skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked on Quake4 as a programmer for a bit over a year, though little of my work ended up in the final game.

The Doom3 engine is mostly C++. If I recall correctly, the renderer still looked more like a blend of C with some C++ slowly drifting in (which makes sense, given how good of a C programmer Carmack is), but the rest of the game code is very heavily C++, for some definition of C++, along with a scripting layer.

Having worked extensively with the Quake 2 engine previously, I really didn't like the Doom 3 engine, myself. It was radically less... pragmatic. Earlier id engines, to me, were masterpieces of concision. They weren't amazing feats of black box abstraction by any measure, and they implicitly assumed you needed a lot of domain knowledge to understand what they were doing, but they did exactly what they needed to do with a minimum of fuss. Features were included because they were used, generally with the smallest and simplest code and tool footprint possible.

Not so with Doom 3. Huge amount of code appears to have been written because someone prolific thought it would be lots of fun to write it, many features end up going unused or are in the way, and ultimately (because it's more typically software engineered in style), every feature requires about 30 times as much code to be written properly and has several extra unused layers of abstractions crufting things up. The game code (in C++) in particular bears an unfortunate resemblance to Windows MFC-style C++, with a giant 12 layer deep inheritance graph with everything inheriting from a few enormous base objects.

All of that to my eyes, anyway. But then, I really cut my teeth on Quake 1 and 2, and found that their concision and brevity really helped them stay out of the way when adding new, innovative features.

The funny thing about the code for Doom 3 is that, looking through it all, you'd get the impression that Doom 3 was a radically more complicated game that what you ultimately experience when you play the game.

The best way I could put it is this: Quake 1 and 2 and 3 were well made games that ended up being enormously fruitful for white box reuse. You couldn't do much with them without understanding fair bits of their internals, but they didn't actively resist being understood. Doom3 was built to be used in a more black box fashion (like the Unreal Engine), with all that entails from an architecture perspective. I'm sure others might disagree with me from a code ideology perspective, but it is hard to ignore how fruitful the Quake engines were for licensing, and how much Doom 3 sank like a stone.

The code bases make really fascinating studies in contrast about the consequences of different software engineering values, at the very least.

TL; DR: Quake 1 - 3 remind me of linux code, Doom 3 reminds me of MFC.
Raw SQL is not very composable, while Korma emphasizes composability on the second paragraph of the page.
Is it ethically OK to take an advert out on a competitors website?
Our biggest main competitor runs a Google ad unit on their website. It's possible for us to take out an advert on it which would probably be up for a little while before they blocked it.

Is this a dirty/back-door/unethical tactic?
I actually did quit when I was (among other things) forced to use Eclipse.
yes. (note: not OP, but I'm not lying :P)
Why you don't need Silicon Valley to have a successful startup
Nokia hints at Windows 8 tablets -- Sidetalkin' tablets incoming?
> It was my impression that high schools and parents were the mechanism for indoctrinating youths into community values. Moreover, without playing too hard to personal experience, if my classmates at uni are tomorrow's leaders I'm a great deal concerned.

Obviously, parents and pre-college education are important (though if they're doing their jobs well, I wouldn't refer to what they're doing as "indoctrination"). But why should education in cognitive, moral, aesthetic, political, etc. skills end with high school graduation? Your second sentence here underscores this point: today's 18-year olds are not fully-formed citizens, ready to become "tomorrow's leaders" without further development.

> What are these "hard problems"? Hunger? Disease? Working boring jobs to shuffle little bits of paper around? I'd wager that the root of your "hard problems" is ultimately scarcity in one form or another, and the only way to address that is through technology, and the only way to get that is through STEM training.

Hunger and disease are hard problems, yes. And of course, having people with technical training is required for solving them, and for solving any problem that stems from some kind of physical scarcity.

But hunger and disease are two hard problems that are particularly easy to conceive, and whose solutions are likewise readily understood: basically, more food and better medicine. Once a problem and its solution are understood, implementing the solution is very often a matter of working out the technical details.

I think that many of the hard problems facing us are not so easily conceived, and their solutions once conceived are far from obvious. For example: what, if anything, should we do about rising income inequality? What consequences does polarization in political discourse have for our ability to address the divergent needs and interests of different groups of people? Which of our social norms are beneficial, and which are harmful? What reasons do we have to support the production of fine art or architecture, and how (if at all) should we do it? What rights and treatment should our institutions afford to those (prisoners, revolutionaries, the merely uninterested) who directly or indirectly undermine them?

