skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A lot of people with a Wii didn't buy much software

But that's wrong - the Wii had a perfectly fine attach ratio of a bit over 8 games per console - above PS3 but below XBox 360.

Sources:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/01/24/wii-tie-ratio-at-81-i...

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20988

As far as the current gen goes, I see only the Wii U as an actual console. XBone is an always-on camera on a consumer PC and I have to pay to get online. PS4 is a consumer PC without a camera and I have to pay to get online. They have nothing that won't come on the PC that's worth playing.

And for the 3DS the two problems I see are the low pixel density of the screen and the motion controls. The low pixel density means I see different jaggies (aliasing) with each eye and that feels weird. The motion controls don't mesh well with the need to always keep the system at a precise tilt and distance from my eyes, but in games without motion controls it works reasonably well. I wonder if any game studio would decide to not use the 3D feature, but instead push better graphics.

P.S. The one thing that worries me about the 3DS is the lack of homebrew. Flashcarts are already available but only for piracy, I still can't run my own software on the device.
Out of all of this the failure of the SEC to say "shit guys, we really could have noticed this, sorry" is pretty damned aggravating.

JPM has plenty they could and should have done better doubtless deserve censure, but it would be nice for the regulators to admit that they did a poor job.
I think what he means is that with $1MM you'd be able to pay off a large chunk of the house which would reduce the amount of interest owed. It doesn't necessarily equate to just being a 20% down payment.
Even with the clarification, I would still ahve to say a few things.

I would say that basic crud-level programming is equivalent at its base to pre-algebra but to get really good at it you have to focus on making it like geometry. Unfortunately too few programmers work on making the code well structured, maintainable, etc.

The second problem is that CRUD itself can mean all kinds of things. Again, at a basic level it is equivalent to pre-algebra, but to do the database side right, you have to appreciate and understand the stuff I learned in first year calculus. Much of this doesn't need to be taught there. But a strong, internalized understanding of terms like function, discrete function, etc are absolute prerequisites for db design.

My answer would probably be "all of the above."
this is awesome!

btw if you plan to make an iOS app, maybe you'll be delighted to know that you can apply as an open source developer to free Xamarin licenses: http://resources.xamarin.com/open-source-contributor.html

(I guess writing F# would make you happier than ObjectiveC, given that you wrote your server side in Haskell ;)
In my case procrastination is/was a symptom of perfectionism. This article was an eyeopener for me: http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming-perfectionism/ .
I learned Perl initially for sysadmin'ing from Minimal Perl (http://www.amazon.com/Minimal-Perl-Unix-Linux-People/dp/1932...). It teach a subset of Perl necessary to use it as a more powerful replacement for awk/sed/grep/find, primarily with one-liners. By far the best bang/buck of any programming book I've ever read.
It seems you only care about the perceived difficulty. I know everyone is proud of their children, but there is really no need to equate programming with any kind of math, let alone any "levels". Programming can and does stand on its own, you don't need to legitimize it through comparison with socially-accepted math skills.

The premise is flawed, in two ways.

First, programming is not math. It can be math-y, but that's not the same thing. Neither is programming any "level" of linguistics, even though it can be language-like at times. You can reason about certain aspects of programming by using math concepts, such as lambda calc, discrete logic, or Turing machines and similar constructs.

Second, and most importantly, math is not a valid measure of difficulty! Some people have an easy time with equations, but can't for the life of them figure out how loops work. With other people, it's the opposite. And it really is that trivial.
I mainly came here to see how long it would take for someone to link to the XKCD cartoon, because it's quicker than thinking of a keyword to find it myself.
Well, this is kind of embarrassing;

"License warning

You don't have a valid license for visage|SDK FaceTrack. Please contact your sales representative. (Error code 0x00000010)"
Storing knowledge is a bit tricky. For a starter you have to consider the types of knowledge. Most commonly you talk about tacit[0] and explicit[1] knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is hard to communicate by writing or even verbally. Rather it is mostly transferred via learning by doing. In a software scenario tacit knowledge would probably be the code base. The style, naming conventions and what not of the code is likely to be relatively unique and it is hard to communicate via a document, rather the employees has to get a feel for the code, use and modify it. It takes time and you probably should have some kind of coaching set up for new employees coming in, especially if your company is specialized or uses something unusual.

You should also keep in mind that certain employees may possess unique knowledge and considering the relatively high employee turnover you should make sure that your processes don't fall apart if an employee leaves the company. Don't let people have their own pet projects that no one else knows anything about, especially if those projects are mission critical.

