skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true, but I think that's an overlooked factor in some other "lifestyle choices" as well. For example, people who significantly reduce their alcohol consumption often report changing social groups and activities to do so, so in at least some cases it can be a package deal. I don't think there are very many choices that are completely isolated, independent from all other choices, and free of consequence on any other aspect of your life, though there's definitely a spectrum of being more or less so.
Brilliant, well done. I had no idea most of these existed and have been using Google Checkout since Paypal locked us out.
Exactly. And if you look at the OP's nick, you'll notice that he is the author of this blog post.
As a matter of fact, if you check out his submissions (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mainguy) you'll notice that he has a habit of submitting his blog posts to HN whenever he writes them.

Here's a message to you, mainguy: It's nice that you're blogging and all, but please, understand that not everything you write is HN-worthy.

Flagged.
Leaving aside questions about sample size / methodology / etc, here are the big surprises for me:

FRAMEWORKS - CodeIgniter at 6%. I use it for some projects, but I'm surprised that 6% of 'top developers' are still using it too given that it's an older entry in the (very crowded) field of PHP frameworks, AND it's PHP (which everyone loves to hate).

TEXT EDITORS - Nice to see Coda on the list. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but it's a great product with just the right mix of minimal features for me (syntax highlighting, simple FTP, sane keyboard shortcuts).
I didn't believe that until I read it myself. It's true:
https://stripe.com/help/chargebacks

If your competitor sells $1 eBooks using Stripe, there's an easy way to move him out of business: buy 10'000, then ask for a chargeback on each of them.

There's got to be a better way to do this.
I read somewhere that mid-air refueling cost in the range of $16 / gal (might be more expensive now), and remember being dumbfounded at the price. But this is even more impressive / appalling.

And I don't think I'll complain about package delivery costs again. :)
The top comment is from a healthy smoker of 65. People always love to discuss how they or someone they know has smoked their entire life and never had a problem. I know lots of smokers who still aren't convinced of the health issues. Seems like there's still a long way to go.
Using the ternary operator is more "eloquent" than conditionals? That's true iff "eloquent" means terse in terms of number of characters, but I find if(...){} much more readable.
These style guidelines correspond exactly to idiomatic Go. I'm impressed how well Pike executed on his philosophy.
Yeah, it was sort of short and newbie-friendly, but it probably helped some people. I wish that it would have gone into more detail to explain how each of those tricks works so readers could learn why those operators work the way they do. For example, he called using a logical "OR" a "var = var || value way of setting variables."

He should have gone into more detail to explain how ||'s work, how you can have more than just 1 of them, the order in which they are evaluated if you do have more than 1, etc.
The examples that are brought up to support that OO languages have a bad economy of execution and compilation seem to be pretty much non existent for Java. The JVM can inline virtual methods and bind non-final methods at the call site when it JITs, so that indirection is removed. Similarly with the compilation issue, Java has a very efficient compilation system because so much is delayed until class loading.

The reads like the author had some bad experiences with C++ not necessarily OOP in general. I didn't see a date on the article... and non of the references at the bottom are later than 1996. maybe this article could use an update?
As someone who writes JS every day, ignoring the fact that I think most of these paradigms are terribly ugly (though the comma placement is acceptable for cleaner diffs), I expected this post to be about actually getting things done eloquently without CoffeeScript. What I got was a blog post about how ternary operators can be written on multiple lines.
It's been my experience recently that there are a lot more downvotes, some of them seemingly random; I hope we haven't enter redditesque territory, where people downvote everything except their own post, giving themselves an effective initial +2 score. For the record, I've +1 your original comment, even though I disagree with it:

SQLite is awesome, really really awesome. It is also not a good example -- part of the reason Redis works so well is that it capitalizes on Unix process management (in a way that was apparently intended when Unix process management was evolved, but has for some reason been unpopular and long forgotten). SQLite was never in that position.
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This site builds docs for projects based on their integration tests. I think it's a pretty good example of what you can achieve using BDD for documentation, https://www.relishapp.com/myronmarston/vcr
Err, the point is that you can have Win32 ports without becoming "bloated and buggy."

I run Apache on Win32 all the time. Is that bloated and buggy? As well as php (well, no worse than on linux) and mysql. Postgres runs on windows as well. Then of course we have crossplatform darlings like Firefox, Libreoffice, etc.
I'm really torn by this debate.

On the one hand, for an idea so obvious, Apple was first for both phones and tablets -- and they were "first" very late in the game. Microsoft OEMs made tablets for a decade, but NONE of them (even the slate tablets) really compared to the iPad.

