skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 20 year-old version of Mark Zuckerberg beats the 20 year-old version of me every time.

That's not the right question. It's whether the 20 yr old Mark Zuckerberg beats himself every time? What are his chances of doing it again.

In my life I've met a lot of people that made it, but few that made it multiple times. The ones that made it all had a lot going for them and many were brilliant. A lot of them were in the right place at the right time, and had a lot of luck along the way. Very few of them (1 that I know for sure) was a serially successful. Henry Burkhardt III. Problem is, he was not an ethical person and was sued by the SEC for fraud[1].

Let's also be honest: on the path to being insanely wealthy there are a lot of forks in the road. One fork is treating people "right" (think golden rule here) and the other is being completely selfish and screwing people over. In my career, I've been at that road many times. I always chose the sleep-at-night path. There are some serially successful people that always take the "get mine" path. I've known a few of those people, too.

So, luck and the willingness to screw people over. Those are two ingredients for success.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr14895.txt
> My current project is choreographing 3 enterprise systems to work together

Well, don't think that's going to be open source.
It seems the media accomplished it's mission. Personally I was more shocked by the twist of the story. A husband and father puts his wife and kids in mortal danger on a overcrowded boat to get from Turkey to Greece. Wife and kids die. Everybody is to blame except the one who was supposed to protect them. Days earlier, Merkel said that Germany will help everyone who enters it's borders. Waves of immigrants enter into a frenzy to reach Germany. People die. We see pictures of dead kids. Merkel has no responsibility. Days later she changes her mind and pressures every country in EU to help with the waves but does nothing to discourage them. My conclusion ? Western Europe politicians and their supporters are insane.
I agree with all your points. I have used jetbrains products for 15 years so I feel sad that this is how they are going to lose me and other customers. I was hoping they would come with an IDE for golang and I would buy that as well. Now, this is a big disappointment.
The most developers will never need to bug their managers because a subscription based solution is a no go for the financial department anyway. Corporations do like getting blackmailed as much as a indie developer.
BlackBerry to Acquire Good Technology (425M in Cash)
Testing. I have never done TDD; I put it off in the beginning as an extra cost to clients (or time lost for me), and then when it became trendy I (as ever) disliked the trend :) Ian Cooper sums up my thoughts better than anyone else: https://vimeo.com/68375232

I'm doing a rewrite of a small project and that seems ideal to give it a go. To me functional testing is much more appealing, testing a simulated user's experience through the website, yet TDD seems more popular - as easier?

> This scenario could be an early warning for burnout too, take care of yourself!

I've been in a burnout cycle for the last few years - a holiday in July was the first time I switched off in 15 years, then a health scare last week and a friend in palliative care have pushed me to reconsider. The lure of money isn't as strong as it once was.
For companies managing the licenses for their employees, this is a great change. It's especially true for those who have a few primary languages but occasionally get contracts or have projects in other languages. For those with staff sizes in flux -- employees coming and going, contractors in and out, interns on board for part of the year -- only being responsible for the number of seats actively in use is extremely helpful, too.

Managing licenses for teams is time-consuming and frustrating. When I worked in the MSP world, convincing our clients (for whom we were essentially the IT department) that they had to buy an extra seat or upgrade everyone license or reminding them that, "No, you upgraded Sally to v5 but the Intern's system has last year's v4 license, and you have to shell out $X00 right now or they can't work" was a _constant_ issue. Creative Cloud and Office 360 made everything better, I expect this to have the same effect for dev teams.
A fair amount of the required effort is a good idea in itself, e.g. efficiency improvements in business, converting coal plants to natural gas to reduce air pollution health effects, wind is the cheapest and easist to build power source for new electricity capacity, solar correlates brilliantly with usage, electric cars/busses/taxis are great for big cities and so on.

It gets trickier later, but a lot if it just needs a tiny push in the right direction, as can be seen by the many countries around the world, already doing the "impossible" with relatively little fuss.

The bigger economic issue is that a very small number of people benefit directly from coal usage, and they can buy off politicians easily without challenge from the millions of people who suffer the ill effects indirectly through healthcare costs etc.
Maven is a first-class project format in NetBeans, whereas IntelliJ still needs to create its own project structure and metadata. So it seems less than ideal from that perspective. But having had to use IntelliJ for a while, I'm now comfortable with its way of handling Maven. I understand why it is the way it is: IntelliJ is a multi-stack IDE, whereas Maven is a Java-specific project format. IntelliJ has a project format that works across all their IDEs (except AppCode) and IntelliJ is just an all-in-one IDE, not just a Java IDE.
Maybe a week isn't long enough? I know I barely start coming down after a week.

