skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Random anecdote: I interned, back in the day, at a consulting firm working w/ their website; at the time -- and perhaps still? -- they worked in gender-segregated areas when on site.

More randomness for the hell of it: I read the Yiddish Policemen's Union the other week and cannot recommend it highly enough. (It's a noir detective alt-history set in a Jewish analogue of Hong Kong in Alaska, where the local organized crime are Hasidic, the slang name for them is "black hats.") (It also manages to be a page-turner without any of that guilty feeling of "I just read 300 pages without thinking a single original thought" that so many page-turners leave you with.)
Good luck, games are fun, but it's a very tough business since it's so hit-based. I'd recommend working on your marketing strategy, particularly if you're working on iPhone games.

Repeat after me: The App store is NOT a marketing strategy.

Create a webpage, do advertisements, etc.
Good luck, and keep us informed!
I'll be there. Looking forward to it...
I presume you're asking about quitting your day job in order to become an indie game developer. As it is, making videogames is my day job, as it is with a number of other people who post here, but in my case, I'm currently not working for a small independent company.

Having not done the indie game entrepreneurship thing myself, I can't speak with any certainty, but I know enough about the business to know that some of what works for web startups won't work for game companies, and yet this industry has a lot to learn from the cutting edge of how software gets made in other sectors. I'd be interested to hear if you've got any thoughts about all this that might be interesting to the HN crowd.

I'm happy to say I've heard of Kids vs. Zombies, though I don't remember in what context (I don't own an iPhone, so I don't keep up much with games there). Given that indie games seem to be a growing segment of the industry (or at least an increasingly coherent cultural force and identifiable subsection within the industry), I hope you're doing your best to get indie and casual game press on your side. A lot of free publicity can be gained that way, and can really help word-of-mouth advertising.

Best of luck!
These are real, though they don't look any less ridiculous: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/01/maker_channel_105_t...
Just downloaded your lite version. Well done.
The standard for inclusion in Wikipedia isn't "contributions to the community", or else everybody who had ever worked on an open source project would have a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia articles aren't lifetime achievement awards.

The standard for inclusion is notability.

This argument is a tempest in a teacup. Either there are reliable independent sources establishing that Fravia is notable, or there aren't. If there are, you will have no real trouble getting and keeping an article. If there aren't, the article will be repeatedly deleted, by people who don't know anything about reverse engineering and thus won't care at all about your arguments.

When this exact topic came up yesterday, I spent 3-4 minutes looking for a reliable source that established notability for Fravia, and I came up blank. Who has written about him, outside of blogs? Surely, given how important he was to reverse engineering, somebody has mentioned him, or he's been published somewhere.
The discussion was here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

AfDs can be contested by doing a deletion review. In this case, based in the comments in the AfD I assume there wouldn't be an objection to writing a new sourced article. It was probably protected because the same content was being readded, not because the article itself should not be recreated.

Note that the outcome of the AfD was not followed; the content does not seem to have been merged into the original article. Creating a paragraph in the article on reverse engineering on the guy seemed to be the original intent.
Why exactly wouldn't it scale?
The challenge is to make sure other stores are run in the same dedicated fashion and not by some dimwit that only hires other dimwits in order to cut costs. Retail chains seem to become prone to this once the whole organization gets big enough to put in place metrics that measure store performance mostly on a revenue basis and those in charge start to manage by the metrics instead of looking at reality because there is no more incentive for them to do just that.
Wow, I just got heavy nostalgia after going through the mirrors of his site.

His pages on reverse-engineering were my earliest findings on the internet. When it used to take days to download a 20mb file.
'Sony Guts!'
I'm not saying Smalltalk is slow, but I've worked with rsaref since the mid-90s, and I don't remember a block cipher routine in it that was horribly slow due to allocation.
As much as everyone trash talks big corporations, I work for one now and have this beautiful thing called flex hours.

Those that have flex time are lucky, and I find that programmers are more likely to have this perk. When I was an employee, I didn't explicitly have flex time, but I pretty much lived on the 10-to-6 schedule, coming in at 11 if I needed the extra hour.

I have a few friends (who are also programmers) who explicitly get flex-time.

But my wife, who is a fashion designer for a major department store, does not have that option. She has the classic "corporate" job. Be there at 8:30, attend useless meetings all day, and after 4 or 5pm the real work can finally start. But she has to be there at 8:30, otherwise she's likely to miss a meeting in the morning. The whole process from concept to delivery is one of the most convoluted processes I've ever heard, involving meeting after meeting. Nothing is approved until an army of committees have agreed to it.
Kauffman Foundation Study: Georgia leads nation in entrepreneurship
Microsoft releases Windows Mobile marketplace restrictions
Isn't this what "Think and Grow Rich" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_and_Grow_Rich) did? At least partly.
How many programmer hours do you think it takes to allocate 12-byte objects out a pool of a round number of 12-byte objects with a freelist or a bitmap?