Explicit knowledge is easier to document and you can use stuff like Wikis or Confluence. Explicit knowledge is basically everything you can easily communicate via documents or verbally. So guidelines, processes and such.

If you got proprietary information or personal information of EU citizens you may want to consider a locally hosted solution, especially if you are located outside USA (avoid Google etc). I've used Wikis in the past but also had solutions like word documents with processes.

It does depend on your needs, simple word documents with processes may be enough. I know huge companies like Shell has had moderate success with a wiki solution[2]. I should have slides from a knowledge manager Shell presentation somewhere, will have a look around.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_knowledge

[2]: http://www.ikmagazine.com/xq/asp/txtSearch.Intranet/exactphr... (Old but may be relevant).
Is it really built on top of Twilio?
Xamarin and Phonegap are completely different beasts. You are thinking about Phonegap now. Xamarin ones are natively built ones; you use Apple classes to build everything but just in C# instead of Objective-C. So you have to rebuild the frontend twice indeed for Android and iOS but it does look and function 'native' as if you did it with Xcode.

Phonegap => not so much; most just works like shit, but you only have to build once for a lot of platforms. It's a big reason for the proliferation of extremely bad apps in the Play store though; just wrapping of a website or form and putting it in as app.
That's typical, always blaming the paper. The world needs to be skinnier, dammit!
1st thing EU should do is to quit the Safe Harbor fiction, preferably by walking out from that deal.
It's not just his view, there are other people who feel the same way about PHP.
IMHO projects like this, should stop using the word "pirate".
I think it is a boundary for people, to emotionally (though subconsciously) having to be o.k. with being seen (mostly by themselves) as "crooks".

You don't need to be doing something illegal, in order to want privacy...

Besides I think we should reverse the picture and make sure it is the secret spying eyes, that are seen as "crooks".

It is not me being mischievous for wanting privacy - it is the governments for not respecting my privacy.

The physical analogy of online spying, paint the right picture I think:
Someone plants several cameras and microphones around your house.
They have also someone following you around almost 24/7, to always know where you are.
Why? Because you might one day do something, that may or may not be dangerous to between 1 and several thousand people - or at least talk to someone who know someone, who knows......
This is, by the way, not just you - it has been done to everyone on your street - oh... And the world...

I saw a film about the old east Germany and how they were spied on and thought wow! They were really aggressive with the spying and surveillance... Till it hit me: That was nothing compare to what is being done to virtually ALL "citizens" of the internet!..

Wow... That became a rant... Sorry... The word "pirate" got me started! ;)
It's about time for legislation making it a crime to report whistleblowers to the police and a criminal offense to search or seize their equipment. Perhaps an independent review body could be set up to arbitrate these situations?
That comment didn't even come across as elitist. There was no need to get personal.
OK, weird. Nobody else has linked to it as far as I can see. Right, it falls to me then, as the official designated representative of nobody in particular:

http://xkcd.com/850/
Another X.Org Security Bug Found, Dates Back To 1991
> Nope, there are plenty of frameworks with large user bases, both OSS and with corporate backend to do it once. From Xamarin to PhoneGap. Especially 2D game developers are spoiled for choice.

With Xamarin you need to build the GUI twice as you are using the native classes per platform to build them, hence the excellent results.

2D games is a whole different ballgame; there are indeed 100s of platforms for devving 2d games on anything. But I think we are talking about apps; games is a solved problem already with Unity2D/3D, Corona, Haxe and many others.
This was going pretty well (except for the patronising dog complements of 'Good job!' :D), and then it got stuck on 'Almost finished...' :(
I've always seen Chrome, Chrome OS and Android as first and foremost defensive products: if you control the OS you control the default browser, and if you control the browser you control the default search engine.

When you look at it that way these products are all very logical moves to protect Google's search business (and the very very lucrative ad business attached to it). The rest is added bonus.
I've never bought into the whole SEO nonsense. There's a certain amount of optimization that any competent web dev can do, sure. But beyond that I can't help but feel it's just so much snake oil.

It's in google's best financial interests to provide the best search results, and by extension to eliminate any ways to cheat the system and jump to the top of the results.

Does link-assistant.com claim to have more expertise or inside knowledge than a billion-dollar search company?
“Character consists of what you do on the third and
fourth tries.” ― James A. Michener

It comes down to discipline and remembering why you're doing what you're doing.

It reminds me of the parable of the parable of the workers in the vineyard.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out
early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed
to pay them a denarius[a] for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

“About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in
the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work
in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.

