skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's like going from having a 19" monitor with 1440x900 to a 24" monitor with 1920x1080."

Ehh....I think you're overstating it, but to each their own. To make the comparison fair, you'd have to turn it into something more obtrusive: it's like going from a 19" monitor to a 20" monitor that's driven by one of those $300 USB video cards that gets really hot and eats up desk space and might occasionally cause RFI problems with my wireless mouse.

Or more directly, it's like going from Ruby to Python, or vice-versa, by using a tool that converts one to the other. They're different, and they have different syntactical features, but the annoyances of either language balance the benefits to the extent that I can't confidently exclaim that one is better. And the auto-generation step would just cause pain.

The critical difference here is that to use coffeescript, I have to add another (IMNSHO) annoying step to my build process. Another layer of indirection to obfuscate bugs. Another sprocket that can come unglued and bork my app at any time. No thanks. I'll stick with my current complexity level, and write my list comprehensions as loops.
> Except in a few cases, monopolies cause problems with deincentivization of innovation, uncompetitive behaviour, poorer outcomes for consumers and often higher prices than there would be otherwise were there a competitor.

I think you'll only find this is the case with government-granted monopoly.

Government-granted monopolies (US post office, some energy utilities, many transportation companies and so on) have little incentive to innovate and generally deliver poor service to consumers.

But how can you argue this about Apple? They're incredible innovators, they deliver great products that consumers love and the prices of those products generally fall over time.
there's a tiresome amount of dick referencing in the programming world.

(fyi, one half of the team who built the game does not possess a dick)
Hmm...

No scripting. Cretinous window layout facilities. No search and replace in selection. No mixed source/disassembly view. Registers view disappears when as you debug. No keyboard shortcut for rectangular selections. Code browsing menu 'thing' doesn't show structs. That stupid log navigator is too damn narrow, and has a proportional font. Pasting of rectangular selections doesn't work. No column/line number display. Lacks numerous basic simple text manipulation commands.
If only Xcode could refrain from crashing long enough to take advantage of those new features.

As a Mac dev for about two decades, I find that Xcode has taken a massive downhill slide latel. It went from merely mediocre to nearly unusable in a remarkably short amount of time.
Google Analytics' Open Secret
Apple isn't forcing anyone to develop for iOS. People have a large sense of entitlement these days-- if you're not happy with it make android or windows mobile apps! The thing is, developing for iOS is generally more profitable, and more fun due to the controlled and tight environment. That's why we're seeing reports of the Amazon app store being more profitable then Google play. The rules, guidelines, and even the pulling of apps is all for a reason. It generates the experience Apple wants it's consumers to have (and they're willing to pay for), and if your app isn't part of that experience then to bad! It sucks when situations like this happen, but you shouldn't feel like Apple owes you anything.
I'm not a coffeescript guy, so I'm curious what sort of support would be most valuable? Would there be more than just a build command?
yes | pv > /dev/null
I've signed in about 10 times but every time I go back to the petition page it requires me to sign in again. :(
Statements like this fall apart in anything other than a well-behaved society. If you were a serf with a starving family in fuedal Europe, living in crushing poverty under a corrupt king, would you wouldn't steal from him to survive, had the opportunity presented itself?
It's worked so far, hasn't it? And $500 is petty cash in the grand scheme of things (what it costs to actually support a developer).
> Wish it were so simple

The process takes time, but it is that simple.

Granted, it would take an enormous effort to start a new company that competes against Apple, but one could do it.

But just because it takes an enormous effort that doesn't nullify the fact that consumers would indeed turn to other products if Apple products failed to satisfy.

I think a big issue to consider is that people are very satisfied with the quality of Apple's products at this point.

If somehow the government decided that people could only buy Apple products, then we'd have monopoly, and then we should be angry.

