skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree with most of this. The idea that price equals quality has long been used by merchants to extract money from consumers, not extend value. Sure it's true of some products and some companies, but overall I'd argue that at best, more expensive things aren't close to being relatively better - by any meaningful measure.

A $300 meal isn't 10x better - in terms of taste (subjective obviously) or nutrition - as a $30 meal. A BMW 3 Series is a better car than a Ford Focus, but looking only at the practical reasons to own a car, it's not even close to having twice the value.

In a lot of cases, brand names bring no value other than the brand. And while that can have a placebo effect, it's not more value. Medicine comes to mind as a great example. You are paying more for marketing and packaging than you are for R&D. The recent thread on memristors even highlighted that R&D costs are 1/100th of total cost, with marketing taking the lion's share.

Quality items appreciate while cheap items depreciate? No consumer good should be viewed as a financial investment. If something does appreciate in 50 years, it'll be more about luck than anything else.
huh. my jeans usually fail through use; they don't usually languish.

The thing is? I have some costco brand jeans I bought during the first dot-com that I still wear. they were under $15. Actually, at the same time I bought a bunch of designer jeans. The designer jeans all failed (at least one of them catastrophically... dramatically ripping the crotch wide open as I lifted a server in front of something of a crowd.) within a year of purchase.

My experience has been that expensive things are not always better. In fact, expensive clothing is usually designed for rich people, who don't need to lift things or trace cables through crawlspaces, and who will want clothing of the new style next year anyhow.

Clothing designed for working people is usually much more durable. And yeah, you can sometimes get increased durability by buying something more expensive within that sector? but the nicest dickies brand work pant is on par with the designer jeans they sell at target, price-wise.

So yeah, in general? if you are selecting for durability in clothing? the price signal is actually the opposite of what you want to look at.
More to the point you will actually get more wear per dollar.
There is usually an upfront cost of time and/or effort. The choice comes down to copy-pasting what you need everywhere or put effort into making a generic function that you can put in one place. If you are working against an impossible deadline, option 1 seems very enticing. In the long run, you are right, the effort is much less to maintain a well thought out codebase.
Good article, though I don't agree with it all.

It is harder to grow software than it is to initially build it. Preconceptions bite you on the ass, data structures don't allow for new features, side effects multiply.

You don't need to learn the layers. In fact, if you're learning all the layers, you're probably an innefective coder. This is not to say that you shouldn't investigate the layers or have a poke around the layers. But, software's about reuse and reuse is about reusing other people's work via known interfaces without worrying overmuch about what goes on underneath the hood.

I'm actually more of a debugger than a profiler, and as much as I'd like to believe that my way is as valid as his, I suspect that he's probably right on this and I'm probably wrong.
Agreed. Microsoft is on a much slower development pace than Chrome and Mozilla, which theoretically shouldn't affect how how many features they build in the next version that comes a year later.

I mean let's say Chrome implements 1 major feature every 6 weeks, so that's 8 major features they add in a whole year for Chrome. So even if Microsoft doesn't update their browser every 6 weeks, but only once a year or once every 2 years, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a similar amount of new features in the new version. But instead, they have significantly fewer. Even in IE10 there are a lot of things missing that have already been implemented in Chrome and Firefox, or are about to, and since they are not coming in IE, that means devs will have to wait another 2 years or more for them to arrive in IE11.
Long live big iron
Nike Air Max 2011 Men : Nike Air Max Shoes Online Greece Store
They are behind the other vendors as a result of decisions they made in the past. They make my job more difficult daily and make the web worse for millions of people.

The decision not to provide an upgrade path beyond IE8 on XP has been a particular road-block in getting people onto better rendering engines.

Of course I'm glad they are improving but ideally I'd rather they got out of the browser game entirely.
I definitely disagree. Maybe sometimes, paying twice as much gives you something that lasts ten times longer. Or maybe, you will pay five times as much, and get something that (hopefully) lasts a bit longer.

I use a lot of earphones, and they tend to break quite fast. Once or twice, I decided to move away from the usual 15$ models and pay 60$ for better brands, with good reviews, and everything. Did they last longer ? Of course not. They sounded marginally better, but nothing worth the price..

The thing is, price is an indicator of positioning. It's a marketing tool, and it's generally not correlated to quality. Buying the very cheapest is usually not a good idea, because the manufacturer probably did everything it could to actually beat competitors and propose the lowest price. But other than that, that's pretty much all you can know in advance.

Knowing what items are made of good quality and will last longer (and therefore are worth paying an extra for) is very hard. So, my reasoning on that is that I prefer to spend less money on something, since on average, it will live just as long.
Bridge Building vs Software Engineering
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/05/bridges-software-en...

