skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google has a monopoly on search in the US due to some early advances (letting them kick Yahoo, altavista, and similar early competitors to the corner) that now seems to mostly be maintained by both having sequestered some content by unfair licensing discrimination (such as YouTube in this example) and generally by "we have more of the web cached and indexed than anyone else" (a race they have a many years head start on, and barring some disruptive advance is probably going to be true for a long while).

They are now using the money they make advertising on that search system (if you check their Q10 they don't actually get much money from third party adsense websites: first party inventory dominates) in order to build large numbers of "engh, good enough but not great" services that are impossible to compete against because Google just gives them away for free or even operates them at a loss... it really isn't that different. They are even now starting to "bundle" things together with their search platform (G+) to directly leverage their position to propel other products.

This is especially clear as what really screwed Microsoft was trying to make certain everyone had access to a web browser that could itself be used as an application platform rather than having to pay license fees to a company (Netscape, if this isn't clear) that had such a large web usage marketshare that they were able to run roughshod over the W3 (to the point where their mailing list sometimes described Microsoft as the open hero that will save them; Microsoft even was providing their DTDs for public review, which impressed the crowd).

Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup, to hold back the original CSS attempts by being unwilling to implement them, and to add tons of proprietary features to their JavaScript engine that they considered a killer feature that others had to bug-for-bug emulate. I mean: I look at the situation and find it surprising that anyone wouldn't think it isn't the exact same story playing out a second (arguably, even a third) time ("you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian", etc.).
"To recap, Page criticized Microsoft for treating Google as a rival, blasted Oracle for caring too much about money, and then whined about everyone being so negative. Heck, if it weren’t for those other companies standing in the way, Google would have probably already solved world hunger."

I mean, pretty much this (assuming the above was facetious). The Youtube thing really made me lose a lot of hope in Google as a company. Even though, I feel that we've made great strides in the past 10 years, I can't help but be reminded that:

1) I have people on my Facebook that I can't add to my phone without some ridiculous hacks (that essentially scrape FB, breaking the TOS) - thanks Facebook

2) I can't use GMail in the vanilla mail app on my touchscreen W8 laptop - thanks Google

3) I can't have a Metro Chrome app - thanks Google

4) My sister can't have almost anything (native) Google-related on her ARM-based W8RT tablet - thanks Microsoft

5) I can't have a distro-agnostic framework that "just works" for downloading/updating/installing/uninstalling Linux packages - thanks FOSS infighting cliques

6) I don't have full control over my Android/Apple phone, over my Android/Apple/Windows tablet, (and soon over my Google glass) unless I root said devices

This is simply a consumer-space extension of the legal battles that these companies are so fond of (see Samsung vs. Apple). The sad part is, it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. Oh, well.. c'est la vie.
"Entity Framework" ... why dont you use Linq instead?
"Changing it" towards what? The practical direction of change would not be toward domination by the enlightened western democracies. It's not a choice between U.S. as the "global bully" or New Zealand. To the extent that the status quo can be changed, it would be towards more multi-lateral frameworks (strengthening the UN, international courts, etc). And that would be terrible.

While the U.S. may lag on many OECD measures, the fact of the matter is that there are only 25-35 countries that you could call modernized democracies. But any practical multi-lateral framework could not exclude the other 160-170 countries, and any framework in which China and India not to mention Saudi Arabia or Sudan have influence proportional to their population would not be preferable to U.S. hegemony.
As a company whose goal is to make money can you blame them? It's the people who naively believe in the propaganda.
Probably cooperation at an infinitesimal scale. Like the money that AdSense pays.
I think a closer equivalent of your CoffeScript code in C# would be

var HtmlLength = new WebClient().DownloadString("http://news.ycombinator.com").Length;

or if you want the length in bytes:

var ByteLength = new WebClient().DownloadData("http://news.ycombinator.com").Length;

Want to do it asynchronously?

var ByteLength = new WebClient().DownloadDataTaskAsync(url).Length;

That code sample you posted is to demonstrate in a rather loquacious fashion the new C# 5.0 features.

As for why create a desktop application rather than a web-based app, I'm not even going to dignify that with a response. Apples and oranges.
AngularJS and $compile
For the question "I want to build a web application", PHP is not the answer. It is the worst in nearly every category you cite.

Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously.

What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting? If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of a few that are generally crappy.

Cost and developer time are non-factors since the time you'd need to learn PHP is probably higher than other languages that make more sense and aren't filled with anachronisms you will spend half your time working around.

You can train someone up in Ruby on Rails in two weeks. Django or Node would take about double that time, but only because the platforms aren't by default as feature complete and the tooling will vary from project to project.
No Windows Presentation Foundation support is one thing some would miss. Seriously though, there's a lot of clients out there that would probably not miss the Microsoft branding if they got over the .net label missing. Perhaps not larger enterprise clients that rely on specific MS tools and support, but a lot of smaller businesses could leave it just fine that use it for things like asp.net and switch to apache + mono.

