skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say M2 research is way off the mark for the estimate of cost for a mobile title.

Let's take the $5K cost and break it down.

A competent young programmer, making $80K/year, would be paid $5K in 3.3 weeks.

However, games don't just need programmers, they also require art, so let's take $1K to pay for the artist's time. That leaves us with only 2.6 weeks of the programmer's time. Let's also say that we have a game designer who we pay $1K. That leaves us with only 2 weeks of the programmer's time.

Having been a professional mobile game developer for 7 years, I've never seen a game take only 3 people and only 2 weeks. The minimum, in my experience, is about 2 months and around 5 people, or roughly $60K, for a very simplistic game. I'd even venture to say that it is impossible to create a quality finished product in 2 weeks.
Philips’ new 100W-equivalent LED bulb runs on just 23W
I wondered if it was the person who coined Moore's law, he's not that either.
It is needed because it is designed to replace all those.

Imagine your wife had Hugh Jackman, Michael Phelps and Bill Gates as her husbands in some strange polyamory type setup (hey you brought your wife into the conversation first ;-) ). And then one day, all those husbands disappeared and she was left with you.
I Am Not a Ninja or a Rockstar
That's funny. An OS usually isn't made by a company that's rocketing toward the bottom...
I prepared this whole rant about how displeased I am with your article and how it doesn't really say anything. Instead I want to recommend that you try Objective C.

You can do most of the string, dictionary, array things using immutable objects, which is nice, and the mutable things like windows are usually used to hold state like positions, colors, etc., and so it's easy to conceptualize what you are mutating:

NSRect frame = [window frame];
frame.origin.x += 5;
[window setFrame:frame];

Singletons are rarely used, mostly for what is basically an event responder (called the application delegate), and objects that are basically a way to group functions (NSFileManager to do IO functions, NSNotificationCenter to send application-wide events).

They've even got a first-class function object.

I have no desire to use Java, and it seems you don't either, but I think you should consider other OOP languages. It's fine to prefer functional programming (I sure do) but if you don't get the visitor pattern, I cannot help but think you don't know enough about it to write OOP off entirely.
Yes, if you go to eBay and order a couple of motivational posters this will only lower morale. Everybody will notice the BS

But this is something different. It's what the company truly believes. Or do you see something not matching Apple's beliefe there?

If you don't believe that, you certainly won't be a good fit.

Now, RedHat can put a poster like "The Power is in the Community" and if you don't like or understand that you certainly won't be able to blend in. Even if you're management.

Now, do you think Google could honestly put a poster "Don't be evil" today?
Your title is unclear - could you rephrase it?
The business model isn't fighting the war, it's selling stuff prior to prepare for a war that may or may not happen.
some people are so mean.
It is just a inspirational note.
someone behaves like apple owe him a lot.
So this is an ad about Trivi.al...
Oh I see. So they installed the government in SV, propped it up and then that government officially invited us. And then we reluctantly offered our "help"?
Dunno why you are looking for free apps when discussing profits. In Top Paid for Android, I see Angry Birds Space, Draw Something, Cut the Rope, Where's My Water, and Osmos HD in the top ten alone. All high quality. Of course, the real intriguing list is top grossing, which is dominated by Zygna style apps which are making out like casinos by running a kind of legalized gambling on both platforms. Basically using the nucleus accumbens like an ATM.
Ask HN: Thoughts on 4GL Code Generators?
I'm currently working on a large scale software project using a 4th generation programming language (LANSA RDMLX). I'm wondering who out there has experience using this type of 4GL or code generators and what was their experience?
20 years of SMS, now serving 4 billion people
Rise of the Brogrammer
Please remove this CSS changes, they look terrible.

The features are nice thought.
> I may be an introvert.

Introvert != Misanthrope.
More like "lower immediate wages for someone else's problem in the future -- maybe we'll have plenty of money to pay, maybe we'll just file bankruptcy, maybe we'll get a bailout"
I really hope this happens because I've been wanting to switch to a Macbook Air for a while now. Anyone interested in trading a late 2009 (I think, might be 2010) 13" Macbook Pro for a Macbook Air? :)
aint that funny how we paint future in such a dark colors (since sun will die in 5 billion years) and assume we all gonna die with it at the end, but yet we don't put humans evolution taken into consideration. "in 600 million years plants will die" -- seriously now? look when we have been 1,000 or even 100 years ago. think when we will be in next 1,000, given nuclear war will not push us back to the stone age. otherwise, in 600 million years we as humans will be able to scan entire universe and find perfect new home and teleport ourselves all plants and everything out there. think this is sci-fi? go back in time to 1900 and tell someone in 100 years you will have a palm size device of grapefruit weight that can gather information literally from air, play sounds, show motion picture, and you can interact with it by touching its colorful screen.
"A full etymology would certainly be interesting, but I was trying to stick to the subject matter at hand."

