skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Now that I was spending more time on the floor, I wondered why the men’s room always stank. Then one afternoon at three, when I was in there taking a leak, I discovered the hideous truth. Traders had a contest. Coming in at eight, they never left their desks all day, eating and drinking while working. Then, at three o’clock, they marched into the men’s room and stood at the wall opposite the urinals. Dropping their pants, they bet $100 on who could train his stream the longest on the urinals across the lavatory. As their hydraulic pressure waned, the three traders waddled, pants at their ankles, across the floor, desperately trying to keep their pee on target. This is what $2 million of bonus can do to grown men.
Hacking personality. Welcome to cyberpunk, what made you think it was all fiction?

Eventually the artificial line between "medical" and "I feel like it" will need to be addressed. On the other hand, the world is probably rich enough to support the kind of experimentation described here "in the noise."

Personally, I expect or rather hope for a drug that will truly help me lose weight with minimal danger and minimal side effects. I eat too much, almost enough to qualify for "the biggest loser," but not quite at that level. (If I lost 100 pounds I'd be thin but OK, they routinely lose 100 pounds or more and are still zaftig, plus they are shorter than me.)

I'd say as long as I wait for the right drug to lose weight, I can't fault those who have found it to talk to more girls at parties. Its probably healthier than becoming a rock star or carrying around cocaine all the time anyway.
That's very possible. No matter how I interpret it, Prozac made my life like a Phillip K. Dick novel.
Am I the only one who finds such stories depressing? It depresses me that so much effort has to be spent on living in some place.
Ask HN: My web site got hacked, what can I do?
When I opened today afternoon http://www.cybertechnews.org I got this (Copied source to unicode text file and zipped): http://www.cybertechnews.org/downloads/hack.zip
I was using wordpress 2.7, now upgraded to 2.7.1 and hoping it helps. Anything else I can do? Besides feeling stupid...
I think you may have missed the point of the article. This guy specializes in making one very specific type of game, and he's pretty good at it. It earns him enough money to live on. He doesn't think his genre will work on the iPhone, but he believes it will continue to work on desktops, so he's going to keep writing for desktops.

Where is the evidence that "early settlers get the best land"? To the contrary, iPhone apps seem to be largely hit-driven; their revenue streams dry up once they fall off the charts. I'm guessing that the author's contention is true: that most iPhone games do not pay off for the time invested.
I'm a french living oversea and so write and think mostly in english... Most of my friends in France work in french and their english level is often quite weak (especially when it comes to oral communication, one of my teacher at university used to read 'done' as do-one, case as 'cahse' and so on, it was rather funny...)

When working in japan, none of my japanese coworkers could speak or read english (even worth than France...) and they only read translated programming books with a 6-12 month latency to get new information....

Now if I hired programmers, I would never hire someone who doesn't read english fluently because I believe that someone, who is truly interested in programming, will try hard to learn English so he can access to the quantity of knowledge written in English.
I get where you are coming from, but looking at the flip side of your comment shows what a smart businessman he is. While I don't agree with this method either (as I am sure most people that read HK don't) there is something to be said about being agressive and protecting your dominance.
You bois suck.
How Bioware Uses Agile
Bioware is now EA. But it's use of agile is infectious.
From the Python style guide (PEP 8), on comments:

Python coders from non-English speaking countries: please write your comments in English, unless you are 120% sure that the code will never be read by people who don't speak your language.

And that's for all code written in Python, not just the code that goes into Python. Guido is Dutch.
We don't have to innovate anything, we already have VPNs. As long as the content exists on the Internet, one can asume that you will be able to access it from somewhere so the only action you need to take is route your traffic to that place before accessing the content.

With Tor it is so easy to go around these things that you install a program and push a button to have your trafic bypass any and all national filters, if only more people dared to put up servers so Tor wasn't so extremely slow.
So... once somebody creates a code that makes it perfect and right and unquestionable?
Fjölnir, renowned for its "GRUNNUR"...
Looking for voluntary developers
May be if a few of you are looking to fine tune some J2EE expertise and referrals on your next job and / or join us if we get funded , hit the url and let us know at accounts@crimsoncomputing.com
Internet Ad Sales Rose in ’08, but at Slower Pace
Microbes turn electricity directly to methane without hydrogen generation
People are asking to give him money in a way that makes him emotionally uncomfortable, so he's turning their money down. Yep, he's professional alright.
rename the admin account to something not "admin"

close down permissions.

stay updated on the newest versions of things.

make sure you know what each plugin does, and make sure it doesn't do anything naughty or insecure.
But to me it is far more interesting to have a dialog with actual information than just comments. commenting is so totally meaningless and a waste of time. Like "Oh yeah, it really sucks" for example. Why even waste your time and mine by writing that? It's small talk. Small talk is so interwoven into American social discourse it's become a virus. I'll admit I'm not a very good writer. Putting thoughts into words is a very alien task to me. Words are too limiting for most of the thoughts I have. Here I am commenting and you can see how boring it is...
Depends on the person and timing.

