skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,

> This is pretty spot-on.

I've studiously avoided working for EA (they almost had me once, but I said no when they pulled a bait-and-switch on the project that convinced me to interview to begin with), but I've been in the industry for 20+ years, mostly working for smaller companies or doing consulting.

I think that while most people (historically) have worked for big companies, that there's a new trend (Kickstarter/crowdfunding) that is making it possible for indie developers to compete, and more importantly, to make a reasonable income while they develop the game.

Granted, a lot of game Kickstarters fail, but then a lot of the people who put them on are not as qualified as they need to be to impress the public.

>I honestly don't believe this will significantly change. I compare the game industry to the music industry.

EXACTLY! And Kickstarter is democratizing the music industry as well! Heck, throw in the movie industry -- there were 17 Kickstarter-backed films at Sundance this year [1], and musicians are using Kickstarter (and digital distribution in general) to get away from the awful music labels that almost universally eat up their profits.

The biggest problem in games/music/movies is typically that you have to make them before you can sell them. All three industries are really hit-driven. If they don't strike the right chord when the product is released, then any money invested in production is lost. So the investors get very conservative about what they'll make, and the general quality goes down as they try to reduce costs in stupid ways (80+ hours a week etc.).

Crowdfunding turns this idea around completely, in that you can invest a small amount of time and money in trying to prove that your idea has legs, and if it does, then the product can be made with the money put in by your fans. If it doesn't, then you either fix your idea or start from scratch with the next idea.

And if none of your ideas work, then it's off to a different industry. The public has spoken.

I'm a game developer with a family and a social life. It can be done. [2]

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-funded-films-hea...

[2] I have yet myself to "hit the jackpot" with anything I've made; some of my time is spent doing consulting (I'm a programmer), where I make enough money to pay for the time I spend trying to make games. My burn rate is low (even with a family) in part because I left the Bay Area because this is what I want to do, and in order to do it I can't have a huge mortgage that forces me to have a day job that I can't quit. It's all about deciding what your priorities are and then acting on them.
This starts with a false assumption. There is absolutely no justification for force feeding a non-consenting person who is aware of the consequences of their actions.
So you think I'm arguing for a rational market. I am not. Another commenter thinks that I'm ignoring the benefits of getting up and working any kind of job. I am not.

Why would you guys have such diverse opinions on what I'm advocating? Because the problem is not sufficiently stated. That's my entire point. You make one measurement and say "let's work on this directly" and you haven't said much of anything. All you have is correlation. Lots of correlation in the world. It's like the doctor taking your temperature and then applying ice packs because you have a fever. Maybe you have a cold! Maybe you just exercised! Maybe cool water would be better! And so forth. Hell, I don't know what you have, all you've given me is one data point.

If you don't define a problem well, you can't define an experiment to prove that some intervention works or doesn't work. You just have a measurement you want to be different. That may be a huge social problem, but in terms of being useful, it's not a lot of anything. I don't particularly like the fact that high schools graduate so many kids who fail a reading test, but I doubt changing the test is going to alleviate my concern.

Sure, the market is probably irrational to one degree or another. That doesn't mean that we should approach it with an equal degree of irrationality. This very well could be a multi-faceted problem only solved at the level of the individual, like most problems are. Or not. From this article, we don't know one way or another.
Show HN: Facebook command line
I'm in the UK so maybe things are somewhat different here with regards maternity but all women I have worked with who have taken time off for this have been given their job straight back once they are ready to return and are usually paid some % of their salary while they were off (I think the law mandates this).
As a blogger, I like comments. They give you immediate feedback. Things you've missed, or overlooked, or an indication that you didn't explain yourself correctly.

However, you shouldn't write expecting people to comment. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

As well, I strongly recommend deleting "bad" or impolite comments. People like to push the edges of acceptable behaviour. Being ruthless with moderation keeps the comments in line and stops your comment threads from degenerating into stupidity.

On the other hand, in my mind the best argument against comments is spam. You'll get a ton of spam, and it is a hassle to deal with. There's things you can do to mitigate this, though every anti-spam action will probably cut down on legitimate comments too. Best thing in my mind is probably close comments on posts older than a month or so.
Teachers: Will We Ever Learn?
Your anecdote doesn't really seem feasible for most people. Do you think it's reasonable that someone who has been out of work for 6 months would take on the risk and cost of flying to a tradeshow?
i can tell you the reason this happens at shitty, small developers making low budget games: designers.

i wouldn't presume to comment beyond that though.
Nu-2.1.0
I have another viewpoint and solution proposition - I think the vast majority of the reason politicians can sanely get away with completely fucking over the many for the interests of the powerful few is because the power and influence is so far disconnected from the people themselves.

