skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting thing about VS and Xcode is that they do not really try to compete with somebody or fight for attention. Both Windows and Mac/iOS developers would use less useful tools if they still let them make products for the popular platforms. JetBrains, Borland and others are fighting for attention and developers' love. They must try really-really hard to make people choose an alternative to the official tools.

So both MS and Apple teams may focus on what is "right" and avoid feature bloat in UI, avoid quick and dirty solutions etc. Yes, they must include some features quickly and efficiently to allow support for some new APIs in the new products. But the overall design and fit and finish is free to define however they want. They can spend time making it right and redoing it how they please. They have resources and expertise for that and they don't need be in a stressing "competition" mood.

I'm really disappointed by what Microsoft did with Visual Studio. They have great technology - great language, great compiler support and integration with editors. But the way it is all presented and organized is all boring mess of panels and tons of icons. They even understand all the icons are heavy for eyes, but instead of rethinking the design, they simply ask "40 existing and 36 new VS users" how do they like monochrome versions.

Apple's Xcode 3 was also a messy window/panel cluttered tool like many others. Many still considered it lighter than any other complex IDE, but it was fairly cluttered on its own. Next version, Xcode 4 was not designed by "asking developers". Developers want a pink pony and all the features in one click. Xcode 4 was designed. They made priorities and straightened UI so much it is now Plain Straight. One window, three panes, 7 buttons on toolbar. Just by learning a single screenshot with both sidebars opened, you already know how to navigate 80% of the time. It is crucial. You don't have to read huge manual to learn more and more useful things. They all are discoverable over time. Most important things are more visible, others are discovered over time.

Apple and Microsoft are rarely in position to throw old stuff out and replace it with brand new in their actual products that make money. Windows, Mac, iOS all have its legacy which must be dealt with. But UI for developer tools are different and Microsoft has no excuse not to make it interesting. Unless, of course, they don't want to maintain their own engineering culture.
I am aware why the distinction exists - from the perspective of "git(1) manipulates the git file system", it make sense (as I wrote). But most people I know tend to use "branch" for all their branching work (as the name implies) and never bother about the finer details. But the fact that this sore point exists and is real makes the git UI problematic. I don't bother, because I know the details, but if I have to explain it to every new guy in the office, there is something wrong.

About git add -p: yes, I am aware of -i, but it doesn't give you the easy "give me all changes to the file system and let me sign them off"-interaction that git add -p has. They are two completely different interaction modes.
Well, here are, for example, these[0] posts, chuckle-worthy and worth seeing (thought-provoking, demonstrating how wrong yet confident we often are when judging innovative ideas and projects). While these[1] short remarks IMO better belong to Reddit.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624604 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624721 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624648 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624793

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624808 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625825
This kind of fiction presented as dry fact is absolutely the best. In my younger and more gullible years, I recall semi-believing in Congo, with the fake assertions that the story is as true as possible, but where no details are recorded, Crichton engaged in creative license. But at least with Congo I suspected a literary device.

When I read The Princess Bride, I was so taken in with the story about the hunt for the book, the subsequent disappointment with the realty of Morgenstern's work, and I never doubted that the book I was holding was in fact "The Good Parts" edition. I had in mind a vague idea of trying to track down the original for myself because the boring parts as described sounded nevertheless somewhat interesting to me, but given the author's difficulties in finding a copy for himself I didn't give myself much hope.

It was years before I found out the truth of The Princess Bride, and the truth tickled me to no end because I had never even suspected!
It's a comment, not a debate. I'm not trying to crush raganwald's constructive and collect many finger snaps from the judges. I'm just trying to explain how Internet advertising works for a community which a) viscerally despises advertising, b) often dreams of working for an advertising company, and c) even if they don't work directly for the ad company will have their careers determined in large part by their ability to form an accurate mental model of how advertising actually works. To the limited extent that I disagree with raganwald about anything, I think that any mental model where "An ad for a BBC documentary about dinosaurs" sounds like a more attractive placement for this pageview than "generic remant inventory" economically is likely flawed. That mental model has not come to grips with the fact that the conversion math would suggest a click on that ad would be worth fractions of a hundredth of a penny to the BBC and cost several orders of magnitude more.
Your new startup designs websites but doesn't have a designer? I don't think you've thought this through.
All that C++ support and they still don't support C99...
Lovely update.

I hope you tackle the orientation/responsive problem soon. At the moment we show and hide a landscape and portrait version with media queries. Not the most ideal solution.
We'll do the initial web design for free, but you're going to be so popular that we'll need to take a small portion of revenue so that we don't go bankrupt from bandwidth fees! We can work this out later.

