skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, from my experience, I don't have any particular experience, insight, or ability to screw people over. Seriously, if you take a napkin and say 50/50 on the napkin, it'll hold up in court. But I'm a Democrat, so I'm not evil. :)

I tried for months to try to find a technical co-founder and couldn't. I gave up and hired a consulting firm to build the initial version of Dawdle because I wanted to get started now now now. They did a fine job, but it would have been much more cost efficient - and we could have iterated much sooner - if I had been able to find a technical co-founder.

Look, I get that hackers have people with supposedly great ideas all the time, but there are hundreds of people with actual insight and seed capital who would kill to find someone they could trust. But both sides don't trust each other - hackers are scared of getting screwed over (which happens, but rarely) and biz types are scared the hacker will walk away (what usually happens; hackers have actual skills that people will pay large sums of cash money for, even in a downturn).

How to solve? Seriously, best way is to put it in your HN profile. "Looking for a biz co-founder; looking for a tech co-founder". The signal/noise ratio is high enough and any idiot can read my comments/posts to realize I'm worth an e-mail conversation. People like Dan (fallentimes) and others are here, too.
Ask HN: When to cut your losses and rewrite with a framework?
I've invested four and a half years in coding my own game engine specifically tailored to the niche genre I'm writing (3D point & click adventure games). It's still pretty buggy and doesn't have many bells and whistles, and it's Windows only with very limited prospects for porting to other platforms. On the other hand, it's certainly usable and I am able to make progress on actually scripting out my game content with it, and it is obviously very focussed on my precise needs.

How do you make the call on whether to persevere with your own reinvented wheel and invest the effort required to debug it, or whether to jump ship and use someone else's fully-featured wheel that's tried and tested by hundreds of thousands of users?

I don't think there's any doubt in my mind that if I were to start from scratch today I'd go with a 3rd party game engine (maybe something like Unity or Torque 3D - good but affordable).

(P.S. You can consider this related to today's Coding Horror blog post if you like, but I've been thinking of this independently)
Mono comes from the same makes-Linux-slow team as the people who "gifted" us with Gnome. Who are these guys really working for?
My most recent home cable box (a Moto from Cox) will only output 720p to our TV via HDMI - component cables force to 480p, FWIW.
this just occurred to me two days ago. i realized that games became a consumable.
Internet free ride soon over
Just curious: Why was mzscheme chosen to implement Arc rather than some other Scheme implementation?
SMB 3 had to have been the easiest game in the world to beat. How could he not beat it? Why is he talking as if he's an expert?

At any rate, it's pretty clear that games have approached reality through time, simply because they can, and since reality is uniform, games have become uniform. Look at the old Atari games, and it's like a gallery of bad LSD trips.

http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/atari2600.htm
Is this complaint really specific to the ps3/xbox360/wii generation? I seem to remember people whining about this back when Quake 1 came out...
Creating a startup that uses AWS (or other similar services) is a (very) good idea. Creating startup to improve AWS infrastructure may be a good idea because - due to fast pace innovation on the Amazon side - one can be steamrolled.
That would be very interesting. I was thinking about this problem for a while, and would like to participate.

What I like in rubygems is that (1) it works on the 3 major OSes, (2) it compiles code for me, if the stars are aligned in the right way, and (3) there is an open central repository.

Achieving the first 2 out of 3 would rock. 3 could happen later.
Stupid idea: Charging $100 a year for an e-mail newsletter
It sounds crazy but I've seen this in action. At my last job they brought in a guy who was unmitigated disaster for a technical leadership position.

In short, he was the most arrogant, buzz-word filled SOB I ever had the displeasure of meeting,

After he finally got booted when people realized he didn't know a damn thing about technology I flat out asked the VP of engineering: "What did you ever see in him?".

He said: "You know, you're going to think I'm crazy, but he was exactly the same in the interview as he was around here daily, and I really thought that cockiness would mean he would take the lead on issues and be able to guide the younger guys".

