skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Utility Broker: Richard Simpson 404-919-7545 is available now
I helped create Crash Bandicoot at Naughty Dog back in the late 90s. I've been out of the game industry since 1998, but find the industry changes catalyzed by iOS and the app store fascinating. It must be very unsettling for those working in the industry.

The survey results were indeed silly, but you have to forgive people a bit for being enthralled by the rapidity with which Apple has changed the game (pun intended). It's not just mobile vs console/PC -- Apple (and, to be fair, Zynga, though I personally despise their work) have also ushered in a new era of casual gaming that really appeals to the mass audience. And, let's not forget, to little kids.

With Crash we tried to channel Miyamoto's emphasis on simple game mechanics and fun for all ages. Nobody did more than Miyamoto to make games (industry-wide) fun. (As an aside, though, there are many largely unknown industry figures who have worked very hard in the same way, and have accomplished similar results; Mark Cerny, whom we worked with at Naughty Dog, and who designed or co-designed the gameplay for the Sonic, Crash, Jak & Daxter, and Ratchtet & Clank series certainly deserves a lot of credit as well.)

As a now-industry-outsider, it seems to me that Apple's resurgence has had the following effects on games:

1) casual gaming is again dominant;
2) it's no longer clear we need dedicated consoles in our living rooms;
3) one or two people can make a viable, salable game again

Naughty Dog has seen their budgets increase from around $1M for Crash 1 to many tens of millions of dollars these days. There will still be a big market for AAA titles with huge budgets. But what interests me most is that two coders in Laos (say) can now make a game that lots of people will buy. Sort of like in the Apple II era, when one or two people could create salable games (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli for a great example); this is a welcome change for aspiring game developers.

And I confess I'm happy about the return to casual gaming and greater emphasis on pure gameplay.

But if I were Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft, I would be very concerned about #2.
Those are some unusually good ideas for a home server already...not the typical "LOL put your home movies on there" blogspam shit.

I have an Eee netbook sitting unused...looks like I just figured out what I'm going to do with my Sunday.
Oligarchy, American Style
Total compensation = salary + bonus + perks + whatever else they give you.
I agree. And this is why I like CouchDB's versioning. In similar cases we could track down unwanted deletes using previous versions of the document in question. Without those, it could easily be interpreted as "data loss".
Why is a database that fails so easily and most of the time even loses data so popular?

Perhaps because both of your premises are wrong? I've used Mongo for over a year now with ~1000 writes/sec and haven't seen any of these problems. I'm not saying they don't exist (some are confirmed bugs that have been fixed), but they're not nearly as prevalent as your 'Do you still beat your wife?'-style question implies.
Its strange to me that you state this in reply to a story that mentions the best first-step Khan could take to reaching "students who might have been great had they been exposed to a better environment".

Did you simply forget to add "and I'm stoked that Khan is obviously working to fix school for everyone!"?

That is what I'm seeing.

Be fuckin stoked!
Ask HN: What earbuds do you recommend?
I'm looking to replace my earbuds for my iPhone & N1. I'm no audiophile, but I do appreciate a good sound. What is important to me is durability of the product. Quality of sound shouldn't degrade too quickly over time and ideally, the audio jack should be L-shaped so it doesn't bend so easily when I have my phone in my pocket. Of course, the earbuds should have integrated controls. I'd like to spend less than $100.

So, do you have any recommendations?
You have to be careful when reporting them as part of compensation because they're difficult to value. Stock is easier in an already-public company like Google, although it is still subject to some uncertainty due to vesting schedule. The monetary value of being able to come into work at 11 is going to differ greatly among employees.
Pace microtechnology, one of the worlds largest set-top box & satellite tv receiver manufacturers, released a market statement revising their profits downward due to the flooding. They use western digital HDDs in their boxes. http://investegate.co.uk/Article.aspx?id=201110200700235290Q
I've been saying this for a year or two and I'll say it again: Apple is a huge player in the gaming market already.

The PSP Go and 3DS are niche products that absolutely won't reach the sales of their predecessors. This I guarantee you and you can blame the iPod Touch and the iPhone for that.

I see a future where the Apple TV becomes a low end console, much like the niche Nintendo currently fills, probably at the expense of Nintendo.

I see Nintendo becoming strictly a software house, much like Sega. Nintendo franchises like Zelda and Mario Bros are still valuable. Their hardware business is (IMHO doomed. Because of Apple.

I'm not a console gamer. I never was. PC games were always my thing and sadly PC gaming seems to be dying. Sure it's still big for FPS titles, MMORPGs and the like but my particular favourites (RPGs and turn-based strategy games) are almost nonexistent. Even my guilty pleasure of the GTA franchise seems doomed (GTA4 took 6+ months to come to PC, RDR din't come at all, I wouldn't be surprised if GTA5 doesn't either).

