skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite true. My daughter is the failure case for condoms combined with birth control and a wife who was told "you can't have babies." I'm just glad it happened two months after we got married instead of for the 3 years we shacked up previously.

Good luck, boss!
>> Still fun for me, after ~15 years of coding, 5 of them professionally.

Lots of us did coding as a hobby for 10 years before gettting out into the professional world. With 5 years under your belt, you're still a junior programmer and the world's your oyster. Let us know how much fun it is 15-20 years or more from now. (And when you do have to care about things more important than programming: family, health, aging parents, job security, etc., etc.)
> Artists who succeed following traditional models (who, incidentally, are the most supportive of draconian copyright laws) are the ones who marketed themselves more heavily and got more access to traditional media: they went on TV, did interviews and concerts, paid for airplay... -- without any of that, they wouldn't be "popular".

Sometimes (maybe mostly). Other times it's because the artist is actually good and people buy their stuff just by word of mouth (Metallica is actually more an example of this). I think it's easier to tell in hindsight which is which. Milli Vanilli vs. Led Zeppelin, for instance.

The traditional role of the record company wasn't to manufacture music and shove it down our throats, but to be the filter--find the good musicians and sign them up. While I agree that there is a lot of manufactured crap out there, I do think that you can't dismiss all pop music because there are actually artists out there that are good and popular.

Incidentally, I think the real revolutionary thing that napster did was stop the record companies from being the filter, at least in our minds. Being able to try out any weird music I liked was liberating and when I found some bands I liked I could look at that user's whole library and use it as a primitive recommendation engine. I was able to find way more indie stuff and it effectively gave some of the filtering controls over to me.
Intel shows off HDR and AA in raytraced games
(The downvote suggest I may have to clarify my statement. I suppose unqualified bashing isn't exactly a good idea.)

By the LOC count of currently maintained projects, most code is definitely badly written, and in a low-level or otherwise unsuitable language such as C++ (C++ is fast, but most of the time we shouldn't even care.) Most code I see (beware selection bias) is indeed badly written C++ (I even authored some of it). Now, if you count by project times end-user popularity, then you have a completely different story. It is a poor proxy for programmer's work quantity, however.

Regarding the 10 fold reduction, just know that I experienced first hand 5 fold reductions when doing my best with C++ and Ocaml respectively. A 10 fold reduction is not unrealistic at all when we talk about badly written C++. For instance…

…I currently write plugin for a 2 million-lines program. The exposed interface alone weights 80,000 lines. Many classes have hundreds of methods, and the inheritance hierarchy is generally 5 levels deep, sometimes up to 8 or 9. And, it actively deals with no less than 6 different types for handling strings (std::string, char* , old Pascal strings of 3 different types, and some String type that inherits std::string). Oh, and it's slow. C++ didn't even help here. We are past the point where we can talk about technical debt: it's a Big Ball of Mud.

For such a program, I expect a 20 fold reduction. And I bet there are other Chtulu abominations out there that make look this program like a little diamond.
Denver as well. Where specifically? I work in Lone Tree but live in Littleton near Waterton Canyon.
Is it Safe to Delete Cache Folders in OS X?
> If you subject "out-of-process cacheing technologies" to the same measurements (performance cost, code complexity), as threading solutions, what do you find?

Yes, I think you find that shared state is difficult.

So it's the old process (private by default, shared as the exception) versus threads (shared by default) split. imho, "less shared state" == "simpler". And imho, "private by default" == "less shared state".

And you have an easier time of it the shared state helps you with concurrent access. This is one benefit of RDBMSs (transactions) and also systems like redis. The fact that your state is external means it is more likely to have been designed to be conncurrency-safe.
I wonder how old this is. Sounds like something from mid '90s maybe?
In a lot of ways the deck has been economically stacked against lower-middle class and working poor Americans, while at the same time macroeconomic trends benefited low-skilled workers in developing countries like China. Workers there were able to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" thanks in part to rapidly rising wages as production moved to lower-cost countries.

