skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily. While playing Braid, in the back of my head I was reverse-engineering the engine.

It's a programmer thing. I'm sure you can all relate. :)

Anyhow, if you come at this sort of program in the imperative mindset, it looks impossibly complicated. Imperative programs live in the now, constantly fiddling with their state with no ability to go back. But if you come at this from a functional viewpoint, suddenly it's not so hard; functional programs naturally live in a timeless way and the challenge there is to actually hook them up to reality in a meaningful way!

Instead of recording the state and constantly mutating it, you record the inputs and replay them as needed. The engine will be entirely deterministic, so the game state can be freely rolled back and forth. And, here's the key: While retrofitting an imperative program to do this would be a nightmare, if you know what you are doing and you start with the understanding you need this, it's not so hard. You build a small test engine with the ability to do just one thing (maybe move units around), work out the necessary primitives, then start expanding the engine, maintaining the necessary properties as you go. You grow it from a small, maintainable seed.

This is where, even though you can't go to school and take "mutatable chronology mathematics", it really helps if you have a lot of math under your belt, because you need to be thinking in terms of invariants and maintaining properties and other such mathematical things. Sitting down to just hack this out Will. Not. Work.

Oh, I don't want to trivialize the accomplishment. This is the basic structure, but you're still going to encounter fundamental contradictions you need to work out how to resolve, and there will be tricky interactions that don't work quite right, and slight violations of some relevant property (that you may not even have fully understood or articulated) may manifest as some of the subtlest bugs you've ever seen (with their only saving grace being that they should be fully replicatable, in a system that basically has a time-traveling debugger). My point here is that while it is complicated and possibly the subtlest real-time strategy engine ever built, it is not as complicated as your imperative intuition is telling you. It's just fiendishly complicated, not impossibly complicated.
An API will often give you an idea of how advanced or mature a product's architecture is. Does the API have any notion of objects? Can you imagine an OO system behind the API?

An example from personal experience: Does a workflow engine require you to read database tables to integrate other software to their state information? (Red flag: How will encapsulation be enforced?)
Thanks for the advice/admonition. Admittedly, I was hesitant to editorialize...I almost never do. It just struck me that the original title revealed almost nothing about the topic of the page.

I readily agree, though, that the concept is widely applicable, not just restricted to writing.
The Geithner plan, slightly demystified
The us will get through this, a year, or two, probably not 3, from now we'll start growing again and get high inflation.

Then the fed will raise rates to kill inflation, economic growth will slow down to a crawl and we'll begin paying off our debts.

This will last 10 to 20, just like Japan.
I was wondering where Jeffy-B had gone to. I stopped getting personal emails from him a while back and I had started to get worried.
Also, you're probably not an Engineer. A real engineer is someone who is trained and certified to sign or "stamp" engineering documents and takes legal responsibility for their correctness.
Programmer's Dress Code - Part2
Depending on where you are at, this may end up being more annoying than its worth. A couple friends with Android Phones on TMobile say their 3g coverage sucks 10x worse than AT&T.
Bill Gate's Mug Shot
In America, the iPhone's 3G modem only talks on AT&T's network. You'll be stuck with EDGE speeds on any other carrier.
It doesn't even have to be fiendishly complicated. Each "time wave" is simply a different run of the simulation engine, with a differing set of inputs. The videos also explain how seemingly paradoxical situations, like units fighting alongside time-shifted selves are handled.

The JWARS simulation engines built by the US Department of Defense (in Smalltalk, BTW) could handle theater-wide simulations down to the individual soldier level at 10,000X speed, and this was implemented in Smalltalk many years ago. Handling a dozen or two dozen "time waves" in parallel shouldn't be too much of a burden.
I was thinking that too. One thing that helps is we allow the player to focus on the time travel gameplay rather than unit micromanagement by giving the units intelligence.

You could create arbitrarily complex battles across the timeline, but in an ordinary RTS, you can also be overambitious, and not be able to manage everything you set out to do.

Your real-world time in setting up position is also a limit they have in common. Of course, they add the complexity of managing paradoxes, but also introduce the limit of chronoenergy, which seems to have the effect of limiting how many units you can deploy across the timeline at once. hmmm... chronoenergy must be a time-global variable.
I think the author is attempting to take the analogy a bit too far.

If "computer wizards" and "programming rock stars" faced the same measure, I would expect them to teleport to their groupie-filled release-parties.
Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR (Startonomics SF 2008)
Not that I've worked with building architects, but I have worked in an HVAC engineering firm that does work with architects. My sense is that the original author's view of a real architect's life is shaped by whatever is shown on TV. In contrast to fictional architects, a real building architect owns her own hard-hat for the almost daily visits to the job site. When something goes wrong with the build, she's involved with coming up with a solution, whether it's really an architectual problem or not. (Example, the cement contractor got a bad batch of cement that isn't curing right. It would take a month for him to get the right aggregate to fix it. Instead of delaying the build, could we make the walls less thick and add in supports elsewhere?)