So remember that kids, if you want to be seen as leadership material, thoughtfulness and pensiveness are not the way to go about it.

Just look at CTOs at companies you respect for further proof and see how many timid figures you find.
I think the fundamental question is: "will having your own game engine give you a decided advantage by making your game unique in some way?"

Will your game be more memorable, enjoyable, etc because of your engine? I'd doubt it, since that will most likely come from your game itself (the rules, balance, game play, etc).

As humans we are inherently programmed to not be able to cut our losses very effectively. We don't want to walk away from an investment even though we know deep down inside that it's the right thing to do. In the financial trading world, this is often quoted as one of the #1 things that makes a trader "good" vs "bad". Can they identify a bad situation quickly and cut their losses so they can focus on the next winner.

In my opinion, the very same could be said for an entrepreneur. Some of the hardest decisions we have to make when running a company have to do with what NOT to do. When to stop a failed effort, regroup, and carry on. If you follow the path far enough you'll see very clear parallels between "cutting your losses" and other "startup" advice like: adapt, don't be afraid to fail fast, more downs than ups, etc etc etc.

So, back to your situation. You have, IMO, answered your question already. You note that your engine is not as good as commercial engines and that there are commercial engines out there within your reach. You also note that it will take away time and energy from your ultimate goal which is to release a game. Finally, you note that if you were to make this decision today (without the fundamental human urge to not walk away from the invested time and energy) that you'd pick the commercial engine.

Without more detail, I'd suggest you go with a third party engine so you can focus on the game and not the framework. Good luck!
Here's some thoughts. I can't say yes or no for you, but I hope these questions help you focus the issue more.

1) Does your engine offer something over these other frameworks that other people might find useful if you finish it? If so, I think you should finish it. But more importantly...

2) Are you more interested in producing your game, or creating your own gaming framework? And what do you stand to gain from each? (Even if it's just satisfaction and learning).

3) How much work do you have left to accomplish both? How does that compare to the work of starting over with a 3rd party framework?
Here's a summary.

"I was 10 years old in 1998 and the Super Nintendo was the funnest evah."
The article is not that bad, compared to the last 5 or so from Jeff.

Atleast what he is saying is correct this time. And this time the article is HN worthy IMHO.
Simon & Schuster Signs E-Books Deal (with Scribd)
Trade-mark Owners - Prevent yours from Being Registered as Usernames on Facebook
I don't mean to piggyback but I find myself in a similar position as the origin-poster and would love to chat with either of you- rogercosseboom@gmail.com
You're not thinking on the margin. He isn't claiming he would achieve nothing without drugs -- just that drugs help him to achieve.
Interesting that the palette of the original Quake game was browns and reds, also for technical reasons, but different ones.
Did anyone talk to you about parasite therapy: http://www.webmd.com/ibd-crohns-disease/news/20040519/wormy-...
...and the author's point in using both? That he lives in Iceland, and is trying to straddle the fence?
Compare Sony Ericsson W715 And Sony Ericsson T303
This photorealism makes new games very boring artistic-wise.

Old games with hand-drawn graphic had some artistic value in them, they made pepole imagine other worlds etc. Now it's just photorealism everywhere.

I wonder, when game graphic dadaism and cubism will appear.

Art is not about making more realistic copies.
Profile | Twine
For Omnigraffle: http://graffletopia.com/stencils/413 (free)
I think we are talking past each other. I suspect sleep does a lot of useful things. Just as humans lost the ability to produce vitamin C we may have become dependent on sleep for things that are not required in theory. So there may be layers of dependence that show up over time. My suggestion is talking about what sleep does can be separated from the fact that sleep is so common and needed.

PS: Your liver does many things necessary for you to live. It also does many things that help you live a better life. Talking about what your liver or sleep does, without including the useful side effects is not the full story. Sleep deprivation hinders memory formation in humans and hinders reaction times. Are those related to the core function of sleep or just a codependence developed due to other useful features of sleep? I don’t think there is a clear separation between the two.

