skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's less of a performance thing than a toolchain thing. Especially for 3D games. Right now most libraries are written in c++ so you either develop your own set of libraries or you go with the flow.

There are some chances that this will change in the future:

One is that web-games and games for mobile phones are already written in other languages and maybe the tools from there find their way back into the rest of the game industry. That's probably the best chance for Java. Probably also for Javascript and Flash.

Another is that games use already more and more scriptlanguages on top of C++. And that's a trend that will most likely further increase so C++ get's replaced from the top. Python and LUA are used here a lot.

And a change could also arrives from the bottom up. Smaller games are done in other languages all the time. If those games start growing - and even more important - get done faster, or are bigger than the c++ counterparts then they can eat into the c++ market from below. C# seems to be a big candidate for a language coming from that direction.

The hardware could enforce some change. Most likely concurrent programming will influence the gameindustry as much as it will influence the rest of the programming world within the next decade. Thought I see some chance that c++ might even survive that. Erlang is probably too esoteric for this industry (even though I heard already a few people using it for game servers). And so far I don't know of another language offering there enough features to really lure game developers to switch. Maybe D has some chance, or maybe a new language creeps up.

But certainly there's still the point that c++ is proven to work even for large game projects. You can discuss how good or bad it works, but so far there's simply not many examples for large games done in other languages, so the "too risky" is still a valid point.
The core engine will most certainly be written in C/C++ for the next 10 years.

A ton of gameplay gets pushed out to Lua and a lot of the UI gets pushed out to ActionScript. Tools are mostly written in C#.

But really, all game programmers need a fundamental understanding how the platform and architecture works all the way down to the nuts and bolts.
> I can name at least a half-dozen foreign doctoral students and post-docs, whom I know personally, who are/were on NIH and NSF funding

Those grants are research-based, so NIH and NSF are paying them in exchange of research work. In your argument, you sound like they are giving money to foreigners who get the money, say good bye and run away with a degree.
Sounds like a brilliant Scheme to me.
this was back in 2006, how much as changed?
The Tiger effect on internet traffic
“You want to really lower crime? Carl began.
Let cops enforce the rules. The whole way.
You ask any cop on the street and he’ll tell
you that he would love to dish out the punishment,
on the spot

Unification of judical and executive branches?

They have a name for that sort of things - it's called Fascism. It was tried before and while they meant well the results were horrific.
Nothing wrong, it's a matter of taste. To me there are two kinds of code: "worker code" that does actual work, and "managerial code" that passes the buck. Lots of managerial code, deep call stacks, short extracted methods that are used only once etc. are heavy smells to me.

Not saying this is the case with the reddit codebase!
> That’s such an unrealistic timeline for a bootstrapped company it’s not even funny.

thanks for this section
You're a head of the class!
Please point out where exactly I am complaining.

And not everyone knows who this Yegge person is, much else keeps track about his writing habbits.
Damnit people, as the quantity supplied goes down, the price goes up, which encourages production. You have two kinds of production: Internal and external. Internal means: People entering the labor market through various means. External means: Immigration.

Unlike importing products from China, importing people comes with various externalities. Here's a recent example of what you can get:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7461099.stm

or, by contrast:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2001/01/05/kuala.2.t.php

...unending political nightmares.
Google has different cost structure, most companies pay a lot more for programmers' time than they would pay for hosting an app. Developing in web frameworks like rails and django is 5-10x more effective and is totally worth time switching. Also you can host rails app on java app servers today with jruby.
Interesting article and perhaps more interesting comments after it.

I wanted to add one point. The focus of the article is on the utility using Ockham's Razor for finding correct (or predictive) models of the world. A second reason to use Ockham's Razor is that simpler theories can have more utility because they are easier to use and understand. Often a simpler theory can be more useful even if it is less correct.
China's Microsoft probe: Lies, hypocrisy, and strongarm tactics
"“Scrabulous is not work, and it does not enable you to be an effective professional,” he said."

That made me laugh -- very true, and why Fbook will have time selling the same demographic that LinkedIn is monetizing.
Randy Pausch to CMU Graduates: A Great Short Speech
"Every time we take a programmer downtown for writing buggy code, nothing happens. So now, instead, we just post their source on hacker news for everyone to laugh at. They really hate that."

(Sorry, just trying to preempt the inevitable "not hacker news" comment.)
Bruce Eckel's _Thinking in Java_ (available free online, just as are his C++, Design Patterns and .NET books) is excellent, combined with just API references.
A few things to remember when programming java:

1) It's not pass-by-reference. Java is pass-by-value, but it is passing pointer values, not variable values. This sometimes behaves like pass-by-reference but if pass a from foo() to bar() and call new on a inside bar, a will get it's old value once bar() returns to foo().

