skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if you're bored and feeling unchallenged, you should stay in college and perhaps take the initiative to self-study on more advanced topics, or better yet, broaden your skill set with other things that you're interested in.

For example, I can tell you that it's very rare to find somebody who has strong software skills AND a solid background in mechanical engineering/civil engineering. Which explains why finite element software, alot of it feels like its stuck in the Stone Age. That's a field that could use a ton of help from a user-interface standpoint.

That's just one example, I'm sure there are many others. College is one of the best chances for you to learn something without being hampered with alot of responsibilities like a full-time job or other obligations, so make the very best use of it that you can.
Learned Sinclair BASIC when I was 10ish. Graduated to the C64 and a BBC Micro through school, ended up doing C and a load of ARM assembler by 16. Picked up PHP, Delphi and Java at college, got PHP and Java work after then. Got into Python 5 years ago, then Ruby 4 years ago, and dabbled in C# in the interim. In the last year I've picked up Common Lisp and Clojure after trying (and generally failing) to make headway in Haskell.

I've only started to think of myself as a "good" programmer in the last couple of years, but I'm not so sure it's a healthy perspective - it's mainly in response to increasingly interacting with other peoples' code and realising how shoddy a lot of it actually is.

And I'm still learning :-)
Another area is 3-d animation + coding...if you're already a good artist, you can rule if you have a robust set of programming skills (so I am told).
That's a fairly even-handed and informative summary of some of the recent issues around climate change. I don't really see why it was worth submitting here though.

(I think the headline is more accurately expanded on in the article. It's the hottest January recorded by satellites since those records began in 1979)
Valley Forge, PA. Our Philly meetup group: http://www.groupomatic.com/haqsm3vj
I'm setting up a development environment to work on writing a FTP search engine tomorrow afternoon. It's a new laptop (new to me, Thinkpad T30), so it's not all perl'd up yet.
nxdom - awesome!
Not having dealt with Escrow.com specifically in the past, I can't say how it would work, but the principle is that this bit is wrong:

> to the buyer (who now has everything)

The buyer doesn't have everything, because they've already paid. They've just paid the escrow service, not you. Escrow.com have an arbitration arrangement, so I don't think there's too much at stake. That being said, Escrow.com is very much tailored to physical goods, so I don't know how well they'd deal with what is effectively a copyright issue.
I've got reservations about articles and websites that have to do with "making money online", and it's no wonder why. His last day at work is at the end of the month, and he hopes to make a living by work flipping websites, and selling stock photography + software. Why does this have so many upvotes?
NBA Tickets
Fanrates.com | Discount NBA MLS NHL MLB NFL MLL WPS WNBA NLL SPORTS TICKETS
Now there's news! As I recall, Roger Bannister figured out that the didn't have time for traditional business training, and medical school, and so settled for interval work. He then became the first man to run the mile under 4 minutes.

As a recreational runner, I see no particular reason to do this. I'd rather be out an hour and a half in the park than 40 minutes on a track. In fact, the last time I did intervals, it was because we were where my wife complained that I should not run on the roads and where the was a HS track handy. Interval work does lighten the tedium of running on a track.
It's just an assertion of a generally acknowledged state of affairs in the world. That's the only thing the phrase 'absolute truth' could possibly mean. The only thing 'certainty' can mean.

If I proclaim any certainty regarding anything, the most certain I can possibly be is when I know that a relevant number of people has tried in a relevant number of ways to discover whether we should be uncertain. Scientific certainty does not exist, but a scientist can still say we are 'certain' about something. It just doesn't mean it's beyond any doubt. In fact, even the phrase 'beyond any doubt' cannot possibly mean something that in fact does not leave any doubt. The situation in philosophy is exactly the same. There is not a doubt on the mind of the vast majority of great philosophers that there could not possibly be any absolute truth. That the phrase itself makes as little sense as speaking of the vat in which you are supposedly a brain (essay by Hilary Putnam). That it cannot possibly mean what you think you are intending it to mean. And despite that, it may still be false. It's just that nobody can argue even remotely satisafactorily that it is.
'77-78 school year: Punched card FORTRAN IV (really more like a II) on the IBM 1130. Prompted me to start and never stop studying software engineering ("structured programming" et. al. was the rage back then).

Summer '78: most everything but C and the like on a rich UNIX V6 system. Focus then besides exploration was still writing the best quality systems, started learning how to work on other people's code bases helping others with their final class projects.

After some time off for first year of college, starting in the summer of '80 heavy duty C (Lions' notes best reference then) on UNIX V7 and BSD 2.x. Plus playing around with Lisp Machines.

'82-83 Lisp at LMI, although wasn't able to get a whole lot of time in (Lisp Machines were scarce back then). First serious work with SICP and Scheme.

