skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've seen companies who forget to renew their licenses promptly or who have long and convoluted processes to approve the expenditure. I guess, under the new model, development grinds to a halt until the purchase goes through.

That sounds like a problem with the company practices and policies and not Jetbrains. I'm pretty sure that would affect other things in the company as well (such as stalling to pay an internet bill or something).
Do you have a link to a good dataset of english-language NK propaganda? I've been playing around with char-rnn and that sounds like a good one to play with.

I agree the output here is lower quality than I would expect from an RNN, and quite similar to what I would expect from ngram-based markov bots.
Sorry, but they have changed their pricing model; the previous model provided a perpetual license with a year of updates, and the new model is simply rental, which access terminating once you stop paying.

I don't rent my tools.
> I struggled for years with OO and was never happy with my solutions. Learning functional was my road to Damascus experience.

Is there anything you could recommend reading that might show how a non-ridiculously-trivial example might be done in a functional language compared to an OO language? The "OO world" seems to me to becoming increasingly unintuitive so I'd be interested to look into something that makes me feel less crazy.
> Nokia 635, $40

I don't understand why these low cost Nokia's get so little love here in the U.S. My 520 was $50 a few years ago and is a rock solid piece of hardware. I guess it's the missing apps on Windows mobile?
Slice Harvester: A pizza memoir
It's hard to make an argument that loyal customers are lost. Don't they by definition renew the license every year anyway? If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire. This change affects only potential new customers who are not renewing every year for some reason.
Am I unique – How unique is your web browser setup?
It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum.

That does not make sense. Spotify et al. were like that from the beginning. You know what kind of deal you are getting. JetBrains is changing the rules of the game completely, with very little heads-up time, for people who might be deeply invested in their products.

It's comparable to what Adobe pulled off: they knew that most people did not have a choice, so they could force it on them. Luckily, the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.
If the code is tested then refactoring the ideas contained within is the way to go. Do the smallest refactorings possible. Even well-respected programmers who've authored tons of books and given talks do not sit down and 1-shot a program. Elegant programs are the result of refining and designing.

The earlier in the development process you get to the refactoring and isolating minimal testable components, the less of a tangle you have between components to refactor; it's a lot like the wire tangles we're all so familiar with). This not only means less refactoring, but it also means that the existing code is easier to understand.

The tests are code. Treat the tests just like the rest of the code. I prefer test-first but if you want to pull your cart in front of your horse then go for it.

If the code is not tested I'd recommend testing it. There are really only 3 options to go from untested code base to tested code base:
- Try to put tests under existing code (often inefficient)
- Refactor the system incrementally as time goes on and features are added and bugs are fixed (slow process but over time test coverage grows)
- Throw it out and start over (ouch but... greenfield; if you do this you should _NOT_ add any new features to the live/production system or you'll end up in a rat race between the two forever)

Also if you're able to take any time away (preferably measured in days) the fresh perspective might help too. Sometimes that little bit of total separation is enough to come back and read a method name and wonder why the hell it's even in that particular class. This scenario could be an early warning for burnout too, take care of yourself!
BlackBerry Buying Good Technology for $425M
The Software Revolution
Related bit of trivia: MI was heavily inspired by Tim Powers' novel "On Stranger Tides" (which is a classic piece of secret history, involving Blackbeard, the Fountain of Youth, and of course zombie pirates). For the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, they bought the rights to the novel -- but pretty much the only thing they kept from the book was the title and the Blackbeard character. Everything else has been changed, for the worse. (So much worse.) So Disney's two pirate franchises are related, in a weird way.
Run away from people that think you will steal their idea
Engineering Internships: The Key to Finding a Job
> everybody is using their IDEs

And I think that's a shame, because I prefer NetBeans over IntelliJ. I've used both, and IntelliJ's Maven integration is just terrible.
This makes no sense whatsoever.

All of the things you listed are services that run on servers that cost money to run.

JetBrains' IDEs are downloadable software that we pay for and exists in perpetuity.

I also have no idea why you're referencing the community edition; the people complaining are customers that pay for JetBrains' non-OSS software.
You don't build a billion dollar business to cash out and retire. You would likely end up investing in new businesses and continue from there.

In that perspective, a billion is exactly a thousand times better than a million. Even more so, perhaps, because it enables you to never have to worry about losing your money and going broke, which you could easily do with a million or even ten.
If they are preventing you from loading your own software, in my mind that lends credence to the idea that ZTE has some sort of spying capability (beyond the usual smartphone spying capabilities) that they really don't want to lose.
> Here (Europe) buying a pre-paid card and a phone separatly is the most cost effective option, isn't it the same in the States?

Where in Europe? In the Netherlands all the calculations I ran every 2 years showed anywhere from slight to major discounts for 2 year contracts paired with a phone, and that's without discounting future cash payments (or valuing money you're paying upfront, either way).