I think these questions---and others like them, which we might not even have the language to express yet---are some of the hardest yet most important questions to answer. But they don't boil down to questions of "scarcity" in any obvious way, and I have a hard time seeing how technical training could ever help produce citizens who are capable of answering them in a reflective and reasonable way.

That doesn't mean that STEM training isn't valuable. And as I said here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187739) many STEM programs are liberal arts programs that do provide the skills required to answer questions like these.
Mainstream and Alternative Media: YASSSU Private Beta
This should not be [dead]:

CJM13 11 minutes ago

Thanks a lot, certainly more helpful than a best of luck wish.

1) What we're doing really isn't any different at all than people just going to events with friends and then meeting potential friends to date. We want to replicate the way dating works in the real world online. So we are providing an online platform to generate more of these interactions. There is certainly the recognition that people are looking for dates so that changes things a bit.

2)Users will be able to search for dates for themselves or set their friends up on dates as a matchmaker. We're coming up with ways to incentivize the matchmakers but for the meantime are hoping users will find the experience of matchmaking fun. There is concern that the matchmaker will be put in an awkward situation if the date does not go well for their friend, but that really isn't any different than setting someone up offline.

3)There is no cost to businesses to use TLF. We help businesses solve the "butts in seats" problem so they are happy to work with us to arrange a deal that allows us to have users prepay for their dates.

4)We are starting with singles events.

5)We completely agree. Our focus is on the offline interaction between users. Our site will only serve as a means for quickly setting up a shared experience offline.
We are actively looking for a woman to bring on board! When developing the concept we gathered feedback from as many of our girlfriends as we could.

P.S. Although we may be two college guys who read HN we'd like to think we have a decent understanding of the fairer sex.

Thanks again!
(Reads links.) I've been going around telling people for a while that A/B testing is non-Bayesian but I didn't realize there was an off-the-shelf solution! You need to pimp your wares more often.
Richard Muller: The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism
the issue seems to be that men are just more aggressive about it

If that's the case, then it would be interesting if a site like OKCupid had a limit on the number of emails per day a straight guy could send to a straight woman. Say, only one every few days. That would require male users to think very carefully about who they email.

It's an arbitrary thing, but it would be interesting to see how the dynamic changes.
The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate
Agreed. This is the primary reason I don't use Google+. I haven't got the time or inclination to split people into groups or even figure out what those groups might be. I did try but found it a taxing process.

Automatically coming up with criteria to filter by is a great solution. I'd love if I could send a tweet just to my UK followers or to those who tweet about "Ruby" a lot. This is all easily solved by machines and doesn't require me to do anything by hand.
Eh, it's good for basic stuff and getting to MVP, but I tend to agree that if search is a core feature, ElasticSearch or Solr are the way to go.
Best Groupon deal ever (buy 1 Share of Groupon Common Stock)
Under 30s: Internet more indispensable than breath
I've been in the Asana beta for a while & while it's a nice product, as far as I can tell, http://www.getflow.com/ is better in nearly every way. I just logged into Asana again today & it looks like they have started copying some elements from GetFlow, like the tabbed projects/tags/people bar on the left.

Anyone seriously use both tools & have an idea of their comparative strengths and weaknesses?
Good stuff, but the thought occurs to me that what you really want to know is when the user has stopped learning - i.e., when proficiency stops increasing as a result of doing more problems - and how much each individual problem increases proficiency. But that would undoubtedly be more complicated.
It does make sense to be able to define business/application logic as reusable query components.

For example, if your PERSON entity has TITLE, FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME fields, that little bit of logic that concatenates them together in the right way to form a full name is something that is useful to define. Likewise, setting up a join of tables that is used many times in your application is something that Korma will let you do.

Even though these components may be implementable on the database side (as user defined functions or views), it may not always be possible (or desirable) to do that way.
from elsewhere in the comment stream: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3188562
When Google+ released, I remember being somewhat confused that they opted for user defined Circles rather than using user relations as a gauge for friend "closeness". As the author of this blog post points out, users almost never want to get stuck placing hundreds of people in groups that could change at any time.

In fact, one Google Research paper[1] opens with the line:
"Although users of online communication tools rarely categorize their contacts into groups such as "family", coworkers", or "jogging buddies", they nonetheless implicitly cluster contacts, by virtue of their interactions with them, forming implicit groups."

I'm curious what the eleven authors of this paper thought as they saw their Google co-workers developing a system they knew couldn't work.

[1]Suggesting (More) Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph (http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...)
While I'm super interested in hearing more about Heroku's inner workings, I was a bit let down by this article.

