skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
-Not OSS (note I didn't include the F)

-Cross-browser pains

-Vendor lockin (getting better with mono, but not officially supported by MS)

-Non-(f)OSS tools or less (F)OSS tools

-Non-OSS risk (can't patch if needed)

-No support for WebGL/other html5 tech

-Useless pushing of Silverlight while industry shifts to HTML5
Gadgets
Profiteer van gadget, cadeau (kado) en geschenk aanbiedingen bij i Cadeau.nl. De winkel voor een origineel idee. Met leuke cadeautips voor verjaardag, valentijn, moederdag, huwelijk, sinterklaas, ...
I almost prefer first class with no stops vs. a PJ. Those tiny ass airplanes can make for some bumpy rides! As someone who already hates turbulence, those little planes don't help.
Google Apps Marketplace Offers TRUSTe Data Privacy Certification
At Busfeed.com all our systems and App are build on Microsoft platform and .Net framework. The MS BizSpark program is a winner for us and many startups we know. The icing on the cake: it’s waaaaay easier to hire Microsoft professionals on the east coast than for any other platform out there.

I think the ability to find and hire good developers is the most underrated factor in tools for startups.
Not so sure that's the driver here. Many devs have bought into the iOS ecosystem. This certainly isn't cheap: macbooks, imacs, iphones, ipod touches, ipads. It's also a pretty deep dive to get into.

On the web side, I really think cost is the driving factor more than anything. As long as there's a free (open source) solution to MS's framework that is on par (we can argue either way which frameworks/platforms are better) there's little incentive for startups to go .NET. If a LAMP stack started costing as much as a .NET stack the landscape would be very different. .NET faces the problems going against the Java stack.

In the end, it's about the money. Which platform can I make more money on and does it more than pay for the costs to be on the platform? Right now on mobile it's iOS and on the web it's typically LAMP or lately a Ruby on Rails stack.
don't want to split hairs, but Friday 17th May does not exist ;)
Maybe I'm naive but couldn't this be used to trick the US into attacking a target that had nothing to do with the cyber attack to begin with? Seems like a huge opportunity for 'bad-guys' to engage the US army to do their bidding, but maybe it's harder to truly conceal or spoof your true origans than I've been led to believe.
I meant to say programs that have a high probability of behaving correctly. That's not to say that the program is correct. There's almost zero chance that any large program is entirely bug-free, but some applications to perform reliably because the most used paths through the software are correct.
Gian Marcos | Musica Gratis
I don't know if a guy asking a leading question (Skip to 8:40 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SdC8LVODY#t=8m40s) trying to justifying his own decisions is 'nuff said.
Can you probife more info on the type of games you make?
Android is fine for apps that are rich clients communicating with servers. For games, Android is a piece of shit. A close friend of mine sums it up best when he says, 'I make 30x as much money on iOS games and have 30x support tickets on Android.' Nuff said.
Yes. Because when you have one terrorist plus 10 planes with 100 people each, your chance of getting blown up is 10%. But when you have one terrorist plus 100 planes with 10 people each, your chance of getting blown up is only 1%
I'm not sure China's leadership has shown a more nuanced understanding of policy and statesmanship than America's leadership.

First, America has dominated the world for the last 30 years. We've got a lot of public fingers in a lot of public pies as the world's policeman. China takes no such stance. It wants oil, so it supports Sudan genocide. It wants a buffer zone between it and the West, so it supports North Korea. Just like the honey badger, China doesn't give a shit. It's relatively quiet and has tons of cash and (directly)stays out of other people's foreign affairs, so everybody more or less ignores it. I wouldn't call this a particularly nuanced understanding or implementation of foreign affairs policy.

Turning to domestic affairs, I wouldn't call China's policies nuanced either. Maybe draconian? Their one-child-per-family policy, their restrictions on speech and travel, their widespread confiscation and displacement, (I could go on) I would call evil, not nuanced.

