skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Put it in an different context,

Lets say you were married, lets say you had an affair, lets say that the news of this came to light and your spouse yelled and screamed at you.

How do you think they would answer the question: "So? How is this any different from what every other person who has had an affair?"

The answer is that the question itself is flawed, whether or not other companies attempt to game the system is irrelevant if the gaming itself is an insult.

We know people will attempt to manipulate society and governments to their ends, we can all be offended when they do so in an attempt to enrich themselves at the expense of the greater good.
Interesting. Yeah I just quit my job to try to start something. I wonder if the driving force that causes me to even think about businesses is because I can't/don't like to work well with people above me.
Stop

Feeding

The

Troll
Open is not a bool, it's a float. Android may not be "open" but it is still far more open than IOS.
Follow up article: Why I would never hire a CEO as clueless as this guy...
Although I also dislike .NET, it seems the primary complaint here about .NET is that it abstracts programmers too much away from the bare metal. But doesn't that apply equally to non-MS languages like Python and Ruby? In fact, isn't abstraction in general a good thing?

The author also bewails .NET's lack of configurability. But what is it about C# that instantly defiles any programmer who touches it, that doesn't also apply to, say, Java?
This article probably does more to hurt expensify than it says anything about .NET development. I'd seriously hope that any CEO I work with would come talk to a dev before writing something like this.
I don't think anybody attributes it to "careless", at least here on the northern plains. I was wondering at the weird phrasing of the original post. It seemed odd.
What. A. Moron. Talk about a mega-facepalm! How is bigotry supposed to entice people to your firm?
At least based on the Wikipedia article on Jordan, it looks like it is one of the better Arab countries when it comes to things like freedom of expression, women's rights, religious tolerance, and so on. Sure, not up to what we expect in a Western country, but pretty good by regional standards.

That's probably going to make it hard to have a revolution, since a lot of people will be happy with things the way they are.
"But choosing .NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I can’t help but ask “why?”"

Because in certain pockets of the country 90%+ of the jobs are in .NET.

"See, Microsoft very intentionally (and very successfully) created .NET to be as different as possible from everything else out there"

? It's almost exactly like java.
F**K YOU, TURN ON JAVASCRIPT.
Putting the money in the middle and getting it when you land on free parking always made the game more fun as the pot got bigger you just tried to keep throwing the correct number to get the huge pot in the middle to hopefully help you get out of bankruptcy!

I never had a MySpace page, I found that the disjointed looks across peoples profiles and seemingly no direction as to what it was to be used for rather annoying and made me consider MySpace as a joke. Facebook won me over in that they had a consistent layout, and no goddamn music playing when I went to a users profile page, and I can't even begin to count the amount of friends I have that agree with me, but I can count the amount of friends on one hand who have a MySpace page.
Global Corruption Index (PNG Image)
Down vote away. Let me clarify.

Think core feature of the operating system rather than a specific application...
> They write everything from assembly to jQuery, on PCs to mobile phones, doing hard core computer graphics to high level social networking. They’ve tried everything. Everything, that is, but .NET.

I've written everything from assembly to jQuery and written software in C++ for mobile phones. I'm not a fan of either computer graphics or social networking but I've written a ray-tracer and built a few popular websites. When I'm not working in other technologies (which is much of my day job) I also dabble in .Net. Why? Because it's an absolutely fantastic platform for getting stuff done in Windows.

I'm working on a little hobby project right now in .Net that interfaces with a piece of embedded hardware. .Net has been crazy effective for it: low-level bit twiddling is a breeze without the programmer overhead of C/C++ (don't even bother trying it in Java). I even made sure it's possible to port it to Mono for Linux users. And those tools that "make 1.6oz burgers"; I'm using those. The project also requires a whole bunch of boring CRUD work and I auto-generated at least half that work away. Sometimes you don't need 1.7oz burgers so why waste a lot of time and effort replicating that capability for nothing?

I think you'd be remiss to hire someone who only knows a single technology, whether that be .Net, Java, or PHP. But I don't think .Net is some kind of poison for the mind.
Review: BitBop offer dream of great video on Android some day
Wow, this is the most personally insulting article I've ever read on HN. I've been programming since I was 8, worked at a successful startup (that used .NET exclusively), and do most of my pet projects on the MS stack.

I can't agree with him on any of his examples on why .NET is a bad platform. Backslashes and coordinates systems are trivial. I can't imagine any point for any startup where it's necessary to know the bytes going over the wire when dealing with networking. Code generation is an incredible time saver, and can easily be deleted if the generated code is unnecessary. Expensive servers have nothing to do with quality of code. I've never heard of a .NET developer allergic to open source, not to mention that also has very little bearing on quality of code.