Edit: obligatory Vacation is like violence. If it isn't working, you aren't using enough
I get burned by proprietary software way more often than I do by Free Software.
Hans Rosling: Don't use news media to understand the world (english subtitles)
I think it depends on the company.

For a larger corporation where the act of managing pools of licenses is a significant expense and literally everything the business does is managed in terms of contracts that must be maintained via regular payments, this makes a whole lot of sense. Even if the licensing model costs a bit more on paper, it's probably still cheaper to them because of saving the cost of having someone spend time physically managing all those individual licenses every time someone switches projects or enters or leaves the company.

For a smaller company or indie shop I'm not sure it's the same story. The calculus above depends on economies of scale to work out.
Ron Gilbert was recently a guest on Retronauts, and he talked about making Monkey Island: http://www.retronauts.com/?p=1147
> It's not a question of $ or of liking MS, it is a question of trust. Microsoft can and will suddenly discontinue entire solutions like Silverlight.

In all fairness all technology companies are like that. Hell even open source groups are like that. If the community disappears why would you continue to invest millions into it when better solutions are coming around the corner? Silverlight, for a while, was absolute king in video streaming (you could squeeze much more quality out of it than flash) but like with everything on the web unless it's strictly standards-based you're going to run the risk of it being discontinued when better standards come around.

I don't think that's really a fair knock against Microsoft.

> It will also make its return to the desktop one day when someone figures out how to make it suck less, as the language and the available libraries are awesome.

Good luck with that; it's going to take a desktop OS who can make a Java GUI framework feel native and not horrible and at this point I don't know why any of them would invest in this.
> * I felt it was a scam (are they going to publish an update in the next year so I get my money's worth? Probably not) but I could deal with it.*

Surely under the current model you can just not pay for another year until they release an update you want access to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

> The theory was popularized in the 1840s by Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle.
> But in 1860 Herbert Spencer formulated a counter-argument that has remained
> influential throughout the 20th century to the present; Spencer said that
> such great men are the products of their societies, and that their actions
> would be impossible without the social conditions built before their
> lifetimes.
You do realize, of course, that YC depends on the idea that certain people will adjust as necessary to become unicorns.

They're fairly explicit about it.

And their track record is pretty positive about the concept.
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jQuery is a bloated library that tries to do too much. It's slow and becoming less and less necessary as browsers become more standards compliant.
Would love to see a version without jQuery! Thanks for the great work.
It seems to me that where JetBrains went wrong was building every language supported as a separate application. According to their announcement post the stated goal of was to deal with the customer ask to get easier discounts on multiple language products or to move from one language to another more easily. To JetBrains the solution was apparently to switch to SaaS, which kind of makes sense, but from my perspective maybe they should have just consolidated some of their product efforts?
> Object Oriented Software Construction (2nd. Bertrand Meyer)

That was the first programming book I ever bought! Sad to say it's sat unread on the shelf for 13 years...
I recommend trying the games that were specifically developed for AirConsole ;)
JetBrains rep here.

"Phoning home" is actually not new. We've introduced JetBrains Account as a way of authorizing a product instance (as an alternative to license keys) for a couple of years now.

Current student licenses work exactly the same way, as well as a part of classroom and OS licenses AFAIK. A lot of current personal and some commercial licenses are managed through a JetBrains Account as well.

With the new scheme, JetBrains Account will simply gain more usage than now, hard-coded license keys will eventually go away, but a license server option for environments that have restricted Internet connection will be provided the same as it is now.

Now, there might be certain additional steps we might need to take to ensure license delivery in certain scenarios but we'll be handling this as we receive specific problem reports.
Haven't read the article but the same argument could be made of cars (not saying it's wrong).
this is very cool.
OP was deleted because it was getting downvoted. Apparently the state is a normal, expected outcome from randomization, and it was a dumb question to ask.
Show HN: Cycligent.js – A micro-library for async script loading and classic OOP
"Because we can"
Nope, we just had to shut down our corporate evaluation of phpstorm because our org does not allow us to purchase locked in products with shut off mechanisms.
Hedge Funds, Spoofers and Sauce
You're right, this isn't quite the same genre anymore, it's more of an interactive story. The trend towards simplicity has definitely crept in. I really enjoyed Broken Age, but not for quite the same reasons as the Monkey Island series.

