skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been much discussed, but I'm afraid I'm still very strongly of the opinion that it's an idea that yields positive benefits -- and we should continue to do as much to avoid shadowed variables as possible.

Always open to debate though, and note that other dialects (Coco, perhaps LiveScript) have added another operator to distinguish higher scoped assignments.
>> 1) Income inequality isn't something that worries me personally, as long as all income levels are rising in quality of life.

We disagree, in that relative inequality is IMHO a concern. The consequences of high societal inequality are reasonably well documented. Negative effects of high inequality include but are not limited to higher rates of obesity, incarceration & drug use, and lower rates of life expectancy, social mobility and educational performance.[1][4]

In addition to affecting levels of trust and civic
engagement, inequality in society has also shown to be
highly correlated with crime rates. Most studies looking
into the relationship between crime and inequality have
concentrated on homicides—since homicides are almost
identically defined across all nations and
jurisdictions. There have been over fifty studies
showing tendencies for violence to be more common in
societies where income differences are larger.[1][3]

Furthermore, lower levels if inequality are correlated to an increase in sustained periods of economic growth, both among developing as well as developed nations [2].

>> 2)Of course, there is the possibility that someday automation completely eliminates all workers leading to a destitute class, or overpopulation overtaxes the food supply, but all evidence points to supreme adaptability of people to overcome these problems, so on the balance of probabilities I take it as a given that the same progress will continue. Optimism, arrogance or idiocy - people would accuse this view of all three, depending on their viewpoint.

Reasonable people can agree to disagree on this point.

>>3) It often gets missed that when automation occurs, even the people who lose their jobs often get access to the product of that automation at a cheaper price than before, and in the long run are better off once re-employment is found. The classic case is the buggy whip maker, who, despite losing their livelihood, is eventually able to afford the Model T that put them out of business.

You will find no argument from me that the economy has thus far been able to re-allocate labor assets reasonably efficiently. The key to the above is not the availability of new goods (the Model T), but the ability of the laborer (buggy maker) to secure re-employment having been made obsolete. You mention it as a given, however this is not necessarily the case.

Since this ultimately ties back to point #2 above, we can agree to disagree. I personally view current trends as being volatile enough to make direct comparisons with the past highly unreliable as markers for future prediction.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality#Effects_of_in...

[2]http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2011/sdn1108.pdf

[3]http://psych.mcmaster.ca/dalywilson/iiahr2001.pdf

[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equa...
I put together this gist as a quick how-to:
https://gist.github.com/3719753
Fair enough. Let's say their cost for a phone, computer, and tablet is $2000. With 94,000 employees, that's 188 $M. I suppose that's pretty trivial when your market cap is 259 $B.
>CS's scoping is a bit... dangerous, because there's no indication of a variable's scope. If you're not paying attention to your environment, you'll inadvertently stomp on higher scopes or globals. You can lose assignments through typos too.

Not just that, but adding a variable to an outer scope can break functions that were previously just fine. Isn't the whole point of scoping that changing code in one place won't affect unrelated code in another place?
When that happens we usually make it the second tuesday.
Why? Why oh why do they sound disingenuous?

AOSP is OSS. Google's proprietary apps, for their propreitary services (GMail, Google Calendar, Google Play), are not. Why d you so wrongly act like Google has to provide those applications? Especially if someone has forked Android to compete with traditional Android offerings?
The enormity of choice at a Chinese electronics market
Funny how Twitter happens to have the guy who invented Storm...
Congrats and keep shipping :)
You can look to Eastern European economies for that, as they still pick up the tab for majority of university education.

1) There's certain stigma attached to blue-collar jobs now that everyone and their pet hamster are proud bearers of a college diploma. Finding a good plumber is next to impossible.

2) There's a subset of people thrown into permanent unemployment. Might be a cultural thing, but second education is a rare beast (as you hang out with students of the same level pretty much throughout the degree, so there's social pressure to be in the same age group as other classmates), and if your first and only degree is not very employable (hi, History majors), it becomes a constant conversation point of how screwed up the society is when a college graduate cannot find a job.
Hello! I was actually looking into applying for this a few days ago. However, I am new to development in general -- I only have knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/jQuery. Would this prevent me from being accepted?
The left-hand side: Pretty good, and most would do well to follow this advice. Remember, however, this was written by a VC firm. This isn't a list of things good companies do, it's a list of things that Sequoia portfolio companies do when they make Sequoia money. To be fair, the overlap is notable. Just remember where the incentives are for a piece like this.

The right-hand side: Steve Blank aptly defines a startup as "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." So a business plan written by a startup is, by definition, all lies. They're a fine exercise as long as you're grounded by the fact that you'll end up with 20 slides of pure bullshit. (Read: Don't put real effort into writing business plans, build a company instead.)
> Like all Mozilla projects, this is developed completely in the open.