GC faster than off-the-shelf allocator? Probably.

GC faster than off-the-shelf strategy? Doubtful.

And "remaining 1% of performance"? How disingenuous is that? Allocator optimizations have sped up commercial software I've shipped by over 200% in the past. Not sped up the allocator; sped up the program.
I find it's best to enforce a time limit. I use LeechBlock (a Firefox add-on), in particular.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
That's the beta. For the RC:

The Windows 7 release candidate will only work for so long. It is due to expire on June 1, 2010. Three months prior, the release candidate will automatically shut down a person's computer after two hours.
http://www.tjetter.com/#3jsK
I use HNs no procrastination feature, but still find myself refreshing the page too often as the 3hour self imposed limit draws closer.
I am thinking of upping minaway: to 240, but raising maxvisit to 30...
True Zero Net Energy Vermont House
There is no output of the post data, you get a list that you can process on submit.

> A list of selected item ids is created inside the original text entry, process them as usual when the form is submitted.
Let's say that you applied a 50% open source quota to the atomic energy agency. What if the open source solutions for their specialized needs are quite poor? Would you still insist that they follow the quota?

In that situation, I'd prefer they go with 100% proprietary software, even if it doesn't fit with my personal philosophy of software freedom.
I'm not really sure how this is any different than any other Ubuntu or Debian installation. Installing the required packages for multimedia playback and GIMP and such is fairly simple on any Deb/RPM based distro anyway, and its a skill that any user will have to learn at some point.
This is the first time I've read of a house that has a documented net export of energy. Anyone have any more examples?
I notice a lot of repetition across the sites I frequent. I'm asking myself, who are the best aggregators, of both story and comments. If they are a bit behind some of the other sites in timing (e.g. Slashdot), perhaps that is a good thing, as it lets the "truthiness" gel and the counterpoints to accumulate.

I'm not saying I've succeeded, but that's my current thinking.

Also, I'm using news browsing way too much as avoidance. Inasmuch, it's an emotional activity. Acknowledging this allows me to tackle it more directly. (Some recent... news stories, argh! -- discussed an apparent strong correlation between emotional intelligence and procrastination. They got me thinking...)

EDIT: I should say "negative correlation", as in, the higher the EI (however that's measured), the lower the incidence of procrastination. It may not be rigorous, but I've found it useful to consider.
But they were a force in that market long before there was a web.
In my book being forced to be in the office for the 8 or 9 hour stretch is equally as bad as having to show up early every single day.
I love the phrase "aggressively unknowledgeable".

I have ordered much stuff from them; would love to visit them in person sometime.
Personally, I don't see much harm in giving a Wikipedia page to anyone who ever lived.

I feel the same way.
Heh, nice idea, the eavesdropping is funny: http://www.tjetter.com/#3jsK
What’s Golden (rule of thirds)
I wonder if someday, someone will ask why Inc failed, and the answer will be that they put big splash screen ads in front of articles.

I love this article. Thanks for posting it wyday.
Agreed. My point is that a store owner cannot assume that a Hasidic employee, even one who is constantly in the presence of other Hasidim, can automatically be trusted not to steal.
Buffett's argument is that he's not a statistical outlier. That others who have taken his approach to investing have also been able to achieve larger than expected gains over time.
Use a name that doesn't mean anything.

It will violate the branding law that a name should impart some sense of what the product/service does, but I think it's worth sacrificing that dogma in favor of having a name that:
1. Will derive a decent Google search without having to fool with any SEO stuff.
2. Work internationally.
3. Will be distinctive.
4. Will provide the flexibility you'll need as your product/service evolves over time.

After wasting a ton of time trying to come up with a name, we took the first letter of four key words that were relevant to our software, stuck them in to scrabble dot com, got some suggested words, one of which was pithy and sounded OK, and then stuck a 'x' on the end to make it unique.

The dot com is easy if it's made up.
Now that is really interesting! Definitely will get it on my FF.
Thanks all!

Yeah, we're learning that the App Store alone is not enough marketing -- I'm amazed at how many games are released every day.

We've reached out to app review sites (avoiding sites that charge $$ for reviews), which seem to be the lowest hanging fruit (if your game gets good reviews!). Facebook and Twitter are all the rage these days, and we're trying these as well.

However, by far, the most important thing that we did was release a free "Lite" version. Our best single-day sales had been about 75 copies, until our demo version was released yesterday and had over 1300 downloads in a single day, and drove up our sales. I highly recommend this approach.

