skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Portal team was scooped up from Digipen. If their game was netting them over $200k/day, something tells me they wouldn't have been so eager to join Valve.

Hey I f'ing love Valve, my all time favorite game company. No one is trying to suggest working for Valve is a bad thing. But a little perspective is needed here.
"unless he can somehow sustain his current income indefinitely"

If he sustains it for 2 weeks he's pretty much set for life.
Here's an approach I've always wanted to try, but never had the opportunity:

If the apartment is currently occupied, write a brief informal note telling the tenant you're considering their apartment and would they send you a brief honest review of how their time there has been. Include a SASE & an email address. Address it by hand to Current Resident, and drop it in a mailbox. You could even include a $5 gift card to starbucks or something. Seems you would have a pretty good chance at a thoughtful response & it's a lot less invasive than just going up and knocking on their door.
Any such thing available for electrical majors, you know something that would at least cover the things like complex algebra and equations? Or things that would be required by electronics engineers?

Sorry if the question sounds so naive, but can't help it (various reasons).
I don't feel sorry for them, they are talented engineers, that means they could work for any company on any project they want. They chose to work on IE for MS.
I'd be in seventh heaven if I was making $2k/day on my own games.
Tell HN: Angel office hours on Formspring
..ish!
Soylent: A Word Processor With A Crowd Inside
I enjoy not having to mentally catalog any dates on my messages. "email from Fred last Friday, or the one from a little earlier that day, or was it maybe the day before" is far closer to my mental time map if I were to try and catalog that day. I remember topics way more than I remember dates, and most people are similar. "from:fred feature timeline" is going to be a FAR faster search than would paging through screens of email. Most 'knowledge workers' process 150 emails a day, on average. Expending any effort to track that seems silly to me.

Also, simply doing "from:Fred" will list, in the results thread, the date of the message from Fred, even if activity has happened in the thread since then. It _also_ has the benefit of, once clicked on, letting you see that Sue followed up an hour ago to mention she took care of the issue. Going through e-mail chronologically, who knows how much time you could have spent on that before you reached the "all taken care of" message?
For what it’s worth, in the summarizer guy’s words, http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb...

“I agree that there is an element of satire, but I feel the humor makes it a bit more readable, and I don't think it detracts from the quality of the summary. However, if you can provide a better translation to some of those responses, I'd be happy to edit them in.”
No, neither of these is what people have asked for over and over..

This is actually one of the banal examples of Django's broken process. For an interesting read on it all, check out this thread. No fundamental downsides given, yet it languishes forever more.

http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...;
Then your company needs to fire their tech team en masse and hire some up-to-date techies.
There is no data backing up the claims and stereotypes in this article.
To be fair, they've been saying IE9 requires D2D, which provides both hardware and software rendering. All he's saying here is that you can ask IE9 to use D2D's software rendering if your VM is having problems with hardware rendering. This is not the same as admitting they don't really need D2D.
Great! I've been looking forward to someone doing exactly this.

As for your website:

1. Lose the top bar. You have to know your market; every single restaurant I work with is run by people that don't use Twitter, Facebook, etc., they don't know what those icons are, and it doesn't help them. You could move "Blog" down to your tabs, de-duplicate the "Contact Us", and shift your entire page up a bit, cleaning it up in the process.

2. Likewise, I'm the I.T. guy for these restaurants, so I'm also part of your market. I'm more likely to hear about your product before the restaurant does, and I'll evaluate it on their behalf. If I think it could work for them, I'll pitch it to them. But, I hate "Register for a free trial". All I need is a product tour. Screenshots and reasonably explanatory text works just fine. Video is nice too, but I would tend to look at screenshots+text first if both are available.

3. Please please please post a price. Do not ask me to contact your for a quote. That tells me that you intend to charge unfairly. I don't want to have to haggle with you. And, if I'm going to pitch your product to my clients, I want to be able to tell them what it's going to cost them. They're busy people. They're trying to manage a restaurant. They don't want their tech guy coming by and saying, "I think I might have found a great replacement system for your restaurant's point of sale, but we're going to have to waste some time together because I have no idea what it costs."

4. Restaurants are very sensitive about being distinctive, especially the ones that are most likely to purchase a handful of iPads to run a system like this. (And I know a couple of those.) Is your menu customizable? Can they add pictures? Custom fonts?

5. And, the big granddaddy question of all: they've invested a ton of money in their current POS, and they hate it. How much work will it take for them to move away from it? Can they use their line printers? Do they have to re-enter their entire menu by hand?

6. How do you expect iPads to hold up to grease, spills, and other foodstuffs? What about being dropped?

Thanks for the great work so far.
Colors are more complex, though: people notice that the color changes and so they understand that something else is going on (something they should know about, presumably!), but don't necessarily know what it is. It causes anxiety to have a device indicating something to the user when the user doesn't know what it is that it's trying to tell them.

