skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well it doesn't look like path planning is going to be an issue for the first couple of Km :-)
Like many people have said, this is very anecdotal. Not all drop outs are as motivated or as capable as you seem to be. At the same time, neither are all college graduates. However, graduating from a top 5 cs program will at least ensure that you have learned a good deal of information from a wide variety of topics in computer science.
Oh, I see, it's the developer's fault for going to a studio and letting them mistreat him so that he could try and hold onto his job. "Quit, and go do great things." Yes, because everyone who works for a scrappy startup and gets acquired has a huge nest egg, right? It's not like starting a company is hard?

Commentary on this stuff is utterly ridiculous sometimes. It's like it's coming from people who don't live in the real world.

The OP describes 12 hour days, 7 days a week with lots of broken promises and obvious failures to address issues, and all a Zynga employee can come up with in response is that it's an "exaggeration" and that it would be more appropriate to call the results "disappointing". So does that mean the employee isn't wrong and his team was abused and given little opportunity to rest after a long pre-launch crunch, and that Zynga staffers only 'slightly' lied about future value of stock to encourage people to overwork themselves? Maybe he only lost 5 pounds due to stress and malnutrition instead of 15 pounds? That's okay, right?

Someone whose employer is acquired doesn't exactly have any easy choices here either. He probably wasn't planning on working for Zynga, and suddenly being told that you're now a Zynga employee doesn't give you much time to find a job - and job hunting in games isn't easy in general. It's only natural to at least try and make the new job work.
Nice to hear Schap's style hasn't changed much. I don't want to sound too much like a whiner, because I'm writing this from my boats on the tropical island where I live now, but I was the first programmer to quit from his first company when he gave me the royal butt-chewing treatment for daring to take two hours off to visit friends on Independence Day 1996. He paid me $24K per year, with zero stock options or advancement opportunities, to work from 11am-2am every day of the week, to write a certain Super Nintendo game. There's worse I could say, but again, the point isn't to whine. Nobody has to put up with that.
I may or may not be a data security professional, but I hardly see how that would make anything I've said more or less credible. Without knowing how Blizzard have set up their infrastructure, I can't really give any examples because each environment is different and requires different forms of security and protocols in place.

While Blizzard were apparently using SRP and while I can't say for sure I am guessing Blizzard are using the SRP authentication algorithm out-of-the-box which is bad for a number of reasons, but the main one being SRP by default is an over-glorified way of SHA1 encrypted and salting a password and by the sounds of it the hackers were able to access those salts and could theoretically brute force the passwords which by todays hardware capabilities is not very hard at all, this is LinkedIn all over again.

Take a look at the SRP design specification: http://srp.stanford.edu/design.html - if Blizzard didn't modify the algorithm, I think we've yet to see the full effects of this breach. LinkedIn learned the hard way and now one of the worlds largest multiplayer gaming companies is about to find out what a simple mistake like this can do. I hope for their sakes they customised SRP and if they didn't, I think we have the right to know.

As a Battle.net account holder, I have the right to voice my concerns about this. I paid money for the privilege of playing Blizzard's games - fortunately my Battle.net password is separate to that of any other account I have, but I feel sorry for the millions who re-use their password for their email accounts, Internet banking and other various accounts that could have all kinds of effects.
No, but YC does.
Sergey made their "secret sauce." If he had been more aware of who the laws were made for, and how they've had them written, he'd have never made such a stupid mistake in taking the actual code. It's not like he couldn't have completely recreated that sauce, from scratch with improvements, within a month or two.

Sergey was the secret sauce. Erlang + OCaml might be a match made in heaven. It's just too bad that he works in a profession where the exact way you've gone about something is owned by your employer. If some fund manager brought his trading strategies to another firm, even if he came up with them at the previous firm, he wouldn't be spending a year in prison.

Of course, this is just what I think - I'm not allowed to see the code in question, so all I can do is guess.
This type of stuff happened leading up to the bubble. Somehow the knowledge didn't successfully transfer from the people burned then to those getting burned now. Fuckedcompany.com sure tried.
As someone who started law school in 2005, this hits close to home -- and is unfortunately true. Unless you were an engineer beforehand and went into IP law, probably the only field in the profession that's still hiring now. But then you'd end up writing patents, which sucks your soul and why I still work in tech at a startup now.

This brings me to my new motto I tell those considering the profession: "law school is never the answer."
I know that marketing messages can take days to weeks to send out because of the incredible number of customers Blizzard has (and avoiding being flagged as spam an other considerations). It may be that an e-mail has started going out, but in the meantime the website and game launcher have been updated with messaging and Kotaku/WoW Insider/etc. is a pretty good way to get info to Blizzard's core player base.
I also use MySQL as backlog, it's practically write-only as I keep the whole state in javascript objects. Only time when data is read from MySQL is at program startup. However, having SQL database enables me to run various complex SQL queries for reporting.