So, in other words, if Mr. Gaffigan isn't careful, he's going to end up paying a lot more than $35k for his site.
I'd say so, but interestingly enough, we were talking about (and very specifically) food trucks as a potential client for a well optimized one pager. This would work nicely I think for pizzeria's, cheap takeaways, etc.
SQL Resumes: Know What You Know
i've come to view luck as preparation + opportunity. You can't directly make yourself "lucky" but you do have control over how much you prepare (study, practice, exercise, think, train, drill, paying attention to surroundings, planning for future, etc) and you can expose yourself to more opportunities by meeting more people, being more ambient, being social as well as analytical, watching community and industry news, etc.

ps. huge fan of Empire! thank you sir for working on that game. i think Sid Meier cited it as a design influence for Civilization as well.
Great, can you include any relevant extracts from RFCs?
Reminds me of http://httpstat.us/
hackers, suits... not sure what these mean.

I work with people who have complimentary skills. Yes, some excel at some things more than others, but we're all people focused on a common goal.

Seems myopic to reduce people down to stereotypes.

Lots of founders have been great "hackers" and ok "suits" and also lots of founders who have been ok "hackers" and great "suits."
wait... didn't I see this yesterday right before it was dead. Dude... this is a crappy idea and it makes the site owners look like amateurs.

And for our next trick we'll make this calculator spell "BOOBIES". hehehe

lame
3 months ago I'd say you're mad for sawing the branch you sit on, taking bread away from content providers whose content you consume. I have content sites myself that rely on ads, I believed in this but my internet experience got increasingly frustrating within last year for some reason - Flash popover or whatever you call them which you can't close, disturbing images of old women tearing their skin as in this article, google ads sneaked into content or navigation in hopes of me mistakingly clicking them.

I've tried readability next, clicking "read now" in my chrome extension on every interesting article..but I'm now with Adblock, at least 3 years later than all my techie friends.

I'll silently consume my purified internet now, thanks.
Anything to avoid tgmath.h.
That's great, except the test is not taking into account my personal preference. I don't use the icons very much to do things - I mostly use keyboard shortcuts. Now, I'm going to be stuck looking at that garbage all day.

Furthermore...76 participants? That doesn't prove anything.
A look at Qualcomm Atheros 802.11ac standard
Show HN: GradeSquare.com - Find and Track your Online Courses
What's wrong with the first Google's response for "HTTP status codes" (i.e. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html)?
Yeah, but the blame the article's author espouses is misplaced.

It's not Google's fault that people want to play games any more than it's the sun's fault that it's shining outside of my window on days when I need to get real work done.

As usual it's easier to blame icons and officials in situations where really it's the consumers that drive these corporate decisions with their everyday decisions.

Granted, Google is showing self-serving ads that benefit it... but then again, maybe that site the opinion writer was reading is only possible because Google Adwords funds it. That part is a wash to me.

Sure, there's something sad in all this. It's sad that people want to play mindless games, watch sports, watch reality tv, etc. instead of learning and growing 99% of the time (or whatever) when given the choice. I don't really fault entertainers for providing the entertainment, though.
This. Github is the killer app for dvcs. Both git and mercurial are good enough, and github simply makes it a no brainer.
Browser extensions development kit for Chrome
There has been an explosion of educational resources in the last few months (think MITx, Stanford, Khan Academy etc).

GradeSquare
provides the tools to help you find courses and plan your studies more effectively.

Check us out and let us know what you think!
> "I'm not stupid, it wasn't a mistake"

Any lithium battery is damaged after 2 months at 0% charge. How isn't that a mistake?
"but rather does a search for everything."

We're fixing this.
I was at this point of thinking 6 years ago - "Hey I know i'll find the content makers and i'll do allt he other work, and we'll split profits. It'll all work out so great because i'll make them so popular, but really I am totally expecting them to do all the work of getting people there".

It's a bad way to start a 'business'. It's a bad way to move forward on an idea. And it's a surefire way of setting yourself up to be looked at as worth... wait for it... nothing.

Instead of trying to entice him to pay you nothing, entice him to pay you 35k. Wouldn't that get you so much further in his eyes and also, in yours? Wouldn't that give you so much more runway to actually do the amazing job you're expecting of yourself, and also the one you're setting Jim Gaffigan up to expect of you also?

I see things like that, and I immediately think amatuer - because I was right there, thinking that way. And I didn't achieve anything of substance until I woke up from silly dreams of making it big by jumping on the backs of giants.
Exactly. I've made the same comments re being the customer vs. the product regarding Facebook. Except with Facebook, there's a lot more than users' attention on offer to advertisers.

The real question is, would content quality improve if we paid for it directly, instead of indirectly through ads?
Maybe you should make a TL;DR how it works; I have not ran into much applications in my life I couldn't do anything with without rtfm.
I think the problem may be less with too many humans and may be with the preoccupation of "Everybody must have a job! 9-5, Monday to Friday. No exceptions or you're a failure and the country is failing and it's all our leaders fault."

