skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with all of the OP's points, except for one. Yes, Macs are incredibly popular with developers.

1) The reason I have always liked Macs since I was a kid is they basically come with what they need, and its easy to install extra stuff if you need it. Just because many developers like Macs doesn't mean that most Mac owners are developers. Most are just normal people who would wonder what is eating up extra space on their hdd.

2) It is absolutely not a burden to install the dev tools. There's absolutely no need to include gcc or the other dev tools by default. Non-developer folks almost never open the Terminal, much less compile their own software.

3) At most, I have to download the latest version of Xcode every 4-6 months. Yeah, she's a fat beast of a .dmg, but downloading and installing doesn't take up more than a few hours a year. Say that for Visual Studio or Eclipse which aren't as polished in some aspects, crash frequently, or run on platforms that crash frequently. (I'm not saying that VS or Eclipse share all 3 of those properties, and the crashing bit refers to Windows).

4) Its been demonstrated many times that Apple charges these $5 fees for previously free tools and applications because of SOX compliance laws. Apple has been providing their dev resources free for years. They are not hurting for cash and this isn't a money grab. They're at their all-time height of profitability, developer influence, and customer and market reach. Its rather obvious its about SOX.
Isn't it on the DVD that came with the computer? Double-click to install..
In March of 2007 I bought 25 shares of AAPL for $2,299.50. It's now worth $8,666.75

In June of 2007 I bought a MacBook Pro for $1,999 to run my startup off of. (The chart says that if I had bought stock instead, it'd be worth $4,413.)

The ROI on the MacBook Pro has been the better investment in my opinion.
Charlie Sheen Death Hoax Spreads Malware Through Facebook
Also, you can sell your apple products for close to 50% of their value.
Sure and the second is clearly illegal in either case.
This is the first, and I suspect only, time I have heard Oleg's examples described as "clear" or "simple".
Universal Wrapping Paper. F'in Genius
Almost every open source library on my Mac is compiled from source. Name your system: homebrew, ports, fink, they have all switch to compiling from source.

Every scripting extension repository I know assumes you have a compiler to compile native libraries for extensions.

And this has been true for "a long while". The change you are proposing is not trivial, and it has far-reaching implications. It is a step backwards, and one that every developer should oppose.
Of course. Veteran journos probably won't churn out "10 reasons to do X" type crap for a pittance.
How to own your friends with 1/50 of $10
Indeed. Linear Lisp promises the same thing (http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machine...) and perhaps Linear Joy (http://osdir.com/ml/lang.concatenative/2005-10/msg00009.html)...

