skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know the guy who writes the GameRanger lobby service (it's literally a single guy - Scott Kevill - for the whole thing).

He's got about 3 million users. Not sure how many concurrent users he gets -- probably an order of magnitude or two less than LoL does.

Nevertheless, it all runs on I think one or two beefy servers. There's a very high fanout of game-available messages and they need to be addressed based on user-registered preferences as to the games they want to play.

From what he tells me, most of his secret sauce is network hackery. Batching up carefully-sized packets and so on. All that stuff I was basically awful at in uni.
First: tenet not tenant; accepted not excepted.

$1.50 espresso for 3-6 hours feels a little like you are taking advantage of the coffee shop. There is always going to be some variation, but I would prefer to be a customer that helps a business--that provides a service that I like--stay profitable rather than one that helps put them out of business.

If/when times are hard it is good that you can do this, but otherwise if you can afford to support a business that is supporting you then order the cappuccino!
As I read it, Morozov's essay has two main points:

1. Propaganda is now self referential. Especially that the selling point of "Government 2.0" is an analogy to "Web 2.0" and "Open," where neither "Open" nor "Web 2.0" has any kind of meaning to begin with.

2. A specific consequence of this is, that the policy debate is no longer about the goals of a policy but about manipulation of meaningless symbols.

It is then quite interesting to read O'Reilly's comments, since he actually does not refute (or even criticizes ) Morozov's points, but only asserts again that 'Open Government' is a better way to archive some policy goals.

This is of course a highly subjective and somewhat unfair compression of an interesting exchange, but functional for my main point: I completely agree both with Morozov and O'Reilly, just on different levels. Morozov does indeed raise very good questions. On the other hand, open government is an important tool to archive some policy goals, at least for some definition of open.
I'm one the dumb kids that went to a game development school. That school was Full Sail University. Do NOT Go There.

Full Sail has almost ALL the red flags that the article and video talk about. Including rushed "accelerated" courses, pumping out students, trying to teach us calculus in 1 month, trigonometry in 1 month, everything was so rushed. Classes were $3,000/month. Lab techs (assistants) played world of warcraft instead of helping us. I honestly have so many bad memories from Full Sail I really don't want to talk about it. The money wasted, the stress it caused me. I just feel overwhelmed with bad emotions.

Just stay away from Full Sail. I went back in 2006, I doubt they've changed. Their marketing and advertising is amazing though...

"Full Sail is not recognized by a regional accreditor or by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. As a result, most traditional colleges would not honor credits earned by transferring Full Sail students or those who attempt to continue their studies after earning an associate degree from the university

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/24/romney-right-a...
Not sure what to make of this statement:

"the costs of sharing code now outweighed the advantages"

Does that mean Google will only be a good open source citizen as long as it is advantageous to them and on a project-by-project basis?

Edit: Well it is part of Chromium, which is open source, so maybe I was too rash.
Agreed, there are many, many publicly available methodologies to rate language popularity, none of which are great, but this one seems especially odd.

It'd be nice to see a time-lapse of the TIOBE index from 2009 to 2013:
http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Or any of these dozen other measures (including mentions on delicious, or IRC):
http://www.langpop.com/

Or employer challenges posted on CodeEval:
http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013

That said, the underlying thesis may be true that more projects today require more languages, hard to say.
If the restaurant provides free bread (and a large portion of them do), I think it's entirely permissible to combine them. The coffee shops make the their condiments available so that people can use them. Why does the milk exist if not to be put in one's coffee?
What question about your field do you dread being asked?
nullary i believe is a word(a function that does not take in any arguments) just like how a unary function takes in a single argument, a binary takes in 2 arguments, ternary takes in 3 arguments, variadic etc etc etc... my apologies if you were being sarcastic :P (i am not a native english speaker)
I've been using GRC Shields Up all along; would like to try this one too. But, I keep getting this:

Sorry, but the monkey that does the scanning is kind of busy at the moment. Try again later!
How to negotiate a job offer
I use it for class, I bought the book before searching if it was free :/. You can use it to kill someone -> http://i.imgur.com/ytr9PZa.jpg
Courtesy of Mr. Casey Patton.
I remember early 80's cartridges for Atari 2600 in the Sears catalogs being $80-120 USD a lot of the time. Though I don't think I ever paid more than about $40 myself.. I remember being REALLY disappointed in a few.. and miss a few today.

To me, the preview video for the game looks like Star Wars meets Half Life.
This is fantastic, would saved me dozens of hours as an econ undergraduate.