The console market Sony and MS fill is harder to predict. I do kinda think it's seen its peak. Consoles are coming out less often. Mobile gaming and Steam are decreasing the prices people expect to pay for games. The hardware race has resulted in top-tier titles having massive art budgets that I don't think are sustainable in this mobile gaming world.

Plus what you can already do with the iPad 2 (in terms of graphics) is pretty incredible. I hazard to think how good the iPad 3 will be.

By any objective measure Steve Jobs has already had a massive influence on the gaming industry.
right but was that MySQL ? schema migrations are not a problem on quality systems like Oracle and Postgresql. Altering tables and such doesn't stop the database from running at all.

it's always MySQL's fault in these things.
Tracking US bank failures (spoiler: 386 since 2008)
I'm a developer because I want to develop software, and by working for someone else, I'm paying them (with my time) to deal with all the nonsense I don't want to do. Things like marketing, infrastructure, support, etc... I'm employing my employer to let me focus on exactly what I want to.

I'm pretty early in my career and I'm certainly open to the idea of working for myself. However, there are advantages to having a job and working a little part-time contracting on the side.
Telah Ditemukan, Sisa Monster Loch Ness
One Last Thing, PBS documentary on Steve Jobs
I went to the article looking for some statistic or a factual observation. I had thought to myself "oh it's Forbes, it must be something reputable."

I was, um, mistaken.

Take the below snippet, seemingly the only piece of information the article is pinned against.

"The 1,000 people surveyed are supposed to be avid fans and industry professionals, but they should all have their consoles and computers taken away after giving answers like these."

So it seems his entire article is based on the pretence that the combined thought of these 1,000 people is incorrect.. because he says so.

I don't think cantankerously written, for-hits-only articles belong on "reputable" sites.
This title seems a bit disingenuous, considering the actual article title is, "How fracking caused earthquakes in the UK". Like stygianguest said, it's about a causal link they found, whereas the title suggests that all fracking in all circumstances (for lack of qualification) causes earthquakes. Even the article says it's "difficult to say" if there will be more earthquakes caused by fracking.

Taking the article title as-is would have been far more accurate and less sensationalist.
HN has a curious relationship to money some of the time.

a) Many of us watched our classmates go into management consulting, investment banking, finance, medicine, law, etc. These are all fields where $250k is not exactly outlandish for a 29 year old.

b) We have a lot of friendly, accessible fellow posters who write computer code and are financially very successful.

c) We talk about $X million valuations and $YY million acquisitions and $Z billion IPOs the way catering company owners discuss the price of tomatoes.

d) We have heard many credible people complain of how difficult it is to hire and retain engineers. So difficult, in fact, that they'd pay $10k+ just for an introduction or $50k+ for an actual placement.

e) We understand incentive structures and equity grants exist.

f) We routinely read industry news like "Google and Facebook in heated war for talent", "The going rate for an acquisition-to-hire is $1 million per engineer", "Four large technology firms were engaged in a gentlemen's agreement to conspire against their employees until the government told them it was cartelicious", "Productivity per engineer is going through the roof", "Company Z supports Q00,000 paying customers per engineer", "Efforts of individual engineers have succeeded in adding millions to billions of dollars of value to some companies", etc etc etc, and generally seem to be at least as savvy as C-students in Microecon 101.

and yet

g) Talk of engineers receiving wages above some magic threshold is met with disbelief, scorn, and a wee bit of jealousy.

It isn't hugely interesting to me what any particular person at a particular company is making, but is $250k an outlandish total compensation number? No, it is clearly achievable. Do you have to be programming demigod to achieve it? No, compensation moves along with several different axes and programming ability isn't the main one. Is this anecdote a freak of nature which we'll never see again? No, signs point that this will become increasingly more common over time.
TL;DR there is already plenty of luck.

Free version:

Ch. 49 :: Innovation

Make it fucking awesome. Listen to most feedback ostensibly.

Ch. 0 :: Magic

(Can't tell you if you don't already know.)

Ch. 1 :: Luck

Be fucking awesome. And always prepared to hustle.

Ch. 2 :: Hotness, or: Lasers and Nukes in a Supernova's Clit

Be fucking awesome. Everywhere cool soon enough, early out.

Ch. 3 :: Closing

Be fucking awesome. You have "Too much mind."

Ch. 4 :: $

Be fucking awesome. Keep those that crush it. Be cheap where it counts and not where it doesn't.

Ch. 5 :: Unquestionable Absolute Silence

Keep mouths fucking shut by having demonstrated a faded red mactools rolling automotive cart full of rusty visegrip needle-nose pliers and an acetylene blowtorch. BPO taken to a new level.

Ch. 6 :: Fun

Look at those 3 words again. Life short ; go fast.
Sorry, I thought it was implicit in my comment that they'd have to go to medical/law school. My point is that the undergraduate degree matters less.
Is anyone from Khan here? Are you guys aware of Sugata Mitra's work?

