going and modifying the .css files for libraries we're using. Often the CSS they write is repetitive and brittle.

Am I being unreasonable to hope my designer can both code and do graphic design? Should I be hiring a separate 'front end developer' to help implement the designer's vision? (I can do 'front end coding' myself, but have other things to attend to, which is why I need to 'outsource' some of it).

If these mythical creatures do exist - how can I find them?

(I'm a regular here but am just posting under a different account)
Strings cannot be used within interpolated expressions; e.g. this will cause a straightforward parse exception

This ought to be pretty straightforward to fix by escaping the quotes via \"
GleeBox: Keyboard glee for your web
But on a larger scale, it helps Ferran Adrià make money, even thought the restaurant loses cash, he ends up making money by being highly respected, in part for elBulli.

It's kind of like the New York Yankees. I've heard they lose money as a team because they rather inefficiently just throw large sums of money at top players to win the World Series. So much money even sell-out crowds and post season ticket sales don't cover costs. But the owner of the team ends up making money off of other Yankees-related properties.
That's awesome. I just checked out your app; it looks pretty bad ass. I have two points of criticism, and its only because I love what you have going:

1. Kill the ads; they make your product look like shit. Instead convince me that you have something ubber clean & simple that I should pay money for to upgrade. Etherpad did an amazing job at this. I'm also guessing you're not making much from the ads.

2. The "collaboration" link is kind of hidden in the corner. That's your killer feature, make collaboration first class. Consider sending me to https://squadedit.com/share/30ed2fbd instead of https://squadedit.com/free when I create a "pad".

3. Make a premium feature where I can hook this thing up to a .git repo and browse a folder structure (like I do in Textmate). I can't tell you have insanely valuable it would be for me and four other coders to have synced code views and tabs while we talk on Skype.

Good luck, I'll be rooting for anybody who can fill in the big shoes that Etherpad will be leaving behind.
Twitter Test:It's easy to increase your followers but does it provide any value?
http://squadedit.com is a pretty similar service. The free version has too many flashing ads for my taste... hopefully they'll fix that!
PhotoelasticTouch Combines 3D Shapes With Touchscreens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
Second Life was essentially hyped PR spin that was latched on to and parroted by reporters that knew nothing about the internet. Anyone who was actually involved with virtual worlds or social networking dismissed Second Life immediately.
Now THAT'S really exciting. I began doing mobile dev recently and I definitely feel the kilobyte pinch. Projects like XUI definitely help, but it'd be nice to use all the cool things that I'm used to from jQuery.
Now you have an idea for your startup. A cool application was just killed and you can replace it.
My friend works for a very large advertising firm, and they're used to this happening with other clients too. I'm certainly not going to give any particulars, because I don't want to cause trouble for my friend. You'll have to choose for yourself whether to believe me.
This reminded me of something from a Steve Yegge rant:

"Now do a Google search for "perl religion". Looky looky, the first link is a Slashdot interview with Larry entitled: Larry Wall on Perl, Religion, and..., in which Larry talks extensively about his conversations with God, in which God evidently explains to Larry that He only likes Perl programmers. "

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ancient-languages-perl
Good to hear about the refactoring and cleaning. There was definitely some cruft in there that made it hard to track down issues / learn from at times.

I'm very curious about the mobile announcement. I've been doing some heavy coding on top of jQuery for a soon to be released project. I've come close to ditching jQuery a few times due to the non-iPhone cachable size of the main script (a real dealbreaker for this project).

Keep on the great work. The alpha has passed all but two of my internal unit tests -- I'll track them down and submit bugs as necessary when I get some time over the next few days.
Sorry for this OT question, but does anyone know of a replacement for Omnisio (http://www.omnisio.com/)? They had great integration of slides and video and how you could browse to a particular slide.

Another Google acquisition that hasn't seen the light yet.
do you use a phone?

i wonder how people felt when phones first came out. the privacy nuts must have gone crazy: oh no! the operator could be listening to my personal conversations.
This is pretty epic -- the only problems are that it doesn't have an API to retrieve text from it or create a new pad. Also, it is not suitable for embedding. However, as a standalone editor this is the best alternative I've seen.