They are booming, and a 10% growth rate will cover up a lot of poor decisions. Their growth is certainly a function of a few smart guys taking the reins and dragging them into the future, but that had a lot to do with last cadre of "smart" guys shackling them to a failed system for 50 years. And it doesn't mean that's the best way forward, either.
I agree. Our company builds products for many startups on top of ASP.NET MVC and it can be EXTREMELY difficult wading through the terrible webforms developers to find the developers with a strong core understanding of how the web works. For us we actually focus much of our attention on developers from outside the .NET world, as we've found they are able to wrap their heads around low level javascript much faster, and relatively speaking picking up C# syntax is relatively trivial.
Yes, there's definitely a split. Core infrastructure like the CLR, OS, and IDE greatly benefit coming from MS (although none are requirements, as Mono demonstrates). But anyone who does serious .NET dev work knows that tons of third-party tools are used.

One big difference I notice in .NET shops is that they seem a lot more willing to pay for the best solution. Whereas for FOSS shops they seem more likely to get an adequate solution for free.
With rails or php, developers can use the editor and the OS they want. With .net, you're "forced" to use Visual Studio and Windows.

Also, I feel like .net teams are a bit closed to the rest of the programming community. Lots of C#/C++ programmers think that everything that is not C#/C++ is a joke or a little scripting language. "Omg, I would never build my 2D game on Python and save 100 hours" - says the C++ developer.

Also, startups and big companies think and act really differently. The mentality of a startup is: "Go faster!!" while the big company is: "Don't screw up or you're out". I know it's not that black and white, that's just a simple way to say it. But basically, the python philosophy is "Programmers are smart and they'll do their best to use the library correctly" while the C++/C# mentality is: "Imagine that an idiot will use your library so play it as safe and defensive as possible".

Finally, I feel like C# is like a big package deal. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like it'd be hard to use CoffeeScript or Compass (for instance) with a C# project. And, it's not that much about the technology, but the mentality of the big company. From my experience, I know that had I told my boss: "I'll use CoffeeScript", he wouldn't have understood why.
Closed source. If it breaks (really breaks) I (or anyone without a Microsoft badge) can't fix it. And if they do fix it, it will take a while for the patch to get to me. Pretty simple if you ask me.
wayyyy too pricey!

Everybody here can probably code a "nice" landing page and use launchrock widget.

You should maybe make something more standard, closer to launchrock but with more customisation like A/B testing, integration with Mailchimp/sendgrid/whatever

I would pay less then $100 for that anyway.
But there is zero chance that an accident in a coal plant will affect more than (say) 1000 people, and yet there is at least a 1/12,000 chance [1] that it will affect 100,000+ with a nuclear station.

Heh, the flip side is that there is a 100% chance that the pollution created by the coal plant over its lifetime will kill thousands of people. But to your point, that is an argument based on facts, not emotion. And emotionally the people living near the coal plant, while dying due to the effects of its pollution will not have been frightened that one day it might have an accident that would cause them to evacuate for a few months.
Yep - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/subscriptions/ee461076.aspx
Very curious how the developer added the arrow to the Keychain request window? Had no idea that could be done. Anyone know how that was done?
Why Google's hiring process is broken
Google is the 3rd largest computer manufacturer in the world
The issue i think is 2 fold:

1) MS technology is designed as if no other exist - it aims to be a self contained ecosystem. It is the ultimate lock-in.

2) MS business practices - after the last 10 years i think many technologists will never trust them again.
Intel: 14 nm Smartphone SoC in 2014
Modernizr does a lot of things, and creating CSS classes to mark the existence of features is just one of those things. Another thing that Modernizr does is allow you to style new HTML5 elements like <section>, <header>, etc. - I think that there is a similar issue here, and I'm really on the fence about it. Depending on the browser to execute Javascript so that CSS is able to style a new element seems risky, and for quite a marginal benefit. I guess people are just trying to make the future happen sooner, but it seems foolish to introduce an external dependency and scripting requirement just because <header> looks better than <div class="header">. What do we really gain here by being more "semantic"? Aren't we just trading reliability for fashion?
I think the issue is with Webforms specifically. Webforms abstracts away so much of the way the web works that developers who have spent their careers developing on it never actually understand how the web really works. Concepts like Viewstate hide the realities of web development. The fact that almost all processing takes place on the server-side means they are weak at client-side debugging, etc.

