skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Node Nockout - a game by substuck, dominic and raynos
163 teams all over the world celebrated Node Knockout 2012 this weekend. Node Knockout is 48 hours of non-stop Node.js hackery.

Substack, Dominic, and Raynos created a browser-based, multi-player adventure game where you can cast spells on any object around you by changing the object's javascript code! For example, you can turn your friend into a monster or a rock if he pisses you off. Click on anything around you to see it's code and start hacking!
> Nokia has emphasized the power and thoroughness of its mapping database

only if you assume tokyo is a rice paddy with a train line through it http://here.net/35.6825729,139.8357904,13,0,0,normal.day
> If it is not that popular (which is rather good)

Not popular often means you have to write libraries or code yourself that in a more popular language would already be sitting around ready to use. In other words, in a business context, it might cost you more money to use a less popular language.

> it is not a language's fault

I don't agree. I think for instance that Erlang could likely have a more C like syntax, and that would have bought it more users. There's plenty of other stuff that you can do to make a learning curve relatively easy, so that people can slowly start out and get to know a language.

Of course there are factors beyond the control of a language's designers and proponents, but looking at things like PHP and Ruby, you can certainly get popular without, say, having huge corporate backing.
Ask HN: Where have all the comments gone?
In my periodic checking of HN today, I've noticed an extreme dearth of comments on today's posts. Why?
It goes to show how irrational we can all be.

Clearly, Petraeus is a very smart guy, and has accomplished many great things for himself and for his country.

When this started, he probably said to himself "it's just a one time thing ...," but inevitably, it escalated, and he slid down the slippery slope of bad decisions.
Sure thing, my reasoning goes like this:

My first premise is that we are still in a relatively early stage of the technological boom signified by things like electronics, computers, robotics and the internet. These technologies have changed life on Earth dramatically, but I think there is at least as much to come. In any case, for the next two or three decades, more and more aspects of life will be the object of automation, computation etc. So the demand for software development will continue to increase, and probably by a lot. Software will become an even greater part of the economy and continue to crowd out other types of business.

My second premise is that only a small percentage of the population have the talent and inclination to become very good programmers, and children with these traits often do not get proper encouragement and guidance. So from the beginning, it is very hard for society to produce a large number of programmers. More importantly, the ratio of people who can become good programmers is probably more or less a constant, while the need for software development will grow much faster.

I also see reasons to believe that we are getting worse at producing programmers. For example, software is become more mature, hiding more and more of the internals. I started programming at age seven, in the eighties. In local stores I could buy glossy magazines with articles about programming, often with entire programs that I could copy into Basic etc. For sure, there is the internet now, but what kind of programming culture for kids is there? I could pick my first computer apart and learn all about how it worked. The kids these days learn to use iPads long before they learn to speak, but they never get to see what's inside. Who knows where this will lead? We already know that a lot of graybeards are retiring and they are often impossible to replace since the current generation of programmers is not nearly as hard-core.
No, you do not get my point. In both cases, it's YOUR tax money we are talking about. It is very much connected. So, if two people owe you money, do you go to the one who owes you 1 billion dollars or to the one who owes you 10 dollars first?

Well, it is fairly obvious that fixing the huge debt problem in the UK and all developed countries in the similar situation is the most urgent thing to do instead of trying to fill the hole with the "missing" taxes here and there, because no matter how Google and other will pay in tax locally it will never make up for the huge hole they are digging everyday through their inability to keep a straight budget.
I imagine said company would then have to contend with getting the raw materials into the US (or buying them in the US at US market rates), US environmental laws, US electricity prices and US rates for "robot service jobs".

Of course, they would save on shipping the finished products..
Right, but the question is whether statistics is the most important facet of the work involved. Everything you've listed except "maintenance of the system" is part of statistics (which I'm going to define broadly as: 'what statisticians do'), and system maintenance is only missing in a "keep servers online" sense, not a "make sure that the concept we implemented remains appropriate" sense.
I remember being a kid and asking my parents to drive me to the local observatory. We stood there for a couple of hours just to peek at the telescope for a minute. I think I'll never forget the fascination I had and how amazed I was.
Actual> Of several plausible reasons, only one rings true.
> I do think that a CIA employee who doesn't know how to cover his tracks properly when having an affair needs to be shown the door ASAP.

Apparently, you're not the only person who feels that way. From an interview on "Fresh Air" last year with Dayna and Robert Baer, two former CIA clandestine service agents, came this bit of institutional wisdom:

GROSS: Yeah, sometimes when people start seeing each other who work together, they try to keep it secret for a while because they don't want everybody in the office to know. Did you do that?

Ms. BAER: A little bit, to some extent.

