skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Video game colleges are a sham, and anybody who's serious about entering the industry would be wise to avoid them. If you want to program games, get a traditional CS degree, focus heavily on graphics and AI, and do a lot of your own dev work in your spar time.

If you want to be an artist, do yourself a favor and go to an actual, reputable art school. You will gain the foundation you need to be a proper artist, not just some monkey hacking out metal-suited space marines all day.

I've known many people in the industry, and the verdict is unanimous: game degrees aren't worth crap, and generally the people coming out of them aren't as capable.
I was doing some development on the Fujitsu F1100 for Docomo. Well, actually, I was more along the lines of handling some of the translation (I still have the original translations on my computer, and they are cringe-worthy - "Vicarious execution input was registered.", for example)

My boss was one of the hardest-working people I ever met. I'll call her "A" for short, and she worked herself to tatters, trying to get the system working for their purposes. I never heard her complain, but on a quiet day I did get a chance to take up the case with a drunk subordinate of hers who pretty much told me the real deal - Microsoft Japan was simply not offering any helpful support, and the "paid support" they offered often ended with them hanging up half way through.

I don't know if there is a back channel to Microsoft or someone reading that cares, but for God's sake if there is, and you want to hear what the problem with the Japanese market is, please just email me. I'll do it for free, I just don't want "A" to be fucking working 8 AM-10 PM every day because of something that I KNOW isn't something that Microsoft wants.
"The real story is that the younger generation doesn't want to work hard"

I'm not saying this isn't true (I don't know). But how could you ever prove this?
This exists. That is actually the de facto way to prescribe placebos.
Firefox Minefield: Leaves Chrome In The Dust
I'd recommend haskell, smalltalk, scheme or lisp for pure mathematics.

If they are into numerical analysis then Mathematica, C and Java are still important and potentially necessary depending on what they are researching.
Did those people bring it about themselves: without really knowing the story of Argentina (except dictator, brutal torturing and stuff), I would wager to say YES. Probably it was another case of communism gone wild. And that is why an attitude like the one from the "second world" you quoted annoys me a bit, frankly. It annoys me if people don't even try to understand the "financial crisis" or what is causing it, and instead simply scapegoat some imagined rich people whom they blame for everything. Because that is exactly the attitude that then makes the real shit happen, communism, fascism, civil war and the likes. I am not saying that I don't feel sorry for the poor, complex systems are hard to understand, and I can not paint you a complete picture of the financial crisis, either. It is important to try to understand it to avoid making the same systems as in the past.
Old joke:
Q:What will the scientific computing language of the 1980's but like?
A:I don't know but it will be called Fortran.

My undergrad physics department taught a course in Fortran because the Comp Sci department refused to teach it. It's only been a few years but I think they are still teaching it. Fortran is nearly as fast as C and far easier to use than C, so there hasn't really been a drive to switch the huge amount of Fortran code out there to C. I think that if anything kills off Fortran it will be Python or something similarly easy to teach to undergrads.
wait... how'd we get that reputation?
I don't see too many X-ers cruising towards a comfortable retirement at 65 like their parents...
'64. So Generation X, according to this, thoug to be honest I've never felt part of a particular generation.
BMW seeking partners for open-source car software platform
1. is the cheap way. as someone else said, you can use BGP instead of dns for failover to improve downtime, but then it's no longer cheap.

Personally, this is my preferred solution. keep as much as possible in MySQL cluster and have the rest built on a central dev server and pushed out when there are changes.

San is not cheap, and it's pretty easy to screw up the whole san. It's still a single point of failure. (I ran prgmr.com on a san for the first few years, and I switched away from SAN not because of cost, but because of reliability. With a san, it's really easy for the new guy to accidentally trash everything.)

so yeah, I'd do #1. if you can use a active-active VPS, that's best, if you want to save money, run a smaller active-active site with ec2 images standing by (remember to test weekly) - the problem with 'cold' backups is that they are usually broken. active active means they are up all the time.
Five years of quotes in Google News
6.5 Million Robots Now Inhabit the Earth
1975 here.

Earliest memories feel like an old Italian movie (spent 1980 there). I can clearly remember Oliver North, the cold war, and my family's first microwave and VCR. (I wasn't all that well off). In grade school we had three lessons from a "computer guy" and were able to spend an hour every week or so on Apple II's.

EDIT: OH! And how could I forget the day we got a Colecovision! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColecoVision)

High School through the early nineties...we all still had big hair. Used a black and white Macintosh to write a program in Turing. For my class project, I had graphics of a missle blowing up a house if you got the question wrong, since I skipped ahead to the back of the book and read the appropriate section. I remember how scared people really were during desert shield. We thought it could be WWIII. Saddam's army was the 4th largest in the world.