“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did
the same thing. About five in the afternoon he went out and found
still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing
here all day long doing nothing?’

“‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

“When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman,
‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones
hired and going on to the first.’

“The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each
received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they
expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius.
When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner.
‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and
you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work
and the heat of the day.’

“But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend.
Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want
to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I
have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious
because I am generous?’

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+20%3A1-1...
how much will it cost?
> there are iOS bindings for all popular languages (and I've used several)

Care to list some, other than Xamarin and RubyMotion?
ObHumility Note: I am Australian, and I suck at geography so much that, had I been born a woman, if I tried this challenge then a man watching me would say "gee, women suck at geography!" (Link for anyone not getting the reference: http://xkcd.com/385/)
I think Zappos still have managers, but they gave them a different name so they could release an article and get some nice PR in the current anti-manager climate.

I think managers are being scapegoated as you say. I'd dare any company to get rid of their management and see what really happens, not just pretend to like Zappos.

Hopefully this is a fashion that will blow over like all the rest so people can get back to trying to work together to create something useful, rather than trying to blame others.
EU-Startups
Which Xamarin apps that you've seen don't look native?

As others have pointed out, Xamarin provides C# bindings for the native APIs. It is fundamentally different to Phonegap, which takes a lowest-common-denominator Java/Swing approach.
Collecting ridiculous amounts of data just because they can, without stopping to think what that data might be used for and is already used for. Using shady practices to override existing protections to collect even more data. Changing the rules mid-game to force more personal information out of people.

And writing blog posts of course.
I just fail to see how it is 'dead' when all the key EU players intend to move forward with it before the elections.
I know very little about weapons, but I can tell he means it is not a comfortable rifle to use. I assume that means inaccurate shooting due to poor positioning, or perhaps he means they are difficult to carry. Ergonomics is ergonomics no matter whether you're talking a chair, a keyboard or a rifle.
Also, coming from a site called "priatebrowser.com" doesn't help instil any faith in me about that statement.
The (non-about:config) UI for these settings was removed for a reason. Even though it makes sense for these to be configurable for testing, end users are more likely to break their browser (make it less secure or make it incompatible with real sites they need to use) by tweaking these settings.

Firefox developers have had to reset these settings in the past in order to save users from self-inflicted insecurity.

Without an explicit effort by Firefox developers to reset these prefs, the prefs won't automatically reset to make sense in the future if the value space of the prefs grows. There is no guarantee of what explicit effort might be taken to deal with non-default values of these prefs in the future.

In my opinion, anyone who wants https://www.howsmyssl.com/ to tell them they are probably okay today should install Firefox Beta (or Aurora or Nightly) instead of manually changing these settings.

(Disclosure: I'm a Gecko developer but I don't work on TLS. Disclaimer: The above is my personal understanding and opinion, not any sort of official statement.)
I once read that when the M16 was adopted for use in Vietnam, it had some modifications that reduced its reliability (which got fixed in later versions). In Vietnam, they became infamous for their unreliability, to the point that Viet Cong soldiers would loot every bit of equipment off fallen US troops except for the rifle, and US troops would sometimes carry 3 M16s so they had a better chance of having a functioning rifle when their first one jammed.

Jamming is a really big issue. When you're crawling through the jungle and suddenly you see someone who's about to shoot you, and you pull the trigger, you want bullets to start coming out of your barrel. There may not be any time to unjam it or get a backup weapon.

So yes, the famed reliability of the AK47 is absolutely a factor. Easy to make, hard to break. Any product fitting that description is going to be easy to sell.
Thanks for this. I am definitely looking at how to store explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge in my mind is a lot about your organizations culture and that needs to be lived.

Luckily being based in Switzerland hosted solutions are not a problem but that is a different story altogether anyways.
I'm surprised of much of the comments here, I'll chalk it up to ignorance, but every start up and company in the world should be wishing for this EU privacy fundamentalism to die. And grandstanding politician to get in grips with reality. Yeah NSA and some other state actors have done fucked up but that law does nothing to curtail government surveillance it instead introduces unreasonable limits and restrictions on innovation and even basic function. Indirectly balkanize data flow and introducing more cookies law style useless notices is the least of it. It's seemingly vindictive against US companies and an miscalculated move to grant an advantage to local ones disguised as reform.
I think judging programming languages by their features is the same as judging people by their talent and not by their deeds.