I mean really, we're heading towards more and more automation. There just aren't going to be as many jobs as there once where. Yes, we might get more programming jobs and management jobs. But not enough to replace the hundreds of jobs replaced by a few robots in a factory.
Moved from the Palm Pre (1st gen.) to Android on EVO 3D 6 months ago. AFAIAC, both the Back button and the Home button are crutches. I use it w-a-y to much b/c there is no card implementation (like webOS had). It was very easy to go back & forth between open apps and cards within the same app. Backswipe=last screen viewed.Simple. The inability to easily, definitively close apps (upswipe/throw off screen on webOS) is maddening. I never know if an app is "still" running or really closed (& don't know until I go home & pick app.... Sloppy, messy, maddening. I REALLY miss webOS.
Making a short video should be essential for something like this.
Twitter logo disappeared
The real issue is that those events are extremely rare given the intensely frequent use of ICE vehicles. Replace all the ICE with electric vehicles, and you'd see just as many electrocuted people. It's simply not a real argument.
If you know all the relevant keyboard shorcuts you can just hide the toolbars :)
Same here, I can't see enough or play with it enough to see if it's useful. When I try to click I keep getting "permission denied".
Afvallen in een Week | Afvallen in een Week
Actually you can learn a lot by seeing ads with a critical eye.
Exactly... news reports claim that MS wants ~12/$500 Android phone. Based upon that, I think Motorola's claims are no more unreasonable.
This post reminded me of Steve Yegge's cat pictures (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8). In a good way.
Patrick, your argument is flawless, but you've become a bit of a robot. There must be some reason why they don't put Marlboro ads in a lung cancer clinic or a Ballantine's ad in an alcohol rehab center. Surely they would be perfect choices for the well-defined audience that frequents those places and they would make perfect sense economically, more than whatever else they put on those walls. Someone might even come along and say, hey, as long as it pays for the heating, it's good for everyone, right?

Also, I think you misrepresent Raganwald's point. I don't think he claims that economically a BBC ad would be better than an online game ad, he must be thinking along some other axis, along which it would rank higher.
C11 added generic selections - tgmath.h is no longer magical...
The deeper problem is that job interviews are irremediably broken. They are artificial to the point of stupidity. At least for the kind of work we do in software, there is no fixing them. They need to be thrown out and replaced with something else.

Working together is a kind of relationship. You don't interview for a relationship.
InstaMatch Turns Instagram Into A Game
We've got a short video at http://cerrio.com/. It's pretty rough, but will give you a little more context if you're interested.
Those ads on the rest of the page, and the sad part about all of this, remind me of what Steve Jobs said about network TV:

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=36783
Odd to see this comment get downvoted. Apple fanboism attempting to reassert the reality distortion field?
They have explicitly stated that they have no interest in supporting C99, because they don't believe their users are asking for it, or their users would rather have new C++ features than new C features.
'simple and cheap':

ICE: park it out the back... or in the street

Tesla: Park it out the back... plugged into a trickle-charger... which is a $2k specialist item you have to have installed... and you can't use a long extension cord... and you can't just have it in the street, it'll need to be undercover, protected from rain... and away from the public, even in a nice neighbourhood...
> Good luck developing anything mission critical with a team of low paid googlers.

IMHO, that's another dark-secret of this trade, most of us don't develop "mission critical" services. By "mission critical" I understand something like "if this code breaks then someone dies or huge sums of money are lost etc.".

> One day even people in our profession might come to actually have some self-respect for what we do

I totally agree with you that "software development is hard", but not because someone happens not to know what methods a standard library class implements (every few days I give almost god-like thanks to the developer that decided to implement the dir() function in Python), but because ~35 years after "The Mythical Man-Month" was first published we repeat at least half of the mistakes presented in there.
Part of my job is user support and a frequent problem is users not sure what a server error means, when explaining I like to provide sources for explanations I give. I don't like linking to the RFCs or wikipedia because they can be overwhelming/confusing for people who aren't particularly competent with technology. The original aim for this site was to have explanations in layman terms that anyone could understand and then also the wikipedia and RFC explanations, unfortunately I found that I am not very good at explaining... in the end it didn't turn out how I wanted but I figure there might be some value in it existing for some people -- I can still use it as a reference when providing user support, but it won't be as useful as hoped.
Thank you for mentioning express, I'm now excited to use it in my next project!
The article goes a great length to mention other companies' and persons' accomplishments in the field, all the while completely ignoring Apple's research on it since the 80s.