Funny story about trial versions -- don't call your free version a "DEMO" -- we were rejected by the Apple store last week ("DEMO" phrase is bad, "Lite/Free" is good), and had to wait 7 days for our renamed "Lite" version to be approved and put up for sale.
This may seem like an obvious point, but encouraging prepayment is often overlooked by typical struggling startups when designing billing options. It's definitely something to consider if you haven't already.
I can't wait until Android becomes a threat.
Yes, I am American. I suppose by assuming you'd know I highlighted that quite well :)
The answer to my question (does this work with 1.9?) is no -- YARV requires pthreads.

So for a much more than 30% performance boost, switch to Ruby 1.9. It's more like a 4X performance boost.
Better yet, make it look like an IDE. In nature, PHBs & IDEs automatically repel each other.
You're right, but wouldn't be fair to let INC earn some money from that interstitial ad?
No, I expect my scripts to run for a long time with many users. This doesn't preclude optimization; some of it is automatic (new hardware, interpreter library improvements), some of it is well established (using SWIG and C to replace only a tiny piece of the program that must be faster).

In some respects, having long-lived software with lots of users makes speed the least of my concerns, because they're always asking for new features, and those are relatively easy to add to scripts.

And the relationship between software speed and productivity isn't linear, because people multitask. If a program takes 10 seconds to run, I might sit and wait for it to complete, without doing anything else. Whereas, if the program takes a minute, I may decide to switch to another quick task, and then return to see results. In this case, both tasks needed to be done, one took longer but it ate up the "slow" runtime of the program, and was only parallelized because of that long runtime.
It just doesn't make sense to add more operating costs when your product is shipped online.

But there's also the place it has in the community. From their Wikipedia article (so take it for what it's worth): "Surpassed only by the Diamond District in terms of Orthodox employment, the company is a vital part of the community's financial health, with hundreds of Orthodox Jews on staff."

That doesn't scale either.
I guess basically you use a rule of thumb like "your age in % in bonds, the rest in stocks" (only a bit more sophisticated) and re-balance in periodic intervals.

Still you are subject to the ups and downs of the market(s).
Thanks, I appreciate it. Madvillainy is a classic.
Some of our customers at FreshBooks remember use from the days the product was named after the company name: 2ndSite. That name has all sorts of problems, not least the website (http://www.secondsite.biz/) so at the top of 2006 they decided to rebrand.

Well, that's putting it lightly. They actually murdered the brand:

http://www.brandmurder.com/

For those of you curious about how we chose FreshBooks as the new brand, Mike wrote all about it in ThinkVitamin:

http://thinkvitamin.com/single/features/how-to-name-your-com...

P.S. Pro tip: .biz is not .hip. ;)

-- Sunir, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks
You're right. The soothing and comforting glow of Excel might warrant a second look...
> imminent demise

Just in case some people don't know, Fravia passed away 2 days ago (2009/05/03)
HAHAH Thanks!
"having to spend the next 8-9 hour block trapped in it"

That's what hacker news is for.
Mexico Global Talent Acceleration Program
On the other hand, my experience has taught me that going to bed late and not having to get up at a certain time in the morning, leads to going to bed even later. I've found that this does not make me less tired, but more.
I knew that getting an app into the store was a bit tricky, and I also knew that the forums were... heavily moderated.

But it is a little shocking to me that huge company like Apple is playing these sorts of games with paying people. That's something I'd expect from a shady backroom sort of company, not a huge corporation like Apple.
Android was probably a bad example to list first. I think there's a huge Blackberry market out there that doesn't get much discussion.
I agree with your reasoning. Only, I would be more careful about the superlatives:

Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_Doing_Business_Index#Ra...
I recently (say 4 months ago) bought a brand new Chrysler vehicle. A week ago I got a customer satisfaction survey.

From the survey I got pretty strong impression that the important thing is not the value of the car, not it's quality, but the fact that the car is made in North America and it's made by "THE CHRYSLER". I bought a piece of American Automotive industry's history and I should be happy with that.
how many users were put off by the domain (eg, couldnt find it / signed up to wrong service)? Answer: you don't know, but you can guarantee at least 1 was.
Early in the interview he announces, "If I could use two words to describe what it is that I enjoy it is that I love to be sneakily outrageous", and then a few paragraphs later he says as a matter of fact, "I usually spend energy 'turning off' the idea-generating machine just as psychics train themselves to turn off their capability".

Now that's what I call sneakily outrageous :-)
Kara Swisher:  Ignore the Twitter Buyout Rumors
Tim O'Reilly on What is Web 2.0?
Has web 2.0 made lying to users acceptable?
An example of a common lie would be to give the user the impression that some of their data is visible to others while this is not actually the case.

