skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congrats nickb hitting 10K karma today
I think that the key to usability design is that you have to understand both people, design and technology. This is very broad, and not many can do it.

Basically a good usability designer needs to be a hacker and a painter that goes to a lot of parties...
Sorry, dude. I will also downmod you. It has nothing to do with your political opinion. It has to do with the fact that it is political. Wanna post about politics, go to reddit. I'd like this place be clean of it myself, and I will use the tools that were made available to me to do it.
That was exactly the problem. I walked out of the keynote along with ~60 others around 40 minutes into it. Ridiculous. It was an atrocity.
risk. What could be better than psychologically manipulating 5 guys sitting next you into letting you dominate the world?
Socialthing
To be honest, I was very sceptical of them at first as well; however, now I have my mind mapping software load at start-up - that is how much I need it. I put everything related to my ideas in it: links, notes, images, videos, pdf's, etc. One thing that you have to be careful of is that the maps for ideas can quickly grow to become huge, and I have now found it more beneficial to split large maps into smaller ones and just link through to them. They are also really useful if you have more than one idea on the go. Good software will allow you to set-up different styles too; this can be useful for simple flow diagrams.
I just feel sorry for Microsoft developers. As a Windows app developer I felt Microsoft was deliberately trying to waste my time. Rather than adding useful functionality to their frameworks that would make it easier to do the common tasks that most apps need, such as better rich edit controls, syntax highlighting, and practical APIs to manipulate images, videos, and mp3, etc. There are plenty of individual 3rd parties libraries that do these things, if you want to spend the money to license each one and they will only work in Windows version X and Y but not version XY. Why the hell can't Microsoft invest some time into making exciting and useful features built into their framework? Developers would flock to Windows development if it were actually easy to do cool things, but it's not. Instead Microsoft pushes all Windows developers to waste time adding support for their new pet features of the season that no one asked for. I got tired of it and finally realized web applications are much easier to develop and have a much greater growth potential than Windows apps.
I thought this piece was an interesting political analysis that avoided pushing political hot buttons. Plus, I figure a lot of people here like Obama and would find it interesting. But, anything political is automatically controversial, so oh well.
You could go further and say that all languages are lists of characters and wish for a language without the lexical top layer.
No, I like chess too, so it doesn't count. You can play chess obsessively without any guilt.
Generally you would hope a project is written in whatever the author(s) excel(s) at. I think that Linus and Co have clearly demonstrated they have a lot of experience doing C correctly, so you should have some faith that they know what they are doing.

They might not have similar aptitude with Ocaml or Python. Given enough time, all bugs are shallow, and Git is becoming popular enough that this becomes true. After all, Python itself was also written in C, so it is theoretically at risk to the same things.
Duby: A Type-Inferred Ruby-Like JVM Language
Yes, that's an interesting question, and I think I agree so far. I won't promise quick or lengthy responses though, so if you've already written something up on your blog about this, feel free to just give me a link. I don't want you to waste your time if it turns out I'm not so interested after all.
...or a MySQL engine on top of S3?

http://fallenpegasus.com/code/mysql-awss3/
They certainly are expert C coders and a VCS can benefit from direct-to-the metal code. Let's hope that lower-quality C won't creep in.
Isn't this exactly like "hg record"?
I'm thinking this might be a 'bad' idea unless you are also hosting the site on EC2. Having significant latency in your session handling will bring your site to a crawl due to IOWAIT on your web servers. Obviously making a request across the net for session data will be slow compared with a request across a local network.

Now, assuming you are also hosting your web servers on EC2, I would recommend using neither S3 or SimpleDB for hosting sessions. S3 is more appropriate for static data, and SimpleDB is still in early Beta (as in, the API is subject to change and you have no SLA).

