skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The MS Office tool bar gets a lot of flack. But it's not aimed at you or I. My mum can use it. Nuff said.
Many corporate customers (lots of money) have legacy applications that require IE6. Cluttering the browser more would not be helpful and would garner more ill will.

Backing out of the browser market and letting Apple/Google/Mozilla "win" would again be counter productive. IE8 is a good browser. Yes, its behind the others in many ways, but give them some more time. They had to build up from IE6, and I think they have begun to close the gaps quite quickly.

I agree with open video and audio being a good direction.

Merge with Linux? Why in the world would they do that?

I don't have experience with the registry, so I can't comment here, but again, a linux style replacement is not going to be in MS's best interests.

Ignoring the Linux part, yes, standardization is going to be key for them moving forward, and I think they have made some big steps with that in Vista => Windows 7.

Why?

I don't see how renaming possibly the biggest name in computing ("Microsoft") would help them in any way.
That is the problem we have in the UK. There is a whole welfare based subculture, often referred to as "chavs".

Personally I would like to see entitlement to the dole based on education... The taxpayer has paid to educate everyone up to the age of 18. If someone throws away that opportunity and leaves school without qualifications they're unemployable, why should the taxpayer support them in that case?
Transcribing common sense into policy is not the way to get more common sense.
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I have to admit that there are some nice CSS hacks there like the gradient and drop shadow effects but it's dependent on proprietary CSS which should be avoided if possible. If you start to rely on proprietary CSS then you are setting yourself up for problems. Isn't this part of the reason why we hate IE because we are forced to use CSS code like this?

I have to think that all these effects will eventually be incorporated into the CSS standard but until then you can achieve all of those effects with small image files and simple CSS.
Any examples on this? Or is is your hypothesis?
Leaving common sense to the judgment of 17 year olds is a great way to find out that not everybody has common sense.

You do it for their protection too.
Reporting In NoSQL
Why Pick On China
Was it this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
The value of unemployment is in the desperation it creates in people. That desperation inspires them to try new, risky things that they would never have the guts to do otherwise.

Would T.J. Watson have had the motivation to found IBM had he not been fired from NCR and indicted by the government for blatant anti-trust schemes? Would Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard have founded HP if it hadn't been the midst of the Great Depression with few jobs to be found? How about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak - HP nearly killed Apple Computer in the cradle, because Woz didn't want to leave his employer.

The opportunity cost of employment isn't just a bunch of people sitting on their ass. It's a bunch of people sitting on their asses getting increasingly worried about where their next meal is going to come from. Eventually, some of them do something about it. Big risks are usually scary - it often takes some equally scary big shifts in your life to push you into taking them.
If you're old enough to be writing professional articles at a major news source, you're old enough to know that asking for goodies in exchange for articles is not ok. I can't imagine that he was confused on whether or not this was acceptable; he just made a bad choice and got caught.

The typical errors of young-adulthood are not those of moral incompetence, but simple bad judgement.
Great news ! My thanks go out to all the people who contributed to this release.
Guys, don't. This isn't an adult you're talking about.
And moving Photoshop to Cocoa took so long that Apple lost all faith in Adobe's ability to deliver a good experience on Cocoa Touch.

This is bloody hilarious and looks like the author has no experience writing real applications. He seems to think a re-write of a complex app like PS is a trivial task.

BTW, before Apple can claim to lose faith in Adobe, it needs to port it's own Pro app, not consumer apps, like Final Cut Pro etc. to 64 Bit Cocoa. Apple itself hasn't migrated it's own Pro apps to 64 bit.
Even Gruber seems to be relatively neutral on this: http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/64000_question

The one and only reason for no Flash and Java on iPad, and iPhone for that matter, is Apple likes closed system where they can control everything and don't want to give up their 30% cash cow.
All other reasons are excuses IMHO.
Despite it's notoriety and admit it or not, Techcrunch is still the most influential tech blog since the start of the Web 2.0 era up to now.
Check out the Google C++ Style Guide. I'm biased (being a Googler), but I think it leads to pretty nice and readable C++:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...
That is a patently ridiculous argument. Allowing unlimited money to be spent by corporations produces a distortion orders of magnitude larger than that of unemployment. Perhaps an unemployed person can have several times the impact of someone with a job (I don't really buy that, but even so). A large corporation, meanwhile, can buy national advertising and have millions of times the impact of an ordinary person.

