skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If information was of no value, then we wouldn't have insider trading laws, nor intellectual property laws. Stealth mode attempts to avert premature competition. If you don't set out to make money, then release early! Linux is an excellent example of where stealth mode would have inhibited the project.
NASA Chief Bolden's Muslim Remark to Al-Jazeera Causes Sti
Microsoft Bob 2.0 :D

With only 503 sold, it's almost a limited edition. I thought about getting one, but Ebay auctions for contractless Kins end over $150
He doesn't mention what he did to get past this issue other then link to top.

Any ideas on how?
Outdated? It seems pretty good to me. I would protest the teachings of API and framework-specific topics without having some fundamentals down first. E.g., Teaching someone jQuery without teaching them bare-bones JavaScript first would be a mistake IMHO.

I imagine the Basic Web Apps and AJAX topics may well use a framework you have suggested. Client Side Scripting may touch on jQuery etc.

Once a student has an understanding of the topics in that syllabus they'll be able to leap into Rails, Django or whatever they like. That sounds much better to me than having someone know how to use one tool only.
VistaDB shutting down because of business operating costs
Buy and read: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Third-Thomas-C...

Once you've gotten through that, consider borrowing TaoCP from your local library.
Excellent point I was wrong he focuses on C as someone higher up in the threat pointed out. My bad.
Personally I just want to watch the game and I tend to enjoy a 15 minute cast from Husky a lot more than a 60 minute analysis from Day9. It's just a personal preference, Day9 is very good at what he does but usually I just want to enjoy the action.
I don't think that even if Microsoft layed off 60% of its staff it would become competitive as Apple or Google. The more I read into their problems the more I think that this is not a management issue. No they have rigid management controls to ensure that stuff doesn't go wrong like the other giants, but due to the lack of a vision.

If you ask an Apple, Google, old HP, or any employee of an innovative company they will be able to tell you what their company is about. They will be able to define what they are contributing towards at in work. They know what their company's mission is and what that company stands for in respect to their product line and their positioning in the market. This has stopped happening in Microsoft.

An interesting question is whether all failing companies have similar blind spots of vision.

As someone once put it; management is knowing how to cut down trees efficiently, vision is about knowing if you're in the right jungle in the first place.
Beans and rice are good, but beans, rice and eggs are much better. That's what I've regularly eaten for dinner for the past one year and still am (I'm in college). It's probably as cheap as you can go on food if you want tasty and somewhat nutritious meals. Add some Thai sweet chili sauce or teriyaki sauce for flavor.
Of course :).

It was in a dorm and I only really ever slept in the bed. SO I would make the ice in my tiny dorm fridge and put it into the A/C's cooler when I wanted to sleep. This happened only two nights.
I've flashed my SPL and my rom several times before. Getting close to 20 times I've flashed my rom and 5 times flashing my SPL and I've had little to no issues. Follow the instructions to the T and nandroid backup and you should be okay.
I worked out a solution on solving exactly this problem in a browser setting
using Javascript. Before you jump on man-in-the-middle, DNS spoofing, code injection or cross domain security, please take a look at http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~ashwink/ajaxcrypt/ and let me know if you have
any comments!
Ha, did MS invent Basic, DOS, word processing, electronic spreadsheets, GUI? billg was the king of execution. After he moved from managing the company to working on the antimonopoly case MS lost direction and now behaves like a typical Fortune 500 corporation.
OODA loop
Last updated in 2003. I think he got a job. Pity.
Mixing it up... doing it upside down :D http://the-web-has-gone-mad.com/mrdoob.com/projects/multiuse...
There's sort of two directions to respond in here. First, you're rather fudging the conclusion that cutting expenses to the bone has bought you a house -- better save for double the time or end up putting 10% or less down, which has been manifestly demonstrated in recent years to be a stupid idea.

More generally, this whole conversation has become one of minutia.

The fact is that moving ahead financially has become more difficult. Impossible, of course not -- but the sacrifice, shrewdness, and plain dumb luck required continue to grow.