Another example is to give the user the impression that the site is busier than it is really is via fake profiles/data.

What other sorts of lies do web 2.0 services use?

Taking this further: suppose you don't feel bad at all about lying to your users. What sorts of lies would you use?
+1 for domainpigeon, its awesome.
If you were to pronouce this name to me (an american) and ask me to type it in, I would probably do this - cheddar.com
It sounds a bit like my management here, though it's not as severe; the dev manager picks a date out of his ass, and if we hit it, he takes credit for being a great manager, and if we don't, we get blamed for not working hard enough.
My theory:
Yes.

When things start going poorly, they cast blame.

Since they were busy casting blame rather than doing their jobs, things got worse.
I don't think there is an evidence that Apple is "playing games", they're just inexperienced at processing and delivering payments and thus are doing a bad job at it. As they say, never blame malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.
How I read Techcrunch
The frenzy of confused customers and hurried salespeople on a typical afternoon at B&H can be a little overwhelming, but this is all trumped by the dazzling selection of equipment. The place feels more "professional" than Circuit City's "consumer," and I think this is the key difference between the two. Stepping into Circuit City always felt a little gross, something like a necessary evil.
Boxee announces ‘app dev challenge’ (get coding, people)
Respectfully: says who? I'm a professional reverse engineer and heard about Fravia for the first time yesterday, on Hacker News. I know brl is also a pro, and he obviously holds Fravia in some esteem, so I don't doubt he's important --- but again, says who? You need sourcing to put something on Wikipedia.
Just reading Arrington's stuff is a good filter on TechCrunch... His stuff tends to be more important, his sources better, his writing style more fun.
Apple’s FileMaker division launches Bento personal assistant iPhone app
Yes, someone is working on this ;)

A lot of this will be presented at RailsConf tomorrow.

Ribrdb, is a googler who works on AppEngine, and has written Ruby wrappers for a a number of the pieces of the Java AppEngine API. You can find his work at http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/

I'm working on some integration & environmental tools for developing locally w/ the AppEngine called Reggae (which i won't link since i don't have anything compelling to show yet).
Redirecting Fravia page to reverse engineering is unacceptable.

He had been an expert in software reversing (which is related to software reverse engineering) and in the last 10 years devoted a considerable amount of efforts to the field Internet Information Searching.

I was a personal friend of mr Ravia, and knew him for more than 10 years.
He was able to build a considerable community of experts in the field around him. The article will definitely be improved now, after is untimely death.

Revert back the redirect.

Regards,
Marco Guardigli
Technical Director
TomWare Group
I think some citations would be in order.
Using curl to interact with Google data services
I still think the Friendfeed site does a poor job of getting across what it does and why it's useful. This readwriteweb article is better. They need some real-life examples, not just waffle about family and work groups. Can I use it instead of a blog, or is it as well as? If I can see the comments other friends are making elsewhere then do my comments on FF get pushed out to those things I'm on, e.g. twitter? That kind of thing needs to be covered, and without me watching a video or screencast.
Yup, and it happens all the time. Take credit when things go right, spread the blame when they don't.
I subscribe to 55 different feeds including Hacker News. I use Google Reader as it is the fastest, most portable option and it isn't blocked at my office. To be honest, I don't find balance. I just let it roll. I find that no matter how much time I spend on either work or "sharpening the saw" (to borrow a CH term), I will likely get the same amount of work done. Why? I really don't know, I just do.

Google Reader is nice because I can let it go and come back later and still see all the old items and skim through the headlines. If there's something I like but it is far too long, I'll star, share and email it to myself.
It really depends, if you are bootstraped, then you really don't need one.
If you want to get funded, then it depends on vc or angel.
Lots of ancesotes, tired cliches, and no insight or inside info. I felt the article was a waste of your time so don't bother.

I'll counter with this ancedote: my 1997 Ford Exbition has 175,000 miles including over 20,000 towing a double axle steel car trailer with a car on it and I haven't had a major repair yet - only the cd player and regular maitrnance. If they can build trucksso well why did the gov force them to make the cars they were bad at making via cafe laws?
To summarize: Circuit City's management ran the company as if it had contempt for its customers. B&H runs its company as if it was its own customer.
Yes, you're absolutely right. I made that assumption, and justified it by seeing that Compete's numbers matched up well for the past 12 months (Compete unfortunately only goes back 1 year, hence I went to Google Trends).
It depends on how much they value being paid on time. These developers are waiting on money they already made. If they could make as much or more on another platform, wouldn't they have switched already?