skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made a point to tell barrkel that I hadn't met him and that I wasn't intending my remarks personally. I don't feel comfortable judging somebody by what they write online. The friends I'm most in touch with from my hometown are gamers. By some standards I'm a gamer, though I'd disagree with the classification. So obviously I don't mean "everybody that plays games" when I refer to the "gaming community".

That said: I stand by what I said to begin with. Does replay value matter in a game? Of course. Is a game without replay value worthless? Certainly not. If a game takes me six hours to beat and I willingly play through all six hours, I've spent as much time playing it as I'd spend on a two-hour movie if I'd watched it three times.

So there's the first thing that I find offense in: The suggestion that something worth "only" six hours of time hasn't given me enough value. In the "gaming community" as I define it, having a game take up dozens of hours of your life isn't an offense. I've always disagreed with that. I remember having a conversation with a friend over Final Fantasy VII, which I played for an hour and then put away. "It takes a few hours to get good," was his mindset. I find that casual disregard for time appalling.

The second thing I found offensive was the suggestion that World of Goo was worth only two dollars. Two dollars? I pay more than that for a fucking cheese steak! For five dollars I will pay a man to sizzle some meat for me and put it in a plastic bag. For two dollars I will pay a fast food chain for a plastic cup to pour syrup into. When two people spend $10,000 of their own money and countless months developing a gem of a puzzle game that takes a quarter of a day to beat—and it's taking me much longer than that, personally—I think it's worth more than 20 minutes' worth of minimum wage.

Craft and finesse has become so devalued. I blame it on gamers, though "gamers" here is a category that includes a whole bunch of non-gamers, including a whole branch of programmers that I occasionally criticize here as well. It's this attitude that other people's work is meaningless, the attitude of FAIL and meh., where having twenty hours of gameplay is expected but making any of those twenty hours magical and beautiful is utterly disregarded. It's not every gamer, it's a specific sort of gamer, but it's a prevalent sort of gamer. The kind that argues that Bioshock is as valuable a contribution to society as the works of Joyce or the movies of Hitchcock. And it bugs me not just because it's obnoxious and tasteless, but because on the flip side we have a lot of tasteful people who argue that video games are not art, can never be art, and I disagree with them as well. I love video games. But it's hard to argue with those tasteful game-haters when the average gamer works to hard to convince others of his crippling tastelessness.
The future of advertising
lets stop thinking about algorithms for a minute. What is the long term future of advertising? Two simple scenarios.
I don't understand your assertion that the second definition is meaningless. Charging the market price is by the given definition not price gouging.

Scarcity may be the term you're looking for.
very frustrating with a bad mouse
Has anyone used spreecommerce?
Thanks for the links, I've never seen those before. I read the agg code without the docs, but it would have been difficult without the example programs. The docs definitely help when looking at some of the algorithms though. I remember spending a good day or two staring at the anti-aliasing code, together with the freetype rasterizer (on which it was based), trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Then in just clicked.
The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing
I think you're broadly correct about the broadness, but that does depend on 2 things -

1) The industry, because some promote more consumer engagement than others - I could see people becoming a Fan of their architect or Following the great interior designer who did their friends' place because they might do the same next year.

2) The brand the business wants to develop, because some brands are designed to be more engaging. I was tempted to use 'a butcher' as a counterpoint to the example in 1), but then I realised I would probably become a Facebook Fan of my butcher if he had a page. He remembers our names, always waves when we go past, etc etc - that works for his business, not all in his industry, so some social media might work for him and his brand as well.
I don't have much truck with religion, but the csm is actually a pretty good paper.
Maybe EveryBlock (considering the source)?

http://code.google.com/p/ebcode/
Posted on this yesterday: http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/10/google-waves-creepy-feature...

Definitely agree with the OP. Wave should allow this feature to be disabled easily for chat.. I can see it being used for doc collab but for chat it's a horrible idea for a number of reasons.

