skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A negative way in what sense? Because you don't write good? ;) Or because someone disagrees with the thoughts and feelings you express?

In the former case, writing (more) often will help you improve your writing skills. The more often you do something, the better you get at it. However, you might want to keep these "exercises" private until your writing improves.

In the latter case, as long as you're being honest, thoughtful, and respectful (and not intentionally controversial or offensive) with the views you express in your writing, I'm not sure how it would come back to you in a truly (undeservedly) negative way. But, if you've lost your rose-colored glasses and are still concerned, write anonymously.
Another day, another panspermia article. So transistor density and publication frequency follow a very strict exponential rule and that rule can in turn be used to trace the time elapsed to their origins. Most systems though don't follow such a rule, and if they do they generally don't at the extremes of the graph (near the beginning and after a long time).

That said, the estimated 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years for life to evolve is at least within an order of magnitude correct, which makes it pretty cool. Also, we don't know how long abiogenesis takes and through which stages (presumably: many) the whole thing has to go until even the most basic building blocks as we know them today are set up. So you can add X billion years on top of that estimate while you're at it.

Does that prove anything? Absolutely not. But even without evoking the tiring panspermia hypothesis this result is interesting, because the result is not completely off. It means that, within a certain period at least, the complexity of life does follow this exponential rule. Clearly, the formula needs to be tuned (based on evidence, not on open-mouth extraterrestrial finger-pointing), but it's a great start. I would venture that a more detailed genetic analysis of relatively recent organisms might result in a curve that is much more accurate.

Assuming something will always double within a certain interval is not detailed enough as a model for this.
I think the problem is perception. We're so used to coloured sound that without over exaggerated bass and treble, higher quality headphones feel very flat. I will admit myself, that I much prefer my consumer speakers (Cambridge Soundworks Air Minx 200) to my friend's studio monitor speakers (KRK Rokits I think) - despite being well aware that they're no doubt coloured.
I stopped reading at: "Ironically, in starting a video game studio to fight these issues and prove that games can be made with sane schedules, Boucher-Vidal has had to put off getting married and starting a family. “Luckily, my girlfriend is incredibly supportive,” he said."

Your actions show your real priorities. How can he really mean what he's trying to do if he doesn't live it himself?

I imagine this article gives me a very limited caricature of what's happening, but I'm busy and will go read something else now.
This is very helpful from a technical angle. I'm interested in the full cost-benefit analysis. Any thoughts there?
Since this is obviously a marketing piece from MS, I'll attack the delivery and not the substance (since the substance is propaganda anyways)...

But are we back in the year 2000? That header image is 936kb! And for what purpose -- to show that they're in-tune with the over-saturated photo hipsters? Seriously, the image doesn't even lend anything to the article; looks like just a generic shot of some random 'burb. I see no signs of high-tech or futurism represented. What...the.....they have another gigantic, completely useless image on each of the next 2 pages as well?

And this horrid navigation thing that slowly slides in at the bottom? It doesn't even queue (if you scroll up/down rapidly a few times the nav bar will bounce up & down several times in succession).

This might be the worst website I've seen all year.
The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing.

This has never been the case. Large corporations do not employ the majority of people.
Free will (by any meaningful definition) cannot exist
The Declaration of Independence has no legal significance. It is just a letter, and the prose is intended to be poetic (to justify violent revolution) rather than functional.

Your comment about the U.S. not existing shows a misunderstanding of the nature of the Constitution. The Constitution is essentially a contract outlining the delegation of powers to the federal government from the sovereign state governments. The rights therein were viewed as already operative, but not because they were viewed as rights intrinsic to humanity, but because they were rights already enjoyed by citizens of the several states. When the Constitution talks about "people" it is not talking about "people in general." It is talking about "the people"--the body politic of the several states which combined to form the union. Those are the people who have rights under the Constitution.
[snip] Nevermind, I overlooked the "package of 10" explaining the price difference. Thanks, realo.
> Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this.

Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job (or market, if you're starting a business) you can find that provides a product that your customers simply can't live without. You just don't want to be selling an elastic product, and you don't want to be in an industry where there's supply-side competition from people who are doing the work purely because they enjoy it.

Healthcare is especially good in this respect. People will (quite literally) die without your product, and the payer is just about as far from the consumer as you can get, which makes demand highly inelastic. Your business isn't profitable? No worries, just double your prices. What are they going to do, stop paying you? And how much competition are you going to get (as a worker) when the work can't be outsourced and you can't hire a kid out of high school to do the work based on his GitHub profile?
You just called it what it is. Criminal extortion, and it would also be sabotage, to use a frequency band to attack another party running on it.