That said, I don't think it's fair to hold the same opinion of ASP.NET MVC developers - as it's essentially the same level of abstraction as Rails.
Enpyr.com en-pire, latin for to bring fire/flame
Marissa Mayer Advice to Female Entrepreneurs & Failure
How is Azure working for you? The last time I've looked into it, the documentation was rather sub standard compared to the MSDN base line.
That's not really saying much. You just mentioned a Microsoft stack with a few client-side or third-party libraries. How easy is it to, say, use Eclipse with C#, nginx and postgres?

The pieces you mentioned are either all on the Microsoft stack or irrelevant to it. jQuery and github, for example, have nothing to do with your backend's stack.
This is not intended to be a criticism of this specific app but more articulation of the mindset that I'm sure I share with many others. I hope this is interesting to the developers.

I probably won't give this app a serious shot because calendaring is something that is so intrinsically web that it's just not compelling otherwise. Immediacy and ubiquity are really the necessary ingredients. I can't install this, link my accounts, etc. I'd much rather hop on any old browser and be done with it. Google does a really good job of it. There are probably a few places to be improved, but it's definitely good. I'd like to see someone go after those things, but I'm much rather seem them done on the web.

Surely there are people who'd prefer it your way, but I figured I'd let you know where I'm coming from...
I use both .NET and the LAMP stack everyday. I love .NET and C# is a beautiful language. But I have to use Windows to use .NET. There is nothing wrong with Windows, except it doesn't have a very good shell; it doesn't come with the GNU user land; I can't just grep and sed and awk on one line to solve problems and answer questions; when I google for help with stuff like mysql I don't find near as many answers that would apply to windows; I can't just type "apt-get install ..." somewhere to try out a new programming language or other large program for free; I can't solve problems with SSH. All of these problems can be solved to a large extent, but not in a well known, well documented and Free way. Maybe that's just a matter of culture, but until the not-artificially-limited version of Windows can be downloaded for free, I can't give it a fair try.
Automatically parallel, multi-dimensional array programming in Haskell
What's wrong with -ly names?
IMHO it's kind of silly to expect things like WPF to run on multiple platforms - and I'm actually glad it does not.

The world doesn't need more apps with lowest-common-denominator UI. Ugly, kludgy, doesn't work well on any of its platforms because it cannot leverage any platform-specific UI strengths. If anything, the last decade of desktop and mobile computing has shown beyond a doubt that a highly refined user experience is paramount for anything that faces general users. In fact, an app with fewer features, but a superb user experience, will trounce a more capable app with terrible UI (see: Apple).

This is also why I dislike apps that use the UI components from Java - they don't look, feel, or work like native UI widgets. Their layout is often confusing, since they are trying to appease the learned design patterns of multiple disparate OSes with a single design. They end up being awkward, frustrating, and a very poor experience. I have never met a Java-UI app that even reached an acceptable level of usability.

For me, having Mono run well with the obvious cross-platform bits (threading? file system access? etc etc) is enough. I for one really like C#, and would much rather write it than Java.
For those interested in an interesting take on how money really works, Steve Keen wrote this amazing article:

http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2009/01/31/therovingcaval...
I held off buying an android tablet and doing any development for one leading up to google i/o. Now I have the hardware and knowlege to get started so will work on a tablet version of my app soon. However its still not my top priority as I don't feel the demand is there yet. No users have asked for it like they did for an iPad version.
I'm using Backblaze but I want to move exactly because I don't trust them. And the reason is the stupid way the restore is done. You have to give them the password and they decrypt it for you. You can't get encrypted files and decrypt yourself. Stupid. FAIL.
Ironically, I spend at least 25% of the time when working with .Net fixing stuff that has broken.
This is interesting. More startup ar using .Net than I would have thought (including mine).

