skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're launching a new distribution platform for independent artists
Is Valve Getting Into the Hardware Business?
Cultures can have a reputation. They can also fight back when someone uses their name for something they disagree with.
Definitely some puritan influence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritanism)
Off-topic, a little detail caught my attention: that guy with a crowbar has a lambda symbol on his chest. Coincidence or a hidden reference to functional programming?
The parent didn't say a book he said the same book.
Hey I was featured in this! :D

I was asked to help write it, but few of my collected performance notes made it into the article because I was too slow. On the plus side, I'll have a canvas performance chapter out in two books in the near future.

Here are a couple off the top of my head really quick:

* pre-rendering is most applicable to text, especially text that never moves (Such as buttons). In fact, any text or complex paths+text to make things like buttons should be turned into pngs. Drawing text and changing fonts is extremely slow.

* re-use your gradients as much as possible, and try to avoid creating them in loops. If you have one gradient that fills several figures you should be making it only once. The function createLinearGradient(x0, y0, x1, y1) goes from one point to another, but you can make your gradient at the origin createLinearGradient(0, 0, toX, toY) and then translate it into the correct location for each figure made in the for loop.

* cache cache cache canvas properties. Never ever set any of them more than you have to, `font` especially. The setter for `font` and the fill styles can change the value so setting it to the same value twice might not be a no-op. It's up to you to make it so. And setting the font especially is really, really slow.

* Avoid save and restore, use them rarely if ever. The only time you should ever really need them is because there is no resetClip currently implemented. For transforms you can can track of them yourself, here's a simple file I made to do that:

https://github.com/simonsarris/Canvas-tutorials/blob/master/...

* fillRect(x,y,1,1) will always be faster than 1x1 putImageData(x,y), but 400 fillRect's will be slower than a 20x20 putImageData(x,y). How often the fillStyle changes will change that hand-wavy metric of mine. If you're placing a lot of pixels in a single frame you should definitely test both to see which is faster in your scenario.
In hind sight was it a good decision? Would you do it again? How are things going one year in?
Purchased. I've really appreciated all the iOS tips and design resources on your blog!
Atari launches game development program on 40th anniversary
A victory for Apple but inventors still lose
At 7 usually.
Point taken. I agree that there are a whole bunch of marketers who couldn't have come up with this idea because they don't have a basic knowledge of how these things work. Maybe I'm just fortunate enough to know a couple of them who actually do...
>Ie a poor programmer won't take 10x as long to code a given feature, he will just a ceiling of ability and not be able to do it at all.

10x longer is not a poor programmer, that's an incompetent programmer. If someone needs ten days to code something that can be done in one day something is very seriously wrong.
Pretty sure that a smart burglar could figure out approximate addresses of people who own iPhones by looking at publicly available Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or Flickr locations. Not to mention people telling the world "I'm camping this weekend" which a burglar hears as "I'll be gone all weekend, steal my things!"
I honestly have no idea what you're ranting about at this point. It's hard to have a discussion when your bias distorts everything I say.

>Work environment is expense. Profit is revenue - expense. Which statement do you disagree with?

I have no problem with the definition of "profit" you used, I already made this clear. All that matters is that we're on the same page.

>No one is suggesting that unions don't benefit their members. Your claim was that unions were combatting some evils

I clearly defined what "evil" I spoke of that unions are a balancing force against--"overbearing" management. Things like dangerous work environments, extreme work hours, lack of health insurance, etc. It is clear that unions are a balancing force to this "evil". If you disagree with this, then provide an argument. This is the only point I've made. I never claimed that this wasn't in the self-interest of its members. Your points are completely tangential to anything I've said.
I zoomed in on the cable lacing, and my sock drawer is a disaster.
Your primary care doctor does not get paid for tests and procedures. Labs and specialists do.
I'm inclined to believe it's less about the time required to code specific feature... and more about the time required to

1. Figure out what features should be implemented (ie, will implementing this feature shoot us in the foot later)

2. Figure out the correct implementation

3. Be able to handle future feature requests

Sure, 1 & 2 will vary by skill/experience. However, the skill/experience with which 1 & 2 are handled can severely impact 3, causing it to easily take 10x longer if it can be done at all. As you move onto 4 and down the line, this becomes more and more pronounced.
Code Academy is now Starter League
Which raises the question often brought up in various forms:

Is a person responsible if someone has been using his or her router for file-sharing because they were able to crack its WEP-encryption, while the accused in question hardly knows what a router is?
Font-wise? Layout wise? Although it's a Wordpress frankenstein-job, but I'm always curious about improving the experience!
Internet Marketer would perfect desctiption for someone who's has required knowledge and skills. If it only wasn't already killed by many "internet marketers".
"One of these isn't like the others..."

Things like the Cone, the rising-cost-of-defects or the 10x claim have been kicking around for decades.

