steve8918

I've been programming for around 20 years now, and I've very, very rarely seen goto statements used, except in the case of error handling (which, in my opinion, was a great use of goto). So, I think as an industry, we've done a good job in curtailing the use of goto, so the article really shouldn't have bothered mentioning it, because it's more like a red herring than anything else.

However, I've seen a whole crapload of terrible code. You don't need goto to create code that jumps around, and where the state is very hard to determine. That can easily be caused by things like global variables, badly designed code, etc.

My PIN number is 8+ numbers long, and to my chagrin, I discovered in 2006 that most ATMs in Europe didn't accept anything more than 6, and most accepted only 4. I'm not sure if things have changed since then, but in the 5 countries I was in, the only ATM that accepted 8 was in Amsterdam, near the end of my trip.

I think the reason why your photos are doubling is because I believe you are importing them into iPhoto and then back into the iPhone. You will get two copies of all your photos on your iPhone because they get imported into iPhoto and then back out. It's super annoying, so I shut iPhoto completely off.

Oh boy.

So now, we are supposed to be evaluated on our "thought process"? Based on what we type in the middle of programming? Talk about a completely ridiculous notion.

First off, what is the point? What matters is the finished product. When I code, I try a bunch of different ideas, get to a working prototype to make sure that the idea can actually work, and then I start to whittle down to what I believe is the best solution.

What does it matter what intermediate steps I come up with? All that matters is the code that I present for code review to my co-workers, and the code that I ultimately check-in. Trying to divine someone's "thought process" (which other people are completely unqualified to do, just based on what you see them type on the screen) is more stupid hoops to jump through in what is already becoming an increasing ridiculous hiring process for programmers.

As a side question, what exactly is the benefit of a time-series database vs a regular relational database? Is it just a special case or a relational database, where rows are stored based on time, so that time-based queries are more efficient? Or is there some other fundamental difference that makes it more useful?

We got lucky. 1.5 years ago, we rented a house in SF for $2700, and the rent was frozen at $2700 for up to 3 years. A friend of ours moved into our neighborhood and is paying $3300/month for a comparable place.

I'm not sure what we're going to do once the lease is up in 1.5 years, hopefully the rent prices will stabilize. I know my friend in SOMA who bought his 2 br condo for $580k can now sell it for probably $800k, and charge at least $4k/month for it. It's absolutely crazy how much rents have gone up, it's as bad as during the dotcom boom, where my rent went up $500/month after the 1st year lease. (I moved out to a worse neighborhood instead of renewing the lease).

What is the value of all companies that weren't picked by YC? Are there any notable black swans that are known YC-rejects?

It would be interesting to do an analysis of those companies that were rejected by YC, and see how many "black swans" were present in those rejects, as well as maybe relative value of the rejected startups vs the chosen ones to see how effective the YC selection process is.

My college tuition was $1800/year, and it was completely covered by the scholarships that I received. I just checked, and the funny thing is that those same scholarships are still at around $2000/yr, but tuition is around $15k/yr.

If I ever have kids, when they decide to go the college, we will do a simple cost-benefit analysis to see if it's actually worth it. I would never imagine that my kids would not go to college, but based on how quickly costs are rising, and how crazy student debt has become, instead of being laden in debt until they are 45, it might be better to simply take the $250k (the costs 20 years from now) and try to create a business instead.

Very cool! The mashup is really catchy and the author did a great job mixing LMFAO and Psy.

The first mashup I remember listening to was the Eminem/Britney Spears mashup (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j98zaF5592c). It was particularly funny because Eminem had recently dissed Britney Spears, but the ironic thing is that this mashup sounded better than the originals of both songs.

The only question I have is how do these mashup-er's isolate the vocals and instrumentals so clearly? Are the vocal and instrumental tracks available for most songs these days, so that fans can create mashups?

