skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Upvoted game development, but it's not really terribly accurate for me. I'm currently in the middle of building a demo (as in demoscene demo) a week, which is requiring me to relearn a lot of 3D stuff I've forgotten over the years, and learn a lot of new things while I'm at it (e.g. how to write GLSL shaders efficiently in a very small space).
I've seen that advice about maintaining several ad groups before, but I'm still a bit skeptical. I've assumed ad groups are just an internal convenience tool for advertisers and that all the ads get dumped into the same auction in the same way in the end. Has it been shown somewhere that Google really uses information about your groupings when it displays the ads?
How to let out your creative beast
"GoF patterns exist primarily to make up for the fact that you're not in Ruby"- this is the epitome of ignorance and the exact denial referred to in the article. I must have missed that part in Design Patterns that said "if you use Ruby you should not use this book".

But hey, I guess the Ruby stdlib includes the "Singleton" pattern for fun right? Not because you'd use it, or anything. Same with delegates. And I guess Rails didn't actually implement Martin Fowler's Active Record, Action Controller and MVC patterns? You just dreamed those.

Wake up. Your comment is painful and a little embarrassing. Design patterns are language independent. They are not implementation, they are descriptions. They can be used in any language, and they are used in Ruby.
The html escaping looks broken, I can see escaped entities in the description text.

Also the contrast between the description text, button text etc and their backgrounds is way too low.

It feels really stripy, you could probably remove some of the horizontal lines and let it flow a bit more.

I thought the "tweetmeme.com", "reddit.com" descriptors were buttons but apparently they aren't. They look like they are.
Just to share more interesting stories from history (supporting your point, even):

Lewis Lapham on a rather nasty defeat of the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest around a.d. 9: "In the Teutoburg Forest, tribesmen led by a chieftain named Arminius surprised and annihilated three Roman legions -- 15,000 men plus camp followers. Arminius had the heads of his victims nailed to trees: it provided a telling psychological message that was not lost on Rome. Violence became its own reward. The empire retreated behind the Rhine and, except for occasional forays, left Germany alone." Among other fun things, the Cherusci (the "barbarian" group that carried out the attack) were known for nailing defeated-but-living enemies to the trunks of "sacred oak trees".
You do security stuff right? Yeah, I'm pretty ignorant about that (regretfully). But I've seen you post about hiring, saying that you are looking for smart people, and have specified Rails. OK, so if I contacted you about a job and had solid Rails skills, what else would you want me to be knowledgeable about, even if not directly related to what you do, that would convince you that I'm the sort of hacker you'd give a second look?

I'm honestly curious, not fishing for a job. It's part of why I created the poll. I have felt boxed in doing just what you're deriding, and I want to know what others here are finding interesting.
A Rails/Django Comparison
Speaking as a member of the rails core team, if you heard someone say that then he made it up.

Rails until 3.0 was heavily invested into SQL simply because it's what everyone used. However, it was swimming against the stream in that rails declared DBs to be something which is incrementally developed by the software through migrations instead of setup by DBAs per change tickets. This has been enormously successfully, there is probably not a single web framework left that pretends we still live in a DBA dominated world. Part of the shrapnel of this decision is that rails did away with triggers, db constrains and stored procedures but this is simply because most high volume sites don't use these things anyways because they get very hard to scale later on.

Rails past 3.0 will work natively with any data store that you can imagine. It ships something called ActiveModel which is a tiny interface that you can implement on top of Mongo, Cassanda, Redis. ActiveRecord is just the SQL incarnation of this interface.

Very high quality libraries based on ActiveModel already exist. Have a look at Cassandra Object as an example.
I think that is just building something from parts. A hack implies something ultra rigged and ugly looking.
Why all the programming topics? Here's what I'm working on at the moment.

