skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The barrier to entry is low from the perspective of sunken costs other than development time, being a purely creative endeavor that you can work on with mostly free software tools.

However, the talent required to pull off a quality game and the time it takes are huge and only grow exponentially. That in recent years we've got a couple of indie games that were successful, that's only because on mobile devices the expectations for CGI quality are for the moment low. Plus, with these app stores, the budget required for marketing has decreased, if you're lucky enough to have your app featured.

And while you can create indie games for the desktop and be successful, as Minecraft shows, the expectations for quality CGI are much higher and so it takes an insane amount of creativity to fill the blanks.

Now, of course, Zynga games are not really on the same level as what id Software or Blizzard are releasing and you can certainly picture yourself pulling off games of the same quality, as Zynga games are nothing special, except for the social-network effects.

However you shouldn't underestimate the effort required to build a game from scratch. I consider it to be by far one of the most challenging fields in software development, as not only it requires great feats of engineering, but it also requires creativity and design. E.g. developers by themselves can barely pull it off without the help of a good artist that can draw.
Does no one send faulty item back to the manufacturer so they can prevent the same fault from happening again?
Clearly everybody missed this little gem which will no doubt be removed:

"7 May 2012 at 16:45 - Andy Murdoch creates a post on twitter referencing this page. Universe invites celebration by all."
Here's a simple test to see if genetic modification does anything: buy seeds for one crop (e.g. soybeans) in both "Roundup-ready" and non-modified varieties. Plant both varieties and let them grow. Spray Roundup on both; see which one dies.
I think he's got the hand-made idea wrong. Programs are machines. Writing software is the act of specifying how those machines work. I don't know any industry in which this is done by other machines. It's always manual work.

The work of a financial analyst is also entirely manual by the way.
Firstly, what is the username you're claiming is invisible? I can certainly see this post.

But apart from that, you have, for some reason, been "hell-banned". Without seeing your posts and/or comments from around the time it happened I can't offer any suggestions or advice as to why it happened. Do note that sometimes it happens by accident. It happened to me the other day, and in a reply to an email I sent asking about it, PG said I'd been "fat-fingered" by accident.

With regards the algorithms, I have no inside knowledge, just deductions based on what I've seen and some experiments I've run. However, if you consistently get flagged, or get downvoted vigorously, I suspect there is an automatic hell-ban, possibly preceded by a "slow-ban" (wherein everything slows down and responds like molasses for a while). If PG was being completely honest (and I'm not suggesting he wasn't, but as a mathematician I tend to try to cover all bases) then some (and perhaps all) hell-bans are actually performed by the moderators, possible in response to flags thrown up by automated detection systems.

As an aside: Do you understand the effects of flags, downvotes, and their differences?

So if you want to know more, perform searches for "hell-ban", "flag", "downvote", "dead", and combinations thereof. You'll find plenty of discussion, and considerable complaints. For one, I think that PG has done remarkably well in keeping HN civil (although clearly not perfect) in the face of popularity, and the occasional false-positive and draconian measure might well be the price paid.
(s/slight of hand/sleight of hand/)
i think this should be working better now. i added some caching to the blog.

it's late where i am, so i'm gonna go to bed. hopefully the site will survive until morning.
> on average you'll make less money [in a startup] than if you take a "normal" job

I disagree. If he's using "average" in the sense of "mean" (not median), then he's saying that starting a startup has a lower expected return and is higher risk than working a normal job, meaning it's inferior in both regards (assuming diminishing marginal utility). Entrepreneurship is a classic "high risk, high return" venture. It has a higher expected return than a conventional job; that's what makes it financially attractive to founders and VCs in the first place. The astronomical success of the minority offsets the lack of success of the majority.

In a similar vein I disagree with his assertion that joining a startup (taking a risk) is like buying insurance (avoiding a risk). They are opposites.
I view Zynga's economics like a tv network. Their primary asset is their audience, and acquisition is a way for them to increase that. There are two different kinds of acquisitions they can do: shows that already have a following (low risk, low payoff, high cost) and promising small shows, which have opposite characteristics. The stuff they produce in-house tends to be highly targeted, less innovative stuff.
Yeah, PHP is great to start off with, it's simple and everything in the language is obvio- Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM
I don't know. Take contractors. For many types of heavy lifting, a good contractor who is also a lead dev etc may be justified in asking for 100 dollars an hour or more, simply due to the complexity, their accumulated experience, and just how good and fast and right they are in a tech that's in demand. However, for every person like that, there are n who do not justify a hundred dollars an hour. So, isn't an OK compromise to start at 40 dollars an hour and see if they can do the work of 3 days (or a week or three weeks, or 'unusable') of one of the 'other' devs, more quickly or just better and more reliably, and if so, bump their rate to 100 dollars an hour as they're asking for? Think like Oracle/SAP specialists etc who would do something like build a complete database and web shop, front-end, back-end, everything from scratch for a traditional brick-and-morter store.

