skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A seismic shift that resulted in the rise (Apple) and fall (Nokia/RIM/Sony) of empires. How often do we expect that to happen? When did it last happen before 2007?

Looking back, I was more surprised by the rise of Google (and Android/Linux) in a world dominated by Microsoft. But at 28, I'm probably just a little older than you.

I'd also argue that the reason the last milestone was in 2007 isn't because of the iPhone, but because that's just before the global financial superbubble popped (foreshadowed by the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble in 02). IMO, that was the earthquake which stymied true attempts innovation. Many people stopped trying to innovate and starting worrying about finding a safe place for their retirement fund (still are), or worse, finding a job.

Shoot me an email u feel like sharing your POC project with a fellow dreamer.
11.59pm of 2012
It's my impression, and no I don't have data, and I appreciate the data that you share. I'm doing a startup in a related area, so I am trying to figure out who is there and who is responding. I'm trying not to play to a small crowd by design.

It's my impression that it's freelancers, small businesses, people that are Internet savvy "creatives". Certainly that has been your initial crowd, right ?

> that we have problems making sales, or that people play with us and switch easily

Wot ? Yo, chill. I am describing the market segment of early adopters. It's a classic description of the pre chasm phase, a term I am sure you are well aware of. I guess you assume everybody in the thread is jumping on you ? My comment was noting that you have had success in a limited, not mass market. Good job. It's not fucking guitar hero, okay ? 6 year old girls don't scream out your product name, get a grip.
Your gripe sounds a bit trivial to me.

If the service they sell works as promised then they're better than many 'real' companies.
Core or not, I'd prefer coverage of those issues myself. I can't really think of core problems I run into myself, I've been writing core JavaScript for a decade or something, but there's lots of intricacies with those other things where I wouldn't mind tips. Different audiences, I suppose. I browsed the TOC one kind reviewer was nice enough to list, saw there wasn't anything I was interested in or had trouble with lately, and moved on.
He doesn't even have an idea! People that sign up for any/everything aren't too valuable as potential customers.
Thanks for posting this, the code is very readable and good for learning. How much time did you spend on Go before you finished these projects?
In the sense of your statement, people are uncomfortable with compulsory concurrency for everything in Node.js off http not http itself.

Though you have to look at the package api yourself to decide whether it's running directly or not.
Purge All Those Embarrassing Tech Stories Before The New Year
it's pretty easy to just explicitly say "if word is hook able" and "if word is a hook", since you have the whole dictionary to hand
Why not an open challenge? I would be interested!
We encourage all GitHub apps to use proper caching on their end. There's no good reason that a hit on a 3rd party site like Gitrep should relate to one or more GitHub API calls. Use HTTP conditional GETs to retrieve data, and any 304's (cache hits) will not impact your rate limit.

Based on its support of tags/searching, I'd imagine Gitrep is being responsible here though.
I think he's implying having an email list for people who want to follow along, not necessarily actual customers for the ultimate product.

I agree. I love the idea of a mailing list where progress updates are routinely sent (even if just links to new blog posts.)
Programmer productivity is, I think, an irreducible paradox of software engineering. It's difficult bordering on impossible to judge even the success or failure of a given software project. It's also difficult to judge the importance of different contributions to a high level of granularity. There are, of course, exceptions and outliers. Someone who obviously succeeds with a 1-man project, for example. But the broad middle is a muddle. People with talent that has been squandered by circumstance, people without talent who have succeeded due to accident and luck, etc.
Servers ultimate is also made out of amazing sauce if you want to go the other way with your devices.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icecoldapp...
Happy New Year (a world globe in SQL)
For many markets (probably globally too?), there's no single smartphone that's more popular than the latest iPhone. So if you're only going to put one device in a photo, that'll probably be it.

And if you look only at the demographics you're interested in, it's likely that iOS will be at or near the top anyway.
I switched to Route 53 (from TinyDNS with custom RoR/Postgres frontend) and I'm completely satisfied. The bills are tiny, the service has been reliable, the console lets me make all our desired records without a lot of hoop-jumping, and somebody else maintains everything. Migration was a one-day project, including DR.

There are some added bonuses if you happen to be using other AWS services, but even without those, I think Route53 is one of Amazon's better offerings.
> it can take up to 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on task after an interruption.

At first I thought that that is a ridiculously precise time, but it turns out to be a mis-quote. The source [1] claims that that is the average time to get back on task.

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/944128/worker-interrupted-cost-ta...
Yeah, and how did you learn about this god of yours? By reading a material object - a book - written by material beings based on ideas generated in their "brain chemistry," that's how. There's no special metaphysical basis for a knowledge of god, despite your stupid rationalisations.

