skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The way games are made now is fundamentally flawed," he responds. "If I was a betting man, I’d imagine that in the future, this business of getting more than a hundred people together for three, four years will look really odd. It's so incredibly expensive. I predict that we'll see a core of deeply talented people working on games beforehand, then a big team comes together for a brief period of time."

So, I say -- game design is moving toward something sort of like a movie, with years of preproduction by a small team, then a big production with set designers and key grips that only lasts a couple of months?

"Yes, exactly."

If you can solve this problem, you will transform the face of the game industry and usher in a new era of creativity in the face of the current method of massive teams and budgets. Is it a good idea for a startup? Beats me. It's a large, open question. I don't have an answer as to how to approach a solution. Yet.
I think the reason a "nation with one big budget and financial system" works better than "50 small budgets and systems in a confederacy" is that the smaller, poorer states benefit heavily from the bigger richer states. In general, taxpayers in rich states get back less than they pay in federal taxes, and the beneficiaries are poorer states, who get back more than they pay.

It's a good setup, because prosperity in one area can help the whole country, and it lessons the infighting among the states. A rising tide lifts all boats if you will. If one state suddenly goes from 'poor' to 'rich' (like Texas when oil became a big deal) then other states will automatically benefit.
Apple Wants More Mobile Music From Labels: 3G Hints...
Google looks at the web and tries to make money. A phisher or scammer looks at the web and tries to make money. Does that make them equivalent?

You can be motivated by money but still be engaged in a noble pursuit.

Newspapers are published by for-profit companies in a constant and noble battle to report the truth, even though many other entities work hard to get falsehoods reported.

Pharmaceuticals are developed by for-profit companies in a constant and noble battle against disease.

The point of my grandparent comment is that the brainpower Google uses for its core service -- improving search -- is engaged in an honorable, beneficial activity. It's a hard problem, they're working against other profit-motivated malicious actors, and we all get a throwoff benefit from Google's work, even if we never click an ad.

That the activity also makes them money, or even was primarily motivated by making money, doesn't change that.
Thanks Dean. Interesting.

On a side note it was great to meet you at the TC event at the Festival Hall last week.
Good thing Python is cross platform. If they needed a special OS X version, it would be Botox.
The fault lies in the system. Nowhere else in the world it's possible to create an official document (like a driver licence) or a bank account without proper authentication.
"Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as well in verbal skills."

Hmm, all the men I know that excel in math and science have excellent verbal abilities. I'd be curious to see their research on this.
Exactly -- both the 'natural' and paid listings are informational, but for different reasons. Even when I find the paid listings more useful, I wouldn't call them 'better' than the natural results -- just interesting along another dimension.
I actually agree with everything you said - I, too, have never felt or seen bias against women in IT, once we're all adults. My perspective is that of the parent of a six-year-old girl, and if you actually believe that society doesn't start drilling into girls' heads from day one that their mission in life is to play with dolls, put on make up, and do little else... well, then you don't see much mainstream media.
I agree with the other comments posted. Your English seems fine to me. I have a similar problem in that though I am in the US, I was raised speaking the Queen's English (for e.g. I refer to the boot of a car as the bonnet :D). I normally ask a friend to review an email/proposal that I have drafted and thats my way of ensuring that everything is kosher.

I guess you could start by putting a disclaimer on your blog stating that English is not your first language, and probably asking a friend/colleague to review your post prior to posting it. But I do think that this should not stop you from sharing your ideas or thoughts. Someone's fluency with English would (IMO) not stop people from reading what you have to say.

Good luck. Hope this helps.
Good thing most of the value on the web is not contained within Facebook.

From Google's perspective, it's just one more pile of crap to route around, and it's your own incompetence at SEO if you put your valuable content behind a walled garden that can't be indexed.

This is how Google has the Blagowebosphere by the balls: it's very much in your interest for Google to be able to access all your content robotically at any time in any way it pleases.

This is serious business, people.
They're in the ocean. Typically, that would involve eating fish and drinking water :)

Then again, this is the 21st century. I cannot imagine the food they eat would differ too much from the food you're currently eating in Seattle/Chicago/SV/London/etc.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with them not wanting to. What's wrong is a society that for 18 years tells them "you don't want to do this, you want to do that".
Meetup is hiring Software Engineers!
Our goal is a "Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything", and we're on our way. We help people use the internet to get off the internet and form community. Meetups make a difference in people's lives and can change the world. We're fast-growing, SoHo-based, venture capital-backed, and a great place for top talent to do their best work.

