skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You will pay the price that a couple of non-contributors will fly under the radar for a bit longer, but between git logs and productivity tools you should still be more than capable of gauging productivity, which should be a binary.

You're missing part of the picture here - time spend helping other employees is time that an employee isn't making commits.

Or, conversely, unless you're looking into the contents of a commit, you don't know the difference between someone making many, regular commits on an easy issue and the person that commits relatively seldom, but contributes code to address harder/meatier problems.

>Regarding the article, written communcation is important even if you're in the same office...you're going to need to repeat yourself with every hire.

Documentation is great, but it's time consuming and much can change in a few weeks time. Write down the stuff worth keeping around for months, and let go of the rest -- giving a new hire volumes of text regarding irrelevant conversations/processes is a sure way to increase spin-up time.
This is very interesting. More research should be done. It may be the case that for high-profile games - which are almost guaranteed to sell well - demos are not needed.

And the article also states that marketing budgets are not taken into account in the research. High-profile games are marketed more widely, and don't need demos, leading to the result that games without demos sell better.
Cool to see something like this in Go. :-)
In hindsight, I'm glad they shut it down. I've discovered so many alternatives. Like others in this thread, I've opted to go for Feedly. I like how it syncs across my desktop, mobile and tablet.
The MER rovers (Opportunity and Spirit) are quite remarkably reliable too. Not 36 years reliable, but they are operating in far more hostile environment.

Opportunity remains active as of 2013, having already exceeded its planned 90 sol (Martian days) duration of activity by 9 years, 62 days (in Earth time). Opportunity has continued to move, gather scientific observations, and report back to Earth for over 37 times its designed lifespan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_%28rover%29
The author has a really good point here, but it's not realistic advice for a lot of mobile developers. As much as I'd love to agree on principle, I don't think it'll happen with the app stores' current incarnations.

There are several problems that prevent this from being actionable for most devs:

1. The barrier to entry is consistently getting lower, not higher. It's no longer particularly difficult to deploy an app - either learn to design and build it, or pay people to do that for you. It's never been easier to put yourself out there as a mobile developer.

2. This isn't marketing enterprise software to employees with spending access to sizable company budgets. This is marketing small applications of limited practical value (i.e. almost every mobile game) to people with limited wealth without much in the way of customer support. People are shrewd about their software nowadays - yes, they are more willing to spend their money on a Starbucks coffee than an app, and you can argue the existential implications and idiocy of this all you want, it's still what they're willing to do with their money.

3. The markets are too large. They're saturated with crap and quality alike and it's insanely difficult to get noticed. If you are making a game, weather, networking, camera, utility or entertainment app, you've got the deck stacked against you. These are released en masse every single day by teams of developers. Because of this, it's a race to the bottom and quality becomes undervalued. This is, as always, supply and demand.

4. A lot of the app store is an old boys' club, and the way to get in front of a wide range of users is broken. If you have a reputable team behind you, a large company's backing and you do a lot of marketing, this will not be an issue for you. But that's not most developers. Most developers will struggle to swim upstream in vain just to get noticed in one of the "Top ___" lists. They might get a faint spotlight at #25 before being thrown back into the depths of the app store like a rejected fish on a line. It gives the term "starving artist" a new meaning.

I mean, I don't want to be cynical. I'm all in favor of developers not underselling themselves. But I think you have to do a lot more than just tell people to adjust their prices when you have all the aforementioned forces working against them.

I can see that in some cases selling your mobile software for more leads to nice benefits, like less of a customer support headache, requiring fewer purchases, etc. But that's not possible for most devs because most apps couldn't reasonably be priced at 30 euros. A really high quality audio or business app could be, sure. But that indie game house? No, that advice doesn't help them.
In Chrome if I right click in the search box and add it as a search engine it doesn't work :(
I don't like this. I'm strongly of the opinion that SQL is a beautiful language, able to express in terse yet readable statements operations which would take many pages of Java to execute. Why try and wrap it up, and pretend that you are writing Java, when you're still writing SQL?

Please don't take this as a dig at you or your code - everyone has an itch to scratch, and I'm quite sure writing this was fun.
I'm not sure what the definition of an "open" web is here. The web has always supported paywalls and distribution of proprietary software via the SaaS model.