Mr. BAER: We used good tradecraft.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BAER: Car pickups, dead drops and the rest of it. You know, in the CIA they say if you can't carry on an affair in secret, you're not worth your salt.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Is it that common that there's sayings about it?

Ms. BAER: Yes.

Mr. BAER: Oh, absolutely.

Ms. BAER: Absolutely.

Mr. BAER: I mean the divorce rate there must be astronomical. You know, they won't - that's a secret too, but I'm sure it is.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
Daily chart:  Oil and gas dependency in 2035
Google's Transparency Report Shows and Increase in Government Requests for Data.
Bold claims for such a small sample size. Arguably, someone who would go out of their way to sign up for look mark, tends to invest more time and focus in their interactions with HN; preferring long for content. This ignores the silent majority that don't have a look mark account, and/or don't have a HN account, and/or visit the site infrequently.
My immediate thought too .. that said "Kingswood" would actually be a good name for a clothing company. It's related to Holden but not in any way that could possibly breach trademark laws as it's a totally different industry.

(Though GM-Holden do sell apparel .. to bogans)
wow, thank you this is extremely useful and easy to understand
The top of the outerwear list gave, to me, quite horrible suggestions. Looking at the very bottom of the list though, provided much better suggestions such as AtlasPeakOuterwear or OpenPlanOuterwear (no limits with open plan).
That's the one, thanks a lot!
I truly believe that this is a possibility.

I don't think it's the most likely possibility, necessarily, but I'm totally open to the idea that near-full employment was a brief historical blip, caused by the momentary usefulness of humans as wet robots during the early days of automation, creating demand for them as 'employees.'

I sometimes suspect that both education and employment, at least as we know them now, are just blips caused by temporary conditions, and that may well revert to a less rosy historical mean. (I don't think that's a good thing, either -- history, uh, sucked).

Take education - what the heck chance does the current educational model stand of preparing people to be, say, a programmer?

It's not hard to learn programming. Not at all. And yet after 12 years of public school, 40-60% of the people who want to be programmers are weeded out of their very first year. That's a fairly damning indictment, given that programming is about the 'softest' engineering discipline out there.

But the truth is that most designers didn't start from zero in college, and most programmers the same. We came in knowing something, maybe knowing a whole bunch, maybe having done it since we were kids.

Industrial-age schools worked when it only needed to produce wet robots. What if that was a blip, and systems of apprenticeship, which are a natural fit for skills that may take several years of on-the-job experience to be really useful in, turn out to be the right model?
By exposing first graders to programming, some will certainly take an affinity to it. By the time they get to middle school, some will have advanced understanding of code. I think it is really an excellent idea. With such a young perspective, will new languages be birthed? What do you think a new generation of coders will produce?
Giftshop for virtual worlds: FigurePrints Makes Minecraft Real With 3-D Printers
If this is Apple that'd be true, but since when has Google really bragged about any sales numbers?
Inflation is always bad for capital and good for debt.
Well he didn't disable the app and he also didn't say something that wasn't technically true.

> How about we all stop using pirated iOS apps? I promise to stop. I really will. #softwarepirateconfession

If you have a jailbroken iPhone, odds are that you did so to pirate "iOS apps" and are hence a "software pirate". That sentence looks like it was carefully crafted to be correct and generalizable.

This is probably not good for the dev's PR though, because accusing customers of being criminals doesn't go down too well (Music/Film) - unless of course you are a lawyer (MPAA/RIAA) - then you make fat stacks.
My First Attempt at Writing A Beginners PHP Kindle Book (free today)
Not that surprising a failure to me. You'd only see the behavior on a phone that tripped their check for piracy. As long as the Apple reviewer didn't use such a phone, no obnoxious behavior.

I am sure that Apple has a standard checklist, and am not surprised that this is not on it.
In marketing analytics there is a saying... "Don't waste time testing things that don't give you actionable metrics".

Meaning... 1 view, 5 views, 100 views... what will you do differently even if you knew this info? Not a thing :)

So spend your time working on your business. Thursday will be here soon enough.
$2500/mo for the max package?
I guess consumer pressure on Microsoft tech support after Win8 release is above any limits. Lack of Start button, no easy way to shutdown PC, full-screen interface with no way of knowning which app is active and without easy way to switch them - all of these ones combined make up a perfect techsupport disaster. I wonder how large is average return rate of Windows 8 devices?
Codeception PHP Testing Framework: Extending standard modules
Since when is a B the 50th percentile?
I think it's safe to say that programs like Outlook have greatly reduced a firm's need for scheduling secretaries.
But without central planning of education, how will society produce well-rounded individuals???
The second aspect of software development is that a developer working 40 hours a week is more productive than two developers working 20 hours a week.

I am unsure that this is true in all circumstances.

So the net result of these factors is that a company must work at maximum efficiency, and maximum efficiency comes when all developers are working 40+ hours a week.