Monkey Island 2 was incredibly frustrating at points and for whatever reason (shorter attention spans probably) there is less of a market for that type of game; people are more likely to stop playing after the first bit of difficulty.

I'd still play that old style of game because the more time it takes you to figure the puzzles out the more immersed you get in the game world, but for a lot of people that's not fun.
1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month.

2. Nothing in their old model prevented them from raising prices. Not sure how you think switching to a monthly subscription model changes that.

i.e. your entire premise, that this is an investment of time and money, really has nothing to do with JetBrains' switch to a subscription model. In fact, they would probably be more likely to go out of business if they stuck with the old model, so this protects your investment.

Complaining because you don't think you can afford it is an understandable position. Your points, however, are entirely irrelevant.
Yes, our free products (IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm Community Editions, dotPeek) are not affected by these changes. They'll be available as before.
Let's see: Event A will cause event B. Event B will
will be really bad. So, let's go on and on
about how bad event B will be, all the
direct effects and all the indirect
effects. On and on.

So, get people all up on their hind legs
based on how bad event B will be.

But event A, what about event A?

How do we know that event A will happen?

When do we get solid information about
the chances of event A?

Event B: Gigantic flocks of
pigs flying over our largest cities
and dropping huge piles of pig poop.
Let's talk about all the really horrible
problems all those flying pigs will
cause. Let's get the EPA, USDA,
CDC, etc. working really hard on the
problem. Let's pass a lot of new
laws restricting and taxing pigs.
Let's have the NIH doing genetic
studies on how to do genetic engineering
to throttle the flying pigs. We need
a UN effort to constrain all those
flying pigs with some treaties with
some severe sanctions to protect
the world, including the poorest
people who will be hurt the worst,
from all those flying pigs.

In all of this, what is the chance
of event A, the chances of the
gigantic flocks of flying pigs?

So, since event B with those pigs
would be so bad, we get to neglect
talking about event A that the
pigs will fly at all?

I smell the faint whiff of propaganda
pig poop.
Yeah, this is what I was getting at. The old, dense neighborhoods are getting expensive. But we can't seem to build them anymore.
What if I want to build a billion dollar company?
5 Real Stories of Big Data Analytics in Action
TheMint.org+-+Fun+For+Kids
Nuff – The Network Universal Frame Forge
>> the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.

Agreed.

I dropped most of Adobe's products after they went to a subscription based model. The only product I still use is Photoshop and I'm planning on dropping that later this year so I can move 100% to Linux.

For the record, over 95% of the front-end devs I know use Sublime Text for their IDE.
>> "A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours."

Where is that quote from? It's been a while since I've seen such an elitist snarky statement and I'd like to know who to attribute it to.
Lot's of "good" cases go sideways. This case could have easily gone that way. To prove causation and damages, you need economic models. The defense has their own experts with their own models showing that the attempted collusion as ineffective at actually suppressing salaries. If your jury buys that, you get $0, even if you have a notarized affidavit from a CEO saying he tried to suppress wages.
The $450 phone was $0 upfront, and the $550 phone was $100 upfront, but they all cost the same per month after that. Scrounging up $200 for a flagship $650 phone is tough for some people, even if they can pay the monthly cell phone bill.

Now, with financing, all the phones are $0 upfront. The $450 one is $19 per month, the $550 one is $23, and the $650 one is $27. So I'd wager they sell more of those flagships to people.
Your 1 year upgrade starts from when your last license ran, not from when you paid for the upgrade. So if your license ran out in January and you bought a 1 year upgrade next June. That upgrade would only last until next January, not next June.
Care to elaborate on how that is?
What's missing from this argument is that opportunities to make ongoing profit without considerable ongoing investments tend to be VERY short lived in the tech field. Assuming that steady revenue will last, will lead you to ending up crashing as hard as Atari.

You grew a steady, low-stress $1MM/year lifestyle business? Great. 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. Software is rarely like the e.g. restaurant business, where you can own a scarce piece of property in a good location and don't have to compete with the whole world, or other defendable advantages. Tech startups tend to have far fewer defendable advantages.

Once you realize this, it becomes obvious that "grow or die" is the nature of the business. Not some silly scheme that only exists due to VCs forcing it upon entrepreneurs.

Long-term opportunities that are easily defendable with minimal effort are extremely rare in the tech startups field.

On top of that, guess which type of businesses are, by far, the most attractive to cloners and other competition? - those "ideal" lifestyle businesses that make profits from early on and require minimal upfront investment.