I have no doubts that the globalization of economic inputs produces higher global growth and a greater overall level of welfare, but I also have no doubt that this process produces winners and losers. One subset of the losers has been low/medium skilled Americans, who face stagnating wages and many of the challenges this game portrays (in an admittedly over-dramatic fashion). We can either accept this as the cost of doing business or work as a society to compensate the losers, but in either case we should acknowledge that there are some larger forces at play that make it harder for certain segments of the population to reach their own bootstraps.
PR2 Robot Can Now Fetch You a Sandwich from Subway
Apple to Samsung in Australia: No Deal
So it is true that somebody can have a month in which his/her gradfather dies, pet dies, friend is terminally ill, they break plates at work, the get depression, their tooth hurts, rent is raised, they get a speeding ticket, neighbor's kid breaks their windows, they make only 150$ is a yard sale selling "a bunch of stuff", their bathroom leaks, they slip and hit someone else, have to pay for a worthless college degree (why would I get any, I don't know), they forget their lunch frequently and thus buy a 1$ burger (if you are working in a warehouse, that is not going to effect you that much), have chest pains, get their gas siponed off, mom gets sick, their children throws a tantrum because they are being taunted as "free lunch kid" (and why would they go hungry for that?) and still make it through with $398 with a paycheck tomorrow?

I mean come on! Utterly ridiculous. Some people have a bad luck but don't forget from next month I would be having food stamps and not any of those expenses so may be able to save much.
I've noticed there is a general malaise around a lot of people at the moment, and I think it has nothing to do with personal circumstances, and more to do with the "impending end of the world scenario" that's been in the media now for nigh on 4 years.

I've also notced people are having real trouble making decisions that 5 years ago would have been snap ones. It's as if there are a lot of people whose thought processes are being befuddled because they worry that in a few months time the world could be turned on its head.ie confusion arises when decisions made today may need to be revised in the very near future in an unknown way.

Of course I worry about that too, and the last years have been the hardest I have ever known for finding freelance work (yes to pay the bills), but I tell you what, I've completely let go of any hopes of trying to protect myself from any "world crisis" on the basis that if the worst does happen, we'll all suffer equally, and you'll be in the same boat as me.

So give up trying to control it and things will start to look better already. And decisions will be easier too.
Whitman's political obsessions spell disaster for HP
OTOH there are compilers (SBCL) which take that beautiful thing Zach probably likes (Lisp) and run efficiently on the stupid thing he seems to hate (Von Neumann machines)...
I've been at this exact same place.
The best way you can prep for a 'web startup' is to leverage the skills you've got (javascript, java, html), and take action RIGHT NOW. [I've a feeling you know enough to get hacking on an idea, and learn along the way.]

We've no clue what the world would look like 2 years down the line. One thing we'd be certain of -- insane amounts of competition.
The most important thing you'll learn right now is 'STARTING' with limited information. If you can couple that with an insane drive to 'COMPLETE', you'd be prepped & ready.

---------------

Since you mentioned 'web apps',

Get into action, the 'lean startup' way:
[http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-...]

- list a few target markets/niches you'd like to work with

- research them online/offline (forums, meetup groups etc.) & dig out their pain points

- build landing pages (unbounce.com) around your MAGIC SOLUTION to their problem

- get enough folks to sign up for your landing page (might cost you about 100$ worth of adspend)

- the inspiration you get from having actual folks that need your Magic Pain Solver would drive you to complete your product

- you'll relieve them of their pains by forcing yourself to build this ASAP, or you'd hire someone

- you'll have learned a ton about the essence of entrepreneurship through this experience

---------------

Basically, you're connecting a pain-point for an small-enough group of people, that communicates amongst themselves regularly (the market), to a transaction (business model).

