skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard. I personally believe that designing large scale video games is one of the most complicated kinds of programming projects out there - so don't try to reinvent the wheel.

Like daodedickinson recommends; you want to look at how AAA game designers design their systems, then imitate them. Your best avenue to figuring out how games are designed is by understanding how game modding is carried out in AAA games. In many games, almost all of the content and mechanics within the game are defined using the same scripting interface that mods are created through.

I recommend using games like Skyrim, Morrowind, Mount and Blade, and The Witcher (i forgot which one shipped with all the game's scripts in the install folder, might have been 2).
I can only comment on the "early years" of the company (2000-2011). It was a business decision -- we felt we created more company value by applying limited development budget and effort to winning entirely new strategic customers (large metro centres, each with their own integration, payment, and back-office requirements that most people never see) than to adding more than core features to the user experience.

Naturally, every potential feature, once implemented, has ongoing costs and risks with respect to availability, data quality, maintenance, impacts on customer service, image, impact on our municipal customers, etc. We were a small, lean organization then. It's impossible to know if we struck the optimal balance; you're reasonable to ask!

I am now just another user of the service and I love it ... but in 2016, location-based everything is a reasonable expectation! Cheers. :-)
I don't think there's any productive discussion to have about the Polanski case, but if you're referring to the most recent hearing (I've linked to it below), I think it's contemptible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/world/europe/roman-polansk...
The New York Times announces newsroom strategy review as print declines continue
The fact that the court is even considering this is an indication of deep and profound ignorance on their part. There is no binding at all between URLs and content. A web server can serve different content for the same URL on every single request. In fact, most URLs on the web today are like that.
Well then, we disagree.
From the title, I wondered how to call Mac OS X's "Core Audio" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Audio, https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/MusicA...) from Windows. My best guess was that QuickTime,
or iTunes ship with DLLs implementing it for Windows.

Turns out a bit of a disappointment for the hacker in me. Windows has an API with the same name (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd3...)
> Not all rocks are the same, so I am pretty sure they didn't name it "rock01" "rock02"

I wouldn't be so sure...
"This is a blank problem. No, this is a blank problem."

I don't think there is, in fact, a "problem" that can be "solved" to return Apple to the glorious design thought leader status we all know and love. The "problem" is that Steve Jobs is dead, and his unique talent was coordinating a huge number of talented designers/programmers/businesspeople to passionately care about meticulous levels of detail in product design.

At this point, the board-meeting-and-shareholder conversation will continue listing the problems with Apple's "management" or "perception" or "process" or whatever. Their efforts are entirely futile.
If the bank lost the particular dollar bill that you deposited last week, but offered you a new dollar bill, would you get angry? If you rent a car from the airport every time you visit a city, and it's always been the same car, but you show up one night and they they tell you the car was in an accident and they'll get you another car, would you be angry?
I have a few text files at work that I keep track of things. I treat it more as a reference file/personal FAQ file, some notes are verbose and some are terse. When I am learning on a side project I keep my notes in Google docs. I take the time to format those notes better so I can study them easily. Google Docs has history and warns you when you delete a file. What do you use versioning for? I correct my notes when I discover they are wrong, and if we release a new version of the product, I just record the new behaviour in addition to the old behaviour (along with dates, build numbers etc)
Search images for "portapro cable mod", it looks like it's pretty easy to replace that cheesy cable.
If you're going to switch to linode you might just as well use any public torrent tracker to store your backups.
I think Google Compute Engine does the right thing here: by default it uses "persistent disks" (network-attached redundant/highly-available block devices) for all disks. The only case I've heard of where persistent disk data was lost was a few acknowledged writes occurring just before an unusual lightning-induced power outage: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056

For added protection, you can take regular snapshots. You only pay to store the diff from the last snapshot (so go ahead and snapshot often), and snapshot storage is geographically distributed.

(Note: I have no idea what EC2 does, maybe it's similar.)
They don't. At least artists are really bad at it when naming their files. I've had to constantly rename assets received from artists to give them some sort of consistency, even after telling them how to name it.

But yeah, Perforce version control is pretty important. It's almost designed to help manage assets, especially large ones. And it's free for under 20 users, I think.

Beyond that, you might want to include the level, screen, and/or date for the assets in your naming structure. Pretty much every company, and sometimes every project, uses a different structure, though.
This jibes with my experience. You need a wide variety of inputs in order to connect the dots and come up with something unique. Time spent taking care of kids (for example) decreased my inputs, resulting in fewer outputs. Until I discovered audio books at least.
"The American people are fed up with the blatant profiteering of pharmaceutical company CEOs like Martin Shkreli. It must end."