Edit: I can't read that link.
logical grounds for dismissing all evidence

I don't know why Evolutionist trolls continue to insist that ID advocates "toss out all the evidence".

You are aware that the same "evidence" such as the vast fossil record, and insane complexity of the universe is what forms the basis for the ID argument, right? Even Dawkins himself admits that all intuition indicates that the universe has been designed.

I'm not tossing out any evidence, I'm re-interpreting it under my own world-view, in the same fashion that you have your own self validating world-view where you interpret the "evidence".

Regardless, explain to me how forensic science and circumstantial evidence works if my "shit" above regarding the bomb example is not sound. It's not a truth table that I've written above, it's an assertion that we can guess with high probability what event happened if 1) we have seen the event in the past or can replicate it and 2) we understand the effects and resulting evidence for that event.
Hey Sean, you put a password for one site into another and then were then surprised to find all your contacts spammed in your name? Doh!
You couldn't be more wrong. I write FOSS software 40+ hours a week at my job and a bit more during my free time. People are not motivated by simply economics. The majority of projects are conceived by a group of people as FOSS from the start, generally as a one that will never generate money. Those that do generate revenue are the exception not the rule.

A lot of the big projects like distros, MySQL,the kernel, Apache, and Firefox are commercially supported, but no one would really use it if it was not for the thousand little pieces of glue someone wrote as their passion or hobby with no hope for getting repaid. A lot of those people are driven by ideology, some just for the fun and challenge, and few for the money.
Really nice =)

Check it on http://news.ycombinator.com/best
The title seems a bit misleading. Humans don't prefer cockiness to expertise, they just have a hard time differentiating between the two.
Ask HN: What formation should I use for my business
I need some advice in how to set up my business. Right now I have some side projects I am developing, which require no investment and would all be owned by one business.

Then I have another idea, which is one that I would pursue for possible angel or VC funding. Now I would only want to give away equity in that application because everything else doesn't require investment. However, I want all of these projects to be tied to one brand.

Do I create an umbrella company, which operates all the side projects and then create another company for the main project. Then does the umbrella company own the share in the project company?

I apologize if this was confusing. Just looking for some insight so here are the main points.

- A few side projects that we want to keep ALL equity

- One main project, which we will look for investment

- Everything tied to one brand.

Thanks
Your chance to name the newest element (Element 112)
Brian LeRoux of PhoneGap JSConf 2009
>A job interview is a competition, not a pass-fail test"

Yes, that's what it really means - "all else being equal during competition, remembering things will get you ahead".

The problem I have with you article is that all else is not equal. This could only work if you have an excess of qualified engineers. I have tons of anecdotal data about severe draught of qualified engieneers and none on the surplus, across Microsoft, Google, Amazon and funded Seattle startups. I am yet to see any data on actual competition, so your position does not pass the "inituition" test for me.

Are things that much different in the valley? It can't be, some of my data comes from people getting offers to move to the Valley.

>As for the comment that I am going to assume all kinds of things. Of course I am and so will other managers.

I think you are projecting.
at&t did at one time try to paint BSD as illegal. They also sued which Microsoft has not done yet.
"But I've been burned, so here's my advice: If you get any kind of message from Tagged, delete it. Avoid the site altogether."

Hear. Hear. Nothing but junk on that site, and annoyance for your friends.
The comments, though. My god, the comments. "Yeah, but how can you trust a cryptography library? This one time, I used a library to parse email addresses, and I wound up having to do it myself. It's like with your car, do you really need the mag-alloy wheels, or shouldn't you just do things right yourself. Like this one time, I took AES and randomized the S-Boxes so even the NSA couldn't decrypt it and" --- sorry, I lapsed into comments from Colin Percival's blog.
Complete and utter bullshit. Games have gotten better if anything.