I have to say that I do prefer RTS, my first one being Ancient Art of War waaaaay back :)

However, I did get in my share of turn-based games. I remember when I first played Civilization, it was over Christmas break during college, and I didn't go home because it was too expensive. I ended up playing Civ for 3 days straight, and my Christmas dinner was toast, 6 boiled eggs and peanuts... whatever I could rustle up quickly without taking too much time away from the game.

Client-serving is very different, and I'm sure a good CEO would insist that you take the call rather than be in a meeting. I was thinking more about from the developer angle, so I guess I should have been clearer.

Like I said below, interrupting a meeting and leaving to take a call from your mechanic because your car is ready, or from a friend to plan your activity that night, is rude, and I've seen a lot of that.

Obviously emergencies are an exception, but for the meetings I've been in, the phone calls that I've seen my peers take have never been an emergency. They are people taking calls from their friends, their significant others, their mortgage broker, their mechanic, etc.

The worst is when they start talking on the phone even before they leave the meeting room, and disrupt the meeting.

Wow, thanks for that link, it looks amazing! This might be the first Kickstarter campaign I might contribute too...

I acknowledge Starcraft's dominance, but my personal favorite game of all time was Total Annihilation. At the time (98/99), it was probably the most advanced game out there. I played my cousin across the country over 33kps modem, and we each had 500 units moving around at the same time. With 1000 units total, each 3D rendered, the action slowed down a lot, but it never crashed, and allowed us to play entire games across the country reliably. It was truly a feat of software engineering.

Chris Taylor (the creator of TA) came out with Supreme Commander in 2007, which I bought a new computer for just to play, but I only played it for a few months, more because I got busy rather than not enjoying the game. But both games never seemed to catch on as much as Starcraft 1 and 2 have. I'm seriously considering picking up Starcraft 2 but it's already 2 years old, so I think I probably missed the boat.

Sure, there are some people that are important enough to warrant interrupting a meeting, but the vast majority of the people that I've seen that get up to leave a meeting to answer the phone don't fit in that category.

I guess I'm old school, but I've always been a bit taken back these days at how some people think it's okay to take phone calls during a meeting.

If you're being paid by your employer to attend meetings, what phone call could possibly be so important that you can't let it go to voicemail and you get to it after the meeting?

But I'm probably at least 10+ years older than the average person on HN, so maybe that's why. I still remember a time when people who took out a cell phone at a restaurant was considered rude and obnoxious, so I guess times do change.

This is the one Kickstarter project that I was really interested in as to how it turned out.

Going from 1000 watches to 100,000 watches is a huge undertaking, and requires a lot of special skillsets. 1000 watches you could probably do by yourself with some friends that you hire, but 100,000 requires a factory, and a whole different set of skills.

Their product looks really cool and I hope that they succeed, but my speculation to my friends was that they might be the victim of their own success. It might be the case that maybe they should have capped their first set of orders at 1000, and then slowly build out their capacity while learning from their mistakes, but now with their high-profile Kickstarter campaign and $12M, people might not give them a second chance if they encounter big problems.

I think the system at HN works as is, and I disagree with everyone who says that the quality of comments have been "sliding" downwards.

I'm a long-time slashdotter, and a recent reddit convert, and I still think that HN comments have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any other forum.

Of course you're going to get opinions you don't agree with, and some of them may be harsh, and that's perfectly ok. I haven't seen the type of garbage I've seen on other sites like reddit where they start developing their own inside jokes and a thread spirals off-topic. HN keeps a good job in making sure most topics stay on target.

If we're talking about improving HN, the only minor comments I have are:

1) I wish pg would add collapsing comments on threads, like reddit. Having the ability to collapse comments means that I can exit out of a thread immediately if it starts to degrade in quality.

2) The other thing I would do is not allow throwaway comments to post for 24 hrs. This way you don't get people coming in and shitting all over a thread, and leaving with impunity.

3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page.

It will affect FB when they make acquisitions based on shares as well. It might make potential acquirees more reluctant to take anything but cash, which will be a drag on their financials.

