skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks Tansey, your comment helped me to fix a trading algo I've been working on for weeks.
All employees are not developers, however. There are apparently 1400+ employees (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet), so that would make 1.1B / 1400 = $786k per employee of revenue.

Here are some numbers to compare it to: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/perfo...

Apparently it's a bit over average for the "Internet Services and Retailing", but not as high as eg. Google.
That's interesting, but:

a) They are going after the third party, not the people that gave them their passwords, and

b) I believe Facebook also harvest passwords for other sites (hotmail etc)

c) In practice, there's not much difference between "Nobody can create a service that uses user's passwords to automate their Facebook access" and "You can't use any automated processes to access Facebook".
Sounds like the workers in the game industry need to unionize.
As a matter of comparison, let's look at Google.

$23.6 bn in 2009 (don't have 2010 numbers, and don't want to speculate).

I don't know how many engineers they have, but I've heard the number 10,000 bandied about.

The below says about 20,600 employees total, so my hunch is that 10k might be a little bit high.
http://investor.google.com/documents/20100331_google_10Q.htm...

Given the 23.6 bn is probably low for 2010, and 10,000 engineers is probably a bit high, the resulting value of 2.36 million is a lowball estimate. The real number is probably closer to, oh, say, $2,750,000 / engineer :D
"Do not concentrate on my finger, or you will miss all of the heavenly glory."
Shameless selfpromotion:

http://000fff.org/a-simple-model-for-innovation/

I wrote this to help people cover the possible option spaces.

Basically there are four areas that your product or service can compete in:

1) Do what others do, but do it better.
2) Do what others do, but do more.
3) Do what others do, but for a new audience
4) Do what no other is doing

The obvious space you want to be in is obviously 4) when it comes to niche business. But one often overlooked area is 3) where you take an existing product or technology and repurpose for a new audience.

My old marketing teacher told us a story about a company that he used to for worked for.

The company sold heavy duty soap for industrial use but weren't doing well.

The company had a lab that he would often spend some time in to see what was going on.

One of the things the lab had been playing around with was the color of the soap. One of the soap colors where bordering pink. It also just so happened that his daughter loved everything that sparkles. So they ended up making a soap that was pink with small sparkling bits in it, much less dry sold it as Fairydust or something like that for kids.

According to him it was a great success. And none the less it's a great way to explain point 3)
Algorithmic trading. Currently only a GUI for managing my existing trading algorithms in Java and a evolutionary algorithm I use for optimizing parameters, but I am looking at using Clojure to implement the trading algorithms themselves.

Pros: wonderful integration with Java, good support for concurrent programming, conciseness, macros.

Cons: numerically intensive code can be a bit slow (but it is going to improve significantly with 1.2, and you can always do that in Java), prefix notation can be quite hard to read if you are dealing with complicated math expressions.
This is an interesting analysis but a very flawed conclusion. What percentage of restaurant owners will make money? How about online entrepreneurs?

Just because the expected value of building something is low doesn't mean it's a bad model. It just means you have to execute well and that most people fail.
I do wonder though why these industries have such an attraction on many people. Sure, I'd love to work on a Hollywood movie in a plush office but I love my dignity even more.
10 Mac Apps for the Geek Inside You
I don't think they've entirely thought it through, but I understand they're working with open standards and talking to other similar projects. I think eventually some standards-based distributed alternative will come together, although I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed when Diaspora launches.
> If 'fanboys' is considered an offensive slur (as it appears to be) then I'm personally happy to use the term 'Apple fans' but they are essentially referring to the phenomena/grouping.

Please do. 'fanboys' certainly is not a distinct term that is useful to describe a cluster of people, as you say, at least not any more.

Aside: Harry McCracken recently wrote a (rather long) essay on the origin and evolution of the word 'fanboy': http://technologizer.com/2010/05/17/fanboy/
JPA(Java Persistence API) implementation patterns
The Status Sorters
AS400 / iSeries Software Executives Email Lists & Mailing Lists
The AS/400 served in a variety of networking configurations: as a host or intermediate node to other AS/400s, as a remote system to mainframe-controlled networks and as a network server to Pcs. Get Instant access to AS400 / iSeries Lists from List2Tech.
If you always live at the bleeding edge of your means then this is true. You'll set yourself up on a treadmill of expenses and never get off.

However, if you live well within your means and you make smart financial decisions then the reverse is true. Instead of building your debt you'll build up your savings and your assets. Someone who's just getting out of college and needs to spend money buying basic household goods, an automobile, and needs to pay down their student loans is in a much worse position than someone with savings who doesn't need to pay rent or a car payment because they've already paid off their mortgage and their cars.
Yes, but it's not a limitation. The "from" number is re-written so that the reply will go back through the Google Voice infrastructure. In this manner, text messages are free, at least for the Google Voice user who is receiving the message.
Fundamentally what's keeping me going is that I see a big market opportunity.

