skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get paid just a little below their averages and I'm not quite the calibre of a Google/MS/Amazon developer. Plus I'm on the east coast in NC where the CoL is definitely cheaper.
Could this be because Google and Amazon promote faster? I ask because my Microsoft offer out of college was more.
I think it's a reasonable argument, but it's perhaps not stated as well as it could be. It's a response to the (presumed) justification from Apple that they want to do this because cross-compiled applications are often low-quality. So the argument is that if Apple wanted to weed low-quality applications out of the app store, then they should do that based on the quality of the applications, rather than based on the implementation techniques.

Clearly, though, the fact that the app store is already flooded with low-quality applications is indicative of the fact that Apple hasn't been doing that, which makes that justification seem totally bogus: if they really cared about low-quality applications, they could have done something about it long ago without restricting cross-compilation techniques. And if they wanted to put a stop to it now, they could still do it without restricting cross-compilation.

So to extend your analogy: if you want to weed the garden, then pull the weeds already. No need to have this strange level of indirection that will result in removing only a small number of the weeds while also eliminating plenty of flowers.
I'll upvote you because your asking me to validate my point, and I'll also answer.

The "rage" does serve a purpose. First, it's a sign to others who would do the same thing that Apple is doing, that we don't like it. If we didn't say anything, others might assume it's accepted, and do the same thing. This would be harmful.

Secondly, if this "rage" is loud enough, it might make Apple change their mind, or come to some compromise. While this wouldn't solve the problem, nor would people forget (two reasons I don't think Apple will change this), it would force Apple to recognize the folly of it's ways. Apple is focused on the user experience, and in this case, the user is the developer.

Next, their intent is not the same as their actions.

"I don't see them deciding to drop cross platform game engines."

But they are. And it's not the official store. It's the only store.

You make the mistake of thinking that "rage" is itself useless. I'll agree it might not seem like anything gets accomplished, but it at least gets the issue out there. Lots of "rage-less" discussion has occurred, and much of it, I believe, a result of reason rising above the general rage, and exists because there was rage to begin with.

Finally, something has happened. You say it's "changed language in their dev agreement for an unreleased platform." But when should people complain? After it's released? No, the time to complain is when it's previewed. At least then something can be done about it. Before it get's released.
I have been an SDET on VS2010. The real problem with VS in the past few years as it has move away from native. Everything is managed managed managed! We have left internal (Office) and external (lots and lots of folks) customers in the dust by only building decent managed tools. That's my opinion.

What I really wanted to address was performance. There was indeed a huge push after Beta2 to improve perf. At the end of the day 2010 is still slower than 2008 and eats up more memory. I guess that's an accomplishment if sucking less is considered good. But will people upgrade? I don't know. Hopefully because that's good for me. But I am pessimistic and currently looking for other employment as the experience was that bad.

Why was it so bad? Well I feel most of the pain points could have been avoided. Management ignored a lot of the performance/memory issues last summer and had an attitude of ship ship ship with NO regard for quality. I was responsible for reporting an overall grade for the areas I tested. I reported them to be poor and fair. I also listed all the known bugs in those areas. Management boosted the rating to good on the basis that memory and performance bugs don't count.

Let me reemphasize that last point: I was told memory and performance bugs DID NOT count towards the overall quality rating of the product. This was management's attitude through most of the product cycle. We could never give an honest assessment of the product because they would challenge it and argue that it wasn't that bad.

I believe their reason was simple for doing this. They need to take the data to their managers and up the chain of command to paint a pretty picture of how great the product is. Even if that's an illusion. Basically telling the truth of product quality is punished. If I lied about quality managers would be ecstatic about how a great a job we did. If I told the truth about quality instead of thanking me for figuring out where customer pain points might be the attitude was ALWAYS this should have been found earlier. The problem is many times I did find it earlier and they did their best to bury it before the next meeting they were heading off too report product quality.