Also, most real-world architects rarely get to build from scratch. Those types of jobs are the dream jobs and tend to be taken by the owners of the architectual firm.
Couldn't you just pay for the phone in full (its subsidized through AT&T) and not have to get a contract?
again, karma be damned, terrible customer service is an incredibly limp definition of evil.

but by all means, enjoy the hyperbole. woe is the author, etc etc
Not entirely unprecedented:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244594

But, of course, Chronotron is merely the time traveler's Donkey Kong, whereas this new thing is Starcraft. For people who are bored with regular Starcraft and have a desire to play n-way simultaneous Bughouse Starcraft:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess
Classic meandering style, although the point he laboriously makes his way to is actually pretty interesting: is it possible to use money to influence and empower open source software? Is that a good thing?

By offering money for bug fixes/new features, it would bring new programmers to projects that wouldn't have had them before. This has benefits and issues:

It could (as Jeff suggests) reinvigorate dead or near-dead projects, and get specific updates completed that trouble a small set of users.

It could also infuse the open-source community with a bunch of mercenary programmers, who have no interest in the well-being of the project, and simply want to get their money and get out.

I'm not sure where I stand on the issue, but I think it's an idea worth a little more ispection.
May work for some kind of projects, but may be a serious issue if you want to contain the number of features in your project. If people start asking about features that the core team of the project don't want to see inside, you are either going to say no or implement a plug-in system so that it will be possible to implement self-contained things useful for customers that are willing to pay.

Still I think that there is a fundamental flaw about all this: even if without a business model even open source software is a product, and if you turn it into a service in order to make some money there is something wrong about it.

It is probably better to ask for sponsorship in a different way: donations, write a book about the project and put it on lulu, ship a pay-only version of the software with some kind of feature not really needed but most users but absolutely useful for Enterprise-style users, and so on.

Cheers,
Salvatore
I wouldn't call this a "terrific" survey; rather it's simply a breakdown of the percentage of the Webware 100 sites and how they make money. The sites in the survey are mostly dominated by massive companies - amazon, google, yahoo - so I'm not sure specifically that us startup guys who can't monetize a site with the flick of a switch can learn too many lessons.
I called it "fiendishly complicated" in this case because even if the code is simple when written out, the underlying mathematics is tricky. A programmer off the street couldn't just wander up and modify it meaningfully in the way that a programmer can hack on the Quake III engine without breaking it; the slightest change could cause massive bugs, if you're not maintaining the invariants. The word "fiend" is chosen carefully :)

The chronoporter is underspecified by the demo (which is not surprising and I do not mean as a criticism, buy the game to find out more). I can come up with several possibilities for how that works in game terms that match what we see in the demo, each with their own problems and benefits for the player.
Microsoft is at last onto something here: Compete on price.

The very thing that makes a mac such a stable machine, namely the fact that they control the hardware and the software is also why they're so expensive because it's essentially a monopoly.

A PC, on the other hand, is an ecosystem of suppliers, all driving down the price of the final product.
Absolutely. Furthermore, niche users tend to be more fanatic about the sites they use if they're done well.
Anyone know a good what to test on multiple browsers on a PC? Are virtual machines the only answer?
And suddenly, ostentatious displays of wealth are out of style.
When irritated, I used to say to friends "When I take over, you'll be up against the wall with the first billion along with X, Y and Z."

I had to find a new joke when my friends noted that the total sums of all the groups I'd promised to be among the first billion up against the wall was at least 10 billion people. (-: Well, I'm not a people person in the mornings. :-)

So when the time for voting for world president/dictator comes around, I promise that everyone voting for me won't be among the first billion up against the wall. "Why settle for the lesser evil, vote berntb!"
Google has always had remarkably bad customer service with all their products. I'm not really sure how they get away with it.

Of course, paypal is pretty bad too, so if there's are the only two options you're considering, it's probably a wash.
Right, so non-Apple branded goods are cheaper then their counterparts. I don't see what the low price of a HP laptop has to do with Microsoft?
Does anybody else wonder if the concept of that restaurant is a bit sacrilegious?
i want to create account
I have a close friend that is an architect, and what you're describing is pretty accurate.

Also I can attest that this is wrong - "An architect can reasonably expect to sleep through every night of the year without a call from work" Architects get just as many ood-hour calls as sys-adms.
So why doesn't jeff atwood code up a website where people can donate funds to get bugs fixed?