But they haven't. So we should relax.
idiot (idiot.com)
But CoffeeScript does introduce new semantics. To name a few:

• a classical object model, complete with super()

• forced strict equality

• loop-local index variables (gets around the setTimeout(function() {console.log(i)}, 100) problem)

• all variables local unless explicitly declared otherwise

• CoffeeScript's splat arrays are totally different from JavaScript's arguments object

• list comprehensions (whether this is a semantic or syntactic change is debatable, I suppose, but the same could be said for basic OO)

• everything is an expression

The last one is a biggie that completely changes the meaning of many seemingly identical blocks of code. If that isn't a semantic change, what is?
Show HN: Presort email in zero lines of code
Do you do any kind of concurrency in your code? How is unit testing working out for you there?
Could you please reference the law that prohibits people sleeping on AOL's couches?

His security clearance was never revoked. Nobody directly informed him he couldn't sleep there. I'd say this is perfect 'grey area' since he didn't knowingly commit any crime and AOL didn't knowingly allow it.
I hope nobody minds too very much if I inject just a little bit of reality here: we are just about the only profession/trade/occupation on the planet that seems to believe that our tools should be free (as in beer). Carpenters, mechanics, hairdressers, even window-washers all have to pay for their tools (and the associated supplies and tool maintenance), and most of them don't get anything like the ROI that a door-to-door ASP.NET site peddler would get pounding the pavement in downtown Lesser Podunk after buying the ultimate all-in version of VS. Maybe it's time we dropped the entitlement attitude.
Even though not a single petition has been taken seriously so far, I think this one actually has a decent shot. If Obama acts were to actually act on one of them before the next election then this one probably has the best chance because it's a relatively small change, and it probably wouldn't be excessively controversial.
If would probably make it easier if they had an interactive version, so that we could learn the game before starting to program.
This is a terrible rule of thumb. You sound very out of touch.
As I get my feet wet again in programming, I've gone through phases in dabbling with web, app, and game programming.

But about a month ago I realized, "You know, what I really loved about my studies back in academic years was numbers. That's what I want to do with code; I want to crunch numbers"

This realization made me switch over from learning Ruby to learning Python. This book is going to be perfect for my interests.

Wes, thank you for your efforts in putting this book together.
Adding to what you said, someone who discovers, attempts and solves this solution is already better than 70% of the programmers out there. They show promise of being motivated to crack a puzzle that robs them of their sleep, and take the time to learn and code against the Scribd API.

Even if they don't "win", they are greatly superior than a normal resume pusher.
Yes, well...that's a bit like drinking lots of cough syrup to cure a case of tuberculosis, isn't it? ;-)
Your "rule of thumb" is a pretty rash generalization. I use Visual Studio because I have a Windows machine, and on this platform it's the best tool for the job I'm doing. I am primarily a C++ developer, both at my day job and on my own projects. I got started using vim, gcc and make. I am perfectly comfortable on a Unix terminal, but I avoid terminals on Windows because - and maybe you've noticed - Windows terminals are dreadful.

Here's a rule of thumb for you: Good developers use the best tool for the job without getting religious about platforms.
By that extremely liberal definition of studying, I "studied" no more than an hour or two in 7 years of undergrad + law school...

Studying is studying. It doesn't matter if it's assigned studying or not.
> If your business is disposing of toxic waste or printing dollars or forming a private army then no, we will not all cry foul.

Of course. And if RA was selling something illegal or dangerous, we'd be fine with Apple removing it; that goes without saying.

The purpose of capitalism is creating wealth via trade. I can still sell hot dogs at places other than Yankee Stadium; however, Rogue Amoeba cannot take their software and sell it elsewhere. Yes, in theory they could make a new Android app from scratch, but (a) their work on the iOS app is still lost, and (b) they permanently lose access to the customer base, which is different than merely losing one sales venue of many.

It's ironic that you indict me for parroting Ayn Rand when I thought I was doing just the opposite. :) Libertarians like to think that tyranny is only created by governments. I take the broader view that concentrated private power will always emerge, like the T-1000 that never dies, taking whatever form is convenient, be it state, company, church, or something else entirely, and we must be constantly vigilant to rebalance power when it crosses a certain anti-social threshold.

