skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When this came out I was still at Microsoft with a charter of "game changing strategies". There were (and still are) quite a few things that MS could do to reinvigorate itself, but the corporate culture keeps them from gathering momentum: the company's success came in a PC-oriented world, so they don't think from a phone, device, or web perspective; and the lack of understanding of win/win dynamics (which Google rode to success) means they're not able to leverage their huge assets. Since then, the ongoing loss of great people has deepened a huge generational hole. So yeah, this essay has held up real well.
Traffic Squeezer - TCP Acceleration and Optimization
Counterpoint, I suppose: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953023
I've been in Ukraine many times, but never in Crimea.
The quality of the syntax is purely a question of taste and as such isn't really debatable (de gustibus coloribusque non disputandum est), but so far it seems that Ruby still lacks in scalability and speed compared to Perl or Python.
It's being added to an existing service, so when I turn it on, it needs to be able to handle 10-20,000 concurrent visitors from the start. I tested that with two Amazon EC2 Medium instances as load balanced web servers, running Apache with only the minimum necessary modules enabled and tuned parameters, and the load (and resulting response times) was too high. More servers than that would be too expensive to support rolling out the feature to the current user base, so I need to try what I can to handle it with the resources I can afford.

If I can handle that concurrency with node.js without overloading the same number of servers, then it would become viable. With 1000+ requests per second that just need to dump some data and leave with empty responses, a non-blocking server that just queues up the database writes and gets rid of the connection fast could do that. Apache's got to load up and tear down the whole PHP environment and wait for the database query to run before it can finish with each connection.
network in your local .net user groups first and foremost. silverlight, whatever you think of it, is still a niche tech. Orgs looking for silverlight dev work are likely going to be moderate to larger companies looking for internal silverlight apps.

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=silverlight+freelance&l=

18 entries at indeed.com for 'silverlight freelance'.
Oh please, guy says linked articles are crap because they are only about US and UK and there is still rest of the world where the situation looks different. But he himself says only about Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands which are at the very top of the richest countries in the world list (he mentions also Slovakia which apparently has good PhD programs funding) and excludes poorer European countries such as Poland and Ukraine because they are too poor. I am sorry, but what kind of argumentation is this? Article is bad because it is only about US and UK but his blog entry is OK even though he compares only three richest countries in the world?
Did anyone else think the article would be about Dan Lyons (aka 'Fake Steve Jobs')? Having several fake Steve Jobses gets pretty confusing.

(The other fake Steve: http://www.fakesteve.net)
"Remind me again of why we 'need' a solution such as this?"

There are lots of services that people want that are impossible to build without a way to prove that someone is who they say they are. E.g. better reputation systems.

"we all KNOW it will be abused."

Obviously. That doesn't mean there isn't a need though.
>Any serious magazine

This is the Mail we're talking about...
>Molecular nanotechnology will, of course, make 3-D printers beat molding.

Why bother with the nanotech when you can buy a flute in a 4D immersive environment and use it via a haptic interface (with feedback) that to your brain is no different than using a regular flute. Oh and it costs equivalent of an iPhone app and an orchestra comes bundled with the flute.
Hotfile
I don't think Win7 is a sign that MS is making a comeback; it's the final product that Vista was a massive public beta for. I don't know anyone who loves it - the usual opinion of people who choose to use it is "good enough".

The Kinect is pretty impressive though. I wonder what the per-unit cost is for MS - are they making a direct profit on sales?
Italian gov has been talking about doing something similar for a long time. It was kindly suggested by SIAE, the italian RIAA.
You could try Windows Phone Apps.
http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/42.aspx
How Much Trouble is Early Foul Trouble?
Except that no financial institution will accept a Facebook identity.
There is a solution - wait.

Artificial popularity without the engineered quality to back it won't stand up to the test of time. People are fickle and will tend to jump to the next thing that catches their attention, but the sort of thing that remains strong after the promotion machine has shut off probably has something real going for it.

FWIW, Google pointed me to a "top 40" chart from 1911: http://tsort.info/music/yr1911.htm. I'm probably outing myself as a cultural ignoramus here, but the only name I recognize on that list is Enrico Caruso.
Then maybe CPAN's advantages shouldn't be explained as "gem install", err... "perl -e -MCPAN "install net::foo". Explain the _actual_ strengths of CPAN that make it a killer app.

Oh, and "It has MOAR!" isn't really a good argument. I've authored two gems, I think. Those are the only two times in two years of using Ruby that I haven't had the ability to just install the library that I needed.

