skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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It’s been a while since we’ve done something arbitrary, complicated, and confusing, so today I’m happy to announce that the name of the company has been changed, effective immediately, to Stack Exchange Inc!

There’s a method behind this madness, of course: we want to emphasize the importance of the 45 sites in our network, which has long since stopped being about programmers:

That, plus, whenever we told The New York Times that we were “Stack Overflow,” they would go to stackoverflow.com and have a heart attack. At least this way people wondering about the company understand that we’re about more than just programmer questions. We have Battlestar Galactica too!

Now the surprise ending. When we first raised venture capital way back in the long-ago year of 2010, we actually had quite a few great investors interested in buying our stock. And since then, the buzz hasn’t abated. We were pretty sure that given the current market conditions, we could easily raise a big pile of new Unicorn-bucks without losing control of the company. We made a few phone calls, took a few meetings, I flew to London and Boston, and hey presto, we sold another $12 million worth of the company to some great investors.

The new investors are Index Ventures, based in Geneva and London, and Spark Capital, based up in Boston. Our first investor, Union Square Ventures, will also put in more money so as to keep the same ownership percentage that they had before (this is called a “pro-rata”).

Needless to say, the new investors will want to keep an eye on all that money, so Neil Rimer from Index will be joining the board of directors, and Bijan Sabet from Spark will be an observer on the board (he can come to meetings but he can’t vote). And to keep from tipping the board to the investors, the “common shareholders” (that is, the founders and employees) will be entitled to elect another representative of their own to the board. We picked Anil Dash, who has been blogging for even longer than I have and has been one of our most valuable advisors.

Now, you may be wondering how we plan to spend all that money. First of all, of course, we need new stickers and T-shirts. And a ping pong table…

We’re also improving the employee snack room a little bit:

If you would like to receive your own totally free commemorative 1,000,000 Unicorn Buck Bill and a Stack Exchange sticker, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

Stack Exchange Inc.
55 Broadway 26 FL
New York, NY 10006

If you live outside the United States, include about a dollar worth of whatever kind of weird thing it is that you use over there for money (no goats or Yap coins, please).
Paul Graham on How to Start a Startup

http://paulgraham.com/start.html

"During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period. Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend's house for dinner. I went to visit my family twice. Otherwise I just worked."

You have to want it, buddy.
Thank you for the feedback I agree, very good points.
Yes I worked very hard and failed way to many times, I realized you have to be a nutcase to start a startup, I am just looking for another nutcase to help me out.
As cool as naming your site after a class of software bug, I think Stack Exchange is more descriptive of the whole initiative, and it rolls off the tongue more easily.

Good move, and keep up the good content (now that Google has woken back up and is indexing them properly!)
Sorry! Yes, Javascript.
tldr: Don't panic, stackoverflow.com is not changing, it's just the name of the company they are changing to "Stack Exchange Inc."
Stephen Colbert Really Wants An iPAD2
This is cool, but not as elegant as what you described. Where do I send the money?
I was kidding, a little. I think 80 characters wide feels a bit cramped (and an artifact from a time before the visual user interface and high resolution displays), but 200 character lines is clearly way too much.
Charlie Sheen Looking for a Social Media Intern on Internships.com
Some thoughts:

* First of all, good on you for trying to learn how to build stuff.

* "I need to learn some Java. Material suggestions?" --> I'm assuming you mean JavaScript. I've heard good things about http://eloquentjavascript.net/contents.html, which is free and has an interactive REPL right in the browser as you do the tutorial.

* "I seriously considered Python/Django..." --> personally I think Python is a much easier language than Ruby for beginners. The syntax is cleaner and more readable. The reason you give for using RoR instead is understandable given your lack of experience, but it's not actually valid. You can make exactly the same apps with Rails and Django, and I don't think one is even more conducive to any specific type of app than the other. I've also heard bad things about the Rails community, though I haven't verified any of that personally. If I were you I'd spend 30-60 mins on Python and Ruby each, and choose based on which you're more comfortable working with.

Good luck!
Yeah, ignore my Java comment. I would start out with just plain ole Javascript.
Anonymous: The secret group's 5 biggest hacks
> virtualizing servers by factors in the hundreds

Yeesh. The way I've heard it, this is due to a peculiar approach in mainframe development. Programs tend to assume isolated use of dedicated hardware, so they have to resort to creating ludicrous numbers of virtual mainframes rather than letting the programs coexist and interact within a single kernel.
Why the switch from foraging to farming?
I'd suggest starting with Mozilla Dev Network/Javascript [1] for learning Javascript. Going through how JQuery/YUI/[library of choice] is written is pretty interesting and a great learning experience.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/javascript
Believe me, I'm not trying to replace game artists or belittle their work in any way. I'm just musing about whether or not there is a way to streamline an artist's job, to make it easier for them to create content. Which, when phrased that way, seems like it is more an issue with the available tools rather then the library of previous works.
I made an observation recently. I do a bunch of contracting for big companies:

Working in a Windows environment -- you will be given Administrator access to anything you ask for.