The point is that you said it was "coined" to describe malware usage. In fact that was neither the first use of the term in this context, nor where the term originated at all.
For anyone else who is confused, this is not the same Chuck Moore who invented the Forth programming language. As the title states, this is the Chuck Moore of AMD.
Surveillance cameras so strong they can zoom in to read text messages
As I'm not aware of the differences between Swedish and US ideas of companies, what is the concept of a privately held company versus a publicly traded company in Sweden? If the comparison holds, are the annual reports of privately held companies public information in Sweden as well?
Picture Tube: Render Images on the Terminal
Ah, good point. I'm not sure why I'm looking at free apps.

But you're right, it's very interesting to look at top grossing. There are some non-Zynga-style apps there which just have huge sales volume. At least, I assume that.
The wonderfully ironic thing about this is that 10 years ago we would have said exactly the same thing about Mac v PC.
The Technology Behind Couchbase
"The problematic thing about Haskell is not understanding monads, it's that they are necessary! They [... are ...] what happens if you try to force something naturally "unfunctional" into a functional straightjacket."

Er, I'm going to have to disagree with that as strongly as it is possible to do so. Monads are an incredibly powerful abstraction, to the point where they'd be useful even in a side-effect-ful language; for instance, for expressing non-determinism, or exceptions, or continuations, or any number of other features that would bloat your language spec if they were built-in. In Haskell's case, one of those features is IO, yes; but they're also used to provide many other features, including all the ones I just mentioned.

And every feature implemented via monad is restricted to only the parts of the code where you need it - your exceptions aren't going to sneak out of the module they're meant to be in because of a forgotten catch; you can parallelise non-IO code with impunity, knowing there are no surprise side-effects; etc etc.

I'd be inclined to compare monads, in terms of utility, to the abstract notion of objects, or to LISP-style macros.

"Use FP where it makes sense, don't use it where it doesn't."

Okay:

http://augustss.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/programming-in-c-ummm...

There. Reasonably clean imperative code where you want it, with Haskell's enforced purity stopping your side-effects leaking into parts of your code where you don't want them. If you'd started from an inherently imperative base language, that wouldn't be possible. And all thanks to monads.

[edit: a discussion of monads in the imperative context of C#: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/monads-in-c1-introd... ]
Ironic environment for an article about an airplane overburdened with mission creep.
This story will also have strong significance for Canadians, whose government is currently in the throes of a controversy over how much we're planning to spend to buy a fleet of F35s.
Thanks! You can use it of course (with caution :) )
My only big suggestion is to center the album covers and format the text below it a little better. Seems a bit lopsided to me. Seems like a cool project though.
I get where Jeff is going with this post, and I agree and disagree. It may seem like splitting hairs, but I find a big difference between details and decisions. My version: your app is a collection of decisions.

The details (and implementation) of an app flow from those decisions. Include or exclude a feature? That's a decision. Buttons on the left/right, top/bottom? Decision. Add a pluggable architecture? Decision.

Look at a rather successful product like the iPhone. Much of its success can be traced to getting lots of details right. But understanding what was going into the iPhone -- the decisions made about how to create it -- led to those details. Touchscreen, app store, glass cover, all of it were active decisions.

Executing details are absolutely critical, but making the decision of what to do (or not to do) is where it all starts.
No-one has said otherwise. Some people do not want to take the risks that you have. That doesn't make them any less of a person or less ambitious, it means that they have different goals and priorities to you. If you weren't so wrapped up in hubris you might actually learn something from it.
Cool hack, but why would I want to wave my hands at my laptop? Maybe my imagination is too limited...
Positive Signs at #BBWC and #BB10Jam Bode Well for RIM
Have you ever worked on a project with millions of lines of code which is supposed to work together as a single piece? That is where OO is required. OO works when you design your system to be composed of blackbox components. Right level of abstraction is the key. Facades must expose blackbox functionality to other components. You are never to look into the innards of a component (the whitebox model do not work). These days the WEB CRUD apps do not require OO as each service rarely exceeds few hundred lines and they never work as a monolithic piece. But once you put your head into a Telecom Switch, a flight control system, an MRI scanner - OO is the way to go.

I think these days exponents of so called 'Functional Programming' just oversee the importance of abstraction in OO and try to use it in CRUD apps where it is clearly not warranted and then hurl abuses. Get a Life!
Except the point with the 5am bit was that the cats no longer directly associate the author with food (and vice versa), so the cats don't sit on his face at all; they'll just get angry at the feeders.
Sounds pretty neat but I find it hard to be excited since the times I've used Kinect itself, it was actually pretty annoying.

Perhaps it was the setup or something about the room, but I found the response rate slow and the accuracy terrible.