I will say this. IntelliSense is much better for C++. Even though other native tools might suck. IntelliSense teams seems to be doing a pretty good job. It has always has been my favorite VS feature.
I don't expect too many people on HN are doing SharePoint work, but if you are, you need to get VS 10 now. They've added templates for a variety of projects, and single-click compile/package/retract/deploy/debug of your project.
Also, the cost of living in the Bay Area is significantly higher than Seattle; housing alone is a huge factor. Google employees are really paid peanuts compared to Microsoft's:

http://www.city-data.com/city/Seattle-Washington.html

Estimated median house or condo value in 2008: $491,600 (it was $252,100 in 2000)
Seattle:	$491,600
Washington:	$308,100

Dec. 2009 cost of living index in Seattle: 126.5 (high, U.S. average is 100)

http://www.city-data.com/city/Mountain-View-California.html

Estimated median house or condo value in 2008: $755,200 (it was $464,800 in 2000)
Mountain View: $755,200
California:	$467,000

Dec. 2009 cost of living index in Mountain View: 164.0 (very high, U.S. average is 100)

Raw dollars, glassdoor says google pays more. Regionally adjusted, there's a lot more that raw dollars can't account for.
http://voice.google.com/ redirects to http://google.com/voice. Technically different domains, but I would be really annoyed if I had to confirm this every time. I suppose you could add a white list, but now we are just annoying people when they first start using a particular install of a browser.
That introductory video makes it look so nice the only thing it needs now is a proper desktop client to get rid of the chrome title bar and tab bar and address bar and google menu bar and google docs title bar... ;)

Also: Bonjour / Zeroconf / simultaneous editing is seriously lacking in the LAN/desktop space. :(
About Eva Mendes Info
About Eva Mendes.info an unofficial fansite dedicated to the talented Eva Mendes. Features Eva Mendes pictures, a large photo gallery updated weekly, videos, wallpapers and news about what she is doing. We try to keep up with Eva’s latest activities in her carrier and her social life.
Very true. A lot of 2010 perf hit is because of WPF. Real hardware and a good video card is required. I never dreamed that a decent video card would be required for a text editor but it is.
Flagged for being misleading. Apple has given no indication they are targeting Unity3D apps for removal. As this list points out, it would be very foolish to. Their SDK EULA only applies to the SDK software, not to any other compilers, and using it as a "heuristic" for what will or won't be accepted to the AppStore is completely at their discretion. Ouside of the Hacker News top stories, this is pretty common knowledge, see:

We've heard directly from Unity Technologies themselves, and the company's CEO, David Helgason, has been in contact with Apple over the matter. Helgason says that so far Unity has "no indication from Apple that things are going to change." This is consistent with John Gruber's viewpoint on the new iPhone OS 4.0 dev agreement. Gruber originally thought that Unity3D would be a prime candidate for banning under the new rules, but given that Unity3D is, in Gruber's words, "a pre-processor than a cross-compiler," it's nowhere near as certain that Unity will fall on what Gruber calls "the wrong side of the line" per the new dev agreement.

Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-dev-agreement-b...
I realize I have an idealistic point-of-view but, I always thought journalism was about the news and not about the journalist.

EDIT: removed gripey, complainy questions.
Please link to the article, not to the comments on the article. It's annoying to start halfway down the page.
> The fact that you can buy an external keyboard (a very un-Apple move)

So you buy a £50 Apple bluetooth keyboard to connect to your $500 iPad so you can use the $10 iWork suite to do less than you could on your $1x00 Apple laptop?

Sounds like a very Apple move.
I don't think so. Advertising is where they make their money, but Google's core competency is storing and making sense of massive amounts of data. That is what they do better than everyone else, advertising is just how they monetize it.
How to Select a Facebook Application Development Team
If you decide to develop a Facebook application, you need a professional development team that can implement that task in the most effective way. The article provides a few tips which can be useful when selecting a Facebook app provider.
Aha, that's a good idea.