Might there be unintended consequences to intervening? Of course. But there can also be unintended consequences to inaction as well. Even if government intervention isn't the right solution, it doesn't mean we shouldn't pay attention to the problem, which is not limited to Apple, and which is likelier to spread than die on its own (refer to the overlapping problem of DRM lock-in).
I misread your comment as "I've signed it about 10 times". :)
I am running a fever, so not really in a good state to make my point clearly/effectively, but inevitably we are all in this together, like it or not, and who benefits is largely a matter of what rules we put in place. Poor people are frequently legally disempowered and rich people are frequently the ones engineering the rules in their favor. The assumption that what the king has "belongs" to him rightfully often turns a blind eye to where it really came from.

Anyway, it is more complicated than the arguments I have been witnessing here today and I just regret that I am not in good shape to give adequate voice to the idea that society needs to come up with a more enlightened means to address ..the whole kit and kaboodle.
Ask HN: Moving to Silicon Valley in one year
I graduate college in one year with my bachelors in Business Administration. I've held multiple business and some political internships and I plan on moving to the bay area and getting a job at a start-up in business development/marketing or sales. I've launched a couple start-ups so far that haven't been successful.

I'm nervous because I go to a state university and I'm not sure how competitive business positions are in the Bay area. What could I do now to prepare myself as far as finding the right position and transitioning from NY to the Bay Area?

Thank You
The API is really simple. The simplest version of a bot is:

function make_move() { return EAST; }

We also provide a downloadable environment so you can test your bot locally.
How is that him taking it personally, exactly? He's just giving an opinion, quite colorfully.
I'm with you. It just looks like a lot of fun. My ten year old is really interested in just playing for the sake of play. So we will!
i don't think its low, when they are curating a majority of the projects. They'll only accept ones that have a higher probability of success.
Really? I'm pretty sure csc.exe (the C# compiler) ships with the .NET client re-distributable, for free. On any box that has any kind of .NET installed I can fire up notepad and a command prompt and compile something. Are you confusing IDE with compiler? Or talking about only the C++ compiler? There are also a plethora of free IDEs Qt Creator, SharpDevelop, Monodevelop et.al. I don't see what the big deal is.
We'll All Have Someone to Love in 2012 w/ Bieber Back on Tour
i'd be more interested in what timelines are like if they never deliver.
Thanks so much for these!
> I guess the next thing they want after .biz is .cool .startup .awesome and .hip

.hipster
BBC Websites Cookie Settings
This is probably the least creative thing ever posted.
There's a subreddit on reddit about First World Problems. This doesn't even seem like it would qualify for that.

Sorry, I just don't get why this was voted up or is that important.
Well said. Law and policy are not holy scripture, and we should be unafraid to re-examine them from first principles, be it patent law, anti-trust, or even the Constitution itself.
Office Perks Startup BetterWorks To Shut Down On May 31
I'm not sure what you mean by "it's worked so far"; Microsoft has provided C++ compilers freely for around 7+ years now.

They have chosen to not do so any longer.

Instead, they give you only the tools needed to write Metro applications, which, just coincidentally require you to sell them through their store and can't be side-loaded onto normal systems, and they get a 30% cut.

As for "what it actually costs to support a developer" -- you're forgetting about the open source developers and other independents. Unless you're talking about Microsoft's costs, in which case, I could care less.

So much for "developers, developers, developers!"
If you're willing to work long hours, you can do both and decide toward the end of the 11 week contract.

Contracting is a very different experience from being an employee. You may find that you enjoy it, or you may hate the experience.
AOL did not suffer from this. They explicitly encourage entrepreneurship, and if they really are so stringent that they don't want a scrappy entrepreneur getting a few free meals, they should have tightened up their security. Eventually they realized their own flaw, and eventually Eric moved on. I just can't get behind the folks who want to villify Eric and call it "theft" considering it was a discovery of a great hack in the system that didn't hurt anyone and will likely create net greater value.
I'd also say that the GP's statement isn't wholly true.