I wrote a stupidly long copy paste here: http://zannyland.blogspot.com/2012/10/political-ranting-part...

On this topic though, people should have very specific direct election of one representative, per 500 - 1500 people, who would represent them in local voting and selecting higher representatives from their elected peers (ie, a local council of 10 would select one to go to the state, the state would select maybe 3 to go federal), and higher tiers of government can't impose laws not adopted by the lower branches (1/4 of local governments can't actively oppose in legislation something proposed in the state, 1/4 of states can't oppose something federal, etc).

That way, to corrupt the whole, you need to corrupt a majority of the people to elect from themselves (because in a pool of 1500, preferably with 1 2 - 4 year office term per official, so career politicians are harder to come by) corrupt politicians to work against the publics interest. Sadly, I think the modern American public would probably do just that and fuck themselves over. It would require an independently minded, free thinking populace that can understand the world to understand forces are working against them. They aren't there now, though.
CSS flexbox playground and code generation tool
Nice tool to working with CSS.
Songnotes - Hand-Crafted Guitar Tabs, Chords, and Lyrics
Isn't MtGox over as a bitcoin trading platform? I agree more generally that bitcoin could be a useful market to test out.

And your story fits exactly with a hands-off automated approach to trading. We wont ever be charting a price series in the production environment because computers don't get charts.
Frankly, you sound very similar to those homosexuals with strongly traditional religious beliefs who try to purge themselves of their "twisted" part.
To whoever owns this : If you remove the NSFW bit you will probably get at least 200% more traffic if not more. I almost shared this on Facebook, but for obvious reasons don't want my mother and younger friends seeing this content on my behalf.

---

Aside, that was really fun and I laughed quite a few times.
I'm not sure it was designed to be blog material. There's a fundamental difference between "A LIST OF 10 FUNNY CAT PICTURES" and "Internalize these 10 ideas to not suck as a designer"
In 1972 there were young teen programmers on the (then) Univ. of Illinois plasma panel graphic-based PLATO IV computer system (based on Control Data mainframes) from Univ of Illinois Laboratory High School (diagonal across the street from the computer facility). Indeed Uni-hi had two of these terminals. Springfield (IL) high students also used the system then because their high school had a terminal.

In fact in 1974 or so one student at the high school taught half the 7th grade class (12 year olds) how to program computers using PLATO.

In 1973 a then 17-year-old David Woolley (also from Uni-hi) implemented a electronic forum system on PLATO
http://thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm#origdev

Ray Ozzie was also a college student working on this system.

See also: http://platohistory.org/

If you want, you can try out PLATO at
http://cyber1.org/
Ask HN: Why haven't we built a decentralized exchange for bitcoins?
It seems to me that a lot of the latest bitcoin crash is attributed to MtGox being a centralized place and unable to handle so much trading activity.

The question of centralization has come to bite us multiple times over the last 10 years, as the internet has centralized around AOL, then Facebook, Google etc. Every time there is a single point of failure and various problems can arise from the disconnect in policies of the provider and the customers.

I wrote about this issue 2 years ago, and I believe eventually we will find better decentralized solutions to a lot of the challenges today (social networking, trading, etc.)

http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21

But if BitCoin was a tour de force for decentralization of currency, why haven't we had a prominent decentralized exchange to go along with it?
I'm looking at "Statistics about Business Size", and considering as "large businesses" those firms with 500+ employees, as that's the largest top-level bracket they track. Within the 500+ bracket, firms with 5000+ employees are (for whatever it's worth) the largest component by far.
Why is this just a game industry problem? I thought the whole valley has this problem. No?
Why don't you engage in rational behavior and get rich?
We don't ask, because we've learned from both direct & indirect experience that we won't get it (and may be punished for asking). We're good at making something from nothing, we just do it and others expect us to; thus making most needs seem a matter of wants, and wants being looked down on as waste, we learn there is little point in asking for more.

You are a good manager, sensitive to how a little money spent on a good chair can make a great difference. Alas, you are not the only one subordinates are exposed to, and takes little for others to undo the good you did.
I'm saying there are no natural monopolies that are not systemic infrastructure. The platforms you build other things upon are often natural monopolies, but those I argue should never be privatized in the first place, so I want to hear of natural monopolies that are not in that category to justify the argument that some economic system will orient itself where one player can heavily exploit its customer base without introducing ample room for competition due to prohibitively high barriers to entry / time to market (where these forces are significantly higher than the prospective returns).
According to Alex: When you show people respect, something magical happens, people respect you back and it pays off. Suddenly, they want to help you win.

