skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i think one of the coolest aspects of this prototype is that HTML/JS is now your canvas for your Python script outputs (rather than stdout/stderr on your terminal, for traditional scripts that you run on your desktop). that means you can leverage Google Charts API and other visualizations
After being responsible for a large SharePoint deployment at her company, my wife agrees with you.

But both of you have to admit that using SharePoint through Office sucks less.
The conspiracy theory is that they want to lock you in for no other reason but to give you no other viable option. That's absurd. They want to sell you as much software as possible, of course, they're a company.

But the reason they will stay in the mobile space isn't to keep you from getting any other mobile device. But because there's money to be made in it and it fits into their core competency.
Nature does tend to push the mother into the stay-at-home role, which is why I'm very much in favor of programs to support greater integration of kids into the workplace to try and balance things more towards fairness -- childcare at work (you take your coffee break, the mother takes her breast-feeding break) is one solution. Allowing mothers to work mostly remotely while still breast-feeding is another.

Here in France the approach is well-funded child care that's available for very young babies -- this is a boon to mothers maintaining their careers, but it's certainly bad for breast-feeding more than a couple of months.
Sadly, IBM is far less entertaining to watch.
Can someone provide a download to the actual file? I'd love to play around with it, without jumping through hoops on launchpad with openid and such. Anyone have it or have easy access to it?
(Arthur) Rock of Valley on New Terrain
Wouldn't this make debugging and (manual) testing so much more difficult?
The problem isn't that they're not inventing stuff; that R&D money isn't just spent on paperclips, and a lot of interesting stuff comes out as a result. The problem is that the inventions get squished, not released.
Bubble 1.0 good, Bubble 2.0 bad
Apple has a product-driven leader at the very top. Microsoft has a marketing-driven leader at the very top. That's definitely part of it.

Micro-startups inside MS would be a killer idea. Small teams of 2-5 people, isolated, given time and necessary resources to create idea's. The challenge would be to keep entrepreneurial types tethered to MS, rather than watching them leave to start a company on their own (be their own boss, reap more financial rewards, etc...).

--------------------

It looks, from the outside at least, that MS has been dealing with plenty of political turmoil for quite some time now. If you exclude legacy products (Windows/Office), you see a pretty bad track record in terms of financial success over the last 10 years. Zune, Kin, Tablet PC's, Windows Mobile (profitable, but who wants one now?), Xbox (successful as a product, how about paying off its multi-billion dollar investment?), MSN, Pocket PC's, etc...

Most of the tech Apple is creating today, Microsoft had years ago. The thing is, MS didn't refine it well enough. They need to spit and polish the crap out of their products. Not release a product, saturate the market with it, declare victory, and ignore nurturing it.

What are they doing most wrong? Lately they've been in reaction mode. They don't innovate. They copy. And by the time they get their copy out it's too late. They've always copied, but their copies use to be good. Or at least tethered to a commonly-used proprietary OS or file format with high switching costs.

Lately their mantra has been along the lines of this:

1) See an idea that's successful.

2) Decide to compete with it.

3) Form a team to build it. Possibly acquire companies to do so.

4) Build it internally behind closed doors.

5) 1-3 years pass. Competitors gobble up market share. Microsoft spends lots of cash.

6) Launch it! Expect consumers to replace their other gizmo with MS's gizmo, costing them money, and time with switching costs (how do you migrate an iTunes database with 10,000 ACC's, ratings, album artwork, et all, to Windows Media Player in a few minutes?).

And people must like it, right? We spent all this money building it, our focus groups said it was awesome, and it does what our competitors product does too!

They're missing a much-needed feedback loop. Alpha users, and beta users. They don't know if their masterpiece is any good until millions have been spent and they show it off. It's hit or miss.
Why cite "other studies on other sources" and claim it "needs more data" if you know the point is present data from one source? Not to present an objective look at cancer studies, but to present a filtered look at Daily Mail articles on cancer studies?
HP, too.
So what's different from google? Top down control vs bottom up innovation. Google engineers have 20% free time to work on interesting projects. Something like that would do wonders for MS. Google didn't invent the 20% free time, 3M has let technical types devote 15% of their to their own projects for decades.
I've started using Redis key/set operations for things like this at GitHub. The nice thing is that these techniques are all simple, and it's easy to modify to fit your evolving needs.
That really is quite pleasing to look at. And as the article mentions, it matches up against the type in the Ubuntu logo nicely. Take note of the 'u', the 'n' and the 'a'.
Definitely interesting stuff.

To a certain extent though we get to 'brute-force' a solution. After the 20th tantrum, and the 20th different thing we try, we'll probably find something that works for that particular child. Of course it'll likely be completely different for the next child etc :) but that's half the fun!
Careful... While that talk was indeed brilliantly conceived, I'm not sure how much it applies in this context.
There are 42 reviews of it on Verizon Wireless' site. Pretty amazing ratio if only 503 were sold.

