skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always wondered about this quote. What, exactly, accounts for the differences here? What is it about that architecture that was so much better than modern architectures?
You clearly have not played Starcraft 2 or (Battlefield: Bad Company 2).

SC2 is such a finely tuned piece of gaming, I spend 30 minutes a day just watching replays at http://youtube.com/hdstarcraft. It beats watching most TV series. It's so good, I bought the game just to support Blizzard, even though I mostly just watch others play.
You are just not the target audience. If Zynga games were not fun to everyone, no one would play them. Just because you do not find them amusing does not make them bad games.

I don't like the My Little Pony games aimed at 6 year old girls, but I won't say they are bad because I know I am not a 6 year old girl.
Equity compensation for consulting/contracting work
What is the best way to structure independent contractor equity compensation and what is an acceptable range?
Yess!!
This mini-history of viaweb is interesting: http://bugbear.com/viaweb.html
The numbering of the classrooms within a building seemed random. For example, Royce 162 is next door to Royce 190. 163-189 don't exist. These rooms were pretty small, so it is unlikely that they would be split into 30 smaller classrooms. Similar story with the 3 massive lecture halls in the chemistry building (Young Hall, but not named after me): CS24, CS50, and CS76. Why weren't these named CS1, CS2, and CS3? But that confusion only lasts a day or two.
Miguel,

How is your team keeping such a fast pace? Do you get a lot of assistance or documentation for Microsoft. Your rate of feature parity with the MS releases is impressive.
Checkout Michael Schacker's book 'A Spring Without Bees.' Though it is a bit one-sided, he makes a compelling case for the pesticide Imidacloprid (IMD) being a significant factor in the honey-bee decline (I don't have it on hand, but I think he cites a study that shows that IMD "intoxicates" bees at as low as 6 ppb).

French beekeepers have been saying it was IMD for years and even though the "official" studies (from Bayer, the manufacturer of IMD) say there is no negative effect on bees.

That said, since the French banned IMD in 1999 (for use on sunflowers and other crops) they've seen a decline in CCD.

I'm a part of a few online beekeeping groups and the general feeling about this NYT article is that yes, probably a fungus + virus is what is killing the bees, but why are they weakened to such a point that it is spreading so disastrously? And here pesticides, migratory stress (i.e. driving them all around the country to pollenate crops), feeding them large amounts of hfcs, and general overwork all seem to play a part in weakening colonies.
you are certainly right for desktops apps (download.com, softonic etc,.. are great sites) However for business software the situation is slightly different if you cannot afford the usual suspects (Oracle, SAP, etc,..) The good thing about those tool bars is that you can add and remove them easily when you don't need anymore. thks for the feedback in any case
From the rules for .IO domains that he links to (emphasis mine):

"No .IO domain may be used, directly or indirectly, for any purpose that is sexual or pornographic or that is against the statutory laws of any Nation"

It's obvious that they don't enforce this as written, but wow... talk about a lawyer's nightmare.
Thomas Limoncelli's book "Time Management for System Administrators" covered how to deal with all your "customers" years ago. There's some google videos of presentations regarding the book material, and its very relavant to this subject. The mutual interruption field, how to deal with users/managers/vp's/etc, how to come off as cool as possible -- it's all in there. I don't agree with this methodologies for keeping time, but the book is still full of gold.
Clojure. I've been a professional Java programmer for 10 years, and in that time I've dabbled in Haskell, OCaml, Python, and Common Lisp, being happiest with Common Lisp but irritated with the lack of standard modern libraries, the usual complaints. My 26 years of professional programming feels like a long journey to Clojure.
It's well-known that Oracle isn't a technology company, but one that uses technology. It's not that their engineers are bad in any way, it's just that that's not a focus of the company as an organization. Instead, technology becomes a background issue (or a hygiene factor, as some economists call it.) It has to work, it has to be good; but it's not what makes the company go - they don't depend on Research and Development to produce a stream of new products. Any new tech they get is bought, via acquisition; and it is followed up only if it is of immediate value to their existing customers. They aren't creating new markets either (though recently they've bought some life sciences companies, which is a big branch out, and might shake up the health care sector in interesting ways.)

Of course, once upon a time, they created the very first commercial relational database, before even IBM (where Codd invented it.) But in the following decades, Oracle didn't keep on developing entirely new technologies.

Sun, IBM and HP all have or had strong engineering traditions (in particular HP used to, though not so much today.) Other examples with strong engineering are Sony, Nintendo, Adobe, TI, Intel and Apple. Another business company, like Oracle, is SAP. It's not intended as an insult, just a description of a company's approach. IBM has certainly moved much closer to that these days, it's almost a consulting company (like the big accounting firms), and its R&D has become very directed towards their client's immediate needs - at least, that's what they said at a presentation a few years ago.

