skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm come to mind. They are free to play games which can be 100% played without paying once (even at a high level, although it takes time). In-game items can be earned or paid for with money. And overall it's quite a fun experience to pay for bonuses (optional gameplay or cosmetic items) in both games.

Blizzard has a very solid F2P model, even though theirs is one of the most expensive of the lot.

There is a lot of enjoyment in earning bonuses over time rather than getting everything at once. Since the developer wants you to keep playing the game, they need a hook. For subscription-based games, that hook tends to be anti-fun (spend time grinding, time-gating content, etc). Store-based content allows for a non-time-based hook and pushes the developer to keep releasing content. So yeah, if done right, it's beneficial for everybody.
Breaking Smart: A set of essays on the future of technology
They are already called corporations.
I was a bit curious, so I did a short experiment:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/dl.dropbox.com/s/l9naqibqyt...

Using numba, and adding a one line decorator to the function (without any changes whatsoever) we get around 2 orders of magnitude speed up.

Note - this doesn't involve any fancy re-writing, annotating, etc, you literally just add a decorator.

Writing really fast numerical code in Python is very easy. There's absolutely no reason not to use numba if you have small functions that just do number crunching. numba can even inline other numba functions - so you don't even pay the function call overhead.
> If power is not an ordinal concept, this phrase is meaningless.

You're reading things that I'm not saying. It is an ordinal concept, but we don't have the ability to measure it well, only notice large differences. You can think of it as a quantity for which we have very inaccurate measurement devices.

> I'm also confused as to how you can even determine that such a "constant shift" isn't happening - in terms of edges in your influence graph, they shift regularly. Yesterday I met a new person at work and we now interact and influence each other. The power digraph has gained 2 edges. Could you explain how you quantify this?

Because in this discussion we are talking about groups (social mobility in individuals is an interesting, yet somewhat different discussion), and when we look at a large number of people, it's easier to approximate power through proxies such as income, percentage of powerful roles such as CEOs, leading journalists etc. (it's harder to compare power in individuals, because it's hard to tell which is more influential, a media personality or the CEO of a large company, especially as the latter's influence might sometimes be hidden).

Shifts in power from nobility to the bourgeois class, or in the relative cultural and technological power of Europe, were sudden changes of relative homeostases. Similarly, you can track power distribution between men and women, or between whites and blacks in the US. They point at very stable states that are violently changed, or (usually in the case of women), a faster rate of smaller revolutions (or a more steady rate of change). The difference between male/female and race hegemonies is also well understood (and seen in many other cultures), because the classification of women as "strangers" is always very different from that of actual foreign ethnicities.
Hmm, I feel like such a revelation would break down fairly quickly. What happens when you check equality somewhere, or add two numbers? It's not only parens everywhere (although that is quite the eyesore), other things like prefix notation also makes lispy code unpleasant to read.

This approach reminds me of when people say, hey JS has classes and constructors just like Java does! And then proceed to write Java in JS.
Hey, is ZeroCater hiring?
Just posted this in the comments on another article about stagefright.

Even better, use TextSecure (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcri...) by Open Whisper Systems (https://whispersystems.org/).

Supposedly the vulnerability is in stagefright, which is the Android framework responsible for audio/video encoding/decoding and playback. TextSecure doesn't do any pre-processing of received audio/video messages, so it seems unlikely that a vulnerability in stagefright could be triggered simply by sending audio/video to a TextSecure user.

TextSecure plays audio/video by handing it to the system's default media
player. If there's a stagefright vulnerability, it's possible that the
system's default media player is vulnerable. From TextSecure, that
interaction should only happen by physically tapping on an audio/video
attachment, then tapping through a warning dialog about insecure
playback. At that point, it's out of our hands.

- moxie

https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/whispersystems/2015-07/msg0...
I have proposed this idea in the past as a solution to the problem of stateless prople. If it ever does happen, I want it to be called the Peoples Republic of Hackistan :-)
100+ Awesome Free Self-Improvement Resources
Whistle into a microphone, generate MIDI to drive a sequencer
I think the way they do it is ok (limited frequency, no votes so they fall down quickly, ... and allowing free job ads by other companies in one collected place), many other sites probably would be worse.
If it kept all of the same people and info, yes.

If I was going to pay just for there become a free alternative elsewhere, no.
> Are we left with only either apple laptops, or shoddy plastic jobs that need to be kept in bubble wrap at all times?

Anecdotally, and based on a limited sample size, I've had great experiences with HP's corporate laptop (and other) product lines - not the consumer lines. They seem to last forever, much longer than Dells and than users, who like new equipment, would like them to. I have one that's around ten years old that runs fine, except for the pointstick. I can't remember the last one that suffered hardware failure.