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=pho...
Hoover began deficit spending only near the end of his presidency. Prior to that he drastically raised taxes and tried to balance the budget.
Ford didn't do this to be nice. He did it because:

"we can get at least as great production in five days as we can in six"

Smart man. By working them shorter hours, he could work them harder.
Helping journalists visualize memes: What's trending? What's not being covered?
> I'm wondering if his idea of a startup is the typical web 2.0 startup, where you slap a web framework on top of a database [...] I suspect that many more successful startups will start needing people who can do the algorithmic heavy lifting.

Couldn't agree more with you. Most of the current generation of start-ups is extremely boring. Quite frankly, looking at Techcrunch headlines is depressing. When you look at job requirements they post it's pretty much the same: they're looking for people to write CRUD screens in scripting languages. The current crop isn't about technology, it isn't about the people who enjoy writing non-trivial software and couldn't be happier that some one out there is willing to pay them for it (e.g., people mentioned in Graham's Great Hackers essay; reading that essay felt like music to my ears when I first read it and got me interested in the idea of startups in the first place).

This is opposed to those who see technology as just a means to wealth creation (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, there are plenty of "boring" problems that nonetheless benefit humanity when they're solved). That's not to say the founders aren't smart: many are coming from top schools, leaving Google etc... to start their companies; that makes it even more explicit that they're not there to solve interesting problems, they're there for something else. It looks like an awful waste of talent.

Out of the web 2.0 crowd, when you look at the successes, you'll also notice that they're ones solving non-trivial problems (machine learning/recommendation systems, graph algorithms, scalability and efficiency, etc...).

I'd love to see more technology startups emerge (i.e., those who do something technology-wise that no one else dares to try). It's a riskier route, but it's also more rewarding: you'll be able to attract more passionate people who would be more willing to actually take the risk even if the pot of gold isn't in sight (e.g., without VC funding a 100mm+ valuation).
Yeah, I definitely considered using Redis too; I'd be able to leverage web UI for even stuff like adding/removing users from buckets. How are you handling with persistence? I presume backing up the dump.rdb file frequently? I'd be a shame to lose any of the data (though I'm probably being overly paranoid)
there is value in time. put your ideas out there and the amount of time you have to go to market could possibly be drastically shortened (specifically w/ simple apps that solve a need for non-techies)
> honestly I could care less what their ideas are unless they've had some great successes in the past.

That's pretty shallow don't you think?
How so? I'm not sure I follow...
Many of these complaints are the same reasons I left Microsoft about a year ago. It's becoming less and less a place where good work is rewarded; where engineering reality trumps corporate BS; where you feel empowered to make the best products; where you look forward to spending time at work.

As more and more talented people are pushed out or leave, as the compensation continues to stagnate, as the corporate culture continues to rot all of this will snow-ball. People will find that they no longer enjoy work because all of the good people on their team have left. They'll no longer be bound by MS's golden handcuffs because their compensation won't be any better than a dozen competing companies in the same city. Etc, etc, etc. Increasingly I get the feeling that the exodus is just beginning from MS.
PG, time to revisit your first idea before ViaWeb.
Why Arduino is a hit with hardware hackers
We were already using Redis and had an existing backup plan. Though if you're using Redis solely for feature rollout, you can likely get away with it failing gracefully in case the server is down.
phone mart was out of iphone 4s and evo 4gs.
I doubt you were serious, but thinking about the Microsoft employees I know, it makes the 503 figure sound very dubious.

The iPhone is a kind of forbidden love among (some) Microsoft employees. Many of them want to/feel pressured to use Microsoft technologies wherever possible. I would expect more than 500 to be sold just among folks in the Microsoft bubble.

Unless it were just really terrible, and everyone knew that from the beginning.
I have no idea. I've never been inside one either. But the author was criticizing--well, insulting--a political faction, not expressing a dislike of women.
i bet they heard of some cyber attack on the government and they wanted to get all you geaks together and you'd come across what they wanted to know and then bam they take the credit and so on becuase they are stupid
> If you are lucky enough to hire that person, don't pigeon hole them.

I was thinking the same thing after reading "You’d be much better off getting one of your kickass API developers to spend a little time on the website portion, which would free salary space to hire another kickass API developer.".

My immediate thought is that you'd now have a front end developer. Unfortunately, it is your former API developer turned reluctant front-end designer, who is likely annoyed that his job description changed midstream.
Germany takes legal steps against Facebook
or get this one they are looking for hackers and they well you all fell into their trap??? dunno lol conspiracies are born everyday.
the reason i say this is because i've tried cracking a few ways and for some reason they are stopped not by me but someone else.
"Un s a ve d D o cu m e n t 1 - g e d it"... Maybe the kerning is the next thing to improve
pretty much the same as this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491783
From http://design.canonical.com/2010/07/the-ubuntu-font/:

> Today all Ubuntu Members will have access to a
> private PPA so that they can use, test and enjoy
> the font.
>
> The font is scheduled for completion 8th August
> and this is when we aim to open the beta to everyone.

