skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In terms of basic development best practices the game industry is easily a decade or two behind the software development industry as a whole. Death marches are commonplace. QA is often neglected. "Write the code, then fix the bugs" is a typical development style. It'll be interesting to see how long it will take to change, or if it does.
EMC Announces Acquisition of Pivotal Labs
Google Sunsetting Wave on April 30th
What would you do if the developers weren't budging after you told them that "this is what the client wants".
The point isn't the exact colour, just that nobody else seems to have even thought of looking in that direction :)
> which unfortunately, is basically every practical language other than Haskell

Is this also true of Ocaml? I have experience in neither, but my understanding from reading up on this says Ocaml and Haskell are roughly equivalent, and if anything - Ocaml is even more expressive.

Anyone with real world experience who can comment on this?
Lunch, disrupted: ZeroCater helps startups get fed
they'll use Intel Smart Response or something similar and use a smallish 20-40GB SSD (possibly welded to the mobo) together with a big HDD.
> I very much doubt a band would be able to get away with that.

This seems to be the rule in most cases. However, some exceptions include:

1. Radiohead - "In Rainbows" -- Was recorded independently by Radiohead and released under a "Pay what you want" basis along with a hard copy that included a vinyl hardcopy and CD.

2. Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero (2007)-- This album was released by Reznor as a free digital download and Reznor also released the master tracks and encouraged remixes of the work.

3. Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts 1-5 / The Slip -- Reznor released these under the "Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike" license.

These acts obviously did not get popular from releasing their music for free, but set an important precedent for releasing artistic content DRM-free.
Ask HN: Cloud Infrastructure Hosting - to be or not to be?
Say you have a small startup idea in mind - you can't get any help (read, hire) so everything will be made by you. The prototype, the selling, the marketing, administration. No way you can do it all efficiently, so something has to go. Marketing and the legwork can't be outsourced as easily as basic admining, so is it worth it? Do you get "bad" habbits from using services such as Pagoda/Heroku?

I always used to host and configure all my machines (VPS, basic AWS or dedicated). It's fine on a small scale, but maintaining 5-10 small boxes is a time killer, especially when you have a tall technology stack.

Not planning to get alot of traffic at first, but the structure has to be there from the beginning - then I will scale.

So basically, are these infrastructure providers:

- Cost effective compared to VPS/Cloud hosting (Linode, AWS)

- Really do scale as advertised? Being removed from low level optimizations one can do to LAMP setup can be VERY limiting...Does the scaling part is as easy and offsetting?
Not knowing the precise my.cnf or httpd.conf settings is enough to give me nightmares.

- Are crack heroin? Will usage of such provider give one terrible coding and architecture decisions? Will the move away to dedicated require large changes to the actual codebase?

Thank you!
It seems more reasonable to view public information and to ask employees not to disparage their employers, but I can't believe companies are asking to view private information.
Agreed 100%. You can tell Elon meant it when he said that they are some of his heros, and that he's truly hurt by them lambasting a mission that he felt would make them proud.

It goes to show you that even our heros don't know everything, and even if they let us down we have to follow our own path. Elon Musk is a hero of mine, and I'm sure to many others. Not to mention he was Robert Downey Jr's inspiration for Tony Stark.
Aren't enterpreneurs supposed to have some business skills too :) .

I guess HN should cater to both technical and non-technical founders - maybe a sub-area of HN? (I know that's probably not in pg's intentions, and sounds a lot like the Reddit approach).
I don't really have a really specific burning desire for one concept.

I just wonder if developer love their jobs, or is it just an overplayed alternate version of Hollywood (completely separate than the reality of the startup life)
Twitter Releases Official Guide For Musicians
The fact that non-technical people love their iPads is clear. But it doesn't automatically follow that the iPad screen quality (v2 to v3) matters much or at all to those users.
Believe it or not I like this being the top story. We know there are lots of bugs in our process and we want to hear the bug reports.

I went back to look at the application. It fell immediately below the threshold for invitation to interviews. I.e. if even one of us had given them a grade one step better, they would have made it to interviews.

When we make mistakes, it's usually in this phase. Most of the time when we screw up it's by not inviting a group to interviews, rather than by interviewing them and turning them down. So this startup is exactly where a mistake would be most likely to occur: in the applications that fell just short of the cutoff for interviews.

The good news is, we'd already decided to fix this problem. We're going to do 3 interview tracks for s2012, which will let us interview 270 groups instead of the 180 we did last time.

If we'd done that last time, we would have interviewed these guys. But last batch was the first time we did parallel interview tracks at all, and we needed to test whether it worked for 2 before we went to 3.
There's a sample pdf linked on the website that includes the table of contents. Here's the direct link:
http://bootstrappingdesign.com/pdf/sample.pdf
I understand interface is important.