I always see the recommendation to spend a huge effort on business planning, etc., up front before you start. This can often lead to giving up on the idea, though. Yeah, you might say then that the person doesn't have the passion to be successful if that is the case but alternatively, I've found that with software, simply doing it and getting something working is what really generates the motivation.

Maybe business planning is good but it doesn't necessarily need to be the first thing you do and it's not worth it if the result is that you do nothing instead.

I'd argue to just do something first.
Woman rule social networking
RPX: Instant OpenID and Data Portability
Totally. If you're worried about water rocking back and forth, kids playing marco polo would seem like the most likely cause.

The author of the article seems to mention how heroically he ignored all of the educated naysayers. We'll see how heroic he sounds when his children are dead and he's in jail for criminal negligence.
Google gives away free music
I downvoted you because it's not that easy. There are a lot of people in the CIA and they all have a different idea of what "keep the US safe" means; some of their ideas are contrasting the ideas that I have, but this is not an agenda. So, when somebody speaks using the terms that you do, I see it not as something factual and enlightening but as something that's oversimplifying an institution that's the work of a lot of individuals, all well-meaning, all probably a bit misguided, that collectively turns into a system with admitted mess-ups.

EDIT: Fixed for vitriol.
I saw that quote re: PyCon and eagerly googled for 'Brett Cannon', pycon, git and only found the same announcement time and again without any explanation as to why git was disqualified.

Is anyone here involved closely in the python community who could maybe shed some light on what made git inadequate for their needs?
You don't have to write, you know. I don't read people who talk about things that suck in boring ways either, and while I occasionally have those thought I don't write them down.

Hacker News still for me signifies the power of signal over noise. Part of that is not saying things unless you have something worth saying.
Lux Delux exists for both PC and iphone (Lux DLX). The PC version is multiplayer, networked, variable AIs, user generated maps. I think most of that's true for Lux DLX. You have to pay for it, but it is worth it if you're a risk player.

http://sillysoft.net/lux/

http://sillysoft.net/lux/touch/

(I am just a periodic addict)
i'd rather educate than be misinterpreted. the term 'hacker' best describes me and what i do. i'm not [just] an engineer. i'm not [just] a designer. i'm a hacker. hacker has a real, defined meaning. the media and popular interpretation be damned.
Ok so let's clarify this:

(SQL schema & upgrades + ORM classes + Logic classes,
random scripts) - (logic classes + random scripts) = SQL Schema & upgrades + ORM classes

The question then becomes how do you handle the trade-off between being able to declare constraints (that evil schema) and the necessity to "map" how you access your data to your programming language.

If you "program" your constraints in your host language, you will need to either recreate the declarative system provided by a RDBMs or else create a system that will be fragile. Sure your code protects you against inserting bad data right? Well what about updating? What about when you delete? What if your constraint references another value in your database? What if that one changes? Integrity is best declared, not guarded by your program.

If your network model implements declarative constraints, then how do you define them? Those "random scripts" again? Suddenly all those performance benefits of navigation disspear when you're updating that data and checking those constraints.

I've seen many improtant production systems that used the network data model and as a warning: it usually ends badly. Be it COBOL, or whatever fresh re-invention of that navigation database wheel.
We've bootstrapped our company since August of 08, so I can absolutely relate to the desire of wanting a healthy, low maintenance revenue stream; sometimes I'm awoken at night by nightmares of raising money. One of the reasons we are bootstrapping this is because 1) we generate cash immediately, and 2) the upside is a VERY NICE revenue stream (no dilution) if we can manage to make, maintain, and keep our place as a premium app developer.

This is something that takes time to build and structure for true sustainability, period. You have to plan for more than a years worth of work if you're really interested in having that type of stream from the AppStore as it matures and pollutes. There will be cases of one-hit wonders for indie shops (especially in video games) and the major blogs will cover it, but make no mistake about it — it takes work.

The developer who was making $10k a month is likely no longer making that amount. He also has a reputation of producing 'junk' applications by his former and future customers (star ratings mostly 1-2), and will have an extremely difficult challenge in the coming months IMHO. So in a sense, his greed and desire to cut corners has poisoned his long term sustainability.

My company and partners are looking at the upside of our product revenue across 3-5 years, not 3-5 months. We're maintaining 4 premium apps (+ 1 junk app), and have roughly 4 new apps we'd like to introduce this year. Our existing products have features that will take over a year to build in and mature, but we're in this for the long haul. This seems to be in line with the thought and actions of the companies that inspire us such as TapTapTap, AppCubby, Polar Bear Farm, Tapbots, Tapulous, and Smule to name a few.