What he is arguing for is called commercial software. Buy software from good software companies that use the money to feed, clothe, and house the programmers that write it.

Look, I'm all for open source software, but the current model is just ridiculous. Open source software is worse than herding cats, as my girlfriend would say, it's like "herding nerdy cats." Everyone has their language of choice, their platform of choice, their development environment of choice, their database of choice, their coding style of choice.

The end result is that every open source project out there has a system that is so different from all the rest that it would be almost impossible to participate on more than one or two without 6 boot partitions and 3 servers. I have tried to participate on multiple open source projects, but I only have 40 GB on my windows partition and I don't have the time to manage all those environments.

So what did I do? I started a company that builds a platform that enables anyone to build a website from top to bottom using only a browser. No development environments to install, no new languages to learn, only JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and SQL and these languages are required to build any website out there. You could use something besides SQL if you want, but none of the alternatives are standard. I wanted to use /standard/ technologies.

If we are going to move forward in this world, we have to stop expecting other people to do the work and if we want other people to do the work, we have to make sure they have food on the table and a roof over their head and clothes on their backs. If they don't, how are they going to write good software?

Open source makes me angry. It devalues our work. No one gets paid for it and if they are getting paid for it, it's rarely of the quality found in the commercial equivalent.

That's just reality folks.
I think indisputable and what a scientific assertion is not clear. I would interpret an indisputable assertion as having probability 1 of accurately describing a collection of observations. Falsifiability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability, is used by many to define an assertion as scientific. From the article,

"Sophisticated methodological falsification, on the other hand, is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice. The object of this is to arrive at an evolutionary process whereby theories become less bad".

A scientific assertion will never have a probability of 1 of describing a set of observations since the supporting observations are of a finite accuracy.

There are many scientific theories that have many supporting observations within a range of parameters, so have a high probability of describing those observations, but none describe the observations with probability 1.

I worked as a theoretical physicist for about 10 years and never worked on anything where I did not make a set of approximations and assumptions that left me with doubts about the accuracy of any assertion I made.
Yes. It will be in the fall this year.
When things can go as bad as in the Slash7 story, statistics totally lose their importance in my opinion. I will never ever pay for a service knowing that it may turn on me like that.
I have some ten years learning and experience invested in perl, and at the moment I'd basically agree with your consultants. I haven't been hired solely for perl since 2003 (it was a web development gig) and I was musing just yesterday that I probably never would be again. I'm just a dinosaur in a world of fleet-footed MVC-wielding agile mammals ;) So I agree with your consultants: although perl is far from finished, it's not ideal for web dev work.

Having looked at Catalyst I'm not impressed - just look at their documentation (which seems to be a series of PODs) and compare it with Django, which has tutorials, detailed docs, etc. I'm no fan of Rails, so maybe Django is a better way to go? Django is very structured, very MVC (almost) and plays nicely with your HTML coders.

Whenever I have worked on a perl project which someone else has started, it's always been a hideous mess. Rather than fight to keep things as they are, if I were in your position I'd agree wholeheartedly with the consultants, except their conclusion - just name another successor product apart from Rails and make a strong case for it. (Although I'm sure there are plenty of people here who would defend Rails and I'm not looking for an argument with them.)
It's not just "dissatisfied customers." It's any customers at all.

I dare you to try to get an answer from Google about how your site is indexed, or about how to accomplish something in analytics. There are several Google products where the only support option available is to post in a Google Support Group and pray that an engineer responds.

It's pretty frustrating.
An Internet Video Blast From the Past - Mark Cuban circa 1999
The card game, Chrononauts, has been around a while already. On the other hand, you'll only be frustrated if you bring too much strategy to the table for that game.
Flickr Co-Founder's New Startup, Hunch, Launching
I played with Authlogic, but I ended up switching back to restful_authentication. I know using generators is a bit more "dirty" but I just couldn't get behind Authlogic. It seemed too mysterious to trust for such a core piece of a web application. Especially considering a minimal amount of good old Ruby code will suffice, as opposed to learning your way around this new tool and DSL.

What really made me decide to drop Authlogic was when I realized it was silently adding validations to my model. I had to dig into the source to find the documentation about that, which really turned me off.

I'm glad people are finding it useful, and I think it's a worthwhile project. I just found that it wasn't my cup of tea. So, I'd encourage people to take some extra time to play with it in a branch before really committing to it. You might consider using the options to make it act like restful_authentication in case you decide to make a change later.
Pretty darn prescient for 10 years old. He way overestimated the timeline for hardware and cooperation from the content providers, but otherwise it's pretty spot-on.
"...even if without a business model even open source software is a product, and if you turn it into a service in order to make some money there is something wrong about it."