Surprised that even the tech community doesn't understand the significance of this.
I really like this idea.

Isn't HN meant to be the kind of place to share this stuff? I love the philosophy behind it, I feel like these guys are having a serious crack at building something that ordinary designers can use to make really beautiful pages without needing to know how to code.

The design of that page is really compelling and tasteful. Neatly showcases what the platform can do while retaining your attention.

And as for the haters, all I can say is - if you made it to the bottom of the page then they are definitely doing something right. I'm sure if you were part of their target market the final flourish would work too and you would be keen to sign up.
Nice list and all, but I find myself wondering just how many of these elements of sustainable companies were exhibited by (Sequoia-funded) Color Labs...
How about the part where you don't pay licensing to other companies? In other words, if you're developing the software anyway, may as well use it.
MS has tons of development tools available internally that they don't release to the world. It's possible that what you're wishing you had is sitting out on Toolbox, invisible to anyone outside the firewall.

There's something of a culture of "our internal developers are smarter than our external developers" at Microsoft, so dev tools are often where the dogfooding has been the weakest. It comes from having internal developers who are hacking on things like OS kernels while the external developers have a massive population of coders churning out enterprise CRUD forms (along with a smaller population of more advanced developers), but this internal/external tool gap sometimes really bites them.
I'm usually pretty cynical and nauseated by these kinds of write-ups too but this time I'm going to refrain. If I made the kind of money Gruber does by staying in his pajamas all day and typing snarky one-liners on his iPad, I'd probably will myself into singing Hallelujah every time Apple released a major product too. The man's gotta make make a living, and he's figured out that being the cult elder makes for a pretty damn good living.
Anyone remember dreamless? This reminds me of the meaningless css wars. In a good way.
Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER5NG2i_5V4
Can't find whether it's translated from bytecode or from source file. Would be great if it's from bytecode, which means we can use tons of other languages (Clojure, Groovy, Scala, JavaScript, Python)...
What really annoys me about Go's declaration syntax is that they left out the colon.

Like Pascal/Ada/etc, Go uses a postfix type declaration syntax, but the former languages separate the variable from the type with a colon. This is both more readable—the colon acts as a highly visible marker for the type, whereas with the Go style, the variable and type end up sort of smudged together—and because of its long history, much more familiar.

Go-style: var foo, bar int

Pascal-style: var foo, bar : int

My suspicion is that Go originally did use a colon in declarations and they got rid of it at some point for some reason, because Go's "auto-declaration" syntax actually does use a colon, only without an explicit type: "x := expr" makes much more sense if the normal declaration syntax is "x : type = expr" ("just leave out the type and it will be deduced")....

There doesn't seem any particularly good reason to omit the colon, it's neither onerous to use nor particularly space-consuming. Neither is it likely it simply didn't occur to them, as the declaration syntax is probably consciously based on that of Pascal-family languages. Given that it seem to yield obvious benefits without any obvious problems, I'm mystified as to why it was omitted.

Unfortunately for all its obvious goodness in some areas Go also seems to have a number of these "WTF were they thinking" areas as well. The impression it leaves is of a rough draft, not something polished. Sadly, these quirks are pretty much set in stone now...
> While these guys are off saving the world from the evils of proprietary software, is it ok if I just get on with teaching my kids to program using Codea on our iPad?

If it weren't for these guys we'd be much worse off than we are today. Firefox single handedly dethrowned IE.

It's philosophical but in the same way that IE was at one time the best browser and quickly became the worst - it's not unimaginable that iOS will do the same.

I'm a pragmatist myself but if it weren't for folks like RMS and Mozilla there would be no voice at all for FLOSS. I don't agree with RMS on many things but it's vital that someone as unwavering as him pushes back.
A nice visible reason why the Rails/Node/OSX FOSS community really need to stop doing the following sort of thing for their installations (seen most recently on yeoman.io, but common to get.pow.cx, npm...)::

curl get.totallytrustworthyapp.io | bash

The above examples are obviously legit, but encouraging this kind of lazy access to even local privileges from arbitrary remote scripts (and Yeoman even asks for sudo in a super-friendly way), is the modern equivalent of padlock.gif on your payment page - training poor security practices.
> Here’s the thing: it’s really light.... The glass of the 4/4S feels great, but it’s fragile and, compared to aluminum, heavy.