They get to the point themselves:

Indeed, what made the iPhone such a great product was precisely that Apple drew together a number of innovations already developed separately—touchscreen phones, capacitive touchscreens, sophisticated multitouch user interfaces—and combined them in a product greater than the sum of its parts.

And then Android just imitated that precise sum of parts (full touchscreen, swipe gestures, on-screen keyboard, apps, desktop-class browser, accelerometer, great graphics...). Android looked nothing like it is today before the iPhone OS.
Interesting that the pictures here that he mentions http://www.president.ir/en/9172 are from 2008, Stuxnet is from 2010. This picture http://www.president.ir/media/main/28838.jpg can be matched to the attack code. Wonder if who ever created it (US/Isreali gov't/attackers?) actually used this as evidence or had better inside sources...
A lot of the C99 features like array initialization got sucked into C++11, and since the C "compiler" in MSVC is the C++ compiler, I think you'll probably get most of C99 for free.
Just launched site for decreasing failure rates among startups. Thoughts?
Dupe - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3618061
Gray is the new Purple
The quick launch feature alone is reason enough to upgrade. Every program should have this!
MMS.
> But it does highlight the key failing of for loops: they conflate three separate kinds of operations -- filtering, reduction and transformation.

Unsurprising for a Haskeller, but he forgot the fourth and likely most common use of for loops: iterative code that has side effects.
'only 5' out of 300 is a failure rate of over 1%
Does Schneier actually write anything himself for his blog anymore, or does he just link to things he finds on the internet?
Probably a good idea to make sure your app works before you bash Yahoo Pipes. Just my $0.02. :)
It looks like they are implementing the functionality from a lot of the plugins available for VS2010 and making them standard functionality.

My biggest issue with VS2010 is the amount of memory it consumes. I hope they do something about that or some how let me disable functionality that I don’t need so I can reduce the footprint.

Some of the icons in the screenshots do in my mind look to be an improvement whilst others are so totally different that I am sure will frustrate the hell out of me until I have adjusted.

I know those screenshots are to show off as many widgets as possible but is it useful to show the tool with about 10% screen real estate dedicated to actual code.
... needing much more advance notice and planning

Without disagreeing with your point ...

The Army being the Army - while the weapons were issued, the troops trained on the system with dummy warheads, I suspect that issuing live atomic warheads to the troops would have required just as much confusion, hurly-burly, and wacky improvisation as getting a wing of airplanes aloft.

Or more? The Air Force does fly airplanes around all the time. One suspects the guys in charge of atomic warheads did not actually issue their toys to the battle groups very often.
Sorry, but this is flat out wrong.

The Tsar Bomba was a 100 MT bomb, period. It was capable of being used in 50 MT configurations but there was absolutely, positively zero chance that the 100 MT configuration would not work. Additionally, the 100 MT version would not have been a significantly different weight or size.

The reason for the 50 MT / 100 MT difference is that such weapons use a mix of fission and fusion reactions. In a thermonuclear weapon you can use natural Uranium (U-238) as a jacket around the fusion fuel capsule. While U-238 doesn't normally participate in a fission chain reaction it will fission when under high neutron flux and as it turns out fusion bombs generate enormous amounts of neutrons. Thus typical thermonuclear weapons leverage the fusion reactions to drive fission reactions and boost yield enormously, resulting in most of the energy from a "thermonuclear" weapon ultimately coming from fission reactions.

The downside of this is that fission reactions are very dirty. And in the case of the Tsar Bomba design that meant that testing the design at a full 100 MT yield would result in 50 MT worth of nuclear fission fallout being spread across the Soviet Union (and ultimately the world of course). Which is rather quite a lot of fallout. By replacing the jackets around the 3rd stage fusion fuel capsules with different materials that do not undergo fission the result is that the fusion reactions still proceed, and the bomb still releases 50 MT of energy, but very little energy comes from fission (the primary, parts of the secondary and the spark plugs in the tertiary stages), massively reducing fallout.

The part about the pilots not having enough time to get to a safe distance from a 100 MT explosion is true, but aside from that had the Soviets wanted to they could have done a 100 MT test of Tsar Bomba quite readily.
So, $35,000 one-time, or potentially way more than that long-term? I think I'll take the first one, thanks.
Some of us grognards would argue that if you're having trouble finding buttons, they really shouldn't be on the screen at all. Seriously, why must IDEs look like this? Why is there screen space dedicated to documentation when I'm not reading docs?

Why are there multiple horizontal bars at both the top and bottom of the full-screen display when the single most important activity in the app is scanning very long text files often dozens of times "higher" than the screen. Seriously, every line of text is precious, why must we steal them from the editor with a title bar and a menu bar and a tool bar (thankfully they now have only one toolbar) and a tab bar and a status bar. Why does anyone think this is a good design?