Working in a Linux environment -- you will be given a normal account and be able to SU to root

Working in a UNIX (Solaris/AIX/HP-UX) environment -- you will be given a normal account and the option to SUDO certain commands

Working in a zOS environment -- you wont be granted a login or allowed within 50 feet of the precious server.
ubuntu Windows 7
That's a good point. I'd guess that their direction is the driving force here, as their current position doesn't reflect where they want to go or be (that I don't know).
Android/iPhone Apps Breach Users’ Privacy
BugHerd offers visual issue tracking for web designers
Cool stuff, but I was half-expecting that you would be detecting touching/tapping light fixtures with a finger and using that to turn them on and off. Version 2 perhaps? :)
I don't know, it makes sense but it kinda reminds me of that sex change company.
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Thank you for the javascript suggestions.

I am 1/2 way through Chris Pine's Learn to Program Ruby book. I hear http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index is a good resource for beginners, I will take a look.

Thoughts? Any other tutorials/books you recommend for Python/Django?
This kind of reminds me of the story in Steven Levy's "Hackers" about how the early MIT AI Lab hackers learned the ins and outs of Chinese-language menus that were not intended for non-Chinese at Chinese restaurants (this at a time when egg rolls were still sort of exotic).
If one had too much cash sitting around and wanted to play with a low-end mainframe, what would be the ballpark cost to get one? Half a million?

Yes, I'm aware that IBM wants you to lease mainframe hardware rather than actually buy it.
This has been true for over 5 years (far cry came out in 2004...). And yet, CryEngine has basically only been used in other Crytek titles. If destructible trees couldn't sell game engines, theres little new hotness in CryEngine 3 that will. I bet in another 5 years, we will be saying pretty much the same thing.
What Really Scares Entrepreneurs?
"Programs tend to assume isolated use of dedicated hardware, so they have to resort to creating ludicrous numbers of virtual mainframes rather than letting the programs coexist" ---->
Sounds like Windows VMWare/HyperV deployment justifications. :)

There is a supposed higher security in zOS partitioning -- but I have no idea what EAL Levels really mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_Assurance_Level
How mental stimulation keeps our brain awake and disturbs sleep
5-6 months seems slightly too long, unless you need to work on it full-time for that whole duration.

If you're considering it then sooner or later you'll probably do it. But timing is crucial, so unless you can't continue working on it without quitting it's best to stall for a bit.
This article makes some great points, but the bigger question is "Does Twitter have a problem?"

All of this silicon valley hand-wringing is a tempest in a teapot. Twitter is a company built on the backs of early adopters and its developer community to be sure, but where do they go from here? A bunch of whiny and entitled nerds chomping at the bit for the next big thing do not a market make. Twitter's gonna piss people off, and they're gonna have to if they ever want to monetize.

Granted this could kill the golden goose, but that's a risk any unprofitable company with a useful product faces, especially one as revolutionary as Twitter. Thinking about business models earlier is no guarantee of better results. On the one hand they might have been clearer communicators and pissed people off less down the line; but on the other, they might have failed to base their business model on the ultimate potential of the company, or worse yet, created a stillborn product that no one ever heard of.

As far as I'm concerned they played their cards right; whether Twitter will be a success as a business remains to be seen.
I will donate ASAP. This man's work allowed us to get on the net with our old 386sx and Win 3.1 machine using Mosaic. I don't know if it was paid for or not, I'm too young to remember, but this guy deserves it for his effort and how its affected me.
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Where do you live? The big tech cities have plenty of events and hackerspace-esque places that will hold fundamentals courses. Look for Meetups.

Despite your comment on Rails hiring, I've found that the larger Python community runs better events. Everything you learn about CS, programming, software engineering, web performance, etc. will hold.

Also, even if it seems illogical for some reason, nobody uses just one thing. The advantages that certain languages and toolkits hold over others are a wash unless you're doing something special, and you already recognize that you're not. You'll pick up much more as time goes on, and you'll never stop.
Why Fans Stop Liking & Following You on Facebook & Twitter
Future competitors: Null Pointer, General Failure, Segmentation Fault.
Most companies have lots of in-house tools and scripts they have written to help artists do their job. A company like Bungie will have people dedicated to working on tools for artists. The positions are called tech artist or tools programmer. Some companies have much better tools than others.
Actually -- if Mac OSX is a certified Unix. And iOS is a variant of OSX. Does that mean that my phone is running an "official" UNIX?