What I'm trying to understand is, if a team of amazing hackers don't understand site design, html and css - should they be rejected at YC?
The pressure on them to have a good website is stronger than for most startups, because they are selling a web development tool.
In my experience they have shitty customer service. I wrote them an email a couple of times and never got a reply back.
>"Tunnel In the Sky"

I loved that book. Heinlein's juveniles would be great for middle school kids.

I hated all the crap I had to read back then. I read Jurassic Park in 3rd grade, and by the time I was in middle school I found the standard literary fare too mundane to be interesting.

School could be much more interesting if they'd just update the reading list.
It certainly wasn't meant to be a low blow...I apologize if it came off that way. I meant it as part of a larger argument to support my impression that the post was not well thought out.
Scaling for Growth? How to Hire Superstars
Apologies for the overload, all. Currently resizing the server, should be better shortly
A viral for Red Bull?
I really really hope this trend catches on!
Or an admission that there is more than one kind of person in the world?
Working Backwards in Product Management
It just goes to show that even though others don't share your vision, you shouldn't necessarily give up on it.
HN people are way too reasonable, supportive, and professional... It's a disgrace to the internet and I'm glad to be part of it.

Good luck, have fun.
Let's not talk about Google Apps users and this setting, shall we? :)

Off-topic: fun to see that someone else got emails about Wave being sunsetted from the "Google Wage" sender.
The ideal setup that I've found is having two people per office that we have at my current workplace:

- cuts out distractions: you can only get distracted if you decide to talk with your office-mate. If either of us wants to chat with someone else, we move our discussion to a meeting room.

- avoids the isolation and slacking off that a single person per office setup generates.

- if office-mates are chosen intelligently, it can result in good collaboration for e.g. pairing a mentor with a junior programmer. A good idea would be to change the pairs every few months.
How Super-Connectivity Kills Economics
Data breaches increasingly caused by hacks, malicious attacks
Surprised I got down-voted. It's kind of naive. Many programmers that have families prefer to go to work instead. Working at home, as a non-bachelor, you're seen as being able to take care of all the domestic issues (dishes, trash, run errands) and many people would just rather strike that balance. Sure, a lot of people like it but I don't think it's going to be that common. Even our industry, supposedly the most forward thinking, and even in SV, many require working on-premise. If working from home is too liberal for SV, it's going to be too much for the rest of the country for much longer than 20 years.
FedEX released to the streets of the U.S. people for charging mobile
FedEX released to the streets of the United States a lot of people with charging stations.
>> There is almost no chance that the parent(s) have actually read the book.

It's sad to think that this might actually be true. I can totally imagine a scenario where except for the teacher and children, none of the other parties making so much noise have read the piece before making a ruckus.
I don't think this is specific to India. Promoting good developers to more managerial roles seems to be a common HR mistake.

Sometimes these developers are good managers as well, but arguably more often they aren't.
Sorry to hear things that you're having trouble with dotCloud. A couple quick questions:

First, which requirements are you putting in your dotcloud.yml? In general, pip-installable requirements should just go in a standard requirements.txt file, and dotcloud.yml should be used to describe the higher-level structure of your application (ie which service types you need).

Also, I'm not sure what you mean about "masking the debug interface", but all your Flask/WSGI and nginx logs are available with the "dotcloud logs" command, and you can also log into your service instance directly to debug using "dotcloud ssh" (in which case logs can be found in the /var/log directory). You can also certainly use Flask in debug mode, by setting "application.debug = True" in your wsgi.py

It is true that you may have trouble using the interactive, browser-based debugger with the default setup on dotCloud, then but this is a Flask limitation, not a dotCloud one. From http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/quickstart/#debug-mode: "the interactive debugger does not work in forking environments (which makes it nearly impossible to use on production servers)"

Hope that helps, and if you have any other questions, drop us a line: support@dotcloud.com
Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence
Pakistani Hackers attacks 31 government and 46 educational institutions Websites
The link is to the actual police report, which the parent filed with police in addition to complaining to the school. Amazing how far off the article is...
This paper was written by an intern at MSR. It's possible that it was easier to instrument Android or it has more apps or whatever.
Well, it seems I spoke too soon! When they first announced this on the official blog it wasn't available to me (an Apps user), but now it is.
I think you'll find death marches, QA often neglected and "Write the code, then fix the bugs" are far more common than you think
This is what i like to hear! In the future, more and more start ups will be the ones choosing who to get funding from. Power always lies with those who create. Congrats, and keep up the good work!
Hrm, I prefer the new look (with icons), but it seems that most people I have read do not. Not sure if I am a minority or just a silent majority.
"How it feels when EVERYONE you know gets laid off"

Perhaps due to my imperfect English, from the title I thought that everyone he knows was laid off, instead of the developers at a former employer he no longer works for.
That's how it started for me. I lurked around for a bit but once I signed up, it started me on this path.

