skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tips to make cover page for term paper
As a student you will have to do a lot of research writing. There is no escaping it! The only way to get away with it is get essay help when you write. If you are not looking for help then you have to have a lot of faith in your capabilities. Once you are done writing your term paper
Startup Business Plan — How an Investor will Evaluate Your Work
I love eventual consistency but...
Years. Months, if you know what you're doing (you've already finished a few games).
Baidu: Registrar 'incredibly' changed our e-mail for hacker
Hi, I'm a co-founder and developer of this application. Maybe I have an obsession about "launching" for a while. (and I'm not English native too.)
The wonderful thing is that if a price tag was placed on the Linux Kernel, it would become worthless. Being free (monetarily and in philosophy) is what makes it so valuable.
This seems like as good an opportunity as any to start a discussion: what do people think about these software cost estimation models and tools? They seem like a valuable tool for communicating the value of working software to non-technical businesspeople, but any programmer knows that the value, complexity, or cost to reproduce software is a function of much more than SLOC count.

For instance, the SLOCCount tools use the COCOMO model (http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/sloccount.html#cocomo), whose follow-on COCOMO II is discussed here (http://csse.usc.edu/csse/research/COCOMOII/cocomo_main.html). These models use factors like the following to calculate an exponent which is applied to the SLOC count to estimate cost to produce:

Required software reliability
Database size
Product complexity
Execution time constraint
Main storage constraint
Virtual machine (HW and OS) volatility
Computer turnaround time
Analyst capability
Applications experience
Programmer capability
Virtual machine experience
Programming language experience
Use of "modern" programming practices (e.g. structured programming)
Use of software tools
Required development schedule

Are these the right factors? How are they suited to estimating the cost to produce or reproduce a piece of software? What would you add?

It seems like some measure of the cyclomatic complexity of a codebase, or the number of syntactic elements, might add some information to the raw SLOC count. Arguably this doesn't tell you much about how much it might cost somebody to reimplement it (since that person might come up with an easier-to-code-and-maintain variant with lower cyclomatic complexity or in a more powerful language), but it might help estimate the cost to get it working in the first place.
That would be too hard. It's much easier to simply say "I'm right. Everyone else is wrong. This language sucks compared to my favorite language."
Summary: OSX, FreeBSD and Linux (in that order)
Can anyone explain the appeal of "strategy" games? every one I've ever played seems like excel with a GUI. figure out what parameters affect income, optimize. I had some fun with Sins of a Solar Empire, but more just for the spectacle of big fleets than anything else. This will come off as pompous but whenever my friends convince me to try a new one I play for a little while and then basically go "I could be playing chess or go right now" and that's the end of it. Is it mostly just the fun of commanding armies? Do people find exploring the optimization process fun?
Hi, I'm a co-founder and developer of this application. Maybe I have an obsession about "launching" for a while. (and I'm not English native too.)

Anyway thanks for your feedback.
Good god, I wish there was a visualization like this for everything. Especially if you could input your own parameters and get your own personalized "worth it" line.
Group blogging Made Easy With Grogger
2010 Olympics powered by 6,200 PCs all running Windows XP
15th Anniversary of the Apache HTTP Web Server
Tough not to draw a comparison here with illegal music. Is there any reasonable expectation that the gaming industry will take the route the RIAA took and start going after people?

It seems like these old games are quite different from old music: both make most of their money immediately upon release, but games lose their appeal much faster as newer games come out, while the appeal of music may last an order of magnitude longer, and isn't necessarily replaceable. Also, while music may continue to make money on the radio or in commercials or movies or other media, games pretty much lose the revenue stream after the first few months.

I recall a few weeks ago another game (C&C maybe?) made news here for releasing an early version in promotion of a new version. You don't see Metallica giving away old tunes in promotion of a new album, do you?
Segways meet resistance in Boston neighborhood
And again cost and value get confused.

You'd think that in a world full of businesses who survive on getting people to pay part of the difference between cost of production and value to the customer that there might be a general understanding that they are not the same thing. But no.

