skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty impressed about how useful Twitter is for me, especially for the development of Redis but not only.

I used to think Twitter was useless because I missed the point. Twitter is a simple messaging system, but the real value is in the communication culture that Twitter users created providing a "network of humans" that was not possible to build in an efficient way before twitter.

The development of this new communication model was somewhat spontaneous I think but because there were two very important features in the system: non-reciprocal following and short messages.
Very interesting. Could you use these tactics to sell YOURSELF to a prospective employer?
I've re-written your story to read as I read it:

In the year 3065 of The Future, people not only have all they need to be happy, but are indeed happy. Alas, uploads remain an imminent futurist dream.

Enter a man, a normal man, a man filling in a 10x10 multiplication table. But that multiplication table held not the numbers 1-10, but pi, and i, and all sorts of other crazy future symbols. If you looked at the sheet, you would find that the correct answers were all there to all their decimal places - that's right, the man was a complete badass at math. And logic. And innovation. He was the type of guy who would ask dickish questions in university classes, which he finished when he was 13. At five months old he beat his mom at math, and his mom was pretty awesome.

He read his idea journal, and it was like reading science fiction because he couldn't remember what he wrote at 2am last night. He lived in a research center, where he goofed off but was still awesome. He had a paranoia of doing math in the dark (e.g. at 2am) which he never could justify to others. So on this day of year 3065 of The Future, he went to bed.

And had a nightmare about being surrounded by Big Black Machines (I kid you not). He thought he could use logic to get out, but ended up sweating a lot instead.

You would think he would shower, but no, he just dressed and shaved. Usually, people shave and then dress, but not this man. He felt strange, like that time he thought he proved time travel (but it was just wormholes).

He drove to the office where his realistic and probably conscious submissive fembot greeted him.

He used Google and manually made a database of all the webpages he visited (grand technologies like "Google Chrome" were lost to the ages). As usual, he wasted most of the day reading 1000-year-old blog posts about how crappy DRM was.

He got back to "work" though. Turns out, everyone except him stopped caring about the origins of life, the universe, and all that.

"Hey babe, get me some coffee!" The smack on the ass that he gave his female robot coincided with the exclamation point.

"It's bad for you, sir."

"Don't care."

She brought it.

"What are you working on, sir?"

"You damn well know what I'm working on based on my search queries, which I know you peek in on."

"...any luck?"

"Not on finding out the origin of the universe. But that's because I'm working on finding out what's real. People seem to..."

"Ignore, sir?"

"Stop trying to end my sentences, sugarbuns."

"Sorry, sir. By the way, I was reading Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and..."

And then it struck him. Maybe he was in the Matrix. A quote floated into his head, "we are someones dream but of whom we cannot know". He decided to get to work.

The story is not good. It's actually pretty bad, but all early stories are bad, so don't worry. My advice is to read a lot of science fiction, and a lot about how to write, how to write SF, and how to write short stories. Pick something and focus on it. In this story, you don't even have anything to focus on - what theory of reality are you actually getting at, and why doesn't it permeate the story? Never describe how awesome things are.
Get whoever coded this site for you to explain how to deploy it, in enough detail that you would be very confident re-deploying it several times a day if you wanted to. If the original coder is unavailable, find a hacker friend who can figure the process out for you.

Once you're comfortable deploying, start making really small changes. Don't bother with books or classes yet - they'll round-out your knowledge once you know the basics, but in my experience they're not much use for getting people started. Begin by just editing bits of text on the website. Then progress to really small pieces of functionality. Try to deploy some small positive change to the site at least once a day. Doing this will build your confidence and get you to the point where you can make gradually bigger and bigger changes.
The problem is not with the IT policies. They exist with a reason, because in large systems a free-for-all approach will quickly end in chaos.

The problem lies with the large organizations. In the informational age, we don't need large organizations,
I think the point is that engines are a commodity, artwork and game logic, motion capture & sound effects are not.
Shoot, sometimes I battle hunger and I'm 24, living on my own (I get lazy and don't go to work, reducing my hours and monies for that pay period). I can't imagine what it must be like for these millions of families with REAL shortage issues, that cannot be fixed by "not being lazy."

