skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldnt agree more.

>I know people who would be much happier doing games
>development subjects at uni but are reluctant because
>future employers may not give them non games dev jobs

This is a good thing in my opinion, it could help regulate the talent flowing into the industry so the companies wake up and start making better environment for the engineers.
I would, but I'm busy building them. ;)
Google music service to take on iTunes.
Stop Barking dog
Stop your dog from barking. Control it with the most humane conditioning solution designed to stop barking dogs.
Android isn't jvm based. They wrote their own VM with their own bytecode format, and a bytecode translator from java bytecode. Since the translator is written in java, it is possible to run it through itself and use that to run clojure, but it's dog slow. Even when statically compiling a sample "hello world" clojure app for android the bootstrap process takes over a minute.
Joomla website templates
Google Adwords Keyword Tool or Wordtracker (if you want to pay for it)
ECSStender: the ‘jQuery of CSS’
I really like http://www.boxee.tv/ 's little Einstein trick.
Microsoft adds entertainment to Bing
I'm a gnu/eff booster most of the time. However, it's worth looking at more of the details here: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2009/01/facebook-vs-power-v...

"Collecting Facebook usernames and passwords is at the heart of the dispute. Power.com impersonates a Facebook user after collecting their username and password."

I would still side with power BUT a TOS that says "you can't give your password to third parties" is a bit different from "you can't use any automated processes at all".
Olark definitely allows proactive chat :) - buddies come "online" when someone lands on your site
There are two great books for you:

1. Web Analytics 2.0, by Avinash Kaushik. He's the Analytics evangelist at Google and his book is very easy to read. Start here. He also keeps a blog: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ . The archives are a gem of a resource.

2. Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton. A much drier read (the guy has a PhD in Chemistry and writes with the dry academic style) but an excellent resource. There is a blog with much lower volume of posting: http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/ .
It's hardly new, remember the people who camped out weeks in advance to see Star Wars episode one?
I work in a physics lab. It would make a nice little controller to run some of the stuff we make. Eg.: for one of our microscopes it could display some parameters like the rotation speed or scan frequency (with eg. a PLL to measure frequency), automatize the start-up process, do a shutdown if temperature goes too high... right now this is all mostly manual.
Look at the programmer job sites, see what they are looking for in a candidate, use that to inform your next steps.
Google Analytics has a series of videos as part of their "Google Analytics Conversion University" that are really helpful. I dig the way they've divided up each section of the video too.

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/?hl=en
I hate how the page scrolls me down to the "sponsored links" section upon loading.
And I don't think the apologizing to families and stupid hours will ever completely go away because working in games for many is a big part of their life/identify/pride for better or worse. Given 1 year or infinite years, some people will choose to make their current project their life. Just as many choose to make their startup/band/sport/passion their life.

The only problem comes when the studios, like EA Spouse, get abusive and ridiculous due to incompetent management. However, over the last 5 years of being tangentially and directly involved in games, I see this happening less and less.
When the iPad was released in Australia the queues outside the Apple stores were long with fans who'd been there much / most / all of the night.

Other distributors with plenty of stock opened on time to ... no queues, and provided prompt sales all day.
I think this is true. There is even ample evidence that relaxed approaches to alcohol does not have an adverse affect. In France, for example, it is (or was) pretty common to offer children small amounts of wine or beer at a relatively young age.

My family had a similar approach and I turned out ok :)
Yeah, I've talked to people in the game industry about where they see their careers going, and the idea of leaving it entirely to go work at some "normal" software job is almost horrifying to many: give up their dream of making games, and settle for being in the credits to like, Microsoft Office 2013, or working on a search engine at Google or something?

The "plan B" seems almost invariably to be to accumulate enough money/connections to start an indie-game studio, at least a ramen-profitable one--- much more often than a plan-B of working a "normal" programming job, anyway. Partly this might be because many of the game programmers really want to be game designers, and hope to work their way up to that. From that perspective, moving from game programming to "normal" programming is sort of a step in the wrong direction, since it's even further from game design than game programming is.
You have to use some type of font smoothing (e.g. ClearType) for it to look acceptable. It looks quite nice once you put it on.
74,000 psi can certainly cause erosion... :(
> Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys.

Here in the UK there are actually quite good limits on that. I'm not sure you would, say, ever see Starsky and Hutch (the film) on at 4pm.

> Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points.