UPDATE: I take it all back. This product is junk. Only one person can edit the entire document at once. If someone is typing, it literally locks the entire screen. This is worse than Google Docs.
Debugging is most of the SLIME functionality. Sending expressions to REPL is trivial and existed long before SLIME (ilisp).
There is a list at the top level of the Market application. However, it doesn't change very often and it's not clear how one ends up on it in the first place.
You probably know me better as GeekStack :)
Wave is slightly similar in the technology depeartment but fundamentally different from EtherPad. :(
Polysemy -- "thing" is an overloaded term.
Wave offers a text editor that's embeddable and allows multiple concurrent edits (which is what the OP requested). Having used both Etherpad and Wave, I don't really see how they're that different. Wave has more features, that's all. If you don't want to use the other features of Wave, well, just don't use them.
Sure, but that's not what you'd like to have happen in the end (though it works in a pinch). I mentioned it because it was one of the issues that is insurmountable from userland right now.
Why You Should Moderate All Comments in WordPress | TechJaws.com
http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/ Gobby.
You could simply decide to eat the tax. For the previous DARPA challenges many teams spent much more than the prize money.

I'd already have a half dozen red weather balloons ready to be deployed...

Sigh. DARPA should make this FAQ #1 on their site. "The DARPA officials accompanying the balloon will have credentials to verify their identities." Not to mention that "jamming" the competition is pretty unsportsmanlike.
The Muggle Coder
Etherpad Goes to Google - Just Another Silicon Valley Soap Opera
Somehow people who play games a lot get some kind of shame and then label it a crazy addiction. I’m not sure I really understand or care to understand the cultural elitism.

I don't understand; I don't care to understand; I just want to rant about it.

Addiction is intentionally built into games. Klondike Solitaire probably hit on it by accident, but Everquest, WoW, and Farmville were built to intentionally exploit the pleasure system to secure hours upon hours of attention. Other games do this to a lesser extent, but there is always a payoff for some interval of play.

Contrast this with comics, which are designed to, at worst, exploit the human tendency to fetishize particular reappearing characters. The latest issue of Captain Amazing may hold your attention for a while, but there is no built-in active mechanism triggering dopamine hits in a regular basis. Television would come the closest, and that is similarly maligned by elitists who want the whole world to know that they don't even own a TV.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this aspect of games, but it definitely puts games in a different category than the other forms of entertainment that Nabeel is holding up for comparison. I'm surprised this isn't obvious.
I've been a front-end engineer for 8 years, and I haven't yet worked with someone who was a truly top-notch graphical designer and an expert-level programmer. (I'm sure there are some out there, but they're not easy to find.) The best projects I've worked on have always split that work between at least two people, though the exact division of labor differs. Sometimes the graphic designer just hands raw Photoshop files to the developer to implement from scratch, while in other cases the designer does the basic CSS and markup and the developer provides tools/frameworks and does integration work.

I think the best situation is to hire a web developer and a designer who already know how to work together as a team. Web development agencies can provide that. Or hire a freelance developer who can subcontract or recommend a designer.
This also reminds me a bit of projects along the lines of "Like Lisp, for <some non-Lisp language>!" Yes, just like it, except missing most of the good parts.
Anyone know if these guys will be moving to Sydney to join the Wave team?
It got overrun by porn, which this story inexplicably fails to mention. I used to play SL occasionally as I like MMORPGs but it just turned into a bad 3d version of geocities with more naked flesh. I think LL eventually decided to hive off all the adult content to a different 'continent' to recreate the clean social space it originally had, but it was too late. Additionally, the graphics engine has got really long in the tooth now...last time I fired it up it looked...old.
A zero-content article, trying to capitalize on the news for traffic. Attempts to create drama where non-exists and fails miserably.
Well, I am the op, so let me elaborate.

By default, Wave creates new "boxes" for everything, or lets you reply to other boxes. These boxes cannot be rearranged, only deleted, or have the contents changed.

I don't give a crap about these boxes, I just want to edit a single document like EtherPad. To achieve this in Wave, have to arbitrarily agree on which box you want to make the "main" box. You then need to click the little tab on this box and choose "edit box" every single time you want to make a change to it.

You also can't track who has made what change in the same box. Also, your cursor turns into a long string (your name) that shifts everything around in an annoying manner.

It is sort of a cross between EtherPad, a chat client, and a wiki. I just want a text editor.