'84: C on a variety of 68000 BSD UNIX workstations. Learned how to grok and port code between these subtlety different systems. Also some Common Lisp on PCs, followed by the T Lisp dialect.

'85 on, moved from working on ersatz versions of EMACS to the real thing (mostly Gosling, which was what Gnu EMACS started from), some heavy duty debugging required to find wild pointers (e.g. ATRON on 8088). More work on other people's code and first client-server project.

Long break for more school and aftermath in a period when Route 128 was dying.

'90 or so, MS-DOS and Sun OS C (WORM filesystem and system interfaces), followed by C on Windows 3/3.1 and Sun OS 4.x. Starting transition from journeyman to master.

After various C and Oracle consulting work, transition complete in mid-90s with a serious greenfield C++ client server system using OOSE methodology (The Unified Process nowadays). That's when I considered myself to have become "good".

With all the interruptions and distractions (was trying to become a scientist in this period, but finances got in the way), took perhaps 10 years of concentrated effort in 20 calendar years.
Is a site full of nerds willing to hear the doctrine that gender is about language and sex about biology?
Sounds like he sees that as sales and marketing problem. I am not sure if things are so simple.
I wonder the same. Why I get so many upvotes. But it is great! Thank you all for it and of course I still ask for more :)
Well, at this point they have everything as far as I'm concerned, as they have ownership of the domain and the WHOIS details of said domain are assigned to them, and they also have all my source-code and assets and FTP access to the site. Where as, at this point, I still have nothing and am waiting on Escrow to approve that the transaction has been completed. If you see my point?

Which makes me worried that it might be possible at this point for the buyer to refute the transaction, Escrow to then cancel the payment and I'm now stuck without a domain or at worst, I get the domain back but someone else has a) my source code and b) the ability to do anything they wish during their access to the FTP until it's removed.

I probably just don't understand Escrow and how it works.
Defensive patents don't stop trolls. That's the whole point of trolls (or Non-Practising Entities), you can't counter-sue or cross-licence, you either pay lots of money to win the court case or you pay lots of money to the troll.
What advantage does apple have over anybody else,
with the exception that they brought out a device
which set a great standard to measure competitors
against.

Don't you think that coming out with device like this is the advantage Apple has? Or rather capability to design such device.
I think there's dishonesty in that enabling Flash on the IPod/Touch/Pad allows an end run about their app store.

Yes, Adobe's software in this domain sucks, but I seriously doubt Apple is trying to meet them halfway, Flash is a mortal threat to their business model.
you seem (if i understand your argument) to be saying that human emotions work like simple linear graphs. they don't. it's been shown in a bunch of experiments that people are "hard wired" to expect equitable shares of resources. so you'd expect a maximum amount of "feeling good" when that occurs, not when extrapolated to some silly extreme.
It's interesting how many different kinds of tools there are in this space.

Everything from ESRI Arc Map products http://www.esri.com to Starlight http://www.futurepointsystems.com to Palantir http://www.palantirtech.com.

Each is as different as can be from one another, yet there seems to be significant overlap between the products as well.
cool - I bought the domain 'FounderStar.com' with the intention of building a site like this. but at the moment I'm too busy with other sites. If you're interested in the domain let me know - either way, I'd be happy to give input or try out anything you deploy...
Just wanted to let you know I've just done this - you can sign up with a randomly-generated account now :)
Honestly, I believe people shouldn't be pirating videogames at all. And most gamers actually don't. So nobody's going to hate them. On the other hand, I think no one's planning to do the same thing for MS Office in the nearest future, that would be insane.
> I think there's dishonesty in that enabling Flash on the IPod/Touch/Pad allows an end run about their app store.

So Apple's monopoly over a part of their own great product is threatening Adobe's monopoly over a part of the whole Web based on a crappy product. Let's not shed too many tears here.

I don't like the lock-in in Apple products, and don't use any, but I'm loving that finally someone is pushing back on Adobe for all the harm they've done to the Web.
Facebook patents the 'news feed' - but was it really first?
Does anybody have any idea how long it took for pirate WOW servers to be running ?

IMO, most game will go towards becoming MMOG or be played online anyway, people will just get craftier at having pirate servers running.
I had to use a pirated copy of SF4 to be able to legitimately play online using the key that came with the copy I purchased due to an install error.
An old Bullfrog game called Magic Carpet had a stereogram mode, as well as red-cyan 3D specs support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Carpet_(video_game)#Innov...
Somewhat informative article, but I disagree with the conclusion. Assassins Creed 2 isn't going to be the best game ever, it's not even an original game, just another sequel. So it's not like people are going to buy it no matter what kind of crazy DRM they must suffer through. I imagine that Ubisoft will loose a lot customers because of this decision.
What matters is clients!

First you find clients, then you worry about execution and ideas.
No, the hate will come from 2 directions: One is the pirate crowd that are mostly angry that they can't get the game for free. The other is the people that bought the game and now the damn thing doesn't work because the servers are down or there's a connection issue or they're trying to play the game they paid for on their laptop somewhere where there's no internet.
1. Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it.