You will have a hard time convincing me, or anyone else paying attention, that this trend is due to some sort of society-wide age-related motivational shortcoming, which seems to be your argument.
I agree. I know of no other language where a # is used to denote lambdas. I would prefer one of:

1. a keyword such as fn, fun, function, lambda. (Incidently, my language uses fn)

2. {...} are used to denote code blocks in many languages, including Java

3. -> or => are also used for functions in several languages (IIRC C# uses =>)
As pointed out, this was normal. My favourite was RiscOS on the Acorn Archimedes. The GUI OS would boot (off ROM) quicker than the CRT monitor would take to warm up. And that was 20 years ago.
Hearing stories like this makes me think about how things 'used to be done' - what was once common practice now seems like an impressive parlor trick, cool hack, or marathon of hacker cool!
I amy profoundly suspicious any time an author opens with a comment like "it was once listed as a biological warfare agent" with no source. Then follows it up with a laundry list of diseases attributed to the substance. The entire piece reads like FUD.
Men (in American culture and similar ones) aren't interested in cars because they are transport. They are interested in cars because they make noise and go fast.
Definitely not true. Just looking at the list of sites they scan, I've visited plenty that have a male/female ratio greater than 1.
Project Natal. Nuff said.
When it's not good to know it all
Serious flaws revealed in "longevity genes" study
"Well, if you install to the SD card to get more storage, you can't use this app when your phone is plugged into your computer."

Plugged in is fine, it's only when the SD card is explicitly mounted as a USB drive that the apps are unavailable. Still mildly annoying, but not as annoying as the iPhone refusing to let you access its filesystem at all.
I think this is largely true, but Microsoft is large enough that it really isn't a single entity - the various divisions are outputting different levels of suckiness/goodness. For instance:

DevDiv is on a pretty good roll right now. It is still many steps behind other communities in a lot of regards (and likely always will be), but LINQ was a huge milestone in 3.5 and the new dynamic integration options of 4.0 is a big step forward for a mainstream static language.

The XBox division continues to do cool things. Last year's dashboard revamp was a huge face lift for the system, XBox Live may continue to be a wretched hive of scum and villainy but it is a well-implemented one. I'm skeptical of Kinect's value for the type of games I play, but I believe it'll be very popular amongst casuals and should be a compelling addition to the XBox's UI for non-gaming apps. Oh, and the "instant-on" 1080p streaming of pay-per-view and Netflix movies is really sick and feels like living in the future.

The Zune may always be an niche choice, but its the best option if you'd prefer to spend $15/mo for "unlimited" music rather than purchasing music at $10/album. Which situation makes the most sense will vary from person to person. Last year Zune started handing out 10 song credits per month to each subscriber as well, which helped take the sting out of the normal arguments against subscription services.

I don't particularly follow the Windows Phone 7 / Kin stuff, but it seems obvious they screwed up royally on at least half that proposition (and I don't expect big things out of the Win Phone 7 half either).

Windows 7 has been very well perceived, though it still lags behind Linux/OSX.

Office 2007 was a pretty good redesign of the suite, but Office 2010 doesn't seem to have raised the bar much. I don't think OpenOffice will ever replace MS Office, rather Office will continue to lead until GoogleDocs is fully ready to take over (its getting closer & closer every day and I don't think MS's new web-based Office will be able to compete).

In retrospect, after reviewing what I've written so far, my opinion seems to be that Microsoft's offerrings haven't been that bad execution-wise lately, but that most are plagued by the fact that they are "also rans": decent products that have some strong merits, but offer no compelling reason to leave the market leader or community favorite.
Yeah I was just gonna quote that line as well. Nowadays invention is often meaningless anyway since there are so many ideas and mashups floating around. And even when it does matter, it has little correlation with success.

In any case, Microsoft's success was based on innovation in the business model, and they've done a lot of innovation with their software over the years.