I really hope that in my lifetime I get to see the invention of food replicators (ala Star Trek). In one of the Star Trek movies they talk about how that was a turning point for the human race, where how to sustain living people was no longer an issue and we became free to focus on other (extra-worldly) problems.
Hey man, I recently had a similar revelation that I just needed to learn how to code. I picked up ruby a week ago with the intent of learning rails and building web apps. I knew a bit of python/django before, but nothing that could be considered hacker knowledge. If you want to learn together, let me know. It'd probably help the both of us. I have a few ebooks and what not that I could send you that have helped me learn the basics. I'm kyrobeshay on freenode #startups. Email is in my profile.
Yes, now you mention it, the Suns at my University worked that way.
What a stupid article. "It's not quite that simple, of course".

So the distributed petabyte-scale filesystem that scales to thousands of nodes, the recent work on append which guarantees fresh writes will be visible to all hosts, the efforts at map-locality which will run your map function on the host where the data split is located, compression layers to improve I/O throughput..

Trivial?
I'm a fan of free markets when they're beneficial to all involved, and in certain cases even when they're not. Even though Apple's model isn't free, I still see it as beneficial to all involved.

Apple's "tax" provides resources and a revenue stream to cover everything from documentation to hosting the free applications. It could also play a part in driving the prices of the phone itself down. It also gives it clear bragging points which it's used quite successfully.

The user benefits from the applications, and one could assume the lack of clutter/meaningless/duplicative applications within the store itself. They also benefit from the "full product" phone->store->apps->payment ecology.

The developer wins because they get to develop towards a product that has a great feature set, an ecology with paying customers and momentum in the product itself.

Windows, Blackberry, Palm et all have all had ways to work with previous products before the IPhone without issue, under the free market approach. No true central registry, no payment ecology, and hasn't gained anything from it directly. Now android is in the mix, and as far as the payments goes, it's not looking too pretty from what's being put out there so far, but it's early yet we'll see.

I'm not defending Apple, I don't even own an Iphone (BB user, contract about up, going to N900). But when someone sits as a developer and continues to blast Apple because it's not open enough (when it's never been "open enough" & when you look how "open" phones before it were...) - it honestly baffles me. If they don't want the Apple "tax", don't play. Through Itunes/Ipod Apple has done something no one else has really done on the web, got users to pay. When the other companies can do the same thing, then we'll see how they do down the road.

Essentially I keep thinking of this. The Texas State Fair rivals as one of the biggest in the United States and doesn't look to lose that anytime soon. It operates in the same persona as Apple does. It selects by committee through applicants on who can be there, you pay a tax (rules, and fees) on how to operate. However, there's a ton of paying people there, so you deal with the rules at hand, because you're getting "fed".

It may not be free in the purest of sense, but griping after going in knowing full well it isn't is idiotic IMO.
Corporate failures to make good technology choices should not be conflated, as they are here, with being unable to look at YouTube at work.

The fact of the matter is that 90% of office workers shouldn't be using their office computers for general-purpose computing. They shouldn't be stifled from taking initiative by the IT department, but neither can they be allowed to jeopardize the electronic security of the entire organization.

In short, the real problem is that many IT departments are complete failures, for a whole host of reasons. Duke University is the only large organization that I have ever encountered with a really well-run IT group. Two years after I graduated, management decided to outsource @duke.edu email to Sun. There was a nearly week-long unscheduled outage, and many people lost their email archives (some going back 10 years or more). (In fact, they seem to be having another serious problem right now): http://it.pratt.duke.edu/aggregator/sources/1?from=60)
For more games like the above, see games ranked according to BGG:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame
So, your idea of telling nobody is to post something on a forum that catches 40K uniques on a good day and has employees from that specific company as it's members ?

Something tells me you're not entirely serious ;)
It really helps to have people to whom you can direct questions as you learn.

Do you have any friends that are developers? People generally enjoy when someone takes a genuine interest in their field. Perhaps ask politely if any of them would mind occasional IMs as you work your way through things.
Ask HN: Finding a hacker that understands music?
Dear HN,

I am currently working to launch a new music startup. Now, I know what you are thinking when you hear "music startup", but this is different.

For the past 5 months, I’ve been piecing together ideas and solutions that will finally put an end to "the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom". The current record labels' business model is not working for the 21st century and thus needs a 21st century makeover; But…

I have no programming skills or background, and I need to find a co-founder that understands what I’m really going for and will bring something to the table that I am obviously lacking (Programming skills). I currently live in Frederick, Maryland where; to say the least, there is a shortage of computer-minded people.