Software Engineers

Meetup.com is hiring exceptional Software Engineers to work on a product that's already helped millions of people find and build local community worldwide. You'll work with a smart, dedicated engineering team to build the next generation of the site. While Meetup is established and successful, things are still growing quickly -- enjoy the challenges and opportunity of working with a startup with the benefits of a mature company.
Requirements

* A love of what you do
* The idea of helping grow local community worldwide thrills you
* Extensive experience programming in Java
* Experience developing for the web
* Strong DB/SQL skills
* Python/Perl/Ruby experience a plus
* Javascript experience a plus
* Formal CS Degree a plus

This position is based in New York City. To apply, please contact techhire@meetup.com and include a cover letter and plain-text resume.
fish occurred to me, too, but is it sufficient?
How to manage brilliant people
What's wrong? Fr each individual, nothing, but for the country as a whole, this is a quick path to economic disaster. These are exactly the types of skills needed to maintain an economic advantage against large countries such as India and China.
Very nicely done. I saw the result posted here earlier, but it's great to get to see the steps that were involved in the decryption.
The original confederacy under the Articles of Confederation resulted in a system where nothing got done, due to the lack of any federal executive power. The US Constitution was explicitly designed to balance the power of the federal and state interests.

Since the Civil War though, that balance has tipped towards the federal government retaining the power and authority over money.

The increase of executive power in the federal system is a two-edged sword. So is the large budget. It lends itself to inefficiencies in spending which are more easily remedied at a state or local level.
The Icelandic language is quite possibly one of, if not THE, most unique language I've ever heard spoken. I took a trip with my fiance out there a year or two ago and, while most people were glad to speak english to us, I was quite rapt whenever I could eavesdrop in on anyone speaking their native Icelandic. It's almost ... elvish?

Having said that, because of that fact I can't imagine the process of learning said language to be too too easy.
What an interesting read. It may be cliche to say, but the description of China's surveillance system is so 1984.
Iceland certainly sounds nice, if you could tolerate the weather.

How does it compare to say, Wisconsin?
The Productivity Bookshelf from LifeHack
Anyone who wants to learn a little more about Icelandic roots you should look for any books by Halldor Laxnes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halld%C3%B3r_Laxness), specifically Independent People (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_People).
Please don't think I was ranting at you, I really didn't mean it to come across like that :) It's just this daft idea that there should be a 50/50 M/F split across any profession, let alone IT.

I have two children (1 boy, 1 girl) and they have very different interests, so I'm approaching this from a parent's viewpoint as well. As for encouraging them into the profession, I always say "do something you like and ignore computers, because it will grind you down in a relentless, soul-destroying fashion." I'm being a bit cynical and if they showed a genuine interest I'd encourage it, but I'll be damned if I say it's the most rewarding, happy profession out there. Cos it ain't.
My personal hope is that optimism for the future and recognition of current conditions are orthogonal.
Thats right Mohinder is awesome... not that I have any self interest in this...
Well it boils down to the simplest of things: Boys generally are interested in things while girls are interested in relationships and people. That explains why there are more guys as engineers than girls. It's not a question of smartness, more of interest and personality.
I excel in math and science but do not have excellent verbal abilities.

There. I ruined your statistic. :P
No offense taken, brother. My rant stems from how shocked I am each and every day at how strongly girls are encouraged to be submissive, or even just plain stupid. People I know without kids often act like it's not an issue, "just keep 'em away from TV", but they don't see that it's everywhere: TV, radio, product packaging, billboards, etc. I was pretty blind to it myself until I had a daughter.
I wonder how the individual US states would fare if measured separately in such surveys. There really is a massive cultural and economic variance between them. McDonald's is everywhere, sure, but if you scratch the surface the differences can be vast. It's often misleading to try to generalize across the entire nation. Many of the tourists and exchanges students I've met here have mentioned how they didn't really appreciate the size and diversity of the nation until they experienced it for themselves.
Selfmade Millionaires:Bear Naked Ambition: The Inside Start-Up Story
"every day at how strongly girls are encouraged to be submissive, or even just plain stupid"

Yup, I agree with that. My daughter discovered Xena a few years ago, then Buffy, so she doesn't fit the submissive, stupid mold at all :-) Good role models, AFAIC. There's no TV and I've always taught them to be suspicious of advertising, so that helps. But, let's face it, we all fit some kind of cultural expectations even when we don't want to.
Selfmade Millionaires:Moveable Type Story
Selfmade Millionaires:Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen
Selfmade Millionaires:Catherine, Dave, and Geoff Cook
There are a couple of "lost arts" that, when performed properly, prevent the things that OP calls "your fault". They're called Project Management and Systems Analysis.

Project Management and Systems Analysis create a straightforward path to success? Wow. Then how come they are "lost arts"?

