skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, the case is easy to make.

Active users for mobile games are extremely monetizable. While most individual games will eventually fade away in popularity, you can advertise your new games to your existing userbase in order to keep them hooked in. Zynga does this extremely effectively for their new game launches. The hard part, especially on mobile, is acquiring users in the first place - these can be expensive, as the natural viral mechanisms that you saw in the early days of Facebook games are typically much harder to come by on mobile, so huge, fast breakout hits like Draw Something are rare.

Whether that translates into $180M of value for Zynga, or if it ends up being more like $50M or $500M depends on a lot of things, but it seems like a good bet to take that the net lifetime value of all those Draw Something users will be huge when plugged into the Zynga ecosystem.

Of course, that's before even beginning to quantify the value of the Draw Something team and the domain knowledge in their heads.
This truly is a great, measured response to all the crazy talk about punting all of the great work that Rails and the core team has done over the last 7 years. Bravo.
Can Coders save America's cities?
I wonder, does this mean we actually want types as metadata on our shell commands? Type of args, type of stdin, type of stdout, or whatever we decide to call them?

All apps would have to speak a single, more complicated language and we would have to do more explicit translation but it might work out better.
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... The point is to use assembly, and a lot of people program in assembly simply for fun.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/business/luck-is-just-the-...
From Gates himself:
http://creating-luck.com/2012/01/30/bill-gates-on-pure-luck/
“I was lucky in many ways: I was lucky to be born with certain skills. I was lucky to have parents that created an environment where they shared what they were working on and let me to buy as many books as I wanted to, and I was lucky with timing. The invention of the microprocessor was something profound, and it turned out that only if you were young and you were looking at that could you appreciate what that meant. And I was obsessed with writing software, and it turned out that was the key missing thing that allowed the microprocessor to have this incredible impact. So in timing, in skill set, in some of the people I was lucky enough to meet – it’s unusual to have so much luck in one’s life, but it’s been a major factor in what I’ve been able to do.”
I should mention that. Thank you.
Agree 100%. As a solo player I usually abandon ideas before publishing them, I tend to lost the initial excitement of the idea and got tired before even launching the MVP. Having a partner(non-technical for my case) in my current project really helps me to focus and push for the MVP(yes, I'm on early stage and I get easily exhausted by the amount of work a CTO has to do when you are bootstrapping).
That's definitely the case for me. I'm going to move in with two friends I made from college, both are very smart, one is a programmer with ideas to form his own startup, working with him is so much more useful than any class from college.
I agree that we still need backends but I think they will need to move locations. The client app should sit on a dedicated server for serving static resources; Apache and Nginx do this very well. The new "backend" will just be your API endpoint. CORS will make this much easier but for now proxy pass will suffice.

In 2012 I see no reason why a JavaScript application should be served by anything but a dedicated web server.
Great, another horror story to add to my "this is why I abhor air travel" bank. I know the statistics show that planes are very safe, but it's hard to reconcile the numbers with grisly accounts like these.
which site to scrape for occupation - linkedin I guess would work to get decent matches.
the nytimes article pointed out that they created 35 games, most of which I assume aren't close to being as popular and successful as draw something. Also, there were already a couple of pictionary games on the app store, charadium and depict that are quite similar. So this just feel like a fluke. The developers themselves were surprised at the success.

If this is a fluke, why would anyone expect the developers to be able to replicate the success on other games in the future? I think I read somewhere the current run-rate revenue of draw is around 100k a day. But you would expect that to tail off when it reaches saturation. Probably most of that comes from the initial purchase, rather than in game purchases. So you're looking at more than 6x of current revenue which will decrease over time, just to break even on the purchase, and not counting expenses.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the developers are talented, and they deserve getting paid. The only people losing are the shareholders of Zynga, and less the management, since they've been dumping the stock. I think Zynga is probably under a lot of pressure to diversify it's revenue away from Facebook, as well as grow the revenue to justify it's valuation.

Comparing acq of OMGPOP to Youtube is just silly.
That's very interesting. I've been studying kanji in the morning because I'm a morning person, making it easier in the short run, but it looks like working on it in the evenings is actually better for long term retention.
A lot of the stuff you read on here can be found in documentation.. Who the hell wants to go back and read all that nonsense?
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Hacker News Tokyo Japan Meetup #12 – 30th March 2012
Surely you can find grisly accounts relating to any mode of transportation you care to name. There's nothing uniquely grisly about air travel accidents.
"Microsoft plays dirty" is the usual story.
What would be cooler is to use something like this as a basis to generate idiomatic php, python, perl or ruby. Let people sketch out their initial ideas in a common language, then compile in to a starter php project, or python project, etc.
In particular, the current version of Firefox kept struggling to link within a 4GB address space. Hence the comments about "having had to back out and ultimately delay some important new features like SPDY": nothing about SPDY itself, but it happened to push the link above 4GB and cause builds to fail, so it got temporarily dropped.
The title is some seriously editorializing, as much as I do enjoy Android.