And we don't "hate God" here - we don't hate any of the imaginary deities invented throughout human history. All of those ideas played an important role in early human culture, even if they are now all firmly past their best by date. Anyway, how can you hate something that doesn't exist? Your claim that we hate your god makes as much sense to us as a Hindu telling you that you hate Ganeesh and Shiva would to you. You would make similar arguments to a Hindu as to why their silly superstition is false, while preserving your own superstition from the same equally-valid critique. We simply observe the most logical and efficient explanation of the many competing ancient superstitions and surmise that they are all equally ungrounded in reality.

We are simply irritated by people who refuse to quit clinging to ancient, irrelevant superstitions, refuse to accept the cutting edge of human knowledge, refuse to accept and take charge of our position in the universe and advance the human story, refuse to accept our true ignorance of the nature of the universe (implicit in claiming that ~3000 year old ideas made up by people orders of magnitude more ignorant than us still have any relevance or signal any absolute truth) - and worst of all refuse to keep their irrelevant ignorance in their pants and instead run around trying to criticise intelligent, enlightened, superstition-free people.
I think it depends a lot on context. I used to participate in a free forum. The founder was brilliant at choking off all possible avenues of monetization while bitching endlessly about wanting to make money (edit: mostly to help cover costs, not necessarily profit per se in his case). He did not want to ask for donations and he also did not want to commercialize it. However it was quite popular and outgrowing its hosting solution, which led to lots of complaints of slowness due to traffic load. I thought he should have posted a notice saying "The site is slow because we need to upgrade from x server costing x amount of money per month to y server costing y amount of money per month. When I get enough donations to cover y for a year in advance, I will happily upgrade. Until then, quit your bitchin." Then any time someone complained, link to the notice (with donate button, naturally) and tell them "Put up or shut up". Similar to the webcomic author whose audience was whining he wasn't updating enough and he said "I make x amount at my day job. Match that." Much to his shock, he had $4000.00 in an hour. He said it to say "shut the fuck up". Instead, he ended up quitting his job and doing the comic full time.

So where do you have demand? Find some way to charge for it. That's what I am trying to say. List your assets, list where you have demand, list different ways that might get monetized. Tie pay to what people want from you.

Best of luck.
Why resize your browser? cmd+tab to Finder, cmd+n a new Finder window, browse to file, drag it in...

(PC win+e a new explorer window and do the same thing)
By the sounds of it, you would make a brilliant "big data" backend developer (e.g. Scala, Python, etc). Lots of web-based companies need them to crunch big numbers.

But if you don't, then I would suggest building ideas that you can build and push live on the web. Lots of novelty (or useful) web apps make lots of media attention, and that would be ideal for employers to be tempted to hire you for that dream role.

Just my 2c.
If you're interested, there's still some low-hanging fruit left, namely in two edge cases:

1. It assumes all slices to be of type []interface{} by default, though oftentimes a more precise type is possible. (This is just a matter of looping through and determining the most specific type)

2. It only accepts valid JSON. Not a bug, but for example, the sample responses on the foursquare API documentation omit the (required) quotation marks around identifiers: https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/venues (click "Try it Out"). That's a common problem which I'd like to fix eventually.
Definitely, early adopters are your friends. They experiment. They validate the idea. They feedback rather than complain. And they may keep you in business for a while. And going mass market isn't everything. The nature of the fickle early adopter crowd just needs to be known and appreciated.
>I am describing the market segment of early adopters.

Right, with the assumption that A) developers are my audience and B) developers behave like early adopters. Now you fan out your description from "developers" to "creatives."

Do creatives behave like early adopters? Is there evidence for that?

> 6 year old girls don't scream out your product name, get a grip.

I think you're misinterpreting my tone, because I'm just pointing out that your comment was full of ungrounded conjecture. It doesn't bother me personally, since I have over 400,000 reasons not to worry what somebody on the internet says about Freckle as a business.

What does bug me is the unquestioning perpetuation of the myth that developers don't pay for things, which is a truthy "fact" that scares people away from serving a varied, diverse, and incredibly valuable market who needs things.
A useful tip on New Years Eve!
Readability api ruby client
You're being facetious, correct?
With a huge 2012, Reddit may be the ultimate Web 2.0 underdog victory
Also, you don't know jack about the way/s I brighten up my life, bitch.
When I entered the web app space, there were quite a few existing diabetes trackers.

It's been 3 years now, I've watched 75% of competitors fold while we kept at it, kept improving our product, growing our SEO rankings and figuring out ways to monetize it.

I hope to do the same for our mobile app :).
Something I think that's interesting and too often overlooked is that even non-programmers can provide lots of help to Open Source projects, sometimes the help they can provide can be critical to the project's success.