Semirelated: I used to have a ton of scanned journal articles that I wanted to be able to read on a kindle without having to scroll across every page, and came across k2pdfopt. It's a C script that finds word and line breaks in image based pdfs and rearranges the text so that they'll fit on smaller screens. It's got a ton of flags you can set and is pretty good and ignoring/cropping out headers and footers and dealing with pages scanned at an angle.
http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/help/k2menu.shtml
No affiliation with Willus
Yea that's what I'm saying. It wouldn't be worth it unless you have really cheap or free electricity. If you're considering buying ASICs you should be very careful.
I know what you're getting at - but it's a good reminder nevertheless. I'm talking specifically about the point of having offline options, like graphic design, emails, offline coding.
What rich client craze? In 2010?
> how does predicting karma differ from predicting the Higgs?

With which model have you predicted the existence of karma? What rigorous experiments have supported the assumptions and prior predictions of this model? Is there a "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the 'Eastern Sciences'" I can look to?

> Well, it has been my experience

Human experience, without very careful treatment, is as near to worthless as you can get. You should know that. Seriously dude, this is elementary.

> But magnetism worked before we understood why. As did gravity.

The effects of gravity and magnetism can be observed. They were conclusively observed well before they were explained. Karma however has never been explained NOR observed. The effects of karma exist only in the fevered imaginations of lunatics and the delusionally religious. If it objectively exists in reality then it, like magnetism or gravity, could be independently measured in an empirical fashion, even if explanation escapes us.

> "you believe you know that karma is no more plausibly real than unicorns or leprechauns. I believe that this claim is unfounded. You think that this makes me insane/irrational. Have I got it right?"

Yeah, it seems like you have that about right. I feel like I am talking to losethos here or something. What evidence have you for justifying your assessment of the plausibility of karma? Your "feels" do not count; if you want karma to be taken seriously alongside proper science, then do the fucking legwork. Otherwise just admit that it is your own wishful thinking and delusion.

> "but the core idea, as I said above, is the idea of cause and effect."

Bullshit. The core idea is a self-leveling system of cause and effects governed by some universal system of ethics. I deny no pedestrian cause and effect reality, only apparently supernatural systems governed by some system of ethics.

> "have experimented with the practice of a variety of religions"

For reasons that should be obvious to all, this does not inspire the confidence that you seem to think it should. Furthermore, you have entirely misinterpreted what I have said. I am not accusing you of being uncomfortable around religion, but rather being uncomfortable around criticism of religion in its entirety. You are "white knight"ing religion. You ascribe it importance without justification.
That sounds like it nails the Friedman op-ed experience ;)
* ... essential reference for any seasoned or up in coming security pro.*

Up 'and' coming.

(Friendly edit)
Former Google AdSense Director Kim Malone Scott Leaves Dropbox After Four Months
Bloody good question. Sad truth might be that bitcoins will move the balance of taxation even more to those who have less power to fight them, i.e. the poor and the technically incompetent. As hacker news readers, this might be good for us in the short run, but what about rest of the people?
I didn't. I was doing my own calling and networking, and came across a regular job, and took it. I was sick of managing clients and finding new ones.
The bold recruiter
Ruby Matrix, the Forgotten Library
Just started a new job where the work week is 34 hours. (1 hour on friday is for happy hour) So 9-5, with no overtime.

I know this sounds crazy, but I feel like I have a lot more energy left after the day is over.

I also notice no one really wasting anytime during the day, since there's one less hour to get work done. No hour of chatting, surfing HN, etc.
I think that's fair. Honestly, I tend not to spend time in shops that are at capacity, as it tends to be quite loud and difficult to maneuver. Certainly, the crowdedness will change the calculus. But, in cases where the shop is not close to capacity, my seat has effectively no marginal value, so I'm not costing the shop anything...
Because people are assholes and the rich can get away with being assholes more easily.
> Well that's ultimately kind of sad, right?

Why is it sad for Chrome development not to be held back by WebKit when each project prefers a different approach?

Personally, I think its win-win: Chrome and WebKit, which have conflicting approaches to a variety of different issues, are free to take their own approaches and prove them. This is a good thing for progress.

> It's certainly not the argument that was made in this blog post, but it certainly is a believable one.

Its actually exactly what the post says when it says "However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit."
This is one of the few posts I've come across that doesn't just focus on the self-congratulatory aspect of self-employment.

