skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many have feared recently that smaller game developers would be pushed out of the business; clearly, with better and better graphics expected out of games and development costs shooting through the roof, they wouldn't have a chance, would they?

But the irony of it all is that the exact opposite seems to be happening: sick of complicated, high-budget, high-price yet often low-quality games, gamers are looking for simpler but more innovative and interesting games to hold their attention.

This is even happening in the non-indie scene; look how wildly popular Portal was, despite the fact that it was a 5-hour $20 game made by the small team behind Narbacular Drop, with some extra resources from Valve. If anything, its release far overshadowed the higher-profile and higher-budget Half-Life Episode 2.

Of course, the biggest chance for indie developers to make their debut is in genres that are classically inexpensive to develop games for: strategy games, adventure games, old-fashioned RPGs, shooters, etc. One example of this is the wildly popular (at least in Japan) Touhou shmup series; a total of 7 PC shooter games (plus the 5 older PC-98 games) all made by a single developer, despite the fact that he has a day job, too. The games are so successful that there's an entire convention each year dedicated solely to products related to his games--and yet despite the success, the only ones involved in production are that single developer and his many, many beers.

Xbox Live Arcade is a perfect ground for promoting such games; if you put a low-priced game that looks interesting in front of the eyes of tens of millions of people with points to spend, you're sure to get loads of sales.
At OSCON, Nat Torkington gave a great talk about teaching kids programming with Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), which looks like a great environment to get kids into programming at a fairly young age. In a world where kids have so many distractions and a computer is not novel and exciting (like the Commodore was), you need to keep their attention by keeping them engaged somehow.
Bach was a pop star in his day. So was Joni Mitchell.
It's really sad how corrupt the system is, yet I've learned to just dismiss it as an expression of existential angst because the corrupt system somehow seems to function anyways and I myself can't fix it. Yet.

http://www.videosift.com/video/From-The-Programmers-Mouth-Ho...
Exactly right. The dogma that develops around these kinds of things is so weird.

Update: Here is a good example of silly REST dogma: http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/06/10/TwoCardinalSins... (since a lot of people don't seem to understand that REST isn't the same as HTTP, but more like a religion layered on top of HTTP).
Yes, comparing raw medal counts across sports doesn't make too much sense. You can only win 1 medal in curling, 2 in volleyball (indoor and beach), a handful in gymnastics (individual events), and a crapload in swimming.

Then again, looking at raw medal counts is a dumb measure of an athlete in the first place.
If I said "Nadia" would you know who I was talking about?
Media Temple Grid Server had uncomfortably high latency for me. Really terrible latency, in fact.

Go VPS and never look back: Slicehost.com (best service/documentation/been on the same virtualization architecture longer than linode) or linode.com (also very highly recommended and slightly cheaper than slicehost)
YC Summer 08 Demo Day: Best Batch Ever
101 shirts, 102 shirts, 103 shirts...
Edit distance of titles?! Do you have a source? I'm very curious about how and why that would help.
Really? It's possible to cram 32 x86 cores and 256G of memory into 4U for $5k and for it all to work? Show me.
I've worked on a large client/server property/casualty insurance application written in C. I've also written programs and middleware in C++, Java, Perl, and Smalltalk.

C is great for getting the CPU to do something at a somewhat low level, but still having some ability to abstract. If you want lots of abstraction my experience is that C++, Java, and Smalltalk are much better choices. Of those, C++ gives you the most leeway for getting yourself into deep trouble that's hard to debug. Smalltalk allows you to blow up or lock up the world with one errant statement, but messing with those parts of the library is rare, and you can get everything back anyhow because your source code and every change to the image is kept in something like a transaction log. Java gives you a lot of the benefits of Smalltalk, but saddles you with a syntax that was designed to allow low level programming with somewhat high level abstraction, even though you aren't doing the former and want the latter in spades.
I wonder how much time and money he spent developing Braid.