I would propose that the platform is a tool, and a developer who can only use that one tool is limited. But it's totally ridiculous to discriminate against someone for knowing how to use the tool and having experience with it.
I use redshift on my Linux boxes http://jonls.dk/redshift/
- step 1 : create rules that makes it near impossible to develop

- step 2 : accuse the competency of developers to hide your own incompetency

- step 3 : fail
But how do you draw the thin line between a "Facebook" startup and a "Groupon" startup. There's so much between those two realities.

I have the same question as the OP.

Also... How can you differentiate between a technical entrepreneur and a coder? Because I'd really be willing to give lots of equity to the former, but none to the latter.
I feel like he is both right and wrong, and for all the wrong reasons.

His hunch is that for the most part .Net developers are bad, and by and large I agree with that. Because .Net is used in a lot of Enterprisey places, and it's so easy to get a job in it right out of school you find a lot of just horrible code, and broken mindsets about programming in general. All of the idiocy I find in .Net is usually just someone who wouldn't know how to solve their problem in any other programming language either.

But he's wrong that that is a direct result of .Net in general. I feel you could swap out .Net for Rails: "oh all you know is how to run `rails g scaffold` therefore you're not worth my time". That is wrong. Like Rails, .Net provides abstractions over mechanics, but you will be a happier, more confident programmer when you can understand the intent of those abstractions, and maybe even take a theoretical stab at how you would implement it. That goes for any platform you develop on.

Personally I think I've grown a lot as a developer in general over the past few years using .Net professionally. Despite the stigma I've met a lot of smart developers, and C# has helped me hone how I like to think about and solve problems in general. I'm sure it helps that I do a healthy amount of other hacking outside of it all to give me perspective, but I certainly don't feel stupider for being exposed to things like LINQ, which helped my grok Monads and embrace more Composition style programming in a fuller way.
Because everyone wants to claim they have the best programmers in the world. :-)
Apparently, so they can beat up everyone else's programmers.

Exactly what that contributes to programming or expense reports is anyone's guess.
Try helping at sparked.com there are many non-profits who could use your help. Just my 2 cents.
Excuse me while I go and remove Expensify...

I started programming out with MSC 5.1-> Borland C++ 5.0-> MS C++-> MS C# and have never looked back.

It's elegant, powerful and gets out of your way when you need to deep dive.

I would suggest you take another look at it and don't confuse all .NET developers with VBA script kiddies.
It's certainly no less AI than natural language processing is -- both seek to use algorithmic approaches to resolve the ambiguities in a bunch of input captured from fuzzy real-world sources, and build data structures representing that data -- as best understood by the program -- that can be manipulated by more traditional processing algorithms.
Wow I hope this guy is just trolling. I haven't done much C# programming myself but the best coder I know built a HFT platform on .NET that made millions of dollars.

If this CEO wouldn't hire that guy because he's a ".NET programmer" then he has more important issues to deal with than his technology stack.

Also, his definition of a .NET programmer is hopelessly out of of date:

Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.

Ummmm no. You're not describing the .NET platform. What you're describing is the old VB6 winforms-style or MS-ACCESS-style coding that was popular 5-10 years ago. The .NET platform has moved much much further than that in a short period of time.
Additionally, protests also in neighboring Syria:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/at-least-23-said-k...
There is a cough awesome* version of f.lux for Linux too: http://stereopsis.com/flux/linux.html ;)

*disclaimer, I'm the author of the gui
Exactly, a tool (technology-based or otherwise) is just a multiplier for the person wielding it. It's the people wielding the tool that make the difference.

Management is not excluded from this either. They have to:

1. know, in depth, the business they are in and the tools they use (or could use) to achieve their goals

2. listen to what their team tells them and provide an environment where they can do the job right

It sounds like there was a lot of micro-management and putting out fires in this case.
Didn't filled a field in our application
Hi Everyone.
I've applied with my team for this season at YC, however we didn't filled a field that standout because it is not related to your informatics skills. You know the one that say:

"Please tell us about the time you, gumbo, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

So you're going to ask me why: in fact the only thing that came to my mind at this point is something close to "illegal". And with the team we agreed to not fill this field.

Now the deadline has passed and we're worried because this can play agains't us.

So now the question is, should we write to YC and say, "hey i confess, and i've hacked some "non-computer" system"? Maybe this could play agains't us even more.