The evidence for or against TDD is, admittedly, inconclusive, but it's more recent and of a better academic caliber. There have been a lot of studies. Most of these studies aren't any good - but at least someone is trying.

There's a deeper question, which is "granted that all the empirical evidence we have so far for claims in software engineering isn't all that good, how can we get good empirical evidence?"

I suspect that the answer is going to involve changing the very questions we ask. "Does TDD work" is too fuzzy and ill-defined, and there's no way you can test that in a blinded random experiment. People's biases about TDD (subjects' or experimenters') are going to contaminate the evidence.

Instead, we need to ask questions that aren't susceptible to this kind of bias and contamination. For instance, we might want to unobtrusively study actual programmers working on actual projects, and record what causes them to write defects.
Your examples do not contradict the thesis.
Bah: https://github.com/ralsina/python-cheatsheet
>The US gov't also does extrajudicial killings, but is probably much more democratic than the above two groups

Why would you assume that? Did you miss that Obama has assassinated US citizens?
neither. its gordon freeman(1) from half life(2)

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Freeman
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(series)
You could probably state something similar about marijuana. The real point being that too many people are up-tight and need to find a way to relax/unwind that releases a bunch of endorphins. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to do this that don't have to involve sex.
The article is over a year old, so all browsers there are older.
I love the caption under that image:

"Hardware, in the form of a crowbar, plays a part in Valve's Half-Life games"
Looks great and I really enjoyed the interactivity. One thing that would be interesting would be a "map at one of the lower corners" that showed the whole field. Just like the world map on a video game where you can see where you are. Also, a bigger eraser would be helpful. :)
It's Gordon Freeman, the main protagonist from the Half Life series.
The character is Gordon Freeman, the protagonist for the game series Half Life which is the game Valve is best known for.

The Lambda here represents the radioactive decay constant and is used as part of the measure for the "half life" of any radioactive material.

The Gordon character is a scientist, much of the game is set in a science lab and Valve are known for making games with many scientific references (see also: Portal).
Depending on where you live, being the owner (or responsible, or whatever you may call it) of an IP used to pirate things can be enough to be condemned.
I think the length is just fine. Longer than other cheat sheets, sure, but still far easier to scan than the official documentation.
Straight from Apple's documentation: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit...
The Man Behind Facebook’s I.P.O. Debacle
Cambodia set to expel Pirate Bay founder to Sweden
G by GUESS Madelin Love Lace Top
Couldn't it be that history books give a sanitized view of society, and gloss over relatively minor issues such as disobedient youths? The books might say, "young people were expected to be x, y, and z", and tactfully omit, "but they were frequently a, b, and c despite our best efforts". As an alternative viewpoint, look at works of fiction from the time, which are willing to be more gritty. For example, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were disobedient in spite of societal pressure. (disclaimer: I have not read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, But I did see a retelling of it on "The Simpsons" ten years ago)

Also, the following is commonly attributed to Socrates: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise". If this is to be believed, rude kids with attitude have been a constant for at least the last 2400 years.
In Valve's New Employee Handbook released a few months ago there was a quip about how Valve struggled to hire disciplines well outside of its typical expertise. They specifically mentioned industrial designers as one of those disciplines. I guess people didn't pick up on it at the time.

Link: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

*Economist was the other job they mentioned, which they filled with the famous Yanis Varoufakis.
Submitting this to provide some extra context for the discussion in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4474166

(Yes, that's my book.)
Right but your point amounts to an argument from authority, and animal models show specific harm from these chemicals. We share very similar endocrine systems. I don't think you can blanket say that there is 'no evidence"--it is far too early.
Or, Another range of "gaming" accessories.
Hackers leak '1 MILLION records' on Apple fanbois from FEDS
I stopped reading when I realized that you call yourself "Dirk the Man" professionally.
Back to Rules
The github account of the White House
Well, the PC biz has not been great to gaming for a long time, if ever. Most PC's don't come with quality GFX cards, so PC games have to be least common denominator, which is basically to port from the XBox360/PS3.

From what I can tell the average selling price of PC's has dropped in the last 10 years from $1,000 to $500 or less. At a $400-500 laptop, you just don't get good GFX, so PC gaming kind of sucks.

Steam helped a ton on the software side, but if the average gamer is going to have to swap out a graphics card to be able to play Skyrim well on their PC, they'll probably just buy an Xbox instead.

The PC market needs some kind of "standard" box configurations with sane pricing and non-crappy software installs. Like, a $500, $750, and $1,000 machines loaded with stock Windows 8, no crapware, good gfx, SSD's, etc.

If Valve did the same thing with their own version of Ubuntu running Steam, they could lower machine prices and also really reshape the PC gaming landscape over the next 10 years, esp. for indie developers who are already porting to Linux.