The real problem with Microsoft if the insider stories are anything to go by is that it's full of bureaucratic middle management self-sabotaging with no real leadership. All you have to do is listen to Steve Ballmer bluster his way through an interview to realize that being a good sales guy in no way confers the ability lead a technology company.

However Microsoft still has a ton of successful products and great people. I imagine if they were to do some kind of massive internal housecleaning and layoff of underperforming and territorial middle management based on interviews of the rank and file that they could restore quite a bit of their product development savvy overnight.
His personal blog is worth a read for some context: http://weev.livejournal.com

He has some posts which suggest the FBI was bugging his apartment and covertly following him around town. This was months prior to the release of the iPad accounts. So, yes, I suspect he is dealing with some mental issues.
I feel that the opposite sequence (hands down first, fundamentals later) works better. Otherwise, you can only teach semantics. When you have zero experience with a particular technology, how can you appreciate the "fundamental design principles"?
Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event
Foreign threats against national security exaggerated? Say it isn't so!

Of course, I'm glad Schneier is providing a sane counter-voice to all this nonsense, but I am constantly amazed that it's even necessary. Everyone who cares and/or matters in this 'debate' should understand the basic premise of hyperbole being ridiculously common in any discussion of national security.
HN iPhone App Live (free; unofficial but very functional)
Would love the HN community's feedback on what else you'd like to see in the app.

We're just moving our company to SF, so this is a housewarming gift of sorts, from AppMakr, the tool used to create the app.
Where did the idea come from that the Kin was supposed to fight agains the iPhone? The product was good. The target audience is there, even still, but the pricing is where the problem was.

But no, it wasn't going after the same market the iPhone is.
Life after Bebo for Michael Birch
Cloud computing...
Btw, Stanford has individual classes for Facebook apps, iPhone apps, even for iPad!

http://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/stanfords-class-cs193p-desig...
Why isn't there a general purpose visual programming language?
Really more a lot of swimming-education propaganda, but that's part of it, too.
Eh, Ives is almost certainly heir to the throne.
A pipeline is a makefile
The article said it is a closed beta. Perhaps, if you install 10.10 eventually you'll get the new fonts in the repo.
Those are bad examples that miss the point.

• Toyota brought hybrids to market.

• Apple elevated cellphones to a completely new level, inventing underlying technology along the way.

I consider both to be bold, innovative moves. I think you are defining "invention" far too narrowly. Edit: Name a single completely new "invention" from software industries. Nothing? Then stop being so pedantic.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/02/life-and-death-of-microso...
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/30/what-killed-the-kin/

These two articles from Engadget explain what happened very well. Essentially the thing was dead and cannibalized before it was released, it's a very sad story.
Apparently Passion Pit played the release party.
The problem with Linux typography isn't a lack of fonts, it's bad rendering. I can buy a font from Adobe. I can't buy a better font renderer for Linux.
I think that makes sense. Perhaps the foundry asked for it. They wouldn't want to any negative comments because the work is not finished yet.
> If the design is somehow more functional, ...

The problem is that the design barely functioned at all. The light switch was hard to discover, and used gestures even harder to discover. How different would it be if the "smooth panel" was a backlit LCD touchscreen with a softly-glowing "O -> |" on it? Especially if it were placed where it was visible the instant the door was opened? Alternatively, if it reacted to any motion instead of specific gestures.

I guess the lesson I take from it is that _visual_ design is only a single component of the overall design or interaction design, and focusing only on the visuals without thinking about anything else is not likely to generate a usable solution.
Opening Up Closure Library
Yup. I was planning on experimenting a little, while retaining cheapness. :-)
Why the downvotes? The thesis of this article is that Microsoft is incapable of innovation.
I thought it had a lot to do with the end of the war, the overcapacity that all those new factories and workers created, and the start of the advertising industry.
I do wonder how many they made, and what will happen to them. Landfill, recycling, or remaindered?
>Maybe it's because when programmers are coding in lisp they considere themselves hackers and don't think about coding cleanly.

