skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I played Elite a lot on the Commodore 64 back in the day. Great game but at some point it was a little too directionless.

If anyone in the modern gaming era has captured that (semi-)open game play it's Rockstar with its Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series (and also Red Dead Redemption, which is just a mouthful).

My particular favourite type of game is turn-based strategy. I spent hundreds of hours playing the original Civ (not so much 2 or 3 but an awful lot of 4 due to the Fall From Heaven 2 mod and almost none of 5). Heroes of Might and Magic was another big one.

Frankly RTSs annoy me as they descend into "how fast you can click". I realize there's skill there but it's just not for me.

Anyway, it's easy to lambaste the game industry with it's cookie-cutter FPSs/RTSs and the samey console titles (although I for one don't share the same nostalgia for old NES/arcade/Atari games that some fervent zealots do).

But the fact is, it's never been more possible to write indie games than it is right now. Successes like Minecraft should tell you that you don't need a big studio $30 million budget for art. Nor do you need the latest, greatest 3D engine. Mobile gaming has a plethora of smaller developers.

I, for one, would dearly love to see an Elite-style game but no one has made one (worth talking about), be it single-player or an MMO. Yes there's Eve Online but, for me at least, it falls short. It's aimed at the raiding crowd really.

But think about it: how amazing could Elite be as a game you play on your iPad?
I started at Secondary school in '78 and there was at least one dial up terminal that was used by a few older kids - this was probably connected to a mainframe/mini somewhere.

By my later years at school (from '80) onward we had ZX-80s, ZX-81s and a couple of Apple IIs.
How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?
congratulation on your first sale. few years back i as one of you :)
I'm seeing a lot of sites now with a landing page that requires immediate registration or facebook connection to do anything. Are people seeing this as a successful way to get people registered, is it because there's not much to see other wise so they want you to register first?

Just seems like a terrible way to encourage registration, by making you "pay" in the form of a registration before really hooking you in.

I could be wrong, though. Would love to hear if other people have good or bad experiences with this type of flow.
A paywall will never really work, only way to make it work is a lot of short term hurt by a heap of news sites. Makes a lot more sense to be the ones working out how to make the best return on advertising then worry about a paywall if other sites have already done the hard work in turning public opinion and removing enough free sources.
Isn't there any standardized SQL benchmarks? I remember one open-source.

edit: http://sourceforge.net/projects/osdb/
I'll just pay the subscription. Their content is exceptional.
Langham Palace Hotel : The luxury hotels of London city 
The Langham, London is one of the largest & stylest grand hotels in London. The reconfigured Langham now has 380 rooms available.The Langham Hotel in London is a 5 star luxury hotel located on Portland Place.Traditional English afternoon tea is served in the Palm Court Lounge. A staffed business centre is equipped with high speed Internet access and offers office services.This luxury London hotel is in the fashionable heart of the city, located on Regent Street and just moments from Bond Street and Oxford Street. Heads of state, celebrities and tycoons have made The Langham their choice among London luxury hotels since 1865.There are six private treatment rooms including a Couples Spa Suite, relaxation area, vitality pool, steam room, sauna, mosaic-lined swimming pool and salt cave.
You're right, and that makes sense from a client services standpoint. But it's totally unacceptable for a news organization.

And maybe I'm splitting hairs, but there's a difference between "the client wants to know why you didn't cover this event" and "the client doesn't like the editorial voice used in your coverage please try to change it in the future"
Tell HN: Hacker News Lite - Have a look
I have recently started following hacker news and the size of the fonts and layout were making it a bit hard for me to read on my little netbook. So I just wrote a few lines of code to reformat the hacker news for me.

Have a look at the 'Lite' version here http://www.skillendar.com/hackernews

Just so you know, it's a cut down version and submissions, comments etc. will still have to be done on the original hacker news website.

If you guys like it, feel free to use it for easy reading.
The periodic table explains more complex relationships than: "how far apart things are" or "where they are in relation to one another." Basic concepts such as distance and relative orientation are things that (should) come as a basic understanding to even people with no formal education; therefore once one is introduced to maps, those concepts are (or should be) very easy to grasp. The relationships and orientation of elements on the periodic table are much more complex and cover much less 'intuitive' topics.
Thanks and congrats on going full time
I'm still waiting for my first dollar from my password generating android app "Password Specialist". It was added in Dec 2010 to the market and still 0 sales :)
Remember there is also MariaDB, quote from they webpage:

MariaDB is a database server that offers drop-in replacement functionality for MySQL. MariaDB is built by some of the original authors of MySQL, with assistance from the broader community of Free and open source software developers. In addition to the core functionality of MySQL, MariaDB offers a rich set of feature enhancements including alternate storage engines, server optimizations, and patches.

http://mariadb.org/
Unless there is a lot of creative abuse of operator overloading or macros lurking in there that code really doesn't look too awful compared to some monstrosities I've had to work with.
You remind me of that guy in the Farmer's Insurance commercial[1].