Which is not to say that using color would necessarily be a bad idea in this case, but it wouldn't be entirely "free".
See also Bruce Sterling's take on it (with a video of it in action): http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/09/soylent-a-wor...
I believe the hot issue is truncating by characters. the slice template tag doesn't quite get the job done because it will not intelligently add elipsis
And if the subcontractor does crappy work, the client will think you did a crappy job.

I would think that if the subcontractor was good enough not to do bad work, he/she would also not want to do IE6 compatibility work.
When you're eminent in your field those sorts of things may become negotiable.
So when will the government require them to conform to banking regulations?

They've been lucky to dodge the banking regulations so far, but with the ability to cash checks it seems that PayPal could actually be used as an alternative to a bank account.
While I'll believe that there are some things that you can do easily in WMP, but not in iTunes, I don't know what they are, and was really looking for examples with my previous question. The idioms, like I said, I'll give you. I remember the confusion of the preferences shortcut key combo. But having moved from WMP to iTunes, I don't remember missing anything terribly from WMP.
Agreed, and I'll go a step further: people just want to voice their opinions. Just look at Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or your local paper's "letters to the editor" section.
To protect against marauders ;)
I agree that it would be nice to be able to "fork" a conversation easily. Just as an FYI: you can "star" individual e-mails (instead of threads), and when you click that subject, it expands only your starred message. I've found this solves the "only need one" problem for me, while still preserving context, should I need it.
They certainly are obsolete. I'm nearly 40 and I managed to send no more than 2 faxes in my whole professional life. I don't seem to having done it once in the past 8 years.
Looking back at the Infocom era: a review of Get Lamp
>turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

Thank God. Not that they haven't been successful, but I really want this to stay entirely in Notch's control, as that's precisely why it's succeeding.
Best Cydia Apps: xGPS Latest Features | InfoMov.Com
Future Electric Cars May Be Made Entirely Of Batteries
I'm not sure. But your website does not really tell me what exactly the product does.

A video tour (or a working flash example) would show me in more concrete terms what it does/what it looks like.
1.4-Gigapixel Telescope Spots Its First Dangerous Asteroid, Heading Toward Earth
http://shop.subway.com/substore/substore/tabid/38/entityname...

I guess when your url looks like that, it's not that much of a surprise to have that much view state.

(edit: Just noticed it looks like that is DNN)
Linux Kernel Tuning for C500k
Dwarf Fortress is at approximately $2k ~ 3k per month, not per day. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)
How Spiders Took Over the Sky
Cool slides. I definitely enjoyed reading those. The fact that I heard about Dropbox exactly how he explained made it that much better.
News startup Ongo gets $12M from publishers
> This is not the same as admitting they don't really need D2D.

It is admitting they don't need hardware acceleration, which is what they advertise.
Insightful. Point taken.
oh boy... 1) I started feeling bad way before hitting on the source... 2) the switch for Go To Country is brilliant!
Ask HN: obfuscated link vs. username/password?
In building a couple simple web apps, I'm considering using an obfuscated link:
http://domain.com/8498j9f43498j9f43o8jeo8je9jfe
that members can bookmark, rather than require a username and password every time.

Terrible idea? What are the risks if the url is long and random enough?
Tell HN: Buxfer(YC07) is dead!
This may be a good thing ultimately, but if there was a gaming company I'd consider working for, it'd likely be Valve. They seem very community focused, and I imagine they'd give this guy the freedom to run the game how he likes, considering its his 'baby'. Plus, they'd give him some risk-free (to him) resources to build a second game if he needed it, and they probably have way more experience handling multiplayer side stuff that he could benefit from. But this is pure speculation. As it is, him keeping it is probably a good thing for the community.
Not sure if I am understanding this correctly. By bootstrapping, do you mean C does only the most basic syntax parsing, and then a fexl script (written in a basic fexl subset) does the more complete parsing?

All this stuff is really neat. Your C code interface looks quite nice and clean. I hope you release some source code soon.

And thanks for taking the time to write all this. Even though a lot of it is over my head, it's quite interesting. I'm really looking forward to playing around with it a bit and learning.
What has happened? A lot of complains from paying users. This might kill the project. I could not back up my data.

http://getsatisfaction.com/buxfer/topics/is_buxfer_dead
More crying please! Thank you!
What are the risks if the url is long and random enough?