Session data is largely meant to be ephemeral. Consider using a standard MySQL (or similar) session backend with a circular hash for distribution to different nodes. Unless you are doing a ton of traffic, you can get by with a single machine running the session backend. The MySQL backend scales to a lot of concurrent users.
Read TechCrunch from its front page. This story gushes about how easy SocialThing is because "you only have to provide it with your credentials" to other sites. Below it is a story about a gmail scam that says "users should have known better than to type their email credentials into a third party service."
Interview: Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect @ Microsoft
How Do They Track You? Let Us Count the Ways
Yeah, my wife read that thread and she was stunned that someone actually thought mixmax was waiting outside his house at dawn with a pistol in his hand. I praised the comment because it's the second funniest thing I've read in a month not because I wanted him to fight anyone!
I especially wonder how much the network was saturated during the 2 hours it took to transfer that 3.5GB patch to all the clients. BitTorrent will use every last iota of bandwidth and clog every router with tons of connections if you let it.
It's hard not to be picky if you've spent a lot of time with a compiler.
Syntax annoyances can be forgiven but for a language interpreter to call exit(1) when unable to allocate memory is really bad. It should instead return an error to the app and let the app keep running.
CSS-Tricks Video Screencasts
Jsure, a static Javascript analyzer, checks syntax, catches undeclared variables and bad regexes.
Escape From Colditz, if I remember correctly, has a 'Do or Die' card you can play. Basically, you roll the dice x times and must escape in that many moves. If you don't make it you are shot dead. Kinda like a startup.
A Mac OS X-style Dock In JavaScript
Settlers of Catan.

With the "penny rule":

On any die roll where you get NO resources that isn't due to the robber, you get a penny. During your trading round, you can turn is as many pennies as you have victory points showing for a single resource.

This reduces the game's tendency to knock someone out of the running three rounds in because of a set of bad rolls.
axis and allies
India's wages surge but risks multiply
Depends on the mood I'm in:

1) Go. Emergent gameplay, endless depth. Studying this game will teach you how to think strategically in the real world.

2) Magic Realm, a '70s Avalon Hill fantasy game. It's a fantastically complicated hack & slash dungeon crawl board game. But it's still simpler than D&D, and takes less time for you and all your geeky friends. The creator of the game is (or was, last time I checked) still active on the fan mailing list.
The pendulum swings
Having yet another "well, why didn't I think of that?!?" moment. Nice app.
some really great design work coming out from the current batch - v. fresh and upfront
Maybe I'm just stupid but the description doesn't make any sense to me. Anyone who's played this care to do a quick overview?
Ask YC: raising angel funding in London
Hi, I've nearly finished developing an alpha of my web app (it's not publicly available, but almost ready for a solid demonstration to potential investors). I will soon be looking for funding to make a couple of core hires and start getting real.

Aside from friends and family, what are the best approaches for a fairly unconnected hacker to raise in the region of £50-100k?
Yes I presume compilers reading programs are more picky than investors reading businessplans.

Investors don't crash if you miss a semicolon.
noscript isn't on that list?

i personally think that site looks terrible.
I believe the hardest thing about learning XHTML and CSS besides having to make things work across various browsers is avoiding the HTML soup, dated HTML practices such as the use of tables, and CSS hacks. I think it would be best to learn according to the current W3C standards which would enable one to have a stable foundation when swimming through content.
Balderdash.

Settlers.

I've also been playing some Clue lately (if you haven't played since you were a little kid, I'd recommend trying again -- but with scratch paper to make notes instead of just the puny sheets that come with the game).

I and some friends were super into Risk a few years back (we even drove from Rhode Island to Pennsylvannia one evening to enter the Risk Tournament of Champions http://www.risktoc.org/)
I dunno - I just asked a friend of mine who was there if it was as bad as it sounded in the article. His response was "it was worse." And this guy is a pretty normal, even-keeled, somewhat-well-known-web-2.0-blogger guy, so I'd bet he isn't overreacting.
Not having your success hinge on random chance. Try Diplomacy for a less hollow victory.
You can't give stock options for founding member.You have to be willing to treat them as partner in this case. So you have to be willing to give out equities instead of options.

