skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usually NDAs cover much more specific information than what he writes about here. They basically cover the company's intellectual property - the specific technical information that lets them do their job better than others.

Stories, anecdotes, and cultural observations don't fall under this, unless those stories reveal the existence of projects/technologies that the company wants to keep secret. You can say "here's why I think my past employer was dysfunctional", and it won't win you any friends, but they can't come after you legally for that.

The only thing here that looks like it may've been confidential at some point is the existence of ClearType or the tablet PC. But since both of those were launched - albeit late - they're public information anyway, and he's not telling you anything you couldn't read in the tech press.
Agreed. Unfortunately it works the other way around too. If you don't appear confident, perceived value goes down...
That's not entirely true. Yahoo issued a takedown notice last year when its price sheet was leaked. I imagine most major US carriers have firm policies given the frequency with which they must service these requests.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/yahoo-spy-prices/

Edit: Dug through a bit on my own link and found that Cryptome unearthed some of these price sheets with a FOIA request to the US Marshals. Implicated companies included Cox, Comcast, Yahoo, and Verizon.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/wiretap-prices/
PHP Creator Asks, Is Facebook's HipHop Just a "Nifty Trick"?
That has some nice side effects, though.
Is it:

Geeks: Polyamory? -> {Manuel Garcia O'Kelly and his extended family, Moon Colonies, Heinlein, good associations}

Non-Geeks: Polyamory? -> {Hippy communes, commun...ism, cold war, evil, bad associations}
Technology moves on so there are new things to tinker with
You said it. I've found it to actually be worse than this. At bigco, his review for that quarter would have read, "trouble with authority, lacks patience, should learn to follow proper channels." That is, of course, if building the thing didn't get him outright fired.
> PHP developers hate us, Java developers hate us, Ruby developers hate us, and Python developers hate us.

Wait. Ruby? What? Did you have a bad experience with some Rails people and decide that Ruby developers hate Perl?

As someone who loves both Perl and Ruby, I haven't seen any Perl hate from Ruby developers in general. I can't vouch for Rails people, though. There are some serious social dysfunctions in that community.

> The only place outside of the Perl community where I can admit to liking Perl (and not be flamed) is #haskell.

I haven't gotten into Haskell (yet) -- but I've never gotten any shit on the ruby-talk list for "admitting" that I like Perl.

> (I've even been trolled in real life over my like of Perl. I was going after some girl, who apparently had a friend that was a Java developer. Perl came up, I came up, and it was resolved "he must not be very good at programming if he prefers Perl over Java". Guess who got the girl? Not the Perl programmer.)

Wow. WTF?

I have gotten shit from Pythonistas in person a couple of times for liking Perl, but nothing nearly that bad -- just as I have for preferring FreeBSD over "Linux".

In general, the hackers I know dislike Java, so I haven't really had the opportunity to get treated that badly by a Java developer. Maybe I'm just lucky.
This article plus a few choice statistics would make slow driving a lot less defensible in court. Plus cops could actually film the slow driver.
Paranoia will destroy ya. Maybe you shouldn't trust anything you didn't build.
In my case, it's probably mostly d). I don't think I hold HN responsible for bringing me links I've never seen before or must like. But I really do come here for great discussion and insights (like yours right here!), in the comments section.

I'm totally willing to see negative comments, but they really have to bring something to the party. The examples you gave are exactly the kind of thing that would bum me out after a visit here.
I read an account of how a guy managed to move his Photoshop installation from a case-insensitive FS to a case-sensitive one. It mostly involved just renaming files, so I don't see why Adobe can't spend a few moments fixing their files.

Link: http://imaginationunbound.blogspot.com/2007/12/adobe-photosh...
DARPA’s Cyber Genome Program could collect/trace/identify all things digital
How much is that to Microsoft's credit, though? Nintendo deliberately targeted a different market and Sony promptly flew themselves into the side of a mountain by fucking up the PS3, so the 360 won almost by default, despite its very real flaws.

In gaming consoles, Microsoft had Sony to compete with. It's easier to beat Sony than to beat Apple or Google.
How to Measure Business Performance in Two simple Steps
I think a two-dimensional attack should, if anything, increase his efficiency since defenses can't cheat and load the box with eight guys every down.
Wouldn't that be when you read about me seeing him banning people from his forum, you're only reading an external representation of the divide within myself within yourself? ;)
What if you start a conversation without any mention of Python at all?
* Opinions are my own and not of my employer (I work for a k12 district) *

A couple of problems:

1. Student data is highly confidential. All traffic should run over HTTPS if you are transmitting student names, grades, etc.