Joined the army in the mid nineties. I remember seeing a buddy's 486 with windows 95 on it and thought that this internet thing was pretty cool, but not as cool as the GPS's we got to play with. I did my time and got out, went back to school and got into IT just as the dot com boom was at its height. Never made the mounds of cash others did.

Been stuck behind a computer in one form or another ever since.
Don't mistake Entitlement for Ambition either. Ambition isn't walking into a company and expecting to be well-paid with a lax dress code and ample time off. Ambition is starting your own company and making something you know will be awesome.
I'm 28, and I've worked with some of these millenials. They talk a big game, but they have no follow-through. All I hear is about how awesome they are and how they grew up with technology and are so productive compared to the crusty older generations. But all I see are a bunch of kids waxing rhapsodic in a mirror lined echo chamber while the rest of us get something done.
Ask HN: Rate my startup: IvyLees
I'm not convinced that Fortran has any remaining advantages. Sure, a bunch of libraries (BLAS and LAPACK in particular) may be written in Fortran, but that doesn't mean you can't call them from C. Maybe there are some uncallable-from-C libraries out there that I don't know about, but I'm pretty sure the only reason physicists still use Fortran is that they have old legacy code (and/or old legacy collaborators).

I use Fortran every day, and I can't stand it. But it's quite common to find physicists, even young ones, who only know Fortran.
I don't remember the first time. It was before the WWW existed. But I get that feeling more often now than I did then. These are good times.
How about the OScar project (http://www.theoscarproject.org/)?
I think the overall "fail" rate of new buildings have gone up even as better tools have become available. Now we can debate what's a failing design, but when a building needs significant work within 20 years of being built I think is a strong indicator, and at every level this has been going up.

I think the idea of deconstruction has promoted the idea that the architect is supposed to pick what a building looks like and as soon as people approve his design his job is basically over except for the building phase.
LucidLogix graphics processor company closes a third round funding
Typical bottom-up thinking. While I do enjoy rolling my own libs from scratch from time to time, the availability of a lot of reusable, well-documented, well-designed code have permitted me to tackle, as a single person, projects that would not have been possible years ago.

I wanted to create a 3D data visualization app just for kicks a while back. Guess what, I didn't have to roll my own OpenGL graphics libs, nor my XML parser, but I still had a blast putting it all together, and being able to focus on UI (the main motivator for the project) instead of the nitty gritty behind the scenes.

I think it's valid to have some concern about coders becoming less capable at low-level code-from-scratch principles, but I don't think it's fair to say that the library-centric development today is less fun.
projecteuler.net

If there was ever any doubt about what programming can offer mathematics, ProjectEuler would dispel that. I say give the students an intro book on Python and point them at ProjectEuler.net. If they enjoy math, curiosity will do the rest. I agree that programming isn't necessary for every mathematician, but it offers so much potential for exploring numbers that any math students not introduced to programming is at a huge disadvantage.
You should take a look at the book 'Supercapitalism" by Robert Reich - it may give you a new perspective on how business has evolved over the past 30 years.

One of the major themes is that the focus went from people as citizens and unto people as consumers. Thus the reason for corporations changing their behavior. It's as much the consumer's fault as the corporations'.
Most would consider you Y, although leading edge.

You missed entering the workforce during the early nineties, (recession) so you probably share more things in common with Yer's than Xer's.
By birthdate, Generation X. By culture, I probably belong to a new generation of future transhumanists that's growing up right now...
I have to ask, what need are you addressing that already existing social networks don't provide?
Seriously, the boomers definitely take that one. :-)
Why not require a programming course for physicists and mathematicians? I think part of the reason is this: programming (badly) just isn't all that hard. Programming (badly) is a skill that most smart twelve-year-old kids can easily teach themselves, and most mathematicians and physicists who didn't program as kids are still quite capable of picking up (bad) programming skills as they need them.

Programming well is a much harder skill to learn, but it's not something that you'd pick up from an introductory programming course anyway, and besides, good programming is overkill for most scientists anyway.
Well, the article is talking about a USC grad program, not really comparable to one of those video game only niche 'colleges.' The way I see it, it's not unlike other interdisciplinary sort of grad programs (e.g. robotics). In the end though, you're right in saying that a traditional degree in CS, with the raw skills in specialties needed in games like graphics and AI, is all you really need. FYI I am a game graphics programmer, with no game degree, just a CS undergrad degree from a public university who took a lot of masters level graphics classes in school and read a lot of SIGGRAPH papers.
Mid-1982 here, but I agree with you...

I don't particularly identify with, say, someone born in 1990.
For a mathematician, I'd recommend a dialect of ML (or Haskell). It's based on a theorem prover, even.
> People LOVE their apple products, they have an odd attachment to them. (Rarely do you hear people telling you they love their computer...well they do when their computer is a mac).

As Mitch Kapor once said, IBM PC is a computer you can respect, Mac is a computer you can love.
Every generation has had a tremendous effect on society.

