skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time.

Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well with server farms without much work beyond configuration you just need to follow a few rules and it works great.

Assuming you went with SQL Server 2008 then chances are your database is going to perform very well for quite some time. A DBA or consultant can come in when things get tough but any senior level developer who tries to act cool by pretending to be a DBA can keep things moving along until you have cash to pay someone to really make sure things scale well.

Plus no one cares. If your startup is moderately cool getting C# developers won't be tough either. I've met plenty of great C# developers so they're definitely out there.
"I don't know anything about programming, therefore my first choice is best."

Sure, that makes sense.

(It also follows from this logic that cheap programmers are a good thing to have. If you need to do twice as much work, you just hire twice as many programmers! Combined with an IDE, you're sure to succeed!)
Apple releases new rules for subscriptions, but what exactly do they mean?
It does not matter what you build, you can achieve the same with using either PHP, Python, Ruby or ASP.NET. I choose Python/Google App Engine, free hosting is what was important for me, so I learnt a bit of Python to build me sites http://initlabs.com
My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact.

Explain? Example? I don't see how this could possibly be true for .net but not for Rails or Python or PHP or whatever.
It also had a lot to do with the fact that at the time Rails sites mostly ran on lighttpd or Mongrel, which was notoriously crashy (god was originally invented just to restart crashed Mongrels). From what I understand, at the time ActiveRecord hadn't yet been rewritten in C, which was also a big bottleneck for them (not to mention trying to scale MySQL to an insane level of traffic).

Nowadays, we have fancy stuff like Resque for background jobs, Passenger (aka mod_rails) for serving up Rails content, and a plethora of NoSQL databases.
If you enjoy the retelling of popular stories from a different perspective, one of the best I've read is Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar. Superman lands in the USSR, is raised as a communist, becomes the villain, Lex Luthor is the hero in America trying to outwit the communist supervillian, Batman is a freedom fighter... I shall say no more, but check it out if you're a nerd like me.
yeah, there's some bad data. bug created!
For those who are a solo developer and get strange requests such as "I demand this to be in ASP/PHP/etc." With whatever language you use, program away and modify .htaccess file to display the desired extension of .asp/.php/.etc.

I haven't yet wanted to try this but get tempted.
The biggest lesson I learned at my last startup is that your dev platform is an HR decision.

After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-head on a rising platform.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=codeigniter%2Ccakephp&...
A while back Caltrain had proposed cuts that actually gave me better commuting trains (SF to Santa Clara). Those never went through and now these are way more extreme. If this goes through I'll have to either start driving (45min to an hour each way) or move somewhere closer, and while I have that option not everyone does.
I really hope this is just a scare tactic intended to force municipalities to change the way Caltrain gets funded so it stops getting jerked around by the various counties that fund it every time they need somewhere to cut costs, even as ridership increases.
I also don't understand how places like SF can allow Caltrain to cut service to games and holiday events. I'd think that would cost them a lot of people who would go if they didn't have to drive, while in turn creating a real problem to figure out how to deal with the increased influx of all the extra cars from those who still go.
I'll have to agree with this... but its worth noting that there's a difference between ASP.Net WebForm and ASP.Net MVC.

I'm a huge fan of .Net (in fact my startup runs on it) but I absolutely hate the 'magic' that WebForms does for you.
I went to ExpertSexchange.com and was very disappointed.
You're right and make an excellent point. But the other platforms are also going to have to work on increasing the revenue per app for the developer or obsolete themselves. So the current state of affairs might only hold for a few years or so.

As well, there are a whole host of factors considered when a developer chooses platforms and while I don't know about how people weigh decisions, its possible that this number could come to irrationally? dominate considerations. So platforms competing over that number will have unpredictable, possibly undesirable effects to the outcome of the current equation for the leader at first and then everyone else.

Just considering the other side, but I do agree with your above point.
Ah, the cycle of revolution and co-option. It will be interesting to watch the original innovators of these incubator programs be replaced by cautious management types, and their institutions become the establishment that gets innovated around.

Make no mistake, YC, techstars and the rest have created massive amounts of value and turning into a clumsy industry giant is a great problem to have. This is just how it goes.
Recreation of pictures, decades after
Atwood talked about exactly this, calling it "digital sharecropping": http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/are-you-a-digital-s...

What amazes me about StackOverflow is that Spolky and Atwood figured so much of this out at the start.
Emacs / xemacs.

NetBSD / OpenBSD.

Debian / Ubuntu.

XMBC / Plex.