This means a lot of work and expense, both to duplicate Ubisoft's game saving code and to set up and maintain the servers. Won't happen.

I'm not even a very good game hacker, and I've done much more dramatic things. It's really not a huge deal. People have reverse-engineered entire online game protocols in order to have their own unofficial servers before the games were even out of beta. The client<->server model of protection is actually a good thing to cracking and the people who use cracks, since the original binary doesn't need to be modified in any way. You just run a little thing in your system tray that emulates whatever portion of the server protocol it needs to. And now you can also get the official updates from Ubisoft, re-activate with your own fake server any time, etc. It's not a "disable one line of code" type deal, but if you think that's even a simplification of how things have been for a while, that's pretty naive.
Eich's Law:

If you are liberal in what you accept, others will utterly fail to be conservative in what they send.

http://calculist.blogspot.com/2010/02/eichs-law.html
Yeah, I had problems of that sort that I eventually got around. Here's my comment, by the way:

You're burying the lede by not putting Peter Seibel's name at the top (e.g. "A message from Editor in Chief Peter Seibel..."). He's the only reason I'm interested it what otherwise sounds like a "me too" site, whereas an effort by the author of _Coders At Work_ demands attention.
I've also seen it used for new domains - buying the domain putting a [niche-specific] site up and SEOing it then selling it on.
I believe that the article is overestimating how hard it will be to reverse engineer the save game code and is fallaciously assuming that crackers will need to maintain a public facing internet server for people to use.

a) You don't need to maintain a public facing save game server -- you simply need to have a local server running at localhost:31337. A successful crack will have this running transparently as you run the game.

b) Many companies entire purpose is to provide "uncrackable" DRM. AFAIK, all of these companies' solutions have failed. Often before the games even publicly ship.

I mean, at the very least, a script kiddie will naively crack the protocol and manually generate save files from each of the levels, so that you can play the game one area at a time. I am confident that it will be properly cracked though. Or as someone else on HN mentioned: you could ship the crack with a light virtual machine and just save states of the entire VM.

There is a huge incentive to crack the game, both monetarily for pirates who will be reselling the game, as well as for the huge prestige for cracking groups. I am not aware of any high-profile game that has not been cracked within a week of release, if not days.
Working on my word-learning application.
Partly to learn Dutch (though the program can be reused for any pair of languages, with some features (irregular verb forms) making it more suitable for Germanic languages - Dutch, English, German etc), partly to get experience with C#.
Finishing touches on porting my chinese checkers game to Android. It is mostly an exercise in writing a HTML 5 app for Android, as I don't expect many people to be interested in chinese checkers. Then, start working on the next Android app.
Or you could just disable the save game feature and then run it inside a virtual windows machine where you just save the state of the machine. =)
I disagree, especially about posting comments. When I was running my social "cute" site, I hired my niece to post comments on icanhazcheezburger, and to have cuuute.com in the sig (the site is dead now). I routinely got 2-5 clicks a day from people clicking through her sig.

And, pretty routinely, every time I post a link to my economic social news site, http://newsley.com. I get around 70 clicks. Frankly, the people that come to Newsley from HN give me the best feedback and are my best users. In fact, a large portion of my first 1000 visitors came from HN. I get a lot of bounces, but i also pick up a couple of regular users every time. Granted, the demographic that I'm looking for actually intersects with HN's demographic somewhat.

I can also vouch for leaving links in the body of comments. As long as your link is on topic to the blog post, I really don't have any problem at all dropping a link in a blog comment. I think it can often add to the discussion.
A friend of mine, Paul, did this in Zurich back in 2002. He saw that the Migros grocery franchise was giving 10x points for a week, some products were giving 10x points and his credit card was giving (I think) 10x points for the month. There was a special offer for miles-to-points at the time. So he put it all together for about 30 round-trips flights in Europe for a couple thousand bucks. At first they yelled at him, and then they relented.

When he told me about the idea, I just thought it was funny. When he told me he found a product cheap enough, and spelled it out, I immediately went to get the Migros point card, only to find out I had to wait a week for it, and the offers expired in the meantime. Damn.

Edit: I'm really fuzzy on the details. I'll ask him about it, if you want the exact specifics.
Let me tell you as an user of this software that this is fantastic! The work that has gone into this product is incredible! Look what I built for my app http://www.creatorfinder.com/ (You can see the video towards the bottom).

You can control stuff like the camera location, gestures, facial expression all by clicking and typing. Really cool!
People were running private WoW servers as early as beta, but it really took off after the game went live.
This seems close to Solution Focused Brief Therapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_focused_brief_therapy). It's interesting though.
Do you have anything to back up that statement? The article says that 90% of all copies of popular games are pirated, but he also doesn't back it up.

