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I am very interested in how this will all play out.

Personally, I think the auction house real money economy is going to be huge. If the trading that went on in Diablo 2 is any indicator:

- people in low wage countries will easily be able to live of the auction house without necessarily having to work for a gold farm.

- hardcore gamers are likely to be dissatisfied with high level content so easily available, but then again, they may take to turning a profit on hard to get stuff.

- casual gamers with jobs will get the maximum amount of fun out of their hour of gaming a day. For a small price at least.

These are incentives for 3 different demographics, 2 of which are highly desirable for Blizzard.

I have the same question.

I don't see buying Twitter as being very useful to Apple. Just because Apple, Google and Facebook are 3 of the largest tech giants at the moment doesn't mean they directly compete.

What's more, if the assumption is that Apple isn't very good at social, then the only thing they achieve by acquiring Twitter is to suddenly make themselves a straight competitor in a field where they have little expertise.

I don't see it making sense, but maybe I'm just being shortsighted :)

Regardless of what price you end up deciding on, please provide people with a way of leaving their email address with you.

I am interested in your video series and may buy them, but right now:

- I have no way of finding out when you're done, except for polling you, which ups the burden on me

- I am likely to forget about you

- I am likely to miss your announcement that you're opening up shop

A simple "leave your email here if you want to be kept up to date" form would be awesome !

That's so obviously correct that I'm going to stop making HN comments so early in the morning and see if that stops me from saying stupid shit.

I am now on my third project using coffeescript together with BackboneJS.

On the second and third project, I am also teaching coffeescript to 3 people who had never written any coffeescript OR BackboneJS before.

Granted, there is a fair amount of coaching involved, but the quality of the code produced is top notch, and the maintainability is _vastly_ improved compared to anything we've done in plain javascript before.

This may be due to Coffeescript, and it may be due to Backbone adding some much needed structure, but I'd like to believe it's a combination of both and even using one in isolation should yield an improvement.

If you are familiar with Javascript, picking up Coffeescript should be a breeze, and in my opinion, the benefits are there.

On a closing note, you say that JS is ridiculously powerful which leads me to believe that you feel using CS means sacrificing some of that power. Since CS translates directly into JS, I think you'll find this fear is unwarranted.

He most likely used HPHP as an example because the message he was replying to also mentioned HPHP. At least that's how I interpreted it.

I can't imagine doing any useful work in the scenario being described.

If I'm being strung along like that, knowing that my attention could be required at any minute, it is extremely hard to load a chunk of code in my head because any spare brain-cycles are reflexively spent trying to figure out if my input is required yet.

This is very much like trying to read when you're tired. You'll read 5 pages and then all of a sudden realize you don't even know what you read in the previous paragraph.

Sure you can triage your mail and small tasks and quickly do the stuff that takes 3 or 4 minutes, but I find that I often have just a few of those tasks. Certainly not enough to fill 3 hours worth of time.

Try cutting out some of the stuff people tend to find boring. Or change the way it's presented.

Maybe your audience doesn't understand what you're trying to tell, maybe they already know.

Try to adapt on the fly.

I really tend to like early returns and use them often.

I usually try to make them use the form:

return x if y

To me, this makes it easier to follow a particular flow when reading code.

As soon as I encounter a return that matches it's conditional, I don't have to care about the rest of the method anymore.

During debugging, this also quickly lets me test assumptions by putting some log statements right after the return that should be occuring.

The only time early returns irk me is when they're deeply nested, but as mentioned by TFA and others in this thread, having deeply nested code is a bit of a code smell in its own right.

This sounds like great advice, and your post would make for a good blog entry.

Identifying gaps in your knowledge is half the battle.

Learning and getting better isn't limited to eliminating known unknowns, it includes becoming aware of unknown unknowns.

Once you can google a problem, there is a very high chance you'll be able to solve it.

> "Why don’t you sell your house/company/whatever if you believe that much in your product?"

How is believing in your product an excuse for not trying to minimise risk.

Especially if you know that most startups fail, there's no good reason not to hedge your bets when it comes to stuff that's at the base of the Maslow triangle.

edit: logic error :)

This mentality switch is a long overdue change in my life.

I'm currently using a Nexus One, and while I like it just fine, my next phone is going to be an iPhone.

At least Apple seems to be beholden to making sure their customers stay happy after money has changed hands.

I completely disagree with your last statement, and believe that that kind of thinking is bad.

It allows assholes to continue to pose as 'smart people' because they simply bully their peers, and their superiors will assume they must be smart because their peers defer to them.

There is absolutely no reason why truly smart people would be assholes.

Very little to none.

Software patent laws are largely written by people paid by companies who:

a) have a lot of patents

b) invested billions buying up patents

c) would very much like to see those patents as an asset which makes them money

d) would very much like to see those patents as a weapon to stifle competitors

Extra patent laws that are introduced as bills are almost always laws that make the current state of affairs worse.

The problem is not having 2 or more app stores, the problem is having 2 or more app stores that are mutually exclusive.

This is very much how my brain works too, and I wonder if it's prevalent at all.

I'll know something is possible, and vaguely know what the technique is called, and I will be able to incorporate that knowledge into my thinking.

Then whenever it is time to build stuff, there's a lot of very specific googling to lay down a strong foundation of a solution.

It seems like the title is a bit poorly chosen.

The author talks about the importance of having a platform to cater to the multitude of devices and other apps out there, and that this means rails isn't the center of the universe anymore.