Because that makes Zakuzaa one of those "condescending unix users"
experts exchange?

expertSEXchange dot com

edit: wow. Just showing the people who didn't get the reference.
Yeah, I'm just reacting. It's a good resource, and I worry that it'll be ignored or diluted. It's the first time I've felt the management considers "just programming" a trivial thing.

Good for them for growing. I hope they remember their base.
I'm in the industry, in a tool group.

I guess you talk about SpeedTree. We used in some of our games, but not in our latest.

One of the problem of using middleware, especially one generating content is how to integrate it with the rest of the pipeline.

If our pipeline sees that as just another model/texture like the rest of the provided, then no problem - e.g. An artist uses the tool to generate the geometry. But if we have to put some control over it, and integrate it deeper so far into the rendering system, then other problems arise:
- Speed of rendering
- Memory usage
- Collision support
- Can it reuse existing shader techniques, or new are required.
- others

And since you've talked about procedural - this would entail more variations:

For example if this is an multiplayer game you would have to synchronize the tree generation to look exactly the same for each player, and have the same collision box, or collision model (usually low-poly bounding convex or set of). This means you would have to communicate synchronize this with the clients.

Then some animatiors might've adjusted certain cut-scene to look very good, but the TREE has changed and now it's weird.

For an open world RPG, or strategy game this might not be a problem - more variation there for the better.

But all in all, if the price is right, and artists and coders agree - why not?
I'll agree to some extent about the consistency, but I don't think that the "fork and go" mentality makes stability any worse.

I mean, as it is, I see segfaults and whatnot regularly in the canonical, distro-released versions of Apache. Major software releases all the time with bugs that could potentially be a show-stopper. My experience hasn't shown this to be any worse with non-canonical sources. Sometimes it's better.

Further, I like to think of the sysadmin's job as fostering business continuity. While uptime is a primary indicator of this, I think it's lower in priority than say, losing a crapload of customer data. If I have to shut a site down for an hour to prevent losing all transactions for the previous 24 hours or something, then it's not a terribly difficult choice. (Having to make this choice at all, of course, means you should be engineering something better. But we don't have the luxury of infinite time.)

And having all the uptime in the world won't help you if your engineers can't do their jobs effectively because the tools you give them are insufficient. Sometimes the best option is to suck it up and try that patch.

It's a delicate balancing act, and I'm not by any means advocating running all your software out of unofficial repos. Sometimes you gotta make that call, though. And if I'm looking at github at all, it's probably because a package doesn't already exist, or because I need a fix for one specific bug.
And what a shame that is. I would've liked to try and buy a ticket to go again, but I can't get out of my Parallel+Distributed exam the same day.
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Why would you ever want such a skewed and biased ratio? It's not something to be proud of, it's a failure.
derr, just saw the above post. Thanks.
I really wish that had been made clear from the title. I mean, I don't really see a site of their (stackoverflow.com) size up and changing their name overnight (though I could see patio11 making grabbing a second domain like AnswersToProgrammingQuestions.com), but the title had me a bit worried. It was only made worse by blog.stackoverflow.com taking it's own sweet time responding to my request.

I've long been confused about the naming of SO/SE. I mean, there was stackoverflow.com (the site), stackoverflow inc. (the company), and stackexchange. For a while I thought that the VC money was only for stackoverflow.com because of this. Hopefully the company name change will help me keep things clear in my head.
True, banking fees really do take up a significant post in the P/L, and the smaller you are, the more you're paying, why it's not optimal for startups. A startup bank would be a cool idea.
Pointing camera down woulda been cool.
Just quickly, do others also pronounce "posterous" as nitrogen does in the video? (post to rhyme with "frost" rather than "post")

I might have it all wrong! Assumed it was because you were "posting" something, not a play on "preposterous."
2011 is either going to suck or be awesome depending on how quickly the new Ruby 1.9 features are taken up by Rubinius and JRuby.

Having to choose between multiple threads and a better language is really not a decision you should have to make.
Yet... No GAME was actually shown here.

Yes this was rendered with the engine, but having the same camera angles, people, etc. you can do lots of tricks that you can't when doing interactive stuff ... ahem GAMES:
- You can cull your geometry offline (you know where you camera goes in and out)
- You can prefetch certain calculations that are to come soon (you know what's gonna happen)
- For sure you can implement correct motion blur filter as you know where you are moving
- Probably no physics - they might aswel prerecord them.
- In fact you can capture where each vertex, color, texture channel moves, and just replay it.
- And probably many more.

I'm not saying it's not cool, and I love good cutscenes in games (Metal Gear Solid), but people seem to confuse that

CUTSCENE RENDERED is the same as GAME RENDERED. No it's not.
Is reddit becoming unusable?
More and more I want to try to use reddit and the site is either slow and unusable, errors when I post, or general maintenance that takes the entire site down.