What kind of things? Everything from sane documentation to artwork is open and in need of lots of help in many projects.
Wind turbines 'only lasting for half as long as previously thought'
Thanks very much - that app shows me a quiet way from home (Raynes Park) to work (Leatherhead); 13.4 miles. It's far enough off the busy roads I know that I would never have discovered it unaided. On to Street View... then the forecast is good for New Year's day, so it's a good opportunity for a practice run.
Uh... no.
Ruby on Rails runs off a ruby webserver. Flask has its own built in webserver, web.py has its own built in webserver. Tho these are not languages, rather frameworks, (and in the case of web.py, a library), they have built in webservers

My point? These things came way before node.js, so no, node.js isn't the only one with a built in webserver.

The difference is node.js has a rather performant built in webserver (still, exeperience shows that a properly tuned gevent or netty beats a properly tuned node.js). The idea is that instead of spending time tuning these things, you can just wrap it in a uWSGI container, and let better tuned-out-of-the-box servers like nginx handle the webserving
I really don't understand why news sites bother with dedicated apps. It doesn't sound like anything they're doing couldn't be handled by web design these days, music, video, images, layout etc.

Sidenote: From the writeup it sounds like TNW is struggling more with their tooling than with Android. Anybody know of better alternatives?
> That's not content that's activity

It's a reason to continue paying money.

> Zynga games have the same ability to run the grind ad nauseum, interact with other users, etc.

No, they don't. In an MMO, if you get to level 80 as a cleric, you can go back and redo all the zones as a warrior. In a Zynga game, this isn't available: it's what MUD designers called single ladder advancement. You get to level 80 and that's it: you can only keep buying more stuff, or only maintain what you have. That's very different. There's no reason to make a new Facebook account and start over.

In an MMO, there are a plethora of interactions, mostly related to group activities. In a Zynga game, interactions are pushed into status updates. To bring in another analogy, an MMO is like a bar. You can go there, sit down, and chat with people. You can buy a beer if you want, but you don't have to. A Zynga game, however, is a beer. You can talk with people over said beer, but that talking isn't an intrinsic part of the experience of the beer. And at the bottom of the cup, it says, "Tell your friends how great this beer was to get more beer!"

> If Joe Customer wants to log in and keep feeding 25 cent cookies to his Zynga dog every morning he could keep doing that forever.

Yes. But are there enough of him to justify keeping the servers running?

In MMOs, the answers tends towards yes, because the interesting activities tend to be group-friendly, which naturally pushes up the number of people playing and paying. You can't say the same about Zynga games.
You likely have a point there, though I wonder how much of the backlash is just people piling on to a post that is fading, rather than thinking for themselves. I'd wager that at least half the down votes were by people who didn't read most or the comment.
So, you stopped releasing a version for android because the software you're using can't deal with the formatting properly (even though it says it can) and the material you're using is locked to one provider... The majority of the blame definitely lies somewhere other than on android's doorstep.
Exactly. When your content is text and photos, there is no reason you can't make it web only, optimized for various resolutions.
Why two neighbors celebrate 25hours apart
> Basically, I'd call someone a "senior" dev if they tend to answer more questions than they have to ask.

IME "asking questions" has a bimodal distribution along the axis of how good a programmer is: juniors ask the most questions, and seniors ask a ton as well. Sr.s don't ask language/framework questions (very often), but they dig in to requirements, project scopes -- they ask "why?" a lot.
Ah, yeah, I agree. There's a fine line between setting good guidelines for safety and enforcing rules based on highly subjective and personal ideas.

I was mostly impressed by parts like point 18:

>> 18. You will mess up. I will take away your phone. We will sit down and talk about it. We will start over again. You & I, we are always learning. I am on your team. We are in this together.

That kind of learning is important.
Flip a coin. When it's in the air you'll know what side you're hoping for. What you're hoping for will usually make you happier than what the logistics tell you.
I'll definitely look up Apollo. I've been interested in mentalism and magic for a long time but only learned one sleight of hand trick which I'm not very good at. Looks like Derren Brown, who is currently my favorite magician, might have some competition.
They did put the effort in to overcome those issues, only to discover that for every 80 iOS users they had 1 Android user, so they concluded that continuing to do the work wasn't justified because there was a lack of demand. If they'd had comparable demand from Android users, they'd have continued to invest.
I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document that you can't even read it. 100% fidelity is not going to happen, but unless you're designing brochures or things for print, you don't need 100% fidelity.
Honoring the tradition of some of the leaderboard's greats:

This is a duplicate:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4991257
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4991233

(Not that either one of these posts has inspired discussion so far.)

Next, I am going to start a ColinWright fanclub (as a joke, because no one ever joins my lists).

Happy New Year.
It's difficult bordering on impossible to judge even the success or failure of a given software project.

This I disagree with. Causes of success and failure are hard to tease out, but people know when software sucks. Also, if people can't use it, then all the cleverness in the world (in optimizations, for example, or in feature set) doesn't matter. It still sucks.

