skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very good points. Since C++ is a good match for the way people are taught to think about programming, it's obvious that anything good programmers can't easily and consistently get right is the fault of the language. With Haskell, you can't rule out unfamiliarity as the cause of any difficulties until you're already heavily invested in it. Most people really have no basis for challenging the statement that Haskell is perfectly suited for game programming in the hands of a competent programmer.

Pragmatically, for the OP, I think it's safe to say that C++ and Haskell are both very challenging languages that take a long time to master. The advantage of C++ is that there's ample evidence of its suitability for various domains. The advantage of Haskell is that you'll learn a different way of programming. The decisive factor may be whether it's your own money on the line.
Well, I think that for large parts of the world (um, me at least) the second part sounds as strange as the first one.

I was once in a Starbucks in Vienna where they did this and was throughly weirded out. What a rude intrusion into my privacy! And first names, too! (All the other Starbucks I visited in Germany didn’t do this. You had to identify your drink by type.)
100 Oldest .COM domain names
Robots that "show emotion" (TED talk)
It may be a myth upon people who are not entrepreneurs but I'm pretty certain money is not what drives entrepreneurs rather being successful, doing what you love, etc.
And if use functional languages you can write all that math yourself - if you use C++ you can use all the C libs that have been debugged and tested for 30years.
The Zombie Game Experiment - Concepts Galore
Upvoted for St Andrews.
Dating Expert Tips on Phone Etiquette for Online Dating
I'm willing to bet that it will become a top grossing apps. The premium price will make a some people feel like they it is an app they really need. Some will buy it to show off.
I wonder how small and low power you could make a 4x5" dye sub printer? A digital camera with builtin printer anyone?
Ask HN: Review my "design-oriented" open source app (iPhone, Mac, Maemo)
To sublimate my unhealthy interest in smartphone software development, I've been working on a cross-platform multimedia app for a while now. Apple recently approved the iPhone version, and thus I figured this might be a suitable junction to beg for your opinions concerning the software.

The website: http://lacquer.fi/2020

App on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=334032238&mt=8
(It's free)

Originally I had some noble goals for this project: I wanted to build something useful for that famous "next one billion users" for whom the mobile phone will be the first computer. I wanted the software to be as minimalistic as possible, language-independent, and with an attractive interface. It would be designed for voice and graphics communication, rather than text. The documents should be highly compressed to enable transmission over crap mobile networks in the 3rd world. The code should also be lightweight and portable enough that it would run on the hundreds of millions of cheapo Symbian devices that Nokia is going to dump onto the African and Latin American markets soon.

I still haven't got around to doing a Symbian version (their SDK is pretty terrible all around, it's not something I want to spoil my evenings with)... And overall, I don't have much hopes of being able to do something to benefit those mysterious 3rd world users.

Still, I've got this pile of C code written; it mostly does what I originally set out to do; and now I'd like to make it into something that could be useful to the ordinary smartphone user today, rather than leaving the code to rot in some open source graveyard.

For more general utility, I wrote a "cloud sync" feature using Google App Engine. I'm pretty happy with the way it works on the iPhone. There's a website that offers access to the files as well, although it's quite minimalistic so far. (The Mac OS X application also has the built-in cloud connection. I haven't yet got around to updating the Maemo version with this feature -- anyway Maemo has a regular user-accessible file system, so online storage is not quite as necessary as on the iPhone.)

I guess what I'm now looking for is some feedback on overall direction. Maybe stuff like:

Does this app make any sense to you?
Are its design parameters too limiting / ill-chosen?
Is there any point in open-sourcing this kind of software?
Is there perhaps something else that I could be building on this base instead, rather than sticking to the original idea?

Thanks for reading :)
Clickable links:

http://lacquer.fi/2020

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...
That's the cliche, but that's not how it works. I'm in the middle of so-called hipster culture. There are no trends and there isn't really a disregard for trend following. There's more an apathy toward the entire concept of trends. There's also not much self-obsession, either: My friends who wear obnoxiously oversized glasses usually bought them with other friends and wear them because they think it's funny. It's not a nonconforming thing and it's not a trend. If anything it's more of an impulse.
I believe this is the paper, for those who can get it:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

And I believe this is a general outline of the experiment as a whole:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_exp...
Is there a list of HN spinoffs anywhere?
The RoR code example in your resume is down. http://pastie.org/private/dozkhmrdgxwauheldxdyw
Apple is very good about refunds. Their support is friendly, and in my experience they've had the refund processed within a week. Also, the App Store allows users to redownload applications to new devices under the same account as needed, and applications can be synced to multiple devices within iTunes.
Do you have any idea what are the conditions for foreign students (non-EU) to start a company in the Netherlands? I'm very much interested in launching my own startup here but everybody I ask gives me a conflicting answer.
All true, but the question for many isn't about the potential ROI (effectively unlimited), but the expected ROI (for the average startup, it is not much more than that experience you talked about). Is that expected experience substantially more valuable than say grad school which is less stressful?
The context was, based on the submission title, an iPhone app and its price, with a link to apple.com. Apple doesn't list any iTunes pricing on its website.
Looks more like their answer to pownce, and we know how well they did.
Hi, I'm Gibi.