There is something different between software and other engineering methods. I'm not sure he expresses it properly, but it's definitely there.
Indeed. Since the article mentioned cell phones: I would say on average, it costs about $200/year to own a smartphone (service not included). $6000† if you maintain that for 30 years. Yet I cannot imagine paying $2,000 for a smartphone that will provide uninterrupted service for 30 years. It is far cheaper to have the single upfront cost, but the technology progresses so rapidly that your device probably won't even work with the communications systems of the day by then. It makes a huge difference on what you are buying.

† Realistically more like $15,000+ if you start to include the costs of not having that money, but we'll keep the calculations simple.
A couple of years ago there was a lot of talk about how the web development advances so much slower than native languages, and that it will take a decade or more before you'll be able to do the things you can with native apps right now.

That's exactly what this is about. Microsoft is the one slowing the web development even more now, by not adopting the latest features on time.
Nice concept but some things made me cringe:

- directionless
maybe I quitted too early to be enlightened but
10 minutes in I couldn't tell what was the goal/point
- unorganized
* rename, rerename
* move window, resize, re-move
- jittery typing
- (imho stupid) background music
The sounds of keystrokes is actually better..

If the goal is to make the audience focus on code, it's paradoxically full of distracting elements.

Next time, use a tiling manager, show a minimal plan ( 4 bullets ), spare us the stadium-oriented noise, author can even gratify us with the sweet sound of human commentary, even if just a few.
My company is one of the early adopters of Persona/BrowserID. You can see our dual-auth (with Facebook) system here:

https://www.voo.st/

We've been live for several months now in the Real World - our userbase (amateur athletes) is primarily nontechnical. About half of our users choose Persona/BrowserID and half choose Facebook. We were initially concerned about the BID login flow (in particular, the immediate email roundtrip) but it hasn't been a problem and the UX has been refined quite a lot over the last month or two.

For a mass-consumer audience, the combined FB/Persona solution is excellent:

* Facebook unquestionably has the slickest auth experience, even eliminating the followup name/sex/bday questions. However, a significant percentage of the world (possibly > 25%) either Hates Facebook or wants to keep their Facebook account isolated. This is unlikely to change in the near future and could even get worse depending on what sleeping dogs Zuckerberg decides to kick next week. We don't have the option of alienating the FB haters and we wouldn't want to anyways.

* The Persona UX is good and rapidly getting better. BigTent integration with gmail, yahoo, hotmail will bring one-click login to those users. A native experience is being built into browser chrome. All this is coming without me having to write code. It may not be as slick as Facebook, but I like where this train is headed.

* Integration is simple compared to writing a username/password system. The API is incredibly easy to work with. Dual-auth with Facebook is a little more complicated, but a complete Persona-based auth system is a question of hours, not days.

* The fact that identity is just an email address makes it easier to integrate with existing login systems. In our system, you can log into the same account with both Facebook and Persona as long as the emails match. No, email is not a perfect identifier, but even nontechnical users understand it immediately and really - what other option is there? "What email address did I use?" is a lot better than "What weird combination of letters and numbers did I use as a login name?"

* Support on the Mozilla dev-identity list has been fantastic.

We're pretty happy. Honestly, I don't ever see myself writing another username/password login system ever again. Persona is less work for a better UX.
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Making your child's cell phone safe & secure was never as easier as it is now with Android parental control software usage. You can be worry free forever with parental control software for Android on your child's cell phone.
I never noticed until now, but I never use a debugger either. An employer urged me to start using one while I was working on their code, but it's just not natural for me. If I need to debug a crash, I just print the 1-2 variables of the state involved, see what's wrong, and fix it.

Is there anyone who uses a debugger for more than inspecting state?

EDIT: I guess lower level languages and more involved applications use debuggers much more extensively.
The seller is listed separately from that. e.g. for
http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-Silicone-Pastry-Brush/dp/B00...

Manufacturer is OXO, but it says "In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available." below the price. That means it's sold directly by Amazon.

You can also go to "more buying choices" where it is even more transparent.
If you like standards and you like an open web, you want more players, particularly those willing to throw resources into it, in the game.

While it will always be messy around the edges, five companies with 20% market share each would be the best thing for a genuinely open web.
Just off the top of my head, I'd guess it's due to a lot of e's in words that, depending on the language, you'll see in almost every single method or function. Things like return, end, else, true, include, self, private, etc.
If (most of) the rest of the developed world can do "socialized" medicine reasonably well, then what's so special about the US that would prevent this? Just the size and scale for fuckups?

There are occasional health system scandals in Australia and the UK, for example, but even with this everyone gets coverage. So why the US needs to drag its heels in this is beyond me.