I find it truly fascinating how magnificently Apple can spin anything it wants any way it wants and have people buy it. For years people have told me how their iPhone's were made of better quality materials and you could feel it in the weight. It was the sign of quality. It's awe inspiring to witness now how after spending so long as a sin, lightness has transformed in the space of 24 hours into a virtue.
It's outdated to the extent it is, in itself, a piece of history.
Biz Dev for engineers
There's also a kind of inevitability here - that schemes with intended pay-off periods measured in decades are not going to interest politicians who's main (some say "only") job is to be re-elected on 3 or 4 year cycles…

Call me cynical, but if this had been my idea - I would have taken it to potential local wealthy benefactors, and probably would not have bothered pitching it to "the government"…
He's missing the point of client-side templates.
Every investor picks duds. What's your point?
Inevitable question: Why hasn't evolution already enabled a natural way of getting to this?

And since it hasn't why should we assume we are ready for it now?
The USA is 6x the size of the UK. Thats the trick. The issue we have: who wants to aggregate all of that power in the hands of [insert conspiraciy theory] actors of dubious propriety. With healthcare thats a problem @20pc GDP (70% increase of size of Gov't spend). With schools, it would need to be thought through, but is likely more manageble. The main conflict with schools is they fight for money, for the research (aka, presitige). Alot of that money comes from the Gov't. And alot of the cost base is fancy non-education-related things.

[edited]
AWS Growth - Adding a Third Availability Zone in Tokyo
Your only other options for early termination of $.each are pretty cumbersome. On the one hand you can bend over backwards to pass in the "should continue" flag "by reference". In C you might pass in bool * should_continue, then do *should_continue = false. In JavaScript you'd have to wrap that in another variable, like flags.should_continue = false, which is less elegant in my opinion. Alternatively, I've seen libraries abuse throw to achieve this, which I also don't like (and I believe has pretty bad performance characteristics, but I can't remember for sure).
I see no such thing.
Video Marketing – Why Use Impact Videos?
Video connects your customers, with tremendous impact and immediacy, to the products and services you offer. Video conveys far more than the single one-at-a-time stream of words that we find on a traditional sales page. Video communicates simultaneously via the senses of vision and hearing. It engages our awareness in multiple layers at the same time: through imagery, motion, color, language, music, rhythm and more.<p>Of course videos needn’t always be complex and multi-layered. Sometimes a simple text or graphic image plus the explanatory power of the human voice does the best job of communicating your message. At the other extreme video can flood the senses with a symphony of sight and sound, saying many things at once through many levels of human perception.
The situation with Color was uniquely transparent that it was ridiculous.

This wasn't some "oh the business idea seemed good, but the team just couldn't get their act together", or, "turned out they attacked the market opportunity from the wrong angle and didn't pivot in time"...

No, this was:

"GEOLOCATION MOBILE SOCIAL INSTAGRAM PICTURES CONCERTS!"

Don't even try to worm out of this and pretend there was any reason to take Color seriously.

$40mm? My ass.
SoundCloud also precompiles their Handlebars templates. In general, it seems like a good idea.

http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/06/building-the-next-so...
Reminded me of that old verse (best said out loud):

"Oneone was a racehorse, twotwo was one too. Twotwo won one race, and twotwo won one too!"
Could you clarify why Windows 8 is Vista 2.0?
That's called "security through obscurity," which isn't really security at all. It didn't prevent daeken from discovering the vulnerability, which means it's likely others with more malicious intent also know about it and are keeping the fact quiet. When the problem goes unpublished, unsuspecting customers will continue to trust the locks on their rooms. When published, customers can make more informed decisions about where to stay.
My cofounder wrote a blog post earlier this year about this: https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/2-do-you-have-enough-exper...

In short, you need to have programmed enough to know that you actually enjoy it. We look for people who are smart, friendly, intellectually curious, enjoy programming, and want to get significantly better.
How do you do it? And on Android as well as iOS? And its the same installation and launch process?

That wasn't working last I checked.
My complaint with a lot of proprietary documentation is that although it exists, it's often almost information free...

E.g., for a function called "void ReverseDirection (x)", the doc says "Reverses the direction of X", without any mention of context, possible issues, subtleties, ... just a mechanical statement of the obvious.
Specifically, in a vacuum the heads crash into the platter, damaging both.
Launch without code.
On that note, what are the viable alternatives?

All I'm really aware of are Google Proprietary Magic™ (motherfuckers. I want colossus baaaaad), CFS from DataStax, Storm (sorta-not-really?), and Spark.
Majority of Sequoia companies become billion dollar businesses and sequoia invests few million in them. In fact for companies like Yahoo it started with few hundred thousands. So what they are saying is not wrong.
Could you explain why Google has the hardware expertise? Besides their Nexus Q, what consumer hardware has Google made?
Sure. My first instinct is to say that's a small concern, but they do have 100k employees.

Sorry, I was introduced to "dogfooding" in Dreaming in Code. I believe there was even a chapter named after it and it was a pretty big deal about how you dogfood to maintain quality. So when I hear the term that's what I assume is implied.
... or you can write it in CS with a for loop which cleans up the syntax quite a bit... or it might be possible to reduce your input first so that you are only iterating over the things you actually want to iterate over...
Clinch iOS app- Automatic Social Video Editor (AWESOME)
I think OP mean that }); doesn't on its own affect program logic, and, realistically if you're reading JS all day your brain is filtering those characters out for you.