After the company is incorporated and has significant fund. Then the options plus salary will make sense. But for founding member, it is just not right to give them options.
Scrabble -- pretty much due to Scrabulous (take that Mattel/Hasbro!). I just like the type of thinking required to consider and place permutations of letters. Learning new words is nice too.
I'm consistently astonished by how much I've learnt from Go, and how much I have yet to learn.

I'm a big fan of games of all varieties, but Go stands above and beyond everything else for me.
Ah, the memories. A true game of Risk is not played on a board alone. If that were the case, then it would be a simple exercise in random dice throws. Rather, the majority of Risk strategy takes place in the psychology of the participants.

In college, we used to play an internet version of Risk. There were six of us that lived in a four room suite sharing a common hallway. The plots, betrayals, and backstabbing were epic. You could guess at which alliances existed by watching who was sneaking into whose room, although since IM was available as a stealthier method of communication sneaking around was often done for misdirection. There was always a risk, though, that if you tried to plot over IM that the other person would betray your plans to his roommate to gain leverage or trust.

I enjoy Monopoly for much the same reasons. I love to make various financial derivatives using various characteristics of my properties. If it could be imagined, I sold or bartered it, including X-turn immunities, partial property cashflows, and dozens of other goods.
When I first saw Dasher about 4 years ago I think there was a demo using a camera for eye movement sensing--the idea being that your eyes can find the next letter faster than your hand-controlled cursor.
pchristensen, you're my new best friend. You have a sense of humor!
I suppose IBM and Sun will just evaporate as people buy Xserves to run their businesses? Apple doesn't even use Objective-C 100% of the time as they can get to the libraries with C++ .
Far and away the best board game ever. If you like Risk and you haven't played this, you should definitely give it a try.
Chess for me too, it would be interesting to start an online YC chess tournament. :P
Personally, I'm a Carcassonne man.

That said, when I have a good day to kill, History of the World is a lot of fun.
A collection of successful startups and their teenage founders
IE 5 (MAC)
I think it's a ploy to get people to start wasting time browsing the internet. Oh wait...
RTMP is patented by Adobe?
Does anyone know the truth in RTMP is patented by Adobe?
Plese let me know, because we're using red5 for our media server. It might impact us.
Thanks
Surely they could use some kind of QoS to make torrent traffic the lowest priority. Since they control the clients too (and don't have to worry about hostile clients trying to subvert your traffic shaping schemes) they can also set connection limits to keep each client from opening excessive numbers of connections.

In short, it's not like dealing with bittorrent in the wild, where every client is trying to leech at max speed with no regard for the rest of the network. They control both ends of the process, so they can tune it.
New Internet Meme - Zuckerbucks
The fictitious unit of money used to describe a startup founders 'net worth' before any shares are sold. In lieu of using US Dollars to state a startup founders net worth before a liquidly event state the amount in Zuckerbucks so as to avoid confusion. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/10/billionaires08_Mark-Zuckerberg_I9UB.html
this is a little more complicated/ costly then i care to implement on a new site. Yes the site is on ec2, but i think i am going to seriously avoid MySQL in aws. if a server crashes your log files are not valid, because the virtual machine hard drive gets disposed. Setting up MySQL on ec2 seems like it should have at least 4 servers running. I will wait till traffic demands it.
hehe... I meant the adjective, not the noun.
Monopoly.
thats what i would like to know. i am still waiting on access to the beta. are you up with doing an S3 version?

it looks like a cool path would be:

# support s3

# support some cache (memcache/ThruDB)

# support SimpleDB with cache
I was thinking of an actual business idea.

Providing some kind of higher level abstraction in a pay-as-you-go utilisation, hosted on ec2 and maybe backed on to simpledb.

You'd really want to throw memcache in there as well. I wonder how easy porting that to memcache and simpledb would be?
Mouse Trap is a great one too. Been playing it with my daughter as of late, and it definitely brings back fond memories of childhood.

I seem to remember a "Grape Escape" or something like that from childhood as well. You were little clay grapes and as you ran around the board you were smashed, cut, squeezed, etc.