So, I came to seek your opinion, HN…

Where can I find a cofounder/programmer that understands ‘music’? (A hacker that understands the current problems that are facing the music industry today. ex: Piracy, declining music sales, etc. Someone that also has an interest in solving these problems.)

Should I just find my way to Silicon Valley by any means possible?

Any suggestions on how I should present my idea to a hacker (co-founder)?

Your advice and, or suggestions are all welcomed.
You would probably have to pay damages; see the ongoing drama of RIAA v. The Public for an example.
Read this: http://norvig.com/21-days.html. If you start now you'll be good to go in 2019.
I would recommend this advice as well. Deployment for Rails apps isn't as simple as uploading something to a remote server.

Here are some links specific for rails deployment:

http://www.capify.org
http://www.modrails.com/

This is specific to hostingrails (a rails hosting company), but it's the simplest tutorial I've found...

http://www.hostingrails.com/wiki/1/How-to-deploy-a-Rails-app...

Some other technologies that you may need:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastcgi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongrel_%28web_server%29
No one can answer that question accurately without discussing specific implementations of specific programming languages.
I agree, but I think that TDD is probably under adopted at the moment. MVC has obvious, measurable, direct benefits to development. As does functional programming (for the right problems). The research supporting TDD is either anecdotal or murky at best.

One of the biggest problems with TDD (and agile), in my opinion, is that it lacks an objective feedback mechanism that makes it obvious whether it's being applied correctly. I believe any methodology must have built-in feedback to ensure that it's applied correctly to be practical or successful. It takes a human TDD guru to subjectively determine if a team is doing TDD "right" or not. Whereas other development practices, such as producing daily builds, have obvious channels of direct feedback (do you produce a build every day, is it broken, does it use up-to-date sources, etc.). I believe that aspects of TDD will ultimately become part of a larger set of methodologies which together provide obvious, measurable benefits to development of many if not most software projects. But today the case for TDD as a one-size-fits-all methodology is far from conclusive.
I would dare to suggest that you create a HN thread for other novices. Better yet, you use this thread to ask your questions, and some folks here will try and answer politely.

Don't worry about the possible flak because of the n00b questions, we ALL were n00bs at one point of time...

As for point 4, you can learn to create a whole site without knowing what's the difference between a function and a closure, so worry about practicing your coding skills hehehe I'm sure you'll nail it if you code regularly.

The best of luck, welcome to our world
<insert dark laugh here>
Hey Biz2Hack,

You posted this earlier today and I wrote you a reply, then when I hit 'submit' the page was deleted!

Here is what I wrote:

(1) Well, you certainly have your problems cut out for you.

You won't be lacking in motivation, that's for sure :)

Where to start...

Programming is a method, a way of thinking, it has nothing to do with the actual language that you use to do it in, that's just a means to an end (though judging by the various language wars they are probably more like religious factions). Changing your site is great, but you'll have to set up a development and a production environment, and make sure you run those on two separate databases to make sure that if you do something you end up regretting you can revert back without your users catching any grief.

(2) Pick whatever feels best and easiest to you. That choice seems to have been made for you, since you mention 'rails', but really that's a framework for a language called 'ruby'. So ruby comes first, then rails.

Probably your best bet is to start off with making a list of the terms that you keep coming across (rails, ruby, framework, webapp) and so on, then read the wikipedia page on each of those to give you a feel for the terminology.

A 'hash' is a programmers trick to turn any object (usually a string, but you can apply hashes to just about everything else) into a more or less unique number. That way it becomes easier to find things, hashing is used for many purposes but one of the main applications in programming languages is so allow you to find in a very short time an entry in a list without having to go through all the items in the list one by one.

Your best bet to understand this stuff given the requirements of your situation seems to be to get a book on entry-level ruby, read that until it falls apart making sure that you do and understand all the exercises, then to move on to the rails framework.

You can test things out but I think there are better ways of learning how to program a given framework than messing around with a live website.

(3) As for courses, there are lots of tutorials available online, I would advice you to find a programmer buddy, preferably one that already has experience in the field that you are interested in.

4) could be, depends on how much time you put in there and how much background you already have. It sounds like a tall order to me, but when sufficiently motivated I'm sure you'll amaze yourself in what you can do in three months of really hard work.

(5) I completely agree with you there, hence the tip for a programming buddy. I'd look for that IRL though, and only use online fora as a backup plan if you can't find a live human being.

best of luck with all of this, let us know how you fared!

j.