The real problem is all of the regulations you need to go through with the FDA to get a drug approved. If it didn't take millions of thousands of dollars and a team of lawyers to get drugs approved in 10 years, the free market would force the hand of these companies and everyone's costs would decrease.

The government is equally greedy and more greed will not fix the problem.

In fact, most countries have cheaper drug costs because of the R&D that is done in the US. Preventing profit (like what Sanders will inevitably do with his health care plans) will be pretty bad for important drugs worldwide.
I found when I was very addicted to facebook that if you turn off all mobile notifications and don't have it pull for updates, since I wasn't getting any notifications I wasn't checking as often. This eventually led me to be okay with not opening the app to check something and then lingering on for a while looking at the same thing over and over again. That's how I was able to become facebook-free. It's very similar to other addictions, if you see less things that remind you of it, it'll help you in the long run
Using Facebook friendships as the connection metric like the link does, I think the vast majority of the tech industry in SF is within two or three degrees.

(I've got mutual "friends" with the guy.)
Wow, that is pretty painful. Short answer is getting hired as a CTO doesn't make you one, and there are people who fill the role but don't have the title, but perhaps most importantly the role isn't as well defined as some people think.

Sometimes people exploit that. Some companies are so desperate to hire they will give someone pretty much any title they want (as opposed to money) so you see people without a significant track record in some sort of executive title role. But in all cases it is what folks do with it, not the title. In pathological cases it gets weird. I met a person whose first job out of college was VP of Engineering for a 4 person company which he used to convince a 10 person company to hire him as their VP Eng, which he used a 20 person company to hire him as their VP Eng, up the line until he was hired by a 1500 person company as their VP Eng where he was fired shortly after being hired. He really didn't have any clue as to what was needed in that role.

That said, in "real" CTO roles there are several but they usually require someone who can both debate things in a business context and a technical context, or in sales oriented companie explain to the technical people of a client enough about the product so they will be comfortable buying it. In non-technical companies the CTO is often really just a glorified IT guy with a smattering of social network support to help marketing with their branding efforts. In very large enterprise companies there might he half a dozen CTO "titles" of which only 1 is actually an officer of the company as defined by the SEC.

But none of that really matters for this author's rant. I can't figure out if they are amazed, jealous, or disgusted at the prospect of this person for which they clearly have no respect whatsoever holding a job with a title which they clearly covet.
OS X and iOS are both way more stable than any pre-OS X Apple OS. I can't believe people forget it.

When people talk about OS X having issues, they often mean some new feature is a little flaky. Classic Mac OS lacked basic stability and security features like preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Classic Mac OS was just like the pre-NT Windows: crash prone.
>2. No realistic means to recover legal fees if you do fight. //

It's normal elsewhere to award costs to the defendant when the plaintiff/complainant is unsuccessful in a civil suit (particularly if the judge finds it lacks merit). AFAIU this doesn't happen in US courts - why on Earth not?
31 Steps to Become a Developer – An Alternative CS Education
I'd assume parent was thinking less of PC users and more of other OS consumers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
The expectation with these services you mentioned, however, is reliability.

The implicit (and explicit) volatility of cloud hosting should change that expectation with such services.

"Non-issue" is an exaggeration because it was potentially a catastrophe. But this is sort of the way these services "work." Servers/droplets/instances are ephemeral and replaceable, and their underlying data is not guaranteed in a failure.
This is very good point. The constraints are in the mind of the customer, but also in the UI. i.e. a panorama viewing app is not great in vertical orientation on an iPhone. There are physical as well as mental constraints in the UI of a computer.

On the topic of cars, it is true that modifications strive toward comfort, but they also strive for marketability. While a leather-wrapped dashboard may be comfortable to look at, it is primarily focused at adding something to market. This same phenomenon exhibits in software, where features are added to increase marketability, "Look! this ERP software has a social network built in!". The utility of a given feature is often perspective-based, especially when the user is not well aware of their actual needs, or the user and purchaser are not the same person.
>>With that kind of money it can buy all sorts of other patents and start the whole progress over again.

Or just quit, $625 million is a lot of money. You can only do that much dirty work.

Plus you don't wan't to milk the cow to a point it bleeds and dies.
I've been looking forward to this one. Learn enough command line to be dangerous is the best beginners guide to bash I've seen and it really made me a lot more comfortable working with cli programs.
Does anyone have any good backup solutions to mitigate this? My agency uses a script we wrote in-house to more-or-less rsync our data to an AWS instance, but it's always seemed a poor way to handle it. I'm using DO's backup service for my personal site which was always supposed to be a temporary solution (the timing of the backups is inconvenient as mentioned by the article).