FB didn't pull one over on the bankers. The bankers and FB sold their shares to investors, so both parties are "guilty" to some extent. Investors are guilty for believing the hype as well, but in any deal, the buyers have a lot more power than the sellers, so keeping the investors happy is important for a healthy market.

Full disclosure: I currently own FB shares (at a loss), but could sell at any time.

Cuban is right in that the Facebook IPO was great in that they sold their shares for higher than what they were worth and maximized the benefit for FB.

But the more important fact is that investors, who are the lifeblood of this entire market, got fleeced, and that's long-term bad.

The people that you do business with MUST have confidence that you will live up to your end of any deal that you make with them. If you're only going to do a single one-shot deal with someone, I suppose it's doable to screw them for whatever they're worth. That seems to be the Wall-Street-style business model that is popular with some people these days.

But if you intend to do business over and over again, screwing everyone you deal with is a great way to go broke very quickly. As well, if you attain the reputation of being someone that is bad to do business with, then you will suffer as well.

Do you think Andrew Mason is going to get as good of a ride on the next company once Groupon fails? How difficult will it be for Facebook to have another secondary if it needs to raise more capital?

My guess is that any new deals underwritten by Morgan Stanley will get a second look-over from any potential investors, given the fact that they really sold some snake oil with FB at $100B.

This is a bit too pessimistic, even for me. Technology is only going to get better, and the quadcopters will become quieter, and with less vibration, with longer battery lives.

As quadcopter technology and things like computer vision become more advanced, it really does seem like there's a lot of possibilities for these types of devices.

I've been daydreaming of the day when I have my own personal swarm of quadcopters that continuously circle my house with a wireless camera, and then land to recharge, and another one takes off. Not that I'm particularly worried about security (my barred windows, landmines and laser booby traps are more than enough protection), but it would be fun to see that.

The other thing that would be fun with quadcopters is if you could give it your gear, like your cellphone, wallet, etc, and have it fly above you everywhere, and whenever you needed something, you could just summon it. It's like the old school Dungeons and Dragons concept of having a familiar that you can summon whenever you needed it. You could also video yourself, from a WoW-like view, just for fun.

I like Bezos's suggestion of having shorter patents for software. 3-5 years is enough to protect innovators, but not long enough to stifle further innovation, and probably not long enough for patent trolls to purchase and then sue people.

The author may have a point in general, but using Holstein is sounding more and more like the wrong example to stand behind.

One of the comments in the blog post points to a very in-depth betabeat article that says that Holstein was involved with much more than just name dropping... she has been accused of credit card fraud and ripping off people around her. If the allegations are true, it might be that she is a criminal and a pathological liar with likely mental issues.

http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls-credit-...

I have no real interest in either side of this story, and Techcrunch isn't really on my rolodex of sites to read from. That being said, I don't think the original Techcrunch article was being a bully at all.

The fact that she allegedly has gotten away with the simplest of social engineering tactics against a group that most likely thinks of themselves as at least smarter than average, was fairly interesting to me. It shows how easy and effective social engineering can be, even by someone as young as Shirley Hofnstein.

All the author appears to write is that they don't like the fact that Techcrunch wrote an article about their friend. It appears that the author of the above article doesn't even defend Shirley Hornstein, which leads me to believe that she was in fact guilty of these acts of social engineering.

If that's the case, then it seems like a decent bit of journalism to me. Do I think it's a huge crime? No, it's not like she pulled off a Madoff scam. But was it an interesting article? Yes, and it really points to the fact that we all need to keep on our toes.

I've been traveling in Asia, and was in Korea this last week when Gangnam style really took off, at least on my Facebook feed.

