skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've shot myself in the foot enough times with "trivial" or even "one character" edits that everything goes through the normal source control + deploy process.
Should consultants take equity?
Since I'm taking a Cobol class this next semester for a similar reason, I went searching for whats out there and found some people attempting that:
https://github.com/dayashi/cobor
As much as this is obnoxious, pageview link-bait, they do have some smart calls. In addition to the YC crowd, Marco, DuckDuckGo, etc. I think they really highlighted some great blogs, including This is my Next, among others.
A former employer spent literally 9-figures on repeated attempts to port a legacy app from VAX BASIC to C++ on Unix. God only knows how much they would need to do APL...
Was that including time to wipe the blood from your eyes?
I would never have believed it as a kid, but coming from a business which shares similar seasonality to yours: summer sucks.

If you ever have an option to get recurring revenue, though, take it. It helps smooth out seasonality considerably.
Far Cry 2 is by a fair distance the best most recent game I've played in some time - it's the only one I keep coming back to. A lot of people found it repetitive (shooting up guardposts etc.), but I don't approach it like that. I like to get around the map stirring up as little heat as possible, and get more fun out of the tension of sneaking past. Before I start any mission, I pull out my map and plan my route - which bits by bus, which by river, which gaps between guardposts, etc. And for the missions themselves, I like to tactically dominate them - take out snipers from distance, find high ground (often ex-sniper posts), burn the place out if suitable, then mop up. If I get hit even once, or seen when I didn't mean to be, I consider it almost a failure. Crysis was remarkably poor by comparison - the suit completely ruins gameplay for people who like to sneak, because it removes the stress.
You can't select any text since everything is inside horribly-pixelated images. This makes me sad.
Third-World Squat
SSH, GNU Screen (byobu), and Vim.
Why CTRL for shoot? It doesn't work in my browser for who knows what number of reasons, rendering the game unplayable. Games running on unknown hardware should stick to common keys which can be expected to work/exist.
Hackers Get a Scoreboard to Track Web Hacks
I think it's difficult to say whether or not the rapid growth strategy was Groupon's best option in their early stages. The low barrier to entry means that a well-funded, well-operated clone could conceivably outshine Groupon before they could scale a profitable model.
DearPhotograph.com is an amazing site, never seen it before

This one broke my heart for some reason:

http://dearphotograph.com/post/8311735731/dear-photograph-if...
Google inadvertently creates a Profanity API
Is that supposed to be impressive? Because it's not. It even broke the W3C markup validator.
It did not accept my perfectly valid email address, just because it had a + in it. Not impressed.
Oh gosh, where to start:)

- on any calculations that are iterative,
- the recacluation rate is limited to something like once per second,
- sheets containing over 2000 market positions getting real time quotes grind to a halt.
- any time you have more than about 20,000 calls out to a COM component per sheet
- large vba functions, it seems vba is about an order of magnitude slower than the corresponding Excel built in methods.

TL/DR large sheets, dde, COM, heavy use of iterative solvers, large amounts of vba, all make excel really slow down.

Having said all that Excel is really awesome, it's just not for big data:)
+1 for localtunnel. It's a great service and really easy to use. I've seen similar ones that cost money, but as far as I know localtunnel is still free to use.

http://progrium.com/localtunnel/
I don't need to do this as much as I used to, so I normally use either a mounted ssh filesystem, or "sharing" through a DVCS these days.

A few years ago I worked at a place where they gave us a local windows box and a remote headless linux box where the code ran (this was before virtualization was ubiquitous). I used cygwin on windows and forwarded X11 sessions running on the remote linux box to my windows box over ssh.

windows w/putty: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XDMCP-HOWTO/ssh.html
OSX: http://dyhr.com/2009/09/05/how-to-enable-x11-forwarding-with...

It let me run eclipse and other GUI apps on the linux box, but have them mostly feel like native apps (well, native X11 apps) on the windows box.
Five Worst Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Pitching Angel Investors
> Instead, the sector faces the real threat of a shortage of one of its most crucial resources: programmers who possess legacy skills in older programming languages, such as Cobol and Assembler.