This reminds me of one of my favorite rules from Stephen Covey: Seek First to Understand [1]

According to Covey (and I paraphrase), good conversations begin when one party makes a real effort to understand the other. This generally triggers a similar reaction on the part of the other person. It seems like a small change in conversational style but what happens as a result is revolutionary.

Alex says: people will "want to help you win". In my experience this seems to be the case. It's also just a more pleasant way live.

[1] https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits-habit5.php
How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its 'clutch power'?
VersionEye implements table view for dependencies
This is true of any language/coder. It's what makes cross platform benchmarking so difficult for non-trivial problems.
FullContact is hiring engineers
FlightCar (YC W13) Raises $5.5M Round to Expand and Hire
It's true that the abstraction got attention when they realized it solved the IO problem. (Before the IO type, IO in Haskell was painful.) It's quite possible it wouldn't have become a significant part of the ecosystem without the fact that it solved the IO problem neatly.

But solving the IO problem neatly is a consequence of the value of the abstraction. It solves it so well because of its useful properties.

I'd say you should take another crack at haskell sometime. But if you're learning Erlang now, stick with that for the time being. It's also got plenty to teach.
Too powerful has many facets.

Take languages like Ada. They were designed so that individual code pieces are understandable from reading them without further external context. The DoD had requirements for this.

On the opposite side is something like Lisp. You look at a simple expression inside some piece of code. Basically it can do arbitrary things you don't see from looking at the expression. You need to understand static and dynamic contexts. You can completely alter the meaning of every single expression on many levels (from macros to the Meta Object Protocol). In the Java world you would need a preprocessor for that. Lisp has this built in. Thus one can program in a language in a language in a language. Debugging and program maintenance gets a nightmare without total self discipline.

One can develop on a level without much of the self-modification - but there actually exists quite a lot software which makes use of advanced Lisp features.
Apologies: What, When, and How
What if you simply got a business name for yourself? A DBA license isn't too hard to get, and would probably look a little more professional (even if unjust) than freelance.
>HFT is a scourge on the world's economy

I'd point out that a lot of the things that are going on in HFT, are rehashes of old trading scams, and either are or would be illegal if there was any adult supervision. I was tempted to say something about the SEC being left behind the technology, and doesn't understand it. But for that to be true, and have this crap go on for so long, they either need to be complete fools, or they benefit from the status quo.

>and it's a game only the biggest and best-connected players benefit from.

That's definitely true in the case of latency arbitrage. But here again. It's the exchanges themselves that have decided that some players get an advantage over others. As an example, latency arbitrage, and a whole host of other problems could be sorted out by putting traders on exchange-hosted virtual machines. http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/05/rigged-market-latency...

If not virtual machines, there are other ways to fix these problems, but first you need to get the players to acknowledge that there is a problem.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/do-it-yourself-latency-arbi...

Nanex has done a lot of good analysis of HFT, some of which is published here:

nanex.net/FlashCrash/OngoingResearch.html
> If one person has been working with machine tools 40 hours a week while the other hasn't used machine tools for six months, hiring the first is the rational thing to do

yes, but the point is that companies would even prefer hiring people that have been doing work in a different industry recently than someone who is 6 months unemployed but with experience in the same industry.

I think it simply comes down to employers automatically assuming that you have some sort of major flaw if you've been unemployed for so long.
IPhone-Controlled Prosthetic Hands Allow Double Amputee to Perform Complex Tasks
i have a blog with no readers! it's my notes from attempts to write my PhD thesis. Heroku makes it a cinch to self-publish http://mrcactu5.herokuapp.com/blog You're no longer restricted to WordPress either since you can use MathJax CDN.

Another good source of material are e-mails... take out all the personal stuff (or leave it in). This material is convincing since I am writing to another person. 3rd parties may have something in comment with the person you are writing to. that blog has not been created yet since my 1st blog is devoted to math.

for the data scientists: blog comments are often more revealing than the article itself, since they are (usually) unfiltered. They are also a bit harder to process -- since usually don't go in the direction you had in mind.
Pen before pixel
So this is more like real-world democracy than textbook democracy.
I put a Spotify playlist together but only found 56 songs.

There were more than one version of a few songs, and I couldn't cross-reference the audio on the researcher's site. I'll do it tonight, unless anyone gets to it before I.
> I really, truly, honestly believe that above 9 hours a day for an extended period of time actually ends up hurting your development efforts.