But if you do think the public service will make a dog's breakfast over the whole thing, I'm all ears.
I built this website to help you easily check if your credentials have been compromised: http://voices.thatsaspicymeatball.com/
Most of the games in the video they have on KS are trivial to modify for OUYA.
I don't really understand why people think that copy pasting takes less time than making a new function.

Your function may need some refactoring to make sense, but just cutting that block of text out and then calling it in a function can usually be done in seconds.

Copy Pasting:
Copy the code. Paste in new place. Change variable names to fit in new place.

New Function
Cut the code. Place inside function declaration. create call to function in old and new places.
"You have to ask yourself: "Do I understand why my program is doing X?""
"I almost never use a debugger."
"And if your program is so complex that you need a debugger [simplify]"

To me, being afraid of a debugger is like being afraid of actually knowing exactly what is going on - being lazy and just read logs and guessing what might have gone wrong, instead of letting the debugger scream in your face all the idiotic mistakes you have made.

I would argue that using the debugger is being lazy in an intelligent way, instead of spending hours reading endless logs trying to puzzle together logic the debugger can show you directly.
English and Welsh libel law is being reformed - there's a bill going through parliament at the moment. The new law is a long way from perfect but is an improvement.

Scots libel law is different but shares some of the problems as well as having several of it's own.

My favourite is that historic (not something that has been used recently, though technically still true) if you hurt someone's feelings it doesn't matter that you were telling the truth...
Partly true, but I guess most of don't buy new things when the old ones are totally worn out. It is more like we just some new stuff for a change, not necessarily because what we have is broken. So it doesn't automatically save you money.
I think what the article is trying to say is "Buy the best quality that you can afford". Unfortunately the Author has completely conflated Quality with Price.

Higher price != Better Quality (not always anyway)
This article is based on a number of nonsensical assumptions:

1) That paying more equates to higher quality. It doesn't. Your £30 t-shirt will fall apart every bit as quickly as your £3 multi-pack from Primark.

2) That you want to have something last a lifetime. Just last weekend, my dad was complaining about having no good jig-saws. Then followed up with "of course, I could buy a good one, but I only use them once every 5 years, so they're knackered when I need them anyway".

3) When you want quality, you can't just borrow it off someone else.

I'm not against paying more for something e.g. my uncle has expensive joinery kit because his day job is a joiner. I simply dislike the mentality of "I must pay top-dollar for everything", before you've evaluated what you actually want.
Education startup puts math on your mobile phone
mTutor the startup focused on revolutionising the education system moves closer to commercial launch
Yahoo Voice hack leaks 450,000 passwords
The problem though is that a big company like Amazon can afford to worry about paying sales taxes properly. I worry about the electronic store that delivers though, being forced out of business due to increasingly complex sales tax reporting requirements. It seems to me it gives the online retailers way too much power over local competition when a department of revenue audit could be used to sink the B&M retailers.
The problem with this "buy for life" stuff is that how do you determine what is really a "buy for life" product rather than just an over-priced "brand?"

For example, I could go out and buy a $200 pair of sunglasses but depending on where I buy them they can either be poor quality (e.g. fashion brands, sunglass hut, etc) or exceptional (e.g. fishing shops, sailing suppliers, workman-glasses, etc).

You would expect reviews to give you an accurate way to tell but people often review a product by the way it makes them FEEL rather than about the product its self.
My experiences from writing + running our tasks App backend ( http://tomorrow.do/ ) on Heroku:

1. Node.js + expressjs is quite an efficient option for serving API and the static site on Heroku, only the single free dyno is needed for over 3 million installs and peaks of 30-40k site visits. Only rarely have we needed a second or third dyno under an extremely heavy peak traffic period.

2. A commercial CDN is a good and not too costly option for static files ( http://maxcdn.com )

3. AWS database + file services like DynamoDB/S3 are not that flexible but aren't too expensive, pretty much scale up and down without you doing too much and don't go offline much at all
I don't know about the nature of the problem you were working on but in my experience there are some cases where the problem is far too complicated to be fixed with debug print statements. I couldn't live without my debugger.
Walgreens and Kicksend partner up for photo printing from your iPhone
I use a debugger. If you've got some input that gets transformed into unexpected output, it's great to follow the code along. Of course, placing debug output works too, be the debugger is usually faster in this situation.