A better solution would be wonderful.
I second Hetzner. See their "server borse" for best value: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/

I just snatched a 6-core Xeon E5-1650v2 with 64GB RAM and 2x240GB datacentre SSD (samsung 840 Pro) for 70eur/month, no setup fee. A steal.
Ask HN: Starting with Windows exploitation/reversing
I wanted to start with windows exploitation and reversing. I am familiar with basics of x86 architecture, buffer overflows, etc. Any suggestions as to where/how to start?
Open Source Initiative celebrates anniversary, history of open source
Well, there's one way to teach these kids...

(Could be worse. Their first lessons could be like mine, in C! If anything will make you paranoid, writing C will.)
Um, I thought gluten was a naturally-occurring part of certain grains, namely wheat and rye and barley (especially wheat, since it's such a huge staple food in the West). It gets added to a lot of stuff (after extracting it from wheat of course), usually to make it stickier, so it's used a lot in baked goods, pastries, etc.

The problem with it is that a small but significant portion of the population either allergies or sensitivities to it, so it's best that they avoid eating it. The rest of us don't have that problem. But those that do look for alternatives, leading to the rise of "gluten-free" foods today. Traditionally, making GF alternatives has been difficult because the gluten is what helps stuff stick together, so GF bread for instance ended up being hard and very brittle, not chewy like normal bread. But GF stuff has gotten better; I think Xanthan gum is a popular gluten substitute in such foods to give the same effect.

Anyway, I'm usually pretty well-aware of pseudoscience regarding stuff like this, "chemicals" in foods, etc., and I've never heard of anyone thinking gluten is an artificial chemical. The GF faddists (the ones who don't have a genuine allergy or sensitivity) usually just think that GF foods are somehow "healthier", though they have absolutely nothing to base this opinion on. However, it's not all bad: because of all these GF faddists, there's a much, much bigger market for GF foods now than there used to be, so people who are genuinely gluten-intolerant now have far more options than they used to. Just 5 years ago, such a person couldn't eat anything from, say, Domino's Pizza if their buddies were ordering from there, but now they can since Domino's has a GF pizza option.

Anyway, there's plenty of foods which are perfectly natural, yet some people can't eat them because they have allergies to them. I believe some people are allergic to shellfish, for instance. And of course, peanuts are a well-known food allergy; they can outright kill people in small doses, even though there's nothing artificial about a peanut. And don't forget the absolute poisons out there like hemlock, ricin, etc. Those are all-natural too. Even apple seeds have small amounts of poison in them.
Huh, that's pretty odd.

I asked why as I work for DO's operations team and I wanted to know what your concerns were. Do you have a specific instance of a problem? What you're describing would be considered a MAJOR outage for us and we have not had one in quite some time.
There is a document written about the differences between rkt and all of the other container tools and engines: https://coreos.com/rkt/docs/latest/rkt-vs-other-projects.htm...

Something similar for etcd should exist but we haven't gotten around to that. Thank you for the feedback, I know these types of docs can be very helpful.
Absolutely right. That's what the purest essence of the "cloud" is.
Would you say we need more medical doctors who are also developers or musicians who are also developers?

It would be enough if a Christian identified these issues that could be solved with software and found a developer who could build that software.
Fitness Fit Plan and Exercises – Aplicaţii Android Google Play
You are already wondering if debt will be repaid. It is very likely many of the larger student loans in the US for financial aid packages in the humanities will never fully be paid back and the holders of the debt will go to their grave with it. Other debt can and is being defaulted in bankruptcy - consider that even for people 45-55 the median net worth is only around 90k, and you can easily find yourself in way more debt than that amount.

Additionally, anyone making loans is already considering the risk of a debt jubilee when making loans now. After a debt jubilee of course the risk of recurrence is higher, but the risk assessment for banks would not be magnitudes different in the medium term.
I uninstalled a bunch of apps and put a domain blocker on chrome. I can get past all of that if I need to, but the extra 5 seconds of work needed to get to 'social' gives me some time to catch myself.
Google BigQuery Under the Hood – Borg, Jupiter, Colossus, and Dremel
> If anything things have got better

Much better in my opinion. For example they've fixed all the issues with iMessage interoperability on OSX/iOS. There are a time when if you used Messages on the Mac you had to suffer through missing messages, duplicate messages, out-of-order messages, etc. Now, as far as I can tell, it's working flawlessly. Even better that it now includes SMS messages.
The concept is valid but hard to implement in tech. Probably a bad idea, too.
Are Your Prospects Under the Influence of Social Media?
They are expected outcomes. Banks fail (think 2008). Dry cleaners do lose clothes. Cars do get stolen. Plenty of stories in the news of all 3 of these. No so sure about gmail losing all your email, but I was able to accidentally access someone else gdocs once. I just logged in as me and saw a complete stranger's docs.
Microsoft indeed improved quality a lot, though Windows 7 inexplicably grinds to a halt and sometimes outright hangs on my desktop occasionally (one can blame my Wacom tablet but that contradicts the thesis of driver verification working wonders), and Windows 8 periodically renders the laptop unusable, using near-100% of the disk bandwidth (I tried like 5 tweaks recommended on the web for this problem, nothing helped.)