So the they are opening usage to a select group prior to the actual completion of the font's design.
Actually, I was thinking of my water bill...
Ask HN: How can I learn more about algorithms?
I'm a 20 year old that's been programming for 9 years now, primarily in PHP and Python.

Have I already been exposed to algorithms? Should I have? How can I learn more about them?
It failed due to high plan and device costs plus a healthy dose of internal sabotage. The Kin's market was not nerds - it was your teenage cousin with a QWERTY feature phone that texts approximately one novel per day. Same as the Sidekick that came before it - but those plans were totally reasonable.

I hope the desktop software resurfaces, that part actually looked interesting.
Actually, that will be a recommended config for replica sets. Most of our slides already show 3 replicas per set.

Also, most people have backups so its not really "running naked". See http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Backups for a few ways to backup mongodb. With LVM/EBS/ZFS or any other snapshotable filesystem, backups can be done almost instantly. With EBS you can even get an insta-slave from the snapshot.
That's not entirely true. In fact, there was an article on HackerNews just the other day about one of the developments that their research department came up with. It substantially reduced the number of blue screens that occurred. Other research that has come from Microsoft R&D is the new camera used in their newest xbox peripherals.

Not everything is squished.
Is the code up anywhere? Would be interesting to look through and hack on.
It's deliberately misleading. "between 1929 and 1932" is a misleading way of saying "in 1932". Almost all of the deficit increase and public works spending occurred in 1932 (due to a single bill: the Emergency Relief and Construction Act) near the end of Hoover's presidency, but by saying "between 1929 and 1932" it makes it sound like it was a consistent policy throughout the downturn. In reality by that time in 1932 the depression was already near its worst lows and Hoover had tried keeping the budget balanced prior to that and only had a few months left in office.
The case for one simple todo list
That depends on how many of the reviews are from real customers.
Is there really any software you can build in hours or days and return vast sums of money? If you have a really specific market, I would imagine even if the software itself was simple, the challenge would be marketing it to that group.
Are you kidding? The grid lines don't line up with anything.
I'd take it. Experience is paramount.

Keep working on side projects. One day, they might be something and really experience might help you there.
Toyota didn't invent the wheel, are they dying now?

Apple didn't invent the phone, is the iPhone a flop and will Apple die next?

And MS hasn't made anything in the last few years that is worthy of mentioning? What about Windows 7, love it or hate it, it's the fastest selling OS in history.

Inventing something isn't a sign of success. Taking an idea, whether it has already been invented or not, then creating the best (or at least the most popular) iteration of that idea, is what matters. I'm no Microsoft fan-boy (I use Linux, have an Android phone, although I do own and love my Xbox 360 to be fair).. but even I can't deny Microsoft's ability to consistently churn out some pretty amazing products (yes, and their fair share of flops too.. but no-one is immune to that.. Apple Newton anyone?).
Have a talk to a lawyer friend and see if it amounts to harassment/invasion of privacy? and if it does see if they will have a little talk to them about it.
Ok, so the standard response seems to be "single server durability" isn't supported, but replication makes up for that.

How can this be? If no single server guarantees durability of the writes, how can a cluster of those types of machines suddenly cause those writes to be durable? Maybe it's a pedantic argument, but it seems to me that semantically speaking you are simply relying upon luck that your replicated nodes don't become corrupt or die for some systemtic reason.

The fact that there is not a replayable, append-only transaction log says to me that no matter what you build on top of it, it will never by definition be durable because the whole cannot be greater than the sum of its parts in this case.
I'm curious. Is there a public database out there of matches played between high-profile players and the results? I'd like to do my own analysis of the data if possible.
This article is just wishful thinking of Microsoft haters.

Microsoft does need to be so much innovative as long as users buy Windows and Office. Windows 7 has been selling at 15 million copies a month. This just proves that whether or not Microsoft is innovative these days, Windows and Office sells like hot-cakes.

Same goes with IBM and their mainframes. A lot of IBM haters kept predicting that IBM and mainframes would be extinct just because they are not innovative, but the reality is that it does not matter. What matters is that they have millions of loyal customers that other companies envy.
A Cell Tower of Your Very Own
This 6k vs 6M LoC comparison is pretty dubious. If your disk driver has a bug and overwrites some data you're just as screwed up, be it running in userspace or kernel space. The argument these bugs are less powerful because they are now in userspace "can't do very much" is at best limited

They are less powerful in user-space he states this about 25 minutes into the talk "moving bugs to user-space will do less damage"...roughly.This is true instead of getting full ring0 access to anything I can only do what the driver is allowed to do if I exploit a bug in the driver.