On the other, I don't see how this is a patent. It feels more like a trademark, although the design of the iPad is probably too general to trademark.

My question is: How did the auto industry resolve this? Early cars looked like horse carriages and steered like boats or trolleys. How did the development of the timeless car design patterns (sedan, coupe, wagon, van, pickup, etc) get to the present state?
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It's not entirely clear to me (from looking at the splash page in the link) that you'd even need to file FOIA requests for the information. There are several sites linked which supposedly already provide the data.

I think the more unfortunate part is not having it in a single place, tied together in a coherent way. Which is not to say that this website did so effectively, just that there's some value in doing that.
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Google has more or less been playing by the "open, free, web standards based" rules until it's browser got too big to fail.

Then started pushing out things like NaCl that aren't standard, and while open, very hard to implement in a way that stays compatible to Google (and arguably not something you want to implement if your focus is web standards of course).

To make sure of that, you buy how some game studios to release for that platform, and eventually only on that platform (See Bungie+MS, since you like these examples).

This is a lock-in, and that's the first extinguisher, and the worth part: it's only the tip of the iceberg we're starting to see.

Wanna wait til it gets bad for everyone just cause you like Google? Then you'll get in the "oh noes, Google deceived us" in 3-5 years?

Well, it'll be far too late. Better to voice things now (and it may already be too late).
After the downfall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the BBC obtained evidence that Gamma had offered its technology to the country’s regime for surveilling Egyptians’ use of tools like Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, Gmail and Skype.

Note to self:
Do not ever work for Gamma.
Remember "Gamma" if you meet someone who worked for them.
Former chairman of ICANN weighs in on the gTLD Congressional hearings
Especially since it's talking about old Java 1.4 collections, with no mention of changes in the last seven years!
> One rule to live by: Never use 3rd party javascript

This is a curious blanket statement. While I have run up against the odd crappy jQuery plugin, the tried-and-true plugins work flawlessly - often throughout jQuery's versions.

I think you're doing a disservice to those who take the time to make great jQuery plugins. The web - as a whole - is better because of the power that these plugins offer designers and developers alike. More people can abandon Flash for simplistic bells & whistles because of the jQuery Plugin.
What I always wondered about eating healthy is, is it the unhealthy foods on their own that is the root cause, or the fact that unhealthy eaters don't eat wholesome foods?

For example, if I eat McDonalds, but then I also eat a bunch of fruits and veggies, would that mitigate the risk?
While I am sure that mindset of the [older] users has something to do with it, I do think that a failure of design is also an important factor.

As eyes loose the ability to focus on small fonts and fingers get less nimble, things like cell phones are a pain in the ass to use. As far as I know, no mobile phone designs have ever successfully addressed the needs of older people. They all pretty much suck to use if you're older than ~70.
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"Should I add x product?" Litmus test.
The iPad is clearly derivative of just about every touchscreen UI shown in Star Trek Next Generation. The enterprise is plastered with them. Samsung should just show any episode of the show and count the number of devices that that are shown that look like an iPad.
In 2008 pedestrian and cyclists deaths accounted for only 14% percent of traffic fatalities in the US.

Where did you get "The majority."

Also most of those deaths were caused by human errors, why do you think they won't be solved by removing human error from the equation? Do you think driverless cars will keep running down pedestrians at the rate humans do?
From Codegolf.SE: http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/1696/what-can-yo...
My first job out of college, I had a Turbo C compiler, a DEC PC, a database app (government) written in Foxbase, and a Postscript printer. No real reporting tools, so all my reports and add-ons were written in C and outputted Postscript directly to the printer. Was a very interesting learning experience.

The Blue and Green books are a must for a new Postscript programmer http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/index_arch...
At times, antirez does appear to be a bit bone-headed. In the early days of redis (pre-1.0 I think) I (among several others) had sent him patches to incorporate unix domain socket support into redis server/client. Not to mention, the patches were summarily rejected by Salvatore. Google "unix socket redis" and you'll find numerous patches developed by several authors for redis 1.x - none of them made it into the official release.

Curiously, I noticed unix sockets had been officially added in version 2.2.0.
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I could see PHBs firing the essential coders who write core parts of code because their line count is low, and bug rate is high etc. and keep the codemonkeys cause they write ten login pages a day.

Thus such a business employing this tool would surely tank or become like Microsoft, who need to use binoculars to the competition to define their metrics.
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> was thicker than the iPad

I'm sure they would have made it as slim as the battery and circuitry technology allowed them to do so at that time.