It's two different approaches to building a revenue stream, I know our approach will last longer once it's well established.
The discussion on Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090330130655372) may be useful to anyone not familiar with the implications of this news (which businessinsider.com is quoting from CNET).
Sorry I misread the article - from the picture I thought he had dug a hole in the foundations of a building for an underground pool.
A surface pool (even inside a garage) is no more of a risk than a free standing pool in the garden. And the 25,000 was in lbs not kg.
Indie developers with loyal fans need to tie in the fans with special editions, just like big companies are. I can buy fable 2... or I can buy the limited edition and get a load of stuff, that as a fan, I would like to have. Same can be said with Fallout 3 and any number of games over the past 5 years. I mean Sid Meier's games release with like a 150 page manual, and I buy Sid Meier games (mostly because I like them enough) partly for the manual.

He could do any number of things. If you buy Geneforge 5's silver edition you get a signed limited edition Geneforge t-shirt. Gold edition, get a signed limited edition novelization of Geneforge 1-4's story and a signed t-shirt.

Personally, if I'd played the demo and loved it, I'd probably jump into Geneforge 5 with a special edition if I got a book telling me the story I'd have gone through in previous games.

A few loyal fans will be willing to pay more for things that can't easily be reproduced, and I'd hedge my bets that if he's earning a living off of an indie game he's got enough loyal fans that this would probably be quite profitable (especially if people want to give him money).
Sys-Con published an article about Aral Balkan. The bulk of the content was just copied from his website. The page title and one little snippet in the body of the article were in Turkish, defamatory, vulgar, and false.

Backstory: Sys-Con have some thing they call "Ulitzer" which supposedly provides lots of useful and interesting content; they supposedly claim that it's going to kill Wikipedia and so forth. Apparently it included a whole lot of Aral Balkan's writings, again copied without permission and without informing him. (I haven't checked to see whether their use of his material was legal despite being rude.) He got cross at them on Twitter, and that seems to have provoked this weird behaviour.

The one time I've heard of Sys-Con before was when their columnist Maureen O'Gara published a rather nasty "investigative" stalking article about Pamela Jones of groklaw.net. I suppose they must publish worthwhile things from time to time too, when they run out of people to smear.
Closing in on The Dream: “one-click-to-deploy Rails apps”
Bit.ly raises $2 million to shorten URLs like this one
Uniquely Antique Restaurant
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwordorigins/...

"The original sense of news was 'new things'; this is long obsolete. Since the 15th century it has been used to mean 'tidings, the report of recent events, new occurrences as a subject or report or talk.'"
Or c) realizes comments phrased that way are poison to discussion threads.

I'm going to kill this whole subthread. I suppose what I need for these ruined threads is a way to freeze them without killing them, but I'm too busy reading applications now to write and release that.
The cities of 2100
Is a Shorter Web Address Worth Big Money? bit.ly Raises $2M
There's probably been a lot of research in that area and just that happend to come out on top. The "food/hungry" analogy may not even be too far off. I mean - it's one of our basic instincts.
You "guess"? That's not a very accurate analysis of the situation.

Since they aren't sharing any of these details, we have no choice but to assume there are none. In fact, their exact reason for not using Git was "it also provokes strong antipathies". That doesn't even _imply_ technicality on any level.

Either way, I couldn't care less personally. The only people they're hurting are themselves, as a gateway can be created between Git and Mercurial. All the projects I work on right now use SVN, and I just use git-svn for everything.
I have to say, I can see why M$ didnt want to sign considering their love of the propietary model and how silly it is :)
It's about time Skype developed this app for the iPhone and iTouch. I hope the connection stability will be better then Fring, etc
I am not one of the book/site's authors, but one of the Kepler commiters :-), but this is what they say at the site's about page:

"This website is powered entirely by Lua, using Sputnik, an extensible wiki package. When the authors and contributers were compiling the electronic API reference, Lua tables were chosen as the data file format, due to it's extreme flexibility and readability. When the time came to produce the online version of the reference, a Lua-based solution was obviously attractive."

As for the wiki's author, he was studying software projects based on Brazil as part of his PhD at UC Berkeley School of Information and decided to stick around and participate.
From everything I've gathered, they are doing just fine. However I still agree with the doubts about "we did it and we do just fine", because they're outliers in some ways, rather than just a couple of average guys working on an average software product.
Yes, OCaml is fast. It's frustrating that folks don't take it more seriously.
To my knowledge, this is a subject that is rarely if ever covered in US schools (I don't recall seeing anything related to software internationalization listed at my university). I'd suggest that those who want to promote translatable software start by encouraging schools to teach their students how to externalize strings, deal with wide characters, etc.
Starting... (Bill Clementson on iPhone Development)
Yup, ad networks and analytics are pretty straighforward platform plays. Facebook had them too. On the web, Google owns one of each.
He didn't say that the developers in particular didn't like it. He didn't even say that _he_ doesn't like it. He only gave a generic statement referring to an unknown group of people.