Is it that hard to get a conference call going via Google Voice and actually talk to other users in real time using your voice?
DNS addresses are not computers. IP addresses are not computers. Forwarding traffic to different machines by port is trivial.
In case you want to maintain your privacy, do what I did...

\/\/\/\/
/ \
/ \
/ \
/\_/ 0 0 \_/\
| |
\/ \ |_| / \/
\ /
\ \-----/ /
\ /
\_______/
| |
Modern men are wimps
Interesting. I wonder if a workable rating system for comments could be found. This might help with the attribution of credit when a significant result is produced.
So a tiny amount of fiddling with it, and it doesn't appear to understand defpackage. Looking at the source, it says "these macros need to be implemented".

So while the front page says it is a lisp, does not really appear to be yet true.
12.60, but I didn't know what I was doing in the first few.
Why do programmer personality types matter?
This statement seems somewhat dangerous to me. If the body slows down because of lack of resources, I'm willing to bet that, like has been observed in animals, fertility will also drop off - you don't reproduce when resources are scarce.

I think the idea is that the animals would have a better chance of surviving until food became plentiful again, at which point their intake would return to normal along with fertility and aging.
My impression : 'Google Wave is nice to Kittens'. We all like kittens, right?

I replaced 'Google Wave' by 'Plone' or 'Blog' and the meaning seemed to be preserved... are they the same thing?
What about smoking in close proximity to others?
Don't know the paper - will check it out.
But why is it called Christian Science?
3.75; I'm surprised, as I consider myself to have a poor eye for these things.
Hibernate is a fairly popular way of dealing with OR mapping in Java:

https://www.hibernate.org/

Unfortunately, you'll end up trading off code cleanliness with XML configuration files, but I believe there are tools out there that help with the generation and maintenance of those files.

I feel that I may have missed some of what you're looking for though, so if Hibernate is the wrong solution for you let me know and maybe I can help you get nearer to a workable solution.
Programming Language Zoo: Tiny language implementations in OCaml
Well that's pretty irresponsible, even by TC standards.

edit: actually I guess it's par for the course.
Most of the project that are being done right now fall in to the 'embarrassingly parallel' group (and it would be nice to see that change).

Applying the distributed computing approach to non-EP problems is challenging; this was my doctoral research project until I got distracted by delta compression and string matching problems. Three are three major problems:

1. Bandwidth. Many parallel algorithms require more bandwidth than the available pool of idle home computers can provide.

2. Latency. Many parallel algorithms require low latency -- say, under 1 ms -- and the speed of light thus prohibits any worldwide computing efforts. In some cases, this can be attacked by replacing algorithms (e.g., LU factorization by block QR factorization) or by using a small well-connected set of nodes to perform latency-sensitive work while most nodes do less latency-sensitive work.

3. Byzantine failures. Home PCs have a very high failure rate -- not only where permanent and transient failures are concerned, but also where returning bogus results is concerned. The best estimates I've seen indicate that bit error rates on home PCs are at least two orders of magnitude higher than those on supercomputing clusters.

I was cold-called by two VCs back in 2000, after I announced the computation of the quadrillionth bit of Pi; at that point distributed computing was a hot topic and over $50M had been thrown at companies in the area in the previous 10 years. I told them that they didn't understand the field, that they were fools for investing in it, and that the research belonged at universities for the present time... and history proved me right.
FAWN: scalable datacenter key-value storage at 4 watts/node
My taxes pay for the services they receive from govt. and I would say that they influence too much of public policy making which in turn affects me.
Reflection (which you'll be using anyway) can access private fields. See Class.getDeclaredFields.

Check out JPA or Hibernate & Hibernate Annotations for the 'standard' way to do this.

I would just use JPA/Hibernate, rather than writing your own mini-ORM. But you could equally borrow the JPA Annotations and use them for your mini-ORM, and then adopt Hibernate when you're ready.
I haven't been able to download a copy of the game from their servers in an hour, guess the sale is working :)
Links from the article:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/

http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/andersen-sosp09.pdf
Accountants are probably the last people you would think would use the command line to do their work.
I found a way to use the 'reflect' class to figure out the mappings, and by caching them after the first query it is reasonably fast and doesn't require any further mapping information, as long as you make sure that the field names in the classes match the field names in the tables it works.