We should create a separate thread to list/show our stuff (for those ready to show).
You're not taking into account quality of picture. I use about 150gb a month from netflix (it has replaced my cable).
Should We Be Rethinking Mobile First?
I had the same confusion, and the sentence which explains it was less than clear to me - I had to reread it to be clear on what it was saying.

That's damn impressive.
That's the only reason I keep my facebook account... it's a dumping ground for competition entries and free content
It's a hard problem, that's all. Not in principle impossible.
I want to get a job in bio-related programming - what should I do next?
I want to work as a programmer for a biology-related company, and I don’t know how to get started.

Background:
I have an M.S. in Bioengineering from Stanford and spent two and a half years working as an R&D engineer for a medical device startup. In October, I quit my job to teach myself programming full time. I did projects in Python, Scheme, Java, and Prolog, covering a first-year CS sequence plus plenty of extra reading. I’ve also experimented with HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

I am most interested in the intersection of biology and computer science, anything from bioinformatics to personal genomics. Within that still broad field, I’m trying to figure out the specific type of programming job that will most interest me and how to get the experience to land those jobs. I presently live in the Bay Area (Menlo Park), though long-term I would like to work primarily from home.

I feel very inexperienced, and I’m concerned that any company I interview with will reject me because of inexperience. Or that I’ll land a job where they expect me to know from the beginning more than I do.

What should I do next? Are there particular things I should learn or types of jobs I should pursue to move down this career path?
True. I wasn't arguing for 700W with single card, but felt that 300W sustained might be a bit optimistic if one is aiming for $500 of Bitcoin revenue per month. The OP was offering a conservative estimate, and one could just as well point out that 20 cents/kWhr is also on the high side.
Does that mean you'd recommend Rails for me based on my criteria?
Remind me what your company does again?
Why? Because Google believes they can get a return on the money that exceeds the interest rate. It's actually pretty simple.
But the culture is a direct result of the Microsoft brand.

Many of us have been at this long enough to at least dimly remember Microsoft's antics in the 90s. Others of us are still dealing with other aspects of the Microsoft technology stack, and hating it.

For instance, I've spent most of a full work-week with a client recently because their SBS 2008 AD server went haywire. We've been troubleshooting ridiculous network issues ever since. We've had to deal with cryptic error messages, software that takes forever to do simple things, software that doesn't do what it tells you it's doing.

And the thing is, this feels normal for anything that comes with the Microsoft brand.

I'm sure there are exceptions. .NET may well be one of them -- I'm totally unfamiliar with it. But, if I'm building a startup, and I already know PHP (or Ruby, or Python...), and I've got all of these bad experiences behind me with Microsoft products, why would I even consider learning .NET?
>> Many devs have bought into the iOS ecosystem. This certainly isn't cheap: macbooks, imacs, iphones, ipod touches, ipads.

It is a mobile tool chain. You don't need to use Macs for servers... (And the cost of an iPad, iPhone and iPod touch isn't high. You will need a phone anyway. And iPad is the only real game in town for pads, so you'll probably buy one anyway.)
10.5+ has API for accessing window info for other processes. A search for "CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo" should return plenty of information.
Thanks for the good response. I'm somewhat surprised that your answer seems to amount to, "All of it."

Would you say there's a way to avoid having customers altogether while only doing part-time work? I'd like to have something closer to an employer.
"Earning bitcoins is based on -luck-."

If you invest serious computing power into that, then there's not enough variance in it to be called gambling anymore. Betting on 6-6 in a single dice throw is gambling, betting on the percentage of 6-6's in a trillion dice throws is boring.
"Not so sure that's the driver here. Many devs have bought into the iOS ecosystem. This certainly isn't cheap: macbooks, imacs, iphones, ipod touches, ipads. It's also a pretty deep dive to get into."