Valve could even do something awesome with Steam where if you buy a "Steam box" it comes with your Steam account and games preloaded and ready to go when you start it up, sort of like what Amazon does when you buy a Kindle.

If Valve goes down that road and tries to truly innovate, there is some real potential.
Same.. not working on Chromium 18
* Reading Packet suggests articles from your Pocket Reading List based on how much time you've got.

Thanks for this as it introduced me to Pocket Reading List.

Have you thought about doing this for RSS as well? Some days I have 200+ new articles and have 10 minutes free. Maybe you can suggest the shorter ones to me then?
Fantastic read and one that will ruffle some feathers..kudos.

I find it interesting that in Andrew Chen's famous growth hacker post he doesn't mention the other craigslist "hack"(insert sarcasm) that was even more important to airbnb's growth.
BBC gets it's TV series published on the torrent networks. That would be one incentive.
I thought the same. Even if Franklin was not a puritanic protestant, I guess a bit of strict ethics rubbed off.

Also these "Top 10 of best virtues ever!!1" were always constructed by male philosophers and lack stuff like "Sociability, "Care", "Empathy" or "Compassion".
$50 to iTunes — August 2012
Looks great! What do the videos cover?
Consoles have been walled gardens since the 80s video game crash. It would be notable if Valve broke from this model.
News: it can access database by edbc (Emacs Database Connectivity) mode. Presently, it only support Sqlite.
Looks great. I'll be using their mailing list service for the same reasons I use HN:
1. to stay in touch with what's buzzing
2. and, to get that kick of inspiration when you see people building great stuff
I live in Sweden, and lack experience from VPN-services which are not close to home, but have a look at: http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anon...
Small datapoint: my iPhone and iPod aren't in this dump. The iPhone hasn't been used in about a year. And the iPod is infrequently used for playing games.
You come from a limited perspective...you know both coding and marketing and some of the fundamentals (particularly of the former) are so grounded that you can't possibly imagine a layman NOT knowing them. But trust me, many of them don't :)
Really enjoyed this. I'm coming up on the one year mark for my design business and I've been stressed out about time, money, and everything in between. I've always told myself that nothing truly horrible can happen, but I relapse from time to time.

This, however, is an excellent way to ground yourself. Even though I've (fortunately) never had to be in the environment described here, this anecdote makes you appreciate what you have and where you are.
I was just thinking that. Actual usage of growth hacker seems mostly "tongue in cheek" or "for lack of a better term".
It isn't fair to discredit what Valve is building on the principle that it isn't free and open. Steam is a walled garden and is adored, for the most part anyway, by its users.
Ask HN: How does Thunderbird's new chat support stack up?
I like the feel of finch (command-line pidgin) personally. Anyone have a lot of love for Thunderbird's new chat?
It's not hypocrisy if you strive to meet your goal and fail. It's only hypocrisy if you demand it of others but don't bother yourself.
Facebook Handled their IPO Exactly Right
Sure, you have a point here. How does one know whether the talk will be small or trifling beforehand?
Yes. And it's not just about _not_ having ideas. Marketers have a billion ideas. Without any technical chops, though, they will drive your devs and designers into the ground with never-ending requests for integrations, trials, landing pages, bug fixes, and more.

A self-sufficient marketer is worth multiples not just in his/her own productivity, but in the gains you get from not driving the rest of your company bonkers.
How to watch football on the Internet
This shouldn't be a surprise. It is trivial to capture that kind of data from large bittorrent clouds like piratebay, and that data may have some useful applications. For example, getting statistics on what movies, tv shows, and music people are interested in (often before commercial release) with really precise geographic information.
Are you talking about AntiSec, or the FBI?
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~tpc/Papers/P2PSecComm2012.pdf

Link to 18-page scientific article by University of Birmingham. This is the actual meat behind the BBC article.

Not an alarmist paper, just boring work with Bittorrent download progress bitmap monitoring.

Some juicy bits on their usage of Tor, from the paper:

"we created our own indirect monitoring client that gathers newly-published torrent files from the Top 100 in each category on The Pirate Bay, and continually contacts each
of the trackers and stores (IP address, port number, infohash, time) tuples from the peer lists that are returned; it then attempts to establish a TCP connection
with each host and sends a handshake message to ensure that the host is in fact a BitTorrent peer. [..]
We collected data from July 21–28, 2009, routing our traffic through the Tor anonymity network."
As a developer I like the idea. As a citizen I wonder why a nation should prioritize programming before any other skill set? Why not rhetoric, drawing or dancing? What are the underlying assumptions and goals of teaching programming at such a young age? Is any of this evidence based?
One thing I really emphasized in my book on pricing freelancing services (ships today, btw: http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com) is to build a sales-driven website. Look at your favorite SaaS product's marketing site: captivating headline, bulleted copy of benefits, a clear call to action.

