skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: how do you estimate a project development time and cost?
Hi,

One of the most difficult stuff of being a developer, it's than I'm never sure about my estimations about a software project development time/effort required and cost.

How do yo do this? I can find a suitable answer specially when dealing with people with no computer science backgrounds
There's nothing wrong with state. State is a fact of life in programming. Even pure functional program has states, which are the parameters passed among functions.

I guess you meant mutable state. You don't have to use mutable state with OOP - just create a class that allows state initialization in the constructors but nothing else, with none of the methods changing the states.
Nikon and Ricoh/Pentax use Sony sensors for their cameras. Sony makes more money when you buy their Alpha A99 camera body, but they still make a bunch of money when you buy a Nikon D600. When business is booming for Nikon, business is booming for Sony.

It seems to me that what was lost in this article is that Sony makes a great deal of its money outside of consumer channels. They also lose a great deal of money there and in their crazy financial/insurance schemes (which were mentioned briefly). I am not really knowledgeable enough to comment further there, but then again it doesn't seem like this author was knowledgeable enough to write the article they were attempting to write.
Found this About page via the "Log in" link at the top: http://www.glitch.com/about/

"Glitch is a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world."
The intent is to make it easier to get a court order to have you stop doing what they don't like.
About a year ago I installed a bidet in my bathroom. It's the one pictured towards the bottom of this article, and I bought it on amazon. I use it and "cloth toilet paper" for my butt-cleaning. It's great.

The water washes me clean. Often 100% and always most of the way. It took a bit to get the hang of it: to get a good wash I find it helps to clench my butt muscles and wiggle on the seat. After 5-10 seconds, I wipe with the cloth: old t-shirts cut into ~4x8" rectangles. The water does a much better job of cleaning than toilet paper.

When I first had the bidet I used toilet paper after the spray to dry off. It was only slightly less miserable than having a waterlogged ass. I needed twice as much paper to dry myself off as I would have used to wipe.

For a while I hung an old microfiber towel next to the toilet and used that, but "oh, that's just my butt-towel…" is an interesting conversation to have. So I cut up some old shirts. They go into a bucket after use and I wash them regularly. The cloth is what makes it work.

I can only imagine what it would be like to have a blowdryer down there.
Obviously skills. Besides that, he should be smart, cool, and a friend. No sense hiring a great programmer who's a douche.
The VMs are designed for Virtual PC, which is of course only available for Windows.

There's a script called ievms that will automatically downloade those VMs and convert them for use with VirtualBox on OS X or Linux:

http://xdissent.github.com/ievms/
Obligatory response: history is littered with people who have said that things are impossible which have since been done. I don't believe that the realm of the possible has just stopped expanding right now. Do you?
Can you give links and resources to support accomplishing the "CS curriculum" you suggested?

Every new programmer needs to start with C. In fact, I am convinced that every new
programmer needs to start with C and be tasked with writing an RTOS on a small
memory-limited 8 bit processor. And then write several applications that run within
that RTOS.

Besides K&R, which resources will help someone accomplish such a task?

Then give them a budget of n clock cycles and m memory bytes and have them create a
solution for a particular problem that barely fits within these constraints.

ditto

I would then expose them to Forth and ask that the re-write the same RTOS and
applications.

what forth resource are worth learning from? why forth?

Then I'd move them up to Lisp.

what lisp resources?

From there move into one of the OO languages. My first OO language was C++, but I
suppose today I might opt to teach someone Java or something like that. Definitely
not Objective-C. Keep it simple.
apparently from the guy who managed the domain:

https://plus.google.com/116028512018932696380/posts/4gDX3Hyg...
I work with him at Google. Google has a single codebase shared by tens of thousands of engineers. People have areas of that that they own, but it is a wrong characterisation to say Rob "works in relative isolation from other programmers".
寂寞花月夜
Really cool! Good luck with this. I suggest a mobile site for it.
Do significantly more US children die from dysentery than Japanese children? Computerized toilets may be on the other side of the point of diminishing returns.
Genetic algorithms are pretty easy. a wikipedia read should suffice.
Interesting. Is there a similar option for VMWare, or is the format too different?
State of california doesn't appear to require medallions, so I don't think that applies in this specific case.
I know that most of them allow Pascal, C and C++. Some of them alllow Java.

I coded on Pascal myself when I was of the winners of Ukranian computer science olympiad.
addlepate wrote 37 minutes ago | link [dead]

OK. I bet you use a WebKit browser.

addlepate: you were hell-banned 100 days ago (unfairly in my mind).
Ah, part04.rar. So I can pretend I'm downloading warez from Usenet and decoding and piecing it together by hand.
I remember seeing an interview with the Unity CEO and he said that they had someone who was looking into (evaluating) HTML5 as a Unity target platform. I guess that would include WebGL, but also things like the Web Audio API and WebSockets.