"You do realize that this is just an exercise, right?"

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNY98KN4p6c
Help me understand, as this escapes me to this day... why is it no trouble at all to copy an article title, google it, and click on that link, and then a major PITA to register an account, sign in, check "remember me" and never deal with it again?

This sort of thing is what throwaway accounts were made for.
He does say that after a few weeks he expects to get hired.

But he should totally charge an hourly rate instead of free. I know people would pay for it.
Facebook Patents Social Search
So much for http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322696 then (My fellow geeks, we need to have a talk.)

I'd say this is nicely done, well organised, useful and well marketed.
I have a lot of respect for MariaDB, but they are aiming to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Drizzle is not a drop-in replacement and intentionally broke some compatibility to reach it's goals.
> bailouts, wars, and other profiteering

This was your original argument against being charged too much by the city government.

> Sorry, don't like getting ripped off.

You could do without the snark. This came across to me like you were implying that I thought that you liked being ripped off or that you deserved it.
Great tips, but BEFORE you start tweaking a website, you should monitor the current performance so you can actually measure the improvements from the end user perspective. AlertFox and Browsermob have good free plans for this:
http://alertfox.com/
http://browsermob.com/
As a matter of fact, I thought of that movie as I was writing the comment. I could have added "however The Social Network might be the exception that proves the rule."
We use SQLBench, Sysbench (I believe both are pretty standardized) and drizzleslap. I'll ask others in the team about the one you linked to, looks interesting.
VANISH!
What is the difference between Enumeration and Iterator?
Lean Startup Bundle for SXSW and the Lean Startup Challenge
Geek Time with Junio C Hamano
The social network wasn't innovative - the clean, uneditable interface with a social graph was. The search engine wasn't innovative - the targetted ads was. The operating system wasn't innovative - the mass market and adoption of it was. These three companies were absolutely innovative, just not on the surface product you consume.

People are missing my point; it's ridiculous to say a blanket statement like "Google, Facebook and Microsoft did it without YC, what say you, entrepreneur!" when you're evaluating them when they are already billion-dollar companies. It's the same thing as someone trolling to say "I don't have to go to college cause Bill Gates didn't!" So when you're evaluating a company that is already successful, of course they won't need the help because their products are already so compelling.

Now if you say "that's not why you're getting down-voted...these products weren't born awesome, they could have used YC then" well then this argument is still flawed. Why didn't Facebook need something like YC? Well it was Feb 2004, before YC even existed. None of these companies HAD a YC to use, so it's not a comparison you can even make valid. Incubators didn't exist for MS, Google, Facebook, Apple, AOL, Netscape...

Of course these people needed to hustle. But they definitely sold themselves - Microsoft was bootstrapped, and Facebook had 100,000 members in 3 months until Peter Thiel caught wind of their efforts and approached THEM. Can everyone use the help? Of course. Facebook did it without YC and could do it again without YC. 99% of entrepreneurs are not in that situation.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324245

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2321408 <- This one has lots of comments.

ADDED IN EDIT - Thanks for the drive-by down-vote. If you really like seeing the same story submitted over and over again, and the same discussion resulting over and over again, I'd be interested to know why. Always willing to learn.
In DirectX you will lose exclusive control of the screen and all rendering surfaces if your app loses focus. Retaining focus is not possible, unless by way of trickery. Game forums are riddled with developers trying to overcome this problem.
he says after a few months.

I generally agree with your parent that he ought to spend that time doing something that can showcase his skills and increase his chance to get hired. He can gain more exposure working on something in the open (a personal project, an OSS project) than doing some work for a single company.
I would actually say recursive descent is better for more complicated projects. Good error reporting in something like Bison is difficult, and that style of parser is also not necessarily any faster. IIRC, GCC uses recursive descent for (at least partially) those reasons.

However, parser combinators make things even better. You get a program that looks like a grammar, just like with a parser generator, but error reporting is much easier and because you're really writing everything in the full programming language you can be much more expressive.
Drizzle - The Icing on the Cake - Part 2
I would suggest you keep at it. Iterate, iterate, iterate
Clickable: http://www.skillendar.com/hackernews
The Gambit Scheme wiki probably has most of what Hacker News readers want: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_P...
Twitter Enables Option for HTTPS by Default
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Myvietnam-visa.com was built for supporting you updated information on Vietnam visa, suggesting the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to get visa to Vietnam, offer promotions for Vietnam visa online service.
Let me try to dig that up. It's a little hard to tell as people coming from the print version are indistinguishable from other people just typing in the url, but I can generalize based on the date they came.

