skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
#1st and foremost, Microsoft has been a leader in the tech industry, and has created great patterns and code for the rest of us to compete with.

#2nd MS you need to take more risks. maybe the MS brand name is not the place to do it, but you have amazing research going on and no place to see how it plays out in the marketplace. find an avenue to test markets like startups do. try things and be willing to fail. in racing if you don't spin out at least once you aren't trying hard enough. Apple jokes about AppleTV as a hobby, but it's a good example of an Apple product that has yet to succeed, even though so many of them have worked. at least Apple is both focused, and taking risks.

#3rd MS your largest competitor is yourself, you have nothing to fear but your own products. you will be a better company if you invite competition into your marketplace. heck if a good competitor comes along, you can do what other large companies do and buy them. and you'll create a reward system for innovators to flock to your set of platforms. on this note, i challenge you to open source or share source on legacy code. why keep the code closed on win 3.11, dos, win95, win98, win2000, winxp? let the market place take that code and do something with it. then buy the interesting companies.

#4 get out there and have some fun. to much of what MS does is profit motivated. do something inspirational, just for the fun of it, just for the geekery of it. it will effect your brand in a positive way.

#5 sell software for linux. great software will win on any platform, you don't need lockin. you just need great products. maybe sell directx for linux. embrace choice.

#6 give away an operating system, that has an app store and make it easy for developers to sell and update their code on those machines. think Steam + iTunes + Windows.
MIT &gt; [caltech, RPI, gatech, cwru] &gt; CMU :(
Maybe its optimistic, but I'd hope this has caused a big enough stir among people running Siemens installations that they are taking care of this issue. If so, that will give it a short lifetime. Even if the individual plant admins aren't doing so, Siemens must be taking action here, right?

I guess I'm buying into the idea that its difficult to do attacks against PLC's for SCADA systems. I have to claim ignorance on that issue, but it sure seems like its a hard problem. That difficulty, combined with the relative sophistication of the malware (four 0days, etc) lends credence to the idea that its a targeted attack.

Additionally, releasing malware that targets something like that and then just waiting to see which plants you end up owning seems unlikely. What is the motivation? Once you figure out which ones you own, then you write more custom attacks against those targets?
We're definitely working on it. =) But this feedback is super helpful. Thanks Max.
I need about 8.5 or 9 normally, but typically get 6. By the end of the week I'm pretty fried and then crash late Friday night for about 12 hours.

My sleep "schedule" is also all over the place due to sporadic early morning customer meetings, or late night international ones.

Oh the life of the startup.
That is pretty atrocious - I was very meticulous about issues like that (verifying ownership of resources before modifying them!) when I writing a what I knew to be an amateurish ecommerce system, with 9 months of PHP experience. No CS degree, nobody to help me. If they're doing stuff like this, the security situation is even worse than people are saying. If you can't get the huge grain issues even remotely right, the fine grained stuff is sure to slide right past you.
boo for cmu.
Learning From Failures: IMVU Founder Will Harvey
Vertical farms are a crock because transport of crops is easy. Moving people is much harder. This is why economic centers are densely populated, but can still eat food shipped from 1000 miles away. There is no reason to spend millions to build vertically when you can buy cheap land and transport the products to the most profitable markets on demand.
Many people are casting Groupon as a "partner", not as an advertising vendor, which is all I think they really are.

A partner may understand my business and be in a position to help me improve it. A vendor is not. When I buy yellow pages ads, AdWords, or direct mail postcards, I don't expect my supplier to give me advice on my business. Why should Posie's expect Groupon to give them financial advice?
Is ycombinator.org an official mirror site?

I followed a couple more links there, and it decided it wanted my login details. This gives me pause...
How is that a fundamental security flaw if there's an easy one line fix with no likely side effects?
you are right, I still maintain that Microsoft needs to be more control freak on this. It has direct connection to the degraded windows experience, and is something Apple rightfully latched on to promote the alternative. At the very least promote manufacturers that dont engage in this practice.
I'd just like to point out that Apple is bigger than Microsoft now. Suck it Bill!

Also: Windows 7 is a good product, thank you.
So they should develop the whole thing behind closed doors because some people are going to have to suffer the embarassment of having someone post "hahaha disregard that ... " on their mini facebook wall?

Their code is out there, they have openly said it is full of bugs and they now have a hell of a lot of eyes, They will get a massive benefit from this being opened early and it really isnt their problem if people refuse to ignore all their and everyone elses advice and give out their banks password
Okay first of all, I'm glad that a bunch of undergrads from my school were able to raise $200k, get a lot of press, and build something. This alone should get a community of people around the project fixing bugs, etc.

I've always been saying that making a distributed social network is much easier than "solving" privacy and security for such a thing. First of all, try even defining what it means to privately share things with people on the internet. Then, realize that most solutions (such as diaspora) will actually EXACERBATE the privacy problem, by making you trust the hosting services of all your friends instead of just facebook.

