skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It certainly isn't the only way to keep developers, but I don't see how it's unsustainable. The nature of software development is such that huge margins are possible, and the productivity of a really good Engineer is that of many, many mediocre Engineers.

I remember last time I was working for a large corp, there was this one guy on the team who was really, incredibly good. Easily worth 5x me, in terms of work done. He made 20% more than I did. There was another guy who was probably closer to 1/5th my productivity. He made maybe 20% less than I did.

the thing is, determining productivity is difficult; but I think even allowing for a high margin of error, you could sustainably target only the best, and pay twice what the competition does.
Creating a navigation bar using RadioButtons in Flex 4
JetBrains has refactoring tools for ruby:
http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/documentation/index.html

There's a video about half way down the page.
It upgrades well to a HTML page if you don't have flash.
FTFY :)
I hear he's just another of these legendary CS people making a lateral move into the porn industry.
Kudos to Google for being smart enough to realize that an open web is a win for them in the long run and for having the guts to compete on the strength of their products and not on platform/api lock-in. Obviously it's still an uphill battle to get this adopted across the board but they're setting the right example here.
I don't understand how that could be... Could you explain? If a portion of your app is written in Lua, how can you claim that the app is "originally written" in a C derivative?
I think that it would be clearer if there were some examples of nested metaphors or metaphors that 'darken' other metaphors. Maybe there is in the actual text, but the quote out of context seems a little abstract.
Windows 7 is selling mainly because Vista didn't and they still have enough monopoly power for Windows to be a requirement. I don't think this will last though. Growth is in the mobile and appliance markets where Microsoft's offerings suck and they have no monopoly power. I expect their Office/Windows monopoly to crack in the next 10 years and then they're just another Sun.
So many stories are being posted that people aren't reading all of them, leading to the same arguments being posted repeatedly.
The Adam has one other huge potential selling point in its pixelQi screen. If pixelQi works as advertised and people get a chance to experience it, I can see that swinging it for the Adam for people who primarily want a tablet to read text on.
It's a consequence of the high number of requests for the doc. It started working for me after a short wait.

Edit: hmm... or maybe when this happens it's because the owner is temporarily taking the the document offline to fix it when people mess it up?
I'm not disagreeing, but Pex looks pretty cool too.
Twitter Acquires iPhone Client Tweetie
It's still convenient to have offline files be automatically imported and editable online and be able to pull latest versions offline if required. Yes, a poor man's version control for documents for the rest of us.
Is anyone besides me worried that Steve Jobs is going to say "they tried to kill the iphone, so we will never adopt their evil standards!"? Is the animosity between google and apple enough to stifle development?
I totally can. Lounging watching TV, pick up the tablet from your coffee table, check out facebook, see what's on at cinema, check latest score on the tablet, pop it back down again? Quick check of email, only need to write back a couple of lines, not at work after all.

Much easier to use than red button on tv. Much better than a notebook or laptop. Much less intrusive than them too.

I think they'll turn out to be totally handy, laptops and desktops will start gathering dust until people who don't need to write articles or code for a living wonder why bother buying a new one?
Both Chrome & Firefox are supporting this from the beginning. It's certainly a great start.
Frameworks are bundles of abstractions, and abstractions leak.  Rails included.
I'd be just as happy as the next man to see this go to court, but that's a pretty weak announcement. Completely anonymous sources, and almost no commentary on what they actually said about a lawsuit.
Pity there's no real why, just an assertion that vaguely points to maths.
I agree, but it would have been a less steep uphill battle if they had done this 7 months ago.
Adobe CS5 Feature Rundown
I've been instructed to do so in engineering classes. It feels weird.
You say "golden handcuffs" and I hear "an employee who doesn't plan on sticking around"

The point of golden handcuffs really is just that; you stick around a while and we'll give you a little extra.

(My problem with golden handcuffs is that most deals I've seen as an Engineer were pathetically small. The employer seemed to be unaware that I can buy stock options on the open market.)
Zoom in on items in a List with a TileLayout
I'm glad that their interest of reaching a wider user base to advertise too is also in sync with creating an open platform like the web. They can keep the Ad platform secret, nobody will care as long as they keep doing things like this.
I think YouTube is enough to drive consumer demand, whatever Steve says.
The merger was finished this February, so they weren't in position to do this 7 months ago.
The API lets you control job submission, result delivery, etc. 80apps control how you process the content on a per-page basis.
> This is akin to if I had said you couldn't use any other editor than TextMate to program in Rails.

Well for starters let me say I admire your perspective on Rails development greatly. And speaking as someone who is greatly enamored of code generation, I am not a fan of restrictions on "original" programming languages.