KHTML / Webkit.

sbcl / cmucl.
Appcelerator Titanium, a relatively prominent open source alternative to Adobe AIR, does cross-platform app compilation on a 'cloud compilation' service:

http://www.appcelerator.com/products/
Isn't this true of any language? ActiveRecord associations in Ruby on Rails are brilliant for getting code out the door, but the queries it produces along with complex lazy loading can make a database melt.
To be clear, there are valid reasons to use C#. I just don't think "nobody cares, besides C# developers are cheap and easy to find" is one of them.

(and while I'm leaving a comment anyway, I might as well apologize for the accidental downvote)
"Modern browsers enable rich, immersive experiences that could hitherto only be delivered through a plug-in or native application. They can blend video, vector and raster graphics, audio and text seamlessly without sacrificing performance."

Ok, when can we expect WebGL support then?
Does the page render correctly in IE9? :P
If you ignore the fact many of those content providers are themselves middlemen. Amazon just resells the content of others, and any ebook is 30% for anything under 2.99 and over 9.99, but everything between those price points amazon's cut is only 30%, so with said model they literally can NOT agree to these changes.
Ask HN: Good .NET host that doesn't cost a mint?
I need a .NET host with a track record of decency and a good admin for a mid weight web application. Ideally it should support many websites (DNS) and be fast and reliable. Budget should be around $10/month.

I'm with Mediatemple so far and quite happy with them (php). Recent move to the .NET platform requires me to look for alternative hosts.

Have you got some companies you can recommend in the similar class of Mediatemple?

thanks!
"It's customer centric, and, if they pull it off (With a good streaming, book reading, and content delivery platform) - brilliant."

I don't see how this is customer-centric in the traditional idea of the term at all. Customers want to be able to listen to Pandora and sync with their Kindle. Customers do not want restrictive DRM and policies that lock them into a given company for eternity.

I thought we were headed in a more open direction regarding the ownership of digital property. Thank goodness for Android.
I find this juxtaposition pretty funny:

"I made a list of likely acquirers and then looked at what kind of programming skills they hire for. It was clear they all favor Microsoft. All things being equal it seemed logical to do the same."

and

"At the end of the day things just have to work and customers don’t give a shit what technology you built your site on."

If you're building a startup to "flip" it, isn't your future acquirer just as much a customer as your, er, customers?
seeing all this energy wasted trying to convince people firefox 4 is better than ie 9 sort of solidifies my belief that chrome reigns supreme
That analogy only works if the theatre was also owned by the moviegoer. A better analogy would be a DVD player that wouldn't play movies if you ate the wrong brand of popcorn while watching in your living room. If you're going to call someone out as "just wrong" by using an analogy, please make sure your analogy says what you want it to say first.
yeah, i've been going through those for good ones.
i'm starting with twitter for now, mostly because the API is the easiest for me to deal with...
New Coke was fantastic for Coca-Cola. Coke was on the decline while Pepsi was on the rise. New Coke was an attempt to reinvigorate the brand and get people drinking more Coke again. It succeeded accidentally, as people decided they liked Coke as it had been, leading to a resurgence of sales.
Ask.com and Answers.com are bigger culprits than all of your list put together.

google this: site:answers.com "can you answer this question"

32,200,000 of their 103,000,000 answers pages DO NOT HAVE AN ANSWER! They are spamming google’s users to get them to build answer.com’s database of answers. (and surrounding the non-content with heavy ads!)

For the pages that do have an answer, answers.com has gone the way of answers.yahoo.com. (I guess you forgot answers.yahoo.com too)

And, BTW, ask.com is just regurgitating answers.com!!

google this: site:ask.com answers.com

or just surf around ask.com to see that they just regurgitate ALL of the content farm results, which makes ask.com a "content farm" farm

your list was a good start, but you missed the biggest (by far) offenders on the internet.
Agreed. I just want to sit here and click through clues, but the UI isn't very conducive to that.
I really like the site. I clicked "get random clue" enough times to get multiple repeats. Perhaps a "get next clue" is in order which a user can use to avoid repeats?

Also the "Read another random clue" button disappears after a couple of clues. I then have to click the random clue link at the top right which doesn't make a lot of sense.
I just finished reading the original Dune two weeks ago, so allow me to digress for a moment...

How is it possible that someone could have rooted for any character /other/ than Paul in the original Dune novel?

The Harkonnens were portrayed as selfish plotters who nearly bankrupted themselves to murder Paul's father. The Space Guild was mysterious and were shown as being utterly dependent on their prescience. The Bene Gesserit were complete manipulators, to the point where they created religions across the galaxy to further their political points. House Corrino was scheming with the Harkonnens.