You may not remember the absolute deluge of games that were utter tripe on the SNES and Genesis (and N64 and PSX), but I do... oh how I do. I think I bought half of them.

Also, the real change in terms of difficulty... was that games added different difficulty LEVELS. Go play Halo 3 on Legendary by yourself and tell me it's a walk in the park.
Silly? Flash has been around for ages, they've courted, supported and won over the design community, it seems to run most places you'd want it (already) and it's not Microsoft, it has great tool integration...

It'd be nice if there were maybe 2 or 3 factors that mattered but there are probably a dozen or more reasons people uses flash over silverlight and none of them have to do with openness. JavaFX and Silverlight are late to the game and they don't do anything more, they just don't raise the benchmark in any really significant ways.

Mono and Java both have been dealing with the same basic battle for their entire existence. C has been around longer, C is what the OS is written in... At least with Python or Ruby you don't have to compile so there is some sort of experiential advantage to the developer. Mono needs to be compiled, it's not terribly slow but all VMs (err, safe runtimes) have that stigma, you can develop much more rapidly with them with fewer bugs and there are whole classes of security defects that simply don't apply and then there is the tooling but that's just not sexy enough. If you only do C, then you're more "hardcore" and how the world perceives you as an OSS developer matters more than a lot of people want to admit.

The politics of Mono probably don't matter as much as the politics of Silverlight. Most of the people that worry about mono, from my experience, aren't developers. Where the design community is the primary user of flash and they've never been served by MS before and they have been exposed to stuff like IE's extended script.
I received three of these from one client. I especially loved the warning that "You have to click!"

Of course, I knew that I didn't have to do any such damned thing. But I wonder what threat Grandma imagined looming over her if she didn't click either of the options in the e-mail?
Reformed after running my own startup and now having access to most things i want to enjoy freely and legally online to stream.

Is nice to hear you can afford to buy legally everything you like but I think those who endorse P2P and sharing they do that especially because they see it as a way for less wealthy people to access information.

I think your opinion is very similar to the one of the discographic industry when they say that every CD you download is a CD that you don't buy.
R&D 2.0: Fewer Engineers, More Anthropologists
Barack Obama's cocky, wouldn't one say? Good in times of uncertainty and change.
I completely agree that what Billboard is doing is bone-headed, but I don't think that a $100/year e-mail newsletter is necessarily a "stupid idea". The trick is to come up with content and quality that justifies $2/week (or $10/month)-- a task that is not trivial, but not impossible. And, as always, that range between the trivial and the impossible is where the viable business idea lies.
Frustrated because he considers his parenting a failure, perhaps.
How to stay motivated on a big project
Developing a big web project can be a bit like running a marathon badly. You put on a giant chicken outfit. Run around trying to trip over celebrities for the cameras. And nearly die of a heart attack. Okay, maybe that's just me. No, seriously, let me start again. Developing a big... bit like... running a marathon. You are full of energy at the start and set off at a frantic pace. Before you know it, you have the concept design and prototype done. Then you begin to start on the database hierarchy, the sign up forms. This is tiring work and soon your pace begins to slow. But you are still excited by the project so you push on.

There comes a point however on most large projects - usually around two-thirds to completion - when your enthusiasm begins to wane. You look into the distance and cannot see the end in sight. There is so much work to do and this work is the boring detailed stuff rather than fun conceptual work. You begin to wonder if the project is any good. You begin to get distracted by Facebook, Hacker News, flash backs of the mangled dying Action Man you threw out of the window with only a paper bag as a parachute when you were a kid (Okay, that's just me again). In short, you are flagging and unless you pick yourself up soon you will be retiring from this race.

