skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Long-term opportunities that are easily defendable with minimal effort are extremely rare in the tech startups field.

I used to buy that. Then I started looking around:

1) What's McAfee today that it wasn't 30 years ago?
2) Windows 10 is a slightly newer look with small WinRT runtime (which may have come from WinCE I don't know) but most of the software underneath is the same code running for over 2 decades as it looks to my eyes.
3) SereneScreen fish screensaver, has it changed much?
4) How many years has Skype been around?

Put some lipstick on the pig and if it ever sold at all, software is renewable.

Also your restaurant analogy isn't really fair, it takes a lot of work every day to keep a popular restaurant popular regardless of location.

>> Now thousands of people are going to see what you're doing, and dozens are going to try to clone you, many of them far better connected than you are.

Linux is better than Windows yet what runs on most desktops?
OS/2 was far, far better than Windows yet Windows is still on desktops because IBM stopped selling OS/2 (and PC's for that matter); not because people would not still be buying it but because they are more interested in selling mainframes (which were supposed to be dead by now).
Extensibility is the reason for Emacs' power. Lisp is just an implementation detail. You could make an equivalently powerful editor in any high-level language.

There are other extensible editors, but the line between Emacs' kernel and its extensions is drawn at a different place in Emacs than in any other popular editor. It is more likely that any given feature you're interacting with in Emacs is provided by its extension code than it would be in another editor.

Probably more important is the benefit Emacs gets from being one of the two major Unix editor projects. It has an immense community and user base.
Did you previously pay the yearly fee to continue to get upgrades?
I code php, java, python regularly. My team of two code php and java regularly and a little python. We have a small resource starved team. May not be normal but it is for us.
"previously they would have to artificially hold some of the bigger changes back to justify the next big yearly version number increase"

I get that. Perhaps they should or could have just sold the current latest version as is for a bit less and then whenever the next big release comes out offer a prorated upgrade amount to those that feel the new features are worth the additional upgrade amount. Their model, withholding features so they could package them into a huge update, was hurting themselves and their customers.

What's to say they don't start pulling IntelliJ with other/more products? That is, to stop or slow down development/improvements and now milk a cash cow?

Clarification: They could have sold a working perpetual license without the 1 year of upgrades. When they have an upgrade they have an prorated upgrade path/cost based on when you purchased your current license/product.
Ron left LucasArts before Curse of Monkey Island and it was made without his consent or original design plans by essentially and entirely new and different design team. To be fair to the Curse design team, it sounds like Ron's vision for his Monkey Island 3 has never really existed outside of his head and he didn't leave them any/many notes to even be able to attempt to end the trilogy with whatever story Ron may have envisioned. Ron also had mostly made it clear that he doesn't like that LucasArts continued the IP without his consent, as it was his baby, but that's the wonderful world of work for hire for you.
Why we also don't use Ruby or Python.
If you're not aiming for a billion dollars (or even hundreds of millions) in a software business chances are you don't have to raise VC money so none of the above matters. I think that's the main point of the article.
Ask HN: Recommended Python frameworks for desktop applications development
Hello,

I'm looking for a python framework for developing desktop applications.
I am looking for an easy to use (drag-drop) interface and the ability to convert the code into an executable file (exe in my case), the availability of a built in DB (files based or SQLight for example) is a plus.

Thank you.
There's a significant attitude difference when you pay for upgrade every year because the product is improving or when you have to pay so the company doesn't pull the killswitch in your tooling.
Nice list, and overlaps a lot with my "Languages to try one day" Post-it note (though I have Elixir instead of Erlang). And I'd never heard of Forth - amazing what I learn!

My current toolbox is:

Professional level: PHP, databases, frontend development (but haven't picked a JS framework due to choice paralysis)

Experience of: C, Python, Matlab, Fortran77, Prolog (my favourite, most mind-bending experience yet. Magic!)

I tried learning about monads recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvD1VjRvGIk made sense (I was nodding my way through) but I kinda missed what a monad was - this just seemed common sense that my languages didn't allow :)

Thanks, you've inspired me to play.
Yeah, but the "right" way to do it is to disable updates on license expiration, not just turn off a product you might have paid for since 2010.

