skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for making your process public. In almost any endeavor where one compares his own process only to the observable outcome of another's process, he can believe erroneously that his (possibly superior) results are the fruit of inefficient labor and near incompetence. While I must edit repeatedly to produce reasonable prose, PG can just dash off a brilliant essay. Few know how may takes were required for a screen actor to nail a particularly difficult scene -- we just see the near-perfect result. Obviously, the same phenomenon occurs in software development. Look at how brilliantly Kevin Bourrillion (et. al., of course) designed the Guava API! [One of my favorite APIs from a design perspective] How many discussions over beverages with Josh Bloch were actually required, and to how many internal iterations at Google were we never privy?

It is only by adjusting our perceptions of the processes by which others produce quality work that we can feel good about our own abilities.
Just want to throw in that our engine mangles the code with Google Closure Compiler 'advanced' mode, so it's probably really hard work to reverse engineer the code.
Mozilla Firefox gets Version 8 with Twitter to search bar
How does it work? The article and the video are light on the theory. What water collection mechanism of the Namib beetle is employed by the device? Is the device made of hydrophilic material like the beetle's skin? Or is it purely the geometry of the device contributing to the water collection capability?
Can Nvidia’s new Tegra 3 chip boost Android tablet sales?
We ported our 2D Android/iOS game, "Bouncy Mouse," to HTML5/WebGL. It's on the Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cgdllcbmneiklcmbec...) and doing great.

With WebGL, the performance seems great, and the graphics and effects look sharp too. Audio was definitely an issue, and more work needs to be done there by browser makers. Using WebkitRequestAnimationFrame over setTimeout helps battery life and performance a lot.

If you're interested, you can check it out here – http://chrome.bouncymousegame.com/ – I'm thinking about doing a post about our experiences making this game for mobile and for web, and some of the economics behind game-making as well.
What I learned from getting republished on lifehacker
Writing is work, most often a lot of work.
Compiled code being decompiled and repurposed illegally is already a problem for people authoring software in Java, .NET and Flash. It would be dishonest to say that HTML5 won't suffer from this problem given that it makes it even easier to repurpose someone's hard work for your own ends.

On the other hand, since you're using HTML5, it's not too hard to make your product a service. When you do that, you can hide all your important code on the server instead of the client and thus make it much harder to steal. Of course, that makes it much harder to play said games on a mobile...
I've been working on an HTML5 game for a year (http://ektomarch.com/games) with Chrome as my primary development target. When it launched, I'd get about 1 hour of battery life on a full charge while testing. Now, however, I'm getting about 4 hours. Flash still brings my battery down to around 2 hours at max.

Google's really put work into making javascript perform as well as possible, and it shows.
Comcast Begins IPv6 Pilot Deployments - Pleasanton, California Market First
If you like text-based games, it is a good introduction.

Otherwise, only really tiny self-contained examples are good. You need to break it down into more 'atomic' pieces - at which point you are no longer developing a text game.

You could use a really trivial VERB NOUN parser instead of the usual RPN calculator example. You can use a directed-graph world as a showcase for linked lists. TCP is often learned by writing a simple chat server.

Higher-level languages might make it easier to constrain this sort of project to a few hours.

But most people do not like text games and doing a proper job is probably an order of magnitude more complex than you imagine it to be. So actually writing or modifying a text game is only a great idea if it is motivating to the learner.
And yet they don't release any numbers of Kindle sales or profits.
Yes. Here's a little bit about our experience with AngelList. We are quite profitable and are doing well growing from our existing cash flow. We are not seeking capital at this time.

We have had profiles on AngelList for a while now, with the expectation that we would "age" the accounts and gradually accumulate interested parties, such that if the day came when we would like to seek additional growth capital, we could then reach out to these people.

Result: Zero followers. Most likely zero views. AngelList is very much a walled garden, useful only to those with preexisting angel connections.
Past experience tells you what percentage of businesses will help, and what percentage will waste your time and money.

That has almost always tilted into the 'better off not trying' category. I end up with more of my time, and happier, if I don't go through the official channels. On average.

That's what companies have trained customers into.
It looks like they are using the public Etherpad code base. Interesting choice to revive a many-years dead company's code as your foundation.

Hopefully they started from a better point than the vanilla code dump: https://github.com/mattsta/etherpad
We'd be happy to address these issues if you are interested.

It's not clear where we're misunderstanding each other, but for clarity NuoDB manages such things as atomic operations and update conflicts without reference to the application. It's an ACID database.

Give us a call or attend a webinar (eg tomorrow) if you want to take a deeper look at it.

