rayvega

Love the symmetry of the photo...triangle. (I suspect with the orange background that it was taken at the YC office? http://m.inc.com/?incid=96)

Here's the announcement by Sebastian Thrun on Udacity:

http://blog.udacity.com/2013/01/sebastian-thrun-udacity-anno...

The developer of Python for iOS, Jonathan Hosmer, mentions that he is prevented by App store policy to provide the functionality of importing external sources into the app.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633968

However, another HN user found a clever workaround using python's builtin exec and urlib:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3634837 http://myblog.rsynnott.com/2012/02/fun-with-python-for-ios.h...

Users have already been taught to choose among different desktop apps. How? By clicking on installed shortcut links on their desktop. The same can be done with internal web apps.

Treat these legacy web apps just like desktop apps in that launching them requires clicking an icon specifically for that web app somewhere on their machine that opens the web app in the appropriate browser. Those browsers (like IE6) could be locked down to only work for certain URLs. For everything else, the user would then just need to use a more modern web browser such as Firefox 5.0.

An ambitious startup could find many other (and probably better) ways to solve this problem. The issue with legacy web apps that run only on IE6 always struck me as a potential business opportunity for any startup interested in targeting the enterprise space. With Firefox's recent shift to an accelerated release cycle, it has made this problem even more pronounce.

Discrete mathematics is definitely what I've been waiting for.

>> "...Had they not bothered introducing LINQ in the first place, they'd have had their 100x performance boost from the get go..."

Except that when StackOverflow started it was a small startup with just three developers and a small user base. They probably made the decision early on to tradeoff any premature performance optimization with the ability to quickly iterate and ship the product by using Linq-2-Sql instead of hand-writing every single CRUD operation.

Now that their business (i.e. web traffic) has grown exponentially and have a larger group of developers they can now go back and optimize and performance tune the code including doing complete re-writes as necessary.

This is an important takeaway for anyone building a startup.

I like the mention of the improvisation concept of "yes and" as being a huge influence on her professionally. She describes how this can take good ideas from two people and create something newer and better.

Some of the best collaborators I have had were of the "yes and" attitude while the worst were of the "no but" or "no because" variety.

>> "...And there's little to stop...Amazon (AMZN), with its own Amazon Web Services, from making a greater push into Dropbox's territory...."

Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding.

I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product.

Alternatively:

    var filtered = new List<int>{1, 2, 3, 4}.FindAll(x => x % 2 == 0);

Comparing the price of each tool individually yes. However, if you add them all up then it really starts to be costly if you want to use most of those tools. You are limited in what you can budget for as an individual developer and are forced to look at the marginal cost of each new purchase as well as the opportunity cost of not buying some other tool unrelated to your purchase.

(Just in your example, we are already at $1335 not including the price of Visual Studio itself since the free express edition does not support add-ins such as ReSharper and other productivity tools)

IANAL, but I don't think so. What law would that be? If I walk into any retail store and pay with cash, is the store owner required by law to get my personal info? No, they are not.

Perhaps in heavily regulated industries such as banking that might be different but search engines are not government regulated (for now).

Org-Mode is another reason I've heard for switching.

>> ...This is getting tiresome; trusted services going down...

That statement from the OP rubbed me the wrong way. Trusted services going down are a fact of life. It is going to happen. I agree Skype's last outage was three years ago which is a good track record compared to more traditional services that you might pay a lot more for. Other "trusted" services like electricity, water, heat, transportation fail from time to time even in the most modern of cities. The key is how a company responds to it, triages it, and communicates it to their customers (i.e. with frequent updates)

Hopefully, Skype provides a postmortem describing what happened and how they fixed it.

StackOverflow recently began adding keyword tags to their page titles to help increase SEO in combating clone sites:

http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/6556/does-the-...

One user was unhappy with it, but Atwood's response is that they had no choice:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/71906/first-tag-in-t...

Unfortunately, I'm unaware of how to do this natively but I recommend using Dummynet which has a Windows port of the FreeBSD networking tool. Oddly, their website appears to be down so here is the Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YJ8bhlD...

You need to install the drivers but once done you effectively use the same commands with ipfw as on FreeBSD (as described in another thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2005190). I just used it for the first time the other day to test a web app browsing with a 400ms delay on a WinXP machine. It worked like a charm.