I know for a fact that this isn't always true - since I've repeatedly seen teams of developers doing 45+ hour weeks become more productive by every metric we had to hand by dropping their working week to 40 hours (with only about 6 hours a day of that being coding).

I talk about this in a little bit more over here before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3883362)... copy/paste below.

-----

There is something deeply broken about equating hours to productivity.

It's been my experience that folk are very good at deceiving themselves about their productivity (myself included :-)

One team I worked with had a serious problem with overtime. They were putting in stupid hours and it was showing in the quality of work going out. So I ran an experiment where we all agreed to work "normal" hours for six weeks.

I was "only" working about 45 hours a week at this point, when other people on the team were regularly working 50-60. I was relatively young, didn't have any family pressure, enjoyed my work and felt very productive doing those hours. I wasn't one of the people with a "problem" as I saw it. We were running the experiment for the other folk on the team.

In the experiment we dropped to a 40 hours week (6 hours coding per day, 2 hours for breaks, meetings & lunch). After a couple of weeks adjustment my productivity went way up. I also felt a lot better in myself - generally sharper and more on the ball.

People seem to have quite a wide bad of "this feels okay" that subsumes the much narrower "I'm performing at my best".

Also people don't jump from a 35 hour week to 60 hours a week. It creeps up a few minutes at a time as pressure increases on the team. People have enough time to adjust to it being "normal" and don't notice the drop in productivity that goes with it.

Currently I work roughly 25-30 hours a week and am just as productive by all metrics that I have available to me as when I worked 40-50.

I would strongly urge people to experiment. Pick some metrics, try working shorter hours for a month, see what happens.

(The only caveat I would add is that with folks doing silly hours - anything over 50 I would say - there is often a couple of weeks where things go to hell as the body adjusts. On the team from the story practically everybody caught a bug and felt crap for the first week or so before productivity rose again).
I realized that I don't rewatch movies I've already seen, so what is the point of "owning" a copy? Netflix killed any remaining point to owning them. I have boxes and boxes of DVDs in the basement, no longer having any meaning.

As for my large music collection, I listen to that every day (set on random shuffle). I enjoy it very much, and it's large enough that I don't overplay ones I like and ruin them.

I do hoard books and magazines, though. My huge book collection isn't remotely available via googling them, nor are most available as ebooks. And old magazines? fuggedaboudit.

So I cut & scan books as a background task, such as when waiting for a test suite to complete. Each book consumes 20 to 30 Mb, so that adds up. The scanned paper copy goes in the recycle bin, and I enjoy using a tablet or netbook to access my library from anywhere in the house, at any time.

I only wish my ebook readers had enough storage to put my whole library on them (about 60Gb now, and growing daily).
I came across Flomio who provides an NFC based IAAS.
Congrats on your taking action. It puts you ahead of 90% of the people who read and don't execute.

A few questions....

*Is your project for fun or for profit?

If the latter, what pain does it alleviate, whom is it targeted towards and before you created it, was there any indication they wanted a solution strong enough to pay someone for the answer

(to elucidate, skip to 1:03 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9m9vPAlb_0&feature=relat... )
YC backed Tag Stand: www.tagstand.com
> Erlang could likely have a more C like syntax [...] so that people can slowly start out and get to know a language

This reminded me about famous Linus rant against C++ - in the same vein it can be argued that "cryptic" (actually very readable and consistent IMHO) syntax would be a win even if it did nothing more than keep C (style) programmers out of Erlang development :)

You're certainly right from business perspective, however.
http://pastebin.com/UGdPnaDb mirror of the comments
Unix, Linux and Java just to name a few highly successful worse is better paradigms. List the number of multi-billion dollar Lisp startups - I can think of only one that comes close - ITA ($700 million), and that was bought out by a C++/Java shop, namely Google.

Don't take my word for it, ask a famous Lisper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_Better
For those who don't know what EdgeRank is, start with this primer: http://edgerank.net/
It felt more like 15 minutes.
I agree strongly that this is a wide open space. As an employer I would pay handsomely for recruiting services that I actually believed in. Of all the concepts floating around, I particularly like the idea of programmers having agents, like actors have. I have experimented a bit with this model myself and expect to see a lot of innovation in this area.
Why Social Media Shaming is OK
In production you may use a process that's more economized than what you'd use to establish a ground truth in research. So the human team in production will have some error rate that is tolerated or won't include as much redundancy. In this sense it's easy to imagine better than human performance from the software, in the sense that the human performance you get isn't a single max value, but rather a function of budget.
>XP released in 2001; Vista released in 2007, essentially an updated XP with some Aero bells and PMP whistles.

What? No.

