skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... it is very difficult to find candidates who know anything but Microsoft tools.

This may depend on a variety of things, such as the job location and desired skill level, but this blanket statement is false. For example, it seems that a significant number of Hacker News participants - who are developers - develop in other languages and platforms.

... completely detached from reality.

My personal opinion is that developers who don't learn other languages, platforms, and tools are completely detached from reality. There will always be (perhaps seemingly a majority of) people where being a developer is just a "job" and learning new things isn't necessary. But, again my personal opinion, this ultimately harms yourself.

Finding good people is hard. Many others have written about this, but don't be discouraged that there's only Microsoft developers out there.
The short (and rather dated) article states:

The only way to observe the behaviour of an object is to see how it affects the state of its world by sending commands to other objects. And that's what Mock Objects let you do.

Does anyone know of a concrete example of this?
I like http://jsonip.com/ as well
Ha! That is because we were hacking and twitter has the easiest oAuth :) I know kind of ghetto. Now you can sign up with linkedin or email
How much music do you have? 100 songs?

I have 5,380 titles, I cannot for the life of me imagine how to deal with that inside the confines of the file system. I want to browse my music. (It probably doesn’t help that I despise search. Search is no alternative to browsing for me.)

(Besides: This is not some evil scheme. Metadata for music is completely standard. My music library app – and every popular music library app – puts music in straightforward human-readable folders. That’s a nice fallback if all else fails – but to me it is just that. A fallback.)
How I hacked my brain with Adderall: a cautionary tale
both down in italy
Please don't misunderstand. If you want to use WordPress that's great. My "What were you thinking" comment refers to PHPBB only, which I've seen used more than once for the primary blog for a startup. I'll use more commas next time or something.

That said, Habari is also a good choice for a blog. ;)
Stop buying TN panels then.
> Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead.

I'm 29 now, switched to mostly doing C# two years ago, and I love it. Its mix of pragmatism, familiarity and modern constructs is unparalleled, and no other truly modern language has this good IDE support.

The only thing I don't love about it is the vendor lock-in, but in reality this is a smaller problem for many applications than it seems.
Don't forget about

curl ifconfig.me
This. I got downvoted the other day for saying that about Kicksend: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4159367

Maybe because it was not on topic but it does get on my nerves.
Clicked it expecting another "list of mixtapes by deadmau5", ended up very surprised, and bought a copy! Very cool!

I know Ableton Live has python scripting support built in. I wonder how hard it'd be to integrate all this into composer tools in the DAW
You missed the part where almost every Windows app breaks at high DPI.
Interesting, it'll display -0.345756 as the answer, but if you toggle the radians/degrees switch twice, it'll show you -0.3457564464
Most software isn't written at start-ups, of course.
Agreed.

I recall someone saying once upon a time (this is a personal anecdote, not something from public history) that it would be in company's best interests to educate employees and therefore we should let the private free market handle education while altogether abolishing public education. I can't comprehend why anyone couldn't see how public education (or at the very least heavily regulated, all-private education) is an ultimate benefit to society.

You think 'government indoctrination' is bad now? How about when these corporations funding the schools start insisting that curricula be modified toward their own agendas? Or perhaps when they decide indentured servitude is the best way to get a 'return on investment' (i.e. we educated you/your kids for the last five years, you owe us five years of employment at reduced wages)?

But that's not actually likely to happen if education were entirely privatized. No, because corporations are focused on returns now and their numbers for this quarter and spending on education cuts into the bottom line and the ROI doesn't happen for two decades. Then, the schools realizing that everyone needs an education and it needs to be funded, start calling for taxes to pay for universal education...

It's a similar problem for pure research. No one knows if pure research will pay off. Ever. Sometimes, it pays off in fifty years. On odd occasions it pays off in less than ten. It seldom pays off in the next twelve months. Someone has to insist on pure research to move technology forward. Or we could all just stay like we are, use up our resources, and go back to living in caves.
> He's been throwing his employees under the bus for over a year now.

Yep: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2352521

It wasn't the execution that destroyed Digg, it was the ideas behind v4. It's a remarkable case study in what not to do with a popular community website, and pointing to technical mistakes is just deflection. Maybe the developers were terrible, but that still has very little to do with why Digg failed.
Microsoft profits from Linux patent FUD
Probably with Citrix-compatible thin clients. There are a ton of those out there.

Why would you post this reply when I specifically address that in the next two sentences?

That may be true in the US and some parts of Western Europe, such as the UK, but what about the rest of the world?

India is overwhelmingly Microsoft-centric. Eastern Europe is overwhelmingly Microsoft-centric. Much of Russia is very Microsoft-centric.