It's still beneficial to phone companies because it makes phones look cheaper than they actually are ($30 a month feels more doable than $720 upfront) and so it's probably easier to sell a $30 a month cost for 2 years than selling a $720 cost even though (ignoring time value of money) they're the same.

And then if you add say a $20 phone plan, it's basically: want to pay $50 a month, or $30 a month and pay $720 now? The latter is probably easier to swallow for most and easier to sell, but that's of course entirely different from being a scam.

So for example, the Netherlands. Apple's shop sells the iphone for 700 euros. KPN (one of the 3 networks) has a one-time 53 euro, 2 year 54 euro plan, so 56 euros per month on average and the phone & plan is included.

A similar plan with the same KPN is €32.50. Add that to the 700 euro cost of the phone over 24 months (€29) and you're at 62 euros, vs 56 euros, more than 140 euros of discount and that's without valuing the financial/convenience value of not having to pay 700 euros upfront.

And this is literally the first, standard plan I looked into, no cherrypicking. (5gb a month plan, no limit calling/texting). Perhaps you could find different results but I've, purely as part of my buying decisions when I bought my own phone, ran these calculations here about every year or every two years at different carriers and it's consistent. So I'd say, it depends on the country.

As for prepaid, it's absolutely horrible here in the Netherlands. It's 30c per minute for calling, 16c per text, 25c per megabyte. Not kidding. That's KPN by the way, the same that offers the above plans. That means if you call say 300 minutes per month, that's 90 euros already. And that's just a little over calling 1 hour per week. Call 30 minutes per week and it's 36 euros. Add a 700 euro iPhone and you're already well over any KPN plan you can get, and you haven't used any data or texts yet. The 5 gigabytes of data the plan has would cost you 1250 euros per month if used in prepaid. Even using just 500 megabytes per month (my plan 5 years ago) would cost you 125 euros per month, prepaid.

KPN's prepaid is disproportionately shitty though, it's meant for old people really. Like my grandfather has it and he mostly just calls for cabs, emergencies etc. T-Mobile's rate in the Netherlands is more sensible, but still 5c per megabyte. A 1 gigabyte monthly data usage still costs you 50 euros, but such a 1 gigabyte plan would cost you less than 20 euros with minutes included. Prepaid here is never, ever a good option, unless you're an extremely light user like my grandfather, or someone who travels tons and doesn't return (as you can freeze plans for vacations etc).
The dangerous separation of the American upper middle class
Baltimore defense lawyers to review nearly 2,000 cases involving stingrays
Good idea. I guess that was my main goal really, learning the structure of some text. The vocabulary generator was a pretty recent add in which is why it is quite in-accurate.
Growing up on a farm provides protection against asthma and allergies
At least it's no so expensive.
Blue sky vanishes after Beijing's big parade
Data, Analytics Help Fight Forest Fires
> Lisps also tend to be dynamically type so if that is not familiar to you then it will take some getting used to.

Eh, dynamically typed languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl are rather popular.
I've signed up. Craving a more formal intro to crypto-currencies. Consists mostly of video lectures and supplemental multiple choice style quizzes. Original course included five programming assignments asking students to build simplified versions of a Bitcoin like system, but its not clear there is any programming involved in the Coursera version.

A draft version of the Bitcoin textbook the instructors are currently working on is available:

https://piazza.com/princeton/spring2015/btctech/resources
This is a pretty cool feature, I can definitely see this vastly increasing the amount of stories that I submit to HN.
I wonder how much of the $425 is simply to dissolve the word mark so that the word 'good' can go back to being an adjective in the phrase 'good technology.'
I once built firefox app, that works also on firefox browser.

https://github.com/tauho/pult
Got Rhythm? – Test your rhythm keeping skills
you can get a 5GB prepaid plan as well, it's something like 15€ ($17) per month (in Germany, which is among the more expensive countries regarding mobile phone tariffs). And when you go over your cap, your speed gets reduced to 64kbit but you don't pay extra. Some prepaid providers then allow you to "reset" your data cap for another 3-5€.
You're not blogging my friend, and that's a problem
Sounds like survivor-ship bias. We also have to account for all broke/dead/etc "Marks Zuckerbergs".
"A nightmare GIF party straight out of GeoCities 1998".

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/29/8860347/byte-app-dom-hofma...
It just means the company's primary high-end phones. For example, the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S6.
I recently hit a wall like this as well after designing many apps and enterprise systems.

It was a problem that seemed simple at first, but I just kept banging my head against it. I did exactly what some people described here, switched to a functional language, but that didn't help. I started doubting myself.

I'm though it now, and I like the solution, although it could be better. Here are some points that I've picked up along the way:

- Remind yourself that you are not only generating value when you actually write code. When you take a walk and think about the problem, draw stuff on paper and so on, this is still work. You are still doing exactly your job.