Though maybe combining the two approaches would improve the experience for more conditions and situations.
Does she enjoy being around kids? Considering the severity of her herniated disc, she may be able to successfully start an at-home day care for children in your neighbourhood. My aunt does this and she is making reasonably good money. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it's definitely more than minimum wage. IIRC, she takes care of about 12 kids scheduled at different times through out the week. Usually no more than 4-6 at a time though.
I don't consider any of those things as shortcomings, simply aspects of anything involving human minds using a creative process. You're right that it's the same as all other forms of engineering, but I would also consider most of that art as well. With that I mostly just mean; despite the laws/science/logic involved, creating something new is usually a creative process.
Per the Kelly Criterion, unless you have a big bankroll, the minimum bet is an overbet, which turns it into a losing strategy.

Suppose you have $100,000, and repeatedly bet .001% of your net worth on a single ticket in the lottery at 100,000,000:1 with a 2x EV (disregarding that you can’t bet more or less than the price of a ticket). You do it 2,000,000 times, and then you hit the jackpot – pretty lucky since the odds are 100,000,000 to 1, right? But by the time you hit the jackpot, your bankroll has been so depleted that winning 200m x your bet, you only get back to 41% of your original net worth – because you overbet!

A longer discussion (by me) of why only millionaires should play Powerball -
http://blog.streeteye.com/blog/2011/11/why-only-millionaires...
Chuck was a friend. He was a brilliant guy. He will be missed. -d
Gmail's is less bad than others when it comes to eating confirmation messages.

I launched a site recently that had deliverability of about 50% for confirmation messages. I pointed my "smart host" to Critsend and things seem to be way better.
I recommend Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans.

There is an argument that OO is bad because it's so hard to do well. I have yet to be convinced that the same doesn't apply to Functional Programming.
Plus, in the history of the world, he said, is there one
thing you can think of that has been hand-made, and on such
a large scale as software, that was as complex? [I cannot
not.]

Yes: musical compositions. The largest software projects are more complex, and take longer to complete, than symphonies. But the failure rate is probably comparable.

There are probably plenty of commercial composers who write music mostly because it’s a job they can do, and they derive a modicum of satisfaction from it. But the composers who have made history — just like the programmers who have made history — do it because they must. If they give it up, they cease to do what they were made to do.
Today’s Stockholders’ Letter
I wouldn't call it a step back. That sounds rather pessimistic.
It looks like an experiment, like many great things that come out of Microsoft's research.

The Computer Vision field has certainly gotten far with head-tracking and object recognition.

With a bunch of relatively simple code, you can have a piece of software that tracks your jaw and blinking gestures with a cheap webcam and run whatever macros you choose.

I'm not sure about eyeball following, it depends on the camera's resolution and how much you train the program.

I have myself experimented with head-tracking to replace mouse-look in FPS games. It is very fun to try, save for an eventual headache in Quake 3's Q3DM17 :)

Now, these kinds of experiments are not for the average consumer, but they have been simplified so much over the last few years that the amount of excuses for not trying it out is decreasing.
Armed police raid McAfee founder, kill dog
What about in-app ads? Lots of Android games have built-in ads that bring revenue for the developer without the need for the user to purchase anything. I remember that the original Angry Birds used to be free on the Android Market but displayed ads, while the iOS App Store version cost a dollar.
Evernote acquires handwriting app Penultimate
Let me write my own version based on experience:

"There's work and then there's my life's work.

The kind of work that will make me millions. You'll work weekends while I'm at my 5000 sqft "green" house in Portola Valley or Tahoe on Friday through Monday. You will do that work here at Apple.

We don't want people to come here and play it safe. We want people to come here that want to drink the kool-aid. We want their work to add up to something for us. If it doesn't, prepare to be screamed at once a day or more.

I want your work to add up to something. Something big. Something that results in wealth for me.

Welcome to burnout. You'll only last 3 years and then I'll replace you with new kool-aid.
You're looking at those inefficiencies wrong - they aren't frustrations, they are job security.
If you go back through my comment history you'll see that I've written a few, but I left for the same reasons as the negative responses here.

The company was making billions and I didn't even have stock options, whereas the executive team was getting paid several thousand times as much me. They always said "our pay is competitive with the valley", but it didn't feel right. It came out later that Apple and other Silicon Valley firms were involved in an illegal wage fixing agreement.

As an immigrant, I can't start my own business in the US so I went into finance, where the employees are generally more cognisant of their market value. I got a 50% base-pay and 125% overall increase right off the bat as finance is desperate for anyone who is genuinely passionate about technology.
It depends on which side you are on :) You might love to buy android phone but will you develop for it knowing it wont bring as much money...
A friend went back to iPhone because there was no option to buy angry birds at the time. Paying X to avoid advertising popup's is a feature many people want.
Link for the lazy:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

It's a good bit of writing, that.
Evernote Acquires Penultimate
> McDonalds used to ask you to supersize, which is
> clearly a proactive position

1. You're already inside of a McDonald's ordering a meal when they ask you the question. The question did not convince you to dine at McDonald's in the first place.