But nonetheless your oddly defensive argument (know the author?) sounds suspiciously like the "oh yeah, they're big in Germany" retort. But anyways what I am replying to is what I see as a immediately ridiculous claim that people under 30 don't know Microsoft, when the overwhelming proof says otherwise.

The author of the blog post, John Hempton, is a hedge fund manager who works out of Australia but invests worldwide, and he often thinks and writes in terms of global trends

This is one of the stranger appeals to authority that I've yet read. When I think "technology trends expert" I don't think "hedge fund manager". That someone invests money gives them zero authority on technology trends. I should add to notice that my business is hedge fund technology, so the circle is kind of complete here.
Another thought: Since rgrep is an alias for grep -r and grep -r has changed, the complete rgrep tool has changed and this can _not_ be fixed by using the "right" switch. Hence rgrep is useless for scripting now.
How Crucial Is the Celebrity Effect for Start-Ups?
We're an iPad travel magazine and are up to about 350 downloads a month. No paid developers, or any developers actually, we rely on a pretty cool open source tool called Baker and I've self-taught myself bits of code here and there to make it work. No profit yet, the ad selling starts next month, so we'll find out then if it will be a success. :)
There were no serious threats to their dominance before; now they have iOS, Android and even OS-X is starting to gain more marketshare than I'd be comfortable with if I were ballmer.
Kudos for Steve Reich on the very front!
Visual Studio 2010 All-in-One for Dummies Ebook
Microsoft Will Kill Its Own Surface Tablet With $1,000 Price Tag
> With very little effort, pretty much anything can be called OAuth 2.0 compliant.

This was both a sigh of relief but also slightly horrifying when I was working on an oauth2 server in Node. It encourages a lazy "implement the parts we care about and that are required, and take shortcuts for unspecified things." I thought the separation of access tokens and refresh tokens was wrong because once you're just giving the client an encrypted string to avoid certain DB lookups later you can put whatever data you want in it (the spec doesn't care) including managing refreshes, revokes, etc. I like the idea of expiring tokens of course, but it would simplify the client significantly to just replace the currently used token with a new token issued by the server if one is returned. I recall the 'standard' flow is "request with access token, fail, request new access token with refresh token if you have one, maybe succeed, maybe get a new refresh token, if succeed request with new access token". Having the access token manage the data to refresh itself is simpler. I'd agree it's bad that token security is reduced to cookie security by default, really the whole rant is spot-on.
Ray Ban Clubmaster solglasögon
Have you read the journals of Jordan Mechner from when he was developing Prince of Persia? They're a fascinating look at the development of early computer games.

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/
Thanks for these important missing bits of information, in light of these I think the change sounds much more reasonable.

/me updates rgrep alias to use -R
"Here are the photos of you dancing at the party next week. Do you still want to go?"
As a Mac developer who's also affected by the mandatory sandboxing requirement, I fully agree.
One of our applications, Trickster, doesn't work sandboxed (being a system utility) as is and we're in this situation where we have customers on the Mac App Store who can't receive updates anymore. Needless to say, neither us nor our customers (who'll mostly blame us) are happy about this.
Most companies aren't graced with a founder who was already rich.
They can write interesting architectural or business things without it being a "blatant advertisement". Often if I read that someone is using Redis in a clever way I'm curious what they are using it for and would appreciate an easy way to get to their main site.
If what this guy says is true, the real story here is that Egnyte lied - the good news is that they now have $16M bucks for HIPAA breach penalties!
It seems to me that there's an opportunity for someone to create a knock-off of the Mac App Store without the restrictions. I'd be a customer.
The argument really isn't labels vs. directories but files vs. siloed databases. The fact that iTunes knows one tag doesn't do me any good for finding the file for use in another application. Labels are great things, but they're much less usable than directories because they're totally siloed to individual applications. iOS definitely does not have a filesystem that replaces folders with tags.
The corporate market is much larger than the start up market. Many corporate web sites, intranets and web applications run on either Java or .NET. This isn't exactly a secret.

That's only one part of the cake however. Think of all the companies out there. From engineering to banking to manufacturers of Q-Tips.
Or making better money compared to your peers.
This may depend on a variety of things, such as the job location and desired skill level, but this blanket statement is false.

The blanket statement was a personal observation about our own hiring, so I can assure you with complete conviction that it is not false. Further I addressed the alternate universe of the start-up world, comprising a tiny, tiny percentage of software developers, and that is what HN caters to.