Looking for advices.

Thanks.
I once had a job doing web development and programming when I was younger. I was paid somewhere around $8.00/hr. When I asked for a significant raise (i.e. $18-$20/hr) [Still not AWESOME but would have been nice for where I lived] I was turned down and instead counter offered $8.50/hr.

I quit the job a week later and accepted a much better paying job. They ended up hiring four people to replace me at $8.00-$10.00/hr each. (I did web development, programming, system administration, customer support, and technical support.) It got pretty rough. I was being asked to do overtime for no additional pay among other things.

Their refusal to pay me something closer to what I should have been making ended up costing them about $32-$40/hr as opposed to the $18-$20 I was asking.

Basically, it boils down to this: Don't be afraid to ask for what you feel you deserve but also don't be afraid to take action if you don't get what you want. I made sure that I had an offer/possibility on the table from another company before I approached the employer regarding the raise -- just in case they sent me packing.

I essentially felt like if I didn't move on after the insulting counter offer that they would continue to walk all over me. I held out way too long for that huge pay raise that was "just around the corner" "as soon as we land this contract."

I find myself in a similar situation now, though it is my own fault. I am consulting and business has been slow the past year or so. I'm giving it another month and then I'm going to start sending out resumes and probably put a hold on consulting work for a while.
I've noticed after a few weeks of using it that I no longer am aware of the screen changing light temperature. I presume that's because I've adapted to it. Anyone else have that?
In 2010 a new law was passed that greatly restricted freedom of speech online.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/21/jordon-c...

In May, the state security court banned news media from covering corruption allegations involving the Jordan Petroleum Refinery Company and several national figures.

This ruling coincided with what many described as a "government-backed media campaign" against news websites, whose criticism of government policies and increasing influence among Jordanians seemed to have become intolerable among thin-skinned, high-ranking officials.

The law makes it a punishable offense to post anything to a website, blog, chat, or otherwise publish via digital means anything that will "inspire lack of confidence" in Jordan, it's economy, or the King. It is so vaguely worded that people have been imprisoned on it from posting political activism to simply swearing at the King.

The thing about Jordan is that it's suffering from a combination of factors that make it seem like paradise. Western Media is heavily relied on to make that things are nice, the King is considered to be a "kindred soul who once acted on Star Trek" (when he was considered to be the black sheep prince and not even a remote candidate for the throne). Jordan is a very important strategic ally for the USA in the region, and only the second country Middle East nation to acknowledge Israel - perhaps even more important than Egypt because it plays host to a 60% Palestinian population.

In Jordan, the average monthly income is about 350 USD. Gas is $4.50 a gallon though, and anything other than traditional falafel (some sort of vegetable burger) or shawarmah (gyros) is much more expensive than in the States. Sales tax has been raised to 28% on any electronics or telecommunication, cars are taxed at 80%, income tax is at 16% and general sales tax another 16%. Does that change the public perception?
As I think about this more, the point may be that .NET is most rewarding for developers at either end of the experience spectrum.

As a very experienced developer, it's easy to get into the low-level framework type features like remoting (and building RealProxies), unsafe code (pointer manipulation), asynchronous programming with io completion ports, etc. All of these features allow experienced developers to create from scratch very powerful abstractions.

In turn, inexperienced developers can easily take advantage of these abstractions to build something quickly. It is this group that the author is referring to (and probably belongs to). Once a member of this group needs to do something outside of the realm of existing re-usable components, it takes a more experienced developer to help.
I think this is just a rant by some CEO who hasn't had much real world experience. Sadly, it doesn't give any examples of why .NET is worse.

I would question why he REALLY doesn't like .NET. This article to me it like a person stuck inside a box with only peep hole towards the java stack. When he realizes that there is more to life and academics than just java or objective C, then maybe we will talk.

Can we please not keep up voting this rant that I didn't learn anything from except for the comments posted here on HN?
Data Processing At bit.ly
Maybe the difficulty in hiring good people is because the CEO is clueless?

Any hacker with half a brain would stay far, far away from this company.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832097 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547830
Having read the article, as well as Scoble article linked I would have to disagree that it was the Microsoft stack. There was just not enough investment in their programmers. I work at a small startup where money is rather tight while we raise funding and attempt to get contracts in, yet us developers get what we need. Every developer has at least two screens (be it a laptop and a large LCD, or a desktop with two the same monitors). We can ask for new staging servers, we can ask for more memory, we can set up our own infrastructure, and we can make technical decisions.