To take an opposite example, consider a designer and logo creator. Short of a portfolio, which many designers are not able to provide except to say, look at this, this, and this web site, which they did not work on alone, it is simply hard to know how much they contributed and how much was the art director, other designers, etc. Some designers are independent and bring customers who pay well and basically justify any rate for themselves. (e.g. fifty thousand dollars for a new worldwide corporate logo for a fortune 500 company). Others are worth fifteen dollars an hour. Don't you think a good compromise might be a decent rate (25-40 dollars) for something small, then bump to awesome rate if, well, they're awesome?

Naturally this only works if there is actual trust from both sides. But you would never pay fifty thousand dollars for a logo by someone who only knows microsoft paint and sucks using it -- or even ten thousand or even five thousand -- nor would you pay 100 dollars an hour to a "hadoop engineer" (your requirement) who turns out to not be a hadoop engineer, barely know some html and php, and even with php can't do anything that you want or need. Nor would you pay 80 dollars nor 60 dollars an hour to that person.

So if there is trust that you're really looking for top talent -- and the dev's bullshit detector doesn't go off -- why not do this: "Rather than you doing 10 hours of unpaid phone calls, resumes, interviews to get to 100 dollars an hour -- your next gig -- why don't you do 8 hours of work for me and get to the same place. This applies only if you're worth 100 dollars an hour"

Then if the person is not lying (they're worth 100 an hour, they're an actual hadoop contributor and ju one of the best in the world), and you're not lying (you really want to pay that, for really such a person), it all works out.
There's also UDT...
Not every piece of software is like that. My updates take time measured in months from the moment developers declare them "done" till the first time a line of code is executed in production. And this is assuming all forks on this path go positive.

Not that I'm complaining, just giving some perspective. Maybe this will make your dad less jealous :)
I've had some problems with Intel graphics on my DELL in Fedora 14. Sometimes video, sometimes full screen flash, and sometimes sleep caused it to crash. On my older IBM with ATI, everything worked just fine. Anyway, in Fedora 16 the graphics and sleep works just fine for me.
Probably something like "Based on the antiquity models of Physics, the ancients thought the following" and then the school children will all have a good laugh.
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He got nervous and started sweating. Might be a bit aggressive to call that a "meltdown."
Where did he ever have to actually show this quality of keeping up with competition? So far there simply hasn't been any "next big thing" that facebook would have to actually be afraid of. They have so incredibly many users, that alone makes them de-facto untouchable as of now. Even google plus could not change that. All of this might change some time in the future, just like it did for myspace and there was nothing they could have done about it if you ask me.
Are you alluding to Scott Aaronson's essay on Who Can Name the Bigger Number? [1]

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
Looks like that change was live for a total of 3 minutes.
Or alternatively you could say writing assembler is the software equivalent of building physical things by putting together individual molecules. Physical builders work at a higher level of abstraction too.

I think the analogy is becoming a little stretched though.
VoiceBunny perhaps? http://voicebunny.com/
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In this case, it really is that simple. Unlike Google, which provides a necessary service, Facebook is not necessary. I have lost nothing at all from not using Facebook. Social media might be important for advertising, but chances are that you personally really don't need Facebook.

Delete your account and go on with life. Some people might not forward you an invite to some event, but they are really not friends if they choose to do this. Writing a short email is not a big time investment. Hell, you can write one email to all your non-Facebook using friends!
>It has a higher expected return than a conventional job; that's what makes it financially attractive to founders and VCs in the first place.

In the exact same sense than a lottery has a "higher expected return that a conventional job", just with slightly better odds.

>The astronomical success of the minority offsets the lack of success of the majority.

That doesn't make sense. Except in the light of something lke the Dunning-Krueger effect, where most people involved in startups expect they will be that "minority".
Not sure i can agree anout great classics being simpler works; as a counterpoint to your argument, how about Bach?