Honestly; I'd say that could be beneficial more than damaging. I wouldn't, obviously, recommend showing it to kids. But if they end up watching something bad at least it's real and real people have probably died. Surely that sends the right message ("hurting people is bad")
I think you have a good point about smaller businesses. When I worked for a medical device manufacturer I was amazed to find out how many of our suppliers were small businesses - in some cases very small.
Would be nice if these holes, and subsequently articles pointing them out, caused Apple to release iOS4 early to iPad owners, rather than back porting the bug fixes. It's higly unlikely that it'll budge their schedule, but it would be a welcomed move!
You're not their biggest customer, but you're up there. :)
We don't discuss that, but Conde isn't a charity. They wouldn't keep us around if it wasn't worthwhile.
There seem to be changes over time that are larger than genetic drift could account for, though. For example, in 1985, about 35% of undergrad CS degrees were awarded to women, while in 2008, it was 18%. What caused the proportion to drop in half over that time period?
I use market samurai. I wrote a review about it today http://freestylemind.com/market-samurai

It's a genuine review and I really recommend it for internet marketing. That said, there's my affiliate code in it but you can access the product directly from http://www.marketsamurai.com/
reddit currently has 73 instances with this breakdown:

25 c1.xlarge
26 m1.large
22 m1.xlarge

c1.xl are generally app servers, m1.xl are generally databases (either postgres or cassandra) and the m1.l are other stuff.
Caligula, Do you mind if I contact you about a project I'd like to start with Sphinx4? wheresjoe @ hotmail.com
Ask HN: What do you know about stocks/securities barriers and startups?
Hi friends, I've been tinkering with an idea for a startup that basically lets people trade stocks and play in the financial market. Kind of like betterment.com.

I was wondering if anyone here knew anything about doing business in this sort of space. How does executing trades work? Would I basically hookup with a brokerage account and resell trades through them to process user stock trades? What are the legal barriers to entry? Is there some sort of stock trading API (lol) that would allow a service to let users buy and sell securities?

Any knowledge is appreciated. Thanks HN
MicroNicheFinder, it looks like another one of those Internet marketing apps with a splash page but it's very good for niche & keyword research.
Wolfram on Alan Turing's birthday.
Great quality post @BradfordCross.

I've been thinking about the value of social sharing. Especially, quantity vs quality.

Broad social sharing ('quantity' AKA buzz, tweet, like, etc) returns little back to me. I've shared tons of links on twitter and essentially nobody says anything in return. But i check bit.ly (by adding a '+' to the url) and see some real use. I feel an obligation to only tweet interesting links for reputation purposes but it's not apparently rewarding.

Contrast forward to HN (quality). Far less traffic, but great community interaction with the content. For me, the discource here is more valuable. Heck, down voting my comments is really valuable feedback (notice how on twitter you never get someone replying back to you with "that tweet sucked" (exception being, you threaten their reputation). Thus, HN completely alters how i interact with content.

HN is only good at distributing certain things and we try to keep it unique here. For content creators, HN can be part of the social strategy but for content consumers on HN each comment seems more valuable than a retweet. Maybe that's why we are not tweeting links to HN discussions (things get less valuable in public).

Does the quality of the HN community hurt the potential quantity of links spreading virally?
Lessons Learned from Being Lean and Crossing the Chasm
So how does Colloquy do it? (Staying connected)
Ask HN: Time series analysis
I am currently interested in time series analysis as it seems to be a great feature for all kinds of software to report unexcpected events. My first go is rather simple with just taking the last 90 datapoints and then look whether it differs more than 2 or 3 times from the standarddeviation. Does anyone have a simple approach for more sophisticated time series analysis? or rather, links and book recommendations?
I love it, but at the same time I am scared of the fragmentation of web technologies this could result in. Bigger specs means more room for companies to do mistakes, to include inconsistencies...
"the art of project management", Scott Berkun. From O'reilly media.

This book is gold. but when berkun said that the job is essentially just creating/updating lists for people, i liked my job less and the book more.
I wanted to "just try the industry for a year" before going back to school to do a PhD. I have ended up being a "Java Enterprise Douchebag" for years :-(

I strongly advise against trying a normal job. Everything you could learn you could learn faster by simply watching the movie "Office Space".
My own assessment is that the games industry is perhaps as much as several decades behind the software industry in coming to grips with the process and culture changes necessary for sustainable high-quality development efforts. There are a few companies that seem to do it right (Valve, for example), but the vast majority of companies seem to be living by rules determined more by fantasy and speculation than by actual experience. Much of this is due to the relatively young age of modern game-making (the efforts behind making, say, Modern Warfare 2 are utterly dissimilar to the process of making, say, the original Doom). Some of it is exacerbated by the exponential revenue growth of the gaming industry.

When you can half-ass your way into making a multi-million dollar return on investment while doing it wrong, it can be challenging to find the motivation to do it right.