To be fair though, the parent I was replying to did not define in what capacity .net would be replaced and how and taking replies as a black and white answer to a gray area question is a bit factitious (this part was not meant as a directly reply to the parent of this reply).
There's a Google Search app on Win8.
awesome find, thank you! Yes, it's a bit pricey but...I expected that. I think $15-20K is reasonable, provided students receive instructor support.
Would it be a fair assumption to say revenues from Azure are primarly from big entreprise companies (ex fortune 500) amd that amazon is more focused around smaller companies?
Why the negative slant in this article?

Personally I want more folks to spread ideas similar to Larry's. (Whether he meant it or not is impossible to know of course)
Cynicism is just a mask of rationalization to be a critical bystander from the sidelines rather than seize the moment.
Well, if Google decides to found a new country akin to Bioshock's Rapture, I don't think they'll lack for volunteer citizens...

But even for Google, founding a country would be enormously difficult. So even if Page genuinely wanted to, it won't happen this decade. Whether it should is a different issue.
It's nothing I haven't seen a millions times over. That doesn't mean I'd want to be caught looking at it at work.
A New 'Smart Rifle' Decides When To Shoot And Rarely Misses
If you don't support Desktop you are not cross platform
Facebook could write their stuff in COBOL and it wouldn't matter to anyone else. Remember MySpace? It was written in ColdFusion, so I guess ColdFusion is a great idea!

Wikipedia's Mediawiki software is awful, and serves as a great example of how not to build an application. It makes WordPress look like a precision engineered Swiss watch.

Yahoo uses PHP because, like Facebook, they could make FORTRAN work in production if they wanted to.
Improving the Pi Searcher's speed by moving from C++ to Go
This one is probably my favorite so far: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,5,2,2,2,3,2,0,5,3,0...

Ends up looking like rain or an old filmreel: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,5,1,3,4,2,1,1,2,3...

Still noise, but looks like sand, maybe, or grass waving in the wind: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,4,1,2,2,2,3,2,2,1...

Wait no, this is my favorite so far: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,2,1,0,6,1,0,2,1,0...

More sand: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,0,1,1,0,1,2,5,2,3...

Proper rain: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,4,1,0,4,2,3,4,1,0...

Moving line: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,0,2,3,0,1,1,2,2,1...

Something about this is cool: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,5,2,0,2,1,1,3,2,2...

Proper grass waving in the wind (wait for it): http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,1,2,2,3,2,2,0,2,1...
It's probably because the Community Edition of IntelliJ didn't exist when they started doing their Android tooling. Eclipse was more dominant back then. That's slowly been changing (thank goodness!)
> Can anyone comment? Particularly interested in being able to access my feed from multiple devices (desktop, mobile, iPad etc).

Well, I can't speak for CommaFeed, but I'm using Fever on multiple devices. Very happy with it.

I modified the CSS a bit to increase fonts and hide the sidebar, but besides that, it works very well for me on the desktop. Just like Google Reader used to.

For Android, I use Meltdown. For IOS, I use Ashes. Both work very well for what I need.
So you're a hipster, basically.

"Hating PHP? That's so mainstream. Personally, I'm hating on Haskell and NodeJS."
Another great example is Team Fortress 2. All the characters are carefully designed to be distinguishable at a glance - I remember seeing a great explanation of this a few years back, but can only find this pdf right now:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_Illust...
Here's my take on Reader replacements. I want a web app, with a mobile web version. I don't want an app, mostly because I frequently open articles in tabs. I also want a hosted option, or a dead-simple way to run it without setting up my own server, virtual(ized) or otherwise.

Feedly is not a web app. It's a browser extension.

I wanted to use Newsblur before Reader was discontinued, but it never made sense to me -- way too complicated. Also, no mobile web. I like their business model, though.

The Old Reader works well enough for me to suggest it to my girlfriend and mom, but I don't like all the space the navigation bars take up and I don't need/want the social/sharing features. Also not open source. I do like the responsive/mobile layout.

FeedHQ is an interesting change from the Reader-clones, and I like the mobile version. Still hasn't added an oldest-first option though, and sometimes miss being able skim through articles Reader-like instead of viewing either titles or single articles. Other plusses: open source, python, no social (yet?).

Commafeed was a little rough when I first saw it, but overall I like it the best so far. The OpenShift instructions look very doable (just have to try them). Needs: mobile view, optimization. (Both on the Github issues list already.)
After careful consideration I've come up with a three step plan to solve all of this -

1) Love yourself, but less. We can't "stop the world if you want to", almost 100% of developers just aren't that special, most struggle to make the same CRUD apps over and over again.