We have an open redirect on our site that I've been looking at fixing, but while verifying all the possible links against a whitelist would work, it would be a pain.
Now you are comparing apples to oranges. Proprietary and open approaches work very well in different scenarios (there hasn't been a lack of experiments in OSS for smartphones for example).

Some innovations, when developed via a proprietary approach bring huge costs and risks (and couldn't be done otherwise) and patents exist to protect the innovators from free loaders.

Now, that's how it should work in principle. If Apple is trying to game that model, it is not up to me to decide. There are courts for that.

And, as I said before, IP is far from being the only important cost when creating a new platform.

"Ruby on Rails" is copyrighted to its creator. So what? Why is it so? Isn't that an "asset" within the economics of OSS? It is, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it being copyrighted.

Anyway, my point is that none of this justifies the fact that the Rails guy is simply being utterly hypocrite, period.
Lua Unbeknownst Acronym
Touche. I thought I had that down but I got sloppy.
Have you used one? What evidence are you basing your insult on?
I'm not advocating banning anything.
Glad I'm not the only one who thought many of the popular iPad applications were silly.

The Average Reading Time idea is intriguing, however, I don't expect it to be of much use. Reading time varies vastly depending on the material. Nobody reads a journal article at the same pace as a novel, for instance.
Maybe, maybe not. It's definitely my favorite aspect of them. It's very nice to be able to read a bunch of top articles from the BBC, the Times, and NPR on my way to work with all the article pictures and really fast loading. The only way it'd be better is if I just had to touch a single button for all of them to update their caches (and that the NPR app would load the audio stories in addition to the text and pictures).

edit: BTW, I take a train to work, so it's not like I'm doing this while driving a car or something.
This are my reasons for creating this platform.
1. This is made with the local market in mind (Nigeria, West Africa), I doubt if this would be a hit in the first world.
2. Due to lack of a reliable payment gateway for local users here in Nigeria, I decided to use premium sms (short code). Once an advertiser texts his ad to the shortcode, his prepaid credit is debited, his ad appears on the target website of his choice and the revenue is shared between the ad platform, the shortcode provider and the website owner.
3. Google adsense or adwords isnt too attractive here in Nigeria because of the hassles of getting paid by google. Recurring online payment gateway issues.
I believe that forcefully weeding out the crap is detrimental. It's hard to define crap. If a buggy app provides functionality users consider critical, is it crap? Wouldn't it be better to let it evolve into not crap?
I don't know what IDE you use, but I use both Visual Studio and Eclipse. Eclipse is significantly slower, but it's still acceptable performance, and I like the python, hg, and remote plugins, so I find it very useful.

For C#, VS is absolutely wonderful, and I haven't seen an IDE for a statically typed language I like better.
If you're going to that much trouble, perhaps you could set up permissions to add target URLs?
"empirically derived mysticism scale"

I want to hear more about this.
My god, I just realized that after looking at my scrollbar. Terrifying. I couldn't understand why two-finger scrolling wasn't working, and now I am disgusted.
Nice to see someone mentioning John Boyd's work.

But you should really go straight to the source and download a copy of "conceptual spiral", and "destruction and creation".
That's more than valid. Thanks for the response. :)
Steve Jobs weighs in on iPhone OS dev controversy
In chrome, you can create an application shortcut for a website, and it will remove the chrome title bar, tab bar, google menu bar, and google docs title bar when you open it.
Aha, my question exactly. I'm using Chrome too and it seemed pretty HTMLy.
Italian judge says profit behind Google verdict
On top of that, all available evidence suggests that psilocybin is very physically safe, while all available evidence suggests that alcohol is very physically unsafe.

This is interesting. What about the danger of bad trips? For example, I know that if I drink 2 beers, I'll get a buzz and as long as I don't drive, I'm safe. I don't know that with regard to shrooms. I've never had a bad trip on those, but I've had terrifying salvia trips, and I have a problem with panic attacks, so I don't have that assurance and would tend to avoid using them.