This proposal does not make DRM part of the web any more than internet explorer makes windows a part of the web.
Yet they can enough to deny foreigners any rights.
Firefox removing the ability to not "Always show the tab bar"
Goes to show, you don't always need to do things the hard/proper/science way to make something like this convincing. Smoke and mirrors ftw. (although this particular set of smoke and mirrors could probably do with a little optimising. I'ts a good effect nonetheless)
Want to save 90% on roaming? Get early invite with 7$
Yes. Its all of the health meters.
Let’s see: Infinity Blade II, RAGE HD, Real Racing 3, Grand Theft Auto, Modern Combat 4, Riven, realMyst, Year Walk, Bastion, Eufloria... I would call those real games.
We Need A Recall System For Bad Science Reporting
I think it's very simple, you should probably simply charge more. See http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who... under "The Most Important Pricing Advice Ever: Charge. More."
This looks very similar to jOOQ in my first impression. http://www.jooq.org/

I wonder if the author was aware of the existence of jOOQ?
Reject DRM and you risk walling off parts of the web, says W3C chief
Maybe they found it performed better, like Adrian Holovaty found for soundslide: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/in-defense-of-canvas/ (see "stacking canvases")
If you layer several animations with varying and carefully selected run times over each other, the result never exactly repeats itself. Good luck recreating that with one GIF animation :D
Robert Rees on Comparing Scala and Clojure (video)
No. I preffer to pay to a small company than one that can afford that and more.
I wonder, is there a video available anywhere?
Google has taken a jab at games before (Google plus Games anyone) but unsuccessful, not sure if they'll be able to get into it ever.
One advantage is that the compiler checks your queries. In case of the jOOQ library, it also makes your queries typesafe and abstracts away some specifics of SQL dialects.

Having typesafety transcend from the database to your "main" language is of advantage so long as you are using a statically typed language anyway.

All this is possible while maintaining much of the expressive power of SQL.
I fully agree with this, although I'm more pessimistic: I don't believe that we can force our way out of this. It might work, for a while, for small teams that already have a community and sufficient loyal customers.

(I'll specifically talk about games, for which this is in my opinion most severe.)

Developers have jumped right into a downwards spiral: Everyone really just tries to make money - when all else fails by being cheaper then the competition. That's rather natural and happens on all markets. However, games do not have any intrinsic value, so they can go all the way down to 0. At some point, games won't have any value left in the eyes of consumers - something we're awfully close to.

But the bills still need paying. So customers are increasingly being tricked into spending money ("free to play", "micro transactions" etc).

As someone who makes and enjoys games, this makes me sad. Unless we manage to revert that spiral, making a living from games will soon mean to build some kind of more-addictive-than-pleasant things more akin to market places and chat platforms than games. And as a gamer, I don't want to touch these things.

I don't want to whine, I want to see the positive side. I just can't find it lately.
Croudfunding Tor anti-censorship infrastructure
Found a big bug: use up/down arrow keys to select an item on the left, then hit right and left keys to open and close the sub-lists. But, if you hit right twice or more it will append the sub list continuously below.
It's never going to be simple because the market isn't an ideally functioning organism.

'patio11 makes great points, but his advice is mostly actionable for desktop software and web applications, which are a completely different beast than mobile apps.

Mobile applications won't sell at high prices unless they have a real core competency that solves a real need that doesn't exist yet - indie games and to-do list apps have little hope of achieving that kind of benefit.

Aside from that, there is such a low barrier to entry that they need that kind of incredible edge over the competition to survive at high prices.

Take a look at the high-priced apps and you'll notice a trend - they're typically not games/entertainment/weather/"fun" apps. They're real tools that can be used in production or they're productivity suites.
That's the thing, he reduced the dataset from 2677 languages with 192 features to 239 languages with 21 features. That's usually the hardest part of any analysis, so it would be nice if he shared the results of his hard work with us...
This is much like how particle systems in games work
Yeah HTML 5 is such a resource hog! Brign back flash :p
what is meant by "multi-core concurrency"? Isn't that just paralellism?
Glastolive, a realtime Instagram wall of Glastonbury
Dash has great support for CocoaDocs too so you can import open source libraries' DocSets. ( disclaimer: I made CocoaDocs. ) for example: http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/AFNetworking/1.3.1/
there's really too much of this going on lately...i hate the path on which we are on....it's a slippery slope.
An animated GIF would weigh a lot more.
The race to the bottom is everywhere, but you're right in that it's most apparent in games.

As always, developers are not necessarily savvy in business. Common sense suggests that undercutting competition with lowered prices will drive market share upwards, eventually beating them out. This is a desperation move, and one that only ever works in the short term, if it does at all.

The truth is the race to the bottom exists because this kind of tactic is deployed by everyone in response to everyone else. But it will only work as a calculated move that crunches the numbers to find a sweet spot. Reducing your game from $5 to $1 might get a lot more customers, but you'll need to increase your user base fivefold just to match your previous revenue. That's not realistic in most cases.

It's the same logic that people without a real edge mistakenly employ when they say they'll disrupt an industry by taking something really valuable and making it both better and free. It's not sustainable, but everyone does it.
Decypher this jazz...
By making the solutions so simple that they pick them because they don't care either way, but make it slightly more annoying for people still on non-end-to-end crypto services to communicate with those who are.