Good times.
I both love and hate Go. It's daunting realizing that I'll never come close to mastering it.
Twilight Imperium, Drakon, A Game of Thrones, The WarCraft (not WoW) board game is excellent, Pillars of the Earth is a great game for programmers (think knapsack problem), Arkham Horror, RoboRally, Khet, Starfleet Command, Basari. The StarCraft board game is actually quite fun.

http://boardgamegeek.com/
Also Ticket to Ride.
Does “Magic: The Gathering” count?

(My green and white deck from 2001 will kill any deck you have)
The measured traffic is mostly of the networking variety. So here's my theory/observation:

Guys use these sites heavily until they find a girl (with or without the help of these apps.) Then, their usage drops off considerably. Girls use these sites primarily for other reasons so their usage never really has a reason to drop off.
No, it's not a unique situation. Or rather, it's only unique in one way: if failure occurs, it occurs loudly, spectacularly, and in front of millions of people. The article itself mentioned the Denver airport, where billions of dollars still didn't prevent software errors from happening, delaying a massive project. And let's not forget the cascading failures that happened just last year because of bad weather and poor planning/routing software programs.

Every time this article is posted, and it's been around since at least 2004, the one thing that strikes me profoundly is how great communications play an integral part in the entire affair. It's getting to the point where we as software programmers and engineers can't improve our software and craft until we learn the importance of communication, between ourselves and our clients. Yeah, we talk about it, but we don't really implement it. It's like saying we understand the need to watch what we eat to be healthy, and yet still eating a McDonalds value meal every meal, only with Diet Soda instead regular.

We need to improve our all parts of our craft to grow. Technically is alright. The people part, the interaction part, the expectation part, goal-setting, testing, planning needs to improve tremedously. We know the problem, and we must provide the solution. If a client doesn't know what they want, ask more information. Educate the client about how the development process should work. Find out more about the industry. See what was wrong/troublesome about the old way they did their business. If information isn't making it's way from the managers to the coders/planners, find the problem and eliminate it. This is not new. I am not smart, and I know these problems. Surely, we can do better.

Yes, the projects will probably end up taking longer. Yes, development will probably end up costing more. But it will be better. And the clients will be happier.

p.s. YC.news needs a preview option instead of just a reply option.
This whole Lacy thing is much ado about nothing. Seriously, an interviewer did a bad interview? Where is the news?
Regarding the office stuff, that might be true for you, but I can't seem to get anything done in complete silence.

I think best with airplanes flying overhead, people screaming at taxis outside, and phones ringing off the hook.
last I looked, it was something like RescueTime or 8aweek, with funny graphics. Interesting, though.
I think Carcassonne is the best, too.
Thanks for the downmod - perhaps you were also there and could provide greater insight?

It was a train wreck. I don't mean to fuel the hype on this at all, but noone had any context for who she thought she was and Zuckerberg deserved significantly more respect than she was giving him.
Diplomacy is easily the most evil game known to mankind. I remember playing in a large group in high school, and the best proponents were the two most devotely Christian members of my year. These two, butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, so when they proposed an alliance, you believed them. The wopping great big dagger that you subsequently found in your back always came as a big surprise.

The worst was that one of them even had the ability to explain to you that it was all a strategic move to make the guy he had sided with to trust him. Evil guy would then backstab erstwhile ally, using YOU as the hammer. And of course you'd happily go along with it.

But that's not what's really evil about Diplomacy. What's really evil is that you NEED alliances just to survive, so you can't just blow these guys off if they are on your borders.

Evil.
Couldn't read it, the link has been down for a few hours.
Diplomacy. The hard part is finding exactly seven players. http://phpdiplomacy.net/ seems like a good online implementation, but I strongly recommend playing with friends rather than strangers.
The fact that he grouped Java with Ruby/Python shows how much he has to learn. If anything I regard Java and C#(.NET) as roughly equivalent in my mind. Both can be used by good programmers to do neat things, but the vast majority of the time they are by-words for overly specified inflexible crap code.