If you think they made it bulky by choice, and then Apple came in and "innovated" by making their own pad thinner, I don't know what to tell you.
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Node.js on IIS outperformed Apache and Nginx.
Interesting I sold a three letter name with the same letters in the same order (many many years ago).

Question, when you contacted the 40 companies, how did you contact them? (Email, phone, postal)?
I know the current way to get Ubuntu on it is the chroot method, but why hasn't anyone hacked the WebOS Doctor to have a boot loader to dual boot Ubuntu? Or even have a system like a GDM login that gives the option to start X/Gnome instead of the native environment so you wouldn't need Ubuntu at all?
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Motorola wins patent suit against Apple in Germany, iPhone/iPad to be banned
>I would still pay somebody else to do it if it were economical.

Of course you would, but, for most middle class people, maids have moved from necessity, to luxury.

The marginal utility of a maid has gone down, they used to save you 10 hours a day, now they may save you 1 or 2. Most modern middle class people can manage an hour or 2 a day, but not 10, so the demand has gone way down. Most people aren't willing to sacrifice in order to afford a maid b/c they don't need one.

It will be the same with cars. If you can rent a car with 90% of the connivence of owning one, owning one will become a luxury.

Many people sacrifice a large percentage of their income because the feel a car is necessary. When it's merely, nice to have, most middle class and lower will no longer do so.
Start asking them to deliver on their own project.

Just because they aren't technical doesn't mean they can't provide you with evidence of their input. Ask for more detailed specs, Spellchecked and proof read copy, mockups, copyright free images to use. Anything that will that will speed up the process for you and prove their commitment.

Ask to see evidence of their attempt at marketing, surveys with potential users giving feedback on proposed features, active twitter accounts networking, competitor analysis.

You need to get them to prove they're not useless. That they can contribute even outside of development.

If it turns out they ARE useless...you know what to do.
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This is satire, right? ... right? Please?
Where is emacs? I'm not expecting it to get #1 or anything, but a very healthy number of devs use it.
You imply that Apple's design itself is innovative. That is exactly what the article disputes with a picture from July 2008. A simple tablet with just one button.

Anyone except Microsoft would have come up with just that.
"That Apple actually has to make these computers also?"

Indeed. Why would a salesperson at an Apple store be entitled to more than the going rate for retail work? Merely because an Apple /engineer/ did an outstanding job? That's nonsense.

Can Apple store employees show outstanding performance relative to other distribution channels? Relative to other stores, or to online sales? If so then the retail employee is producing value and there are grounds to demand higher compensation.

But if the cash haul is universal across distribution channels, which it is according to the article, then the folks entitled to a bonus are working back at 1 Infinite Loop.
It just takes time, unfortunately. This story is still developing. The domain owner needed to get his domain back first, and foremost.
Many of these are elaborated on in the more recent (1999) "The Practice of Programming." Excellent book. http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Brian-W-Kernighan...
It doesn't. As a Canadian, I can say there is always great debate about this, and especially now.

Our current Conservative leaders are trying to push through the purchase of 65 F-35 fighters. These are the same jets the US military is delaying or considering scrapping at this point due to cost overruns.

The estimates for costs on these jets is over 30B Canadian dollars.

In my opinion, our military is a glorified search and rescue team at home and a police force++ abroad. Canada needs an armed forces that is good with dealing with national disasters and supporting human crisis. We should be investing in helicopters and ships. If the day comes that Russia or the USA decides to take our natural resources, 65 fighter jets aren't going to make any difference compared to their vast armies. So why not invest in technology that can be used to address the actual problems we face?
How did they choose the "500 leading developers"? This seems to be heavily skewed towards web development.
where did i write that? I said that that EXTERNAL plugins can get unmaintained at any point and "vanish" from web - or start getting incompatible with future jquery releases. Which seems perfectly logical to me and it happened before many times.
There's a rumor HP is running Windows 8 on Touchpads internally for development purposes. I've looked but haven't found examples of people installing Win8 on Touchpad. This would be a cheap way to check out the OS on its major intended target form factor for cheap. Any pointers?
I don't want to sound like an asshole and I'm saying nothing about the author, but in my personal experience I found lining up variables or =s was something I worried about when I first started programming.

Now my mind's eye just totally skips variable declaration when visually code parsing, variable declaration is meaningless drivel that exists only to stop typos (a good purpose).

I had an opinion on the layout of them back then because I wasn't a good enough programmer yet to have an opinion on anything else, I had opinions on things that didn't matter because those were the only things I actually understood well.