2) Eclipse has a tremendously useful debugger and, as an emacs guy, I can vouch for Eclipse being well worth learning. You can change code in running programs, but beware it reruns whatever method you're in. Sometimes (possibly all times) without resetting values changed in that method.

3) Use interfaces when you can. Map instead of HashMap, etc.

4) Leverage the classpath for testing bugfixes easily. Create a jar with your fixed class, put it in front in the classpath. Keeps things simple and let's you build upon anything you shipped to a client.

5) If you have to use RMI, understand why readExternal() must reflect the order of things from writeExternal() and how this can break easily. This specific case may not be useful to you right now, but it will help you understand what RMI, and serialization in general, is actually doing.

I'm sure there are other good lessons but it's been a while since I worked with someone new to java.
It's not a diagnosis. It's basically a search engine where the queries are DNA and the results are a summary of the academic literature related to specific sequences. If these tests should be outlawed, then so should any site that allows you to enter in symptoms to see what might be wrong with you.
The Hype Worked: Firefox 3 Downloaded 8.3 Million Times In First 24 Hours
Ask YC: The MySpace Redesign
I just don't feel much of a change in experience here. You look at the userpage themes, the new front-page, and really, what's new? Take a step back and I see overuse of the gradient, a bigger ad area, and that's really about it.

What are your thoughts? Combined with just not feeling excited about this (which even if I hate the company, I'm always hoping to be thrilled about a change in design and new user experiences), and seeing lazy execution, I call "failboat" on this.
The question is where are the real time satellite images to see if they are empty for skating in?
Codemasters founders honored by Queen of England
>However, I cannot name any other instances or derivatives of the code which are active

In Spain we have http://barrapunto.com much smaller but also using slashcode. IIRC there are also two more instances, one of them in Portugal.

Barrapunto added its own features for a long time, but they weren't incorporated to main branch, and after serious scalability and trolling problems arose, they reverted to regular slashcode.
Verizon Taking FIOS to 50 Mbps
This reminds me, after I put my pond in my first purchase should be a paintball gun. I stay up really late too.
I'd love to hear what the xobni folks think.
Google Working on Dynamic Runtime?
It is less cluttered than last.fm, but is that all it brings? I don't see the value-add above the current options.
When I first read your comment I thought you were describing Aspect Java....
> a glorified CMS

Much of the web is a glorified CMS, indexed by Google.

If your businesses produces value through human generated content[1], you should share your code to push down the cost of technology, undermining the market for people trying to sell similar but potentially innovative software to your competitors.

[1] as opposed to computer generated content, such as online catalogues or search indices.
Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District is also good.

http://www.amazon.com/Cop-Hood-Policing-Baltimores-District/...
This post has so much wisdom in it, I don't know where to start. So instead, I'll just cite one thing:

So I’m now left with a good number of people who’d give me money if I had something… and I don’t!

Bingo! He hits the nail right on the head. There is a certain "binaryness" to a software business (MBAs and vaporware aside). Either you have it or you don't. Period.

Beware spending time on anything besides hacking. Sure, there are a lot of other things to do, but in the long run, all the prospects in the world mean little without a product.
The announced at Google IO that they have written their own Java VM for use by Android. It would not surprise me if the VM turned out to be more general purpose and Java just happened to be their first supported language.
Live.com is hardly the IE of search.
6,000 virtual reality panoramas.
Great post. Content like this is why I love news.yc.
If your market was thought to be niche or relatively inconsequential, I think it's pretty fair to say the entrance of a major player validates your hypothesis that it was a big deal. You're only screwed if you can't out-execute them.

This seems like a lot of unnecessary laboring over a cliche coupled with some examples of big companies beating smaller companies.
I think some of the suggestions around namespacing methods would also help, and would help in a very clean fashion. But as long as extending core classes happens in a single global namespace, there are going to be problems.

Although it wasn't mentioned in this particular post, the problem is acute for people using extensions for their own third-party libraries. If you install gem foo, and it uses something with "stupid method names for Object extensions," your code is now infected with stupid method names for Object extensions.

What happens if you use gems foo and bar and they conflict with each other? Even though you went out of your way to eschew Object extensions, the authors of gems foo and bar may not have been so hygienic.

My hope is that some mechanism for avoiding this problem becomes popular. This may not be it, but crossing yourself and hoping nobody else uses your method names or conflicts with each other does not scale very well.
Congrats on the work you've done, I like the design. A few notes...

-In the "recently played tracks" box, don't show tracks that can't be played full-length.