(I loved Perl for years until I found Ruby, then never turned back...)
this is pretty close to how I use it as well. It's a great way to keep up with a lot of stuff and dive deeper into the things that look interesting.
I'm willing to bet that using the word "instructional" was detrimental to the tweet's click-through rate.
I can't notice it on Chromium
What does "yinz" mean? I understood the others. This one remains a mystery.
we also have something like that were in the Netherlands. Work really well actally.
Jon, as someone from MS (and with great repute), I'd be curious to get your take on something I've heard from ex and current MS employees I talk to regularly.

One issue that seems to come up a fair bit (often not directly) is that MS has a hypercritical culture, where there's always a reason NOT do something. Since they had big money makers in Office and Windows, no one really noticed for a long time..

I hear constant grumbling that people with ideas get their ideas shot down with lots of criticism. Many of these people say that MS would have killed the iPhone, iPad, and Wii had they been proposed at MS in final form.

It sounds like a company made of bright people who have no problem finding issues with products, but less good at fighting for new innovation against these same critics.
Chrome about:flags now has instant and side tabs
Type about:flags into Chrome address bar.
You ones. (It's the second person plural.)
(+ Me)
"Quantity has its own Quality" has evolved in the modern age as "Famous has its own authority". I don't think this is particularly different from any other time in history, but with all the voices you can certainly hear a wider range of opinions from people who would not have had a pulpit for other areas in the past. For example, in the 1970s a sports reporter would be reporting on that subject and I would know nothing about their personal politics. Today, famous in one area gets your opinion heard in multiple areas (e.g. politics).

The best thing about this from a publisher point of view is that candy sells. It doesn't require a fact checker or any real investigation to just "report" on what personalities said. Cheaper content that can be thrown up quick and SEO'd to death to insure some profit. Many people on this board have this very problem with certain tech blogs.

Combine this with the "them over there" syndrome where too many people think that groups they don't belong to are simpletons and it is a group to blame instead of individual actions. So we get 140 character or less slurs against broad groups of people, or we get two pundits from different groups to yell nothingness on a channel and call it debate. Its cheaper, louder and gets eyeballs. Nothing new really, just faster these days.

The example that really bothered me the most was the whole health care debate. All the 24 hour news networks, yes all, put pundits on and let them scream. No need to even leave the studios. Even when the bill's text was available no network really went through it on air to explain what it meant. It was important, but not enough to read. Heck, some investigative journalism about how government run health care that exists actually works in the USA (e.g. the VA and IHS). Heck, I don't think I saw one newspaper that reprinted large parts of the bill with annotations to explain what it meant. Once again, nothing new just more voices.

I'm not sure there is a tech solution. It would require some way to find authority in an area and do basic fact checking. You can't just say NPR is good (they missed at verifying things this weekend) or Fox News is good (knowing when poles were actually closing in Florida in 2000 would have been a good fact to verify). I'm not even sure you could make money printing a report of only facts around a subject. I get the feeling a self tagging scheme might work (trust this guy for sports but ignore him for everything else). Twitter and Facebook really don't have tools for people to follow based on subject and ignore on others. A very hard and old problem.
That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him.
There's certainly some truth to what you say but I'd encourage you to look at the context of the conversation here. pg's blog and Hacker News appeal to people who are generally looking at the world from one of two perspectives: investing or as a startup.

Keeping that in mind shapes the conversation differently

In Microsoft's case I can absolutely see how 75% of the people visiting your website might be Windows Computers. But how many of those people want to be on Windows? How many are using it because there's simply nothing else or because they're just too lethargic to switch? How many are using it simply because they're on their work computer and no one's seriously challenged MS in the corporate space?

So Microsoft could very well be dead and not even know it (as pg's addendum to this post makes clear). If you accept that thesis it has very relevant implications to the intended audience.

From a startup's perspective it means you shouldn't rely on Microsoft technology and need to pursue a strategy that supports Microsoft's desktop but doesn't build on it (which probably means web apps). From an investing perspective it means looking down the line for any possible desktop competitor that could be viable. Because once that viable competitor comes along the bottom will fall out of Microsoft's profits.
Video: MIT Media Lab Prints Out a Sweet-Sounding Flute with a 3-D Printer
Capitalism's always been the least broken system. Over time, we've added laws to make it even less broken. Anti-trust, for example, relatively uncontroversial. As is the FCC's role in regulating frequency allocation, I think pretty much everyone agrees that a pure-free-market free-for-all with "biggest transmitter wins" wouldn't make a lot of sense.

Right now, IMO at least, the issue is that every time we have a recession, it takes longer and longer for "average folks" to be able to get work again. Last time, it wasn't until right before the bottom fell out again. This time, the jobs might never come back.

What do those people do now? That's what needs fixing in the current version of capitalism, IMO.
20 Timeless Money Rules
Can someone please make a website ismicrosoftdead.com similar to http://isitchristmas.com/.
Can I call this linkbait? As someone who actually spends quite a bit of time working to understand why people use Twitter, this came off more as self-promotional wankery and no discernible insight.
If you make people "opt-in" to parody, there'll just be people who don't do so and thus dupe the easily-duped even more easily.
Personally, I appreciate the "I came across your resume, please send me your resume" thing from many recruiters.