Actually, I know how most advocates answer this question. They say it wasn't (to use your phrase) "performed properly". This is the ultimate teflon defense of any software process theory. If it succeeded, you performed it properly; if it failed, you must not have.
Chances are, "un-enrolling" about half the graduate students would improve a department no matter how big it is. Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is crap".

But if you have a bigger pool to draw from, the 10% that's not crap will amount to more engineers. And the 0.01% that's really spectacular will be more spectacular. That's the way a bell-curve works - if you raise the area under the curve, the tips spread out as well.

There're a lot of smart people in finance whose talents are being wasted making sure that the market reflects all information within microseconds instead of within minutes. If the economic incentives were such that they started companies or did basic research instead, I bet you'd see quite a few more breakthroughs.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but in our engineering office there is only one iPhone (and it's owned by an accountant). There are a couple of hundred 3G nokia handsets though. In the UK the combination of no 3G and limited carrier/plan selection seems to have killed the iPhone off pretty well.

I suspect the same is true of most other non-US countries where the carriers are much less dominant and good handsets, network portability and competitive pay as you use deals are well entrenched.

On the other hand the number of Linux based devices is truly staggering. I can't find the reference at the moment but I believe that something like 300m embedded units were shipping a year. A million plus Eee 700 series devices alone were distributed. 10-15 million phones running Linux were shipped just in Asia(1) which should put iPhone sales of 2-3m in perspective.

(1) http://linux.sys-con.com/read/182937.htm
What the hell is the point of facebook?
yeah, seriously, just start writing, its not like your blog will get a lot of attention right away and you will be embarrassed. You start posting something regularly, and as your written English gets better and you get some readers, you will feel much better about it all. Besides, you can always go back and edit the post when you identify silly mistakes.
The Socialprise Revolution
> ... not yet ported to Windows ...

You have glimpsed the future my friend! :)
Props to the original poster for the link, I've been looking for stuff like that.
Same reason most men don't want to be midwives?
Just browse at -1 on any Slashdot thread about Ubuntu. One guy converted back to Windows after Linux refused to see his keyboard, crashed for no reason, drove away his girlfriend, stole his car, murdered his grandmother, burned down his house and framed him for making meth.

With install problems like that I'm certainly not going to risk it!
Over the last few years I've bought four embedded linux devices without even seeking it out. My two wireless routers have embedded linux. My HD-DVD player runs linux. So does my network-accessible hard drive. The OS really is making inroads.
they just need to throw more money and brains into it

That might be a necessary condition but it isn't a sufficient one. They could just as easily create a money-and-brains soup. Culture and organization are also critical factors.
boto's a great library, we've been using it for S3 for years without a hitch. Mitch's tutorials are nice examples of what's possible with the Amazon services:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...
Consider the following analogy:

psychology researchers : gender differences :: moths : flame

Rosalind Chait Barnett at the bottom of the article has it right. Investigating gender differences is the first quest every psych grad student embarks on, and 19 times out of 20, they're disappointed to find nothing significant. (The other 1/20 is the false positive that comes with 95% confidence testing.) It bothers me that this article pursues so many hypotheses at once -- planning for career flexibility; language aptitude; discrimination; women fulfilled through biology, men through machines. None of them is a satisfactory answer because in a properly controlled gender-differences experiment, having filtered out the noise, there's no signal left.

On the surface, the differences are there, but it's not due to anything innate. The East-versus-West comparison in the article should make that obvious. (The article claims it's because we're more "free".) It's cultural. Duh. I don't see anything wrong with that, either; it doesn't mean there should be a 50:50 gender split in every field. But looking for the explanation in biology is a dead end that enough researchers have run into already.
it's a way to let a certain set of people express themselves, a translation of a social process to the internet. while some of us have outgrown it, we haven't forgotten what it was like for us: phones, chat rooms, geocities.
I can't say I agree. We have increased our pool by accepting sub-par students, and it seems to be shifting the entire curve backwards, rather than "spreading the tips".

I don't know what the right answer is (or if there is one); what feels right is to raise the standards of admission.
have you personally experienced this?
I don't see what the big deal is. Lifelock explains what they do and have a guarantee.

http://www.lifelock.com/lifelock-for-people

Here they explain that everything they do can be done by you for free. They describe what they do as changing the oil in your car. You could do it yourself, but it's just convenient to have the professionals do it.
"Don't read too much; no one will want to marry you."

Lost the source but not making this up.
Un-enrolling the /bottom/ 50% would probably improve a department, sure. But how do you get that bottom 50% without enrolling all of those students in the first place?

Your second point assumes that the relative percentage of "not crap" remains constant as enrollment increases, which is highly dubious.

And there's a lot of smart people being wasted at Google and Microsoft, too.
Unfortunately I can't read it at work, but it does interest me. So what's the proposal about?
Live Notes from Google Factory Tour of Search
The burbclave goes prescient?

