skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pfft. Most big ticket games continue to be the familiar standalone titles without any in-game purchasing models. Sure, DLCs and 'season passes' and the like are more common. But the vast majority of money that a big AAA title is going to make continues to be made in the first few weeks of its release. Being profitable initially still means a great deal indeed. It's still what franchises are made, or broken upon. You have to really be drinking the kool-aid to believe that the fundamental economics of gaming have been upended by a few obnoxious trends du jour.
The thing that always got me is that even if they do exist, the candidate selection methods are, at best, a very unreliable way to identify them.

Still, it really fed into the "only hire the absolute best" mythos that has spread in countless other harmful ways. Consider the aphorism "A players hire A players, B players hire C players".

The general message of all of it has always been: "You must hire the very best, even one merely good employee will poison the well and ruin everything".

Yet hiring practices are, as I said already, imprecise... which creates all sorts of bizarre behavior in the attempt to snag the "very best".
This is really frustrating for me.

I argued up and DOWN with people about us switching to google apps for our email.

Up until recently, we were hosting our own mail on a server in our switch room.

"It's more reliable!" I would insist.

Well...it hasn't been more reliable. There has been more than one longish-term downtime that I can remember since we switched over.

When I was hosting it myself, I could give people status updates, an estimate for when it would be fixed, some kind of explanation.

Now, all I can give them is "it's broken. I don't know why, and google isn't telling anybody why."

Very frustrating, especially considering how much we pay every month for it.
> Who is the government to say that a particular review isn't authentic?

They set up a fake shop, didn't you read the article?
I'm referring specifically to the University and startup scene around here. If anything, it's the opposite – they've been absolutely cynical the last few years. I don't think you'll find a higher concentration of "rim job" jokes anywhere than UWaterloo.

Don't get me wrong, we are _rooting_ for them. A lot of us bought stock years ago and they're very generous with the city and University, but this is basically the first perceived "good news" about RIM in years.
Yes, I know that college was worth it 30 years ago, and even 15 years ago. That is not the real question. The question is will this continue to be true in the future?

I know this gets brought up all the time on here but HN is not a good indicator of college worth. One of the few (if not the only) disciplines where college might not be necessary is software and this board is primarily software. Even then looking at the difference between the definitions of software developer and a software engineer may make this moot.

That line of reasoning is irrelevant if we are in fact at an inflection point. ... Arguments based on trend lines from 30 years ago miss the heart of this subject.

Not really. Until there is a real, tangible way for the average individual to get an accepted post-secondary education, we aren't at an inflection point. And other than software development, I personally can't think of another engineering or science profession that could be replaced by self-study and/or experience.
The web designer crowd appears to favor ruby.
10x might not be a good description. It is not specified at all what is multiplied by ten. But I'm sure there are engineers that are capable of performing at levels far, far beyond the average.

No one would bat an eye if you point out the huge skill differential between a professional musician or a professional footballer and an amateur. If it could be quantified, Yngwie would be at least 500x better electric guitar player than me and Messi 9.37e8 better at football. I don't think software development skill is all that different. In fact, it would be surprising if the difference between average and elite was only 10x when it is so much larger in other disciplines.
Wow, the comments here are a story in-and-of themselves. I have to wonder if the people questioning state involvement are not astro-turfing here as well (in defense of the companies that got snared).

To make a bad pun, it's not free speech if you have to be paid for it. The state will go after those who pay or receive money for what they say.
Yes....you apparently didn't read my entire comment. "While it is in fact a difficult argument to say that a review for the fake business used in this entrapment operation is authentic, perhaps I love or don't love the name or location of the business, and give it a rating based upon that."
If you don't demand jumping on the arduino ecosystem bandwagon, and want the smallest possible microcontroller, there's always the PIC-10 series. A little 6 pin SMD chip in a six terminal'd SOT-23 outline. Years ago I built a little dev board to make one talk to a pickit programmer and all that and it works fine. Made it flash morse code and ran out of other ideas for what to do with it. I believe the 10F220 is obsolete now but its more advanced cousins are still available in the same family, just the usual "more memory, more everything". I recall SMD "ZIF" sockets are fiddly. Somewhere on my bench I still have what amounts to a "smart" LED throwie using this tech.
Kabel-salat ist gesund.
There are numerous other very good dedicated hosts that are alternatives to OVH. The pricing will be slightly higher, but OVH is dirt cheap to begin with compared to AWS. 1tb of transfer with Amazon will cost you almost as much as a nice e3 v2/v3 xeon server with 16gb to 32gb of memory and 10tb to 33tb of transfer.
This data rewards schools that reject more applicants and/or fail more students (prevent them from graduating). Because that increases the average & median of their graduates. Charter schools and private schools do the same thing to increase test scores, but when controlling for other factors they are no better than public schools.