But I'm stuck on not being allowed to access the fields in the classes from a 'foreign' class, it simply doesn't allow it.

So I'm forced to make all those fields public, and that isn't the way things are meant to work.

Java doesn't seem to have a way to say 'this class is a friend' other than putting the classes in the same package, or by deriving the class that has access from the class that you wish to modify (and that isn't an option because that would mean the storage class would have to derive from every object that you wish to store).
What middlewares are you guys using in production?

Most of these seem pretty gimicky.
They will eventually make it public (probably right before it gets voted on). However, at that point the treaty will already be negotiated and it will be presented as done deal. There will be a lot of pressure on senators to vote on it and there will not be enough time for an opposition to coalesce, people that are affected will not have enough time to realize they are affected and to organize an opposition.
Ive seen some heinous regexen floating around to recognize urls/uris. Be nice if this hadn't have happened - but he gave us the web, right, we can hardly complain.
Do you think naturally occurring fresh water should not be considered a shared resource, "owned" by the citizens of the country in which the water is found?
It's not IE that needs to be disparaged. [By the standards of ~2000 it was pretty good, no?]

It's those who declined upgrade it year after year.
Nope, it's everything except my face. Cameras are great for hiding behind ;-)

http://www.shutterscouts.com/about.html
If I had to guess, I think Rack::Cache is very popular - http://tomayko.com/src/rack-cache/ - and not so gimmicky :)
Yes, two dollars, when compared with the value I get out of a decent FPS.

It's funny you mention the orange box; Portal is another puzzle game, and similarly not particularly replayable after solving it, which similarly takes about 6 hours.

And as for Half-Life 2, Ep 1 and 2, these are some of my least favourite FPSes because they are obsessively linear and don't reward creative approaches. For these reasons, they are more like a movie, and don't have particularly good replay value (IMHO).

Far Cry, on the other hand, was a masterpiece of playability, leaps and bounds ahead of any Half Life game, again IMHO. The freedom to tackle each situation resulted in large rewards to creativity.

Far Cry 2 took it even further; rather than just having to tactically plan one's approach to action bubbles, one needed to plan an entire navigation across the map, avoiding guard posts, road patrols, etc. I've never played a more immersive game than Far Cry 2, a game that took me to another world, save perhaps Outcast or Thief.
I've had to run those kinds of jobs before and wanted exactly that kind of tool, not being able to find it at the time, I wrote one:

http://asymmetrical-view.com/personal/code/perl/parallel-jobs.readme

http://asymmetrical-view.com/personal/code/perl/parallel-jobs

Example 'command file':
# specify several downloads to be run in parallel
wget http://some.host/software.tar.gz
wget http://some.host/database.mdb
wget http://some.host/movie-trailer.mpeg
wget http://some.host/linux-distrubtion.iso

Run as:

parllel-jobs --cmdfile=file.cmd --maxjobs=4
Check out iBatis - it might be the solution you are looking for.
> Reflection (which you'll be using anyway) can access private fields.

Yes, I am using 'reflection'. That seems to be the way to get to the 'guts' of a class.

Hey, that's interesting!

Protected is less strict than private, if I can't see protected fields then I should be able to see private fields?

I'm definitely going to see if that works, I never though that it would be able to since it couldn't read the protected ones.

This is where I got that from:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/javaOO/accessco...

Maybe I messed up in a test somewhere.

Or maybe I can fiddle with setAccessible from within the class the does the storing/retrieving ?

Good tip on using the interface of an established library and then making the switch. Like that I can take it one step at the time.
And except that even after logging in... i see only a blank page :(
That was one painful mixed metaphor.

....

Response to dschobel above. Nytimes stats:

http://publishing2.com/2007/07/17/newspaper-online-vs-print-...