The art and music is very good. Probably not cheap.
Humor: Before Twitter we had finger
Don't forget to update your .plan files so we know what you are doing.
Doesn't matter, any method of observation you choose will produce expected results.

Unless you observe yourself, where you will not be able to observe expected results because you're dead.
I really can't imagine how we can use a closed-source voting system; I remember in March when Sequoia flipped out that a CS student was going to examine their machines and stopped him. Like that isn't at all suspicious

http://sysop073.blogspot.com/2008/03/this-post-is-trade-secr...
At this point, how long before we'll be able to vote using the internet? Figure have people enter their social security number, date of birth, and the 20 digit randomly generated password that gets mailed a month before the election.
High-Tech Hitchhiking
Ask HN: Web server development platform, Red Hat or Ubuntu
Hi HN folks,
I want suggestion/advice on which OS should I install for my web development. I bought a HP desktop with Intel quad core, 6 GB ram. I did some digging on ubuntu vs. redhat, it’s a mixed message iam getting. I want to install either redhat or ubuntu.
Some background of the development platform. I need a server that can be used for my web server and prototyping of web 2.0 application
Appreciate any help.
Hot Wire Your Car
That's a big pencil!
Blog Action Day - our startup's NFP side project
I think text editor+canvas+javascript is all anyone really needs now to start making cool "wow look at the sprites move, scroll and scale!" apps that kids thrive on! (I'm actually having a renaissance of fun/explorative graphical programming on that tip myself). The browser is THE platform as they can email an html file or stick it on their school hosting (no server side stuff required) account or maybe even whack it into a facebook/myspace/xanga account somehow.

Also it's free to get an MS xna account and the software required which lets you develop games for the zune, xbox360 and windows. Blatantly not mac/linux friendly but that's not what the article is driving at anyway.
great video about social networking
did you read the comments on his blog post? There are some excellent points made.

You could achieve all of those things w/o using the REST standard, but then it's your standard... and there ought to be at least some reason for rolling your own if one already exists.
Indiana Jones and the _______________.
A new approach to monetizing social networks.
This is a fun question. I don't, but I'm curious what you think are the most persuasive examples of services that don't fit.

One that comes to mind is a service with semantics that require a preview step. Sure you can use create/read/update via the REST verbs, but I think a lot of the confusion on this issue comes from wanting to embed the concept of events, so a read may be for the purpose of previewing an item, but it feels more natural to fire a "confirm" event than to do a post with a field called state=cofirmed.

At least that's my personal opinion. I agree that any service can be mapped given sufficient creativity, but it often seems like extra work in the context I described.
I tried a few queries and I was really impressed. Seems to me like some real value for the IP there and wouldn't recommend going opensource unless you already patented it(Europe but I think doesnt have software patents right?)
I don't know you can say Amazon is sacrificing any power. The Netflix prize isn't about better recommendations per se, rather its about predicting users movie ratings. Its not clear predicting these ratings better will give better recommendations.

I think most of the component algorithms in the Bell labs method provide fairly straight forward explanations - the best predictor is a nearest neighbour algorithm.
Monetization finally comes to the Facebook application platform with the new Wishlist application. Powered by Amazon's e-Commerce API, it enables users to share their gift desires on Facebook. By leveraging the social aspects of facebook and its increasing popularity as a place to plan events, the application hopes to capture some of the important wedding registry & wish list revenue.
Reverse auction already exists in some form. One thing, that comes to my mind is bidding for contracts. Normally outsourced companies bid lower to increase the chance of getting the contract(but yeah not always the lowest bidder gets the contract).
I personally prefer Ubuntu because the support is great in terms of community as well as repositories.

When you are doing a startup, your time is very limited and I believe you should go for anything that saves time & hassle without trading off much.