I asked one of my tour guides about this, not knowing anything about the relevance of the video, and she basically echoed a lot of the comments about how it was poking fun at Korean materialism and superficialism. She said that Korean culture has really shifted in the last few decades. Her grandparents' and her parents' generation, she said, were very hard-working, and transformed their country from a post-war, 3rd world country into one of the powerhouse economies in the world. But her generation (she said she was 27) wasn't nearly as hardworking, and is enjoying the fruits of her parents labor without putting as much in.

She said that the Korean culture had turned very materialistic and superficial as well. Korean males have started to use a lot of the same makeup that females traditionally wear, like foundation, etc. Many girls will have cosmetic surgery done right after high school so that their college graduation pictures will look good, which she said was very important to females. She said her sister practices smiling in the mirror for 15 mins every day, in order to get a certain crease in her mouth, which apparently is the sign of wealth and good luck. She said "double-eyelid surgery" (I guess a type of surgery to add a crease in the eyelids which many Koreans do not have) is so common, that girls don't even consider it surgery anymore. Most eyelid surgeries come with a 2-for-1 deal where they throw in a nosejob as well, and new techniques are constantly being developed, like a form of injection that will lift the nose up temporarily, like a nose job.

I found this absolutely incredible, and I said to the tour guide that it must be very hard growing up as a female, with all this pressure. She said that it was only 30% of the female population that engaged in all this materialism/superficialism, and that left 70% of the females that didn't care about it. It was a good attitude, but still 30% seemed awful high to me.

My guess is that this is just a phase that developed (or developing) nations go through, and social commentary like this Gangnam style are the first steps in seeing a "reversion to the mean", where things become a lot less extreme.

The fact that you only reveal the last hourly sales, which really has zero relevance to total sales and whether or not you "win", makes it feel like a game of 3-card monte, as I mentioned in another comment.

Maybe you need to be more transparent and show the total sales or the ranking. This might help show you're not trying to scam anyone. Then, it turns into something more where people can decide "do I want to buy this t-shirt in a 2-for-1 sale" since they get the next shirt free.

The "intention" may not be "shittiest", but that's the impression I get. It feels like a trick or a game of 3-card monte in order for him to move his worst product. Possibly others might get the same impression as well.

In general, retailers discount the product that doesn't move, and raise or maintain the prices on the things that are popular. So, this is something that would appear to try to artificially increase demand on their worst selling product. Again, I'm not saying he that's his intention, but that's the general impression someone could get.

That's why I suggested changing the mechanics to something more win-win. I suggested something like the most popular t-shirt gets a progressive discount, and early adopters get a discount on their next purchase. This feels more win-win, and you have to do less mental calculations to try to figure out if you're getting scammed or not.

I can't tell what you do from the first page without signing up. There is no chance I'm going to give you my email address, Facebook account, etc, without having an iota of understanding of what you do.

I saw this site last week or maybe the week before, and to be honest, I was put-off by the obnoxiousness of trying to get people to buy the "least popular" t-shirt. To me, it came across as you trying to unload your shittiest product through some clever trick. It had a Zynga-esque feel to it, and I didn't like it at all. The fact you give a clue like "this was the worst selling t-shirt in the last hour" makes me feel like you're tricking me, and I'd rather do business with someone else than risk getting played or ripped off. Sorry, but that's the feeling I get when I see this site.

If you want some additional feedback:

Instead of the gimmicky "you lose I win", I think you need to make it some sort of win-win type gimmick. Like the price goes down the more people buy it, and whoever buys it earlier will get some money back on their next purchase.

You need to make the "game" shorter, I don't have patience to wait a week until I know if I "won".

$25 is something I would pay if the t-shirts were good quality, like American Apparel, but you didn't list the manufacturer.

You need a lot more designs. I was looking for the button for additional designs, but I finally figured out you only have those 5. If I hate all 5 of them, then I won't likely remember your site, and won't come back.

I'm double your age. It's fairly inaccurate to say that all everyone can talk about it fixing it. Sure, some people gripe about it, and some aspects of the community might have shifted over time, but you'll still find the highest quality comments of any online community out there.