jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
In the last decade Microsoft has grown profit margins without creating new product lines. That is great for current profitability, but not for future revenues.

At this point it is only a question of time until free alternatives to core Microsoft products become good enough that people are willing to stop paying the Microsoft tax. The growing popularity of mobile and semi-mobile devices without Microsoft software suggests that this day is coming sooner rather than later. And Microsoft's attempts to increase its profit margins aren't helping any.

In short the relative stock prices of Apple and Microsoft is a vote of belief that Apple understands and is inventing the future, while Microsoft has no realistic plan for how to adapt.
Apple probably locked down on a stable build of WebKit weeks ago. Google has the luxury of staged rollouts with rollback if necessary, so they can take more risk with WebKit builds.
"Our product development was almost stalled for months on end."
Then you're doing something wrong.

I disagree. When we were fundraising we got no actual product development done, and from what I hear this is rather normal. "Months" may be a bit long, but they also launched around the time they raised, so combined with all the support emails (free products = lots of support...good reason to charge!) I can completely understand.

Our fundraising took around 6 weeks, I got nothing done. I tried to take on all the businessy things like support, so my cofounder could keep coding. He got work done, but it was mostly paying the technical debt we had accumulated when trying to launch quickly. I'm convinced that was the right thing to do, since it seems to have gone well for us.

I can definitely see the benefit in the "code every day" mentality, but personally the extra context switch isn't worth it for me. I'm very conscious of when I'm not pushing new code and it physically pains me, so I keep tabs on it and never go more than a day or two without coding, but I don't make any hard-and-fast rules about my coding time.
Mixing grammar with type? I don't think that is good at all.
What I hate is that if you walk too far away, while waiting in a mall or something like that, the little vibrating coasters just don't work. SMS works even if you wander off
Here's what I would like to say about this issue of a font being for a purpose:

Yes, most of the examples presented on this site are heinous and tremendously bad typeface choices. But that has nothing to do with the fact that comic sans was designed to mirror comic book lettering. The designer's intent is not embedded in the typeface, only his actual results.

Papyrus falls into the same category. People get bent out of shape about it: "It was meant to look like Egyptian lettering, but now it's on my Greek menu! It makes no sense!"

Guess what? It doesn't matter what it was "intended" to convey, it matters what is actually conveyed when people read it. Frutiger was designed for airport signage, but it happens to look great outside of airports too. Granted, it was never meant to be a niche font, but the principle applies: you shouldn't get upset on account of people using something in ways you didn't foresee or intend.

All this to say, if you're going to argue that a font is ugly or doesn't belong somewhere, that's fine, but your argument shouldn't be based on what the font was intended for. Sometimes the things we make turn out to be way more useful than we thought.

And I'll stick my neck out here and even say that I think Papyrus often looks good on menus :)
Yes, it's an old Microsoft trick for goosing the numbers.
Perhaps, but one doesn't need nefarious theories (without doubting the nefariety of the Chinese Government) to explain linguistic chauvinism.
Completely agree with you Morgan Stanley is a bank not a tech firm and it falls under various fed laws which slows your pace of development like raising a ticket to login into a dev database or a dev cant push his own code into prod etc.The aim is to audit everything and be risk averse. Try getting any open source software inside the firm within 6 months I would not be surprised if he quit in an year or so.
> Come on, now. How about Google? NASA? Tesla? Plenty of real world problems to solve there tackling difficult problems.

Well, as a professor, he did get some code into some JPL projects ( http://stroustrup.com/mbd09.pdf , http://stroustrup.com/sec09.pdf , http://stroustrup.com/autonomics09.pdf , http://stroustrup.com/fdc_jcse.pdf , http://stroustrup.com/autonomics2008.pdf and http://stroustrup.com/isorc2008.pdf ). (Some information about MDS and goal oriented software can be found on JPL's website, http://mds.jpl.nasa.gov/public/ ).
I had never considered that we might actually be ahead of the Great Filter. From what I'd read about it I've always thought of it as something we are yet to run into.
I haven't worked with them in over 10 years but when I did MS was extremely progressive and leadership saw advanced technology as their way to be competitive against similar firms and as a result had a gigantic technology budget. They were quite progressive in a lot of ways and were a huge investor in distributed Linux setups over traditional mainframes for a lot of things internally.
Are you actually going to respond to the fact that you compared Hello world in Ada to something significantly more complex in Haskell?

How could you ever think that is a fair comparison?
Morgan Stanley is not an investment bank. It is a bank holding company ever since it took bailout money from the Fed.

http://www.morganstanley.com/about-us-articles/6933.html

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/goldman-morgan-to-bec...
Line reported earnings of $600M+ and WeChat $900M+ from stickers/games/ads last year

And yet people still think $19B for WhatsApp was ridiculously overpriced. WhatsApp had roughly double the number of monthly active users compared to WeChat back when they last released comparable numbers[1].