* Online unique users (12 month average): 13,372,000
* Print circulation – weekday: 1,120,420
* Print circulation – Sunday: 1,627,062

* Total advertising revenue: $483,594,000
* Online advertising revenue: $51,000,000
Oh I don't disagree but I mean to point out that engaging in a calorie restricting diet at a young age may be detrimental to fertility, based on the effects that they suggest and the observational evidence from other animals. This may or may not be a big deal to certain people depending on goals - if you want to have children in your 20s versus 30s for example.
I use my netbook whenever I travel - I can write articles and do moderate amounts of software development

It is also cheap enough that I am not too concerned with it getting lost or broken

I get a legitimate 4-5 hours of battery life (tested - I fly Hawaii to Los Angeles)

Genius headline though. Caught my attention. sigh
Quite so, but if you're greenscreening or color correcting in, say, After effects it's nice to be able to work at full res whenever you can. Right now I use RAM preview to get a quick idea of how something looks, but I can see an SSD obviating a lot of the usual disk-bashing for longer previews. For final render, as you say CPU becomes the dominant factor.
pivo, thanks, I did get to read it.
Nothing wrong with adding personality to your site. I don't think it will detract or add anything to it, unless you're either a supermodel or the fly.
Ok, I will do that. Thanks!
A sysadmin friend of mine swears by xapply - although it is largely a BSD-only application (and tricky to build on linux, to say the least) it appears to have been the inspiration for xargs's -P option.
He wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair. Apple had their own version, too, for example, and there's a funny story about Woz not wanting to implement floating-point arithmetic in their version and Apple having to license that technology from Microsoft.

So, it wasn't "Bill Gates wrote BASIC" it was "Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair."

I can imagine you writing a snarky sentence about that. Oh, blah blah, a version of a toy computer language on a toy computer.

I agree that a lot of the other companies featured were more interesting. I think we'd agree on a lot.

I guess one thing we don't agree on is the most productive way to respond to an article like this. I agree the article isn't helpful and that, perhaps, it puts on a pedestal people who don't deserve to be there. Or, in any case, that there are other people doing more interesting things who deserve to be featured instead.

Those people, however, don't deserve to be pissed on just because BusinessWeek decided to write the piece.

My question is this: what was the goal of your article?

From my perspective you went for the cheap shot, the easy laugh, the fart joke. It's ego-gratifying and will get you all over HN, Reddit, and the other usual places, but I'd expect an article exhorting entrepreneurs to do more (or, really, mocking them for not doing enough) to live up to its own standards and bring something new to the table.

For example, I would have been interested in reading a series of articles that goes through company-by-company, outlining their market, their challenges, and two or three things you think they could be doing better.

An article about the "The Top Under-25 Entrepreneurs BusinessWeek Should Have Listed" would have been interesting, too.

Finally, what if you reached out to the entrepreneurs on the list you DID think were interesting and conducted interviews with them? That would have been great!

I realize all of those would have taken a lot of time, effort, and research, but doesn't everything worthwhile?
I had always viewed evolution from the organism perspective. Whereas Dawkins lets you see it from the perspective of replicators. This I found an eye opener.
Looking forward to using this in RailsCamp Melbourne....well done toolmantim, really nice app.
3.07 first try, got it down to 2.35
I just bought a copy. I'd considered it before but it wasn't worth $20 to me.

Even $1 from a person who would never have bought it before is a net win - they probably don't have many expenses associated with sales (support etc) so it's pure profit, with the additional benefit of marketing.
Health care efficiency in the U.S.: strep throat test
Just checked in our code base: getDeclaredFields does return private fields, you then call field.setAccessible(true) to bypass security so you can then get/set the field.

And this definitely works across packages - we use it for some evil tricks like peeking into private fields in the Java runtime library.
4.62 first try. Higher than I expected
With regards parallel jobs, what's wrong with sticking a "&" at the end of the line? Everything he listed is pretty trivial.