Perhaps the musical analogies just break down here, I'm not sure that they are helpful...
Sure I can completely see that being the case in many situations (for example all Aircraft software engineers have my utmost thanks :-)), but even then the cost of prototyping changes or testing fixes is made much easier by the malleable nature of code.
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>Yeah, when you think about it the lottery and insurance are surprisingly similar ideas, though a bit in reverse. Getting in an accident and winning the lottery are both unlikely.

Getting into an accident is far more likely. And everyone has health issues sooner or later, so the probability of that is 1.
How is the code hand-made? The millions of gmail users are using the same piece of code. Same thing with Windows users. That's what you call mass production.
I understand the the telco's are very competitive, but for some reason, free market competition appeared to fail to have an effect on prices like texting or data roaming. Oddly enough, you roam through various network using the internet, and there free market seems to have worked between fiber providers into keeping the prices low and efficiency high.

It seems that Kroes only launched the inquiry into telco's as part of her commision on competition. The price regulations came after her time there (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_reg...)
Rothstein made 3,009 reservations in less than four years, almost always booking two seats, but canceled 2,523 of them.

Until I read this I was cursing AA. Now it seems like they are trying to cost AA even more money, on purpose. It may be legal but definitely not cool
My opinion?

Because as much as the software industry loves to adopt the work "engineer", almost none of the sort of websites and software discussed here on HN ever gets anything much like "engineering" in the sense of, say, "civil engineering" done.

I think in my ~20year career, I've had only 3 projects that were specified well enough up front that we just "built it according to the plans" and had a satisfied customer at the end. Overwhelmingy, some (or most) of the design gets "made up as we go along". Even on projects with several small forests worth of up-front documentation, there's almost always large areas of vagueness or outright contradictory requirements, which need decision making on the developers part halfway into the job.

There are _very_ few websites that couldn't be coded from the ground up in a few weeks with a few good programmers - _IF_ you had already thought through all of the things the site needs and all of the consequences and the contradictions in those consequences. Even the big ugly complex projects, like Google's search or Facebook or Wikipedia or Twitter - if you had a spec that answered all the details about how you wanted them, a small team of experienced web guys could get it up and running in a month or so, and let you now how much cloud/hardware/sysadmin/support you'd need to budget for as your customer acquisition kicked in.

It doesn't take very long to "build" the software or the website (obvious "large scale" projects like OSes excepted). What takes most of the time is identifying and solving the problem. (And, I suspect a lot of the reason software/websites have a reputation for taking "so long" is that they're _way_ too often rushed into the "building" phase way before all the things that need designing are even identified, then all the new solutions take longer 'cause we try to fit them around all the work that's already been done.)
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You might like your terms more, but they are not historically accurate. They were very happy to exploit things, they just didn't see how certain things could be exploited.

Most of the things were invented "for fun" and when that worse off (for example the emperor lost interest) they were forgotten.

I guess it's one drawback to the patronage system - it lets you jump ahead of the curve and invent amazing things (due to all the funding), but you don't look for economic reasons to do it - all you care about is making your patron happy, and when he looses interest the project is canceled.

Going to the moon is a modern example of this. We went to the moon because the patron (the Government) wanted it, and funded it. But there was no actual reason to do it. So someday when there is a huge economic reason to go to the moon (if I knew what it was I'd be rich :) people will wonder how the US squandered the opportunity.
Yes, this post is visible but all my other posts(which are URL links) definitely are not visible. This "hell ban" phenomenon is something I am unsure of how I got, I didn't make any such comments in the past.
A good starting point for more rigorous evidence:
http://stoppredatorygambling.org/category/research-center/lo...

I've been interested in the topic for a long time as I have a relative who spends most of his income on lottery tickets. Any time I can, I ask people who play the lottery why they do it. Most of them spend a tiny amount and it's something they have a little bit of fun with their workmates or family, these are the "normals". But about 20% of the players account for 80% of the ticket revenue, these are the people playing out of desperation because they are in a poverty trap and they have no other way out. They are foregoing essentials to pay for the lottery tickets, so if they didn't play, they wouldn't accrue the money they "saved". These people are often on the brink: depressed, panicked and alone. A lottery ticket is a temporary "self medication" with which they can temporarily quiet their anxieties, until of course, they need the next hit.
It’s easier to learn hacking than find a hacker for your startup.
For the iPad Mr. Reader is by far my favorite RSS reader and I have tried many.

http://www.curioustimes.de/mrreader/
There has been a lot research on grasp detection and interpretation over the last 10 years. Touché is just a new sensing technique, not a new interaction paradigm.