Maybe for a lot of people, but generalizations like that are never true for everybody. Different people have different amounts of time they can work without reducing productivity.
I think that's a positive attribute of the UK system. But consider this: childbirth is a reason many women everywhere temporarily leave the workforce --- not for maternity leave, but literally surrendering their job, perhaps for a couple years. The research we're talking about today shows that after leaving the workforce for a couple years, they face an obstacle that makes it harder to find a new job, and thus more likely that they'll accept an inferior job.
Looking for work isn't an idle task, it is sales and marketing. If you do not record that fact for potential employers, questions are going to be raised. No money exchanging hands is not relevant, you were still working in a legitimate profession doing legitimate work. It is a job and should go on your resume. Likewise for home care, if that was your primary profession during that period of time.
I don't see Python as being cleaner than CoffeeScript. CS is very similar but with less punctuation. How do you figure that one?

Have you tried using CoffeeScript indented with two spaces, or using the async module? You don't always have to do continuation passing, and I feel like Node.js's way is a lot more straightforward than anything like Twisted.
The undervalued advantages of being a small startup
I can't tell if this is parody, or a parody of a parody, or a parody of a parody of a parody. The tone is very much like the original article, but as if written by a hypothetical Scumbag Steve software engineer rather than an imaginary Scumbag Steve management type.
I couldn't agree more with this. Personally I would much rather have 1 person that I have fostered a very strong relationship then 10 people who I have weak connections with. I think that quality beats out quantity just about every time. Just my opinion.
i like how Microsoft is quietly reinventing itself -- by stealing everyone else's great ideas. Nonetheless...
I have no opinion about the choice of haskell. That said, you are already making decisions about the dials if you go in with an architecture that relies on massive concurrency, functional languages, etc. You cannot for instance get the latency dial very low with that central architecture decision.

Again there is nothing wrong with that. It's just better to state it up front as an expectation and/or a goal than to assume you are going to be able to pivot easily once you have an architecture in place.
I've been finding that the messaging part is tricky. But you're right; we are still finding the perfect way for us to message what we do.
The thing is that, we've been finding that the average project on github (specially those using ruby and javascript) doesn't have a huge amount of code duplication (I'm really thinking about making a blog post about it). However we believe that there is duplicate code that:

1) You don't have time to refactor
2) The overhead of refactoring is too big

So for all these cases, we believe you should be able to live with the code you have and not make any inconsistencies.

Showing real life examples is definitely interesting.Will improve.

Thank you for this.
There's an interesting amount of money you can make as a person living in the United States where you're not making enough money to both survive and save on your own; and, you're making too much money for the government to go out of its way to help you. I've had friends in those situations over the course of my life. I believe I've even heard of situations where people would turn down raises or even turn down jobs because making money at the new level earned them less money than the government help they were getting, and the government would stop giving them any help if they passed a certain threshold.

Maybe in your situations you've been lucky; but I've seen people on really hard times that cannot readily save. I'm grateful to know they're living stably now (as far as I know, little-to-know savings).
SICP now free online too (and has been for quite some time)... http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
> I think it's fair to say Rob Pike and his team are very clever

Rob's cleverness and contributions to computer science are indisputable, but that doesn't make him a good language designer.

From what I've seen of Go, it seems like it was designed by a team that stopped looking at other programming languages in the late 90's.
DOM Streams
Google Glass Done Wrong (An Example from Real Life)
My music collection grows more than 52GB per year, and I've run databases that grow that much each day.

That's simply not a lot of data anymore.
Ask HN: Consultancies specializing in dealing with massive traffic and/or data 
Who can you hire (on contract/short term) if you have cash and your infrastructure is falling down due to a massive spike in traffic?

Which companies/contractors are specializing in this kind of work?
What bothers me most about the long term unemployed is the lack of visibility into what they have been doing during the down time. I recently got to look at two resumes, both people who had been unemployed for > 6 months, one guy has this big blank spot, the other has a narrative about what he's been doing. The active guy got in shape, he rebuilt is basement drainage system, he did odd jobs helping people with "handy" work (he was a highly paid system administrator at a New York bank before he was laid off) and he's been reading.

I am much less likely to call back the blank spot guy and much more likely to call back the active guy. What I'd like to know is, there any correlation between callbacks and intra-employment activity?
I thought this was a closely related article that got more into the actual science behind our predilection for music http://www.mcgill.ca/channels/news/why-we-buy-music-225868