skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The cool thing about folders is, if you don't want them, simply don't create them

The cool thing about tags is that you could have multiple ways of viewing them, including a hierarchical folder-like view.

I don't have anything against folders, I just think that tagging is more or less a super set of what folders can do.
Hehe, you know what makes the software more complex to use? Having to grep in the output of "grep --version" before deciding which switch to pass to grep.. :)
Also, I did have a "real merchant account" with FirstData when I was with FeeFighters, and I kept getting stupid opaque fees. The new wave of companies abstracting away that bullshit has not arrived too soon, imo.

I've got a conversation going with Braintree to get another "real merchant account," but with Balanced contributing code, and Braintree only half the solution (still need ACH), and getting burned by FirstData ... what's my incentive?
Where? :)
Disclosure: ex-Bumper here

I've been beta testing this app for a few weeks now and it is an excellent example of a really good app - do one thing in a really streamlined way, do it in a way no one has done before, and improve the user's life in a way that matters.

Download it, you'll really like it.

Oh, and great job guys :)
RIM channels Apple in BlackBerry comeback bid — but will it work?
Along with another HN submission ("Changing My Mind On Microsoft"[1]), Newell's comments are important in and of themselves because of what they represent: a tectonic shift in the business community's perception of Microsoft.

Business executives are now openly doubting the future relevance of the Windows platform!

--

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295711
Invest in Lines, not Dots
When there's a clear benefit, that's great. Feel free to scrap backwards compatibility when there's significant progress to be made in doing so.

This feels a lot more like a "color of the bike shed" choice. There are use cases where the new behavior makes sense, sure, but there are also plenty of cases where the old way is better. This isn't an upgrade, it's a lateral move.
You can get to search history mode this way too. E.g.:

q/ - Search string history
q: - Ex cmdline history
q? - Search string history

Also note that if you normally use Ctrl-C to exit Insert mode, that fails here as Ctrl-C will close the history buffer. You need to use Escape or Ctrl-[.
No, this is historically very typical for Microsoft.

Windows ME sucked. Windows XP was great. Windows Vista sucked. Windows 7 was great.

At least that was the perception. Reality is more nuanced, of course.

And business is very conservative, they never upgrade immediately.

For business, the alternative to Windows 8 is Windows 7 or Windows XP. It isn't OS X or Linux or Android. Microsoft does better if they switch to 8, but they don't lose if they don't.
As someone exploring the prospect of app sales as a career (working on my third app now, supplementing it with consulting work), I'm quite heartened by this article. There's a tenacious belief within the indie game-dev circles I bump around in that the _only_ way to profit from iOS sales is to win the top-ten lottery and join the 1% this article describes.

But the real story that Addey tells here says that Sturgeon's Law is in full effect in the App Store: if you can make your app _not crap_, if you can rise above the dross that inevitably makes up 80 to 90 percent of any sizable collection of creative work, then people will buy it. And if you're willing to act wisely and keep working at it, always pushing out more quality, care-driven stuff, then you can succeed.

This is what I want to do.
I think the guy's opinion is in line with the "popular internet opinion" but as usual that doesn't really match reality.

I deal with a lot of small-medium businesses in the UK, and the reality is as follows:

Chunks of VBA plumbing between Project, Excel, Word, Outlook powering lots of businesses, humming away on 2-3 year old Dell desktops under dusty desks in offices, written by people who don't understand or give a shit about "the cloud", "features" and "touch". A few of these places have a "server" (another dell wedged in a corner) or a few "servers" (3-4 dells or HP's possibly with exchange wedged under a desk and managed by a 3rd party). Most of this junk runs on hodge-podges of Windows XP, Vista and 7 with the odd Windows 2003 server. There are a few bespoke applications floating around but they are mainly knocked up in Access or VB6 and there are a couple of ASP.Net WebForms on internal servers with SQL Server or SQL Express. A couple of people have iPads (usually execs). Everyone has one or two phones. Work phones are mainly Android and Windows phones (CE and 7.5). Personal phones are all pretty much iPhones or Nokia feature phones.

A few things you don't see:

* Linux. Anywhere. Apart from a few of the cheaper organisations hosting it and their POP3 on a £2.99 a month hosting plan. They don't even know that as their "web design" company deals with all that.

* Office 365. People just don't trust it or complain it's too expensive or don't know it exists.

* Mac desktops or laptops. Never seen a single one, apart from one running Windows.

* Amazon or EC2. That's where we get our books from...

* Google apps. Nope not one.

That's the real world and they'll quite happily buy Windows 8 and use it as they have for the last N versions.
A cursory search of the USPTO's trade mark registry by Pinwheel would have revealed the pre-existing registration for Pinweel.
Fire him... Are you serious? Like the truth has ever mattered to Murdoch.