Vista was pretty extensively reworked under the hood. It featured UAC, new driver models, a completely reworked network stack, and a new, vastly-improved memory manager among other things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windo...

Vista was, ultimately, far less ambitious than Microsoft had intended for Longhorn -- which is why they essentially scrapped the project and started over in 2004 -- but it was still a quantum leap over XP from a technical perspective.

W7 is essentially a UI-updated and polished Vista (which is why the NT version number only bumped from NT6.0 to NT6.1), but even given the relatively incomplete state of Vista at launch, it was a huge step forward for Windows, and certainly more that "an updated XP with some Aero bells and PMP whistles."
Friday: Kucinich Hosts Congressional Briefing on Drones
The Raspberry Pi could be the foundation of a new generation of programmers : But I don't see the size of the 'nerdy clique' being any bigger now than when I started out (soldering a 6502 machine).

If programming were painting, it's probably easier to become a housepainter now, but the percentage of Picassos is probably the same.
Inside a Health Care Innovation Center
I used to go to a summer camp on Chemo Pond when I was growing up. Not that that's relevant to this conversation, it's just not every day I see a discussion of the area in which I grew up on Hacker News. Nice area. I hope you guys do well.
The "Dirty Little Secret" of Age Discrimination
Well, more abstractly, anything you ever do is a gamble. Getting higher education? You're gambling that it'll pay off better than just working in a job that doesn't require a degree. Putting your savings in a bank account? You're gambling that the interest rate will be higher than inflation and also higher than the risk-adjusted returns in any other investment type. Buying a house instead of renting? You're gambling that it'll be cheaper and more convenient than renting, after capital costs and price changes. Renting instead of buying? The opposite. Any choice you make, including not making any choice, has consequences.

Putting your money in the stock market? You're gambling that the risk-adjusted returns from the stock market is higher than that of a bank account. Performing stock or option trading according to some strategy? You're betting that you're smarter than your counterparties. Trading any type of paper you don't understand? That's more akin to playing the lotto.

It's a continuum.
I think the switch back is because VMware has their own (relatively new) customized PostgreSQL (vPostgres http://www.vmware.com/products/application-platform/vfabric-...) that they sell/support.
One problem with hiring academics is that they can be far too focused on their subdiscipline as this is necessary to break new ground. An astro physicist might be amazing at identifying peaks in tremendous amounts of data but have no idea how to do basic analysis of a graph.

When we interview someone I like to start talking/asking about matrix decomposition (eigenvectors, svd ect) and see how excited they get.

I consider knowing about things like MDS and pagerank a bare minimum and if someone can bring up a more recent or esoteric application (locally linear embedding, graph partitioning) they stand out.

Asking about the nuances of estimating probability densities from data (bin/histogram vs kde etc) is another good one and something that stops a lot of the cooler theoretical statistics and information theory from getting used (or used well) in the real world.

Both of these questions get more at "do you understand the basic building blocks that come up over and over again" more then "is your research groundbreaking and new." Asking about techniques to do the above at scale also ups the difficulty of the interview.
That's precisely what I'm trying to say, but worded much more elegantly. Thanks!
Using the term Engineer willy-nilly is frowned upon in many countries where it's a professional designation.
Yes, it improves performance because PostgreSQL wants to write data out to disk before returning.
The site design itself is great too. Resize the window and it adapts responsively to any screen size. Matches well with BMW's level of detail and polish.
great. Just signed up.
I realize that HN is not the place to go if you're looking for people who can give good relationship advice, but an affair that comes about due to genuine mutual interest and is the seed for a strong, lasting relationship is pretty much non-existent outside of fiction. Either the original marriages were open to begin with, or there are other problems, either with the individuals involved or with the marriages themselves.

This is one of the more interesting things I've read inspired by the scandal: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/reconsidering-the-petraeus-...
In addition to the normal github page working, they're trying to be fun and bring their normal brand to open source software.

I'm just thankful they've opened sourced so much of their infrastructure, and did it with some humor! Kudos to netflix!
But now they have a lot of people bitching about how the phone doesn't have LTE so it's not like it was known it'd be a total slam dunk. I'm a T-Mobile customer in the US though so i don't worry about stuff like that. ;)
I had success doing something similar at a previous company. I was able to switch to part-time at an equivalent hourly rate. My reason was that I was finish to go to graduate school simultaneously. I wasn't able to keep most benefits, but it wasn't a huge concern since I was young and still in grad school. The company got a good deal (without benefits, they got more work per dollar), and I got a good deal (in finding a part-time job at a higher rate than I would have anywhere else.)
What About Dick: Eric Idle releases film as a Louis CK-style $5 download
FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal
Can ideas get you high?
It is, but it's the transition process that's difficult - you need to sustain people gradually automated out of their jobs while the post-scarcity economy is not yet working.