For reference: here is what an embedded Wave looks like: http://smarterware.org/my-favorite-google-wave-bots
The newest version of grep has --exclude-dir, which handles .svn folders just fine.
As they say, if you can't beat them, you buy them.
"jQuery 1.4 is the first step towards jQuery being the best possible JavaScript library for doing both desktop and mobile development".
..mobile development? Does that mean same app I created using jquery would run both on a pc and a smart phone? Wow..That would make me a very happy programmer.
The Etherpads themselves were very impressed with what the Wave guys showed them, and they are the best qualified to judge this sort of technology of all the hackers I know. Maybe some of the stuff they saw was unreleased, but whatever it was was, the Etherpads liked it, and they seem genuinely excited to work on it.
And I would contend (because I'm right) that you have no idea what you're talking about.

The single most important feature of group health coverage, even more than the lower costs, is the fact that they generally don't (and in many places can't) require health exams beforehand. This is obviously crucial for people with health problems. For example, if you are a survivor of many types of cancer, private health insurance is unavailable at any price.

Perhaps you should take 2 minutes to educate yourself instead of spewing market efficiency nonsense.
All software used in science should be open source, because if it isn't, the science isn't repeatable.
> what's stopping people from just stealing sub-blocks from ISPs?

The thief has to either be upstream of your connection, or peered at an extremely high level with others trusting their BGP advertisements. There was a hilarious incident not that long ago where the Pakistanis accidentally blackholed YouTube's IP-block globally (instead of just within the country).
Squad, https://squadedit.com/
Wah wah wah. A stupid comment from a fanboy. I don't try to capitalize on the news for traffic, I report on the news in unique ways that ad value - sucka.
That's the plan! Right now we're in the process of collecting phones from mobile manufacturers for testing. We want to, first, add these devices into our development and testing workflow so that we can support them fully. Once we've done that we'll be able to start shipping custom mobile-tailored builds of jQuery that strip out unnecessary code and add in mobile-specific stuff.

Ideally though we should be shipping a single JS file that you can embed in your web site and know that it'll work on both the desktop and on a smart phone.
Obama's Bunny Planet Alternative "Surge"
$45 is not expensive for anyone in a developed country, specially as a business expense. That's how much you would pay for a decent dinner for one and 2 drinks by the glass.
Decoys will increase the burden on the other teams. They will have to get someone to actually verify the credentials rather than some guy saying "I drove by the gateway arch and there is a big red balloon there that says DARPA on the side of it." (Yeah, my decoys would say DARPA.)

As for unsportsmanlike, you are working to advance the art of war.
That might work for small things, but wait until you get really hurt or sick.

Eg, the HIV positive friend? His meds w/o insurance are $1700/month. The price with insurance is $60. The manufacturer doesn't negotiate on price.
Not that rare, if you use it efficiently and don't do anything ridiculous like throwing away perfectly good nuclear "waste".
You do know that probably most of Etherpad's users aren't their peers, yeah? So to them, they've just lost a really great service.
I have never used Etherpad, and from the comments I'm a little saddened to find that now I can't check it out.

Does anyone have an old Etherpad that I can play with, or even just a video of how it's used?
Anything that costs money is expensive given the right (wrong?) circumstances.
Eureqa discovers equations from data sets (incl Newton's 2nd law of motion)
What value did you add here?
Not everyone -- I had transhumanist friends saw promise in it as an early version of where they hoped would be a leap for the concepts behind VR.
try Gobby. gnu/linux only, iirc
Resource-Oriented Architecture: The Rest of REST
I think this list is more valuable to employers than to candidates. Employers should be sensitive to the many hot buttons candidates have. Most of them are proxies for appreciation and trust. Treat every touchpoint as a chance to show your employees appreciation and trust.

For candidates, however, I'd advise focusing more on the big picture. Monitors are not a strategic issue. At one company I simply brought in my own 21" CRT rather than argue it. At another, I bought my own RAM and disk to upgrade my workstation.

A candidate who is focused on these minor concerns might come across as selfish, myopic and high maintenance.

Again, as an employer I would absolutely cater to these concerns. But as a candidate I would try to forget them.
There was a discussion about that on HN that a while back. It sounds like the answer is "yes," but only to a point:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598974
I bailed on a company with a great product idea because of health insurance.

Basically, I have a congenital defect in my eyes that will lead, with about 20% probability, to very expensive health bills. This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigment_dispersion_syndrome ) if anybody cares. Therefore, I simply can't live without constant health insurance coverage on the off chance I require pretty expensive treatment -- drugs, then surgery if the drugs don't work.