Their Elite laptop line has excellent support and excellent design. Sitting next to me is an EliteBook; I can pop off the bottom cover and service it as easily as a desktop. It's pretty cool.
Paint and Wordpad are two of the "classic" utilities that stayed untouched in Windows 10 - even though Paint could benefit from some touchscreen-friendliness, for users with touch screens, that is. But Microsoft already has something called "Fresh Paint" in the Windows Store, with IAPs that can cost as much as $99.99 (according to the app description).
Here's what the signs look like for those interested, most appear to be from London.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22no+irish%22+window+...

Here's a reddit thread on the issue

https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3erkxv/nina_no_i...
Apple does have tools for imaging/managing Macs - a combination of Profile Manager and Remote Desktop.

Also, if you have system administrators for OS X machines who need a point-and-click interface for everything, you need to take another look at your hiring practices.

Edit: oh and for the initial imaging you need to use NetInstall and System Image Utility, but they're not separate products still.
It ignores death threats, doxxing, bomb threats and mail threats that came from Vox's group of anti-gamergate supporters, while saying that we shouldn't endorse these things when it's 'our side' that does them.
Doing Good Tech versus Doing Good with Tech
This explanation subtly forgets to explain which agent is responsible for executing the contract-programs. Obviously you don't want the contract to be processed (and the money spent) two or more times at its deadline. Who is doing the processing and ensuring the execution only occurs once?
When did that happen?

Wasn't that way in Perth a couple of years back, it was all Lenovo, except management were moving over to Mac as their refresh cycle came through.
Looks like someone is trying to bring about the Diamond Age.
"stories" as in "a normal submission, with votes that can keep it on the front page and comments" vs the YC job ads that only have a link.
What you're going to jam mobile phones and GPS at a music festival?
To be fair a lot more type inference is done in Java 8 (it's not just lambdas), it's just not available for Android.

And Java tends to do type inference on the right hand side instead of the left hand side, so things look a lot cleaner if you chain them instead of assigning them to intermediate variables.
"Freemium" is usually means you pay for extra gameplay or cosmetic content (or in the case of non-games, extra features). "Pay to remove ads" is usually separate. I was specifically addressing the "freemium" part of the sentence "This freemium / ad-infused software trend is effectively extortion.".
How is profile manager + remote desktop (using the 'install package' or 'run script' functionality) not capable?
What? I think the fact that the NSA was spying on foreign nation's governments is pretty much in their mission statement
It's better to write code that is amenable to being understood when read. These Java forms accomplish things 'the LINQ way' but at the expense of completely obscuring the intent of the code. LINQ makes sense in C# because the syntax supports a mapping from a declarative query to stream-oriented operations. Without the syntactic support, it becomes unreadable.
When is a mob 'in control'? In what case is a mob a good idea?
They are buying large numbers of iPads. It's been fantastic for my company, as IBM is a major customer for one of our products, and now we have to support Safari and mobile Safari as first-class browsers, in addition to the legacy versions of IE still used by many of our other customers.

Not to mention that IBM insists that we use DB2 and run on their flavor of server-side Linux, where the IBM products that we integrate with have different long-standing bugs than on the Windows versions all our other customers use.
An important difference is that Americans are diverse, not as the world itself, but more than any other large nation. A far cry from homogeneous societies.
"We've got to find a way to make the overall cost the same or lower than PCs to make that happen."

That's a tall order given IBM 's existing software infrastructure, Apple's migration tooling and support staff for enterprise, and the constraints that accounting standards place on the way equal cost would have to be figured.

Calculating the charge against goodwill associated with getting 200,000 people to give up their ThinkPad keyboards is left as an exercise for the reader.
(As an aside, why do you say "Bill" instead of "Gates", or "BillG" as I believe Microsoft employees refer to him?)

Yes, he said that. If he really believed it then why didn't the Microsoft Natural keyboard, which added the Windows logo keys and the menu key, also add a special "login" button?
This is an interesting thought; but your assumption that the brain would just "create its own little world" is unfounded. Like other animals, we are born with certain instincts. It's not been definitively proven that the brain is some sort of perfect blank slate.

While I'm not denying that human brains have been shown to hallucinate under sensory deprivation, there's no way to say whether or not a lab grown brain would experience discomfort because of its lack of input, or whether it would even dream up a coherent reality for itself at all. There's simply no way to test this.
It will be hard enough to get widespread social adoption of either blockchain currency or contracts written in programming languages without making them tied to each other.

A better choice for an initial compile target for EtherScript would simply be English.
Exactly.

The popular thing to do right now is for businesses to move away from platform locked software completely. So instead of it being a "Windows Vs. Mac Vs. Linux" battle, all internal software is on the web and the desktop only runs Office/browser/email client, etc.

Now, sure, there is some software that cannot be run in a browser. But that list of software shrinks more and more as additional browser functionality is added and libraries make it easier to do complex things.