It's nice that Paul was depicted as being flawed in Dune Messiah, but his being an evil character does not follow from the original Dune, unless you take extreme care to see certain changes in his character (such as the aside about him being worried about spice equipment and ornithopters).

Was someone seriously supposed to root for Duncan Idaho or the Mentats? Or the Queen/Concubine? Or were we "supposed to" wash our hands of the book and leave saying "They were all scum"?
clicking on "random clue" is unexpectedly satisfying.
Maybe if you spent $500 dollars for rights to use the theater while being told you could bring your own food in, then the rules changed it'd be comparable. Otherwise not even close.
Seems to render well in Chrome. ;)
It seemed to me that everything is tied to a particular page or entry/ There did not seem to be any appropriate place to bring up a pervasive action involving a multiplicity of pages.
There's a vast, vast difference between being first to market, and using that advantage to unethically create a monopoly by cryptographically locking users out of their own devices. If we fail to take a stand against such blatant violations of user rights, then that is what will undo the wonders of computing. Under the Apple model, innovation must follow asking your competitor for permission. Truly disruptive innovation cannot be sustained as long as Apple has unilateral control over the devices that they make, even after they are long past sold.
I think I see now, you mean that as &apos; wasn't in the HTML4 spec despite the other browsers all rendering it consistently as an apostrophe MSIE not rendering it was not a breech of the standards.

So MSIE was compliant but just backward about it's approach to things that were beyond the standard. This presumably wouldn't ahve been an issue at all is MSIE supported XHTML ... but I digress, thanks for responding.

---

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html
I agree. From the standpoint of what you can build a product using alone, any one of those is a good choice. However, I've learned that readability, along with being fun and efficient (from a developer productivity standpoint), is important, and the language makes a huge impact on all of these. I would argue that you can make say PHP readable, but it isn't necessarily going to be fun or efficient (but if someone can get all of those things, more power to them).
You can have a failover, so if one breaks you can quickly boot the apache one back up.
Not sure why their marketing affects the actual merits of Firefox or Chrome, but. I agree that Firefox is trying a bit too hard (though this appears to simply be one user). Additionally, Chrome is still faster and has less ui-chrome that gets in my way. I also find the extensions to be more cleanly implemented still than Firefox 4's.
I had the same experience in Vanier (Ottawa East..). I actually brought back the antenna to the store because I thought it was broken.
do you think you'll ask for email/password later on?
The point about 50/50 partners each deserving veto power on any hire is a strong one. If there's any chance the relationship can be repaired, and a mutual understanding about how to handle things going forward rebuilt, I would think this mutual-veto-power would have to be assumed. It also may be an abstract-enough standard of fairness that it can be discussed without necessarily obsessing over the designer's particular situation.
Paperless Billing Service Doxo Raises $10 Million In Series B Funding
this bit of thread makes me feel like it's time for neal stephenson to write a sequel to in the beginning was the command line, only this time the car companies are apple, google and facebook instead of microsoft, apple, be, and linux.
Not in general, no, but they do have quite enough market share in some niche markets, such as smartphone apps. I think that is sufficient to spark anti-trust suits in many jurisdictions.
I sought out and installed a user-script addon for my favourite browser, specifically to remove EE from search results for technical questions.

EE, I hate you.
I'm not entirely sure it's possible. We've seen examples of other governments taking down sites because of the way internet protocols work, specifically BGP [1]. I believe some number of the DNS root servers are directly or nearly-directly controlled by the government. Service providers have legal obligations to allow access into their facilities. We're not as bad off as others - some governments do run the ISPs.

I don't see the difference between having encrypted data on a mini-server at your house vs. housed at a provider. If the data was stored centrally and there were few options, it would make the legal process of getting the data easier. With the existing options for hosting data in many different countries, this doesn't seem to be a problem. Even then, you could probably stripe this data across centrally stored hosting solutions and still have a more efficient and secure process than hosting off of a 'Freedom Box'.

Options seem to be:
1. Distributed storage. The storage is striped across these boxes all over, and no single box has any data. Nobody can subpoena the data because of the process involved in getting the information from so many people at once. I think using distributed storage would be very, very difficult with data redundancy, latency, and maintaining security with such high availability and access.

2. Each box is self operating, but managed centrally. Data storage is contained to a single (or few) boxes to simplify data access and speed. This still allows centralized access to the data, and fewer people would be involved in collecting the data. Higher levels of security could be maintained, but legally easier to access.

3. Self managed secure boxes that have a 'cloud' or 'bot' organization of peer-to-peer relationships. Again, these types of systems work today, but there are still centralized servers and most of the workload is still carried by large servers/organizations.