Shame about what happened, but I wouldn't have expected any less from official MS reps at an MS store.
I wonder, could similar principles be applied to writing code?
Counting the rich wildlife of such forests along with high density of trees, would spotting a human in all that noise even possible?
look at the js file

var key_binding = {
65: n("gs"),
90: n("a"),
83: n("as"),
88: n("b"),
67: n("c", 1),
70: n("cs", 1),
86: n("d", 1),
71: n("ds", 1),
66: n("e", 1),
78: n("f", 1),
74: n("fs", 1),
77: n("g", 1),
75: n("gs", 1),
188: n("a", 1),
76: n("as", 1),
190: n("b", 1),
191: n("c", 2),
222: n("c#", 2),

49: n("gs", 1),
81: n("a", 1),
50: n("as", 1),
87: n("b", 1),
69: n("c", 2),
52: n("cs", 2),
82: n("d", 2),
53: n("ds", 2),
84: n("e", 2),
89: n("f", 2),
55: n("fs", 2),
85: n("g", 2),
56: n("gs", 2),
73: n("a", 2),
57: n("as", 2),
79: n("b", 2),
80: n("c", 3),
189: n("cs", 3),
219: n("d", 3),
187: n("ds", 3),
221: n("e", 3)
};
Absolutely agree with this advice. It's how I fixed my last unfinished project - launching something completely broken and having people tell you they liked what they saw but could you please fix that one little thing, is a great way to get motivated to fix that thing.
I'm an avid reader but was disappointed with the dragon book. I felt like once finished, I still couldn't write a simple interpreter! I guess it's a good reference.. or maybe a second book, but that's definitely not the best book to get started and learn compilers.

I did actually read The C++ Programming Language when I was in high school.. at that time I thought it was a very important book. Now, with the insight, how dull it was and useless!
It seems like there's a huge drop off in prize money after about the top 11. I wonder how the drop off in salary is, if they are paid one at all. eSports is still growing and I don't forsee it being a viable career path unless you're a top 1% tier talent, which loosely mirrors professional sports as well.
This is the coolest thing.

Another feature request: Chat! So that we can coordinate with each other to play a song!
I think that your job sounds like a prototyper, which to say that your mandate is to develop to a level where others can rebuild it with a point of reference. Hence you're a starter and a finisher.

I have had a similar position.
I wonder what happens during polyphasic sleep, where you sleep multiple times per day. Of course, the amount of sleep you get each time is far less (I'm trying a three-hour nap at night, then three twenty-minute naps throughout the day), but it's entirely REM sleep [1].

REM sleep is also when "memories are consolidated" [2], so multiple REM sleeps throughout the day should drastically improve one's information retention and therefore one's learning.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REM_rebound

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep#Memory...
Priyanka Chopra Crowned the Glam Diva of India Award.
Really?

Microsoft seems kinda humble these days.
Want To Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy.
Pretty sweet! I think real-time social collaborative apps like this are going to become more prominent.

Our multi-player beat machine http://eightbitbeats.com
They use electrical penetrators such as these:
http://seaconworldwide.com/products/penetrators/penetrators/

They are listed as one of the main points of failure on the dive's website:
http://deepseachallenge.com/the-expedition/deepsea-challenge...
IMO, the title is a huge link bait. It's not technically wrong but which is usually frowned upon in HN. As a WP user myself, I agree with the OP that he won. To be honest, based on the title, I was expecting some technical behavior which WP is not good at but cheats to make it better. But it could be only me though.

Edit - Grammar and sentence formation.
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and the same time I am greatly annoyed when I have my code break because there's some space instead of tab or tab instead of space or extra space somewhere where it is not obvious.

I have to say, I love this. I often do website work for clients and it's so incongruent, that switching over to Python where the indentation is perfect every time is like programming from a cloud. Or some better analogy that means "it's nice".
OK, nice link, but was there something in particular you had in mind when you posted this, or did you just assume we'd figure it out (in which case I question if you read the entry)...
James Cameron Completes Record-Breaking Mariana Trench Dive
Similar issues with bookmark synchronization have been raised over and over by many people, on various versions of FF ranging from 3.6 to 9.x, on various platforms

Of the bugs you mentioned, only one of them [1] involves a desktop version of Firefox later than 3.6.3. The reporter there is also syncing with his Android phone and an iOS device. The developers who responded suggest that it might have to do with the Android Sync implementation.