- Computational neuroscience (I have vague ideas for a Ph.D thesis)

- World history (I've come to realize the breadth of my ignorance)

- French (I studied it in school from age 7 to 14 and still struggle to hold basic conversations)

- Driving (I'm 24 and don't have a license... that has to change)
That's a good question. He only mentions a bubble concentration of 1ppm by volume but nothing about the area.
Are you sure it isn't a spaceship built by a teenage boy with designs that came to him in a dream?
Please read the study, instead of making up rationalizations to avoid dealing with issues of stereotypes, gender bias, and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities. http://www.aauw.org/research/upload/whysofew.pdf
I'm not sure what he means here - the higher up you get, the better the ratio. For partners it gets inverted - they are making more than their billing rates because they're getting a cut of everyone below them's billing too.

When you buy consulting, you're buying a commodity. The premium is meant to insure you against natural variation, key people quitting, and so forth. Joe Accenture is meant to be interchangeable with any other Accenture consultant. A lot of the overhead is the extremely rigid, prescriptive methodologies that are supposed to make this possible. For multi-year projects, enough budget-holders believe that this is worthwhile for the entire Big Consulting industry to exist.
9. Money - Someone is willing to pay me for it
SweetSpotter adjusts your speakers' sweet spot to your position in real-time
I thought he was editorializing, but that's actually part of the article's real title.
Does anyone else find it weird and a little sad that Woz has to pre-order one (or three) like a normal person?

Edit: To clarify, I mean sad that they don't just send him some. Since, you know, he helped start the company and everything.
I'm getting tired of both sides of this argument, I'll be happy when the whole back and forth dies :). Rarely do you see a balanced opinion. Sometimes it's people that are fanatical about the new-ish NoSQL idea. Other times, like this, it's someone so stuck in their ways they think that everything but what they like is a fad and nothing will ever change.

One of the key things I look for when I interview developers is that they can recognize the right tool for the job. Potentials that get married to a technology or language are shown the door pretty quickly.

Also, as others have pointed out, this particular article seems to not quite understand the decisions involved, to the point of getting some things backwards.
The CPU has an instruction cache (it reaches out to memory for the series of instructions and grabs a whole bunch at once to be more efficient). When there's a branch (logically, an if statement, a loop, or a goto, or a switch) it has to make a decision about whether or not it should cache the instructions in the if statement or the instructions following the if statement.

Within the linux kernel the macros likely and unlikely are defined so that you can have code of the style

if(likely(x > 10)) {
/* These instructions, which probably will be executed,
* will be cached
*/
}

if(unlikely(ptr == NULL)) {
/* These instructions, which probably won't need to be
* executed, will not be cached
*/
}
the attitude is still prevalent among people who are not so web focussed.
The Big Thirsty: Images from the World's Water Crises
This looks like a great opportunity. The product management looks very interesting, but I think you might be looking for more experience. Anyway to meld some of those responsibilities with a business intern position for a very hungry new grad with a take charge attitude?
Um, no. They were harsh rulers. No one likes to be oppressed by a foreign power. How would you feel if the Chinese came in, killed off Democrats and Republicans, and the rest of us were relegated to serving them afternoon tea and being third-class citizens in our own country?
Ask HN:  Closed vs. Open in the context of Apple's products.
The thing that has always surprised me about Apple's recent success is that they seem to have found a way to convince developers that open doesn't matter as much as it used to.

For years and years, geeks complained about Microsoft being "closed". There were near constant rants against proprietary software, and Microsoft was the most evil amongst other evil companies.

Apple, is and for as long as I can remember been consistently more "closed" than Microsoft, but since OSX was released, rage against "closed" has all but died. Now, people like the iPhone and OSX so much that when the subject of closed vs open systems come up in relation to software these days, people shuffle around nervously, shrug and then start talking excitedly about how beautiful Apple's products are, and how revolutionary they continue to be.

I certainly understand why developers are so enthusiastic about a great GUI on top of a *nix. I certainly understand that the iPhone and iPod were revolutionary products. I'm sure the iPad will be stunning. I just find it incredibly ironic that as Microsoft and other "closed" companies are opening up and releaseing a lot more software under open licenses, Apple continues to tighten and tighten control over it's products, platforms and services.