Good luck!
Er, those are not entirely custom UIs, they use standard widgets in well-defined ways that the platform/window manager understands.
I think office layout advice is not always heeded because it is hard to implement. Basically, if you have an open (closed) office, then switching to a closed (open) office is a pain. Articles might sway you in one direction or the other, but once your company is set up, it's a big hassle to shake things up unless they are very broken. At best, you will try a different approach if/when you start a new company.

For what it's worth, there are lots of successful companies that did fine with offices (Microsoft) and lots of companies that did fine with open spaces (Google).

I worked at LinkedIn while we moved through 3 office buildings. We had an open space, then cubicles/offices, and then an open space again (each layout decision was deliberate). Both layouts had their pros and their cons, and that's why I'm not a fan of blog posts that dismiss the other side completely. Office layout, like many other things, is not a problem with a one-size-fits-all solution.
I know nothing about java's random number generator, but your seeds are also very similar to each other.
Some will argue that it used to be even more reasonable, supportive, and profesional. But as you said, compared to everywhere else it's still a treat.

Thanks for the wishes.
Interview: Richard Stallman by Iranian Linux publication
The Java Random class uses a 48-bit LCG with a 35-bit multiplier. Because of this, small seed values won't be able to "wrap around" the full range of the LCG and will cause starting sequences that are all but random relative to each other.

Put differently, you're seeing that 35/48 = 0.73.

I'd consider this a bug in Java, but it's a common one. Qt has the same problem. Could have been avoided by cycling the seed through the LCG once, instead of using XOR.
The IT Crowd?
Doubled the server, looks to be still a bit slow as the cache warms up, but loading again. Will keep an eye on it. Thanks for your patience!
Look at it this way: at least you interview everyone you accept. Most colleges interview only a few prospective students, and that's for a four year program rather than a three month one.
While in high school, I think I only read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Taming of the Shrew.
You know what they say: killing one person is murder but wiping out an entire planet is just politics.
Service Accounts have arrived
Are you guys keeping track of statistics of grades for applications? I am wondering if at some point there is a clear cut off that you can safely say we don't need to interview these groups. If it is a linear/gradual decrease I'd imagine it would be very difficult to find that threshold.
I can't imagine what it's like to go through so many applicants, so I won't.

A few thoughts:

- It would be interesting to see what made them 181 instead of 179. Would applicants this close to the cutoff get feedback of any kind about how they fared?

- Whoever ranks 271 might be missed out too in the future.

- Has any thought been given to sharing "you're this close" details with the 50 or 100 applicants that were within the proverbial whisker, or giving them a second review to see if any would move up or down relative to their peers in the same range?

0.02
My college dorm was like this: Six little one-person rooms along a common hallway with a common room at the end.

It was like heaven. And I got a lot done, back then.
Is this fake?
Quick data point: DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER filesystem uses a periodic cronjob to garbage collect and otherwise maintains full history of writes.
Can Dehydration Make You Crazy?
30 Dolphins stranding and incredibly saved Extremely rare event
Seems just to be a simple customizable feature. Do you think that the different whitespace options in Gmail are also an "admission of failure"? To me, they just provide different options to suit different people's visual preferences.
I don't know anything about the business structure you have in mind, but usually customers don't get to talk to the developers so they don't expect to be able to do it unless its part of the contract. In my experience usually they don't even ask unless someone has put them up to it.

E.g., they may be working on a complex issue with a Support guy in over his head who has been reduced to relaying messages to "the developers". I'm happy to jump on such a call directly because it feels like it saves everyone time and running around.

But all companies with lots of users eventually develop layers of Support in place to shield their developers from potentially constant interrupts.
> Decompression sickness only occurs when a person is under elevated pressure for a period of time, and then the pressure is released. Pressurizing the sub could in fact cause the decompression sickness, not prevent it.

Only a too rapid depressurization will cause decompression sickness. Unless the sub is pressurized to a much higher pressure than normal atmospheric pressure, decompression sickness won't be an issue.

According to National geographic (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120308-james...) the entire sub is only going to shrink by about 2.5 inches. If we assume that the shrinkage only occurs on the 43 inch pilot sphere, then the lost volume is only about 16% of the total original volume, which means pressure at the bottom is about 120% atmospheric pressure. Since most airplanes are pressurized to 10.9 psi, which is about 75% of atmospheric pressure at sea level (14.9 psi) I don't think decompression sickness will even be an issue.

> For this sub, during descent the pilot's chamber compresses and air is drawn out of that chamber to keep the pressure constant (this from JC's site). Rather unlike the airplane, into which the air is pumped from the outside, usually from the engine compressor's bleed, to keep the pressure from falling too low as it ascends.