[1] "WhatsApp has 430 million MAUs [in Q3 2013], while WeChat had 272 million active users" https://www.techinasia.com/messaging-apps-should-reveal-mont...
Isn’t this the founding idea of Replika ?
There is no strawman.

As an example: if you started offering chicken tikka masala in British pubs in the year 1900, you'd be laughed out the door. But today, it is as common as fish 'n chips. It was voted Britain's "national dish", so it's not a case of "some" people liking it. (Another example: the ubiquity of Chinese food places).

My point is: many critics of veggie meat offerings complain that it doesn't "taste like meat", so they can't eat it. But tastes change (c.f. CTM above), and there is no reason to believe that tastes won't change to accommodate Beyond Meat. So this criticism (that it doesn't taste like "real meat") is shortsighted.
> Maybe JSON-based, definitely not XML-based

No.

Strong schemas are _why_ it's supported across a multitude of platforms. JSON because "it's got JSON, what plants crave" is an absolutely dumb argument. And the see article "parsing JSON is a minefield". I can't think of a way to make the standard worse than re-implementing in JSON.

There are some legit missing features from SVG as other commenters have pointed out. To me, it sounds like the tooling is actually what's lacking. The equivalent of minifying or even the option to render xml to a binary representation is probably what is actually lacking.
From the article:
"A high level of diversity is paramount on Sharma’s list of essential goals. In projects Afforestt has undertaken in India, his company so far managed to use about 336 types of native trees out of 2800 that are known to have existed in the country. And the company has started its own nursery in Rajasthan to begin to add more species to their plantings.

Sharma is adamant that the impact of even very small forests on local communities is significant enough to matter. Research from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which found increased fungi, bacteria, pollinators, and amphibians on two tiny planted forest sites in urban Zaanstad that were based on Sharma’s models,, lends some scientific credence to this claim."

In this case, it would seem end goal is fauna/flora diversity.
I've personally seen as low as 30ms, but also up to 60ms. I also have a bit of packet loss, but my dish is just sitting on the ground in my wooded back yard right now. Once the weather turns back towards just being cold, I'm going to move the dish to my roof and see if that helps the packet loss. Maybe being able to see more of the sky will help get a more consistent latency too, but I'd guess more satellites are really going to be the fix there.
Do you have exact numbers? The estimates I've seen are about $60 per user per annum, so about $5 per month. That's for all services, not just search.

So for less than a Netflix subscription you have Youtube, Gmail, Search, Drive, Translate, Calendar, Maps, Photos, Hangouts and more. Services that many people use regularly.

It wouldn't be hard to argue that any of these products is worth a lot more than $10 a year, but convincing users at large to go down that route will be a challenge, undoubtedly.
My two gripes with SVG I bumped into (although the second one is more to browser implementations).

1. It doesn't support premultiplied alpha interpolation mode. If you ever import partially transparent rasterized images then it can cause visible artifacts at the edges of opaque regions.

2. Last time I checked no implementation supported interpolation in linear colorspace (linearRGB [1]).

So even though it's bloated it still misses features. And even though browsers are good fit for supporting it, they still don't bother implementing the full spec. And they implement PDF with vastly more gradient elements and color interpolation modes.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/painting.html#ColorInterpolation...
I really appreciated this article. It would be great to see a smaller svg graphics standard. I think SlimSVG is a bad name because it implies its still SVG. It should set its self apart. Just my 2 cents.
Yea, talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. This story is about the police department, not copyright. Police have been trying for years to prevent people from recording them, and now they are attacking the publishing step rather than the recording step. The intent is clear. They aren't just jamming out to a song in the middle of an encounter--they are intentionally trying to disrupt citizens recording them.
Thanks for linking this! It intuitively made some sense to me (no IPC/network overhead) but neat to see them point this out as an intentional advantage.
> Or if you are my grandfather who cannot get his money out of Ukraine due to the banks "not having enough USD on hand" to wire his balance to a US bank.

I'm guessing the exchange rate for ukranian currency to bitcoin (and then to USD) is not such to make this a particularly useful thing to do. But maybe?
Mining bitcoin is a speculative lottery. The bitcoins actually be transferred around were given originally to those who won that lottery, but after that, they're just traded like money. In the future, the winnings from the lottery is a percentage of each transaction instead of bitcoins, but that's relatively a long ways away. Basically, with each transaction, a person posts what percentage of the transaction goes to the winner, and the winner chooses which transactions to honor onto the blockchain. The giving out of synthetic bitcoins is a way to bootstrap this process and to make sure that there's no single point of ownership.
Keep the comics!
Oh great, now we are back to "Global Warming". For years that label was not working because many areas were experiencing record low temperatures which kind of made the "Global Warming" advocates all look a bit silly. Thus the term "Climate Change" was introduced because after all who can argue against the fact that the climate is changing! I am on the fence as far as "Global Warming" is concerned but even I must admit that the climate is changing - the fact that the climate has always changed and always will seems to be besides the point.