It comes down to the idea that the command line is a "non-discoverable" interface. If you don't know what you want, there's pretty much no way to find it.

Any suggestions how to fix that? Google solves a lot of them, but not all. Having said that, I've had fair success recently with just typing entire questions into it as if it were a programmer I'm talking to ...
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877535
9+ first try, 3.13 second, 383 third try.

Definitely addicting but too short. Should match you up against peers based off how you did in previous games.
After reading you carefully, I believe you have a fundamental problem in your understanding of the world, and in particular, how economics works.

Things don't have intrinsic value in and of themselves. The fact that something has had "$10,000 of their own money and countless months" invested in it does not mean that the end product is valuable. You appear to be subscribing to the labour theory of value here; it's like something out of Marx.

My point is that I can choose to do multiple things with my next unit of time. I get to choose how I spend my time and money. By analysing my preferences, I can figure out how I value different ways of spending my time. And the fact is I only chose to spend about 6 hours playing something that cost me $20, while I spent perhaps $90 for over 1000 hours playing Far Cry / 2. If you work it out, you'll see $2 is actually pretty generous, as it includes the aspects of the WoG playing experience that can't be directly substituted by the FPSes, such as novelty and newsworthiness. Nevertheless, I regretted spending $20 on WoG. Not hugely, but I regretted it.

Accuse me of tastelessness all you like. Perhaps taste, like value, is in the eye of the beholder.

(Of course, when you factor in the cost of hardware and the like, the cost for me for various FPSes is actually pretty substantial; but these are sunk costs, and almost all of the resources save the graphics card are used in my day job anyhow.)
Sam Ruby: Ruby Client for Google Wave
What do you mean by US only? They have worldwide distribution rights for all the titles there.
Sweet! Ok, so that solves my short term problem, longer term I'll have to put in a more solid ORM than this home built thing.

At least it will cut down on the cruft enough that I can start to see the wood for the trees.

thank you very much.
I don't understand this. As a consumer buying a video game, I'm trying to maximize my entertainment per dollar. Why would I ever pay more than the minimum amount? Maybe the HN crowd will pay a little more out of a sense of camaraderie, but I don't understand why a typical gamer would.
My exercise regime involves taking the stairs to my apartment. I also keep all my snack food and cigarettes in my car.
There are some people who won't like it. I guess it depends on the type of marketing you're doing.. but I'd have a hard time buying an iPhone is I saw Jobs' face on the back.
I like Rands's definitition of best practice:

"A phrase used to convince you to do something different that assumes you don’t actually want to know why it’s a better approach."

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/07/13/the_words_y...
Unless you talk in a monotone, talking and typing are inherently different. Talking has a dramatically higher bandwidth, because you can alter the pitch, stress, and semantic meaning simultaneously.

For example, sarcasm is trivial with spoken communication, and remarkably hard in written.
start with screenr -- www.screenr.com. I saw them a while ago and bookmarked them. Basically, they do screen capture + video recording from your video camera. Not amazing quality but the (free) price is right.
Allocate Your Studies Wisely, Grasshopper
Get a haircut!
The article seems to be a little confused. Everything I've read tells me that the current NVidia GPUs are, in fact, big arrays of scalar cores. They aren't vector processors as traditionally defined at all.
awk? cut.
I think we'll see high level abstractions of a wave. My bet is google will introduce it to the generally population with most of the features turned off, so they don't even notice.

For example:
- In Gmail, when you hit reply it will be in a wave. When you hit replay-all, it will create a wave, auto-invite the recipients and it just looks like Gmail version 2.0.

- In GoogleDocs, the document can be shared now, but you'll be able to rewind the stack and see peoples changes. There will be commenting on documents (dunno is there is now?).

So I think most of googles apps will be wave-ified gradually and most people wont really notice. I think at the moment, you have the full wave hose turned on and people are getting a little freaked out.
Patch-Tag is now darcs-send friendly (for easy mailing patches to repo owner)
Darwin has contributed so richly to our metaphysical vocabulary.