Full disclosure, I use I Win 7 + OSS for my apps, and I've tried to like apple for years, I just have emotional issues vs them. :) I'm obviously biased, but I hope I didn't flame here. I'd love to have a calm, reasoned, discussion about this.

Does closed vs open matter any more?

Thoughts?
Determining the future success of your inventive pursuit
Right. Much of what the article said the iPad would "transform", I already do on my PC and lots of others do on their laptops or tablets -- things like watching TV, for example. The only thing the iPad does is puts it in a small, portable shell with a slick interface that channels revenue to Apple.

There's a market for that. But I don't see it as being "transformational" in any significant way.
NoSQL might be hype. Let's get specific. Cassandra eliminates the SQL database single point of failure and hard to replace masters via a lose sync, "eventually consistent" protocol.

Is there some startup offering a web service that doesn't need that?

And have you ever tried to deploy an SQL database capable of thousands of miles apart syncing?

Eventually consistent is quite a different model than ACID. If you accept that, and accept that you can't rely on networks to always be up, you'll live comfortably and cost effectively.
He's allowed 3 because he's Woz.
Clojure is a "consenting adults" programming language the same as Arc, and IMO has a whole lot more to offer. (sorry, PG)
I think this is actually a fairly even-handed look at the potential (both positive and negative) of the iPad. Even if the iPad is simply the spark that kicks off the touch-tablet craze (iphone to nexus one anyone?) - it's still a significant game-changer.

Will it displace desktops and laptops? Not for people who use them to get work done. Anyone writing a book probably won't use an iPad - nor will someone writing software, or doing accounting/etc. It will, however, one day replace the things "most" people use computers for - consuming media, articles, videos, writing short blogs, etc.

At it's heart - it's a consumption device with some capabilities of creating. The content creation capabilities will simply get stronger with time (UX mockup tools, Keynote/presentation tools, sketching applications, etc). As the tablet/touch-interface market expands and more companies get in the game, things will only get better. More tablets will come, more 3rd party hardware addons will come - creators will be enabled.

Do I wish it ran OSX-Full, instead of iPhone OS? Yes, but while I wish that, I also see the fact that using an OS designed for a touch-based system is superior than a normal OS with touch-based interactivity "bolted on".

Anyone doubting how intuitive and natural a touch-based system is to work with should try handing an iPhone to a two year old. They can figure it out much more quickly than a mouse and keyboard. My poor daughter (my guinea pig) can pick up my iphone, switch screens, find and start her game(s) in seconds. She's still flummoxed by my laptop/touchpad and the little mouse icon on the screen.
Disclaimer: I'm the blog writer behind this :D

Not bad. I guess it will go as either the 11th or 12th item in the new and revamped list: 2 new reasons given in reddit comments and one in comments in the blog. I think we could get to at least 15 good reasons to do it (the best is yours I guess :)
Software solution needed for modeling legal outcomes
Is there anywhere we can get information about the failures, to try and get a balanced view? Is it time for another communal spreadsheet?
I think that the iPad and similar devices down the road really could change everything as far as print and multimedia consumption is concerned. But it's going to take a long time (years, perhaps) until these publishers are producing content that's compelling enough that people will actually buy it as opposed to finding similar stuff for free on the web.

My hunch is that these first attempts by magazines will look cool but feel really gimmicky, to the point that they're a bit of a joke. Think cheesy quizzes and games and video content that's been available on the web for weeks (remember, these digital magazines will take time to produce). I wrote about this topic a bit more back in January if you're interested: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/26/apple-tablet-book-revolutio...
First of all, ActiveRecord is not a GoF pattern and its intent is not trying to implement the lacking dynamic features in static languages. Thus, it's not trivial or a source of unneeded complexity in ruby. And so is MVC(Actually, MVC is quite different from the other "Design Patterns" as it covers the entire architecture of the system instead of just a part of it).