But on a day-to-day basis, when I really hit a brick wall, I take a break.

I have a "small items to-do list". It's a list of things that individually would take a short amount of time (say 5min - 3hrs) that I'd like to do "some day". I do one. Or two. Or 10. This clears my mind and also makes me feel productive. Also, it's a good break so that when I do get back to the big thing I'm chasing, I come back with a clear mind and fresh eyes so that I figure out a way around the brick wall.

Exercise, cooking, watching TV, and other activities also help. Just do what you feel like doing to re-group and re-energize, and then get back at it.
Watch Startup Metrics for Pirates first: http://www.techstars.tv/watch/2714618-dave-mcclure-startup-m...

I would suggest using http://kissmetrics.com to track goals and funnel conversion.

All the best!
http://withpretext.com/post/673179066/on-canaries-and-the-jo...

If you're forward-thinking and flexible, the voluntary redundancy packages are going to look way more attractive than if you aren't.
I never studied anything game-industry specific (I was a math major) & I'm working as a game developer now (albeit in a small company that does casual games, not EA and their ilk) and only worked in 'normal' programming jobs before that (doing mostly semantic-web and "enterprise" stuff).

Of the ~20 people working here only one (the youngest and most junior, probably also earns a lot less than most of us) studied in a games-specific program.

I think many people here don't have a degree or have one in an unrelated field (I have yet to find a CS-program graduate, the ones I know of mostly studied stuff like physics and math).

What you refer to might be AAA specific, or just untrue.
5 Movie Sequels (That Were Totally Unauthorized)
The movie sequel is a fickle business. Studios love them because they honor the time tested tradition of doing successful thing over and over again regardless of whether it makes sense.
That is a recognised method but it does have it's own failings. Certainly in server rooms although it seems noisy to us there are patterns that can still be generated.

Another similar method is to take static from radio waves. While random it's unfortunately hackable by someone who has a radio transmitter and can get close enough to your antenna (the same can be done with the microphone).

I worked at a poker startup and sourcing random numbers is both a political and mathematical nightmare.
How Will the New Emergency Budget Effect SEO in London?
Swing can be a lot of repetitive code. Clojure has mechanisms (functions, macros and libraries) that can help you to abstract this away to exactly the way you like to write user interfaces.
I do most of my programming lately in Not Quite Perl 6, a subset of Perl 6 targeting Parrot. Part of that is because it's currently the only high-level language included in Parrot's repository, and what I'm working on is mostly stuff that's in Parrot's repository(an optimization framework/tree traversal/matching language, if you're curious).

NQP is pleasant to work in. Perl 6 regexes are wonderful(although I haven't had time to work on writing a language using NQP's support for them yet).

Perl 5? I'm finding myself increasingly attracted to it, in part due to being around some very influential Perl 5 people. I haven't been using it much given that most of my coding time is currently devoted to Parrot, and most of the rest is dabbling in C+Lua, but I'm a new developer who's interested, certainly, in joining the Perl community.

It seems to my admittedly inexperienced mind like most of Perl 5's flaws are fairly avoidable with the right modules from CPAN (or even just the right modules/pragmas that ship with Perl). Sure, there's a lot of bad Perl 5 code out there, but the only languages for which that isn't true are the languages for which there isn't a lot of code of any kind out there. Perl 5 is not nearly bad enough a language to deserve its reputation. It's not nearly my idea of a perfect language, but it's a language I like and that I can stand to use while I wait for Parrot and Rakudo(assuming no other Perl 6 implementation shows up out of nowhere and somehow gets to performant and spec-complete status quicker than Rakudo) to mature, or for another language I can love to arrive on the scene(a better Common Lisp would be one of these).

Tl;dr: to answer your question, I'm a new Perl developer. I'm not really starting any substantial projects in Perl 5 yet(although I am in NQP), but when I have more free time on my hands, I am confident that I will.
Set up goal tracking. For beginner level that's all you really need is the basic installation and some form of goal tracking (ecommerce tracking if you have ecommerce transactions). That will let you make business decisions.