That doesn't magically become legal. For the same reasons you could take someone using "your" frequency right now to court, you could take someone using the frequencies you do only for the purposes of attacking the signal quality on the same basis.

And no, opening up spectrum doesn't suddenly mean everyone and their mom is buying radios and spamming electromagnetic radiation, for the same reason people don't do it today, because they can be targeted for sabotage if they aren't productively using their radio usage.
I've seen this in a friend who has worked with some larger gaming companies through the years. When he first told me in high school that he wanted to make video games, I was skeptical. I had read many reports on the status of the games industry; the long hours, the high stress, the lack of respect from leadership. But I supported him.

Through the next few years, he got job offers right out of college from some larger studios. Eventually he picked a small, local studio that went bankrupt without releasing a single game. Apparently that took him by surprise, and he vowed he'd never be in that situation again. He took a job at a top-five company (where he was later laid off, proving some irony). He then went to another top-five, and he complained about everything I worried about for him.

When I asked him why he put up with this, why he didn't take his talents elsewhere, his response was romantic. He liked the games coming from these studios, and had always wanted to be a part of it. He liked the games from Maxis, and wanted to be where they were. He liked the games from Blizzard and wanted to be where they were. It didn't matter what the working conditions were, he was there.

It's taken him a few years to get over the romantic idea of working for the company whose games raised him as a child. It's much different on the inside, and it takes a while for that to sink in. I can't speak for the entire industry, but that was his perspective as I've seen looking through the small gap his life has left me peek through.
Very interesting overview. I wonder how the sensors work... can they detect a broken pipe at a specific location? The article also kept referring to "equipment"... how granular does that get? Is an entire heating system one piece of "equipment", or can they get down to the component level?

Still, very cool. I know we trivialize dealing with lots of data, but still, this is a huge amount of information they have to automatically receive, triage, prioritize, and possibly even act upon. Impressive.
Probably a variation of "better to be thought a fool than to open up your mouth and remove all doubt". In this case you say something which is better than nothing.

In the case of a guy laid off from a factory job better to say you have been spending the time helping a friend doing handyman work then that you are at home watching TV, doing nothing, or just sending out resumes getting rejected. Even better if you imply that you liked the work and were making money. It's all in the story.

Even the BS shows at least you are attempting and know the downside of not having anything. You get a few points for that in my book.
I'm a long-time generalist with what you would call broad experience. I've flirted with overwork, burnout, and social gaming, though not all at the same time.

My perspective is that who you're working with and how you're working is a lot more important for day-to-day happiness and job satisfaction than the specifics of what you're working on.
Save Banned AppGratis (Landing Page)
This project is not HFT. It does not use a full book data feed. Really even the feeds that come from the exchanges are not precisely timestamped enough and HFT firms stamp their own . The data is not huge although trading system need to be able to deal with large spikes in the rate of events. Usually now people are using 10G/40G/Infinibad as a connect to the matching engine.
The app is in early stage, so any feedback is greatly appreciated, thanks !
They also came with a SIM card with £5 credit, on Orange. So in the UK, it's actually cheaper to buy one of these and do Orange Wednesdays if you and your friend plan to go to the cinema twice ever, than to buy full price tickets.
that's redmond in the foreground and seattle in the background
I can absolutely vouch for this.

After a 6 month contract gig, the employer told me they were going to bring me on full-time. I stopped interviewing thinking I had a full-time spot. They told me two weeks before the end of the contract they didn't have anything else for me and I was cut at the beginning of January after our project ended.

I did find a job with a small company, but after three days, realized they were looking for a Javascript developer, not a front-end developer. From then on, I was out of work for almost four months. Luckily, I picked up a freelance project which filled the gap during the time I wasn't technically "working".

On my resume, I put it was a private freelance project that lasted the time I was unemployed (four months). Since it was relevant to my work history, nobody asks about it, or just wants me to go over what we did and the technologies we used.

The interesting thing is when recruiters see "freelance" projects they instantly equate it with being unemployed. While the actual HR people at the companies I interviewed with never made the same connection. To them, work is work as long as its relevant to your career.
Eclipse was just an example. There is going to be a niche for massive projects. There's also going to be a niche for projects that live for a very, very long time and thus are touched by a massive number of programmers... which presents many of the same problems as a massive project.