Barry Morris, NuoDB
Yeah, some good points I guess. But the fact we make an engine lots of games use makes it a bit easier: if magical improvements in JS appear which require some tricky changes to take advantage of, we can do the hard work in our engine and all the games benefit from it. But yeah, probably will always be a bit slower. 2D games don't tend to have really complicated logic though.
I'd like a simpler explanation of how it all works. With colorful flow charts and graphs.

I'm really interested in how it compares to what express does. How is it the same, how different? However since I'm reading this from the office between doing actual work I've not got time to read this version.

I may or may not remember to come back and check it out after work.

Anyways, all of that is intended as a round of constructive criticism. At the end of the day, it is what it is.
You know it's interesting that you're seeing lots of pain going the other way. I realized part of my issue with Silverlight was just how different it was from what I was used to. I don't like things I don't understand :) That being said, I did like the Stack Panel and the Dock Panel. I liked them because they worked more closely to the way HTML layout works. It was the Grid that I despised. The markup was tough to follow (putting Grid.Row="" and Grid.Column="" for each element inside the grid was stupid) and ultimately positioning in Silverlight was very much about absolute position and fixed dimensions.

As far as tips - vertical stack panels are just a series of unfloated divs (or other block element). Horizontal stack panels are a series of floated divs.

Vertical positioning with HTML/CSS can be tricky, especially in older browsers. line-height and padding/margin are you friends :)
So now we just need a stateful ipv6 dhcpd in something like TomatoUSB. Someone has probably already done that.
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This is the point I make. Both the Amazon App Store and Amazon Silk are a huge threat to Google.

Google should be far more worried about Fire than Apple (who shouldn't be lax about it either).
<Minor Argh!> I went to bookmark Stypi, and it had commandeered CTRL-D...On the one hand, I get it. But it's still a webpage in MY browser.
Pagination isn't even necessary if you load chunks of the table as needed. You can even render proportional scrollbars if you know how large the table should be.
Nice game! Runs smooth. Why do you reject non-Chrome browsers instead of doing feature detection?
You're right, Web Audio API isn't standard yet - edited the post to clarify.
If only they had included a camera in the Kindle. That is a serious omission in my book.
The lean startup video
How similar is Parse to Urban Airship? I notice Parse lists push notifications on their homepage, and that seems to be one of the big things about Urban Airship.
I've seen SQL that looked like this but didn't wind up being very complicated. I've also seen seemingly simple queries that were actually very tricky!

I can't read much of the query, but at least a few lines are checking for null values. I wouldn't be surprised if 80-90% of the query is simply output formatting. Depending on the DB platform, some formatting and null-check statements are fairly verbose.
I'm viewing this on an iPhone via the news.yc app, and the website is impossible to view on a mobile browser. Op might want to look into that.
This is extremely cool.

Only one thing I would suggest really - width of linked Stypi page should have some reasonable maximum width, something close to 80 chars. Otherwise, it is really hard to see where all changes are made when browser is maximized.
For your company, that may be the right way to go. But people don't know that.

All they know is that 90% of the time, their time and money is wasted if they go that route. So they take the shortcut. Once you have a good rep with a customer, you can bet they'll do it your way, because that then becomes the best way for them. The problem is that you have to get a rep with that customer first. That usually happens by having a problem, which is the problem in the first place.

Why did this guy think that this was the best communication medium? Do you have forums where you regularly engage your users and answer their questions? Do they know they exist? He sounds like a creative user, and most creative users visit the forums to share and learn tips and tricks.
They're minimizing the number of variables in the initial deployments. DHCPv6 only, no third-party gateways. Massively reduces the number of things that can break.

Comcast has been working on IPv6 for years, and they've got senior technical people who know it inside out, but it needs to disseminate throughout the organization all the way down to the front-line support people. That's going to be hard enough even before third-party gear is brought into the picture.
unlimited: adj- without limits or bounds
Good point. You can, but you shouldn't. And I won't use it or encourage its use. In fact, I'll speak against it on every opportunity I have.
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I had no idea how far HTML5 multimedia support had progressed until I saw this post. Nice find!
> 2D games don't tend to have really complicated logic though.

Your demo asteroids game certainly doesn't, but what about a 2D game that's actually worth playing? Things like physics or flocking algorithms are going to be very expensive in JS.
I think you can argue that this is largely offset by the opportunity the web as a platform can offer you and your games.

Theft of assets is definitely an issue. We've actually been targeted ourselves by someone stealing and reselling our product. It's a pretty upsetting and difficult situation so we sympathise with the concerns.

What we learnt from our experience however is the thief was largely incompetent and didn't actually pose as much of a risk as we thought he would to our operations.