Inorganic growth is a different road to monopoly power. Vertical integration, another. As is abuse of existing monopoly power to gain a monopoly in a different market (see Internet Explorer).

The consumer isn't accountable for the actions of a monopoly. The main problem is that the monopoly becomes less accountable as a whole.

Hence legislation and regulation.
I'd say that based on the usage of that word, it depends. Parents would consider children doing their homework relatively productive even though they're not really producing anything.

Reading increases my ability to concentrate for long periods of time (yes, really), gives me topics for discussion, etc., which apply to many areas of my life, including those related to actual production. Am I being unproductive when I, for instance, learn Scala without the intent of ever releasing the practice code that I've made?
You may find Tristan's story inspirational.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1794501/how-foursquare-tristan-wa...
Since I seemed to get mentioned quite frequently in the comment thread:

I have talked quite openly for about six years on both how much money I'm making and with very specific information on exactly why the business works. If there is a web app begging to be cloned, it is BCC, since you could make a decent 1.0 as a CS102 final lab project. BCC (and AR, incidentally) have been cloned multiple times, right down to button copy (not really a competitive threat) and the SEO strategy. (P.S. The SEO strategy is not "get popular with geeks, make out like a bandit", though being quote-unquote Internet famous certainly has never hurt me. It just doesn't make BCC scads of money. What makes BCC scads of money is 970 niche bingo activities all designed to rank #1 for a narrowly targeted search term.)

A lot of people I respect in the space enormously are similarly open about their business, similarly have clones up the wazoo, and similarly don't really mind. Fog Creek, 37signals, and Balsamiq suggest themselves fairly readily but there's probably another dozen I could think of given a few minutes.

There's also kind of a fixed-pie thing going on here, where Jacques seems to be saying the world has (making this concrete for an example) 5,000 teachers a year who want bingo cards to split up among all the bingo software and they're going to choose based on price. First, if you learn one thing about software pricing, learn that software is not sold on price. Second, there are all sorts of ways in which that sharing information helps to improve the size of the pie. This is true in both hippy-dippy "everyone gets better!" ways and in you-can-deposit-the-larger-pie-in-your-bank account ways. (Someone below mentions BCC and related Internet participation eventually opened quite a few doors in my consulting career. This is very accurate and consulting is rather substantially more lucrative than BCC is, though I probably won't continue doing lots of it forever.)

Also, jealously guarding the pennies you have right now is almost certainly not the thing you can most effectively be doing to have dollars tomorrow.
Wow, some very thorough data to back this one up! Was a great read.

In addition to 'taking breaks' as you sumrize, I think it is helpful if we engineer our 'work' to be more flexible. Sure, if you build a business that is basically a deck-of-cards that could fall at any moment without your presence - those weekend get-togethers with friends and family are going to stress you out. On the other hand, if you build a business that can easily run on auto-pilot when you're not around - things will be a lot more care-free during breaks and life stuff.

Its something important to keep in mind when building a startup, but almost certainly an afterthought for most.
My build process is automated, so it's not a huge darn to me if my computer has to run one additional program once in a while. It's running dozens of them all the time. And if you find CoffeeScript creates a lot of JavaScript bugs that aren't in your CoffeeScript source (adding "another layer of indirection to obfuscate bugs"), I think your experience is atypical.

And as for "obtrusive," I guess that's just subjective.
At that price point, it seems that you can get FAR better specs on Honelive. Kimsufi.ie is even cheaper, if you don't mind your server being hosted in the UK.

edit:

Softlayer: Intel 4x2.40GHz, 2 GB RAM ECC, $160/mo
Honelive: Intel i7-2600 16, 16 GB RAM, $120/mo
Kimsufi.ie: Intel i7 4x 2(HT)x 2.66+ GHz, 24 GB, $60/mo
I'm pretty sure I was the guinea pig for this system and I have to say, it was one of the more enjoyable interview tasks I have had to perform.