Once you start taking away the ability of devs to think for themselves or feel comfortable doing work it makes it harder to be motivated to come into work and fix the issues, and if management isn't listening to the complaints about the need to re-factor then what is the point? Adding hack onto hack gets boring pretty damn fast.

MySpace also lost in that they really didn't have a direction of where they were going (at least that is what it looks like looking in). Blogs, music, status updates, what was it supposed to be? And it didn't help that all over their web properties they didn't have a consistent look and feel because they allowed everyone and their mother to skin their profile page how they saw fit leaving it a disjointed mess that just made me hate the site more.
I honestly would never work for this guy. I have a C, Python, Java, Ruby background (as in what I've used in past jobs), and I'm working with .Net currently even though I'm a Ruby fan. I find C# and ASP MVC, pretty freaking good, even though I'm a Windows hater. Close minded people like this dude don't deserve good programming talent at all.

I might not be one of the best programers ever (I'm probably not!), but even if I was I'd send the same message to this guy: "I play almost every stringed instrument from the violin to the piano. I can juggle up to 5 objects with ease. I know a quite a few magic tricks. I'm freaking special and I will never work for a narrow minded person such as yourself. Even if you pay me a quadrillion nigerian dollars."
The Author of this article obviously has some misconceptions about .NET, and has probably had some bad experiences with enterprise developers. I've worked at two very successful startups that have used .NET for high traffic web development (and no, I'm not talking about MySpace). Some sites dealing with 5million + page views a day, and some of our .NET services would handle 5billion+ requests a month. It is great for large teams, the CLR is well optimized, and C# is a beautiful language in itself (although the platform supports many scripting and functional languages). I believe what the Author really means, is stay away from seasoned Asp.net web form developers who have never strayed from .NET and have no experience in an agile environment... if you are looking to hire for your startup. I've been hiring quite a few developers recently for the once startup I'm currently working at, and when recruiting I make sure to never start discriminating based on the language that an engineer develops in. I've hired programmers who were mainly developing in C++, Java, Python, PHP, and many other languages. If they are Jr, you just need to be super smart problem solver with decent programming skills. If you are Sr./Lead, you need high traffic experience, along with being well skilled with a strongly typed language, among other requirements. These kind of candidates have done extremely well, and enjoy the .NET platform that we mainly develop in. And me personally, I prefer .NET, but if the team and product is great, I would be happy to work with Ruby, Python, .NET, Java, etc... I think my PHP days are over though=)
You're full of it. In what way does .NET hamper you? Why can't you make a "1.7oz burger"? It's a full-blown programming environment - the limit to what you build is what your mind can conceive.
I have a hard time taking this seriously beyond the ".NET is a language" statements. I don't think most of his statements really apply to C#, but they certainly don't apply to F#.

This is cargo cult management at its finest. The author is clearly one step above knowing absolutely nothing about this at all. It reads like he got burned by a bad hire and now everyone who shares traits in common with that person is also a bad hire.
Stuck on Ramen (2010)
roel_v makes a valid point - the majority of web users will not see this text. The whole point is that it's hidden and will only be 'seen' by people using screen readers. The text could easily be changed to "To reduce spam we have included this extra field. If you are a human, please leave it blank."
A lot of .NET hate these last couple days. I consider myself a polyglot, but most of the work I do these days is in .NET. I agree, there's no limitation on what you can do with the languages -- its the frameworks that limit you. Isn't that true with Rails, Django, Struts, and just about any other framework?

As far as languages being a red flag on resumes? I'd argue the more you see, the better. You don't want to see 30 years of C/C++ and nothing else, nor do you want to see someone with 1 year of each language. You want to see passion, dedication, and a genuine desire to learn.

I think the real issue is how much you can make as a .NET developer. Enterprise clients buy things that come in boxes. Rails doesn't come in a box, and it doesn't come with a support contract or a lifecycle agreement. There's something to be said for easy migration from version to version, tested hotfixes, and a fully integrated stack from app code to db server.

Anyways, </soapbox>
while i thought only atomic bomb explosion can have such dynamic, it happens Groupon valuation too:

from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17/groupon-is-said-to-... :

Groupon Inc. has held talks with banks about an initial public offering that would value the online-coupon company at as much as $25 billion
...
Groupon was valued at about $1.3 billion last April, when it raised $135 million from investors, including Digital Sky Technologies. It contemplated more funding at a $3 billion valuation in November, shortly before Google’s offer. An investment of $950 million, completed in January, pegged Groupon’s worth at $4.75 billion.
Gogo2011 Kobamusaji