It seems that when you do that, though, and especially from looking at the tutorial, you end up with semantics that are a) fundamentally different from GC-ed semantics, and b) explicit about memory management. But perhaps it amounts to a kind of type-safe memory management?
Yes, this is the point. It's not like we're just pouring the money down the drain. Technology is (often) an investment.
Hi all, I didn't realize that my project would end up in hacker-news. I was planning to make a public announcement later when I had something more stable. But well ... There is no going back now.
Right now, I need to stabilize closures, finish the standard library, write more tests and optimizations.
I saw a comment saying: it looks like clean. Well it's different in 2 ways, LinearML is strict and every object is linear. In most languages (Clean, ATS, etc ...), linear types are used to encode side-effects, as an alternative to monads. This is not the case here, in LiML, every object is linear! sharing has to be explicit. This leads to 3 interesting properties:
1) message passing is cheap (no need to copy)
2) most operations can be done "in-place", which is normally not true for a purely functional language. This allows better caching.
3) There is no GC. No runtime overhead for garbage collection at all.
Heh, amazing isn't it? Bullshit has a single purpose, and that's to turn itself into gold.
Top 50 Venture-Funded Companies
Honestly, every time I see one of these articles with even a hint at criticism towards Apple, I cringe slightly before I click the comments link...because I know what's coming next. Not that you care, but I'm also tired of Apple hi-jinks, T's & C's, and just general unfriendliness toward devs and I'll stick with Win7/Ubuntu from now on.
I don't understand. What does an accounting compliance law have to do with charging for previously free tools? And how were they able to release free tools in the years after 2002? What makes 2011 so special that they are compelled by law to start charging $5?
C# Basic HTTP Request Class
I am working on that, but it's a bit early for that :-)
It's OK. We just started hosting on Azure, and I wonder what people thought of it in the long term with scaling and usability. It is however some buggy and sometimes slow, but in general I really like it.
It's a legitimate point, but the linkbait title just irritates me. This is something that developers only have to deal with once every year or two. $5 is not a lot of money for a 4.5GB development package, regardless of whether you think it should be free. It certainly shouldn't be any kind of tipping point in platform choice for developers.
...and then calling the support lines asking "why is my disk full?"
Or ok. And what about your dependencies? Let's say you have a dependency on a library that is not shipped with OS X, what do you do? Link it statically and see your tiny gem becoming a monster of a few megabytes? Or do you simply link it dynamically hoping that somehow there will be a binary with the right version lurking somewhere for the user to download.
Yeah, that's what happens when you develop OSS for windows. Or do you rely only on native windows libraries that you know will be there for sure, or do you have to compile against the latest version of the library you want to use that happens to have a binary available for windows users to download. Or then, you resort to some strange things like cygwin, MinGw.
But didn't we all complained about that when windows was the only somewhat userfriendly OS out there? Didn't we all complained about how much it sucked that you couldn't have a free C compiler chain on windows. Well, now at least on windows you can download the Windows SDK and build code without Visual Studio. If and when Microsoft Windows C/C++ compiler, linker, docs, libs and headers are updated you can have a fresh and free Windows SDK download without having to shell out money to buy Visual Studio, would it be so difficult to apple to unbundle GCC toolchain from XCode and make it freely available?
> Its rather obvious its about SOX.

To you, but obviously not to a lot of us. Please explain.
I see your point. But the key here is choice. You chose to go to the gym and do repetitive exercises. You probably do this in part because you want to be healthy and it makes you feel good. Do some kids want to do repetitive math exercises? Sure, I was one them! But they are a small minority. Should we force kids do repetitive exercises just because it is good for them? It's a tricky question.
OS X ships with XCode. Apple has never released a major XCode upgrade in-between OS releases until now.
I admire Khan. Although he is not unique in his approach, he is uniquely positioned to deliver this message. By quitting his job and giving away his time, he is an ideal ambassador to the message of "scalable pedagogy". As he has described, if Isaac Newton had recorded his lessons on Youtube, Khan wouldn't have to.

By giving alway classroom tools like test management and monitoring, he is also equipping teachers to become more scalable and as he described - data driven.
Have there been applicants that were accepted but ended up turning it down for whatever reason (job, move, visa, etc)? Have any of these reapplied and participated in the subsequent go?
it's a (somewhat stupid) iOS recommended design pattern
Things to consider:

It's better to gain traction on one platform than to languish on multiple platforms.

Android and iOS have two very different userbases; I hear that iOS seems to include more people willing to pay for software than Android. On the other hand, Android has fewer apps.

Most importantly, you need to get noticed on at least one platform. If you have a limited amount of resources, you'd be better off focusing on one great product. Once that's done, move to other platforms if that makes sense for your business growth.
I think it must depend on the environment. In my company, development managers (right up to the VP of software) are extremely competent developers and are expected to be able to solve the problems (or help solve the problems) that individual contributors are spinning their wheels on.

Maybe at a larger company this model doesn't work as well, but I would assume that development managers at most small tech companies are highly proficient developers. Am I totally off base here...?
I have an initial port for Safari ready if you're interested. Comments is a bit messed up: http://cl.ly/3X323L1Q3I0Z1u2D1v2C
Not every non-US developer have a credit card. Particularly if you are talking about young students.
Windows SDK (That means: Compiler, Linker, Libs, Docs and Headers) is a free download from MSFT site. You only pay if you are a masochist and want to use Visual Studio.
Everything I've heard about the Zune HD (the only pure CE 6 device I'm aware of) is positive. Maybe you're getting confused with Windows Mobile 6.5, which is based on an older version.