Code reuse is also problematic without structure. C++ has this problem to some extent, which is why the C++ library ecosystem is so fragmented. I typically avoid using most C++ libraries, preferring C++ as high-level glue with C underneath. STL is used because it's standardized, and maybe boost, but that's it. Every C++ library has a different style, so if you use them your code ends up looking like crap... mixed metaphors everywhere. C++ isn't powerful in the same way as LISP, but it is pretty darn powerful in its own way. It lets you do things umpty-different ways, which is bad sometimes.

Common styles and idioms are very useful when you want to connect things to each other.

Ruby and NodeJS have solved this problem by having a certain amount of community standardization around idioms-- convention over configuration basically. (Or in this case convention over language restriction.) Perhaps that's one thing that could help LISP-- an attitude of "yeah, you can do it that way, but that's not standard so nobody will use your code if you do." I know it would really help the C++ ecosystem.
Where US Tax Money Goes (14 charts)
Techniques for smooth infinite scrolling in HTML5
This has nothing to do with gaming in particular. But experience has taught me something. Working more hours != producing more. Daily productivity is a finite resource. You have a choice, you can spread it out over the whole day, or you can try to cram it in 8 hours. Its a lot easier to do all day long. Cramming it in 8 hours is harder. So when I go to work, and look at these family guys who come in at 9 and leave at 5. They get my respect and my jealously, not because i want to work less hours. But rather because I'm not capable of starting productivity at 9am. Its a completely counter intuitive concept, the idea of diminishing returns is hard to grasp as a kid.
Yes, but the concurrency has been shifted to the two disruptors at either end of the business process logic. And I suspect the business logic is fairly simple and lends itself to the straight through solution.
If you want to react to a news event (say), you have to somehow send a signal to the feed requesting recent history (last 20 minutes say), have something waiting to look at it, crunch the numbers when they arrive to see if somethings up, then interupt the existing trade decision/risk management schedule with a potentially better trade. Complexity increases quickly and concurrency helps do all of that at high speed.
Yes, but does it add anything to the piece?
I think it's going to take real design effort if we expect people to reuse these devices. I like your idea of the service helping you repurpose gadgets, or maybe even a deposit on your gadget -- send it in when you are done with it to recycle its rare components.

If a digital device only costs a couple of bucks, and a better/faster/cheaper one comes available a year later, the old one is going to get tossed. How many people repurposed their 2005 iPods, and those cost real money?

Culturally we are accustomed to just tossing aside the old, particularly with electronics. We're going to need significant cultural/technical/legal/design shifts to keep up with these changes. And quickly!
SVN support would be great. We run an ops consultancy business, I can think of a few customers who could really do with this tool, but all of them use svn.

I suspect this isn't a coincidence.
Why does America regulate the trade in raisins?
The unfortunate truth is that tracking and individual targeting improves CTR. Advertisers pay for clicks. Until someone comes up with a more profitable metric, they're not going to stop tracking.
Is it just me or is this article a bit condescending? This makes it seem like software engineers are exotic creatures that normal people require a guide like this to work with. What if someone made "How to work with PMs" or better yet "How to work with women"? I feel like one of the core problems between PM<->Eng is that both sides stereotype each other, this just perpetuates that.

The rules in the afterward make sense but if you need a guide on the internet to get you to do those things, I'm not sure I want you to become a great PM in the first place. The problems here seem to be more fundamental, like: Don't be a psychopath. I think the rest of the rules should follow naturally.

Has the profession of PM become so bad that we need "don't be a psychopath" posts?
Part of the theory is that the first people to be fired at a company are among the least productive or least competent. Therefore, the longer someone has been unemployed, the less competent they are.
A key factor will be disassociating highly personal information & configuration from the hardware. One subversive marketing point of the iPad/iPhone is how it ties so tight to a single user. With something disposable, cloud integration will become important, making the hardware fungible to the user.
Pain Rays & Robot Swarms: Radical New War Games the DOD Plays
You should put links to your blog and startup in your bio/about section of HN.
I've consulted in NYC design shops where most of the designs and documentation were being done by interns. They were available 24/7 and extremely bright; the business couldn't have gotten anything out without them. The full time people and owners were paid way more than necessary all while the interns were unpaid or lowpaid.
>>The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty much anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or just making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely related to the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion. There's nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something with it.

Ideally, yes. In reality, it's easier said than done.

1. Most unemployed people need a way to pay their bills. This is not possible if you're dicking around with open source projects or volunteer work. Starting a business requires a certain amount of capital. And "making stuff to sell on Etsy" works only for a tiny minority of people who have the creative skills to make cool stuff.