In order words, the data shows which schools do the best job of attracting and filtering out the top students. Many folks including some faculty think that IS their job - to set a high bar and see which few students can make it over, but from my point of view that is only half of the job - the other part, the hard part, is to actually educate students - to help more students get over that high bar.
I don't understand the significance of this... Can somebody explain it to me like I'm 5 or provide a source for me to understand this more?
I can't get to box.com myself to see if it's any different, but I do know that dropbox has full access to files you store on their servers. That's an automatic red flag for a lot of companies.
> Who is the government to say that a particular review isn't authentic?

The government.

> Reviews are subjective.

That doesn't mean that they aren't fraudulent in how they portray, among other things, their provenance. (It also doesn't mean they aren't false in how they portray facts; the fact that some parts of reviews, such as ratings, are subjective doesn't mean that they don't include fact claims which are objectively true or false.)

> There is a reason that these cases were settled

Yeah, because the people on the receiving side considered that their probability of winning at trial and getting off with no penalty did not outweigh the cost of trial plus (probability of a penalty being imposed) × (the likely cost of any imposed penalty).

> had a single one of these actually been brought into a courtroom, the case would have been laughed out of it on constitutional grounds.

Were that the case, that would have been a major disincentive for the targets to settle.
Time to put Android on those phones...
What they have declared legal is obviously the least of anyone's concerns. We care what they are actually doing. I'm not sure how one could think that people are just fine with being violated as long as there is a law that permits it.
I don't know if that means intra-home streaming or inter-home streaming. Basically i'm not sure if that means Valve/Steam is doing what nVidia, AMD, MS, and onLive are doing or if they are doing something else.
Your last thought is the big point here. It may be part of more of a horizontal strategy that is initially touted as a niche move.

When we actually see it, it may be either a desktop-less distro, have Unity/GNOME or some other desktop permutation. My best estimate of what best fits a maximum impact strategy is an OS with a desktop environment pre-installed (even if hidden from casual view) or easily installable.

I have a feeling that we may look back at this seemingly minor product announcement as a significant stepping stone.
384 Pages of CSS
WinSCP Bug on Windows?
Maybe the power cover is solid.

Power Cover
Extend the battery life of your Surface. Click in Power Cover and get that extra time you need to make it through that last meeting or the rest of the flight. It’s like a keyboard and battery in one.
you should really consider that this is very clearly a "snapshot" in time. There is a broad gulf in first-five-year earning potential between someone who got their college degree 30 years ago, versus someone who got their college degree 5 years ago; so already those two cohorts are going to see dramatically different life outcomes.
Bet it will affect less people than killing g-reader affected.
Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor (2011)
I'm of two minds about it. It doesn't seem like a solid legal argument for the state to make on a criminal-law basis -- who's to say that bogus reviews aren't "free speech?" -- and I don't see how they have standing to bring civil actions. Perhaps an attorney could comment to fill in some of the many blanks left by the NYT article?

The other side of the coin is that from the perspective of the victimized businesses, fake reviews are equivalent to any other form of organized crime. Same effect, in that the business (metaphorically) burns down if you don't pay off any of the numerous entitles laying claim to your customers' mindshare... entities among whom Yelp itself is the least shady. There's got to be some way to stop this behavior before we all live and work under the online version of the Russian mafia.
> I now resign myself from speaking to Apple people

I'm actually an ex-googler and have been using Android as my daily carry for over a year. Not sure what this discussion has anything to do with possibly being a member of some nebulous "Apple people" group.
If you are referring to Google by "Big Boys", some of their teams are doing trial period work. My friend got hired in Google after three trial days.
GTA:V Bundled Editions sold quite nicely over the past week. Seems like bundling your own console with your own game just became a reality.

Valve just got every major publisher to take a serious look at what they are doing.
OVH is specialized in deployment tho, there is NO "deployment BS". You get the machines nearly instantly. It doesn't one-click scale / unscale like AWS since you need to go purchase more machines and do the deploy, but the machines themselves are available as soon as you pay them.
Interesting point against recurring revenue for some products: We increased overall sales by charging a fixed price for permanent access vs. recurring billing. The lifetime value of the customer turned out to be less in the recurring model. It took us about 2 years to discover this. Just something to keep an eye on.
Most games currently at Steam have no problems running at almost any modern Linux distro.
"[1] In my opinion, privacy is obsolete in a world where people voluntarily give over to third parties every detail about their lives, but reasonable minds can differ on that point."

Speaking of straw men...ha.

While your assertion here may be true, the world you describe (in which people - as in all nearly all of them - hand over EVERY detail) is not the world we live in. Not even close. You're knocking down a figment of your own imagination. In other words? Yup, a straw man.

