skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have always intended on purchasing a copy, in spite of all the DRM stuff. I wanted to play it three days early though, and obtained a copy online. I was disappointed, but I still went out and bought the copy on the launch day, hoping to have the experience improve with online sharing.

Turns out that the creators, and sharing your creation, and then pimping your creation IS the entire game. Your meticulously designed creation which took 3 hours to make is evolutionarily no better than a 10 year old's cell with legs and googly eyes, with the only difference being how much time you have to "sell" it on the official forum to get any attention. It's an intelligent introvert's worst nightmare: your works will not be noticed amongst the hundreds of millions based on merit, but on how marketable it is and how much marketing resources is backing the creation.Your beautifully designed planet with semi-realistically balanced ecosystem performs absolutely no better than a randomly generated neighboring planet inhibited by "variations on the theme of vomit-green spheres."

As a new best selling game it's not bad, but I was looking for a "simulation" game. I did find a spectacular one though, so this year wasn't a complete loss : http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves
I see no reason to believe that schools can systematically rectify socioeconomic inequalities. Educational attainment and status are outcomes of culture and parenting, not schools and teachers. I think these things are largely immutable, unless you want to start talking eugenics.
I’m keeping my Google Phone
Couldn't you just go to the library?
Hence Joel's (much more concise) hiring criteria:

Smart, Gets Things Done.
I suspect this essay is obliquely complaining about folks who THINK they're the smartest guys in the room.

"What you get if you believe this myth is a room full of highly qualified people who waste their time explaining to each other how much more qualified they are."
I'm able to see all the pages now although I wasn't able to over the weekend. I could see the unlocking feature now but without the office page I wasn't able to see anything - only what the other teams had bought.

I've got another idea for you that may make things pretty interesting and may not be too hard to implement depending on the way you are handling the game simulation now:

Display the results of the game (similar to a game cast type of feature). It would be interesting to see how well the various players performed and how the skill investment has paid off.

I have no clue how you handled the simulation but if it's using standard football rules I imagine you randomly choose a play, then randomly choose the player, then randomly calculate the odds of success based on the player's skills (as well as QB if passing play) and the skills of the opposing defense.

I tend to be more data driven than most but this seems like a pretty interesting feature to me. It will also get people to stay more on the app instead of going somewhere else while the energy/stamina regenerates.
I don't get this. It seems to say, e.g., "We reverse-engineered the shape of Texas by drawing a line around all the photos marked 'Texas'."

So? How did the photos get marked "Texas" in the first place?
I have no problem with Apple screening apps for the store. I have a problem with the opacity of the screening process, and the arbitrary, anti-competitive rejections that Apple gives developers who have spent lots of time, effort, and money to develop and have no reasonable expectation for rejection.

See: rejection of apps for competing too closely with iTunes, Mail.app, et al.
You can get movies at the libary, or on tv. Netflix is still a killer service.
And IQ tests don't correlate very well with intelligence. Maybe the name itself is tongue-in-cheek.
It's also a very clever framing the question in a leading way. Let's try framing it in another way:

Let's say you're a business decision maker, and you got yourself on this cloud computing kick. Who would you rather buy your cloud resources from?

1. A company who built its entire business on the high availability of its international network of online transaction engines, 2. A company which has built its business on indexing, and processing one of the biggest data stores in the world, and which has also built and run the world's most popular Internet-based productivity tools. 3. A company whose business relies om shipping a PC operating systems and which also supplies a word processor. "

I'm not saying that my framing is any less biased, just that there is more than one way to view these things.
I agree with your comment that Spore is an entertainment game, not a scientific simulation, and I definitely see why EA went with the "entertaining art" version of Spore.