On a more serious note, it would seem that governments tailor made for specific purposes might have a large competitive advantage over more established legal structures.

Suppose, for example, startups were allowed to hold equity auctions for a tiny fraction of their company on a weekly basis, with no SEC filings and only whatever accounting the market demands. I suppose that example is more generally libertarian, but perhaps particular law on what contracts are enforceable (the NDA for one) might be helpful.
after posting this for 3 hours - i'm delighted by your motivational responses - thanks to all and i welcome more users to share their views and ideas so that not only me but many others like me can also get valuable tips ..
Server-side image processing with JRuby-on-Rails and the Java 2D API
Am I understanding this correctly? In the US, you can create driver's licenses and bank accounts with only a social security number?
Generally if you have solid material to discuss people will overlook a lot of grammar and usage problems.

So if you stick to solid stuff and stay away from gossip and other nonsense you'll be fine.
10 Reasons Gen Xers Are Unhappy at Work
In Missouri at least, to get a driver's license you need your SSN, your birth certificate, and some form of identification like a passport or a bill in your name at your current address.
Startup Music Challenge on Muxtape: Who Else Has a Mix?
If your friend tells you about "le web 08" in person you'll probably google it later.

It doesn't have to be either/or. You can put Upcoming's events on Facebook using either upcoming's or friendfeed's facebook app.
"Society" is a concept we need to banish from these discussions. "Society" exists at a higher level of abstraction than what we are discussing.

A particular woman may want babies because women around her said "babies rock, all women want babies." Was it wrong for her mother to discuss the rewards of motherhood?

A particular man may like computers because his father told him how cool it is to bend machines to your will. Was that wrong?

If neither of those acts is wrong, then what is wrong with "society" telling people stuff?
It was one the old reddit once. Can somebody find it? It was way less crazy than it seemed at first.
Andrew Chen: Why every Web 2.0 startup needs to think about Metcalfe's Law
Your examples only prove the point: newspapers in a noble battle for the truth? Pharmaceutical companies in a noble battle against disease? No offence, but I think you need some reality checks. Not saying that newspapers don't hit upon the truth occasionally, or that pharmaceuticals don't cure the odd disease. But to quote a physician I once talked to: "I wouldn't be surprised if the cure against HIV is already lying in some drawer and not being published, because it has no benefits for the pharmaceutical companies". Or try reading an actual newspaper (not Hacker News) for a couple of days, then reconsider your opinion. It's very obvious that all they care about is making money, and perhaps they get the odd ego boost out of manipulating public opinion to their whims.

I didn't mean this as a hardcore left wing or whatever paranoid comment (at least I don't consider myself any of those things). Maybe it is just because I am a foreign speaker that "noble" simply doesn't sound right to me. Noble is more than just beneficial in my book, I guess it also involves making sacrifices and stuff.

Again I want to stress that I have nothing whatsoever against people reaping benefits of their work. I just took issue with the label "noble", that's all.

Edit: if you could point me to a newspaper that is really fighting a noble battle for the truth, I would be delighted to hear about it. I might actually start reading it.
>What's wrong? Fr each individual, nothing, but for the country as a whole, this is a quick path to economic disaster. These are exactly the types of skills needed to maintain an economic advantage against large countries such as India and China.

How does female engineering differ from male engineering? Why wouldn't male engineering allow us to maintain an economic advantage over India and China? And why does relative economic prosperity matter? As long as we're all getting better, shouldn't we be happy?
Zoho Writer search bug exposed private documents
After Google calls Facebook’s bluff, Zuckerberg says “let’s see if there’s a way to make it work”
I wonder how Google compares to SAS in job satisfaction? SAS is famously high in employee perks and retention, and is extremely family-friendly.
Twitter as a scalability case study
Fewer ideas, not as much innovation, and more difficulty creating products and services with broad appeal. So long as they're more productive in fields like medicine and epidemiology it may not be a net loss.

Note though that a couple of my friends work for scientists and claim gender discrimination is pretty bad. The picture they described of a scientific research company is nothing like what I've seen in the IT industry for the past 8 years or so.
Girls always have a plan B: get pregnant and stop working altogether. Just ask some random female students whether income perspectives had any bearings on their choice of profession. More often than not, the answer is no (they might not even know what salary they can expect). It would make sense if men thought about that some more (since families need money), so they might tend to pick the more prospective subjects.
I remember they outsourced their development to India to these guys http://www.greymatterindia.com/practices/social-portals-deve...

seems to have paid off
Could you point us to some examples, please? Not saying you are wrong, but the researcher cited in the article didn't convince me. She just said "there are so many factors we can't possibly interpret them", but didn't really give a counter-argument. Sounded more political correctness to me.