My impression is that the web browsers aren't quite there yet, in terms of support for all the necessary functionality required by a modern 3D video game. For example, IE doesn't support WebGL.
These images have been available since at least summer 2008:

http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/archive/2008/08/30/internet-...
Jeff Weiner: In Sports or Business, Always Prepare for the Next Play
yes dikshun, university is the same, but I studied journalism there, not math&physics :)
Yeah, I use Zbench which defaults to black (or gray maybe). There may be a better way, but here's how I changed it: http://www.jcopro.net/2012/09/06/change-the-link-color-on-th.... There is probably a better way, but it worked with my limited knowledge, and should work for any WP theme.
Fracking geopolitical foundations
> If I was out for the money, why an earth would I have transferred the domain to the CM Team for free?

Then why did he set up the domain in the first place? Isn't it a kind of donation? And supposedly he was soliciting donations himself..? Isn't that the least you could do?
I'm curious as to why more brands don't just use 'groups' instead?

I'm in a couple of groups that are basically companies and I get all their status updates as well as the ability to turn on or off notifications for them (one I keep on because I really like the company).
There is an alternative if you have the android sdk running on your laptop.

Use adb to forward a port from your machine to your Android device. Run a SOCKS proxy app on your Android.

http://graha.ms/androidproxy/

I use a similar method for transferring media, since mtp doesn't work very well on Linux.

I wonder why did Google decide to implement mtp as the protocol of choice. I know why MSC was not ideal anymore, but it already has working tcp over usb. That can be used to implement so many different things like file sync, tethering, etc.
Seems like they weren't adequate at marketing.. The concept of the game is appealing but I have never heard about it until today, the people who have played it have nothing but praise haven't seen a negative comment yet.
To play devil's advocate, why would it matter? Is there any fix app developers could implement, short of blocking requests from iOS 6 users?
In my todo list there is a line for building one of those for the guys I just started working for. It will sms the number to the phone of the developer requestiong it. I will probably be using an old netbook, though.
> "I purchased the CyanogenMod.com domain name 3 years ago and have been responsible for the renewal fees ever since"

What's not clear is whether he purchased it (through a broker or private sale) or whether he "purchased" it in the sense he just registered it with a registrar. If the latter, he could not have been up for more than $60 ($30 is more likely).

The way he writes it makes it seem like the renewal fees ("... ever since") were a big deal and that he was doing them a huge favor by paying for it.
Yes it's just such a pity that the virtual pc images are so massive.
Creating a Best Selling Business Story
Note that these images can still expire after 30 days (or 90 days with "rearm").
This is outrageous that the taxi companies are just lobbying for laws that protect their business at the expense of other businesses!

Ok, now please pass a law saying internet providers can't limit how much data I can send each month nor prioritize one type of traffic over another. After all, that is hurting internet businesses!
Fedora Infrastructure Message Bus
Some problems, MMORPGs being one of them, are not very amenable to the lean approach.
Company formation, operating agreement (boilerplate a la thefunded.org), "submit your annual reports"/"Q3 taxes need to be filed" reminder service, social media aspects of fundraising (they write the story once, you send it to everywhere it needs to go).
I am really sad to read this. I have been an occasional Glitch player since early betas and I've always been impressed at the civility of the players and the seemingly endless creativity of the game itself.

It's beautiful in the way few things imagine that they could be.
What is going to happen to all the IP?
'a selling point' != 'just because'.

I get your point and I'm all in for being language-agnostic when it comes to the tools I have to use, but that doesn't change the fact that convenience plays a role when you are in a point where you can't affort a long-term decision process. the best technology to quickly launch something is most often simply the one you know.
We are offering refunds for all purchases made since November 1st, 2011 (a little over a year ago) and will immediately begin refunding all payments which can be refunded automatically through our payments processors (which will be nearly all of those made in the last 50 or so days). We will then move on to manual refunds for older payments. This will take some time to wrap up since there is not always a simple way to process the payments — credit cards expire or are cancelled, PayPal accounts are closed, etc. — and we may need to collect additional information from you in order to process your refund.

such an unusual and oddly endearing gesture. i am sure there is some kind of story behind it, but it's kind of beautiful in this industry full of people who first decide they want to make money and then decide what to build.
SICP has wonderful materials to touch on so many important and elegant concepts in CS that it should be taught to any serious CS students. It's not about the language Scheme itself but all the underlying CS ideas. You might be able to learn those concepts here and there from time to time. SICP ties them in one comprehensive course.