I'm a high school student with a lot of free time and a large (for a high school student, obviously) amount of experience, as well as a year of experience working at a startup.

Favored languages would be C, Java, Python, OCaml, Common Lisp (listed in order of experience with them).

If anyone happens to have some part-time remote programming work for me to do, I'd love to - leave a comment or send me an email at piesquared AT gmail and I'll follow it up.

I think I've actually posted something like this on HN, but didn't get too far.

Thanks!

Perhaps the 'jobs' section should be expanded to allow posting in it (for those who have jobs to offer).
I'll guess ;0)>

Someone owns the company for a few hundred dollars which was yesterday valued at tens of millions. The company has assets worth millions [of currency], they can wait for next years dividends or liquidate ... what to do ...
You could make that same comment about his commercial links to anything he says. Derek is pretty famous. I don't think he needs to stir up controversy to get attention. But even if he wasn't, this comment is almost content-free.
Rails migration syntax is intended to be database neutral. That is one of the main reasons to use it. The migration functionality also generates a database neutral 'schema.rb' file, which is intended to be the canonical representation of your application's current schema. This makes it possible for a new developer to simply run "rake db:create db:schema:load" and start working.

Since this particular plugin is aimed directly at postgres, I am not sure it really adds a great deal of value. It might be useful if it maintained the schema.rb file properly, but it does not.

So (at least IMO), I don't think this plugin is all that helpful. You can run straight SQL in rails migrations (and we do that whenever we need anything postgres specific).
I don't have much against it, but it doesn't support my operating system.
Much of World of Warcraft's user interface is written in Lua, and I'm not sure I'd classify WoW as an obscure example.
Superfreakonomics: The Anatomy of Smear
I suppose if you like over-engineering
We're talking about a courtesy, not a moral crusade. Do whatever you'd like.
and still more:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/superfreakonomic...
Give it a few years until China starts sending round the bailiffs ...
HN discussion (on the book and it being available as a PDF here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881230)
> I wonder what causes people to talk/write in a snark fashion? What is the main motivator. To be cool? Get noticed?

It's a part of it - is regarded as cool to be angsty and defiant. When someone doesn't actually have intelligent points, they can just make the same joke they read about in the newspaper or heard a comedian say.

> Maybe only thoughtful discussions can be had when a group is limited to a certain size...

I think this is more true with men than women - I think men jockey for status a little more.

> ...and status is defined by the most original discussions

Either that, or a clearly defined hierarchy. If it's clear who is in charge and there's mutual respect, there's no status jockeying. It's when it's not clear who is in a leadership role or there's not mutual respect that you get the most of it. Anonymity only makes that worse.
Do you know how much money they are making off the API and App? How do you know it isn't a genius decision?
I don't think that alone is worth too much, those links should see you right for 95% of what's possible.
iTunes is the best music player I've ever used, and that includes the one I cared enough about to write for myself. It's "big", but so is my collection, so I forgive it.
Our SQL database experience is two servers (Active plus BCP) which are close to 0% utilized 99% of the time. Then once a month another application on one of the server runs a batch and our users response time increases significantly. And we don't use MySQL.

The reality of SQL implementations with the leading vendors is infrastructure overhead. Even scaling with many server inside one application is not really recommended:

http://wedonotuse.blogspot.com/2006/11/brief-intro-to-market...

Going to a truly shared infrastructure takes you out of the comfort zone so far you might as well dump SQL databases, since people only pick them because of familiarity.
Ask HN: Wrist Pain
I've been a heavy computer user for more than a decade and I think all those hours are finally taking a toll on my wrists. About a year ago the discomfort was so intense that I switched hands so that now I use my left hand both at work and at home. The problem is that my day job has me at a computer for 35-40 hours/week and then I come home and program for another 20-25.

Currently there's kind of a dull, persistent numbness 24/7. Also, when I bend my wrists too far forward or backwards, I feel a sharp pain on the back of my hands. I also occasionally wake up at night and notice that they're numb, which I've read is a symptom of carpal tunnel.

I've tried a few ergonomic changes including a new chair, adjusting the monitor position, and a wrist pad for my keyboard and mouse, and even a wrist brace a portion of the time, but the discomfort persists. I asked my doctor about it a few months ago and he gave me a 20 page packet with the usual diagrams showing where my head should be positioned in relation to my monitor and things like that, but not much of it was practical "do this" advice.

I'd like to work on a startup in a few years and this is a major concern.