Take Java for example. Most people (Dijkstra included) hate it. But look how much Java has accomplished. It's not a coincidence that Hadoop is written in Java. It's not a coincidence that Java is the primary language on Android.

To quote a great man: "Java works. Java captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit"
Same thing applies to PHP, Javascript, and whatever everyone hates.

Couple of years ago I thought that Java was the Devil's invention and the most awful programming language ever. Then I started using Java with Hadoop. And for the first week Java was the most awful programming language ever. Two/three weeks in I was absolutely okay with Java. It worked. And for me that's the only thing that counts.
EU nations always drag their feet nothing new here. That's probably the largest complaint people have about them.

The surprising thing is that the EU is ahead in the privacy initiative not the US.

The US are not even considering it and instead they are wasting time getting nations to agreed to a even longer copyright length.

Sadly the US has been bought by corporations and nothing important for the citizens but potentially damaging for corporations will ever pass.

It's more like the United Corporation of America not the United States of America.
I just made the same comment. This article may help: http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming-perfectionism/ .
That reminds me of a quick lock-picking trick that worked better with highly accurate parts with little clearance, than with cheap parts with lots of clearance.
9 Essential Blogs For Startups And Entrepreneurs In 2014
CRUD is not math.
the consumer has just been forced to get used to it.

Have they? Why? Nokia still sells feature phones with good battery life. Hell, the new 105 lasts a month(!) on a single charge and you can get it on ebay for $30+shipping.

Nobody is forcing anything, people just like smartphones.
"Since the web is viewed in a browser, we believe it should be built in one too."

Seriously?
What blogging was
The article focuses mainly on whether the man did indeed send the Google+ invitation to his former girlfriend. It seems to me that the actual troubling question is whether sending a Google+ invitation can be considered a violation of a restraining order. The bar is far too low when receiving a single inconsequential message that you have full ability to ignore can be considered a form of harassment.
baseless statements from so called software professionals

You're calling this guy[1] a 'so-called software professional' because he criticised PHP?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray
I think the indie game dev industry is like the EDM scene where the really talented bedroom producers rise to stardom very easily while it's nearly impossible for everyone else.
It's definitely more harmful long term to arrest rather than reward. Arresting people for reporting security vulnerabilities only causes the people whom would do so reluctant or even afraid of the repercussions. Meanwhile those who exploit maliciously will continue to not report their findings. If I was to find a security vulnerability in a site I frequent, I'd most likely stay quiet about it out of fear of legal ramifications.
Would you cut off your own hand or leg? They definitely will not.
This was my biggest issue getting started as well. The new tutorial and documentation is awesome, thanks!
I hate this kind of "do gooder" tech.

It's one more thing that will be imposed on us for the greater good making our lives a tiny bit more complicated and a bit more expensive.

This thing will break and will have to be repaired.

It WILL have bugs that warns you for nothing adding a bit more stress to lives that don't need more.

Now if you ask me, it's probably viable commercially and I expect to see this kind of thing in new cars in the next 5 years.

I'm surprised it's not in standard already, but maybe it's a too processor intensive for a cheap controller.
Haskell v Ada v C++ v Awk... An Experiment in Software Prototyping Productivity
After such a motivating action from the govt., they'll simply sell the vulnerabilities for some BTC to someone else.
> the actual troubling question is whether sending a Google+ invitation can be considered a violation of a restraining order.

In America we, the people, go to court to get answers to tough questions. Easy questions we google.
What start ups and companies wish for is not always what is in the best interest of the citizen.

This is not about NSA.

Private companies gather more and more data about us without any control (especially the US-ones), so it's good that EU tries to regulate that.
Couldn't agree more. Within a max num of characters previously established, a title shouldn't be minimal, but say as many things as possible, if they are explicit and clear.

> People's attention is hard to capture, even your colleagues.

True, that's why communicating as much as possible from the title is important, because you don't always expect them to click and "zoom in"

---

Github issues are also essential where I work. We're trying to make them BDD stories, emphasizing most on the customer need and the WHY, followed by what (deliverables) and how (solution)

We went the extra step to have a template that we apply before starting any new issue. I even wrote a Chrome extension a while back, that reads that issue template from an open source repo and applies it in the textarea when you open the /issues/new page on Github. https://github.com/skidding/github-issue-template
A truly stellar example of blogspam.

Despite the title, the article tries very hard not to nail anything down concretely, and I paraphrase their conclusion as "you nead content". It lists essentially every type of web content imaginable and then pretends to have offered sage, expert advice.