Once you figure out exactly what else you'd like to report on then post again, most things are possible but it's not really worth setting it up unless you can gain some actionable insight from it.
are you sure?

the PRNG is a deterministic function of its seed. the hash is a deterministic function of the output. if you do the math and calculate the entropy (this isn't hard) you'll see that the total entropy is still 80 bits because the distributions of the PRNG output given the seed, and of the hash given the output have no entropy. the marginal entropy of the PRNG is 80 bits if you don't observe the seed.

another way of seeing this is via the data processing inequality:
http://www.neng.usu.edu/classes/ece/7680/lecture3/node2.html
CNBC Mobiles Apps Discussion
Don't Sweep Feedback Under the Rug
He's not frustrated with the unforgivability of hardware design. He's frustrated with the overhead involved in getting started learning the ropes (finding the right tools, learning about the conventions involved in identifying the right parts).
> I fundamentally object to the notion that the government gives you a right to a monopoly on an idea, for what looks like perpetuity -- nothing has gone out of copyright since 1923.

Copyright reform has nothing to do with advocating piracy. By advocating piracy, you are harming copyright reform.

TPB steal from:

* OReilly

* Red Hat

* Novell

* IBM

* The World of Goo people

* Trent Reznor

and other artists most people on HN agree are doing interesting things with copyright. Red Hat maintain a fucking list of patents they use to defend OSS against proprietary patent trolls! Yet TPB steals from them. You have no reason to buy an OReilly book if you can get it on TPB.

> Stealing means you've lost something i.e. no longer have it.

The common definition of stealing means you're taking something that isn't yours. I understand you disagree, but I don't care.

> Third, the comparison to slavery was only to disprove your assertion "Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong."

Do you think you disproved that assertion?

> I'm not trying to encourage piracy

But you are encouraging piracy. You're defending The Pirate Bay. Which is a pirate site. Hence the name 'The Pirate Bay, the pictures of pirates, the jolly roger, and the stealing.

TPB, and TPP harm copyright reform. People who make stuff, and people who don't like stealing
Healthy Life Better Living
or programmers in general. i'm baffled why this hasn't happened yet.
We have build a large Web-Application with Clojure. It runs on Google App Engine and we are really happy with our decision. You can find it here: http://the-deadline.com

We use the power of lisp to extend the language for specific tasks, like accessing the distributed key/value datastore or building an expert-system shell.
Ask HN: How to achieve and maintain mastery in spoken English?
I speak English as my third language and have always strived to improve my writing by reading a lot. We recently moved back to Europe from the Bay Area and I've noticed that my pronunciation and active vocabulary has deteriorated in a mere few months.

What resources are out there for native (or close to native) English speakers to improve their spoken language? I listen to podcasts but have found that the language quality isn't uniformly high.
Creating Simple PHP Contact Form
When you need that user contact with you or send feedback to you via email then you have to need make a contact form. In this tutorial you will learn that how to create form with php script.
Engineering marvel dissected: iPhone 4 Teardown by iFixIt
To search use the search resource. Then you have, resource: "search results containing the word 'tuesday'"; url: /search?q=tuesday

To approve you create a new approval resource:
POST to /approval with the id of the resource to approve. This creates a new resource at /approval/1

Then you can revoke the approval by DELETE /approval/1
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> In those circumstances I would work very hard to avoid making full-time hires.

You'd think people would figure out that secondary effects exist sooner or later, but amazingly, they seem not to...
A lecturer and mentor I had at university worked closely with Turing during and after the war, and I never knew until recently. I've had no news of his death, so I'm desperately hoping to be able to catch up with him next time I'm back home, and perhaps get him to reminisce.

PS: Please fix the title. The article has it right - it's "Alan".
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Biggie-router: A Node.js high performance router inspired by JQuery and Sinitra.
"Biggie-router is a high performance, extendable router for use in frameworks and applications. It draws inspiration from several popular open source frameworks and libraries, such as jQuery and Sinitra."<p>Enjoy :)
Let's hypothetically say we have a young turk in a Japanese engineering department, where the unspoken departmental standard is 6 hours of work in a 16 hour day. If he works 10 hours in a 16 hour day, he is going to quickly draw the ire of his older colleagues, because he is making them look bad. The boss will start cracking the whip and get them to meet or exceed his productivity, and then an arms race ensues. If, on the other hand, he works 10 hours in a 10 hour day, he is going to quickly draw the ire of his boss, because he is leaving six hours before everyone else, despite the project being horrifically behind schedule.

There is an entire genre of aphorisms to tell our young turk. Let's see: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. The clever hawk hides his claws. etc, etc.

Work diligently, but with sufficient deliberation to achieve the company's exacting quality standards. Document your steps religiously. Hammer out hundreds or thousands of pages of specification documents, since specs always resemble forward progress. Teach your junior employees, who might be ignorant in the way of the world, how things are actually done, and most particularly how they are actually done here. With due deliberation.

Now, of course, my company was totally different, because we would never slack off like that. But, you know, I've heard stories of how things are done at places I don't have near-feudal loyalty towards.
Unions typically protect workers who belong to industries where there are more employees than there is demand.