Way too many freelancers/consultancies botch this up and don't build their websites with conversion rates in mind, and worst of all, don't ask for visitors to contact them (the call to action).

Also, use wording that resonates with businesspeople (who hire you) instead of just technology. i.e. Are you a Wordpress developer, or do you help brick and mortar businesses get more sales (and happen to use Wordpress to get there?)

Instead of just listing out some screenshots of sites you've worked on, talk about how you helped your past clients. Continually emphasize your abilities to deliver business value.
I'm here to if anyone has any questions about the partnership, the reasons behind the investment, the vision, or anything else.
Yeah, I know. It's just that my name is 'Dirk de Man', which means exactly that, in Dutch. And since 'dirkdeman' was already taken...
The time and cost to fix bugs can have a huge variance which is sometimes dependent on the nature and field of the software being written. There are bugs that take seconds to fix and others that take months.

I have personally experienced hunting down a bug for six months nearly full time (10 to 12 hours per day) until it was finally found. This was a real-time hardware system and the code was that of an FPGA. The culprit was a coefficient in one of many polyphase finite impulse response filters. The calculations used to generate this coefficient were done in a huge Excel spreadsheet. At one point, in the hundreds of equations in the spreadsheet, the author had used the ROUND() function when the ROUNDUP() function should have been used. This was enough cause a buffer issue in the FIFO feeding the polyphase filter. These are tricky problems to track down when you are literally looking for events that take somewhere in the order of single-digit nanoseconds to occur.

On the other hand, there are those bugs where you know exactly what is going on and where in the code it is happening the instant you see the behavior. We've all experienced that during the course of software development.

Fixing bugs for a dating website has vastly different requirements than, say, fixing bugs in a flight control system.

One argument is for more up-front planning in order to avoid some bugs. At one point this can quickly become counterproductive. Sometimes it's better to just start writing code and fix issues as they come up.

Now, if we are talking about fixing bugs after the fact, that's a different matter. One example here might be if you inherit the code to a complex website or an engine control system and, without any familiarity with the code, are required to fix bugs. This can easily take cubic time as it requires to learn the code-base (and sometimes the subject matter) while also trying to hunt down bugs.

This is why I tend to take such tables or studies with great skepticism. I haven't really paid much attention to these studies, but I remember looking at one or two of them and thinking that they tended to focus on narrow cases such as fixing bugs in-house, with a stable programmer team and great familiarity with the code base.
A serious journalist would have given us a link to the source. Here it's not possible to verify the claim without serious digging.
Aren't there bittorrent clients which autodetect and autoblock clients which connect, but neither upload nor download? Doh!
Link to a somewhat more informative, less beeby, story:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/09/honeytr...
And the lead researcher http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~tpc/home.html
Published paper link snaked below! :)

(A previous paper: Analysis of BitTorrent Peers' Behavior and Monitoring Trends http://www.kaspersky.com/images/camilo_andr%D1%83s_gonzalez_... which was based on the Snark Project, updated)
I'm sure that you can die if you push yourself too hard and don't take care of your body. It's probably not as risky as flying into a war zone, but it's a risk nonetheless.
Copyright Enforcement Bots Seek And Destroy Hugo Awards
I wonder if it supports SNI for virtual SSL hosts?
Great work getting something up and out!

Some thoughts -
1. Reminds me of http://www.foodspotting.com/ but more personal. Instead of being told what other people liked, i'm able to remember what I liked.
2. Is it possible to use foodspotting as the back-end?
3. Am I able to comment on what I ate? For instance - dish a was delicious but small so order 2 next time?
4. nitpicky - the white font over the food picture is hard to read. Especially near the end when it's a white font on a white background.

Great work - looking forward to seeing how this develops!
Facebook, Zynga Continuing to slide (17.94, 2.67)
Even before the author mentioned this was marketing, I was telling myself "this is marketing".

Perhaps the term "growth hacker" has arisen because "marketing" has gotten a bad rep. In the world of 1990s software development, marketing drove features based on market research, making developers resent the idiosyncratic nature of the user community, and their proxy: the marketing guy (almost as much as the sales guy who would promise something that wasn't even under development).

In the post 2000s world, every developer dreams of internet gold and striking it rich with their idea (and a marketing guy would corrupt that), so a "growth hacker" sounds less "evil" and more like someone a developer could work with, even though they will likely alter the concept of the product to make it "marketable" (ie, "pivot" the project)
Well, they hired a Hardware Engineer (or something of the sort), and if you bother to read the article, it seems more to me like they may start designing peripherals for the PC.
Which still is something to be excited about! Valve could really make some great ways to interact with their upcoming "Steam Full Screen Mode" or whatever it's called. Plus, We PC gamers are in dire need of our own controller. I'm tired of using my 60 controller.