Lasher

We implemented Lua as the quest / NPC scripting language within a "C" based MUD engine and the performance has been incredible. Tens of thousands of individual programs and not a blip, game pulses smooth as ever 8 times a second.

It hasn't been a good year for "expectations of privacy".

Is this what Google actually uses to parse HTML5 pages? Seems like there might be some SEO value in studying it if so. Not for any "black hat" purposes, more to understand what they can and can't easily get to.

I've been playing and running text-based MMOS (MUDs) that do this same thing since the early 1990s. Probably a naive question but isn't there anything that can be done to void these by proving that this was being done on the internet for long before they came around?

Awesome! 20 years later this is still my favorite game ever.

This doesn't make sense to me as a user or as a page admin.

As a user, if my friends post something I want to see it. If my daughter's karate school or my favorite band posts something, I want to see it. If they're spammy, I'll unsubscribe. I would like to make this decision for myself, not have it made for me. If it has to be made for me, I would prefer it be made based on some approximation of relevance and quality, not because someone paid $5 to spam me with it.

As an advertiser, Facebook has consistently promoted ads as a way to build a following via the 'like' button. So I pay Facebook to gain exposure to build a following of 10,000 fans and now I have to pay again if I want to reach them all?? Classic bait and switch. I wonder how many past advertisers would have paid to build up their 'likes' if they had been told very clearly up front "Just because someone likes your page does not mean they will see your posts in their news feed".

I've been asked to do this before. I just put coworkers into a group and made the post only visible to them. It's ridiculous but harmless and "being right" sometimes just isn't worth the fight when there's no meaningful downside to just going along with it. Save my ammo for battles that matter. Metaphoric ammo that is of course :)

Looks like that site was hacked or something - "cheap viagra" ads all over front page.

Even scarier is their definition of social network. From the patent document:

"Social networking websites may comprise internet-based social networking services that focus on building and verifying online social networks for communities of people who may share interests and activities, wish to communicate with each other efficiently, and may be interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software applications".

In addition to Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn and Facebook they also list YouTube and Flickr as specific examples. This thing is pretty far reaching.

The only real issue with Paypal is unfortunately a huge one if you're unlucky enough to get caught up in it - their overly-aggressive "holds" on funds in accounts. Other than that their customer service is better, their site easier to use, and they have the benefit of a huge network effect already in place. Paypal even called me a couple of days ago to verify that a transaction (I was the buyer) was legitimate. In the past they would have just rejected it and left it up to me to contact them to convince them otherwise.

When working on Aardwolf which is mostly pure ANSI C (GCC) nothing quite beats VIM with cscope extensions.

For quick editing a webpage or some CSS just plain old notepad++.

For day job stuff, either xcode or Visual Studio depending on the App.

It might be unpopular to say it out loud, but I would bet most HN readers have at least one person on their Facebook page they would not hire base on what they've seen posted there - people they might have otherwise considered hiring. I hope the scenario posted in that article doesn't play out on that scale, but it's surely already happening at an individual level. Great read though!

Not to be melodramatic, but as someone still in a day job this whole patent mess seriously does discourage me from taking the leap and risking everything to try to invent something meaningful only to get hit with a patent troll lawsuit just as we start to find our feet.

If your income exceeds your expenses you're in good shape. For too many people that involves an endless game of chasing more income when the 'expense' side of the equation can usually be brought under control with less effort and right now, not "sometime in the future after my next promotion/job change".

I've found Lynda.com is an awesome resource for getting a quick overview or refresher on the basics of a language with more in-depth classes if I find something interesting enough.

If you're looking at learning a single language in depth they're probably not the best for anything, but a lot of breadth on there, they cover a lot of apps too. Not free, basic plan is 25 a month but they do have a free trial.

Presumably nobody would use the name servers that they knew were on a shadow DNS being run by "squatters", so there would be no value to the names and no point squatting them in the first place.

Do you have a way to build in guest accounts that will expire after X hours / days?

Hearing 'sign in without logging in' makes me cringe, but I can see why you would want to do this. I hear what Joachim said that it really is no worse that being able to recover password via email, but it seems there might be more opportunity for a single email to go astray (or accidentally forwarded) than an entire account to be hijacked.

Can you afford to be right in this case? Even if you ultimately win, defending a lawsuit is expensive. Are these companies pretty much in a monopoly situation?

If they have competition, and you can get some of their competitors on board and generate some traffic, that might get them to come around. Otherwise it's going to be a struggle. Hope it all works out for you!

Btw, I do completely sympathize with the situation itself, it sucks.

But name-calling the new owner of the domain, who almost definitely acquired it legally, and is the only person able to make the decision to return it, does not seem very smart.

I leased my car for 3 years then I didn't renew it and they sent multiple notifications to my last contact address and finally repossessed the car a few months after I stopped making payments.

Now some car squatter has hijacked it and has my car on a parking lot. They're not even driving it!!! Why is this even legal!??!

I didn't get one of these emails, does that mean that Paypal are going to hold even more of my funds to cover the increased risk? Ouch :)

I loved this article. This paragraph in particular really struck home for me:

"Entrepreneurs get stuck trying to find something they are passionate about. Picking a business you are passionate about is not as important as being passionate about the process of building a business. I’m not passionate about any particular business industry, but I am passionate about finding problems and solving them. Make your passion solving problems and adding value – then you can go almost anywhere and do anything. And most importantly, you can get started. Once you get started, you start to see dozens of new opportunities open up that never existed when you stood still."

Waited far too long for 'just the right idea' to present itself...

Lots of comments here are focusing on the mechanics of credit card processing and why Paypal might have to hold funds, but to me the entire article was really about the customer service angle and how Paypal handle this. They freeze accounts and make it next to impossible to get valid feedback on why.

He might have argued the point, but in this particular example a simple explanation of "We are concerned about liability if you cancel an issue before the physical version is delivered. The hold on funds helps protect us in that event".

The Paypal model fits small transactions and small volume. As soon as you are big enough to feel like you deserve / expect such an explanation it is probably just time to move on.

Facebook is looking quite tempting lately but it's hard to get over that 777 million shares that will potentially hit the market on November 14.

You're probably familiar with the Eclipse distribution management package then (not to be confused with the IDE), that's the app I was referring to. I've been using Universe since the Vmark days, ADDS Mentor and Sequoia before that. Pick type databases are sadly under-rated. Possibly because there's never really been any kind of marketing aimed at indy developers and/or students?

Interesting that one of the original "noSQL" databases that is still going strong today, Pick and its variants, was not mentioned in the article at all.

Universe and JBase are both well supported on Linux and there are several multi-billion dollar (revenue) companies running their core business on it - I work for one of them.

Different application area but we implemented Lua into a MUD (online RPG) as the scripting interface for all area builder development and it was probably the single most valuable change we ever made. Check out the 'lua coding' section on Aardwolf.com if you want to see some examples. Over 200,000 lines of lua now, millions of prog executions per hour and still as fast as ever.

Java couldn't keep up as we grew. It was rewritten and finally finished in 2007, the main core is still pure 'C' with the rest in Lua. Using Lua was probably the best single decision we ever made in terms of flexibility and what we've been able to do with mob AI. Still going strong, drop by some time, or join the FB Page...

Aardwolf MUD, has been my side project since 1996 and not stopping any time soon. http://www.aardwolf.com

Like the previous poster said, it depends what the names are. If they are top quality generic .com domains then your best bet is probably contacting a domain broker. If they are just average names from an abandoned project you could try any of the regular domain forums. Domain sales on Ebay or Flippa actually do ok too.