2. Passwords must be encrypted, not sent via a simple POST

3. How do you plan on competing with the large gradebook providers? A lot of districts require their schools/teachers to use a centralized system or at least a common gradebook-type system.
I would like to know if this actually works at anything more than a placebo level.
I prefer not distinguishing lexically between e.g. constants and static properties / global functions (depending on the language features), etc. Many constants represent configuration choices, rather than actual mathematical or physical values that will never change.

Local variables are usually distinguished by starting with a lower-case letter, as the codebases I work with have global and method identifiers start with capitals. Global variables, to a first approximation, are never used: I have never known a case where the use of global variables wasn't regretted in the longer term. But a g_ prefix wouldn't be out of place if they must be used owing to an old codebase already littered with them.

As to "counters": for indexing for-loops, at best i through k are used - if more are needed, subroutines are used instead, so i through k can be reused. Other things that count have better semantic names than single letters.
There is a led on the side of many meters that flashes faster as you use more power. Usually it flashes 3600 times for every kWh, so if you have a small bar heater on (1 kw Load) it will flash once per second.

Watt vision counts these pulses. While keeping it simple, it does mean that WattVision is at the mercy of an existing meter to work.
The Diaper Pattern Stinks
Using a text editor (Vim) to edit text.
Particularly in this case use of the :g/ and :v/ commands to filter text and edit all lines matching a pattern.

Excel scripting and filtering and text functions. (Basic things, like looking for a particular string, and filtering a list to just those containing it using formula functions).
Thanks to you as well :). I even may come to see it your way in the near future, as it seems I'm going to be doing some Ruby coding for my new employer.
How To Nail Your Next Pitch So Investors Won't Walk Out On You
It wasn't your clarity, it was your tone. If you're gonna go around "BZZZT WRONG!!!"-ing people, you really ought to be sure you understand the physics. As written, your post completely misses the boat about what relativity is all about.
"At worst, you can say it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist."

Incorrect, at worst it's a monopolist.

`

"It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable. Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office applications suite still utterly rule their markets."

By monopoly...

`

"over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole."

So we are supposed to support monopolies if they support Seattle? and apparently "the nation as a whole." You don't support the economy by monopolizing it.

`

"Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure."

This is philanthropy by force, he is a Robin Hood, steal from the rich USA and give to the poorer countries. Out of all the statements this is the one I find least fault with. Fine steal from me to give to the poor. But do it straight up. Don't also hinder technological advancement while your stealing from me. Just take my money and leave technology out of it.
37signals Answers
I can understand that, and largely I feel the same. But over the past 20 years since completing my PhD I've learned on occasion to let go of the details and look to the underlying point. Sometimes, indeed, often, the example or the calculations are fundamentally wrong, but the point is sound.

I've found I've learned a lot after having learned to look beyond the specifics of a given example. It doesn't suit everyone, it doesn't work for everyone, and I wouldn't claim that everyone should do it.

It works for me.
XBox Live might be a huge business coup, though. If you go to the trouble of paying for Xbox Live, you're gonna want to "make the most of it", and that entails doing things that make Microsoft more money (buying more monopoly money from them for downloadable content, buying more games, etc.)
Well, since it's an entirely mental process, I don't see how it could. Unless you mean actually altering your emotions on a chemical level, which the placebo effect actually does too.
There are several reasons you might want live power monitoring:

If you insulate houses for a living and want to prove that the heater is switching on less often (paying off the cost of the insulation) you want live power monitoring on that one circuit. You can then correlate the power saving with outside temperature and time of day.

If you run office buildings, real time measurement can help you localise faulty HVAC units. It can help you find out when the lights are on and they shouldn't be. It can tell you that there are a lot of standby loads being left on overnight.

If you have a typical house and a huge power bill, you might not know which of many complex loads is using the most power. Perhaps it is standby devices. Perhaps it is lighting in the kitchen. Perhaps the fridge is leaking and turning on more often than it should. Maybe it is the hot water. Once you have localised the problem, you can make a smart investment to save power.
Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back
I've also been a great hater of Acrobat Reader on my Vista machine, and used to use some alternatives like Sumatra. But lately I've not noticed that it seem to work nicely, so either some upgrade has significantly improved its speed or my brain has adjusted to it. Could be both.