It pretty much just stated that they have various teams which have meetings. It also mentions that team members track their tasks with various tools.

I'm not really sure what I was supposed to take away from this.
Cassandra cluster monitoring tool
My first impression with ClojureQL was pretty bad, because it didn't do parameterized SQL in the first public release (which fortunately have changed since they released 1.0.) I know it was only a beta, but first impression is strong. I'm now comfortable enough to use it in one of my production site, though.

korma seems to done this right.
Thanks for the comment! We're gathering a lot of different events that cover a variety of interests, so we're hoping that we will have something to offer for everyone.
This is really interesting in the context of the whingeing about Ubuntu 11.10 and Unity. One part of me absolutely agrees with the OP, but another part of me thinks that in a specific case like Ubuntu 11.10, Canonical, with their Ubuntu gift, do have a responsibility to their installed base. Is there some line related to project size (or something else) that means users _do_ have a legitimate expectation of adequate support?
I just checked and the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosis uses the word "neuroses" as a plural several times. What is the correct way to spell this word if not the way I spelled it? (I'm genuinely curious)
People liked this may also like Rogue http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/01/21/rogue-a-type-sa... which is Scala DSL for MongoDB. It is not a SQL database but can be compared in terms of semantics.
The Farmers Almanac 2.0
It's free for production use now...
As far as I can tell, this rebuttal... isn't. The author just completely misread the original argument.

EDIT: Example: "in particular, how a monad must be capable of "wrapping" (their terminology) arbitrary datatypes, not just one particular datatype"

Yet it was very clear the author was talking about wrapping arbitrary types and IO String was a single example. And it goes on...
Alcohol is a very strong depressant too, and most of the heroin deaths aren't from people robbing houses that are empty while they are in withdrawal due to lack of money to buy heroin.

Heroin (and alcohol) also cause psychosis, which is probably the biggest cause for things such as spousal murder. Legalization is a weak argument when the only evidence is "It worked for Portugal!" or "If we take away the criminal organizations then everything will be well!". Instead of fighting the infinite number of criminals I'd rather we help the dudes who fucked up and now want to make their lives better.
Is it? That's incredibly hand wavy.

For example I tried remember the milk but it immediately crippled itself with the iPhone sync. Not like they're billionaires either.

And their strategy includes leaving out a massive proportion of users by making IE a no go area.

What are their prices? I can't find the damn things anywhere. Am I going to get a £1000 bill when I reach 30 users?

They've a long way to go.

Product is great BTW, if a little programmer centric with the shortcut obsession, just pointing out great product doesn't mean great profits.
Something that would be hugely useful to me (a code monkey who knows good design when he sees it but is incapable of producing anything that looks nice himself) is a chapter that covers a few essential skills in Photoshop or Fireworks.

Basic nuts and bolts stuff like:

- how to use a few simple effects and filters to blend images in to backgrounds or do a cutout or colorize an image to match the sites colour palette

- useful tips or tricks for designing the chrome of the site (e.g. how to make a menu bar with rounded edges and a gradient effect, how to make nice looking buttons, how to make a textured background, how to blend edges etc.

- how to use transparency and/or layers effectively

Why would this be useful?

Like lots of coders (I assume!), my approach to design is to surf around the web for hours and bookmark sites that I think look good or have ideas I can use. I then spend ages kack-handedly trying to bash bits of screen shots together and introduce new elements (buttons, stock photography etc.) until I have ended up with a design that looks vaguely appealing. If I had a quick cheat-sheet for Photoshop or Fireworks that aided this process it would be a god send!
And Apple apps work great on the iPhone. It's to be expected (unless a platform is absolutely horrible).
The lack of ability to look at documentation/stackoverflow/code examples in a browser while simultaneously coding out said example and making the changes I need would severely limit my productivity. "Just copy and paste!" you may say... Sure, that'll work. Only, wait, I forgot what that one line meant, is it needed? What did they say about changing this piece of code that was "really important?" Crap, back to the browser. Let's switch apps again. Crap, the page in the browser is having to reload because I had too many tabs open and memory got low, now I have to wait for it to reload. Where was I on the page? Cause when it reloaded the page, it put me back at the top. Wait, that wasn't the tab I wanted, it's that other tab. Great! It has to reload now too!

I typically work with a single external monitor connected to my Macbook and use the Macbook for holding my mail client, chat and a browser while my Terminal's and IDE are on the external monitor. This works best for me.