My experience with SICP is a case of after the fact. I've learned and wrote LISP codes long before touching SICP. The learning process was reading existing source codes and going through reference materials. It's not until I went through SICP that suddenly all these concepts and ideas became so clear.
My initial reaction to your comment was to snort and roll my eyes, but I am sincerely curious: can you name any similar games that found success by building an MVP and evolving into a sophisticated MMPORG?
Immigration officials in China "really cared" about me presenting a degree from an accredited school when processing my work visa. Despite the fact that I was at a tech start-up (SmarTots) doing work completely unrelated B.A., the degree and school were important to them.
There are utilities to convert a VirtualBox VM to VMware, if you are feeling adventurous :-). From my experience though, it's kinda painful (I forget what the issues were but I remember regretting the decision to convert the VM).
There's too much dissonance between the two brands and their models for sourcing, roasting, and preparing coffee are entirely different. It's hard to see the synergy from such an acquisition. The only thing Starbucks could possibly offer Blue Bottle would be distribution channels for bottled iced coffee (New Orleans or Kyoto style), and I suppose that's nothing to sneeze at.

As an aside, the fact that you're making such a claim speaks volumes to how well Blue Bottle markets itself. They seem much bigger than they actually are, due to high profile locations and a loyal fan base. In actuality, they have less than 12 cafe locations in 2 major cities. Those, combined with all their wholesale accounts probably still doesn't come close to the number of Starbucks in Manhattan alone.
I don't see how this is any different for "OOP" though (or anything in life for that matter)?

Things are always great till they don't work, and usually are absolutely horrible when they don't.

I see your pipe dream on a daily basis as do many other competent functional programmers so I have to disagree with your entire argument which seems to more related to human error than programming paradigms getting in the way.
Creator Of McAfee Antivirus, Is Wanted In Connection With A Murder In Belize
I've been using these for the past few months and they've worked fine. Plenty of things I wish worked better, but for the most part I'm happy that it's free and I don't have to reboot just to debug some CSS.
ievms is not even necessary. This article explains how to do it with VirtualBox, http://samvermette.com/256
You should check out Mathics; It's a free and open source implementation of the 'Mathematica language' written in Python.

Admittedly, there are bugs, and the performance is not as good as Mathematica, but a lot of progress has been made (For example, PyPy compatibility is planed for the upcoming release). Give it some time, and I think (hope) it will grow to fill this niche.

Also, The fact that Mathics is open, allows you to extend it (in Python for example) with minimal effort.

Disclaimer: I contribute to Mathics development in my free time. We are hoping to get more people involved!
HTML5 massive-multiplayer using websocket
Might as well just install VirtualBox, its free afterall. I stopped using VMWare when I had to buy it again for Lion.
Just need to keep making enough sales to continue creating articles so your userbase increases in size. Probably a good idea to promote a newsletter to signup to for updates (possibly offer a weekly and monthly version).
There is so much wrong with the other guy's story [1] that it's hard to even know where to begin.

1. No mention of the 10K extortion attempt.

2. No mention of the "big deal" (fraud) perpetrated by impersonating Steve and or the CM team to negotiate deals that netted the guy (a guesstimated) $8K.

3. The Registrar changing the NSs of a locked domain is either baloney, or a good reason to never use that registrar again. That would make it impossible to do a zero downtime domain xfer.

4. Even on twitter his story was inconsistent or half full of him lashing out at people.

I've been told that the team is not pursuing anything, though PayPal, N2A and... what was the other big one... all have been contacted and told what happened (see #2).

Were there ever "the days" when people would say "I'm sorry" without caveats or excuses and mean it 100%? At best, he apologizes to anyone he "offended". I guess he offended my sense of decency, and offended my sensibilities given how to handle cases where you screwed up. Between his Twitter and this "summary", I would say the shovel is still in his hands. I wonder if he paused for breath or realized how big the hole was.

[1] https://plus.google.com/116028512018932696380/posts/4gDX3Hyg...
The article says,

> A review of research by the U.S. Department of Education in 2009 found that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.” The research should be taken with a grain of salt, since we don’t know how the introduction of world-class teachers, or the effects of scale, will change the outcomes.

Does anyone know exactly which study they're referring to? Preferably a link to the actual paper would be nice; I'd like to see details.
The biggest problem with these is that they all have an expiration date - and Microsoft frequently forgets to update them. And getting through to Microsoft to tell them it is out of date... forget about it.
I really like the concept and I also liked the changes and direction it was going. Sad to see it go. :(

>Why don't you give the game away or make it open source or let player volunteers run it?

So will it be lost forever in the ether? Please, Glitch owners, preserve it in some meaningful way.
Free MS Exam 70-480 Voucher: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3
Found this on slickdeals earlier today. Microsoft is offering a free voucher to take their Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Exam.