If there's enough people who care, then hopefully network effects would slowly take care of the rest.
A Bill Allowing More Foreign Workers Stirs a Tech Debate
Yes, this behaviour is certainly not limited to games. However, other software makers seem to cope by moving to SaaS and ads somewhat successfully. Ads in games haven't really proven themselves, and I'd personally hate it.
Cool project, you seem talented... I'm just a bit confused here.

If we basically know several governments already have copies of your historical gmails, and you're not securing the incoming channel (which we basically know has a beam splitter on it), what good does encrypting the historical files do?
This is a non-businessman's response to a non-businessman's problem. Pricing should be based on the value a customer receives for your product, regardless if it "feels" or "seems" expensive. Instead of asking everyone else to raise their prices, why not demonstrate more value to your users or educate them on why the pricing is the way it is? Or maybe, the value being experienced by his users just isn't worth the price he's charging.
The FreeBSD images can only be run on Windows instances (except for a few expensive instance types). That's why I said you have to pay the Windows tax if you want to run FreeBSD on EC2.
Surely once information's been published in a national newspaper it should no longer be treated as classified.
Stacking canvases makes sense when you have ones that either only need to be built on startup or change infrequently. If everything in your animation is moving (like this one) then there’s no performance benefit.
or crubby :)
I had to read through the Developer Terms of Use to find that out.
This post makes a similar argument to my blog post[1] from earlier this week - that PRISM is simply criminal - although my analysis focused on why this made Snowden immune to charges as a whistleblower.

I agree that it's time to take the US government to task over this. How does that happen? A civil suit, a private prosecution?

[1] http://joe-jordan.co.uk/blog/2013/06/tinker-tailor-whistlebl... (hacker news comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5945185 )
I think one of the biggest pitfalls of SSL/TLS (and many other security technologies available now) is that they are so configurable and flexible. The approach assumes everyone has the knowledge and the time to invest to tune everything. In reality, few people do.

Going back to your request, it's impossible to do with server configuration alone. Many other aspects, including the design of the web application, play a significant role. The best we can do at this point is work on the body of knowledge, hoping others can find the time to invest.

The best I was able to do so far is build the SSL Labs test[1], write the SSL/TLS Deployment Best Practices guide[2], and start the SSL Research Wiki[3], where I intend to add other un-structured information over time (including example server configuration). I have also written a free OpenSSL Cookbook[4] (requires registration, and you can opt out of email afterwards).

Apologies if this post comes across as self-promoting, but this is what I spent a large amount of my time on. These are all genuinely useful and important resources.

[1] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

[2] https://www.ssllabs.com/projects/best-practices/

[3] https://github.com/ssllabs/research/wiki

[4] https://www.feistyduck.com/books/bulletproof-ssl-tls-and-pki...
I concur, Dash is ace and a godsend when coding far away from Internet access.
This seems like thoughtful advice to me: http://www.americanhumane.org/children/stop-child-abuse/repo... - they suggest that while you should step in, you shouldn't so much confront the parent, but rather be empathetic. That way there's nothing to take out on the kid later, hopefully.
First Impressions of AOL Reader and Digg Reader
Especially because there's been past concerns about US intelligence passing sensitive data to US companies to help them win contracts.

There's bound to be a lot of high level execs at European companies whispering in their governments ears at the moment about how this is putting them at a substantial disadvantage, whether or not they believe it to be true.
"The value a customer receives from a product" is somewhat hard to define for games.

So I'd argue there's only a perceived value. And large parts of the industry are working hard to drive that perceived value down. What he does is charge more, so that he has fewer, more pleasant customers paying more. And it works out for him financially. Seems like a businessman to me.
I think this explains why Microsoft is not encouraging towards indie developers for their new console.

By adding barriers to entry they are increasing the value of each game by firstly adding scarcity and secondly reducing the lemon market effect by implementing strict quality controls so that gamers don't have to worry about forking over $50 for a barely functional product.
What would be a good control for this then?
Nice, but anyone needing something like this should probably consider looking at jooq.
It's a valid point. Putting months of engineering effort into something which sells for 1-3 dollars is economically illiterate unless you expect to sell thousands of copies. Considering the very niche nature of many apps, selling in large volumes is not something which could typically be expected to happen.

Of course if you then expect to be able to sell ancillary services around your $1-3 app, as a sort of loss leader, then it's a different matter.
This is right. As much as we as developers would love to raise our prices, we exist in an insular world where we all understand the development process.

Users and customers don't care how long it took to build an app - it's replaceable and they can afford to pass it up. Developers can't afford to have users pass their software up.