Mitra has developed and proven a methodology for teaching children in-person using small groups and computers.

Mitra + Khan makes me jump out of my seat.

Here is an incredible introduction to Mitra's work : http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...
How to Use Facebook To Generate Massive Amounts of MLM Leads
This article mentions an exoskeleton, not a replacement limb. In other words, you keep the non-functional part and add something on top of it. (I've met a couple of quadriplegics. They are, in some sense, slowly rotting hunks of meat. I know this in part because I have a compromised immune system and it makes me very ill to be around one of them.)

If you lose a limb and they replace it with a prosthesis and are working on improving those, great! Seriously. But if you have your original equipment and it just doesn't work, that's a different situation. For example, with organ transplants, you take anti-rejection drugs the rest of your life. I see no reason to believe that a replacement really is as good as getting the original part to work properly. Everything I have seen seems to put a great deal of emphasis on gee-golly-whiz (headline grabbing) solutions (organ transplants, exoskeletons, etc) and not nearly enough on keeping people healthy to begin with or healing what is still there.
I tried to hack out my ideas for the last three years with zero development experience.

Eventually I hit a wall of ability, because I was working alone, completley self taught. I felt like my options were 1) work with other developers, or 2) back to school.

So last month I got a development job. I'm learning a ton everyday, but it's leaving me with almost no energy to pursue my own ideas. I hope to save some money this next year to kickstart my own projects.
This is like saying "JRuby is like giving up on Ruby's performance" or "learning Scheme means giving up on Lisp."

If you can write Coffeescript faster and better than you can write Javascript, why wouldn't you write Coffeescript?
You can't write a program in C without knowledge of assembly, unless you're willing to defer debugging to someone who does.

You can't write a line of code in any language if you don't know, on some level, what it's doing in the machine (whether physical or virtual). Sure, you can, but you're not a programmer, you're a tinkerer. To really program, you need to know assembly.

But at some scale, your application becomes large enough that no one person, no matter how well they know the assembly it's compiled to, can hold the whole thing in their head at once. At that point, reliably adding a new feature isn't hard, it's impossible. There will be side effects you can't predict.

Abstraction isn't there for making hard things easy. It does, and that's nice, but that's not what we need it for. We need it to make impossible things possible.
Having never used myBalsamiq, I'm not sure what they built it in, but some of the tools you could use:

Flash, jQuery, ExtJS, HTML5

Isn't their desktop app built in Adobe Air? or have they moved away from that? I haven't used it in a while.
I'm saying what's happened in the US and Australia is different.

US prices were driven by rampant speculation fueled by shady lending practices where the lenders weren't accountable for defaults and a product that was doomed to failure from the start.

While there has been speculation in Australia, it seems driven largely by structural changes in the economy. Resources has brought a lot of money in. Those people traded up for property closer to the ocean and/or the city, driving up those prices leaving new entrants to live further and further out.

This is basically a natural phenomenon that happened in a somewhat accelerated fashion. I see a plateauing of prices for some years to come as a result.

Rents are simply playing catch up with the change in house prices. They always lag. There's nothing surprising here.

It is however concerning because Australia is very much dividing between the haves (construction/resources) and the have nots (everyone else).

I largely missed this bubble as I was working in Europe at the time (2001-2004). As it turns out, financially speaking I would've been better off buying a house for $80k (in 2000, worth $350k+ in 2004-2005) and sitting on a beach in Spain for 4 years than working.

Australia just isn't that attractive a place to live (for me) now and that's kinda sad.
The Pure CSS3 Content Slider
> PS. 112 in Europe.

This explains. My old phone with a physical keyboard would allow me to dial 112 even when it was locked.
programming languages are a way of thinking (among other things)

whenever i think in coffeescript i think the same thoughts like i would think in javascript, but in a much cleaner, straightforward, more beautiful, less forward/backward jumping way.

coffeescript is just javascript.
Hey everyone. I'm pretty new to Hacker News, but I had a friend refer me to this chat. I'd like to throw my own site into this conversation for feedback. I've recently launched resume site called Kareer.me. Its sort of in between resume.io and re.vu in terms of features. The main difference is that our site is more focused on the process of the job search, allowing job seekers to make individual resumes for each job application. Resumes are traceable and private.

Love to get any of your feedback! Check it at http://www.Kareer.me
I have no clue why people are obsessing over 250K. If you care about money as a programmer, you are better off working at a hedge fund.