the only problem is that Spore wasn't advertised to many of us that way. We got a beautifully decorated cake, but wholesome multi-grain was promised to the masses who have been starving for the past 5 years.
TextMate user #719.
Why is random pricing evil?
Think about how hard it is to port code you wrote to another platform. Now think about porting flimsy code that relies on a set of interactions in an opaque system not functioning as you'd expect.
PerfSpot preps member marketing scheme, but will it work?
JetBrains builds fantastic stuff. IntelliJ is the only way to write Java and Resharper is a requirement for any real C# work. I'm not doing any Ruby work, but this does look cool. I'll assume they build the back-end stuff in a general way for dynamic languages and keep my fingers crossed for Python and Javascript support someday :-)
Diggy title with common sense advice.
What it takes to stay happy: More
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
I think the title is slightly misleading but whats actually said in the article is very much true. In any early stage company, how well they fit together with not only you but the rest of the team members is just as important as what they know.

More surprising is how many investors I've talked to end up telling me that if I'm looking for people to help accomplish some of these more complex tasks that I should just outsource to India or just find a person who does know how and pay them for it. In reality, that's likely not going to solve anything and has a high potential to create more problems on down the road (not to mention if that person doesn't stay forever).
These tips are definitely useful for S3-based apps, but are also very informative in general. Thanks a lot for the article.
I quite like this one:

4.4: People keep saying the behavior is undefined, but I just tried it on an ANSI conforming compiler, and got the results I expected.

They were probably wrong. Flame them mercilessly. Be sure before you do that your compiler is really ANSI conforming, though. If it turns out you were wrong, they get a legal claim on your firstborn.
Thanks for the reply!

That is about the rate I expected. I agree, it is still a safer bet than print or banner ads.

I've been a big fan of Fleaflicker. Congrats on your success.
Users Fix Parking Ticket Machine Interface Themselves
As a european, I see at least one action that makes McCain quite open minded. When the US Army decided that Airbus won the contract against Boeing, Obama took a protectionist stand and voted for the cancelation of it, while McCain said that Airbus won legitimatly and therefore, the contract shouldn't be canceled, because it's the way competition work : the best offer wins.

The contract was eventually cancelled. I believe that this kind of protectionism harms everybody, the US and the Europeans. Now Boeing won't try their best to make a better offer than Airbus, since they know they won't be allowed to fail, and the US taxpayer will ultimatly end paying higher for an inferior product.

“Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.” - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
I'd love to receive a gift in this box as any. It is a GIFT! How can you not be happy, unless someone 'gifts' you a yellow-jacket colony?
Not just the frustration factor, but the recycling factor is key too - especially in areas (such as mine) where trash is heavily limited (3 sacks for 2 weeks max) but recycling paper/cardboard is easy.

I think Amazon might have taken some influence from Sennheiser who have been trying out the whole "eco" packaging thing lately: http://is.gd/6dHl : It's worked out well - I believe the eco packaged headphones outsold the regular packaged ones on Amazon.co.uk for quite a while, so it might have helped them go with the idea.
RadRails works well for me. Its really about how familiar you get with the program, and how much you customize it to suit your coding habits (and how much you prefer the mouse).

Customizations that I use/advocate:

1) Get or make a good color scheme for syntax highlighting.

2) bind arrow keys to ctrl+i|j|k|l.
I bind j&l to next and previous words and ctrl+; to end of line, and it works so well I did that to Word and notepad++ too (you really don't need ctrl+i for italics...). The only problem is that I tend to open up my downloads tab (ctrl+j) when I'm composing emails in firefox.

3) Edit -> Open resource
Open resource is the MAIN reason why I use RadRails. I map it to ctrl+shift+o, and it makes switching between files extremely fast, which is important in rails since you have so many files all over the place.

4) Other notable key bindings that are useful:
- maximize window
- close all but current file
- Search (through all the files)
- Duplicate file

For me, having a clean workspace is crucial as well as getting to places quickly. My customizations reflect this, but I'm sure you can do that to many other IDEs. The exception is NetBeans - their open resource is using a bubble sort or something incredibly slow and they're not caching it either...
It might scream re-gifting, but we need to become happy with re-gifting. In the current economic and ecological climate, throwing away unwanted gifts or toys after mild use is ridiculous. If these boxes become popular, it becomes possible to regift without it looking so obvious and that's a good thing.
Top 5 Windows 7 features Apple should copy
Understandable, but perhaps you could include it in your FAQs?