Meanwhile, back in reality, lots of people have plenty to hide and do their best to keep their secrets. And this isn't just criminal activity. It's also their private feelings, impolitic thoughts, confidential business plans, romantic intentions, parameters of negotiating positions, health concerns, etc. Very, very obviously, they do not share "every detail."

To the extent that indiscriminate openness can be used against people, there are always going to be people who want more of it. For these assholes, the evaporation of privacy lowers the cost of abusing others while making the abuse itself far more profitable and / or intimidating. And obviously, there are a lot of businesses and government agencies that would love to see privacy norms, laws, and technical barriers rolled waaaay back. To the degree there's been natural erosion, they've seen how profitable and efficient this erosion can be. Of course they want moar, Moar, MOAR! Power and profit depends on nothing less!

And one of their favorite ways of getting it is by insisting that privacy is already dead, that protecting its ghost is a fool's errand, so honestly, why not give up already? Just submit! Why won't you submit?
The NYT article shouldn't say "fake" but "fraudulent", as that's the crux of the issue.

I can put up a fake review, but if it's with the intent to harm, it's fraudulent.

Now what do we do about fake reviews that are puff pieces intended to goose ratings?
Do you believe chess Grand Masters exist? They're blind to invalid moves, they don't even see strategically penalizing moves.

"10x engineer" sounds like a requirement a recruiter would put in a boring corporate job summary. Meh.
Yeah, I would agree. Also Spolsky has some pretty interesting data regarding the 10x programmer. It's students, not professionals but it does indicate that (surprise, surprise) things are distributed and it's smeared out quite a bit.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
We've used master/master shards in the past and they've been very difficult to manage. I'm not fully aware of Gizzard's capabilities so I guess the answer is no, because we weren't aware of it.

We also needed something that would speed up writes much more than just 2x (and the way ndbcluster does writes was the key).
You are right.

An unrelated query: does anyone know of companies (like Streak.com) using app engine datastore in production? We are newbie programmers, and developing our app on app engine (because it was easy to learn) - but it feels a bit lonely sometimes :)
They set up a straw man so of course any reviews, positive or negative, are going to be bogus.

But suppose you open a legitimate yogurt shop in Brooklyn, and the competing yogurt shop down the street hires one of those shady Bangladeshi outfits to post a bunch of positive reviews of your business, then rats you out to the AG. The AG is going to come down on you pretty hard, and you're fined, and you're out of business. Mission accomplished.

In other words, be careful what you wish for. This is not an enforceable kind of law.

New York spends a lot of time and money on rather esoteric cases like this when there's plenty of good old fashioned street crimes they could be putting their resources into instead: muggings, gang-related activities, car theft, things that everyone living and working in NYC has to deal with every day of the year.
Cool, mind if I photograph up your wife's skirt and post it online? Actually nevermind, I don't even need your permission.
College is probably worth it but that's not what this graph is really showing. It really should be entitled 'Is Private College Worth It?' because it appears that the only significant cost:wage value is to 'Private Engineering' and even then arguments could be made that state engineering is good enough.
> I find it very worrisome that the government views online anonymous postings on a private website as advertisement to be enforced by public agencies.

Why? I mean, in which of the cases where they were specifically treated as "advertisement" were the facts of case such that the postings should not have been viewed as an advertisement?

Why, particularly, would any of these facts make an advertisement any less an advertisement, or any less subject to any regulation that applies to advertisement generally?

1. The fact that the source is concealed ("anonymous postings")

2. The fact that it is published via a privately owned channel ("private")

3. The fact that it is published on the web ("website")
When the company gets big, the best deal is.. surprise.. running your own DC with an AWS-like system for the devs.
Much cheaper, also much faster..

Of course, using old school deployment is a mistake (slow, pisses off devs, etc.)
Personally, I'd love to see a simpler setup process. Maybe allow using just MongoDB instead of both Redis and MongoDB?

It was also a bit annoying (to me) that at the beginning of installing from source it seemed possible to install somewhere other than $HOME but the install.sh scripts had so many references to $HOME I decided it wasnt worth changing them all.
If John Carmack is a 10x programmer, then trying to find 10x people for your organization is an absolute lost cause unless you're willing to shift your entire organization to be what he wants to do. Because there's only one Carmack and he does whatever the fuck he feels like.
This assumes the meaning of a degree is knowledge, or at least input filtering to only accept the worthy.

From experience, its credentialism, a title of nobility. Oh you are an experienced neurosurgeon? Oh from Russia you say? Well, here's a broom, good luck.

Good Luck practicing law, medicine, accounting, becoming a P.E., pretty much anything but IT/CS work with a foreign degree, and you don't even need any degree for IT work.
So hard to parse this headline...
Blackberry in $4.7bn takeover deal with Fairfax
Very interesting. I've gotten a decent number of requests for a la carte purchases on my site, so I'm strongly considering doing it. (It's a big change, though, which is why I've held off.) Can you say more? I'm particularly interested in how you set your prices, whether you kept the recurring model alongside the permanent model, and how you saw customer behavior change. Thanks!
Putin on a Ritz[1] comes to mind

[1]http://putintheritzon.ytmnd.com/
$350,000 divided by 19, that is more embarrassing to the NY Attorney General than the companies named.