Running all these processes in userspace seems to gain you some capabilities to more easily respawn/reset drivers. Live upgrade seems exciting. I wonder if you are paying for that in added complexity that is hard to debug

Why would there be added complexity? Linux has an api just as well but less defined than simple ipc - even more complex. Hard to debug? you do understand that having parts of the kernel in userspace makes it easier to debug

The bugs I actually see in Linux tend to be oopses generated by bad code that simply disable the driver.

Read LWN theres roughly a root exploit every 2 weeks

An ideal operating system would be a sort of exokernel but proven and a 'relaxed' api that would allow distributed computing. Unverified applications would run under a vm with proven parts being compiled as well as compiling heuristically verified parts and jitting the other needed parts.
The Grandparents Camera
Ask HN: Syllabus for web technologies 101? 
My girlfriend is enrolled in summer session at Berkeley. She signed up for "Web Architecture" class (http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i153-waim/su10/) and got the following syllabus:

- HTML 4 & 5
- Cascading Style Sheets
- Internet Protocol / DNS
- URIs / HTTP
- Client Side Scripting
- HTML II - Basic Web Apps
- AJAX
- Server Side Scripting
- Content Types / Data Exchange
- Browsers
- State & Local Storage
- Privacy
- Security

For me, it feels really outdated. Anyone can read documentation! Do we really need thousands of graduates who know how DNS works and do not know Rails/cloud/mobile? And many modern topics are completely missed:

- jQuery, other javascript frameworks
- web frameworks: rails, djnago
- cloud (AWS, GAE, ...)
- mobile web: iPhone/Android/iPad
- social apps...
- payments
- overview of APIs (e.g. Facebook, Google, YQL, Twilio, Paypal, Google Maps...)

What's your take guys? What should / shouldn't be in "Web Technologies 101"?
Age is a huge factor in cancer. By a certain age, virtually every male has prostate cancer.
For the record, the great depression didn't end until after WW2.

War productions does not make prosperous societies simply because the allocation of resource is redirected to military purpose, not to civilian needs.
My mother stopped using corporal punishment on us when my older brother (at 3 years old) explained that he was justified in hitting me, because hurting people was okay if they were smaller than you. He was practicing.

Children, even from when they're very little, know the difference between hurting themselves on something hot and you, their parent, intentionally causing them pain. Even if your punishments are consistent, there's no chance they will mistake you for a force of nature.

I imagine that some corporal punishment is better for a kid than letting them run wild, but that's a straw man; simply teaching them non-violently (i.e., through example) how to interact with others has a better result overall than using pain to control them. This makes sense intuitively and is well-supported by research.
> The stark truth is that Microsoft has rarely invented anything that mattered.

That doesn't matter, what matters is that lately their execution has sucked.
What epochwolf said: turn the TV off and, if necessary, pick up the child and take him out of the room.

A child with the TV in front of him, being asked to do his homework, is not interested in a reasonable discussion of the house rules; he’s interested in stalling. (Also, if he sees this as a power struggle with Mom, he will not want to surrender.) If his stalling tactic is effective, then you not only extend the period of pointless and frustrating argument in this one instance, but you reinforce, in the kid’s mind, the idea that “turn off the TV” is just background noise that can be ignored with no serious consequences.
My understanding is it applies whether the company is private or public so long as there are any external investors involved.
I hope you're right honestly. The vision of the heroic hacker is much more appealing to me than that of big, bureaucratic, corporate research departments. Certainly the things small independent teams have accomplished lately is impressive.

I wonder though if there are some projects that just require more elaborate support structures. It's difficult for me to imagine that ghc or the scala compiler or postgresql could have been hacked together on the clojure model.
It's more interesting to see how they recover in case of failure, rather than how write is completely on disk. Machine failure will happen. Writes will not be fully flushed to disk. It's how one recovers from failure that defines how robust the system is.
Far, far too much emphasis has been put on invention/innovation/originality lately. Doing something well is (generally) more important than doing something new. IMO, anyway.
Seems to me like internships that are just resume padding don't seem like they'd be of much help to someone looking to be an entrepreneur. Internships at a start-up would yield much better results, as you would get to see what happens in a start up first hand and they would probably pay you, and you would learn a lot more then an internship at a big company. Just sayin'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijf6RysNq9I#t=36m37s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijf6RysNq9I#t=39m05s
Looks like he's been playing hockey or something, not a computer game.
Wall painted animation describing evolution
If you do something for "ethics" in a corporation, you have to be able to show that it is visible to the outside world and that in the end it will thereby increase your profits. For instance, envision an executive at a company giving an anonymous donation (of the company's money) to a charity with no conceivable connection to the business itself. There would be an immediate shareholder lawsuit.

The only places where the courts are touchy on this is religious-y things, like a policy of closing on Sundays.