I can say off the top of my head that I got about 2x to 3x more emails and calls from people (not too many turned out to be worthwhile) from the print version, which I found to be interesting.
code from a 150 line long method which is part of a 6000 line class. Obviously I can't post the actual code on here (but what it is doing isn't important in this context).

private XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX(final XXXXXXXXXXX[] XXXXXXXXXXX, final int XXXXXXXXXXX,
final Long XXXXXXXXXXX, final Long XXXXXXXXXXX, final int XXXXXXXXXXX, final Long XXXXXXXXXXX,
final XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX, final int XXXXXXXXXXX, final int XXXXXXXXXXX, final Long XXXXXXXXXXX,
final XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX) {

if (XXXXXXXXXXX || XXXXXXXXXXX) {
XXXXXXXXXXX
return null;
}

final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
XXXXXXXXXXX
return null;
}

XXXXXXXXXXX

if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {

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final XXXXXXXXXXX
final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX {
for (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
final XXXXXXXXXXX
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if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX || XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX || XXXXXXXXXXX)
|| XXXXXXXXXXX)) {
final XXXXXXXXXXX
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if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
final XXXXXXXXXXX
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int XXXXXXXXXXX
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if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
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}
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
XXXXXXXXXXX
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}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}

} else {

XXXXXXXXXXX
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XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX

final XXXXXXXXXXX
final XXXXXXXXXXX

if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
for (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
final XXXXXXXXXXX
final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX)
|| XXXXXXXXXXX) {
final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
}
}
final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
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}
}
} else {
final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
}
}
final XXXXXXXXXXX
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}

}

if (XXXXXXXXXXX) {
XXXXXXXXXXX
}

return XXXXXXXXXXX

}
Actually, the Redis one was a clone of MongoDB's.
Michio Kaku releases his new book "Physics of the Future"
There is a reason why people set up in San Francisco even though it costs more. We have an office there, and in terms of both recruiting and business contacts, moving it out of San Francisco would be a waste of money.

We also have an office in NYC -- also not cheap, but totally worth it. Between NYC and SF we have no trouble recruiting employees who want to live in a desirable location (and we, the officers, want to live here too!), and nearly all of our partners and business contacts are either in SF or NYC, too.
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One of the best features in drizzle for me is its flexible replication, i built rabbitreplication about a year ago which replicates from drizzle to basically anything over rabbitmq.

Read more here:
http://www.rabbitreplication.org/
http://developian.blogspot.com/search/label/rabbitreplicatio...

* note that rabbitreplication needs a bit of love to actually work since the GBP messages have changed since i last had time to update it.
Thanks. feels great. You can post your story so we know the road ahead :-)
Exactly, there's a big difference between pro bono and paid work. And trust me, the people you do free work for will expect A LOT MORE from you.

I would say the exceptions would be: a) it's a charity or a cause that you like, or b) you really need to improve a particular skill and it's more of an internship you're looking for.

Either way though, I give you mad props for initiative.
Our app sells to the finance vertical, so we deliver a lot of data in Excel. There is a really great project called Apache POI that does just what we need. Yes, there is also the Ruby spreadsheet gem, but while the gem itself works fine most of the time, the underlying reverse-engineering of the BIFF8 (Excel 97-2000) format is sketchy at best. Spreadsheets generated with the spreadsheet gem don't behave as expected in Excel. For example, if you click the '%' format button, you get an error message. This ends up making our product look unpolished.

This kind of turned in to a spreadsheet gem rant, but if you step back, it's typical of a greater problem. The Ruby community is relatively small when compared with the Java community. It's also significantly less "enterprisey". This means that you'll see a lot of effort put in to things that developers like -- clever libraries, syntactic "sugar", etc -- but you're less likely to see mature libraries like Apache POI. Who the hell wants to sit around and figure out BIFF8, anyway? A lot of the enterprise stuff just isn't fun, but there are plenty of Java devs who get paid to do it for their day jobs.

By using JRuby, you can benefit from both worlds.
I am considering open source as good place to learn and to generate some value for people. I do love sinatra framework. I pull source and read diffs every couple days. But they have core team which fixes all bugs in seconds, so I cannot find application there. And my goal is more to make some contacts and to know people in this field. I always was a silent reader and now I want to communicate with intresting people.
yes, lets take away choice of government so the empire can rule effectively.
/s

Competing jurisdictions is a check on corruption.
> he believes the design flaws that prompted his resignation from GE were eventually addressed

Anyway, a design that blows up when power is cut because it cannot cool itself down to safe levels is... weird.
I just hope that whoever hires him gives him something truly challenging and engaging to do. The biggest risk of working for free is that people think that since it doesn't cost anything anyway, it doesn't matter what he does (e.g. the internship curse).
I've said before, and I'll say again -- those cast members are crucial to what we think of as Firefly, but in reality, it was Joss Whedon who put it all together.