I figure a lot of you have had similar problems. What worked for you?
Shows my current abilities with Rails models, helpers, and views: http://pastie.org/private/r8nmuddformctcqrde4aq
I would take a data-oriented view.

Most of the performance of a game stems from finding a sweet spot combination of data structures and data relationships so that data is processed at real-time rates, is accessible everywhere, and can be immediately applicable to the algorithms you plan to use.

If you design relationships-first, the way you would design a database, you can figure out a data layout that doesn't involve any high-level semantics to speak of, just classic data structures from CS: lists, arrays, graphs and trees to order things, records and hashes to name them. Go through each type of value and cross-index it across all the structures it needs to be accessed by.

Then write intersectable queries into the structures to express a complex gameplay question like "Find all the enemy actors that are near mission objective X" as the composable "Find positions between boundaries A,B,C,D, that belong to actors of the enemy type, where A,B,C,D are some distance relative to the position of the objective entity with the name of X." Since you aren't writing a generic all-purpose database, this isn't a hard problem. It's just time-consuming to nail down the data model that captures all of it.

I think you will agree that a fancy language isn't necessary to implement such an approach to game programming. Done that way, data mostly ends up being pointers.

If your game is processing-light(which with today's desktop hardware primarily means avoiding 3d computation), you don't need a fast language: I'm most familiar with doing game code for Python and Flash and they can do just fine on modestly-sized datasets too.
If you don't have a primary key and foreign keys you don't really have a relational DB. And if you have a primary key you can't scale perfectly, because you are promising global consistency.

A non-zero price tag makes many applications impossible (uneconomic in practice). So that's a good reason to use a non-relational engine for them.
In Vancouver they don't use names either. I wonder how it works in other parts of Canada.
I heart OpenDNS! Just thought I would jump in and say so.

That is all.
I wonder if you've seen this: The automatic dice-roller

http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic

It can generate 1.5 million dice rolls per day.
Masturbate less frequently.
I've read mixed reviews of the Devorak keyboard, though I suppose its worth a shot. Has anyone else had success with it?
Idea: "Let's Sing" Facebook app
Writing up a random idea that just occurred to me at three in the morning.

Make a Facebook app called "Let's Sing". I sing any random song into my webcam, then publicly "tag" the next person who must do the same. All resulting videos show up as one long (infinite?) thread. If such an app were available, I'd definitely be a user.

What say ye? I don't know anything about the Facebook platform, is this implementable? Can it fly? Or maybe something similar is already there?
You list your strengths in your CV, so I would assume you've thought about this: what are your weaknesses?
Please go back to Digg and take your friends with you...

:-(
Unwillingness or inability to shift between development tools where appropriate is also something I've noticed characterises less experienced programmers (often evangelism can be driven by this).

Using your example languages. I can think of situations where using C++ rather than Ruby would be idiotic, and likewise situations where the reverse is true.
I've found the exercises in this video help me a lot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUyMNyrOHJQ

Also, when I was having problems a few years back, I narrowed it down to my laptop. The touchpad style mouse was killing my hands and wrists. It sounds like you're on a desktop, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.
10-4 thanks.

Leaves me wondering why database neutrality is so important that you miss a lot of optimal features of a specific database for it. I can't think of one time in the last 15 years where I've moved a database from one particular database software to another (well not entirely true, I've moved around a few but always on Sybase derivatives, ie Sybase -> SQL Server).
Maybe if you could talk to it to input the question like the google voice search app. How can anyone in their right mind drop $50 for an app that you could just as easily use the browser for? (and I just tried it, almost exactly the same as their example page.
This is the first I have heard of either Chef or Puppet. They both look interesting, but I can't tell how mature they are. Anyone care to expand?
Richard Dawkins has a extensive description of this experiment in his new book The Greatest Show on Earth (Chapter Five, Before Our Very Eyes). It’s a quite elegant and beautiful experiment.
Dvorak proponents usually claim two points: 1. Less wrist strain, 2. Faster typing

I've experienced both, but I know that the second point is controversial. As for less wrist strain, I don't think there's as much (any?) controversy. As a personal anecdote, I'm able to touch type both Qwerty and Dvorak. I can feel my wrists get sore after ~15min on Qwerty, but I've been known to go for 2 hrs at a time on Dvorak with little/no discomfort.
Why are you asking for a low rate of $15/hr? Seems far too low for your experience level.
How much does it cost to pay an 'agent' to help it through the process?
Well HDDs never really increased in access time in the last 20 years [as they state] because the problem is basically rotational latency, so get a better speeds than a 15k RPM disk you need a 30K RPM, 60K RPM, 120K RPM disks etc which would be crazy.