What makes it particularly egregious in this case is that whoever wrote the headline ignored the fact that the article itself is clear on the difference between cost and value, and that value was not estimated here.
Anybody else sad to see muzzle go? I think rolling over contacts in the gchat pane in order to see their status messages is perfect. Now I will only be able to see half as many contact names...
Life is Excel with a GUI. (Figure out what parameters affect income, optimize.)
FreeCiv is a client server app with an AI already. You could build a OLPC freeciv client. If you really want to get fancy, port the server to OLPC.
Well if you take it to that logical conclusion, you first reach a point where all the freedom-lovers are together in the last free country, with nowhere else to go. That concentration of effort should help matters considerably.
Since there is Google US Puzzle Championship, there should be Google Code Jam:
http://code.google.com/codejam/
The target market for McDonalds is chav kids on pay-as-you-go phones who want to watch videos on Youtube. They don't seriously expect anyone to be working.
This is my first time ever seeing the term "Bukowskian", but moments after reading this comment, I saw it again here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149682

I suppose I will have to look this one up.
For anyone that is getting a 404, more info is here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=354036

And screenshots: http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/browseimages.php?c=36

Looks shiny :)
I’m not kidding, this is important in a job where most of what you do is sip coffee and type.

Don't forget "sprays coffee onto keyboard when you read that most of what you do is sip coffee and type".
Sejarah Komputer Dan Perkembangannya Dari Generasi Ke Generasi
Might be worth emailing them. It's generated from a Google Docs spreadsheet, so it's entirely possible.
You shouldn't have much problem with that. You'd just have to make svn ignore the .hg folder in your local repository, and you can use hg locally for whatever you want, and when you're at a point that you want to push your changes to your svn central repository, you can.
right, but people choose to spend their leisure time playing computer strategy games as stress relief from "life".
being a native app is not an advantage unless you are equal on all other fronts.

I disagree. Adobe Air apps can't be as fast as native apps. While using Balsamiq (which is an Adobe Air app) I can feel the slowness. The mouse moves slower. Also, scrolling is not smooth compared to native scrolling.
Software Estimation by Steve McConnell (who is pretty much always worth listening to) makes the point that models with many tweakable factors like COCOMO II are not good for estimating costs because people have a strong tendency to start with a number they want to find then tweak the factors to get there. However the research that went into discovering the relative costs in the model has uncovered a lot of data that is worth listening to.

And, of course, if you want to estimate costs and schedules for your software then I highly recommend reading Software Estimation. It offers a lot of good advice for people who seriously want to come up with somewhat less ineffective estimates.
Why should one game finish in one sitting? Some players even play "longturn" games where one turn could take a day, and games would last for months.
Great writing Joel. Thanks.
Lift is moving (or has moved?) from Scala actors to it's own actor implementation as well.

http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb/browse_thread/thread/...
Some Boston sidewalks are crowded and narrow, so I can see how adding a segway, which is about twice as wide as a person, is not a welcome addition.
Whilst you may technically be connected at ("near") those speeds, you'll really be at the mercy of their exchange equipment load.

I just closed my broadband account with Virgin Cable due to breach of contract on their part. Their equipment at the exchange was overloaded with too many subscribers in the area, leading to about 90% packet loss at peak, and 20-50% loss at other times. 2 months after reporting the issue and they hadn't upgraded their network, so I left.
yea I really liked muzzle. It's kinda annoying not having it.
First, are you on Virgin ADSL? Or "Virgin National Broadband" as they brand it. If so you're going to get the same speed variability as any other ADSL provider. I'm talking about their cable service.

Anecdotally, any time I've measured I've got almost bang on what I'm paying for (at several speed rates and in three different houses over several years, though all in one general area).

More scientifically the Ofcom report about the poor performance of ADSL compared to advertised speed noted that it didn't really apply to cable based systems.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/features/broadbandspeedsjy

They got a table there that shows on ADSL you're getting 50% of the 8MB they advertise on average, on Virgin Media you're getting 85% of the 10MB advertised speed.

Obviously if some folk are getting 100% then other's can be on 70% and it'll still average out but I'd say it's worth getting your line checked if you're only getting 20% of what you're paying for.
I'm amazed at how many of them I had forgotten about.

I'm even more amazed that I had heard of all of them.. either I spend too much time on the internet, or Google are good at promotion... maybe both?
The correct order is Linux, OSX, FreeBSD:

"Rob, Ken, Dave, and I use Macs as our desktop machines, but we're a bit of an exception. Most Google engineers use Linux machines, and I know of quite a few ex-Bell Labs people who are happy to be using sam or acme on those machines."
Open Edges, the End of Ownership Heralds New Opportunity
I am not a prophet, but I doubt that will happen.

However there are a lot of people with nostalgia. If someone, somewhere, could put together a legal product that made it easy for a lot of people to take a walk down memory lane, they could find a good market. Such a vendor would have a strong incentive to acquire copyright to abandoned titles then enforce said copyright. This would cause backlash, but it isn't impossible that someone with money and energy could take this step.