Also, again in my personal experience, it's much better to declare them just before you use them for future maintenance, having 4 or 5 declarations at the same time is something I do so rarely now. If you start faffing around laying them out, you're going to be tempted to put them all together.
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What I've found difficult to navigate is that while it feels a little like the joy of programming your old C64 (or in my case, Osborne 1), the truth is you're putting your work out there and it suddenly becomes open to both harsh criticism and support expectations - even if you're giving it away for free, without advertising.

My app is for film-makers, and it's called Acacia (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ephemerald.cameraa...), and I'll fix the bugs when I have time :)
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Just today morning, I was talking to someone who is getting a patent. He was telling me that you outline the idea, and then the patent lawyers come in to phrase it. I don't know how far this is true, but if true just shows how broken the system is.
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There's more to software development than websites.
You know those weren't real devices right?
Are you kidding? Start with Vic Gundotra.
Apparently that doesn't matter, though. The court case is now about the two witnesses arguing about if the iPad is a unique design separate from all other web tablets, or if it is just a natural progression which anybody would have come up with.

I think what this post is arguing is that it was a natural progression, since others were on the same path at the same time.

I tend to side with Apple, but reading that testimony their witness/expert seems to be grasping at straws in some parts.
Sadly, I don't think this is a joke.
Method as described:
"Analysis
We don't write a line of code until we know your business as well as the people who keep it running every day. "
Method as implemented:
"Analysis
We never write any code"
This doesn't look like a joke. Dangerous. Anyone who has done this methodology runs screaming for an exit after a failed project or two.
Strongly agree. The big problem is not TeX, it is LaTeX. We need a better layer on top of TeX that can reset all the LaTeX cruft.
Free and open source projects dont 'fire' their contributors. They appreciate their contribution.

He just made an honest mistake.

The only sad/odd thing is that they had no daily backups.
I honestly thought it was, but crawling the rest of the site it doesn't have an ounce of parody about it. I think these guys really think this is a new methodology...
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wasn't ebay on a MS stack? I'm reasonably sure it's in the top 50 (especially if you consider the various google.* and yahoo.* as single properties).
> If it were a valid argument, then why port any software to work under win32 at all?

That is a great philosophical question, and different people will have different answers, all valid; however:

> "Installing Linux boxes to run Redis", I can't help but feel he's being a bit narrow-minded.

..

> Why not just tell Linux users to get a Windows box if they want to run that software?

This is not a symmetric win32<->linux case. If you're a win user, and you need Redis, you can run it today, for free, starting 10 minutes from now (30 if you've never done this before and need to download stuff):

download oracle virtualbox;
download ubuntu server install, install inside virtualbox
inside ubuntu, sudo apt-get install redis-server

And really, that's all there is to it; if you are an experienced windows developer with no Linux experience whatsoever, this will take you all of 30 minutes (25 of which just waiting for downloads). It actually performs quite well; not as well as running directly on iron, but probably not more than 10% slower than a native port that does everything right (The current native ports are 100000% slower during syncing to disk)

If you're a linux user and you want to run a windows-only server, that costs your $100 or so for a retail win7 license, a few hours of downloading and 20-30 minutes of active setup last time I did that. Want to fire that up on 3 developer machines? That would be $200 more, thank you. Reconfigured your virtual box more than 5 times? You have to talk to Microsoft before you can proceed.

So, really, what he offers IS a viable solution for windows developers. Really. Try it before you consider it "narrow minded". You might find the narrow mindedness was not where you expected.

> In fact, lots of software starts out as Windows software and is ported to Linux.

The few I am aware of are picasa and 7zip, of which I only ever use the latter. Do you have more examples?

It's actually significantly harder to port Windows programs to Linux than the other way around, because the Win32 API has about 100 times more functions, and the standard practice (cheerfully supported and encouraged by Microsoft) is to use all of them.
Hmm. Most of the multifunction, networked printers I've had to deal with in small business offices run NetBSD. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen one that runs Windows. Of course, my experience is limited to only ~9 offices, but I just assumed they were all like that.
That's a stupid, stupid metric.

Most good Oracle sales staff would be probably be generating at least an order of magnitude more than that, and they don't have to cover the costs of the fancy Apple store fitouts. OTOH, they do have to cover a lot of airplane tickets and expensive lunches.

Looking at revenue per employee in only one business segment is meaningless.

It is totally, completely and utterly irrelevant as a measure of anything.
One thing I like about the iPad innovation debade is that it really stresses the importance of execution (because I think it is weak on innovation). People have had the idea of a touch pad for decades and even tried to execute on it dozens of times with real products. The execution of the idea in the form of the iPad made it a success.