cppsnob

Heh, Naggum. Why do we still talk about him? Did he build awesome things? Did he change the world? Affect so many lives by being a great teacher?

One thing he did do was hate a lot. You can find him throwing hate at whatever it is you hate, no problem. Perl, C++, XML... whatever (except Lisp), he probably wrote an article flaming it. So when you want to find a well-written article lambasting whatever it is you hate, you can look to Naggum.

And while he wrote those thousands of USENET posts, the rest of us were off building great things with the stuff he hated on. He was barely on my radar until he died, and looking through archives I realized he actually responded to me a couple times. I guess I was too busy making stuff to pay much attention.

No, they made it possible to port XNA games to the platform. Except that XNA != XBOX SDK.

XNA is a .NET-based game SDK that some people have used for Xbox Arcade games. As far as I know it hasn't been used for any disc-based games. Games like Modern Warfare are written in C++, top to bottom, with potentially some Lua for scripting.

Lack of C++ is a huge issue on WP7, ask any game developer you know who is working on the platform.

> Where did all of that money go? I remember seeing a single TV ad at WP7's launch, and nothing more.

Remember the "Really?!" campaign? I saw this ad at least 50 times last fall.

Here it is in glorious Silverlight: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/details.aspx?uuid=b8...

UI code should be in the same portable OpenGL that the rest of your game is in.

If I remember the numbers, leading up to the WP7 launch, MS dropped roughly 100 million on marketing. They sold less than 100,000 units on launch week. Whatever the exact numbers, I remember someone pointing out it would have been more cost effective to give the phones away for the launch.

It's still that way today. They have no mindshare of the public at large, nor the developers, nor the carriers, nor the handset makers. Somehow, you have to make a product compelling to one of these. iOS is compelling for 2 of the 4 and Android is compelling for all 4. WP7 is compelling to zero of the 4.

For example, they have to fix the native C++ development option. This is especially important for games. Whether or not C# is nice, thanks to only being in C#, every development for that platform becomes a full-on port. If you design your code right for iOS and Android, you can use mostly the same code for both, and just a few glue points for the rest, AND you can develop for both on the Mac instead of having to fire up Windows just for that platform.

The 3rd party development option is so abysmal that Microsoft has been paying for apps to be ported to this platform for two years now. This situation is not sustainable by any measure.

At this point Microsoft is 4 years behind Apple and Google. No one cares if something is arguably better. That's the Zune. That's the Mac in the 90s. Microsoft has to do something that's _compellingly_ better, to someone, somewhere, on some basis that makes money.

Please, name a .NET app that is widely used on Windows.

Worse is better. Everyone seems to rediscover this again and again the hard way, most especially certain companies in Cupertino and Redmond.

"unless you’re willing to spend beaucoup dollars on buying and operating physical infrastructure"

This is the biggest misconception out there about cloud computing.

Cloud computing has nothing to do with saving money. It is usually MORE expensive than comparable--and even more powerful--physical hardware. The advantage of cloud computing is the ability to spin up and shut down instances when you want.

Fair enough, let me add to my counterpoint another piece of personal experience [I see another commenter ripped me for telling an anecdote -- what posted to HN is ever NOT anecdotal or opinion].

Have you ever worked at a company where they've brought in the "hotshot" from <name successful tech company here>? I have. I worked for a tech company in a non-hot-tech location that, once we got big enough, brought in hotshots from California. They almost all were:

1) Overpaid -- in our opinion because we were paid far less since we had lived and worked there for a long time.

2) Know-it-all A-holes.

3) Out within 6 months anyway because they realized it wasn't interesting compared to their last hot-shot job.

The people who came to our company because they actually wanted to live there ("move back", as it often was) and were making a sacrifice to do it... now those people were into it and stayed for years. I think this is what the Austin companies are looking for. They're out in the Bay trying to find the ex-UT, ex-Texas, maybe even just ex-Midwest people would like to contemplate moving back. I think that sounds reasonable before throwing lots of money at people who might not otherwise consider the move.

I normally wouldn't respond to a post like this but when it comes to career advice, many of you who have not been in the workforce long should hear the counterpoint.

The Austin businesspeople are right: folks who want to make a lifestyle choice of going to Austin from California should get paid less to do it. On average, they'll earn more than most people in Austin, but less than their counterparts in Silicon Valley.

I see no problem with this. It's fair. You usually only get to choose where you want to live or where you want to work. The other one is a compromise. That's life. Compromises. Why would a businessperson not take advantage of this when someone wants to live in Austin? Maybe the OP doesn't want to live there but a lot of people do.

Working remotely is a compromise further: you will get paid less, you'll get promoted less, and you will be one of the first laid off.

The OP can rant all she wants about "[companies lacking] the tools to communicate remotely, [probably] can’t communicate at all", but the all of us who have done this can tell you that remote workers are almost never as productive. They only work for "guy who takes the app and ports it to Android because we don't care to do it here" type of projects. 1-3 person projects. Large projects are hard enough to manage with the people in the office, and going remote is a nightmare. I've even seen 10 year experts on the specific codebase try to work remotely and it be completely unproductive when they're remote.

There will be exceptions. The one guy who's amazing as a remote worker. Sales people are always an exception. And of course, all of this turns on its head when the company is not desirable. A crap company will pay you a lot to work remotely, then go out of business 6 months later. Generally though, what I've spelled out here is the way it is.

Here's a proposal, given that she's in Austin already, the OP should demand $150K from those companies or her current employer based on this blog post. Tell us what happens over the next 3 months, 6 months, 2 years.

The web is not a platform in the sense that we're talking about here. It's a set of open, free, non-proprietary specifications that anyone can implement on top of. iOS is not that. Just like Windows is not that.