The point is, most GoF patterns(like factory, builder, strategy, facade etc.) are trivial in "dynamic" languages like ruby and lisp and strictly applying those static-language-origin patterns cause nothing but unneeded complexity in ruby.
Five months in France learning how to make cheese.
Are you looking for business/marketing types are just engineers?
there's 5 FP languages emerging

- scala: 2.8 beta is out, people want reliable eclipse, intellij and netBeans plugins, and more time to figure out type system; I think next couple years, a lot of developers are going to be "upgraded from java" via their VP's of engineering; s/b interesting;

- clojure: users are pretty happy; language, compiler and toolset evolving at warpspeed

- F#: people want Vis Stud 2010 out April 12 and 100% bug-free, ;-}

- haskell: people want lots more time to understand it

- erlang: users are pretty happy
> The only thing the iPad does is puts it in a small, portable shell with a slick interface

Netbooks do that already, and with a real keyboard.
Excuse my ignorance and non-appleness for this simple, non-technical, potentially stupid question:

While my 13" MacBook Pro rests on my knees, I can smoke with one hand, hold my coffee in the other hand, and read this article at the same time. I started it in the kitchen and finished in the bedroom.

How is iPad going to make my life better? Will I be able to do 3 things at a time with it? I suspect one hand will always be busy holding the thing. It will get tired, let alone that I won't be able to smoke and have my coffee and read an article (and always have the UNIX shell at hand) at the same time.

This seems like an iPad killer in the bad sense to me. I'm sorry.
this is simply because most high volume sites don't use these things anyways because they get very hard to scale later on.

If you start with the assumption that "you don't need a DBA" then that's probably true.

Just to give you an idea of my background, I work on a system using a commercial RDBMS that "scales" to thousands of commits/sec and tens of terabytes of data. We expect to take it to tens of thousands of commits (we already do that many reads!) and hundreds of teras with no major structural changes. One thing you learn in this game is that database agnosticism is a wild goose chase. To really scale, you need to intelligently choose a technology and use its features to the fullest and just accept that you will be "locked in". We couldn't port to another RDBMS if we tried because certain things, like our chosen database's locking strategy for example, are baked in to the way we do things. It's not a matter of SQL syntax. We'd be starting again from scratch, we'd need new algorithms. But we can do things, we take things for granted, that most of the Internet peanut gallery takes to be impossible, because they start from assumption that abstracting the database actually helps anything.
I want one. ... It has a nice 9.7-inch screen, weighs only one and a half pounds, and can play movies for 10 hours on a single battery charge. Right away I could see how I would use it. I'd keep it in the living room to check e-mail and browse the Web. I'd take it to the kitchen and read The New York Times while I eat breakfast. I'd bring it with me on a plane to watch movies and read books.

I also pre-ordered, but I will note that I do all of the above with my rather old tc1100 tablet. (A p4 just barely squeaks by with video.) Even now, I'm posting to HN from bed using the phenomenal Windows XP Tablet handwriting recognition.

The iPad will change everything not because it's new. It will change everything because of its execution.
UFC 111 Live Stream Online | GSP vs Hardy | Mir vs Carwin
Is there anymore info on the sales/biz development positions?
I'm still in college, and I won't have kids for some time, but I am terrified by current state of education, especially elementary, in my country (Serbia).

Could you tell me how you have made your kids socially adapted, because that is the main benefit (IMHO) of schools.
"Even if the iPad is simply the spark that kicks off the touch-tablet craze (iphone to nexus one anyone?) - it's still a significant game-changer."

Great point. I disagree about the iPad not being good for writing books. Won't Incase or Mophie come up with a $100 keyboard/case that turns this into a laptop? I think the app ecosystem will be greatly augmented by a hardware eco-system. I'm bullish on the platform.
Precisely. The point people need to realize is that having a well-executed, easy-to-use touch-based interface is the killer feature of the iPad. That "shiny user interface" is the point of it.
Pretty sure they'd be happy to send him ten if he wanted them. Sounds like he's in it for the fun of the launch.
thank you tjpick for your suggestions and pointing out details like the "tweetmeme.com" descriptors looking like buttons.