Find a local testing site at this URL: https://www.prometric.com/en-us/clients/Microsoft/pages/landing.aspx

Register for an exam and enter the promo code HTMLJMP
ITWire’s Varghese is terrible journalist, person
I don't have anything wildly new to add, but I'm part of a podcast hosting site (http://Castmate.fm) and we've seen this bigtime, it's crazy.

We host some high-traffic podcasts with a huge range of listeners, and I've gone through the logs and regularily see stuff like NUMEROUS listeners making 4000+ http requests in 30 minutes, all the 206 calls everyone here is reporting, it's just nuts, so bizarre.

I feel terrible for all the people getting hit with overages, it's so gross. I did some gorilla math the other day and feel pretty confident that this has boosted our network usage by ~25%, I should have narrowed it down to just the affected iOS 6.0 devices, must be astronomical.
This bit I don't quite get:

Why don't you give the game away or make it open source or let player volunteers run it?

Glitch looks simple, but it is not. [...] It takes a full-time team of competent engineers & technical operations personnel just to keep the game open. Even if there was a competent team that was willing to work on it full time for free, it would take months to train them. Even then, the cost of hosting the servers would be prohibitively expensive.

That explains why making it free or open-sourcing wouldn't save the current game world, but why not open-source it anyway? Then somebody can give it another shot, with a smaller, limited world, and see if it gains any traction the second time around.
I always got Maple Story vibes when I tried it.

edit: that said, I haven't for quite a while, and it was only briefly. But I was mostly lost and wandering, where Maple Story had quests up the wazoo to keep me focused. Was that part of the appeal, or a transient attribute?
Speaking of decline, I think Apple is starting what will be a epic landslide of biblical proportions. Tim Cook doesn't seem to have any vision at all. The iPhone 5 is a joke. It's a cop out. Tim Cook chickened out when he merely elongated the iPhone.

Now Apple has that "blue sky" program in effect for employees, and I'm even more convinced Tim is frantically searching for ideas to show him the way.

As for the late Steve Jobs, I was wondering if he had left some future plans for Tim, but apparently not. He was dying. Apple was the most awe-inspiring company in the world under Steve's leadership. He proved his point. I don't think he was concerned about how well Tim would do or even if Apple survives. The show was over for him, and I think it'll soon be over for Apple too.
I was turned onto the SICP lectures[1] though people talking about them on HN, and I was just floored by them. They still give me goosebumps when I watch them. It's like watching a video of someone completely in their element and at the top of their game, like the lecture equivalent of the 2007 Wimbledon Finals or something.

And of course, the book is awesome too. And it rewards repeat readings.

[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
They have one of these in the Google Venture Startup Lab and I can personally testify that they are every bit as good as this article describes. Thanks GV!
Assuming attendance drops dramatically at some point in the next 10 years and universities are left with a lot of excess "brick & mortar" real estate. How is this real estate likely to be re-used/re-purporsed?

It's a very unique infrastructure built for a use case that was expected to stick around forever. Now if that doesn't happen, then what is next for all that infrastructure?
Fluentd Users
You can open VHD's in VirtualBox without any conversion.
Still better than having to buy a copy of Windows.
Presumably, there's some novel IP that is keeping some of the company alive. From the website:

What will happen to Tiny Speck?

Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, will continue. We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products. But now is not the time to talk about that. Right now our concern is with the players and our comrades who are suddenly looking for new work.
Origami Logic Gets $9.3M To Help Marketers Unfold And Make Sense Of Big Data
Sytes is the PHP of Common Lisp
Google Search for WWW
Then - imagine if you put mud on a place with hair!

Sounds like you just answered the question of why these are popular in Japan but not in America.

Doesn't explain their popularity in Europe, though.
NYTimes Education passes
Any other similar vouchers you know, plz post them too.
Lol, he obviously doesn't have a woman in the house.
In a city as dense as San Francisco, dear government,
with no functioning taxicab service and no functioning
public transit system, how do you expect people to get
around?

Bicycles. And no, I'm not trying to be facetious. SF is an good city for bicycling and could be an excellent city for bicycling. One of the main things holding it back is Rob Anderson, author of the District 5 Blog, who has filed several lawsuits derailing efforts to modernize the biking infrastructure.

You can get just about anywhere in the city easily by bicycle. I live at the top of Nob Hill and from just about anywhere in the city I can get home as quickly as a cab. I've beaten my girlfriend on scooter or in a cab several times. The times I've lost have only been by a small margin. People really underestimate how quickly you can get from point A to point B by bicycle.

I used to live in São Paulo and there they do a test every year comparing several transportation options, car, bicycle, motorcycle, bus, subway, helicopter, etc, and bicycles win every single year.
Toolkit to force update your iOS apps
To clarify: trade unions hoist signs and distribute leaflets that literally say "[so-and-so] IS UNFAIR." It's the phrase "is unfair" to which I'm reacting--it's not a summary or simplification of anything else.