My only question about your response here is your choice of comparison. The choice of text editor does not appear to me to parallel the imposition of an entire cross-platform compatibility layer like Flash.

I realize that in a certain sense it seems to be about dictating tools for self-expression, but where things like Flash compilers are concerned it also very much about proprietary companies attempting to control developers by owning the platform.

So... If I had to draw a lesson from Rails it would be that if we developers find ourselves having to choose which behaviour we want from a proprietary platform vendor or choosing which proprietary platform we are beholden to, maybe we should step back and ask ourselves whether we really want to be beholden at all.

Maybe what we really ought to be doing is sucking it up and developing for web standards where "Worse is Better."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
I've had good results with real life. Going out and meeting womens , and enjoying it all the way.
Stickers back there would still bother me because they tend to be ugly and, by definition, stuck on. But they'd bother me less than stickers at the front - which is where a lot of laptop makers stick their stickers.
I saw that but my understanding is that I would need a blog hosted by one of those hosting services in order to do that as opposed to using (for example) Wordpress software on my own site. But it is an angle I plan to look into.

Thanks for replying.
The best things in life are free, so are the best dating sites.

Plenty of fish, okcupid and so on are free (or at least, freemium) and are way better than most of their paid competition.

There are lots of scams on dating sites, so better beware, it's not just some of the site operators that are scammers.
I really enjoyed Rolando - lovely game. So I'm dismayed to now realise that it has bad performance due to not being written in Objective-C, and the Layers and the APIs and the crappy User Experience and the Glavin!

It seemed really good to me, but I guess I wasn't paying attention. It just shows how insidious these fake apps can be - they have poor performance but in a way that is indistinguishable from a Correct application. I'll be emailing Apple ASAP to apologise for being so easily fooled.
In most industries, expect to get less than the software industry as a software engineer. Software is just a lot more important to, say, Microsoft's business than it is at BOC Gases, and they pay proportionately well.

However, that's not necessarily true in every industry, and some industries can pay a premium just because they have good profits and want the best engineers. I wouldn't be surprised if banks paid better on average than the software industry.
This is roughly how it works in Australia, except that the discounted capital gains tax rate is 50% of the normal rate for investments held for over 12 months, and the discount is only available to individuals (and, I think, trusts) but not companies.
I was going to say the same thing. I think they will offer value added things like advertising which was mentioned in the article. But the automated web site creation sounds exactly like what wordpress is doing.
The paper cited as ref [1] has a good explanation. Unfortunately that paper doesn't seem to be available freely online, but here's a press writeup of it: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...
Bootstrapping by freelancing
I don't think Apple will mind much if games don't have explicit support for multitasking right away, but they do care a great deal about getting massive uptake of their new GameCenter API, which a full-service cross-platform game framework might have a hard time supporting.
Getting in to a top college
It broke mine as well (Firefox 3.6.3 on OS X 10.5).
well, perhaps a nice firefox plugin linked to a user-controlled database will do the trick.

Who has some spare time to build this?
I agree, and that's why I think its hard for Google to do high-touch consumer services, and why I am pessimistic about their ability to pull off a mass-market consumer oriented tablet.
His description sounded about the same as my time doing consulting at Deloitte. It didn't leave me with a good impression of consultants.
Prediction: Commutative DB Patterns Ahead
I can't figure out which site he's talking about (I assumed eHarmony, but they don't seem to use "elite" as branding, and searching for elite dating brought up only escort agencies).
I'm not worried about that at all. Rejecting web-standards that others like Firefox and Chrome are implementing is surely a path to destruction and I don't think SJ is that crazy.
This is huge. Great news for the Open Web.
7 Things about sex you learned in Kindergarten
I wasn't aware this had a name, but I've proposed this in terms of families. Most people come from larger families than they have. That is, for most people, the number of brothers and sisters plus one (for the person we're talking about) is greater than the number of children that person will eventually have. Or at least it can be, even in a growing population.

Consider a family with four children. Alice, Bob, Charlie and Dave. Assume that Alice goes on to have four children of her own, and her brothers have none. So Alice has exactly as many children as brothers + sisters + 1. But 3/4 of the children in the original family have fewer children than siblings + 1.

It's a consequence of the counting being proportional to the size of the family. A family with 4 children gets counted four times, a family with 1 child gets counted only once. It's more complicated to show with friendships because the graph isn't directed, but it holds for the same reason. A social butterfly with lots of friends gets counted for each of his or her friends. Someone with few friends only gets counted for those few friends.
Google's best chance to prevent that future from happening is to build some sort of Terminator unit, and send it back in time to kill Steve Jobs and prevent Apple from being founded. Android: coincidence?
Say Alice has 100 friends and Bob has 5, and the average is 20. That means Alice has 100 people whose "number of friends of friends" statistic she's increasing, while Bob is only lowering it for 5.
This is because men are supposed to be seduced easily. People who see double standards everywhere are accurate in one sense, but might benefit from revising their perspective. It's not a very good game if the sides aren't opposing.