Hopefully, as the industry matures it'll settle down into more sensible standard processes.
I guess since HTML5 became the "umbrella"-name for all new web technologies :)
Why don't you start thinking and also working on what you exactly want to do on the side, and solidify your plans once you feel confident enough to make the jump? The transition does not happen overnight.

But, yes, I definitely feel you will really have a chance to learn more in a start-up, since you will essentially juggling various roles, especially in the early days.
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Maybe it's time to dabble in something new?

I've developed many interests over the years -- programming, game design, interactive development, music theory, soundtracks, cooking, martial arts, hiking, circuit bending ... I may not have mastered any of these, but my mind feels limber. I've stopped feeling guilty about putting down a project, and revisiting it later. That's how I get around mental blocks and ruts. It's always nice to revisit something with a clear head; old roadblocks tend to sort themselves out.

Also, your interests can be combined in clever ways. I just finished a new iPhone app, which combines many of the aforementioned. (Shameless plug: Twang is an expressive handheld guitar: http://tinyurl.com/twangapp).

To me, this is success -- not making scads of money (necessarily), but rather having a job I love, and the freedom to pursue new interests.
But isn't that exactly one of the reasons to play games: to be able to explore dangerous things in safety? Maybe somebody should devise a toe stubbing game...
It is incredibly hard to make a really good random number generator in hardware. The best I've ever managed to come up with was also a diode based white noise generator with a PIC chip to digitize the output of the diode after amplification.

One of the problems of that approach is the low quality of the built in A/D converter of the PIC, another the ease with which powerline hum and other electromagnetic noise made it into the circuitry. We did get the circuit to work, but it was hard to duplicate with lots of fiddling required before we had a series of 4 of them good enough for production use.

A typical test run would take a week and it was not rare to see 'good' performance on a test run of a day while still having to discard components after a week.

They were used to power an online casino.
Just because it doesn't make any guarantees about order, doesn't mean you'll get a randomly-selected element if you pick the first one.
Quantum free fall
The classic work on Time Series is Box-Jenkins. I've got the 3rd edition, but it looks like the 4th is now available-- I suppose I'll have to upgrade.

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Analysis-Forecasting-Probability-...
Yeah, there's been some research on this, showing a positive relationship between how "forgiving" a country's personal bankruptcy laws are and the level of entrepreneurship in that country: http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/ahn008v1
Check it out on Google books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=HdRbAAAAQAAJ&dq=Oliver%...
At least to me, those questions imply that you wouldn't be ready for that kind of a startup.

Look it up yourself. Somewhere out there people are starving for that knowledge.

And anyway, wouldn't it take the fun out of the journey if someone were to actually answer to your questions?
Wow. How on earth do these people not sack up, tell their boss to diaf, and walk out the door? Because honestly, if you allow people to use you like a punk, stop whining when they do. At will employment works both ways.

It's not that I never work on weekends, but when I think it's excessive, and particularly when it's not due to my own bugs, I just implement a personal comp time policy. I email my boss and say, "I'm taking a mental health day because I worked too much this weekend." This has only gotten a negative response once and replying, "If this is a problem I'll find another job where it isn't" shit him up. I suggest you all do this. Employment is a two way street, and if you aren't happy in your situation, do something about it.
And old wall street was investing their own money rather than OPM? They must have had such a bad life, those old timers.
I use Olark and love it. Its integration with my contact list is great--don't even have to switch away from Adium to chat with clients.
That was the same situation at the Scottsdale Apple Store for the iPad launch. I didn't reserve, so I was in the other line, and they really did let in one person for every ten people (at least). It was maddening, but there were a few nice people to talk to at least.
Apparently that is coming soon, but they've been saying that for months.
I have to agree, that's the way I see it. I'm just finishing a computer animation / games programming degree and I'm about to start looking for work.

The only other thing I'd add, from my point of view, is my games (and graphics) programming skills and training have always seemed completely separate to traditional software development. For instance, there is a computer software course at my university but it's in a different department (in engineering, mine is in 'media').

I think, at least from the point of view of a graduate, traditional and games programming seem like two different industries...
Those aren't exactly questions I know how to phrase for Google, nor are highly published or easy to find.

You're right in that I'm not ready for that kind of startup, this is literally the first hour of research I've put into this. HN is full of smart people, I don't expect them to have the exact answers, but they can lead me to onto the right places. Which is exactly what I was hoping someone could chime in with, saying "I worked as a financial advisor, here's my experience...", etc.

Thats why I also left the questions vague and wide open, so anyone with any experience can participate. I'm not an complete idiot, I have some of the answers to my own questions, but there are answers and questions I haven't even thought about yet.