And please, start Right Away.
A lot of the smokers that I know started in their early teens. They saw smoking as a way to be cool.
I assume you're aware of http://www.mono-project.com/FastCGI? I suppose you could just implement the FastCGI spec yourself, it's a bit fiddly but not that complicated.

Of course, this assumes you have plenty of time to spend on such projects. ;-)
Finally, a solution to getting things done
>I bet I couldn't name my game "Angry windows" either //

If your game is a clone of Angry Birds then no. If your game is not marketed in a way that confuses people to thinking that it comes from the originators of Angry Birds then yes.
Free Online Jobs, Totally Free.
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/08/19
Pretty cool idea however I wonder when limiting the radius to who receives your vibes how do you calculate the range to display your vibes. Also, if you are protesting an area, and send a vibe, how do you prevent your vibe from being reached by the authorities in the vicinity? Its a pretty cool idea to have them self destruct after a couple of minutes though.
Why would I pay a premium for Azure+ when I can roll out my own equivalent infrastructure trivially, or use the existing competitor?

Because "you" have another reason to use Windows and would like to offer a PHP front-end for it. What other reason? Expertise, another application, etc.
I'd recommend using something like http://css3please.com to generate the CSS for all browsers. Currently it's not really Tilt-Shift Using CSS, but rather Tilt-Shift in WebKit, due to the prefixes used, even though most or all of the properties you use are supported in other browsers as well.
Now write that in Chinese.
That looks awesome. Is there a resource online to find all the start-up/tech incubators in Europe, or the world? I'll be traveling in Europe soon and would love to visit more places like this. Thank you!
RailsCasts is awesome, I owe so much more then $9 per month to it.

But here in China, many young students will still think it is too much...bad bad bad, anybody can do a less pro one, and make it free?
Everybody approaches learning differently, but honestly, my recommendation would be to go ahead and start building stuff.
"Google" is an English word, so you'll have to be a bit more specific.
Mor Ve Ötesi – Kara Kutu . mp3
Ask HN: PAAS alternatives for JVM + SQL service?
Can you point me to the list of cloud hosting services that support JVM + SQL (prefesably Postgresql)?

I know Heroku does that, but the pricing model for database is too jumpy, and I'm not sure about other limitation.

Google App Engine would be fine if it had suooprt for SQL database.

CloudFoundry looks interesting, but pricing is not yet defined.

I would like to avoid having to manage my environment, so Linode and EC2 are not options for me.

What are possible alternatives, and your experience with them.
Red Hat buys Gluster
Storage solutions absed on Open find their real home, as it seems. Congrats!
Totally agree with you here (except one thing). The world in this game is binary in nature. If you don't do that, then this will go wrong. Things like that, that is not how I would see it working.

The one thing that I don't agree on is that

So, coming out a couple hundred dollars ahead, I could run this "poverty" scenario for 4 months and have enough to buy a refurbished MacBook Air and join the Apple Developer's Program, with which I could bootstrap an iOS App-writing business. Seems some others played, came out over $1000 ahead, and could jump in to app-writing in one month flat.

You are not coming out a couple hundred buck ahead. Tomorrow the landlord will require rent so minimum $800 in that, even if you are in a good job you have $200+$300, so you owe a little back rent of $300. But I doubt every single month will be so bad. I mean, my pet, friend and grandfather can die only once right?
Convert kilometer to other units in simpe way
I'm sure you can extract a genericised suggestion out of those given.
I think this game is pretty interesting. It's not realistic by any stretch, but it does get your attention more than yet-another-infographic-with-statistics-on-it. It's a simulation in the very slightest sense of the word, but you probably would have ignored the infographic.
Brought to you by the author of Belly Dancer and Pole Dancer.

This isn't a 'twitter alternative', it is an app for the iPhone. And it is anonymous only because the author tells you so -- who knows what is being done with the data on the backend.