Saying "assembler" is a language is like saying that "Romantic" is a language. Are you talking about PDP-8, x86, ARM, MIPS, SPARC, ... ? Also, having spent the previous night doing nothing but writing assembly (to patch machine code, no less), I suddenly feel very old.
Indeed. I recently saw a US job posting located in a major city that wanted a COBOL programmer to update a legacy system. I know I've read articles in the past about how much of a need there is for COBOL programmers, so I was kind of curious what someone would pay for one. They advertised that the pay would be $30/hour. You could make far more writing horrid J2EE code for practically any big company.
If you lose some packets for a few minutes, it shouldn't die,but there are a zillion real world situations where it can and WILL die....... and it's not an SSH problem, screen was useful for the same reason long before ssh.
Rails 3.1 has zero Issues
I'm writing a game engine at the moment, specifically for PC but also potentially to experiment with on mobile platforms, and I decided to go with C, for exactly the reasons you've mentioned with.
Very cool

A buddy in college updated the old Trek73 game with a 3d version. It was colossally confusing to play. In response I wrote Trek1D which was played very like this game. My universe had stars, which had to be gotten around by firing up the warp engines and entering the 2nd dimension!
CPAN, as always, to the rescue:

http://search.cpan.org/~abigail/Regexp-Common-2011041701/lib...
Why oh why does profanity ever need to be filtered out?
Wagn: a new breed of wiki
This is the first release, it's creative only for now but they're expanding into survival eventually.
No worries! Looking forward to it. Thanks.
Yes, Minecraft is very resource intensive and a lot of people with powerful computers (relative to smartphones) can't run it, a straight port would not work. It's been rebuilt from the ground up.
A "U.S. Person" has a specific meaning in this context:

* a citizen of the United States

* an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence

* an unincorporated association with a substantial number of members who are citizens of the U.S. or are aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence

* a corporation that is incorporated in the U.S.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_person
TaylorMade Burner Superfast 2.0 Fairway Wood
> Could the big companies [...] make investments in startups?

No, investment is too risky.
The Man Behind Android's Rise
Actually this is a bad idea if you want to improve your ideas. The internet is not the problem, the problem is how you use the internet.

You can use the internet to learn about 3rd world problems and expose yourself to different cultures and issues. What you will learn is the developing world major problems are not access to education, technology and infrastructure, access will come with appropriate use of funds. Corruption, mismanagement and large criminal organizations are major problems, they lead to a major misappropriation of funds. Every country has corrupt politician and criminals, some more than others, but when you're in a developing country the effects are really devastating.

And if you want to figure out ways to solve worthwhile first world problems you can use the internet to find people who
are working on those things. There are plenty of people doing that.
Apparently our definitions vary a bit ;)

> As for user visible, actually, yes, changes made to dtrace recently for example.

> Sparse zones as another example, and so on.

Those changes came from SmartOS/Joyent and were not made by the IllumOS developers.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate their work, but I've already lost hope with IllumOS/OpenIndiana... Fortunately Joyent stepped in, so I hope that things will speed-up a bit now :)
just bought your book... makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the tips!
We charge anywhere from 5-10% each month, stipulated in our contract. This takes care of 90% of late payments as no one ever wants to pay that much in a late fee...and they are unwilling to say it is too high because the immediate reply is "why would you worry it is too high? You aren't planning on being late when paying, right?" :D
Spoken like someone who doesn't have a family to feed, clothe, and/or shelter.
Ask HN: good resources to learn about building/deploying large projects?
I have a bunch of questions about how to build and deploy large projects to production and I haven't been able to find good resources for answers. Right now I've been haphazardly checking engineering blogs and hoping someone talks about deploys, and reading http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/12/12/staging-servers-source-control-deploy-workflows-and-other-stuff-nobody-teaches-you/. That's a great starting point but where should I look next? Where can I learn more about building and deploying large projects?