Users wouldn't be able to use public/shared computers without the risk that this URL would be left behind.
That they shouldn't be lumped in with the binary distros driven by release cycles and package freezes — they're the least likely to need an intervention from upstream.
regardless of whether the law is effectively enforced or whether text-messaging is very rarely a factor in accidents, I find it hard to think of any reason why texting-whilst-driving _shouldn't_ be illegal
I use a cell phone exclusively in my personal life. I have cable internet and do not have a land line, which is about how 20% (As of 2009 and growing) of American's are. http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/05/survey-one-in-fi...

So lets go through this list and see just how true it really is....by the way, I usually really like Scott's writing and his points, but this one just doesn't fly with me...

1. True, can be an issue, but this rarely is for me as my carrier has great coverage and most of my friends and family are on said carrier with similar great coverage.

2. Get a better earpiece or headset. There are many on the market and you really do get what you pay for in this arena.

3. Delay problem? Maybe on an international call, but even east coast to west coast I don't have any issues with this.

4. This isn't common to all phones? If you don't want to be bothered, then don't answer right?

5. I'm in a pretty rural area of the country, environmental noise isn't usually a problem and a quiet spot is usually easy to find.

6. Call waiting?

7. Yep, this is legitimate.

8. Better phone? Better carrier? Once again, hardly ever experience a dropped call.

9. Once again, choice on whether to take the call or not. Not the wireless phone's problem. If you want, put it on vibrate and call the person back later.

10. This goes with the noisy environment one. And yes, sometimes my son makes a phone call difficult, but that would be the case if it was a land line as well.

I personally don't see very much validity to this argument. Sorry.
Reviews for lots of online products have bimodal distributions: you get tons of 5-stars and tons of 1-stars.

But that's not the point with this site. As an apartment hunter (probably from another city or state), you have little information on structural problems with the apartment. How can you find out if your 1st-floor apartment floods or lacks concrete foundation? Your realtor or landlord probably won't tell you the truth.

So, instead, you can turn to former tenants. This site isn't a review data aggregator--it's a tool for reaching informational equilibrium.
So many tables, 48 to be precise.
I see... a self-post to brag about your coding skills
I mean something different than regular expressions: I'm talking about how the whole program is structured around "pattern -> action; other pattern -> other action; ...", with special event patterns for BEGIN, END, etc. That pattern-based dispatch is the top level of the language, rather than function definitions. (Those came later.) As the man page says, it's "pattern-directed".

It's a higher-level approach than typical scripting languages, and that's why it can be so concise - the model makes a lot of unpacking and looping implicit. It's a DSL for stream-processing problems which are easy phrased as "count these", "transform this into that", etc.

Are you familiar with Prolog? It uses a similar approach, but can match on whole trees (and other complex, nested data structures), not just a list of $N string/numeric tokens. Also, it supports backtracking - at any point, if it reaches a dead end, it can back up arbitrarily and try a different approach. Sometimes slow, but very handy for prototyping.

I agree that using another language than awk makes sense after a few lines, but it's still a sweet spot for 1-5ish line programs. Since awk itself is small enough that a two page cheat sheet is sufficient, it's worth keeping around. Perl (for example) has many nooks and crannies I forget about if I don't use it frequently.
This would be very useful as a Wordpress plugin.
I don't sync bookmarks and rarely use them; so take multiple computers/devices and I wouldn't be using your service very easily
Entirely agree. But "good for the community" = "good for me" :)

And, given his success, he's likely near-guaranteed a job at high-profile companies for life if he ever wants one. No reason to jump now.
A lot more than 17 front-end web developers use Linux.

Not that I disagree with your broader point.
I thought this article would be about internet explorer 6.
Given that we've had web browsers since 1992, and that they've only recently started supporting hardware acceleration, that doesn't seem like something that needs to be "admitted". They advertise it because when and if it works for you, it is a feature.

I'm not pro-MS here, I promise. But they suck hard enough on real issues that it's stupid to go after them for pretend ones. If you're going to slag them on this, slag them for deciding to depend on a Vista+ api. Don't pretend they're accidentally revealing their own lies when they aren't.
If you have a law that does absolutely no good, why should it exist? The politicians should have to excuse their impositions upon us, we should not have to excuse our private behavior.
These tend to be the same folks who deny that it's broken, leading to piles and piles of steaming code that make adding new features and fixing problems exceedingly difficult. They routinely turn simple, six-week projects into six-month death march projects.
Unfortunately this research isn't visible in your rant, and it's not about factual errors. I didn't notice any effort to understand the situation better, for example by speaking with people involved (like the developer in question). But even if you did that, it looks like you intentionally avoided presenting the other point of view, instead of that you assumed upfront that the only reason is pure evilness. This is simply not a very convincing argument.

If you posted this at oppugn.us I wouldn't say a word, but I assumed that sheddingbikes.com is a place for more polished stuff.