I googled for James Cameron's website and couldn't find anything. Could you please provide a link?

Yes, obviously an airplane is going to pump air in from somewhere to keep the chamber at a higher pressure than the ambient environment and a submarine with a shrinking chamber is going to remove air to keep the chamber at a lower pressure than the ambient environment. However, both an airplane and a sub are designed to keep a chamber at a specific pressure that is relatively close to normal atmospheric pressure, which prevents humans in the chamber from being at risk for decompression sickness, short of some sort of catastrophic failure.
From counting citations to measuring usage (help needed)
My favorite line from the blog post:

"If you are looking for a free solution, you can read the Posterous API documentation to create your own backups."

Well said and great job on the tool Chad! If had a posterous blog, this would be a $9 no-brainer.
This is something about A/B tests that always bothers me. They always seem to assume that if variation A is best for a proxy stat (signups, views, etc) it's also best for what I'm really interested in (longterm value). I still use them though - not sure there's much you can do about it anyways.
indecent :D
Everyone I know at Lolapps - the company that moved me out to SF in the first place - and then some. Roughly 100 out of ~114 people. And probably 80% of my friends in the SF bay area. You're right that I did use hyperbole, but it wasn't to deceive, it was to avoid an awkwardly over-specific title.
Internet is a nice place ranting... Some years ago, I did an Oddmuse wiki to/from git:

http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/OddmuseGit

So you can grab all the emacswiki website (based on Oddmuse) and convert it to your favorite markup/wiki relying on a git repository.

s/rant/do/g
Could be tricky getting the choices sorted out - will you have enough people who want the open plan arrangements? will people just go for private offices on a status basis?

In teaching we have various 'learning style' audits. A common one is the VARK profile

http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=questionnaire

Could you imagine what a 'preferred productive environment' questionnaire might look like? Would this help make sensible choices and slot people in to existing teams?
iPhone case that's a mobile WiFi hotspot
He means the view of Earth from the moon vs from Mars.
Thanks for the feedback! A few improvements that might make your life easier since you last tried: dotCloud fully supports plain old requirements.txt (consumed by plain old pip). You can access all application logs (the less masking the better as far as we're considered).

Pricing is still the same and admittedly not perfect for small-ish projects on a budget. Our delibarate strategy is to charge businesses for a high-value service (and in our experience they gladly pay for it!), then find ways to subsidize hackers, students and bootstrapped startups with something free or cheap that doesn't cause us to bleed money. That is, in my view, the only way to truly help hackers in the long run - what good is our free service if it gets snatched up and digested by another unrelated business within the year?
I recall someone explaining what Facebook was when it first launched. I was told "it's like MySpace but not obnoxious".
I'm pretty sure Louis CK thought it was more than enough money to justify the business model.

He released the numbers on his website after it had sold 250k "copies" within 11 days.

Production costs + website: $250k
Revenue: $1M
Profit: $750k
ROI: 300%

He says that $250k was about how much he would have been paid by HBO or Comedy Central if he let them produce it. So his new model tripled his profit compared to the old model.

Which is probably why he ended up choosing to keep $220k for himself and giving the rest of the profit ($530k) to charity and to his staff.

Louis CK: "That leaves me with 220k for myself. Some of that will pay my rent and will care for my childen. The rest I will do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business. In any case, to me, 220k is enough out of a million."

Source: https://buy.louisck.net/news
Agreed, I've taken a raised interest in comedians since the whole podcast thing has turned into a movement and something of an artform. I've seen three comedians in the last month - I don't think I'd seen more than one per year before this.

But really, musicians have been doing the equivalent - selling albums at a flat/reasonable rate - on Bandcamp for years now. For most of them, being on a label is more about getting exposure in the right channels (getting reviewed on high profile sites, being in premier showcases, etc.) and showing that they live up to curated tastses, which is more difficult than the comedy world.

Exposure seems easier in comedy. A comedian can generate/distribute brand new material (jokes) on twitter or on a podcast at a clip that musicians can't compete with. Subjectively, there seems to be fewer comedians than bands, which is more amicable to cooperation.
More Patent Holders Going After Facebook
Hey, I was 13 years old in 1996! That made me nostalgic for a website I designed around 1998 and I was surprised to find it was still online...

http://homepage.eircom.net/~nopatec/

Dreamweaver special :)

still can't find the geocities site I had in 1997 though...damn
I agree. Even with my nice sound isolating earbuds (Shure), it doesn't block out all the external sounds unless I set the volume higher than I would like.

While playing music on headphones can help block out conversations, it is still a distraction. It's just not as annoying as hearing other people talk.
I don't know that it takes anything special to make nytimes.com look like it's from yesteryear. The only thing it's missing really is some <blink> elements and that dancing baby.

Seriously though if they're going to stick with that column layout, they should look at how pinterest is presenting information.