My problem is not with their decision, but with how they made it. They are taking the "cathedral" approach, rather than the "bazaar" one.
Does one really need to point out the obvious evolutionary selection pressure in favour of being able to identify food sources by smell?

Next up: "I wonder why I don't like the sound of babies crying".
Irony 2.0...

Ken Follett (one of the complainants in the article) wrote a novella for the games Starglider and Starglider 2 in 1986. I asked him permission (in 2003) to put these novellas on my gaming novella site (a collection of gaming-related literature).

He said, sorry, I am re-publishing the Starglider 1/2 novellas in a compilation. So I left his novellas out.

Every novella on the website is there with permission.

Another person who said No was RPG legend (USA, not UK) Steve Jackson (for the Stonekeep book).

So if I can keep honest, how come Scribbers can't?

Note: I left out the URL for the novella site, because it has my full name in the URL.
You should phrase your comments in the form of a question rather than passing judgement on things you haven't looked into.
I must have missed that. I'll see how it is before embarking on my own quest :)
"Once upon a time, this [securitization] seemed like a very good idea, and it might well again, provided banks don’t resume writing mortgages to people who can’t afford them."

While the banks shouldn't escape blame, didn't this securitization facilitate shoveling the risk onto the buyers of these 'bonds', encouraging sloppy lending practices?
Discussion already in progress over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538099
AFIK he didn't modify the garage, so once it's time to sell all he has to do is drain it, disassemble it and no one will be the wiser.

House insurance doesn't necessarily extend to a free standing garage, so he might be cleared there too, he just has to hope nothing disastrous happens to it.
I just wonder how many 5 years business plans written in 2007 had "the global financial crisis" item in them.
So much of planning. Flying with your eyes covered by a paper with some wishful thinking on it isn't any better.
The way I read it, and the document discussing the VCS switch (PEP 374), was that the Big Three DVCSes (git, hg, bzr) were essentially all just fine. Git is the fastest and hairiest, Bazaar is the slowest and cutest, and Mercurial covers both ends fairly well without introducing any glaring flaws. All three systems have big, well-known projects actively running on them, with developers singing about how much better their respective choices are compared to the SVN or CVS systems. Any choice would have been fine; it was fairly obvious.

Python has a history of fussy programmers. Remember the web framework wars of a few years ago? Everyone complained that there were too many choices, picked favorites to champion and nitpicked at the alternatives (which were not actually bad), and nobody could sleep at night because there were alternatives and nobody knew which one was right. Then Guido announced that Django was right, and the lost souls breathed a sigh of relief and did the Django tutorial, and the folks who were already using Turbogears and Pylons productively continued to do so. Django isn't necessarily the best Python web framework for everyone, but it's rarely a bad choice.

That's pretty much what happened this year with DVCSes. The Biopython project was stalled on a CVS-to-SVN transition for over a year, for example, until some grenades were thrown and tears were shed and finally Git was picked because a few people liked it, nobody really had a problem with it and all the other options were triggering nasty blog posts. Case closed. Sometimes we just need a quick slap to shut us up.
Diversifying opportunity - A coming age of the copy cat model?
"Don't put all your eggs in one basket." Whether it was mom encouraging you to apply to more than one dream college or an elder discussing their positions in the market, we've all been touched somewhere along the journey by these words of wisdom. In wake of web apps like AirSet's Web Publish, I'm inclined to believe we're breaching a new wave of web businesses that will utilize aforementioned diversification to silently propel margins and profitability.

With access to tools like web publish, what keeps a company from developing, let's say a collaboration website specifically catered to the needs of Boy Scouts of America, bringing it to market, and all the while having their creative gurus designing templates in the same layout for Fraternities and Sororities sans a few widgets and sub a few gadgets (all available on Web publish)? Copy cat that site with one for little leagues, small business, restaurants, classrooms... rinse lather repeat.

Hence a web business comprised of 90% marketing and design engineers vs. the standard CS team. Systems for unparalleled customer service/retention at full throttle and all revenue driven by subscriptions for the service.

Participate in 2,4,6 markets. Find that only 1 or 2 hit, yet those two bankroll and justify the 4 month worth of pure web design and to market activity for the flounders. Less in one, more in many, spreading risk and overall opportunity while boosting % chance of capitalization.

This was all sparked after a long discussion with Brian Dougherty, CEO of AirSet, and I thought the better to bring it up for open acclaim and abuse.

I'm not rattling about Ning. I understand the link, but I behoove you to check out the power of AirSet's cloud computing service before drawing the correlation.