Programming is a highly-skilled profession that is constantly in demand. We don't need protection because companies compete for the good ones, not the reverse.
You do know that there's lots of different Android phones in all shapes and sizes? It's kind of the whole point of the platform.

Some are big, some small, some have keyboards, some don't, some are high-spec'ed, some basic, some expensive, some cheap.

You may have been mislead by reading gadget blogs that only focus on the male, techy, expensive, American end of the Android spectrum which might be a bit samey, but there's a whole ecosystem building out there.
Notation as a Tool of Thought
Feel free to ask questions! I'm also available on the #node.js channel on Freenode as Tim_Smart.
Ask HN: How do I learn quickly from failure? 
I've heard startup speakers frequently suggest that budding entrepreneurs learn to fail quickly and cheaply. I'm in my first web startup, trying to develop and roll out an Internet web service but getting the technology to work for me seems to be taking much longer than I hoped it would.

Has anyone had similar experiences? I understand there may not be shortcuts around my situation but I'll appreciate any advice or best practices that might help people like myself to keep moving forward.
For non-startup type products (small niche softwares, affiliate websites, or to ensure easy SEO traffic), I do the following:

- I list the frustrations I had in the last two months

- I list the list I like to do

With that list, I head over to google keyword tool, and search for keywords related to what I found in step 1 that have more than 3000 searches per month and less than 30000 exact keyword pages in google (the 30 day challenge method: http://thirtydaychallenge.com)

I keep brainstorming until I find a list of keywords that are in demand but have low competition (When you are a one man show, you'd rather focus on a non-too-competitive niche).

Then I use Market Samourai to check the competition on the first 10 pages of Google to ensure I will be able to rank my website high in Google on my keywords.

Next, I put up a website a la Tim Ferriss to test the market a little bit more. This method only adds value if the test tells you you have a profitable product. If you can't prove it during the test, it doesn't mean you should stop.

In parallel, I "talk" (surveys, interviews, forums) to as many potential customers as I can.

If I feel I am to something, I start coding :)

I wrote about this very topic on my blog.

I published my frustrations there: http://aymeric.gaurat.net/index.php/2010/my-frustrations/

How to test the viability of your idea: http://aymeric.gaurat.net/index.php/2010/how-to-test-the-via...
"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"

What kind of programming role do you think you'd have in a team?

I ask because, as a generalist programmer, I think that I could write you any kind of program, including a game engine, at a professional level. I'm just wondering what the difference between my training and yours is.
I recently did build a desktop computer and chose the
Intel X25-M (80GB). Intel's SSDs are generally considered to offer very good performance, and that one seens to give the best value for money.
Extreme DIY: Building a homemade nuclear reactor in NYC
One thing to bear in mind is that the games programming domain is quite different from the typical web/application programming domain that many here on Hacker News are used to.

In much of Games Development there is a greater focus on optimization and efficiency, the programming is a lot lower level and you need to be able to squeeze as much as you can out of the hardware. All the Games Developers I have worked for and interviewed for always look for certain skills, like pointer arithmetic and bit manipulation, that might not be an issue if you're building a social network or e-commerce site.
Unlawful provisions aren't the only problem; what about selective enforcement?

When everyone is a lawbreaker selective enforcement gives law enforcement tremendous power beyond what's written in the law. A similar situation applies to contracts, and contracts for software and services are so impenetrable these days that you're bound to be violating something or other just in everyday use.
1. Find a mentor or join a "mastermind" group to discuss about your challenges with others.

2. Reflect on what you are doing regularly (collectively if you have a team). To learn from your mistakes, you need to be aware of them otherwise you can fail as many times as you want, you won't get much from the experience.

3. Read / learn / educate yourself. By reading about startups / businesses, you will be able to relate to your own current experience and make adjustements. On top of that, I find that reading keep my level of "awareness" higher, it gives me time to reflect on what I do.

4. To fail cheaply, make sure you approach your startup / idea / business in a lean way, avoid upfront costs, avoid long term commitments, etc...
My main goal was to replace my voicemail... Most of them are hang-up messages from my mom or family member, so I mostly ignore them.

Is that voicemail through your cell provider or Google Voice? I think every provider I've had since 2000 has filtered hang-up messages (presumably messages < n seconds.)
In many countries outside of the US they are. However that hasn't done much to significantly change the working conditions. As long as it remains a 'glamorous' industry that kids aspire to work in, then they know they'll never have trouble hiring new workers. The other aspect is that EA, the mother company, doesn't actually program games. They own IP and publish games. The games are written by various studios with various ties and connections to EA. This means that if a studio gets too troublesome, it is quite easy for EA to cut all dealings with that studio and simply shift its IP from that studio to another studio.