Just to be clear, I don't like that most candidates outside of the startup-sphere are so Microsoft or Java centric. In fact it is a battle that we constantly have to fight (hire somebody and then have to argue every single decision that isn't the Microsoft Way). Yet I have enough real world development experience that I found that claim so ridiculously detached from reality that the author lost any and all credibility on tech matters.
Mark Cuban Leads Mobile App Marketplace Apptopia’s $1 Million Seed Round
I had to stop reading at "I've never met a user who has trouble navigating nested directories."

My experience tells me he is in the 'tech guy' bubble. As someone who volunteered helping city kids use computers, had a 'business' fixing people's computers, and has a dad who teaches a free computer class at a library, and has worked tech support, I say with some confidence that the silent majority of people don't understand folders at all.

You have to be a tech savvy, middle to upper middle class person with relatively high motivation before you stand a chance of understanding folder structure. Exceptions abound, of course, but then again most 9-5 working, intelligent people struggle to organize their data in folders even though they fit my demographic of people with a chance to understand.
Senate live stream of cyber security bill
The article's focus is on the internet itself, which is the "inter-network" - the interoperation of individual networks. The first of these networks was ARPANET, which was developed by contractors by the request and under the management of ARPA (since renamed DARPA). ARPA proposed ARPANET in 1968. So the government's pioneering work in networking goes back further than this article discusses.

There is a complex history here; lots of people built on each other's work, inside and outside the US government and around the world. But it's silly to claim the US government gets no credit.

Of course, the government is always full of conflicting opinions. ARPA's funding of something so speculative and not specifically for military application had to be finessed and described in military terms to satisfy some congress members. But ARPA itself was created with the mission of advanced research after the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik, so computer networking was really quite well within its mission.

If anyone wants to learn more about this history, I recommend "Inventing the Internet" and "Where Wizards Stay Up Late." The former is a bit more academic and technical, but still easy to read, and the latter is a bit more focused on the people involved.
Markov Chains in Plain English
Where else is there? Development in India is more ingrained in Microsoft than anywhere else on earth. Looking for blog posts on silverlight will lead to a poorly written guide by a developer in India. ALL LARGE IT CONSULTING FIRMS have major operations in India, and the majority of them use ASP.NET or WPF. Many are now moving over to open technologies like rails, but only in small US specific shops targeting US customers. I haven't heard or interacted with many Chinese developers who aren't in the US. You mentioned western Europe specifically--from working with some Microsoft platform lately, it seems like most silverlight 'vendors' in Europe of are in eastern Europe (most notably, i think, Telerik).

Australia may be the exception to the rule, though I doubt that a quarter of Australian CS majors go on to work somewhere using python, rails, or PHP. A good number probably go to java, a compiled language, or iOS dev, but if they're going into web, i'd be hard pressed to believe that a majority aren't going into an ASP.NET operation.

Claiming that most developers under 30 don't use microsoft platforms is just pish-posh. They just don't learn it in class, and don't do it in their free time. That doesn't mean their first job isn't going to be a DB analyst on some 10 year old VB.net application.
Yes, I believe so. I often use google for quick calculations and this is the first time I am seeing this show up.
Any idea when it will be released? I love the time-lapse video. Well done!
Existing things I can think of:
* Gaming streaming services like gaikai/onlive - as people continue to get bigger monitor resolutions (like the new retina mbp), they're going to want those resolutions supported eventually.

* Game downloads in general - Downloading some games is upwards of 20 gigabytes, which is fairly slow on most networks

Regardless, it's a step in the right direction IMO - a huge part of the USA is still on a connection that can't reasonably do any of the things you and I have mentioned. If google wants to work on fixing that, I'm happy to let them.
I like http://icanhazip.com best
I'm not sure how much you'd get out of it by "banging" through it. I took SICP at MIT my first semester freshman year, and this class changed my life. I can't even begin to express how amazing I found it. I went to MIT because I wanted to study neutron stars and black holes, and I found SICP to be even more amazing than those, so I changed majors. Since I put a great deal of effort into the class, many of the techniques discussed in the book are still second nature to me.

In the the MIT class, you were expected to put in 15 hours a week for 14 weeks, which is the length of an MIT semester. I probably put in double that, because I loved the materials and exercises so much. (Due to my efforts I did get one of the very best grades in the class, out of 200+ students, but it wasn't necessary to work quite that hard to do well in the class. I'm sure that one could have learned a great deal with the recommendation of 15 hours.)

I'm sure that you can still get a great deal out of the book just by reading it carefully, and that would take a small fraction of the time that it would take to treat the book like a real class. But the best way to learn, of course, is always by doing!

P.S. Be sure to watch the lectures for the class, which are online, albeit in a somewhat abbreviated form. In fact, it might be best just to start with them, and see how you like them.
With Mountain Lion and the iCloud feature only allowed on apps from the Mac App Store, this is a lot harder to do than it previously was.
Learn Smalltalk in 5 minutes (in the browser)
If I were ever involved in a standards process, my gut feeling is that I'd want working code for all serious proposals. Does that seem feasible?