...when the Sync add-on for FF3.6 was removed.

The aforementioned bug notes [2]:

Most of the issues with bookmark sync occur as a result of using the old Firefox Sync add-on and not the version of Sync bundled with Firefox itself.

This would seem to be confirmation that the old Sync addon had issues, but that they should now be fixed. The fact that the majority of reported bugs involving Sync involve Firefox 3.6.3 (or are resolved, like some of the bugs you mention), and that there are none that I can fix involve versions 10 or 11, do not support your assertion that Sync has issues with bookmark sync that "still haven't been fixed."

I understand you want to create a "definitive" report, but it would be good to still go ahead and create a bug about your issue (where actual Sync developers could help you debug it), instead of complaining about it on Hacker News.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721635

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721635#c3
In motor vehicle accidents, you don't have time to think about what is going to happen. As a plane is in a freefall, there's at least a good 30 seconds before ground collision. Having that time to think about how your life is about to end seems grisly to me.
SHIFT and CTROL go UP and DOWN an octave respectively.
The saddest part about this whole story is that it seems if she had searched for her mother she might have saved her. It was probably worse finding out she was still alive after the crash.
Grisly accounts involving cars aren't news. They happen too often.
Wings of Hope is a Herzog documentary that tells this story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Hope
I cannot disagree more. Opening up my ideas to ridicule and critique has been the best thing I've ever done. I don't waste time on the bad ideas, people get behind the good ones, and people see that I'm always doing something. I don't have to deal with the "what happened to that project you were working on" question much because my standard answer is "Boy was that a good learning experience! I showed it to X, Y, and Z and they gave me great feedback and inspired a bunch of new ideas that are more interesting. Take a look!"

Sure, I don't finish everything, but the important bit is that the things I fail to finish are less good than the things I do finish. This is the "fail fast" mantra in a slightly larger nutshell.
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I wonder if she was able to overcome, after all these years, the fear of flying after surviving a crash. Long lasting deep trauma, for sure.
On the other hand, quality of Adler32 is hardly an valid argument here, as HTTP without compression does not use any checksums whatsoever. The fact that it's not consistently implemented is.

By the way, Adler32 I don't think that it's right to call Adler32 broken, as there are much worse algorithms in common use (TCP checksum, for example), and limitations of Adler32 are widely known and are not too relevant for this application.
No, there's no way she'd be able to save her. She could not carry her on the 9 day journey.
I think the title is fair. The author won a competition by 'beating' the Windows phone with his Android at some task, but was cheated out of his prize. Yes, not paying up when you lose a bet is cheating.
A poetic 404 or how to make a user almost happy for a 404
I see this as a dichotomy between people who are doers vs thinkers/creatives[1]

If you are a thinker/creative and not a doer, you need to align yourself with a doer, in order to make great things happen.

[1] http://andrewoneverything.com/its-the-music-stupid
It is probably 100x cheaper per byte than sending an SMS.
Yeah, but as far as I can understand they could have been on very remote locations. How do you even search for someone in an unknown, dark, dense forest ?
You might struggle for days or weeks before succumbing to your injuries after a car accident. Again, there's nothing particularly bad about airplane accidents, except for the part where they're much more rare and thus much more newsworthy.
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This chart illustrates the exact opposite of Zynga shareholders losing something:
https://twitter.com/#!/nabeel/status/182821510493384704 and also Zynga is under a lot of pressure to diversify into other markets, just like every other business in the world. Mobile is an obvious huge market Zynga can dominate now.
Maybe when we hit first 10 million downloads :)
Humbled, perhaps.
1-kilo "gold bar" actually filled with Tungsten discovered in UK (photos)
Another person in the comments there won the contest when the reps asked him to change his Facebook cover photo, but they wouldn't honor the win because they actually meant profile photo instead. I'd be surprised if they really give up the prize to anyone.
I think many people consider CLRS (Intro to Algorithms) to be far more daunting than it actually is. I have read 80% of it (wasn't interested by some parts, maybe will go back to them) and I have several friends who have done similar read-throughs. Doing all of the proofs is a bit much, but a lot of the exercises are quite good and I would hope that most programmers were familiar with the majority of algorithms described in CLRS. Essentially, I think many people are far too intimidated by CLRS. I actually found it to be quite readable, as textbooks go. Note that I did this before actually taking any algorithms class.