I can't imagine how great it would be to get the original cast and crew back together to continue work on Firefly, but in reality, anything that Joss Whedon considers good enough is likely good enough for me, whether or not it's a spin-off, new series or what have you.
Okay, yes. By 'hash', I meant generic, general purpose hashing function. MD5. SHA-1. SHA-2. SHA-3 (any of the finalists). Anything that is fast enough that you would use it to compute a cryptographically secure checksum of a large block of data.
More, better, faster: UX design for startups
For a startup, design may mean the difference between simply shipping, and taking the market by storm. But with tight budgets, and aggressive timelines, how to include design and get the best value for the investment?
That's one way to hack it. Another way to hack it is to write an ambiguous grammar, but annotate the productions with precedences to tell your LALR parser generator how to resolve the ambiguities. And of course you can do what apenwarr suggests — parse with a grammar that is unambiguous but assigns the wrong precedence, and then rewrite the parse tree once it's built.
It seems to me that what he's doing is rather smart. It gives him an chance to be exposed to more opportunities than if he was trying to get hired and he can pick those on which he wishes to take a risk.

I would certainly change the wording a little to weed out the people who will just try to take advantage, but the overall strategy seems quite appropriate.

This will work very well for a person who's confident in their skills, but maybe having a hard time finding income from traditional sources. Get in, kick butt, make a statement and earn income.
Reported to the FBI.
Add analytics. I'm not sure how, but I believe there is a market out there for twitter tools to measure stuff in searches/twitter streams. Integrated with a client sort of makes sense to me. But I'm no social marketer, so I may be way off.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrematureAbstraction
a known anti-pattern :)
This makes sense.

I remember a few years ago Mark Cuban had posted his idea for the 'new' content delivery model -- where he was going to produce original content and own the entire delivery chain from filming to DVD to rentals to theater distribution. His idea was that, in the age of 70+ inch televisions and the advent of the home theater system, many people don't get much bang for the buck in going to crowded, noisy theaters when they get an equal or better experience at home.

In support of that, he was going to film movies that one could, for example, watch at home (for an increased rental fee) on the same day it was being released in theaters.

I was just talking with my wife the other day that this idea has apparently fizzled out, as I haven't heard much about it since then, and that's a damn shame. Hopefully this gets us closer to that objective.
Are for-profit enterprises in the United States allowed to accept free labor? I know that nonprofit organizations can accept volunteer labor (and do so all the time), but I thought that business corporations and business partnerships that check the law (in the United States, at least) find out that they cannot accept free labor. What are the applicable laws involved here?
> Much of the simplicity

It's not simple, it's primitive rounded in the corner.

If all you have is raw blobs of data in pipes, you can't grow up when you suddenly realize need for something more complex.

See the story with adding UTF-8 BOM support before #! in Linux kernel.
http://viniciusvacanti.com/

His blog has great advice for new entrepreneurs. Especially when you don't have a tech co-founder... He covers in depth how he went about learning to code a basic prototype and provides a solid outline to go about doing so.
How to teach a new (remote) developer your application?
Hey,

I'm a hacker and a designer (a rare breed apparently) I've developed a fully working prototype of my application and I've finally found a developer who's probably just as excited to work on it as I am. Which is great since i'm a sole founder.

How do i go about teaching him the system, how everything works, the logic etc... also taking in the consideration that he would be working remotely.

I suppose i tried to do as much as i could on my own to avoid this situation, but i need another pair of hands.

What would you recommend? I know it's probably going to be a tedious task, but it needs to be done.
Timing is everything: RTOS overview
Great present :) I imagine it's a little tough for her dealing with long work hours and the instability entrepreneurship brings.
I'll summarize it by saying that one can have a lot of debugging 'fun' when you have to maintain code that starts including all kinds of other files in nested control structures which, in turn, reside in things like while-loops..
We do plan to work on things like Rabbit and Tungsten replicators soon.
In the mean time we recommend the native solution which is similar to MySQL's master/slave but uses the GBP messages stored in an InnoDB table.
Yes, I'm really grateful to them for cutting through the crap. It's nice to have a relatively confident sense of what's going on.
I came across a similar thing in the mid 1990s. The program had been written in the late 1980s, and the original author had since died, so he couldn't be consulted. In those days memory was scarce, so the program had been "compacted" by removing all spaces and with all variables represented by single characters. The original non-compacted source code had disappeared along with its originator. For any practical purpose, the whole program was unreadable.