Maybe the best thing to do would be an initial payment worth, say, 6 months, followed by monthly renewals; if the renewal does not go through, updates stop. This would be closer to the current model, but would still switch most revenue (renewals) to the SaaS model.
"Horrible math" is definitely one explanation. But the other one is that many people use their cell phones for many hours a day and that phones enable everything they do. By that metric, spending a small amount of extra money spread over two years can make a lot of sense for anyone who is not dirt poor and struggling to eat.
Monads in Scheme
I tried, it's not the same. The dedicated tools are better.
> It removes the option for me to decide to not upgrade because the improvements are not worth the cost.

The blog post stated this as a reason. They want to focus on quality instead of features to sell upgrade licenses. I was a bit put off that statement though since I expect bug fixes as part of my original purchase price.
An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity
khrậng. amazing.
PyData 2015 CFP Is Open
It's $0.60 cents a day. It's still a deal if you only use one thing and they offer 2 million things you absolutely know you'll never use.

I don't know what your hourly rate is, but if you were only making $10 an hour, this tool would pay for itself if it saved you 4 minutes a day. That's 1% of your time in a normal work day for someone not even making a living wage.
How to end insecurity in your relationship forever
The ZTE Blade was _the_ goto phone for price-to-power-to-rootability (absolutely trivial to root).

Then the follow-up, the ZTE Skate started their trend of fiendish difficulty to unlock.
"UniVBE (short for Universal VESA BIOS Extensions) is a software driver that allows DOS applications written to the VESA BIOS standard to run on almost any display device made in the last 15 years or so."

I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year)
Doing professional Java dev with Eclipse since '10, never had any serious issues with Eclipse. IMHO, the biggest Eclipse-related issues I've had were with dodgy 3rd party plugins.

I find that people who "HATE" Eclipse passionately often don't understand how to use it properly. E.g... why is it taking a long time to build? Well, you enabled "Build automatically" in the project settings of your 900KLOC project...

Anyway, I've had this debate many times, I have no interest in having it again. I am just happy Eclipse works well for my needs, so I have no reason to worry about IntelliJ, SaaS licensing or whatever.

I would just encourage people who are unhappy about the changes to give Eclipse another shot -- who knows, maybe you will like it the second time around.
NASA looking at 'hitchhiking' across solar system on speeding comets
Nobody is saying luck is sufficient, just that it's necessary. As is talent, hard work, &c.

The role of luck ("fortune", "fate") in the success of great people is a deep and ancient question, and you should not dismiss it. Machiavelli's Prince is at least 50% about the subject, and Sun Tzu is infatuated with it. Acknowledging luck does not mean dismissing the successful - it's just intellectual honesty.
Even though the standard of living is raised for all humans, it seems like advances in AI and automation will drastically reduce the percentage of productive members of society, in spite of educational opportunity.

Improving educational opportunities (a la Udacity) is a noble idea because it levels the playing field a bit (giving the underprivileged a chance), but the end result is the same - a small number of people will inevitably own AI, and the world by extension.

Assuming that the new AI titans are compelled to share their wealth with humanity, wouldn't less productive members of society still face existential threat? Improved standard of living only takes care of the first 2-3 layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs - but "esteem" and "self-actualization" are really important as well.
It's probably tough to pirate their products in the first place because there isn't much of an incentive to crack them. It's not like a Call of Duty release where kids with no money the world over want the product. This is a tool for professionals, the kind of people who can shell out a couple billable hours worth of cash or get a license from their employer.
Pet peeve: they should simplify the redundant "$0.97c" price.

It's either $0.97, or 97¢, it can't be both can it?
How Google sets goals: OKRs
It's been good news for Serif. I've bought a grand total of 4 non-games on my Mac, Serif's Affinity Photo & Designer being 2 of them so I didn't have to pay Adobe for things I'd only use intermittently (Intellij being a third).
My first impression was the same as Mithaldu, but then I tried one of the other games and it was more responsive.

I think that the NES emulator is bad advertising for your (very nice) product.
I use php storm because it works really well out of the box.
> I want to tools to be excellent, certainly, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time fixing

Thats what drew me to the JetBrains product line. The default functionality and polish feels good compared with eclipse which is what I usually use when I'm in java. I still jump into emacs for some file editing because it feels right. But eclipse still seem strangely odd to use (that could just be the whole java toolchain thing). I spend a certain amount of time on learning the tools and learning how to configure. The curve on emacs/eclipse configuration is steep. oddly I donated for me emacs / eclipse since I use them enough.