It seems easier to simply make Tor more secure, which is a different debate if that's even possible. The article reads like a lawyer who has some tech experience thinks he has created a magic Internet v2.0 because he's found a way to get around the legal ramifications of privacy without regard to technical ramifications.

1. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/022608-youtube-outage-...
The New York Functional Programmers meetup is hosting a series of tutorials on learning functional programming. The first one is on Tuesday: http://www.meetup.com/lisp-59/ (there's a waiting list of three people right now, but if it's like most meetups they will add a few spots and/or some people will change their RSVP to no at the last minute, though this is just a guess since I haven't been to this meetup before).
We want to be able to listen to Pandora and sync with our Kindle to read e-books. The vast majority of the iOS userbase just want to listen to music and read e-books and do not care as much about what delivery mechanism provides the content. As much as I hate to admit it, they are not really going to miss Pandora or the Kindle app as much as we might like to hope. [For future reference, try not to use the Kindle as a counter-example when talking about restrictive DRM and walled gardens, it may be possible to remove the DRM but pretending it is not there in the first place isn't really honest...]
My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor.

If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.
If you want a comparison, look no further than the Hong Kong airport. It's not just restricted to broadband.

This project was completed in 6 years, cost $20 billion to build and was the largest in the world at the time, and included flattening two islands and reclaiming 10 square kms of sea bed. It also involved building a new high speed railway link to the city.

Can anyone imagine something like this being built in 21st century USA? At no time was the project held up by property disputes, political in-fighting, environmental disputes, corruption problems, lobbying efforts or anything else. They just decided to build an airport, found a spot for it, raised the money, awarded the contracts and then set about the serious job of running an airport efficiently, pausing only to collects endless awards.

In the UK, the public enquiries for Heathrow Terminal 5 took longer, as did the build (8 years for enquiries, 8 years to build), and that was just adding a new terminal to an existing airport, and the new terminal was a fraction of the size of the Hong Kong airport. Add to this the fact that the Hong Kong airport cost more than 10% of the country's GDP yet the country still has no net debt. When the financial crisis hit, the airport announced a $500million relief package for airlines to encourage them to continue operations. The airport now generates around $1 billion per year for the government, after paying down it's debts, which are rapidly dwindling.

Basically the people in south-east asia want to build the biggest and best infrastructure and have the best living standards in the world, and they're not sitting around pointing fingers and throwing buns and yelling at each other on TV while they go about it. Frankly I'm surprised they don't sit around laughing at the rest of us. There is no reason why things like the HK airport and broadband infrastructure can't be built, but they require a government to stop sticking it's fingers into lots of pies and get on with the basic provision of infrastructure.
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Kind of reminds me of when Scott McNealy was so obsessed with Microsoft that he didn't seem to notice Sun's real competition sneaking up behind him.
Dear author:

boasting features like song-sharing that Apple still hasn’t managed to catch up to.

Don't be silly. Apple hasn't "caught up," because it was never behind in some kind of race to add song-sharing. Apple chose not to implement that feature, as it has chosen not to add a great many other features.

If you think it's a benefit, it's appropriate to praise Microsoft for adding it, but you shouldn't imply that Apple is staffed by hapless engineers that are somehow incapable of figuring out how to implement this feature, or that Jobs sends out a weekly email asking when this feature will be ready.
very cool. it would be nice to add categories or tags to clues. API would be nice too so maybe somebody else could create a mobile version :)
It doesn't quite work that way. Strictly speaking, you will find more developers if you choose the technology of the week or some other popular thing. But that doesn't mean that you'll find more good developers. They're difficult to find no matter what technology you're working with.

That said, you're on the right track as far as realizing that technology has an impact on who you hire. I would choose one more because it helps set you apart from other companies, not because it's what everyone else is using.
That post is hilarious! And so very true....

First time I had to do that was overseas. I failed twice.... I then realized all my "friends" take pictures only at night and in groups of 10 or more!
This is why Developers hate IE, we have to make code specifically for that browser. I guess if you truly hate Microsoft, you wouldn't code it and just tell the user to download Firefox.
You say Microsoft isn't involved in the politics. That isn't an accurate portrayal: It is more the case that Microsoft is following far enough behind that, by the time they get to the issues that the others are bickering about, the issue has long since been decided.

You obviously think Microsoft is doing great by the Internet with IE. Obviously most people hear disagree. Regardless, you cannot say they are in any way leading nor innovating anymore. For the company that made AJAX possible, it is a sad state.