The paranoid in me asks how hard would it be for 'the man' to put together an app like this in order to track protesters activities, including location...
Reigniting Your Creative Spark
Until they try to trace it to an actual person...
so... you give it your location? from your cellphone? sounds pretty anonymous.
The idea that a customer should pay you to install your app is naive and out-dated. You will simply be beaten by competition who allow customers to install the app for no cost (i.e. everyone else). But beyond that, if your only way to exchange value with your customer (i.e. they give you money in exchange for something), is at installation, then you are missing out on most of your revenue.

There are tons of articles about this online. There are regularly articles about it on HN. Noel Llopis is one of many app developers who blogs about his real-world experiences. Here is one such article: http://gamesfromwithin.com/one-price-does-not-fit-all
Comparing Hacker News & the Slashdot Effect
Cool, but I prefer more humble version numbers, maybe 0.1?

A cross browser javascript is an incredibly ambitious project, just look at how long jquerymobile has been in development and still not ready for prime time.
Git supports hooks, so you could write a script to push a branch out to a server whenever a commit is made. That would be more sensible than running 'git pull' in a cron job.
Just to note that lithium is not like oil: the lithium is not consumed in making the batteries, so if it turns out to be useful it'll be worth gathering even from low quality sources.

Also, sea water is 1-2ppm lithium -- expensive but plenty of it to extract.
Based on the ignorance of your statements, I would have to guess that you're either of an upper middle class background with very little exposure to poverty or that you have an overt political agenda.

I'm really trying to see the intellectual validity of your statements. I'm really trying to understand if you truly believe what you're saying. Would you actually make those same decisions?

Sorry, this isn't against you. I just see these type of comments often, and they only seem to make sense to me, in some abstract 'know-it-all' 'hindsight 20-20' sort of way, as if all of these life decisions are black and white and obvious.
You're very funny, and you have no clue what you're talking about.
great post. i learnt a lot about internet marketing. thanks.
Amazing story of Poker
Thanks for posting the link. I just added my HN id along with 10 other ids to my account: https://metacpan.org/author/SZABGAB
In Spain we have UNIX fire extinguishers. It's funny the first time you see one in the wall of a mall.
> Should I need to pursue software development in my 2 free hours at night after coming home from flipping burgers because only jobs that involve production of physical goods that can't yet be copied still pay the bills?

And yet there are many people that actually do this already, otherwise how would you be booting your linux box? I know I program in my spare time...

> Just thinking about it is depressing. The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans)

I don't know, that sounds kind of cool--everything would be different, that's for sure. I think there will always room for really good programmers. Also, never bet against people trying to find a market somewhere--there's always one somewhere, it just might not look like the ones we have now. Don't fight the future, embrace it (or starve).
Still: congratulations! Babies are great.
> Here I thought patents applied to physical products or manufacturing techniques, not services.

Nothing wrong with patenting a method.

> So, theoretically, if someone had a patent for "transporting goods or people from one location to another, geographically different location", they could pretty much sue every driver?

You might have a prior art problem...
Electric Plane Wows NASA
Startup Marketing Todo Checklist
NASA, Google award $1.35M prize for ultra-cool, mega-efficient electric aircraft
I don't think math needs to be relevant to people's daily lives to be interesting. It just needs to be interesting, not pre-chewed a hundred times and then rehashed another hundred times.

If you haven't already, I heartily recommend Lockhart's Lament, which makes the above point (and others) much more eloquently than I ever could: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
What Impacts Web Form Conversion?
Reminds me of a game about trying to survive as a peasant in Haiti. Might have been this one: http://ayiti.globalkids.org/game/

Same problem that it had only options rigged for failure to chose from.
Whiner. Everything in life is like that.
Exactly the same situation as me. That's why I clarified with "soft-poor", which isn't really the same, but not too different either.
Is it just bluffing?
it works properly for me on Firefox 7 too, actually.
Investigacion de mercados
I wonder why those legal ways are not more used?
For developers, getting on a "career track" is as simple as finding a relatively high profile open source project that interests them and getting some commits in. Instant resume, code examples and you've jump-started your networking for a particular technology.