Now we have a warm year and back we go to "Global Warming". Really hard sometimes to take these people seriously.
Shells (at least bash) don't evaluate aliases when running non-interactively.
I wish the NYT article included more data (though there is a chart). Raw data is available at NCDC[0]

It is true that the data shows a continually warming trend, with 2014 as the warmest on record. It is also true that the recorded warming is proceeding at a very slow pace, with the new record anomaly of 0.69 C only 0.04 C higher than the previous records of 2005 and 2010 and only 0.06 C higher than the record of 1998.

It is false to say that the globe is not warming, but it also false to say that the warming is on pace for even a full degree of warming by the end of the century. The "warmest X years have all occurred since Y" but they are also clumping together pretty closely and moving up from that clump ever so slowly (which incidentally makes me quite optimistic about our continuing technological progress away from fossil fuels)

[0]http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/13
Yes, the number of non MS-ARM devices is probably several of orders of magnitude more popular. But you'd be surprised at how many embedded devices run Windows CE.

Regarding WP7, 3rd party apps are managed. But the core OS is native and 1st party apps can be native. For example, IE and the mail app are both native C++ apps.

Honestly, I think allowing 3rd party native apps would be a mistake in general. Although I'd create a partners program where you require devs to pay $10k and then go through a certification process, which allows them to ship native apps. Basically its the XBox model. Indie devs use managed code. Apps that are willing to go through the more expensive process get native access.

Why? Native apps introduce a bunch of problems that are a pain to deal with. For example, there a bunch of security issues and stability issues that native apps introduce. Additionally you have to target native apps to an architecture. It may lock WP7 into ARM, due to the ecosystem, and block it from moving, for example, to a new Intel architecture.
"Today Twitter burns cash at a furious rate, has only 25 million uniques on their website"

Plus most of those are minorities and foreigners, which is a problem when you're advertiser supported. There's a reason we don't have any working class newspapers anymore.
"If you want to work on something as complex, massive, multidisciplinary, and grand as, for example, the space shuttle, small companies aren't an option. Sure, you might be called upon to learn fortran, and there will be underperformers and politics. But the engineering challenges can be mind-blowing anyway."

Or you could work for a small company like SpaceX and work towards making NASA obsolete. The same engineering challenges without all the bureaucracy.
People have been managing their intimate/public time like this for decades. I feel like this guy dug up an article out of an old newspaper (or magazine) and replaced some words with "social network".
The test was a measure of how well the browser alerts users to the danger of DOWNLOADED EXECUTABLES, based on "reputation." A neat idea, but not NOT a measure of overall browser security.
This is the most anti-linkbait title I've ever seen. It's so prosaic for such an insanely powerful and sophisticated technology!

It's kind of like if Google developed working cold fusion and wrote a blog post titled "Making it easier to heat your home"
They have/had a 'top donators' box on the donation page. I saw one entry that was #1 for at least a little while of $1,000, and it was advertisement. I thought that was pretty clever, and generally beneficial for everyone.
I found the article to be weak, throughout. Shoddy analysis dressed up with citations of marginal importance. It starts by just asserting that the American dream is that America is a meritocracy. The section with with tables showing American wealth and income distributions concludes with this bit of "reasoning":

> The highly skewed distribution of economic outcomes, however, appears quite in excess of any reasonable distribution of merit. Something that is distributed “normally” cannot be the direct and proportional cause of something with such skewed distributions. There has to be more to the story than that.

Right, so the American Dream is a perfect meritocracy AND that doesn't just mean wealth caused by merit, but it means wealth is supposed to be directly proportional to merit (e.g. contains no winner-take-all dynamics).

It's a long article and I'm not going to address everything it contained, but the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful.
Any of the The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. You can start with the first, "Consider Phlebas". They're space opera with a lot of dark wit.
That is a great attitude, but it's pretty orthogonal to any social policy issues addressed by the article.
The Facebook puzzles are pretty easy. That being said, I hate puzzles too. I think it's pretty degrading to ask a well-established researcher/engineer to do that kind of stuff. On interviews I typically ask people to give a talk about their previous projects in detail. A lot of nuances arise during these talks that allow you to quite easily judge the level of the candidate.
I have a number of clients using it, they are all happy with it in terms of performance and reliability.

However they tend to be deployments based on work done previously (the dreaded "legacy" code) and for which it doesn't make sense to spend more money to rewrite the site in another language.

For example, one client is still running code originally written in 2002-2003, they just updated the templates.

Another is using the OpenACS.org codebase and is actively developing custom solutions for clients, where the client doesn't care what the technology is underneath the solution.