- This gets hard when coming up with a design takes longer than usual. It's likely that you have run into a complex problem without knowing it. Endurance & patience is key here.

- Attack from different angles, don't consider the time wasted if you try something and then end up throwing it away, you will have learned something, even if it just eliminating one possible design option.

After you are through it, you might end up cherishing the experience.
We're also hiring in London, and for a few roles in Austin.
Not with the current technology and the given resources. Most of the biomass on the planet lives happily in its means. We need to think like that. That means building with carbon, not metal.
A couple of neat options here:

Look into urwid first, which is a full TUI framework in python.

Also consider using libcaca, which has excellent python bindings but is generally used for flashier stuff than simple utilities (text-based demoscene stuff, etc etc)...

Apologies for not linking to the relevant projects, but I'm certain you'll find them with a quick search :)
Note that the title says 'customer loyalty'. I think IntelliJ et al. became popular through word of mouth of developers (that's how I started using IntelliJ and I recommended it to many others).

If those developers go from 'IntelliJ is great and the JetBrains people rock' to 'IntelliJ may be great, but JetBrains is scammy', it may be bad for growth.

Of course, one can assume that they calculated in some protests + losing customers.
Not so sure about that. JetBrains has excellent products. So, sure, people can flock to other tools, but they aren't necessarily better tools.

I have gotten so used to using ReSharper, I'm probably 30% less productive without it.
The autocomplete attribute and web documents using XHTML
The author claims that indie developers will be hit who let their licenses lapse due to limited income as well as forgetful corporations who forget to renew. I always found the reasons for these issues was because everyone's licenses expire at different times and it was hard to track (even with budgeting as an indie developer). If it is moved to a monthly service model, I think these issues would actually improve.
No.

20 year old Mark Zuckerberg would keep adjusting until he was whatever a unicorn needs to be in this instant. That's his nature.

You would not.

That's the difference.
> If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire.

Converted and new ones do, so previously loyal customers who don't want to lose their perpetual license… can't upgrade their editor ever again.
That was one of the highest-fidelity visual experiences I've had on the web. I know there's no more information being displayed than what's in the audio channel, but I feel like this sort of experience just wouldn't translate well to any current video encoding, even at enormous file sizes.

Thanks for building this and for sharing!
This is not about humans vs machines, it is STILL, after all these centuries, about labor vs capital.
I think the critics are missing one huge benefit: Most of their licenses are bought by companies. A company that buys a perpetual license now has no reason to upgrade unless the developers complain and prod; a company that buys a SaaS subscription enables its devs to upgrade to the newest versions as quickly as they want.

For most of JetBrains actual corporate users, the upshot of this is that they'll never need to bug their managers to buy the new version, or suffer on years-old versions because of corporate inertia. That's a big win.
> When you know the requirements, model the data first. Data comes first because data lasts longer than code. Flexible data lets you do more with less code. And if the data is very well defined you can usually use fewer language features, too - which is a bonus to maintenance later. Think of features in data terms first and lifecycles later.

Boy am I SO GLAD to see someone say that! I think of my approach as "Data-Driven Development", rooted in my days of scientific programming. The data is what matters. On my largest project to date (8 months, entire business system) I spent 25% of the time just on the data store schema. Needless to say it worked & evolved without issue over 5 years.

Yet (at least in the PHP community) the fad is currently Domain-Driven Development, BDD, and architectures ("another travesty of reflection and classes-on-top-of-classes").

> The maintainers will feel like geniuses because they'll keep finding clever ways to use the existing data better

Oh yes, that's how my oldest systems are. Spaghetti code in parts, but the data keeps on giving.

Thank you for taking the time to write this, you've ignited a small flame of enthusiasm in me and reminded me why I enjoyed doing what I do!
Does 'sl' count? Because it should...
Good memories!

The Dig deserves a place on that list as well.
this could be pretty cool for multiplayer turn based games. especially if there was mobile app that could easily cast to a TV in the background.
I love writeups like this, and enjoyed the level of detail Colin provided.

I take away a different lesson, though: even simple web security is easy to get wrong, even for a very smart, very talented developer. I'm not sure what the solution is, though.

As for the comments, while I don't take a hard line here, I agree with Bob Martin's quote: "Every time you write a comment, you should grimace and feel the failure of your ability of expression." Wherever possible, you are better off rewriting the code and variable names to clarify in the code itself whatever you wanted to say in the comments. It's hard to say how to accomplish that here without knowing more about the code, though. And it may have been so difficult that a comment was the right choice.
I don't think Google will ever try to make money directly off of licensing Android or selling phones. It's far more likely they'll continue to leverage it to bring users to their services.