Is there an alternate to reddit as I'm growing pretty tired of this constant downtime.
I'm from NY. I plan on networking as soon as I develop my understanding a bit further. I will look to take advantage of fundamentals courses. That's a good idea, thanks.

I'm going to play around with Python for the rest of the week and then decide. It really doesn't matter to me much, I have no preference... I'm just eager to pick one and start prototyping.
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Yeah, but $750-800 is way different than $1500! Thanks!
Direct link to the FTC report that anigbrowl posted: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2011/03/110307patentreport.pdf
If you can't debug in CoffeeScript, you can't take it seriously. Even meta-CSS frameworks suffer from this problem when there's errors you have to back-track through a whole layer.
RE: designing a set of reusable APIs, or APIs built in reusable components
A lot of what results in a successful, security-conscious API stems from adherence and discipline to good development practices and thinking through your API. A few that have really helped me:

- leverage the power of a suite of SCM/dev tools that match your work flow
- realign your work flow to include good development practices: scm such as hg/git, rst documentation with sphinx/etc, build and testing suites
- use a simple svg editor for diagraming (anyone can use inkscap)
- learn how to think of these abstract model-relationships spatially and relationally
- build new functionality out of tests that define your goals/intentions and the limitations imposed
- use automated tests at various levels, to ensure the above fits your design
- write code with the intention that it be reused, decouple sensibly
- understand that there is 'the right way' and 'just-another-hack', try to go 'the right way' as often as you can, you'd be surprised how much it saves you in the long run

Most web APIs could be broken up into a standard set of steps:
- initial authentication & authorization, note the difference between these steps, of request source
- validation & verification of request data
- processing & preparation of request/response data
- formatting of response
- response & backchannel communication

consider how your APIs can share common code, use APIs internally where it appropriate. decouple components. for example, your data processing components could function independently of the formatting of the input data, and which could be different from the response formatting itself. offer flexibility to your clients and support good development practices everywhere.

use white lists instead of black lists. "what is allowed" over "what is not allowed" as it easier to extend than patch. hack your system, bend it and break it, consider a vulnerability assessment application. consider your audiences and who would want to break your app, intentionally or not.
If those spare cycles can be put to good use, that actually better serve gamers' needs, it seems that consoles would be disrupted.

I guess a big issue is install base: lots of consoles, and few people with expensive, upmarket PCs. Also, piracy. And a single hardware target. And perhaps console game quality is "good enough" for most gamers. Perhaps having many people to play FPS against is more important than graphics (or AI).

Even worse, as silicon gets cheaper, instead of those PCs becoming affordable, I predict most people will buy even cheaper PCs (or phones+HDMI+kb; or iPads; or a new ARM-based PC form-factor). i.e. PCs getting disrupted, as workstations, minicomputers and mainframes were.

Worst case: it's possible that consoles will never improve from where they are now.

The only hope I see is that someone comes up with something sensational, that everybody wants, that requires that extra processing power. Life-like AI might do it... but we already have real people to play against. Though I think cinematic graphics is probably the best bet.
There's no theme for the first one (yet). You can signup on the site, we'll keep you posted!
Er.. who are the top affiliates?
Stack Overflow Raises $12M From Union Square Ventures Etc
If you had a truck and a bunch of free time, say, $499?

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-S-390-G5-Parallel-Enterprise-Server-...

The interesting thing about mainframe hardware is that it's designed to last forever, so the "old" stuff (which really means "brand new" stuff in mainframe terms) is still interesting.
Nice!

Done!
Didn't see this one before. It's a bit unfortunate but no showstopper. Stay tuned!
I was thinking about this naming issue the other day, and I'm glad they made a move.

I convinced myself they'd rename to simply Stack for shortness' sake. I still think they should; stack.com doesn't look too expensive.
"CoffeeScript: The beautiful way to write JavaScript" is a fucking ridiculous thing to say. I'll counter that with Coffeescript is an ugly way to write javascript. Go ahead and say I'm wrong. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I don't give a shit if I get downvotes, it's a ridiculous thing to post everywhere that javascript is somehow 'ugly' and coffeescript is somehow 'beautiful'. It's really quite retarded.
Very frustrating. I just know there's a window of a few hrs in the morning (for me) in which its usable. The rest of the day I don't bother trying.
I'm enjoying finding my webapp niche and letting others do the bits I don't like (js). knowing how to admin your own system is key to providing you freedom, but know when to outsource work so you yourself can get work done.

use redmine, wikis, SCM, etc, and find the vibrant community you most resonate with. for me it was the django/python communities. get creative and have fun, that is also important.
http://www.assembla.com and http://bitbucket
http://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/coders-unit-test...
Their project dates back to 2009. One of the students went on to start a very noble project:
http://grassrootsmapping.org/about/