Btw if you are on Windows right now, you can still install and use Apache on it. There are differences but it'll be good enough for prototyping.
As far as productivity and development goes, you won't experience much of a difference. In terms of enterprise history and endorsement, RedHat wins, but that is largely immaterial.
A Four-Question Business Plan to Jump-Start Your Inner Entrepreneur
That article was pointless to someone who is not currently in YC. Things like "Presentations were better than I've seen in the past." And he does not tell us how they were in the past or how they are now.

And the rest are some mediocre presentation tips, totally unrelated to YC.
The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain
REST's big win, as a commenter said, is caching.

I think of REST-style as the read-only calls in any program being hashed to their results (e.g. "mult(5,2)" -> "10"), and used as a cache. If those parameter values are frequent, this can be a huge win. But if always unique, no win at all (minus the hash.put() and hash.get() overhead).

Probably obvious to folks here, but I now realize REST is FP, in its immutableness...

The human readability of REST is very nice (as another commenter said), but that's the specific realization of REST in HTTP - not a necessary to REST-style.
Fair enough, the article is indeed targeted at those in YC.

In my defense, I did say upfront that "The folks that should (hopefully) get the most out of this are the YC startup founders themselves."

As for the presentation tips being mediocre, you're probably right. I try to be at least slightly better than mediocre, but fail frequently.
Internet Access - Latest Mobile Phones|Cheap Phone Calls
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Why Blogs Need To Be Social
so what?
Great site. I'm sold once you get going down here (Australia). Signed up with Edinburgh to practice ;) Now I wish I lived there.

BTW, I'd love to see the long tail get taken care of properly. That's what I'm really interested in. I'd probably use a 'what's on tomorrow' page for small shows 100X more then a 'what's on this month' page for $100 + shows.

Any way crack away at the RIAA thing.
How would you suggest certifying creativity?
AOL to acquire Socialthing
You know how only children have a reputation for being a little... ah... selfish? (I am one).

Now, imagine a nation of only children.
Django 1.0 beta 1 released
Oh man, you make me want to replay the Orange Box right now.

For those who don't know, Half-Life is a computer game series centered around a cataclysmic event at a secret underground high-energy physics laboratory dubbed Black Mesa.

Highly recommended :)
Amazon isn't sacrificing predictive power because they want to give you the explanation. They're just including profit margin in the data to give recommendations that are valuable to them. Not that I can blame them.
Not understanding something isn't a reason it's not good...
Are Macs More Expensive? Let's Do the Math Once and For All
Yeah, the comments are crazy and seem to completely miss the point.

HTTP is wonderful, but I've gotten along just fine without ever using PUT or DELETE or other bits of REST dogma, as has the rest of web. Sometimes my urls are actually verbs that I POST arguments to instead of "RESTful" nouns, and it works great.
Nearly all of them? Run your packet sniffer on Gmail for example -- I guarantee that send isn't implemented with a PUT to noun url!
Right it may work for you, which is fine.

The point of REST that I thought really stood out in the comments was the one about caching.

If you know that any GET request can be cached subject to whatever is in the expires header or etag, that is hugely useful information when scaling.

REST is not a straight jacket, it's just a simple way of making the /site/url/you/use + the method mean something consistent and logical.
4. Don’t use gender stereotypes:

Were bikini models demo-ing the startups?
Y Combinator's August 2008 Demo Day in Cambridge
Here's an analysis of machines used for the 2004 election. Some security experts were able to do a thorough review because the source code that Diebold wanted to keep secret from state governments was accidentally made available on a public server. Oops.

http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf
He has been working on it for a long time. (from at least 2006).

Jeff Lindsay (who was one of the founders of Super Happy Dev House - and DevJavu) has been raving about it for about that long and is such a fan of indie games he (and friends) is creating a site to catalog them - http://db.tigsource.com/games/braid
I used to be a swimmer and can certainly say, as many others have, that he is the best swimmer of all time. As for how he ranks with athletes from other sports, that is another question. I would say he would rank quite favorably in any ranking of best athletes regardless of discipline.