If it's a job I'm interested in, I want to send them a current resume at the very least, and probably also highlight the most relevant experience.

Who knows how old, what version or how mangled the resume they saw was...

(However, many mean "I did a search on LinkedIn, and yours was one of a couple thousand profiles I decided to spam based on one or two keyword hits and being with 100 miles of the job site")
"Read the best practices book" is great for writing good code yourself, but a primary complaint of the OP is that reading others' code is pure hell. You can't guarantee that others have read it...
Sounds like Jeff Atwood got his wish!

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/11/your-internet-drive...
Replace "Microsoft" with "Google", and this article suddenly captures the zeitgeist of today's startup environment.
Energy Production And Usage Graphs
With Autos At CES, Are Vehicle Hacks Far Behind?
The private sector is already doing a much better job of building reputation systems. It's now a full-fledged area of computing work. There's even a sizable O'Reilly book on the topic.
In a lot of ways, the "fixing" is the problem. Capitalism relies on a consistent set of rules. All the messing around means that businesses will not take risks. Check the history on 1929 and now. There are some serious parallels from recovery to hiring based on actions taken by government.
I'm happy I'm currently in the middle of my PhD, but this article makes a bunch of errors. It generally strikes me as the naive impression that undergrad have of grad school until they spend some time talking to post-doc and professors. I'll just identify a couple of obvious ones.

1. "We all read the PhD Comics and we all hear about how many hours of coursework or admin-duties a typical US grad student has. I don’t know how does it look like in other countries, but in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium this is definitely not the case. "

The Economist article doesn't say anything about there being too much non-research work. It says there are very long hours, and part of it is non-research. The OP has simply misinterpreted the Economist article. I don't know any grad students in the US who spend more than 25% time on teaching, and the OP lists this maximum as some sort of great aspect of the Nordic system.

2. "Apart from all that, a little bit of teaching looks good in your CV, especially if you want to apply for post-doc or other academic positions after finishing a PhD."

For most grad students, than this is just plain wrong. No one cares how good of a teacher you are (especially not for post-doc positions) unless your end goal is a teaching position at a small liberal arts college. But most most grad student's end goals are either research positions or industry.
I believe that that problem could be mitigated by some kind of a reputation system.
I am not saying that it is a simple problem, it should be given a lot more thought.
They will if the government mandates it.
feedly.
Using Kinect with MIT's Scratch (visual programming language)
Very true -- in fact Microsoft's values include being self-critical, but not being self-aware. Also, it's a very competitive culture, and the easiest way to show you're smarter/better/more powerful than somebody else is to attack them. The net result is that it's an incredibly negative culture, and it really affects people both on the professional and personal side.
Last I checked there is an identity management authentication system you can use, for example Twitter has verified accounts (I don't know how they do it, perhaps by mail) or Bluehost asks for people to fax them a copy of an ID/Passport to get shell access (stupid, considering they have your VISA).

So what you are saying is you are prepared to take the potential abuses because you want it to be more "seamless" than a fax, postcard or a $1 VISA charge. And that further these abuses are better than having a market solution where a commercial ID provider or bank does it themselves?

Sounds like f--- all gain for a lot of risk. And we all know that beyond the abuses the "voluntary" nature of this will swiftly decline after it's implemented, so don't try to argue in that direction either. Just a reminder: the US government is currently illegally sifting through people's email, has wars going which are not authorized by congress, still runs a number of secret prisons across the world in which torture is conducted, is seeking people's private twitter messages in addition to their email because they have contact with Wikileaks, is groping people's genitals with high-school drop-outs in airports as well as taking naked photographs of them and has a "Homeland" tsar who is going to appear on telescreens installed in Walmarts to tell people to be alarmed and suspicous. Further, opposition movements have heated up the rhetoric of your politics to the point where there are open calls for the assassination of Julian Assange (who, like or dislike, is doing journalism) and the domestic rhetoric has been such that mentally ill people are now gunning down politicians. And you think it's advisable we install an ID system on the Internet because, in some unspecified way, it would be easier than a $1 VISA charge or a fax.... You sir, are very shill-like.
That will not work outside America though.
Just because it was modelled after CPAN doesn't mean it's not better.

I'm not very familiar with PyPi since I'm not a Python programmer, but Gems pretty much work exactly like they should. Especially when you throw RVM into the mix.
>With regard to the guy that got fired for looking at other people's messages, one rogue engineer messing with a couple people is very different than a deliberate corporate strategy of espionage.