My programmer friends at hedge funds (all between 22 and 26) are averaging 500K salary with 100K bonuses (note: as a programmer, base is much higher but bonus is lower). So if google isn't paying those types of numbers to people, then money cannot be the only factor at play.
In contrast to the article, the grade B at that amazon link is more expensive than the grade A of the same brand. Where is grade B actually cheaper?
I went through my code and discovered that I seldom copy lists. I do often make selections from lists in a new list, i.e:

b = [x for x in a if somecondition(x)]
Chair Massage Techniques – Skull Pull
At some point, being able to forget about what's below is a rare skill. Focusing on building your app, without necessarily having to understand everything it depends on, is hard work if you're a bit curious.
Everyone who uses CoffeeScript knows JavaScript. CoffeeScript is there for our pleasure.
It is a copy of the (linked) article at
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/sugar-and-candy-...
While that may be true for C but I found that it's not necessarily true for GWT -> JavaScript. Knowledge of the DOM API is more important than knowing JavaScript.
Show HN: Now you can save your favorite YouTube Videos on Tubalr.com
How is Padmapper able to list Craigslist properties without getting banned?
I think you're right about the stability, but that's a better question for William to answer. Wasn't aware of Sup, I've only seen him using Turnsole (https://github.com/wmorgan/turnsole) which apparently is derived from Sup.
The problem seems to stem from the fact that most people are presented with paltry-sounding offers from places like google. As is mentioned in many of the response here, it seems that the guy probably quoted total compensation. However, prima facie the only number people see is the salary number from their offer. The offer doesn't tell you how good the bonus will be, nor can you immediately appreciate stuff like 401K match or stock / options awards.

So yeah, I think a lot of people would be jealous if they thought they received a 100K offer from google while some other person received 250K.
Spot on.

(d) in particular is worth stressing. There is no difficulty in attracting and retaining talent. There is simply an unwillingness to pay them what they're worth and give them an environment in which they'd want to work.

Supply and demand. It's pretty simple.

Yet so many (typically business types) want to treat engineers as an interchangeable cost center. "5 years ago an engineer cost $100k so I refuse to pay more than $100k now to keep my costs in check".

The fact that it's taken this long for engineers to be recognized (financially) for the huge impact we have and the vast differences that can exist between individual engineers speaks volumes about us. As a whole, we're just not as good as the business guys at this compensation game and, a lot of the time, it's not our primary motivation. Give us something interesting to do and stay out of our way and we're happy.
I like having things like list comprehensions. I like having a sane scoping system (as opposed to jsl and "best practices"). I'm also pretty fond of the syntactic sugar being offered (the existential operator in particular).

Coffeescript just gives syntax to common patterns being used in js. For the most part, it feels like a bunch of really nice macros that encapsulate those patterns, making them less error-prone, easier to read, and easier to maintain. I'm not really sure what the concern here is, since most of the post seems to assert that people who use coffeescript don't know js, or that these shortcomings could be addressed equally as well by a large framework system. I can't imagine anyone actually believes the former, and while the latter may be true I don't know why that framework will be so much easier to learn, use, and maintain than the equivalent coffeescript.
That's what I was wondering. Two former employees from my group have ended up at the Goog. Both of them can talk the talk in an interview, but they're both below average as programmers. They're both still there, too. If Google is paying either of them $250k it's time to short the stock.
Big Media doesn't want to prosecute the DRM-breakers and content-copiers. They've discovered that it isn't profitable because it's too hard to hunt down every last person who pirates a movie and win against them in court. They'd rather destroy an entire industry and eliminate thousands of jobs so that they don't have to bother with the legal system.
Without sounding like a snob, I would hesitantly suggest that those people who held out for a free iPhone 3gs are less likely to go spending a huge amount of money in the AppStore.
How to Change the World: What I Learned From Steve Jobs
> Capitalism is the engine that propelled us from riding around on horses to putting a man on the Moon in the span of one man's lifetime.

Unfortunately, having your own former employees moving into positions holding political power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Corzine , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Paulson) is not Capitalism, it's Oligarchy.
According to Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs was the only one of the two who was employed by Atari. Jobs and Woz both worked days and nights on end to get the Breakout project done. Colleagues from that period say Woz was a better engineer, but that doesn't mean Jobs didn't do anything.
Show HN: The family budget calculator for android i made
An interview with Shiela Dixon.
You're confusing the implementation of algorithm with a library call.
True, there are lots of professionals with only an undergrad degree. But how many of them required a specific undergrad degree to do that job? To advance in business anymore, it requires an MBA of some kind. How you get it is flexible (right out of undergrad, part-time while working, etc).

These days, requiring a bachelor's degree is the equivalent to requiring a high school diploma from a few years ago. Unfortunately, that means that if you want a higher level job, having just a bachelors isn't enough anymore.

>But the idea that people should be going to into ridiculous, crushing debt to get a purely liberal arts degree, while completely ignoring their employability/financial reality, is hogwash.

No one is saying that people should go into crushing debt for a liberal arts degree. Perhaps people should go to a different school, or work during school. But to assume that you can only pay off their school debts with an engineering degree is silly.