On the other hand the FTC has oversight on this, and there are already existing rules in place. These companies are hardly limited in their exposure or liability from one side.

The FTC has pretty wide purview as to what it wants to do, and the powers that go with it. They can take all of your money, bar you from life from a particular industry,and if you pretend you are broke when your not put you in jail.

As far as US case law goes, yes the government can go after you for making up stuff about a commercial action.
What qualifies as a "New" operating system? This is slightly modified Linux, with a slightly modified UI. Is that really considered new? How about calling it a new Linux variant rather than a new Operating System.
Did you say Android Apps? Those are programmed in Java (natively).
Bring your talents to the table
Almost edible employment ad from D.Labs, Slovenia
What's customer service like in a situation like that, given that you're paying for it?
True, but honestly the 10x thing is only true because so many in the field are so bad that's it's not hard to do 10x more than they do. There are many copy/paste example and modify type programmers that can bang out work consistently yet do so very slowly and build very hard to maintain systems. Programmers who use virtually no abstraction and think it's fine to open a connection to the database and run some sql to get a result set and slap it on the screen and never once realize every method shouldn't duplicate the code to connect to the database and run some sql.
It's certainly true that they ain't no such thing as a free launch.
exactly. good engineers do less, not more.
Jarvis Demo - Control Smart Homes by talking to your phone
Great Demo of Jarvis. A central, smart and voice based smart home controller.
BlackBerry plans to go private
Cruelty Leaks
Why Record iPhone Sales Might be Rotten for Apple
Yep. I'm hardly a 10x engineer but time and time again people tell me I'm the only one to solve basic questions.

As one person who hired me said: there are an awful lot of people who want to have a fat programmer salary but very few who can tell me what design patterns are good for.

Basically once you get past the recruiters there's very little competent competition.
If one route is disrupted, traffic might be re-routed and overwhelm another route?
PHP Tutorial - Retrieving Contents From Website Feed via SimplePie
http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/college-rankings-onl...
99% of adult sites run on single servers using out of date PHP/MySQL scripts. Sites like RedTube, etc use newer technology, like at Confoo a dev for YouPorn talked about their stack and they use Symfony, Varnish and Nginx.
Don’t limit your search to candidates in your area. This is especially true if you’re in the bay area; lots of people want to move here.

At first I thought I misread this paragraph, because I'm so used to people advocating remote hires at this point. I was expecting it to say "Don’t limit your search...lots of people don't want to move here."
Having Uncomfortable Conversations About Money
The physics of human sperm vs. the physics of the sperm whale
As I put it elsewhere, there's not $4.7B of meat on the corpse. And that seems against the grain of a growth-oriented fund. That's the sort of thing that old-school junk bond funds would do to buy up and part out factories, inventory, and pension funds.

The only justifications I can think of for buying Blackberry are a: to rebuild them, b: to integrate their good tech into an existing system (a good play for an also-ran smart phone that wants more market share and is willing to gamble for Blackberry's old, loyal enterprise market), c: to deliberately put them out of business (a good play for a successful smart phone to either go after the vacuum created by their death, or prevent competitors from exercising plan B).
The Canadian press has been beating Blackberry up since the first round of delays leading up to the BB10 release. The Globe and Mail, CBC, National Post and The Star have all turned on them, and continue to be pessimistic while covering today's news.

There is however some delusion among some Canadians that good vibes and loyal patronage can keep BB afloat.
I pull in anywhere from $400-$600 in adsense off my blog, it's not exactly passive because I have to contribute content to it. But I originally only put AS on there to cover hosting costs (and other servers for dev, etc) but now it's starting to get closer to "income".

I'm still putting it into things like Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, Parallellas etc for stuff to write about on the blog. I use that money to try out other services as well, it's nowhere near what I'd call a "business" at this point.
How to Make Money Playing Daily Fantasy Sports
link to said documents?
Cut Bad Facebook Ads in Half
My wife is an economist and one of her biggest pet peeves is that the idea that a child "must" get a college education has had a dramatic impact on how we perceive trade school or apprenticeship educations.

Not everybody needs college.
If I had a console with sane controls and games that fully support those controls (e.g. mouse / keyboard for first person games), I'd totally dig replacing my gaming PC with a console. Unifying your gaming PC with your living room hardware gives you a nice advantage in that you can maximize your budget for a nice HD TV / HiFi sound setup instead of buying all that stuff twice.
Snowden walks the streets of Russia in full disguise, says WSJ.