This writer is exactly on message, they'll give him a bonus.
Two things:

1. The calculation averages the gains throughout ALL apps - given the vast majority of the apps are free, that means the paid ones are getting a lot more revenue (individually)

2. It doesn't take into consideration advertising revenues (admob et all), which represent a considerable chunk of revenue for a lot of apps...
A few minutes ago it worked from Pidgin, now I reboot on Windows and try Google+ and nobody is online. Found it very weird, but this explains... Odd though that it says it's disrupted since 12:40PM and it worked under an hour ago (it's now 16:30 here).

Edit: And I can access it again (16:34)
I come across a great counter-example to directory structures every day. I make 32-bit, 64-bit, debug, and release builds of my product. How do I organize them in a tree? Which distinction is "higher-level"?
So did you read the article? Your "points" are addressed quite thoroughly.
There is definitely a hunger in the Linux community for quality commercial applications in areas where open source has not traditionally managed to perform so well (Image/Video editing, games etc).

You would certainly have limited luck trying sell a C compiler or package manager to Linux users for sure, but there are certainly areas (including some developer tools)where there could be a market.

If you released (say) an image editor for Windows and Mac you are competing with Photoshop as well as countless other programs, whereas if you release for Linux you may have less potential users (although there are still an estimated 30 million) but you are competing with The Gimp.

There is a subset of Linux users who would never consider any commercial software, but this is pretty small percentage, at least that is certainly what Valve is banking on.

Mac users do expect to pay for software sure, but Windows users? Not so much since Windows seems to be the platform with the highest piracy as well as countless horrible "freeware" programs.
Great Summer Reading
Even more than that, they look exactly like silver dragees.
As both a game dev and a gamer, I don't think originality plays such an important role. All the games I paid for in app store so far are basically VERY GOOD clones of old and repeated ideas I've seen/played in the past: Kingdom Rush, Jetpack Joyride, Angry Birds, etc.

IMHO, it's how polished the game is, not how original...
The biggest problem I see is: who the heck would expect a .12 release to break compatibility in an ancient and solid piece of software?
Six Street Smart Startup Survival Secrets
Up for me, but none of my contacts are online...
Good idea, I created a subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/mfgan/
What the post represents is one small stock holder's opinion about a minor position [1], with a link bait title, and echoing popular opinions of the blogging echo chamber.

He has never been particularly bullish on Microsoft. He wrote about his "new" concerns nearly two years ago. [2]

[1] http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2010/08/microsoft-accounti...

[2] http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2010/09/microsoft-laid-bar...
You don't need to do that, just always use -R :)
I agree - quite a few of our current employees told me that they thought the same before they were hired at Simple. You should check out our open jobs at https://www.simple.com/careers/.
(Anecdotal counterpoint) For the vast majority of the students at my university, visual studio is the reach-to solution for any problem. They would much rather figure out how to write ASP.NET because visual studio is "awesome" than go around running node.js (what's that?) from a command line.
They also likely have a much lower volume of files to manage, being non-technical and all. I could probably get by with the single folder level at home, where I mostly just browse the internet and watch video on my PC, but having to manage all my various projects at work would be a nightmare.

How are you supposed to check out a source code repository? Many frameworks require things to be in a specific folder structure in order to work.
Many a time I've posted on HN comments something to the effect of, "that's great, but I have no idea what Your product is." it's extra lethal if your company or product name doesn't describe anything at all to those not familiar with "FooBarlr".
I use 30Mbps cable internet and pay $12/mo (Eastern Europe).
Why aren't these things like javascript frameworks where everyone has an idea.

Because OAuth is a protocol designed to enable systems developed independently and as such it's useless unless there's an high degree of standardization. It's like saying "why can't we all use our custom version of IP/TCP/HTTP/TLS". It simply wouldn't work.

Everyone has unique requirements.

Not really; the reality is more "Not everyone has the same requirements", which still leaves very large groups that do have the same or similar enough requirements; in fact, we've seen that with OAuth 1.0(a).
Switching all my production code to use their alpha as we speak.
The problem with it is that you are assuming that your users are blithering idiots without any actual work to do.

One of the most widely replicated UX results is that over half of people don't "get" the concept of a nested directory structure. Not even when you try to explain it to them.

Not dumb people either. College graduates. It seems to be a mental block. It is not one you will find among programmers (anyone who can't understand this is unable to become a programmer), but if you're designing for the general population you need to be aware of it.

The result is that any user interface which forces people to be aware of a directory structure is going to confuse the heck out of real people. You may have a directory structure. But to get happy users you need to keep them blissfully unaware of it.
They're a YC company (W11 iirc?), and yes, the Community Page is the best source of info at present:

https://www.balancedpayments.com/community

That page was put up in the past week or so, and the whole thing was rebranded from PoundPay a month or two ago--right about the time I started talking to them. Here's an etherpad where a lot of our initial conversation took place, with some additional background and info:

http://sync.in/gittip-balanced
I agree that Microsoft has several chances to get Windows 8 (I.e. the tablet plus computer OS) right, so this is just strike 1.