I personally think the ticket-tracker in OpenACS, were it cleaned up a bit more, would make an excellent lightweight ticket tracker hosted service for many small dev teams.
I read and enjoyed the article. Was not boring to me. I am extremely interested in machine learing and get excited about things like graphical models, MCMC, hybrid monte carlo, online learning, reinforcement learning, deep learners, sparse learners, co-evolution, ensembles etc.

I found this article interesting and actually very well informed as such things go. It does not focus on Human like AI but practical approaches currently being used that are able to do the most basic type of learning at a complex level - ability to infer albeit on restricted spaces. For example, its 9 AM someone is at the door, given my past experience on situations like this (data) who is it most likely to be? I have a best guess based on what I have learned about who tends to come knocking when.

They can also pick out basic patterns whose details are very intricate, sometimes nuanced. What is interesting is that in these small spaces they can account for and infer on and recommend basic actions on vast number of parameters so accurately that they blow away any human attempt to match them to smitherings. This is why they are used as they are. Creativity, abstraction, self aware introspection,emotions, exploration for exploration's sake etc. are nice to think of as AI but that would be a waste of the type of niche intelligence computers are particularly well suited to based on their architecture. They do need to handle nuanced ambiguity better though. As well as transfering learning and dealing with situations far outside their training. The logic overflow of the 1960s movies is quite apt sometimes.

I do believe though that when (if) AI arrives it will be sudden as a unifying framework, a Standard Model of ML if you will is created. But in the mean time there is a lot of very interesting things going on and the combined explotion of introspection in the field (of Statistical Inference/Learning), data and processing power means very interesting times are ahead.
As far as I know, Wired is not operating under a gag order and they are not a party to the case. It is not illegal or anything to evaluate independently-possessed evidence.
There are lots of them. One enterprising swim coach figured out that you could swim breaststroke much faster if you brought your hands forward above the water instead of under it. This'hack' gave birth to the Butterfly Stroke.

Another figured out that swimming upside-down under water was faster than back-stroking above the water. Alas, this innovation was banned. And so it goes.

Politics gets into it, as anyone who followed the UCI's wars with Graeme Obree would remember:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Obree
Valid point but should all upgrades be non-free? The most notorious free upgrade systems are the open source communities. They are mostly back by a company (eg Canonical, Red Hat) with paid developers, but take for example RHEL, who benefits immensely from the open source version Fedora where the community of non-paid developers have a passion for the project.

I guess if you have passion, does the amount of money matter?
> can't evaluate you fairly.

What's the meaning of fair? Several people admit you need to prepare, and then it seems you should not prepare too much? It looks like a date.
Any time I find myself thinking something remotely close to that, I realize that I won the lottery of growing up in and being able to call North America (or more broadly, Westernized civilization) home. I certainly have more control over my path here than I would almost anywhere else.
I don't think Free Software has to be difficult to explain: "if you encounter a bug in your program/game then anyone can fix it, and you don't have to wait for the manufacturer (which may never release a fix)", or "if you want a feature then anyone can add it, and maybe someone already did", or "if you don't like the new version of the software people can continue maintaining the old version".

Some practical scenarios:

- The game Guacamelee crashes at 30 minutes in to the game for me and quite a lot of other people, but I can't fix it or download an "unofficial patch" (how many games have reverse-engineered unofficial patches btw?).

- I happened to have bought Hyperlight Drifer on GOG.com today; it seems okay, but the controls are horrible to the point of being almost unplayable. Pretty sure someone would have fixed it if they could.

- Back in the day KPN (Dutch AT&T) gave everyone a wireless dongle with their internet, but the driver was bugged and after a certain Windows update it would cause BSODs, and I had to sell a lot of new wireless dongles because of that.

- How many people and organisations would have preferred running Windows XP/7 instead of more or less forcibly updating to 8/10 because Microsoft no longer maintained it?

- How many people wished they could get a version of Windows 10 that doesn't forcibly reboot on updates?

And many more. These are all things a regular person could take advantage of, and very concrete advantages for a regular person, and not all that different from "right to repair".

A big point of Free Software really is about "right to repair"; a lot of people really do want their software to do something different or is broken beyond repair, but there is no way anyone can actually make it work any different. Chances are that if you're struggling with $problemX someone else is too, and already released a fix for it. Or, especially in a corporate environment, you can hire someone.

The FSF takes a very high-level philosophical/academic views of things, as well as a very programmer-centric view, but it doesn't need to be like this.
There are atomic swaps between BTC and XMR at least (see https://unstoppableswap.net/) but for centralized exchanges check kycnot.me
It's those mere mortals favorite CMS I'm after. The ones suggesting WP, Drupal and Joomla seems to do so because of the tech side, not so much the ux for the client getting the system after delivery.
Going voting is crucial.