2) If you don't like your job find another one, if you've got the stones create your own job, if you can't do either of those things then find something to look forward to when you clock out.

3) If someone above you undeservedly makes more than you go to www.facebook.com and join the group called "Everyone except Larry Ellison".

Then you'll find peace.
You'd be very incorrect if you thought no one was using Symfony2.

I am specifically talking about Symfony2, by the way.

A great number of frameworks and CMSs are using Symfony2 components. Two popular ones are the http-kernel and http-foundation components.

Drupal is integrating several Symfony2 components.

Composer, the PHP package manager that has taken the community by storm, is using Symfony components.

eZ publish is integrating several Symfony2 components.

Joomla! adopted YAML, using a Symfony2 component.

Stating that Symfony2 is not widely used simply tells me you're not keeping up with the PHP community - which would be fine if you're not a PHP developer, but makes your statement not trustworthy.

edit: PHPUnit, the defacto standard PHP unit testing framework, also uses Symfony2's YAML component.

I can go on.
Ask HN: Will Google glass allow fans present at games to live stream the game?
This may disrupt the next super bowl as we can crowdsource all the google glass streams. I was looking at Robert scobles g+ and the quality of his glass recordings were very good.
That's not a fantastic code sample, but its purpose is to show off the async / await keyword. There's no point in criticizing it for not being a web app... I do wish, however, that MSDN blogs put more focus on good, idiomatic C#, formatted properly, but they so often come up short, only doing one thing adequately while failing at all others.
Try Nsight Tegra VStudio. https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-nsight-tegra

It's still rough and hampered by ndk's buggy gdb. But when it works it's beautiful! Visual Studio stepping between java and C++!!
There is nothing wrong with Google trying to make money. Making money is great. It's the utterly insufferable "we're not just making money, we're changing the world!" rationalization that accompanies it. Fact is that Google is an advertising company (95% of its revenues come from ads), selling eyeballs to companies peddling cheap Chinese crap. They're incredibly good at it. They should just embrace that and stop pretending they're something else.
For one, you're criticizing a web API here and not the C# language-- and you've failed to even do that convincingly since it's an intentionally verbose example using an outdated API.

res.Text = (await new HtppClient().GetStringAsync(url.Text)).Length.ToString();

(Disclaimer: I work at MS.)
I agree. I see it as a massive win for JetBrains!
If you’re interested in reading more tips about cartoon drawing technique, there’s a relevant book I’ve read some of, How to Make Webcomics: http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Webcomics-Scott-Kurtz/dp/1582.... I sampled a few chapters in a bookstore and remember that the author of PVP gave very similar advice, which I found interesting reading. I’m not skilled enough to evaluate the book’s drawing advice, but it looked like the authors knew what they were talking about. Though I’d caution that their advice seemed skewed to comics that update often and have a relatively simple drawing style, as opposed to the kind of comic that releases a detailed full-color page once a week.
You get what you pay for in the PHP world. You can hire some kid out of high-school to slap together some application in a weekend and pay them in beer, sure, but what will you get? The maintenance costs on this abomination will quickly consume any up-front savings.

Secondly, the reason some programmers are more expensive than others is because they're more efficient.

Who would you rather have? Six PHP programmers that flail away for a month and ship a buggy but usable application? Or maybe two Ruby or Python developers that ship a unit-tested, well engineered application?

The two developers will cost you about the same as the six others if they're top-notch, but they will not make the same mistakes and they will not stumble into every potential pitfall along the way to the solution.
> Quite a few people are locked into that toolchain and don't have a choice but to continue buying what Microsoft is selling.

I don't buy that for a minute.

The Windows Server division is one of the fastest growing divisions inside of Microsoft.

From their last Q3FY13 report revenue from server and tools grew 11% driven by SQL server and Windows Server growth.

Based on those figures business is scrambling to buy into the Microsoft toolchain, not trying to leave.
Copper just sitting around has the intrinsic value of being copper, ledger entries do not. This is the meaning of intrinsic value.

In other words if copper stops being used as money it still holds value as copper. You can melt down the coins and make it into wire or pots or waterer else people buy copper to make. Economists argue that these types of things don't make good currency because then the currency is effected by unrelated things like the copper industry. One would not want an entire national economy to fluctuate in value due to the ebb and flow of one industry.
You can achieve almost anything in this world if you're willing to trade your life. However, the original comment seems to have the assumption that the cause in question is not worth dying for. The set of things that governments will kill to protect is larger than the one that people will die defending.
Dirty medicine
I plan to hate Python once I learn enough of it.
So what? People have biases, I never claimed to be unbiased and we're just sharing our opinions. I do not get paid by anyone for what I say. What I said about Google is heretic to some, only because they have this notion of an angelic Google. They'd believe it for Apple, most other companies and especially for Facebook and Microsoft.