But that is not nearly as bad compared to having to rely on software developed the way they do in the aerospace business! From http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/02/09/public-tv-figu...:

> Who crashed Colgan 3407? Actually the autopilot did. … The airplane had all of the information necessary to prevent this crash. The airspeed was available in digital form. The power setting was available in digital form. The status of the landing gear was available in digital form. …

> How come the autopilot software on this $27 million airplane wasn’t smart enough to fly basically sensible attitudes and airspeeds? Partly because FAA certification requirements make it prohibitively expensive to develop software or electronics that go into certified aircraft. It can literally cost $1 million to make a minor change. Sometimes the government protecting us from small risks exposes us to much bigger ones.

(I agree that Apple's cash hoard does not make $1M sound like a lot, however, they also have much more software to tend to.) Overall, it seems that today you have to trade correctness for features and development time, and the cost in features and development time cannot be borne by a market participant unless the market is regulated so that all competitors have to do it, in which case the user is going to get way, way less functionality. I believe that the cost of bulletproof correctness might drop significantly enough at some point to change the game - and I really, really hope formal methods will take off big time, without being sure they can - but it doesn't seem like we're there yet. (This is my opinion, not data, of course; the one thing that I think $millions buy that works very well without costing too much time or features is automated testing.)
Wow, 56 items on the list? Seems like throw them all on the wall and see what sticks case.
Also 'rock01_final', 'rock01_final_final', 'rock01_new_colors1', 'rock01_new_colors2', 'shirt_long_AC07D4' (different item textures using hex color code as an id number), 'rock01_george' (for george's version), etc. All the bad naming you can imagine I've seen with asset naming.
If that's the case, why did they release a comprehensive report detailing the "MH17 truth"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDiLEyT9spI
Around where I live it's the land that costs you the most, so it doesn't really matter what the house costs. Hell, some people buy a property and give away the building for free to anyone that's willing to move it off their land.
Totally agree.

I'm Facebook friends with politicians, athletes, college student body officers, amongst others that I've never met and are obvious common connections for most in my area.
Agreed, transferring money to lending accounts is pretty easy anyway going by direct to the P2P provider.

The wider issue here is that high street banks (or "challenger banks" marketing themselves as equivalent to high street banks) are subject to an awful lot more scrutiny around how they advise customers to handle their finances[1]. If your differentiator from other banks is encouraging your depositors to buy into a wider range of somewhat riskier alternative lending products outside your own control, then the same people that made a fortune from arguing consumers were missold PPI and mortgages are lining up to take shots at you if and when things go wrong...

[1]considering the special privileges they get, that's the way it should be
Because state left on servers is inevitably unmanaged and will get lost eventually. At my job, I have cron jobs running on the production system from years ago that I have no clue what they do and no time to try to figure it out. I find out when they fail and someone, usually customer service, complains.

If the server goes away, then even once I redeploy, I've lost all those cron jobs. Who knows what will happen then.

On systems I build, cron jobs are added as part of the deployment process and managed as code, in the git repository.

That's just one example. Others include iptables rules, FTP server configuration, startup scripts, and such. If it's not in your codebase, it's unmanaged state on the server that you will lose if your cloud provider takes a shit. All of that needs to be managed as code or as configuration and deploy scripts should contain idempotent commands that add them if they are not present. I consider shelling into a server for any reason to be unideal and will think of ways to avoid it.

If you are asking about database being on the same server as the application, it's because it makes infrastructure management more difficult. Application servers are set up quickly, torn down quickly, and work as soon as you deploy. Database servers are fortresses, you don't build new ones and tear them down half as quickly, unless you've got scaling requirements.

It is tempting to want to put data on the same server as the application early on in order to save on hosting costs, with the understanding that you'll separate them later, but that's a rookie move. It's much less work to separate them now, when there's nothing riding on it, much less headache.
If that brand name is tarnished by regressions and performance problems, what consumer would buy a car from the brand?

This.

I would never buy a car from Apple, EVER. You make computers, not cars. It would be like Ford suddenly making a PC, how stupid does that sound? Ford would be the laughing stock of the tech industry. But for some reason since a decent computer hardware company thinks they need to get into cars, they think people are going to buy it?

This is the sort of delusional thinking that makes companies go bankrupt.
Are you missing an /s tag there or am I temporarily dumb?