There is just something extremely satisfying about watching your little robot run across a field collecting little fruit.
HN needs a 'report' button.
Thanks for this post. Enjoyed reading!! Hopefully it applies to people like me (early 30s, aspiring tech. entrepreneur)
Being that there was never a VS.Net 2002...It was merely Visual Studio.NET

But I digress.

Even if I assume honesty from you, what does it say about you that you would use a tool for 18K hours and then berate it in such a way because you had a bad day today? I have been using VS in its various forms since 1995 and while it can be buggy and can crash - it is still a venerable tool. I use XCode, MonoDevlop, RubyMine and Eclipse as well and they all have problems. Claiming VS is 'seriously unreliable' basically makes people ignore everything you say after that because millions of people know better. Crash yes, on occasion...unreliable is different.
Steve sold blue boxes with Wozniak that allowed you to make unlimited phone calls. They profited 6k from this and is often told as the story that set the bond and precedent on how the two worked together.

This cost the phone companies and was an illegal item that they sold on the "underground market"

If Steve didn't partner with Wozniak would Apple be around today? Doubt it.

Was this more immoral then sleeping on AOLs couches for a few months after your incubator ended? I would say so.
http://laravel.com/ looks very promising
Does this have a way to counter spam votes posted from many different accounts?
Heh. Beautiful on desktop maybe, but on Chrome for Android, it's messy and runs like a slideshow while I can feel my phone getting really hot... better hope your investors aren't checking on mobile.
Should've stayed in Maynard, Curt.
Maybe we are seeing a second system effect for Windows - now that they're committed to taking a clean slate, they're going nuts and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree with you entertainment is a cash cow. But FB is _free_ entertainment. As is your photo-album and the discussions you have with your friends.

You appear to be referring to future success. It's like Microsoft talking up "vaporware". It gets people's attention, maybe it convinces some to believe and some to invest, but it offers them nothing. Only a promise of some future of which no one can be certain.

We have almost two decades of web display ads and their effects on building brands. Advertisers are not too impressed. They have waited patiently for something that compares to a magazine ad. And no one has delivered. Maybe solving the context problem might not be so easy. Maybe a website is not a magazine.

Meanwhile people are looking for products and services via the web, with their credit cards in hand. And Google has been there to help advertisers reach them.

That's not some promise of the future, that's the here and now.

Facebook has real power for influence. And some of that can no doubt benefit corporations. But what Google offers is something much more direct and efficient. And it's not a pie-in-the-sky promise, it's proven to have worked year after year.

Facebook has no business model. They only have everyone's curiousity. And that's mainly because the "content" on FB is everyone's friends and family, not the type of packaged, commercialised "entertainment" you get from a magazine. FB is not a magazine. It's a photo-album. More specifically, it's a collection of personal photo albums.

It does have some added "features" to the traditional photo album. It comes with tacky, invasively personal display ads in the margin. And it comes with a team of "engineers" looking over your shoulder to log every photo you look at and every comment you make. And it's exposed to viewing by millions of strangers (this is totally unnecessary). I think we can have photo albums without all that cruft. And I think we will.
Dr. Koop and The Bubble
Hi tarr,

Mobile - we've recognized the need for a mobile app so it's on the future roadmap

Clipping UI - we have heard mostly positive feedback on the rectangular clipping box. You could also use your mouse wheel to select desired portion of the page to clip. Of course, this feature is not very discoverable (yet) but it does make it very easy to clip.

Your points on enhancing readability for text clips and light box are spot on. We have heard similar feedback in usability study and we will see what we can do to address it while maintaining overall consistency and design of our product.

Thanks for your feedback.
Having spent lots of (too much) time on reddit, your little argument made me twitch a little - only to be relieved in how much nicer it is here. ;)