Of course the first barrier that such a company would have is getting copyright permission to the core operating system they need to emulate. Those copyrights are owned by companies like Apple and Microsoft which are aware of the issue and show no desire to bother themselves by getting involved.
It's a cool visualization, but their cutoff line is labeled "worth it." To really justify that, they need more information. Thankfully the bubbles are broken down by specific health claim (so that some supplements have several bubbles for their effect on different conditions), but to determine "worth it," they need to include:

1. Some sort of way to account for type and frequency of side effects. For example if everyone who takes the supplement gets an intolerably bad taste in their mouth, that's a mild but prevalent side effect. If one person in 100,000 who takes the supplement dies, that's a comparatively rare but very serious side effect. This factors heavily into the "worth it" determination, because risk is a consideration.

2. Cost. If a supplement has a mild beneficial effect but costs $1,000 a month, I'm not sure most people would say it's "worth it."

3. Strength of effect. A statistically significant improvement is not necessarily clinically significant. For example, with a large sample a 1% decrease in LDL cholesterol may be statistically significant, but it is not clinically significant.

Those factors would help a person determine the pros and cons effectively. What is "worth it" varies considerably from person to person.
Well written and it comes at a great time for me. It's such a wonderful feeling to know there's someone else out there like me... I too am a family man (2 + 1 in the oven) with a fulltime job and a mortgage, and am trying to make time to build something by myself.

I love pg's essays though I often feel depressed after reading them. He frequently seems to be saying "don't even try unless you're young, free, have at least one partner, live in the valley, have no other obligations, and are willing to 'work until you endanger your health'"

Added your blog to my RSS reader.
git-svn does exactly what you describe:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-svn.html
As pointed out by SpyBlog:
"There is no excuse for censoring thousands of other web pages, from a major website, simply because there is a civil legal dispute (this is not a criminal matter) regarding one of them." http://spyblog.org.uk/
You cannot copyright a Tweet
Thompson didn't commit suicide in some Kurt Cobain "woe is me" manner. He shot himself at age 67 after battling painful and chronic medical conditions, when he decided he had lived a full life and wanted to go.
Width of a Segway: 25"

Width of a Bugaboo Cameleon: 23.9"

I'd like to see the Boston city council try to ban strollers.
Summary, part 2: go check out plan9ports and 9vx.

http://swtch.com/plan9port/

http://swtch.com/9vx/

These give you some plan9 features on mainstream unix.
It's funny to see that Google set its IPO goal on April 2004 to the mathematical constant e (in billions), but hit almost PI (also the mathematical constant, in billions) in Revenue in the planned year :)
Bloom Energy unveils 'power plant in a box'
11 Cool Hotel Bars Around the World
While the "math" of strategy games are typically exposed (and with it the ability to optimize) - the fun of strategy games is to balance competing demands by making decisions with long-term consequences. The difficulty with creating strategy games is to make something replayable that isn't formulaic. I think the Civ series has succeeded so far because of its ability to introduce enough chaos that no single pattern of game play will always win no matter what. (Though unfortunately I don't feel there is much variation in the harder difficulty levels which does produce a stagnant experience).
I've got a few issues:

1. It's Windows only. I do not personally use Windows nor do I have a single peer developer, designer, or project manager (the ones who would primarily be using this for mockups) who uses Windows. It's all Mac in the web dev world these days. A web app or a native Mac app would have been very nice here. As it is I will never use your product.

2. From what I do see, it looks exactly like a number of competitors.

3. You're not doing anything to make this the mockup tool I would use over other established mockup tools out there. Is your niche here that it's Windows? If so... I don't really know what to say.

I'm really curious as to why there is this current trend of mockup tools being created. Do we really need a dozen clones of each other out there? Why is no one innovating in this space and just releasing just another carbon copy every single time?
I like the '99 <body></body> tee on Paul Bausch :-)
Private Company Valuations: Damballa, Inc.
The article starts and ends with a dataliberation.org link, so after a bit of hesitation I decided to check it out. Lo and behold:

> The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.

That was NOT what I expected. With things like this Google really goes a long way towards proving its "do not evil" mission statement. Not just the thing in itself, but the fact that it was a few engineer's initiative which nobody supressed, and doesn't even have "marketing" written all over it.
Researching the sam editor is strangely intriguing. See Rob Pike's description of the command language: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf
It's not all about optimization. Take Starcraft: I like the characters, the gradual development. Japanese strategy games sometimes even have more content than actual novels (for example, the Galaxy Angel series are all visual novels with Homeworld-style space combat interspersed in the story). I like discovering the new buildings, seeing new units, watching a volley of missiles being shot, feeling like the armchair commander as reports from other characters come in :)

Although I like chess as well, after a long day, I find it much more relaxing to watch the tank driver take position and blow up a bunch of zergs, than to think about abstract units like a rook.