I was taught and I consistently read that splitting into smaller functions is absolutely fundamental. I don't know where your programmers learned lisp.
The price wasn't theirs to set. The Kin was a pretty cool product for the market. The price, however, was unreasonable.

Apple get's a free pass with the iPhone despite AT&T, but MS releases a good product, and people blame the phone companies issues on MS.
Randy Komisar, VC, on Women Entrepreneurs
Disclaimer: I'm the brother of the poster, so I'm biased.

This is actually pretty cool since you can read the stories inline (instead of pulling up the iPhone's browser interface). That said, it would be nice to have the option to pull up a browser in case I wanted to navigate around on the source site.

Oh, and bro, you have to tell Isaac and Sean to stop spamming your posts with upvotes and comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118734. They're cramping your style.

Edit: Thanks Sean for removing your comment on this post.
For a consumer web app, I would split it into a Product Designer (someone who can do art, UI design, product concept, workflow, html/css/js), and a developer (who does some js, all server side work, and the related tools.

Finding the product designer is going to be the hard part -- there are a very limited number of visually oriented product designers who can also code. I think that person should either be a cofounder or hired as first employee with 1-5% of equity; on par with a later VP Engineering hire.
Thinking XML: The XML flavor of HTML5
Cool, I'd been meaning to get an Arduino microcontroller myself.

Can anyone give examples of the more interesting projects that are being done with the Arduino that you know of?
The idea that "ideas are worthless" is just a gross overstatement designed to knock some sense into people who are so afraid of sharing their thoughts that they lock up. It's no coincidence that the people most often spouting the cliche are in the venture funding business.

Ideas, of course, are not worthless. Ideas are information, and if the internet has told us one thing, it's that information (and the control of information) is very, very powerful.
I'm guessing not everyone is using a mouse, what are the more precise people using?
“The first, the best, or the free.” New Microsoft products seem to be none of the above lately, including the Zune, their phones, and their consoles (though there, “best” is at least debatable).

Office and Windows are effectively “first” because they have incredible traction.
I've always been amazed looking back at how IBM embraced open source back in the early 90s with a vengeance. I wonder if this saved the company.
Every time I see a vendor abandon a product without open sourcing it it becomes that much less likely I'll touch a non-open source product. Got burned that way with Joel S. (CityDesk), not going to happen again if I can help it.
Ideas aren't worthless. They are a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.

The "ideas are worthless" meme is hyperbole and groupthink.
Even worse is when you know before you start that you are probably going to spend 2 days chasing dead ends because you don't know the problem space yet and need to try a bunch of different things. Battling procrastination in this situation takes a ton of will power.
It doesn't seem to work in Chrome dev here (well it says 50% but I doubt that my history is so less biased).
Is Breaking CAPTCHA a Crime?
Nice, I wonder if you will squish the guy whose app I already bought for this: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news/id339408916?mt=8
Replace that with most other languages.
Perhaps I'm a little biased from studying computer science rather than something more vocational, but as you say there are already dedicated classes for the technologies that you suggested so I think the syllabus is still well-suited for a "web architecture 101" course.
Well, there's F#, and they support the reference Haskell compiler. But the more we learn about how totally political the D part of the company is the more we're likely to believe your thesis that Microsoft Research's notable lack of impact on the greater company is due to the latter. And they don't have Xerox's excuse!

Heck, they're so messed up they almost destroyed one of their foundational cash cows (Windows with the Vista debacle), which would have killed another (Office). A commentator to Mini-Microsoft's previous blog item claimed that the Windows group engineers are now required to fill out by the hour time sheets. The mind boggles ... even if that's not true, the fact that it's believable says enough.
I don't know, iOS4 has made my 3G dog slow and laggy.
When you surrender then your losses should be usually lower then of that when you loose. Otherwise there would be no point in surrendering.