So the question is: How does this expensive Mac migration pay for itself in the short, medium to long term? And are there other avenues, like web-migration, which could have saved more?
This is Chinese manifest destiny.
This is a terrible description of Ethereum and trivializes what it is.

The interesting parts of a contract are not the deadline and the transfer of funds. Even an escrow service can provide those functions.

The interesting parts of the contract are the conditions of the transfer of funds, and how those are evaluated prior to effectuating the transfer, and how the obligations are enforced after the transfer.

What makes Ethereum interesting is that it creates a public, decentralized infrastructure for standardized outsourcing of third-party verifiers for each conditional precursor of a contract, and each subsequent obligation.

A contract can specify a set of payments and deadlines, as in OPs example, but it can also specify Boolean inputs from trusted third-party institutions that provide various named state inputs into the contract.

For example, you could have an input that is Boolean, which says, "Website transferred from Seller to Buyer: Verified by Verisign: True/False", etc. Those conditions can be part of the verification process. AND even more excitingly, small micro payments can be made part of the contract, to the third-party verifiers, as part of the contract itself.

I am kind of sick of people who don't understand what the value of smart contracts is, messing up other people's perception of what it is. I award OP zero points, and may god have mercy on his soul.
Ask HN: Is a Macbook battery consumed when plugged in?
When a battery is charging, does it also get consumed simultaneously? Like, is the device still powered from from the battery instead of the power adapter, though it is also charging?

Does it differ for MacBooks and iPads/iPhones?
In IBM's case it's because they want to reduce their reliance on MS. They have suites of IBM packages that can be installed on top of Redhat, SuSE, Ubuntu or Debian to make IBM-styled linux.

But they also have Notes etc for Mac OS now, so no need to shy away from it.
Being wrong or one-sided is different to being clickbait.
Java is such a boring not-elegant language.
Disagree? Please point me to usage of the term micro-studio in London.
My goal was to explain how I make do with the features that exist (paying one of the tradeoffs, productivity, compile time, or runtime), and that any more general purpose implementation of generics would, to be orthogonal with existing features, necessarily slow compilation (because it would have to take over the job of slices and maps today, and would become prevalent in our APIs).

I'm not trying to shift the argument, I'm to explain the importance of Go in practice. There is a generics dilemma that programmers pay today and it should be possible to turn that into a language feature with the same tradeoffs. In practice, I don't think a generics language feature that captures how I program in Go is possible. (Or at least, I haven't thought of one nor seen a proposal that does.)

Like many others, I'd like to see a prototype that proves me wrong.
Or even Pypy. This is how they measure up:

% python2 fibtime.py
elapsed time: 83.330840 seconds

% python3 fibtime.py
elapsed time: 89.325043 seconds

% pypy3 fibtime.py
elapsed time: 5.799757 seconds
> However, it's a fact that they lead to more conversions, more signups and more sales.

I wouldn't jump to conclusions. Maybe you have expertise on this, I don't, but I've seen nothing that could make me lay a definitive conclusion like this.

The article incision is on the fact that some people needs analytics to back up evaluation of the web site trying to know if it's doing good or not, regardless of revenue. So you end up to those techniques that drives irrelevant numbers up, that can even damage potential revenue, but it's ok, you're doing the right things, look at those good numbers. You can't test such things with A/B testing or anything else, it's long term relationship with the audience, and those analytics are not measuring this.
I guess that's just tough for them.

I can tell you where anti-capitalistic thinking ends up and its not with everyone having more control over what propaganda they are bombarded with--just fewer sources.
We at Beacon (beaconreader.com) agree.

We've focused on this for the past 18 months and have helped journalists and publishers get more than $1m in funding for quality journalism projects.

I wrote about this as well a while back: http://www.beaconreader.com/blog/the-reader-writer-relations...

Hit me up if you wanna chat: adrian at beaconreader.com
I don't think the readability is bad at all ... I'll admit that my first computer systems all had green phosphur monitors (because that's all they made), but I still set my default terminal colors to either green on black or to mimic the original WordPerfect text editor (purchased separately from the word processor itself).
Show HN: FormFiller – A JavaScript bookmarklet for repopulating forms
1) systemd was not pushed at GNOME; the GNOME dependency was the leverage used to push systemd at distributions. This let the systemd cabal look innocent with GNOME getting the blame for any compatibility issues. This is a very common political tactic that is popular because it gives plausible deniability and usually requires more than a sound-bite to refute. Surely you've seen it before.

2) I read debate on the Debian tech-ctte and surrounding discussion in realtime when it happened. GNOME compatibility was a key concern, and while the idea of dropping GNOME was briefly considered, concerns about supporting GNOME ended up having significant sway and a big reason - though not the only reason - why systemd won the vote.

