skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got my son (he just turned 7) hooked on this.

The big problem that I have is that you can't skip levels and the levels get too hard too quickly for his brain.

I know it's just Logo with a different interface but he really enjoys the fact that it's a robot (a more interesting protagonist than a turtle) and the isometric view.

I've been kicking around rewriting this as a game with a more gradual progression of difficulty, a level editor, more goals and a larger instruction set.

While researching similar programs, I was reminded of 'Guido van Robot'. It's view is top down rather than isometric and it's character is a triangle 'turtle'. It has a much larger instruction set and you type your program rather than using icons. I guess what I'm looking for is something in the middle.

It's definitely fun though.
I agree with dazzawazza, the fear of being "that guy" that tries really hard only to fail spectacularly is hard to avoid. Honestly, in my work I have found that working hard and being diligent often produces "lucky" circumstances. I hate that old saying about challenges being opportunities in disguise, but so far it's proven true for me.

I read an article a while back on YC about the virtue of failing spectacularly. I couldn't find it searchyc.com (maybe someone else can find it?), but the gist was that it's far more noble to try your hardest and fail in as grandiose way as possible. I like that idea because it seems more alive and pure, but I certainly hope my startup doesn't end up like that. :)
Heh- true 'nuff! If we could do what we do using only web software, we would. It seems that apps like Quicksilver (Mac), Enso (Windows), Firefox, etc., are still pretty darn innovative. But the agility that the web affords is pretty darn addictive.
I still write C code and GUIs for stuff, but doing it in PHP,SQL,Perl is just so much quicker and easier for things that my C programming is not as frequent as it used to be and my C skills are getting stale. I'm not in need of a client-side app as much anymore nowadays, the browsers are so capable that it's not as necessary to do heavy client-side apps much. I'm not discrediting client-side apps, it's just that the demand isn't as high anymore.
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Technically, Macs were the first Personal Computers, then the IBM-clones came out... the clones were what most people had. Then it was just IBM(and clones) vs Mac, and BAM! people thought PCs were IBM-based machines.

Unfortunately for us geeks, Apple is going to continue to use PC to mean non-mac until PC actually means PC for the average person.

/mini-rant
I don't know what "Money, Media and Power," is, but there are actual economists who are critical of the fractional reserve system. Mostly, they are of the Austrian School, but there are some Neo-Classicists (mainstream) economists who see problems with a system that allows banks to loan out money that they don't have.
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I personally don't mind writing client software. I'm still in school, and I honestly don't have a huge amount of experience, but efficiency is really appealing to me. Web programming is fun when using Django or Rails. The code is beautiful, and it provides a great way to innovate. However, when I sit back and think about all the extra nonsense that is going on under the hood of a web app I start to get slightly frustrated. I'm not saying that I can fix this or even that it isn't the best way for the web to be built. It's just that there is something cool to me about building a brilliantly efficient client side app. I'm not going to say that I enjoy optimizing assembly, but there is definitely something satisfying to me about creating a really efficient and secure application.

I'm not planning on making a career out of client software, but I do enjoy it at times. I strongly prefer writing web apps, but I also hack away at OpenGL and C++ occasionally in my spare time.
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A short while back, the folks at Adaptive Path invited me and the gang at Unit to contribute to a cool project they had in the works for Mozilla Labs. Our part would be to design how The New York Times sports page would look a few years into the future.

http://www.andyrutledge.com/times-new-omen.php
The idea often appeals to me but I quickly get turned off by the practical realities involved, particularly when getting the app to both look reasonable and work on several platforms.

That said, I've been thinking about XUL/Firefox addons for some simple configuration things.
I don't think they hired one, looks like one of the founders designed it
This is really nice. The interface is easy and fun to use.
I have to respectfully disagree here. Having super-lightweight branching and local commits has helped me greatly, even in the tumultuous early days of a new project. Basically, it gives me the freedom to create a branch, hack for a while, and then either pull the changes into the trunk or abandon them, while still keeping an easy "bookmark" in place (a.k.a. the branch itself) to go back and review later.

Using rsync may offer a history of your code, but without any associated semantics, you're dependent on your own memory and grep to actually find out why a change was made. Making commits intentional, and associating them with a particular task, will greatly simplify your code archeology later. Rest assured, some day you will need to figure out why certain decisions were made, and your memory won't be complete (if it was even you who made the decision the first time).