I've read of Mark Reinhold's comments about what's happening with Java now (but not listened to that specific podcast.) He made an interesting point about the JRockit tech (acquired from BEA.) Let me ask you: is it realistic to imagine the new platform architect not saying positive things on this point, given his job and employer? If he thought otherwise, would he be given the job, with its significant Public Relations component (which is what that podcast is, from Oracle's perspective)?

In my view, I'm just stating well-known and accepted facts that I think Oracle itself would agree with. Can you tell me why you don't agree, please? You seem a little angry about it, too. I think it's possible you have misinterpreted me.
"They came first for the vb.ly
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a sex-positive url shortener..."
Developers don't do cover letters
No, they changed it because they had to. They sued the World Wildlife Fund for trademark infringement (they wanted wwf.org), and lost (World Wildlife Fund was older).
Also means more shopping at Hudson News, Auntie Anne's, and Au Bon Pain.

And less missed flights from oversleeping.
Guess what: programming can be done remotely, and clients tend to pay the rates where they are, not where you are. So you can land a job making $150k / yr from a company in NYC or SF, but live in Thailand where you annual expenses are $10k.
If an American wanted to work long term at your company, is there a path to Canadian citizenship?

By the way, do Canadian companies provide health insurance? I keep hearing how good the government health care is in Canada, I'm curious how employers handle that.
I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at least at one point you could scroll down and look at the "solution". I believe before that (and maybe still...) you could just view the cached version of the google result, and see everything. If both of those don't work, get a FF plugin like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/967/ and then modify your request header / user agent to make it seem like you're the google spider. Haven't tried that in a bit, but worked the last time I did. Can't see why it wouldn't now...
I would say it has diverged further from Java than Scala.

Could you please elaborate why do you think so?
(I am just interested to hear some toughts from someone who has experience with all three languages - Java, C# and Scala. I know Java and C#, but I did not yet have time to learn Scala).
The Jewish / Israeli connection is not made in the article. Why? I don't understand how this idiotic behavior was supposed to help the US anyway as Doxer said in http://www.jta.org/news/article/2010/10/07/2741170/jewish-in...
I think the more important questions to compare are the level of service, API development and status, available feature sets, and other such factors like whether you can easily transfer your account information elsewhere if you ever decide to change services. Everything I have read and heard, both in passing and first hand accounts, suggests to me that PayPal is not the route to go for handling payments and recurring billing for established startups. It is, however, a potentially viable option for those interested in simply setting something up quickly without much concern for long term growth and expansion of their own company.
In fact, my experiences (which contrast the article) are what has enabled me to be here and sane. Before, we were fleeting, disorganized, and didn't plan.

Now everything is regimented and organized and "minimalized". That's how we're sane and fairly happy (it feels like the movie Groundhog Day, often. And you really have to focus on marriage time.).

We're finding our experiences to be much more sane than others, when we talk to other multiples parents. They haven't developed a simple life, and a simple set of regiments.
I've only done freelancing on and off yet I've been approached a number of times exactly like this. Client hired someone that would work for cheap and now the project is only half done, poking around for a few minutes reveals a handful of bugs, there was no thought to the design of the code and the code is extremely difficult to understand.
Nice website. I think you should consider making it a widget for the Apple tv, Google tv, yahoo tv,... also meetup.com has movie meetups. You may want to contact some of the leaders about your site.
Programming can take awhile sometimes, especially when you're working without a spec and have to figure out all the details as you go along. Don't expect to be able to crank out new programs every day, unless you want to be cranking out horrible crap, and there's no need for any more of that. Learn C, C++, Java, PHP, Rails (if you want to do a lot of web apps), and Objective-C. Here's a link to a great list of books on a diverse range of subjects, including top programming books in a variety of languages: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755422 Good luck
I think it's unfounded. Perhaps these players were never going to play Assasin's Creed or Halo. Now they have games that they enjoy. The market has just gotten bigger.
I updated this spreadsheet so that the coloured fields can be manipulated to reflect your needs. You need to download it to do this, as if there is a way to allow this on GoogleDocs, I couldn't find it.
If you had the power to remove one thing in your daily job, what would it be?
That's one of the problems though, there are generalizations and data but in reality every case is different. So when you implement something based on statistics you will get people it helps but also get a lot more people who's specific situation doesn't allow them to benefit.
How to Predict Whether a Startup Will Fail or Succeed [audio]
IIRC, wildlife codes in the US have a similar provision. It's against the law in the US to violate wildlife laws of any other country.
So I used to be a game designer in the very hardcore PC MMO world. I now work as a Lead Game Designer at Zynga. You know what? I'm not gloomy in the slightest. If I stayed in the MMO space, I'd be making the same games that I'd been making for the past 10 years, chasing WoW because that's where publishers want to throw their money. Facebook games on the other hand offered a different audience and a different set of rules to design against. It's MORE interesting work, to be honest. The are new and interesting challenges in terms of both gameplay and scale ("raid encounters" for 20? try upping that a few orders of magnitude!)