Has there ever been a "Meh, fuck it." generation?
Coming back from Europe in 87, to a small town in the Midwest, to realize that I was now a few keystrokes away from Europe -- via BITNET.

SLEEPY, where are you? I still remember your text files.
"Beautiful" is a concept completely lost in Architecture in trends dating back many decades. I am a big fan of the beautiful, as are some other architects, but the general trend has been to not even consider the idea for quite a while. The most trendy thing now is sustainable building - also having nothing to do with the beautiful and in many cases detrimental to the idea.

Another way to look at this is as long as it's trendy to make art that ignores the beautiful, so too will architecture ignore the beautiful. It has to do with culture and philosophy, and fortunately there are still some people who desire beauty in their buildings and demand it from their architects, but not nearly enough.
What does coding have to do with an oversupply of engineers?

Do you mean that coding is hard and thus we need more coders?
Don't you think it might be better if we had better, not more coders?
A tiny white box is not the best way to go into depth into this, but a couple notes:

1. Putting neoliberalism to blame here is not exactly the case. It had its moments (allowing certain banks to double their leverage ability) but there were plenty of regulatory screwups: Reducing Fed Funds rates to 1%, Fannie, Freddie, Sarbox, and several others.

2. Where is that 1.7T that those Americans own? This isn't like Ducktales where there is a giant building full of gold. It's the capital that drives our economic system. Of course some of them don't know how to allocate those resources, but its out there.

3. It's terrible the amount of human suffering to the scale that we have is tolerable today. But it's my belief that other economic systems will not do any better. Credit and liquidity affects everyone, including charities.

These discussions are better left to an hourlong discussion over several pints, but those are my thoughts.
Android and its perceived 'openness'
Baby Boomer here.

Not proud of it. Don't apologise for it either. Come to think about it, never really thought about it that much.

I spend lots of time with people from age 4 to 92 and never think about which "generation" they're in. Frankly, I think it's a giant non-issue.

I do know that we didn't have all this cool technology when I was in college, but I sure am glad we do now. Having suffered with earlier stuff makes me appreciate what we have today that much more.

Now stop worrying about stuff that doesn't matter and get back to work.
This essay is just silly. It makes it sound as if our generation is the first to invent entrepreneurship. Millions of our parents' generation own their own businesses. Entrepreneurship isn't a new discovery. My dad started a software company in the 70s. He didn't have hacker news and y combinator. He wasn't even in silicon valley. And guess what, he did have access to information. Maybe he wasn't inundated by it like we are today, but sometimes I question the value of spending so much time everyday consuming internet "wisdom".

Matt advocates working for oneself is an undisputed ideal, as if it would be better to be an independent owner of a pizza shop than an early (or even not so early) employee of Google.

I think it's likely our generation will have to work harder than our parents and for much less rewards. We have quite a mess to clean up. We'll have to pay for a 10 trillion dollar debt, endless wars, and a generation of retired baby boomers to support in social security and medicare. All this with a declining manufacturing industry and a totally dysfunctional financial system. Contrary to Matt's conclusions, our parents have had it relatively easy.

Starting your own company is an awesome thing to do but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're privileged geniuses for doing so.
2/3 of US population lives in Constitution-Free Zone
Bah, somehow I messed up my searches, must have done everything but that.
Where does it say that they are killing anonymous downloading?

Also, they have always limited the volume for their premium users-- the article actually states that they are changing the limits.

The headline seems to be based on an egregious misreading of the blogpost...
Postal Service: Indie pop; you did fine, but not better than the majors.

Eric B and Rakim: seminal NYC hip hop; guessing classic hip hop is a blind spot in your data set.

Fleetwood Mac: mainstream classic AOR; Vetiver? An indie folk band? The Beach Boys are similar only as contemporaries --- also, not a very useful recommendation, since there are 3 different Beach Boys your recommendation could be keying on, two of them execrable.

Sepultura: insider-y mainstream metal; you did fine, I guess, but not better than the majors.

In two cases your recommendations are bad, and in two cases they're just not excellent. But if any online music retailer will do this for me, why would I use your service? To listen to some of the music online?

You should consider:

* Allowing people to upload their entire iTunes library files so you can analyze them and make targeted recommendations to stuff they already own.

* Allowing people to vote on the recommendations, or doing something "social" (gag) to let people adopt recommendations or biases from tastemakers who care about this stuff.

* Link to or repurpose content from Wikipedia to give more background for the artists you're displaying.

It still seems like this app is really just 10% of what Last.fm or Pandora already does.
College email hack: send POP/IMAP campus e-mail without SMTP/outgoing server
I have struggled with this for a while now, because my ISP sucks and has no outgoing mail server. So we use Gmail as a relay server, which actually works really well. The e-mails will read "From: you@school.edu". Alternatively, you could just drop out of school.
It seems like a well-designed application to me. While I am not intimately familiar with the need for such a social network, I will trust that you and others can make that assessment.