That said, Windows is already a minority computing platform (in terms of new devices sold) so perhaps it cannot be as complacent as it has been in the past. If Windows 8 flops monumentally, when Windows 9 ships in 2014 we may all be docking our pads or phones to a keyboard and/or 2160p wallscreen to use virtualized Windows (when we have to) running legacy software and ten year old microsoft licenses.
What 6 months of cell phone data logs say about you
So I've got to ask Alex.. is it coincidence that you decided to leave after 2 years when you were most likely fully vested or was it a strategic move? Did you retain your shares :-P
You, sir, are a genius and a scholar.

Do you have any idea how many tutorials there are out there that involve some kind of obscure plugin or xclip incantation for something as simple as pasting text over ssh with formatting?

To think all I needed to do was :set paste... Extraordinary.
TCO is an optimization, it doesn't affect correctness. So you can ignore not having it, until you run out of stack.

There is a much bigger reason to stick with Scheme for SICP: all the meta-circular evaluator stuff where you learn to implement Scheme in Scheme. I supposed you could implement Scheme in Javascript, but then you'd still need to learn Scheme. And you certainly won't want to implement Javascript in Javascript.
Google Fiber Announcement Live Stream
I noticed the same thing on my profile the info from G +
Paraphrasing Tim Bray, selling bags of bits is probably not a good business model for most of the people. (Unless you have draconian DRM measures in places.)
Thomson Reuters to Acquire MarkMonitor
You are right. Edited.
The App Design Handbook + Time-lapse Design Video
Ideally, the goal is to be like Tesla Motors, a catalyst for the industry.
Dude that's pretty confrontational. I don't pretend it didn't happen. I didn't say so either. No German I know pretends it didn't happen.

HN is not a forum for prejudice.
Better yet, don't launch until you've actually launched. On the list of startup behaviors that drive me crazy, right after the two in my post, comes "Sign up to be notified of when (hah, IF!) we actually do something" pages. To paraphrase Yoda: Launch or launch not, there is no sign up to be notified.
I interacted with Andre on and off for years when running my first company. The company built hardware for web caching, which is a disk-limited task, so we were constantly on the edge of low-cost disk technology (we also built big SCSI boxes, but the low-end ATA boxes were much more popular), so we tickled lots of bugs in the ATA drivers, and shipped out lots of boxes running on his pre-release ATA drivers. It was always, always, always, a pleasure to work with him. Not because he was nice (though he was always more than civil to me, perhaps because my issue reports were concise and complete and reproduce-able), though he was nicer than some of the other folks we were working with (Han Reiser was perhaps the most cantankerous, aside from Linus). But, the important thing was that he was impressively competent. I'd send him a kernel oops and he'd fix it by the next day, sometimes after a couple of back-and-forth communications or having him login to a box where he could replicate it, usually along with an amusing explanation of why the hardware implementation was broken. I think it would be difficult to overstate how important he was during those important growth years for Linux; without reliable and fast hard disk drivers, a system is crippled, and he single-handedly built a significant portion of the ATA drivers during that period.

I never met him in person or knew him on a real personal level, but I considered him a great ally of the things I care most about (software freedom and reliable software, in particular). I hate to see him go, and I'm sorry his family has to go through this. I know that he inspired many developers to stand up for software freedom as well as technically sound implementations, not because he preached about it but because he lived it, every day.
The republicans want to frame the presidential race as Big government vs. small government. "Romney wants to let the free market fuel America's success while Obama wants the government to your money and spend it how they see fit" Obama has recently tried to point out that the success of the free market in America has been dependent on the US Government. "Someone built the road and bridges and someone educated your employees, and someone built they internet that you use. Those things were funded by tax dollars." In this editorial this guy is hoping to convince people that the government was not responsible for setting the foundation of the internet.
>"Reality is more nuanced, of course."

Yes, there were Windows NT and 2000.

And an entire line of server products.

And applications, games, hardware, and a search search engine.

Not to mention enterprise services, etc.

The article is all about repeating the standard narrative.
I think this has been around longer than a year
A crowd sourced review for a crowd sourced user experience.
I've got a dev team of ten, working mostly on iOS and android game apps for hire. We've done 8 iOS/android games in the last couple years, some of them AAA, some not.

Paid ($1) games of a decent quality typically generate sales between 40 and 100 thousand; and can do much better if 'everything goes right'. Development costs are roughly the same. For apps, seems around 75% of cost is on the engineering side. Design is all from third parties here but included in the above figures.