However, I do use Redis for one thing: user sessions. I turned persistence off as Redis seems to be rock-stable, and I really don't need sessions to persist. I was using a modified version of Node's MemoryStore, to which I added clean garbage collection, but with often restarts I mentioned earlier it has become pain for users to have to login again when in the middle of the game. Having a separate, dedicated Redis instance to handle the sessions made restarts completely seamless, as the cookie sent by user's browser remains valid between node restarts.

I was not willing to learn new db technology, but there wasn't really much to learn with Redis. You can set it up in minutes and it just works(tm). I highly recommend you try it.
OP, you are my inspiration from now on. I'm in a very similar situation. And you've just given me some hope. And thanks for that. I'll strive to teach myself more stuff.
I'm glad this has been said -- this is very true.

I have two comments:

>> "College was my biggest mistake?" ...it sure as hell isn't mine.

How do you know it's not yours? Or rather, how can you be so sure? Firstly, opportunity cost is an impossible thing to calculate with certainty, especially when dealing with something so incredibly costly both in terms of time and money.

If you find yourself reasonably discerning, and learning efficiently what you are out to learn, and enjoying it and life, then great, you're likely in a good place.

"Double majoring", having an OK GPA, working two jobs and being middle class -- these all say absolutely nothing about whether you're making a mistake or not.

>> I get to be surrounded by people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am (often, they're more so.)

Now that means a lot, and congrats for finding a place that has such an unusual but hugely beneficial atmosphere!
This is very cool and has a lot of potential, however a few comments.
I have done a lot of hand routing and also have a 3-Axis CNC Router.
Both hand routing and CNC each have their own Setup Costs.
(1) I can see this device being very useful for artists and designers that are doing a lot of one-off shapes and designs (perhaps for Set Design, pattern makers, templates, etc). The setup costs to prepare CNC files for these types of Jobs account for the majority of the costs.
(2) However I would guess that the majority of field (vs. shop) routing is done to "shape" the edge of wood (i.e. with a ogee or roundover, etc). Short of having an on site upside down router table, this is typically done (a) using a plunge bit with a top mounted guide for the Router guard to follow or (b) using a router bit with a small Guide Wheel that follows a top or bottom mounted template/guide edge. The router bits with Guide Wheels can not easily be used for plunge routing and are a pain to use in multi-pass scenarios. I don't know if they can get the precision, however I would think that if this team could offset their sensors to follow the middle of a piece of trim allowing someone to shape the edge of a piece of wood "FreeHand" (after applying some guide tape) and get away from Guide wheels, Clamps, Guides, etc. That would be a MAJOR use case.
(3) After watching the Video, I would urge users to wear dusk masks when routing.
How to Convert FLV to MP4 on Mac
If you often download videos from the websites but don’t know how to watching them on your portable players, don’t worry. A good FLV to MP4 will solve your problem with simple click.
Why would I be a user of the app. I get being a company, but not the user.
It doesn't take half a million dollars to come up with one single actual demoable application that does something twitter won't or can't do. The point of this thing is supposed to be better apps. Fine, show me one, and I'll pay $50 to see more.
Interesting. What's the system's uptime? Close to 12h or rather not? If the latter, this still means 1-2 restarts per day.

Regarding crashes, do you know of any special things to look out for? I do crash dumps and log uncaught exceptions, but sometimes node simply dies without any trace in the log files.
Tủ mạng
tumangvn.com chuyên cung cấp dịch vụ tu mang, máng cáp, thang cáp,tủ mạng cao cấp tại Hà Nội.
Most of their Web site seems to consist of jargon and puffery--"across the enterprise," "enables" and "ecosystems."
Evernote already is for my life. This is going nowhere.
Which Kind Of wholesale Washington Nationals Hats I Definitely Want
I would also argue that while learning stuff on your own is doable for most people, it is even more important to know what you need to learn and to stick with learning it, even if it doesn't seem immediately useful.

This is one thing I think CS programs provide that is really, really hard for people to do on their own. As programs like Udacity and Coursera get bigger and more mature, I think this is one area where they can really add a lot of value: giving people a roadmap and an external way to gauge their progress.
Thanks jonah! Definitely will look into it! We have sponsored member guest tournaments for golf where each team required a slightly different appearance but wanted an overall theme. We have also custom designed whole collection of shirts for retailers so they could carry a product that one could not get on main st.
I have spent the last few years doing automated continuous delivery, and the whole idea of crazy hours around deployment time is like a half-forgotten nightmare. I am happy to leave heroics to the firefighters.
Von Karman Lecture: Mars Science Laboratory's Bizarre Landing System
I actually meet DeMarse in Florida. I made it a point to try and speak with him about his "brain in a dish". He was clearly aggravated with me. He told me about all the other amazing things his lab was doing, and how "dumb" his "brain in a dish" actually was. It was obvious to me that he felt the attention his "brain in a dish" had received was unwarranted.
I think this is largely a result of the average CS student never working on a non-academic project. The projects that CS students tend to work as coursework don't require too much investment in learning to become a good programmer--the code they write is written, turned in, and never looked at again, and working in teams typically isn't common. They never have to learn to be good programmers. The exceptional one's seek out extracurricular work and their programming improves with practice.
Graduating from a top 5 cs program will at least ensure that you have learned a good deal of information from a wide variety of topics in computer science.