Perhaps the WG would produce a set of use-case prototypes which proposals are built on.
Not so fast, you only get the mixtape by deadmau5 if you buy 5 copies ;-)
The problem with it is that you are assuming that your users are blithering idiots without any actual work to do.

I think we are assuming there will be more sophisticated organizational systems built on top of this abstracted file system eventually. We are still in the very early days of this transition. The need to logically organize files can be accomplished in many different ways. An OS could have logical organization features based on concepts like projects, collections, etc. At that point you can start doing some fancy stuff. What if two projects overlap in some way? No problem. They can both reference the same files. Maybe my project is going to include 100 image files that someone else on my team is producing. No problem. I will just add their shared collection of images into the project and they will auto-update themselves anytime my team member makes changes. In the long run this is all about consolidating sharing, organization and collaboration.
Also up for me, also DC area.
Out of curiosity, are the examples intended for python 3? I noticed in the sample you're passing around 1/4, 1/2, etc. which doesn't do a whole lot in 2.x. :)
Technologies ready to reduce annoying check-out waits
5 Tips to Increase Engagement on Your Site
How can he possibly be the best when everyone one of his projects have failed? I also admire him, but lately he seems better at angel investing and spotting other peoples successes than building his own.
Git merge - When should I use git pull --rebase?
As a customer I totally agree. I wouldn't care about simple 5$ tools being removed. But if more expensive tools like PDFPen Pro (which I bought) get removed then I will certainly be very upset. And just because this danger is present I'm very careful and not buying any expensive software anymore from the Mac App Store whenever given the choice (except Apple software of course). That's a pity for both developers and customers.
Thanks! I have the book mostly written, but editing and layout will probably take another month. Mid August or early September...
Increasing Application Performance with HTTP Cache Headers
The claim he's referencing:

Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful
protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it
languished...In less than a decade, private concerns have
taken that protocol and created one of the most important
technological revolutions of the millennia.

Is Cerf's argument against the notion that it was private concerns that created the internet on top of a languishing protocol? That's valid, though it's certainly true that without the private sector investing in developing on top of the internet that it wouldn't be where it is today.
Mark Cuban leads $1M investment in app seller Apptopia
Perfect. I'd add a link to the list of resources :)

Thank you for the awesome work! I'll try and leave feedback on the subreddit once I get started.
Vert.x - the orgy of JVM langs continues with Python and CoffeeScript support
Online-Reputation Services Promise to Erase Negative Feedback. Issues…
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.

As someone who was under 30 during Microsoft's heyday (90s) I can say that most developers under 30 then also didn't use MS tools. Borland tools ruled the roost until VC6 and VB6 (around '98). And most young developers out of school back then knew Unix, not Windows.

My point is that it's a myth that there existed some time when all young developers used MS tools. In fact I'd argue that in terms of mindshare MS devtools are near their all-time high in popularity now -- it's that the Windows OS isn't as popular as it once was among the under-30 crowd.
I can't tell you how many times I've signed up for a beta release, totally forgotten about it, and then get a mysterious email with absolutely no information about what the product is, does, etc.

It's so frustrating and at the same time, right before I hit the delete button I think, "Well, if they're not taking much time to clearly explain this at the top of the email or newsletter, what else are they taking shortcuts on?"
"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."

All of that's true, but it's also true that the guy who didn't build a business also gets to use those roads and the internet. It's also true that private spending on telecommunications infrastructure in this country utterly dwarfs public spending. And nobody serious is arguing we shouldn't have roads and bridges.

How any of this is a justification for $1T deficits and real marginal tax rates that will approach 50+% is anyone's guess.

It also sounded really bad coming out of the President's mouth. "I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. . It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there." Hey, maybe being "so smart" and "working harder than everyone else" doesn't guarantee success, but at least most voters think those are pretty helpful in America, and may not appreciate anyone, least of all the President, sneering at them.
Yes. I was fascinated to learn recently that, as Cerf says, Ethernet was based on a broadcast network in Hawaii. Two interesting things about that:

1) Networking between local machines came after larger, more distributed networks. This seems odd to us who might walk around with 3 computers on our person, but in those days, you might have 1 computer per institution, and networking's goal was to allow better sharing of those scarce resources.
2) The Ethernet method of "broadcasting" every message to everyone on the network (absent a switch to filter traffic for individual hosts) seemed odd to me when I first heard it, but there's no other way to do it in a radio network, which is what Ethernet was based on.