How's this:

Whatever you create, even if it's for iPhone first, don't get bogged down on it being on "platform X". Photoshop, as you mentioned, is a great example, it didn't need to be on a Mac to be great. It just was developed there first, and now sells more on Windows (I think).

If you focus too much on the platform, once that market wanes, you end up nowhere. This is what I meant by the MFC guy -- maybe an even better example is the VB 6 guy. We know this guy, right? He's an expert with VB 6. He made a damn good VB6 app 10 years ago, which he's supported since then. But he spent too long focused on VB6, so god help him trying to get a job today doing C#.

Your idea doesn't have to be as big as Facebook. All I'm saying is, don't get so focused on the platform that you become that VB6 guy. Focus now, sure, but developers over time should be broad and flexible. And if you are starting something new, your idea should be too.

I was sad to see that Gruber couldn't step out of his Apple bubble to tackle this topic (or any topic, ever), so I will:

Everyone who thinks "I should be developing for platform X" is thinking far too small. Take a look around you.. how many of the great companies were formed developing for a particular platform (unless it's their own)? Almost none. In 10 years, do you want to be the old and busted equivalent of the MFC expert whose software was hot in year 2000?

You don't make the Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, of the world by developing just for iOS. Or just for Android. If that's your business plan, tear it up and start over. Because $0.99 a pop doesn't amount to jack-all unless you're Angry Birds. And even they, if they got $1 for each of their 500MM downloads, have still not made as much as Modern Warfare 3 made last week ($738MM in revenue).

Go create a market. Stop being part of Apple's/Google's market for drumming up hardware sales and/or serving ads.

Related: how's Apple's "open" FaceTime specification coming along? Still waiting on just the specification here. Not even code.

The real news is not that they're taking back stock, it's that their initial stock plan was so screwed up that they have to do it.

Prediction: A BSD fan is going to go bonkers over a particular line in this article.

> If Google didn't raise big money, they wouldn't have went on to do as many early acquisitions. Without those acquisitions, they don't stumble onto adwords/adsense

Adwords was out for around 6 months before the company's very first acquisition, DejaNews.

http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/history.html

Google quickly became insanely profitable after launching adwords. They only ever took $25MM in private funding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Financing_and...

I'm curious as to how you arrived at the assertions you made.

Galvin is/was a household name in Chicagoland. RIP.

> Who's making that conclusion?

Everyone who even brings up that he used LSD as a point of interest. At least that's the implication being made.

> that doesn't make the points being made any less valid.

No, the points are not valid. That's why we have a scientific method that proves causation.

It's the exact same fallacy that someone falls into with e.g. alternative medicine. A person's cancer went into remission while they were eating tree bark. They are free to believe it helped them, but that doesn't mean it's scientifically, or even remotely, the case. Taking their word for it doesn't make it true.

> What fallacy is being committed here?

Concluding that he wouldn't been the same successful person without doing LSD. There's no evidence of causation. That's the fallacy.

I'm not sure why so many people are excited about this, it seems like a cheap pro-legalization play in light of his death.

I learned LISP and Python before Java and C#. The latter two are just as useful nevertheless.

The world's experience outside of HN makes me think Dart will not be at all inhibited by its Java like syntax. If it doesn't catch on, it will be for other reasons.

Staying with the norm worked out quite well for both Java and C#.

The thing I never understand about these articles: why aren't C, Java, C++, C#, Ruby, Python and other mundane languages "worth checking out?"

I don't think you should assume people have used all of these, and they're all worth "checking out". Millions of people use these languages every day to create 99% of the software you're using right now. Maybe it's worth a shot if you don't know one of them to learn one and maybe even get a job with it. There's a lot more opportunity to learn Ruby and get a job in it than there is for Scala.

Ok... that fixes the keyboard, not the entire reach, which is what OP is discussing.

Given your 3.5" measurement, a 7" screen for the iPad would have been much better, would it have not?

Apple's not shipping a bigger phone yet because it's something they can hold back on until they need to do it. The iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5XL iPhone 6... one of these will eventually do it so as to sell you something new.

Serious question: has anyone gotten anything out of these browser-based language playgrounds? I just don't think it's hard to download the real thing to try it, so I thought I'd ask if anyone has really been inspired by it.

crucial is the ability to get shit done

Ok, so what exactly does that mean? Are you concerned with velocity or correctness?

e.g. v1 of some key scalable infrastructure

Just so I understand: You're always willing to trade intelligence and experience for someone who produces more, for essential key components of your startup. So you would hire a less experienced person who writes more code over a very experienced slow developer, do I have that right?

All that does is trade the short term risk of not having as much developed with the long term risk of having a broken system. It means you're potentially betting your business on someone who isn't the best, just because they seem more productive.

In summary, you risk making a Friendster instead of a Facebook.

Let me know if I misunderstood your point.

I hire on both: smart people who get it done. And getting it done is relative. Unless you're in consulting, velocity is almost never the issue compared to correctness, so a smarter, slower person is sometimes the right choice. A member of my team took a long time to come up to speed, and is now kicking ass and making the right decisions to keep things on track.

> I'm going to make a bold statement that might not be well received around here. There is no smart people in what you think "webby" is

A large number of web programmers I've met do not have a degree, they know very little theory, and often do not understand the most fundamental concepts like memory allocation or semaphores.

Though, I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying that that means there are no smart people. I've met a lot of smart people who fit the description I just laid out. Their problem is they just don't have the training or experience to make good technical decisions.

Thanks hello_moto. I wasn't being sarcastic -- I mean what I said earnestly.

Put another way: find developers who want to work for you because they want to build what you want to build, not ones who will only work for you because you chose "technology X" to build it. One way to guarantee that is to choose a tech that you're positive can do the job and is boring... Java is that tech.