Anyway, bed time is almost here.
Lately I've been forced to use eclipse for Android development to create a demo app for our technology(* ). The general lack of responsiveness of the UI was so annoying that I basically took to doing all my editing in emacs and just manually refreshing eclipse windows for UI changes, build and DDMS views for debugging. A lot of my development is C/C++ code (NDK build) which I'm doing completely in emacs anyway, it mostly worked out for me.

Can someone who has experience in IntelliJ tell me how well it might support a workflow involving an external editor ? Basically I'm trying to decide whether it's worth investing the time to switch over for my use-case. Many thanks in advance for an informative answer.

(* ) for this -> packetzoom.com
> I work at a fairly liberal software company in SoCal, and if I scrolled down to the bottom-most picture with the hand-drawn fully-naked chick and someone happened to glance at my screen, I would most likely be fired.

If that would be grounds for firing, even after describing the context of the article, then you decidedly do not work at a fairly liberal software company.
Windows 8 and the windows phone 8 messaging apps bring a bunch of these together very nicely. My usage of IM (which includes SMS and facebook messaging) has gone up significantly ever since I switched.
Best new app for Social media management
Erm. .NET is alive and well, especially on the game and mobile phone development front

Xamarin (the monodevs) are doing some really interesting stuff:

http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013

Frameworks such as MvvmCross allow you to target iOS, Android, Windows 8 Mobile, Windows 8 Store, WinRT, WPF all using the same codebase using the MVVM Pattern. Write your code business logic in a PCL and share it across all platforms, i.e. 80% code re-use on mobile, write your UI for each platform and link against your shared core business logic PCL.

https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross

Oh, you can do all of the above, program for all those platforms (iOS included) in Visual Studio with either C# or F# using async/await and linq.

Disclaimer: I went to #evolve, if you use .NET and didn't go then sorry to say you missed out ;-)

Personal highlights from the conference include:

- C# async/await on iOS, Android announced and available in the beta update channel.

- Xamarin acquires Calaba.sh (lesspainful), announces the future of automated mobile phone testing: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-xcjpj20d6s

- 80% code reuse case study: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-shy07zqsoz

- Behind the scenes with the award winning game Bastion (monogame): http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-mazw2c15qr

- (Scott Hanselman) How C# Saved my Marriage, Enhanced my Career and Made Me an Inch Taller: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-umfpnw90c9

- (Josh Collins - @GlobalMoxie) Buttons are a hack: can't wait for vid to be uploaded...
Look up money laundering in a dictionary. After that, watch Office Space. :)
In my experience, MVC has already become extremely popular among medium-sized orgs with at least somewhat ambitious developers. Very large orgs with rosters of stuck-in-time developers who really love WebForms and custom control libraries, and fear or hate jQuery, well... they're not going to change until MSFT officially proclaims that WebForms are for chumps. Even though they are chumps, that will spur them to change.
I identify with this.

I want to produce food for myself and my community on my property, and build structures that make efficient use of space for occupancy, and these things are extremely illegal.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that's true. I have come across a lot more ASP.NET MVC + JavaScript jobs than I have WebForms the past couple of years.

I think the shift has quietly occurred because everyone wants at least a little AJAX, and everyone wants jQuery, and once you've thrown those in the mix, who wants to do that using WebForms?
A lot of things you mentioned are more "why would company A bother building for company B's platform?" than "the companies are evil!"
We'll have to agree to disagree.

Waze can tell you if there's an accident along your route, and point out where it is, and it is pretty accurate most of the time. That feature alone has saved me countless hours. As far as battery usage goes, it's no worse than Google Maps.

I'm not a huge fan of the interface, or the gamification aspect, but the data is just that good.
Vietnamese Search Engine Superior to Google?
Thanks for sharing. I pretty much lost all hope in the big tech companies too. It's starting to become clear from their actions, none of them give a fuck about compromise. It's a battle for control and none of them are even giving a fucking inch for the sake of user experience.
I would think so. It uses some kind of peer-to-peer system to divine traffic information I believe.

That said, it works really well where I live, and I don't live anywhere near a major tech hub.
I always wondered when they'd replace the website's black-white space background. Personally, I can't concentrate on the text long enough to know if I'd like using Meteor or not, because the background is too crazy. From the sound of these frequent HN updates, it sounds pretty neat, though. A little bit of sarcasm here, but not really.
Considering how big of a lie Google's "Don't do evil" motto

Genuinely curious here, what are the things that google has done that people think are evil? Maybe as a follow-up, what corporations do you think make a greater positive impact than google?
Blog MMO - Make Money Online. Working From Home Nowadays
I want to live there ;_;
Weird way for them to introduce new features, but I get it'll get more publicity this way.
They're taking the risk of diluting the quality of their degree by letting in a lot of underqualified and unprepared students. Also if they get a load of unqualified students they'll either have to support these students or just let them fail. Either way drags down the program.