Edit: Or instead of Atari, insert here all the other profitable businesses that you've never heard of, who got crushed after a couple years because they slowed their investments into innovating, assuming that their very steady profits would continue instead of dropping off a cliff. Happened to me twice.
VideoOverPlay
A typical move to subscription based pricing LOWERS costs to the consumer, but the company gets the benefit of more predictable recurring revenues. That makes the pricing JetBrains puts out a little bit of a head-scratcher.
>So, luck and the willingness to screw people over. Those are two ingredients for success.

The older I get and the more I witness people doing business, the more I have come to the same conclusion.
I would possibly broaden "willingness to screw people over" to something like "the capacity to be able to overlook or be oblivious to any negative effects of one's path to success on the other people on the planet."
> but had absolutely zero follow ups to my job applications.

Applicant Tracking Systems are notoriously bad. And worse still, their users are primarily flunky HR types. It's also possible, your CV is weak or off-target for the role.

The work-around: From now on, go direct to the boss. E-Mail and call the hiring executive (yes, people still use the telephone). Linkedin is good for figuring out who's in charge. Sort for CIO, VP or Director of Engineering, etc...

You'll find doing this gets better response rates and more courteous follow up.
.. but then you lose the 'renew' discount and have to cough up full price when the update eventually arrives.
>Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?

One of the main arguments of basic income, as opposed to unemployment benefits, is to reduce the bureaucracy involved. So the answer would be an empathetic 'no'. Hopefully, having a guaranteed income decoupled from location would push people to populate cheaper places. And thus, rent would get much cheaper overall.
They should be happy that the customers are complaining, it gives them a chance to consider their concerns. I just usually walk away without warning if I'm unhappy with a product, customers like me force businesses to do a lot of detective work to find out the reasons for bad retention.
No you can't. Under the new model if you stop paying, it stops working.
Crypto Protocols
Anyone interested in grid layouts on the web should probably take a look at the native CSS Grid Layout feature[0]. Unlike existing solutions it doesn’t require rigid HTML structure or extensive class usage of questionable semanticity.

It might not be too practical if you’re building something here and now, given that spec drafts are subject to change. On the other hand, there are polyfills already and full browser support seems to be on its way.

[0] A nice overview I stumbled across recently: https://medium.com/@patrickbrosset/css-grid-layout-6c9cba6e8...
You can do this already though. Right now, my team has a license server URI they type into their editor, and when we're using the software it grabs a license slot from the server. If that employee left the company they just wouldn't use the license anymore and there's no cleanup work.
How exactly do you think more "heads-up time" would improve the situation? Either you are gonna stick with JetBrains and their product, in which case heads-up is irrelevant, or you are gonna switch to a competing product, in which case heads-up wouldn't help either: you will still need to learn the new product, regardless of when you switch.
vim remains free and free
Please, show me the science behind the "unicorn".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

And since it's all about the determined individual, I also guess women, blacks, latinos, LGBT et al are just lazy or not competent enough as Mark, Gates et co to not have such many billion dollar success stories -- heck even way less million dollar success stories per percentage of the population. Right?
IntelliJ likes to maintain two build systems. It has its own project files that keep track of dependencies and how to build things. Changes made to the POM have to be imported into IntelliJ's project format, if you build or run something in IntelliJ, it's not necessarily the same build Maven would perform, because IntelliJ is invoking java and javac itself without going through mvn.

NetBeans, on the other hand, uses the POM itself as its project file for everything it can. All dependency information exists only in the POM, and NetBeans reads it directly. What little bit NetBeans needs that doesn't go in the POM goes in nbactions.xml (e.g. main class, path to JVM), which is very small and minimal, and there's no duplication of data between the two. The NetBeans project file is just the tuple of (pom.xml, nbactions.xml). I've encountered many instances where IntelliJ and Maven get their dependency trees desynced, and while sometimes it can be solved by re-importing the POM, other times it can't, and resolving it becomes this huge hairy nightmare.

Better yet, whenever you initiate a build or run anything in NetBeans using a Maven project, it simply invokes mvn through a shell. You can see in the output tab the exact Maven command line NetBeans ran, so you can duplicate it or send it as instructions to collaborators who don't necessarily use NetBeans.

I have to use IntelliJ at my current job, and I find myself just using it as an editor and building by manually invoking Maven on the command line myself (and the company has our own system of scripts for running our Java projects).
I really hope they do act, I love their products but this new subscription model annoys me.