2. When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job. You should get up at 8am and look for jobs, make a list, take a lunch break, then spend the afternoon tailoring your resume for those jobs. Then you can get off at 5pm or whatever and do other things. What most people do however is that they do other things during the day, and then in the evenings they sit in front of their computers with Monster.com open and browse job openings, and maybe send out a few resumes. Which doesn't work of course.

Basically, the only people who can afford to work on something meaningful while unemployed are those who have a significant amount of money saved up. In today's economy, most people who are at risk of unemployment don't.
Disassembly and re-usability or recyclability are at odds with the characteristics we have come to expect- small, compact, lightweight, low power...
I don't understand, if there's no ownership of the spectrum, then on what basis would the user be able to take the attacker to court? What if the attacker says he just really enjoys spamming high-powered electromagnetic hash, but would be willing to give up his hobby for the right price?
I've been making games for nearly 15 years now. I am an early 30s white man. I am good at what I do, and can work anywhere I want, at this point in my career. I'm happily married, though we don't have (nor want) kids.

I think the article is somewhat accurate, but I think it also pays short shrift to the improvements that are happening in games.

One of the big things I've noticed in recent years is the amount of people who enter games who are aware of the quality of life issues, and practice work to rule more often than not. It puts pressure on managers to learn to schedule properly, and it puts pressure on directors to learn when to cut.

On top of that, there are a lot of studios that lean older in terms of age. Ubisoft Montreal is a good example of this; I couldn't tell you what the average age is, but I know that it's just as likely someone has a kid at home as not, and that also puts a lot of pressure to run things right.

Also a lot of the managers these days have kids at home that they want to see, so if nothing else, they are improving their methods for selfish reasons.

There's still a long way to go in games, but the game industry today isn't anything like what it was in 2000. It has been nearly a decade since I was expected to pull an all-nighter, for one. It's been nearly that since I was expected to work both a saturday AND a sunday.

These days it's not impossible to find developers who believe in quality of life. But what is very very possible is to find a place to work where it won't be held against you that you have a family at home, and I think that's largely what this article is missing.

That recent photo eulogy of Lucas Arts talked about things that I literally have not seen since before 2005; it's not shocking that a studio which would expect people to miss funerals and prioritize work over relationships would fail to put out games of quality.

The game industry still has far to go, there's no doubt about it. But if you want to have a family, there are large swaths of the game industry these days who are perfectly willing to accommodate you without complaint.
If you are unemployed, please read Ask The Headhunter.
Exploring iOS Crash Reports
Yeah, I wouldn't look at someone with big-game-studio experience as an inferior, just perhaps a little naive and might need a little calibration as to what a sustainable work pace actually looks like.
I liked this comment on the article. This is the kind of feeling I had while reading it:

"Lets take 5 data points and project backwards 3x the range of the observed data. Science! Regression!! There's no way this could be wrong, right?"
Thanks Dave.

I have 2 more questions:
1. A student who was offered a paid internship just asked if there is any vacation.
My first reaction was "WTF?". Is it even appropriate to ask for vacation when you will only be working for 3 months?
2. On my job postings, I usually ask the candidate to answer 3 questions when they apply. However, more often than not, most candidates don't submit the required answers. Should I automatically discard those resumes?
The reason spreads have come down is mostly due to better information on the part of the traders. Electronic markets made this possible.
The term 'scripting language' is useless. If you are getting hung up on that term then you are missing the point.
>> It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed.

Hiring them to do what? The government not only has to hire people it doesn't need, but it has to hire from the 'unwanted' pile that private employers have already selected the best from?

>> Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed.

What happens after a year, when the tax credit expires for that newly hired person, and another unemployed person comes along and applies for that job? Fire the first guy and hire the new guy so you can get that tax credit for another year?
I can't recommend working with the LMAX library enough if you are interested in low latency in the JVM. Lots of people have driven to the same/similar place but LMAX was the first to just let everyone see it.
A huge chunk of that team size is artists, level designers, testing, audio, and studio overhead. Not that there aren't lots of programmers too, especially in a game with lots of scripted levels and separate systems. But it isn't like it's a team of 400 programmers.

Also, while the engines do most of the visual stuff, which was what a lot of the '90s-era tech-talk revolved around, they do nothing to implement your gameplay.

Here's the credits for one of those big-team games, as an example (81 or so engineers/scripters, but only a fraction of the total team size): http://www.mobygames.com/game/xbox360/call-of-duty-black-ops...