Furthermore, adding a ticketing system from day 1 really helps impose a useful type of discipline onto your process. Work to be done is described in a ticket, and the ticket identifier gets referenced in your commit messages. Much like basic version control discipline, having a record that associates change requests with units of work will help keep you sane down the road.
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Why do these polls get repeated so regularly?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323041
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I think within your post right here lies a lot of the problem. There needs to be a really compelling to write something as desktop software instead of as a web app, so most people don't even bother to learn how to write desktop software in the first place.
instead of a blowtorch i would use the oven broil setting.

who knows what kind of partially burned hydrocarbons you're blasting onto the surface of that sucker with a blowtorch
I couldn't agree more. My favorite computer I've owned is still my G4 12" Powerbook. It's the perfect size. Sure, I wish the screen was bigger, but I also wish it had no mass. In other words, Speek's projector comment was right on the money in my book.
I think you're suffering from a virtuous circle or Catch-22 depending on your viewpoint. This site (and others) have made out that everything is going to be a web app, so lots of people want to work on web apps and then if all the smart are working on web apps then web apps look like the place to be.
FWIW, multiple backups and hardlinks are the basic foundation of git. Running 'git commit -a' a few times a day to check in all the changes isn't a big timesink; commit messages can take time or not depending on how detailed you care to be.

I've has some personal projects that were 'moving too fast' for version control, or that I was just playing around with. In every case I ended up losing code because I couldn't remember how I'd done something I'd later removed. And I've never had a project with more than one copy of the codebase -- whether that's a local dev and a production deployment, or two devs -- that didn't end up overwriting code or config at some point.

It's not surprising that version control, largely useful for history, does not appear to be immediately useful for a young project. But young projects become old projects with the same habits and practices. Start with good ones.
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i've done both (although my client-based experience is now a little old-ish). i've worked on client-based stuff (c++ mostly) and done your standard web app dev work (rails, php, java, etc.).

the turning point for me, where i decided that i wanted to focus more on web dev type things, was in a UI and software engineering class i took in college. we had to build a c/c++ program to process and display some data graphically, with a nice gui interface.

learning about, creating, and working with a modest GUI was painful and time consuming, to say the least. everyone struggled, and what took my group (4ish people) weeks in c/c++ and MFC would've taken me hours with html/javascript. the productivity difference and learning curve totally turned me off of client-based app work.

having said all of that, i acknowledge that i didn't do work in .net or in a java framework, and i know that the situation is currently much better than it used to be. i'm not claiming that one is better than the other, just explaining why i turned my focus away from client-based apps. i'd love to return to them, just haven't had the need or time to do so.

also, full disclosure, i dropped rescuetime an email about employment a while ago :)
It just seems so stupid to me - not to mention annoying.
webwright, haven't seen your job ad, but I guess its not that challenging for a real "client" hacker to become attracted. Personally, I wouldn't bother applying because I see no future for myself as a "desktop" fanatic at your company - don't take it seriously, I do and love web apps too!
It's short form for "IBM PC Compatible", something that was printed on a lot of floppy disks back in the early 1980s. It was used to differentiate between "Atari" (which was a computer), "Apple" (which wasn't a Macintosh), "C64", and "Tandy" in the USA, and certainly others elsewhere in the world.

The primary use of the term among (semi-)technical people has evolved to mean the defacto open standard personal computer platform that has a BIOS and uses the Intel 32 bit / AMD 64 bit instruction set.

The use of PC to literally mean "Personal Computer", a computer used by one person, is falling out of vogue. Apple obviously is running from the term, and as far as I can think the only other non-Windows platforms (Sun, for example) fancy themselves to be "Workstations" -- users and vendors alike would take umbrage at the suggestion that they're mere PCs, even though they're the same size, shape, come with a keyboard and mouse, and are often less powerful.
Had mixed results with this, was getting Elton John tracks on songs that sound nothing like Elton John (and yes I listened to the Elton John track to compare)
Steam engine beats John Henry. Every time. So short answer: no. Human powered search will not last.

Cro-Magnon replaced Neanderthal. Robots will replace us. Nothing personal. It's just evolution.

:-)
I'd like it as long as it was Mac.

To elaborate, the pool of people willing to pay for Linux client software isn't large enough. The pool of people willing to pay for Windows software is large enough, but I don't enjoy writing C#/.NET or MFC. And as importantly, it is hard to stick out as an indie in that environment.

So, the time invested to learn these technologies isn't worthwhile.

On the mac, you have a user base which is used to paying for software, and it is growing. And although no environment is perfect, I do enjoy writing Objective C and Cocoa.
> create a branch, hack for a while

$ cp -R project testbranch

> then either pull the changes into the trunk or abandon them

diff or rm -rf. And none of the nuisance of explicitly telling the VC system when you're adding, deleting, and renaming files.
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All projects right now use Subversion except one new project at home that I decided to try Git out with.