Work is enjoyable.
NO. You will break the universe. Do not attempt this.
Guess no more whatismyip what is next trace route :)
This is hilarious. Mythical man ymonth applied to writing. Let's crowd source some more Tolstoy novels while we're at it.
Thanks :)

I'd say the caps are both a representation of your progession as well as a motivator; encouraging you to keep your profile up to date with new information. I'd love it if we could get people to remove the somewhat taboo nature of frequently updated their public CVs even when they aren't looking for a change in scenery. While caps/points aren't necessarily the answer to that, I believe that providing suggestions for personal growth and improvement would be strong motivators.
I signed up the first day I heard of nReduce and got deeply disappointed when they required twitter access to log in.

I hope they changed policies.
Somehow it doesn't work for me. Maybe country/language differences or adblocker?
So we have to continue with an ugly bikeshed for the rest of eternity? I think it's very important that whenever it is decided that objectively one way of doing it is better than another way that eventually that way finds itself to be the way it is.

You basically imply that this change is not big enough to warrant a break with backwards compatibility, but small discontinuities and hacks add up. If thinks like this aren't fixed every once in a while the system will be ridden with inconsistencies.

Besides, even though it hurts when you've inherited some crazy unreadable code that utilizes some obsoleted functionality I think it is always positive for the code quality when the chaos monkey comes around and breaks something.

edit: the downvote button is to indicate I am detrimental to the discussion, the reply button is for when you disagree with me :)
Seriously? Maybe I'm a bit naive, but I never would have searched for pinweel if I was planning to launch as pinwheel (spelled correctly), and I had the domain name.
Mary and Josh release software
Grep is used in hundreds of millions of scripts ranging from mundane rarely used things to install scripts to critical system functionality run every few minutes.

It's not acceptable to break the default way it works under any circumstances.
Seems to be up for me now, DC area.
Yes, yes, yes. I've been fighting photo management software for years when all I want is the ability to tag files.
The "nobody under 30 writes MS" statement is obviously false at it's core but perhaps it means something slightly different?

I imagine most of the under-30 devs working on MS software are being hired by established companies to work on enterprise type software or for consultancies building websites using ASP.net etc.

What about people under 30 who are starting their own businesses from scratch? For example startups, they tend to be using stuff like Ruby/Python/JS etc.

So the question is , what happens when the old guard start to retire? How many will stick with MS because that is what they have used to that point , or will there be interest in switching to newer tools to build newer systems?
Dune 2 is favorite Tower Defense + Tank Rush game. Last month I played Dune 2000 Ordos to Level 8 (it's quite hard, or I suck more than I did in the youth).

There's also a "Super Dune 2" somewhere on the net for more difficulty.
Also http://whatismyip.akamai.com/ for a completely clean "get my IP" page
Good to hear from someone with experience, thanks.
The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance
Phusion Passenger Enterprise: Live IRB Console and Deployment Error Resistance
I was thinking of http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gray/papers/TE... although in retrospect I'm not sure if they implemented cross-node transactions.
Mock Objects: Tell Don't Ask and Mock Objects
There are 2 main differences this time, though:

1) Windows 8 is changing Windows in pretty fundamental ways (being touch first, leaving the "PC" behind), and I can't foresee anything but minor changes in Windows 9 to this direction. I doubt they will try to go back to making Windows 9 a true successor of Windows 7. That seems very unlikely to me now. Microsoft is all-in with this tile-based version of Windows. Even their logo has changed to reflect that. So businesses who don't want to stay on Windows 7 forever, should take into account alternatives.

2) Even if you hated Windows Vista, there was nowhere to turn in 2005 but Windows XP. Now there are some pretty good alternatives, and people are getting used to using different operating systems than Windows, which I think is a huge deal, because it's usually very hard to convince users to use another OS.
First it was the opium dens, then the June Fourth Incident, and now the Internet Cafes. There's always something corrupting the Chinese youths.

Given the sheer numbers reported, I imagine a great deal of injustice has been meted out in attempting to stamp out "injustice". Probably someone on high issued a dictate, that was followed by some action, then some numbers to show how well everything was done.
Citation - I work at Google (in a much different area). It was actually a change rolled out to talk systems. I don't know what the change was yet but will get details and the system is recovering.
A little funding for basic computer science research is not big government. Bailing out banks and giving private solar companies loans is big government.
Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage?

Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicians, ideologues, and other interests who want to cut government spending.
Another cool feature (is this new?): A scientific calculator
https://www.google.com/search?q=ln(4)%20-%20sqrt(3)
Postbox and the Mac App Store
North Texas appears to be up.
it's just that the syntax of ObjC is a total mind fuck.
Wish you could code in whatever you wanted and then compile to native code with a plain compiler, no need for the UI designer BS. Just give me a Java to native compiler and wrappers to all the Cocoa libraries.