Do you believe that psilocybin would be relatively safe if used under proper circumstances? I'd love for that to be true.
Ask HN: How can I get this working?
Hi guys,
I am developing an text-to-web advertising platform and I am stuck at a point. Short description of how it works: Any one can text a 140 character message to a short code, and have it displayed on any website that is on the network of the advertising platform. My Problem: How do I display the text ad on the websites that are on the platform? Iframes? Flash?

These are my reasons for creating this platform. 1. This product is made with the local market in mind (Nigeria, West Africa), I doubt if this would be a hit in the first world. 2. Due to lack of a reliable payment gateway for local users here in Nigeria, I decided to use premium sms (short code). Once an advertiser texts an ad to the shortcode, his prepaid credit is debited, his ad appears on the target website of his choice and the revenue is shared between the ad platform, the shortcode provider and the website owner. 3. Google adsense or adwords isnt too attractive here in Nigeria because of the hassles of getting paid by google another case of reoccurring online payment gateway issues.
If you have ever implemented something like this, I would really like to have some tips from you.
Disclosure: this has been submitted before, but I didn't really glean much for the few responses gotten.
Thanks
https://www.dreamspark.com/Products/Product.aspx?ProductId=2..., if you're a student.
First, I think the difference between 'incremental' and 'disruptive' is sometimes less clear than people seem to think.

Cloud computing is quite similar to old style dedicated server rental with the incremental improvement of the ability to buy in small timeslices and a standard provisioning system designed for developers, rather than for sysadmins.

Reddit, I think, is an incremental improvement on technologies pioneered by Kuro5hin.org and slashdot before that. (I'm not saying it wasn't also disruptive. I can show you revenue graphs from before and after Uggedal's review of me got on reddit. It certainly was disruptive for me.)

Now, I think if you are bootstrapping, you are probably best off explaining your idea incrementally. It's easier to understand, and it doesn't sound as cheesy or as crazy. If you are explaining your idea to me (and I suspect that this applies to most people who are primarily technical, but I could be wrong) you are better off explaining your idea incrementally, because I'm more likely to understand it, and I'm less likely to dismiss you as another crazy MBA.

If you are going for VC funding, then you might want to use the language of disruption, as that is what they require. A VC doesn't want a 'slightly better' dedicated server.
Give larger raises with promotions would be my guess. MS likes to promote (expect more) and then give below inflation raises.
I find Google Docs to be useful as a starting point. Nowadays I will start my spreadsheets/financial models in Google Docs and then once I've finished, bring them into Excel for formatting purposes to get ready to print. So far this method works pretty well.

I'd love to do it all in Google Docs but the print formatting is almost always messed up.
Ask HN: Is investment taxed?
Is venture, angel, or friends and family investment taxed? Does the company receiving investment pay the tax or does the investor? Are there investment tax credits? I'm in the United States, but it would be interesting to see how it works elsewhere.
Surprise Pulitzer Prize Win for First-Time Novelist Paul Harding
I've been laid off twice, and both times the severance agreement included clauses that I basically agreed not to sue them for unfair dismissal. When I've quit, of course there was nothing like that.
Not sure if I correctly understand your problem, but you might want to look into JSONP.
Of course you can. The emulator is hand-coded in C so it is perfectly legal to run it. Now compiled erlang code is just binary data, the emulator handles it as such, and it isn't illegal for an app to generate data. So what is the problem?
> Please support us by purchasing Alchemist for the special "bye bye" price!

It's $18.99?! How much was it before?
This echoes the commentary in Rework that one should always monetize the things you create as a by-product of your main goal. Rework gives the physical example of Ford Motor Company starting Kingsford Charcoal to make something useful out of wood pulp waste. In the electronic sphere, Rework suggests that musicians make "making of" documentaries (a natural side-product of having to make a record) and startup founders share their knowledge gained while in pursuit of their main dreams.

Here, the same example is given with Google's bond trading (a side-product of a massive search database is a massive financial database) and similar.
Assuming the quality remains good, I'd really like this. Especially knowing money would go to the author. Are you focusing just on ad revenue, or are you looking into other ways to bring in money (like subscriptions that remove ads, etc).