This would normally be a purely technical decision, but in this case the GNOME->systemd dependence only exists because Lennart Poettering created it.
Because osx is better than Windows 10?
You could use Java, but it doesn't solve the zero-install issue, updates aren't as seamless as web apps, both for the JVM and the apps itself. You could rework it into something that could work better, but the same could be said for web apps.
Apple could amend their ToS to allow GPL'ed apps:

https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance/
Yes, in Windows 8 / 8.1 Solitaire (as well as other casual games published by Microsoft, such as Minesweeper, Sudoku, etc.) did include ads. They were shown in small boxes on the start screen, if you swipe to the right, and in the end game "you win" screen. In addition to those, I occasionally saw a full-screen ad when starting a session on the PC, but not on the tablet.
Because Apple's drivers are insanely terrible.

Windows runs well in Parallels, but fortunately when you run Parallels you're also running either generic drivers or drivers developed by the Parallels team. Thus the experience is solid.

When you run Windows using Bootcamp you're forced to run Apple's own drivers to power a lot of things. But Apple has left their drivers buggy, unoptimized, and just bad. I think Windows has shown that with good driver support you CAN get solid battery life, but on a Macbook/Pro/Air you get terrible battery life because Apple doesn't support their own hardware going into lower power states.

I've tried to run Windows in Bootcamp, I honestly wonder if the people who constantly tell others to do so actually ever have themselves? The experience was most unpleasant, even graphics switching wasn't supported, the touchpad broke every few weeks, it ate through battery life, got extremely hot, and Apple's updates to the Bootcamp drivers took months.

I'd happily recommend running OS X and Parallels w/Windows. I'd still warn caution if your productivity relies on Bootcamp working and working well.
Different adapters are different wattages. It's definitely possible, for both laptops and phones, to have an adapter that outputs less than the device is using. So you can be both plugged in and drain your battery especially if doing something intensive like running a high frame rate game. Some of the older macbooks, if you remove the battery, will actually refuse to run at full speed and clock down their processors.
Go does have some things like interfaces that don't work quite like they do in other languages.

I have yet to see a full technical proposal that integrates well with the existing language features and has no nasty corner cases. If such a thing existed, I'd be among the first to stand up and applaud it.

The best solution currently (IMHO), is code generation with things like gen [1]. Though I have yet to use that in a real project, so I can't say for sure it is actually the best solution.

[1] https://clipperhouse.github.io/gen/
Yes, those have always been ok. If a story is a good HN post in its own right, there's no problem. Sometimes people push the limit in weird ways and we have to decide which side of the line a post is on, but that's rare.
Interesting additional context, thank you. If you know a better introduction to the topic, please link&submit it. From what I've seen in other discussions about Ethereum, people are kind of sick of not finding an understandable description about what it actually does except making the world a better place ;)
The "linked list on the stack" mechanism can be used even outside of metaprogramming context.

Imagine you are traversing a binary tree and while doing so, you want to keep some data associated with every ancestor node of the one being processed at the moment:

void foo(node *n, mylistitem *list) {
mylistitem item;
item.next = list;

...

if(n->left)
foo(n->left, &item);
if(n->rigth)
foo(n->right, &item);
}
I don't see a problem with using it for the reasons they used it.

In a related video, if you've never seen it, this one is great, with the original Ctrl-Alt-Delete programmer (David Bradley) on stage with Bill Gates...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_lg7w8gAXQ
Hey all,

I'm Mike, one of the guys behind FormFiller.

We made FormFiller to scratch our own itch, but thought others might find some use out of it as well. (You can read more about how it came about at http://wearecontrast.com/2015/07/month-5-introducing-formfil...)

Would love to hear your feedback on how we can make it better.

Cheers,
Mike :D
> And Java tends to do type inference on the right hand side instead of the left hand side, so things look a lot cleaner if you chain them instead of assigning them to intermediate variables.

This example is chained, i.e. there are no intermediate variables.
I think mattnewport was making a joke there, in case you missed it.
It's funny, reminds me of old arguments when CL code could be made fast by adding a tiny (declare ...). Now it's python turn. That speed increase is damn impressive though.
It's so simple now:

http://planck.fikesfarm.com/

download, run, and you have a clojurescript repl ready to go on osx at least.
IBM makes enterprise endpoint management software. That's how IBM currently manages its mixed Windows/Linux/Mac desktop/laptop fleet. Adding more Macs will just be changing the mix.

* Disclaimer - I work for IBM, but not in IT or on endpoint management solutions. I am not in a position to confirm or deny the possibility IBM might be buying hundreds of thousands of Macs. My work laptop is a Thinkpad.
At the same time, I would be concerned about having employers recognize the degree as valuable. Looks like there are some mixed opinions online from students and employers about the quality.
If you ask somebody if they want personalized ads, of course they say no. That sounds creepy.

But in reality, those ads work, which means that people are more likely to make a voluntary economic transaction after seeing them than they would be in the base condition.

So this comes down to: do we believe what people say... or what they do?