I agree with all your points, I'll see what I can come up with.

By the way, are you suggesting me to loose the horizontal lines separating the articles?
Chemistry, biology and ecology; time management and self-discipline; healthy vegan cooking...
I think governments only move in one direction though. (Has the American government ever shrunk year over year?)
Good to see you here udai ... and good luck with finding people.
Later in that comment I pointed that out - content creators will be enabled by third-party add ons, and other companies building "competitors" which further enable creation. I don't think that there is anything blocking creation on it - just that that's not the short-term aim.
I guess this has to come as a kind of brilliant idea while sipping a coffee between compiles. You may have that great idea for the magic algorith that will turn your startup into the next Big Thing. And if you still have 10 hours of work ahead, it may die a little... And probably you just can't code it in your office's computer, IP stuff and all.

Write down the code in paper, or write it down on your portable computing device (iPhone, Android, Nanonote, netbook) and when at home, go for it.
Apple does have a history of entering markets ripe for explosion and then facilitating that explosion. It seems a bit different this time. In the past it seems the Apple was answering consumers' demands rather than publishers' demands. Portable music sold one at a time came to the delight of consumers and the detriment of the music industry. The iPhone's internet connected apps encourage using more and more bandwidth is to the detriment of cell phone carriers. Consumers outside of tech geeks and Apple fans seem to care less about tablets. It is the publishers who pine for a new platform to sell the wares on that seem to be the most vocal about how revolutionary the iPad is. Even friends that have pre-ordered it do not exactly know what they will be doing with it yet, only that the iPad is somehow revolutionary. Time will tell if the iPad will be a success but I personally hope a more open platform will win out.
Maybe you should quit smoking.

Seriously though, the iPad isn't made for the likes of us on Hacker News (though I still kinda want one). It's for people like my father who don't really give a damn what a computer is as long as it's easy to use.
XML is nice for this because it supports multiple schema versions, validation, and has support in just about every language. My chief complaint with json as a cross-language serialization/interchange format is lack of a great way to validate your format. Most of the json schema definitions i've seen require your schema to follow a certain convention, which seems backwards and wrong to me.

Files can be locked if your OS supports it.
Maybe I should have been clear. You only go to SQL RDBMS if you need it. Which, in the vast majority of cases you will not. Further, you only go to SQL where you need it.

For instance, right now someone is developing a street car racing game for Facebook. The XBox kind, not the FarmVille kind. At any rate, one of the features is obviously, playback. Now keeping all of those physics updates in an SQL is pointless. And figuring out a schema for that data would have only gotten in the way of them getting that out the door. Throw the physics messages in a queue and write them to Cassandra. If you have even 10000 MAUs, you will easily generate billions of rows. It's just not data that really needs to go into mysql.

I don't think Cassandra is a toy. I think you should 'get it out the door' with everything in Cassandra, and then slowly, move the business stuff off. User names, what cars they bought for instance. Stuff that is not read often. But at first, get it out the door. Don't stop to figure out a perfectly normalized schema with balanced indexes.
It is interesting to read that the neutralization of rebel leaders is so effective. I would want to know how the disarmament happens. Intuitively, it would seem that the power vacuum and now leaderless organization would fragment or simply find another figurehead.
True for some patterns, but not all. Unit of Work, for example, is a useful abstraction no matter what framework or language you're using. (It's not a GoF pattern, but it was brought up in the OP.)
> fallback that does straight byte by byte comparison

That's not even funny anymore... I wonder how many iterations will it take, until they discover that strncmp compiles down to "repz cmpsb" (or equivalent) and you really cannot do better than that with if-s on each character.
What in the world is this doing on HN? This is not what people come here for.