Yes, but network effects are not limited to just social media and the internet as a whole. Physically clustering together smart, ambitious individuals produces tremendous side effects in opportunities and innovation that are difficult to impossible to recreate with today's technology. This might change but, for now, they are not on equal ground.

A good read on the subject:

http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

The writing style of both the posted question and Joel's response gave off such a "Dear Abby" advice column vibe that it was a pleasant, surprising piece to read on a usual by-the-numbers Q&A site. If he ever returns to blogging, a "Dear Joel" format might be an entertaining read.

I use both but Chrome is certainly my primary browser. On any clean install of Ubuntu I immediately download and install Chrome while treating the default OS browser, Firefox, with a status of second class citizen.

This was precisely how it was for me years ago on Windows but with Firefox in the Chrome role and the default OS browser, IE, in the now Firefox role.

Groovy and Scala but no Clojure?

Although the author discounted Python, I'd still recommend it. Python has a turtle graphics module that is based on Logo, a Lisp-based language that has been traditionally used to teach kids programming (myself included):

http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html

I wish more tech companies encouraged (or even mandated) a day or two out of the year as 'hack day projects'. This is similar to Google's 20% projects but significantly compressed in time. Companies would benefit tremendously from actually sparking innovated ideas in this manner instead of using traditonal "suggestion box" type proposals that go nowhere since those tend to be all talk but no show. Instead what it currently promotes is for its developers to start their own side projects outside of work that lead to them leaving to work on their own business/startup.

If you are on Windows, another alternative is running PowerShell as an interactive shell within Emacs:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnetinterop/archive/2008/04/10/run...

>> is the "too much text" really a problem?

Yes. Even though I read the entire article, the captions for the graphics combined with the graphics themselves provided such a clear, concise summary of good and bad examples for each bullet point that I immediately understood the meat of the detailed text surrounding it.

The graphics and accompanying captions in the article itself serve as a nice TL;DR which reinforces the author's earlier point of one way of fixing the "Too much text" problem:

...Instead of extensive “How this works” (consisting of heaps of text), make a simple graphic detailing the process...

The program manager for IronRuby left Microsoft just a couple months ago citing lack of support and commitment for that project:

http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2010/08/start-spreading-news...

Agreed. With ReSharper, I don't recall a time where syntax was incorrect at compile time. It immediately indicates any syntax errors at coding time.

However, the inline method/function definition that the OP mentions is something I have also wanted. The two closest features are:

1) Visual Studio has a 'Code Definition Window' (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f5yx24a6%28v=VS.100%...) that dynamically displays the contents of a method in a separate window pane. Although it is not inline, at least you can visually see the code without navigating away from the current source file.

2) In ReSharper, you can sort of fake it by calling the command 'Inline Method' and unchecking 'Inline all usages' and then Undo when done inspecting the code. However, that is a hack with its share of problems. I'd prefer a feature to toggle the inline method content in a preview mode without actually modifying any existing code.

To conveniently search all of their stackexchange sites using Google including stackoverflow.com, try the search box on http://stackexchange.com/.

This somewhat helps with a problem they are facing which is fragmentation of questions and answers across their sites. For example, for Ubuntu you might need to search three or four of their sites before finding an answer to an issue you are having.

Yes, I've noticed that it is harder to get things on the front page.

I've recently submitted a few links that I thought were HN worthy but they barely got any notice if at all.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1696933 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714334

Perhaps they're not interesting or maybe with the current system more things are getting overlooked and lost. Don't know.

Usually, I tend to only look at what's on the New page when I submit something (since it automatically redirects you there). So, I'm as guilty as the rest. However, at that time, I'll check out the other posts and upvote other submissions that I consider quality material.

I probably need to spend more time looking at the New page than the front page to help with keeping the quality up.

Between and during Emacs sessions, being able to view a list of my recently opened files via C-x C-r and then select and re-open them as needed.

    ;; recent files
    (require 'recentf)
    (recentf-mode 1)
    (setq recentf-max-menu-items 25)
    (global-set-key "\C-x\ \C-r" 'recentf-open-files)

http://www.joegrossberg.com/archives/000182.html

LinqBridge allows support for Linq to run on .NET 2.0. The description of how it works might provide some insight:

http://www.albahari.com/nutshell/linqbridge.aspx

Based on the those tasks, seems like hiring a lot of cheap VAs would be helpful to spammers.