The whole "Oh god, Zynga is morally and creatively bankrupt" line is at least 6 months old at this point (and for a company that's only 3 years old, that's a pretty long time). Look at the recent acquisitions and releases... FrontierVille was made by Brian Reynolds's team (you know Civ 2, Alpha Centauri, and Rise of Nations, right? Yeah, that Brian Reynolds.) and is by all accounts quite successful. Zynga just bought Bonfire (ex-Ensemble, responsible for Age of Empires and Halo Wars). "Good" (more interesting, fun, higher production values, etc) games are slowly cropping up on Facebook, and more people on getting on board, not just because it's a perceived money train, but because it actually allows you to do something new as a designer.

For the first time in 12 years, my mother understands and enjoys the kinds of games I make. My aunts hassle me to add particular items to my game. Granted, I still haven't figured out a way to tell people what I do without them narrowing their eyes at me... (Previous: "You work on video games, huh? Like Grand Theft Auto, that game is so violent and bad for society!" Now: "You work on FarmVille!? I [love|hate] that game!")

Incidentally, two of the people quoted (Jesse Schell and Daniel James) both make very similar social games on Facebook.
Stunning Designs of Personalized Business And Pocket Folders
Realistically speaking, the designs of both personalized business and pocket folders are eye catching beyond your imagination. That is why online folder printing company offers you cheap folders printing service globally.
A lifestyle without redundancy is a very precarious one. Without redundancy any single failure could turn your day into a nightmare.
Regarding #1, in my experience this isn't a phenomenon limited to middle-aged women. That's pretty much how "normals" use the Internet (as much as I dislike that term). This is what regular people, and quite a few techies, do.
Forage vs Farm Future
And I would argue that an unhappy person is much more likely to be immoral. I know that it's at least true for me.
I don't like McDonalds, but I will say it's unhealthy garbage which beats companies that actually care about food only on the strength of its marketing budget...
Meetings don't write code:

Chit-chat: having everyone in the room wait for two people to talk to eachother about one project.

Not getting in, done and out: Discovering what you are trying to figure out in the meeting rather than before the meeting.

Diving too deep: The minute you start discussing the particulars of implementation then your wasting everyones time.

Going off topic: Don't lose focus of the clear objective of the meeting, going off topic? have the people interested in the other topic meet after the meeting ends.

Going over time: not using an egg timer for your meeting, going over the allotted minutes assigned for the meeting.

Meeting too often: Meetings should be used where other contact methods are inadequate.

Indulging long winded participants: Every group has one, a person who waxes eloquent and loves to hear themselves speak. Use Neo's "stop" arm gesture while saying STOP and say we need to move on/hear from others/not give a lecture. This won't work, so assign this person an egg timer and when they start talking, set it for a certain number of minutes.
Ask HN: Rate my app: Tracku, geolocation sharing app
We have just released a big revision for the app Tracku. It shows participating friends' locations on iPhone, and the ability to share location marks between friends.

It has a free version to try out before you buy the paid version. Any suggestions or feature requests?

Thank you!

The app is at: http://www.trackuapp.com
kudos for hacking wordpress to do this. very clever.
clickable: http://www.trackuapp.com
Thats why I stick to stable technologies and target IE6...

Seriously now, alot of the standard is fairly stable and can be used.
What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily
Okay, I may have gone off at the deep end, for which I apologise. The OP may have been making a good faith observation on the basis on media coverage of this. However, I stand by the fact that "mobile phones are bad for you" is an extremely irritating meme and I'd like to see it die.

As to a temporal correlation, no there isn't. Six years before CCD was observed (2000) there were about 100 million mobile phones in the USA. In 2006, 200 million. Granted that is a large rise, but if I was looking for a correlation, I'd look at 0 to 100 million, not 100 to 200 million.

The reason the popular press includes mobile phone signals as a possible cause, is that a) it's a common meme that people lap up, and b) as you point out, scientists have shown that if you put strong radio signals near hives, bees don't return there. But to me, that doesn't credibly imply CCD is caused by mobile phones.

To look at this another way, Facebook was launched to everyone in 2006. Maybe the bees get distracted by facebook and starve to death? To test this, I put a computer running facebook inside a beehive. The bees stopped going to that hive. QED, facebook caused CCD. That wouldn't be credible, even if I had run the experiment and got that result.

Anyway, you are right, the OP probably did genuinely think this was the explanation, which sucks for science journalism and more generally civil and technological society everywhere.
The guy who founded the company, and with whom I've been working closely for over 5 years, is technical with a design background, but also happens to be a bizdev god. He's in SV (I'm in Portland, along with several of our other employees), and knows a lot of the right people. We do some startup builds, but also a lot of projects that add directly to people's bottom lines - for example, an admissions and course management system for a university, which will contribute directly to them being able to get an accreditation rating they're seeking, and which will return the cost of the work to them (conservatively) at a 10x multiple.