For example, Raymond Veldhuis has been working on smart gun grips that identify their owner since 2003: http://www.sas.el.utwente.nl/open/people/Raymond%20Veldhuis
You sound like my wife... she says I lack the good looks of Hugh Jackman and athletic abilities of Michael Phelps, and I can't even compare to Bill Gates in the amount of money I bring in.

Not defending the F-35 though. My main issue with it is that I can't see that it is needed at all.
It can be very hard to get started with a wiki - content either isn't added, or isn't up to date, so people lose trust in the info in there. This has a negative feedback effect on people writing entries too. In addition, writing articles is hard as people feel expected (perhaps from wikipedia) to having to write detailed, canonical articles.

I have had success numerous times introducing an internal blog as a team knowledge repository, blogging anything interesting to it. With a search function, and making anyone an editor, it has many of the same features with a number of benefits:

- people can comment and ask questions

- signing up the development mailing list as an email subscriber ensures everyone sees new info as it is posted

- people blog about code issues, and tips and trick, not just 'how complicated feature X works'

Honestly, it works a treat. Blogging is the mechanism by which we share programming knowledge on the internet, why shouldn't it be the method we use inside our workplaces?
Learn to crawl before you walk, but don't bog yourself down in textbooks.

Try to find tutorials on the specific things you need to do rather than general courses, complete those, see where you're at and give it another crack. If you still are having trouble, rinse and repeat.
Nothing is made entirely by machines. At some point it's made by hand. The thing is software is a bit like doing clay pottery when it's not properly done. Once you add a bit of a systematic approach to it and you test is, review it, it becomes a bit closer to an industrial product.

The thing is the rest of the world is also in a state of flux. Plumbers changed materials quite a few times in the past decade which changed the fixtures a bit. So the concept is the same (ie. design patterns) but the actual material and its characteristics changed (ie. framework, programming languages) and there are different ways to put them together: welding, glue, etc (ie. APIs).

But changing some material, fixtures and binding material doesn't even compare to the kind of flexibility we have with software!

The solution for plumbers is that they always use what's current. Which makes their field as much of a fashion-driven field as ours (think about it).

But give them an existing house with multi-layer pipes and tell them to fix it and they will also comment that it's old tech and you should switch to copper or whatever.

In conclusion, I don't see how software is any different than other fields except that we are much more flexible and go with a much greater speed.

Software is at its infancy because science in general is at its infancy.
No.

You have an adverse selection problem. If you're looking to hire really great contractors, then you're mostly looking to hire people who have continuing work with their extremely happy customers, leads that their extremely happy customers referred to them, etc. They don't need you that badly.

So, you ask them to work for $40 an hour for, say, a week. They could make at least 4x that if they worked for other clients. Why should they, the super awesome coder, take you on as a customer? You're asking them to pay a big opportunity cost for business they don't need that badly, and you're showing that you're price-sensitive, and are likely to try to get a discount off their full rate after the trial too. The people this will most scare away are the very best, the ones who don't need you, the ones you really want to keep.

So yes, do a trial if you're not comfortable committing to a big contract with them. But treat the difference between the rate you want to pay for the trial and their rate as part of the cost of finding great talent. Don't squabble over what's going to end up being a very small percentage of what you pay the person over their whole time with you at the risk of sending the best talent straight out the door. It's too great a cost.

Also, if you want great talent, double your expectation of what contract rates should be. $40 an hour as a contract rate in a 1st world country is not a "decent rate".
Too big to overhaul?
You know something - I just tried to load this website as the article looks interesting. But it was taking forever to load. So I downloaded YSlow to find out what on earth was causing the problem, and the site has:

* 41 external javascript files

* 22 external CSS files

* Totals to 2106.9K of files, of which 1151.4K are javascript files, and 598.9K in images. It took 204 HTTP requests to get this page to load.

* has about 37 different DNS lookups to get access to all the files

One of the websites that host external javascript files took over 9 seconds to load approximately 350K.

On top of this, I've never seen so much analytics and tracking on any website - ever!

Seriously, someone needs to have a good look at the way that this site is constructed. Such a massive bandwidth hog - and noticably slow!
Upgrading users is one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenarios. If you do: some users are unhappy about old hardware. If you don't: some users are unhappy about uptime and changing software.

Joyent's CEO was on HN a while back and mentioned that if users on the old FreeBSD boxes want to run on the new illumos boxes, they should send an email to support.
The idea that code is the design and it's the compiler doing the construction has been around for quite a long time:

http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_m...