I've been self-employed for the past 8 months and I have struggled to find a balance between work, play, personal relationships, and health. It's nice to know that I'm not just terrible at this and other people have similar problems.
Hard to know:

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=lion+stretching&hl=en...
Not sure why this is got downvoted given that it appears to be correct (https://github.com/mozilla/mozilla-central/graphs/code-frequ...)
So the user would have to enable experimental flags (which will happen approximately never) to see advanced features? And that's supposed to be good for developers? So things like -webkit-box-reflect will no longer be supported in Chrome?
I agree, the thesis sounds plausible. A more thorough investigation would probably reveal good significance in its favor.
Spending a good chunk of your career in game development has a tendency to make it rough to job-hunt outside of games (with the exception of programmers - game programmers seem to get no shortage of offers from SV startups and bigger firms). Some of these people are very much 'locked in'; they probably moved to the bay area to work at LucasArts and brought families with them.

I mean, I interviewed at the LucasArts campus in SF maybe a year ago and the people there definitely didn't act like they were constantly at risk of losing their jobs. It was a big, established studio with a long history, and the team seemed to have a lot of people in just such a situation. 'Go work someplace else instead' is not a simple proposition for these people.
Maybe, but wouldn't the same issues apply? After all, you still wouldn't have people going from planet to planet often enough for there to be much interbreeding. In any case, colonizing the rest of the solar system is fairly pointless since there aren't any other habitable planets.
Things to learn from large companies...
Hi, I was wondering if anyone has tips for me and anyone else interning this summer at a large company as a software engineer? Eventually I would like to work at a startup.
Internet takes education to new level: Will universities make the grade?
As with Firefox it's mostly search engine related income. They also sell opera mobile to manufacturers. Opera surprisingly has a lot of users in certain areas like east Europe.
Prediction: next iPhone will be iPhone 5S in June/July with Apple Wallet
Watch out Square and Google Wallet, Apple is jumping in
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right?

If you can't get all the Java programmers to switch to a functional programming language, just add enough functional features to Java that you can do FP in it. It's genius, really.

Within another version or two, maybe Scala will be unnecessary.
Why bit coin is a bad currency or store of value? If the grid is harmed then but coins may rise in value but if you still have access to your store, trading will be as reliable and fruitful as eating gold to survive. It's too susceptible to an EMP attack and war (which brings down the infrastructure or grid). Paper wealth only appears on paper.
My apologies, I wasn't referring to you specifically, merely adding my own observation.
You don’t have to make yourself miserable to build a great company
Which means getting Apple to allow other rendering engines on iOS should be an even bigger issue with Apple users in the future. Otherwise Safari will become the IE6 of iOS.
Dragonfly is just amazing... I can hardly live without it. That and the UI are the main reasons I use it.

And most people I talk to feel the same way (who use opera).
> I stretch before and after my daily runs under the assumption that this has been reducing my injury risk. From these results, I should stop wasting time on pre-run stretches.

Have you been injured? Have you seen and/or felt a decrease in fitness due to your stretching routine? If not, I wouldn't change much of what you are doing due to a blog post or this study...

The problem with all these studies is that those that are on the bleeding edge of Strength and Conditioning research are the coaches out in the gym working with athletes and soccer moms. Sadly, no matter how many lives these people change for the better, their methods are discounted due to the lack of scientific rigor.

I've been a strength and conditioning coach for 5 years now and I get very little value out of any of the articles and studies published by NSCA, despite their clout. I continue to pay my dues for access to the information.

You do have a great point though about how well trenched the conventional "wisdom" is in these areas and the large commercial influence that controls these studies through funding or not funding a program.
Metascala: a Metacircular JVM written in Scala
One caveat for those who are pushing the big 5-O (and trust me, sooner or later, you all will be): the title of the article should have been "Reasons Not to Stretch before Exercise." Stretching for the purpose of counteracting the loss of elasticity of the tendons that comes with age is a different matter. It's like "the other flossing": it's well-known that it should be done, but compliance is spotty.
wget -rA "SEv2*.pdf" --no-parent --level=0 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
Can someone please explain to me how this applies to students? I have read a lot of articles talking about enjoying life more and working more efficiently (the 4-Hour Work Week is perhaps the most convincing literature I've read on this topic), and although I actually wholeheartedly AGREE with this mindset, I can't see how I can start applying these ideas until I'm out of school.

Are students forever bound to their over-demanding schedules? Or is there some way for us to embrace the philosophies of freedom and joy prior to joining the real world?

-Senior Undergrad Studying CS
Looks cool! A fun project to make would be a "what did you do today" sort of service that you could IM with descriptions of what you're working on. I know that even though I have a journal, sometimes it's a pain to either keep it open all the time or open it up just to write down "worked on foo bar." I always have my IM client up, though.
The poor by definition make less than average - and right now they make a lot less than average. A median income earner at around 50k per year makes over three times what a minimum wage worker earning around 15k per year makes.