As for making some coin, I wouldn't worry about that. I'm sure he has more than enough already. Athletes like him don't do it for the money. They don't even do it to beat the rest. They do it to beat themselves.
I would think that people should be learning to learn much younger than college-age, but that's an entirely different can of worms.
Why is this so important? So many 'are macs expensive?' articles.

Why does this keep coming up?
He asked for an example of a web service that doesn't follow the RESTful model. I replied to his request. My point is that almost no web service is truly "RESTful".
You're thinking about it wrong. Start from Bell's theorem - it tells us we have to sacrifice locality or realism. MWI weasels out of it by making worlds be observer dependent, basically splitting the observer up. Bell's theorem is the root. It's not an interpretation & all interpretations come from it.
If your application is a simple key/value store, then scaling won't be a problem. If it's something more complex, then such simplistic caching models won't work.

For example, the FriendFeed api includes a method that fetches multiple feeds at once: http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user?nickname=paul,bret,jim&#...
Where should one user PUT their updates such that a simple HTTP cache will know to invalidate that GET? It's not possible. The cache must understand the internals of the system in order to do proper invalidation here.
This looks seriously awesome. I am really looking forward to using it.
More details: http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entries2006.php?entry_id=59 -

In 2006 when braid won the Independent Game Festival prize for innovation it said they it was 8 months of dev time.
Here's a paper on the BellKor solution, from one of the top teams:

http://research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/ProgressPrize2007B...
ECMAScript: Object.getPrototypeOf
Considering upwards of 10% of all end-user machines connected to the internet are part of a botnet, probably never.
Why not Debian??

I mean if you're considering Ubuntu, why not try the original? I use Debian as my main development box for exactly the kind of work that you're thinking of doing and I love it.

With Debian you will learn more about Linux than you will running either RH or Ubuntu. And if anyone thinks the Ubuntu repositories are great... They should also try Debian.
Judge refuses to lift gag order on MIT students in Boston subway-hack case
"Heat" and "WALL-E" have a shorter edit distance between them than any Indiana Jones movies.
Sorry, but I asked about a service that doesn't FIT the RESTful model.
Blackjack Optimal Strategy Calculator
Well, I guess it depends how you define "FIT". It's possible to shoehorn just about any service into just about any model, but that doesn't make it a good idea. For example, sending email by doing a PUT to some newly created URL is silly. There's a reason that the english language has more than 5 verbs.
> But what is the big advantage of making all your calls into GET PUT and DELETE? If POST can handle everything you need, then what's the problem?

XML can also be used to represent anything, but that does not mean it's a good idea to use it for everything.
Correct. When using a latent factor method, providing an explanation for for the prediction has been essentially intractable.

A common post-processing step for many teams (particularly BellKor/KorBell) is a KNN. The KNN's are used to provide a sort of confidence metric and if the anyone so decided, using the KNN derived network for explanation is pretty simple and not really cheating.

Edit: Yehuda might have made some breakthrough - He'll be presenting a paper at KDD "Factorization Meets the Neighborhood: a Multifaceted Collaborative Filtering Model", the paper will probably be released after the conference.
Redhat is a commercial product that you have to pay money to use. CentOS is supposed to be a pretty good server OS.

However, I'd choose Ubuntu (and have) for this reason, amongst others: you can run the same OS on your server as on your desktop. You might be able to do that with Fedora, too, but Fedora is not Redhat's main focus, like Ubuntu is with, well, Ubuntu.
not if you normalize by e.g. minimal string length.
> Once you measure it, it is no longer entangled.

This is not true. If it were then FTL communication would be possible. See http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
Visual Studio and SQL Server as well?
levenshtein distance for predictions? haha.

I'd be really curious to know which teams in particular use movie metadata? Yehuda Koren (the first commenter in the blog post) has explicitly stated many times that in his humble opinion movie titles and any non-explicit info has been useless.