All projects at work though use Subversion for now, but I am the only developer. (Just makes it easy to revert incase of issues as our system deals with a lot of numbers)

I like Git .. it's very fast and simple to use :)
This site appeals to me because I am both a gamer and a moron.
Lovely, I am not really that negative a guy... But this post may lead you to believe I am...
I vote for banning submissions that start with a number... there's 3 "list" style posts on the front page right now.
I was only referring to the practice by banks of freezing credit lines for small companies. This WILL create a snowball effect forcing companies to close their doors. We have to figure out a way to inject confidence in the credit system...
Heh, I think the same thing every time this topic comes up here on HN.

I don't think it's just the young though. I think a lot of people have forgotten how bad things can get. The last real recession was in the early 90's for most. Unless you were heavy into tech stocks or worked in the industry, the only thing that you noticed about the dot com boom was the superbowl commercials.

It's amazing how people believe that things will stay the same forever. When we're booming, it will always be that way, when it's bust, life will never get better.

I for one am looking to profit as much as possible on people's ignorance, but I know that won't be easy when I'm having to make my own cut backs.
GUIs just aren't interesting to create -- there's nothing challenging about creating them. For desktop apps, the normal thing to do these days isn't even to code them -- you drag and drop together a UI in something like Glade, Interface Builder, or whatever Visual Studio packages, and hook up handlers to talk to the core logic. It's mostly grunt work.

The same is true about web interfaces, of course, but they at least have hype behind them, and therefore they're picked up by trendy young coders. Plus, there's the challenge -- or, IMO, endless pain -- of actually making it work across multiple browsers.

There is certainly an art to making a good, usable interface, but it's not a typical programmer's challenge, and writing a UI by hand is simply a pain in the ass. It sucks to do the stupid connections and packing if you don't have a drag and drop layout tool. And once you have that, you start leaving the programmer's domain, and into the designer's domain.

Note, I'm only talking about interfaces. The logic behind them can be anything, but it's the same logic with a web or desktop frontend.

I think it's just that once the shine wore off of the "hey, I can make buttons!" thing, the highly motivated programmers realized that UI design wasn't something that they wanted to focus on -- it's better left to designers (in theory at least -- im reality it's probably left to lowly grunt programmers) who can make the UI with drag and drop GUI builders, leaving them to work on interesting technical challenges. Making a GUI tends to be incidental to the core of the problem. I suspect that if it wasn't for the shine factor in web apps, it would have the exact same sort of apathy that you see in most programmers about desktop GUIs.
I got into programming via the games route, and until pretty recently, that meant to-the-metal C, C++ and the libraries close to the system. (and when I started to teach myself to program, I hadn't heard of the internet) I've always tried to stay on top with other tech as well though, including the web, and now that I've given up game programming, my consulting work is about 50% client-side (C/Win32, C/UNIX, C++/MFC, .NET, Java - you name it) and 50% web-based. I enjoy both.

I guess the web is what's hot right now (and that's hardly going to change so quickly) so it's what attracts the freshest talent. I don't think there's anything fundamental about web technology that will attract "YC style hackers". I also don't think the desktop is dead just yet.

I suppose it's therefore no surprise that my own pet project is a kind of web/client hybrid that you'll be able to use either via a browser or run locally. (although some of the more complex graphical UI is pretty tricky to do in a browser, so we'll have to see what happens)

I'm probably in the wrong country to help you out directly, but I suspect there are plenty of people out there that fit your requirements. I don't hang out there, but you could check the Joel on Software boards/jobs, I understand that's frequented by Windows folk.

EDIT: this post seems to make me sound old. I'm 24, so typical YCer age, as far as I can tell.
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Git for hacking projects, DropBox for personal files (which makes for interesting arrangements, since the git repos are in my personal files).
Your country has never looked as bad economically, ever.

That includes the great depression. While controls are still in place (thank god) to prevent bread lines, how well you Americans adapt (and how the rest of us react) to the very real possibility that you cease to be a superpower remains to be seen.

All I can say is that Russia was not a fun place to live in in the early 90's.
Please name which products that the world relies on the US to produce.

Exactly.
Apple is going to continue to use PC to mean non-mac until PC actually means PC for the average person.

That's an entirely normal marketing move. "A car is just a car, but a Cadillac is a luxury vehicle." Same thing, positioning everything else as being "just" a PC, while suggesting that a Mac is special.