I'm guessing that surrendering early might often lead to much less damage than attempting to wage a war against serious opponent.
Andrew, how does this app compare to the one you bought?
It's not enough said, but it is a reasonable counterpoint. MS is taking a big risk with kinect/natal, one of the biggest they've taken in a long while.
The Kin was going after the iPod Touch crowd otherwise known as the iPhone minor-leagues. MS figured there were enough folks who needed the phone but not quite the full smartphone experience. Too bad it required a smartphone data plan at full price.
That's not the history as I remember it. Windows 95 came before NT4, and it was the first to introduce the famous "start button" visuals. 95 however was still based on the old kernel and it crashed a lot. NT4 came later, with the same visuals, but due to the NT kernel it was remarkably stable.
Microsoft is not innovative, but does that matter? Does Offices with bureaucratic rules need innovation?

Microsoft sells Windows and Office because companies don't like the cloud (less stable, speed, privacy) and don't like Apple (expensive, re-education of employees...). So Microsoft products are a good solution.
Looks like a glorified RSS reader...I thought Apple was going to stop accepting apps like this?
That quote doesn't seem to apply. They are making this an issue before anyone has put content on the web with their name on it. This seems more like a bait and switch than people who cry about posting embarrassing pictures on Facebook. Yes their old posts won't have their name so that isn't an issue but they joined a community with one expectation of privacy and now are about to have another. Before that's happening they are taking responsibility. Their customers are paying them not the other way around, so they are asking for their names not to be associated with the product. That seems reasonable to me.

Clearly gamertags or aliases have power for gamers. They are making it obvious that they don't want to put real names out there. Privacy when you want it is a valuable thing.

And as for your question on so what. Ask the PR rep that was in the thread.

They found where he lived. Sent stuff to his mother (or at least were trying to), and disrupted his Facebook and Fickr pages so badly that they had to be deleted.
If there is, he's probably not going to tell you about it. :)
This is why I like simple turn based games like Wesnoth.
So it robs the content provider of any ad revenue?
Replication does not always work if you deploy MongoDB as VM since master and slave instances may be running in a single physical machine.
I'm actually quite a fan of that little app - it works quite well. Possibly overpriced (should probably be free or 59p) but, importantly, it's simple and gets the job done.

This seems like it has a lot of features I would never need or use. Things like needing my current location and sending out push notifications seem a little gratuitous too, but maybe that's just me.
Prices can be negotiated with the carriers. Remember the original iPhone's 600$ price tag? Infact, MS supposedly got a very good pricing deal with Verizon which they botched up by not meeting the agreed upon timelines.
+1 for the app. Looks pretty cool
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Spectrum_Warrior
Hey bro, yes you can actually do that today. Here's how:

Just hit the little arrow button on the top right of a story, and you can view in browser, share in email & Twitter, or, of course, share in Facebook. Wouldn’t want to forget that one ;)

Screenshots on how to do this at http://go.DanielOdio.com/HNapp
Epoch had an auction equivalent process (which we didn't get to implement because we didn't get to the point of being lead underwriter).
I wouldn't trust Gruber's sources. There are other sources that put the number at more than 1,000, but less than 10,000.
I've got friends that work there and they have so many great technologies and products that they don't publish. I have no idea why but if you have time, go look at microsoft research center.. I mean, what are they waiting ?!
I feel like the the passive viewing experience is one area that's really been lacking for web video.... this is a pretty good start. If any youtube product guys are listening i'd like to see some 'curated' (sponsored?) channels.... that would be cool. Something to cut through all the junk- I would watch that.
I'm talking about his statement that companies that don't "invent", don't last.

Toyota didn't "invent" the Hybrid, if anything that's another case that perfectly proves my point.. Toyota took an existing invention, the Hybrid car, and created a brilliant marketable implementation of that pre-existing idea.

Apple didn't "invent" the touch screen, multi touch, the cell phone, or any of the other stuff that makes the iPhone such a good phone. It just once again took pre-existing ideas and created a brilliant marketable implementation of the combined ideas into a product that has netted them billions of dollars.