Besides, Windows 7 is of unquestionably better quality than Vista, so what's your point?
If someone were accepted into YC, and circumstances arose which meant that the founders couldn't remain in the bay area for the entire three months, how would that be handled?
Steve Jobs wants me to sign up for his service and give him $5 for the privilege of downloading 3.5G to get gcc on my computer now. Didn't we see this coming?

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/10/oh-bitty-box-how-youre-grown...

"So rzr_grl had a zillion zillion files she wanted to download from a web site, using her OSX Mac. First she tries to use this program called Fetch, which is expirey nagware. (And it's just baffling to me that anyone would actually pay for software that does something as basic as "downloading files", but that's beside the point.) ...

So I say, fuck this, I've heard rumors that these are real computers now, just use wget. So I download it, configure… oops, no C compiler. Presumably it was on some CD that she doesn't have here. So we go looking for an OSX binary of gcc. (Brief conversation on how it's possible for compilers to need compilers occurs.) Apparenty the only binaries are on Apple's site, and it takes forever to find it, because their site sucks. Also they make you register in order to download gcc. It's gcc! WTF! "
My take: too little and way too late. Don't even pay attention or else you'll waste your time.

About 8 years ago I did my small part in expanding XML capabilities of SQL Server. At the time XML was hot so Oracle, Microsoft, IBM raced to add native XML handling to their databases. It was going to be the next big thing. Possibly even bigger than big.

XML was really hot then and many other sins were committed in its name (e.g. SOAP).

Trust me, the ridiculous inefficiency of XML wasn't lost on developers working on XML technologies 8 years ago. Coming up with a more efficient binary XML format is easy. Microsoft had its version (if not several of them) and other companies had theirs.

The real problem was: politics prevented people agreeing on a standard so no standard emerged.

There was an eruption of creating standards based on XML (SOAP, XML Schema, XQuery). If you don't know what those terms mean it's because they all failed (despite the fact that everyone was convinced they're going to be the next big thing).

In hindsight it was a terrible mistake to work on those technologies but not solve a real problem people had then: an efficient, binary XML format.

If W3C did it 8 years ago, maybe it would have been worthwhile and people wouldn't feel the need to invent Protocol Buffers or Thrift.

But solving this problem today is almost comically late. It has no chance of adoption.
Why Is It So Hard to Quit Smoking?
Previous major upgrades to XCode released with new versions of OSX and required that newer version to install/run.
OSX 10.7 (Lion) has not released yet, so upgrading from 3.6 to 4.0 (Major upgrade) is not considered a maintenance release by Apple's accounting department.
Paying members of the Apple Developer network subscribe ($99 per year) and one of the benefits is access to Beta releases of OS and tools. XCode 4.0 was available to members of the Developer network prior to this official release, and after the release, non-subscribers are given access through the App Store.
Apple is in no way preventing anyone from developing for Mac at this point since XCode 3.6.5 is still available for download and installation by any users of OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and as evidenced by the availability of the iOS 4.3 SDK for XCode 3.6, they are not forcing anyone to upgrade to the new IDE just to develop for their various platforms.
Perhaps a subsidy if your `only` child is a female. Like a baby bonus but for girls only.
Plenty of instapaper android readers, I use everpaper, though would be happy to chip in for an offical version as its so useful.
Very nice post James!

This is exactly the reason why startup hiring is difficult: the amount of trust required in the candidate is magnitudes above that of large companies.

I hadn't thought about it in quite these terms before, but this is so true - very well put.

Good luck with the new venture!
This site and Girl Talk are the coolest things I've seen/heard in a long time. If you like music (who doesn't?) you have to check this out.
I usually don't like straight up clones (e.g. Digg and Meneame) but I'll cheer anything that motivate us write quality content.