2. Eating a few more fries and drinking a bit more soda is not an encouragement of addiction. The extra bit of food and drink is not going to be the deciding factor in whether or not you end up so addicted to McDonald's that you have to keep coming back for more. (Note: I'm not saying that it's healthy)

3. French fries and soda are huge profit centers for McDonald's, which is why they encourage you to pay them more for a bit extra. There was no evil McDonald's marketing meeting where it was decided that adding "super size" as an option would keep people coming back to McDonald's like heroin addicts. McDonald's keeps people coming back by: 1) having food with a pleasing taste -- not necessarily healthy -- 2) via branding, and 3) consistency -- people can count on McDonald's food to taste the same anywhere within the same country.

> they've already been so successful at convincing
> their target market to eat all their meals at
> McDonald's

Are you really going to claim that McDonald's target market is eating all their meals at McDonald's? Really?
>What about in-app ads? Lots of Android games have built-in ads that bring revenue for the developer without the need for the user to purchase anything. I remember that the original Angry Birds used to be free on the Android Market but displayed ads, while the iOS App Store version cost a dollar.

Apps don't make anything near what an actual purchase does. Plus, nobody looks at ads when he plays a game...
Icelandic Anger Brings Debt Forgiveness in Best Recovery Story
Maybe the better analogy would be if McDonald's tested whether people enjoyed their food enough to come back often, and iterated upon that metric to maximize it. Maybe they would use imagery and psychology in their stores and advertising to elicit an emotional response in people to enjoy the "experience" of McDonald's as more than just a food production and distribution service. Maybe they would tie in to other things that people enjoyed (I don't know, like movies or something) to associate McDonald's with the positive traits people perceived in other products. Maybe if they targeted their efforts at children, in order to bring in families and indoctrinate consumers as early as possible.

I actually have no problem with any of this. They're just making a product for people to enjoy. Just because they're running data sets, tests, and using social "science" (bah) to maximize products... so what? What makes that worse than building a product based on your intuition that happens to appeal to people as well on these lines?

I think Zynga is a foul company. I think their product has a net societal cost, and I think the crap they pulled on some of their employees prior to IPO is unconscionable. But I think this aversion to using psychology to optimize your product is misplaced. Nobody is getting hypnotized here. They are just using every tool in their arsenal to make their product perform as well as possible. They do this in an unashamedly metric-based way. Every product you encounter in life attempts to influence and manipulate you. The scientific approach just happens to be very good at optimizing processes.

Last point in this rant... I do believe Zynga makes most of their money off the weak and the crazies who will put thousands of dollars they can't afford into their farmville farm. I do believe that is morally repugnant, and it's well within their power to stop that (which I'm sure they'll never do). I just don't think the design of their games is an issue... it's their billing.
RIM takes shots at Apple and iPhone owners with new campaign
My grandpa used to say: The thanks is in the paycheck.

You want my weekends? Fuck you, pay me.
Dresser Mirrors
Colehawk has a beautiful selection of dresser mirrors and reclaimed mirror that you can decorate your bedroom furniture or accent a wall in any room of your home.
It's estimated that by 500,000 years from now on the Earth will have likely been impacted by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter.

http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/geol204/impacts.htm

Here are the results of current attempts to track the objects that can potentially impact the Earth:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
That is a very good point, coming from the developer's view.

I think that Jeff's point is more valid if you look at it from the customer's view.
My thought was more fundamental than that: any solution which involves asking users to request different transport protocols is not going to solve the problem. There are far more users who have no idea what a "transport protocol" is than those who do.

With that said, I enjoyed the post. It's an interesting problem, and I do find the base idea attractive: allowing applications to opt to be background traffic.
Here's the question (which I sincerely don't know the answer)

Do Apple offer stock options? Bonus per project?

Other factors could be: what's the impact of having Apple in your CV? Getting to say you worked on project X ?(Apparently this is something Apple limits disclosure, still, if you're an cell phone engineer not a lot of projects you could work)

Sacrificing your life for a company's profit looks like the job is only a physical process of "turning a money machine".

And of course, I hate sacrificing weekends and holidays.
Does anyone else thing that it is slimy for ZDNet interpret clicks to the site background as the user clicking the ad below the nav-bar?

As an advertiser I would feel defrauded. Not one person clicking on the background is doing so out of interest in the advertiser's product.

How common is this practice?
Cheap Air Jordan 11 Custom Glow in The Dark White Blue for Sale
Just as you might dismiss the arguments as "No True Scotsman" you could dismiss the original post as anecdotal evidence. The presence of a fallacy does not directly affect the truth of the point being made.