I think we hate the dirty tricks men pull to get laid the same reason we hate the dirty tricks women pull to get love-struck men hanging on to them: in some sense we have an easy time feeling but a hard time defining, it's breaking the rules of the game. Faking confidence, lying, telling stupid stories, using parlor tricks, &c. to pick up girls is breaking all kinds of social rules, but modern society is ill-equipped to stop them. In the book "The Game", Mystery states explicitly that taking advantage of the modern society/social rules impedance mismatch is what he does (though not in those words).
it's better to call it a hmac - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC - since reinventing them using hashes can lead to weaknesses (see "design principles" on that page).
Apple's wager
The gods of moderation seem to have it in for you!

Microsoft has been a hardware company ever since they produced the apple IIe z80 soft card, followed by mice, keyboards, mp3 players game consoles and so on.

For the most part their hardware showings have been sub-par but every now and then they get it right.
Twitter developers: We need you back in 2010 ASAP
On what grounds are they suing? Especially if you mention their name in a negative blog article, I'd really like to know that. If anyone can provide me with details, please reply or contact me, am curious due to legal background.

Edit: Google for "elite dating" now brings this on 4th place. Awesome.
The Future of Social Media in the Enterprise
Since the majority has been No as of this point, do you mean easter eggs in an app perhaps?
News is all about the brand. This is just a reset for the industry, and chance for writers to entirely absolve themselves from the old management model and old media entities, and create new, light-weight unencumbered news brands. The fact that they are being strict with writers and editors means that they actually care about quality -- just like Apple.
This is awesome news. No patent encumbrance means Firefox will support it. Terrific performance means the rest of us will actually use it. Google backing the technology means Youtube, with their unfathomably large proportion of the world's video content, will support it.

Sweet.
"I'm not going to mention any of the websites by name, because they are extremely litigous, and I don't want it to be said I directly accused any particular company of scamming."

I hate this aspect of our legal system.
"even if it is one of the best supported scientific theories out there."

While it certainly has more evidence than AGW, it doesn't hold a candle to relativity (general or specific) or newtonian physics or a whole slew of chemistry theories.

I do agree w/ the first part of that sentence, that the large time scales are hard for people to wrap their mind around, and thus lends itself to a natural doubt of it.
There are entire teams of people working at the big papers whose job is to ensure that they dominate the search results for their category. If these guys can find a way to deliver Class-A search traffic to their sites, they'll be in good shape.
...or a newspaper. What they've done is hire a bunch of journalists to write blogs.

Still, there're plenty of interesting things you could do with a network of strong brands beyond Adsense. I'm guessing the 80% Adsense revenue is just to give the journalists something now for building their brands.
It's about writing Objective-C apps using whatever tools we want that will run on the iPhone.

Exactly. And that's not a natural right. And Apple not allowing it is a valid business decision (whether it's a good one for Apple's bottom line or a good one morally—or whether it even is a moral question—is up for debate). That's all I'm saying. Let's use reasonable terms so our debate is sensible and valid.
I suspect they're extremely aware of True/Slant.
Sorry, already exists: http://www.mywot.com/
When I googled elite and dating there were several: elitepartner, elitedatinggroup, elitedaters, you get the idea.

Edit: elitepartner.de is a German site, which runs in a similar way as described and advertises in major newspapers. They clearly optimize their Google results as a cursory look through search results reveals that their enormously bad reputation on user-review sites is buried amongst dozens of supposedly objective dating sites reviews, which - quelle surprise - they fare exceptionally good on.
I think it's more likely to be a reference to Lord of the Rings. There's no need for the Steve Blank sub-reference for that statement to make sense.
It's a technicality of course but you can rightly claim that the app is written in C and that it interprets the Lua code. In the same way it may interpret and XML file.

Of course we all know this is a technicality and it doesn't matter since 3.3.2 states "... No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application...".

The two clauses combine to put Lua on a sticky wicket.

Certainly for video games it's not as if there is a slim C layer and the vast bulk is written in Lua. Most game engines are huge and only game flow and AI are written in Lua.
The History of Adobe Creative Suite By Year
He could have skills and just neglected to mention them.
If you see a friend at a certain place by accident, you are bound to feel that your friend frequents the place more than you yourself do. I used to think that this is incorrect as there is no way to ascertain that. I may have to rethink now.
Nitpick, but video codec is not a web standard. There was a big discussion whether HTML5 should require support for some codec, and in the end it does not.
Otherwise Apple's WebKit (which is the rendering engine for Chrome) is doing very well in terms of web-standards.
nice, that saves us all some spare time than
Are there any chips out there that do hardware decoding of VP8? That's a critical path item to get Apple on board - they've learned from Nintendo; battery life is too precious to sacrifice for a mere codec.
Jobs is a businessman, it would make sense to him to try and avoid or reduce licensing costs. Google turned from a close partner to being a competitor, not an enemy.
Microsoft Kin: Hands-on video
If their ambitious goal was freedom, why did they sell to a publishing company?