I found Sumatra PDF was viewing quite a lot of things (transparent images and similar) totally wrong, which made me go back to Actobat in the first place.
> Non-Geeks: Polyamory? -> {Hippy communes, commun...ism, cold war, evil, bad associations}

Yes. Because that's what those Russians were doing on the other side of the Iron Curtain... having massive orgies.
> I don't have any practical experience with Ruby, but it looks like a mishmash of Smalltalk and Perl to me

Those are, I think, probably the two most influential sources of inspiration for how the language is put together, in terms of the actual end result.
Apple is training people how to use the next generation of computers with their language. Because no one else has had the guts to do what Apple is doing, they are ceding the opportunity to define that language.
I thought this was great. Newell & Simon are sort of heroes of mine, and I enjoyed hearing McCarthy's view of the relation of Lisp to IPL & Fortran (from Backus). Are there any good biographies of these people? (I know that Simon wrote an autobiography, but I haven't read it.)

The summary of the big ideas/innovations from Lisp was pretty awesome -- programs as data, first-class functions, an expression-oriented language, eval as a Turing-complete function, garbage collection, linked lists, etc.

Guy Steele mentions he is standing in for Alan Kay. I wish whoever arranged that would put together a panel discussion with Alan Kay and Guy Steele talking about programming languages... or pretty much anything...
An MS-based "Enterprise IT" is more than that, much more. It's not about the Windows client version and choice of browser. They'll have heavily integrated server products (all of them, multiple instances), sometimes for good reason and sometimes not. SQL Server, ISA, "Office Communication Server", "Team Foundation Server", SharePoint Server, Active Directory Services, etc. pp. you name it, ad infinitum. All with the appropriate, sometimes buggy GUI tools, and the much-needed, sometimes buggy, 3rd-party add-ons and tools. Often this ends up as a big mess, and while the products have certainly matured over a decade and thousands of developers working on them, a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each update. In the end, it's a big pile of mediocrity and un-agility, and yes, despite that "deciders" often buy into it because-nobody-ever-got-fired-for-etc. Of course, this will not go on forever...
This is why I think we shouldn't count MSFT out. They've had it so easy for 10 - 15 years that they have turned to competing among themselves for something to do. Once a real sense of fear and external competition sets in we may see a very different beast.
You are right, the basic operations for people should be more robust. Perhaps something that automatically backs up Office Documents every night to limit work that is lost? Continuing to ship recovery discs with machines? There are many approaches to this problem but each with its own peril. The solution could be lucrative.

However, I understand the fear of the machine though. Most people are fearful when they first begin to drive, first begin to use power tools or begin to fire weapons in uncontrolled, unsupervised scenarios.
"It will be interesting to see how dramatically they change OSX now that they have found something that sells."

You don't have to wait; they've already done it with the iPhone/iPad OS. Apple is clearly still willing to make hard and dramatic decisions when it comes to its operating systems.
tom if you are interested in working on the project then email me at mklein1 at babson.edu
Definitely, but I also prefer baseball over football (but football over basketball).
I do not like long variable names and believe it is a combination of good commenting and inference through the code, that one should understand the role of the variable.

I was taught camel case for everything, which I don't agree with. Camel case for class names, everything else lower case, short and separated with underscores if needed. Collections are plural, e.g addresses, so that one can be generic in iteration and talk of an 'address'.
A research lab shouldn't directly ship products, but there should be a path from research to productization. MSR seems to mostly lack this path.
> You are much better off in terms of entertainment (through learning interesting stuff) with e.g. PLT Scheme or perhaps Arc.

. . . but if you want to actually use a LISP for practical programming, and you start out with any Scheme, you're going to have to follow that up by learning another (non-Scheme) LISP. You might as well just start out with Common Lisp and be done with it.

Judging by my experience, Scheme is not a language one should set out to learn so much as a language one should learn as a side-effect of going through a book like SICP or The Little Schemer. Trying to do anything "real" with Scheme is an exercise in frustration, especially if you want it to be portable across Scheme versions, since the biggest names in Scheme implementations appear to be entirely uninterested in library portability except where "portable" means "Well, we can use it, and don't care whether you can."

Scheme itself is an excellent language, though. Too bad that, alone, is not enough.
I wouldn't assume the server is stationed in China.
Yep. I also created my own analysis algorithms, which I planned to turn into a small subscription website a while back until I found out that the data services I needed were too expensive for me to turn a profit.

If you're interested in sports analytics, feel free to send me an email and we'll chat.
To me the really interesting question is how Microsoft ever got to be a monopoly in the first place, with the kind of products they've been making.
What made windows and office succeed in the first place? Can you really coast that far just on malignant business practices?
Why Entrepreneurs Should Care About Trade Secret Law
i would have loved to have this guy as an expert witness at my speeding ticket court date
> I haven't seen anyone else using anything like it.

Isn't the point of adhering to a style so that others will already be familiar with it?