This is usually when a good manager will step in and give his team of developers a good motivational talk (or a kick up the butt). But when you are working on your own projects as part of a startup, when you ARE your own manager, inviting yourself into your own office for a motivational talk does not usually do much good and could easily get you taken away by men in white coats (for me, writing this from Bradlington Mental Asylum, this is no longer a problem). It is easy to give up at this stage. So how do you motivate yourself in such a situation? How do you pick yourself up from the road, and crawl, if necessary, crawl, crawl, until bloodied and weeping, you inch over the finishing line on your stomach, a slimey trail of your inards in your wake (sorry, more flashbacks. My teddy this time. Tug of war with sis. Big Ted never was the same again). Yes, how do you do this...

Stop looking at me. Like, I have the slightest clue. What, you were expecting - because you had invested the time to read this far - that I magically would have the answer to one of the most intractable questions in software development - nay, in human psychology: how to motivate yourself and others. Or maybe, if you hadn't quite got the gist of this article, you were wondering how I could help you finish a marathon when, two thirds of the way through, your legs are buckling like a soldier who has taken one direct to the head. To the later, I've heard that energy drinks are pretty good. Else, take a bus - nobody will probably notice and the money is only going to charity anyway. Later, you might want to invest in some smart drugs...

As for the former, get out of here - there's only one way you are going to finish your project, and that is by doing it. So stop reading frivilous blogs like this, and get down to some serious coding.
What to Look For in a HTTP Proxy/Cache
He probably doesn't have a point in doing so. Do you?
Improving Common Tag : Worse is Better (Semanic Web data in CSS classes)
It's long been the case that we invent tools, and then tend to do the things that the tools make easy.

You can see that the distribution of furniture varieties changed a lot when machine tools were introduced. Furniture got a lot cheaper, but because table saws make straight cuts a lot easier than curved cuts, even in higher end furniture, we ended up get a lot more style choices that utilized what was easier.

I'm looking forward to seeing what stylistic changes happen in clothes, furniture and more with the rise of small-lot production, CNC, and other technologies. I expect that we'll see big changes.
I love how Atwood's piece (let alone many of the comments) is directly an example of what he's talking about.

I.e., while's many of his points are true they miss a much more critical point...

When it comes to security all discussion must start with: "what are your threat & risk models?"

Without that, all of the rest of the discussion are pointless, delusional, wastes of time.
Amazon's Kindle DX e-book reader is big and pricey.
That was a funny one. In the end AT&T was suing the BSD folks for using the technology the BSD folks developed and that AT&T was using without proper acknowledgement. I can only imagine what happened at the board meeting when this was disclosed.

But I get your point. Since then, AT&T got a lot more civilized.

Microsoft never was.
What's the incentive for a retailer to offer the cheap HDMI sales? When deciding where to shop, people are influenced by the "sale price" on the Blu-Ray player, not the cables-- and most Blu-Ray player purchasers are not going to walk out of the store without a cable. So, might as well hook them for the over-priced one.
So basically, everyone who took private pictures of their high school sweetheart back in the day and never bothered to delete them after turning eighteen is in possession of child pornography?
"You may not remember the absolute deluge of games that were utter tripe on the SNES and Genesis"

I do, and it's just the same today. Generic FPS 1, generic FPS 2, generic FPS 3, etc... I agree with what you said, but I don't think it's changed. Games today require more money and time to produce and have suffered the same fate as Hollywood big budget movies, they have become bland and predictable.

"Go play Halo 3 on Legendary by yourself and tell me it's a walk in the park."

I never play FPS gmaes, I recently was visiting my parents and played through this on my brothers XBox, and I beat it. Why? Because there is a save point every 2 seconds. It took some time, but not that much. Still have never beat Mike Tyson, excuse me, Mr. Dream.

I think there is a lot of validity in what he is saying. Games today are way easier than games 15 years ago. I really don't think it's even close. It seems that developers today are more interesting in graphics than things like story and game play. Of course there are exceptions to the rules. If he is looking for a challange, go play Star Craft on iccup or login to a Counter Strike server. It seems PvP play is where the challenge is these days.