I don't think it's necessarily the language (although both seem way too verbose for my tastes --- and a little too focused on nouns), but more a factor of industry acceptance. As soon as Java became the industry standard successor to Cobol, they started tacking on all this formal-robust-enterprisey crap that just made the code require a heavy duty IDE to deal with. It stopped looking elegant and fun and started looking like the schematic to build the HVAC system for a skyscraper. Ditto for C#.

I would argue the main problem with the Microsoft ecosystem in general is that everything costs money. Development tools cost money, libraries cost money, even the freaking support of experts-exchange costs money. Why pay for all this stuff when the rest of the programming world already thrives on freely exchanging information. It makes learning cheaper and faster, and probably leads to more rapid development, since new stuff is easier to learn about. When I wanted to figure out how bittorrent works, I just went and read the spec published by Bram Cohen. I didn't have to call up his company and ask for a Certified Bittorrent Engineer to come out and train me onsite in a three day session that costs $8000. The whole ecosystem is focused on making a buck off the developer, instead of helping the developer make a buck off his customers. (That said, the .NET ecosystem seems moderately better about this, from my limited experience with it.)
Sudden reactions to unusual events make bad policy.

That being said, an asset whose price is growing at 20%/year is safe to lend against. If there was no asset bubble, there would be no credit crisis. It’s hard to think of which institutions are appropriate to defend against excesses in an asset price bubble without harming the credit market in more normal environments.
Factors contributing to subprime crisis: Deval Patrick as DOJ lawyer suing over alleged "redlining"; repeal of Glass-Steagall Act in 1999; large number of illegal aliens driving up demand for housing. Add to this a huge amount of restrictions on when and where new houses can be built.
Simple Metaprogramming logger with graph generation
permalink here http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/03/simple-metaprogramming-logger-with.html
sorry, although you will see some more good stuff at the main link
Do they talk louder than other programmers? I never noticed that.
How many of these things will be around in 5 years?

My bet is 0.
Challenge to Boston Mobile Developers: Show Us Your iPhone Apps
you do. the interactive commits was one of the features I missed from Darcs
Good God I'm in the top 100? I've got to get off this site and get more work done.
W3C Semantic Web FAQ
I'm surprised that Puerto Rico hasn't been mentioned. My hacker friends and I dabbled in both Settlers and Carcassonne, but ultimately ended up playing mostly Puerto Rico. Great game. Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck getting my non-hacker friends to play.

A big hit in almost any group of people has been Speed Scrabble. Quick, easy to play in teams, and just great fun overall. If you like Scrabble, try it out.
Would this be an inappropriate time to suggest a merger between RescueTime and Idle RPG? Imagine how much more productive you'd be if you leveled up inverse proportionally to time spent surfing the web.
Only when faced with jargon from non-Microsoft devs that isn't on the Microsoft Certified Terminology sheet they got in their last overpriced training session.

If you say it loud enough, the words will magically translate themselves.
"I thought this piece was an interesting political analysis that avoided pushing political hot buttons."

Maybe.

Hacker news?

Nope.
Arc: I/O
Yeah, love Siedler. Thanks for the penny rule tip!

If you like Siedler, you might like a Dutch card game called "Koehandel".
Star Munchkins. More of a card game but not like magic in that you don't build decks.
You just reminded me of wet holidays stuck in a caravan in Wales.
Smartphones May Be Able To Capture URLs Anywhere
No offence intended, but I do not know such thing as fast rich -GUI JavaScript apps.

I can't understand why this thing http://www.bindows.com/
is consuming my CPU
If you use this site right, it will save you time and allow you to get more done!

PS: Thanks brlewis! I'll send you an email.
I think that this article overlooks some of the previously discussed issues with the iPhone API. Objective C apps can only be run on Mac stuff, unlike Javascript which can be (mostly) be run on all web browsers. When Android starts supporting Objective C, then we'll talk about how Apple won.