I think the point where Google and consumers are misaligned would be their preference of Chrome OS over Android. Still, I don't see them throwing away their market power in a play to move users to Chrome OS. They'll just keep mixing them both together until there is no difference.
* IDEA was 200 + 99/year, new license is 149/year (more expensive from year 3)

* PyCharm, RubyMine, PhpStorm, AppCode and CLion were 99 + 59/year, new license is 99/year (more expensive from year 2)

* WebStorm was 49 + 29/year, new license is 99/year (more expensive from year 1)

Things have gotten significantly more expensive across the board, and if you don't need the new version or can't pay for it… you lose your IDE.

The new licenses are absolutely terrible for holders of individual licenses.
Yea, but action now has a "tragedy of the commons" aspect to it in that not acting lets you freeload off of your neighbors who do. Taking action later to deal with the damage is local expenditure of resources for local benefit.
There are many reasons. The first is that Java is in our opinion the language with the biggest and greatest ecosystem of open source libraries on top of which we can build our software. And this is saving many man-years for us.

I contrast, PostgreSQL extensions need C, which doesn't have these advantages and becomes less productive.

But even more importantly: we don't want to tie it, as much as possible, to PostgreSQL. Maybe, tomorrow, ToroDB would run on other RDBMs :)

If run locally, there's barely performance hit. And it also enables you to run it remotely.
I was confused with the difference between an SVM and a neural network. Easy mistake I guess. The whole goal of this project was for educational purposes, so im still happy with the outcome.
Creating a Simple Login Android App
As an owner of a company, business continuity-destroying dependencies on SaaS is the opposite of a big win.
Broken Age looks and sounds great, but I really hated how the whole game runs on rails pretty much from the beginning. You can't wander around much, so it feels less like a world and more like a movie where you occasionally help the plot along by clicking on things.

The original LucasArts games were only occasionally like this. They invited a lot of trial and error (some of it extremely unintuitive; Zak McKracken had some of those), exploring areas you couldn't access yet, and so on. They were difficult, and they never held your hand.

Unfortunately, this dumbed-down form seems like a fairly new trend in games. (Double Fine's The Cave, which looked fantastic, failed partly because it was just too simplistic.) I suppose they are afraid of losing audiences if they are too hard.
So why isn't Zuckerberg continuing to create new billion dollar businesses? Why stop with Facebook?
Part of a Rocket Engine Landed in This Guy's Living Room
Last time I touched java (a year ago), malabar-mode (https://github.com/m0smith/malabar-mode) was the most feature-rich environment for doing java in emacs. However, it couldn't cope with the complex build system for the project I was working on, so I ended up using intellij instead (if malabar-mode had worked for this project I would have preferred to stay in emacs).
Please elaborate, I havent used Netbeans for a while but it really sucked compared even to eclipse. Also never had any problems with maven integration on IntelliJ.
The more immediately obvious comparison is MSDN. Anyone who's using ReSharper, at least, is already almost certainly subscribing to MSDN.
Nuance, nor perspective, among many other things, do not lend themselves well to any discussion about climate change, which is awfully sad. You are exactly correct that this is a 21st century religion, regardless of the accuracy of the discussion around it.
I agree that this is a terrible idea for the typical end user. For your specific case though I'm pretty sure you can purchase one year of service all at once, so it would still be possible to only invoice once a year.
I remember these guys going hell-for-leather at each other in public fairly recently. Surprise acquisition for that reason, but makese sound business sense I think. BlackBerry's going all-in on the enterprise. Apart from this Android phone thingey it's launching.
Making the components smaller doesn't mean you have to make the sensor area smaller, you can just put more of them in.
After reading the opinions here, for my use case (programming with eventual gaming) I think I'll opt for a 21:9 monitor like the Dell U3415W. I can't really picture how I'd work with a 40" screen, and if I can use 1 graphic card instead of 2, I think that's a plus.
On top of that, it's the difference between monthly costs for the company. Netflix, Spotify and Gmail all have monthly costs in terms of storage space, bandwidth usage, server maintenance, etc that users are directly affecting. You're paying for the content to always be available, to be available quickly and to not have limits on what you can and can't access.

Desktop software on the other hand has no direct monthly costs other than phoning home once a month. You could definitely argue that iterating development costs should be factored in here, I can't imagine that being a deciding factor in moving completely to this business model. I'm sure if they offered a low cost monthly subscription and a perpetual license option, they wouldn't have any issue offsetting development costs. At this point, they could even raise the price of perpetual license (hell, I seem to remember paying $200 for mine). I'd gladly pay an increased price with the knowledge that my software wouldn't stop working, especially given how many hours of productivity I gain by using their software.
White House monitoring reports Russian military is in Syria
718 for me.

Fun.

Back to work...
The article is full of unsubstantiated claims, though I agree with the author in principle.