How much, the number one FAQ the world over for the last 5,000 years :)
Brain scans and buyer beware
Intel lifts curtain on Nehalem performance (hint: it's fast)
Sarah Palin Bot Chat Rules (click "chat" near the top to chat with her)
Yet another reason not to buy Motorla's $2000 phone
> Wikipedia articles go through a review process

About three times I have looked through the past revisions on substantial wikipedia articles and each time it was clear that the revisions generally made the article worse. The general pattern is that an expert occasionally writes meaty, high quality sections and then these either get deleted or eventually made incomprehensible. Edits almost always degrade the prose.

I do not understand the wikipedia fanboism. It's fine for basic facts, and great for pop culture, but better informational articles on almost any complex topic are available elsewhere. I do not think wikipedia is working very well and hope that the more closed system some of the original founders started a while back comes out on top.

edit: I just looked up that new, more closed version of wikipedia and from a quick examination it is much better than wikipedia. Compare:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/War_of_1812

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812
Don't have a spare $100k for a Tesla?  Make one yourself for
Intel's i7: Codename Nehalem
I agree with Steve's point, but he's mostly talking about typing fast to participate in online communities, write more e-mails, etc. That sort of stuff doesn't require a "programmer's" Dvorak keyboard - so my point still stands. The act of programming doesn't require extremely fast input - especially as a lot of people use macros and shortcuts now anyway.

Using Dvorak to be a better participant in online forums, etc, is awesome, but you can use a regular Dvorak keyboard for that.
What's the equivalent of "Slashdotted" for Hacker News? Whatever it is, we appear to have done that to it. "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" :(
Really good advice
Care to explain why Spore is a product that will promote Creationism?

There is simply no element of creationism in the game. All terminology and interface point to an (albeit inaccurate) model of "evolution". Guided evolution, panspermia, saltations, probably. Creationism, no.

On a tangent:
Spore has specified organized religion as a viable route to planetary domination, on the same effectiveness level as economic and military take-overs. Elements of conversion and religious assimilation also comes into play in the space stage, somewhat. But even if I replace the word "Creationism" with the word "religion", your "think of the children!" sentiment is still...naive at best. One could equally ineffectively argue that the game promotes ruthless economic colonization, militaristic violence, wasteful exploitation of resources, intentional extinction of entire species.....
PXE booting: easily getting what you want on to remote servers
Google patches Android security hole
New in Dojo
To be fair though, a RickRoll is extremely appropriate given the topic of this post ;-)
BTW, all chat modes inherit the huge number of generic bot chat rules. So this means you can have a casual conversation with Sarah on all sorts of things.
This strikes me as one of those great, marginal innovations that you need a giant corporation to implement. How many manufacturers are going to change their packaging line for a startup?

Congratulations, Amazon. Way to use your size for good.
The reason I didn't link directly is because then people would miss the link to the "Most Wanted Song" alternative :)

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/05/survey-produced.html

The Most Wanted Song is arguably worse than the Most Unwanted Song. This is ideal evidence that crowdsourcing doesn't yield ideal results!
If you are going to learn Dvorak and you are a programmer, you might as well learn "Programmer's Dvorak" and be able to type your programs faster in addition to being a better participant in online forums etc, don't you think?
You say that now, until you buy a USB flash drive or a CD and while opening it you nearly destroy the product or you cut yourself to the point that you bleed prodigiously all over it.
These are all pretty straightforward (and in some cases, rusty) examples, but I am required by the Rubonics Institute to write this response:

1. ["1", "2", "asdf", "3"].reject {|x| begin; Integer(x); rescue; false; else; true} => ["1", "2", "3"]