It's good for white box testing. It's also good for compiled languages. You know something is wrong, but you don't know why it's wrong.
I can say the same for high level code, but I use debuggers when the source code is not available or I'm coding a device driver or something in assembly.
LinkedIn's New Redesign Released Today
Yes, I've done that sort of programming (embedded stuff) and debuggers and other exotic tools are very useful.
That argument would've had more weight before kickstarter took off. I mean, think of it. A group just raised over $3.5 million in two days on kickstarter to build an opensource and indie-friendly video game console.
I think, non-dramatic european response may, in-part, be due to comparatively sparse product options on Amazon's european stores compared to its US .com offerings. I have used Amazon.fr while in Paris and have been disappointed by the limited offerings. Price is an issue, too: on Amazon.fr: when shopping for a TV, for instance, the prices were cheaper at Parisian retail stores.
I don't really see how their hardware is at all better than the modern smartphone. Any manufacturer targeted at the same user base and a phone device designed to support its gaming needs to boot will beat this.

The only way they can spin this is by creating a gaming community around it which, admittedly, is what they're trying to do. Successfully for now.
Accurate browser numbers are always hard to come by, but for argument's sake, let's assume:

IE: 40%, Mobile: 10%, Other modern desktop browsers: 50%
(Numbers based on Wikipedia's browser market share page)

Current thinking has us building a website that works for all of those browsers, and then building an optimized version that works better for the 10% of mobile users. I've visited many sites on my mobile devices that are complete rewrites, using browser-specific features, of the regular website, for 10% of the users.

Yet, we completely refuse to use features found in 50% of the browsers because Microsoft hasn't implemented them yet. This is where the math falls apart. If resources are limited to two implementations, wouldn't it make more sense to provide a better experience for 50% of the users, and still provide the basic version for Microsoft/mobile users?

If 10% of users are enough to warrant a completely different website version as has been demonstrated with the rise of mobile users, then why not build three variants? One mobile, one old web technology version, and then one using bleeding edge technologies? What is it about Microsoft's latency in feature implementations that you speak to that prevents the latter version from even being considered?
> "Programming is much closer to a craft than a science or engineering discipline. It's a combination of skill and experience expressed through tools"

I think the authors definition of Science, Engineering, and Programming is vague.
What is Science? What is Engineering? And what is Programming?

I don't know what kind of programming he is talking about, but we all know that designing Programming Languages is a science, and also programming compilers and interpreters... Well, how about Artificial Intelligence, isn't it also a Science?
And they all imply heavy programming and optimization.
Hardware startups are pretty rough, and they're giving this fresh grad (with apparently no track record?) 750k to figure out the technology, design the circuitry/mold, setup manufacturing, distribution and so on. That's sure a lot of faith in the team. Good luck.
Microsoft security: Disable Windows Sidebar and Gadgets NOW
There are plenty of poor quality men's shoes. Go to H&M or any similar "fashionable" retailer and pick up some low cost shoes. They'll have terrible thin rubber soles and fall apart within weeks.

Similarly, there are plenty of high quality women's shoes.

I'd probably agree that more men buy high quality shoes. In my experience men on average tend to put less emphasis on style over function, and so that does inevitably lead to functional (well made) shoes.
We are working on pricing. It will be a monthly fee at a reasonable amount and our goal is to grow with you. We know startups aren't flush with cash and you should only start paying for value when you are really getting it too. What would be your ideal payment model?
It'd come up exactly the same, unless you're going to pick out the dvorak-users on github. Even then I wouldn't expect much difference. We're measuring characters in code, not actual keypresses.
The Million Pound Startup Challenge
Full episodes on their website play fine in any country there's no local distributor making claims on the show. I've watched online episodes on their site in Greece, Japan, etc. Well, until now that is.
MIT develops holographic, glasses-free 3D TV
Here are the keys directly under my fingers on the home row: A R S T N E I O

And I can visually see the reasoning behind Colemak being like this, now.
The highest priced items are that way mostly due to the marketing costs associated with selling high priced items and trying to create the illusion that it is better quality.

Lifetime guarantees are pretty much worthless because most people will forget they have one, lose the item or lose the documents related to it.

Top pay doesn't attract the best people. Top work attracts the best people because the best people have most likely realised that money doesn't really matter if you're working on something that doesn't provide meaning for you.

The sweet spot for quality is to figure out the approximate average price of the product you want to buy and then pay a little above that.
Using logs wins against debuggers a few cases though:

- Your program runs on a client system and logs help you understand or reproduce the system without having to do a remote session (which might be impossible on some firewalled envs).

- Your code crashes without stack trace and you want to understand where to begin the search.

Agree with your overall statement though.
Yeah it's definitely not perfect! Our goal is to ship early to demo our progress and there are some rough edges showing. We will definitely get this cleaned up ASAP. Thanks for the screenshot.
I doesn't usually happen like that for me. More likely, I stumble on a point where I have to reuse part of an old code, but with slightly different goals, or with some steps added/removed in the middle.

Copy-pasting and just dropping the useless parts is easier than making a new function, because you have to think about how to make the new function apply to both cases (the easiest way is "well, I'll just put a switch in the parameters and if statements", but it doesn't really lead to better code).