I have seen the kVariable style, and of course the iterator convention. I have never seen the other two, however; usually globals are denoted with all-caps and locals are just assumed (xVariable seems annoyingly superfluous). That's just my opinion, though — if I were coding in a language where your style was the most common, I would use that instead.
AddThis: Add-ons for Firefox
A bit wrong of a comparison. A car is a tool, and can get dangerous, which is why it has this strict interface and education rules.

Computer usage is more like math. It's something you just need, part of every day life, though many people still hate it, as it is more flexible. GUI's really share similar concepts, you just have to adapt them, and if people hate one word, than it's adapt - seriously hate.

You really have time to figure out how things work and GUI's are really no rocket science to figure out.

Nobody expects users to become system administrators or application developers, but answering questions about self explaining clickable graphical elements is very painful. (With a little endurance you could probably get a chimpanzee to understand most of our 'modern' UI's).
Don't use CGIHandler on Google App Engine
Dividends don't actually change the picture much. In the past five years (02/03/2005 through 02/03/2010), total shareholder return (including dividends) for AAPL was 412% whereas MSFT only returned 19%.
It depends on how you choose to define both, really.

In my mind, there is no difference, but there are different categories of "bugs".

1. The first the "mistake". In that there is universal agreement that a piece of code does x yet it does y. These are usually trivial and often picked up either prior to ship or in initial testing phases, whatever that may be. In order words as long as you are competent, you will catch and fix 90% of these.

2. The second is where the result does not match the intended result. There are two sub-classes of this bug.
a) The spec/directive/customer request is not properly followed, or interpreted in a way that is incorrect.
b) The spec/directive/customer request does not exist for a specific component.
c) The spec/directive/customer request is incorrectly defined or invalid within the business context.

This second class is where there are more opinions than stars in the sky, and it's also where we differ from building houses and such. Interpreting a customer's intent and desire (even if the customer is you) and translating that into a functional program is one of the most difficult parts of being a programmer.
MSR is a very powerful research org, agreed. In, say, machine learning and computer vision, this has been so for over 15 years.

But the point, and it is a valid one, is that this research does not seem to be turned in to actual products.

What is the systemic problem? Why has Google, which historically has had nowhere near the research depth, been able to innovate demonstrably, but not MSR?

One hypothesis is that research innovation starts with a small idea. It's easier to deploy a small idea on the web than as part of shrink-wrap software. Google can field the small idea, and iterate it on the web.

But to be included in the kind of software MS ships, you have to do things like (a) convince a project like Office to take it on, or (b) pitch it as part of a "big concept future system". Avenue (a) is very hard. And avenue (b) tends to produce vaporware. Sound familiar?
I think it's fair to say we could shorten that last regex to:

^\d+\s.
This reminded me of a previous comment (and discussion) on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840331

"Another way to look at this: The first time you meet someone, you learn their full name. When discussing them with someone else who knows them, you use just a single name. If they're standing right there, you don't bother using their name, but just make eye contact, and maybe a "Hey". Should be the same way with variables."
Their statement that the scientists looked in the direction from whence the particle came, but did not see anything should be self-evident. Whatever caused the particle to be travelling at such speeds would still emit light at... the speed of light. They would have had to been looking BEFORE detecting the particle, even if only nanoseconds before.
Why Amazon Cannot Afford To Lose The eBook Wars To Apple
"No" was encoded by imagining himself walking from room to room.

The absence of anything was recorded as "no answer".
But why would all these people need a "real desktop computer"? People need to read their emails, browse their facebooks, store and browse their images... And most of them will get all this done easier with a simpler device than a "real" computer.
I love how he tells his staffer to buy the printed book and not the version on the kindle. The author goes on to say that the printed book is marx, the kindle book is rand. History makes it pretty clear how your economy will wind up using marx's theories.

Capitalism is the worst kind of economic structure out there, until you look at all the alternatives.
Hallucinations are caused by sensory-deprivation rather than motor parylization. For example, float tanks, also there are specially designed rooms that have as close to no background noise as possible, and people report hearing all kind of audio hallucinations such as bees, etc.

This test demonstrates he can at least hear sound. I'd imagine the effects would resemble senility from lack of engagement more.

Also, interesting side note, sleeping drugs such as Ambien in some cases allowed patients in coma to regain awareness and even hold CONVERSATION:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/sep/12/health.healtha...

Over stimulation by excitatory neurotransmitters is the primary cause of neuron death during stroke, the idea is that many neurons thought to be dead might have just shutdown to prevent from being overstimulated. And if baseline stimulation is reduced enough through what is normally sleeping medication, they might actually start to activate again.
Sperm cell releases protons from tail to swim
"you need a commercial SDK for which you pay $99"

The SDK is free.
Great Success indeed!