Is there a gospel for building and deploying systems? What's a "good" duration for end-to-end deploys?
How do I make sure I don't break everything?
How do you swap the production code without dropping in-progress requests?
What are the things I won't know that I don't know, if I've never done this before?

Thanks,
Kevin
Compaq bought DEC, got into trouble and got bought by HP. It was a fairly short time line between rescuing DEC and needing their own rescue. How is that a good out come? I am not saying buying DEC brought them down but it certainly didn't save them from impending doom.

As far as Sun goes there is a much longer time line between the Netscape purchase and there own, but the way Sun fell apart until its eventual purchase isn't what I would call a paragon of success.
I can't really tell if this is a joke or not. Regardless, it's funny.
In the context of COBOL, the natural assumption would be mainframe Assembler of the S/390 variety. Which is a distinct language, not the class of assembly programming.
University Of Michigan creates a Cylon like robot
What's the line? If they'd had the internet, they'd never have got round to inventing the internet.
I imagine CTRL was chosen for historical reasons; it was the fire key on the original game.
Software Update Versus the Mac App Store
You're right, of course, but this is not a tech site. In this case, I think it's reasonable to use the more familiar term. It's a bit like Lisp; it's not technically a language, but everyone knows what you mean.

[edit]Or seanstickle could be right. COBOL was invented before my mother was even born, so this isn't exactly my area of expertise. ;)
Facebook Says That Google+ Has No Users
Ask HN: Who can down-vote comments and/or submissions?
It seems that comments are sometimes "greyed out", which I presume is the result of down-voting. Who can perform this down-voting?
None of the above. Google AppEngine does it all for me with the click of a 'deploy' button. Sysadmin work is so 80s.

To be honest, since GAE all I do now is open notepad2 and code, nothing else, then deploy and presto. I remember the old days when having apache, filezilla, svn, and a plethora of sys tools was the order of the day.

Coding is more fun when it is pure coding and nothing else than coding. Thanks GAE.
While I agree that iTunes is a very cumbersome piece of software and it is more difficult to use on Linux, the amalgamation of educational videos is the big step forward. The technology has been around, like you said, for a long time to post videos online - but what good is it if those videos are hosted on a thousand different websites? iTunes U aggregates them all into a platform that can easily be searched, as well as enforcing a minimum level of quality in order to provide a higher quality learning experience. Is Apple truly that magnanimous? Probably not. But it's an ad-hominem fallacy to dismiss the quality of iTunesU on the basis of it's creator.
Muse makes markup that looks exactly like I thought it'd look: ridiculously impractical and invalid. Fun.
Ask HN: On the importance of RAM: Is Paging as bad on an SSD as it is on an HDD?
We all know that paging is bad. In an ideal world - you want all your memory in RAM so that everything is on the bus.

My question is from a relativistic standpoint: when paging takes place, is it as slow on an SSD as it is on an HDD? Is the bottleneck the transfer time over the bus or the seek time itself?

For context: I am debating moving from an SSD Macbook Pro to an SSD Macbook Air, which would require moving from 8 GB RAM to 4 GB RAM. I am interested in the technical answer though as well as the pragmatic one.
Feds Stumble on Social Media Security
Huh? 51 years old, putting 3 through college. Been out of work for 6 months at a time. Currently dissolved my consulting business to go back to work for "the man" (though truthfully am vesting equity, not all bad).

I understand sheltering the family can be a burden, yes.

But hungry? Never. Lets use some other euphemism for hardship. Your family, church, community, government will not let you go hungry if you have the wit to stand in line.
How to set up a reliable conference wifi on a remote island
Yeah, it's awful. Gratz! Doing it fast isn't good, if it can't do it well. Agreed on all the HTML/CSS rape comments.
From the FAQ:

Why don't I see down arrows?

There are no down arrows on submissions. They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold.