PS. Debian is a loosely coupled group of more or less skilled volunteers with very little oversight and no business motivation. Debian has its flaws, but I see nothing in common with Microsoft.
Map based passwords
Thats what i can't life with.

I like to enjoy doing things i want to. Mostly.

But money will never get me to do things that are awful to me.

It's just not feeling right and money really isn't worth it.

Try to enjoy your life without a lot of money, i think it's really possible and even better in the end.
That's 10 times as many tables as the average Subway restaurant has!
Those arguments can be used to put off adopting any technical advance. While it may be wise not to follow a policy of early adoption, eventually there's a tipping point that will force one to embrace the present. The disadvantages of protecting IE6 will soon outweigh any advantage of using it. Hopefully, the UK government will be lucky when it pins itself to the next platform.
On a similar note, Minecraft is written in...

get this

...

Java

Which seems to be the dorkiest and most uncool language on the planet if you were to ask HN.
I assume you have seen this:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/buxfers-founders-both-work-...

PS. You might get a better response if you retitle your post "Ask HN: is buxfer (YC07) dead?"
I've never liked southwest, I flew with them once, and it was generally a bad experience. On the other hand I have always LOVED Air Tran. $50 upgrade to business class, with wifi, and free xm radio. This combination made for one great flight. Loosing that, looses me.
Midtown Manhattan may have capacity problems, too many callers and not enough towers. But dropping calls in Queens at 7 AM, now that is too much (no iPhone, I might add, but good old Nokia, that has seen its first dropped call there. But yes, roaming in AT&T network).
As long as <10 airports satisfies your domestic needs, more power to you ;)
So when you talk about the ideas posted to these sites are they the type of ideas that would fall under trading or are they more of the idea that would fall under core concepts for a fund? Like anyone who hangs around HN I've got ideas for companies but I've also got ideas involving frameworks for the start-up industry much like a VC, neither of which are trades. Is this the kind of site to bounce off conceptual ideas?
You said it better than I did. A Catholic priest, who has credible authority talking in detail, would have been better.

If you go in front of a crowd who is outraged by the actions of the organisation you're representing, do expect difficult questions.
Of course, you're adapting your behaviour to the the metric by which you're assessed.

Any rational person can determine that the metric is the wrong one.

Except it isn't because the stated goal is to pass as many students as possible. Probably because that is how the rewards up the chain are determined, and because there are school league tables whereby the further up the table you sit the more funding you receive. Or something like that.

Extrapolating your current course of action will result in you simply passing all students simply for signing up for the course. No need to attend. No need for the course. Job done.

When setting metrics it is critical to ensure that they provoke the wanted behaviour. In reality, they very rarely do. Determining people's behaviour is trickier than it looks.

For a good alternative, take a look at John Seddon's work and his System Thinking ideas.
Good news: Indie developers can still get rich doing what they love.

Bad news: You will probably not be one of them.

;-)
You have two distinct directions here, though: World of Warcraft's gameplay is rather complex (compare the image of WoW with this image from Minecraft: http://imgur.com/lQdye.png), is about killing monsters and obtaining the best equipment, showing off how much time you're able to spend in-game. I think showing your personality to others is really hard in WoW, at least without talking to them.

Minecraft, on the other side, is about you, your personality and creativity. You're able to modify the game as you like: First off all, you're making your own world! Second, texture packs are available, in order to change both the world and your own character. By making the game less complex, it is also very easy to get into, compared to WoW.

(I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but I'm no professional game developer.)
What do you mean health care? Look again where he's living.
A livescribe pen?
When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed
Ow, ow, those sharp edges of those tables!
I'd phrase it slightly differently, if you want a one sentence response. Which is "Standards are important and we believe that multiple browsers and rendering engines are necessary for improved standards compliance across the board."
Hardware Upgrades for Developers
"Google seems under-rewarded." Google's growth was anticipated more and the and factored into the stock price (at the start of the five years) to a greater degree than was for Apple.
Maybe people are holding the phone lower while they text to hide it. So their eyes are farther off the road.
He's already sustained at least $250k/d for two weeks. These numbers are 100k bigger than the last ones I saw a few weeks ago.

Pretty sure he could BUY Valve at this point. :p
In all fairness, the site featured is BADnycapartments - so the sole purpose of the site is to catalog and displayed data skewed in the favor of negative experiences.
There is more value in having a large quantity of money at once then that same quantity over time. If he is smart with the money, I would say he (and his children) are set for life.
Santa Barbara startup Social Intelligence brings 'Pre-crime' to the HR dept.
Five dollar... Five dollar... Five dollar foo....web designer!
Thanks about the post retitle. Although i did not expect they shut the page off.
My metric for discovering if a place is bad on Craigslist is number of posts. If a place has been posted more than twice it's almost guaranteed to have something wrong with it.