There's a pretty big difference here: lack of choice. If you want to deploy native apps to iOS, you literally have no choice but to get into that world. If you want to deploy web applications (as many startups, especially HN startups do) there are dozens of options to choose from aside from buying into a single vendor's full stack.
What about the reputation of MS amongst the developer community? Eg. Stability of Windows (reboots over weekends to free up memory), countless hours spent cursing MS for IE6 etc. IMHO that's also a major factor.
I just installed this and linked it to my Google calendar using Google's instructions here:

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...

Event changes are propagated both ways.

For me, this solves the problem of having to load a web page to look at my calendar. Now I can just hit the Fantastical shortcut (ctrl+opt+space) to quickly see what's on my calendar. Getting that plus the features of gcal is a big win.

I suspect I'll be purchasing a license when my trial runs out.
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Is it? I do most on my organization on the train from and to work. So i cannot use a fancy web app, because I am constantly switching cells and dropping in and out of 3G land.

I would say that calendaring is the canonical example for the need to sync. But web? No, not at all.
Every post hyping Bitcoin increases the value of the Bitcoin held by those making the posts.
Here are my reasons for not using Java:

Visual Studio .Net (huge), C# vs Java (C# has WAY more features), SQL Server integration (if you are using it), IIS is pretty much painless to configure and works really well with .Net, LINQ which is a pretty good ORM.
However, you have to use MS OS, MS development tools, MS deployment

You can use Mono tools if you'd like. For deployment, AppHarbor is just awesome.

...you can't use shiny macbooks any longer

I'm on a brand new Macbook Pro right now and I just pushed to AppHarbor. Bootcamp is great.

For example, what does it have for non-relational storages?

MongoDB works great with .NET. I'm actually about to switch my .NET-based startup[1] over to it from SQL Server.

Stack Overflow started from pure-MS infrastructure and it's 50/50% already - redis, linux frontend proxies.

Everything breaks at scale. This is the same kind of argument people used against Ruby on Rails regarding Twitter. No matter what technology you use, if you reach the massive scale that StackExchange has, you'll delve into optimization voodoo as well. It's one of those good problems.

[1] http://effectcheck.com
Great response. Thanks.

Follow-ups:

2. Are some market/language combos more or less saturated than others? I'm willing to tackle less sexy, more difficult stuff if it makes this aspect smoother.

3. Good point.

4. I suppose it's more the "part-time" aspect I'm wonder about. People seem to really, really want full-time for some of these skill-sets.

5. Good to know.

Did you have an overall recommendation? Anything I should have asked but didn't?

Thanks again.
Lots of people pick up a bit of .NET in business school - just enough to get hired for an entry-level programming position. They don't teach any programming fundamentals in those classes.

After they're hired at a bigcorp, the devs get by through cargo-culting and leaning on the GUI, so they never learn to actually program. Visual Studio is a great IDE, but it's too helpful for the beginning programmer. 5-10 years later, they've got enough "programming experience" on their resumes to get hired as "senior" devs.
try soffit.com
Google Docs adds Pivot Table support
How easy is it to, say, use Eclipse with C#,

You do realize that C# in VS is just a compiler? It's csc.exe. There's no reason you can't host it in Eclipse. In fact there are several 3rd party components that allow you to host a C# editor anywhere you like.

The problem, in this case at least, is that the C# experience is so solid that the motivation to create an Eclipse one is pretty low. Maybe the Mono folks have something for it. But the amount of work that MS has done for the C# experience is truly impressive. I can, and have, written C# programs in vim, but it's not something I'd like to do on a regular basis.
what is your runway?
if you've got only 20 users I don't think you can count on this to pay the bills if you don't have months of runway ahead of you and that you should get some work and then find someone to have a long term relationship with.
So long as the majority of clients agree?

So if someone controls 51% of the BitCoin clients they can do anything they want?! Sounds like a flaw. Once lots of money is involved, it would make sense for people to start throwing botnets at this to hack it.