Of course, these aren't lump sum, flat bid projects - they're paying for an agile team over the course of a year or so.
"I’m not going to remember you use a sharded MongoDB infrastructure as your database"

But you're sure as hell going to remember if the site is down for 11 hours.
That clearly seems to me like they will be scrubbing not just IDs but also email addresses of my friends when I download my data.

What do you base this on? "not your friends information, because that is not your information" suggests to me that you cannot download your friends' photos and status updates. That says nothing specifically of your friends' Facebook ids, which (privacy settings permitting) are public to the point of being indexed by Google.

Further, the new social network, a Facebook competitor, would continue to be dependent on Facebook and any future changes to their TOS which they are forever subject to.

Only for future updates. If someone wanted to leave, they could.

What I dislike about your line of reasoning is that it presupposes that nothing has really changed, when the reality seems to be very different. Not only have developers been given access to Facebook data, they are allowed to cache it indefinitely (bound only to the user requesting removal). This is a radical departure from last year.

I feel that it is important for this to be recognized on Hacker News, because this is the community that would most benefit from realizing that the field has changed. The social space has become more open (maybe temporarily) to competition, but this also signals that the incumbent has a strong enough position to allow this. A year or two ago, you might worry that Facebook would prevent you from getting any traction. Now you only have to worry that creating a competing network is so hard that Facebook thinks no one can do it.

If you think that calling attention to factual inaccuracies requires being rude

No, it doesn't. But it does get skin in the game, and at the right time that can be valuable. Also my self-description of rudeness is also an overstatement of a single sentence in my first post in this discussion. I hope that the rest of my commentary has not been viewed as such (maybe curt, but hopefully not rude).

I never implied that people "really want to leave Facebook"

Sorry if that was implied, it was a comment on the zeitgeist of Hacker News and not you specifically.
Thanx - I had not seen that thread.

Looks like I will apply :)
Game developers hate Zynga for the same reason that real comedians hate Dane Cook: Uninspired, unoriginal (borderline theft), and a dilution of the craft.

Sure, you could chalk it up to jealousy of success, but the reality is that there are people out there who are in it for more than money, and sometimes it hurts on a visceral level to see mediocrity succeed wildly.
We use a flash player and 'fall forward' to html5 when flash is unavailable. We do this because most people do have flash installed and this covers about 99% of the use cases. In the case that flash is not available, we fall back to the default html5 player of the browser and currently don't use any custom chrome of our own.
It shouldn't be conspicuous and self-congratulatory

Does writing a blog post about your minimalist lifestyle count?
Here's how I'd look at it: Is the kind of processing you are doing more like the kind of thing you'd do in a text editor (where you need to move around a lot in the source file) or the kind of thing you'd do with "cat" or "tail" (where the last couple of lines is all the context you need).

* SAX is stream based. This is like "cat" or "tail" on a Linux system, there is no history besides what you yourself put together. If you don't need to walk up and down the tree (much) then this is by far more space and time efficient.

* DOM is tree based. This parses the whole document into memory and gives you an API for walking up and down it. If you need to jump around in the document, this may be the way to go, but note that parsing and storing the full document takes time and memory.
South Park did not invent it; it is a real organization.

Try not to think about that too much, though.
I could have worded what I said differently and it would have remained one point.

I guess that in fact proves the point that something can suck and still suck. I guess the problem was that it didn't suck by design.
You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance
Here's the law: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode16/usc_sec_16_0...

"It is unlawful for any person... to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce... any fish or wildlife taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any law or regulation of any State or in violation of any foreign law"

So you're correct, and it's a badly-written law, but I think any reasonable judge would interpret it as being restricted to violations of foreign laws committed on that country's soil or waters. If Elbonia passes a law against stepping on ants, and you squash one on the sidewalk outside your house in the US, I don't think you're in jeopardy from this.

In the case of the .IO domain regulations, a similar interpretation doesn't make any sense. Packets don't go through customs.
How Products Are Made
Do Your Social Networking Privacy Settings Matter If You Get Sued? Yes and no.
Simple to conceptualize and easy to do are not the same things.
Wow. I naturally expected the title of that blog to be tongue-in-cheek.

I was actively avoiding paying to see that movie as I feared it would be another Hollywood over-dramatisation of an actual event but based on the emphasis Scott placed on the quality behind this movie, I may just change my mind!
Competing on Talent Analytics - Useful advice for hiring at your company
Airships: like flying cars, jetpacks and hydrogen fusion reactors, they're always Just 10 Years Away! And They're So Gee Whiz I can hardly Stand It.