-----
This really depends on the group in question. Talking about a lot of extraneous stuff in the middle of a game would probably be frowned upon in my particular group. In particular, in Settlers, people are often yelling out general trade offers, "anyone need wool? Wool for wood at 2 for 1! etc..." such that I think any added conversation would be problematic.
Unfortunately that seemed to be part of the culture -- don't even bother learning about / using competitors products because you "know" yours is better. Many MS programmers have only ever played on the MS stack.
"Each vehicle will be equipped with a GPS device that tracks how many kilometres are driven and when and where. This data will be then be sent to a collection agency that will send out the bill"

I'm far more concerned about the implementation than the concept.
these are all great - very creative! I suspect a few of them will work their way into any future games I'm a part of.
How Will We Keep Supercomputing Super?
Indeed, and sometimes even if you know you have to take the time to do things the right way and to have time for your life and not only for your work, other guys will try to prevent you from doing the Right Thing: co-founders, VCs, bosses, ..., make sure to be very clear about this points with this people as you have only 1 life and to work is worth it only if you can enjoy your work. To get stressed by an asshole should not be the way to do great things.

Also in general I tend to see that the clueless people are, the fastest they want to go. I think this is because people without knowledge can only stress other points like time to market, how big my deal is, and so forth.
Absolutely. These conventions are not arbitrary and the people working within them are not stupid. That they would lead to poor code in a completely different language is beside the point.

I went through something like this hacking in Lisp, actually. When I started out, I used long descriptive variable names; it's the CL style anyway (MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND, anyone?) Over time, I found myself using shorter and shorter names, to the point where my code is now of the sort that some of the commenters here would apparently fire me for it. Yet it's not like I somehow became less passionate about readable, clear code. What gives?

It took me a while to figure out. As programs get shorter (because the level of abstraction gets higher), the shape of the code itself becomes increasingly meaningful. (I mean the physical shape of the code as it appears on the screen.) This is doubly true of languages with very regular syntax like Lisp and K, and is a huge advantage to such regularity. Partly this is just that, since the program is shorter, more of it fits on one screen. But I think it's a deeper and more mysterious effect than that. You begin to develop an intuition for different patterns that have different semantics, as it were. Grokking these patterns becomes a big part of what you do when you read this sort of code. This effect is weaker in mainstream languages, so it's not surprising that people aren't aware of it. (Edit: although I used to joke that I could tell how good C# code was by printing out reams of it, hanging it on a wall, and stepping back 15 feet. That's an example of the effect too. It's just that in more powerful languages you don't have to step back 15 feet to see it.)

When you're working in a verbose language, long variable names are indispensable. You've got a whole lot of lines of code to read through, and a name like "x" does nothing to orient you as you switch contexts. But exactly the opposite is true of dense, concise programs. Variable names as long as even, say, "customerID" will dominate such programs textually, obscuring their natural shape. To increase overall clarity, you have to shorten those names to a length consonant with their semantic role. In other words, this style evolved not because people don't care about readability but because they are trying to maximize it.
A convention like "one letter for local vars, two for global, and three for functions" is exactly the sort of thing that would help achieve this in a language like K.

Ironically, I have given a verbose expansion of what you just said:

Using single letters in a piece of code helps in outlining the structure, instead of the contents.[...] The idea is that we are emphasizing the generic relations

My excuse is exploratory writing: I've been meaning to write about this for a while to clarify how it works in my head. And I don't have time to make it shorter :)
I really like the first one : No one will ever be as excited about your [product, service, business] as you are. That should really be the first thing to say to a new entrepreneur : "noone cares so you better be prepared to fight".
Obfuscation via a suitably-long unpredictable URL can work, but as others have noted, there are a number of ways such an URL can leak -- toolbars/browser-plugins being one of them. Also, that a user can easily forward the URL to others to grant access may be a bug or a feature, depending on your preferences.

One often overlooked leak: the 'Referer' [sic] header. If your document is hypertext, and includes outlinks to elsewhere, and the authorized user(s) click those links, those outlink-target sites may receive your confidential URL as a 'Referer' header. As some sites then publish their referrers, in one way or another, the 'secret' URL could wind up in public.

Remember this before creating a 'Competitors' page with outlinks on a 'login-required' but plain-HTTP wiki!
I think you need to define what you mean when you say someone that understands 'music'.

Do you mean someone with experience in the music business? Someone who understands thing from the perspective of a musician? A hacker with knowledge of distribution channels? Recording labels & studios?