That said, after diaspora was announced it made me think about whether it's possible to ensure privacy in principle. Meaning, is it possible to only trust YOUR hosting company and friends, and cut out every other middleman from being able to snoop your data?

I came up with something which I think would be very useful, and I actually submitted a provisional patent for the technology, which basically enables distributed AND private social networking using just today's web browsers.

If you want to check it out or get involved, see http://myownstream.com . This is an open-source offshoot of a social network I'm building, which I hope to release next year. You can see the roadmap there, but so far it's been going really well :)
I am most alert if I get 5-6 hours of sleep, eat a minimal amount, and take a 30min nap around 2pm. Most days I don't need to take a nap.

If I sleep more than 7 hours, I am tired all day. If I eat too much I need a long nap.

If I am up late all weekend hacking, partying, or playing games, getting may 8 hours of sleep for the entire weekend, I may need to catch up for a week or two after that with 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night.
I'd say do your best to beat your competition, but within the spirit of law.

And no NIH syndrome to control everything in your stack.

Means you could have used android, linux or webkit etc instead of writing everything yourself.

But choice is good too, so give it a rip and happy days to you and us consumers :)
1) might hurt you more than it helps. Firefox is on Windows and Mac, and unfortunately you cannot assume that what works on one will work on the other. Same with Flash. The only way to really test what your site looks like on an OS/Browser is to just get a comp running it.
Probably too late to comment, but I can't get past why Microsoft still charges an exorbitant fee for Visual Studio. Eclipse and other development environments are free of charge. It encourages development by reducing barrier to entry.

More developers = better apps = more customers.
JQuery UI 1.8.5 is now available
Same thing is true with UsersController#update (http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/app/controll...). At least they had the good sense not to implement #destroy.
Posterous fires back at TwitPic
You mean like http://diveintohtml5.org/detect.html ?
Ask HN: I Think This is the Best Task App
I'm biased, as I made it. But I use it everyday.

http://taskthing.appspot.com/
or blogpost: http://blog.staydecent.ca/entry/task-thing

I obviously like the UI, but I've always had a feeling that others wouldn't as it relies heavily on mouseover. I added a KISSInsights question, but no one uses Task Thing, so haven't had much feedback. What do you think?

It's free but requires a google account.

Why I'm posting here: I see other people still making new Task apps, and charging money. I still like mine better but that's not really a fair judgement.
There was a recent forced logout on all stack* sites due to changes in the way cookies are handled. If you haven't visited in a while, that could be the cause of it.
I'm sorry that this happened to you. However, the question that you pose is empirical and has been studied extensively. To my knowledge, no benefit has ever been shown from spacing out vaccinations.

Staggering vaccinations is unlikely to be helpful or harmful, but in general would reduce adherence, so should be discouraged on a population scale without evidence supporting it.
This is a legit concern. My wife also had reactions to some of the vaccines given her as a child, putting her life in danger, as did some of her siblings. So when we have kids, we'll definitely be very careful about that and do a lot of research beforehand.

The autism concerns are almost certainly overblown, and the benefits of vaccines are enormous, as has been pointed out.

But I think its also a mistake to unreflectively get every vaccination possible. Side effects can and do happen. As with every medical procedure, responsible parents should know what they're getting into, and what the pros and cons are. Even though the answer SHOULD be to get vaccinated in 95% of cases.
Good point, 4/8 works better than 5 or 7 for me.
Pex for Fun - Programming puzzles and coding duels
Alternating floors would be kinda harsh on the environmental systems of a modern building (one problem: humidity). The other problem is economic. The builder will make more money on more office space than farming.

Also, a lot of farmers really don't want to live in skyscraper land.
Lanchester’s Law: why small advantages swell in StarCraft
How about those who can't afford it? It's also truly a personal and private choice. I don't judge you because you are insane about getting shot up, thats your choice. Mine is to question face value headlines, see what's happening and make an educated choice.

Furthermore vaccinating the most of the world is not going to happen until they are made strictly for all people and not for profit. Patenting medicine and vaccines and distributing it to only those who are "deserving" sound a bit off no?
How is that a fundamental problem? It takes two lines of code to fix.

This is an alpha release. People shouldn't be using it, that's all. They should've put in an artificial limitation like max. 2 users with max. 2 pics each per server to avoid people using it.