The other argument is that }); is line noise and therefore unnecessary, which I think boils down to preference.
IMDB, which started in the days of Usenet, was founded on user contributions. In today's parlance, it's built from user generated content (UGC).

It would be surprising to see any suit to enforce the licensing restrictions on a database built from user contributions like IMDB actually go to trial.

We might come away with some interesting answers to the questions of what licensing terms on such databases are truly enforceable (as opposed to mere intimidation).

What happened to that Craigslist lawsuit? How is that progressing?
Simply swap the air in your facility with helium. As a bonus, corrosion and fires will be a thing of the past.
There are two reasons I disagree with you. Let me start with the one that has some chance of changing your mind.

I believe that spending on education is positive sum. That surely isn't always and everywhere true, but I believe that it's true at the margin, considering the conditions in the U.S. The book that originally convinced me of this was _Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform_, by Hacsi. It details, along with a lot of other evidence, a longitudinal randomized controlled trial (which is very rare in educational policy) which shows a positive benefit from additional education spending (admittedly, of a very specific type, and in one particular context). There's no way to provide a good summary of the evidence in the book, so let me just say that my opinion is that while the evidence is tenuous, the overall weight of the evidence indicates that the gains from education in tax revenue are greater than the costs. If you like, you can check out the book and decide for yourself. If you agree, then government funding of education seems like an obvious solution. And, of course, the overall gains to society are much greater than the increased tax revenue.

I don't mean to say that our educational system is particularly good. In fact, I think it's very inefficient in many ways. That doesn't preclude the previous conclusion, though.

The second reason is that, in the model above, college administrators capture much of the value added by subsidies. Some gain goes to "good" students, and "bad" students are severely penalized. I believe that's apparent from looking at the practical results, and you can see that in the model by adding student ability and graduation rate to the simple model above. You get an even more extreme result if you add types of degrees (hard vs. easy, with hard degrees resulting in more compensation. Typing out the entire "proof" would be tedious, but I can do it, if you disagree with the result of the model, given the premises. But, in the end, this is a philosophical difference. I don't think that we should be subsidizing college administrators (who are already much better off than average) and really good students (who, on average, will do fine in life anyway) at the expense of bad students (who, IMO, could use some help). I understand that a lot of folks would prefer that people are rewarded purely on talent. Having subsidized loans with a random probabilistic outcome magnifies that, so perhaps you think that solution is fair and just. If that's the case, and you're not convinced that spending on education is a net positive, then there's no hope my line of reasoning will convince you, and we'll have to agree to disagree.

I agree that incentive compatible solutions are important, but I don't think that creating a system that's efficient (in the sense that an econ 101 student would use the word) is the only thing we should consider.

P.S. Your original comment has been downvoted, but it wasn't by me. I disagree with your position, but I don't think you're arguing in bad faith or presenting even presenting a fallacious argument, which are the things I would downvote someone for.
CoffeeScript is only two years old. It hasn't been around for a "long time".
In C++'s defense in the one example you gave, you could have just done this and had the same amount of code:

if (map.find(x) != map.end()) {
}
I mean, I'm not defending Color. It was a terrible app and an even more terrible business. Sequoia invested in the team because they liked them. They gave a bag of money to people they thought could make good use of it, and it didn't pan out.
Coming from a European country where we still have free university I think it's a good thing. Sadly things are changing. Now there are limitations, first universities where you have to pay and ever since this was introduced you can follow how the rankings fall and fall.

Note for people from the US: College/University is harder to attend to (graduating from high school is harder) and it's also harder to stay in there (or not take long), so it's still not like everyone can attend it which sucks, because the reason may besides personal problems may be the fact that you are not good at something you won't ever need again anyway. Also on personal experience stuff like math is completely different at college anyway, if you study CS.
There may be bugs, but being able to select compatibility modes from prior versions isn't something I've seen in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox.
My point is that Color Labs was obviously a dud when it was funded by Sequoia[1] -- and that it almost certainly satisfied none or nearly none of Sequoia's own putative criteria. They are certainly entitled to their duds -- but when they are of Color's magnitude, it makes it a little hard to endure their sanctimoniousness around building sustainable businesses.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364463
You're still ultimately going to be running some code without reading all of it first, aren't you?
The point is, they're not practicing what they preach if they publish this list and yet fund a company that doesn't follow most of it.
More like $200 for a tablet, and $400-$600 for a phone. Those are retail prices, and I'm sure MS gets a pretty good discount on those too. You tend to get things a lot cheaper if you buy a lot of them.