2. [[1,2,3], [4,5,6]].flatten.sum => 21

3. tbl = Hash.new {|d, k| d[k] = []}

4. tbl["foo"] << 1 => ["foo"]

5. ["a", "b", "c"].zip([1,2,3]) => [["a", 1], ["b", 2], ["c", 3]]

6. "the little green men".titleize => "The Little Green Men"

Obligatory snarky aside: these aren't hidden gems in Ruby (well, except for String#titleize, which is an activesupport extension, so only Rails devs see it by default). They're baked in.
I'll take the hit. At least it isn't politics.
He's had a couple of books, two that I liked the most were Permission Marketing and Purple Cow.

Permission marketing talks about new media and how in the future we can't bombard users with ads (television). Users are too good at tuning these things out. Instead we have to establish relationships and give them things that they actually want.

Purple Cow talks about making unique products and how these products sell themselves. A purple cow is something taking notice over. But once we see one purple cow, its not nearly as interesting the second or third time. We also can't create a blue cow to have the same effect. Our next innovation must truly be unique and special to get the same "purple cow" effect.

Since then he's had other interesting books, but none that translated to an "ah-hah" moment for me.

Go skim some of his books at the bookstore and see if they interest you. I'd highly recommend the two above. His other books I won't vouch for.
Graveled?
Hrmm...I was under the impression all new language support (JS, Flex, Ruby, etc.) would be rolled into IDEA in the form of a new plugin architecture that was to be release with v8. This is an interesting development indeed.
The Most Accurate Election Forecast? Hardcore Gamblers
It's really hard to stress how much IDEA blows eclipse, netbeans, etc. out of the water when it comes to Java development.
I was skeptical clicking on the link, but it actually lived up to the title.
Think more carefully about your argument. The hackers don't "care" what OS they're targeting --- that much is true. The aesthetics of POSIX vs. Win32 vs. Carbon are not a major deciding factor for them.

What is a deciding factor is, "how much money will I make for each line of code that I write". The answer:

* Linux: Negigible.

* Mac OS X: Very near negligible.

* Win32: Very significant.

Malware authors are only going to move to new platforms when they hit "peak oil" for Win32 --- when there is so much competition for new desktops that it's worth it to target an OS that has a 5-10% share. We are nowhere near that point yet.

The words "similarly exploitable" are slippery and imprecise. The overwhelming majority of Windows "infections" are not caused by Win32 platform flaws. They're caused by unsafe user interactions with the web browser and mail programs. Those exact same unsafe interactions are present on OS X. Are the two "similarly exploitable"? Well, if writing a Mach-O malware shim is "similar" to writing a Win32 PE malware shim, then sure. Otherwise, no.

PS: Bona fides: my company is standardized on OS X, I came to OS X by way of Yellow Dog Linux on a TiBook, and prior to that I'd been FreeBSD since 1994. I've got an aggregate of 5 months of Win32 "userhood" in my whole career (though much more exposure at a systems programming level). I'm not an apologist; I just think the Win32 security haters are wrong.
Each one of those illustrations represents the boundaries of a particular place whose outline was generated using nothing but the latitudes and longitudes of the geotagged photos associated with that location’s WOE ID.
(1) Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right"

...a nice introduction to abstract linear algebra, but not quite abstract or terse enough.

(2) These course notes: http://www.math.mcgill.ca/goren/AlgebraII07-08/AlgebraII.htm

...good, though the duality section is a bit lacking. Riesz Representation Theorem FTW!
it's funny

--because it's true
Because Netflix competes with video stores, which offer a better selection and next to guaranteed availability of movies, especially new releases. Video stores are the established market with which Netflix compares.

Last time I checked, there aren't any established book rental places. This is probably due to a few factors, but the biggest is that a library is doing this job about as efficiently as possible already, for free.

Basically, this startup is competing against something that is free, funded by government, and offers no real advantage, other than the fact that I get to use my computer instead of walking down the block.
Well, it is Ruby we're talking about - who's surprised it doesn't scale?
The Requirements Myth
A lot of these packages are designed to attract customers in stores - something that is not required online.