The whole thing being in Rails is much more of a turn-off for me.
What if you covered existing skyscrapers with hydroponic trellises?
They state it's a preview and has security holes. It's not their fault people are stupid.
Mach messages sneaking into Linux? </sarcasm>
Indeed. HN is simple enough to be comparatively inexpensive to run. HN helps generate interest in y-combinator amongst the most important target demographic. Almost certainly the benefits for y-combinator (increased submissions, greater visibility for YC funded companies, a larger and more engaged talent pool for people looking for YC help or looking to work at YC companies, etc.) exceed the cost of HN.
Maybe I am mistaken but wasn't windows phone there before iPhone, MSN search before Google? The same argument can be also applied to other companies. There's Googles iPhone, Google's Facebook, Google's Windows, Google's Office and what not. I personally don't think its bad to compete on those fronts. The technology is changing and so companies have to adapt to these changes. I don't really see them going after every hot trend. They are just making their offerings more complete.
I can hear Zuckerberg chuckling like an evil genius.
Their tools are also a gigantic pain in the ass. (Note: things are improving, thanks to the power of competition!)

I've thought very strongly about having a standard policy of upping my bill rate 50% if I'm doing ArcObjects code. :)
I appreciate what they are doing and really want this to succeed, but with this (maybe a little premature?) release it seems they are alienating their early adopters right off the bat with licensing questions and shaky code (and bad press). Sure it's pre-alpha, but once someone has an opinion it's hard to change their mind later, even if their first impression was based on false information.

Their biggest challenge however isn't code but rather getting the 500+ million people who don't care about private seeds to go through some clunky prohibitive process and start all over again. That's not to mention getting the millions of websites already building on top of FB to change.
Become an Entrepreneur in 11 days  Watch these 11 movies
I'm completely fine with this. We just need to internalize the externality. You not vaccinating your child harms not only your family but potentially many others around you.

We need some sort of legal construct that would hold those who do not vaccinate responsible if there is an outbreak in the area. For example, you don't vaccinate your daughter for whooping cough and my daughter(too young to vaccinate) catches it. My daughter has to suffer months of terrible pain and discomfort in addition to potential long-term consequences. I should be able to seek compensation from you.

Of course there are other social alternatives, such as lychings.

As a side note, you probably don't know shit about vaccines. What makes you think spacing them out will improve her reactions to them?
Not only is it OK to answer your own question on SO, there's a badge you can only get by doing so: "Self-Learner: Answered your own question with score of 3 or more."

Here's the tip I shared to get my Self-Learner badge:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1107551/css-strikethrough...
Microsoft says Android is not free
Cell phone manufacturers must go through the exact same software approval process with their European carriers as with their North American carriers.

Except for Apple, of course. Their customers can download and install an update directly from Apple as soon as it's released. Apple's the only one who's allowed to do that. Android, on the other hand, is no different than BlackBerry.
Google Chrome to Phone Extension
Windows needs proper package management. Having each application be responsible for its own installation, uninstallation[0] and updates is so last millennium.

Debian and its derivatives have done a good job of it in the Linux world, though they haven't done as well as they could at convincing third-parties to integrate. Google Chrome is an example of how to do integration right: the download is a .deb, and installing it adds Chrome's repository, so you get automatic updates through apt. A repository containing almost every library dependency that's likely to show up along with automatic dependency resolution and updates makes life better for both users and developers.

MS could provide similar functionality for Windows. The lack of an (almost) everything is open source culture on Windows would, of course make some things harder, but it's also a huge opportunity for MS: they could integrate an app store. How best to run an app store is still being explored, but here's what I'd do if I were in charge of such a project at MS:

* Make the standardized packaging format very preferable. Make the tools for creating packages open-source and easy to use. Make the question asked of the user clear and friendly ("Do you want to install Foo app from Bar company?", not "This requires administrative privileges..."). Make verifying your identity as a developer to sign apps with a MS-issued key free and easy.

* Allow side channels: packages installed by other means could add their own repository and use the central update mechanism. Allow them to hook in to the payment mechanism too, otherwise we'll see annoying in-app payments.

* Avoid any attempt to lock in developers to your store as the sales channel: developers will prefer it because users will prefer it. If users don't prefer it, make it better.

* Allow anything non-malicious, but tag things that would offend a large percentage of users. Hide those by default.

[0] Yes, there's a centralized UI for uninstalling well-behaved applications, but that's not the point
This really seems like something that shouldn't belong in the kernel. The D-Bus protocol is a bit more complex than other IPC, and it makes sense to me to keep that level of complexity in userspace. (Of course if it were a simpler model -- just a bunch of multicast channels, rather than all this filtering, it might make sense to put bits in the kernel).
I have to admit to being astonished that there was a need in the first place to explain that vertical farms are a crock[1].

The long list of articles from prominent news sources was actually rather sad.

[1] The question how do you propose to grow over a thousand bucks worth of wheat each month in your tiny apartment? comes to mind.
From the blog post:

These early numbers show up to 60x speed improvement
over the current version of Google Chrome.