Now that spaces and expose are so tied together, working with even just one screen is much nicer. I have toyed with the idea of just using a single external monitor and use spaces extensively. Just a swipe and I'm at a new space. This is much faster and nicer than changing apps on iOS.

I think it's a neat trial idea, but for long term productivity, it certainly is more of a "hipster factor" than useful.
Interesting. TLDR: Harvard undergrads walking out of Mankiw's Intro to Econ class (Economics 10), because he only intro's his area of Econ, rather than a broad survey of all its major schools of thought.

For anyone not familiar with Mankiw's positions, as I was, Wikipedia is a good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Gregory_Mankiw
You rarely have to do both at the same time.

IMHO if you've just started out on a startup - its better to be a designer because you can do customer devleopment without touching a line of code but by having a design which shows the customer exactly what to expect.

After you get a bunch of people begging you to build, then you build.
Sorry :) It's on the readme for the source. I'll add it to the website once things calm down a bit.
I think that's because those majors appeal to more people. It makes sense that the most sought-after jobs are the ones that appeal to the least amount of people.

My completely uneducated opinion is that middle and high school should do what colleges are supposed to: prepare students for the real world with useful skills. Teach them how to teach themselves. Then, when they go to college, they can focus on a subject they really want and not treat it like Camp College™.
Same here in India, any academic degree which is not Engineering/Hard Science/Medical is frowned upon.
I'll fully admit this article is much lighter than the future ones, a large part of this is to set the baseline for how basic structure works. Many companies work in a top down structure or set standards across the company. While this is indeed a pretty simple concept without it most of the other principles of how Heroku works wouldn't work at all.

The key points are meant to be:

- small functional teams

- teams determine their process, not someone else determining how a team works
I actually think they could do a much better job with the gmail app on Android...
Chinese Spacecraft Successfully Docks in orbit
Furthermore, no one is lining up outside your stores days in advance to get at your product/service. In all likelihood, a handful of people know and care about your startup.
Isn't about half the universe closer to the Earth than to the moon (at a particular time)?

Meaning: stand on a point of the Earth such that the moon is situated exactly above the opposite side of the Earth. Then look up. All that stuff you see is closer to the Earth than the moon.
Portland, OR | Full-Time | AppFog

Developers and Designers

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For more details visit http://appfog.jobscore.com/
"takes the pain out of working with your favorite RDBMS"

The way that's worded just sounds a little odd.

Aside from that, this looks really cool.
Very intuitive interface. You might want to help increase speed adding/editing tasks by providing many possible ways of adding due dates. See todoist, they've done it very nicely.
When 'Friending' Becomes A Source Of Startup Funds
Low-hanging fruit would be a good thing to pursue. Did you mean the opposite?
Seville in the 16th century is the best example of what might happen. Spain got hold of the equivalent of a gold-filled asteroid - South America. All the gold and silver came in through the port at Seville, which became very rich, and inflation slowly radiated out from there to the rest of Europe.
I love stuff like this. Email sent!
I'm in the same boat - a colorblind engineer. I always browse kuler, and google stuff like "web design awards" to find examples. Also, if you can pick up a copy of Illustrator it has a cool color picker feature that allows you to look at different color options based on color theory (complimentary, analogous, etc.)
I prefer no app at all. For example, if you visit YouTube's mobile site on iOS, it has a neat little javascript animation that directs you on how to add it to your home screen. Once it's on the home screen, it feels like I'm opening an app. YouTube on Safari has a very app-like feel.
Put Your Work in a Qu » RubySource
US, certainly. I should have established the context.
Look at the domain - this is probably a joke.
This is similar to the problem that Picasa has. Their facial recognition technology is really cool, but the work that I need to go through is so immensely tedious that I stopped bothering. Having to approve tens of thousands of faces just doesn't work. And then if you move the photo directory, you lose everything.
It's got nothing to do with "the valley" but it's the best text editor I've used on either Win/OSX platforms.

Just because people you dislike like it, is no reason to dismiss it entirely.
This is where research pays off. Community college advisers, at least at my school, are very bad. In Illinois all of the schools have a complete transfer database online at uselect.org.
A weird case where the more developed nations are being held back by their early adoption!
A couple of nights ago a had strange dream about asteroids hitting earth. Didn't think much of it... still don't think much it.... but I would like to know where this would hit if it were to hit.
I am hoping that commercial space applications will create a new wave of technology startups. Previously the capital costs associated with getting into space were so extreme as to make speculative investment in the space ludicrous, but with access to space from folks like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others, this becomes much more tractable.