As will books: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/books/list.html

It's been my experience that the most capable members of a team have all shared a passion for learning combined with open mind. The fact that the top schools tend to select for those traits have led people to conflate credentials with excellence.
too much techcrunch on YC
I don't know that anyone says it is the "only" way. The real claim is that college offers a significant advantage which it would be foolish to turn down.

Hard to say how most High School students would be able to accurately gauge that college would be useless for them ahead of time, except if they already couldn't handle academics.
Note that e.g. BCrypt has a maximum passphrase length of 56 characters.

http://bcrypt.sourceforge.net/
Carbon Wheelset Clincher
I you write more about these experiences, I would be eager to read them.
I'm so tired of these articles from people that didn't even make it in college who are so proud to proclaim what a waste college is. Or that having skills means getting a job.

I knew rails and linux and a half a dozen other things and had built a product for a client before graduating highschool. I also lived in the middle of no-where in the Midwest.
It is called Long Term Potentiation and is believed to be one of the ways information is stored in the brain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
There's no way to "save" the shirt I just created currently - right? Trying to "Add to my collection" brings up a form that is non-functional. I entered my email on the home page and hoped I might have a login waiting for me, but alas, just a note saying I may get one in the future! I took a screenshot for now, should be good enough.

Are you guys currently hiring a developer to do the HTML5 version of the site? :)
I too use a random and unique Secret Answer each time I am prompted for one. The Rackspace people, who require the account's SQ/SA before they push you through to the real support people, think I'm weird.
I am currently receiving an education in computer science with the intent to pursue a Ph.D. following graduation. I grow somewhat tired of all this anti-college talk - at the bike shop a while back, the worker asked what I was majoring in, I told him CS, and he asked if getting a college degree was really worth it, as if he thought it wasn't. Yes, it's worth it if what you plan to do is go to grad school or enter academia. It's worth it because it's the only feasible way to do this. It's worth it because my current presence on a university campus gives me opportunities for research and for invaluable interactions with faculty and fellow students.

I understand that the backlash is mostly driven by the observation that increasingly, people are pursuing expensive college degrees only to end up working at Starbucks, simply because they have been made to believe that it is in some way "the thing to do". But college is still worth it and a good idea for a great many types of people, not the least of which are programmers (as distinct from computer scientists). An education in CS is almost certainly one of the best things someone who hopes to be a programmer can obtain.
what about projecting the sticker patterns onto the wood rather than real stickers?
Yes I came in to say something similar. I would of absolutely loved to attend MIT or Stanford but went a shoddy 3rd tier state school. All this talk about research opportunities and connections with renown professors does not apply to students in universities not in the top ~50. Modern universities are extended high schools with more parties and social events than actual studying.

I think if you can get into a Carnegie Melon or Harvard then you should definitely attend, but there are over 2500 universities in the US. I, like many others, did not have any direction in high school and ended up attending a local state school where most of the professors were grad students more preoccupied with their own course load than with their students being able to understand the material.
What? If you are less unique, then you are also less identifiable.
Familiar with it, no thanks. Apache + mod_wsgi is still better for a variety of use-cases.
Farmers' children(in an Indian state) forced to give up school
The term hackers was used in the 50s, well before. The 1963 quote.
Best Cool Gadgets For the Nike Air Max LTD Shoes
A very large number of them were code refactors to take better advantage of gzip; Richard Gibson (gibson042) has become a master of that [1]. It turns out that a good style guide can actually help improve gzip compression as well [2]. Others were things like an optimization for $("body") which we pulled out [3]. Its main job seems to have been to look good on a circa-2008 benchmark that didn't cache its selectors. The Sizzle optimizations that Timmy Willison (timmywil) did pretty much made the jQuery-side optimizations unnecessary anyway.

[1] https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/788
[2] https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/840
[3] https://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/9ebc27db54194c88fa7a...
That's somewhat of a straw man. I have no doubt it improves writing skills at least a little bit on average. I contend that it doesn't make a difference in any absolute sense.

I received AP credit and thus passed out of Freshman Composition so my experience is slightly different. In my AP class, everyone's writing skills improved but no one who was a bad writer became a good writer.