Hm... I don't need my browser to be 60x faster if it can't figure out that (60/1) < (35/.5).
I am not happy with Microsoft's splintering of Windows into so many versions. It is a waste of time. I say just offer one client version of Windows and sell it for a flat price.

I would also like to suggest giving me more options on what I install during the install. I'm not suggesting this option be something that normal users see, it can be hidden away somewhere, but to make me install a web browser I won't use is silly. (And no, the current "hide access" way of doing this, after the bits are infecting my hard drive, is not satisfactory.)

Bitlocker should accept pass phrases and be easier to enable if one doesn't have a TPM.

Finally, I think it is high time that Windows allows people to have their home directory anywhere they want to; especially during account creation. This is something that should be an option in the Users control panel.
Shdh
dfsdfs
A perfect storm of backlash against Facebook's privacy issues combined with major media coverage thrust them into the spotlight - their original ambitions for the project and fundraising goal of $10,000 were set before that happened. By no means do I see that as "over-promising in order to get money."
Impromptu - A Scheme Live Coding Environment
Such is the danger of sharecropping.
Microsoft enabled competition in the PC market when introducing DOS. It's something like Google is doing today with Android in the smartphone market. I would like Microsoft to do that again. Today's Microsoft products are designed to vendor-lock-in the users, instead of liberating them.

Microsoft limits user freedom not only regarding its own products, but also adding DRM to its OS, for example DVD zones.

Vendor lock-in and DRM are the main reasons why I won't use Windows unless it's in a virtual machine. I don't want the OS I use to limit my freedom.
> because the rational part of the brain isn't the part of the brain that buys stuff.

i think you might also be admitting that most stuff isn't worth buying.
Yes - this is my one wish also.

With every new version of IE that comes out millions of hours of programmer productivity are lost around the world. Microsoft, it's time for an intervention. Stop, please just stop. Your hurting us, and yourself. Put DOWN the web browsers.
In a way, that's the need Meetup.com serves, though with more of an emphasis on in-person interaction. There are quite a few Meetup groups that have grown into their own kind of social network. I suppose you could recreate these as Facebook Groups, but I think there is a need for a customizable social network platform for niche groups.

An example that come to mind is www.modelmayhem.com. It is a social network of models, photographers, makeup artists, photoshop experts, etc. It would be tough to recreate this on Facebook because you wouldn't have centralized control over photo upload approval, and you couldn't monetize membership.

If there were a platform available that let you create your own social network (and maybe there already is), it should give you the flexibility to charge for membership, give the admins control over admitting members, restricting content, access, etc. Then you can target any type of group, like teachers, tutors, and students, or the local car club, Boy Scout troops, you name it.
The people who are complaining that this speedup only applies to 2D canvas are missing the point.

HTML rendering itself is already "fast enough." All of the perceptible delay when loading a webpage is network latency, rendering is already pretty much instantaneous on all modern browsers.

What browsers can't do right now is enable webapps with native speed and experience. And that is what Google is targeting squarely, with this in combination with Native Client.

If HTML5 is ever going to be a real Flash replacement, it's advances like these that will make it happen.
Part of me wants to say 'Cut them some slack, they just put their work-in-progress code on Github like they promised!'[1], but I understand that most of the criticism stems from caring enough about the project to want it to succeed. At this point, they should be thankful for the attention and the guidance more experienced people are providing for free.

The question is, do the problems in the code establish beyond doubt that this team is not capable of delivering a final product that will see some level of acceptance? I really hope not.

1: I'm assuming that - I would hope they didn't think this was release-ready material.
I tried to get involved in this early on, but I was quickly turned off by the way the project was being run: it felt like the founders were promising a vague end goal and trying to make too many groups of people happy.

http://groups.google.com/group/newslabs-qa/browse_thread/thr...

Kudos for writing all of this down, Paul. Next time, stick to your guns and do the simplest thing that works!
Coding Horror: YouTube vs. Fair Use
Bring back the courier. I'm not usually an early adopter of hardware but if you made it work like the demo vids, I'd buy it on day 1.
I'm not sure this is even an SV-specific phenomenon; small-business founders in the U.S. have long been disproportionately foreign-born. I wonder what the statistics would be for restaurant owners.
Seems a bit ranty, but I'll agree that the mortgage thing is a bit of a PITA. I went through a broker and only needed to show 3 years of tax returns but I know of self employed people who've set up companies, employed themselves, then filtered their savings through the company as paychecks to qualify for mortgages. (The only downside being you end up paying taxes again on the money "earned" in this new employment in order to keep it legal.)

Why a few tax returns can't suffice is beyond me. A few years of working for yourself and making a decent income looks a lot better on paper than having held a job for 3 months to me.
Heck, 50% of this entire industry is foreign born.
It would be even more unfair to increase the risk of exposure to other children. I think there is a role for public shaming and peer pressure with respect to vaccination.