A couple notes on the design:

- Focus borders on the username and password fields are different.

- I like the clean look overall, but the contrast is a bit too low in some places: Large buttons, Registration form header.

- I think a little more top and bottom padding on the search bar would be nice.
I certainly don't miss the days of Internet Exploder 3, or Geocities, or AOL domination, or ....

I certainly do miss the days before commercialization and marketization of the internet, when sites were genuine repositories of information and not cash grabs or click-thru whores, and you didn't get 100 times more spam in your inbox than legitimate email even after the filtering....
Wow I had no idea. Your way is probably smarter.
DroboApps - Community Created Apps for the Drobo
We're offering traditional public relations tools, including an online newsroom, a press release builder, and media list building.
I'm pretty sure we gave it to ourselves when we were feeling surly during the 90s.
Yes, pure game colleges might be utter crap, but I think the "game-lines" you can choose at regular CS-universities is a good idea.

The one we have in Denmark[1] make the students work in a (small) real-life scenario, and actually produce games. On the side it is required to take courses in AI, graphics, HCI, distributed networks and other fields relevant for game development.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=342642
Knuth thinks in algorithms, not solutions. In his day, people were constantly inventing new algorithms--if you've never done it before, you should at least be able to guess that it's a big rush. That's what Knuth thinks of programming as: a series of completely new inventions and associated rushes.

What he's actually trying to say was that, as a usefully large number of algorithms for everyday tasks have already been discovered (optimally, even!) and codified into "libraries", people are running out of (easy) things to invent, and so aren't getting that rush as often. What was needed, in his mind, was a replacement for the rush, as that was what he saw as the raison d'etre of programming; being a mathematician himself, it was probably the only reason he programmed at all!

Of course, we've gotten on just fine without the rush. "Programming" as solving problems has continued to flourish; Knuth's "programming"--really referring to the scientific method applied, as it should be, to Computer Science--has quieted. It used to be that every programmer was a practicing computer scientist by necessity, just as every astronaut is currently an astrophysicist by necessity. When "platforms of discovery" (computers being one, the vacuum of space being another) mature, the need (or ability) for their practitioners to be involved in the creation of the theory underlying the field diminishes. This doesn't mean the field "dies"--it merely segregates.
The design is nice. Is this addressing a real need? I am very close to the "media outlet environment" and I'm not sure if we have a need for such a resource? What are the tool-based things you are talking about? Maybe I just need more convincing?
Just curious - have you read Supercapitalism by Robert Reich? He tries to explain the reasons for the various changes in American capitalism over the past 50 years.
So this is like TechCrunch for umm.. science and stuff.

In other news (on the same site): "Listening to personal music players at a high volume over a sustained period can lead to permanent hearing damage, according to an opinion of the European Union Scientific Committee".

Wow, who would have thought!
HN should show TipJoy gold stars next to usernames here. ;)
Isn't subconscious marketing illegal?
openly pessimistic i see. they slapped their name on the thing, they put their rep on the line, you think they're going to just let people run free and create viruses and malware to tarnish their baby?

think man. would YOU go through the trouble to create a product and release it with no controls in place? that would be like letting anyone bottle coke with your logo on it and them selling shit in a can.
$1 for 200k views is very little. Typical CPM with adsense is between $1 and $10, so for 200k views you might typically expect between $200 and $2000.

Having said that, Slashdot readers are more likely than average to use ad-blocking software.
amazing this comment gets voted down.
New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome's V8
Thank you. You have a very good eye for detail-- I'll add these to the to-do list.
ah, excellent, thank you!
I agree with you. Yet my friends' imagined "rich people" are everyone living in a developed country. I.e. "rich people" means something entirely different to him.

Some people was born after the collapse, or were children at the time. Yet the first world handles them just the same way as their perhaps accountable parents. And exactly how is their fault in any way? So from their perspective, the whole situation is just unfair, and the cries of self-pity of large financial institutions very much out of place.

Also: here is an account of how life is currently in a country that used to be just fine, and now is totally broken down:

http://www.frugalsquirrels.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ub...

Search for "We understood it the same way a kid understands photosynthesis" for a description of how it feels to have the process explained of how a large middle class falls down to a low class, and when that means your own class in your own country. I found it heart-shattering.
Except that it isn't. It's completely different. The Zune and iPod are two competing products from two proprietary vendors, that go head to head and someone wins.

The G1 is the first device of many, built on an open, configurable, hackable, repurposable platform called Android. Perhaps the G1 isn't quite what you want, but the possibilities are wide open, and not limited to what Google, or Microsoft or T-Mobile wants. The important thing in this equation is Android, not the first device that happens to run it.