But the broad middle is a muddle. People with talent that has been squandered by circumstance, people without talent who have succeeded due to accident and luck, etc.

That's very true.

This is part of why I think Valve's self-organizing open allocation is superior. Management rarely knows who the best programmers are. The group of programmers, if they're good, usually can figure out an appropriate leader on a per-project basis. This doesn't generate the permanent, entitled leadership that management wants to see, but it gets the job done.

You also need to create room to fail. If the software project can't be saved, let it die so people can allocate their talents and energy to something that has better odds. Give the architects respect for trying and ask them to write up the challenges they encountered, so as to keep the knowledge in house. If you fire people for failing projects, then you lose that knowledge and will probably fail in the same way again.
To extend the analogy, expanding to the wild west eventually required a revolutionary war with Great Britian. That's a war Silicon Valley is woefully unprepared for.
My brain hurts from the stupidity of this story.
In 2011 Rails had been out for about 6 years. If we assume that the prereq for getting 6-12 mos. of real-world experience is 6-12 months of practice time, then your recruiter's definition would be more like 12-24 months' experience. On the high end, that's 1/3 of Rails' existence!

Like any other new tech, that number is bound to inflate with time.
Cute. Like Apaches retarded little brother ;)
They offer an optional subscription through in-app purchase on iOS.

I imagine they get a lot more support that way than they would if they put it on the web with a 'donate' button, so basically they are putting their effort into the audience who is willing to pay them.

Why would they just give it away rather than going to the market that values their product?
Yes it will - that's basic relativity. From the point of view of the person firing the gun it will look entirely normal - as if it's flying off into the distance. Only from the point of view of someone on the ground will it appear to just fall.

However... a bullet normally travels around 2000 fps, 1363 mph. Even the slowest bullets still travel 700 mph or so. So you wouldn't see it in practice.
People read about Feynman because he was fun.

Who here has read a biography of Dirac? One summer he got a book of differential equations and worked them through. Other than research, he would take a walk on Sundays.

He also got a Nobel Prize in Physics. But few aspire to walk in his footsteps.
My Dad's Nonprofit: Fighting preventable blindness
The Prozac Yogurt Effect (March 2012)
I don't have an opinion on major lifts as I have fairly little experience with them, but as a younger man I would have (uninformedly) considered them "not right for me". What I did find right for me was intense rowing (on a machine), which I believe develops many of the same support muscles (but doesn't lead to the hypertrophy-induced visible muscle growth the same way lifts do, so if that's your goal rowing may not fit you).

For my tastes, I find rowing the perfect counterbalance to a sedentary lifestyle. The full-body compression/extension cycle just feels like the direct opposite of sitting fixed at a desk all day. It may be psychological, but it's very common for me to sense a relative weakening in my posture control muscles if I miss a week of rowing for holidays or illness.

Related tip: if you find long (6+ hr) flights physically taxing (yes, first world problems etc.), improving your posture control musculature can provide noticeable relief. Even as a teenager I used to dread having to sit upright and mostly fixed in place on transatlantic flights, but ever since I took up rowing in my early 20s I almost never feel cramped or fatigued anymore even on long haul 15+hr flights.
I suppose this is a call to action for a better magazine publishing tool. It is an interesting challenge, and one illustrates the 'ecosystem' effect. They're publishing software supplier (Mag+) is better at supporting iOS than Android, so supporting Android becomes too onerous.

On the one hand that is sad for TNW, after all more subscribers is always good, but it is really bad for Mag+ since it points out a gaping hole in their strategy. By not investing in Android they leave the larger market share of Android devices open to another publishing company, and when that company uses the strength of their Android base to enter the iOS market, their customers (like TNW) will switch because they are all about the subscriber numbers.

Lets see how Mag+ responds ...
A mom and son's 18 point contract for an iPhone
Thank you for your Computer Science work on Khan Academy! I tech my kids using your system for several months now, and I am very happy! :) Would be great to be able to change the rendering size from 400x400 to something bigger, may be even having a splitter in the middle, and deciding how much you want to use for the editor and for the program :)

Happy New Year!
I can't really quantify it as it was in drips but in general, since I already knew C and Python, learning Go was easy. I could have started to write a web app right away, following tutorials on Go website and elsewhere.

At the beginning it's frustratingly slow, as it always is when you learn something new, but if you know other C-like languages, picking up Go will be fast. You just have to put the time to learn standard library and Go way of doing some things.
Indeed, but what I was mostly getting at is that you have another possible attack vector if your run your own DNS, while services that provide it for you are basically pennies on the dollar compared to potential losses.
I think the author didn't read Lean Startup - or didn't understand it properly. MVP isn't a product per se, it's a customer discovery process.
What is Metachromatic Leukodystrophy