I wrote an article recently about how social news sites are hurting brand recognition for smaller sites, so it's nice to see what amounts to a "social news site" that puts the brand of the content producer up front.[1]

Honestly, I would like to reduce the number of sources I go to for news, and I'd like to see news sites focused on news, not ads and massive animations and videos. Hopefully, you guys can deliver.

And, honestly, I also like that you are using Facebook Connect. I do think it's accurate that "Readers will write much higher quality comments if they use their real identity." Part of the reason I use my name where I can. I accept my comments, the good and the bad, openly.

[1]. http://www.jasonlotito.com/news/reddit-hn-digg-reducing-writ...
Google/MS/Amazon do have some VERY smart developers. But there are dolts too at the big ones. The fact that you realize there are better developers than you puts you above most. A lot at MS think that because they work at MS they are the best thing in the world for software.
APIs and common mistakes done when developing them
Ask HN: Javascript / Ruby Refactoring Tools
As a long time Java developer, and user of eclipse. I've come (possibly to my detriment) to become very dependant on the refactoring tools that come with Eclipse. Specifically extract method, extract variable, and rename though to a lesser extent I very much enjoy f3 to follow a method/function.

I was wondering if anyone in the HN community is aware of similar tools for the more webby type languages (JS, Ruby, etc etc etc.) I currently use TextMate but it doesn't really cut the mustard, and the only plugin I've seen for it is called RFactor and it appears to be dormant.

I've tried things like Aptana as well, and all in all was not impressed with the performance.
> Your clarification makes sense, but it's not the message I got the first time.

Ahh, just as we favour "Convention over Configuration," we also believe in the power of "Discussion over Dismissiveness." This exchange of view is great, thanks.

:-)
Microsoft promotes faster than Amazon since Microsoft uses an internal numerical rating score that can potentially improve each review cycle.

Also, the offers I heard about (from a few years ago) from both companies were comparable with respect to base salary, with negligible differences. However, Amazon's stock-based compensation offers blew Microsoft's (laughable) offer out of the water.
But the dangers of drugs are treated completely out-of-context with any number of other aspects of modern life.

I agree, especially in comparison to the overprescription of stimulants to children and students.

I don't think it's ever been convincingly shown that criminalization decreases drug use. Last I'd read, the opposite seems to have been occurring in areas that have legalized drugs.

That could be, but it's counterintuitive, so I've always believed the opposite. However, it's irrelevant because, even if drug use increases, if drug-related harm goes down, this is a good thing and should be encouraged. Whether people choose to use drugs is their own business; harm reduction should be the goal.
Show HN: See what is trending amongst friends
Yes, it is. But the source of that news is also important as well. Fox News, for example, isn't highly regarded in many circles.

With this, the 'brand' is interesting. First, the journalist makes money directly, which is nice. Secondly, the journalist suffers and succeeds based on the news reported.

Finally, commentary offered by a journalist is also valuable. I don't have time to be an expert in everything, but I can assume that a automobile journalist will be better informed then me, and can provide me with meaningful information.

Those are, of course, just my thoughts on the matter. =)
Great article, this quote stuck out for me:

The same rule applies to visual metaphors: Just as any
literary metaphor, a visual metaphor confuses if it doesn’t
clarify; it breaks if you stretch it; and it becomes
ridiculous if you combine it with a second or third
metaphor.

Avoid metaphor that do not clarify; if a metaphor darkens
the meaning of what you are trying to express, don’t use it.
I don't remember the last time I saw ads on my nexus phone. I think I had an app once months ago that had in app ads but that's the only one that comes to mind. IME they are far from the norm on the phone.
The Adam is really gong to sink or swim because of it's UI, which is (AFAIK) non-existent, or just basic Android, at this point.
I'm sure he's welcome to Google!
Computer security: Loose clicks sink ships
Poll: Do you code easter eggs?
Do you or have you ever put easter eggs in your code?