BellKor, BigChaos, Gravity, and Gavin Potter (just a guy in a garage) are going to be presenting at Yehuda's KDD workshop next week. I'm sure other teams will also be represented. I'll ask them if they use movie metadata, and I'm pretty sure the answer will be no.
You can think of RESTful approach as an extreme case of object oriented programming when your methods are limited to CRUD.

Obviously there are cases when there's more than one way to change the state of the object that are only relevant to that object type. In the web world usually the full object state is already on the client so it is not a big deal. You can have your special methods in the client side library and still expose only CRUD methods in the service API.
Since we're having so much fun with quantum mechanics today
All about Giclee Printing
If you are a photographer with acute photographic skills then you can make a lot of money by making giclee Prints out of your exclusive collection of photos. Giclee is nothing but photos printed on canvas using digital printing. The term Giclee is from the French word gicler which means to spurt, basically referring to the inkjet printing technology that is used to make Giclee
Right, closer analogy would be object oriented programming, where some methods are standard (constructor->post, destructor->delete, copy->get, assignment->put) and some are totally type specific. The point of REST is that these type specific methods do not have to pollute your core / transport and can happily reside in your client libraries.

Sending email is best mapped to POST (create), not PUT (update), and the URL doesn't change for POST.
not really, the system would only need to keep track of the last updated time of each record and when aggregating them, set the proper etag.
I agree with both qhoxie and sharjeel here, as they both make great points. Ubuntu has a GREAT community support and a huge list of repos, but jusst like qhoxie said, if you're developing it really doesn't matter what you use.

As is the case, in my opinion with anything, just how you use it.
Gears Best Practices
the simplest explanation of REST:

the URL is part of the UI, both to the user and to api consumers.

If you think of it that way, REST makes a lot of sense. Sure there can be other elegant approaches, but REST is one that has gathered steam b/c it addresses this in a logical, useful way.
Yehuda later wrote http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/03/using-imdb-data-for-netf... and http://hunch.net/?p=331 that using movie metadata has produced no measurable improvement in RMSE.
Make people use the first one instead of the second one, for the sake of "clarity", and they'll be banging at your door with torches and pitchforks in no time flat.
Is There a Market for Premium Online Data Visualization?
Michael,

My suggestion is that you use your salary to hire someone to work fulltime on the project. You are presumably in a good position to find a smart employee who is interested in your work and will be able to contribute within a short period of time.

If you cannot make headway in the market with two developers/proponents, it seems unlikely you will succeed alone. Not all of the work needs to be technical - there's no reason you can't hire someone and have them handle marketing/sales.
I didn't realise you actually read this site, so I'm sorry for being a bit rude. I thought it was some big name reporter who did not give an owls hoot what others said.

The tips you give are common for people who often given presentations, but perhaps for the hacker crowd here, they could be quite useful.

The traction one was good though!
Chi.mp is Evolving OpenID
No it's not a toy language that's for sure. Anyone who has read the ES4 draft will concede that it's not something you just play with. In fact I haven't seen such a bloated monstrosity since the day I read the UML 2.0 spec.

Just read the section about packages and namespaces and you're going to want to kill yourself. And they're making the same mistake as C++, Java and C# before. They don't include generic types (aka templates) from the start. The language includes everything plus the kitchen sink and the dirty dishes too, but they're not including generic types even though everybody now knows that statically typed languages without type parameters don't fly. You can be absolutely sure they're going to add it in the next version and, as always, it won't be pretty.

I really hope Microsoft is successful in slaying this monster once and for all!
way to go, these labels tactics are not fit for public consumption.
This is very interesting technology something our startup like many others could use it. Server licensing is always tricky. I would say go with number 2 and in the meantime build a commercial product around the technology. Since you understand this technology the best it wouldn't be hard for you to build a shopping engine based on CatchPhrase.
In addition it can pick up stuff that you never thought about as properties/clues for classification. PG has written about this in his spam posts.