I think often the same can apply for theft of assets, it's upsetting that someone steals in in one swoop without any thought and appears to be making money from it, but most of the time they are struggling to make anything at all from your work. If someone more successfully is stealing from you there are a lot of options to take it further if it becomes economically viable. For the majority of developers though I don't think it's as big a concern as many people think it is. Although I'm sure there are some good counter examples and arguments against this.
Other games tend to hide their assets into cryptic packages and file format (or they can even try to encrypt them). Not always impossible to bypass, but very annoying. It's a bit harder to do in html5, where you are supposed to use the standard formats for images/sounds, etc.

That, alone, is not really an issue. I suppose you could do the same as native games. If a demand is there, an API or libraries to do that will appear.

The source problem seems harder to change, short of rolling your own javascript VM and precompiling everything. And if the source is readable, the "obscure file format" technique breaks down.

In practice, though, can someone make something out of loads of minified javascript ? Or is it equivalent to reading deassembled C ?
Engineer from StackMob here (http://stackmob.com). We agree that the need to extend your API on the server side is a huge part of what we are working to achieve in this space. That is why we have always had our "custom code" offerring, allowing you to extend your API in Scala, Java or Clojure. Our partnership with Heroku has also opened up Rails applications to be extensions to your API as well.

As for lock-in we have always said from the beginning that our customers own their data and can take it with them at any time. I think you may find a recent blog post by our co-founder of interest as well: http://www.stackmob.com/2011/11/why-a-paas-for-mobile-develo...
For one thing, with Prism, binding events to view model methods was a giant pain, specifically if you wanted to pass event args. I know I ended up having to write a number of attached properties to handle different event binding scenarios. With jQuery it's a cinch to handle user interaction. (I guess my major gripe in this case is with Prism, which is perhaps separate from SL).

Further, text wrapping and layout were my biggest pain points in SL. I wasn't used to having fixed dimensions on everything. That really bugged me.

Finally, I didn't like the visual state manager at all. There's not really an analogous equivalent in JS/HTML, but for a "rich" internet platform it certainly didn't seem like the way to go to me. I have to run now, but I'll try and think up some more of my pain points and edit as appropriate.
This is really cool. No Common Lisp love though in the syntax highlighting! /sadface

edit: amusingly, I had to go edit the comment. I find that very reflective of the original article.
You're allowed. I'm also allowed to not be held hostage by a "standards committee" that never gets anything done.
Well, that certainly explains a lot. The sad part is that a lot of people spent a lot of time trying to get that code to work on mobile devices in the early 2000s.
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Thanks.

I found this a couple of weeks ago, and it seems like it might be useful: http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-flexbox-20090723/ Demo: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/ I wanted to post this for anyone who stumbles across this info via search.
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I didn't like The Distiller as compared to the Knife Maker.

The guy in the Distiller doesn't seem to have the same passion as the knife maker. I got the impression that he wanted to do something and thought he could make money as a gin distiller because they didn't exist anymore in his area.

The knife maker, on the other hand, obviously enjoys his craft. I think he will be making knives forever, even if they don't sell as well as they do now.
>not some kind of bytecode

Have you ever tried to reverse engineer/figure out the details of any of google's compiled javascript?

It's pretty damn obtuse.
It's not hostility, it's stating the obvious. patio11 as well as few other HN high-karmers get their most trivial comments routinely up voted to the top of every thread. It is reasonable to assume that this happens because a large number of people take triviality as revelations or insight because it comes from a person they really like. That's fanboyism. May not be the most neutral term, but it captures the essence of the problem - the lack of critical thinking. The comment about the website design (the one I took an issue with) had the exact same problem - if one removes the positive bias, the website looks bland at best.

With regards to being an anonymous jerk - I like my privacy, but should it have been an in-person conversation I would've said the same thing and probably then some.
Here's a comparison review on the two. http://gizmodo.com/5857041/nook-tablet-vs-kindle-fire-the-di...
Siri on iPhone 4s by Apple
Ooh, watching that caused me too much fremdschämen. Neat concept, though.
Using a pseudonym for customer support is a fairly accepted practice. Unfortunately, when it's your job to deal with a lot of customers you're inevitably going to have some that are unhappy with your response, no matter how well you do your job or how great your company is. If you deal with enough customers (thousands) over time, some of those unhappy customers are going to try to track you down outside of work and make your life difficult.

Customer want honesty from a company / service and good customer support. They want to be able to reach the contact they talked with before again, at the same name / extension. I don't think they generally care very much if the name they're given is the operator's legal name, so long as there is a consistent response from the pseudonym.