> If you use proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the vendor for features..

Something I kinda knew, even as a paying customer, but this change really brings it home. Especially since we now have to keep paying to keep using.
Base tools for 'attention whoring' bloggers
What would be really cool is: your browser is the game console, your gamepad is the gamepad.
Agreed, that's kind of how I value my rMBP, or equivalent windows laptops around $1500. I'll use it for 4 years, sell it for 25% the price (this is sadly where windows loses some value that's often not justified, resell market for Apple is great, resell market for top (not crappy but top) windows hardware seems to really undervalue the remaining quality).

Got my MBP for about €1400, aim to sell it for at least about €400 a few years down the road. That leaves a cost of about 20 euros per month.

Then I look at the fact that as an independent developer I'm earning a few thousand a month and this device basically like 90% of my office.

It means a device that costs $100 or $1000 or even $5000 doesn't really make a huge difference. It's like a writer's pencil costs $1 or $10 or $100, when it's a tiny percentage of his costs and a gigantic percentage of his usage.

That having been said, whether a purchase is justified in and of its own ignores the fact whether it's justified vs other purchases. After all, spending money supremely is a game of opportunity cost. And here spending an additional $500 starts to break down, and now we'd have to weigh the marginal benefit. Does a MBP vs a MBA for say a web developer who has a career in SEO, or say CSS, add much? Often the answer would be no, and compared to say $500 on a year at the gym, a romantic weekend, charity, is hard to defend. And with cheap phones hitting the essentials more and more (messaging, calls, basic snapshots, directions, quick info, a game of poker, dating etc), I'm already personally getting disinterested with new iterations of phones. The latest giants' 6 versions (samsung, apple) did nothing for me in terms of purchasing desire, despite thinking they're awesome devices.
That could be an awesome previewer for .ild files (Laser Show stuff). The OpenLase and VectorBoy projects might like to hear from you.

It would may also be really nice for rendering the old vector games in MAME - I have a Cinematronics emulator that can run about 13 vector games too, mostly black and white.
I like it, and it works for now, but there's definitely a latency issue for some of the games. Looks like the phone and browser are connected to the server through web sockets. I've tried something similar and I don't know if it'll scale. Why is phone input mandatory? I get the novelty of holding a controller but then this appeals only to console gamers.

As a side note, Apple's new Apple TV may pack enough hardware to run its own games, w/ the phone as a potential medium for a controller, so it'll be a tough space!
32 of the 48 countries in Africa are in an energy crisis according to the World Bank. Think how many millions of lives could be improved/saved by cheap coal plants, with immediate benefits. Or, the horror, nuclear power plants in 15 years.

We're leaving hundreds of millions in abject poverty today, for some mild to negligible benefit in the future (We aren't cutting CO2 emissions from industrialized nations much anytime soon).
If you go deep enough, sometimes you can find the models on one author's university website. Then you'll scream.

Often you'll find the source program, but then discover it's a 12,000 line matlab file with no comments, no spaces between lines, and lots of copy/paste.

Step one of reproducible results: stop using matlab. Step two: give every author a "code reviewer" or "code tidier" to fix their rush-rush-rush-hurry-theres-a-deadline code into something others can at least evaluate against.
Wait, what? The only product I use is Resharper... I was paying $119 an update before, now I'll be paying $240?!? Yeah, that's not a good deal for me. There's no amount of skewed math I can apply that makes $240 less than $119...
A taxi driver will buy a nice pair of comfortable shoes and then keep them forever. The seller will not come around every month asking for money and threatening to take back his shoes if he doesn't cough up. That's what a different type of "business" does.
If you want to stay on a perpetual licenses for a little longer (to see how everything pans out), you now have to buy it within two months and not at your planned upgrade term, otherwise you lose that option.

Another benefit of more time would be that in a corporation where purchases are not as simple as pulling the trigger, you have some time to do the paperwork to get the subscription approved, while still continuing in the current update scheme until then.
You make a good point that I didn't think of. Tracks are safer, despite the higher speeds, I think. I never took my bike to the track. I always wanted to but never wanted to wreck it.
Intel invests $50M into quantum computing partnership
Why is it madness? It works and like the author said, it's an extremely safe way to do it.