If this is about fairness and equal representation, your position is untenable.
A very interesting and informative piece. I knew in the abstract what the Blue Brain project was doing, but this really clarifies the route they're taking. Was a bit annoying how it sounds like they need to justify it with. This is worth doing for the pure coolness of it.
A very specific suggestion:

Push the Zune. With WiFi, HD decoding & output and significantly increased storage size, they could turn it from a pure iPod competitor to a significantly better SlingBox/iPod combo. If I walk into a friend's house and have it recognise the network, it should instantly start serving files over wifi, which any pc (Windows Media Center or XBOX, if you're looking for the tie-in) could play. If I want to charge it as it plays, or play particularly high-bandwidth content over a weak network, or output pre-decoded stuff, plug it in directly and stream it that way.

As it stands, it can 'only' play 720p. Also, at 16/32 gb options and with current transfer speeds onto the device, the zune can't really achieve this. With 64/128 it starts to be possible, and Wireless N might help for streaming via wifi. Perhaps USB 3.0 will help load it with content faster?

They need to milk the early adopter crowd as well, to win back mindshare the Zune has completely failed to grab from the iPod due to being such a "me too" project. This means working with all file formats at the very least, and arrangements with Hulu, Netflix, Spotify - if they don't already have them - would be good moves too.
Poll: Disclose or do not disclose?
I've been approached by a technology blog to post their stuff to HN.

Obviously I would never give in to stuff like that but it makes me wonder if this is common and what to do about it.
just ignore it
disclose the company but not the person
disclose the company and the person
Not sure he'd be leaving on a high note. He does need to go though. He was never a visionary - he's always just been a good salesman like Larry Ellison. These guys win by shoving their products down the customer's throat. In the long run they always lose however. It takes vision to run a company. He obviously has none.
*... has anybody here been approached by writers to post links under their HN username ? [This] has definitely happened to me..."

Really? That's awful. Ha - I've been making comments around saying that people shouldn't be outing the intern. But now I'm dying to ask you who it was. Maybe if the person's real identity can't be guessed from the username...? Jeez, I don't know. This sucks; I'm going to bed. Figure out the ethics yourself. ;)
Thanks for this! I've used 'Better CSS Font Stacks' as my primary reference for a while. It's nice to have another, and it's extremely nice to be able to see some numbers about font presence on OS X/Windows.

(Better CSS Font Stacks: http://unitinteractive.com/blog/2008/06/26/better-css-font-s... -- the PDF they link to at the end is highly recommended.)
I don't think there's any consensus in the statistics community on which of the many ways to do inference over "nearly all" functions is the better one; nonparametric regression is basically a whole field, and pretty in flux over the past 10 years.
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Stupider(read: more damaging) things are done by 17 year old kids everyday. Heck, I can't even share mine and at the time it happend I just wanted to lock myself in a room. But it taught me a lesson that I pretty much apply a few times everyday.

When the dust settles, pick yourself up and tell yourself "I'll never be that stupid again". It's been a few yrs but I still tell myself that and it usually does wonders in knocking some sense into yourself.
That's what is wrong with MS: they lack vision. They need to focus on a compelling vision. All else comes from that.
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I'm reminded of the whole tiff between Arrington and Leo Laporte. Irony anyone?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/ouch/
I'm pretty tired of hearing reasons about why Flash isn't included ... and while I'm happy for HTML5, it's pretty sad that Apple doesn't give this choice to its customers. To make matters worse, I don't think Apple allows modifications to Safari on the App Store.

The web was built on top of such technologies (Java, Flash, ActiveX) and while all of them where a PITA in the long run, back then it was the only way to work-around the browser's limitations ... competitive third-parties are driving innovation, not standards, and definitely not monopolies.

Imagine if Microsoft controlled what software gets installed on people's computers ... today we wouldn't have had neither Java, or Flash, or Firefox, or HTML5 for that matter, and AJAX would have been a second class citizen.

I don't want such a future. Of course, I trust the market enough to make the proper choice when the time comes. People aren't stupid, and unfortunately for control freaks, the genie is already out for openness.

But it saddens me to see such positive reactions from people that benefited so much from openness (like DHH). Even with all the viruses, spyware and spam flying around, it's still a better present that what could've been if the PC was locked.
This also happens to some extent in Denmark. Generally, they think that the cost is worth the benefit of the system.
At least with one centralised system there will be a definitive log of who has accessed what and when they accessed it. Hopefully it will add some accountability. It sure beats post-it notes.
That depends on how it all got started.