I hope this one catches on.
This rings true --- almost obvious --- and I don't think it should surprise anyone here. Some facts:

* Every major product Microsoft ships gets weeks (or, in the case of core OS components, months) of outside security testing. Look at the past 7 years of Black Hat talks, and the majority of the speakers/researchers now work for firms contracting to Microsoft to pen-test their code.

* Every Microsoft developer working on a major project has been trained for secure programming, and the courseware and objectives for those courses were designed by acknowledged experts in security.

* Microsoft is the single most targeted vendor in all of IT; every security company with a research team spends a significant amount of cash to reverse engineer components and attempt to find flaws in them. Microsoft benefits from this by getting first dibs on almost every new bug class.

Compare this to the third-party software developers; none of these things are true. Just in terms of external testing; factor out Adobe, Apple, and Mozilla, and you'd be surprised to find a vendor that did have a policy of third-party assessments.

The Microsoft Insecurity story was a real issue in 2003. Bill Gates got up and said they were going to make security a key focus for the company. Normally, you ignore a statement like that. This time, they meant it, and they had hundreds of millions of dollars to back it up.

Microsoft is the best commercial closed-source vendor in the industry at security.
This is a pretty cool take on what a music version of reddit would be like. I like how simple and straight forward it is compared to the busy looking music sites out there.
Walmart has a similar initiative to reduce packaging from its vendors. This has a couple effects - increases shelf space and reduces waste. Size does have its advantages.
Error: unavailable?
Dash Charts a New Course, Cuts 50 Jobs
GitHub adds code search
Github added a new feature to search through all of their public source code.
just spotty
Are there disclosure guidelines on Hacker News? The submitter is on the GitHub team, IIRC, but it doesn't say that in the submission title or in his profile.

Edit: changed from "What are the..." to "Are there"
Great idea. It says the manufacturers do the package "out of the assembly line!" That's very clever, I'm sure Amazon is saving on packaging things for shipping.
Like most of the little essays I put together (author here, thanks everyone for reading) it was a reaction to an observation. That observation was that lots of small going on medium sized companies tend to inherit something from the Microsofts of the world, and that is resume myopia.

For everyone who said it's commonsense, I agree completely. Unfortunately, commonsense is not quite as common as you might believe. Around here, this seems obvious but I can say there are plenty of people struggling with the balance.

tptacek summed up my point really well. Thanks again for the feedback!
Mobs rule
I'm just saying, it's a silver lining. If someone comes out with some new totally hyped up MMORPG, I am going to be relieved if it sucks and terrified if it is the greatest thing since Trade Wars. I lost friends to EverQuest.
Excellent observation. There is also a bit of that in there. A part of working on a small team is learning to learn. It doesn't matter that you can lift mountains with your pinky if you can't deal with anyone else as a peer.
None, AFAIK. And I don't see a desperate need for any, either. The submission will get voted up on its merits regardless of who submitted it.
What are you talking about? Where do you get these hyper efficient libraries open after hours and on weekends on every single block?

In the real world, libraries are slow, far and few between, poorly stocked with weeks-long inter-library waiting lists, and open during hours convenient only to the un-employed.
how do you manage to cut yourself when opening a box?
Pretty much anywhere in northern California. It's like that where I live in Sonoma County.
Agreed. And once you learn to use refactoring effectively, you start to really appreciate static typing and generally just want to give the JetBrains team a real big hug.
wow! There exist rules for not posting something that is already public? Or rules for filling out a more complete profile? I would guess if someone wanted to keep something a secret then making it so every search engine in the world wouldn't crawl it would be job 1.

I don't recall being asked to read such rules when I signed up for HN. But I'm happy to learn them if they exist.
that might make for a long title. i would be happy to add that to the description, but i'm just submitting it as a news item, not providing opinion.