Personally I think that the language doesn't really matters and sharing stuff in english is the nearest thing to send a global message, but it's annoying that so many people speak the language and our blog community is so poor.

I just know I'm tired of Engadget and Boing Boing copycats.
Wow, that's a long complaint-blog for $5!

The cheapest new mac is $699 and the install DVD comes with XCode 3. Pretty sure new macs will come with XCode 4 preinstalled.

I don't see how this is a problem. Even if you are building a Hackintosh, you're pirating OSX anyhow so pirating XCode too doesn't seem so far fetched.

I have to use iPhoto'08 since that's what my Mac came with. But they just released iPhoto '11! Should I also write a long blog post complaining how Macs are not for normal people that take photos?

XCode is just another app: it costs money to create and maintain and they charge for major revisions. Same as OSX, iLife apps, iWork, etc.
History of APIs – Foursquare API
I am not a GCC toolchain expert, but what is the trouble with someone hosting a GCC for OS X binary?
I'm working through that book right now, and it's fantastic. I'd used haskell before in class, but I definitely suffered from the "fibonacci gap." Now, I'm starting to do small scripts in haskell, and hopefully I'll be able to tackle a decently-sized project soon. I can't recommend this book highly enough if you're curious about haskell.
Most links are english articles though...
RadiumOne raises $21M for new ad network with a social twist
Instapaper and Reeder are, for me, the 'killer' iPhone apps.

When people ask me why I like/choose the iPhone , I point at those 2 apps.
To be clear, I'm referring to leaving the corporate environment and possibly even selling a house. I can fully control my own life situation, but I can't ask my co-founder to travel out West when his wife won't allow him to move away from the family for three months.
(edited my comment before I saw your reply)

I agree that a smaller (and free) tool chain would be great, but so far as I know there is nothing preventing anyone from making one.

Related, I realize it is now the case, but when did casual users start needing gcc? Time was, in my pre-OSX days, compiling things yourself if you weren't a dev was seen as somewhat pointless, you just get thousands of users all building the same binary instead of building one binary to be downloaded by thousands of users...
Well,you would need some C compiler. You could build FCC with clang.
It's up to you. I won't think less of you for running ads (I run several non-blog advertising funded sites), but I know that some people would. Paying for your hosting costs is fine, but it's another thing to get paid for your time.
I agree with this article's central theme. People who don't grasp the basic concepts of economics or parenting should not have kids, its not fair to the economy and its not fair to the kids.
Your tone sounds like you disagree with me, but your words make the same point I did. I was saying that Kudos is wrong in claiming that the codec isn't different from the old version.
OP isn't complaining about the price, or at least not principally. He's complaining about the 4gb download, the 15gb of HDD and the time of installing Xcode just to get gcc.

The price is just another barrier to entry to add to the list before you're up and running.
So where do I buy this? Pretty great idea...
Another single founder question.

What if the startup (single founder) is already passed the building stage and is now looking to scale.

Would it make more sense to start hiring a team instead of finding a co-founder?

In this specific scenario (obviously an exception), would the single founder issue still be that much of a problem, or is it diluted down now that they company is established somewhat.
>The iPad no longer uses the top and bottom gradient to fade the text out, instead opting for a clean shadow line borrowed from Reeder’s style.

Glad to see this. It was irritating to almost-but-not-quite see the first line of text as you scrolled, which sometimes meant you had to scroll back, which sometimes meant you lost your place, which sometimes resulted in hair being pulled out.
Yeah, I hear the "it's about SOX" comment a lot, and I hear the "it's about greed" comment a lot, neither of which make any sense to me... I'd love to get a real explanation.
What's interesting about Instapaper is that Marco is in a way moving towards embracing both models. With his "3rd-party access only for subscribers" model (see http://blog.instapaper.com/post/3208433429), he can focus on keeping the iOS app polished while letting third-party developers handle writing apps for other platforms. Assuming this actually happens (a big assumption, to be fair), non-iOS platforms will serve as a revenue source by driving subscriptions.
The system has detected
Thanks. It was made by Chris Lavigne at http://www.crlvideo.com He's UBER talented.
You ship binaries for the top 2-3 platforms and provide source for the rest.