To me, this does not necessarily mean moving on from rails.

It does mean moving on from writing all code in rails.

There could be a fullfledged backbone.js app powering a responsive ui, and a distributed clojure jobqueue making sure messages are fanned out to their destined networks in the backend. However, there is still room in this picture for Rails as a router of sorts.

Rails still makes it easy to quickly build a solid REST api, and easy to delegate long-running jobs to a separate system, in this type of architecture, Rails would have roughly a third of the responsibility / code that it has in a Rails only architecture, but it's still a vital component.

Well, there's a ton of technologies you could play around with, from lisp to haskell, ruby to python to any jvm language.

If you go with Java or Scala, Eclipse, IntelliJ or NetBeans are good choices. Personally I prefer IntelliJ where you can check out the community edition.

For scripting languages such as php, ruby or python, vim and emacs are the goto editors (i use emacs myself). On the other hand IntelliJ and Eclipse have plugins or alternate builds for these languages as well.

If you come from .NET and your main goal is to broaden your horizon, I'd definitely try to go with a plain text editor like jEdit or SciTE and pick a scripting language.

Since you said you're into webdev, the rails or django frameworks will probably get you the most bang for your buck.

Install ubuntu or mint.

Once you have that set up, it really is just a question of what stack you want to work with.

If you don't want to start using vim or emacs right away, which is understandable, there are a lot of text editors out there. You will just have to do a bit of looking around to find something you like.

The best thing you can do right now is to get a linux box up and running and then write a simple hello world in rails or django.

For bonus points, get a github account and commit your first steps to a github repository.

Doing that will give you a good bit of exposure to the shell and finding your way around the OS.

Paranoid is overloaded here to apply to both sourcecode and dealing with people.

When slinging code, by all means assert instead of assuming.

When dealing with customers / bosses as in the example provided, try to agree to build the simplest thing that can possible work.

i.e.: scrape google and don't build a distributed architecture just yet.

Maybe that's all your boss needs, just ask for some feedback and mention that results would probably be better if the app had a distributed architecture and that you're not sure if this is in line with Google's TOS.

Let him take responsibility for wether or not to invest extra time / money in these issues.

disclaimer: obviously there are certain aspects that you would be unwise to ignore, such as securing your app etc. But feature wise, building something small first is awesome.

I haven't used RailsAdmin yet, but from your analysis, I would feel hesitant to suggest people start of with it.

I found working with ActiveAdmin to be very straightforward, and it sounds like getting the equivalent of RailsAdmin up and running may take an extra 30 minutes.

The big win after those 30 minutes is that you have a flexible admin module that you can continue to tweak / improve where necessary.

ActiveAdmin feels like the solution with the smallest chance of painting yourself into a corner and therefore seems like the best recommendation of the both.

Even if you would have to invest 2 extra days into ActiveAdmin compared to RailsAdmin, I'd say the flexibility is definitely worth it.

Bonus tip: ActiveAdmin is in heavy development, and the documentation tends to lag behind a bit. I've found the github issues for the project to be a great source of information though.

An inflection point is the point where a function changes sign. This can be both a positive or a negative indication.

This article carries a positive tone, so what they probably mean is that ICS to Android is the point where people start saying more positive than negative stuff about Android.

No penalty implies a moral / ethical stance that is different from even a $1 penalty.

The underlying argument being that the majority of the population finds the current laws to be unjust not in measure, but on principle.

Deliciously ironic given the title of the article though.

The deal was x amount of shares for the risk of working for a startup.

Renegging that to x/2 amount of shares in hindsight is evil.

It's a construct in which an early employee can only lose, if the startup fizzles, he gets nothing, if the startup booms he is screwed out of half of what he and his employer agreed on.

One of those emotions projects on the guy, the other projects on the reasons why people buy his stuff.

I suppose the easy way to buy from him and not feel like an asshole is to appreciate the passion and love that goes into the work he does.

Especially the way it's portrayed by the video, and especially with knives, there's this "this is a Hattori Hanzo sword" feeling attached to it.

If you're in the business of fighting other people with swords, a Hattori Hanzo is likely a good thing to have.

If you are a professional chef or butcher, or a passionate hobby cook, owning one of these knives may provide you with more value than a regular knife. Which side of your opposite judgements someone falls on, to me depends very much on what they use the knife for.

Custom skins layered on top of vanilla Android are such an antipattern it hurts.

It sucks for device manufacturers because it is costly to build.

It sucks for consumers because the manufacturers have an incentive to drop support for any device sold asap WRT software updates.

It sucks for developers because custom components are not standard across devices.

The only point in favour of custom skins is that it theoretically allows manufacturers to differentiate and as a result offers more choice to end users.

In reality though, I suspect very few end users to pick their Android based on the custom skin it comes with, and I'm sure many would be pissed if they realized that custom skin is the reason for them not getting free ota upgrades to something they gave a nice chunk of cash for.

I would suggest just getting emacs 24. If you are on OSX you can build the emacs head using homebrew. There's some cool stuff in 24 like the emacs package manager (package.el) etc.

Once you have emacs 24 ready to go, it's a good idea to take a look at the emacs starter kit: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

There's also a pretty good peepcode screencast on emacs, its a bit old, but gives a good overview of a lot of the basics.

Once you feel like delving deeper, your best bet is to snoop around on emacswiki.org

I'm from Belgium, and I've never heard people talk about their salary after tax.

edit: to answer your question, the 250k is before tax.