Especially if you have an easy to Google name (you're not "John Smith"), using a pseudonym for customer support means you can leave your job at the office at the end of the day and not worry about risk to yourself or your family.
Everyone just wants to be on the winning team now and be able to call the others losers. It's kind of the way things are now. iPhone vs Android. XBox vs Playstation. Coke vs Pepsi. Etc etc etc.
I learned SQL with copy/paste/modify from PHPBB code base. When I got my first web programming job I could write basic select/insert/update/delete but knew almost nothing of joins. I learned the rest by reading MySQL docs on the job. (Later I also improved my understanding of joins by doing an MS Access project.)

So SQL is just as easy to pick up as anything else, but you're going to be horrible at it at first and need to get past the mental block of seeing something so different conceptually to "normal" programming.
Not sure what enterprise software company means? Must be a java/c++ thing do you namespace ur java apps MyCompany.Enterprise.Domain and so forth.. My last mentor insisted naming was number one, followed by two days of setting up a fragile jenkins server and the rezt
I don't see anything misleading in Republic's marketing. I think they've made it pretty clear. This isn't a cellular company, it's a VoIP company that relies on wifi and happens to fall back on Sprint's CDMA network when there isn't wifi available. Their service is unlimited but the fallback cellular network isn't.
At least in Toronto this doesn't apply only to chinese people. The city is highly segregated, but people ignore it by calling it multicultural.
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The conclusion presented in the title is not supported without more data. Bad news for Hong Kong factory owners, most likely, but how does that reflect on all of China?

- 50,000 is what percentage of all factories in China?

- How many factory closings happened last year? What is the ten year average?

- How many factories are opening? Perhaps HK factories are closing due to competition from bootstrapped mainland factories?

- What is the success rate and average lifespan for a factory in China today? I imagine it is quite low.

The article presents a compelling data point, but not a full argument. The Pearl River Delta is far from stable and there are as many carcasses of failed investments as there are successful ones.
I think it's mostly a misreading of software best practices. Descriptive does not imply verbose (and vice versa), but many people don't see the distinction.
rdf technology is coming on strong in late 2011; the tools are getting better fast

Can you expand on this? I'm very interested in RDF but have been frustrated by how little interest in Semantic Web tech there seems to be in the US. I'm interested in highly specified networks rather than slippery ones from the consumer marketplace, and in visualization/manipulation tools rather than the underlying DB technology. If you have any suggestions I'd be grateful, I feel like I've been plowing a lonely row with this stuff.
Once you're rich enough, you become concerned with protecting that wealth and your own well-being. You want transparency from your government, rule of law (in a transparent, predictable manner) and political stability. Those are not strong points in China these days.
I have no idea who this gentleman is but this type of offer captures the entrepreneurial 'get out there' spirit of what ycombinator felt like several years ago. Hopefully it will start the seed for something great.
Mark Zuckerberg: Google, Microsoft Are Violating Your Privacy--Not Us
In our case we shared the support load between two people behind one name.
Don't panic if we're funding a lot of groups on the first day of interviews; have someone take a second look at the applications Rtm gives Cs to; pay more attention to the founders than the idea.
Rudeness gets downvoted pretty aggressively.
While I love the idea I wonder how dangerous it is set your business on top of this thing given the possibility Parse can go out of business some time in the future? I mean, it ain't no AWS backed by Amazon that has quite the track record.
Avos Acquires Link-Saving Service Trunk.ly
Watching this gives me much more confidence in my writing abilities. I thought I was the only one who proofreads and changes things again and again until they are perfect :)
It's like, how much more black could this be?
Their limitations make sense, you just have to look at your own usage and decide if it will work for you. I don't feel like they are hiding anything, I read through their entire site yesterday and it was all there in black and white.

The only concern I do have is how well will actually work? Does it switch seamlessly when I leave the range of my wifi like the site claims. A co-worker signed up and has one on the way, so we will find out soon.

At least they are more upfront about the "unlimited" rules than other carriers like say AT&T. Even Sprint is close to killing off their unlimited plans.
Yes. You could call it "lack of imagination" :)
Assume a Pareto distribution; it's usually a good bet.
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You're right physics uses a lot of CPU, but I don't think games not using physics are automatically not worth playing. Did you see this platformer? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3192719
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So kinda like the real world?
Java SE / EE, methinks. After a while, a variable that's only 30 characters long feels small and insignificant compared to its type (AbstractThreadsafeSimpleMailTransferProtocolProxyFactoryInterface).
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Apparently I have 60 slaves working for me. Anyone beat my "high score"?
This is in no way a software issue, this is a social issue. Everywhere people are complaining about everything that doesn't work exactly according to their wishes. Not seldom in order to gain something themselves, such as threating hotels with bad reviews if they don't get a discount..

Then again, when a customer complaints about a bug, this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208990) is probably not a good way to keep them from going public.