Also, if we're going to be pedantic, I'd recommend a FET over a voltage divider.
> It sounds like you may be at a point in your career where you may be suffering some imposter syndrome when it comes to making the decisions to move the PoC code to something more final.

Definitely! I'm the imposter that imposter syndrome was defined around ;)

> That should be your primary goal during this time, is this readable and maintainable?

Oh, that's an interesting twist. Move the focus away from craftmanship of the present-day to future-proofing. It may be more ugly but if I can fix/extend it in 12 months without missing a beat then my job is better done.

> I spent the first six weeks so twisted up I'd go days without a line of code written- luckily there was enough in the way of infrastructure and Ops tasks to give me something to do. I think the stress of it all just kept me from being able to focus like I need to in order to develop.

I'm 31 and that's how I've spent a lot of time recently. Especially when not working flat-out on a project to meet a deadline. Give me one of those and I'm happy: head down, pounding it out.
@toyg (not sure why I can't reply to you so I'll reply to me instead) - really? I've never tried them. I thought Intellij was the same with the appropriate language plugin. Maybe I'll give some of them a go...
It's great that this is available (haven't worked through it yet).

Two major show-stoppers for me right now though:

* In the Perl 6 repl, I can't use my up/down arrows, or ^p/^n to get at previous lines I typed, nor ^a/^e and alt-B/alt-F to navigate on the line.

* In the repl, I can't do `doc(some-func)` to get at docstrings.
They gave me a free version of WebStorm because I'm a hobbyist open source developer. I love it, but I'm obviously not going to pay $80 a year. Does anyone know if they're going to continue having some kind of free option for non-corporate use?
JetBrian used to have to improve the product significantly every major release so that people would pay for the new version. Just want to point out that by changing to the new subscription model, they no longer have that drive.

Of course there are still other reasons for innovating their product, it's just one less.
The cost of international transfers: A tax on the poor
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Sounds like a great place to dump a body...
Announcing the Tesla Model W
Also those emissions are relatively easy to fix since it's mostly cheap and nasty coal plants. They're already sick of coal plants due to local pollution, and switching electricity generation tech is much easier than say changing 100 year old car based city structures. And they are well positioned to do renewables & nuclear.
although it came later, don't forget Outlaws! Maybe the most underrated and unknown top-10 game of all time.
Smartphones and Ultra-Orthodox Jews: Digital Temptations
Most of the large organizations I've dealt with are fine with this because they like having someone to call for problems. “subscription” is the same as “support contract” for the accountants and that's something they're very used to: it converts an unknown risk of an expensive outage into a predictable annual expense.
At this I'd like to remind folks that Emacs has been around for over 3 decades and isn't going anywhere. Don't trust a single company with your most essential tools.
> The correct answer is that features like push notifications should be opt-in in the browser.

They are. They are completely opt-in. You don't get push notifications unless you ask for them.
Codecademy's Summer of Code projects–upvote your fave and help a student get ahead
The Ur language excites me with its type-level programming, row polymorphism, combination of both ML modules and Haskell type classes, and high performance. However, I have very little interest in web programming. It's quite odd (and more than a little frustrating) that there isn't any way to do write just regular old command-line apps (hello world etc) with Ur. There isn't even a print function; you'd have to FFI it from C and then wrap it inside of a web server route to get it to do anything...
Since your GP post has been flagged I will post this here.

JS;DR - nice, I'll be borrowing that one in future.
Resharper ultimate is $11.99 a month or $119 a year.
I think TDD is a great exercise to do a couple of times, and a great way for a new developer to grow some good habits very quickly. I'm much, much less convinced of its utility for people with experience.

However, you really do need some automated testing. One of the reasons I love automated testing is that it permits me to make (nearly) monotonic forward progress on my tasks. If part of your burnout here is that you are just [expletive] tired of making changes in one bit of the code just for it to create 6 more bugs in the rest of it, automated testing is the core solution to that. I used to get that type of burnout... I don't anymore, except when I'm stuck crawling around somebody else's code base where I can't add testing for some reason.

Also, rather than posting another comment, rather than a new "field" you may just need a new job. It isn't all CRUD coding. Mind you, there isn't really much out there that is fascinating cutting-edge research every day, either; even that involves a lot of grunt work. But it isn't all CRUD work out there, either.