I appreciate the "concern" though.
I agree, the conversation was fairly interesting, but the problem with the news feed widening its focus is that the site becomes interesting to a wider variety of people, with a tendency to regress towards the mean.
It's fascinating how we're just starting to use HTTP as it was designed, nearly twenty years later... :)
I don't think the 3GS was on wifi. Where did you find out this was the case?
I'm not really sure what to do. I'm an app developer and really need the phone, but I had a lot of trouble with the pre-order system, and couldn't get an order through until the ship date was back to July 14. If I don't go camp out, I won't get one for a month.
Bigger screens? I am sure that appeals to some people.

Actually SE is taking the opposite approach. They are actively pushing their X10 mini as the smallest high end smart phone on the market and using the smaller screen as a major selling point. If a huge screen appeals to you get the X10, if a really small phone appeals to you get the X10 mini.

I would be happy if at some stage, they produced an android phone that focused more on quality and battery life.

The HTC Legend is probably the phone you are talking about. High quality metal case, focus on design over specs and the best battery life of the current generation of Android phones. Hopefully HTC will continue this two pronged approach with the Desire++ being for people who need top specs at any cost and the Legend++ for people who care more about design and battery life, but still want a top quality smart phone.

That's the thing about the Android platform. No matter what your priorities, someone will probably make a phone to fulfil them.
Does the quality of HN hurt the potential quantity of links spreading virally?
For me, broad social sharing ('quantity' AKA buzz, tweet, fb like, etc) brings back little in return. I've shared tons of links on twitter and essentially nobody says anything in return. But i check bit.ly (by adding a '+' to the url) and see some real use. I feel an obligation to only tweet interesting links for reputation purposes but it does not make me feel gratified.<p>Now consider HN (quality). Far less traffic, but great community interaction with the content. For me, the discource here is more valuable. Heck, down voting my comments is really valuable feedback (notice how on twitter you never get someone replying back to you with "that tweet sucked" (exception being, you threaten their reputation). And i'll always leave a comment here versus on the creators website (as i hate comments coming up in google searches for my name). In the end, HN completely alters how i interact with content.<p>HN is only good at distributing certain things and we try to keep it unique here. For content creators, HN can be part of the social strategy but that comes at a cost. Some content creators may not even wish for stories to be here and get sucked into this bubble. For content consumers on HN each comment seems more valuable than a retweet.<p>What i wonder is: Does the quality of the HN community hurt the potential quantity of links spreading virally? Should this change the social media strategy of content originators?<p>{sidenote: Dick Costello should bring down voting and up voting to tweets}
Ah yeah, that's an issue I've been doing a lot of thinking about--- I'm finishing up a games-and-AI PhD and, gods willing, going to start soonish as a prof in a cs-and-games program. They vary a lot from school to school, and I think we're still working out how they should be taught, and where they should go relative to other departments. Some are basically CS programs with a bit of an applied twist, some are basically media-studies programs, some are very art-heavy, some are more like a vocational degree, and many are some mixture of those.

Some of the variation is based on institutional politics, I think (probably more than it should be), but some is a fundamental disagreement over what games "really" are. The two endpoints of the spectrum of views are: 1) games are a specific type of software, like search engines or word processors or operating systems; or 2) games are a specific type of media, like films or cartoons or novels.

Mind sharing where you went? I have some first-hand knowledge of Georgia Tech's and UC Santa Cruz's programs, and am curious how others compare.
Beyond basic data on visitors, browsers etc, the next step is to think about the goals of your website e.g. purchase, signup, download etc.. Once you've decided the goals you have for your website's users, take a look at Google's docs on setting up goals: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer...
What do you want to learn from your analytics? Remember that Google Analytics is just a tool — the hardest part of using a tool "efficiently" is asking the right questions, and right now it sounds like you don't have any questions.
My co-founder and I just got engaged :)
> Where are you getting the normal distribution information from?

The author spends much effort estimating an 'average' app income and costs. Talking about averages does not make any sense in case of power law distribution. He is using Gaussian approach which is a wrong model for given phenomena. Bringing skewness/kurtosis/whatever to the table doesn't help a thing since he has completely mis-classified the problem.

> That said, independent developers making money on that app store directly is a complete crap-shoot.

Can the same can be said about entrepreneurs in general? What is an 'average' income of an entrepreneur (including failed ones)? Is it worth it? Do you aim for this dismal income when you start a business?

Scalable business model is completely different animal from a non-scalable one (i.e. selling your personal time as a developer, consultant etc.). Quite a few developers expect from iPhone apps the same they are used to in their contracting/salaried careers.
Valve have had a philosophy of not shipping until it is perfect. (see TF2, HL2:EP3, etc). This might be changing (L4D2), but I'm still waiting for HL2:EP3, and games like HL2 had a 6 year development cycle.