The market is dictated by customers, not the other way around. Like it or not, the app economy (in its current state) rewards those who deal with this reality and break out of it somehow. It's ugly and not ideal, but accepting this is the first step to finding success.

On the other hand, encouraging people to charge more for a beautifully designed, but otherwise replicable game is useless. The highest grossing apps consistently are the first in their niche, do something none of the competitors can, or have incredible financial and engineering endeavors to get noticed.
Yes. I guess he was distinguishing from multi-machine concurrency i.e. distributed systems, which are a different matter and one which both languages have tools for, but the author chose not to address.
You are acting irrationally.
You give the information if you think it can be useful to provide a better service.

Otherwise you have the means to withdraw from sharing information and you are supposed use them.
By that I mean that, if you value your privacy and don't trust another company to keep your confidential information private, why would you trust another company to keep from collecting your information? Just don't give it in the first place!

There are throwaway accounts on forums like HN and reddit, private browsing, VPNs and anonymous remailers if you need them, but, if you don't need them, that's just noise slowing you down.

Other thoughts that are directly related to the matter in question are that it shouldn't be a problem that a company knows my sexual preferences, political views and medical history, it could be a problem if that information is shared with someone else, or used against me by that company. Second note, my confidential information should, in a perfect world, be of no matter to anyone. No company, person or government should be allowed to judge someone basing on those characteristics instead of skill, compatibility or lawfulness. It is not the case, unfortunately, but this is the reason why privacy does matter, it's because we don't live in a perfect world.
I guess this is a "normal" reaction of a crowded market. Everybody wants to earn money and tries what works best.

Many musicians have quite similar problems:
They can play for free or some other band which is even more desperate to get a gig will play.

I personally try to keep away from priceless markets (though being a musician too).

The only way I know to handle this is delivering the best quality I can and finding customers who want/appreciate this.
FYI, Apparently there is a clone for Linux called ZealDocs (http://zealdocs.org/).
Paralellism is about using multiple cores to speed up a certain operation. Cuncurrency is about doing many things at once.

Multi-core concurrency means that your concurrent operations can happen at the same time and thus corrupt shared state.
I have a few problems with the article:

1. Two of the authors arguments for higher prices is "more intelligent users" and "less support queries". Those strike me as incredibly snobby reasons to set a price tag. In the case of the latter, if you're selling software then you have to be expected to support it (I know customer support is an absolute pain - I hate it as much as the next person. But think about things from the consumers perspective. You'd be pretty pissed off if you've paid for a product that doesn't appear to work for you and you're clueless about how to fix it). As for the "more intelligent users" remark - I think that level of selective pricing is just disgusting.

2. The article neglects to mention that there's room for two different business models: free versions subsidised by ads and non-free but without adverts. While it sounds like the author does have an ad subsided free app on the market despite his arguments about the merits of premium versions, quite a few publishers seem happy to release against both business models concurrently (ie they'll have both a free and a premium version available). I don't have figures about how successful that strategy is (if anyone else does, I'd be interested to read them), but I think the theory of that works rather well as you're combating the piracy / freeloader issue with the ad subsidised versions and have a premium version available for the aforementioned snobs and those who just hate adverts.

3. The whole article amounts to little more than price fixing and arguments against a free market. The very reason prices are so low is because the market is saturated so developers undercut each other to get sales. If the author doesn't like that, then perhaps he should switch to a market that isn't saturated rather than demanding that everyone is owed financial reward for their work - even if their product is unoriginal and available "ten to the dozen". This might sound harsh, but it's little different to any other industry. eg if everyone became window washers tomorrow, there would be more people washing windows than there would be houses with windows needing washing - so the whole market would collapse. And it's a similar case in mobile app industry, the market is far to saturated to guarantee every developer a decent wage.

I hate being negative like this, but I'm so sick and tired about hearing people moan that they're not earning as much as they think they should be while working in a saturated market. And the remarks about tailoring his prices to the "intelligent" was just unnecessary in my opinion.
Tesla wins in North Carolina, paves the way for direct-to-consumer sales
Russian meteor shockwave circled globe twice
There is really no difference between perceived value and value. I'd bet that his sales of his app follow a supply demand curve almost perfectly. I'm not sure if that makes him a businessman, but what certainly won't work is advocating some kind of "minimum price cartel" that agrees that "higher prices are deserved".
Hipster Startup App Combines All Of Tech’s Worst Cliches
And if you are using Alfred (Mac) you could use http://wemakeawesomesh.it/alfred-dev-doctor/
They said in the past that Reader used a lot of internal APIs to fetch, process and store the feeds, some of which may not be exposed even on GAE.
Google's Quantum Computer Proven To Be Real Thing (Almost)