Edited to add: I have no idea why this is getting downvoted. If you disagree with my assertion then by all means leave a comment. Hitting the down arrow and wandering off does us both a disservice.
Well, the big one is the clear assumption that any statistically meaningful portion of the poor population is capable of being a developer of any kind.

Software developers are less than 1% of the US workforce, and it's sure not because the pay sucks.
"Six Reasons for Sudden Drop in [My Son's] Math Grade".
Should people be able to change their usernames?
Salu to you for watching this
Certainly. However, I wouldn't be surprised that some parts of America have a serious lack of infra-structure.
I find the idea of "testing" funny in that it admits we are going to fail before we even try. It's like going into a game and saying "Ok, we aren't going to win, but let's make sure our score is at least 80% of the final score".

I am no way saying that we shouldn't test (though I'm more of an advocate of TDD/BDD).
6 Lessons in my 6th year of marriage
Best Cyber Monday Deals, Sales, Ads, Specials 2011  Cyber Monday Sales
My favourite javascript raycaster was P01's "Wolf5k" (http://www.wolf5k.com/) - a raycaster in 5k of Javascript: before there was any such thing as canvas! It worked using an obscure, two colour, but programable image format - .xbm files, now killed by the browsers, so it won't work anymore.

But there is a great article on the Opera Dev blog about how to build your own like the parent's: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/creating-pseudo-3d-games-... (in fact, looking at the code it seems like this post is just a re-write of the Opera code by Jacob Seidelin - though it might me a coincidence)
Was this really necessary? Why are all of these debates Black vs White? I'm less inclined to try the 0MQ library now that I know one of the maintainers doesn't care about the correctness of the library as a whole (yes that's hyberbole).

I love how the OP negates his entire argument at the end by saying that you need to have "... test-driven development increasing as the product matures;..."

So what is it? Is testing considered evil? Is TDD considered evil? Make up your mind.

FYI: TDD is a design tool. Yes, the OP is right in that at the beginning you're at the point of most ignorance. TDD is a tool to help you learn and figure out your design. Is it right for all circumstances? Probably not, prototyping is a big one here too, but once you figure something out prototyping, THROW IT AWAY, and do the TDD on what you learned, you'll probably figure more details out that way.

Addendum: Step 4 of http://unprotocols.org/blog:13 is writing a test case, before any API code is written.
I wholeheartedly intend on starting my own company at some point, but I'm on my fourth year of salaried experience. Why? Because there is so much to learn from big corporations, problems to solve, and impact to make that you would never know about outside this walled garden. These problems can be solved, and big corporations will pay for the solutions. No need for freemium or non-existent business models here -- everyone wins.
I hope the "Lovie Awards" wither and die
Is There Proof that 30-something Mothers Will Fail Doing a Tech Startup?
Not quite how I remember making $8/hr at an internship right out of college for 6 months.
I used to work on Clinical Trials management software. We had an IVR product written in PHP and PGSQL. Project designers would build a project workflow with a half-baked web "flow chart" and custom PGSQL function that called existing PGSQL functions.

I have a nacent dream of a language that could elegantly replace the workflow definitions with pure code that looked like Lisp or Json. I'd like to work on a program like that.
Un|Reasonable

Locked in for years.

Lock-in is real.

Propriety feel,

Fear alternatives,

Data liberation features near.
Senior Product Developer wanted
I've certainly always approached maths as a game, but even that does not guarantee that everybody would enjoy it. If chess was a mandatory subject in school, lots of people would probably still resent having to learn it.

On the other hand I think many people are doing algorithmic and mathematical things on a daily basis (like cooking), yet they would claim that they have no idea about maths and avoid it like the plague.
> I made it through the month with $150 to spare.

So you ate up $850 in savings and have no way of paying rent the next day.

The game isn't realistic. It condenses in one month what could happen in the span of a year or more, but the result is the same though. you end up broke.