If he initiated this kind of behaviour then I'm with you. If he was approached by a company first and they promised him some goodies in exchange for a write-up with the note that 'everybody does it' then you get in to a gray area.

After that he's definitely not in the clear for not going higher up and asking his boss about this, and TC is not in the clear for not spelling this sort of stuff out to journalists and interns alike.

As for ethics, TC reaps what it sows.
Yes - see QT Jambi. Unfortunately not many Java devs are interested in it.
There were other questions where almost everyone in the audience raised their hands.
Anyone else having trouble viewing this using YouTube's HTML5 viewer?
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Your argument was simply that money is speech, as if it's a tautology. I didn't feel like going through a long, detailed refutation if that's the level of effort you were going to put in.

The whole thing about money being speech is not because money actually is speech. The issue is that putting restrictions on how people spend their money can unconstitutionally limit their freedom of speech, or of the press. For instance, if you say that they can speak all they want, but can't spend more than $10 on printing costs, then you've limited their freedom of the press. So, the court can strike down laws about spending money in elections if it unduly restricts people's freedom of speech and of the press.

That doesn't mean that all money is speech. Money is trade, commerce; and the Constitution explicitly allows Congress to pass laws relating to interstate commerce (which the court has since broadened to pretty much all commerce or economic activity, even within a single state, as it can affect interstate prices, which I think is somewhat dubious, but that's the precedent we've got).

So, it's the tension between these two issues is where we have the debate. Money isn't speech, but because money can be used to buy almost anything, including a forum for your speech, it's hard to block money without also blocking speech.

I think that we can do considerably better than what we are doing, however. Paying money directly to a candidate or campaign goes beyond simple speech; that could be construed as bribery. With appropriate limits on campaign contributions, you can reduce the disparity, and make it so that everyone (or almost everyone) can afford the same impact on the campaign, though I still find it a little bit dubious.

But beyond campaign contributions, it's hard to determine where to draw the line. It's very easy to write laws which do unjustly forbid certain kinds of political speech. It's also very easy to turn from a democracy into a plutocracy by simply allowing money to buy everything that actually matters in government. I don't know what the right solution is, but I suspect that reducing the financial incentives for congressional staffers and congressmen to act in the interests of those with money will help to get changes in the government that the public actually wants.
I've made the question in to a poll:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103021
Scaling: Why Giants Don't Exist
Gevent 0.12.0 final is released
Why should Apple care about what it takes to re-write a complex app? If Apple can go without the pain, why shouldn't they?

Sometimes it sucks having a huge portfolio of hard to repurpose application code. Eventually the programming world will figure out how to write compact, easily refactorable code. But why should everyone wait till then.

This blog is harsh but logical.

The one and only reason for no Flash and Java on iPad, and iPhone for that matter, is Apple likes closed system where they can control everything and don't want to give up their 30% cash cow. All other reasons are excuses IMHO.

I don't think the author is saying much different in the end. It's just there are certain advantages to having locked-down platform - especially quality control.

I'm totally down with open source alternatives but we need to understand that there's no reason for Joe average to tolerate the standard bullshit that the programming world has gotten used to.
reminds me of kamikaze curve, on the way to Binghamton in NY state
http://www.interstate-guide.com/images088/i-088e_wt_04.jpg
> -> Deleted /var on a production system I had no right touching at a Fortune 500.

The 'you had no right touching' bit should have been 'you should have no possibility to touch'.

Whoever administered that systems shares part of the blame, you have done it, but they should have never let you get within spitting distance of a terminal capable of doing that.
Steven Sinofsky needs to be named the next CEO of MS soon. Not only because Sinofsky is a key reason for the success of Windows, but also because he is tech orientated.

Every tech company which has abandoned tech oriented management has stagnated. For instance Apple after Jobs, maybe McNealy and Joy leaving Sun.

When management becomes business oriented they look to maintain market position. They look to maintain current products at the cost of developing internal competitors. A tech orientation looks to innovate and create new markets.

A business orientation looks at Vista and says it is good enough to maintain X% of the market, a tech orientation is embarrassed by its quality and lack of polish. A tech orientation would have given time to fix those belimishes that drives it to grow to X+Y% of the market.