I don't understand what's wrong here. Lots of fast food restaurants just use the food to get you in the door so that they can make a killing selling you sugary drinks. So long as you're making money, what's wrong here?
You make it seem like this is a breaking new story. It's not. There are complaints about this going back years.

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+checkout+closed+accoun...

It's also pretty typical for a one-on-one interactions with Google. Check out all the people who had their AdSense accounts frozen for "click fraud" with no recourse or detailed explanation.
Because it helps adoption of their API. They will be the premium provider for their platform, and the bigger it gets, the more business they get. Plus many businesses won't consider a technology that has only one vendor, so having an open alternative opens doors.
The HP laptop uses MS Windows (and likely Office). It's in Micrsoft's interest to move laptops that don't have fruit on the cover.

I assume HP paid to be placed in the ad so people who aren't cool enough for Macs will buy HP instead of another Windows-based laptop.
Here are people complaining about this a year ago: http://groups.google.com/group/google-checkout-payouts/brows...

I think the lesson is, do your homework on researching partners -- don't just trust a brand name.
Well, I am sure HP is happy for the free advertising.
What Is Your QQS In your Marketing?
In his book “Think and Grow Rich”, Napoleon Hill discusses the importance of QQS in marketing.
I think you're being exceptionally observant. Just consider how heavily marketed MBA and especially "Executive MBA" programs are. Schools with brand cachet advertise them all over the place.
Clash of Subways and Car Culture in China: Are a hundred Los Angeleses destined to bloom?
I'd think using those forms would be analogous to using different variable naming conventions in the same codebase or having no conventions for "{" placement.

That in itself is not so bad, but it can possibly lead to the sort of environment where everyone has their own little version of common helper macros / function / libraries.
Quite! Good point :)

I think it taps in to old assumptions. "Software expensive, Web free." On 37signals Live yesterday David Heinemeier Hansson was talking about how people take recommendations more seriously when someone is a paying customer of something than just a free user. I think this sort of thinking ties in with software being perceived as more valuable and why Alkaline could, perhaps, get better buzz than the underlying service.
Did newspapers give too much away too fast? Would the beauty of things online be ruined if we required a subscription to our favorite local and national news sites?

We have a new printing press and it’s called WordPress, Blogger, Typad, Movable Type, etc. etc. Where there are economies of scale there are new business models and there is change. But, should newspapers have been more careful in how they dealt with the demand for newsI’ve read a few books that say that newspapers’ biggest mistake was when they failed to acknowledge the internet as a new industry, a product and service that wouldn’t just compliment what they were already doing, it would cannibalize and eat away at their pages.
I'm confused...aren't there quite a few counter examples to your claims? Things like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Firefox, etc, etc?

I'd feel better about your rant if you weren't a) biased against the idea and ethos of FOSS, and b) selling something.
"Microsoft is at last onto something here: Compete on price."

They were very late in responding to Apple, but I actually thought this ad was effective. I'm on the Mac/PC bubble when it comes to getting a new laptop.
> it seems that America still has the edge.

Please don't mince words about freedom in China, a brutally repressive state: It doesn't deserve it.

* You can't leave your village without a pass

* You can't have more than one kid

* No freedom of expression

* Oh, and that ongoing massacre in Tibet
Twitter seeks tweet of the blue bird of profit
It is the wrong question:

There are lots of possible candidates for it, but communism ruined it all in China.

Anyway, left are:

1) Africa (don't underestimate it, it could grow much faster than any other country, iff it only could free itself from all those nasty colonialism consequences...)

2) Europe, united with all of its parts (and I mean especially the eastern ones)

3) Middle East + India; may seem strange (to some of you), but there you can find the top of the top of human-brewn Culture -- no other region on earth can beat this.

America, you have to "die" (read: take the last place on earth for some decade), because it was you trashing whole world in this financial disaster. This is not popular, so you people will not agree -- the same as children never agree when it comes to take some bitter medicine...
Main reason I am not an architect: I favor Judging to Perceiving.
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
Agilent to restructure in part, lay off 2,700
Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply
that is absolutely ridiculous, people are giving their spare time to do something they enjoy and help others, and that annoys you?

and the quality argument is also ridiculous, the internet runs on open source software, this forum is on open source software (possibly a bad example), along with pretty much every single site you use.

and as for all these "multiple platform", open source desktop applications are typically build, unsurprisingly, on an open source platform, i think youll find if you ran a linux variant you could contribute to 90% of all open source project without having to switch.

and as for "devalues" your work, the market decides what your work is worth, not you, if your ability to make money is crippled by what people do in their spare time, I would suggest rethinking how you are going about things