These folks are going to qualify for Medicaid in 2014. They can't participate in the market-based healthcare system. They're just too poor. Give them more money, and they'll be able to participate in a market-based system.

That's at odds with your argument about high tech gentrification in the Bay Area. Those workers were going to start out at the median income, and only earn more over time. So the effect of their getting more money is going to raise prices.

My argument is that the janitors at Google (and other companies owned by the wealthy) should get paid more. My argument is that that housekeeper hired by Meg Whitman should have been paid more, and paid overtime etc.
> If the restaurant provides free bread (and a large portion of them do), I think it's entirely permissible to combine them.

They provide bread under what most people understand to be the social contract: that you will order more than a side of bacon.

Some restaurants -- especially those that serve students -- even require a per-person minimum order to ensure that they're not losing money on cheapskates.

You, sir, are a cheapskate, in that you're willing to break the social contract as to further your own interests, while transferring the cost of your benefit to your host.
Inventors	Denis Kulgavin
Applicant	Kulgavin Denis

Which one are you?
Perhaps I'm misreading you, but you seem terribly focused on the letter, not the spirit, of not quite laws but presumed social rules of behavior.

That someone can scheme up a rationalization for some behavior does not make it right, desirable, or honorable.

It's OK to put milk into a coffee you buy. It's not OK to buy one coffee and then drink several glasses of milk.

The same goes for seating. Seats and tables are there so people have a place to sit while they consume their purchases. There may be no set rule on how long it should take to you drink a coffee, but this is where people have to be honest with themselves and consider if they are really still finishing up that coffee or if they are now, so to speak, just drinking free milk.
Nicely done. Add two dashes of unrepentant war mongering and no one would know the difference.
And what about the people holding lots of BTC who are going on about how it's going to be more stable than the dollar?
Your comment should've been downvoted into oblivion by now. I guess HN has changed a bit. You brought no argument to support your idea, just throwing mud.

Sometimes forking is necessary, even in open source projects, some party feels the majority or the leaders of that open source project take it into a wrong direction. That's what happened to LibreOffice, too.
Dark Matter Found? $2 Billion Orbital Experiment Detects Hints
A $2 billion particle detector attached to the International Space Station has detected the potential signature of dark matter annihilation in the Cosmos, scientists have announced today. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was attached to the space station in May 2011 by space shuttle Endeavour — the second-to last shuttle mission to the orbital outpost. Since then, the AMS has been detecting electrons and positrons (the electron's anti-particle) originating from deep space and assessing their energies. By doing a tally of electrons and positrons, physicists hope the AMS will help to answer one of the most enduring mysteries in science: Does dark matter exist? And today, it looks like the answer is a cautious, yet exciting, affirmative.
Ask HN - it's clear, status quo in gaming is f'sckd, how do we improve?
So, with the LucasArts shut down and a few other articles around the web, computer gaming is clearly a challenging industry. With the SimCity franchise, we saw the DRM debacle, with the LucasArts shutdown we see popular (3+ million activations) as not successful.<p>I ask, where do we go? Is gaming doomed to social gaming/FB cheesy/Zinga game levels? In app purchases to gain a stronghold is the norm?<p>I ask these questions in the context of looking at a recent obsession -- The Masterpieces of Infocom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Text_Adventure_Masterpieces_of_Infocom) Where game play was first rate, if old school.<p>Is computer gaming doomed?
You're assuming it's the exact same multi-process architecture. Is it, really?
Agreed. Personally, whenever I study or do work in a coffee shop I try to regularly make purchases.

I usually end up averaging between $1 and $2 per hour which I think is completely reasonable for the space, drinks, snacks, and internet access. I'll ramp it up a bit if they get busy and if they stay busy for very long (30 min. or longer) I will usually leave.
AeroFS (YC S10): Build your own Dropbox
Right! So we agree then.
Assuming that the article is correct (and perhaps it is not), I think this is bad for software development.

It takes a lot of work to become really proficient in any one language. Multiple languages? For most people, that means only adequate proficiency — or even barely adequate proficiency — in some of them. Don't we already have enough lousy programmers?

I do expect a programmer to be able to handle at least a few languages, let's say C, HTML, CSS, Java, PHP, Emacs LISP. Now throw in SQL, JavaScript, C++, ASP.Net, Python, Ruby, etc... It's not just syntax. How can anyone know most of the ins and outs of all of these, learn best practices, understand the libraries, keep up to date on new versions?
Picturefill - A Responsive Images approach that you can use today
All PDFs for v2 combined in order:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1748506/SEv2.pdf