This is what I don't get. You make something you're passionate about… and then you get rid of it. Or you get bought, with the acquisition. Into, that's right, a job! Typically with superiors!

Which was what you were fleeing from to start with.

So was their ambition a number of digits, or was it freedom?

EDIT: I've met the founders of some very high profile sales to big companies, including Google, who were incredibly miserable about doing so -- afterwards. And yet here, they are poster children for success.
Is it possible for existing H.264 hardware decoder chips to be used to (even partially) help decode VP8? Or will we see a new generation of chips that does H.264 and VP8?
I didn't find those with that search, but searching on a complaint quote in the article did bring me this: http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/elite-meetingmeeti... which seems to make it pretty clear which site he means.
An actual Turing machine
Maybe $800 is the "non-discount" amount. If you follow whatever terms, you get the discount. If you don't follow the terms (like, not paying), they charge you the non-discount.
Ok I am going to say it: I think this finally secures a big big future for Chrome.

It will now be the only browser to support all three of the main codecs - and Google will control one of the two open source / royalty free ones (indeed it's arguable that status may be more secure that Ogg Theora because, simply, Google are likely to aggressively defend any submarine attacks).

All told - great news.
No you can't rightly claim that. The C is an intermediary translation layer.
At launch, On2 went so far as to claim that it could provide “50 percent bandwidth savings compared to leading H.264 implementations.”

Considering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube content, this move is far from altruistic. The more viewers adopt a bandwidth-superior format, the less terabytes of data to stream, the less the cost of running YouTube. They have absolutely no benefit from any kind of "platform/api lockin" to H.264 or any other video standard, only that there are less bits to stream.

I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees per year. I'd expect Microsoft to ship this instead of H.264 in the next major IE, and, if this comes with a good and open hardware interpreter, Apple to follow soon after.
Yep. Actually, some stats surprised me quite a bit... obviously, you should take those stats with a grain of salt as they are not 100% accurate.
They have been. Remember they expurgated all of the "sexy" apps a couple of months ago?
Ah, true, I was a little hasty. Still I don't see how Apple could realistically refuse to support this in Safari, since presumably support for codecs is directly built into WebKit and either Apple or Google would have to fork it if they wanted to go in separate directions. That's not totally out of the question though I suppose...
What I meant by unsustainable is that I feel the retaining talent problem is less related to money. My guess is smart people are leaving mostly because of the environment and not because of pay and benefits. When those smart people leave, theoretically the quality of the product suffers and overtime the competitor with better people wins. If MS profits go down over time, and investing in things like Azure and Bing and Entertainment (all which loose money), I don't see how they can continue to throw money at the talent problem. But man if I could get paid more AND work in a better environment (one where I had an impact) I would go for it in a heart beat. So in that sense money DOES matter. I agree with the rest of what you said though about it being difficult to measure.

This is what I think of when the subject is talented people leaving MS: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2008/12/Key_data_center_arc...

http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2009/06/james-whittaker-jo...

I think Amazon and Google are better because of it.
I think Chrome already had a big future, but you are still very right that this is a huge win for the browser.
Actually, you'd be surprised. This is purely anecdotal, of course, but around New York City, I see more girls with a Blackberry than iPhone. BBM is really hot. I would say it's the new AIM.
Does anyone know if the new features are built on top of the wave? It looks like wave was an experiment that is now being applied to the existing products. Honestly, wave is useless in its current form but I am very excited for these new wave like features.
OmniGraffle is the only good desktop app in this space -- nobody else even does * alignment guides*!
I think you're missing the point of a reductio ad absurdum argument. Very often, it's easy to overlook the flaws in something because we have a viewpoint that makes them look smoother than they really are. Reductio ad absurdum grabs your head and jerks it to an unnatural angle where you're looking at the flaw head-on. This precise case is not likely to happen in practice, but that doesn't matter, because the value of the situation is in helping us see a problem.

If you want to see an example of where this approach might have helped, look at the children convicted of making kiddie porn for taking cell phone pics of themselves. You could have brushed off reductio ad absurdum arguments by saying, "Oh, that precise situation is so unlikely," but the flaws are real just the same.
Star Wars Uncut's "The Escape," five-minute teaser