However, it's important to always remember that a pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale. Many people download a game, but never install it or play it. Others download and play it, but if they couldn't have downloaded it, they would never have played it. And finally, there's a percentage of downloaders that would have bought it if they hadn't gotten a pirated version first.

It will be interesting if this experiment by Ubisoft can determine how large that percentage is. It's definitely not 100%, and it's definitely not 0%. I would guess that it's a single-digit percentage of the people that would normally pirate a game that could go and buy it instead.

However, this new DRM is so vile, that they will also lose sales on it, and I wonder if the sales they gain from delaying the pirating of it is larger than the sales they lose from having a horrible DRM.
You missed Option 4, which is what will actually happen:

4. Make it easy to set up your own local game server and alter the hosts file on your machine to point to it.

That is dead easy to do. I actually did it for the game FantasticContraption, not to steal it (it's well worth ten bucks. go try it: http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/), but because their server is so hopelessly overloaded at peak times that the game is unplayable.

Sniff network traffic with Fiddler or similar, construct a simple webapp to mimic what's needed (which for this game would only involve storing what you're given and handing it back when asked for it), and run it on localhost. Sorted.

It'll end up the same as every other copy-protection scheme: An annoyance for paying customers, no sweat for pirates. I suspect legitimate paying customers will be running their own servers too.
This is not surprising given that the game is made by the creators of Bejeweled. It's pretty clear that they have lots of experience in what makes a highly addictive casual game.
Why I dropped Scala in favor of Java?
Can you explain what you mean by "connectness over convenience", here? I find Lua to be much less so than Python, which has heavy-handed ideas about what isn't "Pythonic". With Lua, the elements I suspect you're referring to are because the language is targeted at making embedding convienient - for example, there's no threading in the core language because concurrency decisions will probably be decided by the project Lua is running inside.

Also, the small and completely portable standard library keeps it small enough to trivially embed. One common response to wanting a batteries-included Lua to be standard is essentially, "If you want Python, you know where to find it." (There are such distributions, such as Lua for Windows (http://luaforwindows.luaforge.net/), they're just not the primary one.)
Soon I will write my first monthly report number 0

I liked the report 0 part, in true hackish tradition. Wish you luck! Just remember business is like a bicycle, you need to keep pedaling to keep going.
Working on a quickie startup using a domain name I've had since '03 which is foreverlist.com. It's a paid classified ads site where, for $5, you can list an ad with unlimited images that never expires and which you can change to anything at any time.

So, as an example, you have a classic car which just sits in your garage collecting dust. You're somewhat interested in selling it, but only for the right price, and definitely don't want to fuss with relisting the ad every 30 or 60 days like ebay, craigslist or kijiji. So, one day you sell the car and then want to sell your snowblower. Just change the listing.

Cheaper than ebay's fees by far, less hassle than CL or kijiji. The $5 keeps out the spammers and scammers. Yeah, I know, it's extremely saturated but like I said, it's a quickie.
RE: MS Office...

Office, and plenty of other desktop software will nag you relentlessly until you "Activate your copy online".

This is especially annoying for people like me, who spend months at a time off in the sticks where there may be occasional generator power but there certainly is no internet.

Just a few weeks ago, I "activated" my copy of CodeSmith with 5 days to spare (out of 30). If I had had to make a special trip to a city just to do it (which from the pacific coast of Colombia would have required a flight), I would have been pretty upset with that company.
I've been playing it on my 360 and if you could forgive some of the seemingly simple things that Ezio can't do, it's a pretty good game. I like the fact that money isn't hard to come by if you focus on upgrading the villa early.
3. Hack the game to not need to save games on a remote server.

This means a hacker has to figure out the saved game format, somehow jam into the application new code to write the saved data and new code to read it, TEST IT, and get it to work.

In most of the cases, there is no need to figure out the game format. Just read the binary data sent to the server and save it. Usually save game files are not that large and I suspect that most games read them at once to the memory.

Again you don't have to write a lot of code to do all these stuff. Just redirect whatever is sent to the Ubisoft server to a local server host in the same machine. This way the user can carry the save file anywhere. This is an added advantage for pirates while legitimate users should rely upon Ubisoft to save their game files for them. Heck, they can even play when the Ubisoft server is down, or even if there is no internet connection.
The OP seemed to credit the number and quality of the backlinks gained as opposed to a SEO strategy per se.

I understand that SEO is vitally important, but for getting high quality backlinks (which in turn generate a more back links) you'll always have to go though, and please, gatekeepers.
You are not a gadget, progress is not a widget
Been working on a new bug/ticket tracker for a while... Continuing to do so :)
Thanks. I will write a report 0 in the weekend so it would be ready on monday. First day of my "company". Then you will know more exactly what am I standing on... There is more than my "hope" as some people have commented :)