Perhaps the post should be rephrased to "However, unless you have at least a Masters degree in Computer Science (and in Algorithms specifically), I doubt you've HAD TO read more than a few selected chapters from Introduction to Algorithms."
Ask HN: Do you use Quora?
Do you use Quora? If so, how and for what purposes?
I'm sure there's a good amount of overlap applicable to any creative process.
Seriously people...who cares?!

This isn't even a tech story. This is the kind of tabloid content I expect to find in the grocery store or 9:00 local news.
I was looking at Windows Phone seriously the other day. The UI seems pretty nice, except for that bit about text running off the screen. I don't know why anyone would think not being able to read entire words is helpful.

The default apps are really nice looking. Some of the apps made by other companies also look very nice. The foursquare app screenshots look super nice. I also find the xbox integration appealing.

But if you take a close look at the app store, you see people griping about not getting updates, not getting features found on Android and iPhone apps. I couldn't find a decent task management app the quality of Things on iPhone or Astrid on Android. There's no Google Voice integration. If I wanted to make an app I would have to have a Windows computer, you can't do it on a VM.

I think Windows Phone's app store is about where Google's Android Market was just as the original Droid was released. You would really, really want to have a Windows Phone to put up with the dismal app experience. Some people don't really install apps. I know some people who have owned iPhones since 2007 and have bought hardly any apps. I think people like that could switch to a Windows Phone and be pretty happy, but I don't think I could. Not until I can make apps on a Mac at the very least. Also you can't sideload apps the way you can on Android. It just doesn't seem like a better experience.
The C++ Programming Language and the ARM(Annotated Reference Manual) won me many interviews. After reading those I could claim that I know the language. Sadly, I could never find such concise reference for Python or Java (or Erlang, but there was no documentation anyway).
I was about to call BS on that last sentence but it looks like I was the one full of it. I thought that the amd64 calling convention was standardized, bummer.

On Windows, amd64 is much better than x86 in this regard because of the bevy of x86 calling conventions that are still around. Only one amd64 calling convention.
#!/usr/bin/env python

also ensures your scripts look for the virtualenv python when virtualenv is activated, but the system python when virtualenv is deactivated.
Making the leap from coder to enterprise architect. Any suggestions?
Hey Guys,

This may not be the appropriate forum but I tend to trust the members of ycombinator and am not really a part of many online communities lately.

I've noticed that since last Fall my role at a major U.S. corporation has started to move away from writing code and more towards interfacing with internal business customers and providing architectural leadership and review. I am not officially an architect (yet!) because in my company we have very few architects all of which report to to the executive vice presidents (i.e. the CTO, CIO, etc).

Surprisingly I miss coding a lot less than I had feared and find myself enjoying and embracing my new position. However, now that I am seeing the world through a new lens I am no longer the expert in my field that I used to be. Also, I do not have the relationships with mentors at this level that I developed through 10 years of software development.

I was wondering if anyone else has successfully made this transition and any tips or suggestions that may be up for offer.

Right now I know that I am weak in soft skills (communication, presentations, goal setting, MS office skills, influence, leadership, etc) so if anyone has any recommendations on training or educational resources I would appreciate them.

I would like to add that it was my pursuit of running a startup that provided me the tools and mindset to get to this new elevated position and almost all of the information and motivation came from the ycombinator community.

Thanks for any suggestions or motivations,
Ian
Forget that shit. Basically if you are the TOP 10 players in the world or so, you will make what an average programmer will make or greater.

If you are in the top 23 players in the world, you will make a decent salary, comperable to a secratary at a decent company.

If you are in the top 50 players in the world, you will make just above the poverty line.

If you are anywhere below that, you will work at McDonalds.

AND NOTE: the best players play all day to practice. It is work for them.

EDIT: Compare that to anyone in the NFL. This is absolutely worthless as a money-maker. Maybe if you are in Korea and 10 bucks a month will sustain you.
Rather pathetic of them to run this challenge
I've found that that deflation comes from trying to live up to the expectations you've shared with others, rather than letting your project grow organically in isolation.

Very true! You know that this feature just needs to be dumped if the project has any hope of progressing, but you are now beholden to the image of your project before the constraints of reality set in. This is why every project with a high profile debut ends up missing part of the highly touted killer features.
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Note that it is possible to "always guess long" and pad out with null bytes... this usually works (many file format parsers aren't too picky). However, this is more of a practical work-around than a recommended solution!
I came here to mention exactly this. I can't believe how the article misses this fact, even when it includes pictures of her return to the crash site that were actually taken during the filming of Herzog's documentary. For all of HNers interested in this story, the documentary is highly recommendable if you like Herzog's deeply psychoanalytical take when he portrays real life characters and situations.

Other curious fact: Werner Herzog was supposed to take this flight. He missed it.