If you ask any author the most effective way to become a better writer they'll tell you to read. Most people don't like to read and thus (I believe there is a causal link here) most people are bad writers. It takes much more than two semesters of Freshman Comp. to radically improve ones writing skills. Quality writing is something that you internalize over many years.
So when they shut the service down in 18 months and kill all access to our data, will they be quick to point out that "indefinitely" = for as long as they are profitable? Now I'm not saying this is what's going to happen, but you would have to be foolish not to consider this the most likely outcome.
But can you export your data?
> An iPhone and web app called Everyday.me

Right, so I get into the "private beta" and go to the link in the email. It gives me a popup saying, "Please use an iPhone to install this app."

Meanwhile, on their homepage:
> Access from anywhere - on mobile, email, or the web

If having an iPhone is a requirement of using your website (which I assume functions perfectly well on its own), you're doing it wrong. If the website is merely a way to view (but not edit) your content, then you're REALLY doing it wrong.

Also, why are people still developing exclusively for iPhone? Last quarter there were four times as many Android phones sold as iPhones.
Because then 3 of the 12 hours in that crazy day end up being spent on HN.
If a person writes a book, and a publisher prints and sells a ton of copies of it without giving any of the money to the writer, that doesn't seem to be moral. Even if it is moral, it doesn't incentivize people to try making a living at writing, since they will rarely be able to compete with big publishers. So: if we let authors claim copyright, and force publishers to come to terms with the authors for an acceptable royalty, then in general there will be more authors. If we balance copyrights correctly, our society = will take some damage from skewing "property" to include "intellectual property", but it should be smaller than the total good of having more authors.
The article specified the first use of the term as applied to a criminal act, not just in general.
Thanks for the tip. I just fixed it.
That because basic science research is a painstaking slow process. It is very rare to see a field of research just explode at an exponential pace like software development has.
And the ones who have enough money to A) have a computer to mess around with and potentially break at home B) not have people look too hard at what they do 95% of the time and C) hire a lawyer when they got caught.
Some of the photos for 'Stranger Personals' that appear on the right of the article aren't really safe for work.
>> Also, why are people still developing exclusively for iPhone? Last quarter there were four times as many Android phones sold as iPhones.

I can only speak for myself, but developing for Android is a nightmare compared to developing software for iOS. Different behaviour amongst different Android devices makes it really hard to provide a consistent user experience.
Probably explains why the credit card I used there was canceled. Last time was a few months ago for Steam.

Hackers play games. Hackers hack game companies.
Yep: it doesn't happen, FAQ:
http://trafficwaves.org/tfaq.html#five

- if truckers can maintain a bubble, how can it be impossible?

- yes, aggressively weaving drivers sometimes jump in ...then they jump out again.

- at merge zones, the entire point is to let people into your lane.

- In theory, everyone else wants your precious bubble. In practice, not.

...and in a burning building, we all know the best way to escape, eh? EVERYONE AGGRESSIVELY PUSH FORWARD, DON'T LET ANYONE ELSE GET PAST, COOPERATION AND TEAMWORK ARE FOR LOSERS! Yep, that certainly won't trigger a huge clogged mess where everyone dies.
This is just the developer preview. I think the companies will have to provide reasons to do the activities, either by being useful or providing other motivation (monetary, leaderboards, points, etc, whatever their system does.)

We'll build more tools for user motivation in the future. For now I just wanted to make sure that the actual things that people can build are interesting enough.
Order of magnitude compensation difference (non exec salaries at google, acquihire signing bonuses aside, top out at what, 150-200k?), the fact that they sell services instead of maybe-kind-of-only being a middleman, blah blah blah.
Not at all. It's a recognition that if racists run around using code words to thinly veil their hatred, it behooves the rest of us to make sure we don't get confused with the racists.
They do, but 2 of the top 3 mention TextMate in the title!!
Intriguing. I only purchase dress shirts on Indochino now. By the time I buy a premade shirt then have it tailored, Indochino is cheaper. My main complaint is that I have never had a shirt arrive on time.

Vastrm is intriguing, but prices do not seem to compelling. They seem right inline with custom dress shirts. Plus, with Polos I feel like there is more room for error, e.g. with stretch fabrics that hide imperfect sizes, unbuttoned collars that hide imperfect collar sizes, fairly limp collars that do not show details
I agree with the rule about never working crunch hours - it's helped me a lot to stick to it - but I know a lot of people who simply don't have that option: If they don't work those crunch hours, they get fired. I've only had the benefit of being able to do it due to job security, and not everyone has that. I have to imagine that would apply to most Zynga employees based on what I know about how that company runs.
this is more of a case of too much YC on techcrunch.
Doing it because they have a significant group of customers who can't access it: The right reason

Doing it because people on HN bitch and moan that the technology: The wrong reason

I'm all for dumping flash for the right reasons (and, personally, I wouldn't have built it using flash). Dumping it for the wrong reasons, though, is an unnecessary distraction that doesn't build business value.