I wish it were that simple, but then you also have to worry about library versions (unless you really want to bundle all your dependencies too, bloating your little library from 10KiB to tens of megabytes, or more).

Also see this reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2311455

Meh, it isn't insurmountable.

Yeah, because forcing a huge infrastructure change is what we want to do for the sake of having poor GCC distribution on OS X.
There are also good hackers in Europe, and they all speak various languages, but they all learned English at some point in their life. And I guess this is an advantage, because they can collaborate/interact with other tech people, especially from US/Canada.

I'm not against a spanish HN or any other website in a mother tongue, but wouldn't be better for everyone if Latin American Hackers would become fluent in English? Maybe then US companies could open up offices in Latin America, hire the best programmers, pay maybe less than what we pay now, etc.
Ok, but where in this scenario do the SOX compliance laws compel them to charge money for a "major upgrade"?
Congratulations guys! I hope this means there will be some more really cool tools coming soon :-)
STL is great. I like STL so much that, after moving from my startup (where we did C++) to a friend's (where it was all C), I backported a void*-specialized version of STLport's <map> and <vector> libraries. It took a couple hours. The pain of C++ isn't worth the benefit of the STL; fortunately, you don't have to suffer C++ to get access to its better libraries.

It is flat-out not true that you need to write data structures in C each time you use them. The programmers that do this are, in my limited experience, uniformly bad. I wouldn't even write a linked-list for fear of screwing up a corner case on deletion. There are libraries for everything, and they're plenty fast. They're just less pretty looking.
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Another day, another imaginary profit using 20/20 hindsight. Yes, stock trading is easy using a time machine. Do you have a time machine? I didn't think so. Next!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2306882
Here's a plausible explanation: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=113884...
The Unix Haters really liked Unix; the book was an act of love. Yossi clearly wants to stab C++ in the eyeball with a fork.
What about iTunes? Why don't they have to charge for iTunes?
That's a fair question. Since they aren't using user blacklists as a signal yet I will punt. Were they to start, then I think you have a point that finer-grained data is preferred. They should probably offer both options in that case, i.e. "don't show this result anymore" and "don't show any results from bar.example.com anymore."
A Reasonable Argument for God's Existence
While not shady, the repeated links to follow you on twitter detracted from the article. It also made me trust your writing a little less. Just sayin.
The following was said about Apple charging to unlock 802.11n in MacBooks.

Why don't they give it away for free, say with Software Update? Because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (which was passed in the wake of the Enron scandal). iLounge quotes an Apple representative: "It's about accounting. Because of the Act, the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognizes revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn't finished delivering the product at that point."
Disassembling community-driven websites
A simple intro to creating a MVC framework: Using GEF
This.

We've got a mixed team of Ubuntu/Macosecks people, and _nobody_ does actual development work on OS X any more. It's a lot more convenient if your development environment matches your deployment environment. Working otherwise is swimming upstream.
Then why not offer the download for free on developer.apple.com and charge the 5 dollars for the convenience of using the Mac App Store?
It's not a mind game. It's a simple truth. It is totally irrelevant.

Asking is it's own mind game, because they're not asking in good faith, they're asking so they can bully you into accepting a lesser offer. They either don't know what is fair OR they do but want to go "Well we don't pay more then 10% of what you're already on" which has NOTHING to do with your value.
Click the magnifying glass on any search-return item.
I would prefer a rebus version, where I circle pictures of Joe Quimby, the letter E, a "C," a wrist, and an arrow soaring over a target.

Everyone loves rebuses, right? They're at least due for a comeback.

My co-founder and I have a running joke where we surprise potential investors by announcing we're pitching a rebus-based Twitter instead.
yes, send me an email gustaf@voxer.com
Direct quote from the post: It’s not about the money