-Don't put the time it was played for now... I don't see any upside to counter the hit you'll take in perceived value from the half-hour gap between tracks being played.

-I don't really know what's going to happen when I click the "get started" link... how about some explanatory front-page text like "1. download snuzu 2. listen to music and snuzu shares it with your friends 3. snuzu tells you what your friends are listening to." That's rough, but the point is, I'm not going to install this unless I know what it is.
> How do they expect their code to be deployed when it requires a hacker to set it up?

I think their plan to remind people in hacker communities who are bored with Ron Paul stories that they still exist, rather than create competitors. Though that might be a straw man.

Also, if you want to manage programers, it would be worth your while to read the Mythical Man Month. Right in the first chapter, it explains why it is harder to produce software that runs on other people's hardware (software as a product) than it is to make it run on your hardware (in-house software). That certainly applies here.
The Case for Building Wireframes
How have you gathered the rights to the songs you play?
This has absolutely, completely nothing whatsoever to do with hacker news.
Yeah, as the two previous posts from filipe and cconstantine point out, we're talking about net contribution.

This is why I mentioned the MBA, Law, Medicine, and Undergrad degrees as something apart from Ph.D programs in science and/or engineering. Since most people experience college as an undergrad, or maybe as a professional student, they think of a degree program as a situation where you get an education in exchange for money. So scholarships and stipends are a privilege, maybe even a kind of gift.

PhD programs are completely different. Universities use grad students to provide labor that at a fraction of the market rate - maybe 10%-20%.

By the way, it doesn't bother me that a person would be willing to apprentice to a professor in order to get a PhD and experience. That's the student's decision. But it irritates me enormously when I see a visa or green card used to force the worker to accept employment at severely below market rates.

The first is choice, the second is government sponsored indentured servitude, an egregious violation of everything I believe is good about free markets, democracy, and at-will employment (this is no exaggeration, I really do think when an employer controls the employee's right to reside in the US and hopes for getting a green card, it severely undermines personal freedom in a way that has no place in a capitalist democracy).
Monroeville, next to the 376 near Pittsburgh huh? Yeah, I digitally stalked you on Google Maps:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Latitude%3A%2040.441333%20Long...
Powerset Unveils iPhone-Optimized Wikipedia Search
You can do a lot of useful performance analysis with only a profiler and trial-and-error. Also sometimes mathematics seems to help.
Yeah, that seems fishy to me too. Altough i can see an argument about how the high salary is needed to compensate for the lack of job stability.
They were re-examined. Remember Lorentz and his transformations?
Ummm... isn't Apple the original nemesis of Microsoft?
Tim Sweeney (Epic/UnrealEngine) did a great presentation a while ago about what his ideal game engine programming language would be like.

http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/doc... (PDF)

It's almost a cry for help, but he explains why they're not using e.g. Haskell.
It doesn't offer much over last.fm except that it finds full length songs. You might be able to get some traction if you offered a widget people could place on their blogs, myspace, facebook, etc.. What music search engine are you using? Seepod?
Clean design, not sure if the idea is new but if not, there’s potential to upgrade existing stuff.

Good job!
In the case of your example, if you truly have a label that resides beside an input box that could hypothetically be as long as a sentence... then you've done more wrong in your content structuring, than you have with your code. :)

As far as your column example is concerned, you made two content areas dependent on each other when that relationship may change overtime too, however with tables... you must recode the entire site structure to adapt to that.
I've made the mistake of taking on work that competes with the startup. It has hurt. People have segued from the "day job" to the dream job but it's likely much easier to do it all at once. PG understands that and funds startups to do nothing but work for at least 3 months.
I’m not sure how good an idea of a Wikipedia search is. It certainly cost too much to get there for Powerset.

Also they should not call themselves search engine in respect to all those working hard every day to bring a real challenge to Google and improve the overall search engine project.
How about if you're having a poll to decide where to go for dinner? There's times when it could be necessary.
very nice. I know your using the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER on the bottom there.

The only suggestion I have would be: when I click play within the list, switch the play button to pause or stop icon. I don't know if you can send a stop request to the player. Also, i do realize that if you play one song, then play another it switches nicely.

Otherwise, very cool. good luck and be careful with the licensing.
Hey, that's me!
So some of the lawyers I talked to said were leery of LLC's because they weren't proven in court as corporations are. So what are they going to think of virtual corps? This is really interesting stuff though.
Japan Makes Robot Girlfriend For Lonely Men
Right. You just won a free beer at the Penn Monroe.
It sure is - you must be spending much less time in grocery store queues ;)
There is, in fact, an embeddable HTML widget for blogs/websites as well as a full-fledged Facebook application.