In real terms, a business orientation wants to move Windows onto the phone, a tech orientation wants to create a new OS/API for mobile devices. A business orientation sees introducing a low power tablet as a threat to desktop dominance, a tech orientation sees the possibility of a entirely new market.

Maybe the difference is that a business orientation asks, "Is this good enough to make money" and a tech orientation asks "Is this the best we can do?" Microsoft needs to continually ask the second question. After that, all else will follow.
Regardless of how well these tricks work, I'm all for reducing the number of image dependencies in my sites. I like to make use of widgets like YUI buttons ( http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/button/ ) as much as possible so that I don't have to ask a designer to re-recreate button images for me, or shill out money for Photoshop / Illustrator.
One thing that I found useful in my craiglist sales pitches, was to get away from pitching yourself as a LAMP developer and pitching yourself as a consultant of popular technologies -- instead of just listing out php/mysql etc, have a section where you emphasize drupal, facebook, mobile applications etc. -- basically follow some of the hot markets that organizations want to break into. This falls a lot in line with selling on benefits and not features. "writes PHP" is a feature; "developing viral media platform for organizations" is a benefit.

Taken with the advice that other people have on here, if you are able to make people think that you develop technology based on thought out, data/fact driven market/product decisions, they will be much more likely to buy from you at a premium.
My friend's sister would be constantly corrupting her external hard drive because she would just yank the plug to remove her laptop from her desk.

In the short term, your friend should tell her that she won't fix it anymore (or should have, whatever).

In the long term, thats a design problem. Not that I know how to fix it, but the idea that you can't just disconnect is something that needs teaching. If we can find a way that people can disconnect hardware (e.g. USB drives) that would be a good thing.
I don't advocate having a detailed decriminalization scheme, but an overview or outline would be nice. To that end, I think identifying clear steps, as opposed to a strictly ideological argument, is a good way to convince the overwhelming majority that the change is necessary and good.

But of all those examples, the War on Drugs is probably the easiest to "just stop," so to speak. Putting an end to Social Security overnight means that grandparents around the country won't have any source of income. That's a good example of where just ending a program overnight seems impractical to me.

To address your previous point, I have spent some time on Mises before, not as much Cato. But not enough time on either to really comment about specifics on their proposals or lack thereof. I suspect the reasoning you presented is probably accurate, at least in some part.
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Gilder's opinion piece went from nebulous to outright flamebait upon reading these back-to-back lines:

It is ironic that liberals who once welcomed appeasement of the monstrous regime of Mao Zedong now become openly bellicose at various murky incidents of Internet hacking.

Nonetheless, with millions of Islamists on its borders and within them, China is nearly as threatened by radical Islam as we are.

His other comments aside, the answer to Gilder's question of "why antagonize China" isn't "to make another enemy." He claims that it's self-destructive for Western nations to pressure the Chinese government on issues such as human rights or pollution, but without such pressure, the results will be much more destructive for the Chinese citizens marginalized by their government.

Allowing the PRC to get away with their "but we're still a developing nation" cop-out every time the pressure is on to do the Right Thing is setting ourselves up for much bigger problems later on. If China wants to work with us, trade with us, and be regarded as a modern nation, it needs some help, yes, and some peer pressure along with it. We're a global community and we have some expectations - ones unsurprisingly not met by the "enemies" listed in Gilder's article.

We are, in fact, attempting to guide China towards a particular path so that it DOESN'T become an enemy later on. That is why we pick on them: it's tough love.
I disagree. About 2 years ago I lived with a college senior who didn't know what the "My Documents" folder is, where their downloaded files went or that they could put things in different places. All her files were in one place and she had to make sure their names were easy to remember.

Once, I put a folder on her desktop to download some images to, and she freaked out a bit. Funny shit for me, but a good learning experience as well.

Edit: This is one example. I have other, smaller, examples.
The article also includes the bizarre suggestion that Google would react to all this by making their services chrome only - rather than doing the thing they are way better than Microsoft at - innovation.

I am sure in this battle of the behemoth a round or two can be won with money - especially since their are other heavy weight players - Apple, Amazon etc. circling and strategic plays are always going to be happening - but Microsoft have had three goes at getting to where Google are now and being in second place in the search wars would surely motivate Google to stop innovating with passing nonsense like Wave and the like and put all their best brains back on search.