Consider the case of the UK PM's director of communications (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Coulson#Renewed_allegation...). He was a newspaper editor that allegedly¹ instigated the use of phone cracking to get info on celebs and public figures. Of course once caught he denied having knowledge despite those doing the cracking saying that he instructed them to do it. Result: the peons get it in the neck and the top brass get positions of greater power.

I don't think Google are doing something like that but I'm sure more than one rogue elsewhere, in the past, was actually following orders.

¹ - weasel words!

Edit: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/phone-hacking... for anyone interested; they "lost" the emails sending them to India and of course a major newspaper never keeps backups ...
Was the Daily Mail actually even "confused"? I figured they were just looking for the most attention grabbing stories and headlines, truth be damned.

The sad thing is that you still occasionally get people who take them seriously. Even the Onion has more accurate reporting and that's by accident!
Money isn't everything. Article is comparing absolute rewards, not pecuniary rewards. That said, I would say that a PHD is a much more modest risk than a startup, and has similarly modest rewards.
A better REPUTATION system (??!!??!!) is the best you could come up with? I cannot think of a less important application of a national ID card.

And even in this area, Amazon/Newegg have solved the pretty nicely with the "verified purchaser" tag. How is the national ID card system better?

For Serious Stuff (TM) like opening a stock trading account, laws have already been passed to make an all-electronic signup as binding as a paper signature.

We criticize China when it does something like this, but when America does it's all fine.
Anti-trust, for example, relatively uncontroversial.

I get giddy thinking about being persecuted for predatory pricing, gouging, and colluding.

Never mind those anitrust people often persecute smaller companies for bigger win, ignoring the big guys.

Oh yeah, let ignore copyright and patent laws, which creates monopolies. It's for the "benefit of the public".

You want to fix capitalism? How about restoring the rule of law? Nobody get special privileges. Not the writers, the inventors, the big corporations, or small corporations.
This is a waste of time. Any good intelligence organization can already gain most or all or probably too much of the information they need from online actions, transactions, networks, posts/comments, protocol sniffing, ISP/ad network data, re-routing/copying traffic, social hacking, infected pcs, etc. And if you are encrypting, proxying, spoofing then you are Anonymous and already on the radar.

This Internet ID would just be a show piece.
Media companies have a poor track record when it comes to acquiring big internet properties, as the author points out.

Goldman Sachs is a whole different story. Look up their investment profit track record and it tells a very successful story.

So what I'm really saying is comparing Goldman to Newscorp or Time Warner is a very bad analogy.

This may still be the beginning of the end for Facebook, and I wouldn't be surprised if Goldman rips Facebook to shreds to extract maximum profit, but the authors analogy doesn't hold water.
So it's like y'all or you-guys?
be careful with things like this, it could get you locked out of your server very quick.

denyhosts and fail2ban are better ideas for dropping bad actors on the net.
at iWantMyName we use:

- email/calendar/docs: google

- hosting: slicehost, rackspace cloud, cloudprovider, dedicated servers

- accounting: xero

- analytics: google

- project management/ bug tracking: redmine

- file sharing: dropbox

- version control: git

- IM: jabber

- stack: perl, CouchDB, RabbitMQ

changes in the last year or so:

mail -> google (from zimbra)

hosting -> +rackspace

accounting -> xero (from home grown)

file shareing -> dropbox (from VPN/own server)

stack -> -PostgreSQL

for my personal projects i also use:

time tracking: minutedock + xero (-> from freshbooks)
Can you elaborate on what's going on with these stocks?
Must Read Links for Web Designers and Developers – Volume 2
Today I am pleased to bring you Volume 2 of the interesting links I have gathered. If you are at all interested in anything web design/development related I am sure you will find a link or two that interests you in this list.
They say Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.. even from the sky, and even in cartoon format. hehe.
Single-page view: http://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared-value/ar...
I actually clicked & watched this and assumed that it was a paid tweet (i.e. you paid him to post it)

Very neat that he just randomly posted that.
me gusta esta idea, muchos de los resultados iniciales son spam, y los resultados que de verdad me sirven aparecen dos o tres paginas después, apreciaría mucho que se pudiera banear los resultados alejados o que considere spam, thxs
Today’s transaction in IPL auction; Daniel seems highest paid player
Abstract:

We use a large dataset of play-by-play NBA data to determine when yanking foul-plagued starters is optimal by applying insights and tools from finance. We find that a team performs significantly worse if a starter with foul trouble is allowed to remain in the game, and that this effect is strongest in the third quarter. We use a novel win-probability technique that is sufficiently general to be useful for other questions simply by appropriately redefining the state variables. Thus, our two contributions are to introduce the new approach and also to demonstrate its usefulness by solving the problem of early foul trouble that had remained unaddressed in the academic literature.
The Race to Somewhere