I believe it's around 500 points.
Warren Buffet, and the Fallacy of Trickle-Down Economics
ASK HN: Comparing processors - Why do these sites give such different results?
How can I get reliable information on the actual speed in practice of different processors? For example, I'm comparing 2 laptops with these processors:

Intel Core i3-2310M
AMD A6-3400M

According to Passmark's CPU benchmarks, the AMD has much better performance, it gets a 3455 compared to i3's 2566.

Yet according to Notebook check, the AMD processor is actually more comparable to the older Intel Pentium T5400.

So which processor will actually perform better? How can one get reliable information on different processors?

[1]: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD%20A6-3400M%20APU%20with%20Radeon%20HD%20Graphics
[2]: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel%20Core%20i3-2310M%20@%202.10GHz
[3]: http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A-Series-A6-3400M-Notebook-Processor.55753.0.html
Touchscreen-oriented phone that appeared mostly as a large touchscreen with a couple of buttons around the periphery. You can add LG to that list, too.
This answer will vary depending on what you are building. Web app? Language/framework?

As far as not dropping in-progress requests, most web sites have multiple servers with an haproxy instance that redirects among them. You can deploy to only one box at a time, and haproxy can direct visitors to the boxe(s) that aren't in the middle of being upgraded.

There is no generalized answer to your larger question though. Many frameworks and architectures have different deploying methodologies because of their unique nuances. If you share what you're building on, I'm sure many folks here can direct you towards some best practices/how-tos.
I thought of that afterwards. Yes, some banks and having trouble. But... when business was great they didn't do it either. Banks shouldn't even bother mentioning "it's too expensive" because they've proved that even when profits are great, they still won't quickly move away from 60s legacy cobol systems.
I felt the video is promosing, let me see if it accepts my email address.
I'm in the opposite camp... various side projects are based around cycling, which peaks in the summer and dries up in the winter (Nov/Dec).
How to Get into Graphic Design on a Budget
Live Natural Disaster Map
I agree to the point that colleges are shifting their curriculums. But to think its not the legacy giants (IBM, Oracle, etc) not pushing on colleges for "java hires" could be causing it?

Not saying any intention is that sinister, but the general CS job market is a different market than administering legacy systems mostly. These guys will be able to sit on that job for years.
I just finished "Hamlet's BlackBerry," which is exactly about taking time to disconnect to get "depth." A little preachy some times, but thought-provoking.

Basically, we haven't developed the social norms needed to put some space between our brains and maximal connectedness, but we can look to history and personal experience to try and figure out what some of them would look like.

It's got some good historical bits about how different great thinkers have dealt with technological change (writing, printing press, telegraph were as disruptive as the Internet). It's also got some personal anecdotes of the author's decision to have an 'Internet Sabbath' every weekend, where from Friday night to Monday morning there is no connectivity in his house.

I'm not sure that engineering (including social engineering) is going to work in a situation like this, but it's probably not very harmful to try.
If you need more than 4G of memory (ie. if you think it's probable that swap is going to get used), using 8G + HDD is a no-brainer. SSD is a fantastic improvement over HDD, but the difference between memory -> disk is not a factor of few (like HDD->SDD), it's orders of magnitude.
Judging from the empirical evidence my own comments afford me, this ability is safeguarded for only the most short-sighted and humor-deprived HN users. (Bait.)
Biclique cryptanalysis of the full AES
There are some other advantages of having someone who knows assembly and the likes as well. First, lets face it, if they can program well in that language they can probably program well in any other higher level languages. Second, not very many people at all even know what a CPU's register is, or what the difference between big endian and little endian is, or why we should be really really happy that we were brought Protected Mode Flat Model. Meaning that if your one of those people that do bother to learn it then you'll have a much higher "edge" factor for any company willing to admit they need those skills around still. And finally, to see how bits turn to hexadecimal. How hexadecimal matches with CPU's registers and all you really do is move or push data from one piece of memory to another. It all gives you a perspective on how programs work underneath it all, how the operating system works, and lets you see things like the code beneath something in front of you. You get a good foundation of a core technology which may one day be needed again very badly. (Hasn't anyone figured out that quantum computers will need someone to create a new assembly language/architecture for that matter?)
If you want a game that allows more complicated movement in time, there is Achron (http://www.achrongame.com/site/).
Admid security fixes, a cool new feature in Firefox 6
Sorry Google, isn't it a bit spammy?
just found this
http://www.gstatic.com/trends/websites/sitemaps/sitemap1.txt