SSDs are pretty new and are very fast despite several problems that the makers haven't quite worked out yet. Random access seek time can be improved by adding more chips. Also seek times will no doubt increase with faster clock speeds and reduced feature sizes in the same way CPUs and memory do now.

SSDs are lower power than HDDs and Memory is high on power usage not to mention the savings by having fewer servers.

SSDs are simply too new for people to design for them, if you look at what http://www.rethinkdb.com/ are doing, or the TRIM feature, or log based file systems, there is quite a lot to be done to update the software people use to take advantage of SSDs. It has all been written with the limitations of HDDs in mind.
Seriously, dude, why not approach startups that fit your technical strengths? Going to PG is kind of silly. (Also, having your resume in PDF form only is lazy - if you can code, surely you can get that into decent-looking HTML/CSS.)
To succeed in academia, you need to build things that please your customer, its just that your customer is a funding agency and/or your community. There are many, many publications that nobody sites, which is the equivalent of products nobody buys.
You didn't say what keyboard are you using. Is it just the standard, straight one? Try something more curvy, like ms natural keyboard.

I've never had any major problems with my wrists, just some slight discomfort from time to time... but man, does that keyboard make a difference!

Also you could configure your desktop to be more accessible with keyboard only. Less switching between keyboard and mouse == faster work and fewer useless movements.
1. Get a good keyboard. Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 is what I use.

2. Use Vim as text editor.

3. Use left handed mouse at least occasionally. Keyboards are typically longer on the right hand side due to number pads so that places mice at a odd angle at times.

4. Though you have already adjusted your position, just ensure that your hands are not at extreme angles.

edit: I too had wrist pain and after doing the above changes, I dont have wrist pain anymore. YMMV obviously depending on what is causing your pain.
Funny...what you described sounds an awful lot like being a grad student. :)
If someone could come along and invest the millions of man hours required in making a performance-critical high-level language without the C-baggage

As long as it also had C syntax, and something close to the C memory model, and was recognizably object oriented and/or functional. And came with a lot of libraries. And 3D graphics engines. And physics engines.

Unless some independent game developer does something in a new language that other developers can't easily duplicate with their current ecosystem (not that it couldn't be done in C++), and it catches on, there's no incentive to do anything other than continue to evolve things in the most backwards compatible way. There are always more C++ programmers coming off the assembly lines who want nothing more than to work on games.
Resume updated: http://tefflox.net/JesseCrockett_WebDeveloper.pdf
I like it. My only gripe is its sense of timing. If you have it start on login, which is a good idea if other people use your library, it does a LOT of disk seeking and jams up the whole login process. It would be nice if it would prioritize its library read below "getting a browser and mail reader open".
Also under no circumstances use a laptop keyboard for extended periods of time. Most of them are very unergonomic. And stop using touchpads if you use them.
Just wait until they release the Poladroid instant picture camera phone.
I'm going to nitpick. Adroid's strategy is that it's not tied to one brand, one manufacturer, one feature-set, and one network. Time will tell if it is a strength.

Apple has not launched an Iphone strategy that is the opposite by chance. It is deliberate.
First: You need to take this very seriously. "Dull, persistent numbness 24/7"? Get thee to a doctor who will react to this news with action. If nothing else, get referred to a physical therapist.

Don't use pads or braces without medical advice. You can actually injure yourself more by bracing your arms, wrists, or hands against things.

Don't assume your wrists are the problem. I have had occasional wrist pain or numbness for twenty years, most of which turns out to emanate from a nerve pinch in my shoulders. Doing certain shoulder exercises makes the wrists feel great. Again: find a doctor or a PT who will give you specific advice.

Don't think that gadgets and gimmicks are the whole solution. They can be useful -- I swear by my Kinesis Advantage keyboard, I have Ergotron monitor arms to put monitors precisely where they need to be, I have a keyboard drawer with an adjustable arm to adjust height, tilt, and distance and with an attached mouse support that I've tinkered with to get the height correct -- but this is secondary stuff. The real secret for me is exercise, strategically placed pillows and cushions [1] and, of course, rest breaks. Get some software that orders you to take breaks, like Workrave or AntiRSI for the Mac. Try not to learn to ignore the software.

Get into shape. You would be surprised at the extent to which walking and biking will improve the health of your wrists, not to mention the rest of your health.

EDIT: Oh, and codedevine is right: Be very careful using laptops, and don't use one for any length of time. They force you into specific postures which are generally terrible. I get away with using mine for one or two days at a time, but only because I've been diligent with my health.

---

[1] For the back, not the wrists. Don't rest your wrists on things!
"Valuable", in a market sense, means people are willing to pay for it. Apply for the same set of jobs, once with a graduate degree and once with a failed startup under your belt. See how many companies are willing to pay for your services.

My hypothesis is that there are disjunct sets of employers who will value one over the other, but the set of employers who value startup experience value it more than the set of employers who value grad school experience value grad school.