Which it is, really. To anyone outside of our little echo chamber here, a Mac is entirely unlike a PC, and it has nothing to do with Apple's ads. At work they are given a "PC," and it is different from the iMac they see in my children's playroom in almost every way that counts to them.
Summary: know your audience and use the corresponding lexicon.

Safe to skip.
I'm reading this on an Aspire One. The screen is plenty for most sites (1024x600). Even with its small size there is space in the case to make the screen quite a bit larger and I expect that will happen in the future.
I know from experience that git is superior, but I still use svn because it is the (modern) Lingua Franca of revision control. TortoiseSVN on Windows also gives it a definite advantage on that platform.
Can anyone with experience with both SVN and Git comment on the pros/cons of branching and merging (this is something I do often in Perforce). Which would you use based on this one issue?
I can definitely see human-augmented search engines working in niches. i.e. crawl and index a category of content (like all the museum sites in the world), categorize the info (hours of operation, prices, directions, exhibits, etc), have people eyeball it against the real sites for accuracy. It's like the Semantic Web without expecting the web to change.

But as a general purpose search tool? No, there are too many things people search for. Google is right too often for anyone to remember something else as a backup search.
Or printed.
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In that case it's worth plunking down the cash for a Qt license (or going Open Source). It really is the best framework for doing cross-platform native-ish development.

http://www.trolltech.com/
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using subversion over cvs because of repository revision numbers, renaming of files.

using git over subversion because of sane branching / merging / rolling back, history tracking, SPEED, increased redundancy (everybody is backing up the repo!) and local commits.
Where else are you going to get that valuable "cost per degree of chilling" statistic? From now on, I'm sneaking in my own ice.
Google, Boeing, Ford, Windows XP, iPhone, Nike, Levis, McDonalds, Coke. That's just by looking around the room I am sitting in.
You are right. His comment was off in left field though: "fractional reserve banking invariably increases inequality" - something he even goes so far as to label a "fact" (citation needed!). I think if you run the data, you would not find such a correlation, and that things like taxation and redistribution policy are more correlated to the gini coefficient. In any case, there are appropriate forums for the discussion of these things (like peer-reviewed journals) where knowledgeable people can comment.
A good article. I wonder if inspiration counts as luck? His advice to read non-fiction contributes to inspiration, however.
Also /^Top \d+/i
Absolutely, the paradigm of 'client-software' is becoming ambiguous for most of the web people. 'Porting' an existing web app to a 'client software' is a very trivial work, thanks to stuff like XULRunner.
I agree with the basic idea, but the reality is more complicated.

Hiring someone has a lot of tangential factors that will come into play. Most hackers have a personality that tends to be strongly focused at the task at hand, often at the expense of paying attention to others things around them. This means that while they might be technically capable of functioning as an office assistant, it will be a very poor use of their skill set and others are likely to be able to do a better job with it, as they enjoy using the skill set required for the job. If the sole responsibility of the role is a tour guide, or PR individual, then there is a good chance that they are the hacker is the wrong individual for the job. On the same note, if there is a lot of repetitive work that requires an intense focus and can't be automated, quite often the hacker personalities may lose interest.

Just because one is qualified to do the job does not mean that you'll be meeting the companies unspecified needs. If you aren't agreeing to work for X amount of time, the company may lose out solely because the costs of hiring and replacing you are greater then the benefits you'll provide.

In summary, there are occasions where HR is required and does it well. Just because most companies err too far in one direction does not mean that there aren't legitimate reasons hiding in the original guidelines that will need to be addressed. For a specific instance, I have friend who is looking to go into coding from QA. We had a QA opening at my current employer, but the desire to leave QA means after X amount of time means that my friend was not the right candidate for that job.
Neat stuff, i especially likes the background pic of a guy holding two wiimote similar to Prince of Persia holding swords. Good design, best of luck.
Technically, Macs were the first Personal Computers

Did you mean the Apple II?
It's funny actually, this is something I learned from grade school! One of my elementary school teachers made this rule in class to write out numbers from [one to ten] and then use numbers to represent everything greater than ten [11, 12, ...]. Helped remove a lot of confusion then as to when is it OK to use numbers vs. writing-them-out!
Because not all of them make the front page? And even if it did, this person probably missed it. Really, is that so wrong?
Non-transparent markets do.
Thanks for the insight, I appreciate it. I'm currently aiming at some rarely explored user base in the social networking area. Can't disclose details, but it entails the sharing of life events.
I would say that unless you're making command line programs or AI the most important part of an application is the GUI. It is all your customers see, and if it doesn't work nothing else matters much.
i thought i saw compiz running on these things? it has a very nice zoom feature i use all the time... like win key + scroll wheel... very handy