and is it ok to link to bad pages?
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=babysstory.com
requestAnimationFrame() is new to me. Sort of a setTimeout() but with the time being "when it is appropriate to draw a new frame". A much more polite way to handle animation in the browser, especially when there are multiple independent animations running.

A little article with shim code: http://paulirish.com/2011/requestanimationframe-for-smart-an...

Draft: http://webstuff.nfshost.com/anim-timing/Overview.html
Nike air max 2009 shoes grey and black and white
Unless you just use the first two digits as sign bits - if num would encode to (x,y) then instead you have 00num = (x,y), 01num = (x,-y), 10num = (-x,y), 11num = (-x, -y)
Hope it fixes video performance.

On my MacBook Pro, it's horrendous.

Exposé is very harsh, and the RSS screen saver is s l o w
A maybe condition is necessary.

see: http://www.wdyl.com/profanity?q=balls
Which isn't a valid metric. There are no issues in the tracker with the "rails-3-1" label, but there are a number of issues in the components of rails (ActiveRecord et.al)

The full list of all Rails related issues: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues?sort=created&direc...

As you can see, there are quite a few for the 3.1 code base.
But when you have those obligations is being unemployed REALLY better than having a crappy job? Waiting in a dole line, living on the edge, and not being able to support a family just because being unemployed is better than a bad job? I think the reality is that many people can't make these sorts of decisions - many people have to take jobs because they have obligations. And to simply not take a job because it's better to be unemployed while supporting a family doesn't make sense.
The video was okay-ish, but the lack of _any_ kind of reasonably content on their website was a big let down. I tried to request an invite anyway, for the heck of it (I usually give these things a try, when they can present something marginally interesting), but if they don't want my email address... well, I'm not going to force them to have it, either.
None of these points (except perhaps for #5) are specific to smart people.
That's true, but I would argue that your body will give clear signals if you're doing something you shouldn't be. Things like sprains, sudden joint pain, and light-headedness have a very clear purpose: to stop you from continuing.

Perhaps I should add "and listen to your body" to my previous comment.
Thanks! Hope my tips will be useful in your business!
Here's a simple example of a case where profanity filtering is almost certainly a good thing: say you have a voice transcription program (which Google makes available as part of Android). Voice transcription is an error-prone process. Wouldn't it be good to be able to avoid returning bad words that the voice transcription program mistakenly thought were there?
You are almost entirely correct. I had severe internet addiction (or so i thought) when I was working at this web dev sweat shop. I found it nearly impossible to concentrate, I was on the internet more than I was concentrating on work. One day I did an experiment. I downloaded the database, and setup my computer to work completely unplugged from the network. I was completely off the grid. Yet I still could not get work done. I would stare at the code, not really caring about it.

I found, I wasn't going to the internet because I loved the internet. I was going to the internet because I no longer had ANY interest in my work.

I quit shortly after that, my new job is extremely interesting, and my web usage has minimized severely.
Provided you still have source code and development tools available, the problem in cases like this usually isn't the language. Even APL is pretty easy to pick up if you have a book or someone to teach you.

The bigger issue is that the application you need to fix is mission critical, undocumented and contains massive amounts of spaghetti code. There usually aren't any tests, source control might not be used and it's far from certain there are automated builds or deploy scripts.

In some cases you might not even have source or the tools to use it, and then you have much bigger problems. But the language usually isn't the main problem.
The Daily Mail used my photos despite my denying them permission
The SPDY Book
Culture Clash: Google and Motorola