Yes song results are from Seeqpod.
We can hope. Maybe the thought of this will make ISPs reconsider metered hosting.
Can't agree more with huhtenberg.
Where have you been? Java is SO 20th century for web development!
Am I the only person who thinks this shit should be sent back to reddit where it belongs?
I have been having problems with my paid Yahoo account for months now. Can't search my own email. I call support, they reset the settings, it's fixed for a day or two, then it breaks... hit repeat. And all these new error codes. When did Yahoo mail ever need an error code?! Garbage!
Thanks for the input. I've just implemented your first suggestion and will work on the other two when I get a chance.
What do you want?
I truly agree that a business is only successful if it builds something that people might want or addresses a problem that people have.

So, what is it that you want? I am interested to hear about all the (plausible) ideas floating out there.
Hrmph. The article starts out with this weird meta-argument about degree programs and accreditation (not enough game developers because there's no standard curriculum? Please...) which makes not sense to me. And finally it gets to the meat of the argument which seems to be:

"The games developers say that they are struggling to find in the UK the kind of high-powered mathematicians and computer scientists that they need to build increasingly sophisticated products."

Get in line, folks. News flash: 3D graphics programming is hard, and can't be done by typical IT employees. If you want these rare people to work for you, how about offering higher salaries than your competitors? Understood in this context, what the bit about degree programs and accreditation really means is: we can't find enough smart kids willing to work for cheap any more. Cry me a river.
FTA:

"The death of maths, physics and computer science graduates is hitting us hard."

Graduates are dying?! Bogus! OOOhhh you meant to use dearth.
No, that's a canard. Whatever your particular religion is about language choice, anyone capable of doing 3D programming is more than talented enough to be able to be productive in C++, irrespective of what they were taught in school. The problem is that modern game engine development is hard. People who solve hard problems for a living are expensive, and the games industry isn't used to paying that kind of salary.
The content of Ockham's Razor is "don't make stuff up for no reason".

If it's dull then you're doing it wrong.
Weirdly, they've refused to consider moving their source to github (1) citing that they want to "stay in control of their code." So for now their code is stuck with very weak community interaction. Even gitorious would have been a better choice than trac.

It's disappointing and puzzling.

1. http://groups.google.com/group/reddit-dev/browse_thread/thre...
It's a fair point, and I really don't have much to say other than this: If and when snuzu hits a critical mass of data influx, I have some statistical tricks up my sleeve to go above and beyond what Last.FM, iLike or any other site offers in the way of recommendations or charts.

Of course this is probably not reason enough for you to invest time and energy into snuzu at this stage if you're already married to other music sites. But given what I have to work with now (i.e. statistically insignificant amounts of data) what features would make snuzu an attractive alternative to Last.FM for you?
Embracing Encapsulation [high-level vs. low-level programming]
No, I said that the US is paying graduate students, and that if we're investing in them, we ought to encourage them to stay.
I would argue that anyone who becomes a cop in a major inner-city would eventually resort to similar tactics to deal with the overwhelming volume of criminal activity.
Cops want to be powertripping assholes who aren't subject to any oversight? No way!
Unfortunately, it looks like the ars forums are down. Anybody happen to have a copy? These comments have piqued my curiosity.
oh i didn't mean anything negative either. it was just ... the logical conclusion.

unlike you, i have no interest in your profile.
its cleaner. thats about it.
11. Put ugly little text ads everywhere.
The could also find a fax machine or a telegraph. It's not the user's job to jump through hoops -- stopping the service shouldn't be harder than starting it.
That's his point, but it's an irrelevant one to my argument.

The gains we get from paying for research are hypothetical. Research is an investment. Nobody expects it to turn an immediate profit, or even generate a revenue of any significance -- which is great, because it usually doesn't, and most academic research isn't commercially viable anyway.

When we pay for foreign students to earn advanced degrees, only to kick them out of the country once they've graduated, we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. Why are people having such a difficult time understanding this?
I have to remember to never to work on any project with "Ars" in the name. It seems they'll always end in tears.
This also:

http://www.infoq.com/books/starting-struts2
Why should they not adjust the interest rates? If they state clearly that they want to fight inflation - nobody will be surprised and no trust will be lost.
Big idea looking for people to help it grow
I'll keep it short. VC Cafe is the leading blog for Israeli startup news. I'm looking for talented bloggers that can help blow it out of the water to compete with the big guys...
If you fit the description or know of someone who would, please contact through the site.
ah, reading comprehension... I can has some?

You are more correct than I am :)
I don't understand how Ars selling to Conde Nast would change whether you have the rights to the publishing system.
Oh the days of Treasure Island Dizzy.