I must say I don't like most modern strategy games however... I'd much rather play Settlers III than Settlers 7, the original Stronghold over Stronghold 2, or civ 2 over civ 3. Somehow the transition from isometric to full 3D made the game much harder to control for me, and I prefer good drawings to 3D renderings. Japanese games are still very 2D-based though so I play a lot of them. YMMV.
I was wondering why Green Tea is on there three times until I realized you can click on each circle to see what symptoms its referring to.
Story about nothing really. You can bet the planning for the IT has been going on years - I'm sure the decision was made a couple of years ago, and everyone knew Vista stinked, so XP is hardly surprising.
Anyone know how they are generating the visualization automatically from that google doc? Is there a tool for doing this?
This is about snake oil, but there's no "negative evidence" line?
> If I want to express, say, a dissenting political opinion, I may want to be anonymous, and I may not want to pass the burden of accountability to someone else.

I am certainly not saying that no protected speech should exist. Indeed, I am all in favour of a law that protects certain classes of speech, with political views probably the most important class.

I just think that such laws should be crafted carefully, striking a balance between freedom of expression and protecting people from the harm when others abuse that freedom, and that once such laws have been made, they should apply on the Internet as much as anywhere else.

There are complications with jurisdiction in the on-line world, but there is no reason that most of the international community can't reach a consensus on these issues, just as they have on many others before.

I have always struggled with the idea of anonymity as a vehicle for free speech, for three reasons. Firstly, most people who think they are anonymous on-line really aren't, if someone tries hard enough to identify them, so it is often an illusion. Secondly, actively protecting anonymity automatically removes any responsibility from the speaker, whether or not what they are saying is within a protected area, creating a huge loophole in the laws. Finally, while anonymity may have a perceived value in protecting those opposing an undemocratic government, we don't have that situation anywhere in the west (to the point where political dissidents are routinely threatened or "disappeared"), and if we ever reach that point again, the correct response will be one of the three boxes after "soap".
that makes sense. i suppose the difference then is that I simply get my relaxation from a different sort of stimulus. I too tend to prefer the older iterations of games over the newer. even when the game play mechanics are less refined, the older games just often have this character to them that I suspect comes from having smaller development teams.
I think negative ones aren't even worth including and would confuse it. Also, when they prove really negative like ephedra, don't they usually get banned?
One already exists for the Firefox plugins Stylish/Greasemonkey. It should be trivial to adapt for other browsers that allow custom stylesheets.

http://userstyles.org/styles/22246
Keep Distractions From Hijacking Your Time
Ephdra is not banned in the US, it's merely restricted. It's still available over the counter in Canada as well.
The maintainability of unit tests
http://www.drupalgardens.com/ is providing a free hosted Drupal service. It's in private beta but you can sign up for a code or wait around until it goes public. They have (or will have) an export-site-to-code feature which will send you a zipped up version of all the code running your site + a database dump.
Sun actually discontinued their UNIX workstations a couple of years ago. Ironically, I believe IBM was the very last vendor of real UNIX workstations.

IBM has since discontinued its last workstations. You can still buy a tower server and stick a Matrox card in it, but that's as close as it gets.
If the licensing costs of the Kernel were 1 cent I don't think many users would switch to another system. You might see a significant drop in the embedded systems market, but only because there are other systems of similar value floating out there.
Segways can be banned on pure aesthetics.
It took much time to prepare the list but i think it's the most detailed list about Google's services.
That's a specious comparison. People make all sorts of concessions for people with children. People who want to drive their mechanical devices on the sidewalk, not so much.
it would be more interesting to know what kind of systems these guys are developing nowadays
10 Best Google Nexus One Apps | TechnoBuzz.net
10 Best Google Nexus One Apps | TechnoBuzz.net
Hmm, first thing I notice looking at their data is that they put red yeast rice on top for blood pressure and cholesterol based on two studies, one of which did not assess red yeast rice, and neither of which assessed blood pressure.

The study that did not assess red yeast rice did assess lovastatin, which is assumed to be the active ingredient in red yeast rice, but if you're going to assume that they are equivalents, red yeast rice is definitely not "worth it" because you can buy a month's supply of the active ingredient for $4 at most any pharmacy, less than you would spend on the rice, and get a more precisely controlled dose.

Still a neat site design.
You might check out http://www.gog.com/ - "good ol' games"

They sell a fairly large back catalog of older games as downloads.
"snake oil" was not listed. Surprising as it is said to offer real relief for joint pain: http://healthmad.com/alternative/health-benefits-of-snake-oi...

The origin of the term "snake oil salesman" was to disparage people who sold fake snake oil or pushed it for diseases it would not treat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil).